September 4, 1933
When I woke up, I wasn’t surprised to find an empty space where Victor had been. I knew he was due to leave at sunrise, but the bed in Indochine seemed bigger than ours in Paris, and suddenly I felt very much alone.
At the end of the bed was a tray with breakfast on it, a real French breakfast of fruit, croissants, and strong black coffee, which I devoured, placing my silverware on the plate silently when I’d finished. Victor had taught me how to put down my cutlery without a clink, as if we were eating with feathers, and now I did it that way even when I was alone. It was one of the many things Victor had had to teach me when we were married, but to his delight, and mine, I was a quick study.
I pushed the covers off my legs. All the linens on the bed were white, as was the mosquito net covering it and the curtains on the two French doors. I looked down at my nightgown, cotton with delicate silk edging. It seemed to have been made to match. It was a welcome gift from Trieu, who said it was too hot in Indochine to sleep in anything else. She was right again. I gathered the skirt and stared out at the sweeping city view. I knew I shouldn’t step onto the front balcony in my nightgown, so I let my eyes take in the buildings from bed—the mismatched rooftops and shutters closed to block the sun, the slice of the lake we could see from our perch, and the white masses of milk flowers that seemed to have blossomed overnight. In the bright morning light, I could see farther than the evening before, past the smart avenues to the east of Hoan Kiem Lake and into the crowded local neighborhoods far west of it. I stood, wrapping myself in my blue silk dressing gown, the same one I had worn after Victor and I made love. We’d spent the next day in a haze of exhaustion, the weight of our journey and our night at the Officers’ Club hitting us, but now, on this Monday morning, as the city woke up below me, I felt well in my skin again. I opened the door to the balcony and tried to spot Hanoi’s landmarks, ones I had read about in travel books on the boat journey over—St. Joseph’s Cathedral, the Hotel Métropole—but I was distracted by the lovely view of the opera house, which was just at the end of our street.
I had just glimpsed a rowboat bobbing in the lake when I felt myself gripping the iron railing. It had been on the boat journey from France that things had turned difficult. On a rainy afternoon, alone in our cabin, I had accidentally picked up Victor’s papers, documents penned by Michelin management. What I saw had tainted the journey over, but I was determined not to let it wedge itself inside me for good. They were just notes on the past, Victor said when he’d found me reading. He was going to Indochine to change things.
I gave up looking for landmarks when I grew distracted by the morning’s noises, including the sound of Lucie pushing open my door, still sleepy-eyed in her pink nightgown. She wandered in, looking a little off balance, Cam behind her.
“My Lucie!” I said, tying the belt of my dressing gown in a loose knot and meeting her by the door. I had barely seen her the day before as she had slept on and off for hours. I leaned down and kissed her warm cheek. She still smelled like the same Lucie, even in a new country full of different air, different odors. “Are you hungry? You must be. I just ate, but I’ll make you anything you like if we can find the ingredients. What would you like to have for breakfast, ma chérie?”
“Oh, madame,” said Cam, putting her hands on Lucie’s bare arms. “You do not have to worry about Lucie’s meals. The cook will take care of them. We should have informed you yesterday.”
“Thank you, Cam, but I don’t mind,” I said, placing a hand protectively on Lucie as well. “I like spending time with my daughter in the kitchen.”
“But the lady of the house is never in the kitchen,” said Cam. She smiled at me and respectfully removed her hands from Lucie.
“Oh,” I replied, feeling embarrassed. Cam was, of course, only doing what she was trained to do. They all were. “If that’s the way it’s done here, then of course. I will stay out of the kitchen and just join her for breakfast on the terrace.”
“If you would like to,” said Cam politely. “But don’t you have many things to do today?”
I thought for a minute, fiddling with the watch Victor had given me before we left Paris, a new model called a Reverso. The jeweler had told him that no other modern wristwatch kept time as well. On the back of the watch face, Victor had had engraved a simple image of an orange, a nod to my maiden name, Holland. The watch was novel in that it could flip around to show the orange, not the time, a feature that also protected the face.
“No,” I said to Cam, glancing down at the watch, which, now that I had no appointments or visits with friends or family, seemed more like jewelry than something I depended on. “I don’t have anything to do today. I suppose I’ll just explore this little neighborhood of ours. I can’t really learn too much about it from up here, can I?”
Trieu slipped in the door, surely having heard our voices, to start getting me dressed. Cam played with Lucie and her doll at the foot of the bed as Trieu helped me into my undergarments, and I watched them while standing in my slip, Lucie dissolving into giggles as Cam pretended that the doll was doing somersaults.
When my dress was on and Trieu was brushing my hair back, pinning it out of my face, Cam put the doll in Lucie’s arms and turned and looked at me with curiosity. “Did you cook the meals when you lived in France?” she asked, drawing a quick reprimand in Annamese from Trieu.
“Sometimes,” I said, not bothered by the question. “I’ve always enjoyed cooking. We had help, but I often just did it myself.”
“I didn’t know the French knew how to cook anything,” said Cam.
“I’m not French, remember, Cam,” I said. “Where I’m from, we cook.”
I thought of my mother, who, despite having lived in two different countries and being fluent in two languages, had never known anything but an impoverished rural life. Her father had grown tobacco on their farm in Joliette, near the St. Lawrence River, fifty miles north of Montreal. But when his crops failed, he moved the family to a warmer climate, finding work on a large tobacco farm in Mount Airy, North Carolina, near the Virginia border. It was there that she’d met my father, whose people also worked that land. Together, they attempted to farm their own land in Virginia. It was hard for me to picture my mother doing anything but working. All through my childhood, until my siblings and I were old enough to help, she killed chickens herself, cutting off their heads with as much emotion as she exhibited when plucking a weed. She would de-feather the birds, butcher them, and fry them for all her hungry children, keeping the heads and feet for stock and the feathers to stuff pillows with. As I grew older, and she grew more exhausted with each succeeding pregnancy, that duty fell to me. I did not miss that kind of cooking one bit.
“Perhaps the Americans are more like the Annamites than the French are,” I said. Or perhaps poor people were just the same the world over.
Cam took Lucie downstairs for breakfast once Lucie had tired of watching me get ready.
When my hair was done, my favorite rings were on, and a pair of small emerald earrings were glimmering on my earlobes, Trieu walked me down to the kitchen. All through the empty house, the fans were blowing up the thin curtains in the sitting rooms like the skirts of twirling children.
When we reached the open door to the kitchen, I looked in and saw Lucie, Cam, and our cook, Diep, clustered closely together. Diep was flipping a fried egg into the air, much to Lucie’s delight. She was seated on Cam’s lap, her back arched happily like a cat’s. I stood silently and watched Cam’s hand moving in gentle circles on Lucie’s spine. My stomach tightened at the sight, and not even the sound of my daughter’s laughter, or her enthusiastic phrases in Indochinese, could stop the jealousy that pricked me.
“Nũa!” Lucie shouted, shrieking for more, as the egg landed precisely in the center of the pan. The cook cracked another one so she could continue charming Lucie.
“We are so in awe of Lucie’s Annamese,” said Trieu quietly as she watched them. “What an intelligent child. How did she learn?”
“We all had lessons with a tutor before we came,” I said. “I picked up quite a bit, but Lucie started speaking it with impressive ease after just three months of study. She was like a little parrot with her tutor. She’s quite good, isn’t she?”
“Excellent. And she will be happier here because of it,” said Trieu. “It’s rare. But it is a gift.” We watched as Lucie gave the cook a hug after she flipped an egg onto her plate.
“The van Dampierres’ children loved Diep, too,” said Trieu. “Though they only had boys. Poor Madame van Dampierre. She was such a feminine woman. She deserved to have a girl. As for Cam, even though she’s so young, she treats the children as if they’re her own. She is the oldest of ten children. That’s why she’s so motherly.” Trieu stepped into the kitchen, motioning for me to follow.
“Mama!” Lucie exclaimed, not moving from Cam’s lap. “Look at what Diep can do with eggs! They fly like birds. It’s magic.”
“It really is,” I said, watching the second egg land in the pan, its yolk intact.
“Shall I sit with you while you eat, darling?” I asked her. “On the terrace?”
Lucie hesitated, then looked at the cook. “I want to stay here and see the eggs,” she said, leaning her head against Cam’s shoulder. “May I?” she said after my face fell. “Just for today?”
“Of course, darling,” I replied, forcing a smile. I had counted on her taking to the staff, but perhaps not so quickly. “How amusing,” I said. “Flying eggs.”
I made my way back upstairs, walked down the tiled hallway, stepping only in the middle of it, the slight clack of my low-heeled day shoes the only sound in the house. When I reached the end of the hall, I paused in front of the master bedroom. I leaned against the doorway and looked inside. I’d never had such a large bedroom. Our apartment in Paris was beautiful, but the French didn’t build the same way in their country.
I closed my eyes a minute, remembering my childhood bedroom. In our neglected farmhouse, the walls were a mix of old chipped paint and water leaks. In the bedrooms, there were creaky metal beds everywhere with sagging mattresses that felt like sleeping on wet cardboard. Like the rest of the house, my bedroom was inhabited by children of various sizes with too little space and privacy to properly grow.
I looked at my new bed, already made by one of the servants, the light streaming in to kiss the room, and wished I could transport the restless child that I had been to this place. But it wasn’t worth looking backward. My childhood was lost, but I had Lucie. She, I had vowed when I started to feel her move in my stomach, would have everything I had not. She would be the opposite of me.
I walked into the bedroom and put my hands on the bed. I was tempted to climb back in, my body still not set to the hours of the Orient, but I noticed there was a door to my left slightly ajar. I thought it was the closet, but quickly realized that it was the door to the adjoining room, the small one that Victor had taken for his study. One of the servants must have opened it and forgotten to close it when I was downstairs.
Below the only window in the room was a large wooden desk, simple but well polished, which must have belonged to Théodore van Dampierre. On top were a typewriter, a navy-blue blotter, two of Victor’s pens, and a few Michelin guidebooks. I looked down at the familiar red covers, the picture of the Michelin Man—André and Édouard had noticed one day that a haphazard stack of tires resembled a figure—printed on each cover. I picked up the most recent guide, its familiarity giving me a certain comfort, and ran my thumb over the price indicated on the cover. Twenty-five francs.
There were three drawers on each side of the desk and one wide, shallow drawer between them. Only one had a small silver keyhole in it. Instinctually, I reached for it, but it was locked. I opened the drawer below it. Empty. Then I opened the middle drawer. Inside was a small silver key. I took it up quickly, pressed it between my fingers, and then slipped it inside the keyhole. It unlocked without a sound, and I pulled the drawer open.
Inside was a stack of papers, held together with a metal clip. On the top of the stack was a document I had seen before. I had read it on the boat. It was an internal report that had circulated through the company. There was nothing out of the ordinary about it except that instead of focusing on the factories in France, it went into detail about the plantations in Indochine.
I knew much about the company. But I had never read an internal memo before. All I had ever read were the guidebooks.
But halfway into our boat journey, that changed.
Victor and I had left the small window of our cabin open, and late in the day, despite blue skies, there was a sudden downpour. I jumped up from the top deck and headed down to close it as soon as I felt the drops on my skin, but when I arrived, I was too late. The rain had come in and soaked a folder that was on the small table right below the window. I grabbed it, wiped off the table with a bath towel, and opened the folder to see if there was anything important inside.
It was full of Victor’s papers, and the top one was a memo penned by his uncle Édouard. I scanned it quickly to see just how significant it was, worried that the water stains might upset Victor.
There was quite a lot of damage in the middle, but it was still fully legible. I started skimming from top to bottom. There were a few suggestions for Victor as he headed into his new position and a short economic overview of each plantation. I stopped there, seeing no need to keep reading, but just as I was moving the paper off to dry, a phrase jumped out at me. A moment later, I was sitting on the floor with the paper in my hand reading it carefully.
“Race primitive.”
A primitive race.
When I was a child, I’d been called primitive many times. It didn’t have to do with my race, but something else I couldn’t control. Poverty. “The primitive country children”—I’d heard my teacher say the phrase when I was thirteen or fourteen to speak of my family and others like us. My sister had asked me whom exactly she’d been talking about, and I hadn’t had the heart to respond, “Us, of course.” I’d just shrugged.
“Paresseux.” Lazy. That term, according to the memo, best described “les coolies tonkinois,” the laborers from Tonkin, the northern region where Hanoi was located and where the majority of the Michelin plantation workers were recruited. It went on to describe a typical day’s work for a coolie, beginning at 4:45 a.m. and ending at 5:30 p.m., including nearly two hours of walking. The coolies received five days off a month, but only half days. On those days, they were required to clean their accommodations as well as the homes of the French overseers. Next came recommendations on how to save more money in this time of economic crisis. Perhaps a shorter pause for lunch could be implemented now that the mishap of 1932 was further behind them, allowing more rubber trees to be tapped in a day? Already the plantations were ahead of their competition, the Michelin coolies able to tap over four hundred trees a day when the coolies on competing plantations owned by the Société des Terres Rouges couldn’t even tap three hundred. It was stressed that Victor had to maintain or improve those numbers.
The memo also mentioned the salaries on the plantation, which had recently been cut. Despite that, Victor would be making a salary that was equivalent to the pay of 4,500 coolies. The coolies made two and a half francs a day. In Clermont-Ferrand, the lowest-paid worker made nearly forty francs, they noted, but Indochine was different. Cost of living, it said, was very low. It was a fair wage.
I planned to stop reading then, but at the bottom of the page I saw the words “nombre de morts.” Death toll. It was noted that in 1927 alone, 17 percent of the labor force at Phu Rieng had died. And more recently, it had been 25 percent.
I was so fixated on the figures that I didn’t hear the cabin door open. But I heard it shut.
Victor was standing there, watching me. He didn’t say anything. He simply stared at me, looking from my face to the papers I was holding.
“Did they get wet?” he asked.
“A little,” I managed to say.
He walked over, taking what I was reading out of my hands and closing the envelope.
He placed it under his arm. “It is no great secret that things haven’t been easy on the plantations, for the workers or for the management. You may not have known to what extent, but you’ve read the newspapers. This should not come as a shock.”
“I have,” I managed to say, though they certainly had not printed the mortality rate for coolies.
“I am going to try to change many aspects of our operation, including the welfare of the workers. But the most important thing, taking precedence over everything else, is that the plantations continue to make money. If we don’t have profit, we can’t even feed our men. The second priority, which is equal and forever linked to the first, is to keep the communist element from rising up. After what happened in December, that is imperative. I don’t know what you read from this,” he said, patting the folder, “but you should already know that.”
“I did know that,” I said. “But it’s helpful to be reminded,” I added honestly.
He nodded. “You’re always a wonderful vehicle for change, Jessie, and you have helped me realize that I’ve been complacent in my career. Relying on my bloodline to keep me afloat but not taking it as far as I can. If I succeed in those two tasks, I think we can have a very nice life.”
“I will do anything in my power to help you,” I said earnestly. Victor’s success mattered even more to me than it did to him.
“Good.” He turned for the door. “But please don’t read my papers,” he said without looking back at me.
After that day, I’d felt Victor watching me. When we were alone together, his eyes gave off electricity. I’d felt it when we first met. He would track me, not out of suspicion but out of lust. Now he tracked me out of something else. It felt like suspicion at first, but I realized that it was just contemplation. He was wondering at times who this wife of his was.
When we’d reached Indochine, excitement had replaced the discomfort of that day. But as I looked at the papers again now, my eyes sought the same word on the same water-stained paper. “Primitive.” I flipped the page, not liking the way that word turned my stomach. I was now reading a 1927 report of the Michelin plantations, done by an inspector named Delamarre on behalf of the colonial government. At the top was written “Extremely Confidential.”
I loosened my grip, afraid to wrinkle the pages, and started to read, but nearly dropped everything when I heard a sound at the door.
“Jessie.”
Victor’s voice broke me out of my state. Every fiber in my being stood on end as if I’d just been thrown into a frozen lake.
I looked up at him. He didn’t look angry, just surprised.
“What are you doing?” he asked, his voice still calm.
He looked at the exact sheet of paper I was holding.
“I thought you were traveling to the plantations today,” I said helplessly.
“Yes. I am,” he said, watching my nervous movements. “But I’m taking the evening train. I received a phone call this morning and was advised to stay in Hanoi through the afternoon as there’s an important meeting that I should attend. Informal but important. The government man I met with this morning suggested it.”
He watched as I struggled with the clip, trying to make the papers look like I had when I found them. I bent the top page accidentally, smoothed it, and started the process over again.
“Let me,” said Victor, reaching out for the papers. He took them gently out of my grasp, placed them in the first drawer, closed it, and locked it with the little silver key. This time, he put the key in his pocket.
I turned away from him and began to walk back into the bedroom, but he caught me by the shoulder.
“Jessie. This is a complicated business. You know that. But I’m here now. I’m going to try to make our plantations both lucrative and peaceful. That’s what I said on the boat, remember?”
“Of course,” I said, relaxing under his touch.
“The men my family has put at the helm, as plantation directors, Theurière at Dau Tieng and Soumagnac at Phu Rieng, they’re an engineer and a military man respectively. I’ve never met them, but my guess is that while they are certainly intelligent, they might lack compassion and economic know-how, the kind that I gained from working with André all these years. All this,” he said, pointing to the stack of papers, “is just an attempt to educate myself about what I’m walking into. Our company isn’t perfect, but we are trying. And succeeding. We’re still turning a profit, more than any other plantation in Indochine. So I don’t want to change that. I want to improve upon it. And avoid a repeat of 1927, when the French overseer was murdered by the coolies, and 1930, and last year.”
I felt very silly. We had spoken at length about the three coolies who had been shot at the end of last year, the very unfortunate result of 1,200 coolies stomping in anger past a guard on the edge of Dau Tieng plantation. Michelin had reduced their rice allocation by a hundred grams and lowered their pay from 0.4 piastres a day to 0.3. It was unfortunate, but the economy dictated it. But the coolies didn’t understand that. Some of the 1,200 men were just angry; others were communists trying to incite change. Men like them were very dangerous in communities like plantations where people lived in close quarters. Victor had to keep things like that from happening again. But I hoped he wouldn’t use the word primitive when he did.
“I didn’t want to get you caught up in all this,” said Victor, running his hand softly across my hair. “I wanted you to just get settled in our pretty house, enjoy lazy days at the club, and spend time with Lucie.”
“But I care about your work, too,” I said, which I did, far more than Victor even knew.
“I know you do. And I need your continued support,” he replied. “I’ve always had that from you.”
“Of course,” I replied, looking up at him. “You always will.”
I was going to say more when we were interrupted by a knock on the door.
“Yes?” Victor called out.
“I’m sorry, sir,” said Trieu, appearing at the door. “A note was just left for you. The man who delivered it said it was important.”
Victor motioned to her to bring it to him and opened it before she left the room.
“Wonderful news,” he said without looking at me.
“What is?” I asked, trying to glance at the paper.
“The governor-general can meet me today. In an hour. I put in a request with his office just this morning. It’s not why I stayed in town, but it’s a nice turn of events. I will just have to forgo my other meeting this morning. Unless—”
Victor glanced at me, all worry gone from his face.
“Unless you would like to go for me. It’s just speaking to one of our security contacts about a man who has been making things difficult for us on the plantations. You just need to write down what the officer says. It’s like secretarial work, really. Would you mind terribly?”
“But won’t he be expecting you?” I said, feeling uneasy.
“He will be. But you can explain that I had to meet with the governor-general. Besides, look at you,” Victor said, grinning. “He’ll be thrilled to speak to a beautiful woman instead.”
“I just have to write things down?” I asked. After my years of teaching, I had often wanted to be more involved with the family company in France, to feel productive and useful. Though Victor was open to it, his mother was strongly against it. She refused to have a daughter-in-law who did anything to get her hands dirty. I once suggested that I teach again instead, and she looked at me as if I’d proposed working as a chimney sweep.
“Yes,” said Victor, still clutching the note about the governor-general. “But you must be there at eleven o’clock sharp. Very sharp. You know how these men in uniform are. He’s no longer in the military, but the habits tend to linger.”
I wanted to help Victor and, more important, wanted him to trust me after two incidents where I might have inspired mistrust. “Of course, I’ll do it. Thank you for asking me,” I said brightly, though nerves were pricking at me. I couldn’t have anything go wrong.
“Good,” he said, kissing my forehead and then taking a step back. “Bright as you are, I suppose it would be a waste to just have you recline by a swimming pool all day.”
“That doesn’t sound too bad, though,” I said, smiling.
“Let’s make sure you do that this afternoon then,” he replied. “Keep me company while I change,” he said, walking toward his large dressing room, “I’ll explain everything. But like I said, it should only take a matter of minutes. Have a cocktail while you’re at it. Secretarial work, I hear, is far more interesting with a drink in you.”
“Trieu,” I said after I rang for her and she hurried to my room. Victor had left a few minutes before, staying only long enough to set the course for my morning. “I need Lanh to chauffeur me somewhere, a neighborhood south of the train station, and I must arrive a few minutes before eleven. Could you alert him?”
“Yes, madame,” she said, turning around quickly.
There was still over an hour before I had to leave, but I couldn’t bring myself to do anything except alternate between sitting on the bed and sitting on a chair on the large balcony off the bedroom. Even though I told myself it was ridiculous—I was overqualified to take dictation, as Victor had described it, even if it was in this entirely foreign place—I could not stop feeling nervous.
At twenty minutes past ten, I exited the house and climbed inside the Delahaye.
“Did you take Monsieur Lesage to the governor-general’s house?” I asked Lanh brightly as he started the engine.
“Yes, I did, madame,” he replied without looking at me.
“Oh, good. He’s very excited about it, even if he’s not letting on.”
“I did detect that, yes,” said Lanh. “As he should be.”
He maneuvered the car onto the street, and we moved through the neighborhood slowly as I tried to enjoy the view of the large houses and the few elegant women I saw strolling down the sidewalks. That was what I might have been doing if I hadn’t read the dossier.
I flipped the face of my watch mindlessly. When I looked up again, we were in a local neighborhood. I lowered my window a bit, but when Lanh turned a corner abruptly, an animal carcass hanging on hooks outside of a butcher shop hit the car, causing me to yelp.
“I’m sorry, madame, such tight streets here. Maybe better if you roll up your window. Can you do it yourself, or should I stop and help you?”
I rolled it up quickly without answering.
“Are you certain that this is the neighborhood you’re due to visit today?” Lanh asked, still keeping his eyes in front of him.
“Yes, quite sure,” I said, feeling utterly unsure all of a sudden. “In fact, I think this is the correct street, no?” I said, glimpsing a row of noodle stands. Victor said I would know I was in the right place by the noodle vendors.
“It is, yes. At least it is the address you provided,” said Lanh, slowing down. “And this is the café that you mentioned.”
I looked down at my watch. I was twenty minutes early.
“You can let me out just here and then drive on, Lanh,” I said.
“Yes, madame,” he said, stopping the car, exiting, and opening my door. “I will return in an hour then. That’s what you would like?”
“That is. Thank you, Lanh.” I watched him climb back in the car and drive off.
The street was sunless and narrow, with wobbly bicycles and rickshaws weaving among the pedestrians. Men and women carried bundles on their backs or slung on wooden rods that they balanced on their shoulders. Among them darted rickshaw coolies in worn shoes or wearing no shoes at all. I tucked myself between people until I was against the row of rusting iron tables in front of the café. There was no terrace, so the tables and chairs were placed on the road, pushed up against the café’s front wall to take up as little room as possible. There was a young woman leaning in the door frame, with a tray dangling from her hand. Café Mat Troi. I checked the sign, to be sure I was in the right place, and then slipped into an empty seat and smiled at the waitress.
“A whiskey, please,” I said as she approached me, my smile tight. I said it in French, but I was quite sure that “whiskey” was a universally known word. She shook her head no. “Pas de whiskey ici,” she murmured. “Café. Thé. Eau.” “Eau,” I replied. She nodded, went inside, and returned quickly with a chipped glass and a carafe of water.
When she was out of view, an indigène man next to me reached into his jacket pocket and handed me a dented metal flask.
“You French own the alcohol. We Annamite are not allowed to sell. Can’t pay the taxes. They have it here. Bootleg whiskey. But she won’t give it to you.”
“Why not?” I asked, watching him pour whiskey in his water glass. He rubbed the rim between his fingers and handed it to me.
“You are French. You can report her for selling alcohol. And then the café owner must pay heavy fines. Maybe worse. You’ll never be served whiskey, or anything else, in a café like this one. You go to the nice hotels, the ones built for you. There you can drink it. But today I’ll help you.”
“Thank you,” I said. Victor clearly had no knowledge of these rules or he would have warned me.
“A little more,” he said in French, refilling my glass as the waitress eyed him angrily.
On this tight street, life seemed to be lived on the pavement as much as it was indoors. It was loud and chaotic, and there was not a face like mine to be seen.
I tried to drink my second whiskey slowly but drained it in a matter of minutes and received a third from the man without even asking.
Feeling slightly numb, I was finally able to sip instead of gulp, mindlessly spinning my emerald ring on my finger. It was something I often did to soothe myself.
There was no trace of the scent of hoa sua flowers here, no one in formal clothes, and only a few cars tried to inch through. Instead there were barefoot children running around, women in conical straw hats or with rags on their heads pouring out buckets of brown water, men with greasy gray hair hurrying here and there with cigarettes dangling out of their mouths, and a few establishments, like Café Mat Troi, that catered to them. I thought about how strange it was that this world apart existed just a twenty-minute drive from my new home. It was also odd that the policeman wanted to meet Victor in such a neighborhood, but perhaps he was patrolling it. What did I know of life here yet?
“Are you lost?” I heard a voice say to me in perfect French. I looked up to find a Caucasian man in a three-piece cotton suit staring at me with interest. I had not expected anyone to speak to me except the man I was meeting, and my pulse quickened at the sight of him. “It’s five blocks that way,” he said, pointing. I looked in the direction he was gesturing, where the street seemed to grow even narrower and more packed with willowy Indochinese bodies.
“What is?” I asked.
“Luong-Vuong,” he said, matter-of-factly. “Pour le chandoo.” He looked at the nearly empty glass on my table and repeated the word “chandoo.”
“I’m not looking for Luong-Vuong,” I replied. I tried to sound as if I knew what he was referring to, even though I hadn’t the faintest idea. “I’m just enjoying a drink.”
He shrugged. “You don’t have to keep it a secret here, my dear. These people don’t care.” He waved at the Annamites around us, none of whom were looking at us, and then quickly left, hopping in a rickshaw just a few steps away.
“C’est quoi Luong-Vuong?” I asked my waitress, who I hoped spoke enough French to understand me.
“Une fumerie d’opium,” she replied, barely looking at me. “Chandoo c’est l’opium. Et Luong-Vuong est une fumerie très connue.”
She ran her hand over my table with a rag and then took a few piastres off the table next to me, which was leaning askew, one of its legs broken. Luong-Vuong was an opium den. That man thought I was going to smoke opium, chandoo, at 10:57 in the morning. I wondered what exactly about my appearance gave him that grim impression.
“It’s why a French will walk down this street,” the waitress added, as if sensing my confusion. “Not why you here?”
“Me?” I said, looking up at her. Why was I on this street? Because I was helping Victor. Because I had made a life for myself supporting my husband. Because my old life was something I could never return to. And perhaps most importantly, because I spent countless hours thinking of my childhood self and how I didn’t want to disappoint her. But perhaps opium was an easier explanation.
I looked down at my watch, wondering if it was eleven yet, when I heard a car engine roaring. It grew louder, and I turned to see a large black Citroën making its way down the street, forcing people to press against the buildings so it could get by. It slowed just one door past the café, in front of a run-down row house with light blue walls and faded, peeling shutters. It jolted to a halt, and the back door, the one closest to the café, was flung open. A French policeman in a black uniform with bright gold buttons and a wide belt emerged and banged on the roof of the car.
I stood up quickly and smiled at him, giving a friendly wave, as he wasn’t expecting a woman. The front doors of the Citroën opened, and two more officers, one French, one native, climbed out. The Annamite policeman walked around to open the other back door before soundlessly dragging a man out of it. Wearing only a black stretch of cloth tied around his lower half, the man wasn’t putting up a fight. He wasn’t moving at all, his body heavy in the officer’s arms. He was dead. I sucked in my breath and gripped the table. This could not have been what Victor was expecting. All I had to do was write things down, he’d insisted. Secretarial work. Instead, I was looking at a dead body.
The dead man’s face as they moved him, battered and burned, was visible to all of us on the street.
I stared, frozen. I watched the police, the dead man, the Annamite men and women coming up to see, the few children whose eyes were being covered by their mothers’ hands, and then I opened my mouth and screamed, gripping my chair for support. Embarrassed, I moved my hand over my mouth to make sure I didn’t emit another sound.
I watched as one of the French policemen helped move the body, grabbing the dead man’s ankles. Together, the officers sauntered a few paces, looking as if they were holding prize game, not a human being, and deposited the man in front of the blue door. He fell with a thud, his head rolling in the direction of the café, and I could see how badly bruised it really was. The burn marks around the man’s eyes and mouth were still raw. He clearly had not been dead for long. The older policeman, who hadn’t yet touched the body, put his boot against the man’s torso, rolling it even closer to the door, exposing the back of his head, which had large patches of hair missing. From the bloody flesh that was exposed, which looked sticky and not the least bit scabbed over, I guessed it had been pulled out just a few hours ago.
“Victor,” I whispered, not sure why I said it. He certainly couldn’t help me now.
I heard another scream, and then another. A woman shouted something in Annamese, and I saw someone hurry out the door to my right. It was a young woman dressed in a brown ao. She ran to the dead man’s side, slumping against the door of the blue house. I held my breath as I watched a rush of grief hit her.
She pulled the man’s body into her lap. She was facing me now, and I saw that she was quite pretty, perhaps in her early forties, with her hair tied back at the nape of her neck. She was weeping. The three officers said nothing, stepped over her, and climbed back into their car, driving off, their speed slow and leisurely.
I removed my hand from my mouth and shook my head. She had to be his wife. “Help her!” I called out in French, taking a few steps toward them. The café server followed and pulled me back to my table, wordlessly refilling my drink. This time she gave me whiskey.
I looked at her, picked up the glass, finished it in two swallows, and held it out for yet another pour. She motioned for me to sit back down.
“Communist,” she said, refilling my glass again when I was seated. “He is a member of the Indochinese Communist Party. They want him dead for long time. Now, he dead.”
“Communist?” I whispered, looking up at her.
“Yes, communist. Men in that party getting killed now. It’s very dangerous to be in the party. Especially to be in the party and to be talkative. This one talkative.”
“It’s this dangerous?” I asked, still whispering. I knew what a problem communism was the world over, but I didn’t think that in a French colony the consequences could lead to what was in front of me.
“They want independence,” she said as another patron lifted his glass to her for a refill. “From you,” she said without glancing at me. “The police in the black car, they Sûreté générale indochinoise. Political police. Dangerous police. This is how they do it. Kill people.”
“Because the people who die want independence?”
“Yes. Independence and more. They want the workers to lead the country and they want you out. But communists, they are stupid people. They won’t have it, never. Independence. You French. You are too strong for us.”
“I’m not French,” I said. “I’m American.”
“American,” she said, stopping to think about what that meant but evidently coming up with nothing.
“The wife there,” she said, nodding toward the sobbing woman. “She must forget it. If it is not the French in Indochine, it will be another. The Chinese again. Or the British also very greedy. Worse than the French, I think. Maybe they want us, too, and then we speak your language. I don’t want to learn another language. And it’s an ugly language, yes? English.”
“I don’t know,” I replied in French, standing up and strewing more piastres on the table, my hand unsteady. “I barely use it anymore.”