A Thousand Tiny Truths Page 18

What he handed out instead was a reporter’s handbook. It was written by an AP reporter named Malcolm Browne and was full of tips that would have scared me and put me on the first plane out of Saigon had I been in their shoes. I still have a copy. Among the tips it contains are these:

  • If you hear a shot and think it’s not from your own side, don’t get up and look around to see where it came from.

  • When moving through enemy territory (a good part of Viet Nam is enemy territory) watch your feet. Spikes, mines, concealed pits and booby traps are everywhere.

  • When possible, step in exactly the same places as the soldier ahead of you. If he wasn’t blown up, you probably won’t be.

  • Never be the first to walk into a hut.

  • Beware of water buffalo. When they get excited they stampede, charge and kill.

  David gave me an extra copy of the handbook one afternoon and I spent some time scribbling in the margins. I drew soldiers marching in a line. I drew a boy peeking out from a hut. I didn’t know what a water buffalo looked like so I drew an oversized and angry-looking sheepdog.

  At one point, looking up from my scribbling, I realized that there was a reporter seated on every chair or sofa and each one had a ceremonial copy of the handbook on his lap. David was reading slowly from the table of contents. “On page nineteen, you’ll find some tips on covering operations . . .” He reminded me of the Christian evangelists that went pamphleting door to door in Beckenham.

  When he was done, he unspiralled a roll of Life Savers and handed them around. “Cherry?” he said. “Lime?”

  Some people think that war is full of non-stop excitement but that wasn’t the way I saw it. What I saw was a lot of waiting around. A lot of boredom. I discovered that waiting reporters were a tense and fidgety species. In the lobby, cameras and gear piled up on every available surface. Glass ashtrays and saucers overflowed with bent cigarette ends. Photographers cleaned and recleaned their lenses, adjusted their focal rings. Other men crammed around tables, played cards, ordered beverages, peeled the labels off bottles of Tiger Beer. Some of them beat time to music that wasn’t playing. A few of them read magazines or local newspapers, fingers smudging with cheap ink. Sometimes I listened in on conversations, trying to guess which reporters had kids, and what had brought them here.

  I came to understand that even when they looked relaxed, they were actually alert as watchdogs. Just by sitting with them, I felt myself grow more attuned to small changes in the environment, ears perking when a window clattered too loudly, eyes tracking a young man in black peasant garb strolling down the sidewalk. I learned that it was important to catch things just in time—just at the moment of boil, when the flat surface began to bubble.

  What I didn’t know at the time was that in some parts of the country there was no flat surface, no point of stillness. One after another, bombs were being dropped on the country by the United States. Planefuls of bombs falling on hills, falling on villages suspected of harbouring Viet Cong. Seven million tons of bombs. By the end there would be twenty million bomb craters all over the country. There was no time to absorb one tragedy before another occurred.

  Initially, Oliver seemed a bit embarrassed to have me hanging around, but the other reporters didn’t seem to mind. I think my presence reassured them. (How bad could the war get if Oliver thought it safe enough to bring a child along?) They liked it when I played errand boy, fetching cigarettes and drinks for them. They said I was clever and mature for my age, that I asked surprisingly smart questions.

  “Is there a chance the South Vietnamese army won’t win even if it is better armed?”

  “Is it true that when a North Vietnamese soldier dies, his family receives money as a reward?”

  “Do you think it’s a good idea for reporters and soldiers to be friends?”

  They nicknamed me “the Interrogator” and told Oliver to beware, that I was bound for the profession.

  Nevertheless, I could tell that some days they found it an ordeal to make small talk. They turned their eyes on me as though they had forgotten why I was sitting among them. Or they looked right past in a way that made them seem busy and important. Some mornings, especially if they had headaches, it didn’t matter how clever or perceptive I was, I could see myself reduced to the status of “bother” and “child.” At such times, they closed ranks in my presence by using words I didn’t understand. Whenever I figured out what a word meant, I would write it down in my book. I compiled a secret glossary. In this way I learned that a zippo mission was a search-and-destroy operation meant to root out the enemy. Comic books were military maps. Birds were any aircrafts, though usually helicopters. A mad minute was when all weapons were fired at once—intensely, briefly. Blown away, lit-up, zapped, whacked, greased, owned, wasted were all words for dying.

  When I repeated these words, Oliver gave me a stern look and told me not to say them again.

  “Oliver?”

  He didn’t answer right away.

  “Oliver?” I repeated.

  Anh had gone to spend the day with her son and I was sitting in the lobby, which was unusually quiet. I was looking at the wall in front of me. The paint was peeling. There was a jagged crack in the plaster from ceiling to floor.

  “Oliver, the walls are coming apart,” I said.

  Oliver was sitting by himself on a nearby loveseat. He put his notepad down and glanced at the wall. “It’s just a plumbing problem.”

  I nodded, but it occurred to me that the wall had burst open for a reason—the way my eardrum ruptured right after my mother left. I wondered if there was a limit to how much stress an ear or a wall could bear.

  In the seat across from me, a reporter from Amsterdam was looking inside a tobacco canister as if trying to find the news trapped inside. He kept wiping the green tin with his sleeve, over and over again.

  A man walked in off the street and noticed the reporter and his tobacco tin. He made Oliver and me laugh by pretending to be a genie emerging from a magical lamp. He twirled his hands and swayed his hips, conveying rolling smoke and vapour and shimmering veils.

  “Joseph,” said Oliver finally. “Quit your sexy dancing and come meet my son.”

  Joseph walked over and clasped my hand, examined my face with a warm smile. “Marcel, I met your father in Ghana,” he said. “We shared a cab from the airport and he kept his nose in a newspaper the entire way. Oliver, do you still do that? Ignore your fellow passengers?”

  “Yes, he does,” I blurted.

  They laughed.

  Joseph’s blue eyes crinkled at the corners behind his thick round glasses. “But, tell me, how are you doing, Marcel? How do you like Saigon? Have you tried the durian fruit? Would you like to? Have you . . . ?”

  When I finished answering Joseph’s questions, I learned that he was a reporter from Warsaw who worked for a Polish press agency. He told me other things but I was too distracted to retain them. The truth was, I had never before seen Oliver so energized by anyone’s presence, or known him to have a friend, and it startled me.

  I watched them sitting together on the loveseat in the lobby, resembling an old married couple. Joseph even had one arm slung over Oliver’s shoulder. I noticed his fingers were short and his hand networked with spongy veins. He reached up and gave Oliver’s hair an affectionate ruffle.

  “How are you today, my Lordship? I haven’t seen you at the Caravelle roof bar lately. Perhaps you’ve found somewhere else to drink and free your peacock?”

  “Piss off,” Oliver said.

  “Che!” said Joseph. “Ho!”

  “Stop it.”

  “Oliver, you have no sense of humour. You take everything much too seriously.”

  They had a whole routine. Gregarious Joseph. Standoffish Oliver. Joseph knocking down Oliver’s fences, Oliver putting them up again. It didn’t seem to matter that Oliver had no knack for friendship, Joseph seemed to find him agreeable. They were Holmes and Watson, Laurel and Hardy, lighting cigarettes from the same match,
raising their eyebrows at each other: Joseph’s, heavy and unruly; Oliver’s, wheatish and sparse. I think Oliver enjoyed playing the straight man while they bantered back and forth. He parodied his own English dourness.

  (The problem in the coming weeks was Joseph wasn’t always around to brighten Oliver’s day. He had taken an apartment at the edge of the city to keep his costs low.)

  “I think I’ll go have a nap,” I said, leaving Oliver encircled by Joseph.

  I left them and headed back upstairs.

  When I entered the room, the windows were closed but the wind was fluting through a crack in the frame. I wondered, in that moment, where in the world my mother was. I walked over to the window, closed the shutters. Feeling hungry, I went to Anh’s pantry and opened a packet of raisin cookies and a pot of strawberry jam, which I ate with a spoon. Then I grew tired and headed for my bedroom, where I placed all my books on one side of the bed, arranging them neatly into a long column, which I piled with my clothes. When the shape I had created was vaguely Kiyomi-size, I lay down beside it and closed my eyes.

  Nearly a month into my stay, Oliver began once again to act like the old Oliver. One day he cupped his hands over his ears like a child and announced he needed “quiet time,” making it sound as if Anh and I had been marching around with cymbals and a Sally Army brass band, when really we had just been sitting at the table reading to ourselves.

  “I’m feeling a bit tense,” he explained.

  Anh nodded and said, “You go be quiet with your tent.”

  Tense. Tent. A misunderstanding. But that’s how Anh and I came to understand his need to isolate and recompose himself. For brief periods, when it was too much effort to connect to people, he retreated, just as he had in London. In those moments, we slipped away. We invented errands, wandered the city markets.

  The tent was Oliver’s claim to peace and solitude but, oddly enough, it was not quiet. Not in the least. When we returned to the hotel after a few hours, the shortwave radio would be playing so loudly we could hear it in the corridor, the BBC World News, tinny and distorted.

  Anh would smile and say, “Listen, Macee. Your papa has gone fou.”

  But some days, the tent was blue with dread and shadow: it held Oliver inside its taut belly and wouldn’t let him go. On those days, Anh didn’t smile. Instead she shook her head at me and said, “Oh, Macee. I think your father is feeling very bad today.”

  The worst were the days when they were both feeling bad. Especially the days when Anh was upset and cried because she didn’t get her usual letter from her family in Hue. Why were adults so upset all the time?

  IT DIDN’T OCCUR TO ME THEN that the wildly shifting moods of the adults around me might be related to battle fatigue, that my young world was defined by men and women whose nature and nerves had been restrung by war and loss. When I look back it seems obvious. It wasn’t that the adults closest to me were unreliable. They were devastated. And I, a boy raised in their midst, soaked up their sense of mortality and mistrust like a damp sponge.

  It is only now, nearly forty years on, that I can begin to grasp how much I absorbed, how much lodged itself in me.

  My mobile is buzzing. I see on the display that it’s Kiyomi. I turn off the kitchen tap and wipe my hands on a tea towel. I walk over to a stool and sit down to answer.

  “I have unbelievably good news,” she says, breathless with excitement. “Natsumi has awoken from her coma. Claudio and I were sitting by her bedside when she opened her eyes and announced that she was hungry. Can you believe it? The doctors say I need to wait a few days, but I wanted you to know that Iris can come join me soon.”

  No preliminaries. I sigh.

  “Marcel? Are you there?”

  “Yes, that’s wonderful news.”

  I can hear the flat mumble of my voice, which has no bearing on the content of what she’s just said. It’s unforgivable, really, my tone. I’m genuinely happy about Natsumi. So why the disappointment? Is it simply the thought of Iris leaving before her two weeks are up? I can feel my chest tightening: yes. If they go to Mallorca, then back to New York, where will that leave me?

  “I was thinking . . .” I realize I need to say something quickly. “Kiyomi, my birthday is in a week. My fiftieth. And I was wondering if you might . . .” But then the words evaporate. In the momentary quiet, I am stumped by how desperately I want to see her and how hard it is to say so. I haven’t asked her for anything in nearly twenty years.

  “What is it, Marcel?” she says with a note of impatience. “Is Iris there? Can you put her on the line?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  I call out several times for Iris but there’s no answer. I mutter an excuse about a yoga class and tell her we’ll call right back. Then I go looking. Iris? Iris? I search every room. Iris? Iris?

  Perfect. How will I tell Kiyomi that I have lost her daughter?

  I’ve just closed the bathroom door when I hear a loud thump from my studio. I walk across the hall and nudge the door open again.

  “Iris? Are you in here?”

  I find Iris on the floor, jammed between the bookshelf and a bedraggled ficus. She doesn’t look up when I appear.

  “What are you doing?” I ask.

  “Nothing,” she says. But she looks pale and oddly passive.

  “What’s going on, Iris? You don’t look well. But, listen, your mother has good news for you.”

  I scan the room for clues. Then I find what I’m looking for. The source of the thump.

  Let it be said that despite poor reading habits, I have a respectably large collection of books: non-fiction doorstops, illustrated magazines, monographs, books you can depend on (i.e., no poetry, no novels). I have relied on this collection over the years for pictorial support. In subject areas where my imagination has proven limited, these books have provided the necessary details for buildings and machines and period costumes; yaks and quartz and cactii. (Increasingly, I have moved to online sources for material, but when Corbis or Google image come up cold, I like to know there is somewhere else I can turn.)

  Of all the books Iris might have chosen to examine—say, Taschen’s reprint of The Book of Plants or Pastoureau’s The Devil’s Cloth: A History of Stripes—I discover that she has gravitated towards the least childworthy, the most unthinkable of my collection, my Vietnam War books. Nam Massacre, Four Hours in My Lai, Death Valley . . . They’re all in a pile beside her. I have no idea how far she’s waded in, what hideousness, what wounds she’s already seen.

  There is nothing to do but approach her, gently take the books away. I try to keep my expression neutral, underplaying the moment because I know children tend to look to adults to judge how they should react to an injury. But with my arms now full, I feel Iris watching me, her own face still washed of colour.

  “I know what’s in those books,” she says impassively.

  I nod. My mind is lit with a flash. An image of a Vietnamese child trying to push the innards back inside her mother. And I wonder if this is one of those moments that Susan Sontag describes, when you are cut in half by what you see—Dachau, Hiroshima, My Lai—when you stop and say: Oh my God. This is what human beings can do to other human beings.

  Iris. How could I have known she’d snoop around?

  As I reshelve the books, I sneak peeks at her, trying to assess the damage, to understand if this is a surface injury or something deeper. (I can think of preferable transgressions: my Big Book of Breasts, the stash of pot in my nightstand drawer, the vodka in the icebox.) But this. She just looks back at me blankly. For a split second, I feel a flicker of resentment. Why does she get to be so bloody innocent? Let her suffer a bit. Then I feel shame. Her eyes are fixed on mine. Why does she look like that? I am beginning to wish she were an opera with surtitles floating above her so I could tell what she’s thinking. Then I feel a hand swat my leg. Hard.

  “Marcel. Help me up. I’m going to go see if Sarah is teaching any classes downstairs.”

  “Okay,” I say
, forgetting all about Kiyomi’s call.

  She looks back from the door and says, “By the way, I don’t like your books.”

  Her tone is adamant, non-negotiable.

  “No.” I shake my head in agreement.

  This gesture seems to satisfy her. She smiles a small smile before disappearing around the corner. The smile is more for my sake than hers, but I choose to see it as a good sign, a sign of emotional agility.

  IN THE ABSENCE OF OTHER COMPANY and to occupy myself while Anh went about her chores, I sometimes visited a man people called “the General.” The General was a regular fixture on Tu Do, a decorated hero after the French defeat by the Vietnamese at Dien Bien Phu nine years earlier. His skin was tanned a deep brown and his grey hair was shiny with Brylcreem. The story went that he had lost a son at Dien Bien Phu, then another, and then—suddenly or slowly, I couldn’t piece together all the details—he had lost his mind. Now he dressed in a faded uniform and walked about with a plastic toy rifle over his shoulder. He usually marched to and fro on the pavement by the hotel terrace. Occasionally he would stop, put his toy rifle on the ground and fiddle with the medals on his jacket. He didn’t seem to mind or notice when I paced with him, though once he stopped and let me touch his medals, staring very clearly at me before continuing. Once in a while, the doormen would usher him off the premises but I noticed they always did so courteously.

  Lately, the hotel staff was too busy to notice the General. The hotel driver was constantly travelling back and forth to the airport. It seemed there were new reporters arriving all the time. They bummed cigarettes and smoked like gangsters in the lobby. They sat on bar stools with their Vietnamese dates. I knew that Anh didn’t like any of them. She thought they were too young, too old, too nice, too mean, too stupid, too smart to cover the war fairly.

  But they liked her.

  I was standing by the lobby elevator one afternoon when Anh walked through the front door of the hotel. Hearing the room suddenly go quiet, I turned to see what was going on, only to discover the reporters staring at Anh as she passed. I could see their eyes skimming her thin beige dress. Anh continued to make her way towards me, her chin raised. As she got closer, I noticed that her ears had turned red. A patch of dampness had blossomed on her chest.