The Committed. Viet Thanh Nguyen

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СКАЧАТЬ wine, and exhaustion blunting his murderous instincts. He looked again at my aunt with something like regret, the closest he might ever come to actual regret. It’s not personal.

      Politics is always personal, my dear, she said. That’s what makes it deadly.

      My aunt retired to her bedroom, leaving us in the living room with a sofa and a pile of bedding on the Persian rug.

      You never told me she was a communist, Bon said from the sofa, his eyes bloodshot.

      Because you never would have agreed to stay here, I said, sitting down next to him. And blood’s more important than belief, isn’t it? I raised my hand to him, the one with the red scar on the palm, the mark of our blood brotherhood, sworn back in Saigon one night in a grove on the grounds of our lycée. We had sliced our palms and gripped each other’s hands, mingling our blood then and forever.

      Now, a century or two after our adolescence—or so it felt after all we had suffered—in the land of our Gallic ancestors, Bon raised his scarred hand and said, So who’s sleeping on the sofa?

      While lying on the floor I heard Bon on the sofa whispering the prayers he uttered every night, addressed to God and to Linh and Duc, his dead wife and son. They had died on the tarmac of the Saigon airport as we sprinted to board the last airplane out of the city in April 1975, the second of our refugee experiences. An uncaring bullet lanced them both, fired by an unknown gunman in the chaos. Sometimes he heard their mournful ghosts calling, occasionally pleading with him to join them, other times urging him to stay alive. But his hands, so adept at killing others, would not turn against himself, for committing suicide was a sin against God. Taking another’s life, however, was sometimes permissible, for God oftentimes needed the faithful to be His instrument of justice, or so Bon explained to me. He was at peace with being a devout Catholic and a calm killer, but what worried me more than how Bon contradicted himself, and how I surely contradicted myself, was that one day we might contradict each other. On that day when he learned of my secret, Bon would render justice on me, regardless of the blood we shared.

      Before we left the next morning, we presented my aunt with a gift from Indonesia, a package of kopi luwak, one of four in Bon’s duffel. We had been inspired by one of the Boss’s henchmen, who had approached us the day before our departure with three packages of kopi luwak as gifts for his patron. The Boss loves this coffee, the henchman said. His quivering nose, scraggly whiskers, and black pupils made him resemble the weasellike creature on the packages, or so I had thought at the time. Boss asked for it special, the henchman said. Bon and I scraped together our money at the airport and bought the fourth package of kopi luwak my aunt now held, choosing the same brand. When I explained that the luwak, the civet cat, ate the raw beans and excreted them, its intestines supposedly fermenting the beans in a gastronomic way, she burst out laughing, which rather hurt. Kopi luwak was very expensive, especially for refugees like us, and if there was anything that the French should love, it should have been civet-percolated coffee. Given their gastronomic peculiarities for eating brains, guts, snails, and the like, the French were honorary Asians in their heroic determination to eat every kind and part of an animal.

      Oh, the poor farmer! she said, wrinkling her nose. What a way to make a living. But aware now of her faux pas, she quickly added, I’m sure this is delicious. Tomorrow morning I’ll brew us a cup—or at least, I’ll make one for you and me.

      She nodded toward me, as by tomorrow morning, Bon should be with the Boss. Sober in the morning light, Bon made no mention of the devil that had divided them, a sign that the City of Light might already have enlightened him just a touch. Neither did she, instead offering directions to the metro station Voltaire, a block away, from where we made our way to the 13th arrondissement. This was the Asiatic Quarter, or Little Asia, of which we had heard many rumors and tales in the refugee camp.

      Stop crying, Bon said. My God, you’re more emotional than a woman.

      I could not help myself. These faces! The people around us reminded me of home. There were a good number of them, but nowhere near as many as one would find in the Chinatowns of San Francisco or Los Angeles, where almost everyone was Asian. But as I soon came to learn, more than a handful of people who were not white made the French nervous. Hence, Little Asia offered a notable if not overwhelming number of Asian faces, most of them ugly or unremarkable, but nevertheless reassuring to me. The average person of any race was not good-looking, but while the ugliness of others only confirmed prejudices, the homeliness of one’s own people was always comforting.

      I wiped the tears from my eyes, the better to see our customs and practices, which might have been out of place here but nevertheless raised the temperature of our hearts. I speak of the shuffle that Asians preferred to longer steps, and how the men typically walked ahead of their long-suffering women, who carried all the shopping bags, and how one of these same examples of chivalry cleared his nose by closing one nostril with a finger and forcibly ejecting its contents through the other, the missile narrowly missing my two feet by a foot or two. Disgusting, perhaps, but easily washed away by the rain, which is more than can be said for a balled-up tissue.

      Our destination was an import-export store that announced its intentions in French, Chinese, and Vietnamese, its services including the dispatch to our homeland of parcels, letters, and telegrams, which is to say the delivery of hope to a starving country. The clerk looked at us from where he was sitting on a stool behind the counter and grunted by way of greeting. I told him I was looking for the Boss.

      He’s not in, the clerk said, just as the henchman told us he would say.

      We’re the ones from Pulau Galang, Bon replied. He’s expecting us.

      The clerk grunted again, eased himself off his stool with hemorrhoidal care, and disappeared down an aisle. A minute later he reappeared and said, He’s waiting for you.

      Behind the counter, down an aisle, and through a door was the Boss’s office, scented with lavender air freshener, decked in linoleum, and adorned with pinup calendars featuring nubile Hong Kong models in exuberant poses and a wooden clock whose type I had seen before in the Los Angeles restaurant of my old commander of the Special Branch, the General, the man I had betrayed and who betrayed me in return. Admittedly I had fallen in love with his daughter, but who wouldn’t fall in love with Lana? I still longed for her the way we refugees longed for our homeland, which was the shape into which the clock was carved. Now our homeland was irrevocably altered, and so was the Boss. We almost did not recognize him when he stood up from behind his steel desk. In the refugee camp, he had been as emaciated and ragged as everyone else, hair shoddy, his one shirt stained brown under the pits and between the shoulder blades, his only footwear a pair of thin flip-flops.

      Now he was clad in loafers, creased slacks, and a polo shirt, the casual wear of the urban, Western branch of Homo sapiens, his trimmed hair parted so neatly one could have laid a pencil in the groove. In our homeland, he had owned considerable interests in rice, soda pop, and petrochemicals, not to mention certain black-market commodities. After the revolution, the communists had relieved him of his excessive wealth, but these overeager plastic surgeons had sucked away too much fat from this cat. Threatened with death by starvation, he had fled here, needing only one year to become a businessman again and reassume the padded appearance of affluent humanity.

      So, he said. You brought the goods.

      We commenced our masculine social grooming ritual by embracing and slapping each other on the back, followed by Bon and myself assuming the position of the socially inferior simians by offering the alpha male our tribute: the three packages of kopi luwak. Then the fun began, which involved smoking French cigarettes and drinking Rémy Martin VSOP from snifters that fit in our hands like the most perfectly shaped breasts. For the last couple of years, I had drunk nothing more refined than moonshine rice whiskey, which could blind a man, and the reunion of my tongue СКАЧАТЬ