Fear of Mirrors. Tariq Ali
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in a three-piece designer suit, a black silk fedora sat uncomfortably on his head and he was loaded with presents. He looked like a fifties photograph of Bao Dai, the deposed emperor of Vietnam, in his Parisian exile.
The reunion was joyous. He had insisted on taking them all to a small island off the Baltic coast, a seaside resort that was once the exclusive holidaying preserve of Party bigwigs. Sao, who spent a lot of time at the Casino in Nice, had assumed that there would be some luxury facilities, but he was a few years too early. His obvious disappointment had amused Helge, but it was a relaxed week. Vlady and Helge had not realized how much the continuous political activity of the last six months had exhausted them. Meetings, street demonstrations, all-night discussions had taken over their lives. Poor Karl had been virtually ignored. Now, thanks to Sao, they were all together again.
The poor citizens of the DDR were about to be orphaned, shell-shocked and raped, but few of them realized this in the heady weeks before reunification. Vlady was one of the few. His doubts had been aired in the press and on television. In those days, the little cabbages, mimicking the Big Cabbage in Bonn, used to respond in a friendly, albeit patronizing, fashion.
‘Professor Meyer, you and your friends belong to the old world. We know you will always be a socialist at heart, but we don’t hold that against you. We are ready to forgive and forget. You can still render some services to democracy. Come with us. Let us build the new Germany together.’
Sao knew that Vlady’s thoughts were elsewhere. Vlady had shown only polite interest in the story of his friend’s transformation from slave-worker to property-holder. Vlady and Helge had begun to feel guilty after a few days in the sunshine. At night Sao would hear them whispering to each other. He couldn’t hear them properly but certain words and phrases indicated that they were obsessed with the future of their country.
It was young Karl who had followed every curve in the story. How Sao had exploited the quickened pace of history to transform his own life. The adventures of a Vietnamese entrepreneur and how he made his first million was just more exciting, thought Karl. He had been alienated from his parents and their recent activities. The big demonstrations in Berlin and Dresden had left the young man unmoved. He was, by temperament, a creature of the committee room rather than the street. Displays of public emotion embarrassed him. The passions of the multitude frightened him. Vlady and Helge were reduced to exchanging looks of despair or resignation as they watched their young cub grow.
Sao’s odyssey had excited Karl. It was as if Sao had cast a spell on him. He listened carefully, his eyes sparkling, and occasionally he interrupted the story-teller to get exact details. It was Karl’s interest that alerted his parents and compelled them – against their will, because all they wanted to think about was the precarious condition of the Politburo in Berlin – to pay serious attention to the tales being told by their Vietnamese friend.
Sao had fled to Moscow. Compared to Dresden and Berlin, he told them, Moscow was a cosmopolitan paradise. He had immediately established contact with the Vietnamese community and found a bed in a two-roomed apartment, which he shared with only five other people. Two of these were always travelling and, of the rest, there was one who came from a neighbouring village. Sao asked them about his cousin in Kiev, whom he hadn’t seen for several years. They had no knowledge of him. When Sao asked if they would take a letter from him on their next trip to the Ukraine, they laughed and took Sao along instead. Travel documents and money posed no problems. It soon became clear that the two travellers were unofficial businessmen, involved in the task of primitively accumulating capital. They ran a growing black market for Vietnamese communities throughout the Soviet Union. Their distribution network was both efficient and reliable.
Sao was staggered by the scale of the operation and by the fact that the only currency they used was dollars or deutsche marks. On the train to Kiev, he thought of his own country. Since the fall of Saigon in 1975, the leaders in Hanoi had found themselves at the head of a ruined country. Its ecology had been severely damaged by chemical warfare; its bombed cities needed to be rebuilt; its orphans had to be found homes; its demobilized soldiers, traumatized by the war, had to be found jobs; surplus labour had to be sold to the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe in return for badly needed equipment and essential commodities.
The United States had promised reparations, but reneged on each and every promise and imposed an economic embargo instead. Sao knew that his country was being punished. They had dared to resist and win. Now they had to pay a price for their sensational victory against the most powerful country in the world.
The war years had been full of tension, anguish, fear, but also a sense of excitement at the thought that they would one day win and reunite Vietnam. That was all over. Peace had brought few dividends for the common people. Sao was bitter. He had fought hard. He knew that paradise was only a dream, but surely, he had thought, the immediate future would bring some relief.
Hope, struggle, hope, betrayal, hope, revenge, hope, collapse … no hope. He had said all that at a party meeting in Hanoi. Many heads, too many, had nodded in silent agreement. Within three weeks they had packed him off to a new front, the DDR, a misnamed country ruled by misled bureaucrats. What a life.
He felt he had come to the crossing of ways. He was travelling on shifting ground. His life could take many routes. He looked at his compatriots, busy working out what they would buy and sell in Kiev, and decided to join them. He felt the network should be extended to every major city in the Soviet Union and that they should develop links with Vietnamese workers in Eastern Europe.
‘Commodities needed to be circulated,’ Sao had laughed, ‘and who better than us to circulate them? For centuries we had been ruled by the Chinese. Then it was the French. Then came the Russians. Now, we thought, let us work for an economic system.’
Sao and his friends developed a tried and tested network of middlemen, which straddled the whole country. Their money became a mountain. With the beginning of the collapse, they insisted on being paid in dollars or marks. Some of the money they filtered back to Vietnam. Many a new motorcycle or television/video set in Hanoi was the result of such activities. Hanoi actually experienced a tiny boom as it began to catch up with Ho Chi Minh City, which was still really Saigon.
‘In the early days,’ Sao continued, ‘we had to share our profits with party bureaucrats big and small, starting with party officials of the oblast and ending up with members of the Central Committee. Then they decided to change the system. At first we panicked: could this be the end of us? We were small fish in a medium-sized lake. Now we would become minnows in the sea. The sharks would get everything. How wrong we were, my friends. How wrong we were.’
He stopped at this point and laughed. And laughed. There was more than a trace of hysteria in his laughter.
‘What’s so funny Uncle Sao?’ Karl inquired in a puzzled voice.
‘What’s so funny is that we were the only ones in a position to exploit the collapse. Nobody had imagined that the Soviet Union would disintegrate so quickly, but it did. It did. Yeltsin was in a hurry to dump Gorbachev, and if he had to dump the old Soviet Union first he would do so. And he did. The Russian mafia was caught by surprise. Anyway, their connections were neither as extensive nor as efficient as ours. They had relied too heavily on their links with party officials. The old system was paralysed. Distribution collapsed. We Vietnamese came to the rescue, but at a price, just like they had come to the rescue during our war. At a price. We established a chain of command. We moved goods. We developed our own transport system. We stepped into the breach, my young Karl. And now your Uncle Sao has an apartment in Paris and a French wife. I can travel anywhere, but Vlady and Helge are my two best friends. Real friends. There is nobody like them anywhere else. Remember that Karl, always. OK?’
And then he was gone again.
A week or so ago he had rung Vlady to warn him of his imminent arrival in Berlin on important business. They had agreed a date for dinner. Vlady was on his way.
Nguyen van Sao, son of Vietnamese peasants, was submerged in a foam-filled bath in a luxury suite on the third floor of the Kempinski. He was in a foul mood. It had been an awful day. The flight from London had been delayed. Berlin immigration had inspected his French passport with too much