THE street called Huong-Dieu slants through a slum pervaded by the yellowish scents of raw fish, urine, and charcoal fires. You push your way through throngs of yam-and-mango vendors, Vietnamese veterans still wearing their field uniforms the better to beg, women between the shafts of donkey-carts, and small girls who tug your sleeve but speak not a word; from one sunstriped alley to the next until you reach 22 Huong-Dieu.
Up a stairwell so worn its wood looked gnawed, I passed into a narrow passage, made narrower by heavy red draperies, and into a room where women sat or lay upon a dozen beds. Some wore slacks, some miniskirts and some were in their slips. Above, several candles burned in Buddhist altars. Only one had a Christ impaled above her. I favored Jesus as being the lesser fire hazard. I was in a camp of refugee whores.
An upended container, marked US ARMY in rusting white paint, held water for both washing and drinking. Yet the room was so spacious that 22 Huong-Dieu, I surmised, must once have been a luxurious French hotel; there were still gas fixtures from that long-gone time. Now the water was off and lights were out and all the carefree times were done.
“Where Xuong?” I asked one of the women.
“What numba?”
I’d first spoken to Xuong in the Central Market. I’d been shopping for oranges. Not the little green-skinned lumps that pass for oranges in Saigon—I wanted those big yellow California Sunkist dandies imported from the nearest American commissary.
A foreigner pays half a dollar each for them; a Vietnamese gets them for a quarter. Moreover, when a foreigner buys six, he winds up with five. These market women are really deft.
I asked Xuong to buy a dozen for me and gave her the piastres. When she returned with oranges and the change, I was impressed; it was the first time I’d seen a Vietnamese return change to a foreigner. I gave three oranges to her eight-year-old boy to show my appreciation.
“O, me wuv you too much,” she thanked me, and added, indicating the boy as we walked out of the market, “him Hiep.” I would have walked her further but she seemed embarrassed.
“Me Xuong,” she told me, “2 Huong-Dieu,” and walked away.
When I ran out of oranges I went to find her. Had she told me her number instead of her name she could have saved me a troubled search. In a troubled season.
“What numba?”
Then Hiep jumped out of some cranny, put his arms about me and his head against my chest, and bummed me for a cigarette. He wouldn’t lead me to his mother until I’d given him a light. Then he pocketed the matches.
Xuong was sitting cross-legged on Bed 16 with neither a Christ nor a Buddha above her. Her nose had no bridge and her right cheek bore a long slant scar that must once have been livid but had long since turned ash-grey.
“Numba-One Mama-san codock,” she explained instead of saying hello; touching a safety-razor blade to her temple with a slanting motion to show me how Numba-One Mama had codocked her. “O, me wuv you too much,” she remembered; and put the thin blade down. Two middle-teeth of her uppers were gold. Her skin was unblemished nonetheless.
The girl on the next bed put on shades, though the light was dim, and turned up the volume of her transistor as though to raise a sound-curtain between the beds. Some of the beds had drawstring curtains. One woman took her laundry off the curtains and drew the strings. The Mama-san, a woman in her seventies, no bigger than a child, was led in by Hiep.
“Short-tam?” the old woman wanted to know. “Long-tam? Numba One gel.”
The girl on the next bed took off her shades, turned down the volume and came out flat against Short Time: “Short tam didi fast. Long tarn Numba One.” A girl lying on her back in a far comer agreed and added, indifferently, “Me wuv you too much too.” Then Mama came out, independent of the opinions of anyone else, for Long Tam.
The only dissenter was Hiep, who kept pulling the bed’s drawstrings and trying to push his mother onto the bed. He was plainly afraid that unless it was Short Time, it might be no time at all. A bird in the hand was Hiep’s thinking.
A quorum having finally been attained, the girl on the next bed put her shades back on and turned up the volume while Xuong began to get dressed for the street. She had a slight limp, yet she never went out on the street without looking neat.
Mama-san took me aside to tell me her sorrows. She had been, when young, she assured me in a mixture of French and GI English, a dancer in Paris. I gave her the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps she had danced a step or two down the Boulevard Sebastapol circa 1917. Up from some Cambodian hamlet to the lights of Montmartre, then down to the alleys of Saigon. Where now she raced curfew, comer to comer, night after night, upstairs and down on her seventy-year-old legs.
Xuong came out of the curtains wearing a white blouse and a dark pleated skirt. But Hiep clung to her and wouldn’t let her leave him.
“Give cigarette,” Xuong explained.
“Eight years old and pimping your mother,” I congratulated the child, “here, son, take the whole pack.”
On the street I gave Xuong cab fare to my hotel. I walked in the opposite direction to be certain I wasn’t being checked by one of the White Mice. Then took another cab to the hotel.
What a lovely city this once must have been, I reflected, driving north on the Rue Pasteur, when it was still flowered and wooded. Now its gardens are sandbags and barbed wire. If you want a flower you can buy an artifical one in any market.
Xuong left her ID card at the hotel desk under the eyes of four bell-boys. Before the night-chameleons had fled the walls, one of them would be rapping my door for 500 piastres for entertaining a guest. But there wouldn’t be a tip in it for him. I always knew they’d like me in Saigon.
“Beaucoup piastres,” was Xuong’s first reaction to my second-class yet air-conditioned nest. “How much for all?”
“36,000 P. a month.”
Xuong rolled her eyes at a sum so fantastic. “Hundred P. a day for me and Hiep,” she filled me in on what it cost her and her son to survive. Her rent comes out of her own half of her fees. The other half, she assured me, is divided between the Mama-san from the Rue Sebastopol and the First District Police.
Police—the White Mice—and mama-sans alike are terribly hard on these village women. Country girls sometimes have a tough and sinewy pride; so codocking them becomes more or less routine. If a mama-san’s razor doesn’t subdue one, the First District will be happy to take her in hand. After living in darkness a month, on rice cooked in muddy water, never knowing at what moment she’s going to be slapped silly again, then being turned back to mama with her head shaven, the girl may wish she’d settled with mama out of court.
Mama doesn’t feel she’s asking too much of the girl—just to hold up five fingers or 10, meaning 500 piastres for short time or 1000 for long.
Each holds up her fingers in the end: police and mama-sans get it all.
Around the Hotel Caravelle and the Continental Palace, women are available who are never codocked. Who never hold up five fingers or 10, and are never shaven by police. These are city women from Vung Tau, Dalat, Danang, Saigon and Hue. Generally, they’re better looking than the refugee women, and always better dressed. Most are Catholic and have had some French schooling. The village women are commonly Buddhists and speak no French at all.
These restaurant courtesans, more mistresses than whores, don’t sleep with a man because he pays for a dinner. They pick and choose and take no chances on the common soldier. Most dress in the traditional aodai, and are, essentially, conservative women. They are for men with bank accounts in New Delhi, Cincinnati, Athens, Stockholm, Hamburg, Buenos Aires, Paris, and Manila.
Some of them must marry a bank account in Cincinnati: anything to get out of Saigon.
Xuong came out of the bathroom holding a bar of soap.
“How much?”
“Fifty P.”
“Fifty for you, fifteen for me,” she informed me smugly, and returned to experimenting with hot and cold running water. Then gave a yelp of surprise and came out drying her neck, looking both pleased and rueful. She’d gotten an unexpected sprinkling from the shower. Xuong was a fast learner; even if she was a little heavy around the hips.
The refrigerator was a lesser mystery; some of its contents curiosities. “What name?” she’d want to know, holding up a can or jar. I had to open instant coffee, soluble chocolate, powdered orange juice, and let her taste them all before she could be satisfied. Now she had a tea-bag in her hand. “What name?” When I brought a cup of hot water, she tore open the bag and poured the leaves into the water. She had the right combination anyhow.
Then she discovered a manicure scissors. She pushed me back on the bed, pulled off my socks, and I had to submit to a toenail paring. She enjoyed the work so I let her go on, meanwhile watching a bug on the wall above her head. He’d been living in the room before I’d moved in, and my thinking had been that if he didn’t bite me, I wouldn’t bite him. Live and let live was how I’d looked at it. Because if he were the kind of bug I suspected he was, he was The King. Now watching Xuong working on my big toe, he began applauding with his feelers. The rascal was growing bold.
Xuong transferred her scissors to her other hand, smacked the brute with her palm, and went back to paring. Five gets you ten that the stain The King left on that wall remains there to this day.
Xuong was older than most of Saigon’s refugee whores. For her own refugee time had begun when her father had been killed fighting against the French, or fighting for the French; or for refusing to fight anybody; it all depended on who Xuong was talking to.
Some of these women have been made homeless by B-52s and some by bulldozers. Some by search-and-destroy, and others by search-and-cordon. Some fled the NLF. Some the Americans. Some because a father said a plague on both your houses; or because he rowed down a river nobody had told him was no longer his own. Some are lost because a pilot had to lighten a bombload; others for revealing a cache of rice. Some because a brother informed to the NLF; others because someone informed to the Americans. And some by the defoliant called Blue Bamboo.
Some by knives and some by mines; some by fire and some by water. One says her husband would not have been killed had he not been bareheaded in the paddy. The war has been going on so long, the woman has sold her grief to so many, it is no matter now whether she herself did the informing or was informed upon. Nor upon whose side her father died while being pacified. All she knows is that her name was once Xuong-thi-Nhan; and that it is now Number 16. It all comes under the general heading of winning hearts and minds.
Xuong was a big girl and a resolute one. My fingernails had to be manicured, too. I tried to get free while she was shining my bedroom slippers and almost made it. But she put the slippers down and began to massage me.
Later she showed me needle-marks, on her arms, with pride. She wanted me to know that she took anti-VD shots every week. She was reassuring me. Then she splashed about in the tub like a great baby. I fell asleep hoping she wouldn’t drown.
In the middle of the night, I wakened to find the lights still on, the radio going, and something still transpiring in the bathtub. I rolled out of bed.
Xuong, naked in the tub, was stomping the hell out of every shirt, pair of socks, shorts, and tops I owned, regardless of fabric, fast colors, or condition of cleanliness. She’d found it unthinkable to let all that lovely bathwater down the drain without putting it to some use first. Her hips may have been a bit heavy; but she made up for that in frugality.
Personally, I felt it was a little early in the day to be getting out a laundry. Yet, by the way her big breasts bounced as she stomped, it was plain she was having a ball. So I turned off the radio and went back to bed. When I woke in the morning, Xuong was gone and so were most of my clothes. She’d left me one shirt, one pair of pants, and my shoes.
I didn’t want company that evening. I got a knock all the same. Xuong, with laundry ironed and my pants pressed. I went for my wallet.
She looked hurt. “No money,” she reproved me. And kicked off her shoes. I would have preferred paying her. I didn’t think I could stand another toenail paring this soon.
A lot of good it did me. So what do you know; instead of a Numba One Gel, what I had on my hands was a pedicurist, laundress, masseuse, bodyguard, nurse, cook, seamstress, market-woman, vermin-exterminator, economist, pants-presser, shoe-shiner, and bed-warmer. At the least a mistress; at the most a wife. I didn’t have a shirt-button missing. And clean underwear has its own appeal. I just wasn’t prepared to set up housekeeping.
“I find Numba One hou’ for you,” she seemed to read my mind, “you come see.”
Now she was in real estate.
So we went down a walk so narrow that no light had ever fallen across its walls, into a passage littered with droppings of children and dogs, down a hall, then up a ladder to a floor that sagged beneath my feet. Into a room about 8x10 containing an iron cot bearing a mattress stained with rust or blood. We were home.
Xuong switched on a floor fan and looked at me as much as to say, “Didn’t I tell you it would be great?” Well, we had electric power at least.
I just sat on that beat-up bedspring and boggled; this was how people actually lived in the world, born into rooms like this: eat, sleep, pray, make love, and die in such kennels. Whole lifetimes. The floor fan creaked and skreaked. It didn’t like the place any more than I did.
“Numba One!” Xuong assured me.
“Numba Ten!” I assured her.
“Numba Ten for you, Numba One for me,” she reminded me.
When she knocked the following evening, I didn’t answer the door. She knew I was there all the same.
“You Numba Ten!” she denounced me from the other side of the door.
A chameleon on the wall fled for cover.
The night before I moved, Xuong caught me in. My bags were packed and my escape-route plain. I let her stay. She bathed but didn’t splash about. And wouldn’t turn out the lights until I’d turned off the ceiling fan.
“Make bad wind,” she explained her superstition: death comes on a night-wind.
ILL WIND STRIKES SOLDIER
A soldier slept soundly in his home at Trinh Minh The Street, but alarmed his wife when she heard him uttering indistinct cries. She sped him to a hospital but he died upon arrival. There was speculation that the soldier had died of an ill wind.
—Vietnam Guardian
We had breakfast in a Chinese noodle cafe. When she rose, I glanced up. Then let her go. She didn’t turn and look back at the door. She didn’t look back from the street. She didn’t look back at all.
Those shots she took ought to help one of us, I reflected glumly.
I’ll say this much for Xuong: she fought with all she had to get out of a whore’s bed and back into a wife’s.