The Spy Who Loved Us_ The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game ( PDFDrive )

The Spy Who Loved Us 239
One night when I am visiting An, a typhoon blows in from
the east, and the following morning, showers fall throughout
the day. Now that the rains have come, An’s room fills with
the smell of damp dogs and bird droppings, and my ankles erupt
with red dots and begin to swell from flea bites. By midmorning,
the air thickens with the smell of spicy vegetables and then
dissipates as An keeps talking through the lunch hour and into
the afternoon. Fortunately, I have learned to eat a substantial
breakfast before going to see him.
Great streaming sheets of water are puddling in the garden
and filling the air with mist. I worry for An’s yellowing books,
which are getting foxed with mold and slowly dissolving into unreadable
pulp. An pauses occasionally to get up and search for
a quote or press a text into my hands to confirm his analysis.
Many of An’s books are signed, either by their authors or by the
people who presented them to him. Of his two copies of Neil
Sheehan’s A Bright Shining Lie, one is inscribed by Sheehan,
the other by CBS correspondent Morley Safer.
An’s collection includes volumes in French and English,
but very few in Vietnamese. “People here can’t write freely,” he
explains. “This is one reason I won’t write about my life. I’d get
in trouble if I talked about my life or what I know.”
I sometimes feel as if the books An presses in my hands are
coded messages, ways of talking about experiences that are
still too dangerous to confront directly. For each day’s visit, An
seems to have chosen a text or a passage around which to weave
our conversation. One day it is Dickens writing, “It was the
best of times, it was the worst of times.” Another day, the lesson
is drawn from the Fables of Jean de La Fontaine. An delights
in these stories of beasts acting like men and men like
beasts.
At one of our final meetings, An shows me a book by Gérard
Tongas, a French educator who went to Hanoi to help the
Communists establish a high school after their victory over
the French in 1954. According to An, Tongas, like Edward