The Man from Saigon. Marti Leimbach
Читать онлайн книгу.
with their packs and cameras and she suddenly ran forward and was sick on the dirt by the fence-line. Son waited, then carried her pack for her.
You might one day want it, he said. That picture.
She was wrung out of emotions. She felt places in her body that were like bruises, the result of clenched muscles. She shook her head and wondered why anyone would want that photograph. Why would they keep such a thing? She did want it, not then but many months later when she was packing for home. It was among the few mementos she took with her.
A month before, in Saigon, a guy had given her a mimeographed pamphlet written by another reporter, the pages stapled together, corners curled, the title stamped across the front in capital letters: HANDBOOK FOR NEWSMEN IN VIETNAM. It was written during the years when the war was still young, a small affair with none of the sense of increasing disaster that hung about it now. Its author mixed practical advice with his own, idiosyncratic observations about the locals, warning reporters never to travel without ID papers, for example, and that the Vietnamese will always tell you what they think you want to hear. Nobody spoke much about the Handbook; everybody read it and pretended they had not. In fact, the reporter she borrowed it from made a point of saying he did not want it returned.
They were in a bar, a group of other newsmen around them, enjoying the air conditioning and the darkness that contrasted with the extreme light outside. She had arrived exhausted into Tan Son Nhut airport sixteen hours earlier, the plane diving toward the landing strip as though it meant to bury itself there. She’d never been to Asia, or covered a war. Now she found herself in a bar that might as well have been in New York or Chicago. She didn’t know what to expect. She felt a little disoriented. The chatter of the reporters confused her; she couldn’t even figure out what they were talking about—this infantry, that unit. Drinking did not help, but she certainly was not going to sit in the bar surrounded by men drinking scotch and order a ginger ale. The reporter who had asked her to meet him said he had something for her, and that something turned out to be a copy of the Handbook. He gave it to her along with his business card, his home number handwritten on the reverse side.
Let me know when you get back, he said. I’d like to hear how it went. He was ten years older than her, maybe fifteen, the beginnings of gray in his hair making his head appear to shine. He looked as though he felt a little sorry for her. He regarded her as one might a younger sister, even a child.
She smiled. You don’t think I’ll last two weeks, do you?
He was taken aback, though he tried not to show it. I didn’t say that. Anyway, it depends on where you go.
She laid the Handbook on the table next to their drinks. So where did you go? she asked.
He brushed the question aside. You’ll notice how slim it is, the Handbook. That’s because you really can’t tell people what they need to know. But read it anyway. Definitely read it.
He smiled. He explained he was leaving for New York the following day and all he could offer by way of good advice was for her to go home now. Or at least soon. It’s hard enough for a man, he said. Though being a woman will have one advantage. You’ll be the first on at the airstrip, that’s for sure.
She nodded. She didn’t know exactly what he meant and yet she felt to admit this would embarrass them both, so she filed the words away in her head: first on at the airstrip.
The drink came to an end. The man smiled and then looked right at her for a single, long minute as though trying to memorize her face.
I’ll be fine, she said. It was odd that he should be so concerned. It made her nervous—not of him, but of where she was, what she was doing. These were the earliest hours of the earliest days, long before bullets or chopper rides, before anything at all. She said she’d be fine but she had no way of knowing if this would be the case. She hadn’t really thought there could be any other outcome, until now.
He took a long breath. You’re awfully young, he said, or maybe it’s me. I’ve gotten old here. He finished his drink in one long swallow. Then he stood, shook his head as though to push away a thought, and flicked his ash into his empty glass. She extended her hand to shake his, and he took her fingers, drawing her forward and planting a soft kiss on her forehead. He nodded slowly, then turned away, holding a hand up at his shoulder as he went. He left the Handbook on the bar table for her as one might an old magazine, disregarding entirely the warning in the pamphlet’s introduction that the contents were confidential.
She read that she must bring a canteen, a poncho, zinc oxide, a hat, malaria pills. Never to go out with any unit smaller than a company. Bring pencils as well as pens because pens dried up in the heat and pencils broke or needed sharpening. Halazone, iodine, chlorine. She was told by those around her to be careful; some even recommended she not leave the ever-tightening boundary of the city. In the hotel’s narrow bed, she passed her first sleepless jet-lagged nights with the Handbook across her knees, scanning a flashlight across the words on each mimeographed page. In the middle of the night, just upon falling asleep, she would suddenly jerk awake, asking herself frankly how on earth anyone thought she could do the job of a foreign correspondent, a war correspondent, because she was quite sure she could not. She told herself it was normal to feel this way, that everybody must have their doubts. Then she doubted that, too.
She discovered it was hard to function in Saigon. The electricity didn’t always work. The water came out rusty from the taps. She drew herself maps, wrestled with the foreign money, drenched her clothes in sweat trying to get used to a climate that seemed from another planet entirely. One day she saw school children file past a dog that had died outside the school gates. The children walked over the stiffened legs or hopped above the bloated body. One of the boys got a stick and hit the dog’s ribs as though it was a piñata that had failed to burst open its sweets. A few others stood around, watching. Then another kicked the dead body. She went back the next day and the dog was still there, most of it.
She had plenty of time to read the Handbook because she found it impossible to sleep. The traffic was like some background record that kept repeating itself: screeching tires, honking horns, exhausts backfiring, and engines that moaned and spluttered under the slow poison of inappropriate fuel. That ended shortly after curfew at eleven, but then there was all the noise from the assortment of odd guests at the hotel where she stayed. Some nights they arrived drunk from clubs, speaking at the tops of their voices, playing music, or kicking a soccer ball down the halls. Fights broke out between the drunken ones and those who had regular jobs that required early rising. It was not unusual to hear an argument conducted in three different languages, and once in a while it got physical.
The hotel’s owner was a middle-aged balding man named Thanh. He had a mustache like two sets of toothbrush bristles stuck above his lip, and an open, sad face. He seemed particularly burdened by the noisy guests and was concerned, too, about their impact on the quieter ones. Even so, it did no good at all when he knocked door to door along the corridors at midnight with the question, They boddering you?, while further down the hall came shouts of laughter.
I was asleep, she always lied.
Even when all was peaceful at the hotel, it was still only a couple steps up from camping. Insects trailed her wherever she went, crossing whatever barrier or combination of sprays she used, bringing up itchy swellings on her skin. When she did sleep, she managed it only by putting a pillow over her head to block out the noise. Reading was good. It helped her to believe she was learning something useful and she knew there was much to learn.
In those early days she could not have understood what she had gotten into. For example, she paid no attention to the Handbook’s suggestion to pack belts and field straps—materials that could be made into a tourniquet—as she didn’t think she was going anywhere she might be shot. She glanced over instructions on first aid because she thought there were specific people who did that—others, not her. Okay, so she had seen some kids beating the corpse of a dog. And she’d noticed, too, how many people with crudely amputated limbs begged along the streets. But she hadn’t made the connection yet. She