The Centurions (19 page)

“I feel better now. There's no need for you to stay.”

Esclavier seemed ashamed of inflicting these nursing duties on his comrade. He knew how keen Glatigny was on his morning fatigue—a ten-mile walk, there and back, to fetch the rice from the depot. He called this “physical culture” and claimed it kept him in shape.

But Glatigny refused to leave him:

“I'm not going out this morning, I'm on barrack fatigue. I'm going to clean up and bring in the water and wood. You had a nice bout of malaria last night.”

“My attacks are violent but short, I'll be up and about tomorrow.”

In the course of the morning, Captain Evrard, the medical officer on duty that day, came and saw Esclavier. He sounded his stomach, examined his throat, felt his pulse.

“I've got malaria,” Esclavier insisted almost angrily.

Glatigny followed Evrard outside and, when they were some distance away from the hut, questioned him:

“What's wrong with him?”

“Fever,” said Evrard, “I can't say more than that without being able to make an analysis. I'll put him down for the régime,
*
but I don't know if Prosper will accept him. Your team has a rather bad name, you know.”

“Prosper,” an arrogant little Vietnamese who barely concealed his hatred for the whites, bore the pompous title of Camp Doctor. He had been an orderly of sorts at the Gia-Dinh hospital before joining the Vietminh two years earlier. Every morning he presided under this title at a medical inspection in the infirmary where the sick had to come and report in person.

From the sixteen medical officer prisoners he had selected two assistants to whom he had at least conceded the title of male nurse. His assistants examined the patients, which he was incapable of doing himself, made their diagnosis and prescribed a treatment which they recorded in an exercise book. This was eventually submitted to Prosper who made the final decision, without even having seen the patients, according to standards that were utterly alien to medical practice.

Beside Esclavier's name was the note: “malaria, two tablets of nivaquine, three days' régime.”

Prosper screwed up his little monkey face. Esclavier and his team were classified as W.S.s (wily serpents). He crossed out “malaria” and wrote in: “fever, relieved of duty for forty-eight hours,” which meant that his team would draw only half a ration of rice for him.

“Thank heavens the little rat doesn't know Molière,” Evrard reflected, “otherwise he would have the whole lot bled so as to kill them off the more quickly.”

For four days Esclavier's temperature kept rising. He lay without moving under the blankets which his comrades piled on top of him. Glatigny, who never left his side, persuaded him to drink a little boiled water every two hours. More often than not he brought it up, and at night he was delirious.

One evening the old Tho, before smoking his water-pipe, came and squatted down by his head. He looked at the whites of his eyes, lifting the lid with a finger the colour of paddy-field mud, and drew back his lips to examine the gums. He cleared his throat and aimed a long jet of saliva with accuracy through a gap in the floorboards. Then he rejoined Boisfeuras by the fire.

“Tiet!”
he said, taking out his pipe,
“tou-bi tiet
.
”

Boisfeuras questioned him in Tho, but the old man merely shook his head and repeated:
“Tiet
.
”

“Tiet
”
meant “death” in Vietnamese. The old man made no further comment, he had no time to waste in gestures and words for a man whom he considered already
tiet
.

Evrard called half a dozen times, bringing with him a different doctor each time. They discussed the case at the bedside of the patient whose skin, stretched over an emaciated frame, had gone a reddish-yellow colour. Glatigny or Marindelle walked back with them to hear their verdict.

“He ought to go to hospital,” Evrard declared one morning, “he can't last another week. But Prosper won't hear of it. Yesterday his note in the book was: ‘dysentery, diet.' He might just as well have written down ‘small-pox, aspirin' . . . if small-pox were a disease which is tolerated by the puritan democratic republic. I'd like to strangle that filthy little politico who dares to assume the title of doctor but can't even give an injection!”

Marindelle persuaded Potin and the doctor to come with him to see the Voice about it. His dialectic, supported by Evrard's technical arguments and Potin's political guarantee, eventually extracted an agreement from the political commissar to move Esclavier to hospital.

The hospital was two days' march away and the patient had to be carried there on a stretcher. The whole team was given permission to join a fatigue party which was going to bring back some salt. Leroy and Orsini volunteered to go with them.

Mahmoudi was worn out but decided to accompany them all the same.

Boisfeuras believed in the old Tho's diagnosis. Esclavier was
tiet
; there was nothing more to be done for him. But he preferred not to say so. Esclavier would end up being carried by his comrades: like a barbarian warrior, he would receive in homage their sweat and their endeavour.

And that was something which could hardly fail to please the strange captain.

The Thu-Vat hospital was situated among wooded hills intersected by broad cultivated patches in the vicinity of the Bright River whose reddish waters were a churning mass of tree-trunks, driftwood, carrion and tufts of grass. It was the biggest and best one in the People's Army and consisted of over thirty Annamite huts built at ground level and scattered through the forest. They were connected to one another by paths of beaten earth shaded by huge trees, redwood
saus, lims
as hard as iron, silk-cotton trees with thick white trunks, and giant
bang-langs
which are used for making dug-out canoes.

A tangle of creepers draped the hospital in a natural camouflage net which was impenetrable to observation from the air.

From the straight white secondary road between Bac-Nhung and Chiem-Hoa, which bordered it on the east, there was nothing to betray its presence except for a few sentries posted at the near end of the paths which were hidden by thick clumps of bamboo.

The group of prisoners carrying Esclavier reached the hospital late in the evening. Esclavier was still alive but delirious. His comrades were exhausted from their efforts. They had hurried all the way and their legs trembled while a Viet orderly, trying to impress them by wearing a gauze mask over his mouth, looked with disgust at the patient they had laid down at his feet.

“
Tiet
,” he said. “You may as well take him away.”

“He's no more
tiet
than you are.”

Dia appeared, wearing nothing but a pair of shorts, with his muscular ebony torso, his slim waist, his sprinter's legs and his powerful bass voice booming like a drum.

“What has he been treated for?” he asked Marindelle, as he bent over Esclavier.

“Malaria.”

“He's got spirochetosis. My dear colleagues don't know how to use their eyes, they need laboratories and analyses, radio equipment and neatly labelled bottles of medicine. But since all these are lacking, they just throw up their hands in despair. They've stopped being proper doctors. Real doctors should be like wizards who possess the secrets of life and death, of plants, poisons and sex . . . I, Dia, have a number of secrets . . . even for curing spirochetosis.”

“What do you use?” Glatigny asked.

“Bromide,” Dia calmly replied, shrugging his massive shoulders. “It was a brainwave. There was nothing else available, so I thought of bromide. If I'd had any aspirin, I might have thought of aspirin . . . But above all I believe I inspire those who have thrown in the sponge with a will to live. My dear colleagues have a name for that: psychosomatosis. They give high-falutin names to whatever they don't understand.

“Bring the patient to that hut down there.”

Captain Dia of the Medical Corps disappeared into a
canh-na
behind a screen.

“He's a bit of a crackpot, isn't he?” Merle asked Marindelle.

“Most of us owe our lives to his secrets. There are plants that he knows, but above all it's his love for mankind, for all men, and the life and strength he disseminates all round him. He's looking after Lescure . . . he may be able to save Esclavier.”

“He has even made an impression on the Viets,” said Orsini.

“Haven't they tried to work on him politically?” Boisfeuras asked.

“Dia's not like us,” said Marindelle, “fragile and inconstant, uncertain of everything. He's a magnificent and generous life-force. I can't explain it more clearly, but he's neither white, nor Negro, nor a civilian, nor a soldier; he's a sort of benign power. What do you think the sterile, sexless Vietminh termites can do to him? Termites only attack dead trees.”

Dia reappeared; he was sweating freely and scratching his crinkly hair.

“We might be able to save him,” he said, “if he wants to be saved, but it won't be easy. Is he a new arrival? What's his name, Marindelle?”

“Captain Esclavier.”

“Lescure has told me a lot about him—Captain Esclavier, the man who led him by the hand like a small child throughout the march.”

“Lescure talks to you?” Glatigny asked.

“Certainly. He's not mad, you know . . . just a little strange. He's taken refuge in a sort of cocoon where he doesn't want to be disturbed by anyone. I'm very fond of him. He stays with me, where I can keep an eye on him.”

“Can we see him?”

“Not yet. He's cured all right but he doesn't know it, he's got to get used to the idea. Off you go now, chaps. I'll take good care of Esclavier . . . because I appreciate what he did for Lescure. Marindelle, please tell Evrard that he might have sent him along a little sooner.”

“It's Prosper.”

“Sometimes,” said Dia, “I dream that I've got my hands round his throat and that I'm squeezing, squeezing hard. Then I let go and he drops down dead. Prosper . . . and all his dirty politics which poison man's happiness.”

He waved goodbye and went off to join Lescure in a small hut where he lived with him on the edge of the forest.

Lescure was cutting down a tree with a hatchet, humming under his breath as usual.

Dia came and squatted down beside him.

“What's that tune?” he asked.

“A Mozart concerto.”

“Go on, I like it . . . Yes, I like it very much, but I couldn't sing it like that, I'd have to alter the beat. Go on, my lad, sing.”

He picked up a wooden calabash, turned it upside down and started tapping out a jazz rhythm with the palm of his hand. Lescure sang louder and the marvellous, elegant music seemed to lend itself cheerfully to the big Negro's fanciful improvisation.

“There's something I'd like you to hear,” said Dia. “Every now and then it comes back to me. It's music from the Sacred Forest, the music of my people, the Guerzés; it's the Nyomou or fetish song. I couldn't have been more than twelve when I last heard it, but I haven't forgotten it.”

He started whistling through his teeth, beating time on the calabash. The sound he produced was plaintive, like the whimpering of a sick animal or an unhappy child, but accompanied by the deep resounding rhythm of the jungle, the rhythm of nature, overwhelming, savage and inexorable and at the same time serene and beguiling. It spread its arms wide to welcome men, beasts and plants alike in its warm embrace, to reduce them to their essential atoms and bring them back to life in the various forms adopted by the “vital force,” as the Guerzés of the Sacred Forest called it.

“Your music's lovely,” said Lescure, “but it lacks tenderness and sweetness, the sort of friendly gentleness of a human smile . . . What about Esclavier? You'll save him, won't you? You've got no idea how I hated him until I discovered what lay behind those grey eyes of his. Esclavier's rather like your music, your Nyomou song, the part you accompanied on the calabash. He's hard, relentless, tireless, completely unbowed, proud in his animal strength . . . but he's also an utterly pure, subtle and ancient melody . . . friendship and human affection . . . the violins in the ‘Autumn' part of Vivaldi's ‘Four Seasons.'”

“You express yourself extremely well!”

“All I can do is talk or make music, but I don't know how to fight like Esclavier, or how to cure like you . . .”

“You don't enjoy fighting?”

“No, neither the noise of the guns, nor the whistle of the bullets, nor the mangled corpses, nor the waving flags . . .”

“And you don't want to remember . . .”

“But I don't remember any more.”

“Let's have something to eat, then I'll go and see Esclavier. If I can keep him alive for two more days, he's saved.”

“Will you speak to him?”

“No, he wouldn't hear me. But I'll be near him, within arm's reach. What he really needs is a woman at his bedside all the time. I'm going to ask for a nurse.”

It was comrade nurse Souen-Cuan of the
22
nd First Aid Section at Thanh-Hoa who was detailed by the director of the hospital, as much on account of her knowledge of French as by virtue of her sound political education. She was a pure product of the Vinh training establishments. She wore uniform tunic and trousers, both several sizes too big, and a
bo-doi'
s fibre helmet from which two long plaits escaped. In spite of this garb and her abrupt and bossy manner she was beautiful, for her beauty lay in the purity and delicacy of her features and the harmony and elegance of her gestures.

The first task Dia gave her was to cut the patient's hair, shave him, make him drink a mouthful of tea every half-hour and a spoonful of bromide every two hours. But Souen demanded that the Vietminh doctor should confirm this treatment, for it was scarcely to be believed that a man who was not a Communist should know anything about medicine or even have access to any form of knowledge whatsoever.

The Vietminh doctor was extremely flattered; he congratulated “his little sister” but nevertheless asked her to obey the medical officer who, in spite of his primitive methods, sometimes obtained excellent results. In any case she would quickly be relieved of her task, since the prisoner had no more than a few hours to live.

Souen raised Esclavier's head, opened his chapped lips and poured a little tea between his clenched teeth. His face was covered in a heavy growth of beard. His hollow cheeks threw his jaw and cheek-bones into sharp relief. He could scarcely open his burning, bloodshot eyes; racked with fever, he could no longer articulate, while his body, which day by day lost more and more of its substance, was reduced to a sort of skeleton under a tightly stretched, orange-coloured skin.

As she touched him, however, Souen felt a faint indefinable tremor, which she attributed to her fatigue or the heat. This was the first time she had been put in charge of a white man, and she had been warned that this particular one had been an extremely dangerous type before his claws had been blunted by disease.

Esclavier had a sort of spasm which contracted his limbs. With a jerk of his foot he threw back the bedclothes. He was stark naked except for a filthy, stained slip which concealed his private parts. Souen realized how strong and vigorous he must have been. His chest was hairless, his wrists and ankles slender. As she pulled back the bedclothes, she noticed several scars on his chest and thighs. She could not refrain from touching one of these with her finger.

Her sister Ngoc at Hanoi had once had a lover who was a white man like this one. She lived with him in a villa with a garden and when he came back from the war they used to give little parties to which they invited Frenchmen and their wives or their Vietnamese girl-friends. Little Japanese lanterns were hung among the trees; there was music; there were sweet things to eat, preserved ginger and papaw salad.

Ngoc and all her friends were nothing but strumpets. One day the soldiers of the People's Army had killed the major who lived with her sister. Ngoc had been so besotted with him that she had refused to marry the son of the governor of Tonkin and had gone off to live with another white man. She was nothing but a cat in heat, who had no other thought in her head, who mewed in the dark when making love.

Perhaps this man who was lying here and whom she was tending had been to her sister's parties, perhaps he had even held her in his arms . . .

One night in Hanoi the major had introduced her to a swarthy, bandy-legged little lieutenant with an overpowering smell. When he had tried to lay hands on her, Souen had sent him off with a flea in his ear. Then she had packed her few belongings and gone off to Hai-Duong to stay with a girl-friend who belonged to the Vietminh organization. First of all she had done a spell with the Du-Kits and, since she spoke good French, she had been detailed to pick up drunken legionaries and try to buy their arms or induce them to desert. On two occasions she had narrowly missed being raped and one night it was only by a miracle that she escaped from a police patrol. Her partisan comrades also tried to sleep with her and on three or four occasions she had had to give in to them, because they accused her of being an aristocrat and a reactionary and of reserving herself for the caresses and slender hands of a mandarin's son.

She had developed an absolute horror of everything to do with men and sex and it was with profound relief that she had joined the regular army where chastity was the rule.

Souen tried to imagine how Esclavier must have looked before his illness and what she would have done if the major had introduced her to him instead of to the runtish little lieutenant. She dismissed this absurd thought from her mind. He was an enemy of the Vietnamese people, a colonial mercenary, and it was only because President Ho had advocated a policy of leniency that she was looking after him.

On the evening of the ninth day of his illness Esclavier had an internal haemorrhage. Souen was wiping the bunk clean with cold water when Dia, accompanied by the doctor in charge of the hospital, looked in. They were both laughing, because the Negro even managed to make the little Asiatic unbend and made him forget his old resentment as a medical student in Saigon who used to fall asleep over his books from sheer fatigue and as an underpaid doctor on a plantation in Cambodia who was only allowed to look after the coolies. Besides, Dia was a Negro, a member of a race that was exploited by the whites, and the instructions about him were explicit: in spite of the failure they had so far encountered, they were to persevere in their attempts to indoctrinate him in the hope of winning him over to the Communist cause.

Thanks to these many pretexts, Doctor Nguyen-Van-Tach was able to indulge in an occasional display of friendship before resuming the inflexible mask of a Vietminh director.

Dia looked at the bloodstained rags and drew closer to the patient.

“How do you feel this evening?”

In the interval between two bouts of fever it sometimes happened that Esclavier recovered his full lucidity. He would then lie hunched up under the bedclothes, motionless and silent. With an effort the captain would muster all his strength and try to fight the illness. But like those fragile banks of sand that children build on the seashore and which the tide eventually comes and sweeps away, the powerful waves of the fever likewise destroyed his last defences and dragged him back into the furnace in which his memories, his resentments, his hopes and his strength were all consumed in flickering red flames.