A Thousand Tiny Truths Page 17

  I was sitting in the corridor one afternoon sketching a fish skeleton I had obtained from the kitchen, when a man walked out of the room next to ours.

  “Hello,” he said with an American accent. “I’m David. You must be Oliver’s.”

  I nodded. “I’m Marcel.” I looked him over quickly. He was tall with hair cut close to his scalp. He had a sporty stance, knees slightly bent, as though he were waiting to block a football. “Are you his friend?” I asked.

  He laughed a loud laugh. “Am I friends with Oliver?” he said, rolling forward on his feet. “Oliver is a bloody nuisance. I call him Mr. Marx. His reports are no good.” Then he said, “Yes, of course, we’re friends.”

  “I’m glad.”

  “Are you?”

  I nodded, then pointed at his shoulder bag. “Are you going someplace?”

  “Yes.”

  “Oh.”

  I don’t know if he heard the disappointment in my voice but he said, “Look, I was just heading out, but if you come quickly, I can give you some chocolate my sister sent me from San Francisco.”

  He opened his door to a room strewn with rolls of film, bits of paper, photos, clothes, books. There was an old French map of Vietnam taped to the wall. On the floor just by the door was a room service tray covered by a cloth napkin.

  “The dearly departed,” he said gravely, pointing at the tray. “Very sad. I’d come to love that pork chop.”

  I laughed and accepted the chocolate. Then I headed back to the suite, slipping through the door quietly so as not to disturb Oliver while he worked. Almost immediately, the typewriter stopped clacking.

  “I just met your neighbour,” I said, grabbing my chance to speak. “David, the American.”

  “Oh yes?” Oliver looked up, his fingertips still on the typewriter keys. “And how was David, the American?”

  “Funny.”

  “Funny is one way of describing him. Arrogant and self-satisfied might be another.”

  “Don’t you like him?”

  “David.” He paused, searching for the right words. “Oh, he’s fine. We just don’t see eye to eye on certain matters.”

  “He called you Mr. Marx.”

  Oliver pulled a face. “Yes, well, that’s because I quoted Ho Chi Minh in a recent article. Back in 1945, Ho Chi Minh said that ‘Vietnam has a right to enjoy its freedom and independence.’ I don’t think that’s a terribly scandalous idea, do you?”

  I shook my head, and pointed at the wall we shared with David. “But he didn’t like it?”

  “No. One thing you should know about David is that he is extremely convinced of his own opinions. He’s an old-fashioned, patriotic American who sees nothing inappropriate about his country’s arms and money being used in this distant land. He’s very very certain about everything.”

  “And you’re not?”

  “No,” he said, combing a hand through his hair so it lay in greasy strips at the top of his head. “I’ve never been so uncertain.”

  He turned back to his typing while I ate my chocolate. I waited to see if he would say more, but he didn’t. So I said, “His room was just like ours.”

  “Oh yes? In what way?”

  “Messy.”

  I walked around the room, making a show of stepping over a pile of discarded clothes, then headed over to the windowsill and left Oliver in peace.

  I was sitting at the edge of my bed contemplating the paper pocket on a drinking glass. A sheath of daily rechristening. I considered which of the hotel inhabitants had last touched the glass with his lips before it had been carried downstairs and hosed off in the kitchen. What were the chances that it might have been me? Then I wondered if there were pre-assigned glasses for the various hotel inhabitants that were washed and stored separately. Then it occurred to me that it was possible that they were never cleaned at all, just covered with new pockets of paper, like birthday hats.

  I had already been up for two hours, awakened before sunrise by a group of monks who had gathered under the trees on Tu Do to meditate and chant. All the words they chanted seemed to rhyme. At first the sounds had melted into my dreams. Then the pitch of the chanting had changed and pricked me into wakefulness.

  I opened my sketchbook to put the finishing touches on a self-portrait. Suddenly, I noticed a hammering coming from the next room. The hammering grew louder. I slid off the bed, put my feet on the cool floor and went into the sitting area to investigate.

  Oliver was busy nailing a lid onto a wooden box.

  “What are you doing?”

  Oliver looked up and smiled. “I had a local artist create a black chess set from soapstone. I’m sending it to Pippa.”

  “All black pieces and all black squares?”

  He nodded.

  “Just like that Japanese artist’s white chess board . . . only the opposite.”

  “You remember. It was called Play It by Trust.”

  I didn’t know what to make of Oliver’s gift. Was it an act of love or war?

  I watched him hammer in the last nail. “So with trust there are no opponents.”

  “Yes,” he replied after a pause. “That’s right. That’s absolutely right.”

  Oliver continued to spend afternoons clacking away on the typewriter in the room, but we both knew he couldn’t stay hotel-bound. There were only so many stories he could write on corruption in Saigon, only so many damaging profiles of President Diem.

  Eventually, his duties started to take him away. He went to the airport to interview American soldiers returning from operations in the north and to the main Saigon highway where uprooted peasants were slowly arriving from the countryside. While he never left me for longer than a few hours at a time, checking in at regular intervals, and always returning for meals, I could feel his nervous energy building, the crackle of adrenaline. His concentration fluttered as we ate together. In his voice were a thousand fishtails beating against a metal bucket. I noticed the way he held the sides of the table, as though set to flee.

  Then, one morning, Oliver told me he had placed an ad for a nanny. Three days later, he sent me downstairs to the lobby while he conducted nanny interviews in the suite. Having put off the task for weeks, I finally began a letter to Pippa, my first to her from Vietnam.

  There is no football team in Vietnam, I wrote. I have thought of several names for one if such a team existed—the Saigon Serpents, the Saigon City Slugs—but such a team does not exist . . . This morning I saw people practising slow-motion shadow boxing in the park. In Vietnamese it’s called thai cuc quyen and it’s very strange looking . . .

  As much as I wanted to, there was so much I couldn’t bring myself to write. For example, I had started to wonder about the what and why of Pippa’s search methods as she groped for information about my mother. What was she asking people? (Did she approach former neighbours and say, Pardon me, but do you happen to remember a crazy woman fleeing this flat about ten years ago?)

  I was also trying to figure out why she was so determined to help me find my mother. Why would she bother, when she had been so careless in looking after me?

  The woman Oliver hired was named Anh Mai Nguyen. She had wide-set eyes and beautiful long black hair that she wore in a low knot at the nape of her neck. She came from Hue, a city near the border of North Vietnam and South Vietnam, and arrived wearing a loose white blouse and a pair of dark blue peasant pants.

  She said she had a son about my age named Dinh and that once she had settled in, she would send for him. She said she was going to do some home cooking for us so we could enjoy a few meals in the suite.

  Then she pointed at my legs and said, “Quan voi.”

  When I gave her a questioning look, she giggled and explained, “Quan voi means ‘elephant pants.’” She giggled a bit more at the wide legs of my trousers. Then, with a more serious expression, she said, “What happen? There is something wrong with your feet.”

  I looked down at my blue toes. This time it was my turn to laugh. I shook my h
ead and explained that Oliver had bought me a pair of shoes at the market, that the cheap navy dye had leached onto my skin. Then I looked down at the Chinese slippers on her feet and thought how plain and unglamorous and unlike Pippa’s they were.

  Once Anh was reassured that my foot circulation was normal, she excused herself and wandered about the suite. She ran her fingers along the shelves and shook her head. So dirty, she must have thought. She stood on her tippytoes and looked behind a teak and bamboo cabinet and shook her head again. When she was finished her inspection she said goodbye and left for the day.

  Oliver had leased Anh a small room in an apartment across the street. It was in the building with the balcony that displayed my laundry. Many workers in the hotel service industry had rooms there.

  The next morning, she arrived early, hauling cleaning supplies into the room. She cleared the empty shampoo bottles and pill containers into the wastepaper bin. She sniffed the towels and bedlinen and threw everything that didn’t smell fresh into a heap on the floor. She called down to the concierge to come up and unlock the glass doors of the teak cabinet so she could clean inside.

  After she had finished scrubbing everything clean, she took me downstairs to the restaurant, where she spoke with the head waiter. I watched them argue back and forth in Vietnamese, until he finally sighed and walked off to the kitchen, returning several minutes later with a cardboard box filled with plates, cups and utensils.

  Back in the suite, she walked with the box straight to the bathroom and cranked the faucet until the water gushed into the tub. When she had finished washing all the kitchenware, she placed each item on top of a towel to dry, while she lined the shelves and empty drawers of the cabinet with pages from old Vietnamese newspapers.

  When that was done, she took me shopping to buy dry goods, spices and other food items. Back in the suite, she began stocking the cabinet, building a war pantry to rival Mrs. Bowne’s.

  “Ask any Vietnamese,” she said. “When trouble comes, you need a month supply of rice.”

  “But, Anh, that looks more like a year’s supply.”

  “Do you think we need less?” she asked as she poured the rice into smaller bags. “Do you think only one grain or two grain?” She shook her head with disbelief.

  Despite her unconcealed opinion that I was a soft English boy with no common sense, I soon saw Anh warming to us. Within days of arriving she was calling me her Leonardo da Vinci, her petit chou-chou. She pronounced my name Macee. She bought a potted orchid and woven placemats that added a homey touch, while respecting Oliver’s need for a certain amount of disorder.

  She transported multi-course meals from her apartment in a towering steel Tiffin. Each layer was designed to hold a portion of food. The bottom layer was usually rice or a tangle of vermicelli noodles, the second layer, meat or fish, the third layer, vegetables or salad, the top layer, something sweet. She joined us at the table and ate her meat and fish, gnawing and sucking the bones until they were clean and beautiful.

  When Oliver was away, she fed me from food stalls along Tu Do Street: sliced mangosteen with white segments of flesh; guava dipped in a mixture of salt and red chili pepper; paper cones filled with longan, rambutan or sweetsop with thick scaly rinds.

  Eager to replace my cheap dyed shoes, she bought me sandals with soles made of black tire rubber and straps cut from inner-tube. We both laughed that she gave me peasant footwear while treating me like a prince. But it was true. She always steered me around flooded alleys and dirty pathways. We seemed only to walk along smooth, paved streets.

  Our conversations were simple, conducted in a mixture of basic English and French, a peppering of Vietnamese, and occasional sign language.

  Den gio di ngu, she said when I went to bed.

  Chao buoi sang, she said when I awoke in the morning and she poured me tea.

  If she noticed my hair matting to my scalp, she might say, Viens içi, and bring out a brush. When the brushing turned my hair into a stormy nimbus, she might say, “Tough luck,” and switch to a wide comb, working her way through the knots and tangles, creating a part on the right side, but leaving the rest to nature.

  From the bits of information I collected, I knew that Anh had come to us through a man named Pham, a Vietnamese journalist who spent many hours at Givral, a small patisserie across from the hotel. I gathered that Anh’s father had been a French teacher in Hue at a school headed by Pham’s grandfather, and that her presence in our suite had to do with the North Vietnamese Communists trying to take over the country, though Oliver called it the “Vietnamese struggle for liberation.” I suspected that Anh had left her real clothes somewhere during her journey south and, thus, wore only borrowed outfits, baggy pairs of trousers, shirts that were too short in the sleeves. Even so, I wondered why she never wore makeup. I wanted to buy her the colourful ao dai dresses I saw fashionable women wearing in the streets.

  One day while we were sitting at the table sipping tea, she said, “Your Oliver has helped me beaucoup. No one else has helped me this much.”

  Whenever I asked about her family, she usually waved my questions away with her hand, but that day she reached into her apron and showed me a photo of her son Dinh. When I took the photo in my hand, I saw a boy with wide-set eyes just like Anh’s, who looked to be about my age. I saw that our hair was parted on the same side and I touched my head.

  I had noticed that whenever Anh had a strong opinion to share she liked to preface her words with “I will say nothing.” Now she said, “I will say nothing about Oliver’s choice, but if you were my child I would not follow trouble around and pull my child along.”

  There was a fierceness in her voice when she said this that I liked. It made me think of a mother lion protecting her young.

  Hours later, as darkness gathered, Anh wandered around the suite, switching on the lights. The window was open. Salt and car fumes moved through the air. She walked over to the balcony doors, parted the thin curtains with her fingers and peered out. I went to join her and took a seat on the windowsill, holding my knees under my chin.

  Suddenly, across the Saigon River, the sky erupted with noise and light. White flares floated down like winged fairies. Just as they dissolved to pinpricks, the sky filled with bursts of red fire, a constellation of angry shooting stars. The entire spectacle lasted no longer than a few minutes. What remained were thin nets of smoke, swirls of delicate ribbon, cast across the perfect night. I looked for Anh’s reaction. Was the sky beautiful? Horrible?

  Horrible. Her face said it clearly.

  Before Oliver returned to the hotel, we made sure the French doors and windows and shutters were carefully latched shut. We did this so he would believe that we were safe, that he was protecting us.

  I FEEL A PRESENCE BEHIND ME.

  “What’s wrong?” Iris asks, finding me cleaning my studio for the third time in two days.

  I turn around and look at her. I picture myself saying, Let’s go to Afghanistan. I am trying to imagine being an adult who brings a child to a place with gunfire.

  “What’s up?” she repeats. “You’re acting weird.”

  Disarmed by the tinge of concern in her voice, I answer honestly: “I’m stuck.” I point in the direction of my lightbox.

  This afternoon, Julian left another message about the comic I am never going to finish. I want to tell him to just commission someone else—Joe Sacco—someone smarter, more fearless, better.

  I want to tell him that the whole commission is a bad idea. I’ve worked out a conversation in my head. It goes like this. Maybe if we stop picturing wars, they’ll stop happening. Maybe if we lay down our cameras and our sketch pads, and start a visual blockade, all the wars will shrivel up and die from lack of attention. Anyway, what can a drawing do? Pluck a few liberal heartstrings?

  Iris walks over to the lightbox, flicks the switch and says, “Whoa.” Facing her are my grim pencil sketches. In one sequence, President Bush wields a “Terror Free” sledgehammer against Afghani
stan and Iraq while Tony Blair (depicted as a poodle) surveys the carnage. I have portrayed my wounded victims nonspecifically, with a combination of passion and aloofness, and a derivative horror (think Nancy Spero, think Leon Golub). And yet I have neither the courage of a Spero, nor the crude oil-stick of a Golub. My victims are almost comical, but comical in a wretched way.

  I glance at Iris, who now gives me a look, hands on hips, an attitude I’m not sure how to decipher. She turns off the lightbox switch, calmly shakes her head. “Look, I’m not an expert or anything but I don’t really think this is a comic.”

  I frown at her appraisal, scratch my unshaven face, then smile because Iris thinks comics should be funny. She is of another world, not the deranged one I am now sick of.

  “It’s a habit,” I say with a grin. “I plunge into worst-case scenarios. It’s a family trait.”

  As far as I can tell, she has no melancholy inside her. Even when she’s sad, she’s still vine-green inside. No grey. No rust. Just green.

  THE HOTEL BEGAN TO FILL UP with newspeople: military writers for armed forces newspapers, college journalists from the American Midwest, a seminary student representing a Catholic paper. The mail slots were jammed with correspondence and new slots kept getting added. The Honolulu Examiner, the Cuban Granma, the Hindustan Times . . . David with his clipped military haircut sat in the hotel lobby on the arms of chairs, greeting everyone. He was a one-man welcome brigade. He rolled and rerolled his sleeves, clearly proud of his strong, tanned forearms. If there had been name tags, he would have been the one to slap them on people’s shirts.