Prince of Peace (55 page)

"Me?"

"Yes."

"You think I should just go home and lead the rosary in a parish in the suburbs?"

"You said you wanted to help the children. So you go home and tell your people what their soldiers and pilots do to the children." She looked away. When she put her hand to her mouth, Michael saw that it was trembling.

"Fräulein..."

"I was four years old, but also sing 'Deutschland über Alles' in church. I see priests making the Nazi salute from the altar."

He reached his hand across to touch her shoulder. "I'm not one of those priests, Fräulein."

"You are Spellman's priest, yes?"

"And should I wear a yellow star?"

She slapped his face, hard. He ignored the blow. "Are you Germans all alike?"

"My God, I think, yes! So now some of us are here. You will also leave it to your children to denounce twenty years from now what your country is doing?"

"Fräulein, you are wrong."

"If I was wrong, you would not listen. But always you listen, though you know now what I am saying. Why is that?"

He couldn't answer her.

"You have seen it with your own eyes. You know I am right."

It was as if she'd hit him again; this time he felt it. She was forcing him to see what these months had taught him, cost him. Spellman's priest? Yes. He was back to that, at last. A man with no conscience of his own. No capacity to act. This war had the blessing of the one to whom he'd handed over his soul. Therefore he couldn't oppose the war, he could only hate it. Now it was Michael who trembled. He tried to control himself by fumbling for a cigarette, but when he struck a match he could not keep it lit.

He felt naked suddenly. This woman was staring at him. He
was
naked. He turned away, pretending to turn from the wind, to light his match.

When he had his cigarette lit he rubbed his hair, then pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes. "I ride on helicopters, yes. Once I rode with twenty American kids, GIs, just like fellows I grew up with, fellows like me. Except for one thing. They were all dead. I was the only one in the helicopter alive, the only one not in a bag." He stopped for a moment to breathe, then said, "And the Vietnamese, the
loyal
ones, the
Catholics
at your hospital, won't even recite a phrase from the national anthem! Christ! And we call it 'Winning Hearts and Minds'!" He slammed his fist into the sand. "Also known as WHAM!"

After a moment Inge Holz said softly, "They are not Catholics."

"They have pictures of the Sacred Heart and the pope hanging in their hooches."

She laughed. She reached across to squeeze his arm, the first sign of warmth she had yet shown him. Her eyes twinkled at him, to her he seemed so naive. She saw how devastated he was. "They have pictures of Ho Chi Minh too, but hidden. They know we are a Catholic hospital. They think we want those pictures everywhere."

Michael laughed and slapped his forehead. Her touch had soothed something in him. "They were so nice to me. I thought it was because I am a priest."

"They are nice to you when you are so nice to them. I have watched you with patients. You are a kind man. You are not a marine. I did not mean to say that."

Now she took off her glasses and let him see her eyes. "Father," she said, "I talk to you directly because I see you with my people. I see you are good."

He did not look away from her. Suddenly she made him feel all right. As if she knew how much he wanted her to, she touched him again, resting her hand on his arm.

He was acutely conscious of the feel of her fingers, how they had no weight, but caused sensation right to the bone. He wanted to take her into his arms and bury his face in her hair. Are you in love with someone? he would ask. And when she said no, he could ask her to be his friend. That was how he'd put it; perhaps we can be friends. He imagined her agreeing. She would stop being aloof and accusing. She would be like him; vulnerable, unsure of what such feelings meant, afraid of expressing them, yet desperate to.

Ah, poor Michael. The man's loneliness, just thinking of it, undoes me. It was of course the loneliness of a man at sea with himself, a man approaching yet another impossible choice. That loneliness we all know. But his was the further loneliness of the avowed celibate. Figments of women were as much at the center of his inner life as any man's but his figments were of a type. The love of his life, remember, had been a nun. He was immune to the charms of Saigon whores and of the pampered, bikini-clad
colonistes
of the Cercle Sportif. The tough-talking American women correspondents struck him, with their swagger, their blatant if rough-hewn sensuality, their lust for gruesome copy, as crude parodies of the male safari-jacket type. The nurses he'd encountered were noble and strong, like this German, but they lacked her attachment to the full truth. Her willingness to see beyond the victims she treated to their victimizers, and the rare ability to sustain compassion for the first while honing her fury at the second were what moved him. Michael wanted to be like her. And, yes, he wanted to possess her. He was like many priests; only purity could seduce him. When he looked down at her then, the lines of her body, the tracery of her womanliness, breasts and hips, thighs, dominated his perception. The vise-grip in which he held his desire—priest's vice—loosened for a moment. If he imagined lying with her, naked; if he imagined making love to her, it was because she, unlike the whores and
colonistes
and adventurer-correspondents, seemed the opposite of everything he'd encountered in Vietnam. But wait. Wasn't it his fear exactly that once he disavowed his place in the middle of the road—it is necessary to pursue the war, but we should do so humanely—his grip on moderation itself would slip? If he could call into question his patriotism, the bedrock virtue, what would happen to his other commitments? To his celibacy? In other words, didn't both his priestly vocation and the integrity of his fresh rejection of the American war depend on his carefully sustained detachment? Detachment from her? If he was going to place himself above the moral standard of his own people, he could do so only as a man of virtue. With this woman he could perhaps have softened the pain he felt because of the war, but wasn't it his duty now to keep that pain sharp and find a way to act on it? The thing was to stop the war, not his hurting. Thus, he steered not only their talk, but his train of thought away from his attraction to her. Ah Michael, you poor fuckless bastard!

He withdrew his arm and lit cigarettes for both of them. How do couples manage such moments now that no one smokes?

They were silent, staring off at the lake.

Michael hadn't a clue what to say, what to do.

He thought of Nicholas Wiley who seemed wise now, in his moralism, his simplicity. Michael fingered his cross, and it filled him with affection for the kid, a rare longing to see him. He said, "A friend of mine gave me this. He says about the war, 'Just stop it! That's all. Stop it.'"

"When enough people say that to them, they perhaps will."

"Maybe whether they would or not, people should say it."

Inge picked up
The Christian Failure,
looked at it for a moment, then opened to a dog-eared page. "In nineteen thirty-nine our bishops made a joint statement," she read. "Catholics must 'do their duty in obedience to the Führer, ready for sacrifice and with commitment of the whole being.'" She snapped the book shut. "I wish someone had said 'Stop it!'" She dropped the book into her bag. With her cigarette dangling from her lips, she stood and folded her towel. She dropped it in her straw bag, then withdrew a worn white lab-coat, which she donned as a robe. "I must get back."

Michael pulled on his trousers and shirt and walked with her. Neither spoke. At the entrance to the compound, she stopped. He sensed something stiffen in her, a decision made, a resolution. She held his eyes and said quite deliberately, quite carefully, "I want you to come into An Hoa with me tonight."

That was all she said, all she asked of him, but suddenly his throat was dry and he could hear the blood pulsing in his ears.

 

They walked in silence. The dark forms of palm trees were silhouetted against the night. The mountains beyond the lake were visible only as the black nothing above which the sky, by comparison, seemed a shade of coal blue. Ahead of them, at a distance of half a mile, were the spires of the church. No lights shone from the village. The country lived permanently in blackout.

"The cool air feels good," Michael said at last. He had to deflect the tension he felt into talk.

Inge said, "You know what happens in Vietnam at sunset, don't you?"

He heard something whimsical in her voice, something girlish, and he was drawn in by it. He was aware for the first time of her cologne. Had she worn that for its effect on him? "What?" he asked.

"The gates of the underworld are said to be opened and the souls fly out, naked and starving. They fly back to their home villages and are eating the food left for them on their family altars."

"Sounds like the Viet Cong."

"Vietnamese feed not only their children, but their ancestors."

"You love them, don't you?"

"Yes. It breaks my heart, what happens. You say that—'breaks my heart'?"

"Yes."

The sound of helicopters in the distance stopped them. They listened as the noise grew louder. They stared up at the dark sky, but saw nothing. The aircraft flew without running lights. Soon the sound of their engines began to fade. It was impossible to say how many there were.

Michael said, "In Saigon, when there is rumbling in the distance, people in the cafés hope it isn't thunder because they don't want it to rain, they'll have to go inside. They listen and then say to one another, 'Oh good, artillery fire. Oh good, bombs.'"

Inge nodded. "Europeans and Americans."

"No. Vietnamese. I've heard Vietnamese say it."

She shook her head. "Someday soon they will bomb An Hoa."

"Why do you say that?"

"Because of the marines across the lake. They cannot have a village here. If there is a big village, always there will be NLF, what their leaflets call 'wicked Viet Cong.'"

"Are you worried for the hospital?" Michael asked, but he was thinking he was worried for her.

"Of course worried. We're in the middle, no?"

They walked on in silence then.

Once in the village they went directly to the church. Inge rapped the heel of her hand on the large mahogany door. In a matter of seconds it opened and a shadowy figure stepped aside for them. Michael recognized the form, even in the pitch-black of the church, of a cassocked priest. Once they'd entered he closed the door softly behind them, then led the way into the darkness. It took Michael a moment to realize why that darkness was wrong; not even the sanctuary lamp, indicating the Presence in the tabernacle, burned.

At an altar the priest lit a candle, then faced them. He was Vietnamese, taller than most of his countrymen but considerably shorter than Michael and extremely thin. His Roman collar hung loosely at his throat. His black hair fell across his forehead. It was impossible to say how old he was—perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty—but a certain fierce vigor showed in his face. His black eyes fixed on Inge Holz, and he greeted her softly in Vietnamese.

She responded with a whisper, and Michael sensed at once the current of their relationship.

The priest faced him.
"Mon Père,"
he said gently,
"bienvenu à l'église de Vinh Son."

Michael looked blank.

The priest read his small embarrassment, and said, "Welcome, Father, to the church of Vinh Son." They shook hands.

"Thank you." Now that his eyes were adjusted, Michael looked around. It was a typical Catholic church, the dominating high altar, its gaudy crucifix with painted corpus—Jesus a pale Caucasian—and two side altars, one for Joseph, one for Mary. They were standing in front of Mary's altar, and the candle the priest had lit was a small votive candle in a blue cup. "Vinh Son?" Michael asked.

"Vinh Son," the priest repeated. "Vinh Son Da Sal."

Vincent de Sales, Michael realized, as the French pronounce it. He nearly laughed. Saint Vincent. Good old Saint Vincent, patron of the order to which Carolyn had belonged, patron of the hospital in which Molly was born.
Vinh Son!
When he told me this story, he smiled. By then the Church was like a haunted house to us, and certain saints like ghosts.

The Vietnamese priest was staring at him intently, taking his measure. Finally he said, "You know of the Struggle?"

It took Michael a moment to realize what he was referring to. He said cautiously, "The Struggle; I know the word. It is used to mean 'resistance.'"

"Not 'resistance,'" the priest said softly. "In Vietnamese 'Struggle' is to rebel with all one's life-force."

"It refers to the Buddhist Struggle, no?" That movement had brought Diem down in '63 and lately it had shown signs of quickening once more.

"It is not only Buddhists who seek a third way between the Communists and the generals. Some of us do also." The priest studied Michael.

Michael showed him nothing.

"Inge told me perhaps you would like to learn. I thought to approach you as a brother priest."

Michael suddenly thought, This might be a trap! He said warily, "Every Vietnamese priest I've met is loyal to the Saigon government."

"But of course they would appear so to you. We are loyal first to God, second to the Church and third to our people. The government does not command a priest's loyalty." He smiled. The strength of his conviction communicated, but he was speaking gently. "It is the same for priests everywhere, no? Even in America?"

"It should be."

"It is so with you?"

Michael said carefully, "My government commands my loyalty as a citizen, not as a priest." He looked at Inge quickly. She was staring at him, waiting for him to declare himself. But still he felt wary. He said, "The Buddhists are tools of the Viet Cong." It was a provocative statement, one he didn't really believe, but he felt instinctively that he had to stiff-arm this priest. Why had he brought him here? What did he want? "Communists do not command my loyalty either."