‘No. It’s history.’
The curtain was drawn aside, and the faint yellow light of an oil lamp spilled through from the other half of the cabin. Serey’s face looked drawn and pale as she crouched in the half-light, but there was a brightness in her dark eyes that Elliot had not seen before. ‘Time,’ she said.
McCue sighed. ‘My watch.’ But he made no attempt to leave. He lit another cigarette and chucked the packet to Elliot. ‘Not many left.’ He took a long draw on it. ‘Tell you a funny story.’
Elliot glanced at Serey, but she remained impassive, waiting patiently.
‘I spent some time upcountry with my unit in Nam before I was in the Rats. Always used to pull night watch. Used to love it. Me and the dark, you know. So anyway, my bunker was next to this lake, full of lungfish — you know, they got lungs and sound like humans breathing. Well, sometimes, in the dark, they would get stranded in the mud. You couldn’t see them, but you could hear them, like horror-movie monsters breathing right in front of you.’
Elliot managed to extract a cigarette and light it.
McCue went on, ‘So one night I was just lying there, thinking and listening, and I hear very clearly, right in my ear, this voice saying, “Fuck you.” Shit! I knew I was a dead man. I grabbed my rifle and all I could see was this lizard, about eight inches long, just sitting there. I looked at it, and it was looking at me. There was this moment of just nothing, then it blew out its gills and said, “Fuck you,” again. Christ, I’m shaking and waking the other guys. “Hey, man, this lizard just told me to go get fucked!” They’re grabbing their rifles, too, and the three of us — three grown men — have this stand-off with an eight-inch lizard. Finally the little bastard said “Fuck you” for them, too.’
Elliot laughed till the laughter caught in his throat and he choked, and lapsed into a fit of coughing that pulled and hurt his shoulder. But the pain didn’t matter. He had forgotten how good it felt to laugh. He saw McCue still grinning as he pushed past Serey to the outer cabin. Her face showed no understanding.
The sampan rolled as McCue clambered out to sit up back. Elliot’s smile faded. Serey turned away. ‘Wait,’ he said. She hesitated, still holding back the curtain. ‘Why are you doing this? You’d have been safe if you’d stayed in Phnom Penh.’
She took a long time to answer. ‘After four years under the Khmer Rouge, I’d forgotten I was still a human being. I just remembered, that’s all.’ And she dropped the curtain and was gone.
Chapter Forty-One
Long Xuyen lay in the heart of the delta. Nature had been generous here. It was the richest, most productive area of Vietnam, the rice bowl of south-east Asia. Its comparative wealth had been almost shocking to the conquerors from the north. It had also been the breeding ground for revolt. The Viet Cong and their cadres had worked tirelessly among the peasants, to turn them against the puppet regime of the Americans. There had been little to choose, back then, between the corruption of capitalism and the harsh and unforgiving dogmas of communism. But the communists possessed the more effective weapon. Fear. And they used it to good effect.
Life had changed little for the people since 1975. They worked in the paddies as long and as hard as before — for as little return. There were more rules and regulations. Enterprise and initiative were frowned upon. What little education existed had been replaced by re-education and indoctrination. The new religion was the atheist state but, as the French had failed to establish Catholicism, so the communists could not exorcize the Buddha, or the dozens of other schisms and sects. The history and essence of the East lay too deeply in the hearts of the people.
Here, as elsewhere in the world, racism and bigotry had always existed. But now it had the blessing of the state. As the Asians in Africa and Europe, and the Jews in Europe and America, are the object of jealousy and hatred, so the ethnic Chinese in south-east Asia are envied and despised — for their flair in commerce and trade, their stubborn refusal to discard an ancient heritage many generations removed. Now, under the communist authorities in Vietnam, hatred of the Chinese had been institutionalized. The Chinese community was harassed and persecuted. They were blamed for the country’s economic ills, driven from their businesses and their homes. Four years after the war had ended, fear still stalked many streets.
Tran Van Heng was one such ethnic Chinese, driven in late middle age to the very edge of despair. It was from this man that McCue hoped to receive help.
The American squatted just beneath the cover of the rush matting, fear fluttering in his belly like butterflies caught in a net. He had exchanged his ragged black pyjamas for a pair of neatly pressed dark trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt. He had shaved, and his face felt strangely naked. Serey and Ny had returned with the clothes from a market in town shortly before dark. Now they sat in the cabin behind him, boiling up rice over a small stove. But he wasn’t hungry.
They had arrived at Long Xuyen in the late afternoon and berthed near the harbour among dozens of other sampans upon which hundreds of Vietnamese ate and slept, lived and died in a floating ghetto. Their presence there was unremarkable, and went virtually unnoticed. During the last hours of daylight, McCue had stayed out of sight, sitting with Elliot in the rear half of the cabin, waiting, hoping, for Serey and Ny to return.
Lights from the gently bobbing flotilla were reflected now on the dark waters. The smell of cooking rose like hope above the stink of human waste. The murmur of voices and the tinny scratch of transistor radios drifted gently through the night. From the direction of the harbour, the persistent twang of Vietnamese pop music blared from some waterside café. McCue felt a hand touch his arm. He turned to find Ny crouched beside him.
‘When you go?’
‘When I finish this cigarette.’ It was the third he had smoked since he’d made himself the promise.
‘You scared?’
He nodded. ‘Sure am.’ He glanced beyond the sleeping figure of Hau in the bottom of the boat to where Serey was dishing out bowls of rice. Her face bore a serenity, as if she knew that after everything she had been through nothing could harm her now. ‘I wish I was brave like your Mamma.’
Ny smiled. ‘You brave, too. You eat later.’
‘Sure. Later.’ He threw his cigarette into the dark and heard its brief hiss as it hit the water. The last thing he felt, before he clambered across several boats to the wooden landing stage, was the gentle squeeze of her hand on his arm. He carried the touch with him like a lover’s last kiss, not knowing when, or if, he might feel it again.
He felt acutely vulnerable. Unarmed and alone, a strange face in a land where his countrymen had suffered a humiliating defeat. Curious eyes fell upon him as he walked through the lit area of the harbour, then flickered away in feigned indifference. Curiosity was not encouraged by the authorities. Cafés and some shops were still open, their yellow lights burning harshly in the dark. He hurried away from the lights of the harbour, seeking the dim anonymity of the backstreets.
It was nearly ten years since he had last been here, and yet little seemed to have changed. The crumbling French colonial homes with their peeling shutters and broken balconies; the jumble of market stalls and cavernous dark shops; the rusted iron gates and dilapidated signs painted with extravagant Chinese characters; all remained much as memory had preserved them. The narrow streets of broken pavings and pitted tarmac, the evil smells that rose from cracks in the sidewalk. All appeared to have ignored the passage of time. He passed the terrace of a café where three men in his unit had been blown apart when a bomb planted by a shoeshine boy had exploded. It was in darkness now, closed for the day. And although its windows had long since been replaced and its terrace patched, the walls still bore the scars of the explosion.