The Eaves of Heaven (27 page)

IN
another building at the prison was Gia, one of my colleagues from Phan Boi Chau High School in Phan Thiet. He was a nice fellow from a good family who had once been madly in love with my sister Huong. He had wooed her for three years without success. Drafted into the army, Gia served several years as a lieutenant in the logistics department in Saigon before his decommission in 1972. With his harmless, non-combatant background, Gia thought they would not consider him an enemy of the country. He confessed his rank and army service. They rewarded him with years of hard labor in the mangrove swamp—a disease-infested cesspit so vile half the prisoners did not survive their term.

O
NE
by one, my cellmates were called away by the loudspeakers, each leaving behind a few items of clothing, sandals, toothbrush, candles, and a Guigoz stove. These bits and pieces were all that was left of them. Those of us who remained dared not use their belongings for fear of inheriting the same bad luck. Next to the toilet, a pile of goods collected like bones.

I
REMEMBERED
how, in my impassioned youth, my heart had swelled with pride at the sight of brown pajama–clad fighters, our brave young men and women—
our Resistance
—coming to my family’s estate for supplies. How thrilled I had been when they defeated the Algerian Mohammed and drove the French from our land. How I had wanted so desperately to join our Resistance, to fight injustice, to strike back at the oppressors. I would have become a part of this.

Do the ends truly justify the means?

And to what ends had we arrived?

They had won the war, the populace, and the country in its entirety. This was barbaric. This was ridiculously vindictive. It was all so senseless.

M
Y
time came after sixty-five days of confinement. Dawn brought smoky clouds. A drizzle haunted the long afternoon, fading at twilight. The loudspeakers screeched to life and began calling out names. Pham Van Thong. I heard it as clearly as I had heard it in my nightmares.

I put on my slacks and shirt, the same garments I had last worn as a free man. Everything else I left behind: my extra clothes, straw mat, food supplies, toothbrush, toothpaste, even my precious Guigoz stove. And there against the wall, rolled up in my ragged undershirt, a small fortune in gold.

I had thought I would be terrified. I had expected to soil myself or vomit or scream. But when they came for me, I wasn’t afraid. Perhaps I was beyond fear. There was only an overwhelming sense of sadness that I would never see my wife and children again.

A numbing emptiness calmed my limbs. I did not think of my father, my siblings, or anything else. I did not think about whether the execution bullet would be painful or whether death, in its ultimate mercy, would come quickly. I did not think about where my soul would go, or if a heaven existed beyond this hell.

The sky was dark, starless, the air scented with deep, heavy earth. I felt a piercing love for my dearest ones. It did not occur to me to say a prayer.

THE NORTH
1954

33. T
HE
P
EASANT
G
IRL

T
here were three rules to managing a French whorehouse.

First, never say no to a soldier.

Second, never challenge a soldier.

Third, never fall for a girl who went with soldiers.

Mai first came to sit outside our inn late in the final colonial winter. I saw her on a stormy afternoon, coming home from school. She was huddling alone beneath the awning of the beverage kiosk; her blue dress, drenched from the waist down, clung to her legs. In the pale, bent light, she seemed half melted into the puddle at her feet. It was a striking image and I couldn’t help but ask her permission to take a picture. Photography was my new hobby.

She said no, but smiled, pleased.

We stood under the drumming rain. Then I blurted, “Miss, please come inside. You’ll catch a cold out here.”

“Thank you. I’m fine here.” She smiled.

She was soaked and shivering, purple-lipped from the cold. Her fine black hair lay matted across her forehead like a wet silk scarf, the wind lashing droplets onto her face. It wasn’t going to ease. This was the middle of the wet season. I smiled. She looked confused when I made no attempt to go.

“I’m fine, thank you,” she insisted through chattering teeth.

I held my umbrella closer to her. I couldn’t leave her standing in the miserable January rain. It was the sort of cold that bored into one’s chest to dwell. She must be new. Most girls didn’t bother waiting for clients in this bad weather.

“Miss, would you like a cup of tea?”

“No, thank you.”

“It’s very cold out here, if you ask me,” I said.

“At home, we worked the paddies in weather worse than this. We just got used to being wet the whole season. At home, this would be just an afternoon shower.”

“Around here, people accept a cup of tea when offered.”

Old man Nghi lifted the rain flap of his kiosk and cried, “For heaven’s sake, go sit in the inn, you silly girl! It’s going to rain through the night. I want to close shop and go home. Quickly, quickly, before both of you catch an ill wind.”

She stood up and smiled awkwardly.

The afternoon passed with jasmine tea and biscuits in the lounge. The inn was nearly empty. We sat cozily on the sofas as though it was a normal social visit. Wrapped in blankets, she was an ordinary peasant girl. The rain had washed off her makeup. There was no perfume on her. Mai had weathered farm hands and big brown eyes like giant longan seeds. She had perfect doll-like lips. In from the cold, her cheeks turned rosy like freshly steamed dumplings. When she giggled, her eyes went squinty. She was a country girl. Emotions lit up her face like primary colors. Her expressions were untutored, somehow still uncorrupted. It was like talking to a girl from my village.

Mai’s sharecropping family had lived in one of the villages recently ravaged by the fighting. Her father and older brother had been killed while working in the paddies. Separated from relatives on the other side of the front, her mother had fled with Mai and her younger sister into Hanoi. They had lost everything. Her story was not so different from the hundreds of girls working these streets, but Mai was unique. She seemed unaware of her beauty, and she loved books.

I was the only reader in my family and had a whole library to loan.

W
HEN
we first opened the inn three years prior, a group of six girls and two pimps came and sat at the beverage kiosk in front of our place. There was one tall stunning girl from Ninh Binh named Ly with shiny river-stone eyes. She was eighteen and had the sort of striking looks that in peacetime would have made her a star of the stage regardless of talent. Tan and I were sixteen then and smitten. We vied for her attention, not caring that we were making fools of ourselves. We behaved like silly pups, so Cung, our inn gofer, took it upon himself to free us from our romantic notions.

At the time, Cung was a lanky seventeen-year-old. He was an orphan from Hai Phong. Sharp and street-smart, he came and asked for a job a week before we hung up the inn sign. Father hired him out of pity, and Cung soon showed that he had a talent for communicating with the soldiers and placating the drunks. Within weeks, Cung made himself indispensable. He became intimately familiar with the running of the inn. While Tan never talked casually with the soldiers, and I avoided all but the nice ones, Cung was everyone’s friend and confidant, from the French regulars to the North African legionnaires, to the sub-Saharan legionnaires, to the girls and their pimps.

One day Cung said he had a surprise for us. He led us upstairs to the linen closet at the rear of the villa, put a finger to his lips, and winked. The hallway was empty. Cung unlocked the door, and we crowded into the five-by-six-foot room. It was pitch-dark and stuffy, reeking of cleaning solvents. Muffled noises from the next room came through the wall. Cung struck a match. Tan was grinning excitedly. Cung reached for a small wooden dowel jammed into the wall and then smiled at us. We bobbed our heads vigorously. He blew out the match and removed the dowel. A thin finger of light passed through a hole in the wall. Cung peered into the opening and sighed with pleasure. Illuminated, his eyeball looked like it was floating in space.

Tan was next. He stayed glued to the peephole until I shoved him aside. Ly was in the next room. I felt a distinct sharp pain in my chest. It was the first time I saw a naked woman. The legionnaire was behind her, rising above the pale sweep of her back like a dark shadow. Pain twisted her features. His grunts passed right through the wall. Suddenly, I could discern—and understood—the vibration I felt through the floor.

Somehow, any virginal idea I had about sex was destroyed at that moment. Here, a few feet away from me, was an act of depraved needs, of desperation—a sort of carnage as horrible as the Algerian raping the women in our village.

Cung’s breath was hot in my ear. He whispered, “It’s shocking at first, but once you get used to it, it’s the best show in the city.”

With the strand of light between us, I could see Cung grinning, nodding, enthusiastically proud of the hole he had drilled in the wall. I felt robbed, betrayed, soiled. At that instant, I loathed him profoundly.

Tan and I turned away. We left Cung in his peeping closet. Tan and I never talked about what we saw, but neither of us could look Ly in the eyes again.

Our ways parted from Cung’s after that day. For him, it was the beginning of a headlong dive into gambling, whoring, drinking, and smoking opium.

M
AI
didn’t wait outside our inn again. There were dozens, if not hundreds, of other places in the city, and I didn’t ask where she worked. But she did visit me every few days to return a book and borrow another. She had her pride and would not accept gifts.

We wandered the city’s lakes and picnicked on little pâté baguettes sold from pushcarts. We discovered a common passion for food. She allowed me to take her to my favorite ice cream shop. I introduced her to chocolate ice cream, peach melba, and crème fraîche. We spent many misty, languorous mornings at the waterfront cafés listening to Johnny Mathis. We chose places without foreigners. She never talked about how she spent her days or nights; I never talked about our inn.

Mai dreamed of becoming a teacher. Extremely bright, her mind leapt from topic to topic with ease. Although her family could not afford to give her more than a primary education, Mai had continued to study on her own. She hadn’t given up, even in her current situation. Each time we met, she had a list of questions for me. I never had to explain anything twice. We slipped into the roles of tutor and pupil. It was a constructive charade that created a space where there was no pain, no history, and no expectation, as if on some unspoken level we understood or agreed that this was all we were allowed: a stroll around the lake in the pearly drizzle, a poem read on a park bench, a moment of early morning stillness sitting side by side.

A
FTER
his second marriage, Father slipped deeply into his familiar opium currents, content with his new wife. And he found that she was, indeed, a good woman, competent with her household duties and raising his younger children. He left Tan and me to manage the inn and its staff of five workers. With his inattention, Tan and I had access to as much spending money as we wanted. We went to cinemas, boxing matches, soccer games, shows, and new restaurants. We went sculling on the lake. On holidays, we cruised the countryside on rented motorcycles. Once, on a whim, we caught a bus out to Hai Phong for our first glimpse of the ocean.

We were young, educated, and eligible. Tan was handsome and powerfully built, like his father. He was confident and could talk to girls with ease. I was tall and fair-skinned, like my father. Academically, I was at the top of my class, which in the competitive French system had a certain prestige. We could have courted pretty girls from good families, but we felt unworthy. We were ashamed of our family’s business, and couldn’t imagine how we would explain it to girls’ parents. We ran a modest inn, but the soldiers had turned it into a whorehouse. There was no polite way around it, and no way of denying the ugliness that pervaded everything.

It was very difficult for Tan. Since childhood, Tan was raised to succeed his father as head of our clan and magistrate of the domain. Serving thugs and mercenaries was demeaning work. At the inn, Tan never smiled, joked, or chatted with the guests. He became obsessed with bodybuilding and fashioned himself a fierce image to ward off any friendly overtures from the soldiers. Tan never said it, but I knew he resented Father for getting involved in such a lowly industry, unbefitting of our station.

“I hate this business. We shouldn’t be here. We should be out there!” Tan told me late one night as we cleaned up the bar. There had been a brawl between French regulars and African legionnaires, and we had to call the French military police. The place was a wreck. “We should be shooting these bastards instead of serving them!”

I was fed up with the inn as well. It was ridiculous trying to keep full-grown men from smashing each other to bits. I said, “Maybe we should have joined Hoi’s group.”

“I’ll fight the French, but I’d never join those treacherous Viet Minh,” Tan growled.

Neither of us could stomach fighting on the side that had murdered his father, Uncle Uc, and my cousin Quyen. But if we were in Tong Xuyen now, we would have been drafted into the Resistance. Aunt Thao sent news from home that there were only children and old people left to work the fields. No boy or girl over fourteen years old remained in the village. Anyone capable of carrying a gun had been drafted. They were all gone—all our schoolmates, boys and girls, even poor Chau, the estate’s buffalo boy.

“It’s terrible that the Nationalists can’t reorganize themselves,” I said.

“Forget it!” Tan snapped. “It’ll never happen. The Nationalists have turned into a bunch of living-room revolutionaries like your father’s friends. They talk themselves silly while Ho Chi Minh outwits them on every front.”

I sighed. “True, the Communists assassinated all their best leaders.”

The Nationalists had degenerated into a hopeless cause. The Viet Minh, masquerading as the Resistance, was our only option, but Tan and I were infected by our elders’ distrust of Ho Chi Minh’s brand of Communism, the Viet Minh’s deceit, and their political rhetoric. Alternately filled with impotent rage and general apathy, we trusted no one; we couldn’t even be proud of our own country. Furthermore, it was impossible to feel very patriotic working in the inn and serving the enemy.

Tan chewed his lower lip. “This war won’t last much longer.”

Running the inn was like having one’s finger on the pulse of the war. For the last several months, French forces had been returning from the front looking ragged and beaten. Their swagger, so prevalent two years ago, was gone. In the bars and clubs catering to foreigners, a sense of agitation had replaced the usual festive air.

As the war crept closer to Hanoi, more troops and refugees moved through the city. Hundreds of wounded soldiers wandered the streets, waiting to be shipped back to France or Africa. Half our guests were convalescing wounded. Even the healthy soldiers on leave were in bad shape. Fear and exhaustion showed plainly in their eyes. They drank and spent money with reckless abandon, making the girls happy and nervous at the same time. The soldiers were more generous, but they also had hotter tempers. Brawls were a daily occurrence at our inn. The French regulars fought with the African legionnaires, one unit against another. Blows were exchanged over the slightest provocation: an attractive girl, a spilled drink, or an insult.

One had to be blind not to see the coming of the end.

T
HE
last time I saw Mai was late in the spring. She hadn’t been by to visit in two weeks. I was very busy with school exams and didn’t think much of it. That day I was on my way to a friend’s house. I almost didn’t recognize Mai standing outside a hotel four blocks from ours. I had never seen her with full makeup. She wore a red Chinese dress. She was with three French soldiers. They were laughing, pawing at her. One draped a proprietary arm around Mai, his hand straying down to her buttocks.