He heard them going downstairs together, carrying suitcases, locking her door. She had slipped an envelope under his door as she left.
The last thing he heard was her high heels in the corridor. His own feet were dragging slightly as he went to the door. He picked up the note: ‘Darling Kien, I’m leaving. Goodbye to you. It’s better this way. Better for both of us. Please, please, forget me, I beg you. I wish you great success.’
Kien coaxed himself: ‘I must write!’
Collar up, coat wrapped securely around him, he paced the quiet Hanoi streets night after night making promises to himself, dreaming up slogans to pull his thoughts into line.
‘I must write! It’s going to be like smashing granite with fists, like turning myself inside out and exposing all my secrets to the outside world.
‘I must write! To rid myself of these devils, to put my tormented soul finally to rest instead of letting it float in a pool of shame and sorrow.
‘I must push on! Even if some hours spent at my desk appear wasted, or some of the story-lines I begin have to be discarded, I must press on. Otherwise the pain will be unbearable.’
The writing was coming along slowly. Pacing the pavement seemed to help, and to rid him of some of the ill humour that occasionally built up. Besides, pacing the streets occasionally brought him flashbacks by association.
Passing the silk quarter one day he stood watching the girls trying on new silk fashions. He was reminded of some Khmer girls who’d been appointed jungle guides in the West Dac Ret area. They wore their bras on the outside of their garments, as adornments, or like precious jewellery. The clever young soldiers who hid bras in knapsacks won themselves any of these young girls who’d volunteered to help their troops. These country girls would give themselves to the boys and fulfil their wildest fantasies in return for a bra.
In 1973 his regiment had mistakenly been sent a batch of uniforms and assorted articles meant for a women’s platoon. Side-buttoned trousers, waist-length jackets, and army-issue bras. They were rock-hard, coarsely woven, ugly things which resembled a pair of green beetles. Such was the tension that any little army supply bungle like that set the boys laughing.
Street scenes prompted him to generate stories for his book artificially. Scene: A beggar outside an expensive restaurant approaches a wealthy, well-dressed gentleman and a lady wearing gold and diamond rings. ‘Show compassion for comrades in these hard times,’ the beggar tells the rich man. The girl starts laughing at the beggar. The rich man says, ‘If you weren’t so bloody high-principled I’d give you some money. We Vietnamese are so good at fighting that we’ve forgotten our manners. Drop the aggression, old man, and I’ll give you something.
‘Just a minute, don’t I know you?’ he says, looking closely at the beggar.
‘I’ll use this scene,’ Kien said to himself. ‘I’ll have the rich man and beggar as former schoolmates.’
Later he decided it was a foolish idea. A fictional replacement for his true stories. But it did have the soothing effect of sustaining his interest in writing. After these encounters he would return and start work again.
It was by night that the old, true stories began to flow back, bringing their own urgency to him. He needed to trap them as they emerged, to get the details down. Parts of stories he thought he’d forgotten floated through his mind, like disconnected mathematical equations, and he’d grab them and pin them down on paper forever. He found they would float into his mind more freely if he took to the pavements at night. It was a curious phenomenon, but it worked.
Occasionally he would unconsciously begin following a pedestrian, wandering behind him aimlessly until he reached his destination.
He tried imagining how this one or that one would react to living their lives as we did. The ‘Holyland Boys’ they called the Hanoi men as the troops lay side by side, swinging in hammocks, at some rest point. The Holylanders would test each other in trivia: Where was a certain street? Which street in Hanoi had only one house? Which had the most? Which was the oldest street? The shortest? Why was the famous Chased Market called Chased? The others would listen in fascination to these nostalgic trivia.
One of the Holylanders was ‘Bullhead’ Thang, who was a third-generation pedicab driver working the Hang Co station, but even Thang admitted Kien knew Hanoi better than he did.
They referred to themselves not as Hanoiese, but as Thang Long soldiers, after the original name of Hanoi. No Thang Long soldier knew Hanoi better than he did. He could name all the streets in one area starting with ‘Hang’, knew scores of lakes, big and small, the street where the most beautiful girls were found, on which night the Pacific Cinema would have banned films, and also how to get in to see them.
What the others didn’t know was that Kien had known almost none of this inside information about Hanoi before he left. He had picked up these trivia during the war, from Hanoi units he fought with. As a teenager he had known little of Hanoi, for he was not allowed to wander the streets alone.
Military life in the jungles over those long years developed within him a deep, tender love for his home town. When he returned, some of that passion faded as the realities set in. It was not that Hanoi itself had changed – though yes, there had been changes – but he had changed. He had wanted to wind the clock back to his teenage days and relive those memories.
But the impressions of the friendliness and uniqueness of his home town that he had generated during those trivia sessions in the jungle had been based on hopes in a situation of despair.
Post-war Hanoi, in reality, was not like his jungle dreams. The streets revealed an unbroken, monotonous sorrow and suffering. There were joys, but those images blinked on and off, like cheap flashing lights in a shop window. There was a shared loneliness in poverty, and in his everyday walks he felt this mood in the stream of people he walked with. Another idea that emerged during his long walks was flashed into his mind by a written sign: ‘Leave!’
‘Leave this place. Leave!’
He began dreaming again of returning to Mo Hill, where someone had promised to be waiting for him. The orchard at the rear of Mother Lanh’s house, the view across the stream to the forest, the peace of the rural scenes appealed to his desire for an escape.
Into his memory then flashed scenes of the B3 troop movements from Phan Rang on the coast to Ngoan Muc Pass, crossing the Da Nhim hydroelectric station, past Don Duong, Duc Trong, down to Di Linh to take Road 14. The twists and turns of that long, tiring march came to him as though it were yesterday. From Road 14 down to Loc Ninh, then turning around to regroup for an attack on western Saigon, to end the war. A mixture of marching and troop transports, across paddyfields and country paddocks.
They were in a field when most soldiers awoke, their faces weather-beaten from days of exposure to sun and dew. They spoke excitedly, knowing they were nearing the city but unsure of their exact whereabouts. The journey itself was an adventure; that’s what he needed now, to go travelling. Away from Hanoi.
His visions of the war-time journey faded as he paced along by the Hoan Kien lake in central Hanoi. He turned and walked down to the Balcony Café, a nightspot hidden away at the end of a narrow alley, a place he often visited late at night. No loud music, no vain poetic ramblings by aspiring authors as in other coffee shops around the Thuyen Quang lake.
‘Hello, foot-soldier,’ said the fat host, smiling and pleased to see him. The host had a bright red nose.
Unasked, he brought coffee to Kien’s table, adding a dish of sun-flower seeds and a half-bottle of brandy. ‘Want some female company?’ he asked.