The Communist League had always supported the Vietnamese Revolution. After the failure of the May '68 uprising in France, the far Left student groups were outlawed by the DeGaulle government and promptly regrouped themselves, often splitting into factions in the process. Some of these turned away from Vietnam mobilization and reorganized around issues closer to home: immigration, women's lberation, homosexual rights, high school reform and support for French soldiers, or a combination thereof. None of the far left groups turned away from the Vietnamese struggle against their American ínvaders, though one spontaneous group criticized the Vietnamese as petty bourgeois and nationalist. Only the Communist League continued to prioritize Vietnam. And the French Communist Party, which was of course not a group or groupuscule (to use the government nomenclature), but a powerful political party with representation in the French Parliament.
On January 27, 1973, the Paris Peace Agreements between the United States and Vietnam were started. Vietnam signified North Vietnam, that is, the sovereign state of Vietnam under the leadership of Ho Chi Minh. The French colonialists had been defeated by the Vietnamese army at the battle of Dien Bien Phu in 1954, and all the French expelled from the country. The United States under President Eisenhower had refused military assistance to the French, and after their defeat, the United States had invaded Vietnam on its own, being defeated in turn by the Vietnamese in 1975. The victorious Vietnamese forces entered Saigon on April 30th, while the last helicopter took off from the roof of the American Embassy, taking the last of the Americans and the last collaborators who were able to a handhold on the fusillage. The Peace Accords had already started in 1973, the same year that, in the mini-history of events, a Vietnamese film was shown at the film festival in Cannes.
Max Watts and I drove four Vietnamese, three men and a woman, from Paris down to Cannes for the film. Like many other Americans, we had been drawn into support for this small country in Southeast Asia where the Americans were dropping more bombs than had been dropped on Europe in the entire Second World War. By the end of the Vietnam war, everyone in the world was for the Vietnamese except the very Far Right. The French in particular were delighted to see powerful America losing the same war that the French had lost before them.
Max and I were part of a group of anti-war Americans and others, living in France, who were against the war. As PACS (Paris American Committee to Stopwar), we were tolerated, as the French government phrased it, under the umbrella of the Quakers, a traditional antiwar religion, established in Paris since the first World War. The French would have closed the Quaker Center immediately if it had expressed an opinion about their own Indochinese War, but the Quakers were good politicians as well as sincere believers and knew when to be discreet. When our minority in PACS became active in support of American deserters in France, the Quakers let us continue to use their address as a contact and on our leaflets, inciting to desertion, more or less.
At the age of forty, I had also joined the Communist League, mainly to learn what was going on in the streets of Paris, also because the JCR (the Young Communist Revolutionnaries) had been the dominant student revolutionnary group in the Lycèe my daughter attended. It had never even occurred to me to join the French Communist Party. My French husband had been friends with a group of intellectuals in Paris who had gone through their love-hate relationship with that organization long before I appeared on the scene. And in PACS, some older members were in Paris because of they had lost their jobs because of real or more usually purported political affinity to the PC-USA. These people, like my French friends, had put this part of their past behind them.
My own political history was short and is easily summed up. Born in the US, I had qualified for French nationality when I married a Frenchman. The nationality remained even after the divorce, and, as a citizen, I could no longer be expelled from France for taking part in politics. I could only be sent to jail. That was not the case with Max, who was not American at all but Austrian, although he had lived several years in England, later America, now in Paris with a longterm residence permit. His wife was a French citizen, but what applied to men did not apply to women--they could not confer their citizenship on their chosen partner. Max and I fell between two stools, a generation older than the May`68ers, and one younger than the present leaders of the French Communist Party.
Back to Vietnam: the Vietnamese had won their war against the Americans in 1973, although it was to continue on the ground for two years after this first round of Peace Accords. The bi-annual film festival was taking place in Cannes in January, distinguishing itself from its more famous summer counterpart by specializing in documentaries. Normally, a film festival was not anything I was interested in. Documentaries on the Vietnamese struggle abounded, and the Quaker Center, the Communist Party, the Trotskyist Communist Ligue, and all the many antiwar groups in Paris programmed them often. It is part of the folklore of the war how the Vietnamese had set up an underground infra-structure in and under the jungle. Tunnels not only facilitated troop and supply movements, but led to underground hospitals along with operating rooms. Films abounded showing these installations, as well as the above-ground Ho Chi Minh trail connecting the North and South. If the Quaker Center or PACS had thought about the festival at all, we would have assumed one of these anti-Vietnam (war implied) films was displayed. Not at all. A pornographic film made in Saigon, under American occupation, was the only entry for South Vietnam. There was no entry for North Vietnam.
There was already an American anti-Vietnam group on the Cote d'Azure, working with French anti-Vietnam groups active in the costal cities like Marseille, Nice, and Cannes. We had learned about the planned projection of the porno film from the FSI, the Front of Indonesian Solidarity, a group set up by members of the Ligue to organize anti-Vietnam people who were not on their own political line. We still would not have heard of this if it had not been for Eric. Eric was a thirty year old shooting star of West Coast academia, and had been invited to lecture on American films in culture centers all over Europe. I had gone to one lecture at an American center on the Left Bank and reproached him for not mentioning Vietnam.
--But Vietnam has nothing to do with films of the 30's and 40's, objected Eric. When it's relevant, I always mention it.
I said Vietnam was always relevant, particularly in an American institution. This was at Christmas, and the US had decided to continue its bombing of Vietnam throughout the Christmas holidays.
I don't know how affected Eric was by my criticism, but he finally did more for the Vietnamese by getting the porno film thrown out of the Cannes Film Festival than he would have by inserting a few anti-Nixon slogans into his lecture. When he got to Cannes, he had been shocked to see that although the title of the whole Festival was Youth in the World Struggle, there was not one film on the Vietnamese war against America, war being a notorious consumer of the young. There was only the porno film. So Eric got himself invited to the first showing, along with Gilbert, the head of the American center in Cannes. Both of them stood up in front of the audience and explained what kind of film was being shown and why they, the audience, should refuse, not only to look at it, but to stop it. This type of influence was possible in those days. Some of the audience got up and left, and some went with Eric and Gilbert to tell the projectionist why he should not screen the film. So he didn't.
First the film was stopped only for that evening. The administration did not want confrontations and demonstrations. But the main purpose of the film was to sell it for distribution. I would not have thought of that, but Eric, a professional critic, did and had little trouble finding out there was a private screening for prospective buyers the next night. He knew about the Front of Indonesian Solidarity and came with some of them to block the door at the private showing. Since the showing had only been for prospective buyers, they were not battering the door down and simply went off to get their porno films somewhere else. By now, word had gotten out that something was going on. People were still very sensitive to protests in 1973, and the older anti-Vietnam Americans in Cannes and environs asked the director to look into it.
--The director was a conflict manager, said Eric. Remember, many Americans in Cannes and Nice had been involved in the movie business. Some had been expelled from the Hollywood studios during the McCarthy witch hunts, so they pressured the director to devote an evening showing Vietnamese films put out by the Front. That managed the conflict. The director gave them the main hall and all its facilities but said he could not include the showing on the official program. Well, that was all right. As long as we had the hall and the projectionist and lights and ushers, people would come because there were thousands of people in Cannes for the festival, ready to go to anything in the evening. Then Eric called PACS to contact the Vietnamese Legation in Paris and ask if it wanted to send representatives. The Legation had a very active PR department in Paris to counteract the official propaganda of the puppet and the American governments.
The anti-Vietnam ex-Hollywoodians were enthusíastic about the whole thing, and offered to put up the Vietnamese for the night on one of their estates. Now the only problem was that the South of France was rich in small fascist groups, some of whom might, for their part, try to prevent the showing of the Vietnamese films. This information from the people we knew in the Ligue who were organizing the FSI, and who offered to provide a service d'ordre (security guards) for the night of the showing. We did not think the presence of a small group of fascists on the Cote d'Azure would worry the Vietnamese, after having defeated the entire French army, and now on the way to doing the same with the mighty Americans. Our specific problem was how to get in touch with the Vietnamese Legation at all, and present the invitation. Like all diplomatic bodies, the Legation was very prudent, and the festival might be over before they would even learn about it.
I have been saying we and our, although none of us were really coordinated. Eric and Gilbert had contacts with the director of the festival and with the FSI, both of those had contacts with the American movie people, and we were in contact with Eric. There were certainly Vietnamese in southern France, but they had no contact with the Festival, and none of us knew them. Anyway, the Legation was the only one that could authorize such a visit. Both PACS and the Ligue had been attending the Vietnamese press briefings on the war, and were acquainted with several of the speakers, but not to a point where they could just pick up the telephone and ask. Fortunately for us, the Ligue turned out to be an exception. One of its close contacts was Vietnamese. Tian had worked closely with them when the Ligue had still been the JCR, and one of my daughter's friends had brought him to the house. She had once remarked that in all her years (two) of working on Vietnam, she had never met a Vietnamese, outside of the waiters in Vietnamese restaurants in the Latin Quarter. Her boyfriend at the time was one of Tian's best friends, and both of them found it amusing to cast Tian in the role.
--Although she is hardly going to meet a real Vietnamese when she meets me, said Tian.
His parents were both Vietnamese, but Tian had been born in Paris and gone to school and the university there. His father had been in the French army, and his mother was the revolutionnary. "Tian" was a French version of Trang Le, and one day, after we had become friends, he sat me down and made me write out the correct version of his entire name, Trang Le being all I now remember. French was his native language, of course, and he had to "get up" his Vietnamese whenever he went back to Vietnam. Now, at the young age of twenty-two, he was an assistant professor of math in the French university system. I think the Vietnamese used him as a liaison with the academic world, as well as the various anti-Vietnam groups around Paris. He had a large apartment, belonging to one of his absent parents, on the rue Richard Lenoir and was always ready to put up a deserter while we were figuring out what to do with him next. So when Eric phoned from Cannes as ask about the Legation, Tian was the one we thought of. Age was only a minor division in the Vietnam support movement, the revolutionary ones young, the supporters middle-aged. The Vietnamese in Paris, we were to see, were both. We met Tian, as agreed, two blocks away from the Legation at four-thirty the next afternoon. The dusk was already growing at that time of year.
--We had better walk around until it's time, said Tian. No point in giving the French police a chance to study us for the next half hour.
Like all embassies and their surrogates, the police were on duty to protect the rights of foreigners. It was cold as we walked the streets, telling Tian about the Cannes Film Festival and the porno film and the revolutionnary films that had been sent down to take over.
--I am only an intermediary, said Tian. It is better for you to explain yourselves directly.
--Can we offer to do anything?
--Max has a big car. Perhaps you could offer to drive them down. They will certainly send more than one person, if they agree to go at all, and train fares are expensive.
We got back to the Legation in time to see the doors open and let three Vietnamese out into the street. As they passed, we could see their ties and white shirts in the opening of their overcoats. I remember a musical evening at an American cultural center where a Vietnamese mixed choir had sung first, followed by an American draft resister playing an acoustic guitar. The Vietnamese had been impeccably turned out in white shirts and pressed blue trousers; the American had dirty jeans and long uncombed hair. Healthy Vietnam and decadent America? The Vietnamese had sung about the future of their country, and the American about the world coming to an end.
Tian whispered that the three Vietnamese who had just passed were leaders of the Revolutionary Provisional government. In the South, that is. The Legation is the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, the government in the North.
--Two of them smiled at me, but the third didn't, said Tian. I wonder why.
--Tian must be very sensitive about his position, said Max later.
The door opened again, and we followed Tian, who was following an elderly Vietnamese acting as doorman. He left us in a large reception room furnished in hotel suite style: two couches, Louis XV chairs, light appliqués on the walls., Only a large portrait of Ho Chi Minh in what seemed to be pastels showed any particular Vietnamese influence. A thin, middle-aged man appeared behind us and greeted Tian in Vietnamese. After their short conversation, we were introduced in French and we all sat down. Max and I explained alternately about the festival and our own role as intermediaries for the people organizing on the Riviera. The Vietnamese took one or two notes, and with a smile, excused himself. A minute or so later, he reappeared with a short, square younger man. We stood up when he entered the room, all shook hands, and sat down, and we repeated the invitation to the Festival. It occurred me that we should have had an invitation to show him. The Vietnamese always send out nicely printed invitations to their press briefings. The second Vietnamese was second secretary to the Legation. He asked a few precise questions about the Festival, its exact name, organizers, and then whether or not the puppet Saigon government had already shown a film there. We did not know whether the erotic film was an official government offering, and told him all about it.
Nguyen Ho Nam, the second secretary, said this was important as they, the Democraqtic Republic of Vietnam, could not appear at a festival if the Saigon government was in any way connected with i
--This is very important, you see, he repeated, soliciting our agreement. There is also the question of flags.
--Flags?
--Are there flags in front of the festival, or inside the hall?
Max and I looked at each other. I said I supposed there were.
--At least in front, I said.
I thought the festival hall in Cannes must be something like the United Nations, adorned with flags.
--I suppose they would have a French flag and an American flag, added Max. But I don't think they would have a flag from the Saigon government. We can ask when our friends call tonight. What does the Saigon flag look like?
Ho Nam smiled and waited.
--It is red with blue stripes, isn't it? asked Max.
--Five blue stripes, amended Ho Nam.
--Well, we'll tell them to look. They can probably tear it down. What do you want up there--a flag of the NLF and your own flag?
Ho Nam nodded.
--Our friends in Marseilles have flags, he said. But they won't be able to come to Cannes.
--The FSI here certainly have flags, I said.
The FSI was basically a "Trotskyst Front" organization, just as the Peace Movement was basically a "Communist front” organization. Both must have had flags of the two Vietnams, but we were aware of the thin and difficult path the Vietnamese had to thread between the various political parties supporting them, particularly between the Communists and the Trotskysts. Ho Chi Minh, for example, had always been a Stalinist. Before coming today, Max and I had decided only to refer to the FSI and not mention the Communist League at all. The Vietnamese, we noticed later, only referred to the peace movement, which could always be taken as referring to all groups supporting them.
--Could you bring the flags then? asked Ho Nam.
I said I would enquire and call this evening. We also did not yet know whether the Vietnamese films were programmed for Sunday or Monday; so it was agreed we return the next day at ten-thirty in the morning to continue our conversation.
The next morning we came with flags and without Tian. He had fulfilled his role of intermediary. The French cops were still in front of the Legation with their guns and walkie-talkies. We were shown into a smaller reception room this time. I omitted to mention that on our first visit, the elderly Vietnamese had offered us cigarettes from a solid multi-partioned box on the table, with Craven A's and small wooden match boxes in neat stacks. Even on reactionary coffee tables, open cigarette boxes have always symbolized a certain civilized generosity to me, and I had been pleased to see one on the certainly revolutionary--if any object can be so classified--coffee table in the Legation. Ho Nam entered almost immediately and put me at my ease so to speak, by lighting his own cigarette. At the time I did not notice whether or not he was smoking Craven A's, but later he told me he got a numbered brand at one of the diplomatic services. Since he and I were the only ones who smoked, it created a small bond between us. Shortly afterwards, the elderly Vietnamese doorman came in with a tea tray, which he put down on a small table next to Ho Nam, who poured out. I took this as a positive sign.
--We brought the flags, said Max.
I produced them, wrapped in a neat paper package by one of the comrades from the FSI. The elderly Vietnamese who had brought the tea left with them. I thought it rather elegant that no one had opened the package to see if we had brought the right ones.
--We have discussed the question of going to the film festival, began Ho Nam. In fact, we found we had received an invitation to send our films there a long while ago.
He put a letter on the table: Tenth Encounter of Films for Youth (literal translation from the French: Le Dixième Rencontre des Films pour la Jeunesse).
--Would you like to look at it?
Max picked it up.
--That was last August, continued Ho Nam. Shortly afterwards we were busy with many other things, you see.
He smiled as though they had been guilty of an omission, albeit an unimportant one. I tried to remember exactly what stage in the destruction of Vietnam Nixon had been engaged in last August. Max handed me the letter, a simple invitation to send representative films to the Festival in January. For the Vietnamese, it probably cautioned their participation. If the DRV had not been invited, and the Saigon government had, the Festival would have been definitely "on the other side." A festival that asked two warring governments to send films was just another bi-lateral uncommitted capitalist democracy. But it was also important that the Saigon film had not actually been shown, that Eric and Gilbert and the young FSIers had stopped both showings. The slot Vietnam was still open for the revolutionary films.
--It is also difficult to liberate someone to go there, Ho Nam was continuing. We are very busy just now.
The Christmas bombing. But when wouldn't they be very busy?
--However, we have conferred, and we think it is very important that people see films of Vietnam at this festival. First, however, we had to be sure that the Saigon government had not taken part in it.
Max explained again about Eric and his friend organizing the audience to prevent the showing of the Saigon film. Ho Nam smiled.
--That is very good, he said. And so that is another reason to present our own films. But there is something else worrying us. Yesterday you mentioned fascist attacks. We do not want to be the occasion for a fascist attack that might compromise the success of the festival. If our presence there would be the cause of a disturbance, then it would be better if we did not come.
Max and I exchanged glances again. What Ho Nam had just said was logical in terms of their general politics. We had just never heard it applied to a film festival. That is, we knew the Vietnamese position that they were fighting for their right to administer their own country without outside interference. When they had expelled the invaders, they would not try to take over all of Southeast Asia, as the Americans said. They had stopped when they had expelled the French colonialists, and would do so when they had expelled the American imperialists. They did not want to be thought of as trouble makers, and had much experience with the official medias in France and elsewhere, which castigated Vietcong violence while ignoring, or placing on a different, acceptable level, the carpet bombing of Vietnam by US B-52's.
--If the fascists want to attack, I said, the films themselves are enough excuse, whether representatives of Vietnam are there or not. But we will take all possible precautions.
--We warn you, said Max, that this is a cultural event, not a political one. We cannot supply a service d'ordre as experienced as those of the political groups in Paris. But our friends in Cannes have been able to round up about thirty young militants from Vietnamese support groups from the region to guard you. I don't think much can happen. Someone might come with a gun, but people will be checked at the entrances, although the hall is pretty big, 800 people, so it can't be totally secured.
For a reassuring speech, I have heard better.
--We are not worried about ourselves, you see, explained Ho Nam. But we would not want to compromise the success of the Festival.
I was glad he took Max's information so calmly.
--I suppose with what's happening in Hanoi, said Max. a few fascists in Cannes is not much of a threat.
--We are used to attacks, you see, said Ho Nam. But we are interested not to compromise the success of the Festival by our presence there.
He was patiently presenting their position until he was sure it penetrated. I could see how they were wearing down the Americans at the Peace Talks.
--We'll ask the comrades when they call this evening, said Max. But I think, if the fascists want an excuse, they will find one in the film itself.
Max was also an old militant. Actually, I found this way of discussing relaxing. Each person advanced and underlined his position until it was understood. At subsequent discussions, other positions could be advanced and discussed. Either both sides agreed or they did not. There was no evoking a rationality deformed to fit the situation. Whatever the technique of discussion, I was beginning to feel that the Vietnamese were seriously thinking of going to Cannes. We agreed to call them that evening, and confirm the type of flags outside and inside Festival Hall. We had already asked Eric if there was a Saigon flag there, but he had had no more idea of what one looked like than I had had. Max said he knew because he was a sailor and sailors had a habit of noticing flags.
--You don't want there to be a Saigon one, but you don't care about an American one? asked Max.
Ho Nam shrugged. There obviously would have to be American flags at a film festival, but they were anyway less important on French soil than those of the collaborationist Vietnamese. Ho Nam was a diplomat, and the diplomatic concern was to affirm the status of the DRV, particularly since it was also representing the Liberation Front in the South.
--If these two questions are resolved, said Ho Nam. Then we will go. Will you accompany us?
--Eric is already there, said Max, and he is one of the few people who can speak as well about GI resistance as I can. I don't think our presence is important.
Ho Nam smiled and said nothing. I felt this was another question of two positions being advanced. Politically we had nothing to do there, but diplomatically, as an example of American-Vietnamese friendship, we would be seeing things through instead of handing the Vietnamese representatives over to people in Cannes that they did not know. By now we had each consumed two cups of jasmine tea, and I had smoked two cigarettes from the box and one of Ho Nam's. We repeated that we would call again that evening after we had talked to Cannes.
In no reality or fiction had I ever come across a diplomat as autonomous as Ho Nam. The Vietnamese final decision to go to Cannes, and Ho Nam's acceptance of our invitation to drive them down were, I believe, taken entirely on his own initiative. Perhaps he was a prince in disguise-- like in a novel where the equerry for the prince turns out to be the prince himself. Tian had told us Ho Nam was the Second Secretary to the Legation, not the First Secretary. But he undoubtedly had the autority to make decisions in his field, whatever multitude of issues that covered.
As for our decision to drive them, Max, Tian and I all felt it was the correct protocol to follow.
--They asked us if we would accompany them, but, of course, it would cost money, and we really have no function there.
--It is too bad they can't fly, said Tian. One hour and they would be there. But it would cost twice as much.
--The Cannes comrades will certainly meet them at the train, I said. But it somehow seems impolite to leave it at that.
--You could offer to drive them to the station, said Tian. Of course, it means getting up at five.
He grimaced.
--Oh, I don't mind, I said. Always enthusiastic.
Max grimaced.
--If they refuse, said Tian. You should be at the station anyway, to see them off. That would be appreciated.
In our last conversation, Ho Nam said four of them would be coming, two from the Legation, and two from the Front. And that they would be very pleased to make the trip with us.
--Six people in a car, said Max, don't cost more than two in a train. I know they run their Embassy on very little money. The diplomatic cars, for example, are lent by the Communist Party.
The great French Communist Party. Well, none of the "groupuscles" (to use the media term) could have afforded to pay for cars for the Vietnamese delegation. I doubt whether the thought ever occurred to them. Theoretically they could have organized a project to purchase diplomatic cars for the Vietnamese Delegation in Paris. Only theoretically. As I said, the Ligue had grown out of a youth group who, like youth around the world, had been inspired by the uneven fight of the Vietcong in “black pyjamas” against the Americans with tanks, planes, and the latest technology. The Vietnamese were a symbol, and that they also needed cars to get around Paris did not fit in with the Left's image of Vietnamese resistance; whereas the Communist Party did think of such things. Also, it had enough money to support the Vietnamese discreetly in these little ways. Discretion is the operative word. The Vietnamese certainly would not have countenanced a public campaign to buy them cars.
--The rent for the Legation building too, I added my bit. Mrs. Jolas told me that.
Despite their gratitude for small favors from the Soviets or the Chinese, the Vietnamese have succeeded in maintaining a great deal of independent in running things their own way.
First Day
So let us begin our motoring trip, on New Year's Day 1973 at six in the morning. The Christian New Year's Day. Whether any of us were Christians is information I never investigated. Certainly neither Max nor I. He was a Jewish national, according to Zionist terminology, but not religious, and since his parents were also brought up in the free-thinking Vienna of the early years of the 20th century, I doubt they were either. My own parents had departed the beliefs of the Catholic Church shortly after my own christening. Any of the Vietnamese could have been Christian, since French missionaries had been active in the country ever since it had been taken over by the French in 1880. The Catholics were a political entity inside the country, right wing. Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of Diem, the ruler of the fantoche government, was a fascist as well as a Catholic, vide Franco.
Ho Chi Minh had been a loyal Stalinist to the end, and the USSR still outlawed religious observances of any kind. So our four comrades from both sides of the 17th parallel would long ago have abandoned any religion they might have been exposed to as children.
To start by identifying them from the oldest on down: the first was Ho Nam and then Monsieur Chan, the Press Attaché, both officials from the DRV, a government recognized by France but not by the USA nor its two main European allies, Great Britain and West Germany. "West Germany" was a Social Democratic government and should logically, being on the Left in its way, have recognized Vietnam's right to exist as an independent country. Willie Brandt, chancellor of West Germany, had opted for the United States, however, because East Germany was on the side of the Vietnamese and was in the Soviet block. France did recognize the Hanoi government, and implicitly the People's Liberation Front of the South. So, back to our two DRV comrades who were both over fifty. As I have said, Ho Nam occupied a high position in the Legation, but we never found out exactly what. It did not much matter. Physically he was short and square, not unlike Max but a muscular version. Chan, the Press Attaché was tall, thin and humorous. He leaped into the jump seat at the back of the Citroen at my proposition that he should sit in one of the middle seats where his legs would not be up to his chin. Instead, he made himself very comfortable in back, using his knees as a desk where he spent much of his time writing, as was appropriate for a press attaché.
The two young comrades from the People's Provisional Government in the South were Van and Tam. Van was a woman, my companion as Ho Nam had mentioned to us on the phone. Neither of them looked more than twenty-five, although they told us later they were in their early thirties. I looked to see if each had a thermos bottle. Outside of small overnight bags, Tam's movie camera was their only extra equipment and took up no more room than an overlarge pair of binoculars. Only Max had a thermos. It was under the driver's seat, accompanied by twelve bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches he had conned me into making the night before and which were to feed us all during the 1000 kilometer drive.
--I won't need to stop driving, he told me. We can drive straight through and with a little luck be there around four or five.
I was exhausted at the prospect. But since Max would be the one doing all the driving, I only objected that the Vietnamese might prefer tea to coffee.
--I shouldn't be at all surprised if they had their own thermoses, said Max. The Vietnamese usually bring their own supplies. In Vietnam, every bicycle has a thermos.
I did not point out that we were not all bicyling to Cannes but without objection made sandwiches to supplement their supplies.
--Once we get well outside of Paris, said Chan. We can stop for coffee. In about an hour and a half, I should think.
--Oh, I can keep on driving, said Max. We brought coffee and sandwiches for everyone.
--There is no point tiring yourself, said Chan gently. We can stop for coffee.
He was also their public relations man.
--Whatever you prefer, said Max. But, as far as I am concerned, we can drive straight through.
In an hour and a half we stopped for coffee. I already felt less exhausted.. In former trips with Max, I had had the feeling that his long distance driving was a tool to impress others with his stamina in crisis situations. Although a film festival was hardly a crisis situation, he had nevertheless leaned pretty heavily on the fascist hordes in Cannes. But this first coffee stop gave me the idea that the Vietnamese had decided we were on an outing.
I had driven and been driven along the Autoroute du Sud innumerable times since its construction in 1960, but at six in the morning, it looked strange and limitless, like an air strip to nowhere. Both the many small, mainly communist municipalities and the large wholesale market at Rungis that we avoided passing through reminded me of everything you avoided in air travel. What had they done with the blocks of low cost housing in Stalingrad-Bicetre, invisible as we clipped along the autoroute. I knew they were somewhere out there out of sight. Max lived there. He was now telling Ho Nam about resistance inside the army. I had heard this many times before, but could easily not check in from my seat in the second row. Van was next to me and Tam on the outside window, occasionally remarking to each other in Vietnamese. Both were small enough so we had plenty of room. Chan, as I said, was in the jump seat in back. I had time for myself, and decided to write this account as Four days with the Vietcong. I would have to ask if Vietcong was at all perjorative, since it was used indiscriminately by the US media whenever it wanted to downgrade Vietnam. Did it refer to the North or the South?
--The flags! said Ho Nam suddenly. I forgot the flags. I left them at the Legation.
--We can telephone Marseilles when we stop for coffee, said Chan. They may have flags.
That was almost all that was ever said about the flags again, though they had been one of the sticking points of the Vietnamese decision to go to Cannes. I found that very human. At eight-thirty we were the only customers in the Autoroute snack bar., modern, flimsy and neon lit. A chrome bar ran along one side, plate glass windows on the other, looking out on the Autoroute. I wondered if the manager and the two waiters were impressed with the Vietnamese. I would have been. I was. More likely, they were beyond being impressed by anyone who tumbled into the restaurant at any hour of the day or night. We all drank cafe creme and Chan ordered ham sandwiches for all of us. So much for my theory that the Vietnamese would prefer tea.
--We made our own sandwiches, said Max, bringing out the plastic bag. I half-heartedly lay them out on the table, but they looked small and squashed on their silver paper next to the blooming fresh bread of the ham sandwiches. I was afraid one of the Vietnamese would feel obliged to take one out of politeness, and so unobtrusively swept them back into the plastic bag once the conversation got going.
--I'll telephone to Marseilles for the flags, said Ho Nam.
In most embassies, the senior member would ask a junior member to make a call. On the other hand, the Vietnamese were closely watched in France, and the people in Marseilles might only talk to an identified voice, who logically would be the Second Secretary.
--Will they be up so early? I asked. --Oh, I think so, said Ho Nam.
--It's New Years Day, I said.
Our New Year. Of course, many Vietnamese had been converted to Christianity during the almost one hundred and fifty years of French occupation, but there were also many other religions in the country. I did not know the demographics, but it was unlikely that the religion of the occupier would be celebrated as a national holiday. Nevertheless, the Marseilles branch of the Legation might have been invited to New Year's Eve parties last night by their French friends. Perhaps they had, for Ho Nam soon returned and said the Marseilles number did not answer. I again foound these small signs of human error sympathetic, showing the fragility of the most successful revolutionary war on the books, one that was defeating the American war machine. The flags were forgotten back in Paris, the Marseilles number did not answer. I thought of Trotsky waiting on the wrong train platform and almost missing the Geneva conference of the Bolshevik Party. It would have been better for him if he had missed that and gone to Lenin's funeral. The French Communist Party undoubtedly had human failings too, but I did not think, from what I knew of them, that they would admit them so easily to outsiders. I do not think they would have told us they had forgotten the flags.
When we left the snack bar, it was already day, and the sky was blue.
--We have brought gas coupons for you, said Ho Nam.
That was very considerate and a surprise. We had decided the gas would be our contribution to the Vietnamese struggle, but as diplomats the Vietnamese were issued very cheap gas coupons by the French government, and so that was what we travelled on.
My romantic conception of the autoroute as an airstrip to nowhere faded in the daylight to become incorporated into a Vietnamese division of France, along with its mundane role as the Paris-Riviera liason. Like Cubist painters arranging bits of newspaper and otherwise familiar objects into collages to create another visual reality, the Vietnamese had cut up the Midi of France into their own political reality. For example, at noon Ho Nam asked, after a brief discussion with Chan in Vietnamese, if we preferred to stop in Avignon or orange for lunch.
--Oh, I don't need lunch, said Max, still in his own crisis situation. I can drive through.
--You mustn't tire yourself, said Ho Nam. It's a long drive.
- -For me, it's all right, said Max. I had two ham sandwiches back there.
--There are Vietnamese restaurants in both places, said Ho Nam.
--Decide quickly, said Max in his last attempt to maintain the crisis situation. The turn-off for Orange is in twenty kilometers, At our present rate of speed, we will be there in twenty minutes.
--Then perhaps we could stop a minute?
Max pulled into the emergency stopover. Two hundred meters farther on, a large sign said Orange.
--Orange is coming up, Max pointed out to us all. If we go on to Avignon, we will have to make a detour. We have the time but--
--We will go to Orange, , said Ho Nam.
And so we did.
Orange
Orange was a cold little provincial town whose streets were lined with plane trees, looking wintry, its shop fronts drab.
--Now we must find the restaurant, said open, I said. We'll leave a note: Unfair to hungry comrades.
But they were open. The proprietor was on the sidewalk as soon as Ho Nam got out of the car. He was heavyset. dressed in black, exactly as the proprio of a provincial restaurant should be on a Sunday. We stood back to let our Vietnamese ambassadors preceed us into the restaurant. Inside the door, a grinning dragon's head with horrible white teeth, terrifying pop eyes, and golden horns was strung up on the wall beside its limp body. Dances from Vietnam on Saint Sylvester said a sign in French. Scrolls, framed tapestries of embroidered dragons, small porcelain figures, tea sets, and tiny liqueur cups were perched on precarious pedestals, hung from thin walls, lit by fragile brackets. Snow white table cloths separated in a narrow aisle where there was a reception committee: an old cook with wrinkled face and bent back, the young cashier with smooth skin and black curly hair, the greying dishwasher, and a young waiter in a white jacket.
--These are our friends, said Ho Nam.
I thought of the Christmas bombing going on. I think we also looked very American, rather than French, and I would have been te mpted to throw myself and Max out. Maybe Max looked less American than I did. But instead of being thrown out, we found our selves sitting very comfortably at a table for six, placed at right angles to a large window half-masked by chips of multi-colored plastic simulating multi-colored glass chips simulating stained glass. The top of a giraffe-like plane tree lifted its camel nose outside in the allée.
Van and I, opposite each other, felt the chips to see if they were real or painted. Watery sunbeams wavered on the white tablecloth.
--Pretty, said Van.
Music started.
--That is a Vietnamese chorus, explained Ho Nam, sitting on my right.
An invisible tape, hidden in a black laquer cabinet, sang in high clear voices of events or emotions to western ununderstanding ears
--They sing both modern and traditional songs, said Ho Nam.
--What are they singing now?
--I have to listen.
He listened.
--Songs from the South.
I listened too, trying to hear a guideline that would forever identify this song as being from the South.
--These are, for example, modern songs, continued Ho Nam. Most of the songs are modern, in fact. Or the old ones have been modernized. The traditional music is preserved but arranged differently.
Suddenly distinguishable above spoken and sung Vietnamese, the owner asked if we would care for an aperitif. Bringing us back to France. Max asked if they had mei kwei Lung. The proprietor said mei kwei lung would be offered as a cordial, after the meal, but that he would make us a cocktail now in which it participated. A refreshingly rose-colored beverage arrived soon afterwards, preceeding a meal of many dishes, doubly disposed so no one had to reach: imperial patés in nests of mint leaves, thin slices of roast pork, cubes of beef in oyster sauce, curled shrimps nestling in batter, and an ethereal soup where shreds of egg and tracslucent noodles joined slivers of chicken and bamboo shoots in momentary mutual suspense. Suspense before we start drinking them up. Max's plump hand tentatively touched recumbant chopsticks.
--Can you use them? asked Van.
--All the years I have eaten Vietnamese food, said Max. I have always been in too much of a hurry to eat with chopsticks.
--In Vietnam, explained Chan, a knife is considered a weapon and is therefore out of place at table. But we can have you brought a fork if you wish.
--No, this is as good a time as any to learn.
Van picked up a chopstick between fourth finger and thumb, Max#s fingers followed suit. While still following the music, I asked if it was now modern or traditional.
--Traditional, said Ho Nam. From the mountains.
Isolated, the musical mountaineers preserved musical mountain music from century to century.
--What about those mountaineers? I asked. We hear they are very reactionary.
--It will take a certain time to teach them, said Ho Nam. We have to go very slowly with them so that they will understand us.
Bought off by the Americans, the mountain people alternated between reservation-like retirement and blind hitting out at any outsiders, usually the Vietnamese of the plain. Plane-transported Americans appeared, paid off, and disappeared. The music seemed neither classic nor modern.
A middle-aged-looking, probably elderly Vietnamese in a worn leather jacket appeared, was presented, and disappeared. Ho Nam said he was going for flags.
--If we leave now, we can be there at five ö'clock, said Tam, the cameraman.
--We must wait for the flags, said Ho Nam. Perhaps you would like to take a walk and look at the Arc de Triomphe of Orange?
Well, why not, if we had to wait for the flags, anyway? We all went for a walk. Ho Nam stayed and had his political meeting. The Arc de Triomphe was at the end of the wintery street. Surrounded by a circle of plane trees, it had sunk slightly below the surface of the ground.
--Why? Because it's from Roman times?
--Oh, in Roman times it was probably on a hill, said Max. Overlooking the entrance to the city.
Time had erased any outward symbols of its history; no people figured on its grey stones. We walked around it with Chan, Van, and Tam. On our return, Ho Nam was standing in the door of the restaurant.
--Our friends here are coming to Cannes with us, he said.
On the glass door of the restaurant, amidst the paper stars, a small sign said For family reasons, the restaurant is closed tonight. The old cook, young cashier, grey-haired dishwasher, overcoated young waiter, and portly proprietor were transformed into active supporters of the United Front of Vietnam.
-They wouldn't let us contrbute to the lunch, said Max on our way to the car. The restaurant people said it was the only way they could do something for the Front, isolated as they are in Orange. I said we were not the Front, but they said we were friends supporting it, and that ended the discussion.
What kind of car had they? A Renault TS drove out of the allée. Max walked over to it.
--Our rendez-vous point is right after the Cannes pay station, he said. Do you want to meet us there, or would you prefer to follow us on the autoroute?
--We can meet after the pay station, said Ho Nam.
Max said that was good because his car went very fast and would be difficult to follow on the autoroute, particularly when it began to get dark. Ho Nam went with the contingent from Orange. Chan took Nam's place in front next to Max, and Van, Tam, and I dozed in the back. Between Orange and Cannes was a stretch of non-autoroute where a line of wet cars tried sporadically to overtake intermittent wet trucks. Buvette and Camping signs stuck out of clumps of damp bishes. Once, a great hole in the sage exposed an immobile steam shovel and tractor.
--There should be yellow flowers here, said Van. I forget their name.
--Mimosa?
--Yes, said Van. Mimosa.
A clump of yellow mimosa flowered out of a black wet rock.
--Very pretty.
They were the only item in the countryside that came out victorious in the rain.
At the pay station we heard a horn.
--Hello, said Ho Nam, leaning out of a Renault TS.
Indistinct faces smiled to his left and in the back.
--They didn't go slower than we, after all, I said to Max, gratuitously.
--I couldn't make time on that road, said Max. Here's the pay booth, but where's the cafe?
Max got out and consulted with the Orange car. Since Eric had not turned up at the pay station, we decided to drive down to Cannes together. The exit for Cannes was about forty-five meters down the road, but there was no cafe there either. An iron barrier blocked incomplete pay stations. The Renault TS pulled alongside and offered to drive us to a cafe in Cannes where we could call our friends. Slim slippery streets slid to a small baffled bay where silent swaying ships were stashed in a confined Croisette, half-circled by haphazard houses. Shops sheltered a café de commerce where we reunited to call and wait for the Cannes comrades. In less time than it takes to tell, Eric appeared and re-disunited us into three cars which cortege went up stilted, slim and slippery streets to Mougins.
--There is an American film writer who has arranged for us to eat and sleep at his place, said the young driver of the new car. the Festival starts at eight-thirty, and so we just have time to fill you in, eat, and go back. Everyone's waiting.
--The American film writer happens to be his father, said Eric
--What's your name?
--Isidore Hauptman.
I repeated all this to Nam in French before Max could find an opening to go into the Truman witch hunts and the Hollywood Ten. Ho Nam summarized their position for the two Americans, ending on a repetition of their desire not to disturb the Festival if their presence was to be troublesome. All very formal. I could not imagine they had come all the way to Cannes to spend the evening in Mougins, not to be troublesome.
--I don't think we'll have any trouble, said Eric. We have a service d'ordre guarding the hall.
--Max was talking about fascists.
--Nothing new out of them.
Turning off what might have been considered a main road after all the other slippery slopes, we began turning in and out of a double line of sad cypresses on a bluff inside the Hauptman estate.
--Very pretty, remarked Ho Nam.
Determined Provencal architecture turned the cars under a porte-cochère where Izzy stopped and opened an oaken door into the renovated Hauptman manse.
Nine Vietnamese were preceded by two out of three Americans, accompanied and followed respectively by one American and one Austrian through a waiting dining room where they were met halfway by waiting Mrs. Ruth Hauptman taking over the lead into a large circular living room with a roaring fireplace where two immense sofas stood at right angles.
--We are so glad you are here, said Mrs. Hauptman. It is so wonderful to be able to do something for Vietnam. I don't know if we should all introduce ourselves, these are people from the FSI, why don't you just sit down and I'll bring you something to drink, we have vodka and tomato juice, dinner is ready after you've finished talking but I thin--you're June, I'm so glad to meet you, and just let me know what they want to eat, I think it's so wonderful they could come.
I like American enthusiasm. Eric and Gilbert, the ex-League member, explained how they had stopped the Saigon porno film from being shown, orgnizing the service d'ordre, local support here present, plan to propose a motion after the showing supporting the aims of the PRG (south Vietnam) and the DRV (North), and general agreement of "the other America" with Vietnam desire for independence. A copious dinner was already on the table for nine Vietnamese, three Americans, and one Austrian while the FSI sympathizers, the Hauptmans, and whoever else was present, presumably already restored, waited in front of the fire.
--How are we going to get down to the Festival? asked the proprietor from Orange, my righthand dinner companion.
--In our cars.
--Could you arrange to have us driven down?
--Oh, you might as well take your own car, I said. Since there are five of you.
--I would prefer not to.
Bartelby, the Scrivener.
I re-concentrated on possible problems that had no immediate relation to the atmosphere of wealthy protection radiated by the Hauptman establishment.
--The South of France is very reactionary, explained the Orangeman. I don't want the police or the fascists to see my license number.
--Oh, of course.
I envisaged his restaurant's red and silver stars splintering in shreds of glass some starry Orange night. of fascist fireworks. And so the occupants of the Renault TS were divided among the many cars descending to the Croisette, so many that we were finally only three in Max's car, Max, the proprio from Orange, and me.
--It's all very well to show the film, said the Orangeman. Our comrades from Paris are pleased but do not think it is well-organized.
I wondered what his position was, besides the front seat. Was he from the South or the North, or even the French Communist Party?
--It was done at the last minute, I said evasively, although I myself was impressed with the organization. At one point Tian had had reservations about no French political party being involved. Which? Was that disappeared our proprietor too?
--The precautions are insufficient, he said.
So he was a security nut. If it was not disturbing Ho Nam, I don't see why this cat should be worried. We had fixed it for his car, at his request.
--Well, you know, it is not a political meeting. There is a service d'ordre, but it can't be the same setup as a political meeting.
--If we had waited for a political party to organize it, said Max, we'd be still waiting. The Communist Party isn't organizing anything, and probably would not have found out until it was all over that the Cannes Festival was showing a porno film.
I don't know why Max did not stop there and let the orangeman answer. Undoubtedly because Max thought what he had to say would be informative for the dissatisfied Orangeman.
--I'm Old Left myself, continued Max. When we started getting American deserters in Paris in 1967, I thought right away of the Communist Party as the group best organized to get them jobs, put pressure on the government for residence permission and so on, but they wouldn't do it. They said that our work with deserters was just fine, but they could not officially get involved. The people who finally did help us came from all sorts of little groups, some religious, some pacifists, a lot of individuals, not at all organized in the sense I was used to. When I thought of the Left, I thought of a structured organization. The people we work with now also are not very structured, but they are willing to take initiatives the Party just won't take.
So maybe Max thought the Orangeman was a communist. Ho Chi Minh had been very Stalinist. If either of the two Vietnams had been a branch of the official Communist Party of the Soviet Union, it would have been the North under Ho Chi Minh, that is, the Vietnamese Legation in Paris, Ho Nam and Chan, which the orangeman had implicitly criticized by saying, "our comrades from Paris are pleased." Tam and Van were also from Paris, but from the National Liberation Front, not the Legation. I did not know exactly where the restaurant people from Orange fit into the picture, but probably with Ho Nam who had set up the meeting. Far Left groups in hostile areas, such as the South of France, would be inclined to worry more about police repression than people in a city like Paris. Of course, the orangeman was specifically worried about his plate glass windows and his car, which we had had no problem in leaving at the Hauptmans. We were not so badly organized after all. In any event, a public meeting could hardly be turned into a clandestine action. If you were all that worried about being clandestine, you kept away from public meetings. The Vietnamese presence at Cannes, after all, was to present their position openly, because they were sure they were right and the Americans wrong. The four comrades travelling with us were all agreed about being open, I believed. We had had no reproaches from them on lack of precautions.
We entered Festival Hall by the stage entrance, passing a brightly lit, thirties type phoney facade. On the roof, worn flags of random countries anonymously waved. Were our flags now up there? I meant to ask one of my comrades but at the moment I was accompanying the orangeman up the steps and he probably should not be disturbed with any more questions on organization. Would he approve at all of there being flags? Impossible to know. I would look once we get inside. Outside, on duty, outside the stage entrance and lining the inside steps downward to the hall, a line of very young men stood on guard.
--We're glad to see you, I said.
--We're glad to see you too.
The old Vietnamese woman--the cook or the dishwasher?--took my arm. She had slight difficulty walking. Max wondered later if her feet had been bound as a child.Van told me she had had seventeen children and was a supporter of the Front. If the orange Vietnamese were all a political whole, then there went my theory about the proprietor being a member of the French Communist Party. Not that the Communist Party did not have a strong presence in south Vietnam too. I forgot to ask Van.
--I'm afraid you'll all have to sit in the front row for security reasons, said Eric. But the stage is deep and I think you'll see all right.
I hoped the Orangeman heard that bit about security. A long dais had been placed center stage, covered with the red flag of the Front. Nothing indicated the presence of the DRV. Same error in the introductory speech: Welcome to our comrades of the Vietnamese Liberation Front. Well, since they all considered it one Vietnam, none of them seemed at all put out. Van gave a speech for the Front, Eric for the festival. A French intellectual gave a report of a control commission recently returned from Hanoi. Tam talked about making the first film. The director of Cannes and the members of the Bureau of administration hid in the balcony. They were represented with a leaflet which the ushers gave out sporadically which said they were all working for a just peace in Vietnam, but they themselves had nothing to do with this particular evening and had only lent the Hall. I ask you! I wondered if they considered that "working actively for a just peace in Vietnam" had been promoted by the porno film they had originally scheduled, and by their not coming down personally to greet the Vietnamese present in the hall. If the Vietnamese had any thoughts about all this, they kept them to themselves. They were probably used to all sorts of illogical behavior from well-meaning supporters.
First Night Cannes
The same atmosphere of warm security--open fire, two couches, jasmine tea, vodka--infused the Hauptman living room as when we had left it. More French and Americans were there, less Vietnamese. The Orange contingent had picked up their car and returned to Orange. I had a cup of jasmine tea and listened to Mr. Hauptman talk about his experiences as screen writer. He explained how he had been offered a bribe by Oufkir's goons to modify or at least consider modifying his script on the Ben Barka movie. The goons' minute knowledge of the terms of his contract with his producers had surprised and slightly impressed him.
--They knew the exact terms, he repeated. Particularly that I had the right of veto on the film And this contract had been signed in the strictest privacy of the company office!
--Wasn't there a secretary around? asked Max, somewhat mechanically.
--Just myself and the producer. Then it was filed.
--Who filed it?
--Oh, a filing clerk, I suppose.
--How much does a filing clerk make a month?
--Oh, I don't think--do you think? Anyway, they knew all about it.
I have assumed that the reader knows all about it too. Ben Barka was the leader of the Tunisian oposition who in 1965 was kidnapped outside the drug store at Saint Germain des Prés and taKen off to be found assassinated at a villa in Fontainebleau. The collaboration of part of the French police was established, and DeGaulle, who was then President of France made a public statement that he was seriously displeased.
--You will be one of the five people in the world, Oufkir's messenger had said to Hauptman, who will know what actually happened to Ben Barka.
Hauptman had said that the last thing he wanted was to be one of the five people in the world who knew what had happened to Ben Barka, and that, in any case, he had no intention of using his veto to stop the film in order to please General Oufkir who, as it turned out, was found dead several weeks later after his abortive attempt to organize the assassination of the King of Morocco.
After this anecdote I went off exhausted to bed. I first checked with the Front and the DRV to see what time we were leaving in the morning. The young comrades from the Front, Van and Tam, thought that maybe nine-thirty, but suggested we leave it up to Ho Nam. Ho Nam, relaxed as usual, proposed ten-thirty, a more civilized hour certainly. We agreed to meet at breakfast since they were staying in the big house and Eric, Max,and I in one of the small summer houses scattered about the property.
Izzy walked me down there with the keys and an extra sleeping bag. He hardly seemed to belong to the happy family of seven children radiating around Mrs. Hauptman. But then neither did Mr. Hauptman. His wife seemed to have created him too, along with the comfortable living room. I suppose I put them in a context of old-fashioned Riviera and movie writers that I had borrowed from reading novels about Hollywood in an earlier phase of my life. They had all treated us royally, both Hauptmans and their many friends that evening, and I had no quarrel with them.
--You are in the Communist Ligue, aren't you? Izzy asked me as we strolled down the cypress allée.
--Literally yes. But I am beginning
to question a lot of things about it. I don't know how long I'll stay with them.
You're spontex?
--Well, if you want to put it that way. I was in the JCR. But I left them when they formed the Ligue and decided to join the Fourth. Now I just militate in the FSI.
--But the service d'Ordre tonight was the ligue, wasn't it?
--No. As an organization, the Ligue did not partake because they said it was too haphazardly organized. One or two members were in the Service d'Ordre, but as part of the FSI, not the Ligue.
The Hauptmans and their friends were all FSI. I wondered why they had gravitated towards the FSI, instead of the French Communist Party's Peace Movement. Perhaps they wanted no contact with the Communist Party after all the accusations that had been thrown at them during the McCarthy-Truman period.
--So you're just here for the Christmas break? I asked.
If I had been less tired and less cold, I would have asked him more about his political position. Instead, I went to bed in the little wooden cabin in front of a gas heater. Eventually Max and Eric turned up, the first to share my bed, then send with a bed to himself.
I was sorry the next day that I had not discussed with Izzy, or let him discuss with me, which is usually how discussions with young male militants turned out. The only one interested in my political position was me, and so I will outline it here, in case, in reading this account, anyone has become interested. Those that are not can skip the next paragraph and go on with the trip the next morning. Izzy's position, I imagine, was similar to that of other young militants who had been in the JCR (Young Revolutionary Communists). That youth organization had been dissolved by the DeGaulle government in the repression following the 1968 revolutionary movement. A few months later, it reconstituted itself as the Ligue Communist. (I maintain the French spelling to avoid any confusion with the old WWI League of Nations). The spontaneous people, or spontex as the Ligue called them, were those elements of the old JCR who, like Izzy Hauptman had left the Ligue in 1969 when it had voted to join the Fourth International. The Fourth had been formed by Trotsky and his French secretary, Pierre Frank, before Trotsky left for Mexico , in the final years of his expulsion from the Soviet Union by Stalin.
The spontex, where I had placed Izzy, considered joining anything as the beginning of political sclerosis, whether the organization was a Communist Party or a Trotskyst one or the Social Democrats. Some of the spontex did their own organizing into something like the old JCR, some abandoned politics altogether, some worked with one-issue groups for homosexual rights, or soldier rights, or women's rights, or, like Izzy, stuck to supporting the Vietnamese. The essence of being a spontex was to be spontaneous, a program not conducive to forming a political group. Even the anarchists were a political group and did not appeal to the spontex any more than the other alternatives. I myself, without being at all a spontex, was drifitng toward the one-issue solution. In principle, I was all for discipline and democratic centralism, but I was finding it very difficult to be an effective militant in a structure where I was by definition marginal. The Ligue was still built on a student or ex-student base, bolstered by old militants like Pierre Frank, or a few my age who had, unlike me, been in politics all their lives. Many of them had begun as members of the French Stalinist Communist Party, feeling it was better than nothing, until one of the usual points of clevage, like the break with Tito's Yugoslavia, or the Hungarian workers' uprising, or the French Algerian War.
The Ligue was trying to establish a base in the working class, but I was not a worker nor a student nor a potential political cadre. My grandfather had been working class, and in a way I was nearer that than either the students or the cadres, but I was not really close to any of them. As I have made clear, I hope, I was twenty years older than the young militants, and when I had been young, I had been in America, not France, and that also made a difference. I was willing and had been formed to a degree, although in my late twenties already, by the intellectual life in Paris, but was far from possessing the mental agility, background, or experience to become a political cadre. But I did not have to work and had time to devote to politics.
So I got involved in support of deserters from the US army who had sought refuge in Paris. The other people involved in this support were mainly the two Quakers in Paris, who lent their Center as a contact point, and some of the Paris Americans Committee to Stopwar, who had organized themselves as PACS. These last were not very enthusiastic about helping deserters, many of whom had deserted to get away from the army for a few days until they were inevitably picked up by the military or local police. They certainly did not desert in objection to the Vietnam War which they, back in the late sixties, early seventies, knew little about and cared less. The Ligue certainly supported desertion, first in the US military and then, in the early seventies, in their own. But the US desertion was in the hands of the SWP, the Socialist Workers Party, which knew little and, from my infrequent contacts with them, cared less about the US deserters in Europe. They were part of the Fourth International, but no matter how inclusive the title, militants, to cite an old saying, are more interested in the dead dog outside their doorstep than a dead mandarins in China. This last reference from Balzac where the chic young men of the early nineteenth century would ask each other if they had killed their mandarins yet (if you could immediately get a considerable sum of money by pushing a button and killing a thousand mandarins in China, would you push that button?).
Back to the SWP who tried to pass the US deserters right over the border into Canada, which, like Sweden, was offering official asylum to Vietnam War deserters who could manage to get into the country on their own. One of the early deserters became a test case for the French government and we got a sort of asylum for U.S. deserters in France too. We were mainly Max Watts and I, who you are also meeting in this story of Cannes. There would have been no contradiction for me to "take on" the deserter movement for the Ligue in France, but, I repeat, that belonged to the American sector, which I had never had anything to do with. The Fourth liked to keep everything in the place assigned to it, in which it was not unlike the French CP. Both on a Leninist model of organization, I guess. That is why I had said to Izzy that I was wondering if I would continue to work with the Ligue. This trip to Cannes thus became a turning point in my own political life. It had been brought about by the collaboration of all sorts of "spontaneous people," from Eric and Izzy to the movie people. Spontex did not mean they had no political convictions or even party membership on their own, but that they did not require all political actions to be sponsered by a political party. If they had, to cite Max again, nothing would have happened in Cannes, and the original porno film might have been aired because it took too long for the organized parties to organize against it. The Ligue, for one, had declined to participate itself, but it had indeed created the Front of Indochinese Solidarity (FSI) for just such initiatives. As the French PC had, to a lesser extent, created or taken over the Peace Movement. I asked Eric if the Ligue had participated in the Service d'Ordre and he repeated what I knew already, that the small cell on the Cote d`Azure had not condemned it but preferred to observe rather than participate in what was a spontex action. I wondered if they had been somewhere in the hall last night observing. No one had come up to be introduced to the Vietnamese certainly. (End of my political thoughts, and back to the narrative.)
Izzy and I did not discuss, as you know, but just said goodnight in front of my cabin, and he went back to wherever he was sleeping. Van told us later that all the Vietnamese had been very touched because the children had given up their rooms to them. I myself slept marvellously and dreamlessly in the cold little summer house and knew nothing until Max woke me for breakfast at ten the next morning. I went into the big house through the kitchen to throw away finally the twelve bacon and lettuce sandwiches I had been carting around since Paris. A heavy woman with bright blond hair, later introduced to us as a Polish refugee, was the major domo of this part of the house. She took the sandwiches and said she would throw them away, and that I should go in to breakfast with the others.
Nimes
The Vietnamese-American-French contingent was eating and discussing with animation in the dining room. More American and French friends of the Hauptmans had come to talk to the Vietnamese. From a public relations point of view, the trip was a real success. Max was carrying on enthusiastically with a blond English lady who had lived in the village he had been evacuated to as a refugee child in England during WW2. Our epoch is floating on wars and assassinations, like Ben Barka's back in 1965. I wondered if Mr. Hauptman's film on him got made at all. Over coffee, Mrs. Hauptman told me a story of a less successful spontex action than ours which she had been involved in. A million dollars had been collected for the women and children dispossessed or injured by the American bombing. I don't know why men were excluded. Such a large sum could only have come from liberals in the U.S., and I suppose the donors were afraid some of it might go to the Vietcong. The world knew by now that women were also in the fighting forces of Vietnam, Van ici présent, for example, but I suppose "women and children" was a good collecting gimmick. Once the million was reached, an Ad Hoc committee was elected to present the money to a committee of doctors in Hanoi. Mrs. Hauptman's pediatrician had been chairman of this committee, but once in Hanoi had taken a personal dislike to his Vietnamese opposite number and finally returned to France, taking the money with him. He had it put in a special account in a French bank where it had lain for the past year, helping finance the Pompidou government, and accruing interest for Vietnam, I hoped.
--Maybe we could arrange something to get it delivered, said Mrs. Hauptman. It seems such a shame.
I agreed, particularly as the bombing had intensified over Christmas, creating more dispossessed women and children. Fortunately, the Vietnamese were not dependent on the vagaries of French or American liberals for their financing.
We discussed other projects like getting a group of movie people to send more modern equipment to the Vietnamese movie people. We also touched on amnesty for American deserters and draft resisters, and speculated on whether or not Nixon would sign the Peace Accords now taking place in Paris. Any change in the present situation demanded as much and more time as we had all expended on the comparatively simple problem of arranging a Vietnamese evening at the Cannes Film Festival. Individual responsibility, contacts, letters, phone calls would go on. I again regretted the Ligue's non-participation, thinking how much more efficient it would be if we had an organization behind us with its possibilities of coordinating more quickly and on a more permanent basis than a weekend. The FSI was far too young to organize people of the age and experience, whatever it was, of the Hauptmans and friends, but I doubted if the Ligue would be the appropriate vehicle either. Perhaps that is how spontex groups get born.
Our visit to the Hauptmans ended with all of us taking pictures of each other outside in front of the cars. They took pictures of all of us, and the Vietnamese asked permission to take their pictures. I never did get to see them and regretted I did not have my own camera. In those days I had regarded picture-taking as a bourgeois activity. One more prejudice to erase. As we said our goodbyes, the sound of trucks going towards the auto route reminded us to be on our way. I had not realized last night that the property was so near the autoroute. No one took a picture of the trucks, but only the vehicles in the driveway, our car, the Hauptmans two cars, the sympathizers several cars. Mrs. Hauptman gave Van the names and ages of her seven children which Van carefully wrote down and left in Max’s car. All the children had been planned, said Mrs. Hauptman, and they were wonderful people as people, not just because they were her children. Chan contributed that the Vietnamese also put a great value on children. We parted on feelings of fraternity. At the gate I realized I had forgotten my suitcase in the little summer house. To avoid an anti-climactic return in the car, I got out and walked back, skirting the house to the kitchen entrance to ask the blond cook if she could help me. The summer house was already locked. The cook looked dubious, as if I were bringing her more sandwiches to dispose of, but found a key and accompanied me to get my suitcase. I walked back alone to the car, passing as I went an overgrown tennis court like a reminder of Hollywood. Then we drove out and away towards Salon.
The South of France was divided iby the Vietnamese militants into sections: one grouped Salon, Orange, Avignon, Nice and Cannes, while Marseilles with 1000 Vietnamese and sympathizers was a section in itself. Paris, of course, was organized separately, and I don't know exactly what the North consisted of. I have avoided comparing Cesar's Gaul divided into three parts Vietnamese France with Cesar’s Gaul divided into three parts, although it seems to show that France lent itself easily to political divisions. I remembered a group of reactionary old French Resistance people from WW2, who once told me that if Nixon did not win the Vietnamese War for the Americans, the yellow peril would overflow into Europe, and the French would soon need a laissez-passer to go to Rouen. That three successive American governments had been bombing 5000 years of Vietnamese culture to smithereens since 1966 in no way hindered these Free French from equating Nixon and the United States with progress, the Vietnamese with barbarism. I suppose they classified Cesar as progress, the Gauls as barbarians.
The Vietnamese were taking the trip as a welcome respite from their daily arduous life in Paris, and asked if we could stop on the Croisette on our way out of Cannes. So we did and took pictures of each other on the promenade along the sea. Where are those pictures now? Some gone, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. The Festival flags, by the way, had included no Saigon swatches. We all said that we had looked last night. But were "our" flags flying? I was not sure what the Vietnam flags looked like, and did not like to ask, after all the trouble we had had getting them here. I realized the importance of flags, however, from an article in the Struggle of South Vietnam, the press organ of the National Liberation Front in Europe. In south Vietnam, all citizens who were stopped by the Vietnamese police working with the Americans, or by American soldiers on police duty, had to show, in addition to their identity card, a small flag of the Saigon government, like a vaccination certificate against subversive ideas. Meticulous in every detail, the Vietnamese in France were eliminating this symbol of submission.
The only manifestations of US might on the Croisette came from the many tourists, their possible nationality smothered in class symbols like the fur coats on the women who emerged and submerged themselves into the Negresco Hotel, which remained open during the winter. The Festival attracted enough tourists so that cars were jammed along the curb, and a sparse crowd strolled along the sea front and bought postcards like we were doing.
--Bao Dai's villa is somewhere along here, remarked Ho Nam.
Bao Dai, the last ruler of Indochina, had spent more of his life on the Riviera, briefly was returned to Vietnam as a "valid interlocutor" first for the Japanese, and then for the French during and after WW2, finally deciding that the Mediterranean was more conducive to long life than his own country.
--Where is the villa? I asked.
--I think it was torn down, said Max.
--What was he like? Was he as bad as Diem?
--He was a fascist and a collaborator, said Ho Nam coolly.
--Like Thieu?
--Thieu just bought a villa in Geneva, said Ho Nam. His children are there already, riding around in a Mercedes.
--Maybe that is a good sign, I remarked. If he bought it, it must mean he is thinking of settling there permanently.
--The American government has already deposited seven million dollars in his Swiss account, said Chan.
From which I deduced that Chan's public relations were very encompassing.
Ho Nam asked if we would consider prolonging the trip another day, so that we could spend the night with a friend of theirs in Nimes, returning to Paris Wednesday afternoon. So our gastronomic tour of Vietnamese restaurants in the South section continued. In Salon there were two Vietnamese restaurants, one for the United Front, the other pro-American. The fact that tiny Salon had two Vietnamese factions surprised me. In fact, that it even supported two Vietnamese restaurants would have surprised me before this trip. But now I was getting used to the Vietnamese organizational capabilities, and supposed the collaborators were also organized.
--Was the restaurant in Orange also the Front, or the DRV?
--There is no difference, said Ho Nam. The division of the country into North and South is simply another idea of the Americans to divide us. Of course, we have to have separate government structures for practical reasons. The South of the country is occupied and is confronted with unique political decisions. But as soon as we win the war, we will be one country again, with one government.
So I decided not to ask why yesterday evening had to all intents and purposes been solely under the auspices of the Front. Had they both had flags displayed? What flags had Ho Nam brought? But no one was talking about flags any more. Perhaps the army of supporters that we had encountered around the Hauptmans were supporting the Provisional government of the South, rather than the sovereign country of the North. Both were only divided because of the American ploy of the 17th parallel which had never had any significance until they had "invented" it, so to speak, on the model of the 38th parallel dividing Korea in two. Maybe for the Americans, support for the sovereign country of Hanoi implied supporting the Communists, whereas the Front was not a country but a group of resisters inside the "fantoche government" created by the Americans and now ruled by Thieu. None of this seemed a reason why both flags could not have been flown, and I reminded myself to ask Max that evening if he had noticed the flags.
In Salon, we were greeted by the now familiar row of smiling faces, including a young boy and girl who could not have been over fifteen, despite the Vietnamese tendency to look far younger than their years.
--I wonder what happens to them? asked Max.
--You mean, what happens to them politically?
--No, politically they probably follow their parents, said Max. The Vietnamese seem to have succeeded in deviating the youth revolt into a revolt against the aggressor.
--What about the Hauptmans then? Izzy did not seem to be in a state of revolt against his parents.
--There the parents seem to be following their son, said Max. If Izzy moved from the JCR to the FSI, his parents probably followed his lead when they wanted to get active in support of the Vietnamese struggle. I meant, what happens to these children we just met after they come and say hello to us. I must say, I felt a little embarassed being kissed by a young man. Anyway, where do they all disappear to?
--I suppose they all have their own things to do. And they mustn't be too interested sitting around with their parents friends.
--You're judging by different standards, said Max. Where do they go? Think.
--Oh, to the kitchen.
--They help prepare lunch.
--Family business.
--I wonder what they think about socialism.
We asked Ho Nam and Van about this later, and I will get to it then, that is, back in the auto route snack bar outside of Paris. As for the family economy in Salon, it had many of the outward signs of success in European life. After our official welcome, a young man, also very young, sat and played background guitar. It was then past three o'clock and the dining room was empty. After the obligatory sequestration with Ho Nam for a political exchange, the proprietor had some lunch with us. I don't know whether he was having a second lunch, or whether he habitually ate at three, when the last customer had gone. He mentioned that the meat soup was inauthentic because it was difficult to get the correct herbs here. Before the war, they had imported the herbs from Vietnam, but now that was often difficult.
--My clients tell me it does not taste the way it should, he smiled. Many French people were in Vietnam before.
Old colonialists. I wonder if they guessed the proprietor supported the Front. Probably they discussed food, not politics. For colonialists, it probably was unrelated to the quality of the soup, unless the whole war, which prevented the herbs reaching France, or even being grown possibly, was the fault of the revolutionaries. For the comrades, every fact of their life was related to politics. We asked about their children, for example. Van had a boy and girl of ten and twelve; Tam had a four year old daughter. Ho Nam had four sons. We looked at their snapshots, young, nicely dressed children, looking serious or smiling at the camera.
--Where are they now?
Van's children were with her family in US-occupied south Vietnam. Tam's was with his wife's family in Hue, and Ho Nam's were home in north Vietnam.
--How long have you been away from them? I asked Van.
--Four years.
--It must be very hard to be away from your children for so long.
--Now that they are old enough to write, I get letters from them. But, of course, they change a lot in those years, and it is hard to know them well if you are not with them.
--Are all of the children of people working in the Legation in north Vietnam?
--Almost all.
In shorts and sandals, Ho Nam's three sons had been snapped outside their school.
--Where is the fourth? asked Max.
--I had four sons, said Ho Nam. But there are only three in the picture because the fourth one is dead.
--When was he killed?
--In 1968.
--How did it happen? asked Max.
--He was going to school in the fourth zone, began Ho Nam. The southern part of Vietnam, the archi-bombed panhandle which we saw last night in the film about Vinh Linh, City of Steel. That is in the fourth zone. And that day my son was classroom monitor, and the school was bombed. It is the job of the classroom monitor to see that all pupils are inside the shelter. He is always the last one to leave the classroom. And he was killed before he got to the shelter.
--How old was he?
--Six. He would have been eleven this year. The oldest is seventeen--he is going into the army--and the others are fifteen and nine.
I looked again at the three boys who were left, in shorts and sandals, standing in front of their school,
--You can get broadcasts from the Front on the radio here, said Ho Nam.
He got up and turned it on, fiddled with the knobs for some time until, partly covered by atmospheric noises, we heard a voice that was probably speaking Vietnamese.
--The radio of the front, said Ho Nam. It is very powerful.
--What are they saying?
--They are afraid the dikes will be bombed.
The waitress said something in Vietnamese.
--She says she can't bear to hear it, said Ho Nam. It makes her very sad to hear about the bombing.
She was a woman of about my age, in her late forties. Did she have children in Vietnam? No, Ho Nam told me later. She was originally brought over here as a servant in a French family. Then they dismissed her, and she was destitute for a long time. Forlorn.
Back in the car after lunch, Max's car radio did not capture the Front. The word is like a bell. But on the French radio, the news was all about the Peace talks which seemed to be failing to achieve anything.
Keats.
We had left Salon and were driving across Provence to Arles where we stopped to see the Arènes. Last summer's list of dead bulls fluttered on one of the stone pillars outside the stadium in a mistral wind.
--Did you think Nixon was really going to sign a Peace Treaty?
--In October we thought it might be possible, said Chan as we got back in the car after making a tour of the stadium.
Chan signifies truth, Tam heart, Van cloud, and Nam south. The Golden Dragon was the name of the restaurant in Nimes.
--It is somewhere near the Coliseum, said Ho Nam.
The Coliseum was a large round ruin in the middle of a large round circle somewhere in the center of the city. Spaced lampposts lit the surrounding sidewalks. On the outer circumference, bright hotels and shops threw their reflections into the late afternoon. The Coliseum absorbed them impassively.
--The Golden Dragon is in the Old City, said Max, returning from the lobby of the Nimes Carlton. First turn to the right.
The Old City of Nimes was like all old Mediterranean cities, narrow streets with badly parked cars blocking them, small bright boutiques with sparkling clothes, shiny records, mediocre paintings, and dull food for sale. Paving stones led to city-lit narrow doors, one of which, encircled by a golden dragon, plunged forward into a bamboo-lined corridor leading to a circular, bamboo-lined staircase, stopping on a small landing closed by two doors. A small white card on one of them read the French equivalent of Tuesdays rest.
--We have come on the wrong day, I said sadly, as if it were the first time, and as if we were not in one of the Vietnamese political circumscriptions with political representatives of the DRV. Ho Nam rang the bell and the door opened. The welcoming committee of cook, dish washer and young waiter were waiting for us in an elaborately decorated dining room where set tables stood correctly aligned for future diners. Like an immobile train, the restaurant had become part of a landscape, a familiar landscape by now, a political landscape. The walls were lined with cabinets of oriental bric-a-brac, meditating Buddhas, saki sets, ivory elephants, gold and enameled boxes, silent chimes, inlaid panelling, two partridges in a weeping willow on a plate, pretty babies, and silk-embroidered scenes of sylvan scenes.
--These are all real, said Van. The ones in Orange were copies.
The main thing I had noticed in the Orange restaurant had been the ferocious dragon's head at the door.
--Were you in the main reception room at the Legation? she asked me.
--Yes. We met you there. I –
The portrait of Ho Chi Minh is also real embroidery. That I did remember, thinking it was a pastel drawing. The materials of the Vietnamese are not ours.
This Vietnamese meeting seemed to have a more definite political function than those at the other two restaurants. Vietnamese from Nimes came and Ho Nam left with them and came back later. Discussions took place in a small room next to the dining room. The young son of the house appeared, was introduced, and went off to help in the kitchen. On one of his return trips, Ho Nam handed Max a message.
--Your friend, Balthus, is away on vacation, he said. His school is closed for the holidays.
--That's too bad, we said. Max meant it and I did not.
A few years ago, Balthus had taken a nineteen year old American deserter in charge and turned him into a political militant. Buster, the deserter in question, had been sent to Nimes, trailing a background of car stealing and incipient alcoholism which Balthus, a French Hugenot, had snipped off as neatly as a paper tail. Frank blue eyes replaced the opaque orbs of bewilderment we remembered. Buster learnt French, some elements of Marxism, what capitalism was. Buster Heiselman became Jean Martin. And who was Balthus? Twenty years ago he had worked for Renault, the French car manufacturer where he had taken on both the French government and the CGT, still today the most powerful French labor union, by organizing a wildcat strike. It broke under the combined pressure of the opposing giants, and Balthus had broken too and had to go to a sanatorium before going back to his life in Nimes.
--The Left was fighting a rear guard action in those days, said Max when he told me about it before we sent Buster down there. Buster was gotten a job in a factory in Nimes, married a girl from a small Trotskyst group and after May '68, went off with her to Canada to organize with the deserter community in Montreal. I was sorry he was not still here and wondered how he was doing in Canada. I wondered if it had been a good idea to turn him into Jean Martin, and then send him to Canada to become Buster Heiselman all over again. If he was going to organize deserters in Canada, then obviously he would be more useful as an ex-deserter himself than as a Frenchman from Nimes. The experiment of changing his identity might have been interesting to the Nimes comrades, but it was certainly not a recipe for all American deserters. So I was not very pro-Balthus. Max said you had to accept whatever people were ready to do, as long as they were helping out. I preferred that this weekend be devoted to the Vietnamese and did not let myself get side-tracked into another discussion of the deserter movement.
During dinner, the Vietnamese explained again why there were so many Vietnamese restaurants scattered throughout France.
--There is very little else we could have done when we came here, said the proprietor of the Golden Dragon. We could open laundries like the Chinese in America, or restaurants, and we decided on restaurants. It was very hard to get any other sort of employment.
--But you've made a success of it, I said. A very American remark.
--If you work hard, said the proprietor.
Also a very American remark. From different countries, he and I and Max were the same generation. If you work hard, you'll be a success. Max called this the second wave. Optimism. The portly Vietnamese who knew Balthus also had an import-export business in Nimes, as well as a part interest in his own restaurant. He told us all this at dinner, also very American. First he had gone into a private room to talk to Ho Nam. We had been talking about the liberation of women. Chan said that women had always played an important role in Vietnamese history since the Tuong sisters in the Middle Ages.
--Who was the woman married to Diem? asked Max. Or his brother?
--Ngo Dinh Diem's sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, said Van. She was very bad.
--In Vietnam tradition, said Chan (truth), Both men and women have the same amount of pure elements. But women have five impure elements, and men have only three. He smiled at Van.
--What are they?
--Ah, smiled Chan. I don't know.
--That part of folklore was probably made up by men, I said.
Van put her arm around me.
--In Vietnam today, she said, women are very active.
--I'd like to know more about those impure elements, said Max.
The young son of the restaurant, waiting on us instead of being relegated to the kitchen, smiled. We talked of women laying down the gun and going back to housework. Van said that would not exactly happen. Women would rebuild the country along with the men.
Dinner was a gastronomic notch above the Salon and the Orange restaurants, it seems. I had found them all excellent. But there were many delicacies, like celeri sauté with a Vietnamese sauce, octopus paté, and roast pork with bean sprouts. Everything was double, as usual, so no one had to reach. We chatted about small topics, like giving up smoking, to more political ones, like the nationality of the trucks in the Vietnamese movie. Soviet. On the way out, we passed through the kitchen to thank the comrades who had made the dinner.
--I first saw Jean Martin right here, said Mr. Le, the proprietor. They were hiding him in the kitchen and we came up the back stairs. Later I helped him get a job.
Hiding again. He and Balthus. In Paris the deserters had stopped hiding, not that they had ever hid with any seriousness, as soon as they had gotten the right to apply for residence papers. So if they felt they had had to hide Buster, how had they gotten a job for him? Okay, as Jean Martin? And what type of identity did he have as Jean Martin? Well, everything had been satisfactorily arranged eons ago, and Buster or Jean was no longer even in France, so I stopped tormenting myself about it.
--Tonight we stay in a chateau, said Ho Nam and smiled.
Mr. Le lived in a small Italian type chateau perched on a hill overlooking Nimes. Floodlights hidden in the trees lit the parking place, along with three small steps in the front, where a stone staircase led up to the front door and also down to a pool obliquely arranged on a lower terrace. Imitation amphoras at regular intervals awaited spring plants. The villa reflected many things in its oval mirrors framed in mother of pearl, mostly successful importing-exporting. A chrome garnished kitchen and a color television reflected France. Overhead lighting shown on square tables of varying heights with straight chairs tucked around them. No books reflected a non-intellectual, no ashtrays a non-smoker, children's pictures in communion dress a non-Buddhist, and many empty bedrooms an ex-husband. In one, a small frame encased an Italian landscape with peasant boatmen rowing picturesque ladies around a lake.
--You like Italy?
--Yes. I have made many trips there.
Either Mr. Le or I could have asked the question, could have answered it. We were in the hall. The next picture was a photograph showing a young Mr. Le standing beside a young French bride decked out in white: a successful businessman, a successful Catholic who had now joined the struggle for national liberation. According to my off center standards, he could have bought a cheaper car than a Mercedes and donated the difference to the Front. But then he no longer would have been the successful importer-exporter in Nimes. From a cheaper car to selling his villa was a path totally at variance with his present life style. When I mentioned this to Max, he said I was putting carts before horses.
--What really happened was that this man, in the relatively unfavorable atmosphere of Nimes, succeeded, as your father had done between Brooklyn and Wall Street, in becoming a capitalist. Le is the head of the Vietnam association for this whole area--a patriotic Vietnamese exile, he still supports his country's struggle against the foreign invader. And the Vietnamese communists are smart enough to appreciate allies wherever they can get them. To get back to your father, it is a little like Roosevelt putting people like him in charge of the war effort.I did not think that had much to do with the price of eggs. My father had been a Republican and had wanted nothing to do with Roosevelt. Neither he nor Mr. Le lived on their capital, one a restaurant owner with lucrative investments, one a dealer in municipal bonds on Wall Street. Living on capital had nothing to do with defining a capitalist.
The beds were comfortable, the water hot, all quite different from the summer outhouse where we had slept the night before. The Vietnamese had been lodged in the Hauptmans main house, and I thought of asking how it compared to Mr. Le's. Mr. Le's was a chateau, as the Hauptmans had no pretension of being. Anyway, the Vietnamese did not need the Americans to introduce them to high life in the South of France. The only fault in the arrangements here was that there were no towels in the bathroom whereas at the Hauptmans there had been no bathroom. I remembered Johnny Martin again, who had come once to Paris to visit us after his transformation from a GI to a French student and brought his own towel and soap. Americans always expect to find towels in any bathroom that has a shower. Max and I certainly had. Mr. Le did not have towels in his pretty tiled guest bathroom, and I dried myself on the shower curtain, out of a sort of synthetic cotton.
We left at six o'clock in the morning, after a mornng pick-up of green tea and biscuits. Mr. Le said it was stronger than black tea. Ho Nam and I smoked. In the entrance hall, a small tiled pool held water but no fish. The terraced garden was still dark. A villa we were never destined to see by daylight. A mistral blew through us and the cold cars. Ho Nam rode with Mr. Le to the auto route entrance where we waved goodbye to the Mercedes and Ho Nam joined us for the long drive to Paris.
The auto route out of Nimes had the same eerie look of unreality as it had had two days earlier when we had left Paris. an air strip veered alongside the road for a kilometer before ending altogether on a national road bordered by plane trees. Ho Nam began to sing and soon was joined by the three comrades. I thought of the American theory, still pulled out and published in some Establishment newspapers, whereby north Vietnam had invaded south Vietnam, and wondered if the song was from the north or the south.
--That is a song, said Van, that we learned in school in French and then put revolutionary words to in Vietnamese which the French could not understand. Later we put revolutionary words to it in French too.
They sang it again for us in French.
--You see, said Ho Nam, it is much easier now than it was at the time of the First Resistance. Of course, we are much better equipped for the struggle than we were then, even though the Americans and the fantoches are now infinitely better equipped than the French were. In fact, next to China, the Saigon Army is the best-equipped in Southeast Asia. In the First Resistance, we fought for three years before we had our first cannon. There was a French officer, a major, who was helping us. One day he let us know where the French would be sending this 75mm cannon.
Pride of the French army in 1914. French 75. A cocktail named after.
--We stopped the train and took it off.
--I bet the French were upset, said Max.
--Well, if you want to put it that way. I was in the JCR. But I left them when they formed the Ligue and decided to join the Fourth. Now I just militate in the FSI.
--But the service d'Ordre tonight was the ligue, wasn't it?
--No. As an organization, the Ligue did not partake because they said it was too haphazardly organized. One or two members were in the Service d'Ordre, but as part of the FSI, not the Ligue.
The Hauptmans and their friends were all FSI. I wondered why they had gravitated towards the FSI, instead of the French Communist Party's Peace Movement. Perhaps they wanted no contact with the Communist Party after all the accusations that had been thrown at them during the McCarthy-Truman period.
--So you're just here for the Christmas break? I asked.
If I had been less tired and less cold, I would have asked him more about his political position. Instead, I went to bed in the little wooden cabin in front of a gas heater. Eventually Max and Eric turned up, the first to share my bed, then send with a bed to himself.
I was sorry the next day that I had not discussed with Izzy, or let him discuss with me, which is usually how discussions with young male militants turned out. The only one interested in my political position was me, and so I will outline it here, in case, in reading this account, anyone has become interested. Those that are not can skip the next paragraph and go on with the trip the next morning. Izzy's position, I imagine, was similar to that of other young militants who had been in the JCR (Young Revolutionary Communists). That youth organization had been dissolved by the DeGaulle government in the repression following the 1968 revolutionary movement. A few months later, it reconstituted itself as the Ligue Communist. (I maintain the French spelling to avoid any confusion with the old WWI League of Nations). The spontaneous people, or spontex as the Ligue called them, were those elements of the old JCR who, like Izzy Hauptman had left the Ligue in 1969 when it had voted to join the Fourth International. The Fourth had been formed by Trotsky and his French secretary, Pierre Frank, before Trotsky left for Mexico , in the final years of his expulsion from the Soviet Union by Stalin.
The spontex, where I had placed Izzy, considered joining anything as the beginning of political sclerosis, whether the organization was a Communist Party or a Trotskyst one or the Social Democrats. Some of the spontex did their own organizing into something like the old JCR, some abandoned politics altogether, some worked with one-issue groups for homosexual rights, or soldier rights, or women's rights, or, like Izzy, stuck to supporting the Vietnamese. The essence of being a spontex was to be spontaneous, a program not conducive to forming a political group. Even the anarchists were a political group and did not appeal to the spontex any more than the other alternatives. I myself, without being at all a spontex, was drifitng toward the one-issue solution. In principle, I was all for discipline and democratic centralism, but I was finding it very difficult to be an effective militant in a structure where I was by definition marginal. The Ligue was still built on a student or ex-student base, bolstered by old militants like Pierre Frank, or a few my age who had, unlike me, been in politics all their lives. Many of them had begun as members of the French Stalinist Communist Party, feeling it was better than nothing, until one of the usual points of clevage, like the break with Tito's Yugoslavia, or the Hungarian workers' uprising, or the French Algerian War.
The Ligue was trying to establish a base in the working class, but I was not a worker nor a student nor a potential political cadre. My grandfather had been working class, and in a way I was nearer that than either the students or the cadres, but I was not really close to any of them. As I have made clear, I hope, I was twenty years older than the young militants, and when I had been young, I had been in America, not France, and that also made a difference. I was willing and had been formed to a degree, although in my late twenties already, by the intellectual life in Paris, but was far from possessing the mental agility, background, or experience to become a political cadre. But I did not have to work and had time to devote to politics.
So I got involved in support of deserters from the US army who had sought refuge in Paris. The other people involved in this support were mainly the two Quakers in Paris, who lent their Center as a contact point, and some of the Paris Americans Committee to Stopwar, who had organized themselves as PACS. These last were not very enthusiastic about helping deserters, many of whom had deserted to get away from the army for a few days until they were inevitably picked up by the military or local police. They certainly did not desert in objection to the Vietnam War which they, back in the late sixties, early seventies, knew little about and cared less. The Ligue certainly supported desertion, first in the US military and then, in the early seventies, in their own. But the US desertion was in the hands of the SWP, the Socialist Workers Party, which knew little and, from my infrequent contacts with them, cared less about the US deserters in Europe. They were part of the Fourth International, but no matter how inclusive the title, militants, to cite an old saying, are more interested in the dead dog outside their doorstep than a dead mandarins in China. This last reference from Balzac where the chic young men of the early nineteenth century would ask each other if they had killed their mandarins yet (if you could immediately get a considerable sum of money by pushing a button and killing a thousand mandarins in China, would you push that button?).
Back to the SWP who tried to pass the US deserters right over the border into Canada, which, like Sweden, was offering official asylum to Vietnam War deserters who could manage to get into the country on their own. One of the early deserters became a test case for the French government and we got a sort of asylum for U.S. deserters in France too. We were mainly Max Watts and I, who you are also meeting in this story of Cannes. There would have been no contradiction for me to "take on" the deserter movement for the Ligue in France, but, I repeat, that belonged to the American sector, which I had never had anything to do with. The Fourth liked to keep everything in the place assigned to it, in which it was not unlike the French CP. Both on a Leninist model of organization, I guess. That is why I had said to Izzy that I was wondering if I would continue to work with the Ligue. This trip to Cannes thus became a turning point in my own political life. It had been brought about by the collaboration of all sorts of "spontaneous people," from Eric and Izzy to the movie people. Spontex did not mean they had no political convictions or even party membership on their own, but that they did not require all political actions to be sponsered by a political party. If they had, to cite Max again, nothing would have happened in Cannes, and the original porno film might have been aired because it took too long for the organized parties to organize against it. The Ligue, for one, had declined to participate itself, but it had indeed created the Front of Indochinese Solidarity (FSI) for just such initiatives. As the French PC had, to a lesser extent, created or taken over the Peace Movement. I asked Eric if the Ligue had participated in the Service d'Ordre and he repeated what I knew already, that the small cell on the Cote d`Azure had not condemned it but preferred to observe rather than participate in what was a spontex action. I wondered if they had been somewhere in the hall last night observing. No one had come up to be introduced to the Vietnamese certainly. (End of my political thoughts, and back to the narrative.)
Izzy and I did not discuss, as you know, but just said goodnight in front of my cabin, and he went back to wherever he was sleeping. Van told us later that all the Vietnamese had been very touched because the children had given up their rooms to them. I myself slept marvellously and dreamlessly in the cold little summer house and knew nothing until Max woke me for breakfast at ten the next morning. I went into the big house through the kitchen to throw away finally the twelve bacon and lettuce sandwiches I had been carting around since Paris. A heavy woman with bright blond hair, later introduced to us as a Polish refugee, was the major domo of this part of the house. She took the sandwiches and said she would throw them away, and that I should go in to breakfast with the others.
Nimes
The Vietnamese-American-French contingent was eating and discussing with animation in the dining room. More American and French friends of the Hauptmans had come to talk to the Vietnamese. From a public relations point of view, the trip was a real success. Max was carrying on enthusiastically with a blond English lady who had lived in the village he had been evacuated to as a refugee child in England during WW2. Our epoch is floating on wars and assassinations, like Ben Barka's back in 1965. I wondered if Mr. Hauptman's film on him got made at all. Over coffee, Mrs. Hauptman told me a story of a less successful spontex action than ours which she had been involved in. A million dollars had been collected for the women and children dispossessed or injured by the American bombing. I don't know why men were excluded. Such a large sum could only have come from liberals in the U.S., and I suppose the donors were afraid some of it might go to the Vietcong. The world knew by now that women were also in the fighting forces of Vietnam, Van ici présent, for example, but I suppose "women and children" was a good collecting gimmick. Once the million was reached, an Ad Hoc committee was elected to present the money to a committee of doctors in Hanoi. Mrs. Hauptman's pediatrician had been chairman of this committee, but once in Hanoi had taken a personal dislike to his Vietnamese opposite number and finally returned to France, taking the money with him. He had it put in a special account in a French bank where it had lain for the past year, helping finance the Pompidou government, and accruing interest for Vietnam, I hoped.
--Maybe we could arrange something to get it delivered, said Mrs. Hauptman. It seems such a shame.
I agreed, particularly as the bombing had intensified over Christmas, creating more dispossessed women and children. Fortunately, the Vietnamese were not dependent on the vagaries of French or American liberals for their financing.
We discussed other projects like getting a group of movie people to send more modern equipment to the Vietnamese movie people. We also touched on amnesty for American deserters and draft resisters, and speculated on whether or not Nixon would sign the Peace Accords now taking place in Paris. Any change in the present situation demanded as much and more time as we had all expended on the comparatively simple problem of arranging a Vietnamese evening at the Cannes Film Festival. Individual responsibility, contacts, letters, phone calls would go on. I again regretted the Ligue's non-participation, thinking how much more efficient it would be if we had an organization behind us with its possibilities of coordinating more quickly and on a more permanent basis than a weekend. The FSI was far too young to organize people of the age and experience, whatever it was, of the Hauptmans and friends, but I doubted if the Ligue would be the appropriate vehicle either. Perhaps that is how spontex groups get born.
Our visit to the Hauptmans ended with all of us taking pictures of each other outside in front of the cars. They took pictures of all of us, and the Vietnamese asked permission to take their pictures. I never did get to see them and regretted I did not have my own camera. In those days I had regarded picture-taking as a bourgeois activity. One more prejudice to erase. As we said our goodbyes, the sound of trucks going towards the auto route reminded us to be on our way. I had not realized last night that the property was so near the autoroute. No one took a picture of the trucks, but only the vehicles in the driveway, our car, the Hauptmans two cars, the sympathizers several cars. Mrs. Hauptman gave Van the names and ages of her seven children which Van carefully wrote down and left in Max’s car. All the children had been planned, said Mrs. Hauptman, and they were wonderful people as people, not just because they were her children. Chan contributed that the Vietnamese also put a great value on children. We parted on feelings of fraternity. At the gate I realized I had forgotten my suitcase in the little summer house. To avoid an anti-climactic return in the car, I got out and walked back, skirting the house to the kitchen entrance to ask the blond cook if she could help me. The summer house was already locked. The cook looked dubious, as if I were bringing her more sandwiches to dispose of, but found a key and accompanied me to get my suitcase. I walked back alone to the car, passing as I went an overgrown tennis court like a reminder of Hollywood. Then we drove out and away towards Salon.
The South of France was divided iby the Vietnamese militants into sections: one grouped Salon, Orange, Avignon, Nice and Cannes, while Marseilles with 1000 Vietnamese and sympathizers was a section in itself. Paris, of course, was organized separately, and I don't know exactly what the North consisted of. I have avoided comparing Cesar's Gaul divided into three parts Vietnamese France with Cesar’s Gaul divided into three parts, although it seems to show that France lent itself easily to political divisions. I remembered a group of reactionary old French Resistance people from WW2, who once told me that if Nixon did not win the Vietnamese War for the Americans, the yellow peril would overflow into Europe, and the French would soon need a laissez-passer to go to Rouen. That three successive American governments had been bombing 5000 years of Vietnamese culture to smithereens since 1966 in no way hindered these Free French from equating Nixon and the United States with progress, the Vietnamese with barbarism. I suppose they classified Cesar as progress, the Gauls as barbarians.
The Vietnamese were taking the trip as a welcome respite from their daily arduous life in Paris, and asked if we could stop on the Croisette on our way out of Cannes. So we did and took pictures of each other on the promenade along the sea. Where are those pictures now? Some gone, more no more, more again lost alla stranger. The Festival flags, by the way, had included no Saigon swatches. We all said that we had looked last night. But were "our" flags flying? I was not sure what the Vietnam flags looked like, and did not like to ask, after all the trouble we had had getting them here. I realized the importance of flags, however, from an article in the Struggle of South Vietnam, the press organ of the National Liberation Front in Europe. In south Vietnam, all citizens who were stopped by the Vietnamese police working with the Americans, or by American soldiers on police duty, had to show, in addition to their identity card, a small flag of the Saigon government, like a vaccination certificate against subversive ideas. Meticulous in every detail, the Vietnamese in France were eliminating this symbol of submission.
The only manifestations of US might on the Croisette came from the many tourists, their possible nationality smothered in class symbols like the fur coats on the women who emerged and submerged themselves into the Negresco Hotel, which remained open during the winter. The Festival attracted enough tourists so that cars were jammed along the curb, and a sparse crowd strolled along the sea front and bought postcards like we were doing.
--Bao Dai's villa is somewhere along here, remarked Ho Nam.
Bao Dai, the last ruler of Indochina, had spent more of his life on the Riviera, briefly was returned to Vietnam as a "valid interlocutor" first for the Japanese, and then for the French during and after WW2, finally deciding that the Mediterranean was more conducive to long life than his own country.
--Where is the villa? I asked.
--I think it was torn down, said Max.
--What was he like? Was he as bad as Diem?
--He was a fascist and a collaborator, said Ho Nam coolly.
--Like Thieu?
--Thieu just bought a villa in Geneva, said Ho Nam. His children are there already, riding around in a Mercedes.
--Maybe that is a good sign, I remarked. If he bought it, it must mean he is thinking of settling there permanently.
--The American government has already deposited seven million dollars in his Swiss account, said Chan.
From which I deduced that Chan's public relations were very encompassing.
Ho Nam asked if we would consider prolonging the trip another day, so that we could spend the night with a friend of theirs in Nimes, returning to Paris Wednesday afternoon. So our gastronomic tour of Vietnamese restaurants in the South section continued. In Salon there were two Vietnamese restaurants, one for the United Front, the other pro-American. The fact that tiny Salon had two Vietnamese factions surprised me. In fact, that it even supported two Vietnamese restaurants would have surprised me before this trip. But now I was getting used to the Vietnamese organizational capabilities, and supposed the collaborators were also organized.
--Was the restaurant in Orange also the Front, or the DRV?
--There is no difference, said Ho Nam. The division of the country into North and South is simply another idea of the Americans to divide us. Of course, we have to have separate government structures for practical reasons. The South of the country is occupied and is confronted with unique political decisions. But as soon as we win the war, we will be one country again, with one government.
So I decided not to ask why yesterday evening had to all intents and purposes been solely under the auspices of the Front. Had they both had flags displayed? What flags had Ho Nam brought? But no one was talking about flags any more. Perhaps the army of supporters that we had encountered around the Hauptmans were supporting the Provisional government of the South, rather than the sovereign country of the North. Both were only divided because of the American ploy of the 17th parallel which had never had any significance until they had "invented" it, so to speak, on the model of the 38th parallel dividing Korea in two. Maybe for the Americans, support for the sovereign country of Hanoi implied supporting the Communists, whereas the Front was not a country but a group of resisters inside the "fantoche government" created by the Americans and now ruled by Thieu. None of this seemed a reason why both flags could not have been flown, and I reminded myself to ask Max that evening if he had noticed the flags.
In Salon, we were greeted by the now familiar row of smiling faces, including a young boy and girl who could not have been over fifteen, despite the Vietnamese tendency to look far younger than their years.
--I wonder what happens to them? asked Max.
--You mean, what happens to them politically?
--No, politically they probably follow their parents, said Max. The Vietnamese seem to have succeeded in deviating the youth revolt into a revolt against the aggressor.
--What about the Hauptmans then? Izzy did not seem to be in a state of revolt against his parents.
--There the parents seem to be following their son, said Max. If Izzy moved from the JCR to the FSI, his parents probably followed his lead when they wanted to get active in support of the Vietnamese struggle. I meant, what happens to these children we just met after they come and say hello to us. I must say, I felt a little embarassed being kissed by a young man. Anyway, where do they all disappear to?
--I suppose they all have their own things to do. And they mustn't be too interested sitting around with their parents friends.
--You're judging by different standards, said Max. Where do they go? Think.
--Oh, to the kitchen.
--They help prepare lunch.
--Family business.
--I wonder what they think about socialism.
We asked Ho Nam and Van about this later, and I will get to it then, that is, back in the auto route snack bar outside of Paris. As for the family economy in Salon, it had many of the outward signs of success in European life. After our official welcome, a young man, also very young, sat and played background guitar. It was then past three o'clock and the dining room was empty. After the obligatory sequestration with Ho Nam for a political exchange, the proprietor had some lunch with us. I don't know whether he was having a second lunch, or whether he habitually ate at three, when the last customer had gone. He mentioned that the meat soup was inauthentic because it was difficult to get the correct herbs here. Before the war, they had imported the herbs from Vietnam, but now that was often difficult.
--My clients tell me it does not taste the way it should, he smiled. Many French people were in Vietnam before.
Old colonialists. I wonder if they guessed the proprietor supported the Front. Probably they discussed food, not politics. For colonialists, it probably was unrelated to the quality of the soup, unless the whole war, which prevented the herbs reaching France, or even being grown possibly, was the fault of the revolutionaries. For the comrades, every fact of their life was related to politics. We asked about their children, for example. Van had a boy and girl of ten and twelve; Tam had a four year old daughter. Ho Nam had four sons. We looked at their snapshots, young, nicely dressed children, looking serious or smiling at the camera.
--Where are they now?
Van's children were with her family in US-occupied south Vietnam. Tam's was with his wife's family in Hue, and Ho Nam's were home in north Vietnam.
--How long have you been away from them? I asked Van.
--Four years.
--It must be very hard to be away from your children for so long.
--Now that they are old enough to write, I get letters from them. But, of course, they change a lot in those years, and it is hard to know them well if you are not with them.
--Are all of the children of people working in the Legation in north Vietnam?
--Almost all.
In shorts and sandals, Ho Nam's three sons had been snapped outside their school.
--Where is the fourth? asked Max.
--I had four sons, said Ho Nam. But there are only three in the picture because the fourth one is dead.
--When was he killed?
--In 1968.
--How did it happen? asked Max.
--He was going to school in the fourth zone, began Ho Nam. The southern part of Vietnam, the archi-bombed panhandle which we saw last night in the film about Vinh Linh, City of Steel. That is in the fourth zone. And that day my son was classroom monitor, and the school was bombed. It is the job of the classroom monitor to see that all pupils are inside the shelter. He is always the last one to leave the classroom. And he was killed before he got to the shelter.
--How old was he?
--Six. He would have been eleven this year. The oldest is seventeen--he is going into the army--and the others are fifteen and nine.
I looked again at the three boys who were left, in shorts and sandals, standing in front of their school,
--You can get broadcasts from the Front on the radio here, said Ho Nam.
He got up and turned it on, fiddled with the knobs for some time until, partly covered by atmospheric noises, we heard a voice that was probably speaking Vietnamese.
--The radio of the front, said Ho Nam. It is very powerful.
--What are they saying?
--They are afraid the dikes will be bombed.
The waitress said something in Vietnamese.
--She says she can't bear to hear it, said Ho Nam. It makes her very sad to hear about the bombing.
She was a woman of about my age, in her late forties. Did she have children in Vietnam? No, Ho Nam told me later. She was originally brought over here as a servant in a French family. Then they dismissed her, and she was destitute for a long time. Forlorn.
Back in the car after lunch, Max's car radio did not capture the Front. The word is like a bell. But on the French radio, the news was all about the Peace talks which seemed to be failing to achieve anything.
Keats.
We had left Salon and were driving across Provence to Arles where we stopped to see the Arènes. Last summer's list of dead bulls fluttered on one of the stone pillars outside the stadium in a mistral wind.
--Did you think Nixon was really going to sign a Peace Treaty?
--In October we thought it might be possible, said Chan as we got back in the car after making a tour of the stadium.
Chan signifies truth, Tam heart, Van cloud, and Nam south. The Golden Dragon was the name of the restaurant in Nimes.
--It is somewhere near the Coliseum, said Ho Nam.
The Coliseum was a large round ruin in the middle of a large round circle somewhere in the center of the city. Spaced lampposts lit the surrounding sidewalks. On the outer circumference, bright hotels and shops threw their reflections into the late afternoon. The Coliseum absorbed them impassively.
--The Golden Dragon is in the Old City, said Max, returning from the lobby of the Nimes Carlton. First turn to the right.
The Old City of Nimes was like all old Mediterranean cities, narrow streets with badly parked cars blocking them, small bright boutiques with sparkling clothes, shiny records, mediocre paintings, and dull food for sale. Paving stones led to city-lit narrow doors, one of which, encircled by a golden dragon, plunged forward into a bamboo-lined corridor leading to a circular, bamboo-lined staircase, stopping on a small landing closed by two doors. A small white card on one of them read the French equivalent of Tuesdays rest.
--We have come on the wrong day, I said sadly, as if it were the first time, and as if we were not in one of the Vietnamese political circumscriptions with political representatives of the DRV. Ho Nam rang the bell and the door opened. The welcoming committee of cook, dish washer and young waiter were waiting for us in an elaborately decorated dining room where set tables stood correctly aligned for future diners. Like an immobile train, the restaurant had become part of a landscape, a familiar landscape by now, a political landscape. The walls were lined with cabinets of oriental bric-a-brac, meditating Buddhas, saki sets, ivory elephants, gold and enameled boxes, silent chimes, inlaid panelling, two partridges in a weeping willow on a plate, pretty babies, and silk-embroidered scenes of sylvan scenes.
--These are all real, said Van. The ones in Orange were copies.
The main thing I had noticed in the Orange restaurant had been the ferocious dragon's head at the door.
--Were you in the main reception room at the Legation? she asked me.
--Yes. We met you there. I –
The portrait of Ho Chi Minh is also real embroidery. That I did remember, thinking it was a pastel drawing. The materials of the Vietnamese are not ours.
This Vietnamese meeting seemed to have a more definite political function than those at the other two restaurants. Vietnamese from Nimes came and Ho Nam left with them and came back later. Discussions took place in a small room next to the dining room. The young son of the house appeared, was introduced, and went off to help in the kitchen. On one of his return trips, Ho Nam handed Max a message.
--Your friend, Balthus, is away on vacation, he said. His school is closed for the holidays.
--That's too bad, we said. Max meant it and I did not.
A few years ago, Balthus had taken a nineteen year old American deserter in charge and turned him into a political militant. Buster, the deserter in question, had been sent to Nimes, trailing a background of car stealing and incipient alcoholism which Balthus, a French Hugenot, had snipped off as neatly as a paper tail. Frank blue eyes replaced the opaque orbs of bewilderment we remembered. Buster learnt French, some elements of Marxism, what capitalism was. Buster Heiselman became Jean Martin. And who was Balthus? Twenty years ago he had worked for Renault, the French car manufacturer where he had taken on both the French government and the CGT, still today the most powerful French labor union, by organizing a wildcat strike. It broke under the combined pressure of the opposing giants, and Balthus had broken too and had to go to a sanatorium before going back to his life in Nimes.
--The Left was fighting a rear guard action in those days, said Max when he told me about it before we sent Buster down there. Buster was gotten a job in a factory in Nimes, married a girl from a small Trotskyst group and after May '68, went off with her to Canada to organize with the deserter community in Montreal. I was sorry he was not still here and wondered how he was doing in Canada. I wondered if it had been a good idea to turn him into Jean Martin, and then send him to Canada to become Buster Heiselman all over again. If he was going to organize deserters in Canada, then obviously he would be more useful as an ex-deserter himself than as a Frenchman from Nimes. The experiment of changing his identity might have been interesting to the Nimes comrades, but it was certainly not a recipe for all American deserters. So I was not very pro-Balthus. Max said you had to accept whatever people were ready to do, as long as they were helping out. I preferred that this weekend be devoted to the Vietnamese and did not let myself get side-tracked into another discussion of the deserter movement.
During dinner, the Vietnamese explained again why there were so many Vietnamese restaurants scattered throughout France.
--There is very little else we could have done when we came here, said the proprietor of the Golden Dragon. We could open laundries like the Chinese in America, or restaurants, and we decided on restaurants. It was very hard to get any other sort of employment.
--But you've made a success of it, I said. A very American remark.
--If you work hard, said the proprietor.
Also a very American remark. From different countries, he and I and Max were the same generation. If you work hard, you'll be a success. Max called this the second wave. Optimism. The portly Vietnamese who knew Balthus also had an import-export business in Nimes, as well as a part interest in his own restaurant. He told us all this at dinner, also very American. First he had gone into a private room to talk to Ho Nam. We had been talking about the liberation of women. Chan said that women had always played an important role in Vietnamese history since the Tuong sisters in the Middle Ages.
--Who was the woman married to Diem? asked Max. Or his brother?
--Ngo Dinh Diem's sister-in-law, Madame Nhu, said Van. She was very bad.
--In Vietnam tradition, said Chan (truth), Both men and women have the same amount of pure elements. But women have five impure elements, and men have only three. He smiled at Van.
--What are they?
--Ah, smiled Chan. I don't know.
--That part of folklore was probably made up by men, I said.
Van put her arm around me.
--In Vietnam today, she said, women are very active.
--I'd like to know more about those impure elements, said Max.
The young son of the restaurant, waiting on us instead of being relegated to the kitchen, smiled. We talked of women laying down the gun and going back to housework. Van said that would not exactly happen. Women would rebuild the country along with the men.
Dinner was a gastronomic notch above the Salon and the Orange restaurants, it seems. I had found them all excellent. But there were many delicacies, like celeri sauté with a Vietnamese sauce, octopus paté, and roast pork with bean sprouts. Everything was double, as usual, so no one had to reach. We chatted about small topics, like giving up smoking, to more political ones, like the nationality of the trucks in the Vietnamese movie. Soviet. On the way out, we passed through the kitchen to thank the comrades who had made the dinner.
--I first saw Jean Martin right here, said Mr. Le, the proprietor. They were hiding him in the kitchen and we came up the back stairs. Later I helped him get a job.
Hiding again. He and Balthus. In Paris the deserters had stopped hiding, not that they had ever hid with any seriousness, as soon as they had gotten the right to apply for residence papers. So if they felt they had had to hide Buster, how had they gotten a job for him? Okay, as Jean Martin? And what type of identity did he have as Jean Martin? Well, everything had been satisfactorily arranged eons ago, and Buster or Jean was no longer even in France, so I stopped tormenting myself about it.
--Tonight we stay in a chateau, said Ho Nam and smiled.
Mr. Le lived in a small Italian type chateau perched on a hill overlooking Nimes. Floodlights hidden in the trees lit the parking place, along with three small steps in the front, where a stone staircase led up to the front door and also down to a pool obliquely arranged on a lower terrace. Imitation amphoras at regular intervals awaited spring plants. The villa reflected many things in its oval mirrors framed in mother of pearl, mostly successful importing-exporting. A chrome garnished kitchen and a color television reflected France. Overhead lighting shown on square tables of varying heights with straight chairs tucked around them. No books reflected a non-intellectual, no ashtrays a non-smoker, children's pictures in communion dress a non-Buddhist, and many empty bedrooms an ex-husband. In one, a small frame encased an Italian landscape with peasant boatmen rowing picturesque ladies around a lake.
--You like Italy?
--Yes. I have made many trips there.
Either Mr. Le or I could have asked the question, could have answered it. We were in the hall. The next picture was a photograph showing a young Mr. Le standing beside a young French bride decked out in white: a successful businessman, a successful Catholic who had now joined the struggle for national liberation. According to my off center standards, he could have bought a cheaper car than a Mercedes and donated the difference to the Front. But then he no longer would have been the successful importer-exporter in Nimes. From a cheaper car to selling his villa was a path totally at variance with his present life style. When I mentioned this to Max, he said I was putting carts before horses.
--What really happened was that this man, in the relatively unfavorable atmosphere of Nimes, succeeded, as your father had done between Brooklyn and Wall Street, in becoming a capitalist. Le is the head of the Vietnam association for this whole area--a patriotic Vietnamese exile, he still supports his country's struggle against the foreign invader. And the Vietnamese communists are smart enough to appreciate allies wherever they can get them. To get back to your father, it is a little like Roosevelt putting people like him in charge of the war effort.I did not think that had much to do with the price of eggs. My father had been a Republican and had wanted nothing to do with Roosevelt. Neither he nor Mr. Le lived on their capital, one a restaurant owner with lucrative investments, one a dealer in municipal bonds on Wall Street. Living on capital had nothing to do with defining a capitalist.
The beds were comfortable, the water hot, all quite different from the summer outhouse where we had slept the night before. The Vietnamese had been lodged in the Hauptmans main house, and I thought of asking how it compared to Mr. Le's. Mr. Le's was a chateau, as the Hauptmans had no pretension of being. Anyway, the Vietnamese did not need the Americans to introduce them to high life in the South of France. The only fault in the arrangements here was that there were no towels in the bathroom whereas at the Hauptmans there had been no bathroom. I remembered Johnny Martin again, who had come once to Paris to visit us after his transformation from a GI to a French student and brought his own towel and soap. Americans always expect to find towels in any bathroom that has a shower. Max and I certainly had. Mr. Le did not have towels in his pretty tiled guest bathroom, and I dried myself on the shower curtain, out of a sort of synthetic cotton.
We left at six o'clock in the morning, after a mornng pick-up of green tea and biscuits. Mr. Le said it was stronger than black tea. Ho Nam and I smoked. In the entrance hall, a small tiled pool held water but no fish. The terraced garden was still dark. A villa we were never destined to see by daylight. A mistral blew through us and the cold cars. Ho Nam rode with Mr. Le to the auto route entrance where we waved goodbye to the Mercedes and Ho Nam joined us for the long drive to Paris.
The auto route out of Nimes had the same eerie look of unreality as it had had two days earlier when we had left Paris. an air strip veered alongside the road for a kilometer before ending altogether on a national road bordered by plane trees. Ho Nam began to sing and soon was joined by the three comrades. I thought of the American theory, still pulled out and published in some Establishment newspapers, whereby north Vietnam had invaded south Vietnam, and wondered if the song was from the north or the south.
--That is a song, said Van, that we learned in school in French and then put revolutionary words to in Vietnamese which the French could not understand. Later we put revolutionary words to it in French too.
They sang it again for us in French.
--You see, said Ho Nam, it is much easier now than it was at the time of the First Resistance. Of course, we are much better equipped for the struggle than we were then, even though the Americans and the fantoches are now infinitely better equipped than the French were. In fact, next to China, the Saigon Army is the best-equipped in Southeast Asia. In the First Resistance, we fought for three years before we had our first cannon. There was a French officer, a major, who was helping us. One day he let us know where the French would be sending this 75mm cannon.
Pride of the French army in 1914. French 75. A cocktail named after.
--We stopped the train and took it off.
--I bet the French were upset, said Max.
Ho Nam
smiled.
--They tried very hard to get it back, he said. They dropped parachutists in the region, but by then we had dragged it up into the mountains. We had taken shells from the train too, but unfortunately no one in all the three provinces around Hue knew how to fire it. Of course we did not want to misuse it. So we sent people off--on foot in those days--and four months later they came back with someone who did know and was able to teach us. A few weeks later, we forced the French to abandon dozens, perhaps even more, fortifications in those three provinces around Hue.
--Thanks to the cannon.
--Some day, some C.S.Forster will write that up, said Max. He wrote a book about a cannon in Spain that solved a lot of problems for people back in 1809. What happened to the major, by the way?
--We never found out. I imagine he went back to France.
--And lived happily ever after? I wonder, said Max.
--The lack of materials was not the most serious, added Ho Nam, not particularly interested in the fate of the French major. People at that time did not recognize the necessity of the struggle against the occupier, as they do at present. When I joined the army as a young man, our soldiers did not know how to read and write. Now everyone has been to school.
--In the North and in the liberated areas of the South, asked Max.
Ho Nam nodded.
--General Westmorland--I mean, Wastemoreland--said, "We don't want intellectuals in the infantry.
--In Vietnam, we were not worried about intellectuals understanding the need to free our country from the French, but about the people whom we could not reach on a sufficiently wide scale because of their inability to read and write. You see, many Vietnamese identified with the colonialists. Of course, this is what the colonialists want, and it is normal that some people would believe their widespread propaganda that the interests of Vietnam were advanced by colonial status. So, during the First Resistance, this was an attitude we had to counteract by our own propaganda, and it was hard to reach people unable to read. Now this problem does not exist, and the people understand very well the necessity to fight for our independence from the imperialists.
--During the 'First Resistance, asked Max. You were with the Viet Minh? Why did you choose to join them?
Max was always very interested in why some people acted, and others remained passive.
--I joined because I was for our national independence, answered Ho Nam. It was only afterwards that I started reading Marx and Lenin.
--You were an officer?
--From 1947 to 1969. We were shooting down a helicopter one day, and my group--there are usually three of us in a fighting group--was buried by a bomb exploding near us.
--I once talked to a Polish militant who worked with two French Communist Party members against Franco, I put in. Three was the magic number there too.
--Did you get the helicopter? asked Max.
--I never saw whether we got that one. In the beginning, it was very difficult to shoot down helicopters. Because, you see, we did not know where to aim. Then, one day, we did succeed in bringing one down and took it apart very carefully to see how it was made. Our mistake had been in shooting at them just under the nose. But there it was armor-plated. Whereas the one we brought down had been hit by accident in the tail, and a connecting rod broke. With the connecting rod broken, the helicopter has a very difficult time staying in the air. So then we knew we must aim not for the nose but for the tail, and not from the bottom but for the side. From then on we put our machine guns on top of the hills and shot sideways, and we shot down a lot of helicopters that way.
--When you go out in a three man group, said Max. As the officer, do you give the orders?
--Sometimes.
--If you send out twenty, thirty, or fifty three man groups, you don't have enough officers to go around?
--No, of course not, said Ho Nam. Most groups do not have an officer with them. Just three soldiers. But before every action, we spend a long time discussing it until everybody understands clearly what is to be done. Then afterwards, when we return, we discuss the success or the mistakes of the operation and try to improve for the future.
Mistakes. Failure was not a word in the Vietnamese vocabulary.
--So, Max pursued, in the Vietnamese army, soldiers can criticize their officers?
--Of course. How would the officers learn otherwise?
--But as an officer--I mean, if a soldier criticized him too harshly, won't the officer put him on point duty, in a dangerous position that is, next time around? To get rid of him?
For the first time, Ho Nam looked shocked.
--Oh no, he wouldn't do a thing like that!
--So, in addition to promoting equality in the Army, dividing up into three reduces the casualty rate, I assume.
--Yes, said Ho Nam. For example, when the bomb explosion buried our group, it was just three people.
--Were any of you killed?
--No. Fortunately we were all only injured. I myself spent five months in the hospital. It was after that I was sent here to Paris.
--If I told this to the GI's, they would not believe me, said Max. Well, maybe. But it wouldn't work in the American Army. Splitting up an infantry company into thirty, forty, fifty-three man groups and sending them out separately to fight--oh my! Even in conditions where each company, each platoon is led by officers and lifer NCO's, the soldiers would simply go off and get stoned until they figured it was okay to come back. No one wants to play hero. The troops make it very clear to their officers that, if they themselves want to stay alive, they had better be careful where they take their men. Gung-ho lifers, and a lot of lieutenants and captains, have been found shot in the back. But, of course, the officers don't discuss operations with the GI's beforehand, or ask for their criticism afterwards.
I thought Ho Nam was listening as if he were being informed of the customs of some archaic society. Perhaps he was.
--Switching from Vietnam to Germany, said Max. B battery billets in Wiley barracks outside of Neu Ulm caught on fire--a fire of unexplained origin. I might also add that the 81st Field Artillery, which is stationed there, is equipped with Pershing rockets and that one Battery B G.I. achieved more than local fame by refusing to go through the motions of firing his rocket after he and his buddies doped out that for their 50 ton atomic warhead the objective was Prague. He was a GI who thought--Spec/4 David McCampbell. someone wrote a ballad about him.
--Don't sing it, I put in.
--I didn't say I wrote it, said Max complacently. A FRITA wrote it, a friend of resisters inside the army. Where was I? Oh yes, the point I wanted to make was that while the fire was burning in B billets, and the G.I.'s were jumping out of second story windows, battery commander, Captain Cochran was, according to several G.I.'s I talked with later, standing outside the burning building and smiling. "He was probably happy we were losing everything we owned, said one G.I. Our steroes, camera, hash, all our things.
--What about his things? asked Ho Nam.
--Whose?
--The captain's.
--But the fire was in the G.I.billets.
--But I thought it was his troop.
--It was, said Max. But in the American military, officers do not live with the men. In the Vietnamese Army they do?
--Why yes, said Ho Nam. Where else would they live?
--Well, said Max. If they tried it in the U.S. Army, they would need a twenty-four hour a day guard standing at the door to his room. And perhaps even a guard to watch that guard.
--It isn't a people's army, said Ho Nam.
After our by now traditional stop for coffee on rejoining the Auto route du Sud, we stopped once more for lunch. By now we were out of the southern circumscription of Vietnamese France and at lunchtime had to make do with another auto route snack bar where we were surrounded by snow-booted skiers returning from Christmas vacation. There was a complicated self-service system filtering everyone past chrome steam tables of water-logged food. Back to Paris and capitalist mass production. I thought nostalgically of our double Vietnamese dishes, conveniently arranged around the table. On the way out, I joined Ho Nam wandering past key chains, flashlights, records, magazines, dishes, toys, clothes--a mass exposition that extinguished any desire I might have had for any of them.
Van and Tam were talking with Max outside in the parking lot, near an iron stairway leading up to a higher class restaurant on a covered bridge out over the auto route. I wondered if the same food was filtered up through pipes.
--The women, Van was saying, explain to the soldiers and tell them what is happening in their families, how they are being driven out of their villages and re-located to concentration camps. It makes them feel ashamed they are betraying the interests of their own people.
--The fantoche soldiers? I asked.
--Of course, said Max.
--What about socialism? Do you explain that too or just the immediate problems of national liberation.
--The two are of course connected, said Van. But at present the people are waging a war for national independence and that is of primary importance.
Our Vietnamese friends were, of course, first and foremost political party militants, and I did not think they would, go into the modalities of their future political plans with us. However, I felt by this time we were all good enough friends for me to ask one or two questions.
--Not even the nationalization of factories, for example?
--In the liberated areas they are already nationalized, said Van. Of course, after we win, we will take everything out of the hands of the Thieu puppets.
--What about collectivization of land?
--It is not in our program for the present, said Van. First we must win the war. Then we will decide what is to be done.
I tried to remember who in the Ligue had told me that the Vietnamese were on Trotskyst positions. More specifically on Ligue positions, since the Socialist Workers Party, the American section, disagreed with the Ligue on many points, although both supported the Vietnamese Revolution. The Alliance of Youth for Socialism, another Trotskyst group im Paris, supported the Vietnamese Revolution but with reservations, considering it insufficiently revolutionary and too petty bourgeois. In Russian-Chinese disagreements, and less important ones than those between these two powerful allies, the Vietnamese kept tactfully silent. When both these allies separately welcomed the President-cum-commander in chief of the American forces fighting in Vietnam, Hanoi had packed its overt criticism into a long poem on the editorial page of the Party newspaper. From time to time, the Vietnamese praised the actions of a reputedly terrorist group, dixit the West, like the Palestine Black Septembrists or the German Baader-Meinhof group which was condemned or ignored by all the Right and many Left groups, both moderate and extreme, outside and inside Germany. In none of these instances were they on Trotskyst positions. As Van explained the position of the PRG in south Vietnam, defeating the foreign aggressor and driving them out of the country, which would then unite as one, was the rallying point for both north and south. Not to recognize the importance of this priority and liken the Vietnamese two parties to any political party in France seemed to me only to obfuscate matters unnecessarily.
The short series of days, hours, and minutes which had made up our trip together came to an end at four o'clock in the afternoon of January third, on the opposite corner of the rue d'Assas and the rue Verrier from which we had started, sixty hours minus two ago. Our finite worldly goods were separated in the mass of bags and equipment stacked beside, behind, and under the jump seat in the back where Chan had sat to write. We all got out into the street to say goodbye. A single bored French policeman watched from the sidewalk in front of the Legation.
--Would you care to come in for some tea? asked Ho Nam.
--No, thank you, I said or Max said.
We thought they had done enough for us and the rest of the world, a small country stopping the voracious American monster from devouring Vietnam.
I could also imagine they might be getting a little tired of us. Max used to say, a little of him went a long way. I added myself, although much later Tian told me Ho Nam had asked after me. To sum up, ours had been a successful collaboration, accomplishing what it had set out to do, mainly, substituting,for the stupid film proposed by Saigon, a film informing a wide public about the on-going struggle of the Vietnamese Revolution, implying a coming victory. I am sure the five of us recognized we had created a friendship, although we were all very busy and never saw each other again.
--They tried very hard to get it back, he said. They dropped parachutists in the region, but by then we had dragged it up into the mountains. We had taken shells from the train too, but unfortunately no one in all the three provinces around Hue knew how to fire it. Of course we did not want to misuse it. So we sent people off--on foot in those days--and four months later they came back with someone who did know and was able to teach us. A few weeks later, we forced the French to abandon dozens, perhaps even more, fortifications in those three provinces around Hue.
--Thanks to the cannon.
--Some day, some C.S.Forster will write that up, said Max. He wrote a book about a cannon in Spain that solved a lot of problems for people back in 1809. What happened to the major, by the way?
--We never found out. I imagine he went back to France.
--And lived happily ever after? I wonder, said Max.
--The lack of materials was not the most serious, added Ho Nam, not particularly interested in the fate of the French major. People at that time did not recognize the necessity of the struggle against the occupier, as they do at present. When I joined the army as a young man, our soldiers did not know how to read and write. Now everyone has been to school.
--In the North and in the liberated areas of the South, asked Max.
Ho Nam nodded.
--General Westmorland--I mean, Wastemoreland--said, "We don't want intellectuals in the infantry.
--In Vietnam, we were not worried about intellectuals understanding the need to free our country from the French, but about the people whom we could not reach on a sufficiently wide scale because of their inability to read and write. You see, many Vietnamese identified with the colonialists. Of course, this is what the colonialists want, and it is normal that some people would believe their widespread propaganda that the interests of Vietnam were advanced by colonial status. So, during the First Resistance, this was an attitude we had to counteract by our own propaganda, and it was hard to reach people unable to read. Now this problem does not exist, and the people understand very well the necessity to fight for our independence from the imperialists.
--During the 'First Resistance, asked Max. You were with the Viet Minh? Why did you choose to join them?
Max was always very interested in why some people acted, and others remained passive.
--I joined because I was for our national independence, answered Ho Nam. It was only afterwards that I started reading Marx and Lenin.
--You were an officer?
--From 1947 to 1969. We were shooting down a helicopter one day, and my group--there are usually three of us in a fighting group--was buried by a bomb exploding near us.
--I once talked to a Polish militant who worked with two French Communist Party members against Franco, I put in. Three was the magic number there too.
--Did you get the helicopter? asked Max.
--I never saw whether we got that one. In the beginning, it was very difficult to shoot down helicopters. Because, you see, we did not know where to aim. Then, one day, we did succeed in bringing one down and took it apart very carefully to see how it was made. Our mistake had been in shooting at them just under the nose. But there it was armor-plated. Whereas the one we brought down had been hit by accident in the tail, and a connecting rod broke. With the connecting rod broken, the helicopter has a very difficult time staying in the air. So then we knew we must aim not for the nose but for the tail, and not from the bottom but for the side. From then on we put our machine guns on top of the hills and shot sideways, and we shot down a lot of helicopters that way.
--When you go out in a three man group, said Max. As the officer, do you give the orders?
--Sometimes.
--If you send out twenty, thirty, or fifty three man groups, you don't have enough officers to go around?
--No, of course not, said Ho Nam. Most groups do not have an officer with them. Just three soldiers. But before every action, we spend a long time discussing it until everybody understands clearly what is to be done. Then afterwards, when we return, we discuss the success or the mistakes of the operation and try to improve for the future.
Mistakes. Failure was not a word in the Vietnamese vocabulary.
--So, Max pursued, in the Vietnamese army, soldiers can criticize their officers?
--Of course. How would the officers learn otherwise?
--But as an officer--I mean, if a soldier criticized him too harshly, won't the officer put him on point duty, in a dangerous position that is, next time around? To get rid of him?
For the first time, Ho Nam looked shocked.
--Oh no, he wouldn't do a thing like that!
--So, in addition to promoting equality in the Army, dividing up into three reduces the casualty rate, I assume.
--Yes, said Ho Nam. For example, when the bomb explosion buried our group, it was just three people.
--Were any of you killed?
--No. Fortunately we were all only injured. I myself spent five months in the hospital. It was after that I was sent here to Paris.
--If I told this to the GI's, they would not believe me, said Max. Well, maybe. But it wouldn't work in the American Army. Splitting up an infantry company into thirty, forty, fifty-three man groups and sending them out separately to fight--oh my! Even in conditions where each company, each platoon is led by officers and lifer NCO's, the soldiers would simply go off and get stoned until they figured it was okay to come back. No one wants to play hero. The troops make it very clear to their officers that, if they themselves want to stay alive, they had better be careful where they take their men. Gung-ho lifers, and a lot of lieutenants and captains, have been found shot in the back. But, of course, the officers don't discuss operations with the GI's beforehand, or ask for their criticism afterwards.
I thought Ho Nam was listening as if he were being informed of the customs of some archaic society. Perhaps he was.
--Switching from Vietnam to Germany, said Max. B battery billets in Wiley barracks outside of Neu Ulm caught on fire--a fire of unexplained origin. I might also add that the 81st Field Artillery, which is stationed there, is equipped with Pershing rockets and that one Battery B G.I. achieved more than local fame by refusing to go through the motions of firing his rocket after he and his buddies doped out that for their 50 ton atomic warhead the objective was Prague. He was a GI who thought--Spec/4 David McCampbell. someone wrote a ballad about him.
--Don't sing it, I put in.
--I didn't say I wrote it, said Max complacently. A FRITA wrote it, a friend of resisters inside the army. Where was I? Oh yes, the point I wanted to make was that while the fire was burning in B billets, and the G.I.'s were jumping out of second story windows, battery commander, Captain Cochran was, according to several G.I.'s I talked with later, standing outside the burning building and smiling. "He was probably happy we were losing everything we owned, said one G.I. Our steroes, camera, hash, all our things.
--What about his things? asked Ho Nam.
--Whose?
--The captain's.
--But the fire was in the G.I.billets.
--But I thought it was his troop.
--It was, said Max. But in the American military, officers do not live with the men. In the Vietnamese Army they do?
--Why yes, said Ho Nam. Where else would they live?
--Well, said Max. If they tried it in the U.S. Army, they would need a twenty-four hour a day guard standing at the door to his room. And perhaps even a guard to watch that guard.
--It isn't a people's army, said Ho Nam.
After our by now traditional stop for coffee on rejoining the Auto route du Sud, we stopped once more for lunch. By now we were out of the southern circumscription of Vietnamese France and at lunchtime had to make do with another auto route snack bar where we were surrounded by snow-booted skiers returning from Christmas vacation. There was a complicated self-service system filtering everyone past chrome steam tables of water-logged food. Back to Paris and capitalist mass production. I thought nostalgically of our double Vietnamese dishes, conveniently arranged around the table. On the way out, I joined Ho Nam wandering past key chains, flashlights, records, magazines, dishes, toys, clothes--a mass exposition that extinguished any desire I might have had for any of them.
Van and Tam were talking with Max outside in the parking lot, near an iron stairway leading up to a higher class restaurant on a covered bridge out over the auto route. I wondered if the same food was filtered up through pipes.
--The women, Van was saying, explain to the soldiers and tell them what is happening in their families, how they are being driven out of their villages and re-located to concentration camps. It makes them feel ashamed they are betraying the interests of their own people.
--The fantoche soldiers? I asked.
--Of course, said Max.
--What about socialism? Do you explain that too or just the immediate problems of national liberation.
--The two are of course connected, said Van. But at present the people are waging a war for national independence and that is of primary importance.
Our Vietnamese friends were, of course, first and foremost political party militants, and I did not think they would, go into the modalities of their future political plans with us. However, I felt by this time we were all good enough friends for me to ask one or two questions.
--Not even the nationalization of factories, for example?
--In the liberated areas they are already nationalized, said Van. Of course, after we win, we will take everything out of the hands of the Thieu puppets.
--What about collectivization of land?
--It is not in our program for the present, said Van. First we must win the war. Then we will decide what is to be done.
I tried to remember who in the Ligue had told me that the Vietnamese were on Trotskyst positions. More specifically on Ligue positions, since the Socialist Workers Party, the American section, disagreed with the Ligue on many points, although both supported the Vietnamese Revolution. The Alliance of Youth for Socialism, another Trotskyst group im Paris, supported the Vietnamese Revolution but with reservations, considering it insufficiently revolutionary and too petty bourgeois. In Russian-Chinese disagreements, and less important ones than those between these two powerful allies, the Vietnamese kept tactfully silent. When both these allies separately welcomed the President-cum-commander in chief of the American forces fighting in Vietnam, Hanoi had packed its overt criticism into a long poem on the editorial page of the Party newspaper. From time to time, the Vietnamese praised the actions of a reputedly terrorist group, dixit the West, like the Palestine Black Septembrists or the German Baader-Meinhof group which was condemned or ignored by all the Right and many Left groups, both moderate and extreme, outside and inside Germany. In none of these instances were they on Trotskyst positions. As Van explained the position of the PRG in south Vietnam, defeating the foreign aggressor and driving them out of the country, which would then unite as one, was the rallying point for both north and south. Not to recognize the importance of this priority and liken the Vietnamese two parties to any political party in France seemed to me only to obfuscate matters unnecessarily.
The short series of days, hours, and minutes which had made up our trip together came to an end at four o'clock in the afternoon of January third, on the opposite corner of the rue d'Assas and the rue Verrier from which we had started, sixty hours minus two ago. Our finite worldly goods were separated in the mass of bags and equipment stacked beside, behind, and under the jump seat in the back where Chan had sat to write. We all got out into the street to say goodbye. A single bored French policeman watched from the sidewalk in front of the Legation.
--Would you care to come in for some tea? asked Ho Nam.
--No, thank you, I said or Max said.
We thought they had done enough for us and the rest of the world, a small country stopping the voracious American monster from devouring Vietnam.
I could also imagine they might be getting a little tired of us. Max used to say, a little of him went a long way. I added myself, although much later Tian told me Ho Nam had asked after me. To sum up, ours had been a successful collaboration, accomplishing what it had set out to do, mainly, substituting,for the stupid film proposed by Saigon, a film informing a wide public about the on-going struggle of the Vietnamese Revolution, implying a coming victory. I am sure the five of us recognized we had created a friendship, although we were all very busy and never saw each other again.
