The Darkest Little Room (3 page)

5

It was just after nine. I did not want to spend two hours waiting alone for the girl. I decided to visit Zhuan tonight instead of tomorrow. My 125cc Minsk was getting its fuel pump repaired so I walked out to the road and caught a taxi to Binh Thanh District. The taxi took me across a bridge over the Rac Thi Nghe tributary of Saigon River. The water here divided wealthy and comfortable District One from the much poorer and cluttered eastern part of Binh Thanh where year by year the wood and rusted-corrugated-iron houses slipped into the river. An enormous rat jumped at finches under a light on the bank. A barge glided along the filthy black water beneath me carrying brown young men, shirtless in the heat. They drank rice wine and played cards on the deck in the light of a kerosene lamp. Entire families rode by my window on the backs of motorbikes. Girls leant on the railings in tight-fitting jeans holding varicoloured motorcycle helmets in the hope of being picked up.
Butterflies of the night,
the Vietnamese call these bridge girls. Some evenings I walked to Zhuan's along this bridge and I would look for her face along the row of girls. On other bridges too, till the girls began to think I was teasing them and all I received were sneers and turned faces. But I knew she would not be a bridge girl. And I was no longer certain I would recognise her, even had she walked up to me and caught my arm.

Zhuan lived in the only French colonial villa in the district. I imagined it made him feel like a mandarin of the century gone. The gold-framed portraits on his walls were French, the scrolls of calligraphy, Vietnamese, and finely carved jade ornaments and polished Ming-dynasty hardwood furniture sat in every room. The furniture, which at first I believed was made at one of the city's outskirts knock-off sheds, was very real and any piece of it – the chair with dragon armrests that eyed you in the living room – was worth as much as any of his neighbours' houses. Zhuan was a part-time dealer in classical Vietnamese art – his buyers were expatriate Vietnamese opening restaurants and hotels in Saigon and Hanoi – he would call himself an art dealer wherever he could get away with it – though I knew he made his real money in tiles and bathroom fittings for the bland middle-class tenements designed by the government and regarded as symbols of progress.

He was just forty when I met him. He dressed immaculately – which is not difficult in Saigon given the surfeit of good tailors willing to make precise replicas of recent European fashions from pattern books. But anyway, he had to have his clothes made for him as he was five inches taller than any man I ever met in Saigon. He was well-built and youthfully handsome, though beyond an occasional game of tennis at our sports club and a few laps at the Victory Hotel swimming pool where we often began a Saturday night, I had never heard of him exercising. The friendship began strangely enough. I saved his life. At least, that's how he saw it. I was walking Bui Vien one morning and saw him standing on the road buying cumquat juice and saw a boy on a motorbike screaming towards him with head down sending a text message. I grabbed his shirt and pulled him on top of me onto the side of the road. The look on his face when he picked me up was touching. He wanted to buy me a drink. I told him it was too early and I had work to do. He insisted we swap phone numbers and I thought that was the last I would hear of him, but he called me that night and treated me to a hundred dollar seafood meal at Ngoc Suong – in Saigon that is a decadent price. He pledged eternal gratitude throughout the night. It was such a simple thing. He did not seem to think what a monster I would have to have been to have let him get hit. But we liked the same books and composers, and then, when I mentioned an article I had read in
Time
on South East Asia's richest men under forty, he had waved a hand at me and said, ‘Men make money, money never makes men.' I had few wealthy friends and fewer of those were tolerable and I found him fascinating.

His maid was dressed permanently in silk pyjamas. She unlocked the street-level door for me and I walked up the stairs and Zhuan greeted me holding a Walther PP pistol. He claimed he bought the gun to protect himself from highway bandits on his journeys into Laos and southern China, but he was an admirer and collector of firearms; had been ever since he learnt to fire an American assault rifle as a boy in the last days of the American War. He was, he assured me, a great marksman. That skill aside, the war had left him with nothing but the stigma of being regarded as a traitor.

Visiting him was like entering a time capsule from the city of the 1950s. He was a throwback to the era of brilliantine hair, opium dens, chiffon and silk and bicycles flowing beneath paper lanterns. He seemed not to belong to the tremendous metropolis of Euclidian high-rises and roaring backfiring scooters that sounded on the street outside. He was born in 65, so I supposed some vestiges of that lost era might have remained in his memory, and certainly his parents had lived in old Saigon. His nostalgia was the reason Zhuan rarely left his villa. Here he could dream he was in another, more graceful city. I knew that he occasionally had a girl sent up here, never in jeans or a skirt but rather in the white silk
ao dai
that became a rarer sight in the city with each passing year.

We went to a balcony that overlooked the river and a ragged concrete esplanade. Here he would wave his pistol above people's heads while he spoke, occasionally training the sight on a light or a dried fish hanging in a vendor's cart.

‘I have found a place where we can see
hat boi.'
he said. ‘Very authentic by the account I received.'

With the Walther PP he pointed to the chair I was to sit in. I laughed.

‘I'm sorry,' he said. ‘I forget myself. You told me last time that the Walther makes you nervous.'

‘A little. Perhaps if you did not keep it loaded.'

‘I will put it away.'

He placed the pistol on the soil of a potted jade tree.

‘But about the
hat boi,'
he said.

‘I'm not even sure what that is.'

‘It's a stylised Vietnamese opera that reached its classic form around the beginning of the fifteenth century and never left. That's the wonderful thing!'

We had gone to an open-air theatre to see a performance of
Cai Luong
the week before. The form was a mix of traditional Vietnamese and French theatre with concessions to modernity such as an electric guitar. I thought it was amusing. Zhuan found it crass. He was determined we should see something ‘proper' next time round.

‘Hat boi,'
he said, ‘has an appealing simplicity. A man with a curly black beard is given to violence. A man with a blue face is arrogant. A red-faced man is hot tempered. The theatre is a cyclo ride away. We will go tonight!'

I felt a fool riding in cyclos with Zhuan while motorised traffic hurtled by. I was surprised he did not. But anyway I was busy tonight.

‘I have work,' I lied.

Zhuan shook his head. ‘Taking compromising photos of high CPV men is not a way to make money. It is a way to get killed.'

Following our
Cai Luong
night and a half-dozen Saigon Reds I had mentioned my last paid job. Perhaps I had wanted to run it by him to gauge his reaction – to make sure it was no more dangerous than I had accounted for.

‘That was a one-off,' I lied again. ‘Anyway, Mr Le was a low government man. Those worried about promotion are manageable. The men who have nowhere to go but down are the dangerous ones … So I'm told.'

Zhuan furrowed his brow. ‘You are very young to be so cynical. Are you thirty?'

‘Thirty-three. And I look every day of it.'

Zhuan smiled. Then he went to his minibar and opened a bottle of French pinot gris.

‘What's the occasion?'

‘My friend, a wine like this is an occasion in itself.' He smiled, recited a proverb and translated it: ‘
Va ruou ngon phải có ban hien
… and a good wine requires a good friend.' He poured and sniffed the wine. ‘I think the bouquet would be lovely were it not commingled with the air of this filthy city.
Rất thỏi!'
he said. ‘Very stinking!' He filled my glass. ‘I read the article you wrote on the hill tribes of the central highlands for the
Melbourne Times.'

‘The Age.'

‘Yes, that one. Has your phone been tapped yet?'

‘Not that I know of.'

‘Do you realise that that is political sore spot number one in this country? Really you are careless. You could at least have used a fake byline. You think every place is as forgiving and polite as the country you are from. Very careless.'

‘Perhaps.'

He sighed.

‘But you have a nice turn of phrase. You could have been a novelist.'

‘I have no special love of poverty.'

‘No, nor do I. But for that, I think I might have tried my hand as a composer.'

Zhuan uttered a few sharp words of Vietnamese and his maid brought out two ebony pipes and the silver canister in which he kept his opium peas.

‘Will you smoke?'

‘Not tonight.'

He told the maid to prepare the one pipe. The little woman kneaded three peas and cooked the first over the lamp and Zhuan reclined in his chair and took his pipe to his lips.

‘I wanted to talk to you about a news story,' I said.

Zhuan smiled and nodded.

‘A young girl with bullets in her back was found washed up on the river bank today. It seems she was dumped in the water out there.'

Zhuan nodded again.

Even in the middle of his first pipe an abstracted glow came into his face, as though he were dreaming while awake. He held the opium smoke deep in his lungs. I should keep him going while he was still with me.

‘I wondered–'

He exhaled.

‘Which do you think is the real world, Joseph? The one seen through opium smoke or the other?'

‘I'm not sure.'

‘I know which I prefer.'

‘But the girl in the river–'

‘I don't mind telling you, Joe, I've been very low lately. Sometimes a strange mood, a dark cloud, descends upon me. I believe it was the war that did this to me.'

‘The war?'

‘Surely there was a war! Perhaps it was in a past life. No, but I was a soldier in another century. And you would not believe the things they made me do. The depravity, the privations, the humiliations. It stays with you. It is so very necessary to lift the cloud once in a while, don't you think?'

‘What cloud is that exactly?'

‘
The
cloud. Surely you know.'

I did not answer. Zhuan inhaled. The air in the room became sweet with opium and there was that entrancing gurgle of the pipe. Zhuan was drifting very far away now – from the room, from this conversation that could not contain his thoughts.

‘You know, my mother was Vietnamese, Joe. I remember her as a girl in wartime. We were so very poor. As a child she had one pair of shoes that she shared with her sister. She had one pair of pants but no zipper, and the other girls laughed at her. Even when they were young my father was ashamed of her, you see she could not write. He had gotten her pregnant and then blamed her for it. The pig. She could not write because she had had so few days schooling, she had to walk up into the mountains in the morning and forage for sticks for kindling that she would sell by the roadside in the evenings for less than one dollar, so there was no time for class. She took to that work again when my father left, and with the money she made we ate cassava leaves and fish oil. But before my father left he beat her. Beat her terribly. Whipped her like an animal, Joe.' I thought he was about to weep. ‘And to think, I could protect her so well now. So easily.' He drew on his pipe and his sad eyes glimmered and then he smiled, perhaps at all the valuable objects in the room glimmering brighter now through the opium haze. ‘She used to sing to me,' he said. ‘So very beautifully.' A tear described his cheek.

Zhuan was the only true hedonist I knew. He did not care about money, only for the things it could buy him, because as a boy he had had none of them and there had been no reason to believe he ever would. He was that rare thing in Asia, the truly self-made and well-polished aristocrat – and like the mandarins and aristocrats of ages gone by he had all of their complacency: he appeared to forget that money had to be made as well as spent. I confess I admired him for that. He was capable of enormous sentimental generosity; I had seen him give the equivalent of five hundred dollars to an armless beggar on Pham Ngu Lao who had the same name as a boy from his village. The man held his begging hat in his teeth and Zhuan presented him with so many notes that he could no longer carry the hat and we had to put the notes in the man's pockets for him and then follow him home so no one would rob him.

Zhuan stared lovingly at the ebony pipe he laid down on the whisky bitten cedar table between us.

‘But I'm sorry,' he coughed, ‘the girl in the river. I did hear about it – half an hour ago. I dare say I know what you know. You must remember that criminality is a way of life here. You live here for any time, you will, at some level, end up a criminal. One could argue that you–'

‘Yes, I know.'

Zhuan smiled.

‘What I mean is that sin is unavoidable. You believe you are not already guilty in your heart, but you are. The sins you possess are just waiting to be borne out. And then you must pay the piper.'

He sighed and it seemed the tendrils of his black cloud had momentarily crawled back in through the opium. His maid was watching soap operas on the downstairs television. He hated the sound and rolled his eyes.
‘Anjing yixia!'
he called out. I doubted she understood Chinese. He placed a pea in his bowl himself and held it over the lamp.

‘You are beginning to talk like the priest at Notre Dame,' I said.

‘Am I? Well, I am Catholic, you know. I told you that. Nominally Catholic. I suppose the faith rubs off on you when you have lived in this city all your life – just like crime. But I will tell you what I truly believe: there are two human states, suffering and pleasure. The first must be avoided, the second expanded.'