‘Are there snakes around here?’ the English man asked the guide.
‘Yes, sure. Not too many now, because of all the people.’ He stamped his feet a few times. ‘Snakes go further away from all the walking. Many, many years ago this whole place—’ He arced his arms out over the jungle – ‘was full with snakes, wild pigs, buffalo, tigers.’
‘Tigers!’ The English woman sat up straight, excited.
‘Yes. Once there were many tigers in Vietnam. Now they all gone. Maybe twenty, thirty very far north. Here, all gone.’
‘Was it the war?’ the man asked.
The guide smiled, shook his head. ‘Long before this war, the ancient people here they feared the tiger above all else. For their fear, they had two solutions: first, they make cult of tiger, they sing and perform rituals to calm the tiger spirit so it won’t hunger for their children and buffalo. But also, the people were not stupid. They did not only pray and hope. No. They pray to the tiger spirit, but they hunt the tiger flesh. Actually, tiger is easy to kill. Arrows and swords and poison bait. Easy. So soon the tigers run out.’
‘That’s very sad,’ I said.
‘Maybe yes. But more sad if tiger eats your baby for his dinner, I think! Yes?’ He smiled. ‘I think for the tiger it is good to be killed fast like that. Sometimes the people try to catch the tigers, because they want to capture the power or something like this. To catch a tiger alive is very proud for a young man, you understand. The thing they do is, they climb the tree, very high so they can watch the tiger while it kills a pig or something. You see, after a kill, tigers would eat just a little and wander away, coming back later to eat some more. The hunter would watch and when the tiger left, he would climb down from the tree and push a barbed hook into the dead thing. The hook is tied to very fine silk, which is tied to a wooden pole.
‘When the tiger came back to finish its meal, it swallow the bait before reaching the wooden pole and trying to push it away. The bait hooks in its throat and the hunter could come forward and claim it. Now he is a hero. Now the tiger is roaring in pain. But still the man is proud of his catch. Soon the tiger has infection or is starving because throat and mouth is too damaged to eat. The man is still a hero but maybe a worried one. It takes some time, but the tiger dies. It is slow, the meat is no good, the skin is ruined. The hero is not a hero anymore. He said he captured the power of the tiger, but actually when he captured the tiger the power was gone. You can catch the tiger, but not the tiger’s power. And without the power, the tiger is no good to itself and no good to the people. But people don’t like to learn. They keep doing this thing, fishing for tigers, feeling proud, then burying tiger skin and bones.’
‘Imagine that,’ said the English man. ‘Catching a great big tiger with a little tiny hook.’
The first person to emerge from the tunnel was a twenty-something Canadian girl. She was white and shaking. Her friend came up behind her and grasped her shoulders. ‘And that’s been widened! God. Look at me! I scraped the walls and ceiling the whole way. That was the worst!’
Cal looked fine, but when he sat beside me and I asked how it was he shuddered. ‘Rather be shot to bits than have to live in a hole like a fucking rat.’
‘You say that now, but if you’d been—’
‘What do you know? You’re too gutless to even try it.’
‘I have a bad back.’
‘Yeah, right.’ He stalked off into the jungle, toward the souvenir stand.
As we boarded the bus for the trip home, Cal sucked in his breath, gripped my hand. I followed his gaze. An overweight bloke with silver hair and a long grey beard sat on the ground outside the toilet block. His hands were around his knees, his body heaving with silent sobs.
Back at the hotel I told Cal about the tigers.
‘That’s stupid. Never happened,’ he said. He sat stiffly on the edge of the bed, looking down at his knees.
‘I’m just telling you what the guide said.’
‘Yeah, no offence, but I think he was having you on. It’s too contrived, too perfectly metaphorical.’
‘Maybe.’
‘You think it’s true. Admit it.’
‘Okay, yes. I mean, I don’t actually get what the metaphor is. Sorry, I’m a bit thick sometimes.’ I touched his arm, trying to get him to look up and see the smile I hoped was self-deprecating enough to defuse things.
He continued glaring at his legs. ‘Why do you always try to dodge conversations?’
‘I’m not trying to dodge anything. I liked the story and thought you might, too. That’s all.’
‘Liked? It’s fucking horrible. Tigers starving to death or rotting from the throat down.’
‘You’re right, of course. I didn’t really think about that part. I just liked the idea of the jungle back then, full of wild animals and the occasional brave, lone hunter, instead of tunnels and bomb-craters, everything dead.’
‘Mish, come on, are you serious? You must know there were tigers during the war – it’s common knowledge. There were all these unburied bodies everywhere. All this meat. The tigers got a taste for it and became man-killers. Soldiers on both sides were eaten. You must’ve heard the stories, men sitting in pitch black listening to terrified screams and unidentified grunts, not knowing what had happened until the sun came up and they found some poor half-eaten . . .’
‘Maybe I’d heard about it, I don’t know. Some things I choose to forget.’ I went to the window and drew the curtains, muting the neon buffalo’s glow. ‘Can we stop talking about this now?’
He looked at me with contempt. ‘How do you do it? Just switch yourself off like that?’
‘Cal, I’m lost here. What is it you want me to say?’
‘I want you to stop playing dumb.’
‘God. Listen. I don’t know what you think I’m playing dumb about, but it doesn’t matter. I’m sure I’m guilty. Go ahead, hand me my sentence, Judge.’
He left my room and stayed away all night. A brutal punishment indeed.
In bed, alone, I remembered Ho Quyen, a crumbling arena on the banks of the Perfume River that I had visited in last year. The guide told us that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the emperors used to hold gladiatorial battles between tigers and elephants. The tigers – symbols of independence and rebellion – were drugged, declawed and had their teeth filed down before being released into the arena. Still, they’d charge at the elephants, scratch and bite with all the force of a newborn kitten. The elephants barely bothered to stomp them to death.
The people cheered, because they knew the elephants represented royalty and up there was the emperor, watching them rather than the animals. But secretly, our guide said, the people were sick with worry about the treatment of the tigers.
‘Tigers hold the spirits of the oldest and wisest of our ancestors. Sometimes we use the word for “grandfather” when we speak of them. So the people worried: what will become of us if we continue to abuse the grandfather spirits this way? I think soon the answer came. Yes? The emperors did not last much longer and their people suffered very much without the tiger spirit’s protection.’
In the morning over breakfast I told Cal what I remembered about the arena in . I thought I had a handle over the meaning of this one, that people everywhere use folk beliefs and religion to explain inconceivably large, historically tangled events. That they take impersonal events personally, believe their lack of muttered prayers or correctly bundled offering has affected the fate of the world. That most people would prefer to feel guilty than to feel powerless.
Cal didn’t respond right away, just continued slurping his soup. His forehead was coated with sweat even though we sat underneath the icy air-conditioner.
‘So you really didn’t get it yesterday?’ he said at last.
‘What?’
‘You spent all night thinking of a different story about tigers, as though . . . Oh, man.’ He laughed, the first authentic, uncontrolled laugh I’d heard from him in so lo
ng. ‘Next, will you tell me the one about how the tiger got his stripes? Or about why the medicine men boil tiger bones for soup? Wow. I’m sorry, Mish. I really thought you were playing dumb. But you were for real.’
I made myself sit still, smile at him, shrug. ‘Yep, apparently I’m genuinely dumb. You going to explain to me why?’
He looked me in the eye. ‘Figure it out yourself,’ he said.
We’d been in Saigon only five days, but it felt much longer. I was close to sorting out Matthew’s mess, but it looked like he would not be fit to travel for several weeks. Cal insisted he would stay and keep his dad company, but when we were alone again he asked me if I could call work and extend my leave.
‘Maybe, but I don’t particularly want to.’
We were walking single file down Bui Vien, a street on which you must keep moving or be swamped by book and postcard sellers and shoe-shine boys and bar touts.
Cal threw a look of contempt over his shoulder. ‘Great, thanks a lot.’
‘Try not to take everything so personally. It’s tiresome.’
He stopped and I stepped on his heels. He faced me, glaring. ‘How else should I take it?’
‘No, ,’ I said to the shoe-shine boy approaching from behind Cal. ‘Think for a minute. I have a job and a life in Hanoi. Coming down here to help a friend was the decent thing to do, but – No, , no – staying on now he’s capable of managing his own affairs would be weird. People will ask questions. He’ll ask questions. No, no, , no. Cal, we need to keep walking.’
He scowled, but continued along the path. A moustached man sidled up to Cal, who stopped, damn him, to listen.
‘Hey, brother, you come in my bar. Cold beer, nice girls.’ The man pointed towards a nearby shopfront, the window painted black with the words Crazzzy Girls in pink.
‘No, I’m with—’ Cal waved a hand in my direction.
‘Forget her. Much more beautiful girls here for you.’
‘Nah, mate, thanks.’ He pushed on.
A few doors down I spotted a pub I remembered from my last brief visit here. ‘I need an air-con break,’ I told Cal.
We found a booth and ordered beer and bottled water. Cal poked the edges of a wet-looking sore on his knuckle. ‘Did this coming out of the airport. Little scrape against the wall. Now look.’
‘It’s the climate. Wounds tend to fester. You should cover it.’
Cal shoved the knuckle into his mouth and bit down.
I watched a man at the bar, fiftyish, white hair, dressed in a crisp pale blue shirt, perfectly pressed beige trousers and expensive runners. He was twirling a pink umbrella in a bulbous glass filled with something thick and orange. A young Asian woman wearing a skin-tight black dress slid onto the stool beside him and smiled widely at the drink. He put his face to her ear and she squeezed his arm.
‘Disgusting,’ Cal said.
‘Maybe they’re in love.’
He snorted. ‘Yeah, she’s in love with his money and white skin and he’s in love with her tight Asian body.’
‘Like us, then.’
‘Fuck you.’
A wave of vertigo passed over me. I pressed the heels of my hands into the seat.
‘I mean, you’re not exactly rolling in it.’
‘What?’
‘Money. You don’t have much. The white skin, though, yeah. I admit that does it for me. Big time.’
‘I don’t know if you’re joking or being ironic or what.’
He looked at me, shattered and ravenous. ‘Mischa.’
‘Yeah. I know.’ I rubbed his shin with my foot. ‘It’ll get better.’
Saigon did not care that it was December; the heat was relentless. At breakfast, Cal thrust the Vietnam News at me, open to the weather report.
‘Look at Hanoi,’ he said and seemed to melt down into his seat. Hanoi had dropped ten degrees in the week we’d been gone. School children would be wearing brightly coloured ski-jackets over their uniforms. The moto drivers would have knitted caps peeking out from under their helmets. And I, like the other tâys in town, would wear t-shirts and jeans and rejoice at my ability to walk a block without sweating out half my body weight.
I was to return in two days and tried hard to hide my jubilation from Cal, who was as morose as I’d ever known him to be. I was as anxious to get away from his sulkiness as I was to lie in my big bed and listen to the bells of St Joseph’s.
‘I have an idea. Let’s indulge ourselves. We can take a taxi to , have lunch somewhere flash, wander through the designer malls.’
‘If you want.’
‘Well, what do you want to do?’
He swirled his chopsticks through his . ‘Don’t care. What you said is okay.’
He brightened once we reached . ‘This used to be the rue Catinat, you know? From The Quiet American?’
He had bought a photocopy of Greene’s novel from a legless boy across from our hotel. He’d also bought Catfish and Mandala and The Sorrow of War. I’d wondered out loud whether the street pedlars would sell those titles if they were able to read them. Cal had given me a pitying look. ‘They’d sell whatever the tourists buy. They’re trying to survive, not curating a politically correct post-colonial reading list.’
But today, strolling along the wide, clutter-free streets of , he was unselfconsciously excited. He pointed out landmarks from his reading, told me snippets of history and anecdotes. In a French patisserie we drank American-style iced coffee, our glasses overflowing with whipped cream and rich New Zealand ice-cream. The drinks cost more than the previous night’s dinner, but half as much, Cal reminded me, as they would cost in Sydney.
‘It’s like we’re not even in Vietnam,’ Cal said, watching through the chilly glass as two women in sky-high heels and exquisitely tailored pantsuits exited from the Caravelle Hotel and hailed a yellow cab.
‘It’s as much Vietnam as Hanoi. Or the Crazy Buffalo.’
‘Yeah. Shit. I sound like one of those orientalist wankers. “Oh, I want to see the real Vietnam. I want to drink snake blood and eat dog and, like, wear a nón lá while walking through rice fields.” ’
‘You’d look good in a nón lá.’
‘I look good in everything.’
‘And in nothing. Mmm. Nothing except the pointy hat. I think I need to see that.’
‘Hey, lady, calm down. I’m not your cheap Asian sex toy.’
‘What if I get you an akubra instead? Will you be my cheap Australian sex toy?’
He shrugged. ‘I suppose that’d be okay.’
Back outside our hotel we were approached by a shoe-shine boy. He dropped a child-size plastic stool at our feet, shook his head at Cal’s flip-flops, then thrust his brush and pot of oil at me with a hopeful smile and a glottal grunt. When I said no, he touched my sleeve and nodded at my dusty boots and forced another painful-sounding grunt from his throat.
‘No, ,’ I said, and took a step toward the hotel.
‘Go on, Mish. What’s the harm?’
‘No.’ I began to walk away. Cal grabbed my upper arm and yanked me back. ‘Ow! What’s your problem?’
‘Just let him clean your shoes. Please?’
‘No!’
The boy waved his brush at me, grinning widely.
‘I’ll pay for it, okay?’
‘It’s not about that. I said no and—’
‘Okay, yes, please,’ Cal said to the boy. He pushed me back toward the stool and I would have had to kick both of them and overturn the boy’s already open pot of oil to escape.
The boy knelt on a flattened detergent box and rubbed my boots. Across the street the legless bookseller stacked and re-stacked his plastic-wrapped photocopies of war porn and French colonial romances. Asian girls in tiny shorts and white men in pale billowing shirts filed past. A coconut seller, her face swaddled in blue cotton, wheeled her cart up the centre of the road, never flinching as the motos roared around her. Cal kept his hands on my shoulders.
‘,’ I said when my boots were clean.
I jerked away from Cal’s hands and stepped in front of him when he tried to pay. I don’t know how much I gave the boy. I took notes from my purse and he smiled and clicked what I suppose was thanks.
In the elevator, Cal said sorry. Walking up the two airless flights to my room, he demanded I say something. In my room, he stood with his back to the door and called me a cold bitch.
I sat on the unmade bed and took off my boots.
‘I couldn’t take it anymore, Mischa. You always flick those guys away like they’re nothing, like they’re shit stuck to your shoe. I know I was out of line down there, but Jesus, I can’t take it. That could be me! Do you understand that? You look down on him like he’s a bug, but how am I different? Seriously? If that guy could speak – if he could speak English – would you bring him up here and suck his dick? If his skin was a bit lighter? If he didn’t need to clean your shoes to feed himself?’
I sobbed suddenly. And although I saw that it was distressing to Cal, I couldn’t stop. He came and held me, he apologised, he begged my forgiveness, he told me how much he loved me, he cried too, he washed my face and took off my pants and shirt and pressed ice cubes to the back of my neck and eventually, I suppose, we must have fallen asleep.
I saw the maid a moment before she turned her face away and left the room and re-locked the door behind her. I lay frozen, listening to the cleaning trolley clunk down the stairs. The late afternoon sun pulsed through the thin, gold curtains.
‘Shit. Cal. Shit.’ I shook him awake as I fumbled for my clothes.
He sat up, rubbing his puffy eyes. His torso was striped where he’d lain across the crumpled bedspread. ‘What time is it?’
‘I don’t know. Late.’
He reached for the phone. ‘It’s four-thirty. We’ll just tell Dad we went to another museum or something.’