Better Than Fiction 2 (11 page)

I made no decision to be an American, made no sacrifices to be called an American, did no work to be born into the place and time and conditions that the United States enjoyed in 1970 and my family enjoyed in 1970. It is chance, blind luck, random. And it’s random that this Saudi driver, now hitting 175km/h, was born into a Saudi vessel – both countries are so new that
identifying too strongly with their names and flags is a psychic stretch – and it would be absurd if this man, this soul-in-a-Saudi-vessel, were to harbour any antipathy toward me, a soul-in-an-American-vessel. So it makes it difficult to take a situation like this, the possibility of danger in this car hurtling through the Saudi desert, too seriously for too long.

I have the frequent thought that if the worst came to the worst, a man like this and I could together recognise the absurdity of our nationalities. You are not a Saudi, I would say, referring to a country that has only existed since 1932. I am not an American, I would say, referring to a country that has existed for 240 years. You are not a driver. I am not your passenger. We believe so little of what we would be expected to believe – we believe nothing of the foundational evil of our nations assumed by many – but we do believe that it feels good to be trusted; we believe in the constant movement of souls, the restless nature of the spirit, the profound game of make-believe necessary for either one of us to assume a set of values or motives of the other based on our passports; we believe that we are tired, so tired, of being asked to distrust or hate the people of this country or that culture, the people wearing this uniform or that one, the people who worship this prophet or that god; that we can do better than our fathers and grandfathers and forgo the pretence of rivalries and suspicions; that what we really want are not inherited antagonisms but only some measure of human and material comfort; some frequent stimulation and delight of the mind; some sense of progress for the rights of people; some possibilities and choices for our progeny and the progeny of our neighbours; the ability to love who we want to love; the ability to move freely around the planet as time and means allow.

And right now, driving with this man, what I want is to make
this interaction work. I want him to feel good about having met me, and I want to feel good about having met him. One thing you learn after twenty-odd years of random travel is that the people you see along the way – the cabbies, the vendors, the hoteliers, the fellow bus passengers, the man who rents you the kayak on the Isle of Skye – you’re unlikely to see again. So you want to get it right. To get it right you have to make it right.

But I didn’t make it right with Majed. I run the incident through my mind a dozen times during this drive, watching the desert go by. What did I say that was so wrong? Some joke about the American military. Some joke about unnecessary wars. It was not so wrong. He shouldn’t have been offended. Not just offended – he changed his mind about me completely. Had our friendship been on this razor’s edge from the start? One wrong phrase and I’d fallen into league with all US foreign policy wrongdoers – that couldn’t be fair. And then I was offended that he was offended. I was finished, too. I could spend hours trying to convince him I wasn’t some agent of imperialism, or I could wait out our last day or so, allow him to put me in some random car with some random man, and be done with it. Which is what I did.

Hours have passed since the ‘American, boom boom’ comment. Shadad has made various other, uneventful, phone calls since then. I have felt comfortable enough to even take a few photos out the window, and even a few inside the car, including the one opposite. Shadad didn’t seem to mind.

And now we’re stopping for gas. The station looks like any gas station anywhere in the world. Shadad stops and unlocks the doors.

He gets out, stretches. I open my door and look around. I could run this way, I think. I could make a phone call at that shop over there. I could hide over behind that shed. I could appeal to that truck driver over there.

But instead I ask the driver if he wants a snack or drink. I mime drinking and eating. He shakes his head.

I walk over to the shop next door to the gas station. Inside, there is a solitary man, in his sixties, behind the counter. He nods to me and says,
‘Salaam.’
I nod back, return his ‘Salaam’.

In the shop, I think again about escape. I could stay here. I could find a way to call Majed, and ask Majed for his guidance and his help, and maybe along the way apologise for my unfunny jokes about Saudi-American relations. I would miss my flight. I would have to stay overnight in Riyadh. Majed would have to drive out to get me here, four hours away from Jeddah and into the desert, to get me to Riyadh, or back to Jeddah, or–? But what’s the alternative? Should I really get back in the car with a man who seemed to have promised some terrible threat to my person?

Travel is about great and illogical leaps of trust, though, so I find myself buying a soda for myself and one for the driver, and a box of crackers big enough that we can share it. And then I’m walking back to the car. Shadad is already inside, a new cigarette filling the car with a toxic cloud. I offer the soda to the driver, but he smiles, confused –
Didn’t I tell you I didn’t want a drink?
– and puts the car in gear, and we’re off. He doesn’t touch the soda the rest of the drive.

Night comes on as we approach Riyadh. The city’s lights overtake the darkness. I look at the clock and see that because we’ve been travelling so fast we’re almost two hours early. I want to believe that Shadad was devoted to making sure I was on time
for the flight, but it’s just as likely that he wanted to be finished with me, with this long silent drive, so he can get home.

I get out at my terminal, and he helps remove my bag from the trunk. ‘We made it in good time,’ I say. I point to my wrist and give him a thumbs-up. He nods and almost smiles. We stand outside and again we stretch.

I take out an envelope of cash and try to give it to him.

Looking confused, he refuses.

‘You friend?’ he says. ‘He pay before we leave.’

I should have known. Majed, a young man of no great means, paid for the whole ride when he met Shadad in that Jeddah alley. I think of Majed now, and I want to embrace him, to tell him how sorry I am. But now I have only Shadad, so I shake his hand, my two hands around his one hand, and he adds his second hand to mine.

S
ome of my most memorable adventures have begun so benignly, with the seemingly harmless preoccupations of a writer at her desk. All my life I’ve been interested in the places where writers lived and the journeys they took. Not those of my contemporaries, which seems intrusive, but, rather, those seen from the distance of a life in its entirety. I’ve been especially drawn to the dark moral dilemmas that stalk through the work of Graham Greene.
The Quiet American
, set in Vietnam, is one of my favourites among his books. I knew that for a time he had forsaken Roman Catholicism and embraced the Cao Daist religion, a unique sect founded in 1926 and based in South Vietnam, and that its temple in Tay Ninh Province had provided one of the prime settings for the novel. In 1991, I innocently decided that I would go there.

Tay Ninh province is northwest of Ho Chi Minh City,
bordered on three sides by Kampuchea, or Cambodia as it is known these days, Kampuchea being the name bestowed on the country by the Khmer Rouge. Now, when I close my eyes and recall Tay Ninh, I see a great plain dotted with brick kilns crouching like red igloos against a cobalt sky. Beyond lies a mountain range known as Black Lady Mountain. In 1991, the little township was a collection of makeshift dwellings, mostly open to the elements, many of them surrounded by rusted barbed wire. Its distinguishing feature was the Great Temple of the Cao Dai Holy See, home to a religion that had been formed through a fusion of secular and religious philosophies from both the East and the West, including those of Roman Catholicism and Buddhism.

I can picture all this now, but when I arrived in Vietnam in 1991, when the country still had a wild and dangerous feel, and you might go all day without seeing another European, I had no idea what I would find at Tay Ninh – or where that journey would end up taking me.

My husband and I were staying at the Rex Hotel in Ho Chi Minh City. The hotel was a strange hybrid of East and West, occupied by the Americans before the fall of Saigon. You could tell it was a place meant for men, with twisted wooden racks for holding uniforms at the doors and no mirrors in the bathroom. Carved wooden animals crouched in the dim passageways and more amongst the topiary work on the rooftop garden. A huge crown, twice our height, rotated on a pedestal. Giant orange and black cichlids floated in shoulder-high tanks encrusted with china decorations.

We were visited at the hotel by a guide whom we had hired to escort us to the Củ Chi tunnels. When I told her that I also wanted to go further into the countryside, beyond the tunnels,
she was doubtful. ‘I have never been to Tay Ninh,’ she said. ‘You would have to pay extra.’

She said that she was a poet, but that poetry didn’t pay very well, although she had won the Grand Prize for Young Writers in Vietnam. Her name was Pham Thi Ngoc Liên, she told us. Liên meant lotus flower. In order to pay the bills, she had learned English so that she could guide people like us.

I told her that I was a writer too, both a novelist and sometime poet. I explained my mission to follow in the footsteps of Greene. She would talk to the driver of the car, she said. After some time, she came back, nodding. She had talked to the driver, who turned out to be a dour former tank driver called Nuan. It was agreed that both destinations were possible and there was no particular danger in such an excursion. He had been to Tay Ninh during wartime combat and knew the area. All the same, she shook her head and muttered what I took to be ‘crazy New Zealand writer’.

So, the following day, after we had been to the tunnels, we set off for the temple at Tay Ninh. I was glad to leave the tunnels, for I don’t care for confined spaces. The road we took was crowded with stray ducks, children riding buffaloes, and, in some places, rice that had been laid out to dry on its clay surface. Clay from the surrounding area was used to make bricks and tiles; smoke drifted from kilns.

Then we came upon the enormous sprawling temple. It reared up against the sky on the flat plain, and it was not unlike coming upon Chartres Cathedral in the French countryside, astonishing, sudden, vast – although there the comparison ends. The Eye of God at the entrance to the temple stared at us across a brick and beaten-grass causeway from under its portico, a wide unrelenting eye with a heavy fringe of lashes. The temple was a
cross somewhere between the castle of the Wizard of Oz, Notre Dame Cathedral, and a pagoda. Lattice-work balconies trickled over the walls, snakes and dragons curling up its pillars, and Christ-like figures were embedded amongst pink plaster, carved lotus flowers, and six-sided stars.

Midday prayers had just ended, and shadowy figures were sliding away to a compound of smaller buildings. But on seeing us, the group turned back and beckoned us towards them. These were
huong
, or nuns, and
thanh
, or priests, dressed all in white, although the men wore little flat pleated black hats. We followed the group and came face to face with a mural depicting Victor Hugo, holding a quill pen, alongside the Chinese statesman and revolutionary leader Dr Sun Yat-Set, who was holding an inkstone, and the Vietnamese poet Nguyen Binh Khiem (he died in 1587), depicted writing with a brush. These were the three signatories of ‘The Third Alliance Between God and Man’. Revelations, I was told, arrived during séances through the medium of poets, philosophers, and political leaders.

Some English was spoken. A nun told me she taught herself from books after her nightly prayers. Liên and I were taken by the hand and led in one direction, and Ian, my husband, in the opposite direction by the men.

‘We women will walk clockwise, the men anti-clockwise,’ explained Liên, who had been talking to the nuns. This was how it was, men and women walked in the opposite direction to each other. Before us lay the dim interior of the temple, built on nine levels, with nine fifteen-metre-high domes, each dome representing the starry heavens. On the roof of one, Christ exposed his bleeding heart, but Buddha and Confucius also appeared. Under the furthest dome stood a colossal blue globe speckled with what I was told were 3072 stars, but I
wasn’t counting.

And then, when the tour was almost complete, we began to rotate anti-clockwise towards the men.

‘Why is this?’ I asked. ‘Why are we allowed to break the rules?’

There was a concerted sigh from the
huong
. They had been in conversation with Liên. ‘You are a writer, the rules do not apply to you. You will write us a poem. You will both write us a poem.’

So there, in that strange temple, which ultimately Greene would dismiss, some garbled messages that passed for poems were written by me and the young Vietnamese poet. Liên’s writing was that of a fine calligrapher. Perhaps the poems are still there.

And that is where the day should have ended, with the photographs and smiles that followed. Only, on the way back, we spotted a signpost pointing down a road which the usually taciturn driver indicated, via Liên, was the way to the Kampuchean border. It was full of bullet holes. ‘Take us there, please,’ Ian said.

‘No,’ said Nuan, finding some English.

‘That’s not possible,’ Liên said.

‘Boom boom, you die,’ said Nuan. An uneasy memory flashed past me of a young man back home in Wellington who, when we had said we were going to Vietnam, had held two fingers to his forehead. I had dismissed this as scaremongering. The war in Vietnam was over.

Ian is rather deaf. He has said, since then, that he didn’t really hear what was being said. He suggested a further fee of a hundred dollars. The car pulled over. There was a silence, and then a reluctant agreement. The road we followed led to Cho Huu Nghi, loosely translated as The Friendship Market. I believe it is now a tourist destination called the Moc Bai Border
gate. Hundreds of cyclists were hurtling towards us, laden with enormous packages on their backs, on the handlebars, in trolleys pulled along behind them. The bicycles were not ordinary vehicles, but consisted rather of two bikes lashed together, their cargo so heavy that the riders teetered from side to side.

The marketplace was a huge squalid area, filled with mosquitoes. Makeshift bamboo dwellings were huddled as far as the eye could see, in ankle-deep mud. Thousands of people were camped out there, the men bare-chested, wearing rolled-up trousers, the Cambodian women colourful in their
krama
, the big scarves serving as headdresses, sarongs, and bags. We could see what was being traded, items such as Marine Saigon brandy going into Cambodia, Western clothes and toiletries and tobacco coming into Vietnam. The whole scene was seething with movement and a sense of urgency. Ian, who was teaching Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees then, was enchanted. He began walking through the crowds. At first the people were merely curious, smiling slightly at our presence. A man asked Ian to take his photograph. Liên translated the tattoo above the stump of his arm – Pol Pot wound, 1979. But after a few minutes, she retreated to the car. I felt exposed, sensing a tension around me.

By then, our guide and driver were both sitting nervously in the car, the doors hanging open, the engine idling. Ian raised his camera to take pictures. And suddenly I understood what a terrible risk we had taken. We were seeing what no Westerner was meant to see. We smelled of Western money. I know now that people were being traded across those borders too. I remembered the year before when I had had a child offered to me for sale in a Cambodian market, and the shock and revulsion I had experienced.

The crowd began a pincer-like movement towards Ian, cutting off his retreat. Liên and Nuan shouted at us to jump into the car, which had begun to move slowly away from us.

I saw at once what would happen: we would disappear over the border and nobody would ever admit to having seen us.

I screamed, ‘Ian, get in the bloody car. Run!’ He heard me and understood. We both ran, with the crowd in hot pursuit, jumping into the car as it speeded up, the doors swinging wildly. A shot rang out behind us. We came to a checkpoint, manned by military police whom we had not properly taken into account on our approach. A barrier fell across the roadway. There was not a glimmer of friendliness in the faces of the men in uniform. ‘Get out,’ they indicated, and we stood there in the Vietnamese afternoon, with our hands raised and guns pointed at our heads. Our guides were quivering with fear as they spoke rapidly to the soldiers. Nuan’s movements were slow and careful, his voice low and insistent, sounding as if he was pleading with the men. Lifetimes seemed to pass. I thought about our children and how they worried about us on their travels, and, as I remember it, I said their names to myself, trying to visualise them for what might be the last time. I looked up at the roadside signs with their bullet holes. We were nothing in the scale of carnage that had occurred along this road.

Nuan continued his intense murmuring conversation with the police. Perhaps three or four minutes passed. We must have looked worthless after all, foolish nosy tourists, nothing more, because all at once, the barrier arms lifted and we were allowed to go. We all climbed back in the car, and it barreled away, weaving between the steady stream of loaded bicycles. The rest of the journey back to Ho Chi Minh City passed in silence. We said we were sorry, and asked our guides to accept a gift of money.
We could think of nothing else; at least they would be spared working for people like us for a month or so.

We wandered over the road that evening to the turn-of-the-century Hotel Continental, more Graham Greene territory, where other parts of
The Quiet American
had taken place. Beneath the ornate ceiling there was a hollow air. The famous ‘Continental Shelf’ where war correspondents used to hang out was deserted. When it got dark we walked back to the Rex, watching lizards weaving across the lemon-coloured walls of City Hall.

We had planned to go to Hanoi, but we heard there was a cholera outbreak up north and suddenly the thought of a beach in Thailand was very appealing. It would take us a day or two to organise early tickets out of the country. There were all kinds of documentation and paperwork required, explaining what we had done in Vietnam and why we were leaving before the expiry date on our visas. We lay low at the Rex until we were able to go. We didn’t hear from our guide, and who could blame her.

But news travelled in the city. When we got to the airport, suddenly Liên appeared. She had come to wave us goodbye and give me a copy of one of her books. She waved as we disappeared into the terminal. ‘Crazy writer,’ she called, ‘come back!’

That was nearly a quarter of a century ago. I go back when I can, and some of the most vivid experiences of my life have occurred in Vietnam. But I haven’t been back to Tay Ninh.