The Quiet American (18 page)

“It is a little uncomfortable when you are not used to it.”

The Gascogne Squadron possessed only small B26 bombers-the French called them prostitutes because with their short wing-span they had no visible means of support. I was crammed on to a little metal pad the size of a bicycle seat with my knees against the navigator’s back. We came up the Red River, slowly climbing, and the Red River at this hour was really red. It was as though one had gone far back in time and saw it with the old geographer’s eyes who had named it first, at just such an hour when the late sun filled it from bank to bank; then we turned away at 9,000 feet towards the Riack River, really black, full of shadows, missing the angle of the light, and the huge majestic scenery of gorge and cliff and jungle wheeled around and stood upright below us. You could have dropped a squadron into those fields of green and grey and left no more trace than a few coins in a harvest-field. Far

 
ahead of us a small plane moved like a midge. We were taking over.

We circled twice above the tower and the green encircled village, then corkscrewed up into the dazzling air. The pilot-who was called Trouin-turned to me and winked: on his wheel were the studs that controlled the gun and the bomb-chamber; I had that loosening of the bowels as we came into position for the dive that accompanies any new experience-the first dance, the first dinner-party, the first love. I was reminded of the Great Racer at the Wembley Exhibition when it came to the top of the rise-there was no way to get out: you were trapped with your experience. On the dial I had just time to read 3,000 metres when we drove down. All was feeling now, nothing was sight. I was forced up against the navigator’s back: it was as though something of enormous weight were pressing on my chest. I wasn’t aware of the moment when the bombs were released; then the gun chattered and the cockpit was full of the smell of cordite, and the weight was off my chest as we rose, and it was the stomach that fell away, spiralling down like a suicide to the ground we had left. For forty seconds Pyle had not existed: even loneliness hadn’t existed. As we climbed in a great arc I could see the smoke through the side window pointing at me. Before the second dive I felt fear-fear of humiliation, fear of vomiting over the navigator’s back, fear that my aging lungs would not stand the pressure. After the tenth dive I was aware only of irritation-the affair had gone on too long, it was time to go home. And again we shot steeply up out of machine-gun range and swerved away and the smoke pointed. The village was surrounded on all sides by mountains. Every time we had to make the same approach, through the same gap. There was no way to vary our attack. As we dived for the fourteenth time I thought, now that I was free from the fear of humiliation, “They have only to fix one machine-gun into position.” We lifted our nose again into the safe air-perhaps they didn’t even have a gun. The forty minutes of the patrol had seemed interminable, but it had been free from the discomfort of personal thought. The sun was sinking as we turned for home: the geographer’s moment had passed: the Black River was no longer black. and the Red River was only gold.

Down we went again, away from the gnarled and fissured forest towards the river, flattening out over the neglected rice fields, aimed like a bullet at one small sampan on the yellow stream. The cannon gave a single burst of tracer, and the sampan blew apart in a shower of sparks: we didn’t even wait to see our victims struggling to survive. but climbed and made for home. I thought again as I had thought when I saw the dead child at Phat Diem, ‘I hate war.” There had been something so shocking in our sudden fortuitous choice of a prey-we had just happened to be passing, one burst only was required, there was no one to return our fire, we were gone again, adding our little quota to the world’s dead.

I put on my earphones for Captain Trouin to speak to me. He said, “We will make a little detour. The sunset is wonderful on the calcaire. You must not miss it,” he added kindly, like a host who is showing the beauty of his estate, and for a hundred miles we trailed the sunset over the Baie d’Along. The helmeted Martian face looked wistfully out, down the golden groves among the great humps and arches of porous stone, and the wound of murder ceased to bleed.

Captain Trouin insisted that night on being my host in the opium-house, though he would not smoke himself. He liked the smell, he said, he liked the sense of quiet at the end of the day, but in his profession relaxation could go no further. There were officers who smoked, but they were Army men-he had to have his sleep. We lay in a small cubicle in a row of cubicles like a dormitory at school, and the Chinese proprietor prepared my pipes. I hadn’t smoked since Phuong left me. Across the way a metisse with long and lovely legs lay coiled after her smoke reading a glossy woman’s paper, and in the cubicle next to her two middle-aged Chinese transacted business, sipping tea, their pipes laid aside.

I said, “That sampan-this evening-was it doing any harm?”

Trouin said, “Who knows? In those reaches of the river we have orders to shoot up anything in sight.”

I smoked my first pipe. I tried not to think of all the pipes I had smoked at home. Trouin said, “Today’s affair- that is not the worst for someone like myself. Over the village they could have shot us down. Our risk was as great as theirs. What I detest is napalm bombing. From 3,000 feet, in safety.” He made a hopeless gesture. “You see the forest catching fire. God knows what you would see from the ground. The poor devils are burnt alive, the flames go over them like water. They are wet through with fire.” He said with anger against a whole world that didn’t understand, “I’m not fighting a colonial war. Do you think I’d do these things for the planters of Terre Rouge? I’d rather be court-martialled. We are fighting all of your wars, but you leave us the guilt.” “That sampan,” I said.

“Yes, that sampan too.” He watched me as I stretched out for my second pipe. “I envy you your means of escape.”

“You don’t know what I’m escaping from. It’s not from the war. That’s no concern of mine. I’m not involved.” “You will all be. One day.”

“Not me.” “You are still limping.”

“They had the right to shoot at me, but they weren’t even doing that. They were knocking down a tower. One should always avoid demolition squads. Even in Piccadilly.”

“One day something will happen. You will take a side.” “No, I’m going back to England.” “That photograph you showed me once. . .” “Oh, I’ve torn that one up. She left me.” “I’m sorry.”

“It’s the way things happen. One leaves people oneself, and then the tide turns. It almost makes me believe in justice.”

“I do. The first time I dropped napalm I thought, this is the village where I was born. That is where M. Dubois, my father’s old friend, lives. The baker-I was very fond of the baker when I was a child-is running away down there in the flames I’ve thrown. The men of Vichy did not bomb their own country. I felt worse than them.” “But you still go on.”

“Those are moods. They come only with the napalm. The rest of the time I think that I am defending Europe. And you know those others-they do some monstrous things also. When they were driven out of Hanoi in I946 they left terrible relics among their own people-people they thought had helped us. There was one girl in the mortuary-they had not only cut off her breasts, they had mutilated her lover and stuffed his. . .” “That’s why I won’t be involved.”

“It’s not a matter of reason or justice. We all get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love-they have always been compared.” He looked sadly across the dormitory to where the metisse sprawled in her great temporary peace. He said, “I would not have it otherwise. There is a girl who was involved by her parents-what is her future when this port falls? France is only half her home. . .” “Will it fall?”

“You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can’t win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night. You know we lose one class of St. Cyr every year. We were nearly beaten in ‘50. De Lattre has given us two years of grace-that’s all. But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years.” His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child’s eyes peer through the holes in the paper. “You would not understand the nonsense. Fowlair. You are not one of us.”

“There are other things in one’s life which make nonsense of the years.”

He put his hand on my knee with an odd protective gesture as though he were the older man. “Take her home,” he said. “That is better than a pipe.” “How do you know she would come?” “I have slept with her myself, and Lieutenant Perrin. Five hundred piastres.” “Expensive.”

“I expect she would go for three hundred, hut under the circumstances one does not care to bargain.”

But his advice did not prove sound. A mail’s body is limited in the acts which it can perform and mine was frozen by memory. What my hands touched that night might be more beautiful than I was used to, but we are not trapped only by beauty. She used the same perfume,

and suddenly at the moment of entry the ghost of what I’d lost proved more powerful than the body stretched at my disposal. I moved away and lay on my back and desire drained out of me.

‘I am sorry,” I said, and lied, “I don’t know what is the matter with me.”

She said with great sweetness and misunderstanding, “Don’t worry. It often happens that way. It is the opium.” “Yes,” I said, “the opium.” And I wished to heaven that it had been.

It was strange, this first return to Saigon with nobody to welcome me. At the airport I wished there were somewhere else to which I could direct my taxi than the rue Catinat. I thought to myself: Is the pain a little less than when I went away?’ and tried to persuade myself that it was so. When I reached the landing I saw that the door was open, and I became breathless with an unreasonable hope. I walked very slowly towards the door. Until I reached the door hope would remain alive. I heard a chair creak, and when I came to the door I could see a pair of shoes, but they were not a woman’s shoes. I \vent quickly in, and it was Pyle who lifted his awkward weight from the chair Phuong used to use. He said, “Hullo, Thomas.” “Hullo, Pyle. How did you get in?”

“I met Dominguez. He was bringing your mail. I asked him to let me stay.” “Has Phuong forgotten something?”

“Oh no, but Joe told me you’d been to the Legation. I thought it would be easier to talk here.” “What about?”

He gave a lost gesture, like a boy put up to speak at some school function who cannot find the grown up words. “You’ve been away?” “Yes. And you?” “Oh, I’ve been travelling around.” “Still playing with plastics?”

He grinned unhappily. He said, “Your letters are over there.”

I could see at a glance there was nothing which could interest me now: there was one from my office in London and several that looked like bills, and one from my bank. I said, “How’s Phuong?”

His face lit up automatically like one of those electric toys which respond to a particular sound. “Oh, she’s fine,” he said, and then clamped his lips together as though he’d gone too far.

“Sit down, Pyle,” I said. “Excuse me while I look at this. it’s from my office.”

I opened it. How inopportunely the unexpected can occur. The editor wrote that he had considered my last letter and that in view of the confused situation in Indo-China. following the death of General de Lattre and retreat from Hoa Binib, he was in agreement with my suggestion. He had appointed a temporary foreign editor and would like me to stay on in Indo-China for at least another year. “We shall keep the chair warm for you,” he reassured me with complete incomprehension. He believed I cared about the job, and the paper.

I sat down opposite Pyle and re-read the letter which had come too late. For a moment I had felt elation as on the instant of waking before one remembers.

“Bad news?” Pyle asked.

“No,” I told myself that it wouldn’t have made any difference anyway: a reprieve for one year couldn’t stand up against a marriage settlement. “Are you married yet?” I asked.

“No.” He blushed-he had a great facility in blushing. “As a matter of fact I’m hoping to get special leave. Then we could get married at home-properly.” “Is it more proper when it happens at home?” “Well, I thought-it’s difficult to say these things to you, you are so darned cynical, Thomas, but it’s a mark of respect. My father and mother would be there-she’d kind of enter the family. It’s important in view of the past.” “The past?”