He swung open the door the rest of the way and inclined his head for her to leave. Her last sight of him was as he smiled, owlishly, like a benign professor. But his tongue was darting, moistening the bright round of his mouth.
On the day of her arrival at Cahn Roc, Nan Luc was introduced to the new provincial prosecutor, Kiet Van Khoa, a forty-year-old veteran of great battles at Hue and Da Nang. A dedicated servant of the state, Van Khoa saw his role as maintaining the legal purity of the revolution. He was not in any sense a democrat. Though fully aware that the original Vietnamese Declaration of Independence had, ironically, been modelled on another, more famous declaration, Van Khoa never allowed that to lead him to the belief that the people should choose. The law chose. The law was the creation of ancestors, the government and above all the wisdom of the late Ho Chi Minh. There was no room left for doubt.
Yet despite a relentlessly undeviating line on the law, Van Khoa, his dark hair flopping forward over his dark-olive forehead, pointing to the map with the only finger left on his injured hand, was still able to give real sympathy and consideration to village boundary disputes or fishing rights on the river banks.
From the first anxious day Nan Luc was plunged into work. There was little civil crime except occasional incidents in the capital Cahn Roc itself. Most of her duties were echoes of the reverberating problems caused by the American war. A village which had been flattened in the US Army urbanisation programme might have had land annexed by a half dozen neighbouring villages. But if the scattered families of the village returned, even to huts blackened by the fires of a decade or more ago, the land itself was an inalienable part of their family heritage.
Each week Nan Luc, under Van Khoa’s supervision, struggled with two or three blue folders of such cases. Sometimes the same cases were presented again by other villages who believed their sacred claims were being flaunted and the high-pitched disputatious voices of the villagers filled the old colonial courtroom with claims and counterclaims. It was all a long way from the glib solutions of Qui, the gentle ghost of the Ministry of Education’s yellow-jacketed volumes of propaganda stories.
To Nan Luc’s intense relief Quatch was absent from Cahn Roc. Some of the junior clerks spoke of an administrators’ conference in Hanoi and Van Khoa briefly confirmed that Quatch would be absent into the rainy season. Her problems with Quatch deferred, every day Nan Luc went out in the departmental jeep, her straw sun hat held firmly on her head and discussed and sometimes arbitrated claims with the leaders of the village families. For herself, a product of the city, it was an often moving introduction to an age-old Vietnam.
She was close to being happy. A cloud descended on her every time Quatch’s name was mentioned, but for the moment a confrontation with the administrator was a problem deferred. She thought of Paris often, of that day in the Brasserie and of the American she had risked so much to spend an hour with. But these thoughts of Paris were to her so incredibly distant they resembled more those of an older woman reflecting on the irrecoverable past.
It was not long before Nan realised that the ever smiling Van Khoa possessed influence. Where or how this influence was exercised Nan had no idea. But the typists in the downstairs office and even Nan’s subordinates, the three women counter clerks, all contrived to give Nan Luc the idea that Van Khoa was different. If she needed something he lifted the telephone and spoke to some department of government in Ho Chi Minh City. Usually he would get what she wanted: the loan of a winch-truck – US Army, reconditioned – to clear shattered tree trunks from an old road between two villages; a spare part for her jeep; emergency medical supplies when a fire leaping through a village bamboo thicket hedge, trapped and burnt the villagers. And there was something else that impressed everybody about Van Khoa. The way he spoke of Quatch, without that intimation of deep respect for the administrator’s power which was the accepted style among all the other officials.
There was another area of her duties which soon brought daylight fantasies and recurring dreams. It was the role of the coastguard to supervise the fishing boats of Cahn Roc province, those strange, black-sailed wooden ships she could see at sunset from her window, motionless on a blood-red sea. The relative proximity of Thailand to the north was the problem. Should a fishing boat disappear it might have gone down in a storm. It might equally have been sold to a group of refugees. Sometimes it fell to Nan Luc to investigate.
These duties kept Nan Luc busy deep into the summer. She remained, though always anxious about the return of Quatch, moderately content, if not happy. She was lonely, with only Van Khoa to provide the sort of company she wanted. But above all she was becoming obsessed with the thought of what might have been, with the thought of America. Every night she watched the black rhomboid sails of the fishing boats go out into the Gulf of Thailand and wondered why they would choose to return in the dawn.
More and more as the year lengthened memories of Paris occupied her waking dreams, memories that came in clean-cut snippets. Two young people walking together by the Seine, a family Sunday lunch at a cafe off the Boulevard St Michel, a group of Americans at a foreign aid reception at the Swedish embassy. And an unobtrusive but ever present regret that she had not been able to meet Max Benning that last night before she left the West for ever.
For ever? At night she looked out across the ocean at the black sails of Cahn Roc and let all her memories or part memories of her childhood filter through her mind. Somewhere a garden hung with bright coloured flowers. Grass of a vivid, dark green. In a child’s memory she saw a tall, fair-haired man in a light suit. He held a large coloured ring, like a deck quoit, in his hand. Smiling, he was about to throw it to her…
In these days of loneliness at Cahn Roc Nan Luc suffered more than anything a recurring desire to know her father. The ache was more than a thinly disguised desire to leave the land in which she felt cut off by her mounting scepticism and her hybrid appearance. The desire to know the man who had fathered her was, ironically, purely Vietnamese.
But it pointed her always towards America.
Her fear of Quatch’s return was constant. She recognised now the quizzical movement of Van Khoa’s eyebrow whenever she referred to the subject. Since the administrator’s absence Van Khoa had spent more and more time in the past weeks working in Quatch’s office. Many of the officials believed that he was about to be appointed Quatch’s deputy. Even to Nan Luc it seemed that Van Khoa was dealing with fewer and fewer legal issues. She discovered her mistake one afternoon when she had been forced to ask his advice on a particularly complex problem in one of the outlying villages.
When he had given his opinion she thanked him and turned to leave the room. ‘Just a moment,’ he said. She stopped, her hand on the door. ‘After all these months working together it would be wrong for me to go without saying goodbye.’
Nan Luc stiffened. The fear of loneliness enclosed her. She had not fallen in love with Van Khoa, she knew that. She saw little or nothing of him in the evenings. But she had become very dependent on his company at work.
‘You’re leaving,’ she said in a voice as flat as she could make it.
‘For the moment. Perhaps for a long while. Perhaps for ever.’
‘I shall miss working with you,’ she said guardedly.
He bowed his head. ‘Nan Luc…’ He paused. ‘I had thought to ask you to marry me. There, I have blundered it out…’ He left the words hanging hopefully in the air. With a sharp movement of his head he threw his hair back from his thin face. His injured hand was held behind his back.