Saigon (42 page)

As the darkness deepened on the third night, Joseph found himself peering with growing anxiety through the rain-spattered windshield. There had been no sign of an inn for many miles, and he felt a quiver of revulsion pass through him at the thought of sleeping in one of the partly ruined houses in those dying villages. A few miles south of the town of Rao Nay, the headlights of the jeep fell onto the rain-lashed waters of a narrow river as they rolled downhill towards a ferry point. When he got out, he found the riverbank was deserted and the ferry had ceased operating; clearly they could go no farther until the next morning. An uncomfortable night in the cramped jeep seemed the only alternative, then Joseph noticed the dim outline of a building that turned out to be a European bungalow that had perhaps once been a modest auberge for travelers. Its windows and doors were padlocked, its paintwork peeling, and its French owner had obviously long since departed. Joseph inspected it with a flashlight, then using a tire iron from the jeep, broke into the building by forcing the window shutters. Inside it was bare and musty from lack of habitation, but he found some wood and built a fire in the stone fireplace of its echoing kitchen, which still smelled faintly of wine, stale cheese and dust; then he led Lan shivering from the jeep and sat her gently on a chair beside the flames. 

He brought in a kerosene lamp and a small spirit stove from the jeep and boiled some water before the hearth. A half-empty bottle of cognac had been left abandoned in a cupboard, and in his service mug Joseph mixed a measure of the brandy with some boiling water and handed it to Lan. While she sipped the steaming drink he spread Out the contents of two C ration packs on a wooden stool by the fire—some sausages, fruit and a square of cheese. But when he urged her to eat, she shook her head and looked away into the fire. They sat mutely by the flickering flames in the dusty kitchen without moving for perhaps an hour. The horrors of the day seemed to have deadened their senses, rendered them speechless, and although the cold and the damp evaporated slowly, the awful numbness induced by the harrowing sights their eyes had witnessed seemed destined then to remain with them forever. 

Neither of them knew how they arrived at the moment when they were clutching each other with the convulsive hands of drowning swimmers. They held one another blindly, aware only that the other was reassuringly alive and whole, and their two bodies trembled as one with the despairing fear of having come close many times to death at its most grotesque. Recoiling from the unbearable images of slack and ravaged corpses, unable even to eat what little food they had, they were nourished, each of them, by the closeness of the other. Stark dread of the death they had seen spilling slowly across the cold, drowned countryside had frozen their tears inside them too, so they couldn’t weep. Instead they clung to one another in a long shuddering silence, their lovemaking an act of helpless reverence before a dreadful, uncaring fate - The frantic joining of their bodies at last was a flight from inexpressible grief and sorrow which had seemed profound enough to destroy them while they sat apart, contemplating the awful tragedy all around them in which a daughter of their love was lost. 

Later they slept deeply in each other’s arms, wrapped in blankets on the floor-of the abandoned house, the meager ration of food still uneaten upon the stool before the embers of the fire. They didn’t touch it until the following morning when they rose wordlessly in the blurred light of dawn to continue their agonizing quest. Then they ate mechanically, without pleasure, before hurrying out again into the freezing rain. 

They found the ancestral village of Lan’s mother, close to the sea, soon after dawn. Like most northern settlements, it was surrounded by dense groves of bamboo, first planted centuries before when marauding pirates and hostile clans had posed a constant threat to its safety. Coconut palms and areca-nut palms hung with betel vines grew along the nearby shore, and once, Lan told Joseph before they arrived, the village had been prosperous for the area. Large three-roomed houses had been built around a beautiful lotus pool, guava and fig trees abounded, and during childhood visits she had played hide and seek along the sun-dappled pathways that wound through the whispering bamboo thickets. 

When they finally came in sight of the village, however, it bore little resemblance to Lan’s description; a freezing wind was blowing off the sea and rain squalls blotted out the frowning mountain peaks to the west They had seen no living soul on the road or in the fields that morning, and the approaches to the village were silent and deserted; only the constant hiss of the rain broke the eerie silence, and even before they entered the dripping bamboo thickets, Joseph knew what they would find. 

In the lotus pond in the center of the village, the bloated body of a man was lolling half in and half out of the water; his bloodless face, the same gray color as the mud, had swollen and burst, and as they walked by, Lan stifled a sob. Half the thatched houses were derelict skeletons of charred wood, and sodden piles of ashes were all that was left of other dwellings; the walled house of the village council chairman, the office her maternal grandfather had once filled, was locked and barred. Unable to speak, Lan lifted a trembling hand to point to one of the few thatched houses still standing on stilts on the far side of the pond; part of it had been burned, but one end remained intact, and Joseph motioned her to stay where she was while he looked inside. As he slithered through the slime beneath the withered trees, his heart lurched within him; the sickly stench of putrefying flesh hung heavy in the air, and he was certain he would find nobody alive. 

The gray light filtering through the driving rain left the interior of the house in shadow, but as he peered in through the door, Joseph caught a glimpse of a familiar face — that of the Annamese servant girl he had last seen in 1936 opening the red moon gate to him in Saigon. She lay propped in a hammock slung from the roof beams, and her lifeless head was level with his own. Her lips were drawn back hideously from her teeth as though in a silent scream, and at the moment of his arrival there was a sudden commotion in the gloom. He heard rather than saw the engorged bodies of the rats flop to the floor and scuttle away into the darkness, and when he finally switched on his flashlight and swung its beam around the room, a wave of nausea swept over him. Alongside the far wall, a man of her own age, presumably her husband, lay dead on a straw plank bed, and like hers, his body had been horribly preyed upon by the rats. 

Joseph stumbled outside and leaned weakly against a dead tree; standing bareheaded, he lifted his face and let the cold rain fall on his cheeks until the feeling of nausea left him. When he returned to Lan’s side, she searched his face with distraught eyes for a moment, then hit her lip fiercely and turned away without speaking. A minute or two later the bent figure of a old bearded Vietnamese, hobbling beneath an umbrella of oiled paper, emerged from the mist and approached them. His sodden, frayed gown marked him unmistakably as the village chairman. but beneath his mandarin’s cap his lace was gaunt from starvation. He bowed once gravely towards Lan before speaking. 

“The family you seek are all dead like the rest of the population of Ben Thoung. Neither our village nor our country has ever known such a terrible calamity in all our history.” He spoke French, but his voice was a dry rattle in his throat, and he kept his head half bowed as though he was deeply ashamed of what he had to say. “Many flocked here to the countryside to avoid the bombing. We distributed our stocks with great strictness, and when the rice ran out they ate the husks. We distributed edible roots for them to grow and they swallowed the bulbs and planted only the stems. Then they tore up the stems and ate them also. They ate the roots and vines of their potatoes and they ate the seeds of next year’s crops. They ate the roots of banana trees — even pennywort from the marshes. When they had nothing else they bought clay in the markets o staunch the pain of hunger in their empty bellies.” 

The old man swayed on his feet, supporting his thin body on a bamboo cane which he clutched tightly in a claw like hand. He had spoken to Lan as if he recognized her, although he made no open acknowledgment. When he looked up at Joseph, the American saw his rheumy eyes were brimming with tears.”There has been much suffering, monsieur. Parents had to decide whether to starve themselves to let their children survive — or keep the food from them and watch their little ones die before their eyes. Some tied their offspring to the hut timbers to keep them from stealing food in the house.” He shrugged hopelessly. “They hoped to live long enough to begin new families Now I am the only living person in the village, and soon I will die too.” 

Lan pointed to the house by the pond again. “Did all the children of Nguyen Thi Thao die?” 

The old man turned unsteadily to look at the house. “The three children died two weeks ago,” he said quietly over his shoulder. “Last week the parents died. They were the last surviving family in the village. He lost his mind at the end and tore out his own eyes. There was nobody left to bury them.” 

Lan swayed, and Joseph circled her shoulder quickly with his arm. “But they had/our children,” she whispered when she had regained her composure. 

The old man nodded slowly. “The fourth, the girl with the pale skin, they sent away six months ago to her sister’s village— Dong Sanh, four miles to the south. They thought the prospects would be better there.” 

“And are they?” asked Joseph in an agonized voice. “Are people still surviving there?” 

The old man didn’t answer immediately, but closed his eyes for a long moment as though gathering his strength. “People are dying everywhere. Nobody knows or cares any longer what happens in the next village.” 

Joseph offered the old man food from the jeep, but he refused to accept anything at all from them. When they left the village, he was still standing in the rain at the spot where they’d spoken to him, and before they went out of sight he waved his umbrella once in a final pathetic salute. 

It took them an hour to reach Dong Sanh because the road was badly flooded, and neither of them spoke during the journey. To express any hope at all amidst such horrifying scenes of desolation seemed to be tempting fate, but when they arrived, to their relief, they found people still struggling to stay alive. Shortly after they reached the village the rain stopped for the first time in days and small ragged crowds of spindly-legged Vietnamese came out to throng a makeshift market where a few food sellers were setting out shallow dishes of rice gruel. Those without money crowded round watching with yearning eyes as others with the few necessary coins poured the steaming liquid into their throats. Gangs of begging children, wearing mats or bundles of hay tied with banana ropes, wandered lethargically among desperate vendors who were offering for sale their ancestral altars, half-burned house timbers and even the ragged clothes from their own backs to get money to buy food. Sometimes at the roadside Joseph and Lan saw a motionless figures wrapped in a rolled mat, dying or already dead, and the obviously lifeless corpses they noticed were being covered quickly with big banana leaves on the orders of a patrolman who moved among the crowds wielding a bamboo cane. 

They quickly found the half-wrecked house where the sister of Nguyen Thi Thao had lived, but it turned out to be deserted, and Lan was told by a woman too weak to rise from her plank bed in the next house, that the parents of the family living there had died ten days before. The woman scarcely had strength to speak herself, but when Joseph prompted Lan to question her further, she admitted that some of the children might still be alive. They could be running wild with the other orphans of the famine in the village, she said, and together Lan and Joseph hurried back to the market square. There the gangs of starving children were still milling aimlessly among the displays of tawdry goods spread out on sodden mats, and Joseph watched Lan’s face with a fast- pounding heart every time they drew near to a small girl. But each time she shook her head, and after an hour, feeling sick at heart, they reluctantly turned away and headed back towards the jeep. 

It was Joseph who noticed the tiny figure kneeling alone by the steps of the muddy village pond as they prepared to drive away; hardly daring to hope, he touched Lan’s arm and they got out of the vehicle again and walked quietly back towards the pond. When they drew near, they saw that the long hair of the girl was matted and tangled in muddied skeins down her back; she was pitifully thin, and the only garment covering her body was a torn mat tied about her waist with twisted banana leaves. Her head was bowed, and as they approached, they saw that she was staring listlessly into the slimy water. 

Lan stopped a few feet away and peered intently at the girl, but when she looked up at Joseph again she was biting her lip and he could see that the interval of four years and the ravages of the famine left her uncertain. The little girl had not turned her head, and Joseph on an impulse stepped towards her and dropped to her knees. “Tuyet,” he called softly, “Tuyet ... on dung so! — don’t be afraid.” 

At the sound of the name, the little wasted figure tensed, and the instant she turned towards him, Joseph knew their search was over. Although she was pitifully thin and her overlarge eyes burned luminously in a haunted face, he saw in her features an unmistakable inheritance of Lan’s beauty. Close to her, he could see that beneath the grime her skin was paler than the other children’s, and the less-pronounced tilt of her eyes showed him too that his blood and Lan’s were mingled in her. Suddenly his temples throbbed at his release from agony and he reached out his arms to her in an imploring gesture. 

- The girl, obviously terrified by the sight of his white face, backed away and almost slipped down the bank into the pond. But he made gentle, reassuring noises and advanced slowly and patiently until, trapped with her back to the water and too feeble to resist further, she dropped her head and allowed him to pick her tip in his arms. Beneath the sodden mat her sticklike body was shivering with cold, and she seemed in his big hands to weigh nothing. He pressed her wildly against his face and the earthy smell of the wet rotting mat and that same sickly sweet odor of famine that permeated every village of the region engulfed his senses. When at last he held her out at arm’s length, her big burning eyes looked blankly back at him. She stared with the same uncomprehending expression, too, at the tears that had begun flowing unashamedly down his cheeks.