' – anyway, where'd you say you're going? Marble Mountain? You wanna stay away from there about this time.' He looked at his watch. It was five-thirty. 'There might be Charley there. I don't know. I wouldn't want to be responsible.'
We left, and when we got to the car I looked back at the bungalow. The CIA man waved his cigar at us; he seemed to be unaware that a Vietnamese girl still clung to him. His friend stood on the porch with him, agitating in his hand a paper cup full of whisky and ginger ale. The black man had returned to the high-bar: he was doing chin-ups; the girls were counting. The sentry sat hugging his rifle. Beyond them was the sea. The CIA man called out, but the tide was coming in and the noisy surf drowned his words. The refugees in Danang had taken over the barracks; these three had the general's beach house. In a sense they were all that remained of the American stake in the war: degenerate sentiment, boozy fears, and simplifications. For them the war was over: they were just amusing themselves, raising a little Cain.
Four miles south of this, near Marble Mountain, our car stalled behind a slow ox cart. While we were waiting, a Vietnamese boy of about ten rushed over and screamed through the window.
'What did he say?' asked Cobra One.
'"Motherfucker",' said Dial.
'Let's get out of here.'
That evening I met Colonel Tuan who, under the name Duy Lam, writes novels. He was one of about ten writers in Vietnam who told me how severe censorship was under Thieu's regime – not simply political censorship, for A Streetcar Named Desire is also banned. Afraid that their own books will be censored, Vietnam's novelists have chosen the safer course of translating inoffensive novels: Saigon's bookshops are full of Vietnamese versions of Jane Eyre, Jonathan Livingston Seagull, and the works of Washington Irving and Dorothy Parker. Colonel Tuan said he liked writing in Vietnamese, although he could write with equal ease in French or English.
'Vietnamese is a very beautiful language,' he said. 'But it is hard to translate. For example, if a man is addressing his wife there are so many ways he can do it. He might say "You" – but this is considered rude. Or he might call her "Little sister", and she will call him "Brother"… The most beautiful is when a man calls his wife "Myself" – "How is myself?" he will say to her. And there are others. He might call her "Mother", and she will call him "Father" -'
'"Mother, Father",' said Cobra One. 'Why, Mister and Mrs Front-Porch America say thatY
Before he left I asked Colonel Tuan what the general feeling in Vietnam was towards Americans after so much war, disruption, and death, after all the years of occupation.
Colonel Tuan thought a long time before he replied, and when he did he chose his words carefully. 'We think the Americans,' he said, and stopped. 'We think they are well disciplined… and they made many mistakes in the war. And of course we think they are generous. But we also believe they are people without culture – none at all, none that we have seen. I am not speaking for myself: I have read Faulkner and many other American writers. I am thinking of the average person – most of the people in Vietnam. That is what they think.'
I flew from Danang to Nha Trang to take a train to Thap Cham, but the day I arrived there was an attack by a squad of sappers on the oil depot outside Saigon, at Nha Be, and 50 per cent of Vietnam's fuel was wiped out in a morning. Fuel rationing started and I cancelled my trip. It was an unnecessary extravagance, since I would have to be driven a hundred miles back in a car. I got a bicycle and pedalled around the town of abandoned villas, then ate eels at a sea-front restaurant. The next day I waited hours at Nha Trang airport for a Saigon plane; and finally one came, a C-123 laden with Kleenex, Kotex, beans, toilet paper, grapefruit juice, a huge crate of Port of Call Extra Fancy Cal-Rose Rice (odd, since Nha Trang is in a rice-growing area), and a 1967 Dodge, belonging to one of the Americans there.
The flight back to Saigon in a thunderstorm scared the life out of me; I was strapped against the stomach wall of this pitching whale, and the three Chinese pilots gave me no reassurance. I recovered sufficiently to give two more lectures of which I remember little apart from what Auden described in 'On the Circuit' as
A truly asinine remark, A soul-bewitching face.
And then I was off and waiting at Tan Son Nhut Airport to go to Japan. In better times I would have taken the train to Hanoi, changed for Peking, and gone via Shenyang and Seoul to Pusan for a boat linking to one of Japan's Kyushu expresses. Or I could have gone straight from Peking to Moscow via Ulan Bator in Mongolia, and then home. The way is clear, by rail, from Hanoi Junction to Liverpool Street Station in London. Perhaps at some future date…*
* Now – April 1975 – most of the Vietnam towns I passed through by rail have been blown up, all have been captured, and many 6f their people killed. For the survivors the future is melancholy, and the little train no longer runs between Hue and Danang.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE HATSUKARI ('EARLY BIRD') LIMITED EXPRESS TO AOMORI
In Japan I planned to outfit myself for Siberia. There were the trains, of course, and the lectures to pay for them; but clothing for my onward journey was my initial concern. I arrived in Tokyo with the clothes that had served me for three months in the tropics, my drip-dry wardrobe. These clothes, stained with curry juice, somewhat threadbare, the trouser seats worn shiny by my sedentary travelling, were inadequate for the freezing Japanese weather, which augured ill for what I had been forewarned (Soviet railway timetables give average temperatures) would be thirty below in Khabarovsk. It was then December. Tokyo's winter was aggravated by wind-blown grit and exhaust fumes and those choking updrafts between buildings that characterize big-city winters. I spent two days searching for warm clothes. But Japanese clothes are not designed for the Siberian winter, and they are made only in small sizes, and they cost the earth.
It is with a kind of perverse pride that the Japanese point out how expensive their country has become. But this is as much a measure of wealth as of inflation, and I began to wonder if it was as crippling as people claimed. I asked about it, but this timid inquiry is the foreigner's first question and the knowing resident is prepared to shock you with joke prices. How much does a kimono cost? 'You can get a good one for a thousand dollars.' A meal? 'At most restaurants you cann get away with paying about twenty dollars – for one peirrson.' A bottle of gin? 'Imported stuff might set you bs-ack twenty dollars or more.' And when I laughed denrisively, an American turned on me with what I thounght was unwarranted savagery and said, 'Listen, you caiAn't get a cup of coffee here for less than a dollar!' There was, I learned later, a place in the Tokyo outskirts wvhere a cup of coffee (including cream and sugar) was saiftid to cost forty dollars. This information, offered so casunally, is like a form of fagging at schools where the senioors' automatic response to the new boy is to exclude hii.m by horrifying him. Americans in Thailand initiate youu by saying, 'Never pat a Thai on the head – the head is s sacred here. You could be killed for that.' The retailing; of the Thai religious mystique, like the money mystiquue in Japan, is supposed to make you think twice about starving. No one says you can live cheaply in Japan – but it's possible, by staying in Japanese inns and developing a tasiSte for the large bowls of noodle soup called ra-men (no o charge for the tea) and using the train. Fruit is also inexpeensive since Japan buys cut-price oranges, apples, and tang.gerines from the South Africans, who are so grateful to geaet radios in return, they have officially declared the Japarnese to be white. And there is a McDonald's hamburgeer joint on the Ginza. Winter clothes were a different strtory. Most coats I saw were well over $100 and the onee I settled for, a tight-fitting number with a rabbit-fur- collar, cost me $150. Gloves, scarf, woollen hat, and s so forth exhausted the fee I got for my first lecture, but 11 was prepared not only for Siberia but also for my speaking engagement in the December snows of Hokkaido, two train trips north.