Highways to a War (11 page)

 

 

—I sometimes think of writing up some memoirs from them, now that the war’s over. I hope of course that you’ll never get to listen to them—no one ever has—but if you do, they may be of interest. You always were fond
of history....

I punched off the letter-tape again. Did he really want me to “write up” these memoirs for him? He didn’t say so directly; he was always a little sly like that. But I thought he did want it; and if he proved to be lost irrevocably, I’d do it: I knew that already. So did he, standing behind my shoulder.

The taped diaries, nearly all of which I’d now heard, had surprised me deeply. Mike’s silences had always made me see him as inarticulate; even unimaginative. But not on tape, it had turned out: not when he was alone, speaking into his machine. Was it old John Langford’s beatings that froze him outwardly? His mother’s early death? There was an inner life I’d half suspected, but had seldom been given a glimpse of; now it was all in my hands, more complex and intense than I would have thought possible—to be dealt with as I wished.

There’d be a great deal to be sorted through, if I were to do this properly. What I’d have to do first would be to organize all the material into categories: tapes, photographs, work diaries, notebooks, reports and the letters Marcus had given me. There was a small mountain of material: eventually I’d have to start reference cards. I was thinking of a text illustrated with his photographs: a memorial.

The work would be extensive, but not difficult. His notebooks and papers were well organized and barely travel-stained—like the effects of a fastidious bachelor whose existence was completely stable; even dull. Yes: it was all in surprisingly good condition for the personal effects of a war photographer who moved constantly from country to country and battle zone to battle zone, his existence seen as utterly fluid, rootless and dangerous—especially by certain kinds of safe, wistful men who openly envied him, and who questioned me about him with a common expression of naked yearning on their faces: men who lived as Mike did only in their fantasies, and who wouldn’t have found his reality tolerable, even for a day.

The work diaries interested me least, containing as they did a bare professional record of assignments covered, costs of film stock, and expenses claimed. But they all had one feature in common that did interest me. Each one of them had the same epigraph written in the flyleaf, in Langford’s small, careful hand:

No author was given. Where did he hit upon it? When I’d first read it, I’d been touched and embarrassed, as though I’d uncovered something no one was meant to see; and I reflected that when a man of action revealed the secrets of his spirit, he was apt to seem jejune. There was something almost schoolboyish about his having faithfully entered that inscription into the work diary every year. But now, looking at it again, I no longer felt so patronizing. This was the creed he’d lived by, and had probably died for. He’d earned the right to inscribe it in his work diaries —even though it did make me see him as incurably young. At thirty and at forty he’d been the same young man, hitting himself each day with the elixir of risk, and writing into the book of each new year the same magic rune that made it all worthwhile. Well, why not? He’d probably lived more intensely in any two weeks than I’d done in a lifetime.

The notebooks had at first appeared to be personal journals, but had proved on examination not to be. Each of them carried the title “Contact Notes,” and these contact notebooks dealt entirely with other people—mostly political, military and business leaders in Indochina. They took the form of running diaries, detailing Langford’s meetings with the subjects of the entries. Until I’d listened to the tapes, it had been hard for me to see why a war photographer would want background material of such detail, or would record these meetings so meticulously.

It had taken many evenings to carry out this audition of what I’ll call his audio diary. He had each cassette neatly labeled, and they dated from February 1965 to the week preceding the fall of Saigon—just over a year ago.

It was clear that in many of these recorded diary entries he had in mind his projected memoirs. There was a good deal of analysis of the progress of the Vietnam War, records of his experiences of battle, and impressions of military and political leaders. Such passages recorded a life lived on the plane of momentous public events; life as history. He certainly documented it well. And I’d begun to suspect that he’d seen himself as living inside his own preplotted story from the time he’d first arrived in Singapore. But many other passages were highly personal. These, as he’d indicated in his taped letter, were pretty clearly records made only for himself. Electrical recording has made this fatally easy to do: much easier than confiding to a written diary. But even in such passages, intimate though they were, I found that Langford still remained somehow a little removed, as he used to do in life; and I wondered if there were once even franker passages that he’d decided to wipe.

The narrative I’d decided I might attempt wouldn’t be quite the sort of book he’d planned to do himself. I’d take the liberty of expanding on the account in the audio diary where I felt I had the knowledge or insight to do so—and where his friends might add to the record, when I got up to Bangkok. I might even take some of the liberties of the novelist—some, but not too many. If the result proved more revealing than he might have anticipated, I’d have to hope that he’d forgive me; but it was the inner story, after all, that was the one most worth telling.

In portraying the outer story, I’d be helped by his photographs: the two books on the Indochina war published in New York and London, and the unpublished prints, negatives and transparencies he’d left in my hands.

I drew some of these out now: black-and-white prints from a package labeled
The Delta.
Images of the Vietnam War accumulated and flowered in the circle of light on the desk—most of them taken by Langford, some by his fellow cameramen or by friends, since these featured Mike himself. South Vietnamese troops in steel helmets slogged thigh-deep through the water of a rice paddy, on patrol: small, wiry men, their faces set with fatigue. They rested on a bank, automatic rifles stacked beside them. They lay flat, under fire. I pulled out more, and the desk was covered with black-and-white glimpses of that long, fruitless conflict which a year ago had slid into history, with all the other wars. Langford’s war: the center of his life.

I continued to sort and sample.

At some irrational level, he didn’t believe he could die: I knew enough now to feel certain of this. How else to explain his habit of standing up to film under fire, when the troops around him were flat on their bellies? Or his practice of filming in the front line, and even beyond the front line? He never seemed to grow older; well, he might well be safe from age now: might be locked in the frozen youth of the soldier.

He waited, in the darkness behind my chair. The calm voice waited on the tapes, and my grief was ambiguous. Reason said he was probably dead, but emotion said he might still be alive: it was just possible, and the mixture of affection and bafflement that he’d stirred in me as a boy was back again. It reached out to me now from that tropical kingdom of Dis he was lost in, beyond the Thai border.

TAPE 1 : SINGAPORE, FEBRUARY 22ND, 1965

—In order to conserve my capital, I’ve decided to live poor. I’ve taken a room in a Chinese shophouse: I like the idea of getting to know Singapore from underneath. I have one bag of clothes, this new tape recorder, and the Leica that I hope’s going to make my fortune.

—Came here to do some freelance work. Arranged this with the Age before I left: pics for a series of articles they’re planning to run on independent Singapore. I also have a reference I can show to the people at the Straits
Times
.

—I intended eventually to go on to London. But now I’m not sure that I will.

 

 

In the first moments of waking, he looks up in puzzlement at the aged ceiling fan revolving above his bed. It’s a strange device to him, and makes a noise like a motor boat. Then it says
Singapore,
and he remembers where he is. His wristwatch says ten past seven.

I see him here, in Wu Tak Seng’s shophouse: he describes it in loving detail. At twenty-nine, he’s still in the peak physical condition of an athlete; he runs five miles a day religiously, and no doubt comes to consciousness with the sense of his body purring in neutral: perfectly tuned and ready to serve him. The single sheet on the bed has been kicked off during the night; he finds himself naked in the dense, humid warmth of Asia.

A strong shaft of sun comes through a doorway framing sky. He contemplates this for a moment and then stretches, beginning to hear a set of novel sounds. There’s a trilling and whistling of many small birds, as though he’s in an aviary. Half-chanting Chinese voices float up to him and always seem to break off on a note of question, and someone lengthily hawks and spits. Strange mechanical hoots and a persistent, hollow tapping come from somewhere below. He arrived at Paya Lebar airport yesterday evening, on a Qantas 707 from Sydney, and now, as he lies here, the road from the airport unravels again in his head.

His taxi was a rattling Morris Oxford driven by a Sikh, and in the headlights, Asia was disclosed to him for the first time, like a video show arranged for his pleasure. Dim and shadowy, the old road from Paya Lebar was very different from the freeway that brings the air traveler of today into Singapore from Changi: it was a glowing and teeming tunnel of life, walled and roofed over by the dim fronds of palms, and by giant, snake-limbed banyans and rain trees. Dusk became blue-tinged darkness there:
malam,
the big Malay night, flaring and glimmering with the little mysteries of kerosene and oil lamps. These lit up the humble thatch-and-bamboo matting of kampongs; it was a rural road, Langford says, and that appealed to him immediately. Along it, in endless, festive crowds, flowed the figures of three races: Malay, Indian and Chinese. Slow, creaking bullock carts impeded the Sikh’s taxi, and the turbaned figure at the wheel cursed as though they were not extraordinary. Toy-tiny roadside stalls with awnings the color of paper were memories from another existence: a life of medieval simplicity, always known about, yet forgotten until now. The stream of warm air through the taxi’s open window carried vast vegetable smells; Indians in dhotis pulled handcarts; Chinese in singlets and baggy shorts rode bicycles. There were few cars, then.

Sometimes the course of a life is set by an experience that’s both undemanding and unexpected. A simple drive from the airport had apparently begun this process for Langford, and the voice on the tape develops a soft fervor.

 

—This is the place I’ve always been waiting for. If there’s any way to stay here, I’m going to do it.

 

He sits up on the edge of the bed, and begins to look for his clothes.

The room, for which he pays only ten Straits dollars a day, is on the third and topmost floor of a Chinese shophouse on Boat Quay, owned by a merchant called Wu Tak Seng. The two rooms next door are divided into cubicles accommodating whole Chinese families: six or eight people in each. The place is of a kind that very few Europeans in Singapore except the most desperate would ever contemplate renting, even for a few nights. The furnishings are like those in a hostel for derelicts: two metal chairs; a Laminex-topped table; a bare electric bulb. For a wardrobe, there’s a hanging-space in one corner, behind a ragged floral curtain. Yet what Langford proposes to do is to make it his home for the next month. What arrangements there were in the way of showers and lavatories in Wu Tak Seng’s building he doesn’t record; but probably they wouldn’t have been as daunting to him as to someone city-bred. After all, he’d spent most of his life in comfortable familiarity with the outdoor dunny on the farm, and its ancient, somber stink; and he’d taken his regular turn at removing the can, and burying the family shit. His upbringing had made him in many ways indifferent to the comforts and luxuries of this century; it would stand him in good stead, in Asia.

The only source of light and air is the doorway at the end of the bed, opening onto a tiny balcony. Two louvered shutter doors, painted a faded and flaking sky blue, stand permanently open; one of them has a broken hinge, and hangs at an angle. He describes a balcony with a balustrade of crumbling stucco, on which sits a struggling jade plant in an earthenware pot. A bare bamboo washing-pole, angled like the bowsprit of a yacht, projects above the street. Dressed, he walks out there, into sun which pours over him like a thick, scalding soup.

The whistling and trilling he heard on waking is explained: many bamboo cages containing pet birds hang bathed in sunlight above the balconies on both sides. Mingled with their sound is that of a radio playing Chinese music, raised Cantonese voices, chugging marine engines, hooting of river craft, roaring trucks, jingling bicycle bells, and the sounds of many feet: clicking shoes, clacking sandals, and the whisper of feet that are bare. There’s also a dry, rattling noise, subtle as the sound of the naked feet: in the spreading trees that line the Quay, big black pods are shaken by a faint breeze; a sound that will be stitched into his life here.

The radio is quite close, and a female Chinese voice is singing, high and wailing and plaintive as a child‘s, yet sexually tantalizing, hovering on the edges of both discord and sweetness: the melody a blend of Chinese and Western. He’s never before heard a Cantonese love song, and it flowers for him as that most telling of all hybrids, beauty crossed with strangeness. Together with these sounds, a wave of smells comes up to him: cooking rice and pork, rotting cabbage, rubber, the sweetness of sandalwood, and a strong stink of the tidal inlet. He puts both hands on the warm stucco of the balustrade and breathes in Singapore.