Fishing for Tigers

  ‘It’s a sentimental favourite; not a national anthem, more like . . .’ I thought back to my teenage years, karaoke night at the local RSL club. ‘Ironically enough, it’s kind of like “Khe Sanh”. Some old song that everybody knows and when they get drunk, they sing it as though they lived it. In the karaoke bar we went to in Hanoi, it was always played over this background video of a mournful-looking old woman outside a bamboo hut. I must have seen that video and heard the song fifty times before Marcus explained the lyrics to me. Long me means “mother’s intestines” – the song’s about the physical ache in the guts mothers have when they lose their children. I thought it was weird that Marcus sang it with such sincerity and emotion, given he knew what it was about, but he said the subject matter wasn’t important, that participating in social rituals was the key to cultural adhesion, or something.’

  ‘Sounds like a tosser.’

  ‘Nah. He was sweet.’

  Cal stabbed his fork into the bowl, twirled some spaghetti, dropped it again. ‘Yeah? Why’d you break up with him then?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘No, I suppose you wouldn’t.’

  I pushed my uneaten pasta aside. ‘Meaning?’

  ‘It’s just that I heard your husband used to beat you up and if you didn’t leave him, then . . .’ That fucking adolescent shrug.

  I made eye contact with the hovering waiter and made the check sign. He nodded and dashed towards the kitchen. I smoothed the napkin in front of me.

  ‘Obviously I did leave him.’

  ‘But not for ages. Not until he nearly killed you.’

  The waiter brought the check and despite the inedible food, I gestured that he should keep the change. Leaving the restaurant immediately was worth much more than 50,000 dong.

  On the street, Cal caught me by the elbow. I shook him off. He put both arms around my waist and held me still against him. He kissed my neck, murmured sorry sorry sorry. The street was packed with tourists, many of them wearing almost nothing, many others trailing very young Vietnamese girls, but still I felt a rush of danger. I gently disentangled myself, but let him keep hold of my hand.

  ‘Did your dad tell you that?’ I asked after a few minutes of calm.

  ‘No. Listen, I shouldn’t have said anything, please—’

  ‘Who?’

  He sighed. ‘Collins.’

  ‘Him? Jesus. He doesn’t even know me. How would he . . . Fucking gossipy fucks I call friends.’ Adrenalin flooded through my arms. My hands and throat felt swollen. If Cal hadn’t been holding on to my hand and if the road in front of me hadn’t been swarming with motos I would’ve run and run until I couldn’t anymore.

  ‘It was ages ago, Mish, before you and I were together. Some stupid throwaway line. I thought if it was true that you’d tell me eventually, so I never brought it up. I wish I hadn’t brought it up now.’

  ‘Me too.’

  A man cut in front of us, blocked our way forward. It took me a second to realise he had only one eye and no hands. Around his neck was a glass jar with a few low-denomination bills clinging to the sides. ‘Please, monsieur, madame. I cannot work. Please help.’

  Before I could respond he stepped forward and caught Cal’s face between his smooth stumps. ‘.’ He looked like he wanted to spit. ‘You come back for nice holiday ?’

  ‘Here.’ I waved a wad of notes in the air. He dropped his stumps and I shoved the money into his jar. He sneered at Cal, then turned to me, nodded sharply and lurched off into the crowds.

  ‘You okay?’ I asked.

  ‘Me? Christ. He’s the one without any hands.’

  e were catching our breath after making love when Cal told me he was thinking of going back to the War Remnants museum tomorrow. ‘Dad said we missed the best bits. Upstairs, apparently there’s an exhibition of photos taken by the ­foreign photographers and reporters who died here. He said it’s more balanced and subtle than the horror propaganda downstairs.’

  ‘I thought you said the photos downstairs should be essential viewing?’

  ‘Yeah, but Dad had a good point, too, about how ­photos can lie in the sense that you can choose what to show and what to leave out. At least with the upstairs exhibit you know the context, that these were guys from our side, trying to document the truth.’

  ‘Our side?’

  ‘What? Is that wrong?’

  ‘I’ve never really thought of myself as being on a side, I suppose.’

  Cal scratched his jaw. ‘No, you wouldn’t.’

  ‘Ouch. What was that tone?’

  He sat up on the edge of the bed and looked out at the Crazy Buffalo. The neon turned his skin deep rose. ‘You pride yourself on the fact you get along with everyone, and that sounds great, like you don’t judge anyone, but the more I think about it, the more I think that really sucks. You know the only people who get along with immoral scummy losers, Mischa, are other immoral scummy losers.’

  ‘You get along with me okay.’

  ‘Not lately.’

  ‘No. That’s true. You’ve been a brat and I – immoral scummy loser that I am – have continued to be nice to you.’

  He turned to face me, sitting up on his haunches, looking like he might overbalance and tumble to the floor if either of us moved. ‘Why have you?’

  I wanted to lay him out on the tiles of that shitty cubicle of a bathroom and turn the cold tap on full and lie with him there until our flesh puckered and wrinkled. I wanted to rub aloe into his burnt shoulders and tea tree oil into his inflamed zits. I wanted to take him back to Hanoi and sit with him in the gardens of where history heals instead of horrifies.

  ‘You can’t even answer me! But I know why. You’re nice to me because you’re nice to everybody! You’re pathologically nice. You treat me the same as you treat everyone else.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Apart from the fucking.’ He looked away on the last word.

  ‘That’s a pretty big exception. And even without it, you’re wrong. I’m not keen on confrontation, that’s true, but these days I’m excellent at walking away from it. Yet you’ll notice that I haven’t walked away from this stupid argument, that I haven’t told you to get dressed and get out of here after you’ve shouted at me, insulted me. Believe me, I wouldn’t be like this with anyone else.’

  He crumpled a little. ‘But why?’

  I was struck by the expression on his face. Transparent as ever. He wanted me to save him, to give him a reason to end this fight and come back to bed. More than that, he wanted me to give him a solid excuse for staying in a relationship that he clearly knew was bad for him. I wanted that too.

  ‘Because you’re the best person I know. Have ever known, I think. You try so hard to be good and fair and to think deeply about all these hard things that most people ignore. Sometimes that makes you a total pain in the arse, but that’s good, too. Because otherwise you’d be perfect and that would be fucking unbearable.’

  ‘I’m not a good person, Mish. I’m lying to my dad, who’s injured and trusting and needy. And to my mum, whose heart I’m breaking just by being here.’ He lunged at me, kissed my neck and face, clutched my ponytail in both hands. ‘And I’m so mean to you. I don’t know why, but I am and I hate myself.’

  ‘It’s okay. I can take it.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have to.’

  ‘So stop doing it. Be nicer.’

  He kissed me so hard, then. It was like he’d never meant it before.

  I was drifting off to sleep when he started talking again. ‘I remember scripture class at school, I must have been eight or nine. The teacher asked if we thought most people in the world are good. I said yes and that was wrong. I don’t remember anything else from scripture. I still don’t know if I believe it.’ He shifted, brushed his lips over my ear. ‘Do you?’

  ‘It depends on what you mean by good, I suppose.’

  ‘What do you mean by it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Doing no harm, causing no pain. Or t
rying not to, anyway.’

  ‘I think that describes most people. I do.’

  ‘Me too,’ I said.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. What time is it?’ I sat up. The Crazy Buffalo had gone dark. I reached over the edge of the bed and fumbled for my phone. It was almost 3 am. ‘You need to go.’

  ‘Dad’ll be knocked out for hours still.’

  ‘Just in case, though.’

  Breakfast was served each morning between seven and ten at fold-out plastic picnic tables in the hotel lobby. Since the first morning here, Cal and I had been meeting down there at eight-thirty. This morning he didn’t turn up until a few minutes past nine. I had finished my already and was about to go back upstairs and call him.

  He slumped across from me, red-eyed and already sweating, and told me that after he’d left my room he’d sat in the empty stairwell and called his mother.

  ‘I told her I was in Saigon. I didn’t tell her about Dad’s accident, just that we came here to look around. She wasn’t upset. She was interested. Wanted to know where I’d been. What it was like. I told her it was very different to Hanoi and she liked that. We got talking. She told me things she never has before. The year before she was born, there was this big battle, really famous, the Offensive. The Northern army stormed this palace fortress thing. It was at, um . . .’

  ‘.’ I pictured the bomb and artillery scarred walls of the Imperial city. On a short break last year, I had sat under the flag tower and eaten a delicious lemon sorbet.

  ‘Right.’ He glanced at the nearby tables, then slid his chair closer to mine. He was almost whispering. ‘So, my grandpa’s sister and her family got caught up in it. The whole family, mother, father, three children under the age of six, they were all killed. Clubbed to death and thrown in a mass grave.’

  I shivered as the air-conditioner blew freezing air down the back of my shirt. I think I said ‘Christ’ or something equally pointless.

  ‘I asked her how I never knew about this and she said she only found out a month ago. Her father who she has lived with all of her life, and she never knew half his family was massacred. Mum said it was because of me. Me being here has cracked him open.’

  I patted his hand; he pulled it away, brushed the non-existent fringe from his forehead.

  ‘She told me something else, too,’ he went on, his whisper as loud as ordinary speech now. ‘Something I’d forgotten. When I was ten I had nightmares about my dad being killed in Vietnam. I think I must have seen some American movie on TV and got it in my head that Dad was stuck in the middle of the war that Mum and Grandpa and my aunties escaped from. Apparently I started talking about going over to rescue him and she had to explain that the war was over, that he was in Vietnam by choice. I was really distressed, though, and so she got this travel book about Vietnam from the library and showed me all the pictures: beautiful Ha Long Bay and smiling people in colourful markets and pretty girls on bicycles. It calmed me. I forgot about having to rescue Dad.’

  A teenager dressed in a waiter’s white pyjamas put a plate of cut fruit on our table. The dragonfruit I tried felt like sand in my mouth.

  ‘That must have been very difficult for your mum,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah.’ Cal stabbed a fork into a slice of watermelon. ‘She really fucking hates this place.’

  Matthew suggested Cal and I take a half-day tour to the Cu Chi Tunnels. I thought it was a terrible idea and argued for the Cao Dai Temple instead, but Cal was insistent. ‘I’m a bloke, I like guns and shit,’ he said and Matthew laughed proudly. I wanted to slap them both. Instead I went downstairs and booked the tour.

  The mini-bus was as old as me and in far worse condition. The tour was fully booked so Cal and I had to sit squished in the corner of the back seat. Our arms stuck together, the skin pulling and stinging at each sharp turn. Every time we hit a pothole or bump I was lifted half an inch off the seat. Once we cleared the Ho Chi Minh City limits, there was nothing but potholes and bumps. By the time we arrived in Cu Chi I felt my spine was made of glass. With every step I risked shattering.

  The day was drizzly, though no cooler for it. Our group huddled under a tin roof at the entrance of the historical site as our guide, a sad-eyed young man with German-accented English, explained the history. During the American War, a revolutionary compound was established under the town of Cu Chi. Eventually, the tunnels stretched 200 kilometres and encompassed underground classrooms, meeting rooms, even a field hospital. Air slid in through bamboo plants or tiny vents disguised as ant hills. Cu Chi became the most bombed, defoliated, and gassed region in the history of modern warfare.

  Now the compound is a popular tourist destination, necessitating a ticket office and orderly queues, introductory videos and reminders to stay with the group. But the ­jungle remains the jungle, dense enough to keep our heads dry for minutes at a time, dark and full of the sweet stench of rotting vegetation. Our guide pointed out historically significant lumps of earth and clusters of bamboo and bomb craters blanketed in weeds.

  He stopped at a cordoned-off patch of grass and picked up a nearby branch. ‘Look!’ He poked the ground and it flipped up. Metal teeth snapped the branch in two. People giggled or sucked in their breath. Cal asked if it was real.

  ‘Of course. All over here there were traps. After the war, they’re mostly removed, but we leave some like this to show how it happened. American try to sneak up on tunnel entries. Snap!’ He clapped his hands, once. ‘Americans are tall. Usually, the teeth cut them here.’ He indicated his stomach. ‘Sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Always they scream. No more sneaking.’

  We moved on to a replica bunker. Cal and the other men in the group posed with the replica rifles. The sound of real gunfire echoed through the jungle. ‘Firing range over there,’ the guide explained. ‘We can go soon. Shoot the real war weapons.’

  The drizzle hadn’t stopped. I couldn’t tell anymore whether I was drenched in sweat or rainwater. The gunshots got louder as we walked further into the jungle. We came to a shoebox-sized hole in the ground and a middle-aged man dressed in camouflage folded himself into it and dis­appeared underground.

  ‘Anyone want to try?’ our guide asked, and we tourists shook our heads, ashamed of our largeness, amused by the idea of being Vietnamese, of living in the ground like spiders.

  ‘How about you, ?’

  Cal stepped forward as though he’d expected to be called on all along. Several among our group cheered.

  ‘Yes. Good. Come on. You have camera? I can take photo for you.’

  ‘No camera,’ Cal said. He knelt next to the hole and peered in. ‘Is there a trick to this or do I just squeeze in?’

  ‘Vietnamese very small. This is the trick.’

  Cal stood, grinned at the crowd, and stepped into the hole. His body dropped and my breath rushed into my throat. ‘Ugh,’ Cal said. His arms hung out over the top of the hole. He wriggled a while, trying to get one or both arms down, but his torso filled the entire space. ‘So close,’ he said. The group applauded as the guide helped him out.

  ‘Good try. Usually the tourists get only to here.’ The guide pointed to his hips. ‘But you’re part-Vietnamese, so you get halfway down.’

  Cal frowned. ‘How did you know I’m part-Vietnamese?’

  ‘You have Vietnamese face, but you are bigger and paler.’ The guide turned to me, smiled. ‘Now some Vietnamese boys and girls are big like this, too. If they study overseas, they get big. Yes. Sometimes they speak good English or German, they pretend to me they are not Vietnamese. They pretend they are from overseas. But I always know.’ He gestured at Cal’s chest. ‘When I call on overseas Vietnamese they smile and I see their teeth are like American movie teeth. ­Vietnamese have small teeth, not so white. They don’t smile when I call them. And when they don’t fit in the tunnel they are angry. Overseas Vietnamese are not angry. Always they laugh.’

  The guide patted Cal’s back and hurried to the front of his group.

  ‘Do I loo
k like I’m laughing?’ Cal muttered.

  ‘Very rarely these days.’

  ‘This place is sick. Woo-hoo – let’s crawl in and out of holes where people were gassed to death! Let’s poke murderous jungle traps! Let’s go shoot the weapons used to kill Americans. What kind of a country turns this kind of shit into a goddamn tourist park?’

  I sighed. ‘Every kind, Cal. Anyway, you’re the one who wanted to come here. What did you think it was going to be like?’

  He toed the long grass. ‘Do you think there are leeches here?’

  ‘Probably. We’re losing the group.’

  He grunted and surged forward.

  The gunshots grew louder. By the time we reached the tin hall that acted as an entry to the firing range, my hands were over my ears and I could barely breathe. ‘You look idiotic,’ Cal hissed, but looking around, there were more people covering their ears or cowering against the far wall than doing as Cal was, sauntering casually up to the gun bank and handing over 200,000 dong to fire ten rounds from his choice of carbine, M16 or AK-47.

  ‘You don’t want to shoot?’ the guide asked me. I shook my head.

  ‘Maybe you like some refreshments.’ He pointed to a cloudy fridge at the far end of the hall. I bought a bottle of water from a woman old enough to have fired these guns the first time around. I wanted to ask her how she could stand working here. I covered my ears and cringed, but she only smiled toothlessly and turned to the next customer.

  ‘You should’ve had a go,’ Cal said, taking my water and swigging down half.

  ‘I don’t like guns.’

  He handed back the bottle, let his hand rest against mine for a second. ‘You’re all shaky. Are you sick?’

  I shook my head. His sudden, familiar kindness made me speechless. He pressed his palm to my forehead and it must have felt okay, or else terrible, because he turned on his heel and stalked off to the fridge to buy a bottle of Coke.

  The final activity of the tour was the walk through 20 metres of the original tunnel, specially ‘widened for westerners’. I immediately declared my intention to wait above ground, as did a middle-aged English couple who cited ‘back problems’. The guide ushered the others into the tunnel entrance and then led the three of us to a picnic table near the exit.