Hanoi
Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi
What a City Keeps
A city is a palimpsest. Hanoi especially.
We arrived in October, in the honey-gold light the Vietnamese call mùa thu, the light of the few weeks each year when the heat has broken and the rains have mostly gone and the city remembers that it is beautiful. It falls on the old walls at an angle that warms without burning. It lies across the plaster of the Old Quarter with the patience of something that has done this a thousand times and is in no hurry to be thanked for it. The mornings were cool. The afternoons came up dry and warm. What was left of the rain was in the stones, petrichor held in the porous French plaster and given back to the air when the sun touched the walls.
The car turned off Ngô Quyền and stopped under the white portico of the Metropole, and the doorman in his uniform of a century ago stepped forward, and I took her hand as she came out of the car. She looked up once at the white shuttered facade with the small private acknowledgment a woman who knows buildings gives to a building that knows her.
The hotel has stood on that corner since 1901, which in this part of the world is both very old and not old at all. It has been French, then Japanese, then French again, then the property of a government that did not approve of such places and kept it anyway. Graham Greene took a room here and wrote part of a novel about how little the West understood the country it was losing. Chaplin spent a honeymoon in it. The names are a varnish the building wears lightly. What I have always liked about the Metropole is that it does not trade on them; it simply goes on being the coolest, whitest, calmest room in a hot and crowded city, the way a certain kind of person goes on being himself in any weather.
“I did an editorial here,” she said. “In the courtyard.”
“I know.”
“You were not in the country that week.”
“I know that too.”
She smiled her private smile, the left corner of her mouth, and we went into the lobby, into the smell of old wax and cut lilies and, somewhere further in, the ghost of strong coffee.
The suite gave onto the interior courtyard. French doors, cream linen, a ceiling fan turning slowly because the hotel had decided, correctly, that a ceiling fan in Hanoi in October is not nostalgia but good sense. She set her bag on the chaise and went to the doors and opened them, and the courtyard came into the room: plumeria, old stone, and a thread of something sweet baking three streets over that I worked out, a breath later, was bánh trung thu, mooncakes, late in the season because the moon festival had not long passed.
She breathed it in once and held it.
“This city has been claimed a lot,” she said.
“It has.”
“And it kept something anyway.”
I did not answer at once, because I had not finished working out the answer. On the descent I had been thinking about how many hands this place has been taken by: a thousand years of Chinese governors, then the French with their opera house and their plaster and their bread, then the bombs, then the long grey decades after, and how each time it had surrendered its rulers and its street signs and kept, underneath all of it, the one thing that was never actually on the table. She had said that in seven words while she was still holding her first breath of the room. She often says the thing that matters before the room has finished arranging itself around her. What I did not say was that I had not been thinking only of the city.
The Shelter
We did not go far that first night. But we did go down.
There is a room under the Metropole that the hotel itself forgot for a time. When the American bombers came over Hanoi at the end of 1972, in the days the calendars here still mark, the guests and the staff went down a narrow stair into a sealed concrete cellar beneath the bar and waited out the raids by candlelight. A folk singer from California sheltered down there on one of those nights and sang into the dark, and someone kept the tape. Then the war ended, and the stair was covered over, and for decades the hotel ran its smiling daylight business above a room no one mentioned, until a crew digging a new wine cellar broke through a wall and found it, dry and intact, the candle soot still on the ceiling.
They keep it now the way you keep such a thing, carefully and without selling it too hard. I had asked, quietly, when we arrived. After we had rested, when the courtyard light had gone amber and then blue, a young man in a grey jacket took us down.
The stair was narrow and the air changed on the third step, cooler, mineral, the smell of held water and old concrete. The room at the bottom was small, low-ceilinged, the bare walls weeping a little at the seams, a single bulb now where the candles had been. The young man told us the year and the names in careful English and played a few seconds of the woman singing, her voice thin and very young in the speaker, and then he let the silence come back, which was the kindest thing he could have done.
Her Highness stood in the middle of the little room with her arms crossed loosely against the cool and said nothing for a long time. I watched her more than I watched the walls. She was not performing reverence; she does not perform anything. She was simply down there with it, completely, the way she is with whatever she has decided to look at. After a while she said, not to me and not to the guide, “They built a whole bright hotel on top of this and forgot it was here.” And then, lower, “That seems about right.” I did not ask her what she meant. I had a fair idea, and the idea was about more than the hotel.
We came back up into the warm dark and the noise of the living city, and the contrast made its own argument, and neither of us spoke it aloud.
We went out for bún chả. If phở is the city’s morning, bún chả is its afternoon: a Hanoi dish and only a Hanoi dish, pork fattened and grilled over coals fanned by hand until the edges catch, dropped hot into a bowl of fish sauce cut with vinegar and sugar and a raft of pickled green papaya, with cold rice vermicelli and a thicket of herbs alongside to build each bite yourself. We found a place that was four low tables and a charcoal brazier on the sidewalk, the smoke of it visible from the corner, which is how you choose one. A man worked the coals with a paper fan. A woman built the bowls without asking what we wanted, because there was only the one thing, and it was the thing we had come for.
She ate the way she eats anything she respects, with full attention and no apology, building each bite herself, dragging the pork and the noodles and a torn fistful of herbs through the broth, lifting it, closing her eyes for the length of one chew. She opened them.
“I am going to be unbearable about this for the rest of my life,” she said.
“About what.”
“Pork. Fire. This.” She tipped the chopsticks at the brazier, the man, the smoke, the street. “You have ruined ordinary dinners for me.”
“I did not do this. Hanoi did this.”
“You brought me to Hanoi.”
I had no answer to that that was not simply looking at her, so I looked at her.
We walked back the long way, through the lit Old Quarter, and came out on Hoan Kiem Lake with the night full on it. The lake is small, and on a scrap of island in the middle of it a single crumbling tower stands lit gold against the black water. Hoàn Kiếm means the returned sword. The story, which every child here is handed early, is that a king named Lê Lợi was given a magic blade by a golden turtle in this lake, used it to drive the Chinese out, and afterward, crossing the water, was met by the turtle again, who asked for the sword back: the loan called in, the debt of liberation settled. He gave it back. The lake has been the Lake of the Restored Sword ever since. There were giant softshell turtles in it once, real ones, ancient and enormous, the last of them mourned in the newspapers when it died a few years ago, because a city that keeps a legend likes to keep the animal that anchors it.
She stood at the rail and looked at the gold tower on the black water.
“They gave the sword back,” she said.
“They did.”
“I would not have.”
“No,” I said. “Neither would I.”
It was true of both of us, and we both knew it, and it was the most honest thing either of us had said since the airport, and we let it lie on the water with the reflection of the tower.
We went back to the hotel. The lobby was softer at that hour. We slept with the courtyard doors cracked and the fan turning, and the city assembled and disassembled itself outside until the part of it that wakes early began to wake.
The Lake at First Light
I woke at five. I left her sleeping.
The Old Quarter at that hour is not silent, only quieter than it will be. A metal shutter rolled up somewhere. A scooter coughed once and thought better of it. A woman called softly to another woman two floors above her. The city was assembling itself in the unhurried way of a place that has been assembling itself for a thousand years and is unimpressed by the need to do it again.
I walked back to the lake I had seen the night before, to see what it did in the morning.
The mist was on the water. The red lacquer of the bridge to Ngọc Sơn temple rose out of it as though it had been painted onto the air rather than built onto the lake. Along the grass verge, in small scattered groups, the tai chi practitioners were already moving, women mostly, some men, each placing one slow arm through the space in front of them and then the other, without hurry and without audience, the way a person waters a plant that has stood in their window for thirty years.
I walked once around the water and did not time it, which for me is its own small event. The mist lifted by degrees. The gold found the tops of the tamarind trees and the tamarind trees gave the gold back to the air, and by the time I closed the circuit the light was the color the poets here have been writing down for centuries and most travelers sleep straight through.
On a corner near the hotel a woman had set up her phở stand: a low blue stool, a vat of broth at a steady simmer, rice noodles in a strainer, slivered raw beef, a basket of coriander and green onion and Thai basil and lime. I sat down on the stool. She had no English and I had none of her language. I held up one finger.
I will admit a thing here that the people who know me would not believe. Phở is built on star anise and cinnamon and charred ginger, and as a rule I do not allow any of the three within reach of my plate; I have sent dishes back over less. I have spent a life being exact about what I will and will not take, and the exactness has served me. I took the bowl in two hands and ate every grain of it. The broth was beef bone and that warm forbidden spice and the long patience of a stock that had been going, in some sense, since before I was born, because the woman’s mother had made it the same way and her mother before that. I ate it on a sidewalk at six in the morning in suit trousers and an open-collared shirt, and a scooter went past with a small dog standing on the floorboard, and a nun in grey went by with a paper bag of French bread under her arm, and the woman at the stand did not look at me twice, because there was nothing about me more interesting to her than the next bowl. The city had asked me to set down one of my rules, quietly, without making anything of it, and I had, and the sky did not fall. I walked back with the broth warm in my chest and the spice I do not allow still on my tongue, and I did not mind it.
She was awake when I came up, in the white robe with her hair loose, on the small iron balcony, a cup of cà phê sữa đá in her hand, the condensed milk settled at the bottom and the black coffee floating above it.
“You ate without me,” she said.
“I did.”
“Good. Now you take me.”
I took her.
The Thirty-Six Streets
By late morning the Old Quarter was fully itself.
The thirty-six guild streets still run in their old pattern, each named for what was once sold along it: Hàng Bạc, Silver Street; Hàng Gai, Silk Street; Hàng Mã, the street of paper offerings, where they still sell the paper houses and paper money and paper motorbikes you burn so the dead will have them on the far side. Some streets had kept their trade. Most had half-kept it: the old craft beside a café, the old craft beside a bánh mì cart, the old craft beside a shop selling phone cases to tourists who would never know they stood on the street of tin. A city becomes what is useful to it. What it was stays written in the name, and the name is not taken down.
She wore a linen dress the color of unbleached paper, sleeves to the elbow, hem to mid-calf, a thin leather belt. Low sandals. Her hair in a loose braid over one shoulder. Silver at her wrist and nothing at her throat. The dress was made by a house whose face she had been the spring before, which she did not mention and would not have, because she does not carry her work into a city the way travelers carry cameras.
The merchants on Hàng Gai noticed. It is not possible for them not to. A woman whose walk has been trained on the best runways in Europe does not enter a silk street unobserved. She did not adjust. She did not soften. She did not change how she stood when she felt the looking. She allowed it the way the lake allows the mist, and walked on.
We stopped where a woman sat embroidering a panel of silk on a frame by the window, her needle moving with the steadiness of a hand that had done this since girlhood, faster than the eye and never once hurried. Her Highness stood beside her a long time. The woman looked up once, took her in, nodded, and went back to her work. No performance on either side, two women in a room who agreed that the cloth was what mattered. Her Highness bought nothing. She thanked the woman in the small Vietnamese she had taught herself on the plane, cảm ơn, and the woman answered with a closed-mouth smile and a sentence that neither of us translated and neither of us needed translated.
We took bánh mì from a cart on Nguyễn Hữu Huân: baguette, pâté, pickled carrot and daikon, coriander, chili, a sliver of pork, the whole colonial-and-after history of the country pressed into one warm loaf. The crust shattered between her teeth. She closed her eyes for a chew and opened them.
“The French left this,” she said.
“They left the bread. The rest is Vietnamese.”
“That is the whole country in a sandwich.”
“Yes.”
She took another bite and kept walking, and the chili had found her lip, and she did not wipe it away.
At the edge of the quarter, where the streets give out toward the river, you can see the Long Biên bridge, the old iron one the French flung across the Red River back when an iron bridge was how an empire signed its name. The Americans bombed it and bombed it; the Vietnamese mended it and mended it with whatever was to hand; it stands today crooked and mismatched and still carrying trains, a thing held up by sheer refusal. She looked at it a while.
“They would not let it fall,” she said.
“No,” I said. “They wouldn’t.”
The Courtyard
In the late afternoon we came back to the hotel.
The interior courtyard of the Metropole is small and white, planted with plumeria and something lower I never learned the name of, with a fountain and a scatter of iron tables. At five o’clock in October the light comes down between the wings of the building and strikes the white plaster, and the plaster gives it back, and for an hour the courtyard is the warmest room in Hanoi. We sat. The waiter brought me bourbon, neat, the hotel keeping a bottle because the hotel has always kept a bottle, and for her a small glass of cà phê trứng, egg coffee, the drink this city invented during a shortage of milk and has been improving ever since, the yolk whipped with sugar to a warm sweet foam and floated on the black coffee like a thing that ought not to work and does.
She tasted it. She did not close her eyes this time. She looked at me over the rim of the little glass.
“Where did you go this morning?” she said.
“Around the lake.”
“And where were you before that?”
She had not asked it as a question about the morning. I understood that it was not a question about the morning.
I have been asked harder things in worse rooms, by people who meant me harm, and answered without a flicker, because in those rooms a flicker is a door left open. I set the bourbon down on the iron table and went to give her the answer in the same even voice I give everything, and the voice was not there. What came up instead was lower, and it caught once, the way a thing catches when it has been held still a long time and is moved for the first time, and I had to stop and begin again. A plumeria blossom came loose above us and fell between us onto the white stone, the small white star of it, and its scent opened in the warm air, and past the wall a vendor sang out the price of the last mooncakes of the season, and I was grateful for all of it, because it gave me somewhere to rest my eyes while my face did the thing I had spent a lifetime not letting it do.
“I have been many men in my life,” I said.
That was all. I did not elaborate. I did not number them. I did not give her the decades or the rooms or the cities or the names I had worn and set down. I said the one sentence, and it cost more than anything has cost me in longer than I will tell you, and I let it stand in the courtyard between the bourbon and the egg coffee and the fallen flower.
She did not ask which ones. She reached across the table and put her hand over mine, and the warmth of her palm was the warmth of the courtyard itself, borrowed from the same sun and handed back at the same heat. She gave me the small steady attention she had given the embroiderer on Hàng Gai. She nodded once.
“I know,” she said.
Two words. I counted.
She did not say it the way a person says she has finally worked something out. She said it the way a person says the sky is blue. She had known. She had known before I said it. She had known, I think, before I did. I turned my hand over under hers and laced my fingers through hers, and we sat while my face came back to itself, which it did, slowly, and she watched it happen without hurry and without comment, the way she had watched the mist go off the lake. The plumeria lay between us on the white stone. I did not pick it up. Some things are better left where they fall.
Mùa Thu
We dressed for dinner, as we do. Expected. Not required. We dress for each other and no one else, and the distinction is the whole of it.
I laid the suit out on the bed. Midnight navy, the weight my Hong Kong tailor cuts for the Asian autumn, the cloth dense enough to hang true in the evening cool. White shirt. The surgeon’s cuffs left unbuttoned at the wrist, because this is a city that looks closely and rewards the man who has bothered. The silver dragon cufflinks, the pair I wear in Asia and nowhere else, cold against the skin for the first second and warm after.
She came out of the dressing room in silk the color of the lake at six in the morning, a grey with the blue of the water held under it. The dress followed her without hurry and without resistance, the way silk of that weight does in her hand and almost no one else’s. Her hair was up, a single pin. The line of her neck was bare. She had given her skin no decoration, because the color of the silk against it was the only decoration the dress would allow. She did not turn to show me. She stood in the doorway and waited until I had finished looking.
St. Joseph’s rose at the end of its narrow street the way old European churches do in this part of the world, too large for the lane that holds it, the twin neo-gothic towers in stone gone black with a century of weather, the bells cast in France and carried across an ocean for a congregation that did not yet exist. They had built it, the story goes, on the ground where a great pagoda once stood, pulling the pagoda down to do it, which is the kind of thing the century was forever doing here. Evening mass was letting out. Vietnamese families came past in small groups, children in white shirts, grandmothers in áo dài the color of weak tea. Incense smoke from the open doors met the smell of baking bread two doors down, the one religion and the other, and the two of them sat together in the street as they have learned to sit together for a hundred years.
We did not go in. We took a small café across the street, and she ordered a second cà phê trứng, having decided in the afternoon that it was her drink of this city, and I ordered bourbon. A scooter went past with a family of four aboard, a child asleep upright between his parents, the mother steadying a sack of grapefruit on the footboard. The cathedral bell rang the hour, and a temple gong answered it from some streets off, and the two sounds crossed above the street and neither one cancelled the other.
“This city,” she said.
“Yes.”
“It has been many cities.”
“It has.”
She was not looking at me. She was looking at the cathedral and the bakery and the scooter and the lantern strung over the café and the thousand small signs of the thousand other hands the place had passed through.
“And what it kept is underneath.”
“Yes.”
She turned to me then. The honey light was gone and the streetlights had come up, and her eyes in that light were the color they only are in the evenings of cities like this one.
“That is you,” she said.
I did not answer. There was no answer I could have added that would not have been subtraction.
She finished her coffee. I finished my bourbon. We walked back through the Old Quarter, past Silver Street and Silk Street and the street of paper offerings, past a woman still frying something golden on a corner at nine at night, past a man on a stoop drawing a slow tune out of a two-stringed đàn for no one in particular, past the star anise and clove lifting off a phở stand being lit for the late shift, the spice I had eaten that morning and would eat nowhere else on earth, past the ghost of incense from a pagoda we had not entered, past French bread cooling in a window for the four o’clock trade, past every century the city had carried and not let fall.
At the Metropole the doorman nodded to us both. The lobby was softer than it had been at noon; the lilies had opened wider; the wax of the old floor held the lamplight and gave it back warm. Below us, somewhere beneath the courtyard, the small concrete room sat in its dark, keeping the soot on its ceiling and the thin young voice on the tape, while the hotel above it kept its lilies and its calm. Both were true at once. Both are always true at once.
In the room she took the pin from her hair. The silk made no sound. She stood at the French doors to the courtyard with her back to me, the lamplight on the bare line of her shoulders, and I understood, watching her, that I had said the truest thing I have ever said to anyone in the courtyard that afternoon, that my voice had broken on it, that she had answered with two words and not looked away while my face put itself back together, and that the two words had been enough.
A city keeps what it loves underneath.
So does a man.
She had always known.