The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen
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consume them. After all, if we look back in history, there is always a need for intoxication: China has opium, the Arabs have hashish.
Being neither Chinese nor Arab, I was not sure how this koan applied to me, and I turned it over in my mind for a second before I found the right response: And what does the West have?
The West? The Maoist PhD smiled. The West has woman, or so Malraux said.
I smiled back, and we smiled at each other for a moment.
Well, I said. I suppose I’m getting back to my European roots.
I always tell my students that they should strive to be the first of their kind.
I guess I’m a true original then, I said, rubbing the sole of my shoe into his Turkish rug. And I intend to be so very good at being bad.
CHAPTER 4
After my aunt had gone to sleep, I sat on the sofa with my two new companions, the hashish and the money. The only way to make the hashish stop giggling and whispering at me was to smoke some of it, which made it, and me, relax. Under the dim light cast by the one lamp I kept on, an antique older than me, I surveyed the handful of bills that I had earned that day, with my aunt’s 60 percent already deducted but with the Boss’s 75 percent yet to be deducted. I had earned almost nothing, but did I truly deserve almost nothing? What I had done was exchange the hashish for the money, and before that, I had exchanged something for the hashish with the Boss. I had offered him a part of myself.
The more I stared at the francs, the more they seemed unreal. What made each of those leaves of paper nearly as powerful as a human being, and what made them, together, more valuable than a human being? After all, I would no more harm one of those bills than I would harm a human being.
Actually . . . the specter of Sonny said.
In fact . . . said the equally ghostly crapulent major.
And it was true. I had killed them both, and I had never done more to money than fold it. I had never ripped a corner off a bill, the way little boys tore the wings off captured flies. I had never lit even the smallest denomination just to see how it would burn, in the manner that I had once seen an American child use a plastic magnifying glass to incinerate an ant on the sidewalk. Collectively, money was invulnerable. And individually, a bill like the ones I now found in my possession was protected by that aura of invulnerability, the way an individual cop embodied the entire Repressive State Apparatus. That was how the almost weightless bills I picked up in my hand affected me with their magic.
Perhaps I felt anew the strange power of money because of my new occupation. I had only ever been paid for my work as a soldier, which was, in theory, if not always in practice, an honorable occupation. As a spy, I had never been paid, believing that not even my life was more precious than independence and freedom. But now I was selling hashish, and there was nothing noble or honorable in that, as one part of me understood and as another part of myself did not care. Why should I? For most of my life, I had constantly and desperately believed in something, only to discover that at the heart of that something was nothing. So why not give nothing a chance?
And yet—what would my mother think of my new career? I tried not to think about how much I would have disappointed her. How could I break her heart, when she had given it all to me? But when I thought about what my father might think, I was filled only with happiness. Here I was in the land of my father, infecting it with Eastern drugs, a small payback for how his country had infected mine with Western civilization.
My new job was made easier because my predecessor in supplying hashish, the mysterious Saïd, had built an impressive network of clients over the past decade, with the Maoist PhD being the oldest. Saïd never could get a job with a name like Saïd, the Maoist PhD had told me in parting. A meaningful job, that is. And he wouldn’t do something so simple as change his name.
The Maoist PhD thought of himself as not just Saïd’s client but his patron, helping him become a financially self-reliant young man by introducing him to his many eager friends, colleagues, students, and former students. Now through the Maoist PhD and my aunt, the news of the quality of my goods and the speediness of my delivery circulated through the network. I was a novelty—a Eurasian pharmacologist of the black market, a half-Vietnamese dealer of partly beneficial, partly dangerous goods that were not so good but also not so bad. Over the next few weeks, I made my deliveries with the nonchalant air of the law-abiding citizen, assured in the knowledge that the police tended not to look twice at Asians, or so Le Cao Boi had reassured me. At the restaurant, he pointed to how the Arabs and the blacks did us the unintentional favor of being our racial decoys, drawing the attention of police who thought them to be as brown, sticky, and aromatic as hashish itself.
I looked out the window at the passersby and said, How can you tell who’s Arab?
How do you tell? You tell by looking! It’s obvious!
I wasn’t trying to be dense. I had some understanding of the Arab situation in France: the war that the French had fought with the Algerians right after fighting a war with us; the Pieds-Noirs who had fled from Algeria to France, refugees like us; the hard feelings that always remained after this kind of forcible separation. But I had never met an Arab, and I had not been here long enough so that the differences within French society felt natural to me. To an outsider, another society’s differences always looked odd, which was why the French had a very good understanding of the absurdities of American racism and the specter of THE BLACK, which to Americans was simply the way the world was. But for me, here in France, THE ARAB was an abstraction. Just to provoke Le Cao Boi, I pointed at a man walking by and asked, Is he Arab?
No, Camus, he’s French. (I was not certain that Le Cao Boi had ever read Camus, but in this and other conversations, whenever he got frustrated with me, he would call me Camus, perhaps the only philosopher he had heard of.) Look, there’s an Arab now.
The man walking by wore a white sweatshirt, gray sweatpants, and white sneakers. Yes, I could see it! He could be an Arab! Or he could just be a very tan Frenchman with somewhat curly dark hair. I can’t tell the difference, I said, still having fun at Le Cao Boi’s expense. What are the signs?
The signs? Le Cao Boi wrinkled his forehead, a sure indication the mechanism behind it was working. It’s—I mean—you just can, all right? The hair, the skin, the way they carry themselves, the way they talk. You just haven’t been here long enough to read the signs. Just take my word for it. The police aren’t going to be looking at you except as a harmless foreigner, so long as there’s only one of you. Two of you, still acceptable. Three of you, or us, the French get a little uneasy. Four—forget about it. That’s an invasion.
Since I was already me and myself, I felt already in danger of being too noticeable. So, to accentuate my disguise as an innocent, harmless Asian, I draped a Japanese camera around my neck, borrowed from my aunt. I also wore a small backpack in reverse, the straps around my back, the pack on my chest. With a fedora, a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that lent the illusion of a slant to my eyes that were not slanted, at least not to me, and a little bit of cotton wedged behind my upper lip, to imply something wrong with my teeth, my disguise was complete. I was not just a mostly harmless domestic Asian; I was a completely harmless and well-disciplined Japanese tourist. In this disguise, as an innocent visitor intent on taking photographs rather than an invader who might be taking French jobs, I could go almost anywhere.
I confess that I thought I was pretty smart. I had not anticipated that Bon might be even smarter. But he had changed, too, as a result of reeducation, something I began to understand one day when he waved me over to a table at the restaurant on a typically empty afternoon and said, I have an idea.
You have an idea? I said. Bon did not have ideas; I had ideas.
Bon stared at me. There are communists here.
There are communists everywhere.
In our community.
You’re talking about my aunt.
She’s not a part of the community. She’s turned French.
So have a lot of our countrymen here.
They