“I think someone’s moved in,” said Cobra One. “Let’s have a look.”
We walked past the sentry and up the stairs. The front door was open, and in the living room two Americans on sofas were tickling two busty Vietnamese girls. It was the absurd made symmetrical — both men were fat, both girls were laughing, and the sofas were side by side. If Conrad’s dark reenactment of colonialism, “Outpost of Progress,” were made into a comedy, it would have looked something like that.
“Hey, we got company!” said one of the men. He banged the wall behind his head with his fist, then sat up and relit his cigar.
While we introduced ourselves, a side door opened from the wall the cigar smoker had punched and a muscular black man hurried out hitching up his trousers. Then a very tiny, bat-like Vietnamese girl appeared from the room. The black said, “Howdy,” and made for the front door.
“We didn’t mean to interrupt your picnic,” said Cobra One, but he showed no inclination to leave. He folded his arms and watched; he was a tall man with a severe gaze.
“You’re not interrupting nothing,” said the man with the cigar, rolling off the sofa.
“This is the head of security,” said the American official who had driven us to the place. He was speaking of the fat man with the cigar.
As if in acknowledgment, the fat man set fire to his cigar once again. Then he said, “Yeah, I’m the head spook around here. You just get here?” He was at that point of drunkenness where, acutely conscious of it, he made an effort to hide it. He walked outside, away from the spilled cushions, full ashtrays, supine girls.
“You took the what?” asked the CIA man when we told him we had come to Danang from Hué on the train. “You’re lucky you made it! Two weeks ago the VC blew it up.”
“That’s not what the stationmaster in Hué told us,” said Cobra One.
“The stationmaster in Hué doesn’t know whether to scratch his watch or wind his ass,” said the CIA man. “I’m telling you they blew it up. Twelve people killed, I don’t know how many wounded.”
“With a mine?”
“Right. Command-detonated. It was horrible.”
The CIA man, who was head of security for the entire province, was lying, but at the time I had no facts to refute the story with. The stationmaster in Hué had said there hadn’t been a mining incident in months, and this was confirmed by the railway officials in Danang. But the CIA man was anxious to impress us that he had his finger on the country’s pulse, the more so since his girlfriend had joined us and was draped around his neck. The other fat man was in the bungalow, talking in frantic whispers to one of the girls, and the black man was a little distance from the porch, doing chin-ups on a bar spliced between two palms. The CIA man said, “There’s one thing you gotta keep in mind. The VC don’t have any support in the villages — and neither do the government troops. See, that’s why everything’s so quiet.”
The Vietnamese girl pinched his cheek and shouted to her friend at the edge of the beach who was watching the black man swing a heavy chain around his head. The man inside the bungalow came out and poured himself a whisky. He drank it worriedly, watching the CIA man rant.
“It’s a funny situation,” the CIA man was saying. “Like you say this village is clean and this village is all Charley, but there’s one thing you gotta understand: most people aren’t fighting. I don’t care what you read in the papers — these journalists are more full of shit than a Christmas turkey. I’m telling you it’s quiet.”
“What about the mine?”
“Yeah, the mine. You should stay off the train; that’s all I can say.”
“It’s different at night,” said the man with the whisky.
“Well, see, the country kinda changes hands after dark,” said the CIA man.
“I think we’d better go,” said Cobra One.
“What’s the rush? Stick around,” said the CIA man. “You’re a writer,” he said to me. “I’m a writer too — I mean, I do a little writing. I pound out articles now and then. Boy’s Life — I do quite a bit for Boy’s Life, and, um—”
The girls, shouting in Vietnamese and giggling, were beginning to distract him.
“—anyway, where’d you say you’re going? Marble Mountain? You wanna stay away from there about this time.” He looked at his watch. It was five-thirty. “There might be Charley there. I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to be responsible.”
We left, and when we got to the car I looked back at the bungalow. The CIA man waved his cigar at us; he seemed to be unaware that a Vietnamese girl still clung to him. His friend stood on the porch with him, agitating in his hand a paper cup full of whisky and ginger ale. The black man had returned to the high bar: he was doing chin-ups; the girls were counting. The sentry sat hugging his rifle. Beyond them was the sea. The CIA man called out, but the tide was coming in and the noisy surf drowned his words. The refugees in Danang had taken over the barracks; these three had the general’s beach house. In a sense they were all that remained of the American stake in the war: degenerate sentiment, boozy fears, and simplifications. For them the war was over: they were just amusing themselves, raising a little cain.
Four miles south of this, near Marble Mountain, our car stalled behind a slow ox cart. While we were waiting, a Vietnamese boy of about ten rushed over and screamed through the window.
“What did he say?” asked Cobra One.
“ ‘Motherfucker,’ ” said Dial.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The Trans-Siberian Express
AFTERWARD, WHENEVER I THOUGHT OF THE TRANS-Siberian Express, I saw stainless-steel bowls of borscht spilling in the dining car of the Rossiya as it rounded a bend on its way to Moscow, and at the curve a clear sight from the window of our green and black steam locomotive — from Skovorodino onward its eruptions of steamy smoke diffused the sunlight and drifted into the forest so that the birches smoldered and the magpies made for the sky. I saw the gold-tipped pines at sunset and the snow lying softly around clumps of brown grass like cream poured over the ground; the yacht-like snowplows at Zima; the ocherous flare of the floodlit factory chimneys at Irkutsk; the sight of Marinsk in early morning, black cranes and black buildings and escaping figures casting long shadows on the tracks as they ran toward the lighted station — something terrible in that combination of cold, dark, and little people tripping over Siberian tracks; the ice chest of frost between the cars; the protrusion of Lenin’s white forehead at every stop; and the passengers imprisoned in Hard Class: fur hats, fur leggings, blue gym suits, crying children, and such a powerful smell of sardines, body odor, cabbage, and stale tobacco that even at the five-minute stops the Russians jumped onto the snowy platform to risk pneumonia for a breath of fresh air; the bad food; the stupid economies; and the men and women (“No distinction is made with regard to sex in assigning compartments”—Intourist brochure), strangers to each other, who shared the same compartment and sat on opposite bunks, mustached male mirroring mustached female from their grubby nightcaps and the blankets they wore as shawls, down to their hefty ankles stuck in crushed slippers. Most of all, I thought of it as an experience in which time had the trick distortions of a dream: the Rossiya ran on Moscow time, and after a lunch of cold yellow potatoes, a soup of fat lumps called solyanka, and a carafe of port that tasted like cough syrup, I would ask the time and be told it was four o’clock in the morning.