Saigon

Chapter 11  Saigon

I spent my first evening in Saigon having a haircut. I had nothing in mind other than the usual "short back and sides", but the barber did not make the mistake of asking for instructions. He made a workmanlike, if lengthy job of the haircut and without a break moved straight into the profitable part of the sequence.

I was massaged manually with chopping strokes from the edge of his hands and then with a devilish electric vibratory device, which set my teeth chattering, my cheeks shuddering and my chins buzzing - face, scalp, head, shoulders - nothing escaped. Then he twisted my ears till they cracked, tweaked my cheeks, realigned my eyeballs, poured half a pint of fluid into my hair and kneaded vigorously. Finally he pulled my head back to an angle which prevented me from swallowing, and cooked me under hot towels while I filled up with saliva.

  Staggering to my feet, I asked him how much I owed him for all this, and, with a bland Oriental smile he indicated the back of the room, where a beautiful girl was seated at a desk. This was smart; who would haggle with her? She gave me a ticket reading 350 which I paid, and a further hundred to the barber, now brushing imaginary hairs from me - a total of about thirty shillings, but it had been an interesting evening, cheap at the price.

My hotel had a good name; rather superior in sound and associations to, say, the Waldorf-Astoria, but it had nothing else to recommend it. I was there only because despite a firm reservation, the Continental Palace Hotel was full when I arrived and passed me on to this establishment, one of the many which have sprung up to cash in on the desperate shortage of hotel accommodation.

It was just a few rooms up a winding staircase. Though in theory air-conditioned, my room was like an oven because there was no electricity. By loading air-conditioners on to an inadequate circuit, in which fuses had been replaced by copper wire, some costly damage had been done. The water supply failed during the first day and thereafter one or other of the two boys running the hotel brought up water in a bucket.

I lay naked and sweating through the night. Planes droned out on operations and soon gunfire and bomb explosions rattled the windows. Towards dawn it became cooler and I dozed long enough for the mosquitoes to close in. Soon I was awake, scratching frantically at a hundred bites. Though I have never yet been to prison, the room reminded me of a cell in its bare drabness and I wished I could remember what crime I had committed. The following day, during the siesta hour, despite the heat of my room I lay down, hoping to sleep, but the slam of a door and the raised voice of the occupant of the cell below, quickly dispelled that idea.

It was an American soldier on Rest and Recreation leave after combat duties. He had been drinking and had some grievance against one of the two Vietnamese youths in charge of the hotel.

"Don't give me any of your lip, you sarcastic son-of-¬a-bitch," bellowed this gallant ally of South Viet-Nam. "I don't want any goddam lip from you. I'm a free-born citizen of the U.S.A. and my name is Lewis B------- not Hu Flung Dung.

I told you to do it and why the hell didn't you? Why? Why? Why?- Why? Are you stoopid or what?"

The boy's voice was too soft for me to hear his reply, but after Lew had told him, four times more, that he was a free-born citizen of the U.S.A., I retired to sleep in one of the armchairs in the lounge of the Caravelle Hotel, nearby.

That evening, after a late dinner at l'Amiral Restaurant, I returned to my hotel. The small alcove, about twelve feet square, at the head of the first flight of stairs, served as an office, a lounge and as a bedroom for the two Vietnamese youths. A Ship's Engineer who introduced himself as Bob, was playing Brahms' Lullaby on a harmonica so small that his capacious lips sometimes engulfed it. As a fellow-artist on this instrument, I applauded him, fetched my own harmonica and we exchanged repertoires. We were joined by a young Negro soldier and harmonicas were interchanged in a spirit of unhygienic bonhomie. The Ship's Engineer specialised in vibrato effects; the Negro in syncopated rhythms, and together they produced some lively music for me and for the two Viet boys, who were stretched out, one on the desk, the other on tomorrow's sheets and towels, attempting to sleep through all this. The towels, incidentally, bore all the signs of having been dried but not washed, which made me slightly unhappy. If I have to have a dried, unwashed towel, I would prefer it to be my own.

There was a noisy altercation at the foot of the stairs, by the entrance from the street. The free-born American citizen, Lew, had arrived the worse for drink and in the care of a Negro Military Policeman, who, with a white colleague was engaged in clearing the streets of stragglers, still out after the midnight curfew. Lew had decided to resist, and had just called the Negro M.P. a "dark-faced son-of-a-bitch". Sternly, the Sergeant pushed him with the flat of his hand and Lew fell back in a sitting position on the stairs.

"Don't hit me, Sergeant!" cried Lew, the craven   no longer even pot-valiant, "I didn't mean anything, Sergeant!"

This must have been one of the quickest promotions on record; from "Dark-faced son-of-a-bitch" to "Sergeant", in two seconds.

"Hit you!" said the Negro Sergeant contemptuously, "Man, I'm trying to help you:"

Lew was escorted into our midst by an even drunker soldier who had just arrived back and who, after swaying to and fro for a few moments announced that he was "tahd" and going to bed. Meanwhile, the young Negro soldier had put down my harmonica and, shaking his head sorrowfully, but with an air of calm reason, confronted Lew.

"You shouldn't have 'called' that Sergeant on account of his skin," he said.

Lew denied that he had, and as an afterthought added that he was a free-born American citizen. The Negro repeated the charge and appealed to the Vietnamese youth now sitting up on the pile of towels. He looked uncomprehending as, in fact, he was.

"You want to go in for that sort of stuff back in the States - that's your prerogative," continued the Negro, maintaining with some effort his attitude of calm reason -"but as long as we're here, don't go 'calling' a man for his colour."

"I don't know why the hell we ARE here," shouted Lew. "All I want is to get back to civilization and never goddam leave it again."

"Well and I don't reckon we should be here either, but there's no cause for 'calling' a man on account of his colour."

"I never said a goddam thing about colour," yelled Lew.

"You telling me I didn't hear it?" said the Negro, all pretence of calm gone. Lew moved across the room for no apparent reason.

"Don't brush me out of your way!" said the Negro.

"Now you're picking on him," interposed the Ship's Engineer, "can't you see he's drunk?" The Negro ignored this. Moving across to Lew he said:

"Why don't you 'call' me for my colour?" He was trying to provoke Lew into calling him a "dark-faced son-of-a-bitch", so that he would have an excuse for killing him, but Lew was not drunk enough for that.   This seemed a good point at which to leave the party and so I picked up my harmonica and sneaked quietly away.

The following day, after still another night without sleep, I managed, mainly through the influence of a friend, to get myself transferred to the Caravelle Hotel. When leaving my original hotel, I presented the young Negro with a harmonica. For some vague reason, I felt out of sympathy with Lew, despite the fact that he was a free-born American citizen.

I had looked forward to the opportunity of practising my French while in Saigon, since it is still the second language here, though rapidly giving place to American English. Certainly, after a few days I was speaking English with a strong French accent, but in general, by the time I had worked out, not what I wanted to say, but what I could say - the conversation had moved two topics further away from me. In one restaurant which I had been advised to try for its French cuisine, I realised that I had just ordered nightingales instead of kidneys, but it did not matter since they had neither.

This was one day when I was lunching alone, and the waiter stood by while I tried to select from over a hundred items. Kidneys, I gathered, were off; so was chicken; so too were steaks.

At this point, I put down the menu and asked what was "on". Only "saucisse" and "haricots" - there had been an accident in the kitchen - a fire! I refrained from asking him why on earth he had not told me this, without letting me waste time over the menu. My restraint was partly due to my inability to translate this instantly into French, which had a steadying effect, like counting ten before bawling someone out. I accepted the sausages and beans and was rewarded for my forbearance by seeing a party of six businessmen going through the same performance, a few minutes later. Someone was being "entertained", and, after the usual style of business lunches, it took five people to look after one visitor.

There was a good deal of joking, chatter, and exchanging of ideas as they went through the menu, the waiter meanwhile looking-on benignly. When they had all settled on what they would like, the head of the party - the man who would eventually push the bill across to his assistant - started to give the order. The waiter was sorry. Oh! too bad! Well, let's see now - why don't we have? Three times the waiter allowed this to happen before he disclosed that only sausages and beans were available. Surprisingly, no-one hit him. In silence they rose and left.

In Saigon, too many people are chasing too few taxis -a classic inflationary situation, leading to higher fares and to the use of substitutes, such as motorised rickshaws in which the passenger reclines in a basketwork contraption - acting as the driver's first cushion against a crash. Because of the passenger's forward position, he projects well into the stream of traffic before the driver can see if it is safe to proceed, and sudden braking would probably pitch the passenger into the path of whatever the driver wanted to avoid.

Any youth with a Lambretta-type scooter plies for hire, and in desperation I perched myself on the rear seat of one. The boy drove slowly around the centre of Saigon, shouting to his friends to find out if they knew the street and hotel I had named. Then he speeded up, apparently determined to cover every street until I recognised the one I wanted. It started to rain and we slid on clay from the many road-workings, amid the roar and confusion of the Saigon traffic. After what I guessed to be eight miles travelling, I recognised my hotel and paid off my driver, making a mental vow never to treat life so lightly again.

The next day, having obtained a street-map, I was able to walk the journey - it was less than half a mile direct, and took me past the Roman Catholic Cathedral with its graceful statue of the Virgin Mary. In Latin, on the pedestal, it says: "Queen of Peace, pray for us."

Barbed wire - a feature and symbol of Saigon today - is wound round the base, providing equally barbed comment, if more were needed.

Because the Caravelle could not fit me in more than two nights, I ended my stay in yet another hotel. This is memorable firstly because of an American businessman with whom I was discussing the U.S.A.'s immense material wealth. He said:

"Yes, you guys really ought to blackball George VIII or Henry VIII or whoever it was lost you your American colonies. He sure cost you a lot of dough."

Secondly, as I was passing the Reception Desk, one of the clerks started to tell me how desperately short of rooms they were - even to the extent that they had a problem over a very good friend of the Manager, who was arriving that day, and "would I, as a personal favour, let him share my room?"

"No! Certainly not: I don't share my room with anyone."

"He is a very nice gentleman - very clean - a friend of the Manager!"

"Then let him share the Manager's room."

"But the Manager sleeps with his wife!"

I would have liked to say: "So?", or "Then put a cot in their room," but contented myself with repeating that no-one was sharing my room.