'They might prefer to go to Thailand or Malaysia,' I said. 'They have nice beaches, too.'
'They are so commercialized,' said Mr Chau. 'They have big hotels and roads and crowds of people. They are not very interesting – I have seen them. In Vietnam the tourists can go back to nature!'
'And we have hotels,' said Mr Ngoc. 'Not five-star hotels, but sometimes air-conditioned or electric fan. Minimum comfort, you can say. And we have that bungalow, built for President Johnson when he visited.
It could be turned into something. We don't have very much at the moment but we have plenty of scope.'
'Plenty of scope,' said Mr Chau. 'We will appeal to their curiosity – people in America. So many had friends or relatives in Vietnam. They have heard so much about this country.' Sounding distinctly ominous he said, 'Now they can find out what it is really like.'
Mr Ngoc said, 'Places like Bangkok and Singapore are just commercial. That's not interesting. We can offer spontaneity and hospitality, and since our hotels aren't very good we could also appeal to the more adventurous. There are many people who like to explore the unknown. Then these people can go back to the States and tell their friends they saw where this or that battle was fought – '
'They can say, "I slept in the bunker at Pleiku!'" said Mr Chau.
There were really two selling points, the beaches and the war. But the war was still on, in spite of the fact that nowhere in the forty-four-page booklet entitled Visit Viet-Nam was fighting mentioned, except the oblique statement, 'English [language] is making rapid progress under the pressure of contemporary events', which might have been a subtle reference to the American occupation and perhaps to the war. At that time – December 1973 -70,000 people had been killed since the cease-fire, but the Commission for Vietnam Tourism was advertising Hue (a devastated city of muddy streets, occasionally shelled) as a place of 'scenic beauty… where historic monuments, yards and porticoes bear the mark of its glorious past', and urging visitors to Danang to travel six miles south of the city to see 'brilliant stalactites and stalagmites', not mentioning the fact that there was still fierce fighting in that very area, where gunmen hid in the grottoes near Marble Mountain.
Before I left the office, Mr Chau took me aside. 'Don't go to Bien Hoa by train,' he said.
I asked him why.
'That is the worst train in the world,' he said. He was embarrassed that I should want to take it.
But I insisted, and, wishing him well with his campaign to attract tourists to the battlefields, I set off for the station. There is no sign on Saigon Station, and, though I was perhaps fifty feet away from it, no one in the area knew where it was. I found it purely by chance, cutting through an Air Vietnam ticket office, but even when I got on the platform I was not sure it was the railway station: there were no passengers and no trains at the platform. The train, it turned out, was a short distance up the line, but it was not due to leave for twenty minutes. The carriages were battered green boxes, some wooden (with protruding splinters) and some metal (with dents). The seating arrangements, a narrow bench running along the walls of the carriage, were neither comfortable nor convenient, and most of the passengers were standing. They smiled, clutching their very discouraged ducks and chickens and their cruelly sunburned half-American infants.
There was another even older train parked on the far side of the yard. Attracted by the wrought-iron railings on the porches – a French feature of the car – I sauntered over. I climbed into this semiderelict train and heard a sharp howl of complaint. A girl jumped up two cars away (I saw her figure framed by the broken doors) and pulled on a pair of jeans. Then I saw a boy fussing with his clothes. I started off in the opposite direction and ran into two sleeping heroin addicts, both pimply girls with tattoos and needle scars on their arms. One woke and shouted at me. I hurried away: there were other lovers on the train, and children, and menacing-looking youths poking through the cars. But the train had no engine: it wasn't going anywhere.
The stationmaster, wearing a plastic-visored cap, crossed the track, waving to me. I hopped out of the derelict train and went over to shake his hand. Laughing sheepishly, he explained that it was not this train that was going to Bien Hoa but that one, and he pointed to the line of bulging boxcars. I headed for one of the cars and was about to swing myself up when the stationmaster called out, 'No! No!'
He motioned for me to follow him, and, still laughing, he led me to the tail end of the train, where there was quite a different sort of railway car. This wooden carriage, with a kitchen and three sleeping compartments and a large lounge, was obviously a relic from the Transindochinois, and, though it was not luxurious even by Indian standards, it was comfortable and spacious. It was, said the stationmaster, the director's: the director had requested that I ride in it. We got in; the stationmaster nodded to the signalman, and the train started up.
A free ride in the director's personal railway car, to confound the unreality of the place still further: it was not what I expected – not in Vietnam. But this emphasis on privilege is a version of American extravagance. It is a function of the war, which produced an obliging system for conditioning the sympathy of visitors, all of whom (for the risks they believed they were taking) wanted to be treated like VIPs. Every visitor was a potential publicist, the irony being that even the most furious dove was afforded the unlimited credit and comfort on which he could preen his sensibilities into outrage. This hospitality, heightened by the natural generosity of the Vietnamese, continues. It was almost shameful to accept it, for it had its origins in the same plan a company develops when it cynically mounts a campaign to popularize an unsuccessful product. It distorted the actual. But I reserved my scorn: the Vietnamese had inherited cumbersome and expensive habits of wastefulness.
We sat around the table in the lounge that took up a third of the director's carriage. The stationmaster put his cap away and smoothed his hair. He said that after the Second World War he had been offered a number of well-paying jobs, but he chose instead to go back to his old job on the railway. He liked trains and he believed Vietnam Railways had a great future. 'After we reopen the line to Loc Ninh,' he said, 'then we go to Turkey.'
I asked him how this was possible.
'We go up to Loc Ninh, then we build a line to Phnom Penh. That goes to Bangkok, no? Then somewhere, somewhere and somewhere – maybe India? – then Turkey. There is a railway in Turkey.'
He was certain Turkey was just over the hill, and the only difficulty he envisaged – indeed, it seemed a characteristic of the South Vietnamese grasp of political geography – was getting Loc Ninh out of the hands of the Viet Cong and laying track through the swamps of Cambodia. His transcontinental railway vision, taking in eight vast countries, had a single snag: evicting the enemy from this small local border town. For the Vietnamese citizen the rest of the world is simple and peaceful; he has the egoism of a sick man, who believes he is the only unlucky sufferer in a healthy world.
The stationmaster said, 'Sometimes we get ambushed here. A few weeks ago some four people were killed by rifle fire.'
I said, 'Perhaps we should close the windows then.'
'Ha! Very good!' he said, and translated the joke for his deputy, who was setting out glasses of Coca-Cola.
It was a single-line track, but squatters had moved their huts so close to it, I could look into their windows and across rooms where children sat playing on the floor; I could smell the cooking food – fish and blistering meat – and see people waking and dressing; at one window a man in a hammock swung inches from my nose. There was fruit on the window sills, and it stirred – an orange beginning to roll – as the train sped by. I have never had a stronger feeling of being in the houses I was passing, and I had a continuous sense of interrupting with my face some domestic routine. But I was imagining the intrusion: the people in those poor houses seemed not to notice the strangers at their windows.