Stray Love (25 page)

Back at the hotel, Dinh put on Anh’s favourite record again, the Portuguese music she had taken to calling “mornas.” After the first popping and scratching sounds, he raised the volume so the music drowned out the street noise, drowned out the gun that was still ringing in our ears. Even though the song was sad, it felt like being rinsed. The woman’s voice was so clear and full. Anh stood behind me and scratched my shoulders lightly with her fingernails. Then she walked over to Dinh and rested her hands on his shoulders. When the record ended, the room filled with the sound of the needle looping, the rhythm of empty grooves. Dinh lifted the arm and placed it back on the post. He turned the machine off and the record spun until it slowed and stopped.

That night I lay awake in bed listening to a street vendor’s singing lament rising through the window.
Who wants vodka? Who wants banh mi?
I heard the hypnotic
clickclickclick
of a playing card brushing bicycle spokes in Lam Son Square. And Dinh whimpering in his sleep. A part of me knew that Dinh was dreaming about his father, that it could have been his father
in the market. When the whimpering continued, I hummed to him, trying to drown out his bad dream.

A letter arrived from Pippa the next morning. I tore the envelope open and unfolded the paper. She wrote how lovely it was to hear from me, to hear that I was so happy, but that she missed me terribly and did I know when I would be back. Wasn’t there a small part of me, she asked, that missed her too? Even just a little bit? She signed her name with fourteen hearts.

I had made her suffer—a hollow achievement, but I clung to it.

Oliver had started going to the Caravelle roof bar across the square. He now got drunk nearly every night, and had taken to sleeping at odd hours.

When he had been napping for an unusually long time one afternoon, Anh told me to wake him. I opened his bedroom door and saw him asleep on top of the covers. He was lying at the very edge of the bed, one leg dangling off the side.

“Oliver,” I said softly.

Usually he wrapped himself in a very thin gauze of sleep, on the verge of waking, but now he looked as though he had died.

“Wake up,” I said softly. I had read once that a soldier could wake up swinging, so I extended my arm and tried to tap Oliver’s shoulder from a distance.
Tap, tap.

Oliver’s forehead made two deep vertical creases in the middle like coin slots. But he continued sleeping. I took the lace coverlet at the bottom of the bed and pulled it over him and walked back to the table, where Anh was mending one of Dinh’s shirts.

“I can’t wake him. He’s snoring pretty loudly.”

“We’ll let him have peace, then.”

I looked at Anh, trying to read her mood. “I think Arnaud’s back from Tokyo. Can I go to Givral’s and see if he’s there?”

She looked up and put down her sewing. “Yes. And if you find him, tell him to join us for dinner.”

I was not surprised when Anh started asking after Arnaud. He was the most charming man in the world. He looked like Pig Pen when he returned from the field, covered in dust. Half an hour later, he would look like nobility. A few of the Vietnamese men working at the hotel didn’t trust him because he was half French, but Anh would sneak peeks at his handsome face and giggle at his funny accent.

That night Anh made a fish hotpot for dinner. I was glad to have Arnaud there making conversation while Oliver and Dinh sat silently at opposite ends of the table, staring at the flowers Arnaud had brought. When the meal was over, Oliver excused himself and took off for the Caravelle roof bar. Shortly after, Dinh and I left Arnaud and Anh sitting at opposite ends of the French sofa and headed to Brodard’s for ice cream.

When we returned to the hotel an hour later, Arnaud and Anh were still on the sofa but now they were listening to a jazz record. Anh looked very happy. They were still sitting side by side. Anh’s slender hands were still folded on her lap, but it looked as if someone had tilted the room and slid them closer together.

There was a glow around them that I wanted to be part of, so I walked over and said the first thing that came to mind. “Arnaud, can you give me a photography lesson sometime?”

“Of course, Marcel. I’d like that. We’ll wait for a good shooting day. How does that sound?”

Several days later, Arnaud showed up to take me around the city for a photography lesson. In the absence of rain, the dust had been building, softening the sun’s usual glare.

Arnaud arrived toting a pair of cameras around his neck. His fishing vest was crammed with extra film. He handed me the smaller camera to carry and showed me how to set the light meter, adjust the lens, load a roll of film.

“Remember to keep the sun behind you,” he said. When he was satisfied that I had a grasp of the technical basics, he said, “Now forget all that. Let’s go.”

I trailed behind him, timidly snapping photos, while he kept repeating, “Don’t overthink! Don’t overthink!” We made our way over to Le Loi, where Arnaud explained that the street was named after the general and emperor who had won back independence for Vietnam from China in 1428. He pointed out how many streets were named after Vietnamese heroes who had fought off foreign invaders.

Arnaud took his own pictures during our walk. He snapped a group of five children sharing a giant red lollipop, vampiric smiles as they passed it up and down the row. He did a kind of twirl on the sidewalk and snapped two grenade guards, who were protecting a sidewalk café that had stayed open. He did this without them noticing, acting like a smooth dancerly spy. He stopped by a tree, which stood alone amid a row of stumps, and without taking a single picture—simply changing his camera angle—he demonstrated ten different ways of framing it.

“Elevated. Cropped. Intimate. Epic. Abstract. Tragic icon. Triumphant symbol …”

Once we had shot six rolls between us, Arnaud led me back to his darkroom on rue Pasteur—a converted lavatory in the AP offices. For the next hour, we stood shoulder to shoulder,
tinted by the red light, soaking our gloved hands in vinegary developer and fixer.

My photos were all embarrassingly simple: subject right in the centre of the frame, flatly lit. There were orbs on all the photos I had taken of the General, circles of brightness that Arnaud explained were caused by moisture in the air. But it was an incredible feeling, knowing that I was creating a permanent record of some kind. Even the mistakes felt magical.

While we waited for the last batch of photos to dry, Arnaud showed me some of the recent pictures he had taken while on patrol.

“Soldier, peasant, child, peasant, soldier, soldier, soldier,” he said, sighing as he passed them to me one by one.

I noticed one particularly good photo of a backlit American soldier walking through a field. I lifted it up. “I can see this one on the cover of
LIFE.
“

I passed the photo back to Arnaud, who looked at it for a moment, then shook his head. “Never trust a war picture that impresses too easily.” He ripped the photo in half and said, “Mythology impresses. Propaganda impresses. We’re not interested in the easy picture.”

I nodded uncertainly.

Arnaud sighed. “Look, I’m not really meant for this—war hunting. Given the choice, I’d prefer the quiet of a garden over the excitement of combat any day.”

“Then why don’t you switch and become a garden photographer?”

“Oh. It’s much too late for that.”

I didn’t really know what he meant:
Too late because it would be hard to find work? Too late because even flowers would remind him of death?
I decided to change the subject.

“How much can you get for a good war photo?”

“Well, I’m on staff but a stringer … let’s see. Probably ten, fifteen dollars.”

“Not bad,” I said.

Arnaud gave me a disappointed look and said, “No. Not good.”

When we were finished in the darkroom, Arnaud sat down at his desk, leaned back and said, “Well, let’s have a peek.”

I slid my photos across the desk. Arnaud picked them up, shuffled through them quickly and put them down.

“So?” I said tentatively. “Am I even remotely on the right track?”

He gave me a steady look and said, “Find the one with the dog.”

I searched through the stack until I came to the photo: a skinny black dog standing at the feet of a young Vietnamese soldier who was pinning his laundry to a bamboo rod. The dog was looking up devotedly.

Arnaud said, “Forget the roadblocks and tanks on the streets. The dog is good.”

The next morning I was sitting with Dinh across from the hotel on the steps of the old French Opera House. It was one of the few places we were allowed to spend time without being supervised. I was showing him my photos when a voice came out of nowhere: “Hey, big guy.”

I glanced around.

“Up here,” said the voice.

I looked up and saw the shoeshine boy with the red cap, seated on a window ledge, his skinny scabby legs dangling in the air. He jumped down and loped towards me. He was wearing a
tiny pair of shorts and a tight shiny blue shirt. With a hard yank, he pulled his cap out of his back pocket and put it on, arranging it to his satisfaction.

A few more boys walked up Tu Do, a gangle of legs, arms swinging with wooden shoeshine boxes. “Hey, Trang!” they yelled.

I looked carefully but I didn’t notice Mr. Ten Cent among them.

When I turned back to Trang, he was holding a watch up by its strap. It took me a moment to realize that it was
my watch.
The one Mr. Ten Cent had stolen.

“Hey, where’d you get that?”

“All this time, I wait for you.” Trang grinned, tossing me the watch.

Trang stalked off to buy ice-pops from a boy in the square, then came back to join us. We sat there in silence, enjoying our frozen treats, watching the dark rippling shadows from a string of street pennants, triangles dancing happily on the sidewalk. The shade moved with the sun and we hoisted ourselves up a few stairs. When Trang finished his ice-pop, he lit a cigarette and offered it to Dinh, who refused. Then he passed it to me and I held it to my lips, taking a tentative puff. I felt the smoke clutch the back of my throat and started coughing. Trang leaned back on his elbows, watching while I took another puff. This time I pulled so hard I could hear the paper crackle.

“You give me money, man. I promise, I get you both
beaucoup
girls,” Trang said, taking the cigarette back.

Dinh pulled a face.

“We don’t—want—girls,” I said, between coughs.

Trang sighed a world-weary sigh. “You’re right, man. They only make me trouble.”

A few minutes later, Trang stood up to leave. He shook Dinh’s hand and patted me on the shoulder. “Dinh. Marcel. You stay number one. Anytime, you let me know what you want. Okay?”

We stared after him as he walked away. His body small and tense, ready to shoot across gaps in traffic and snap at the heels of rich foreigners. I guessed that Mr. Ten Cent had been overthrown. I hadn’t seen him around for a while. Now Trang’s turf stretched for a dozen blocks.

Louis Armstrong was playing on the record player when we returned to the hotel room. Shiny trumpet sounds and a bouncy gravel voice. I walked across the room, stepped out on the balcony and looked at the apartment across the street where my clothes were strung up from one end to the other.

Anh followed me outside a minute later. “I saw you, Macee,” she said. “I want you to stay away from those boys.”

When I didn’t respond, she clucked her tongue. “You listen, okay? Those boys are like gangsters. That one you speak to is a
cao boi!
“

I looked down at the square, finding it difficult to connect my image of Trang with the boy Anh was demonizing. He had saved my life. I could have been beaten far worse if he hadn’t stopped Mr. Ten Cent. Anh kept looking at me, waiting for me to dispel her worries, but there was nothing I could think to say that wouldn’t feel like a betrayal so I just stayed quiet.

Anyway, she needn’t have bothered warning me away from Trang. It’s true that for a short while he adopted me. Anytime I was out in the neighbourhood, he popped out of thin air: catching up to me as I walked across the street, tapping the window pane when I sat down for a bowl of
pho
at the noodle house.
But, then, not long after, Trang fell in with a group of GIs at the Brinks. They cropped the sleeves and legs off a GI uniform and he became their mascot, cadging cigarettes and soft drinks and issues of
Soldier of Fortune.
They taught him more English, including a bunch of new swear words. In return, he acted as their interpreter, even bargaining with prostitutes on their behalf. When the Brinks was vandalized with pro–Viet Cong graffiti, he translated the red spray-paint into English.
Go back. American Pig Fucker. Long live Ho Chi Minh.
Sometimes, Dinh and I saw him outside one of the nearby brothels, sitting in the doorway, slugging a bottle of Coca-Cola by himself while waiting for his new friends. He always took off his sunglasses and waved us over, but generally he had less and less time for us.

A few days after Trang reappeared, Oliver was called in to see his Saigon editor. He came back a few hours later with a warning letter sticking out of his breast pocket like a silk handkerchief. The letter accused him of failing to follow house style. It said Novus was not the place for crusading journalism. It asked him to tone down the editorializing.

I read the letter after he threw it away. Then, later that night, I overheard him talking about it with Joseph. Dinh was sleeping and I was reading in bed by flashlight when I heard their voices through the open bedroom door.

“All I wrote was that, contrary to the
official story,
American pilots aren’t just cheering the South Vietnamese on from the passenger seat. Come on, Joseph. You know as well as I do that those aren’t just training planes they’re flying. They’re leading a full-scale air war against the Viet Cong.”

“Well, if that’s the case, then you need to stick to the facts. You’re acquiring a reputation.”

“Those
are
the facts. This air war is producing massive casualties.”