The Quiet American (11 page)

When I stood up the two 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 normalise 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 names of the stars are friendly. Venus is any woman we love, the Bears are the bears of childhood, and I suppose the Southern Gross, 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 l 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 Viet 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- Fowlair.” (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 hope it’s loaded-we wouldn’t know how to reload.”

The guards had quietly accepted the loss of the gun. The one lowered his rifle and laid it across his things; 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.” “Touche,” I said. “I wish the Viets knew it.” “What’s happening out there?”

I quoted again tomorrow’s Extreme-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 the 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 barricade 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. Fowlair?” “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 arc 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 naive to start that way. . .” “No.”

“It’s not in the Kinsey Report.” “That’s why it’s not naive.”

“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 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?” I wished that he hadn’t asked that question. “No,” I said, “that woman came earlier. When I left my wife. “What happened?”

“I left her, too”

“Why?” Why indeed? “We are fools,” I said, “when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing—I don’t know if she really was, but I couldn’t bear the un-certainty any longer. Iran towards the finish just like a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.” “Death?” “It was a kind of death. Then I came east.”

“And found Phuong?”

‘Yes.”
    
:

“But don’t you find the same thing with Phuong?” “Not the same. You see, the other one loved me. I was afraid of losing love. Now I’m only afraid of losing Phuong.” Why had I said that, I wondered? He didn’t need encouragement from me.

“But she loves you, doesn’t she?” “Not like that. It isn’t in their nature. You’ll find that out. It’s a cliche to call them children—but there’s one thing which is childish. They love you in return for kind-ness, security, the presents you give them-they hate you for a blow or an injustice. They don’t know what it’s like -just walking into a room and loving a stranger. For an aging man, Pyle, it’s very secure-she won’t run away from home so long as the home is happy.”

I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I only realised I had done it when he said with muffled anger, “She might prefer a greater security or more kindness.” “Perhaps.” “Aren’t you afraid of that?” “Not o much as I was of the other.’ “Do you love her at all?”

“Oh yes, Pyle, yes. But that other way Fve only loved once.’

“In spite of the forty-odd women,’ he snapped at me. “I’m sure it’s below the Kinsey average. You know, Pyle, women don’t want virgins. I’m not sure we do, unless we are a pathological type.”

“I didn’t mean I was a virgin,” he said. All my conversations with Pyle seemed to take grotesque directions. Was it because of his sincerity that they so ran off the customary rails? His conversation never took the corners.

“You can have a hundred women and still be a virgin, Pyle. Most of your G.I.S who were hanged for rape in the war were virgins. We don’t have so many in Europe. I’m glad. They do a lot of harm.” - “I just don’t understand you, Thomas.”

“It’s not worth explaining. I’m bored with the subject anyway- Fve reached the age when sexisntthe problem so much as old age and death. I wake up with these in mind and not a woman’s body. I just don’t want to be alone in my last decade, that’s all. I wouldn’t know what to think about aH day long. I’d sooner have a woman in the same room-even one I didn’t love. But if Phuong left me, would I have the energy to find another?. . .”

“If that’s all she means to you. . .”

“All, Pyle? Wait until you’re afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. Then you’ll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, any one, who will last until you are through.” Why don’t you go back to you rwife, then?” “It’s not easy to live with someone you’ve injured.” A sten gun fired a long burst-it couldn’t have been more than a mile away. Perhaps a nervous sentry was shooting at shadows: perhaps another attack had begun. I hoped it was an attack-it increased our chances. “Are you scared, Thomas?” “Of course I am. With all my instincts. But with my reason I know it’s better to die like this. That’s why I came east. Death stays with you.’ I looked at my watch. It had gone eleven. An eight-hour night and then we could relax. I said, “We seem to have talked about pretty nearly every-thing except God We’d better leave him to the small hours.” “You don’t believe in Him, do you?” “No”