Night In Vietnam

I don't think it is hindsight that tinges the city with the colours of dying. The tree-lined boulevards of this 'Paris of the East' were no more than the fixed grin on a corpse. Behind the veil of chestnut trees, the concrete facades were cracked and discoloured, and the shops burrowed into their own darkness like rabbit holes, or threw out cheap awnings and a sprinkle of neon signs. Here and there, between faceless apartment blocks, the architecture of nineteenth-century France intruded with a sad grace, or some government ministry piled upon itself in an impenetrable heap of wedding-cake Ionic.

As I tramped the streets, I rarely knew precisely where I was. My map pinpointed six official buildings and a few streets ending in –ngi or –uyen. The rest was an empty grid. I couldn't speak a word of Vietnamese. The posters pinned to walls or telegraph poles were printed in a Roman alphabet so flecked by cabalistic accent-marks that the language looked literally unutterable. I knew nobody. I was dreaming the traveller's arrogant dream of understanding things by an ignorant observing and listening. So Saigon interpreted itself to me only in clichés – US servicemen lumbering like intrusive giants among a fragile, hard-faced people, enigmatically beautiful.

The whole city was glazed in rain. Its peculiar noise was the shush of bicycle tyres over wet tarmac – bicycles and trishaws everywhere, a treadmill of lean yellow legs. On the outskirts, the streets faltered into tracks where ox carts creaked and wobbled into the rice fields and barracks of Vietnamese soldiers hid behind whitewashed walls crested in barbed wire.

I became mesmerized by the women. They wore split skirts over pantaloons, and high collars, aggressively chaste. They emerged from their sordid apartment blocks with the cold immaculacy of mannequins and tripped along rubble-strewn pavements in a titter of high heels. Their faces were urban and often exquisite, nested in Western hairstyles. But their incongruous illusion of wealth and separateness had not been bought with American money. An old and rigid culture incarcerated them in this defensive glamour. If they had been used, they yet seemed untouched.

I had no money for a decent hotel, let alone for a woman. The nightclubs in the million-strong Chinese quarter of Cholon were asleep in the mid-afternoon, and I wandered instead among fruit markets filled with brown-skinned men come in from the country, and old women draped in Annamese black robes. Compared to the shifting townspeople, they were earthy, dark, rather solemn.

I was the only foreigner in the National Archaeological Museum. It had almost closed down. Nothing was lit. Fragments from extinguished dynasties were scattered indecipherably in its gloom. I searched the stone gods' faces for some secret that the people outside had withheld. The statues gazed back at me from the pilfered plinths of temples. Their faces were broad and thick-lipped: another race. Their stone haloes rose in flame-like mandorlas that had been worked into runnels like the excreta of worms. There were photographs of jungle-darkened temples in parts of Vietnam where I couldn't go. Their towers were tasselled in shrubs, and their stonework showed the same mysterious delicacy as the gods' haloes.

I felt excluded and restless. I was walking through Vietnam's past with the same ignorance as I had walked through its present. Why hadn't I read anything before coming? I had entertained ideas about encountering Vietnam free from prejudice; I would be a clean slate for the country to write upon. But the country had written nothing, and I was a blank.

I stopped beside another man, staring into a cabinet of worn sandstone faces.

'Are these portraits?' I asked the question to make contact.

Yes, he said, in a dry, guttural English. They were Champa sculptures from Huong Qua (or somewhere).

I nudged him into conversation. He had the face of a middle-aged boy. His hair was close-cropped, his eyes lidless and undreaming behind their spectacles. He taught physics at Saigon's university, he said. 'And you are with the army here...?' But his gaze on me was uncertain, as if something about me didn't fit.

'No, I'm English.' I added foolishly: 'I'm just looking around.'

He showed no surprise. He began asking me about conditions in Britain and how easy was it to get a work permit? He wanted to leave. 'Our top people have all got money or property in the States, ready for when the time comes.'

I wanted to ask him naive questions. What was really happening in this city that the powerful were deserting? What lay behind the hard, immaculate faces of those women? Or behind the peasant watchfulness in the markets? Were they filled with fear or just a habit of enduring? Did they expect anything any more?

But instead I found myself answering his questions about Britain and visas. The man seemed as far from his stricken country as I was. Whatever it had once meant to him had disintegrated. He was going to abandon it.