Months later Marie saw the policeman again, the one who had pushed her father’s gun on her mother, looking almost the same. He stood in the midst of police barricades around some kind of accident, pointing his finger and shouting orders to a straining crowd of citizens who lurched forward dangerously against the wooden sawhorses, unbalanced by the weight of their curiosity. In a manner intended to startle them and keep them back, the policeman stamped his foot and gestured flagrantly toward the butt of his holstered pistol. It had rained, but it was clearing now, and one of the spectators poked his umbrella out of the group at the barricade like a rifle, and some people laughed hate-filled laughter at the policeman. Behind him an ambulance waited while a stretcher was being loaded through its open rear doors.
A mo-ped in perfect condition lay on its side near the ambulance. A street boy in khaki shorts, squatting like a monkey, wrestled with one of its saddlebags until another policeman, backing off from the ambulance, noticed and shouted something that drove him away.
Marie turned to see her father, tall and pale and caressed by a white shirt. He was sipping a cocktail among onlookers in a streetside bar, all of them mildly diverted from their own troubles by this anonymous street tragedy.
“Daddy!” Remembering the moment these many decades since, she couldn’t tell it from a dream.
“Daddy!”
Perhaps it had been only a dream.
He saw her but pretended not to. Rather than drinking his drink, his drink appeared to be drinking him. Rapidly he was consumed by it until the glass hung in the air and then exploded. A woman in a blue dress sat there instead of her father.
“Daddy?” she called. The khakied policeman looked up, the man who had held her father’s gun in his hands. He searched for the one who had called to him from the crowd.
Her mother went to sleep in her face, as a Chinese expression went, at about this time. Marie was surprised and confused to find one day that Hua-ling had produced an armor of lifelessness around herself. She’d transmitted to Marie the faith that to suffer over generations was unremarkable, and now because her husband had killed himself, one man in all this panorama of endlessly masticated hope, she collapsed inward like a dry toadstool and spoke neither yes nor no. She couldn’t think of going to Hong Kong, or even England, but only to her brother in America. Marie had to learn to care for herself and her mother, bargain with merchants, avoid traps, and navigate bureaucracies, while they all invented new ways of delaying her and she passed her sixteenth birthday.
Much of Hua-ling’s correspondence and many of her transactions regarding their visas, it turned out, had been only imagined or dreamed. While Marie came to appreciate how bad off her mother had been immediately following the suicide, Hua-ling got even worse. She starved herself, took too many pills, passed out, swelled up — kidney problems were evidently killing her, and she could hardly drag her fattened legs beneath herself from one room in the apartment to another. Something happened to her sweat glands and she ceased perspiring, even on the muggiest days when the air conditioner was worthless. The hot weather drove her temperature up to nearly fatal levels, from which she shouted down at imaginary goblins in a fever-world, sometimes finding the crazed strength to move things around the living room, barricading the door or building herself small shelters from private, terrible eventualities. She couldn’t be left alone for more than a few minutes, and even so, one day Marie came back from shopping to find her mother stretched out and looking dead on the sidewalk in front of their building. She was alive, but from that day forward her English, formerly perfect, was so elementary she hardly ever spoke it. All day she smoked Peace, a Japanese brand of cigaret, and coughed with a tearing sound and beslimed hundreds of Kleenex tissues with the congestion from her nameless disease, scattering them like white blossoms over the tabletops. Often she had to take her breaths from a yellow compressed-air tank labeled “O2.”
As the people of Saigon came to appreciate, against all belief, that they’d be abandoned by the Americans and eaten by the Communists, the city’s atmosphere grew much more crazed and scary. Marie dragged herself among government offices where the Vietnamese employees, some made rabid, others lobotomized by betrayal, failed to help her in the matter of visas. Everything that happened around the American Embassy was taken as a sign of hope or of disaster — a change in gate personnel, the early or late arrival of the gardener — and everyone had a theory or a rumor, but there was never any official news except what everyone knew just couldn’t be true: that nothing of significance had been decided; that things would go on as they had.
But the machines moved paper to the extent that such movement was possible, and on a day when the news was official, and Danang was falling and Saigon would certainly fall, and sources said there were no spaces on the flights, no flights, no way to get to the airport, no airport, no pilots left in the country, no planes, the papers arrived for Hua-ling and Marie. Marie raced back down Tu Do Street with the manila envelope soaking sweat under her blouse, restraining herself to a pace befitting business rather than panic, more terrified to have these precious papers, even, than she had been of the chance of never getting them.
She crossed Tu Do in the hope of skirting a group of six or seven ARVN officers who moved along the sidewalk with a shopping cart full of what seemed to be gold bullion. When they came to the broken curb of a cross street, four of them had to take hold of the heavy cart and ease it down, and then up over the next curb. The group stopped in front of a closed goldsmith’s, and one of the officers, who carried his sidearm unholstered, banged on the door with his free hand.
Marie turned left and got off Tu Do. The side street she entered was empty. Dressed in the anachronistic white suit of the tropic colonial, a man who made no sound of footsteps strolled toward her from its far end. Her father.
The heat of their surroundings smelled of fear, a humming, ozone fragrance. She stopped still and waited, stroked by its sickly fingers until she felt weak. He kept walking but got no closer.
When she moved back onto the larger street, the ARVN officers were out of sight inside the shop, and except for a patrol of their subordinates passing in a jeep, white-faced, weeping boys manning a high-caliber machine gun and draped with belts of its ammunition on the day of their defeat, the traffic seemed suddenly usual.
Mme. Troix bid Marie and her mother goodbye. She’d been on the phone, and was crying and dancing jerkily through the hallways in fear. “The big helicopter have seen leaving the roof of the U.S. Embassy. You see everything is finish! I have predicted it! I have predicted it!”
There were barricades up, she said, along all the roads between the city proper and Tonsonhut Airport. People from the countryside were crowding into Saigon. The American Embassy was being mobbed. She herself had made secret arrangements for Hong Kong. The black mascara streaked down her face as she cried and kissed them goodbye, because they’d all grown very close in Hua-ling’s illness, and Mme. Troix had been nursemaid, friend, and, finally, hysterically loyal family member, refusing to take herself out of the doomed city until she knew that Hua-ling’s and Marie’s papers had gone through.
Wiping her neighbor’s tears from her neck, Hua-ling seemed to grasp the situation for a moment. She wished Mme. Troix a passage without hazard, and gave her a black lace shawl for a gift of parting. But a stealthy satisfaction firmed the lines of her mouth, as if the end of things in Saigon was something she’d arranged single-handedly, to get back at everyone.