The Price of a Word

Chapter 1

Saigon. Tuesday, 11 June 1963.

The telephone rang at half past six, and Marguerite Vernier let it ring four times before she answered. She had been up until two in the morning working on a report about the negotiations between the government and the Buddhists, which were going nowhere, and she knew who was calling. No one else in Saigon called at this hour.

“Madame,” Lộc said. “The monks say something important is going to happen this morning.”

“They’ve been saying that for four weeks.”

“This time they called me. Not the office. Me.” He paused, and she heard the hiss of the line and, behind him, a woman’s voice saying something to a child. “The junction of Phan Đình Phùng and Lê Văn Duyệt. Outside the Cambodian mission. Around ten.”

“A procession.”

“Perhaps.”

“Go,” she said. “Call me if it’s more than a procession. I’m finishing yesterday’s report.”

She hung up and sat on the edge of the bed for a while longer. A grey light, already warm, came through the shutters, and down on the Rue Pasteur the cycle rickshaws were beginning to ring their bells. She had come from Vientiane in January because the story that interested her was no longer taking place in Laos, and in five months she had learnt that Saigon was a city in which something important was announced every day. Usually it did not happen. When it did, it happened somewhere else and at a different hour, and the announcement had served only to send the police to the wrong junction.

She showered, dressed and sat down at the typewriter. Yesterday’s report concerned a communiqué that no one had signed. Three paragraphs took her an hour.

* * *

At ten past ten the office called. It was Morel, the young Frenchman who operated the teleprinters and occasionally wrote a report when no one else was there.

“A monk has burned himself,” he said. “At the junction by the Cambodian mission. Lộc is there. He called from a pharmacy. He says you should come, but it’s over.”

She took a taxi, a small blue-and-yellow Renault whose driver knew the junction and did not want to go there. Two streets short of it he stopped, pointed ahead with his chin and took the money without counting it. She walked the rest of the way. The street was full of people who did not know whether to stay or leave. Policemen in white shirts pushed them back, half-heartedly, as though they themselves were unsure what they were protecting people from.

Then she smelled it.

It was a smell of petrol and something beneath it, heavy and sweet, which she knew from Haiphong in the winter of 1946 and had not smelled since. She stopped. An old woman beside her held a cloth to her face and prayed under her breath. Further ahead, at the junction, stood a ring of monks in saffron robes, shoulder to shoulder, two hundred or three hundred of them, and in the middle of the ring, on the asphalt, lay something small and black that she did not recognise as human until she saw the shape of the folded legs.

Two banners hung above their heads, one in Vietnamese, one in English. A Buddhist priest burns himself for our five requests.

She found Lộc by the wall of the Cambodian mission. He stood with his back against the stone, his notebook in his hand, and was not writing. He was a slender man of thirty-four, with a round face and black-rimmed glasses he liked to take off when he spoke, and that morning he had kept them on. His shirt was wet. When he saw her, he merely nodded.

“When?” she asked.

“Just after half past nine.” His voice was even, as though he were reading from a page. “A car came, a pale blue Austin. An old monk got out, with two others supporting him. They put a cushion in the road. He sat on it with his legs crossed. One of the young monks poured petrol over him from a can they had brought. The old man took a match. He lit it himself.”

He stopped.

“He didn’t move, Madame. Ten minutes. He fell over when it was over, not before.”

Vernier looked towards the ring of monks. Some were weeping, others stared straight ahead, and among them a monk with a microphone walked to and fro, repeating a sentence in Vietnamese, over and over, with the same emphasis.

“What is he saying?”

“A Buddhist monk burns himself for the five wishes.” Lộc finally took off his glasses and rubbed the lenses on his shirt, which did not make them any cleaner. “The banner says requests. The Americans will read demands. In Vietnamese it is nguyện vọng. That is something you say before an altar. A wish, a hope. Not a demand.”

“Who wrote the English?”

“The monks. For you.” He put his glasses back on. “For the foreigners. They called the Americans last night too. Only one came, the man from the AP. He took photographs.” He pointed with his chin at a tall, gaunt American at the edge of the ring, calmly slipping a roll of film into a canister. “I don’t have a camera.”

They stood side by side for a while. A lorry arrived, and the monks lifted the figure from the asphalt into a yellow cloth and carried it towards the Xá Lợi Pagoda, without haste, followed by the others, who chanted as they walked. The policemen let them go. One of them, a young man, had been sick and now stood apart, his cap in his hand.

“You should have made me come,” Vernier said.

“You said I should call if it was more than a procession.” Lộc did not look at her. “It wasn’t a procession. I called.”

It was not a reproach. That was precisely why it hurt.

* * *

The Agence France-Presse office occupied the first floor of a building on the Rue Catinat, above a fountain-pen shop, and had a balcony from which you could see the cathedral if you leaned out far enough. Inside were three desks, two teleprinters and a fan that struck a loose screw on every third revolution. A map of Indochina hung on the wall. Someone had traced the border between Laos and Vietnam in pencil because it was too faint in the printing.

Vernier wrote the report in forty minutes. Lộc sat beside her, translating the leaflet the monks had handed out at the junction, a sheet of thin paper printed on both sides with the monk’s last letter to the president. He translated it sentence by sentence into French, aloud, and she typed as he spoke.

“Before I close my eyes and go to Buddha,” he read, “I respectfully ask President Ngô Đình Diệm to show compassion for the people and bring about equality among the religions.” He paused. “The word is respectfully. That is how a son asks his father.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not in Paris.” Lộc put down the sheet. “Here it does.”

She wrote respectfully. The monk’s name was Thích Quảng Đức. He had been sixty-six years old, from Khánh Hòa province, and according to the leaflet he had known for weeks what he would do. She wrote it all down, the time, the car, the can, the ten minutes, the banners in two languages, the policemen who did not intervene, and she wrote it as one wrote for the agency, in short sentences without adjectives, because the adjectives would be cut in Paris anyway. At the end came a sentence she rewrote three times: The correspondent witnessed the final minutes. She crossed it out. She had not been a witness. She wrote: A member of the agency’s staff was an eyewitness.

Lộc read over her shoulder. He said nothing.

Morel carried the pages across to the telegraph office, the large yellow building beside the cathedral, where a clerk received the foreign agencies’ reports, counted the words and issued a receipt. Whether and when he sent them was another question. Since May, since the shootings in Huế, some reports had reached Paris only after hours of delay, others not at all, and no one at the telegraph office could say why. Vernier had begun sending important texts twice, once through the office and once with a traveller to Hong Kong, who sent them from there.

“This one will get through,” Morel said when he returned. “The clerk was crying.”

* * *

That evening they sat on the balcony. Below them on the Rue Catinat people strolled as they did every evening, couples, students, soldiers in dress uniform, and outside the Café Givral the tables crowded right up to the kerb. It did not look like a city in which someone had burned to death at a junction that morning. Vernier knew from Haiphong and Hanoi that cities were like that. They went for an evening stroll because they always had, and habit was stronger than memory.

Lộc drank tea. He had worked all afternoon, reading the newspapers, translating the government statements that arrived later in the day and spoke of a “regrettable incident”, and not once had he spoken of what he had seen. Now he held the cup in both hands.

“Why did the monks call you?” Vernier asked. “Not me. Not the office.”

“Because I talk to them.”

“You’re Catholic.”

“Yes.” He smiled for the first time that day. “They know that. I come from Nam Định. My family has been Catholic for three hundred years, as long as the president’s family. We came south in 1954, like everyone else, with a suitcase and a Madonna. I go to Mass every Sunday.” He put down the cup. “But I also translate for the monks when they write a letter to a foreign newspaper. They don’t pay me. I do it because you cannot be Catholic in this country without feeling ashamed when you see what the government is doing to the Buddhists.”

“Do the people at the palace know?”

“The people at the palace know everything. It’s their profession.” He said it lightly. “They don’t know what to do with it. A Catholic who translates for Buddhists doesn’t fit on any list.”

A jeep passed below, slowly, with two men in civilian clothes looking up at the balconies. Lộc watched them until they turned the corner.

“Tomorrow the photograph will be everywhere,” he said. “In Paris, in New York, in Tokyo. People will look at it and think they know what happened.”

“Don’t they?”

“They’ll see a man burning. They won’t hear what he said. He said nothing. He only sat there.” Lộc stood, picked up his bag and looked at his watch. “My wife is waiting. My daughter wants to show me she can count to a hundred. In French.” He hesitated at the door. “Madame. I’m glad you weren’t there.”

“Why?”

“Because you would have to write it down as you saw it. I only have to translate it.”

He went down the stairs. Vernier stayed on the balcony until the streetlights came on. Her clothes still smelled of the junction, although she had changed at midday, and she knew the smell was not in her clothes. Tomorrow the world would see a picture she had not seen and read a report she could not personally vouch for.