A Dangerous Friend (23 page)

Not so, Sydney said. A Special Forces team got one near Dak To. Big one, male.

I don't believe it, Claude said.

It's well known, Sydney replied.

My wife hates the idea of killing tigers.

From a helicopter. With a machine gun.

How sporting, Claude said.

The female got away. And the cubs got away, too.

They could have used rockets on the female and the cubs. That way, they would have killed them all.

Probably it didn't occur to them. The rockets.

There are still a few elephants around Dalat. Bao Dai used to ride one.

If I were an elephant, I'd watch out. I think I'd go to Laos or Thailand or even China. If I were an elephant, I'd emigrate.

Marxist elephants in particular, Claude said.

Sydney said, Since Dalat isn't going to work out maybe you should take her to France, take her shopping in Paris, visit the Louvre, visit your family in Comminges. It would be a change for her, someplace new and different, not so many memories and the violence is under control. Wait a month and then encourage her to go to America where she could see her family.

My wife doesn't want to go to America, Claude said glumly. We have spoken about it often. She has no use for America. She says she is ashamed of her country. I don't approve. Countries have a way of behaving idiotically and never making amends. But one must never place one's faith in nations, one's own or any other nation. Don't you agree? At any event, my wife prefers Vietnam and the life we have here. And I must manage the plantation. It doesn't run itself. Someone has to be in charge night and day, especially now. The helicopters were very, very close to the house last night, and the flares were annoying. Why were they so close?

Night operations, Sydney said.

Then Dede Armand was in the room with a tureen of steaming pho and a platter of whitefish smothered in water chestnuts and slices of pineapple. Claude held her chair; and as they sat down to eat the sun broke through the billowing clouds and flooded the room with golden light.

T
HEY ASKED
Sydney about his daily life in Tay Thanh, how he went about things, what he did with his evenings and weekends. How do you
live
here, Sydney? What do you do for amusement? Do you have a girlfriend? As he began to relate his comings and goings, his evenings in and his evenings out, he realized how paltry his existence was. Across the table, Claude and Dede Armand listened with a polite show of interest. Anecdote followed anecdote, none of them especially illuminating. He was describing the life of a bank clerk.

His father had told him romantic stories of life in France in the Second World War, General Gavin occupying a medieval château near Sedan—a film star installed in one wing, a beautiful American war correspondent in the other—and Field Marshal Rommel at Château Roche-Guyon on the banks of the Eure, gazing every day from his high terrace west to the hills on the margins of Normandy and imagining the half million Allied troops on the march just over the horizon. On soft nights Rommel could hear the rumble of bombs and artillery and knew that however many panzer divisions he could summon, they would not be enough; so he went in to dinner with his senior officers, bottles of claret from the chateau's cellar warming the discussions.

I have never been to the Eure, Sydney said.

A sluggish river, Claude said. Wide in some places, narrow in others.

Picturesque, Sydney said.

I suppose so.

Sydney remembered the night on the Tay Thanh road with Rostok, his first night in Asia, and told them about the stealthy figures on bicycles, the tick-tick-tick of the wheels and the brush of cloth, the VC whose spectacles had slid to the end of his nose so that when he looked into Sydney's face, he saw nothing but vegetation. And how they had so completely vanished into the night, leaving no trace but some marks in the road. When Rostok asked to spend the night, he brought his revolver into Group House with him.

So Sydney was neither a general nor a field marshal, only an anonymous member of a group whose objectives were dubious; or perhaps there were so many that he had trouble keeping them straight. Nation-building was a demanding business, especially in Asia. He described the weekly meetings at Group House, the bureaucratic miseries and the impossible requests from Washington.

He told them the story of the Mosler safe and the listening device in the chandelier, and the visit of the undersecretary; it had been announced and was therefore not classified information but he was able to add details that caused the Armands to smile between bites of whitefish. He told them about Blind Pablo Gutterman and the difficulties of trying to work with the American military. God, they were voracious—

And then, without quite understanding how it happened, the transitional thought or sentence, he was talking of Karla, how they had met at the concert in the church downtown, Karla in black with her white scarf leaning into the cello, drained at the conclusion of the German Requiem. God, she was wonderful looking but unpredictable, savage one moment and serene the next. He was looking at the five fist-sized Buddhas arrayed in a bookcase, imagining them as the five inscrutable faces of Karla. Her mother had given her the middle name of Engels, Marx's collaborator, who in his meticulous search for new categories of the downtrodden and the victimized had managed to discover the entire female sex, an insight that so appealed to Magda Parkes that she saddled her daughter with his name. But the effect was not all her mother had hoped for.

Let me tell you the sort of thing she got up to, Sydney said.

This is how strange they were.

When she was a teenager living in the Bay Area, she and her friends assembled a scrapbook, they called it The Ugly Brides Book. They'd cut photographs from the
San Francisco Chronicle
of the week's homeliest brides, sullen, rat-eyed, misshapen girls who would never draw an admiring glance but had managed somehow to attract a fiancé. Karla and her friends had more than a hundred photographs by their senior year in high school, girlish hilarity on Sunday afternoons in the Bay Area, the paper spread on the living room floor, arguing over the candidates and then selecting the unlucky few for inclusion in the scrapbook. She still has it. She brings it out from time to time and makes up stories about what happened to the homely brides and their loutish grooms. Naturally Karla and her two girlfriends were fair-faced and doe-eyed and slender as starlets, popular with boys. To Magda's delight, her daughter became a cheerleader in her junior year, the year before she discovered the cello and injustice generally.

Magda was Czech. Picture her now, built like a stevedore, beset with a racking cough from the sixty Balkan Sobranie hand-rolled cigarettes she smoked daily. Her hair was short and looked as if it had been trimmed with garden shears, her eyes a wintry blue; she had the most delicious laugh, ruined only slightly by the hacking cough and the lumbar wheeze that went with it.

Sydney, darling, could you fetch me a pilsener?

I disliked her on sight, and then suddenly we were the best of friends. She had an exile's view of the world. She believed her country's history disappeared in 1938 when the West allowed the Nazis in. That was when she became a Red, more in protest against the bourgeois values of London and Paris than out of any sympathy with Stalin. She thought that with the Reds in charge, the Czechs could begin to write their history once again. In 1939 she and Karla left Prague for California, her husband remaining behind to work with the partisans; they never heard from him again and do not know even now whether he is dead or alive. Very possibly he is alive, since the marriage had not been happy and he was unsuited to life in America. Everyone knows that exiles make bad witnesses, and when Czech history remained mute, dead on the page, Magda blamed Stalin for destroying the promise of communism and blamed the West for corrupting democracy with capitalism. She said that the only virtue left for the Czechs was irony. It was a way of surviving, getting along from one day to the next, even if the days were identically dreary. She said that in 1938 the Czechs surrendered their history to outsiders and that was the one thing you must never do. It was unforgivable. You had an obligation to be one of the authors of your time, an obligation she herself had failed by leaving her country at its hour of maximum danger. She had done this for the sake of her young daughter, a sound enough explanation though not a serious excuse. She could not forgive herself.

And I took her point. I sympathized with her. She thought about Czechoslovakia all the time, loving it, disappointed in it, grieving for it, angry with it, always frustrated—and laden with guilt. Magda was no fool. I agreed with her about writing your own history and being present at the end of one era and the beginning of another. Meaning, not to allow history to unfold in your absence or as a consequence of your indifference. That was the reason I came to South Vietnam.

Sydney saw Claude and Dede look at each other in—perhaps alarm, perhaps amusement.

He said, Magda worked as a seamstress in her apartment in the Bay Area. She had many rich clients who invariably called her "a treasure" or "that marvelous Czech woman with the beautiful daughter." She rarely went outside and never mastered English beyond the phrases necessary to talk politics. Karla brought her the news, described the social and economic conditions of the United States, described the life of the American mind; she reported the events of the day, the Bomb, Hiss, the Rosenbergs, Joe McCarthy, Sputnik, the march on Selma, Kennedy's election and Nixon's final ignominious defeat. Magda knew what Karla told her, and Karla was not always a meticulous reporter. She was mischievous. She created a fanciful America of incipient race warfare and a restless, militant peasantry that looked to Europe for its socialist blueprint. Beyond the windows of the apartment on Buena Vista was an appalling smog of resentment and arrested expectations; and the war in Indochina was scheduled as a diversion from these unresolved conflicts. How much of this Magda believed was hard to say. She had her own inner compass. Her own, as Karla liked to say, context. But she had a good heart. She never ceased to care. She never gave up.

The glass is in the fridge, darling. And have one yourself.

Politics drove me and Karla apart, Sydney said sourly. We disagreed on the shape of the modern world. He continued to stare at the five Buddhas, now in full sunlight. The shadows of the Buddhas were sharp against the planes of the bookshelf and now he saw that each Buddha had a different aspect, slender through obese, and their expressions ranged from contentment through indifference to fury. He took a swallow of wine, and Claude refilled the glass at once. He knew this was one glass too many, his words were beginning to drool around the edges and he had the familiar scratch behind his eyeballs. Both Armands were listening carefully now, their faces betraying some bewilderment at the turn to the conversation—monologue, really, because in his heat and desire Sydney was not pausing for questions, indeed appeared unaware that anyone was listening to him. He spoke as if reading from some memorized text, including the non sequiturs.

Karla's political
conceits,
he amended, now that Magda's voice was gone from his memory. It would be too flattering to call them beliefs since they rested on a quicksand of prejudice and hysteria, meaning ignorance of the facts and the lack of a sense of proportion as to what was possible in a dangerous world. She never understood that coincidence was not conspiracy, and in that way she was not truly her mother's daughter; and she did not have Magda's apocalyptic vision of things, the express train of history running headlong into the wretched cul-de-sac of the Soviet empire. Magda insisted that history ended with the disappearance of Czechoslovakia in 1938 because she believed that Czechoslovakia was the soul of Europe and Europe was the soul of the West. Absent Czechoslovakia, Europe was flyblown Dealey Plaza without the grassy knoll. Europe would not be Europe until Czechoslovakia was restored to it. She believed this as passionately as Freud believed in the subconscious. She wanted a Czechoslovakia free of Russians and irony, as Freud wanted a subconscious without the dogma of free will. A simple leap of faith from that precipice to the next: the West did not exist in any recognizable form, certainly not a moral form, because it was deprived of its compass, ego or superego, depending on how you parsed Freud.

Sydney considered the matter and then he said, Perhaps you could say roughly the same thing about the United States today and its relation to South Vietnam. Many do. For isn't South Vietnam poised between East and West, a prize as great as Czechoslovakia.

Hysteria, Dede muttered, but Sydney did not hear.

Karla was not interested in the West, Sydney said. And she believed irony only a bourgeois word for false testimony, the escape hatch that let you out of the locked room, a refusal to accept responsibility for crimes against humanity. Karla measured things on a Marxist yardstick, even the music of Gustav Mahler, Mahler whose greatness was circumscribed by suburban romanticism and a decadent admiration for military themes, adagios in the first instance and marches in the second; and in the mighty Second Symphony he had inserted a tango, as if at any moment Fred and Ginger would float in from the Wienerwald.

Anyone could understand about hating the war, there wasn't much about it to admire, but since troops had been committed and were dying every day it was not practical for America to simply disappear one dewy morning, leaving South Vietnam to the barbarians who were trying to destroy it. Yes, destroy its history. The regime in Hanoi was a dictatorship on the Stalinist model. It didn't have genius enough to create its own politics so it borrowed the politics of a discredited Slavic state with all the usual totalitarian circus acts, secret police, politburos, prison camps, propaganda, and cult of personality. It did not care about the suffering of its own people.

He saw another look pass between Claude and Dede and added, I wanted it so badly.