Free Finding the Dragon Lady by Monique Brinson Demery Page A

She held the baby tighter and kept her eyes down.
    They looked like cavemen to Madame Nhu. Even their smell was primal—sweat, smoke, and wet earth. She could barely make out what they were saying to her, much less what they were saying to each other.The toneless speech of commoners in the central region had continued to elude her, despite the three years she had been living in Hue. Distinct rising and falling tones distinguish words from one another in Vietnamese, and to the well-bred northerner, the flat, pounding noises these men lobbed across the room at each other sounded like savage grunts.
    Madame Nhu’s dog whimpered pitifully from another room. Quito, a German shepherd, was a magnificent and loyal animal. After her husband had left her all alone, the dog had kept her safe from the Chinese Kuomintang troops stationed in the city after September 1945. They had descended on the city like a swarm of locusts. 1 When a motley crew of them decided to settle in her garden, Madame Nhu, her cook, and the housekeeper had tried to scare them off by making a ruckus, banging ferociously on pots and pans and yelling. The men hadn’t budged—they weren’t field mice. They saw that Madame Nhu was pregnant, her husband was nowhere to be seen, and her only company in the big house by the river was two old maids. The ragged troops, sick of war and starved for food, warmth, and the comforts of home, began to think they would be more comfortable inside the house. Madame Nhu looked vulnerable enough standing alone at the window, clutching at something behind her rounded belly, but then they saw what it was. She was holding a dog loosely by the collar. He performed well, baring his teeth and laying his ears flat against his head. The threat worked, and after that the men had left her mostly alone, a blessing for which she couldn’t help but thank her darling, snarling beast.
    He had had no chance to come to her defense this morning. She had locked the dog up in another room for the night. It was a foolish mistake.
    The Viet Minh soldiers turned their attention to the piano. It was a fine instrument that Madame Nhu had tried to have transported out of the house, along with the few valuable heirlooms of lacquer and silver, which she had asked the Jesuits to store in their monastery in case something like this should happen. But the piano had jammed in the doorway. The men encircled it, running their hands over the glossy wood, but not out of any particular admiration. Human skin oils leavea rainbow residue in their wake, dust and grime can scratch a prime paint job, and touching the strings, given the difficulty of keeping them in tune in the tropics, during wartime no less, would ordinarily have constituted an unspeakable trespass. The callused fingers were seeking something as they probed under the hood and around the insides. The men were looking for hidden communication devices. They seemed to think the piano, with all its strings, was some sort of telegraph.
    Finally, the Communists decided to detonate the piano. “Imbeciles,” Madame Nhu had fumed. “They didn’t even know what a grand piano was!” But Madame Nhu didn’t actually watch as they packed the cavity with gunpowder. Perhaps the Communists had known exactly what the piano was all along, and blowing it up was their revenge for the bourgeois decadence on display. But it is possible that something else caused it to explode. The cast-iron harp of the grand piano might have suffered during the hasty attempt to move it. If the harp had cracked or the frame had been weakened, the tons of pressure holding the strings taught might have released in a cataclysmic boom. Whatever the cause, the eruption blasted an enormous hole through the main section of the house.
    Amid the wreckage, Madame Nhu set to gathering up what she could for baby Le Thuy: blankets and diapers, a change of clothes, and a large basket to carry it all. Then, before she