Saigon (12 page)

A loud bellow rang out as the bullets struck home, then they heard a heavy body plunging wildly among the restraining toils of the thorn bushes. After a few seconds all movement ceased and silence returned to the glade. Grinning triumphantly at his son, the senator dropped two fresh shells into the magazine of his rifle. “Didn’t I tell you, Chuck, that all you need is determination? Come and take a look at him with me.” 

Chuck hesitated as his father moved off unsteadily towards the thicket, and at that moment Devraux and the Moi trackers entered the glade. When the Frenchman saw what was happening, he shouted angrily for the senator to stop. But if he heard, he paid no heed. 

“Wouldn’t it be better to\wait some, Dad?” yelled Chuck as his father reached a narrow defile between the thorns. 

The older man stopped and turned. “It was me that shot the bull, son. You wait there with the trackers, if you’re feeling nervous.” Without waiting for a response he stepped into the thicket. 

Stung by his father’s words, Chuck dashed forward across the clearing. 

Immediately inside the tangle of bushes Nathaniel Sherman was astonished to find himself face to face with the massive standing bulk of the black seladang bull. More than six feet high at the shoulder, the enormous, blue-eyed animal towered above him, swaying slightly on its legs. All around it the bloodstained undergrowth lay broken and flattened by its struggles, and as soon as it saw him, the animal lowered its needle-sharp horns that had grown in its prime to a length of nearly three feet. Although he had set his loaded rifle at his shoulder in readiness as he entered the thicket, before he could squeeze the trigger the wounded seladang was upon him. The bony excrescence between its horns knocked the wind from him and he collapsed onto its great hump-muscled neck. He hung there for a second before slithering sideways, and as he slipped towards the ground the seladang hooked blindly at his body, knocking it this way and that, until one of its long horns caught and held. Entering from under the pit of his arm it pierced and split his left shoulder joint, and his body swiveled slowly into an upright position, suspended on the horn. Bellowing and rearing on its hind legs, the massive bull lifted him bodily off the ground and shook him repeatedly like a rag do 11. 

When Chuck Sherman ran into the thicket, his father seemed to be bending over the great bull’s lowered head in an attitude of extreme tenderness. The animal, sensing a new danger, shook its horns furiously to free itself from the encumbrance, and the already unconscious senator was catapulted into the thorns, where he lay without moving. 

Chuck raised his rifle coolly and fired just as the bull launched itself on him. He had aimed carefully between its eyes, but its movement changed the attitude of its head and his first bullet merely grooved the glossy hide of its neck. It was an arm’s length away and raising its head to hook at him with the horn that was already dark with his father’s blood when he discharged his second barrel. The hard-nosed bullet struck home into the bull’s chest, wounding it fatally, but it could not stop the lunging charge nor ward off the twin crescents of bone thrust upwards into his body with all the force of the seladang’s powerful neck. 

He fell gored through the abdomen, and the bull attacked him again as he writhed in agony on the ground. On the second thrust, one horn pierced his lung high in the left side of his chest and its tip reached his heart. As the animal roared and twisted above him, he saw close before his eyes the gray hairs of its broad black muzzle and felt the heat of its sour and bloodied breath. From below he could see that its skin was strangely pale and pink between its wide-straddled hind legs and the tight black bag of its scrotum, he thought, seemed incongruously small and toy like for such a massive, murderous animal. Distantly he heard the report of another gun and felt the impact of other bullets shudder the bull’s body, but by this time its heavy black bulk was already sinking down upon him, lifeless from his own second shot. 

Curiously, the last sensation of his own life was not the pain of the terrible wounds inflicted by the horns of the seladang. For a final moment the inflamed bruise on his left calf where the scorpion had stung him a week before seemed to blaze with new agonizing fire. He tried to move one of his hands to touch and soothe it but a great weariness engulfed him suddenly and his hand never reached its destination. 

The foundations of the colonial era, during which white European nations dominated vast areas of Asia, Africa and Latin America, were fatally undermined for the first time during the turbulent second decade of the twentieth century. 

Revolutions toppled first the Chinese emperor in 1911, then the tsar of Russia in 1917; the Great War of 1914—1918 also weakened the European powers drastically and at the same time showed the colonized peoples that their seemingly invincible white masters were capable of enormous self-destructive folly. This undermining of the colonial system was accelerated further by the formation in 1919 of the Communist International. The organization was dedicated to the overthrow of capitalism worldwide, and in the latter years of the l920s Comintern agents began working secretly in the vulnerable, far-flung colonial territories of the capitalist nations to exploit the native discontent. In the Annamese lands political dissatisfaction had intensified following the premature death of the Emperor Khai Dinh in November 1925. He was only forty-three when he died, and the French, seizing the opportunity to reinforce their influence, insisted that he should be succeeded by his son, Bao Dai, then a boy of twelve still at school in Paris. They ensured that the infant emperor continued to study in Paris for another seven years and meantime the French Résident Supérieur in Hue arrogated to himself the few remaining vestiges of imperial authority. This quickened anti-French feeling, and encouraged by the successes of Sun Yat-Sen and Mao Tse-tung in 

neighbouring China, Annamese nationalists and Communists began to organize themselves more coherently. The Great Depression of 1929 sharpened the mood of rebellion when a catastrophic fall in the price of rice spread hardship and even starvation to many parts of Indochina. As a result of these mixed forces the resistance movements that had previously been the exclusive domain of irresolute Annamese intellectuals began, as the decade drew to a close, to stir the mass of the people toiling in the rice fields, the mines and the rubber plantations. 

With its customary fury the northeast monsoon fling its nightly torrent of rain onto the close-packed ranks of rubber trees sprouting from the red-brown jungle soils of the Vi An plantation a hundred kilometers north of Saigon. In the midnight blackness the glossy-leaved trees stood silent, each with a beggar’s cup of tin wedged against its straight trunk to catch the milky latex that oozed slowly from within. On the earth floors of the leaking, palm-thatched barrack huts dotted around the vast plantation, fifteen hundred Annamite coolies who would resume the unending toil of emptying the little tin cups in the gray light of the corning dawn shivered and drowsed fitfully in the downpour. To their untutored peasant minds it seemed that the endless rows of alien rubber trees marching with unnatural precision across great tracts of their wild ancestral jungles provoked the storm each night to new extremes of savagery. 

In Village Number Three, where five hundred coolies were quartered, the men were packed so tight in their barracks that many of them slept and dozed seated upright. Ngo Van Dong and his younger brother, Hoc, huddled close together in the darkness in one of the long huts, their ragged clothes already saturated with the rain that streamed in through the inadequate thatch. Close beside them an older coolie, stretched full-length on the earth, was shaking and moaning uncontrollably with malarial fever. 

Although they were still only in, their teens, the two young Annamese had undergone a drastic change in appearance in the four years since the Sherman family had watched them gamboling around the cooking tent of their father, Ngo Van Loc, the hunting camp “boy” of Jacques Devraux. Woefully undernourished, their bodies were emaciated, pocked with sores, and eighteen months of unremitting labor in the dark, fever-ridden alleys of the rubber plantation had left their faces pinched and haggard. By day their sunken, listless eyes reflected the depth of an inner misery that would have been unthinkable to the exuberant youths of 1925. 

In a lull of comparative quiet in the wind-driven roar of the rain, Hoc leaned towards his elder brother and put his lips close to his ear. “He’s stopped shivering,” he said in a horrified whisper. “Do you think he’s died?” 

In the near-total darkness Dong could not see the old coolie stretched out on the muddy floor beside them. He had been trembling violently for several hours but now no sound came from the place where he lay. Noticing that his Younger brother himself was shivering, Dong, who was taller than the average Annamese, inched his long, thin body closer to him and put his arm around his shoulders.” Don’t think about it. Maybe he’s sleeping now. Let us try to get some sleep!” 

The younger boy closed his eyes, but the sudden familiar gnaw of hunger pains drove all thought of sleep from his mind. It was six hours since they had shared their meager ration of black rice, boiled as usual in a rusting can on the communal fire inside the barrack hut. For cooking and drinking all the coolies had to use brackish water from the mosquito-infested streams that flowed sluggishly through the plantation, and Hoc wondered, as he did every time he found himself shivering, whether he too might have contracted the dreaded fever. 

Dong, sensing his brother’s fear, reached quietly behind him in the darkness with his free hand until his fingers brushed against the face of the malaria victim; the clammy flesh, already growing cold, was slippery with rain and the sweat of the fatal climatic fever, and in the moment that his hand recoiled from the contact Dong knew that they would not be able to avoid the horror of a burial this time. During their stay on the plantation more than a hundred coolies in Village Number Three had died of fever and malnutrition, or had committed suicide — but there had never been a death among their immediate neighbors. 

Fleetingly Dong wondered whether the excursion into the jungle with the corpse might present them with another opportunity to escape. Then immediately he dismissed the thought. They had tried twice before, and on each occasion they had been pursued relentlessly through the forests by hostile Moi tribesmen who had stripped them naked, lashed their hands behind them and led them back to the plantation roped together at the neck with twisted creepers. The glowering Moi had been rewarded by the French plantation director with five piastres for each of them, and he and his brother had been publicly beaten on the soles of their feet by a group of overseers wielding heavy staves. Their swollen feet had bled profusely and they had hobbled painfully among the rubber trees for more than a month before they recovered. After the second escape attempt they were beaten again and flung into the blackness of stone-floored isolation cells in the nearby fort at An Dap. There they had spent fourteen days in solitary confinement, chained in heavy leg irons and fed only on dry rice. Never once during that time had they seen the light of day. 

“Dong! We will have to bury him, won’t we?” His brother spoke in a quavering voice close to his ear as though he had read his thoughts. The younger boy was trembling more violently now, and Dong feared he, too, was becoming feverish. 

“Try to sleep, Hoc. I will make the grave. Don’t worry.” 

A half ‘mile away in the plantation director’s house a scratchy rendition of “Muskrat Ramble” played by Louis Armstrong and Kid Ory was struggling to make itself heard over the roar of the monsoon rains. Gauze screens fitted to the doors and windows were tightly closed as always to deny the plantation’s malaria- bearing mosquitoes access to the presence of Claude Duclos, a heavily built Corsican in his early forties who was sprawled in a wickerwork chair under the cooling breeze of an electric fan. A glass of iced cognac and soda dangled from his right hand and he listened to the jazz with an expression of seraphic contentment on his face. When the record ended he sat up and drained the last drop of his drink, then banged the empty tumbler loudly on the low, glass-topped table beside him. 

While he waited for a response he got up and moved ponderously to the wind-up gramophone housed in a carved oaken cabinet in a corner of the room. He lifted the chromium-plated playing arm and with some difficulty replaced the worn needle with a fresh sliver of sharpened steel from a tiny tin. As he restarted the record, the door of the room opened and a young Annamese peasant girl entered. He turned and watched blearily as she walked to the table, picked up the empty glass and departed again without once raising her eyes to look at him, Her bare feet made no sound on the polished pine floor, and she moved with the smooth, unbobbing grace of the peasant pole carrier. She wore the “uniform” of a house congaie a long black skirt and a white blouse-cloth tied in the small of her back to leave her arms and shoulders bare; on her dark hair she wore a scrap of cloth, also of white. Swaying slightly and humming tunelessly in time with the tinny notes of the recording, Duclos waited until the door closed quietly behind her, then made his way unsteadily back to his seat. 

In the kitchen his congaie began preparing him another drink without hesitation, although she had noticed he was swaying on his feet. He had banged his glass on the table and it was not for her to disobey. He had indicated already he wished her to stay in the house for the night, and she knew well enough that the continued presence of her widowed mother and four brothers in the servants’ quarters in the rear compound depended on her strict obedience to all the wishes of the plantation director in his house. Even so, a little frown of apprehension clouded her face as her thoughts strayed to the hours ahead. Normally, although his massive body dwarfed her own, he showed her consideration in his bed, but she knew from the rare occasions when it had happened before that drinking heavily coarsened his sexual appetites. She had already refilled his glass five or six times but she had no idea why he was drinking so much. In the sudden hope that he might fall asleep without calling her, she poured a large extra measure of cognac into the glass before adding the soda. 

In the main room of the house Duclos sat up suddenly in his chair, wondering why his drink was taking so long. As he looked about him his eye fell again on the telegraph message from Paris lying on the table beside him. Snorting angrily, he picked it up and read it aloud in a contemptuous voice: “Shareholders demand immediate explanation why production tonnage down last month. Essential you increase output at once to fill projected quota by year end.” 

He stared at the paper for a moment then crumpled it angrily into a ball and tossed it into a corner. Were the damned shareholders never satisfied? Average monthly production figures were higher than ever. Ten new vats had been installed since Christmas, there was a new dryer, the warehouse had been extended — and all this had been achieved despite the fact that twenty of the feeble “yellows” were still dying every month from malaria! Now because the output tonnage had fallen slightly for once, they wanted his blood! How did they think he could get more production from his work force if they allowed so little cash for its upkeep? If draft horses weren’t fed sufficiently, they couldn’t pull heavy loads, didn’t they know that? If machinery wasn’t serviced it broke down! He cursed the shareholders again, then looked up as the Annamese congaie appeared soundlessly beside him. She avoided his eyes as she placed the fresh drink on the table by his elbow, and the unchanging passivity of her face enraged him suddenly without reason. A European woman might at least chastise him about his drinking! As if the jungle and the heat and the blasted “yellows” were not enough to endure in the godforsaken tropics! His intense irritation with his distant superiors transferred itself with an illogical rush to the silent girl, and he caught her by the arm. She halted, helpless in the grip of his massive fist, but still she kept her eyes downcast. In his irrational anger he wanted to snap the lotus-stemmed wrist, and he tightened his grip until she winced. Then as soon as it had come, his anger subsided and he smiled. 

With his free hand he pulled at the cheap cloth of her blouse until it slipped from her shoulders and bared her breasts. He stared at her for a moment, then motioned with his head towards the door. “Va te coucher,” he said quietly. “Et deshabille-toi!” 

Holding her arms modestly across her chest to cover her nakedness, she hurried obediently from the room. After she had gone he switched off the gramophone, drained his drink in a single gulp, then stooped to pick up the offending telegraph message. Smoothing out the paper he stood staring at it, reading it over and over again, all the while drumming his fingers agitatedly on the gramophone top. Then at last he straightened and squared his shoulders in resolution. 

“All right!” he said vehemently, speaking aloud. “If Paris wants higher production this month at all costs, they shall have it! Let them learn the lessons of capitalism the hard way. The ‘yellows’ will have to start half an hour earlier from tomorrow and treat five hundred trees each — instead of three hundred and fifty! If they die faster, whose fault is it?” 

He strode angrily from the room, slamming the door behind him, and when he reached the bedroom he found his lamp already lit. In blurred outline through the fine mesh of his muslin mosquito net he could see the dark shape of the Annamese peasant girl stretched naked on his bed. He pulled the net aside and looked down on her with greedy eyes. She had drawn one leg up so that her thigh hid the base of her belly from his view. Her head was turned away from him and she held her left arm across her face. Because she was reclining on her back, her small breasts lay flat on her boyish chest; only the nipples, purple shadows in the dull glow of the lamp, stood tautly erect, through fear. 

Already distended in his excitement he had difficulty in removing his clothes. When he finally lowered the heavy bulk of his sweating body onto the bed beside her, his roughened hands pressed her small thighs wide and he forced himself into her immediately, ignoring her repeated cries of pain. For a few brief moments he reared and plunged on the bed, grunting like an animal, until his lust emptied itself into her. Then his corpulent body collapsed and gradually the noise of his drunken snoring drowned out the quiet sobbing of the Annamese girl.