Finding the Dragon Lady (9 page)

They looked like cavemen to Madame Nhu. Even their smell was primal—sweat, smoke, and wet earth. She could barely make out what they were saying to her, much less what they were saying to each other.
The toneless speech of commoners in the central region had continued to elude her, despite the three years she had been living in Hue. Distinct rising and falling tones distinguish words from one another in Vietnamese, and to the well-bred northerner, the flat, pounding noises these men lobbed across the room at each other sounded like savage grunts.

Madame Nhu's dog whimpered pitifully from another room. Quito, a German shepherd, was a magnificent and loyal animal. After her husband had left her all alone, the dog had kept her safe from the Chinese Kuomintang troops stationed in the city after September 1945. They had descended on the city like a swarm of locusts.
¹
When a motley crew of them decided to settle in her garden, Madame Nhu, her cook, and the housekeeper had tried to scare them off by making a ruckus, banging ferociously on pots and pans and yelling. The men hadn't budged—they weren't field mice. They saw that Madame Nhu was pregnant, her husband was nowhere to be seen, and her only company in the big house by the river was two old maids. The ragged troops, sick of war and starved for food, warmth, and the comforts of home, began to think they would be more comfortable inside the house. Madame Nhu looked vulnerable enough standing alone at the window, clutching at something behind her rounded belly, but then they saw what it was. She was holding a dog loosely by the collar. He performed well, baring his teeth and laying his ears flat against his head. The threat worked, and after that the men had left her mostly alone, a blessing for which she couldn't help but thank her darling, snarling beast.

He had had no chance to come to her defense this morning. She had locked the dog up in another room for the night. It was a foolish mistake.

The Viet Minh soldiers turned their attention to the piano. It was a fine instrument that Madame Nhu had tried to have transported out of the house, along with the few valuable heirlooms of lacquer and silver, which she had asked the Jesuits to store in their monastery in case something like this should happen. But the piano had jammed in the doorway. The men encircled it, running their hands over the glossy wood, but not out of any particular admiration. Human skin oils leave
a rainbow residue in their wake, dust and grime can scratch a prime paint job, and touching the strings, given the difficulty of keeping them in tune in the tropics, during wartime no less, would ordinarily have constituted an unspeakable trespass. The callused fingers were seeking something as they probed under the hood and around the insides. The men were looking for hidden communication devices. They seemed to think the piano, with all its strings, was some sort of telegraph.

Finally, the Communists decided to detonate the piano. “Imbeciles,” Madame Nhu had fumed. “They didn't even know what a grand piano was!” But Madame Nhu didn't actually watch as they packed the cavity with gunpowder. Perhaps the Communists had known exactly what the piano was all along, and blowing it up was their revenge for the bourgeois decadence on display. But it is possible that something else caused it to explode. The cast-iron harp of the grand piano might have suffered during the hasty attempt to move it. If the harp had cracked or the frame had been weakened, the tons of pressure holding the strings taught might have released in a cataclysmic boom. Whatever the cause, the eruption blasted an enormous hole through the main section of the house.

Amid the wreckage, Madame Nhu set to gathering up what she could for baby Le Thuy: blankets and diapers, a change of clothes, and a large basket to carry it all. Then, before she was forced out of her home, she put on a coat, a wool redingote, a bit like a coatdress that fastened narrowly at the waist with darts and tucks. It had been fashioned in Europe, an unimaginable luxury during the last years of war and privation. It was the warmest piece of clothing she owned. Tropical conditions ruled her corner of Southeast Asia ten months out of the year, but December in central Vietnam was predictably damp and cool—conditions that would only get worse the farther she got from home.

She was herded out of the city under a gunmetal sky, part of a human stream pouring down the road, heading inland away from Hue. They were mostly women, children, and the elderly. Baskets bobbed along like flotsam, carried across the shoulders of women using the traditional
dong ganh,
long poles balancing a basket on either end. Much was made of the fact that their shape resembled the long and
narrow contours of the country itself. The full baskets on either end represented the fertile deltas, the Red River of Tonkin to the north and the Mekong of Cochinchina in the south. The area in the middle, the long hard yoke that rubbed the skin off the back of the novice, was the rocky and relatively infertile region in the center of the country, the area that the refugees now tramped through.

The roads cut like a red gash through flooded fields. They were awash with clay and scented with manure from the water buffalo in the fields. The road itself got too dangerous as soon as the concrete towers came into sight. The French army had constructed these watchtowers along the country roads to keep watch for Viet Minh troop movements, so the captives cut through the rice paddies instead. They were corralled single file on narrow dikes. To avoid soaking the only pair of shoes she had with her, Madame Nhu had to measure each step minutely. It was exhausting work, carrying her daughter in one arm and the baby's things in the other. She tried to keep pace with her sister-in-law and her niece; her mother-in-law, a tiny, fragile thing, was carried on the gardener's back and hung back a little farther. Around them, the rice grasses rippled like waves. The vast sea of emerald was broken by white marble gravestones—ancestral burial plots that served as a constant reminder that death could lurk nearby.

Where the paddy ended, the procession of women and their guards had to return to the road. They were approaching a bridge when a loud blast shattered the air. “N
m xu
ng!” Get down! The guards crouched at the edge of the road. Pebbles scattered as the quickest women scurried down an embankment. Others followed, heads tucked low, elbows around their ears, their baskets abandoned on the road. The road to the bridge was suddenly deserted except for Madame Nhu and the baby she clutched in her arms.

Madame Nhu knew that decomposing bodies would have washed up against the pilings and abutments. She had been close to bridges like this one before and had heard others graphically describe the scene. From where she stood, she thought she could smell the putrefaction. Whether killed by the Viet Minh or caught in some crossfire, what did it matter? They were the bodies of fallen fighters too poor or too far from home for a proper burial. The swollen corpses of those anonymous
unfortunates were rotting and leaking their fluids into the very same shallows where she was being told to take cover.

Madame Nhu simply couldn't go. It was too awful. It had begun raining, but she planted her feet in the center of the red-clay road and held on even tighter to the baby. She would not take refuge like the other women among the dead; she'd rather join them as a corpse herself. It was the first time Madame Nhu had seen, at first hand, the grim reality that had gripped her country for the last few years, the same years that she had spent as a newlywed, then a young wife and new mother, far removed from political intrigues. She'd moved into Hoang's fine house. She had servants, including a cook, a gardener, and a nanny for the baby, to tend to the business of homemaking for her. In her spare time, Madame Nhu had taken up the
don trang,
a delicate instrument that resembled a lute. She was also content to be pushed around town in her
pousse,
which she had actually had brought to Hue by train after her wedding. She boasted that its northern comforts were so envied that people would stop and stare at her daily passage along the banks of the An Cuu canal to dine with her mother-in-law. But she could never be entirely sure if they stared out of admiration or with some more sinister intent. Now all such luxuries were gone.

To Madame Nhu, standing there in the rain, death leered at her from every angle. It was a grim kaleidoscope. Yet, she insisted, it was liberating. If she stayed on the road to cross the bridge, she wondered, who would come to get her? Her captors or whoever was shooting at them? She doubted either of them would be brave, or foolish, enough to risk it. Madame Nhu felt free. How tired she was of adhering to pointless expectations. Her shoulders fairly ached from all the slouching toward whatever it was she thought she was supposed to do. She straightened and looked ahead into the mist. What would come next she didn't know, but she would look it in the face, and she would make her own way. Madame Nhu believed that in that moment in the rain, surrounded by desolation but strangely untouched by it, she began to understand things. She would not step down into the filth and decay; she would hold her place on the high ground.

Madame Nhu flipped up the hem of her coat. It was long enough to fold over the baby's head, making a sort of shield from the rain,
which was falling hard and cold. Le Thuy thought it was a game of hide-and-seek and pushed her face out, giggling with delight. When Madame Nhu insisted and tried to position the coat again, the baby only laughed more. Peels of high laughter escaped from the woolen folds of Madame Nhu's coat. The joyful sound rolled over the battleground as mother and daughter set off across the shaky wooden beams of the bridge.

As fantastic an image as it must have been, Madame Nhu wasn't the first woman to cross a battleground with a baby. The Vietnamese have a rich mythical history featuring noble and heroic mothers. One of the fabled Vietnamese kings, Le Loi, is said to have hidden from the Chinese Ming invaders in the skirts of his mother. The mother myth is tied to the creation story of the Vietnamese people, and the mother's affection and devotion are credited with the remarkable feats of Vietnamese heroines. The Communists would be the most effective at conflating maternal sacrifice and patriotism in their revolutionary propaganda, but Madame Nhu would also try, during her years in power, to use motherhood as an image of righteousness. So, I had to wonder, did the Vietnamese emphasis on Quoc Mau, or National Mothers, influence Madame Nhu's version of herself in the story? Whatever the case, her perceived invincibility became her reality. Madame Nhu's audacious bridge crossing boosted her confidence that she would survive this trial and whatever else might come.