Message from Nam (24 page)

“I met her when I was doing fashion photography ten years ago, then I got fascinated by this, photojournalism. She thinks I’m crazy. She meets me in Hong Kong once a month, and it keeps me sane. I don’t think I could stay here without that. How long are you planning to stay here for?” he asked, with casual interest.

“Six months,” she said bravely, sounding very young, and he smiled.

“You have a boyfriend here? In the army?” She shook her head, but some women did. He knew a lot of civilian nurses who had come over because their boyfriends had been sent to Saigon. But sooner or later they all regretted it. The place broke your heart, the boyfriends were wounded or killed, or shipped back to the States and the girls stayed and tore their hearts out caring for maimed children. Some felt they couldn’t leave, some did, but no one was ever the same. “Once you’ve been here,” he said knowingly, “you won’t forget it.” She nodded, willing to take the chance, as she looked around her in amazement. They had sat down at a table on the terrace of the Continental Palace Hotel, and there were limbless beggars everywhere, crawling like insects between the tables. At first she didn’t understand what was happening, she thought they were looking for something, and then suddenly one of them was looking up at her, half his face blown away, one eye gone, and both arms, and he looked up at her and moaned as she almost fainted. Jean-Pierre brushed him away and Paxton looked mortified, as shoeshine boys, and prostitutes and vendors of drugs and assorted wares accosted them, and everywhere the smell of flowers and fuel, the voices, the horns, the shouts, the cars, the bicycles, the people. It was like a circus.

“I’m sorry,” she apologized for her weakness when confronted by the faceless beggar.

“You’re going to have to get used to that. There’s a lot of it here. In Saigon, some of the time you can pretend nothing is happening, and then one day a bomb goes off, a bar blows up, one of your friends is hurt, or you see children bleeding in the street, crying for their mother, lying in front of you, dead from a VC bomb. You can’t always hide from it. And in the North, it’s worse. Much worse. There you really see the war.” He looked at her carefully over their drinks, curious about her, she was just young enough to be his daughter. “Are you sure you want to be here?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, sure of herself now that she was here, even if she still wanted to cry when she saw the beggars and the limbless children. But she had only been there for a few hours. Fourteen exactly.

“Why?” he asked pointedly.

She decided to be honest with him, as she had been with the boy on the plane. “Someone I loved died here. I wanted to see it. I wanted to understand why he died. To come here and speak the truth about the war through my paper.”

He smiled sadly at her. “You are very young and idealistic. No one will care, and when you cry in the darkness, no one will hear you. You want to send a message from here … but to whom? For your friend it is too late. And for the others? Some will come here, if they have to, some will live, some will die. Nothing you can do will change that.” He made it all sound so hopeless, but Paxton didn’t believe him.

“Then why are you here, Jean-Pierre?” She looked directly into his eyes and he wondered if she would sleep with him. He knew Nigel wanted her. Ralph had France and her boy … and of course he had his wife in Paris. But she was a long way from there, and this girl was so fresh, so pure, so full of her ideals, so clean and yet at the same time so strong, so sure. He smiled to himself then and Paxton asked why and he laughed as he answered.

“I think you remind me of … Joan of Arc, I think you call her. We call her Jeanne d’Arc, she believed in all the same things you do. The truth, the power of the sword in the name of God, and freedom.”

“That sounds pretty reasonable.” Paxton smiled. “But you didn’t answer my question.” She was a journalist, after all, and she was smelling the place out, and the people in it.

“About why I am here? I don’t know.” He shrugged his shoulders, looking, and sounding, very Gallic. “I wanted to see it, so I came for
Le Figaro.
And then I stayed, because it intrigues me. I wanted to ‘see it through’ … and I like it here. It is a sinful place,” he said, smiling at her, “if you want it to be. I like my friends. And perhaps …” He shrugged. “Perhaps like all men, I like the danger. Paxton, don’t let men he to you. We all love to play with guns, to pretend we have an enemy, to take a hill away from a friend, or a house, or a mountain … or a country. We love it … it makes sense to us … until it kills us.” There was truth to what he said, and instinctively she knew it.

“Is it worth dying for?”

“I don’t know.” He shrugged, smiling sadly at her. “Ask the men who died … what will they tell you?”

“I think they’d say it wasn’t worth it,” she said philosophically, but he disagreed.

“That’s because you are a woman. Maybe it was worth it to them.” He loved the argument, the exchange, the philosophy, and she liked him. “But to a woman it is never worth it. The men who die are their sons, their lovers, their husbands. A woman can only lose in war, never gain, and for her it holds no excitement. The faces of the women I photograph are all filled with pain, as they hold their dead babies, dead men, dead children. They do not care if they die themselves. I think they are much braver than men. But they cannot bear losing their loved ones.” His voice grew gentle then. “And you? The man you lost? Was he a lover or a friend?” He was curious about her.

“Both,” she said, feeling calmer than she had in a long time. “We were going to be married. We had been together for … for four years … and I should have married him.” She looked away, still guilty over it. “I should have … but I didn’t.” Her voice was very soft at the end and he touched her hand.

“If you didn’t, it is because you were not meant to. My first wife died in an accident. In a plane I was supposed to be on with her. I missed the plane. She went anyway. She was killed in Spain. And I felt guilty forever. She wanted children, I never did, and afterwards I thought if I’d let her have a baby, then I’d still have a part of her. But you know,” he shrugged, “it just wasn’t meant to be that way.”

“Do you have children now?” Paxton asked softly.

He shook his head with a smile. “We’ve only been married for two years, and my wife is twenty-eight. She wants to finish her career as a model before we have any babies.” And if something happened, Paxton asked herself, would they regret it? Was Gabby right with her simple, married life, and her pretty babies? Was she crazy to be here? Was Jean-Pierre right, that her marriage to Peter just wasn’t meant to be, or would she feel guilty forever?

“How old are you, Paxton?” he asked, increasingly attracted to her with each sip of Pernod. Eventually he switched to Scotch, and eventually Paxton switched to water.

“Twenty-two,” she answered him, and he smiled.

“I am exactly twice your age.” But he didn’t seem to mind it. “I think I can say with absolute certainty that you are the youngest journalist here, in Saigon. And surely,” he toasted her, “the most beautiful.”

“You haven’t seen me in the morning,” she said by way of conversation, and a voice behind her took her by surprise.

“No, but I have.” She wheeled around in her chair, and it was Nigel. “I’d say you look very nice in the morning. Why, is this a serious question?”

“Not exactly.” Paxton smiled, relieved that he had joined them. Jean-Pierre had had a little too much to drink by then, and she had a feeling he was going to start getting amorous with the next Scotch. Nigel’s arrival made it all a great deal simpler. “I thought you went to Xuan Loc” She smiled at him.

“I decided to go tomorrow.” In truth, he had come across an appealing whore, and delayed the trip till the morning. “Have you two eaten yet? I hope not, I’m starved, and I don’t want to eat alone.”

“No, we haven’t eaten,” Jean-Pierre volunteered, but it was nine o’clock, and Paxton was still feeling jetlagged. “Where do you want to eat?”

“I don’t know. What about something quick somewhere, and then going to the Pink Nightclub to go dancing?” Nigel had his eye on Paxton, too, and the whore had only offered him temporary comfort. But Paxton was looking at her watch. She had to get up at four o’clock the next morning.

“I don’t think I should. I’m going to have to take a raincheck. Ralph Johnson is picking me up at five tomorrow morning.”

“What’s he up to?” Nigel looked annoyed, and Jean-Pierre was rapidly getting too drunk to really care. And he only had another week before he met his wife in Hong Kong. And there was still lots of time to seduce Paxton.

“We’re going to Nha Trang with a film crew,” Paxton explained.

“It’s hot up there,” Nigel said with a frown, and then remembered how green she was, “and I don’t just mean the weather. Lots of Victor Charlie around. Watch your pretty little ass. Because if I know Johnson, he won’t watch it for you. He gets the story if it kills him. He’s been wounded twice, and I think he’s out here for a Pulitzer, although he won’t admit it.” Paxton smiled at the obvious rivalry between them.

“I’ll be careful.”

“Coming back tomorrow night?” Nigel looked intrigued by her, and she was a damn pretty girl. But she had no interest in him, or any of them. That wasn’t why she’d come to Saigon. She had come to learn what she could and write good stories for her paper. But there were plenty of men here if that was what she wanted.

“I don’t know when we’re coming back,” she answered Nigel’s question. “Ralph didn’t say. Wouldn’t he have said something if we weren’t coming back?”

Nigel laughed. “Not necessarily.” They all stood up, and the flurry of movement drew the beggars toward them. Nigel and Jean-Pierre waved them all away, and one child really tore at Paxton’s heart, a little girl with no legs being pulled along on a cart by her slightly older brother. Paxton looked away, unable to stand it any longer. You couldn’t change things for them, couldn’t make the war go away, couldn’t bring their limbs back.

“You should do a story on the Quakers,” Jean-Pierre suggested when they left. “The American Friends Service Committee has a fabulous center. They fit all these kids with prosthetics. I got some fantastic photographs there. It’s really incredible what they’ve been doing.”

“I’ll check it out. Thanks.” She smiled at them both, thanked him for the drink, and they dropped her off at the hotel before going on to another bar to drink longer and harder. They had decided to skip dinner for a while and go on drinking, since she wouldn’t join them. And when she got back to the hotel, she saw several nicely dressed couples going upstairs to the penthouse restaurant for dinner. But she was too tired to even think of food. She walked into her room, lay on the bed, and fell asleep as soon as she set the alarm, and before she even took her clothes off.

And it seemed only moments later when she heard the alarm go off. It was a strange buzzing sound, and she was dreaming that there were insects coming after her, and then bees, and she was trying to escape by pedicab and the driver didn’t understand where she was going. And the droning noise went on, and then finally she opened an eye and looked around the hotel room. It was still dark, and she took a shower and washed her hair and climbed into the jumpsuit she had brought for occasions like this one. It was a dark khaki green, and she put on the boots she had, in case Ralph hadn’t had the time to get her the ones he had promised.

She was downstairs at exactly five a.m. and the lobby was deserted, but the streets were already coming to life, with vendors and bicycles and cars, and people hurrying home or to work or to somewhere, and she could see the women in their pointed
non la
hats and graceful
ao dais.
She walked outside and smelled the air, and you could still smell the pungent aroma of fruit and flowers, and still the smell of fuel and the cloud of smoke that always seemed to hang over the city, and then just behind her she heard steps, and turned and saw Ralph coming up the steps of the hotel in fatigues and a bush hat and combat boots exactly like the ones he carried, and he had a heavy vest on, and he was carrying another one, and when she joined him, he handed it and the promised boots to her.

“You got the boots! Thank you.” She was amazed.

“No problem.” And they weren’t. He had bought them on the black market where you could buy absolutely anything stolen from the PX, from tampons to nylons to army issue. “I brought you the flak jacket too. It’s not a bad idea, if you can stand to wear it.” And he had a spare helmet he gave her, too, and with that, he lifted her into the truck they were taking all the way up Highway One to where they were going. They had an army driver with them, and Ralph had a crew of four, two cameramen, a sound man, and an assistant. He introduced her to everyone, and they all looked like GIs. Everyone had on fatigues and camouflage and boots and helmets, and the sound man laughed nervously as he looked around, and the assistant unscrewed a huge thermos of steaming coffee.

“Shit, if the VC grab us on the way, they’re going to think they caught themselves a truck full of regular army.” He looked at Paxton, who was similarly outfitted. “Got any high heels in your purse?”

“I’m too tall. I never wear them.”

“I meant for me.” Everyone laughed, and they watched the sun come up as they headed out of Saigon. It was a beautiful summer morning. It was late June, and suddenly Paxton realized why people talked about the beauty of the country. As they left the city, everything was lush and green, and there was a delicacy and simplicity to everything that reminded her of antique silkscreens. And then here and there, you’d see craters, from bombs, or children standing by the roadside on crutches.

The group fell silent as they drove, and Paxton was awestruck by the beauty of it, the red earth and the rich green. She just kept watching as they drove north, and finally Ralph Johnson leaned back over his seat to offer her some doughnuts.

“Pretty, isn’t it?”

“I’m finally beginning to understand what I’ve heard. Saigon is very different.” It had been pretty once, when the French were there, but it was dirty and loud and corrupt, and full of prostitutes and urchins. This had a natural beauty which Paxton had never seen before and touched her deeply. And yet even here, the country was battle-scarred, even far, far out in the country.