The Quiet American (6 page)
I went on, “If it’s only her interests you care about, for God’s sake leave Phuong alone. Like any other woman she’d rather have a good . . .” the crash of a mortar saved Boston ears from. the Anglo-Saxon word.
But there was a quality of the implacable in Pyle. He had determined I was behaving well and I had to behave well. He said, “I know what you are suffering, Thomas.” “I’m not suffering.” “Oh yes, you are. I know what I’d suffer if I had to give up Phuong”
“But I haven’t given her up.”
“I’m pretty physical too, Thomas, but I’d give up all hope of that if I could see Phuong happy.” “She is happy.”
“She can’t be-not in her situation. She needs children.” “Do you really believe all that nonsense her sister . . .?” “A sister sometimes knows better. . .” “She was just trying to sell the notion to you, Pyle, because she thinks you have more money. And, my God, she has sold it all right.” “I’ve only got my salary.” “Well, you’ve got a favourable rate of exchange any-
way.”
“Don’t be bitter, Thomas. These things happen. I wish it had happened to anybody else but you. Are those our mortars?”
“Yes, ‘our’ mortars. You talk as though she was leaving me, Pyle”
“Of course,” he said without conviction, “she may choose to stay with you.” “What would you do then?” “I’d apply for a transfer.”
“Why don’t you just go away, Pyle, without causing trouble?”
“It wouldn’t be fair to her, Thomas,” he said quite seriously. I never knew a man who had better motives for all the trouble he caused. He added, “I don’t think you quite understand Phuong.”
And waking that morning months later with Phuong beside me, I thought, “And did you understand her either? Could you have anticipated this situation? Phuong so happily asleep beside me and you dead?” Time has its revenges, but revenges seem so often sour. Wouldn’t we all do better not trying to understand, accepting the fact that no human being will ever understand another, not a wife a husband, a lover a mistress, nor a parent a child? Perhaps that’s why men have invented God-a being capable of understanding. Perhaps if I wanted to be understood or to understand I would bamboozle myself into belief, but I am a reporter; God exists only for leader-writers.
“Are you sure there’s anything much to understand?” I asked Pyle. “Oh, for God’s sake, let’s have a whisky. It’s too noisy to argue.” “It’s a bit early,” Pyle said. “It’s damned late.”
I poured out two glasses and Pyle raised his and stared through the whisky at the light of the candle. His hand shook whenever a shell burst, any yet he had made that senseless trip from Nam Dinh.
Pyle said, “It’s a strange thing that neither of us can say ‘Good luck’.” So we drank saying nothing.
I had thought I would be only one week away from Saigon, but it was nearly three weeks before I returned. In the first place it proved more difficult to get out of the Phat Diem area than it had been to get in. The road was cut between Nam Dinh and Hanoi and aerial transport could not be spared for one reporter who shouldn’t have been there anyway. Then when I reached Hanoi the correspondents had been flown up for briefing on the latest victory and the plane that took them back had no seat left for me. Pyle got away from Phat Diem the morning he arrived: he had fulfilled his mission-to speak to me about Phuong, and there was nothing to keep him. I left him asleep when the mortar-fire stopped at five-thirty and when I returned from a cup of coffee and some biscuits in the mess he wasn’t there. I assumed that he had gone for a stroll-after punting all the way down the river from Nam Dinh a few snipers would not have worried him; he was as incapable of imagining pain or danger to himself as he was incapable of conceiving the pain he might cause others. On one occasion-but that was months later—I lost control and thrust his foot into it, into the pain I mean, and I remember how he turned away and looked at his stained shoe in perplexity and said, “I must get a shine before I see the Minister.” I knew then he was already forming his phrases in the style he had learnt from York Harding. Yet he was sincere in his way: it was coincidence that the sacrifices were all paid by others, until that final night under the bridge to Dakow.
It was only when I returned to Saigon that I learnt how Pyle, while I drank my coffee, had persuaded a young naval officer to take him on a landing-craft which after a routine patrol dropped him surreptitiously at Nam Dinh. Luck was with him and he got back to Hanoi with his trachoma team twenty-four hours before the road was officially regarded as cut. When I reached Hanoi he had already left for the south, leaving me a note with the barman at the Press Camp.
“Dear Thomas,” he wrote, “I can’t begin to tell you how swell you were the other night. I can tell you my heart was in my mouth when I walked into that room to find you.” (Where had it been on the long boat-ride down the river?) “There are not many men who would have taken the whole thing so calmly. You were great, and I don’t feel half as mean as I did, now that I’ve told you.” (Was he the only one that mattered? I wondered angrily, and yet I knew that he didn’t intend it that way. To him the whole affair would be happier as soon as he didn’t feel mean-I would be happier, Phuong would be happier, the whole world would be happier, even the Economic Attaché and the Minister. Spring had come to Indo-China now that Pyle was mean no longer.) “I waited for you here for twenty-four hours, but I shan’t get back to Saigon for a week if I don’t leave today, and my real work is in the south. I’ve told the boys who are running the trachoma teams to look you up-you’ll like them. They are great boys and doing a man-size Job. Don’t worry in any way that I’m returning to Saigon ahead of you. I promise you I won’t see Phuong until you return. I don’t want you to feel later that I’ve been unfair in any way. Cordially yours, Alden.”
Again that calm assumption that “later” it would be I who would lose Phuong. Is confidence based on a rate of exchange? We used to speak of sterling qualities. Have we got to talk now about a dollar love? A dollar love, of course, would include marriage and Junior and Mother’s Day, even though later it might include Reno or the Virgin Islands or wherever they go nowadays for their divorces. A dollar love had good intentions, a clear conscience, and to Hell with everybody. But my love had no intentions: it knew the future. All one could do was try to make the future less hard, to break the future gently when it came, and even opium had its value there. But I never foresaw that the first future I wouldn’t have to break to Phuong would be the death of Pyle.
I went-for I had nothing better to do-to the Press Conference. Granger, of course, was there. A young and too beautiful French colonel presided. He spoke in French and a junior officer translated. The French correspondents sat together like a rival football-team. I found it hard to keep my mind on what the colonel was saying: all the time it wandered back to Phuong and the one thought-suppose Pyle is right and I lose her: where does one go from here? The interpreter said, “The colonel tells you that the enemy has suffered a sharp defeat and severe losses-the equivalent of one complete battalion. The last detachments are now making their way back across the Red River on improvised rafts. They are shelled all the time by the Air Force.” The colonel ran his hand through his elegant yellow hair and, flourishing his pointer, danced his way down the leng maps on the wall. An American correspondent asked, “What are the French losses?”
The colonel knew perfectly well the meaning of the question-it was usually put at about this stage of the conference, but he paused, pointer raised with a kind smile like a popular schoolmaster, until it was interpreted. Then he answered with patient ambiguity. “The colonel says our losses have not been heavy. The exact number is not yet known.”
‘This was always the signal for trouble. You would have thought that sooner or later the colonel would have found a formula for dealing with his refractory class, or that, the headmaster would have appointed a member of his staff more efficient at keeping order.
“Is the colonel seriously telling us,” Granger said, “that he’s had time to count the enemy dead and not his own?”
Patiently the colonel wove his web of evasion, which he knew perfectly well would be destroyed again by another question. The French correspondents sat gloomily silent. If the American correspondents stung the colonel into an admission they would be quick to seize it, but they would not join in bailing their countryman.
“The colonel says the enemy forces are being over-run. It is possible to count the dead behind the firing-line, but while the battle is still in progress you cannot expect figures from the advancing French units.”
“It’s not what we expect,” Granger said, “it’s what the Etat Major knows or not. Are you seriously telling us that platoons do not report their casualties as they happen by walkie-talkie?”
The colonel’s temper was beginning to fray. If only, I thought, he had called our bluff from the start and told us firmly that he knew the figures but wouldn’t say. After all it was their war, not ours. We had no God-given right to information. We -didn’t have to fight Left-Wing deputies in Paris as well as the troops of Ho Ghi Minh between the Red and the Black Rivers. We were not dying.
The colonel suddenly snapped out the information that French casualties had been in a proportion of one in three, then turned his back on us, to stare furiously at his map. These were his men who were dead, his fellow officers, belonging to the same class at St. Cyr-not numerals as they were to Granger. Granger said, “Now we are getting somewhere,” and stared round with oafish triumph at llis fellows; the French with heads bent made their sombre notes. “That’s more than can be said in Korea,” I said with deliberate misunderstanding, but I had only given Granger a new line.
“Ask the colonel,” he said, “what the French are going to do next? He says the enemy is on the run across the Black River....” “Red River,” the interpreter corrected him.
“I don’t care what the colour of the river is. What we want to know is what the French are going to do now.” “The enemy are in flight.”
“What happens when they get to the other side? What are you going to do then? Are you just going to sit down on the other bank and say that’s over?” The French officers listened with gloomy patience to Granger’s bullying voice. Even humility is required today of the soldier. “Are you going to drop them Christmas cards?”
The captain interpreted with care, even to the phrase, “cartes de Noel.” The colonel gave us a wintry smile. “Not Christmas cards,” he said. I think the colonel’s youth and beauty particularly irritated Granger. The colonel wasn’t-at least not by Granger’s interpretation-a man’s man. He said, “You aren’t drop-ping much else.”
The colonel spoke suddenly in English, good English. He said, “If the supplies promised by the Americans had arrived, we should have more to drop.” He was really in spite of his elegance a simple man. He believed that a newspaper correspondent cared for his country’s honour more than for news. Granger said. sharply (he was efficient: he kept dates well in his head). “You mean that none of the supplies promised for the beginning of September have arrived?” “No”
Granger had got his news: he began to write. “I am sorry,” the colonel said, “that is not for printing: that is for background.”
“But, colonel,” Granger protested, “that’s news. We can help you there.” “No, it is a matter for the diplomats.” “What harm can it do?”
The French correspondents were at a loss: they could speak very little English. The colonel had broken the rules. They muttered angrily together.
“I am no judge,” the colonel said. “Perhaps the American newspapers would say, ‘Oh, the French are always complaining, always begging.’ And in Paris the Communists would accuse, ‘The French are spilling their blood for America and America will not even send a second-hand helicopter.’ It does no good. At the end of it we should still have HO helicopters, and the enemy would still be there, fifty miles from Hanoi.”
“At least I can print that, can’t I, that you need helicopters bad?”
“You can say,” the colonel said, “that six months ago we had three helicopters and now we have one. One,” he repeated with a kind of amazed bitterness. “You can say that if a man is wounded in this fighting, not seriously wounded, just wounded, he knows that he is probably a dead man. Twelve hours, twenty-four hours perhaps, on a stretcher to the ambulance, then bad tracks, a breakdown, perhaps an ambush, gangrene. It is better to be killed outright.” The French correspondents leant forward, trying to understand. “You can write that,” he said, looking all the more venomous for his physical beauty. “Interpretez,” he ordered, and walked out of the room, leaving the captain the unfamiliar task of translating from English into French.
“Got him on the raw,” said Granger with satisfaction, and he went into a Corner by the bar to write his telegram. Mine didn’t take long: there was nothing I could write from Phat Diem that the censors would pass. If the story had seemed good enough I could have flown to Hong Kong and sent it from there, but was any news good enough to risk expulsion? I doubted it. Expulsion meant the end of a whole life: it meant the victory of Pyle, and there, when I returned to my hotel, waiting in my pigeon-hole, was in fact his victory, the end-the congratulatory telegram of promotion. Dante never thought up that turn of the screw for his condemned lovers. Paolo was never promoted to the Purgatorio
