The Eaves of Heaven (29 page)

D
URING
one interrogation, I collapsed with a high fever. The inspector splashed water on my face, but couldn’t revive me. Two prisoners carried me back to my quarters. Fellow cellmates nursed me with aspirin and penicillin from my stash of medicine. Three days and two nights I lay on the cold ground, wrapped in four layers of borrowed clothes, sweating, freezing, delirious. The body was ready, the spirit nearly there. Colleagues had fallen all around me, worthier men had perished, and I was learning to let go of my fears.

I thought of the Buddhist’s third truth of existence: Death is a natural condition. There is no way to escape death.

In the long descent, I arrived finally at a place where what I had lost did not matter as much as what I had had, however briefly, in life. Here, I was free of bitterness and sorrow. Things, the essence of them, came to me, caressed me, entered and passed through me like familiar spirits.

Riding the border of sleep and wakefulness, I dreamt of the green fields of March, the yellow wind of summer harvests, the eternal gray of October rain, the blush of Hanoi winters, the gold foil on a champagne bottle buried in Tong Xuyen.

THE NORTH
MAY
1954

35. F
AREWELL
, H
ANOI

W
hen I first met him a year earlier, Lieutenant Gerard was a good-looking twenty-three-year-old. He strode into our inn, a tall, fair, and bespectacled young man, confident and full of promise. He struck me more as a scholar than a soldier. In fact, Gerard did enjoy reading and had borrowed many French volumes from our library during the dozen times he stayed here. But the war and his part in it had changed him. The longer he stayed in Vietnam, the less he read, and the more he smoked and drank. In the final days of the French occupation, he was wounded and discharged from service, a veteran and a wreck of a man at twenty-four.

“What will you do?”
Gerard asked me in French, the morning he was due to be shipped back to France. He was slouching on a stool, his chest against the bar. He pushed his glass across to me.

“Go south,”
I said and poured him his fifth whisky of the morning. “We’ve lived under the Viet Minh once; we won’t do it again.”

“The inn?”

I shrugged.
“My relatives will take care of it.”

“After we’re gone,”
he said, meaning the French,
“who are you going practice your French with?”

I canted my head in that French manner of ambiguous acknowledgment without conceding a point. I didn’t bother mentioning that I would probably no longer need a language that I had spent more than ten years learning.

“I’ll miss our conversations,”
he said, looking into his half-empty glass. Gerard had expressive eyes, and I could tell he was referring to something else. The days of the empire were ending, and so with it the opportunities for French commoners to rise above their class by going to the colonies.

“Merci, monsieur.”

“You should go to France. A man can not consider himself civilized until he has seen Paris,”
Gerard declared with a magnanimous wave of his hand.
“Come with me.”

He was joking. Playing along, I protested,
“Monsieur, what would I do for work?”

“France is full of Annamites.”

I smiled. Although “Annamites” meant “the people south of China,” I somehow never got used to the tone in the way the French used the term. It sounded derogatory in my ears. They called our land “Indochine,” but I had never heard a Frenchman used the proper term “Indochinoise.”

He continued,
“There are plenty of jobs for your countrymen.”

Indeed, I aspired to go to college in order to be a servant in France. Surely he must have remembered that only recently did France repeal the law requiring the highest paid colonial subject to be paid less than the lowest paid French worker. A Vietnamese professor’s salary had to be lower than a French janitor’s wage at the same university. For a Vietnamese, France held little promise, certainly in my lifetime.

“Ah, Monsieur, but where would I find a girl?”

He jutted out his lower lip and shrugged.
“Whores are everywhere. Some go with Annamites.”

For a French soldier, Gerard was not a bad sort. I liked him. One simply had to learn to be deaf when convenient. Gerard had come here directly from the hospital, hoping to convalesce in the arms of a woman. He was looking for Yen, one of the working girls he had seen regularly. I told him she went back to her village to find her family. Many refugees had left the city since the government declared a ceasefire. The last two nights, he was the inn’s only guest. He was drunk the whole time, shouting to no one in particular:
“C’est la vie! They abandon you when you need them most.”
It was impossible to tell if he was referring to the girl or the French army.

I took the good whisky bottle from beneath the bar and filled his glass to the rim.
“On the house, monsieur.”

“You’re a good man, Thong.”

“Merci, monsieur.”
I raised my glass of grenadine to avoid his eyes.

It was no easy task managing the halfway house to hell. The last few months had been particularly bad. The French knew they were losing the war. Both the French regulars and the legionnaires behaved as though it was the end of the world. Those with orders to go to the front caroused as if they did not expect to return. The convalescing wounded on their way home to France poisoned themselves with alcohol binges. Soldiers spent money like barons. They drank, fought, and beat the girls with a vehemence I had not seen before. Then Dien Bien Phu fell, sending a palpable shudder through the French population in Hanoi. But it was more than that. It was the death knell of the French empire of Indochina.

Secretly, I was proud that the Resistance had defeated the French against horrendous odds. And I was also devastated that my family would lose our life of comfort and all our worldly belongings because of it.

Cung came into the lounge and said,
“Monsieur’s taxi is ready.”

Cung took the suitcase. I held the stool for Gerard as he struggled onto his one good leg. The other had been recently amputated below the knee. His face reddened with the effort and his hands shook. We walked him slowly out the gate. On the shady sidewalk, old man Nghi was still in his kiosk selling his icy pickled lemonade. Gerard glanced at the tables where the girls and their pimps usually sat waiting for customers. All gone.

He sighed, then hobbled the rest of the way to the curb. We helped him into the cab. Gerard sank into the seat, head lolling backward against the cushion.
“Bon voyage, Lieutenant,”
I said. His eyes were closed. The young lieutenant neither looked at me nor said good-bye. Indochina had already faded for him.

I locked the gates, feeling more carefree than I had felt in a long time. Hoa Inn was closed. Its last French guest had checked out.

T
HAT
evening Father took the family to La Maison, his favorite French restaurant. The Vietnamese owner was an old acquaintance. We dressed formally—the last time we wore our tailored suits, which would be left along with everything we owned in Hanoi when we went south. The restaurant’s specialty was a superlative bouillabaisse. French expatriates and rich Vietnamese filled the tables. They drank and dined, laughing as though nothing had changed. Father called for champagne. Even Hung and Hong were allowed sips. Father raised his glass, and we raised ours. There was no toast. Father smiled. His hair was combed and slicked back, a dated style he had carried over from his younger years. Father was thin, but straight-backed. The opium’s toll was not yet visible on him. He was a debonair and striking man just past his prime at thirty-six.

At home, we gathered in the lounge. Father announced that Uncle Chinh would manage the villa with the current staff. We were to pack one small valise each. Everything else must be left behind. Father had registered our family and his new in-law’s family for airplane transport to Saigon the day after tomorrow. My mother’s side of the family, Aunt Thuan’s family, and nearly all of my relatives were due to follow us within weeks. My cousin Lang would go with Aunt Thuan’s family, but his mother would stay behind to safeguard the clan’s interests. It was the greatest of her many sacrifices for the greater good of the clan and harmony of her family, one with a terrible price that she would pay for the rest of her life. Father’s younger sister, Aunt Thao, also chose to stay. Her husband, a former clerk, was now a ranking Communist party member.

I walked through the empty inn. There was nothing I wanted to take. The villa had been in our family as long as I could remember. As a toddler, I had played in these rooms; I knew their every nook. I remembered Father’s famous parties, afternoon teas in the garden, my mother hosting dinners for relatives. But now these rooms also bore the markings of foreign soldiers and cheap sex. I went down to the bar and mixed myself a glass of grenadine. The villa was wonderfully silent. No music, no raucous games, no shouting. No drunken soldiers. At last, it was over.

A light was on in Father’s room. I came to the door. He was sitting on his divan, a suitcase open next to him; inside a single change of clothes and stacks of loose photos. Father looked up and motioned for me to join him. He went to the cabinet and took out his opium apparatuses arranged on a tray inlaid with mother of pearl.

He picked up the pipe and handed it to me. It was the color of a dark plum. “It’s
truc
bamboo.”

“It looks like lacquered wood.”

“It’s a polishing treatment the old craftsmen used.
Truc
is lighter and never cracks like wood. See how perfectly the end ivory pieces flow into the bamboo? Slim and graceful.” He handed me a thin brown bottle the hue of chicken liver. “Look at the opening on the bottle; it’s all silver.”

“Instead of nickel?”

“Instead of copper. This is a special type of clay from China. It’s baked to be thin and very light so your arm won’t get tired holding it. Clay won’t crack like the enamel of ceramic. Over time, opium sap will creep into the cracks and make a ceramic bottle ugly. Can you tell that the lamp is also very expensive? Both the shade and the oil pot are crystal, and the base is silver.”

I asked him if they were antiques. He said they were from my grandfather’s generation. I glanced around his room at the other luxuries he could have taken: tailored suits, watches, imported hats, antique porcelain, paintings, and priceless poem scrolls. In the third drawer of his dresser were his silk mandarin robe and headdress, the official ensemble he had proudly worn at public functions in Tong Xuyen. I asked him how much his opium kit would fetch on the market. Father flinched and replied that people never parted with such items unless they were in very dire straits.

He was sharing with me his most treasured possessions—the things he would keep until the day he died.

I
T
was our last day in Hanoi. Tan and I rented two Motobecane motorcycles—we could have bought them. Our pockets were stuffed with rolls and wads of French piasters, notes that would soon be worthless. We cruised around the city, looping through one district after another, visiting all our favorite haunts. The French were vacating their neighborhoods. The regal mansions looked desolate. The rest of the city was bustling, restaurants and shops thriving. Peasants streamed into Hanoi by the busload looking for missing family members separated by years of war.

At the new open-air market, prospective émigrés sold all their belongings. Normally secondhand stores handled such goods, but there was no time. Folks laid the entire contents of their homes on the ground: clothes, mirrors, combs, dishes, pots, pans, furniture, bedding, souvenirs, and knickknacks. One could almost read people’s lives in the things they laid on the ground for sale at ridiculously low prices. It was a bizarre essay of desperation, these spoils of war.

I saw a spyglass and heaps of books I’d wanted to own. Tan wanted to buy a Japanese sword, but he knew he could never take it on the plane. We had more money than we could spend in months, but what was the point? It was like showing up at a feast where we weren’t allowed to eat.

Bargains could be had throughout the city. Stores slashed prices to reduce their inventory. The wealthy liquidated their assets. Luxury items suddenly became very cheap. Those who weren’t emigrating south were on shopping sprees. Even the poor did their share of window-shopping. Homes went for a third of their purchase prices. Mansions cost no more than an ordinary shop house, but there were few takers. The future was too uncertain for big investments.

Dealers went door-to-door, inquiring if the inhabitants were leaving, hoping to buy anything at a steep discount. Others came with offers to pack and ship émigrés’ belongings south. Agents competed to be caretakers of homes and businesses. Hanoi took on a frenzied, almost festive atmosphere for those who stayed.

A week before, four village elders from Tong Xuyen had made the long trip to Hanoi to convince my father that his ancestral land still belonged to him. They urged him to stay; however, if Father were determined to leave, they would gladly, for a healthy percentage, be the leasing agents for his land. They had brought the same offer to Aunt Thuan in Hung Yen. She had also left the ancestral estate with her children to live with her relatives in the French-controlled area. Father treated them well and said that he was undecided. He knew the Communists had sent them and worried that they might try to stop him from going south.

Father had anticipated much of this. His foresight saved us from the madness and disaster awaiting those who evacuated later. The time would come when the Communists would rally the populace to physically halt the exodus of hundreds of thousands to the South.

O
UR
favorite restaurant on Umbrella Street was packed with a well-to-do lunch crowd. Tan and I waited for a table near the front so we could have a view of the pair of pretty sisters selling umbrellas just outside the restaurant. In the two years we had been coming here, neither of us had the courage to talk to them. It seemed silly to try now.