The Quiet American

  ‘Thank you, your Eminence.’ I got up to go. He came with me to the door, scattering cigarette-ash.

  ‘God’s blessing on your work,’ he said unctuously. ‘Remember God loves the truth.’

  ‘Which truth ?’ I asked.

  ‘In the Caodaist faith all truths are reconciled and truth is love.’

  He had a large ring on his finger and, when he held out his hand I really think he expected me to kiss it, but I am not a diplomat.

  Under the bleak vertical sunlight I saw Pyle; he was trying in vain to make his Buick start. Somehow, during the last two weeks, at the bar of the Continental, in the only good bookshop in the rue Catinat, I had continually run into Pyle. The friendship which he had imposed from the beginning he now emphasized more than ever. His sad eyes would inquire with fervour after Phuong, while his lips expressed with even more fervour the strength of his affection and of his admiration—God save the mark—for me.

  A Caodaist commandant stood beside the car talking rapidly. He stopped when I came up. I recognized him—he had been one of Thé’s assistants before Thé took to the hills.

  ‘Hullo, commandant,’ I said, ‘how’s the General?’

  ‘Which general?’ he asked with a shy grin.

  ‘Surely in the Caodaist faith,’ I said, ‘all generals are reconciled.’

  ‘I can’t make this car move, Thomas,’ Pyle said.

  ‘I will get a mechanic,’ the commandant said, and left us.

  ‘I interrupted you.’

  ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ Pyle said. ‘He wanted to know how much a Buick cost. These people are so friendly when you treat them right. The French don’t seem to know how to handle them.’

  ‘The French don’t trust them.’

  Pyle said solemnly, ‘A man becomes trustworthy when you trust him.’ It sounded like a Caodaist maxim. I began to feel the air of Tanyin was too ethical for me to breathe.

  ‘Have a drink,’ Pyle said.

  ‘There’s nothing I’d like better.’

  ‘I brought a thermos of lime-juice with me.’ He leant over and busied himself with a basket in the back.

  ‘Any gin?’

  ‘No, I’m awfully sorry. You know,’ he said encouragingly, ‘lime-juice is very good for you in this climate. It contains—I’m not sure which vitamins.’ He held out a cup to me and I drank.

  ‘Anyway, it’s wet,’ I said.

  ‘Like a sandwich? They’re really awfully good. A new sandwich-spread called Vit-Health. My mother sent it from the States.’

  ‘No, thanks, I’m not hungry.’

  ‘It tastes rather like Russian salad—only sort of drier.’

  ‘I don’t think I will.’

  ‘You don’t mind if I do?’

  ‘No, no, of course not.’

  He took a large mouthful and it crunched and crackled. In the distance Buddha in white and pink stone rode away from his ancestral home and his valet—another statue—pursued him running. The female cardinals were drifting back to their house and the Eye of God watched us from above the Cathedral door.

  ‘You know they are serving lunch here?’ I said.

  ‘I thought I wouldn’t risk it. The meat—you have to be careful in this heat.’

  ‘You are quite safe. They are vegetarian.’

  ‘I suppose it’s all right—but I like to know what I’m eating.’ He took another munch at his Vit-Health. ‘Do you think they have any reliable mechanics?’

  ‘They know enough to turn your exhaust pipe into a mortar. I believe Buicks make the best mortars.’

  The commandant returned and, saluting us smartly, said he had sent to the barracks for a mechanic. Pyle offered him a Vit-Health sandwich, which he refused politely. He said with a man-of-the-world air, ‘We have so many rules here about food.’ (He spoke excellent English.) ‘So foolish. But you know what it is in a religious capital. I expect it is the same thing in Rome—or Canterbury,’ he added with a neat natty little bow to me. Then he was silent. They were both silent. I had a strong impression that my company was not wanted. I couldn’t resist the temptation to tease Pyle—it is, after all, the weapon of weakness and I was weak. I hadn’t youth, seriousness, integrity, a future. I said, ‘Perhaps after all I’ll have a sandwich.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ Pyle said, ‘of course.’ He paused before turning to the basket in the back.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘I was only joking. You two want to be alone.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind,’ Pyle said. He was one of the most inefficient liars I have ever known—it was an art he had obviously never practised. He explained to the commandant, ‘Thomas here’s the best friend I have.’

  ‘I know Mr Fowler,’ the commandant said.

  ‘I’ll see you before I go, Pyle.’ And I walked away to the Cathedral. I could get some coolness there.

  Saint Victor Hugo in the uniform of the French Academy with the halo round his tricorn hat pointed at some noble sentiment Sun Yat Sen was inscribing on a tablet, and then I was in the nave. There was nowhere to sit except in the Papal chair, round which a plaster cobra coiled, the marble floor glittered like water and there was no glass in the windows. We make a cage for air with holes, I thought, and man makes a cage for his religion in much the same way—with doubts left open to the weather and creeds opening on innumerable interpretations. My wife had found her cage with holes and sometimes I envied her. There is a conflict between sun and air: I lived too much in the sun.

  I walked the long empty nave—this was not the Indo-China I loved. The dragons with lion-like heads climbed the pulpit: on the roof Christ exposed his bleeding heart. Buddha sat, as Buddha always sits, with his lap empty. Confusius’s beard hung meagrely down like a waterfall in the dry season. This was play-acting: the great globe above the altar was ambition: the basket with the movable lid in which the Pope worked his prophecies was trickery. If this Cathedral had existed for five centuries instead of two decades, would it have gathered a kind of convincingness with the scratches of feet and the erosion of weather? Would somebody who was convincible like my wife find here a faith she couldn’t find in human beings? And if I had really wanted faith would I have found it in her Norman church? But I had never desired faith. The job of a reporter is to expose and record. I had never in my career discovered the inexplicable. The Pope worked his prophecies with a pencil in a movable lid and the people believed. In any vision somewhere you could find the planchette. I had no visions or miracles in my repertoire of memory.

  I turned my memories over at random like pictures in an album: a fox I had seen by the light of an enemy flare over Orpington stealing along beside a fowl run, out of his russet place in the marginal country: the body of a bayoneted Malay which a Gurkha patrol had brought at the back of a lorry into a mining camp in Pahang, and the Chinese coolies stood by and giggled with nerves, while a brother Malay put a cushion under the dead head: a pigeon on a mantelpiece, poised for flight in a hotel bedroom: my wife’s face at a window when I came home to say good-bye for the last time. My thoughts had begun and ended with her. She must have received my letter more than a week ago, and the cable I did not expect had not come. But they say if a jury remains out for long enough there is hope for the prisoner. In another week, if no letter arrived, could I begin to hope? All round me I could hear the cars of the soldiers and the diplomats revving up: the party was over for another year. The stampede back to Saigon was beginning, and curfew called. I went out to look for Pyle.

  He was standing in a patch of shade with his commandant, and no one was doing anything to his car. The conversation seemed to be over, whatever it had been about, and they stood silently there, constrained by mutual politeness. I joined them.

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think I’ll be off. You’d better be leaving too if you want to be in before curfew.’

  ‘The mechanic hasn’t turned up.’

  ‘He will come soon,’ the commandant said. ‘He was in the parade.’

  ‘You could spend the nig
ht,’ I said. ‘There’s a special Mass—you’ll find it quite an experience. It lasts three hours.’

  ‘I ought to get back.’

  ‘You won’t get back unless you start now.’ I added unwillingly, ‘I’ll give you a lift if you like and the commandant can have your car sent in to Saigon tomorrow.’

  ‘You need not bother about curfew in Caodaist territory,’ the commandant said smugly. ‘But beyond . . . Certainly I will have your car sent tomorrow.’

  ‘Exhaust intact,’ I said, and he smiled brightly, neatly, efficiently, a military abbreviation of a smile.

  II

  The procession of cars was well ahead of us by the time we started. I put on speed to try to overtake it, but we had passed out of the Caodaist zone into the zone of the Hoa-Haos with not even a dust cloud ahead of us. The world was flat and empty in the evening.

  It was not the kind of country one associates with ambush, but men could conceal themselves neck-deep in the drowned fields within a few yards of the road.

  Pyle cleared his throat and it was the signal for an approaching intimacy. ‘I hope Phuong’s well,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve never known her ill.’ One watch tower sank behind, another appeared, like weights on a balance.

  ‘I saw her sister out shopping yesterday.’

  ‘And I suppose she asked you to look in,’ I said.

  ‘As a matter of fact she did.’

  ‘She doesn’t give up hope easily.’

  ‘Hope?’

  ‘Of marrying you to Phuong.’

  ‘She told me you are going away.’

  ‘These rumours get about.’

  Pyle said, ‘You’d play straight with me, Thomas, wouldn’t you?’

  ‘Straight?’

  ‘I’ve applied for a transfer,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want her to be left without either of us.’

  ‘I thought you were going to see your time out.’

  He said without self-pity, ‘I found I couldn’t stand it.’

  ‘When are you leaving?’

  ‘I don’t know. They thought something could be arranged in six months.’

  ‘You can stand six months?’

  ‘I’ve got to.’

  ‘What reason did you give?’

  ‘I told the Economic Attaché—you met him—Joe—more or less the facts.’

  ‘I suppose he thinks I’m a bastard not to let you walk off with my girl.’

  ‘Oh no, he rather sided with you.’

  The car was spluttering and heaving—it had been spluttering for a minute, I think, before I noticed it, for I had been examining Pyle’s innocent question: ‘Are you playing straight?’ It belonged to a psychological world of great simplicity, where you talked of Democracy and Honor without the u as it’s spelt on old tombstones, and you meant what your father meant by the same words. I said, ‘We’ve run out.’

  ‘Gas?’

  ‘There was plenty. I crammed it full before I started. Those bastards in Tanyin have syphoned it out. I ought to have noticed. It’s like them to leave us enough to get out of their zone.’

  ‘What shall we do?’

  ‘We can just make the next watch tower. Let’s hope they have a little.’

  But we were out of luck. The car reached within thirty yards of the tower and gave up. We walked to the foot of the tower and I called up in French to the guards that we were friends, that we were coming up. I had no wish to be shot by a Vietnamese sentry. There was no reply: nobody looked out. I said to Pyle, ‘Have you a gun?’

  ‘I never carry one.’

  ‘Nor do I.’

  The last colours of sunset, green and gold like the rice, were dripping over the edge of the flat world: against the grey neutral sky the watch tower looked as black as print. It must be nearly the hour of curfew. I shouted again and nobody answered.

  ‘Do you know how many towers we passed since the last fort?’

  ‘I wasn’t noticing.’

  ‘Nor was I.’ It was probably at least six kilometres to the next fort—an hour’s walk. I called a third time, and silence repeated itself like an answer.

  I said, ‘It seems to be empty: I’d better climb up and see.’ The yellow flag with red stripes faded to orange showed that we were out of the territory of the Hoa-Haos and in the territory of the Vietnamese army.

  Pyle said, ‘Don’t you think if we waited here a car might come?’

  ‘It might, but they might come first.’

  ‘Shall I go back and turn on the lights? For a signal.’

  ‘Good God, no. Let it be.’ It was dark enough now to stumble, looking for the ladder. Something cracked under foot; I could imagine the sound travelling across the fields of paddy, listened to by whom? Pyle had lost his outline and was a blur at the side of the road. Darkness, when once it fell, fell like a stone. I said, ‘Stay there until I call.’ I wondered whether the guard would have drawn up his ladder, but there it stood—though an enemy might climb it, it was their only way of escape. I began to mount.

  I have read so often of people’s thoughts in the moment of fear: of God, or family, or a woman. I admire their control. I thought of nothing, not even of the trap-door above me: I ceased, for those seconds, to exist: I was fear taken neat. At the top of the ladder I banged my head because fear couldn’t count steps, hear, or see. Then my head came over the earth floor and nobody shot at me and fear seeped away.

  III

  A small oil lamp burned on the floor and two men crouched against the wall, watching me. One had a sten gun and one a rifle, but they were as scared as I’d been. They looked like schoolboys, but with the Vietnamese age drops suddenly like the sun—they are boys and then they are old men. I was glad that the colour of my skin and the shape of my eyes were a passport—they wouldn’t shoot now even from fear.

  I came up out of the floor, talking to reassure them, telling them that my car was outside, that I had run out of petrol. Perhaps they had a little I could buy. It didn’t seem likely as I stared around. There was nothing in the little round room except a box of ammunition for the sten gun, a small wooden bed, and two packs hanging on a nail. A couple of pans with the remains of rice and some wooden chopsticks showed they had been eating without much appetite.

  ‘Just enough to get us to the next fort?’ I asked.

  One of the men sitting against the wall—the one with the rifle—shook his head.

  ‘If you can’t we’ll have to stay the night here.’

  ‘C’est défendu.’

  ‘Who by?’

  ‘You are a civilian.’

  ‘Nobody’s going to make me sit out there on the road and have my throat cut.’

  ‘Are you French?’

  Only one man had spoken. The other sat with his head turned sideways, watching the slit in the wall. He could have seen nothing but a postcard of sky: he seemed to be listening and I began to listen too. The silence became full of sound: noises you couldn’t put a name to—a crack, a creak, a rustle, something like a cough, and a whisper. Then I heard Pyle: he must have come to the foot of the ladder. ‘You all right, Thomas?’

  ‘Come up,’ I called back. He began to climb the ladder and the silent soldier shifted his sten gun—I don’t believe he’d heard a word of what we’d said: it was an awkward, jumpy movement. I realized that fear had paralysed him. I rapped out at him like a sergeant-major, ‘Put that gun down!’ and I used the kind of French obscenity I thought he would recognize. He obeyed me automatically. Pyle came up into the room. I said, ‘We’ve been offered the safety of the tower till morning.’

  ‘Fine,’ Pyle said. His voice was a little puzzled. He said. ‘Oughtn’t one of those mugs to be on sentry?’

  ‘They prefer not to be shot at. I wish you’d brought something stronger than lime-juice.’

  ‘I guess I will next time,’ Pyle said.

  ‘We’ve got a long night ahead.’ Now that Pyle was with me, I didn’t hear the noises. Even the two soldiers seemed to have relaxed a little.
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  ‘What happens if the Viets attack them?’ Pyle asked.

  ‘They’ll fire a shot and run. You read it every morning in the Extrême Orient. “A post south-west of Saigon was temporarily occupied last night by the Vietminh”.’

  ‘It’s a bad prospect.’

  ‘There are forty towers like this between us and Saigon. The chances always are that it’s the other chap who’s hurt.’

  ‘We could have done with those sandwiches,’ Pyle said. ‘I do think one of them should keep a look-out.’

  ‘He’s afraid a bullet might look in.’ Now that we too had settled on the floor, the Vietnamese relaxed a little. I felt some sympathy for them: it wasn’t an easy job for a couple of ill-trained men to sit up here night after night, never sure of when the Viets might creep up on the road through the fields of paddy. I said to Pyle, ‘Do you think they know they are fighting for Democracy? We ought to have York Harding here to explain it to them.’

  ‘You always laugh at York,’ said Pyle.

  ‘I laugh at anyone who spends so much time writing about what doesn’t exist—mental concepts.’

  ‘They exist for him. Haven’t you got any mental concepts? God, for instance?’

  ‘I’ve no reason to believe in a God. Do you?’

  ‘Yes. I’m a Unitarian.’

  ‘How many hundred million Gods do people believe in? Why, even a Roman Catholic believes in quite a different God when he’s scared or happy or hungry.’

  ‘Maybe, if there is a God, he’d be so vast he’d look different to everyone.’

  ‘Like the great Buddha in Bangkok,’ I said. ‘You can’t see all of him at once. Anyway he keeps still.’

  ‘I guess you’re just trying to be tough,’ Pyle said. ‘There’s something you must believe in. Nobody can go on living without some belief.’

  ‘Oh, I’m not a Berkeleian. I believe my back’s against this wall. I believe there’s a sten gun over there.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘I believe what I report, which is more than most of your correspondents do.’

  ‘Cigarette?’

  ‘I don’t smoke—except opium. Give one to the guards. We’d better stay friends with them.’ Pyle got up and lit their cigarettes and came back. I said, ‘I wish cigarettes had a symbolic significance like salt.’