The Sympathizer (16 page)

When I handed him a glass of rye, I saw the red scar on his hand. Here’s to the major, Bon said. The medicinal taste of the rye was so awful we had a second drink to wash it away, then a third, and so forth, all while watching television specials celebrating the nation’s birthday. It was not just any birthday, but the bicentennial of a great, brawny nation, a little punch-drunk from recent foreign excursions but now on its feet again and ready to swing, or so proclaimed the chatterati. Then we ate three of the oranges and went to bed. I lay down on my bunk, closed my eyes, knocked my knees against the rearranged furniture of my thoughts, and shuddered at what I saw. I opened my eyes but it made no difference. No matter whether my eyes were open or shut, I could still see it, the crapulent major’s third eye, weeping because of what it could see about me.

CHAPTER 7

I
confess that the major’s death troubled me greatly, Commandant, even if it does not trouble you. He was a relatively innocent man, which was the best one could hope for in this world. In Saigon, I could have depended on my weekly visits to the basilica with Man to discuss my misgivings, but here I was alone with myself, my deeds, and my beliefs. I knew what Man would say to me, but I just needed him to say it to me again, as he had on other occasions, such as the time I passed to him a cartridge of film recording the heliborne assault plans of a Ranger battalion. Innocent men would die as a result of my actions, wouldn’t they? Of course men will die, Man said, masking his words behind his folded hands as we knelt in a pew. But they aren’t innocent. Neither are we, my friend. We’re revolutionaries, and revolutionaries can never be innocent. We know too much and have done too much.

I shivered in the humid climate of the basilica while the dowagers droned.
As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.
Contrary to some perceptions, revolutionary ideology, even in a tropical country, is not hot. It is cold, man-made. Little surprise, then, that revolutionaries needed natural heat sometimes. Thus, when I received an invitation to a wedding not long after the crapulent major’s demise, I accepted with enthusiasm. Sofia Mori was my curious guest to this reception for a couple whose names I had to check on the invitation before greeting them. The bride’s father was a legendary marine colonel whose battalion fought off an NVA regiment during the Battle of Hue with no American assistance, while the groom’s father was the vice president of the Saigon branch of Bank of America. His family had fled Saigon on a jet chartered by Bank of America, thus avoiding the indignity of the refugee camps. The most distinctive thing about the vice president, besides his air of effortless distinction, was the Clark Gable mustache playing dead on his upper lip, an adornment favored by southern men who fancied themselves debonair playboys. I had received an invitation since I had met the man several times in Saigon as the General’s aide. My status was indicated by how far I sat from the stage, which is to say very far. We were positioned near the restrooms, buffered from the scent of disinfectant only by the tables for the children and the band. Our companions were a couple of former junior officers, two mid-tier bank executives who had found lower-tier jobs with Bank of America branches, an in-law who looked inbred, and their wives. In dire times I would not merit a seat, but now we were more than a year into our American exile, and flush times had returned for some. The Chinese restaurant was in Westminster, where the man with the Clark Gable mustache had settled his family in a ranch-style suburban home, a demotion from his villa in Saigon but many rungs above almost all the evening’s attendees. Westminster was Sonny’s town, and I spotted him at a table several rings closer to the center of power, Clark Gable’s attempt to ensure positive press coverage.

Despite the noise and activity in the restaurant, where Chinese waiters tucked into red jackets scurried through the maze of banquet tables, a touch of melancholy pervaded the huge dining room. The bride’s father was notably absent, captured along with the remnants of his battalion as they defended the western approach to Saigon on the last day. The General praised him at the beginning of the banquet in a speech that stirred emotions, tears, and drinks. All the veterans toasted the hero with voluble bursts of bravado that helped to obscure their own uncomfortable lack of heroism. One simply must grin and drink unless one wants to sink to one’s neck in the quicksands of contradiction, or so said the sad crapulent major, his severed head serving as the table’s centerpiece. So I grinned and poured cognac down my throat. Then I mixed a libation of Rémy Martin and soda for Ms. Mori while explaining the exotic customs, habits, hairstyles, and fashion of our fun-loving people. I yelled my explanations, struggling to be heard over the loud cover band that was fronted by a petite dude in a sequined blazer. He sported a glam rocker’s perm modeled on a Louis XIV wig, minus the powder, and strutted on gold platform shoes while fondling his mike, pressing the ball of it to his lips suggestively as he sang. The heterosexually certified bankers and military men absolutely loved him, roaring approval at every flagrant pelvic gesture of flirtation from the singer’s extraordinarily tight satin pants. When the singer invited manly men to the stage for a dance, it was the General who immediately offered himself. He grinned as he sashayed with the singer to “Black Is Black,” the theme song of riotous Saigonese decadence, the audience cheering and clapping in appreciation, the singer winking over his shoulder à la Mae West. This was the General’s element, among men and women who appreciated him or who knew better than to voice any disagreements or discomfort with him. The execution—no, the
neutralization
—of the poor crapulent major had pumped life back into him, enough so that he had masterfully eulogized at the funeral. There he praised the major as a quietly self-sacrificial and humble man who always performed his duties to country and family without complaint, only to be tragically cut down in a senseless robbery. I had taken photographs of the funeral with my Kodak, the images later dispatched to my aunt in Paris, while Sonny sat in the front row of mourners, taking notes for an obituary. After the funeral, the General slipped the widow an envelope of cash from the operational funds provided by Claude, then stooped to peer into the bassinet where Spinach and Broccoli slept. As for myself, I could only mumble something generically appropriate to the widow, whose veil cloaked a waterfall of tears. How was it? Bon asked when I came home. How do you think? I said, heading for the refrigerator, its ribs lined as always with beer. Besides my conscience, my liver was the most abused part of my body.

Weddings often exacerbated the abuse, aggravated by the sight of a happy, innocent bride and groom. Their marriage might lead to alienation, adultery, misery, and divorce, but it might also lead to affection, loyalty, children, and contentment. While I had no desire to be married, weddings reminded me of what had been denied to me through no choice of my own. Thus, if I began every wedding as a pulp movie tough guy, mixing laughs with the occasional cynical comment, I ended each wedding as a watered-down cocktail, one-third singing, one-third sentimental, and one-third sorrowful. It was in this state that I took Ms. Mori to the dance floor after the wedding cake was cut, and it was then, near the stage, that I recognized one of the two female singers taking turns at the microphone with our gay blade. She was the General’s oldest daughter, safely ensconced in the Bay Area as a student while the country collapsed. Lana was nearly unrecognizable from the schoolgirl I had seen at the General’s villa during her lycée years and on summer vacations. In those days, her name was still Lan and she wore the most modest of clothing, the schoolgirl’s white ao dai that had sent many a Western writer into near-pederastic fantasies about the nubile bodies whose every curve was revealed without displaying an inch of flesh except above the neck and below the cuffs. This the writers apparently took as an implicit metaphor for our country as a whole, wanton and yet withdrawn, hinting at everything and giving away nothing in a dazzling display of demureness, a paradoxical incitement to temptation, a breathtakingly lewd exhibition of modesty. Hardly any male travel writer, journalist, or casual observer of our country’s life could restrain himself from writing about the young girls who rode their bicycles to and from school in those fluttering white ao dai, butterflies that every Western man dreamed of pinning to his collection.

In reality, Lan was a tomboy who had to be straitjacketed into her ao dai every morning by Madame or a nanny. Her ultimate form of rebellion was to be a superb student who, like me, earned a scholarship to the States. In her case, the scholarship was from the University of California at Berkeley, which the General and Madame regarded as a communist colony of radical professors and revolutionary students out to beguile and bed innocents. They wanted to send her to a girls’ college where the only danger was lesbian seduction, but Lan had applied to none of them, insisting on Berkeley. When they forbade her from going, Lan threatened suicide. Neither the General nor Madame took her seriously until Lan swallowed a fistful of sleeping pills. Thankfully she had a small fist. After nursing her back to health, the General was willing to concede, but Madame was not. Lan then threw herself into the Saigon River one afternoon, albeit at a time when the quay was well stocked with pedestrians, two of whom jumped in to save her as she floated in her white ao dai. At last Madame, too, conceded, and Lan flew off to Berkeley to study art history in the fall of ’72, a major her parents felt would enhance her feminine sensibilities and keep her suitable for marriage.

During her returns home in the summers of ’73 and ’74, she reappeared as a foreigner in bell-bottomed jeans and feathered hair, blouses stretched tight as a trampoline over the swell of her bosom, clogs adding several inches to her modest height. Madame would sit her down in her salon and, according to the nannies, lecture her on the importance of maintaining her virginity and of cultivating the “Three Submissions and Four Virtues”—a phrase that calls to mind the title of a highbrow erotic novel. The mere mention of her endangered or putatively lost virginity provided ample wood for the cookstove of my imagination, a fire I stoked in the privacy of my room, down the hall from the one she shared with a little sister. Lan had visited the General and Madame a few times since our arrival in California, but I had not been invited to the home on such occasions. Nor had I been invited to go with the General and Madame to her graduation cum laude a few months before. The most I heard of Lan was when the General muttered something about his unfilial daughter, who was now going by the name of Lana and who had not returned home after graduation but instead chosen to live on her own. Although I tried to draw out the General on what Lana was doing postgraduation, he had been uncharacteristically incommunicative.

Now I knew, and now I knew why. This Lana onstage bore no relationship to the Lan that I remembered. In the band’s arrangement, the other female singer was the angel of tradition, clad in a chartreuse ao dai, hair long and straight, makeup tasteful, her songs of choice estrogen-soaked ballads about lovelorn women hailing distant soldier lovers or lost Saigon itself. No such sadness or loss tinted Lana’s songs, no looking backward over the shoulder for this temptress of modernity. Even I was shocked by the black leather miniskirt that threatened to reveal a glimpse of that secret I had so often fantasized about. Above the miniskirt, her gold silk halter top shimmered with every gyration of her torso as she flexed her lungs, her specialty being the rock-’em, sock-’em numbers that the blues and rock bands of our homeland had mastered in order to entertain American troops and Americanized youth. I had heard her sing “Proud Mary” earlier in the evening without realizing it was she, and now I had to remind myself not to stare at her as she let loose a throaty version of “Twist and Shout” that called nearly everyone under the age of forty to the dance floor. Besides the simple yet elegant cha-cha, the twist was the favorite dance of the southern people, requiring as it did no coordination. Even Madame usually did the twist, innocent enough that she allowed her children to flock to the floor and dance, too. But glancing at the General’s table, which occupied a place of honor on the dance floor’s edge, I saw both the General and the Madame remaining seated, looking as if they were sucking on the sour fruit of the tamarind tree that had shaded their lost villa. And no wonder! For no one was twisting more than Lana herself, every rotation of her hips working an invisible ratchet that pulled the heads of the men on the dance floor forward and then pushed back. I might have participated if I was not so aware of Ms. Mori dancing with me, twisting with such childlike glee that I had to smile. She was looking remarkably feminine compared with her usual style. A lily nestled in her marcelled hair, and she wore a chiffon dress that actually exposed her knees. I had flattered her more than once on her appearance, and I took the occasion of seeing her knees during the twist to compliment her on her dancing as well. I haven’t danced like that in a long time, she said when the song was over. Neither have I, Ms. Mori, I said, kissing her on the cheek. Sofia, she said.

Before I could respond, Clark Gable took to the stage and announced a surprise visitor, a congressman who served in our country as a Green Beret from ’62 to ’64 and who was the representative for this district we found ourselves in. The Congressman had achieved a significant degree of renown in Southern California as an up-and-coming young politician, his martial credentials serving him well in Orange County. Here, his nicknames of Napalm Ned or Knock-’em-Dead Ned or Nuke-’em-All Ned, used depending on one’s mood and the geopolitical crisis, were affectionate rather than derogatory. He was so anti-red in his politics he might as well have been green, one reason he was one of the few politicians in Southern California to greet the refugees with open arms. The majority of Americans regarded us with ambivalence if not outright distaste, we being living reminders of their stinging defeat. We threatened the sanctity and symmetry of a white and black America whose yin and yang racial politics left no room for any other color, particularly that of pathetic little yellow-skinned people pickpocketing the American purse. We were strange aliens rumored to have a predilection for
Fido Americanus
, the domestic canine on whom was lavished more per capita than the annual income of a starving Bangladeshi family. (The true horror of this situation was actually beyond the ken of the average American. While some of us indeed had been known to sup on the brethren of Rin Tin Tin and Lassie, we did not do so in the Neanderthalesque way imagined by the average American, with a club, a roast, and some salt, but with a gourmand’s depth of ingenuity and creativity, our chefs able to cook canids seven different virility-enhancing ways, from extracting the marrow to grilling and boiling, as well as sausage making, stewing, and a few varieties of frying and steaming—yum!) The Congressman, however, had written editorials defending us and welcoming the émigrés to his Orange County district.