‘Don’t you trust them?’
‘No French officer,’ I said, ‘would care to spend the night alone with two scared guards in one of these towers. Why, even a platoon have been known to hand over their officers. Sometimes the Viets have a better success with a megaphone than a bazooka. I don’t blame them. They don’t believe in anything either. You and your like are trying to make a war with the help of people who just aren’t interested.’
‘They don’t want Communism.’
‘They want enough rice,’ I said. ‘They don’t want to be shot at. They want one day to be much the same as another. They don’t want our white skins around telling them what they want.’
‘If Indo-China goes . . .’
‘I know the record. Siam goes. Malaya goes. Indonesia goes. What does “go” mean? If I believed in your God and another life, I’d bet my future harp against your golden crown that in five hundred years there may be no New York or London, but they’ll be growing paddy in these fields, they’ll be carrying their produce to market on long poles wearing their pointed hats. The small boys will be sitting on the buffaloes. I like the buffaloes, they don’t like our smell, the smell of Europeans. And remember—from a buffalo’s point of view you are a European too.’
‘They’ll be forced to believe what they are told, they won’t be allowed to think for themselves.’
‘Thought’s a luxury. Do you think the peasant sits and thinks of God and Democracy when he gets inside his mud hut at night?’
‘You talk as if the whole country were peasant. What about the educated? Are they going to be happy?’
‘Oh no,’ I said, ‘we’ve brought them up in our ideas. We’ve taught them dangerous games, and that’s why we are waiting here, hoping we don’t get our throats cut. We deserve to have them cut. I wish your friend York was here too. I wonder how he’d relish it.’
‘York Harding’s a very courageous man. Why, in Korea . . .’
‘He wasn’t an enlisted man, was he? He had a return ticket. With a return ticket courage becomes an intellectual exercise, like a monk’s flagellation. How much can I stick? Those poor devils can’t catch a plane home. Hi,’ I called to them, ‘what are your names?’ I thought that knowledge somehow would bring them into the circle of our conversation. They didn’t answer: just lowered back at us behind the stumps of their cigarettes. ‘They think we are French,’ I said.
‘That’s just it,’ Pyle said. ‘You shouldn’t be against York, you should be against the French. Their colonialism.’
‘Isms and ocracies. Give me facts. A rubber planter beats his labourer—all right, I’m against him. He hasn’t been instructed to do it by the Minister of the Colonies. In France I expect he’d beat his wife. I’ve seen a priest, so poor he hasn’t a change of trousers, working fifteen hours a day from hut to hut in a cholera epidemic, eating nothing but rice and salt fish, saying his Mass with an old cup—a wooden platter. I don’t believe in God and yet I’m for that priest. Why don’t you call that colonialism?’
‘It is colonialism. York says it’s often the good administrators who make it hard to change a bad system.’
‘Anyway the French are dying every day—that’s not a mental concept. They aren’t leading these people on with half-lies like your politicians—and ours. I’ve been in India, Pyle, and I know the harm liberals do. We haven’t a liberal party any more—liberalism’s infected all the other parties. We are all either liberal conservatives or liberal socialists: we all have a good conscience. I’d rather be an exploiter who fights for what he exploits, and dies with it. Look at the history of Burma. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren’t colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad conscience.’
‘That was a long time ago.’
‘We shall do the same thing here. Encourage them and leave them with a little equipment and a toy industry.’
‘Toy industry?’
‘Your plastic.’
‘Oh yes, I see.’
‘I don’t know what I’m talking politics for. They don’t interest me and I’m a reporter. I’m not engagé.’
‘Aren’t you?’ Pyle said.
‘For the sake of an argument—to pass this bloody night, that’s all. I don’t take sides. I’ll be still reporting, whoever wins.’
‘If they win, you’ll be reporting lies.’
‘There’s usually a way round, and I haven’t noticed much regard for truth in our papers either.’
I think the fact of our sitting there talking encouraged the two soldiers: perhaps they thought the sound of our white voices—for voices have a colour too, yellow voices sing and black voices gargle, while ours just speak—would give an impression of numbers and keep the Viets away. They picked up their pans and began to eat again, scraping with their chopsticks, eyes watching Pyle and me over the rim of the pan.
‘So you think we’ve lost?’
‘That’s not the point,’ I said. ‘I’ve no particular desire to see you win. I’d like those two poor buggers there to be happy—that’s all. I wish they didn’t have to sit in the dark at night scared.’
‘You have to fight for liberty.’
‘I haven’t seen any Americans fighting around here. And as for liberty, I don’t know what it means. Ask them.’ I called across the floor in French to them. ‘La liberté—qu’est ce que c’est la liberté?’ They sucked in the rice and stared back and said nothing.
Pyle said, ‘Do you want everybody to be made in the same mould? You’re arguing for the sake of arguing. You’re an intellectual. You stand for the importance of the individual as much as I do—or York.’
‘Why have we only just discovered it?’ I said. ‘Forty years ago no one talked that way.’
‘It wasn’t threatened then.’
‘Ours wasn’t threatened, oh no, but who cared about the individuality of the man in the paddy field—and who does now? The only man to treat him as a man is the political commissar. He’ll sit in his hut and ask his name and listen to his complaints; he’ll give up an hour a day to teaching him—it doesn’t matter what, he’s being treated like a man, like someone of value. Don’t go on in the East with that parrot cry about a threat to the individual soul. Here you’d find yourself on the wrong side—it’s they who stand for the individual and we just stand for Private 23987, unit in the global strategy.’
‘You don’t mean half what you are saying,’ Pyle said uneasily.
‘Probably three quarters. I’ve been here a long time. You know, it’s lucky I’m not engagé, there are things I might be tempted to do—because here in the East—well, I don’t like Ike. I like—well, these two. This is their country. What’s the time? My watch has stopped.’
‘It’s turned eight-thirty.’
‘Ten hours and we can move.’
‘It’s going to be quite chilly,’ Pyle said and shivered. ‘I never expected that.’
‘There’s water all round. I’ve got a blanket in the car. That will be enough.’
‘Is it safe?’
‘It’s early for the Viets.’
‘Let me go.’
‘I’m more used to the dark.’
When I stood up the soldiers stopped eating. I told them, ‘Je reviens, tout de suite.’ I dangled my legs over the trap door, found the ladder and went down. It is odd how reassuring conversation is, especially on abstract subjects: it seems to normalize the strangest surroundings. I was no longer scared: it was as though I had left a room and would be returning there to pick up the argument—the watch tower was the rue Catinat, the bar of the Majestic, or even a room off Gordon Square.
I stood below the tower for a minute to get my vision back. There was starlight, but no moonlight. Moonlight reminds me of a mortuary and the cold wash of an
unshaded globe over a marble slab, but starlight is alive and never still, it is almost as though someone in those vast spaces is trying to communicate a message of good will, for even the names of the stars are friendly. Venus is any woman we love, the Bears are the bears of childhood, and I suppose the Southern Cross, to those, like my wife, who believe, may be a favourite hymn or a prayer beside the bed. Once I shivered as Pyle had done. But the night was hot enough, only the shallow stretch of water on either side gave a kind of icing to the warmth. I started out towards the car, and for a moment when I stood on the road I thought it was no longer there. That shook my confidence, even after I remembered that it had petered out thirty yards away. I couldn’t help walking with my shoulders bent: I felt more unobtrusive that way.
I had to unlock the boot to get the blanket and the click and squeak startled me in the silence. I didn’t relish being the only noise in what must have been a night full of people. With the blanket over my shoulder I lowered the boot more carefully than I had raised it, and then, just as the catch caught, the sky towards Saigon flared with light and the sound of an explosion came rumbling down the road. A bren spat and spat and was quiet again before the rumbling stopped. I thought, ‘Somebody’s had it,’ and very far away heard voices crying with pain or fear or perhaps even triumph. I don’t know why, but I had thought all the time of an attack coming from behind, along the road we had passed, and I had a moment’s sense of unfairness that the Viets should be there ahead, between us and Saigon. It was as though we had been unconsciously driving towards danger instead of away from it, just as I was now walking in its direction, back towards the tower. I walked because it was less noisy than to run, but my body wanted to run.
At the foot of the ladder I called up to Pyle, ‘It’s me—Fowler.’ (Even then I couldn’t bring myself to use my Christian name to him.) The scene inside the hut had changed. The pans of rice were back on the floor; one man held his rifle on his hip and sat against the wall staring at Pyle and Pyle knelt a little way out from the opposite wall with his eyes on the sten gun which lay between him and the second guard. It was as though he had begun to crawl towards it but had been halted. The second guard’s arm was extended towards the gun: no one had fought or even threatened, it was like that child’s game when you mustn’t be seen to move or you are sent back to base to start again.
‘What’s going on?’ I said.
The two guards looked at me and Pyle pounced, pulling the sten to his side of the room.
‘Is it a game?’ I asked.
‘I don’t trust him with the gun,’ Pyle said, ‘if they are coming.’
‘Ever used a sten?’
‘No.’
‘That’s fine. Nor have I. I’m glad it’s loaded—we wouldn’t know how to reload it.’
The guards had quietly accepted the loss of the gun. The one lowered his rifle and laid it across his thighs: the other slumped against the wall and shut his eyes as though like a child he believed himself invisible in the dark. Perhaps he was glad to have no more responsibility. Somewhere far away the bren started again—three bursts and then silence. The second guard screwed his eyes closer shut.
‘They don’t know we can’t use it,’ Pyle said.
‘They are supposed to be on our side.’
‘I thought you didn’t have a side.’
‘Touché,’ I said. ‘I wish the Viets knew it.’
‘What’s happening out there?’
I quoted again tomorrow’s Extrême Orient: ‘A post fifty kilometres outside Saigon was attacked and temporarily captured last night by Vietminh irregulars.’
‘Do you think it would be safer in the fields?’
‘It would be terribly wet.’
‘You don’t seem worried,’ Pyle said.
‘I’m scared stiff—but things are better than they might be. They don’t usually attack more than three posts in a night. Our chances have improved.’
‘What’s that?’
It was the sound of a heavy car coming up the road, driving towards Saigon. I went to the rifle slit and looked down, just as a tank went by.
‘The patrol,’ I said. The gun in the turret shifted now to this side, now to that. I wanted to call out to them, but what was the good? They hadn’t room on board for two useless civilians. The earth floor shook a little as they passed, and they had gone. I looked at my watch—eight fifty-one, and waited, straining to read when the light flapped. It was like judging the distance of lightning by the delay before the thunder. It was nearly four minutes before the gun opened up. Once I thought I detected a bazooka replying, then all was quiet again.
‘When they come back,’ Pyle said, ‘we could signal them for a lift to the camp.’
An explosion set the floor shaking. ‘If they come back,’ I said. ‘That sounded like a mine.’ When I looked at my watch again it had passed nine fifteen and the tank had not returned. There had been no more firing.
I sat down beside Pyle and stretched out my legs. ‘We’d better try to sleep,’ I said. ‘There’s nothing else we can do.’
‘I’m not happy about the guards,’ Pyle said.
‘They are all right so long as the Viets don’t turn up. Put the sten under your leg for safety.’ I closed my eyes and tried to imagine myself somewhere else—sitting up in one of the fourth-class compartments the German railways ran before Hitler came to power, in the days when one was young and sat up all night without melancholy, when waking dreams were full of hope and not of fear. This was the hour when Phuong always set about preparing my evening pipes. I wondered whether a letter was waiting for me—I hoped not, for I knew what a letter would contain, and so long as none arrived I could day-dream of the impossible.
‘Are you asleep?’ Pyle asked.
‘No.’
‘Don’t you think we ought to pull up the ladder?’
‘I begin to understand why they don’t. It’s the only way out.’
‘I wish that tank would come back.’
‘It won’t now.’
I tried not to look at my watch except at long intervals, and the intervals were never as long as they had seemed. Nine forty, ten five, ten twelve, ten thirty-two, ten forty-one.
‘You awake?’ I said to Pyle.
‘Yes.’
‘What are you thinking about?’
He hesitated. ‘Phuong,’ he said.
‘Yes?’
‘I was just wondering what she was doing.’
‘I can tell you that. She’ll have decided that I’m spending the night at Tanyin—it won’t be the first time. She’ll be lying on the bed with a joss stick burning to keep away the mosquitoes and she’ll be looking at the pictures in an old Paris-Match. Like the French she has a passion for the Royal Family.’
He said wistfully, ‘It must be wonderful to know exactly,’ and I could imagine his soft dog’s eyes in the dark. They ought to have called him Fido, not Alden.
‘I don’t really know—but it’s probably true. There’s no good in being jealous when you can’t do anything about it. “No barricado for a belly.”’
‘Sometimes I hate the way you talk, Thomas. Do you know how she seems to me? She seems fresh, like a flower.’
‘Poor flower,’ I said. ‘There are a lot of weeds around.’
‘Where did you meet her?’
‘She was dancing at the Grand Monde.’
‘Dancing,’ he exclaimed, as though the idea were painful.
‘It’s a perfectly respectable profession,’ I said. ‘Don’t worry.’
‘You have such an awful lot of experience, Thomas.’
‘I have an awful lot of years. When you reach my age . . .’
‘I’ve never had a girl,’ he said, ‘not properly. Not what you’d call a real experience.’
‘A lot of energy with your people seems to go into whistling.’
‘I’ve never told anybody else.’
‘You’re young. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.’
‘Have you had a
lot of women, Fowler?’
‘I don’t know what a lot means. Not more than four women have had any importance to me—or me to them. The other forty-odd—one wonders why one does it. A notion of hygiene, of one’s social obligations, both mistaken.’
‘You think they are mistaken?’
‘I wish I could have those nights back. I’m still in love, Pyle, and I’m a wasting asset. Oh, and there was pride, of course. It takes a long time before we cease to feel proud of being wanted. Though God knows why we should feel it, when we look around and see who is wanted too.’
‘You don’t think there’s anything wrong with me, do you, Thomas?’
‘No, Pyle.’
‘It doesn’t mean I don’t need it, Thomas, like everybody else. I’m not—odd.’
‘Not one of us needs it as much as we say. There’s an awful lot of self-hypnosis around. Now I know I need nobody—except Phuong. But that’s a thing one learns with time. I could go a year without one restless night if she wasn’t there.’
‘But she is there,’ he said in a voice I could hardly catch.
‘One starts promiscuous and ends like one’s grandfather, faithful to one woman.’
‘I suppose it seems pretty naïve to start that way . . .’
‘No.’
‘It’s not in the Kinsey Report.’
‘That’s why it’s not naïve.’
‘You know, Thomas, it’s pretty good being here, talking to you like this. Somehow it doesn’t seem dangerous any more.’
‘We used to feel that in the blitz,’ I said, ‘when a lull came. But they always returned.’
‘If somebody asked you what your deepest sexual experience had been, what would you say?’
I knew the answer to that. ‘Lying in bed early one morning and watching a woman in a red dressing-gown brush her hair.’
‘Joe said it was being in bed with a Chink and a negress at the same time.’
‘I’d have thought that one up too when I was twenty.’
‘Joe’s fifty.’
‘I wonder what mental age they gave him in the war.’
‘Was Phuong the girl in the red dressing-gown?’