The Quiet American, Page 4

  ‘Who do you think I am? I’m a correspondent with an Ordre de Circulation which shows when I’m out of bounds. I fly to Hanoi airport. They give us a car to the Press Camp. They lay on a flight over the two towns they’ve recaptured and show us the tricolour flying. It might be any darned flag at that height. Then we have a Press Conference and a colonel explains to us what we’ve been looking at. Then we file our cables with the censor. Then we have drinks. Best barman in Indo-China. Then we catch the plane back.’

  Pyle frowned at his beer.

  ‘You underrate yourself, Bill,’ the Economic Attaché said. ‘Why, that account of Road 66—what did you call it? Highway to Hell—that was worthy of the Pulitzer. You know the story I mean—the man with his head blown off kneeling in the ditch, and that other you saw walking in a dream . . .’

  ‘Do you think I’d really go near their stinking highway? Stephen Crane could describe a war without seeing one. Why shouldn’t I? It’s only a damned colonial war anyway. Get me another drink. And then let’s go and find a girl. You’ve got a piece of tail. I want a piece of tail too.’

  I said to Pyle, ‘Do you think there’s anything in the rumour about Phat Diem?’

  ‘I don’t know. Is it important? I’d like to go and have a look,’ he said, ‘if it’s important.’

  ‘Important to the Economic Mission?’

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said, ‘you can’t draw hard lines. Medicine’s a kind of weapon, isn’t it? These Catholics, they’d be pretty strong against the Communists, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘They trade with the Communists. The Bishop gets his cows and the bamboo for his building from the Communists. I wouldn’t say they were exactly York Harding’s Third Force,’ I teased him.

  ‘Break it up,’ Granger was shouting. ‘Can’t waste the whole night here. I’m off to the House of Five Hundred Girls.’

  ‘If you and Miss Phuong would have dinner with me . . .’ Pyle said.

  ‘You can eat at the Chalet,’ Granger interrupted him, ‘while I’m knocking the girls next door. Come on, Joe. Anyway you’re a man.’

  I think it was then, wondering what a man is, that I felt my first affection for Pyle. He sat a little turned away from Granger, twisting his beer mug, with an expression of determined remoteness. He said to Phuong, ‘I guess you get tired of all this shop—about your country, I mean?’

  ‘Comment?’

  ‘What are you going to do with Mick?’ the Economic Attaché asked.

  ‘Leave him here,’ Granger said.

  ‘You can’t do that. You don’t even know his name.’

  ‘We could bring him along and let the girls look after him.’

  The Economic Attaché gave a loud communal laugh. He looked like a face on television. He said, ‘You young people can do what you want, but I’m too old for games. I’ll take him home with me. Did you say he was French?’

  ‘He spoke French.’

  ‘If you can get him into my car . . .’

  After he had driven away, Pyle took a trishaw with Granger, and Phuong and I followed along the road to Cholon. Granger had made an attempt to get into the trishaw with Phuong, but Pyle diverted him. As they pedalled us down the long suburban road to the Chinese town a line of French armoured cars went by, each with its jutting gun and silent officer motionless like a figurehead under the stars and the black, smooth, concave sky—trouble again probably with a private army, the Binh Xuyen, who ran the Grand Monde and the gambling halls of Cholon. This was a land of rebellious barons. It was like Europe in the Middle Ages. But what were the Americans doing here? Columbus had not yet discovered their country. I said to Phuong, ‘I like that fellow, Pyle.’

  ‘He’s quiet,’ she said, and the adjective which she was the first to use stuck like a schoolboy name, till I heard even Vigot use it, sitting there with his green eye-shade, telling me of Pyle’s death.

  I stopped our trishaw outside the Chalet and said to Phuong, ‘Go in and find a table. I had better look after Pyle.’ That was my first instinct—to protect him. It never occurred to me that there was greater need to protect myself. Innocence always calls mutely for protection when we would be so much wiser to guard ourselves against it: innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.

  When I reached the House of the Five Hundred Girls, Pyle and Granger had gone inside. I asked at the military police post just inside the doorway, ‘Deux Américains?’

  He was a young Foreign Legion corporal. He stopped cleaning his revolver and jutted his thumb towards the doorway beyond, making a joke in German. I couldn’t understand it.

  It was the hour of rest in the immense courtyard which lay open to the sky. Hundreds of girls lay on the grass or sat on their heels talking to their companions. The curtains were undrawn in the little cubicles around the square—one tired girl lay alone on a bed with her ankles crossed. There was trouble in Cholon and the troops were confined to quarters and there was no work to be done: the Sunday of the body. Only a knot of fighting, scrabbling, shouting girls showed me where custom was still alive. I remembered the old Saigon story of the distinguished visitor who had lost his trousers fighting his way back to the safety of the police post. There was no protection here for the civilian. If he chose to poach on military territory, he must look after himself and find his own way out.

  I had learnt a technique—to divide and conquer. I chose one in the crowd that gathered round me and edged her slowly towards the spot where Pyle and Granger struggled.

  ‘Je suis un vieux,’ I said. ‘Trop fatigué.’ She giggled and pressed. ‘Mon ami.’ I said, ‘il est très riche, très vigoureux.’

  ‘Tu es sale,’ she said.

  I caught sight of Granger flushed and triumphant; it was as though he took this demonstration as a tribute to his manhood. One girl had her arm through Pyle’s and was trying to tug him gently out of the ring. I pushed my girl in among them and called to him, ‘Pyle, over here.’

  He looked at me over their heads and said, ‘It’s terrible. Terrible.’ It may have been a trick of the lamplight, but his face looked haggard. It occurred to me that he was quite possibly a virgin.

  ‘Come along, Pyle,’ I said. ‘Leave them to Granger.’ I saw his hand move towards his hip pocket. I really believe he intended to empty his pockets of piastres and greenbacks. ‘Don’t be a fool, Pyle,’ I called sharply. ‘You’ll have them fighting.’ My girl was turning back to me and I gave her another push into the inner ring round Granger. ‘Non, non,’ I said, ‘je suis un Anglais, pauvre, très pauvre.’ Then I got hold of Pyle’s sleeve and dragged him out, with the girl hanging on to his other arm like a hooked fish. Two or three girls tried to intercept us before we got to the gateway where the corporal stood watching, but they were half-hearted.

  ‘What’ll I do with this one?’ Pyle said.

  ‘She won’t be any trouble,’ and at that moment she let go his arm and dived back into the scrimmage round Granger.

  ‘Will he be all right?’ Pyle asked anxiously.

  ‘He’s got what he wanted—a bit of tail.’

  The night outside seemed very quiet with only another squadron of armoured cars driving by like people with a purpose. He said, ‘It’s terrible. I wouldn’t have believed . . .’ He said with sad awe, ‘They were so pretty.’ He was not envying Granger, he was complaining that anything good—and prettiness and grace are surely forms of goodness—should be marred or ill-treated. Pyle could see pain when it was in front of his eyes. (I don’t write that as a sneer; after all there are many of us who can’t.)

  I said, ‘Come back to the Chalet. Phuong’s waiting.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I quite forgot. You shouldn’t have left her.’

  ‘She wasn’t in danger.’

  ‘I just thought I’d see Granger safely . . .’ He dropped again into his thoughts, but as we entered the Chalet he said with obscure distress, ‘I’d forgotten how many men there are . . .’

  II />
  Phuong had kept us a table at the edge of the dance-floor and the orchestra was playing some tune which had been popular in Paris five years ago. Two Vietnamese couples were dancing, small, neat, aloof, with an air of civilization we couldn’t match. (I recognized one, an accountant from the Banque de l’Indo-Chine and his wife.) They never, one felt, dressed carelessly, said the wrong word, were prey to untidy passion. If the war seemed medieval, they were like the eighteenth-century future. One would have expected Mr Pham-Van-Tu to write Augustans in his spare time, but I happened to know he was a student of Wordsworth and wrote nature poems. His holidays he spent at Dalat, the nearest he could get to the atmosphere of the English lakes. He bowed slightly as he came round. I wondered how Granger had fared fifty yards up the road.

  Pyle was apologizing to Phuong in bad French for having kept her waiting. ‘C’est impardonable,’ he said.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she asked him.

  He said, ‘I was seeing Granger home.’

  ‘Home?’ I said and laughed, and Pyle looked at me as though I were another Granger. Suddenly I saw myself as he saw me, a man of middle age, with eyes a little bloodshot, beginning to put on weight, ungraceful in love, less noisy than Granger perhaps but more cynical, less innocent, and I saw Phuong for a moment as I had seen her first, dancing past my table at the Grand Monde in a white ball-dress, eighteen years old, watched by an elder sister who had been determined on a good European marriage. An American had bought a ticket and asked her for a dance: he was a little drunk—not harmfully, and I suppose he was new to the country and thought the hostesses of the Grand Monde were whores. He held her much too close as they went round the floor the first time, and then suddenly there she was, going back to sit with her sister, and he was left, stranded and lost among the dancers, not knowing what had happened or why. And the girl whose name I didn’t know sat quietly there, occasionally sipping her orange juice, owning herself completely.

  ‘Peut-on avoir l’honneur?’ Pyle was saying in his terrible accent, and a moment later I saw them dancing in silence at the other end of the room, Pyle holding her so far away from him that you expected him at any moment to sever contact. He was a very bad dancer, and she had been the best dancer I had ever known in her days at the Grand Monde.

  It had been a long and frustrating courtship. If I could have offered marriage and a settlement everything would have been easy, and the elder sister would have slipped quietly and tactfully away whenever we were together. But three months passed before I saw her so much as momentarily alone, on a balcony at the Majestic, while her sister in the next room kept on asking when we proposed to come in. A cargo boat from France was being unloaded in Saigon River by the light of flares, the trishaw bells rang like telephones, and I might have been a young and inexperienced fool for all I found to say. I went back hopelessly to my bed in the rue Catinat and never dreamed that four months later she would be lying beside me, a little out of breath, laughing as though with surprise because nothing had been quite what she expected.

  ‘Monsieur Fowlair,’ I had been watching them dance and hadn’t seen her sister signalling to me from another table. Now she came over and I reluctantly asked her to sit down. We had never been friends since the night she was taken ill in the Grand Monde and I had seen Phuong home.

  ‘I haven’t seen you for a whole year,’ she said.

  ‘I am away so often at Hanoi.’

  ‘Who is your friend?’ she asked.

  ‘A man called Pyle.’

  ‘What does he do?’

  ‘He belongs to the American Economic Mission. You know the kind of thing—electrical sewing machines for starving seamstresses.’

  ‘Are there any?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘But they don’t use sewing machines. There wouldn’t be any electricity where they live.’ She was a very literal woman.

  ‘You’ll have to ask Pyle,’ I said.

  ‘Is he married?’

  I looked at the dance floor. ‘I should say that’s as near as he ever got to a woman.’

  ‘He dances very badly,’ she said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But he looks a nice reliable man.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can I sit with you for a little? My friends are very dull.’

  The music stopped and Pyle bowed stiffly to Phuong, then led her back and drew out her chair. I could tell that his formality pleased her. I thought how much she missed in her relation to me.

  ‘This is Phuong’s sister,’ I said to Pyle. ‘Miss Hei.’

  ‘I’m very glad to meet you,’ he said and blushed.

  ‘You come from New York?’ she asked.

  ‘No. From Boston.’

  ‘That is in the United States too?’

  ‘Oh yes. Yes.’

  ‘Is your father a business man?’

  ‘Not really. He’s a professor.’

  ‘A teacher?’ she asked with a faint note of disappointment.

  ‘Well, he’s a kind of authority, you know. People consult him.’

  ‘About health? Is he a doctor?’

  ‘Not that sort of doctor. He’s a doctor of engineering though. He understands all about underwater erosion. You know what that is?’

  ‘No.’

  Pyle said with a dim attempt at humour, ‘Well, I’ll leave it to Dad to tell you about that.’

  ‘He is here?’

  ‘Oh no.’

  ‘But he is coming?’

  ‘No. That was just a joke,’ Pyle said apologetically.

  ‘Have you got another sister?’ I asked Miss Hei.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘It sounds as though you were examining Mr Pyle’s marriageability.’

  ‘I have only one sister,’ Miss Hei said, and she clamped her hand heavily down on Phuong’s knee, like a chairman with his gavel marking a point of order.

  ‘She’s a very pretty sister,’ Pyle said.

  ‘She is the most beautiful girl in Saigon,’ Miss Hei said, as though she were correcting him.

  ‘I can believe it.’

  I said, ‘It’s time we ordered dinner. Even the most beautiful girl in Saigon must eat.’

  ‘I am not hungry,’ Phuong said.

  ‘She is delicate,’ Miss Hei went firmly on. There was a note of menace in her voice. ‘She needs care. She deserves care. She is very, very loyal.’

  ‘My friend is a lucky man,’ Pyle said gravely.

  ‘She loves children,’ Miss Hei said.

  I laughed and then caught Pyle’s eye; he was looking at me with shocked surprise, and suddenly it occurred to me that he was genuinely interested in what Miss Hei had to say. While I was ordering dinner (though Phuong had told me she was not hungry, I knew she could manage a good steak tartare with two raw eggs and etceteras), I listened to him seriously discussing the question of children. ‘I’ve always thought I’d like a lot of children,’ he said. ‘A big family’s a wonderful interest. It makes for the stability of marriage. And it’s good for the children too. I was an only child. It’s a great disadvantage being an only child.’ I had never heard him talk so much before.

  ‘How old is your father?’ Miss Hei asked with gluttony.

  ‘Sixty-nine.’

  ‘Old people love grandchildren. It is very sad that my sister has no parents to rejoice in her children. When the day comes,’ she added with a baleful look at me.

  ‘Nor you either,’ Pyle said, rather unnecessarily I thought.

  ‘Our father was of a very good family. He was a mandarin in Hué.’

  I said, ‘I’ve ordered dinner for all of you.’

  ‘Not for me,’ Miss Hei said. ‘I must be going to my friends. I would like to meet Mr Pyle again. Perhaps you could manage that.’

  ‘When I get back from the north,’ I said.

  ‘Are you going to the north?’

  ‘I think it’s time I had a look at the war.’

  ‘But the Press are all back,’ Pyle said.


  ‘That’s the best time for me. I don’t have to meet Granger.’

  ‘Then you must come and have dinner with me and my sister when Monsieur Fowlair is gone.’ She added with morose courtesy, ‘To cheer her up.’

  After she had gone Pyle said, ‘What a very nice cultivated woman. And she spoke English so well.’

  ‘Tell him my sister was in business once in Singapore,’ Phuong said proudly.

  ‘Really? What kind of business?’

  I translated for her. ‘Import, export. She can do shorthand.’

  ‘I wish we had more like her in the Economic Mission.’

  ‘I will speak to her,’ Phuong said. ‘She would like to work for the Americans.’

  After dinner they danced again. I am a bad dancer too and I hadn’t the unselfconsciousness of Pyle—or had I possessed it, I wondered, in the days when I was first in love with Phuong? There must have been many occasions at the Grand Monde before the memorable night of Miss Hei’s illness when I had danced with Phuong just for an opportunity to speak to her. Pyle was taking no such opportunity as they came round the floor again; he had relaxed a little, that was all, and was holding her less at arm’s length, but they were both silent. Suddenly watching her feet, so light and precise and mistress of his shuffle, I was in love again. I could hardly believe that in an hour, two hours, she would be coming back to me to that dingy room with the communal closet and the old women squatting on the landing.

  I wished I had never heard the rumour about Phat Diem, or that the rumour had dealt with any other town than the one place in the north where my friendship with a French naval officer would allow me to slip in, uncensored, uncontrolled. A newspaper scoop? Not in those days when all the world wanted to read about was Korea. A chance of death? Why should I want to die when Phuong slept beside me every night? But I knew the answer to that question. From childhood I had never believed in permanence, and yet I had longed for it. Always I was afraid of losing happiness. This month, next year, Phuong would leave me. If not next year, in three years. Death was the only absolute value in my world. Lose life and one would lose nothing again for ever. I envied those who could believe in a God and I distrusted them. I felt they were keeping their courage up with a fable of the changeless and the permanent. Death was far more certain than God, and with death there would be no longer the daily possibility of love dying. The nightmare of a future of boredom and indifference would lift. I could never have been a pacifist. To kill a man was surely to grant him an immeasurable benefit. Oh yes, people always, everywhere, loved their enemies. It was their friends they preserved for pain and vacuity.