The Quiet American

  I wished that he hadn’t asked that question.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘that woman came earlier. When I left my wife.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I left her, too.’

  ‘Why?’

  Why indeed? ‘We are fools,’ I said, ‘when we love. I was terrified of losing her. I thought I saw her changing—I don’t know if she really was, but I couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. I ran towards the finish just like a coward runs towards the enemy and wins a medal. I wanted to get death over.’

  ‘Death?’

  ‘It was a kind of death. Then I came east.’

  ‘And found Phuong?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But don’t you find the same thing with Phuong?’

  ‘Not the same. You see, the other one loved me. I was afraid of losing love. Now I’m only afraid of losing Phuong.’ Why had I said that, I wondered? He didn’t need encouragement from me.

  ‘But she loves you, doesn’t she?’

  ‘Not like that. It isn’t in their nature. You’ll find that out. It’s a cliché to call them children—but there’s one thing which is childish. They love you in return for kindness, security, the presents you give them—they hate you for a blow or an injustice. They don’t know what it’s like—just walking into a room and loving a stranger. For an aging man, Pyle, it’s very secure—she won’t run away from home so long as the home is happy.’

  I hadn’t meant to hurt him. I only realized I had done it when he said with muffled anger, ‘She might prefer greater security or more kindness.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  ‘Aren’t you afraid of that?’

  ‘Not so much as I was of the other.’

  ‘Do you love her at all?’

  ‘Oh yes, Pyle, yes. But that other way I’ve only loved once.’

  ‘In spite of the forty-odd women,’ he snapped at me.

  ‘I’m sure it’s below the Kinsey average. You know, Pyle, women don’t want virgins. I’m not sure we do, unless we are a pathological type.’

  ‘I didn’t mean I was a virgin,’ he said. All my conversations with Pyle seemed to take grotesque directions. Was it because of his sincerity that they so ran off the customary rails? His conversation never took the corners.

  ‘You can have a hundred women and still be a virgin, Pyle. Most of your G.I.s who were hanged for rape in the war were virgins. We don’t have so many in Europe. I’m glad. They do a lot of harm.’

  ‘I just don’t understand you, Thomas.’

  ‘It’s not worth explaining. I’m bored with the subject anyway. I’ve reached the age when sex isn’t the problem so much as old age and death. I wake up with these in mind and not a woman’s body. I just don’t want to be alone in my last decade, that’s all. I wouldn’t know what to think about all day long. I’d sooner have a woman in the same room—even one I didn’t love. But if Phuong left me, would I have the energy to find another? . . .’

  ‘If that’s all she means to you . . .’

  ‘All, Pyle? Wait until you’re afraid of living ten years alone with no companion and a nursing home at the end of it. Then you’ll start running in any direction, even away from that girl in the red dressing-gown, to find someone, anyone, who will last until you are through.’

  ‘Why don’t you go back to your wife, then?’

  ‘It’s not easy to live with someone you’ve injured.’

  A sten gun fired a long burst—it couldn’t have been more than a mile away. Perhaps a nervous sentry was shooting at shadows: perhaps another attack had begun. I hoped it was an attack—it increased our chances.

  ‘Are you scared, Thomas?’

  ‘Of course I am. With all my instincts. But with my reason I know it’s better to die like this. That’s why I came east. Death stays with you.’ I looked at my watch. It had gone eleven. An eight-hour night and then we could relax. I said, ‘We seem to have talked about pretty nearly everything except God. We’d better leave him to the small hours.’

  ‘You don’t believe in Him, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Things to me wouldn’t make sense without Him.’

  ‘They don’t make sense to me with him.’

  ‘I read a book once . . .’

  I never knew what book Pyle had read. (Presumably it wasn’t York Harding or Shakespeare or the anthology of contemporary verse or The Physiology of Marriage—perhaps it was The Triumph of Life.) A voice came right into the tower with us, it seemed to speak from the shadows by the trap—a hollow megaphone voice saying something in Vietnamese. ‘We’re for it,’ I said. The two guards listened, their faces turned to the rifle slit, their mouths hanging open.

  ‘What is it?’ Pyle asked.

  Walking to the embrasure was like walking through the voice. I looked quickly out: there was nothing to be seen—I couldn’t even distinguish the road and when I looked back into the room the rifle was pointed, I wasn’t sure whether at me or at the slit. But when I moved round the wall the rifle wavered, hesitated, kept me covered: the voice went on saying the same thing over again. I sat down and the rifle was lowered.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ Pyle asked.

  ‘I don’t know. I expect they’ve found the car and are telling these chaps to hand us over or else. Better pick up that sten before they make up their minds.’

  ‘He’ll shoot.’

  ‘He’s not sure yet. When he is he’ll shoot anyway.’

  Pyle shifted his leg and the rifle came up.

  ‘I’ll move along the wall,’ I said. ‘When his eyes waver get him covered.’

  Just as I rose the voice stopped: the silence made me jump. Pyle said sharply, ‘Drop your rifle.’ I had just time to wonder whether the sten was unloaded—I hadn’t bothered to look—when the man threw his rifle down.

  I crossed the room and picked it up. Then the voice began again—I had the impression that no syllable had changed. Perhaps they used a record. I wondered when the ultimatum would expire.

  ‘What happens next?’ Pyle asked, like a schoolboy watching a demonstration in the laboratory: he didn’t seem personally concerned.

  ‘Perhaps a bazooka, perhaps a Viet.’

  Pyle examined his sten. ‘There doesn’t seem any mystery about this,’ he said. ‘Shall I fire a burst?’

  ‘No, let them hesitate. They’d rather take the post without firing and it gives us time. We’d better clear out fast.’

  ‘They may be waiting at the bottom.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘The two men watched us—I write men, but I doubt whether they had accumulated forty years between them. ‘And these?’ Pyle asked, and he added with a shocking directness, ‘Shall I shoot them?’ Perhaps he wanted to try the sten.

  ‘They’ve done nothing.’

  ‘They were going to hand us over.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said. ‘We’ve no business here. It’s their country.’

  I unloaded the rifle and laid it on the floor. ‘Surely you’re not leaving that,’ he said.

  ‘I’m too old to run with a rifle. And this isn’t my war. Come on.’

  It wasn’t my war, but I wished those others in the dark knew that as well. I blew the oil-lamp out and dangled my legs over the trap, feeling for the ladder. I could hear the guards whispering to each other like crooners, in their language like a song. ‘Make straight ahead,’ I told Pyle, ‘aim for the rice. Remember there’s water—I don’t know how deep. Ready?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Thanks for the company.’

  ‘Always a pleasure,’ Pyle said.

  I heard the guards moving behind us: I wondered if they had knives. The megaphone voice spoke peremptorily as though offering a last chance. Something shifted softly in the dark below us, but it might have been a rat. I hesitated. ‘I wish to God I had a drink,’ I whispered.

  ‘Let’s go.’

  Something was coming up the ladder: I heard nothing, but the ladder shook under my feet.

  ?
??What’s keeping you?’ Pyle said.

  I don’t know why I thought of it as something, that silent stealthy approach. Only a man could climb a ladder, and yet I couldn’t think of it as a man like myself—it was as though an animal were moving in to kill, very quietly and certainly with the remorselessness of another kind of creation. The ladder shook and shook and I imagined I saw its eyes glaring upwards. Suddenly I could bear it no longer and I jumped, and there was nothing there at all but the spongy ground, which took my ankle and twisted it as a hand might have done. I could hear Pyle coming down the ladder; I realized I had been a frightened fool who could not recognize his own trembling, and I had believed I was tough and unimaginative, all that a truthful observer and reporter should be. I got on my feet and nearly fell again with the pain. I started out for the field dragging one foot after me and heard Pyle coming behind me. Then the bazooka shell burst on the tower and I was on my face again.

  IV

  ‘Are you hurt?’ Pyle said.

  ‘Something hit my leg. Nothing serious.’

  ‘Let’s get on,’ Pyle urged me. I could just see him because he seemed to be covered with a fine white dust. Then he simply went out like a picture on the screen when the lamps of the projector fail: only the soundtrack continued. I got gingerly up on to my good knee and tried to rise without putting any weight on my bad left ankle, and then I was down again breathless with pain. It wasn’t my ankle: something had happened to my left leg. I couldn’t worry—pain took away care. I lay very still on the ground hoping that pain wouldn’t find me again. I even held my breath, as one does with toothache. I didn’t think about the Viets who would soon be searching the ruins of the tower: another shell exploded on it—they were making quite sure before they came in. What a lot of money it costs, I thought as the pain receded, to kill a few human beings—you can kill horses so much cheaper. I can’t have been fully conscious, for I began to think I had strayed into a knacker’s yard which was the terror of my childhood in the small town where I was born. We used to think we heard the horses whinnying with fear and the explosion of the painless killer.

  It was some while since the pain had returned, now that I was lying still and holding my breath—that seemed to me just as important. I wondered quite lucidly whether perhaps I ought to crawl towards the fields. The Viets might not have time to search far. Another patrol would be out by now trying to contact the crew of the first tank. But I was more afraid of the pain than of the partisans, and I lay still. There was no sound anywhere of Pyle: he must have reached the fields. Then I heard someone weeping. It came from the direction of the tower, or what had been the tower. It wasn’t like a man weeping: it was like a child who is frightened of the dark and yet afraid to scream. I supposed it was one of the two boys—perhaps his companion had been killed. I hoped that the Viets wouldn’t cut his throat. One shouldn’t fight a war with children and a little curled body in a ditch came back to mind. I shut my eyes—that helped to keep the pain away, too, and waited. A voice called something I didn’t understand. I almost felt I could sleep in this darkness and loneliness and absence of pain.

  Then I heard Pyle whispering, ‘Thomas. Thomas.’ He had learnt footcraft quickly; I had not heard him return.

  ‘Go away,’ I whispered back.

  He found me then and lay down flat beside me. ‘Why didn’t you come? Are you hurt?’

  ‘My leg. I think it’s broken.’

  ‘A bullet?’

  ‘No, no. Log of wood. Stone. Something from the tower. It’s not bleeding.’

  ‘You’ve got to make an effort.’

  ‘Go away, Pyle. I don’t want to, it hurts too much.’

  ‘Which leg?’

  ‘Left.’

  He crept round to my side and hoisted my arm over his shoulder. I wanted to whimper like the boy in the tower and then I was angry, but it was hard to express anger in a whisper. ‘God damn you, Pyle, leave me alone. I want to stay.’

  ‘You can’t.’

  He was pulling me half on to his shoulder and the pain was intolerable. ‘Don’t be a bloody hero. I don’t want to go.’

  ‘You’ve got to help,’ he said, ‘or we are both caught.’

  ‘You . . .’

  ‘Be quiet or they’ll hear you.’ I was crying with vexation—you couldn’t use a stronger word. I hoisted myself against him and let my left leg dangle—we were like awkward contestants in a three-legged race and we wouldn’t have stood a chance if, at the moment we set off, a bren had not begun to fire in quick short bursts somewhere down the road towards the next tower. Perhaps a patrol was pushing up or perhaps they were completing their score of three towers destroyed. It covered the noise of our slow and clumsy flight.

  I’m not sure whether I was conscious all the time: I think for the last twenty yards Pyle must have almost carried my weight. He said, ‘Careful here. We are going in.’ The dry rice rustled around us and the mud squelched and rose. The water was up to our waists when Pyle stopped. He was panting and a catch in his breath made him sound like a bull-frog.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Couldn’t leave you,’ Pyle said.

  The first sensation was relief; the water and mud held my leg tenderly and firmly like a bandage, but soon the cold set us chattering. I wondered whether it had passed midnight yet; we might have six hours of this if the Viets didn’t find us.

  ‘Can you shift your weight a little,’ Pyle said, ‘just for a moment?’ And my unreasoning irritation came back—I had no excuse for it but the pain. I hadn’t asked to be saved, or to have death so painfully postponed. I thought with nostalgia of my couch on the hard dry ground. I stood like a crane on one leg trying to relieve Pyle of my weight, and when I moved, the stalks of rice tickled and cut and crackled.

  ‘You saved my life there,’ I said, and Pyle cleared his throat for the conventional response, ‘so that I could die here. I prefer dry land.’

  ‘Better not talk,’ Pyle said as though to an invalid.

  ‘Who the hell asked you to save my life? I came east to be killed. It’s like your damned impertinence . . .’ I staggered in the mud and Pyle hoisted my arm around his shoulder. ‘Ease it off,’ he said.

  ‘You’ve been seeing war-films. We aren’t a couple of marines and you can’t win a war-medal.’

  ‘Sh-sh.’ Footsteps could be heard, coming down to the edge of the field. The bren up the road stopped firing and there was no sound except the footsteps and the slight rustle of the rice when we breathed. Then the footsteps halted: they only seemed the length of a room away. I felt Pyle’s hand on my good side pressing me slowly down; we sank together into the mud very slowly so as to make the least disturbance of the rice. On one knee, by straining my head backwards, I could just keep my mouth out of the water. The pain came back to my leg and I thought, ‘If I faint here I drown’—I had always hated and feared the thought of drowning. Why can’t one choose one’s death? There was no sound now: perhaps twenty feet away they were waiting for a rustle, a cough, a sneeze—‘Oh God,’ I thought, ‘I’m going to sneeze.’ If only he had left me alone, I would have been responsible only for my own life—not his—and he wanted to live. I pressed my free fingers against my upper lip in that trick we learn when we are children playing at Hide and Seek, but the sneeze lingered, waiting to burst, and silent in the darkness the others waited for the sneeze. It was coming, coming, came . . .

  But in the very second that my sneeze broke, the Viets opened with stens, drawing a line of fire through the rice—it swallowed my sneeze with its sharp drilling like a machine punching holes through steel. I took a breath and went under—so instinctively one avoids the loved thing, coquetting with death, like a woman who demands to be raped by her lover. The rice was lashed down over our heads and the storm passed. We came up for air at the same moment and heard the footsteps going away back towards the tower.

  ‘We’ve made it,’ Pyle said, and even in my pain I wondered what we’d made: for me, old age, an editor?
??s chair, loneliness; and as for him, I know now that he spoke prematurely. Then in the cold we settled down to wait. Along the road to Tanyin a bonfire burst into life: it burnt merrily like a celebration.

  ‘That’s my car,’ I said.

  Pyle said, ‘It’s a shame, Thomas. I hate to see waste.’

  ‘There must have been just enough petrol in the tank to get it going. Are you as cold as I am, Pyle?’

  ‘I couldn’t be colder.’

  ‘Suppose we get out and lie flat on the road?’

  ‘Let’s give them another half hour.’

  ‘The weight’s on you.’

  ‘I can stick it, I’m young.’ He had meant the claim humorously, but it struck as cold as the mud. I had intended to apologize for the way my pain had spoken, but now it spoke again. ‘You’re young all right. You can afford to wait, can’t you.’

  ‘I don’t get you, Thomas.’

  We had spent what seemed to have been a week of nights together, but he could no more understand me than he could understand French. I said, ‘You’d have done better to let me be.’

  ‘I couldn’t have faced Phuong,’ he said, and the name lay there like a banker’s bid. I took it up.

  ‘So it was for her,’ I said. What made my jealousy more absurd and humiliating was that it had to be expressed in the lowest of whispers—it had no tone, and jealousy likes histrionics. ‘You think these heroics will get her. How wrong you are. If I were dead you could have had her.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ Pyle said. ‘When you are in love you want to play the game, that’s all.’ That’s true, I thought, but not as he innocently means it. To be in love is to see yourself as someone else sees you, it is to be in love with the falsified and exalted image of yourself. In love we are incapable of honour—the courageous act is no more than playing a part to an audience of two. Perhaps I was no longer in love but I remembered.

  ‘If it had been you, I’d have left you,’ I said.

  ‘Oh no, you wouldn’t, Thomas.’ He added with unbearable complacency, ‘I know you better than you do yourself.’ Angrily I tried to move away from him and take my own weight, but the pain came roaring back like a train in a tunnel and I leant more heavily against him, before I began to sink into the water. He got both arms round me and held me up, and then inch by inch he began to edge me to the bank and the roadside. When he got me there he lowered me flat in the shallow mud below the bank at the edge of the field, and when the pain retreated and I opened my eyes and ceased to hold my breath, I could see only the elaborate cypher of the constellations—a foreign cypher which I couldn’t read: they were not the stars of home. His face wheeled over me, blotting them out. ‘I’m going down the road, Thomas, to find a patrol.’