The Second Sight, page 17
“Not yet,” Christopher said.
His gaze, always intense, was now almost feverish. He looked as if he had just recovered from an attack of malaria—gaunt, weakened, pallid beneath a deeply tanned skin. No doubt he had; like many who fought in the Pacific, he was infected. He had been in the jungle with the Vietminh for exactly a month, a fact that impressed Patchen—not the duration of the mission but the timing. The guerrillas had picked Christopher up in the middle of Hanoi and then dropped him off on a streetcorner as if they were running a bus service behind enemy lines. If they could do that, how much longer could this war last?
He said to Christopher, “What do you mean ‘not yet’?”
“I’ve done what Waddy wanted. Now I’m going to do what I came here to do.”
“That may not be as important now as it seemed before.” “After what I’ve just seen, I have to disagree.”
Patchen made a noncommittal gesture. “We’ll talk.”
“We already have,” Christopher said, straightening up.
As he talked, Christopher had kept his back turned to the house and leaned over as if to tie his shoelaces. He had arrived ready for the game, wearing tennis shoes, shorts, and a faded knit shirt. Now he walked onto the court, called out to the partner Patchen had provided, and hit a ball to him. Patchen sat down to watch. Christopher was a good player; so was the other man. They split two sets. Although this was a concrete court, Christopher’s canvas shoes were spotted with grass stains and smudges of red clay. He never seemed to wear new clothes. Neither did the O. G. Neither, now, did Patchen, who was dressed in a seersucker suit and a black knit tie, the costume he would wear in summer for the remainder of his career.
At the end of the game, the players sat down side by side to cool off. When they got up they took each other’s racquets, which were identical American models. Inside the hollow handle of Christopher’s was his report on his journey with the Vietminh. Patchen read it later that afternoon in a safe house. It spoke in meticulous detail of night marches, tunnels, ambushes, political discussions, acts of atrocity. The writing was factual, neutral, stripped of opinion and emotion. Nevertheless, when he put it down, Patchen was convinced that Christopher had been changed in some fundamental way by his month with the Vietminh.
“Not changed, reminded,” Christopher said later, when Patchen suggested this to him. “These people are killers. I saw them massacre whole villages. They call it Dâu Tô—‘Struggle-Denunciation.’ From their point of view they’re not killing anything that has a right to live. Some of them talked to me about it. At first the work is disgusting, they said—the blood, the brains, the howls for mercy, shooting children or mutilating them. But you get used to it. It’s done in the name of the cause, so it’s virtuous. Everybody you know approves and sympathizes. The higher reasons are known to all. It gives you a moral glow. Heinrich Himmler said the same things about the Death’s-head SS after watching them shoot Jewish children: ‘Virtuous boys, to perform such unspeakable acts for the Reich.’ “
“You’re describing maniacs.”
“Believers.”
“According to your report they don’t spend all their time massacring innocent people.”
“No. They’re good troops. As good as the Japanese.”
“They seem to remind you of your enemies no matter how you look at them.”
“Except that this bunch are going to win,” Christopher said.
His voice, always difficult to hear, was practically inaudible over the scratchy music of a wind-up phonograph. They were drifting at night in a sampan on the River of Perfumes in Hue. It was very dark. The moving water splintered the yellow light from a lantern at the stern, where the boatman stood, bare toes gripping the deck as he sculled upriver, grunting a little each time he swiveled the oar. This was their first meeting since the tennis game.
The atmosphere in Hue, the imperial city of Vietnam, was less warlike than in Hanoi. All around them, other nearly identical sampans, each with an awning amidships and a lantern on the stern, were carried by the current. Plaintive songs from other phonographs drifted through the darkness. Pleasure sampans, these vessels were called, and in some of them, no doubt, guerrillas back from the scenes Christopher had described were being entertained by prostitutes. Vietnamese women were the most beautiful human beings Patchen had ever seen.
The record ended. Christopher said something in Vietnamese. The boatman went on sculling, winding up the machine with his foot and delicately placing the needle on the 78-rpm record with his toes.
Patchen said, “Tell me what you want to do and how long it will take.”
“I don’t know how long it will take. I’ve already met the schoolmaster.”
He meant Vo, the 0. G.’s friend from the First World War. Even though his voice was virtually drowned out by the tinny music issuing from the gramophone, even though Vo was one of the most common surnames in Vietnam, Christopher was careful not to pronounce it. By itself it would mean nothing to an eavesdropper. Even the full name, Vo Van Tho, would have been a feeble clue; “Van,” the middle name of all Vietnamese males, means “civilized, literary,” while “Tho,” the given name, means longevity. The Vietnamese rarely tempt fate by using their given names among themselves, but are called by nicknames. Vo had a scraggly beard, like his classmate, Ho Chi Minh, and the nickname his students had given him was Rau, meaning “beard.” That would have been a dangerous name to speak, because it would have identified him to anyone who happened to overhear or read Christopher’s lips.
“How are you two getting along?” Patchen asked.
“All right, I think,” Christopher said. “We talk about poetry.” “Yours or his?”
Vo Rau, under that name, was a well-known poet. Between the wars he had written verses in French, but after the Japanese vanquished the French and occupied Indochina, demonstrating that Asians could defeat Europeans, he had written only in Vietnamese, and only about restoring Vietnam to its own people. These patriotic works, disguised as love songs, were the foundation of his appeal to the young. As for Christopher, he had published a book of poems the year before. They, too, were about war and loss.
“We’re exchanging favors,” Christopher said. “He’s helping me translate my stuff into Vietnamese, and I’m helping him with an English version of some of his poems.”
“You think there’s a market for the result?” Patchen asked. “I think it’s a way to talk about anything.”
“Is he a believer?”
“I don’t think so,” Christopher said. “Just as his old friend said, he’s a romantic. I think he’s surprised at the effect of his poetry and his teaching. What has he done? He may not know the details of the Struggle-Denunciation, but I think he suspects the truth.”
“Are you going to tell him his suspicions are correct?”
“In a poem, yes.”
10
AFTER PATCHEN RETURNED TO WASHINGTON, CHRISTOPHER MOVED to Hue and rented a small house near the Citadel. Hue was filled with Christopher’s fellow poets, many of whom were Communist terrorists. The Annamese girl who had been sleeping with him in Hanoi came with him and carried on with her work as a writer and printer for an underground Communist newspaper. She was also the Vietminh agent assigned to monitor Christopher and his activities.
Her revolutionary name was Phuoc, meaning “luck,” but Christopher called her Lê, or “Tears,” because like many people of deep political conviction, she cried easily over trivial experiences. A poem, a movie (even a French movie), a particularly lovely sunset beyond Imperial Screen Mountain, a song, an orgasm, would cause her soft brown eyes to glisten and overflow. She never sobbed, never made a noise she did not intend to make.
“Le is an unkind name to call me by,” she told Christopher.
But she liked it because it was poetic, and because it acknowledged her femininity. At heart she was a conventional girl in spite of the bombings and assassinations she had carried out. She was an expert rifle shot and maker of booby traps who had killed French soldiers and other enemies of the cause. She had seduced Christopher in the first place because she had been ordered to do so by the apparatus, making the proposition herself when he failed to invite her into bed in response to her signals.
She was surprised by her own ardor. He was her first white lover, and she had not expected to feel passion for a body that was so different from her own. As soon as they took off their clothes, however, she discovered exciting similarities: a French bullet had passed through the muscles of her arm and the tissue of her breast, leaving puckered scars. Christopher had been wounded in Okinawa in almost the same places: “Kissed by death before they kissed,” as he wrote in a poem after she compared their wounds to love bites. He made no attempt to teach her American-style lovemaking, if such a thing existed. Instead, he was content to discover Lê’s methods. She taught him the Vietnamese words for the sexual acts, as for everything else. Sometimes, as she taught, she felt something like amusement running through his body. She took strict precautions against pregnancy, knowing that any child they had would be ugly and an outcast.
Although Le was assigned to watch his every move, Christopher actually had a great deal of time to himself. Living the secret life in a country controlled by an intelligent enemy is time-consuming because of the elaborate precautions involved, and Lê’s days and nights were consumed by writing, printing, and distributing her newspaper, her skin smelling of ink when she crawled into bed with him after a night at the print shop. She was required by the Party to attend innumerable Marxist-Leninist study, discussion, and self-criticism groups. Her schedule was as hectic, and as filled with snubs, slights, boredom, and dreams of marriage as that of a young American matron who has let herself become too deeply involved in community affairs. Christopher wrote no reports now, so he had nothing to hide. In Hanoi, he had composed them when she was out, in invisible ink in the Greek cipher, between the lines of the great epic poem Kim Van Kieu, which he was copying from a book as a means of perfecting his Vietnamese and getting the rhythms of classical Vietnamese verse into his head.
Le came from a village about fifteen miles from Hue, and every Sunday she bicycled home to visit her parents after rising early to cook delicacies that she packed in a basket hung on the handlebars. Christopher never went with her. Her parents knew nothing of her politics and nothing about Christopher, or so she thought. They wanted her to marry one of the prosperous men of the village.
“As soon as the French are beaten I’ll have to get married and stop being your meo,” she said to Christopher. Meo, “kitten,” was the word for a married man’s mistress.
“How can you be my meo if I’m not married?” he asked.
“You will be,” she said. “In the next year of the rooster.”
Lê often made confident predictions about Christopher’s future. She had his horoscope drawn by the cu si, the Buddhist lay monk in charge of religious questions in her village. This man was not only an astrologer but also a geomancer, so she was in possession of a great deal of information about the three souls and the nine spirits that ruled Christopher’s life. This knowledge was based on the hour, day, and place of his birth in the year of the rat. Christopher had given her the correct data when she asked for it, drawing a map to locate his birthplace, the island of Rügen in what was now the Soviet zone of Occupied Germany. Of course she reported these facts to the apparatus as well as the cu si, and for a long time afterward there was a school of opinion among Vietnamese Communists that Christopher was in fact a German who had been tricked into revealing the truth about himself by his meo.
Some things about his fate Le did not tell him. He was accompanied in life by a benevolent con hoa, the ghost of someone who had died by fire and wished to protect him from the same fate. Nevertheless, bad things lay ahead for him, but not until he was in his thirty-seventh year. The cu si was quite specific: In the year of the hare a woman would betray him, another woman would die for him, his enemies would put him in a cold place and separate him from his family. Le did not warn Christopher of these misfortunes. It was useless: he could not change what was ordained by his stars even if he believed her (as few foreigners would), and besides, the years he was now living through were fortunate ones, dominated by tien, or good spirits, who had given him the gifts of intelligence, literary genius, and sexual grace and were protecting him for the time being from the wicked female spirits, the Ba Giang Ha, or Falling Goddesses, who were to cause such turmoil in his life later on.
Lê had no difficulty accommodating these beliefs, and many other superstitions, to the “scientific” Marxist-Leninism she studied so conscientiously and believed so blindly. Although this was never stated outright by any Vietnamese, she understood that Communism, like everything else that brought death and sorrow, was the product of the yêi and tinh and the other invisible demons that had always swarmed over Vietnam, catching at the legs of the Vietnamese and creating their mournful, inescapable history.
11
CHRISTOPHER AND VO RAU BECAME FRIENDS BY TALKING TO EACH other through their poems. They usually met in the cool of the evening in a sampan on the River of Perfumes, reading aloud in each other’s language. The listener suggested refinements in the translation. Christopher’s faint speaking voice was an asset to him in Hue, where Vietnamese was pronounced in refined, barely audible tones.
His friendship with Vo aroused curiosity, but no unusual suspicion. All but the most paranoid members of the Vietminh apparatus had lost interest in Christopher. In what way was he dangerous?
He was not French; he might even be German. It was also possible that he might be what he represented himself to be, a poet in search of experience who sometimes wrote articles about Vietnam for American and European magazines and newspapers. His journalism was scrupulously accurate and nonpolitical.
How can any man be nonpolitical? asked the apparatus. Why was he here in the midst of a colonial war that did not concern him or his country? When he went with the Vietminh in the jungle, though he refused to touch a weapon, they saw that he had been a soldier; maybe he still was.
The last thing they imagined was that an American might be patient enough to be interested in the future, that he was quiescent now in order to be the contrary in times to come.
Christopher never mentioned the O. G. to Vo, never gave him the slightest hint that he came from the Outfit. Vo did not need to know; he did not want to know. In time they came to understand each other completely.
When Vo was asked about his friendship with Christopher by one of his former students who was. now Lê’s control officer in Vietminh headquarters, he said, “He is a poet.”
“A poet or somebody who wants us to think he’s a poet?” “See for yourself.”
Vo showed the man a poem Christopher had written. It was about the fighters in the jungle, and if you understood how unsparingly truthful it was, it was very moving.
“You translated this for him?”
“No,” Vo said. “He wrote it in Vietnamese. He can do the same in English and French, and I suppose German. He is gifted.” “Then why is he here?”
Vo sighed before he answered. “I think because he believes that Vietnam is the place where truth and lies will have their next great battle, and he wants to be present.”
“On which side?”
“A poet is always on the side of truth,” Vo said.
FOUR
1
A DECADE LATER, SOON AFTER CHRISTOPHER LIVED OUT THE PROPHecies of Lê’s fortune-teller and disappeared into China, Patchen met Vo Rau on the River of Perfumes. They went out at midnight in separate sampans rowed by agents of the Outfit—Khmer not Annamese or Tonkinese or Cochinchinese—who lashed the hulls together so that the two men could talk as they drifted with the current.
In the lantern light, Vo was white-bearded and emaciated, with the weary eyes and benevolent air of the very old, but in fact he was only sixty-four. Like his long-ago friend the O. G., he was venerable before his time.
Patchen and Vo had never met.
“Do you know who I am?” Patchen asked. “Do you require other proofs of identity?”
“No. He describes you in one of his poems. You couldn’t be anyone else.”
“As you know, he has disappeared.”
“And you think you will find him in Vietnam?”
“No. He’s in China. I hope I can find out why in Vietnam.”
“ ‘You will have your choice of explanations.’ I am quoting poetry:
“ ‘When you ask the makers of the dead to remember the reason why, you will have your choice of explanations.’ “
“That sounds like Paul.”
“Yes. He wrote it ten years ago, here in Hue. Even then he was curious about murderers. Too curious, too imaginative, too brave. He was born under a very unpredictable star.” The old man smiled. “We Vietnamese are superstitious in these matters.”
“Did he explain his theory to you?”
“That your American President had been killed in revenge for the murders of Ngo Dinh Diem and his two brothers? Yes.”
“Do you believe that?”
“I thought it was a very dangerous idea. It suggested that the most powerful man in the world had been assassinated by the weak, and that he was in some way responsible for his own death. Whether it was true or not, the thought was intolerable.”
“Did anyone in Vietnam besides yourself understand this?” Patchen asked.
“Everyone who heard it. We’re weak, not stupid. But I think you’re too late. There are no answers in Vietnam. Everyone here who wanted to harm Paul is dead. They were all killed after he was in China, and out of danger. That is rather strange.”
