My bus carried at least a few soldiers in civilian disguise, although the rest of the General’s in-laws and cousins were mostly women and children. These passengers murmured among themselves, complaining of this or that, which I ignored. Even if they found themselves in Heaven, our countrymen would find occasion to remark that it was not as warm as Hell. Why’s he taking this route? the driver said. The curfew! We’re all going to get shot, or at least arrested. Bon sighed and shook his head. He’s the General, he said, as if that explained everything, which it did. Nevertheless, the driver continued to complain as we passed the central market and turned onto Le Loi, not ceasing until the General finally stopped at Lam Son Square. Before us was the Grecian facade of the National Assembly, formerly the city’s opera house. From here our politicians managed the shabby comic operetta of our country, an off-key travesty starring plump divas in white suits and mustachioed prima donnas in custom-tailored military uniforms. Leaning out and looking up, I saw the glowing windows of the Caravelle Hotel’s rooftop bar, where I had often escorted the General for aperitifs and interviews with journalists. The balconies provided an unparalleled view of Saigon and its environs, and from them a faint laughter drifted. It must have been the foreign newsmen, ready to take the city’s temperature in its death rattle, as well as the attachés of nonaligned nations, watching the Long Binh ammunition dump glow over the horizon while tracers sputtered in the night.
An urge seized me to fire a round in the direction of the laughter, just to enliven their evening. When the General got out of the car, I thought he was following the same impulse, but he turned in the other direction, away from the National Assembly and toward the hideous monument on Le Loi’s grassy median. I regretted keeping my Kodak in my rucksack rather than my pocket, for I would have liked a photograph of the General saluting the two massive marines charging forward, the hero in the rear taking a rather close interest in his comrade’s posterior. As Bon saluted the memorial, along with the other men on the bus, all I could ponder was whether these marines were protecting the people who strolled beneath their gaze on a sunny day, or, just as likely, were attacking the National Assembly at which their machine guns aimed. But as one of the men on the bus sobbed, and as I, too, saluted, it struck me that the meaning was not so ambiguous. Our air force had bombed the presidential palace, our army had shot and stabbed to death our first president and his brother, and our bickering generals had fomented more coups d’état than I could count. After the tenth putsch, I accepted the absurd state of our state with a mix of despair and anger, along with a dash of humor, a cocktail under whose influence I renewed my revolutionary vows.
Satisfied, the General climbed back into the Citroën and the convoy proceeded once more, crossing the intersection of one-way Tu Do as it entered and exited the square. I had a last glimpse of the Givral Café, where I had enjoyed French vanilla ice cream on my dates with proper Saigonese girls and their mummified chaperone aunts. Past the Givral was Brodard Café, where I cultivated my taste for savory crepes while doing my best to ignore the parade of paupers hopping and hobbling by. Those with hands cupped them for alms, those lacking in hands clenched the bill of a baseball cap in their teeth. Military amputees flapped empty sleeves like flightless birds, mute elderly beggars fixed cobra eyes on you, street urchins told tales taller than themselves about their pitiable conditions, young widows rocked colicky babies whom they might have rented, and assorted cripples displayed every imaginable, unappetizing illness known to man. Farther north on Tu Do was the nightclub where I had spent many evenings doing the cha-cha with young ladies in miniskirts and the latest in arch-breaking heels. This was the street where the imperious French once stabled their gilded mistresses, followed by the more déclassé Americans whooping it up in lurid bars like the San Francisco, the New York, and the Tennessee, their names inscribed in neon, their jukeboxes loaded with country music. Those who felt guilty at a debauched evening’s end could totter north to the brick basilica at the end of Tu Do, which was where the General led us by way of Hai Ba Trung. In front of the basilica stood the white statue of Our Lady, her hands open in peace and forgiveness, her gaze downcast. While she and her son Jesus Christ were ready to welcome all the sinners of Tu Do, their prim penitents and priests — my father among them — spurned me more often than not. So it was always at the basilica that I asked Man to meet me for our clandestine business, both of us savoring the farce of being counted among the faithful. We genuflected, but in actuality we were atheists who had chosen communism over God.
We met on Wednesday afternoons, the basilica empty except for a handful of austere dowagers, heads shrouded in lace mantillas or black scarves as they chanted, Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name. . I no longer prayed, but my tongue could not help wagging along with these old women. They were as tough as foot soldiers, sitting impassively through crowded weekend Masses where the infirm and the elderly sometimes swooned from the heat. We were too poor for air-conditioning, but heat stroke was simply another way of expressing religious fortitude. It would be hard to find more pious Catholics than those in Saigon, most of whom, like my mother and myself, had already run once from the communists in ’54 (my nine-year-old self having no say in the matter). To rendezvous in the church amused Man, a former Catholic like me. While we pretended to be devout officers for whom Mass once a week did not suffice, I would confess my political and personal failures to him. He, in turn, would play my confessor, whispering to me absolutions in the shape of assignments rather than prayers.
America? I said.
America, he confirmed.
I had told him of the General’s evacuation plan as soon as I learned of it, and that past Wednesday in the basilica I was informed of my new task. This mission was given to me by his superiors, but who they were, I did not know. It was safer that way. This had been our system since our lycée days, when we secretly pursued one road via a study group while Bon openly continued on a more conventional path. The study group had been Man’s idea, a three-man cell consisting of himself, me, and another classmate. Man was the leader, guiding us in the reading of revolutionary classics and teaching us the tenets of Party ideology. At the time, I knew that Man was part of another cell where he was the junior member, although the identities of the others were a mystery to me. Both secrecy and hierarchy were key to revolution, Man told me. That was why there was another committee above him for the more committed, and above that another committee for the even more committed, and on and on until we presumably reached Uncle Ho himself, at least when he was alive, the most committed man ever, the one who had asserted that “Nothing is more precious than independence and freedom.” These were words we were willing to die for. This language, as well as the discourse of study groups, committees, and parties, came easily to Man. He had inherited the revolutionary gene from a great-uncle, dragooned by the French to serve in Europe during World War I. He was a gravedigger, and nothing will do more to bestir a colonized subject than seeing white men naked and dead, the great-uncle said, or so Man told me. This great-uncle had stuck his hands in their slimy pink viscera, examined at leisure their funny, flaccid willies, and retched on seeing the putrefying scrambled eggs of their brains. He buried them by the thousands, brave young men enmeshed in the cobwebbed eulogies spun by spidery politicians, and the understanding that France had kept its best for its own soil slowly seeped into the capillaries of his consciousness. The mediocrities had been dispatched to Indochina, allowing France to staff its colonial bureaucracies with the schoolyard bully, the chess club misfit, the natural-born accountant, and the diffident wallflower, whom the great-uncle now spotted in their original habitat as the outcasts and losers they were. And these castoffs, he fumed, were the people who taught us to think of them as white demigods? His radical anticolonialism was enhanced when he fell in love with a French nurse, a Trotskyist who persuaded him to enlist with the French communists, the only ones offering a suitable answer to the Indochina Question. For her, he swallowed the black tea of exile. Eventually he and the nurse had a daughter, and handing me a slip of paper, Man whispered that she was still there, his aunt. On the slip of paper was her name and address in the thirteenth arrondissement of Paris, this fellow traveler who had never joined the Communist Party, and thus was unlikely to be surveilled. I doubt you’ll be able to send letters home, so she’ll be the go-between. She’s a seamstress with three Siamese cats, no children, and no suspicious credentials. That’s where you’ll send the letters.