Saigon (20 page)

“So you don’t have enough faith in our revolution to stay?” Lat couldn’t hide the note of triumph in his voice. 

“We’ve worked patiently for five years training our activists in Moscow and at the Whampoa revolutionary academy in Canton — some small results are beginning to show. But we must proceed carefully. Our organization is still poor.” He stopped, and a rueful smile played across his face. “Many peasants still believe the hammer and sickle is the flag of the French government. So the road will be long—and you are right—we need many more good men to lead our movement.” 

He smiled again and his face radiated a warmth and simple heartedness that the younger Annamese found strangely disarming despite his anger. 

“What if I join your new party,” said Lat brusquely, “and go to Nghe An to help organize the peasants? We lack arms now, but what could the French do if fifteen million Vietnamese could be persuaded to lay down their tools in the factories and mines and in the rice fields?” He paused, and his voice grew excited. “What if the cooks and the boys and coolies of the cities could be made to join them in peaceful protest marches? Even without arms they would become a great unstoppable tide!” 

“We must proceed carefully,” warned the man between the shafts of the rickshaw, staring over Lat’s shoulder. “The movement isn’t steady or continuous by any means. Don’t take unnecessary risks.” Then he smiled quickly. “And don’t arrange any more meetings in daylight on the shores of the Ho Roan Kiem.” 

Eat saw that the other man’s eyes were fixed on the Boulevard Gamier, and swinging around to follow his gaze he saw a shiny black Süreté Citroën nosing slowly along the lakeside. Nguyen the Patriot raised his hand in the direction of the red coral pagoda and immediately a bent peasant woman hobbled from the doorway, struggling with a heavy bag of vegetables. The Annamese removed his faded, threadbare shirt and wound it quickly around his head in a makeshift turban. Naked to the waist he trotted slowly towards the woman, and when she had climbed into the rickshaw, he turned with lowered head and brought her back across the bridge. Hobbling hunch-shouldered between the shafts, he had transformed himself in seconds into a bowed and shriveled figure, in appearance twice his forty years. 

Lat leaned over the narrow parapet again, watching the rickshaw out of the corner of his eye. He saw the Süreté car cruise slowly towards the shabby little vehicle, then pass by without pausing. In the rear seat Inspector Jacques Devraux was reading a newspaper and he didn’t even glance up at the hunched figure between the shafts. 

Lat remained on the bridge with his back to the road until the car had disappeared into the distance. Left alone he felt suddenly exhilarated and full of confidence. He would show Nguyen the Patriot who was right! He would show him that too much caution was as dangerous as too little. Millions of peasants now were crying out for strong, courageous leadership, and if Nguyen the Patriot wished to give priority to his secret foreign duties, he, Dao Van Lat, would show the way! And perhaps by his decisive actions he would even win first place in the hearts of the people as Le Loi had done five hundred years before! 

Excited by this thought he turned and strode briskly away along the eastern shore, glancing from time to time into the shimmering waters of the lake. The jade dragon was there in the shadowy depths, he reminded himself fiercely, waiting to rematerialize as a mighty sword of vengeance. It remained invisible only to the eyes of those without sufficient faith and determination to see it! But as surely as the dragon of his own iron will lay coiled and waiting inside him, it was there, ready and eager to spring forth again soon! 

The narrow road winding through the empty paddies of Nghe An province in northern Annam was lit only by the feeble glow of a waning moon as Dao Van Lat pedaled a bicycle furiously northward in the early morning of September 12, 1930. It was an hour before dawn, and to the west, the peaks of the Annamite Chain, dimly visible in the fading moonlight, resembled a dark jagged row of dragon’s teeth. As always the sight of the mountains stirred Lat’s emotions deeply; the mighty outcrops of gnarled rock that pushed down almost to the sea in places in the province where he had been born, he thought of as the strong roots of his own life. Sandwiched between the mountains and the sea, these stony rice lands, much less fertile than the rich deltas around Hanoi and Saigon, had over the centuries produced a tough, resilient breed of people from whom he was proud to be descended. They were accustomed to battling hard to survive, and all the leaders of peasant rebellions in his country’s history had sprung from that region — including, Lat reflected grimly as he rode, Nguyen the Patriot. 

His encounter with the Communist leader in a rickshaw coolie’s guise had lived on vividly in his memory during the past three weeks; the strangely hypnotic physical presence of the man had left an impression that grew with the passage of time — but above all else his smiling, ironic criticisms had continued to rankle in Lat’s mind. As a result he had flung himself into his new role in the Viet Nam Cong San Dang — the Vietnam Communist Party — with ferocious energy, and he had found his determination to prove Nguyen the Patriot wrong increasing daily during the furtive meetings of the party’s Provincial Committee. 

He had been appointed to the committee immediately on joining the party because of his reputation, and in the first ten days of September its members had been meeting in almost daily session in pagodas in and around Vinh, the capital of Nghe An, as they battled to control the great upsurge of peasant discontent that was shaking the province. By then it had become clear that starvation was affecting about a third of the entire population throughout the Annamese lands, and the unrest that had begun with Communist-led coolies hoisting a hammer-and-sickle flag above the cainha of a rubber plantation on May Day was obviously reaching a new peak. In Nghe An and the neighboring province of Ha Tinh, violence had become widespread; peasants armed with crude spears and coupe-coupes had begun burning down district government offices, murdering landlords and pro-French mandarins, and other terrified Annamese officials were fleeing to the provincial capital in increasing numbers. In many areas something close to anarchy reigned. 

To bring the stamp of firm leadership to this growing chaos and provide a focus for the discontent, Lat had proposed a massive unarmed protest march into the city of Vinh and had undertaken to organize and lead it himself. He had worked day and night for a whole week, drafting fifty of the best members of his Society of United Hearts into the party to help him in the task. He was trying to assemble a column of ten thousand peasants, and as dawn approached on the day of the march he was racing from village to village by bicycle checking that they were being assembled in sufficient numbers, distributing crudely written petitions to be carried and giving last-minute orders. 

He had already visited a dozen villages in the past two hours and to his satisfaction had found that behind the tall bamboo thickets which screened all the settlements of that part of Annam, the sleepy-eyed peasants were gathering obediently in groups several hundreds strong under the watchful eyes of his own handpicked leaders. 

Lat himself was wearing a tunic and trousers of cheap red- brown peasant cloth, and a mollusk-shaped straw hat was tied about his shoulders. He crouched low over his handlebars as he rode, pumping the pedals in a fast rhythm, his anticipation of the march’s success fueling his strength. Occasionally he disturbed a pair of long—legged herons rooting for frogs in the shallow water of the roadside paddies and the quiet plain echoed for a moment with a succession of eerie cries as the birds flapped away into the darkness. The rice fields through which he was pedaling had just produced their third bad harvest in succession, and he had found little difficulty in persuading the hungry peasants to march on Vinh to present petitions demanding abolition of the high rice taxes still being collected by the French. When he dismounted from his machine to wheel with rough the bamboo groves rattling in the pre-dawn breeze around the fourteenth village on his list, Lat was pleased to see the familiar face of Ngo Van Loc materialize from the shadows. 

“How many, Comrade Loc?” he asked sharply before offering any greeting. 

The murmur of a big crowd could be heard coming from the clearing in the center of the darkened village, and Loc smiled. “Don’t worry! Already seven hundred when I last checked fifteen minutes ago.” 

“Good!” Lat glanced down at his list. “Then you still have three hundred or so to come. Send out new messengers and hurry them up.” He lifted his head and listened for a moment to the growing murmur. “And when they begin to move, they must all remain absolutely quiet. Is that clear? The march must be tightly disciplined. It must take place in total silence.” 

 “Yes, Comrade Lat,” replied Loc dutifully. “I have already told them. But I will get Dong to make a new announcement when they are all assembled.” 

Lat had persuaded the former hunting camp “boy” to accompany him to Nghe An with his son Dong when they had met by chance in the old quarter of Hanoi. After watching his younger son and the Viet Nam Nationalist People’s Party itself die under the guillotine at Yen Bay, Loc had turned naturally in his agony to the new Communist Party to continue the fight against the hated French. He had welcomed the hard work and the responsibility of supervising one of the biggest assembly points for the march, and when Lat arrived, his eyes were alight with a subdued excitement at the success of his efforts to gather the large crowd together in secret. 

Lat patted him on the shoulder and smiled as he pulled a sheaf of petitions from inside his tunic. “Now, Comrade Loc, you are really seeing the people rise up together. There’ll be no more crazy, halfhearted military mutinies! This time the leadership is right!” 

Loc nodded and took the papers he was offered. “These look very authentic, comrade,” he observed leafing through the pages by the light of his flashlight. 

“I had them written by semiliterate peasants of my society. Give them to innocent-looking villagers. When the time comes, hide yourself in their midst — but make sure that they know you’re there so that you can control them.” 

Loc nodded again. 

“How many women and children have you got?” 

“Over two hundred, I think.” 

“Good. Put them all at the front and along the sides of the column. Your group will lead the whole march, and the soldiers won’t open fire if they see only women and children.” Lat glanced at his watch. “Begin moving towards the road half an hour before dawn. Arid search them again before daylight for weapons. No bamboo lances, no coupe-coupes, nothing. Understand?” 

“Yes of course, comrade.” 

Lat turned his bicycle and swung his leg across the saddle again, then he stopped and patted Loc quickly on the shoulder. “You’ve done a good job, comrade. Keep it up. Things are going well. Today you will be part of a mighty sea of protest — the biggest the French have ever seen!” With a wave of his hand he turned and pedaled rapidly away towards the next village on his list. 

While it was still dark the village groups all began trickling out of concealment and heading for one of the main highways ten miles from Vinh. By the time dawn broke the column had virtually assembled; filling the narrow road from edge to edge, it stretched for a distance of three or four miles between the flat patchwork of paddy fields. Moving slowly and in silence, it began heading for the provincial capital. 

The sun was well up the eastern sky before the French detected the marchers and it was an adjutant chef, piloting a Potez 25 fighting biplane of the Armée de l’Air, who first caught sight of them. He was flying his first routine reconnaissance patrol of the day and from a distance he merely thought he was looking at a muddy brown river that he hadn’t know was there before. Then as he drew nearer he saw with astonishment that he was looking at a silently flowing stream of human bodies. Wide, conical hats spread a multipointed roof of straw above the heads of the peasants, but as he flew in to take a closer look, the pilot saw the hats tip backwards in a long slow rippling movement; like an army of mollusks opening their shells in unison on the sea bed, the brims lifted to reveal thousands of soft, unprotected faces beneath. With their eyes narrowed against the glare of the sun the peasants of Nghe An stared blankly at the unfamiliar sight of the little French warplane as it flew along the length of the column. 

Because the plane was on reconnaissance duties, its external bomb racks beneath the fuselage were empty and the two Lewis guns mounted in the rear cockpit were unmanned, but when the adjutant chef recovered from his astonishment he used his cockpit wireless to call his base near Vinh. “C’est incroyable!” he repeated over and over again into his tiny transmitter. “It is incredible. There are many thousands of peasants marching towards Yen Xuyen — but they have no arms, no banners. And they are marching very slowly it’s all very eerie. 

On the ground Lat dismounted from his bicycle and stood still at the side of the procession, watching the little biplane disappear into the sky towards the east. “Retreating in bafflement,” he thought delightedly and turned to look at the faces of the peasants trudging past a few feet away. Men, women and children alike were hollow-cheeked from hunger, but they were moving along the road with determined strides and he felt a tremor of elation run through him. It was working! The great tide of humanity flowing towards the French administrative capital had been conceived in his own mind, and by his energy and determination he had brought the dream to life! 

As the peasants plodded by, they stared at him incuriously and he wondered if they knew that they were marching because he, Dao Van Eat, had decided they should. Then he realized a face beneath one of the wide straw hats was staring at him with unusual intensity. For a second or two because, like him, she was dressed in the dun-colored clothes of the region, he didn’t recognize Lien. They had not met during the eight months that had passed since the eve of Tet, and she was staring at him with a pained expression in her eyes. Although she must have seen that he had recognized her, she turned away quickly without acknowledging him to whisper in the ear of a young Annamese marching beside her. For a moment Lat watched her retreating back, but she didn’t turn her head again and he jumped on his bicycle to give his stewards towards the rear of the march new instructions. 

As he pedaled along the column, however, he found he couldn’t dismiss from his mind the naked expression of pain he had seen in Lien’s eyes. Remorse welled up inside him with sudden, unexpected force, and when he had finished giving his orders he hurried back towards the front of the marching column. On spotting her he ordered one of the peasants to push his bicycle and slipped into the crowd at her side. “It’s good to see you marching with us today, Comrade Lien,” he said quietly. 

She looked startled when she turned, but didn’t speak. Despite her drab clothes and her cartwheel-sized hat of plaited banana leaves, the fineness of her features still betrayed the background of her upbringing in one of Hue’s leading mandarin families. If anything, her plain garb accentuated the refined, gentle loveliness of her face, and Eat felt his pulse quicken at the memory of the love they had once shared. 

“This is Comrade Hao,” said Lien awkwardly, and the young Annamese at her side nodded and moved away so that Eat could walk between them. 

‘And have you come here together to join my march?” 

“Yes.” She nodded once but stared hard at the ground as she spoke. 

“I take it you’re an enthusiastic worker for the party, comrade,” said Eat, addressing Hao in a curt voice. “Would I be right?” 

“Of course.” Hao, who appeared to be in his early twenties, looked steadily back at him, his eyes bright and eager in his boyish face. 

“Then take my bicycle and ride two miles ahead to Yen Xuyen. Give me an idea how many Legionnaires are on duty there and how many local militia!” 

“Very good, Comrade Lat.” Hao turned and pushed through the crowd and mounted the bicycle immediately. 

Even after he’d gone Lien still continued to march with her eyes turned from Lat, arid because he found himself at a loss for words they walked side by side in silence for several minutes. Once, somebody ahead of them stumbled and fell, and as the crowd surged to a halt he was pressed roughly against her. Conscious of touching the softness of her upper arm and the curve of her hip with his own body, he felt a spasm of sweet agony shoot through him. Almost immediately the crush of those around them relented and they shifted apart but she saw at once how deeply he had been stirred by the brief moment of contact. 

“Lien he began then stopped, his voice dying in his throat. “Lien ,...I’ m sorry.” Impulsively he reached out and took her hand in his own, looking at her with burning eyes. 

“It is too late to be sorry, Lat.” 

He felt something fall against his hand and looked down to see that a single gold bracelet, one that he had given her a year before, had slipped down her arm from its place of concealment beneath the loose sleeve of her peasant tunic. She glanced down and saw it, too, then looked into his face and tried to smile. But tears suddenly welled in her eyes.