‘Well, well. Even you have that service now?’
The landlord smiled. ‘Yes. It’s the new fashion.’
People around him were playing cards, drinking coffee, smoking pot and other weeds, and talking business.
In the first days of peace the host had been as impoverished as all other demobilised soldiers. He had been so thin then that he resembled a pipe-cleaner; the effect enhanced his dark face, the result of catching malaria in Laos. When he opened the place it quickly became unofficially known as the Veteran’s Club.
All the original customers were demobilised soldiers, most of them unemployed, still gathering their wits. Little by little the money they did get upon leaving the ‘jungle gate’ and being demobilised left their pockets and found its way into the owner’s pocket, and he began to prosper.
Those early days were pleasant and hilarious. The soldiers told each other stories of their attempts to adapt to civilian life with their special brand of humour.
Helped on by a drink or two, the mood in those days was always light and for hours they would laugh almost continuously. They shared new inside knowledge of how to apply for a job, how to bribe clerks to get on the housing list, how to get a Veteran’s pension, how to get admitted to the university – all sorts of helpful tips. Or they came for nostalgic conversation.
Kien on this night was sitting in a seat usually reserved for ‘Vuong the Clumsy’ a former armoured-car driver who now lived at the back of the railway station. When Vuong had first returned he had openly appealed to all his mates to help him find a job as a driver. Anything’ll do,’ he shouted. ‘Trucks, cars, buses, even steam-rollers. Anything that’s got a steering-wheel and drives on sealed roads.’
Vuong drank very little. He was a huge, tall, slightly clumsy man, but he was kind and timid.
After his unsuccessful appeal to mates to help find him a job, Vuong wasn’t seen for many months. When he did return, he was whiskered, red-eyed and hung-over. ‘I’ve given up driving, me old mates. Now alcohol drives me.’
For the next months Vuong was a fixture at the Balcony Cafe, sitting in ‘his’ little corner, always with a dish of food and a glass of alcohol.
When he became tipsy he sang loud military marches, or obscene ditties. ‘Drink up comrades!’ he would shout. ‘Afraid I’m broke? Hell, don’t worry. Without drivers like me you’d never be considered the world’s best infantrymen. That’s what the brass used to boast: “World’s best infantrymen.” Well, watch out, here come the infantry vehicles!’ And he would go into a pantomime of his fighting days as a combat driver.
Vuong went into a steep dive, reflecting his trauma. It was sad, almost unbelievable, that such a tough and courageous fighter could fall so quickly in the post-war days. His friends said he had hit one pothole too many. But they said it with sadness, not in jest. After a while he became a ragged, beggarly drunk.
It was in those drunken times he voiced his nightmares, as though they were stories. ‘Potholes are bearable,’ he would say, ‘but to ride on something squishy and soft, supple and pulpy, that used to make me vomit. There were nights when I couldn’t sleep. I used to run over the bodies. That’s what happened recently. I got a normal job driving, and had no troubles with potholes and puddles.
‘It was the soft surfaces that brought back the memories. Then people around me, bicyclists, pedestrians, started looking hatefully at me. So I started to drink.
‘Ever seen a tank running over bodies? You’d think we’d flatten them so much we’d never feel them. Well, I’ve got news for you, mates. No matter how soft they were they’d lift the tank up a bit. True! I used to feel it lift. After a while I could tell the difference between mud and bodies, logs and bodies. They were like sacks of water. They’d pop open when I ran over them. Pop! Pop!
‘Now they’ve started running over me. I see the tanks coming and know exactly what’s going to happen to me. Remember when we chased Division 18 southern soldiers all over Xuan Loc? My tank tracks were choked up with skin and hair and blood. And the bloody maggots! And the fucking flies! Had to drive through a river to get the stuff out of the tracks.’
Vuong would drink until he dropped. Every night. There were many others like that – or well on their way.
The little club got a reputation as an interesting place and soon many more veterans, including vets from the war against the French, were joining the nightly sessions. Few were easily recognised by outsiders as veterans, including the now fat owner for one, and Kien.
One night, when he was one of the few left in the club, a roughly made-up prostitute wearing an army surplus jacket dropped into a seat at his table. She reeked of cheap Chinese perfume. ‘Don’t stay,’ he said.
‘You don’t like me?’ she asked.
‘Correct.’
‘You piss off then,’ she said.
‘You know plenty of places. You piss off,’ he said.
The whore laughed, revealing ugly broken teeth and blackened gums. Under twenty, he guessed. She looked better before she smiled, if better was the word.
‘It’s so cold here,’ she moaned, making no move to leave. ‘Fatty!’ she called to the host, ‘bring me a double Maxim.’
‘Drinking’s no good for little girls,’ he replied, but went for the drink anyway.
‘You’re pretty small yourself,’ she quipped.
She swung around and slipped her hand up between Kien’s legs. ‘Hah!’ she shouted, then withdrew her hand. ‘God, you’re dull. Let’s get drunk,’ she said, lifting her glass to Kien.
Drunk.
In all his life he’d only been truly drunk a few times, so drunk that, like Vuong, everything around him became meaningless and he had difficulty separating reality from hallucinations.
The Air France bar at Tan Son Nhat airport in Saigon was one place, back on 30 April 1975, Victory Day.
The other time was here, at the Balcony Café, in 1975 when this tart in front of him was sucking ice-cream cones, and the owner was still a skinny returned soldier.
It had been a black day all round. He’d come for a drink and a joke with a few of his old war buddies. He’d been demobbed, one of the fortunate few to have a house to return to. He’d been admitted to the university. He’d soon be graduated and marry a very beautiful woman who’d been waiting for him to return from the war. Until then it was perfect.
He’d not been back in Hanoi very long and had just discovered the Balcony Café. The police later said the trouble had been caused by soldiers spoiling for a fight. Not true. He had simply come here to have a peaceful drink.
Four toughs had ridden up on Hondas, parking them out front. They were fashionably dressed, like singers from a band. But they were actually thugs, and dangerous, and strode about confidently, certain no one would get in their way or dare to bother them.
Vuong, sitting in the back of the café, started singing an old army song.
‘Listen to that garbage,’ said the leather-jacketed leader. ‘Victory, shit! The victory we got was a victory for morons. Call that civilisation and progress? Garbage!’
‘You sound like garbage yourself,’ said Kien quietly but clearly.
Leather-jacket spun round, ready to pounce. But recognising Kien, he whistled slowly, and began to smile. ‘Well, well, well,’ he said, standing up and walking towards Kien’s table threateningly.
The owner rushed out to stop what he thought would be a fight and Leather-jacket’s mates took hold of him and sat him down. But he paid little attention to them. He moved to sit opposite Kien.
‘I’m garbage? Me? What, and you’re honourable, are you? I seem to remember seeing you last Sunday at the August cinema, when you waltzed in with your beautiful girlfriend. What a joke! Your girlfriend. Know why she was embarrassed? She saw me looking at you both. Shit, she’s a fucking tramp,’ he leered.