Highways to a War (20 page)

“Everybody know Madame Phan,” the voice murmured. “She is a dragon lady. Important business every place. Her husband Mr. Phan Le Dang also important—but I think he is never in Saigon now. Some say Phan Le Dang is killed by the Communists. Why do you visit Madame Phan, Mr. Mike?”

Just business, Langford said.

Silence followed, in which the squeaking of the cyclo’s pedals sounded like a protest at Langford’s brusqueness. Then the machine stopped beside tall iron gates with white, grimy pillars. The cyclo boy wanted to wait, but Langford told him to go, and paid him off. The boy pedaled slowly away under the streetlights, looking back with lingering reproach.

As Langford approached the gates, a small, fantastically narrow figure materialized in the darkness on the other side, coming from behind an orange tree. At first, he says, he thought it was a child. But it was a young Vietnamese woman, little more than five feet tall. She wore a white
ao dai,
the silk tunic and pantaloons outlining her body from throat to hip, and her face was an inverted triangle, peering at him through the bars.

 

—Like a fairy looking out of a cave.

 

She unlocked the gates and swung one open to admit him.
“Bonsoir, monsieur.”
Her piping voice was only just audible. He summoned up his school French to return the greeting, and she led him up a short set of stone steps to the main entrance, pushing open tall, heavy double doors that he calls “historic-looking,” their carved wood the color of dead leaves. The villa was French colonial, with a basement area below the steps, two stories above, and many windows with faded blue shutters. The girl brought him inside and then vanished, as though into a crevice.

He found himself in the semidarkness of a sort of anteroom. In front of him, light came from a remarkable number of candles on shelves and low tables, their flickering causing the whole interior to dance with a golden glow. He smelled sandalwood and spices, and was startled by the sound of a piano; a European piece was being played that he identifies only as “classical.” He took a couple of paces forward, his eyes adjusting to the light.

The piano was an old upright, situated at the far end of the chamber; it was played by a woman who sat with her back to him. Her black hair was drawn back in a chignon; she wore a high-collared Chinese blouse of midnight blue, and a black slit skirt. At first he thought she was unaware of him, but then she turned and smiled over her shoulder-as though they’d already met, and shared some intimate joke. She went on playing, one prominent cheekbone dusted orange by the candlelight.

It was the last kind of scene he would have expected to confront him in Southeast Asia: a cameo from nineteenth-century Europe—or rather, a kitsch idea of nineteenth-century Europe: a painting on a chocolate box. He found it absurdly stagy, and was partly embarrassed, partly amused. Yet he was also impressed: perhaps because the staging was so effective. He waited politely, among gilded Chinese cabinets and carved tables: all of them aflame like altars, all of them laden with dimly seen busts, statuettes and vases. “Crowded with junk” is how he describes the place—not yet knowing (as he would do eventually) that he was looking at Khmer, Cham and Chinese artifacts centuries old: some of them of great value. He had an impression of museum dustiness, and the closeness in here made the heavy Saigon heat almost suffocating. Sweat ran down his face, and he mopped it away with his handkerchief. There seemed to be no electric fans—as though in this papier-mâché Europe they were thought to be not needed.

The woman brought the piece to an end, and stood up. He guessed her to be somewhere in her late thirties. She was slim, but much more substantial than the servant girl had been, her physical scale European rather than Vietnamese. Moving towards him, hand outstretched, she gave off an aura of vigor and physical well-being. The silk blouse, worked with a design of red peonies, shone like porcelain; so did a heavy gold chain around her neck that was set with rubies. He describes the chain with some awe.

“Do you like Chopin, Mr. Langford? Yes? Forgive the romantic candlelight: we’ve had a power failure.” Her speech was rapid, her voice somewhat deep, and her accent French. The pressure of her hand was firm.

A single color photograph of her has survived among Langford’s effects: a portrait with the name of a Saigon studio on the back. It was probably taken around this time, when she still had her youth, and it’s easy to see that she was as attractive as Langford claims she was. But it’s an unconventional attractiveness, and one he does little to describe. The face is dominated by the eyes, which look directly and challengingly at the camera. They have the Vietnamese almond shape, but the French side of her ancestry has made them a surprising gray green.

“No electric fans, either,” she was saying. “So we are melting. That’s bloody Saigon for you. We melt.” She took Langford’s arm. “Come on. My girls have still found a way to cook dinner —under my supervision, of course. I don’t want to disappoint you. I’m sure Aubrey Hardwick will have told you about our cooking. Perhaps that’s why he sent you here—for a good meal. Yes? But Aubrey never has one reason for doing anything. You’ve found that out?”

Langford told her that he didn’t know Aubrey well enough to make a judgment.

She laughed as though what he’d said had been witty. Her laugh was a gleeful, exuberant shout, her deep voice making it almost masculine. It made him laugh too, and she looked at him with quick warmth. “Yes,” she said. “Good. You have understood that Aubrey needs a lot of study. True. He does.”‘

She slid back a curtain of heavy red velvet that screened a door beside the piano, and led him through.

 

 

They sat at a round table covered with a lace cloth. The room was large, and less stuffy than the other, but the warmth was still heavy. Folding bamboo fans sat beside their plates, and they both made use of these. There were even more candles in here than in the anteroom: the same golden flares and areas of shadow. The room was imposing—but it was not, to his mind, like the dining room of a wealthy household.

High and square and somber, its white walls dim and grimy, it was more like the shabby-genteel salon of cultivated people whose country had been occupied and impoverished: somewhere in Central Europe, perhaps. Its fans hung stalled above them like the wheels of an extinct machine. Eventually he’d discover that this had been the house of Madame Phan’s late father, a French colonial official. It belonged to Asia and Europe at the same time, and the effect was odd and troubling. There were huge stuffed armchairs from the 1930s, their backs draped with antimacassars; dark French dressers; a library of books in French, Vietnamese and English. More Asian objets d‘art, some of which Madame Phan identified for him, sat on shelves: stone heads of Buddha; a bronze statue of Shiva; a stone bas-relief of the naked Cambodian nymphs called apsarases, dancing with serene smiles.

But Langford has more to say about the cooking than he does about the art works. Aubrey had been right: it was quite simply the best meal he’d ever eaten. There were little spring rolls and spiced chicken wings; hearty French onion soup; then a chicken casserole with rice, accompanied by a delicate Beaujolais. The casserole was French, yet with a coloring of Indochina, the flavors mysterious and novel. It had come in individual clay pots, carried in from the kitchen by two young women who Langford assumed were servants, yet who didn’t look like servants: he describes them as “refined.” Both were formal and elegant in the traditional white
ao dai;
one of them was the girl who had opened the gate.

He complimented Madame Phan on the meal with an enthusiasm that made her smile; and she shook her head.

“No, I’m afraid it’s quite crude,” she said. “Forgive me, but things are always rushed these days: since I’ve had to take charge of my husband’s trading company, I have too little time for important things like cuisine. Aubrey will have told you that my husband disappeared? Yes. Six months ago, he was captured by the Communists near Tay Ninh, on the Cambodian border. He was visiting one of our trading posts there, and never came back. We trade into Cambodia: watches; electrical equipment; food: everything. One of our agents there says the Viet Cong were trying to extract too much protection money, and my husband refused. I expected an approach for ransom for a long time, but nothing happened. So now we have little hope. And I don’t really know whether I’m a widow or not.” She smiled faintly.

Langford said he was sorry.

She shrugged, her face suddenly blank, and sipped her wine. Then she said: “This country is built on bribery, my dear—you’ve learned that? Our pure-minded Communists are no different; they want their share of the graft: all for the Party, of course. My agents at every depot on the Mekong need a constant supply of bribe money-to pay off the Viet Cong, and to pay off the criminals who burn our warehouses and raid our ships. Everyone thinks the Phans have a bag of money with no bottom. But it isn’t true. Like all businesses, we run on credit; we take risks; nothing is certain.”

She looked drolly despairing; then she smiled. She was never serious for long, he says.

Over a second bottle of Beaujolais, they began to talk more easily. Already she was Claudine, and he was Michael—but not Mike. She had the gift of achieving a sort of light intimacy without in any way losing a final formality and privacy; and he’d already sensed that failure to recognize these boundaries would be a mistake. She questioned him about his life and his background, and he pictures her listening with absolute intentness, one elbow propped on the table to rest her chin on her hand, the other hand slowly flapping her bamboo fan.

“So why are you here, Michael?”

For a moment he thought that his visit was being challenged, and he stared at her in confusion. But he had misunderstood, and she laughed.

“I’m sorry: I meant why have you come to Vietnam? You are very welcome in my house.”

He told her he was here for Telenews.

“Of course I know this,” she said. “But why have you come to Indochina in the first place? That’s what interests me.”

He seems to have answered in a deliberately prosaic way. Because it was the best place to be at present for any correspondent or news photographer, he said: the best story going.

But she pursed her lips as he spoke and shook her head slowly in mock reproach, matching it to the rhythm of her fan. “You are giving me careful answers,” she said. “I think that you are an interesting man who wants to hide the fact that he is interesting. You forget that I have learned a little about you from Aubrey. When he found you in Singapore you were starving. Now why would a healthy, attractive young guy like you want to starve in Singapore? To punish himself?” She shook her head. “No; you don’t look the type. On the run from something? Maybe. I think so. Yes?”

Cocking her head, she snapped the fan shut and pointed it at him. Then she laughed: the same frank shout that he’d first heard in the anteroom. It invited him to join in, and he did. He saw that she wanted to know him, and to make him like her—but not to flirt. Her sexual presence was strong, and had a quality that was formidable rather than seductive. He saw this as non-Western; baffling.

“Am I being nosy? Yes; I am nosy,” she said. “That’s me; that’s Claudine Phan. Everyone knows that. If I want to find out, I ask; if I think something is so, I say it. The Saigon bourgeoisie find me appalling. I’m a rude bloody
frog,
they say.” She laughed again, briefly: a statement in two syllables. “You can stop me asking you these questions if you like,
mon cher.
But because Aubrey has sent you to me, I’m being absolutely frank with you, and I would like to be your friend. So you and I must be truthful with each other: no secrets. Our secrets have to be from other people—you understand? Aubrey and I have trust, and I want to have trust with you too, Michael. But I cannot be anyone’s friend unless I know him.”

He said that he’d value her friendship, and would value her help. And he must have given her his smile, because she nodded and said: “Yes. You know how to charm, Michael; good. But still I’d like to know what made you change your life. Why did you come to Asia?”

 

—I told her. Told her everything: things I’ve discussed with no one else. I thought it was the wine, last night; now I think it was only Claudine. It’s the way she listens: listens without speaking. I felt she understood everything, and didn’t judge me.

 

He gives no detail at all of what he said. But it’s clear that he talked not only of his hopes and ambitions, but of his relationship with Diana Lockhart. He doesn’t even do this in the audio diary: he never looks backward. And in someone as private as Langford, I find the bare fact of this confession remarkable. Nothing could make clearer the way in which Madame Phan had won his confidence. And while his own side of the dialogue is lost, everything she said is recorded in full.

“I think you will be very successful as a war photographer. You are the kind who will be good at it: you are cool, aren’t you? But I think you must leave your pain behind. Not just about this woman, but the guilt over your friend. Because there’s nothing to be done, is there? You did a bad thing—to yourself as well as him—but it’s all gone. Gone. And now you are doing what you really want to do, and you are where you are meant to be.” Suddenly, her voice grew humorously hard; almost coarse. “So never mind.”

She laughed at his expression, which must have been disconcerted.

“Never mind, baby—never mind. Everyone says that in Asia: here in Vietnam we say
khong xâu,
and where you just came from, they say
t‘id-apa,
right? ’Never mind; not to worry.‘ The same in Vietnamese and Malay and in all Asian languages. When nothing can be done, we say
khong xâu,
and walk away. You are going to have to learn to do that too, Michael. I think you have been like Rip Van Winkle. You were asleep; in a dream over this woman, and time went by. Perhaps that’s why you look so young—and you are not really so young, are you? Nearly thirty; that’s quite old, in this country. Yes; you nearly lost your youth. But then, one day you woke up in Singapore. And now you commence living the life you were meant for.”