"Yes, that sampan too." He watched me as I stretched out for my second pipe. "I envy you your means of escape."
"You don't know what I'm escaping from. It's not from the war. That's no concern of mine. I'm not involved." "You will all be. One day."
"Not me." "You are still limping."
"They had the right to shoot at me, but they weren't even doing that. They were knocking down a tower. One should always avoid demolition squads. Even in Picca-dilly."*
"One day something will happen. You will take a side." "No, I'm going back to England."
"That photograph you showed me once. . ." "Oh, I've torn that one up. She left me." "I'm sorry."
"It's the way things happen. One leaves people oneself, and then the tide turns. It almost makes me believe in justice."
"I do. The first time I dropped napalm I thought, this is the village where I was born. That is where M. Dubois, my father's old friend, lives. The baker-1 was very fond of the baker when I was a child-is running away down there in the flames I've thrown. The men of Vichy* did not bomb their own country. I felt worse than them." "But you still go on."
"Those are moods. They come only with the napalm. The rest of the time I think that I am defending Europe. And you know. those others-they do some monstrous things also. When they were driven out of Hanoi in 1946 they left terrible relics among their own people-people they thought had helped us. There was one girl in the mortuary-they had not only cut off her breasts, they had mutilated her lover and stuffed his. . ." "That's why I won't be involved."
"It's not a matter of reason or justice. We ail get involved in a moment of emotion and then we cannot get out. War and Love-they have always been compared." He looked sadly across the dormitory to where the metisse
sprawled in her great temporary peace. He said, "I would not have it otherwise. There is a girl who was involved by her parents-what is her future when this port falls? France is only half her home. . ." "Will it fall?"
"You are a journalist. You know better than I do that we can't win. You know the road to Hanoi is cut and mined every night. You know we lose one class of St. Cyr every year. We were nearly beaten in '50.* De Lattre has given us two years of grace-that's all. But we are professionals: we have to go on fighting till the politicians tell us to stop. Probably they will get together and agree to the same peace that we could have had at the beginning, making nonsense of all these years." His ugly face which had winked at me before the dive wore a kind of professional brutality like a Christmas mask from which a child's eyes peer through the holes in the paper. "You would not understand the nonsense. Fowler. You are not one of us."
"There are other things in one's life which make nonsense of the years." He put his hand on my knee with an odd protective gesture as though he were the older man. "Take her home," he said. "That is better than a pipe." "How do you know she would come?" "I have slept with her myself, and Lieutenant Perrin. Five hundred piastres." "Expensive."
"I expect she would go for three hundred, hut under the circumstances one does not care to bargain."
But his advice did not prove sound. A mail's body is limited in the acts which it can perform and mine was frozen by memory. What my hands touched that night might be more beautiful than I was used to, but we are not trapped only by beauty. She used the same perfume,
and suddenly at the moment of entry the ghost of what I'd lost proved more powerful than the body stretched at my disposal. I moved away and lay on my back and desire drained out of me.
'I am sorry," I said, and lied, "I don't know what is the matter with me." She said with great sweetness and misunderstanding, "Don't worry. It often happens that way. It is the opium." "Yes," I said, "the opium." And I wished to heaven that it had been.
CHAPTER II
(1)
It was strange, this first return to Saigon with nobody to welcome me. At the airport I wished there were somewhere else to which I could direct my taxi than the rue Catinat. I thought to myself: 1s the pain a little less than when I went away?' and tried to persuade myself that it was so. When I reached the landing I saw that the door was open, and I became breathless with an unreasonable hope. I walked very slowly towards the door. Until I reached the door hope would remain alive. I heard a chair creak, and when I came to the door I could see a pair of shoes, but they were not a woman's shoes. I \vent quickly in, and it was Pyle who lifted his awkward weight from the chair Phuong used to use. He said, "Hullo, Thomas." "Hullo, Pyle. How did you get in?"
"I met Dominguez. He was bringing your mail. I asked him to let me stay." "Has Phuong forgotten something?"
"Oh no, but Joe told me you'd been to the Legation. I thought it would be easier to talk here." "What about?"
He gave a lost gesture, like a boy put up to speak at some school function who cannot find the grown up words. "You've been away?" "Yes. And you?" "Oh, I've been travelling around." "Still playing with plastics?"
He grinned unhappily. He said, "Your letters are over there." I could see at a glance there was nothing which could interest me now: there was one from my office in London and several that looked like bills, and one from my bank. I said, "How's Phuong?"
His face lit up automatically like one of those electric toys which respond to a particular sound. "Oh, she's fine," he said, and then clamped his lips together as though he'd gone too far.
"Sit down, Pyle," I said. "Excuse me while I look at this. it's from my office." I opened it. How inopportunely the unexpected can occur. The editor wrote that he had considered my last letter and that in view of the confused situation in Indo-China. following the death of General de Lattre and retreat from Hoa Binib, he was in agreement with my suggestion. He had appointed a temporary foreign editor and would like me to stay on in Indo-China for at least another year. "We shall keep the chair warm for you,"*
he reassured me with complete incomprehension. He believed I cared about the job, and the paper.
I sat down opposite Pyle and re-read the letter which had come too late. For a moment I had felt elation as on the instant of waking before one remembers.
"Bad news?" Pyle asked.
"No," I told myself that it wouldn't have made any difference anyway: a reprieve for one year couldn't stand up against a marriage settlement. "Are you married yet?" I asked.
"No." He blushed-he had a great facility in blushing. "As a matter of fact I'm hoping to get special leave. Then we could get married at home-properly." "Is it more proper when it happens at home?" "Well, I thought-it's difficult to say these things to you, you are so darned cynical, Thomas, but it's a mark of respect. My father and mother would be thereshe'd kind of enter the family.* It's important in view of the past." "The past?"
"You know what I mean. I wouldn't want to leave her behind there with any stigma. . ."
"Would you leave her behind?"
"I guess so. My mother's a wonderful woman-she'd take her around, introduce her, you know, kind of fit her in. She'd help her to get a home ready for me." I didn't know whether to feel sorry for Phuong or not-she had looked forward so to the skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty, but she had so little idea of all they would involve. Professor and Mrs. Pyle, the women's lunch clubs; would they teach her Canasta?* I thought of her that first night in the Grand Monde, in her white dress, moving so exquisitely on her eighteen-year-old feet, and I thought of her a month ago, bargaining over meat at the butcher's stores in the Boulevard de la Somme., Would she like those bright clean little New England grocery stores where even the celery was wrapped in cellophane? Perhaps she would. I couldn't tell. Strangely I found myself saying as Pyle might have done a month ago, "Go easy