LITMIR.BIZ

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make contact with the Buddhists in that region. They were well organized and we were told at that time that they were sympathetic to us. Later the war became more defined (the Vietcong versus the Americans’ puppets), but then the whole country was a mess of different factions, and we were trying to organize them. The only thing that they had in common was that they were anti-colonial – anti-French-colonial, that is: the French had done our work for us. Datt was a sort of soft-minded liberal, but he had influence with the Buddhists – he was something of a Buddhist scholar and they respected him for his learning – and more important, as far as we were concerned, he wasn’t a Catholic.

      ‘So I took my bicycle and cycled sixty kilometres to see Datt, but in the town it was not good to be seen with a rifle, so two miles from the town where Datt was to be found I stopped in a small village. It was so small, that village, that it had no name. Isn’t it extraordinary that a village can be so small as to be without a name? I stopped and deposited my rifle with one of the young men of the village. He was one of us: a Communist, in so far as a man who lives in a village without a name can be a Communist. His sister was with him. A short girl – her skin bronze, almost red – she smiled constantly and hid behind her brother, peering out from behind him to study my features. Han Chinese¹¹ faces were uncommon around there then. I gave him the rifle – an old one left over from the Japanese invasion; I never did fire a shot from it. They both waved as I cycled away.

      ‘I found Datt.

      ‘He gave me cheroots and brandy and a long lecture on the history of democratic government. Then we found that we used to live near each other in Paris and we talked about that for a while. I wanted him to come back and see de Bois. It had been a long journey for me, but I knew Datt had an old car and that meant that if I could get him to return with me I’d get a ride back too. Besides I was tired of arguing with him, I wanted to let old de Bois have a go, they were more evenly matched. My training had been scientific, I wasn’t much good at the sort of arguing that Datt was offering me.

      ‘He came. We put the cycle in the back of his old Packard and drove west. It was a clear moonlit night and soon we came to the village that was too small even to have a name.

      ‘“I know this village,” said Datt. “Sometimes I walk out as far as this. There are pheasants.”

      ‘I told him that walking this far from the town was dangerous. He smiled and said there could be no danger to a man of goodwill.

      ‘I knew that something was wrong as soon as we stopped, for usually someone will run out and stare, if not smile. There was no sound. There was the usual smell of sour garbage and woodsmoke that all the villages have, but no sound. Even the stream was silent, and beyond the village the rice paddy shone in the moonlight like spilled milk. Not a dog, not a hen. Everyone had gone. There were only men from the Sûreté there. The rifle had been found; an informer, an enemy, the chief – who knows who found it. The smiling girl was there, dead, her nude body covered with the tiny burns that a lighted cigarette end can inflict. Two men beckoned Datt. He got out of the car. They didn’t worry very much about me; they knocked me about with a pistol, but they kicked Datt. They kicked him and kicked him and kicked him. Then they rested and smoked Gauloises, and then they kicked him some more. They were both French, neither was more than twenty years old, and even then Datt wasn’t young; but they kicked him mercilessly. He was screaming. I don’t think they thought that either of us was Viet Minh. They’d waited for a few hours for someone to claim that rifle, and when we stopped nearby they grabbed us. They didn’t even want to know whether we’d come for the rifle. They kicked him and then they urinated over him and then they laughed and they lit more cigarettes and got into their Citroën car and drove away.

      ‘I wasn’t hurt much. I’d lived all my life with the wrong-coloured skin. I knew a few things about how to be kicked without getting hurt, but Datt didn’t. I got him back in the car – he’d lost a lot of blood and he was a heavy man, even then he was heavy. “Which way do you want me to drive?” I said. There was a hospital back in the town and I would have taken him to it. Datt said, “Take me to Comrade de Bois.” I’d said “comrade” all the time I’d spoken with Datt, but that was perhaps the first time Datt had used the word. A kick in the belly can show a man where his comrades are. Datt was badly hurt.’

      ‘He seems to have recovered now,’ I said, ‘apart from the limp.’

      ‘He’s recovered now, apart from the limp,’ said Kuang. ‘And apart from the fact that he can have no relationships with women.’

      Kuang examined me carefully and waited for me to answer.

      ‘It explains a lot,’ I said.

      ‘Does it?’ said Kuang said mockingly.

      ‘No,’ I said. ‘What right does he have to identify thuggery with capitalism?’ Kuang didn’t answer. The ash was long on his cigarette and he walked across the room to tap it into the wash-basin. I said, ‘Why should he feel free to probe and pry into the lives of people and put the results at your disposal?’

      ‘You fool,’ said Kuang. He leaned against the wash-basin smiling at me. ‘My grandfather was born in 1878. In that year thirteen million Chinese died in the famine. My second brother was born in 1928. In that year five million Chinese people died in the famine. We lost twenty million dead in the Sino–Japanese war and the Long March meant the Nationalists killed two and a half million. But we are well over seven hundred million and increasing at the rate of fourteen or fifteen million a year. We are not a country or a party, we are a whole civilization, unified and moving forward at a speed that has never before been equalled in world history. Compare our industrial growth with India’s. We are unstoppable.’ I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

      ‘So what?’ I said.

      ‘So we don’t need to set up clinics to study your foolishness and frailty. We are not interested in your minor psychological failings. Datt’s amusing pastime is of no interest to my people.’

      ‘Then why did you encourage him?’

      ‘We have done no such thing. He financed the whole business himself. We have never aided him, or ordered him, nor have we taken from him any of his records. It doesn’t interest us. He has been a good friend to us but no European can be very close to our problems.’

      ‘You just used him to make trouble for us.’

      ‘That I will admit. We didn’t stop him making trouble. Why should we? Perhaps we have used him rather heartlessly, but a revolution must use everyone so.’ He returned my pack of cigarettes.

      ‘Keep the pack,’ I said.

      ‘You are very kind,’ he said. ‘There are ten left in it.’

      ‘They won’t go far among seven hundred million of you,’ I said.

      ‘That’s true,’ he said, and lit another.

      36

      I was awakened at nine thirty. It was la patronne. ‘There is time for a bath and a meal,’ she said. ‘My husband prefers to leave early, sometimes the policeman calls in for a drink. It would be best if you were not here then.’

      I supposed she noticed me look towards the other room. ‘Your colleague is awake,’ she said. ‘The bathroom is at the end of the corridor. I have put soap there and there is plenty of hot water at this time of night.’

      ‘Thanks,’ I said. She went out without answering.

      We ate most of the meal in silence. There was a plate of smoked ham, trout meunière and an open tart filled with rice pudding. The Fleming sat across the table and munched bread and drank a glass of wine to keep us company through the meal.

      ‘I’m conducting tonight.’

      ‘Good,’ I said. Kuang nodded.

      ‘You’ve no objection?’ he asked me. He didn’t want to show Kuang that I was senior man, so he put it as though it was a choice between friends.

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