Deep in the Mekong Delta

15

   

Photo by Jil Beckman, Unsplash.

Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap here).

With the hustle and bustle of the floating market behind us our craft enters a narrow canal that leads on to a myriad of others, thick with low-hanging trees on either bank. We glide under small curved bridges, past bamboo houses and wooden dinghys tied up to tiny landings with makeshift WCs hanging on the end of small plank jetties. It feels like we could be somewhere down Kipling’s ‘great grey-green greasy Limpopo River all set about with fever trees’ except the colour of the water is milk-tea brown. Mr Thao tells us the Mekong Delta is the fruit bowl of Vietnam and we are now in the heart of rambutan land. Not only the hairy skinned rambutan is grown here but all the favourites I have come to love while travelling in Asia: mangosteen, dragon fruit, longan, mangoes, star fruit, tamarillo, custard apple, to name just a few.  As if to illustrate his point our boat pulls into a small wooden jetty in front of a large, weather beaten sign filled with pictures of all the fruits he just listed.  Island Fruit Farm is apparently one of the largest in the area and is open to tourists any time of day. We file out of the boat onto the jetty and follow Mr Thao into the orchard.  There’s no gate, no fences either, just a path winding through a forest of leafy trees of assorted sizes and foliage. Name signs hanging off their different sized trunks give them the look of delegates at a tropical fruit tree conference. A row of snaky dragon-fruit plants reach out their octopus arms, a mango tree bows its branches heavy with ripening fruit. Rambutan trees laden with bunches of red baubles give an out-of-season Christmas vibe.  Our guide announces, ‘just twenty minutes to explore, free range. Do not pick the fruit. We are on a tight schedule, lunch next stop! See you back at the boat!’

        We spread out along different pathways and at the end of one of them, hidden by tall clumps of yellow-stemmed bamboo, I find a loo. It’s a squat toilet of course but who cares? I’m busting to go. On my way back I end up in an open-walled, thatch roof structure set with a few cafe tables and chairs. In the middle, leaning against a central post, sits a white-haired Vietnamese man with a long thin beard.  Dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, he is a plumper, more modern incarnation of Ho Chi Minh. When he sees me approaching he gives a smile and a wave.  I wave back and head over to say hello. At the same time, a young woman appears.

       ‘Good afternoon, my name is Cuc, would you like to meet my uncle? I’m sorry, because of a stroke he can’t speak. He just turned ninety last week.’

         I’m surprised, I would have said he was in his late sixties. He puts out his hand for me to shake, his grip is firm and his grin is cheeky.

        ‘Enchanté Monsieur,’ I declare, returning his flirtation.

        He pats the stool next to him for me to sit down.

       ‘ Actually he’s not my real uncle,’ explains Cuc. ‘He and my parents fought for the Viet Cong in the American War. He saved their lives many times. We call him Ông but most people know him as ‘Ho Chi Minh of The Mekong Delta’. He fought the French, the Japanese and the Americans, and he still is going strong.’

        ‘Oh, how extraordinary. What an honour!’ I say, giving him two thumbs up. Cuc asks if I would like a photo and I hand over my camera. Ông puts his arm around me and draws me close while stroking his beard and grinning. It’s a great snapshot moment. There are many questions to ask but I feel I should get back to the group. I thank Cuc and Ông for the pleasure of meeting them and hurry down the path.

        Back on the boat I find myself thinking about my dad. Unlike Ông He only fought in World War Two but one of my earliest memories of him is in uniform. Chas was a handsome man, even more so in the uniform he donned to lead the school cadets in their marching practice on the oval, and at reunions with his military mates. There's a photo of them taken at one of their get togethers in the mid 1950s raising their beer glasses to their mascot — a plump rooster. Chas must have retrieved it from our chook pen.  'Up she goes, the big red rooster!' was their catch cry. Dad would often call out this incantation at home, usually after a few drinks, and my brother and I, as innocent chorus, would join in. What it meant, we had no idea, we knew it was somehow connected to the war our father had so bravely fought before we were born. And we loved the wild spirit it represented, signalling a welcome break from toeing the line and best behaviour. For when the adults around the kitchen table were a few beers in, like them, we could behave badly and get away with it.

         At the time I was between the ages of four and eight, and we were living in a small weatherboard house in the country town of Shepparton, across the road from the high school where Chas was the senior master and geography teacher. My brother and I spent all our days playing on the railway tracks near the huge SPC fruit cannery, rolling small trolleys back and forth, collecting pocketfuls of packing case staples to shoot out of our slingshots, throwing rocks at things, kicking cans around. And on the weekends we'd all go out to visit family friends on their orchard, helping out in the packing shed, picking as many peaches and apricots as we could carry, and staying on for an evening barbeque on the lushly irrigated homestead lawn. Shepparton is flat, very flat, and sits on the floodplain of the Goulburn River, sister to the Murray.  Although generally dry, from time to time the rivers would flood and once the muddy waters snuck up to our back door, covering the back step, but luckily didn't come any further.

        An event occurred toward the end of our Shepparton stay that remains in my memory so vividly it overshadows the rest. In the middle of a cold winter's night our  small boxy weather board house filled with thick black smoke. We were bundled out of our beds by our parents to stand shivering in our pyjamas on the front lawn. Orange flames leapt from the chimney and it looked like the whole house would soon be on fire. I felt our vulnerability keenly as our little family stood huddled together, about to lose everything. I was glad my dad was not away on one of his cadet bivouacs and as a part-time uniformed man, could stand tall as our protector. If I hadn't known it before, I knew now that this was his job; that a mother was inherently weak and a father, inherently strong. Marj would later rail against this biological imperative but in an era when divorce was considered an aberration, like so many women of her generation she would find there was no way out.

        The fire brigade arrived with sirens blaring and lights flashing and soon pronounced it was not the whole house, just old soot in the chimney that had caught fire. Our tragedy had been averted. The smoke cleared and we were able to go back to our beds as if it had all been a bad dream.                   

        MD didn’t have the arms of a father protector to run to when threatened by danger and as a child had a number of brushes with death that turned up later in her writing. Her first sighting of a corpse* occurred one day when she and her brothers came across the body of a man left in a garbage bin outside a house. The old body was alive with lice and stuck with its legs and head sticking out of the bin. They couldn’t stop looking at it.  Another encounter occurred when they lived in Vinh Long. The young Marguerite was followed by a terrifying figure who would later turn  up in her books and haunt her dreams until she found a way to befriend the madness she represented. The beggar woman * was known by the family and at one point they had even taken care of her infant daughter for several months before she died of malnutrition. Leprosy was rife in the French colonies among the poor and MD was terrified of catching it. * Taunting her with crazy shrieks of laughter the woman chased Marguerite along the street as she ran for her life. She made it home safely but the memory of this terror remained with her forever.

         The most insidious threat came within her own family — from the continual bullying of her violent older brother.  Uncouth, ill-mannered and delinquent, he seemed to have no redeeming features. The product of his mother’s obsessive love, he stole, lied, gambled and conned his way through life from an early age. He had no feelings of love or loyalty for the family, only resentment of his younger siblings’ presence in his life. At the age of fourteen he was already frequenting opium dens and brothels, getting himself into financial strife his mother always had to bail him out of.MD felt her most important task in the family was to protect the younger brother Paulo from his threats.

        In The Lover she describes how the feeling of war when it arrived in France, was familiar to her. She likened it to living a childhood pervaded by her violent brother. ‘I see the war as like him, spreading everywhere, breaking in everywhere, stealing, imprisoning, always there, merged and mingled with everything…there at the gates, against the skin.’ *

        Not far from the orchard, down a couple more narrow canals, our river boat pulls up at another small jetty and Mr Thao leads the way along a dirt pathway to a farmhouse restaurant with outside tables and chairs under awnings. It’s surrounded on all sides by rambutan trees and fish ponds. I order the ‘elephant ear’ fish and when the deep-fried creature arrives standing vertical on a bed of rice, it does indeed look like a huge ear. It would have been caught this morning fresh from the nearby ponds where the ones that got away still flip-flop about, enjoying their short-lived freedom. I choose this moment to ask Mr Thao what time we will get to Sadec to see the tomb of the Chinese man, the lover of Marguerite Duras.

           ‘No, no, this tour does not stop in Sadec,’ he tells me, ‘only the one day delta tour goes there.’

               As I am about to insist firmly that the agent told me it would, a French man from another tour group who arrived not long after us, starts going ballistic at his tourguide for not sticking to the itinerary.  He rants on and on, gesticulating wildly while his guide just stares back at him as if he has seen it all before. The rest of us watch in silence and no-one makes any gesture to calm him down. An older lady traveller from his group sitting at my table clucks over her glasses.

         ‘You just don’t do this in Vietnam, nobody here shouts.’

 When the Frenchman’s tantrum is over Mr Thao turns back to me.

         ‘I’m sorry, what was that?’ he asks.

         ‘Oh, it was nothing,’ I reply and plunge my knife deep into the ear. The lady traveller, observing my gesture, gives me a ‘tut tut’ look too. Her glasses, like a pair my mother used to wear, are practically on the end of her nose by now. If she did any more tut-tutting they would fall off.

        When I went searching through photos of Marguerite to see if she ever wore the same cat-eye glasses with the pointy rims that Marj did, I couldn’t find one.  It seems Marguerite wore no glasses at all until the 1960s, then adopted the standard squarish dark-rimmed style she wore for the rest of her life. As soon as cat-eyes went out of fashion, Marj chose this style too, giving my comparison study another likeness. But by the time Marguerite and Marjorie were in their forties, styles of photography were changing. Colour photography took over from black and white and instead of bringing out the photo albums to show the rellies, we treated them to slide shows projected on a bed sheet or a fold up screen. The vinyl suitcase, being just a small overnight bag, has limited capacity and I had to go searching in a different place for photos from this era. I found the collection of small boxes full of slides stored in a large plastic tub in my garage. For years after my father’s death in 1994 they had languished in his wardrobe with a sign that Marj had written: ‘Jan’s research project, KEEP.’ When we had to sell Marj’s house, I finally brought them home. A small viewfinder accompanied them but looking at them one at a time offered no way of referring back to them again, so I borrowed an old projector from a second-hand dealer friend and spent a few days throwing them up on the wall, then photographing each image to transfer to my computer.

         Marj’s absence was noticeable as I pored over the first few boxes of slides and not because she was the one taking the photos. Dad was thrilled with a device that would let him put the camera on a tripod, set off the timer then race into the photo for ‘cheese’. We also didn't know why he started cooking on the weekends, how he built a special kind of barbeque from half a kerosene tin with welded legs on wheels, for cooking up our Saturday lamb chops and sangers, how proud he was of the huge pots of veggie soup he would leave on the old wood stove to keep us filled with hearty warmth as we slammed in and out the back door en route to all our outdoor adventures. All we knew was that Marj had taken to her bed again and couldn’t be disturbed.

I was in utter HELL

a fair win in Tatts

a dear friend came

lady luck thrived all around me

but I cared not a damn

all I wished was to walk away

leave the planet earth

walk across the mountains

disappear — hide in an old mine

until I crumbled into a mess

of pale dust

Yet this is not practical

think of the police dogs, trackers, bushmen

so

I hide my head under the doona

MC  1985

________________

*Adler, p 25. Too late, MD’s mother put her hands over her daughter’s eyes. But how could she ever forget it?

*Adler, p 36 -37. The beggar woman turns up in The Sea Wall and The Lover. In India Song you hear her shriek and sing.

*Xavier, p 153. MD talks about her leprosy phobia. Even after she went back to France she was worried she could still get it.

* The Lover, p 67.