He claimed to be a farmer recruited only recently and that he was someone who wanted simply to go back to his village and work the land – the thing he supposedly knew best. But his hands didn’t look like those of a farmer and when they had searched his home they had found books, including poetry, that were unlikely to be the reading material of the background he claimed. Afterwards Donovan told me he had worked as a teacher in a French Catholic lycée in Hue. In another life we would have talked about books and Baudelaire.

It was the first time I had heard Donovan speak French and I tried not to smile as he adopted a pronunciation that made it seem as if he resented the words coming out of his mouth, and his knowledge was pretty basic but I hesitated to supply the words he searched for. He could have used Vietnamese translators, but I knew already he didn’t trust them and suspected they passed on intel to other sources, so I was stuck with the job of being his conduit and receptor however much I didn’t want to be. Once, in his self-conscious fumbling, he glanced at me but I stared back impassively and then, as if wearied by the effort, he got me to translate for him. I was invited to pull my chair closer to the table and so, if I wished, I could have stretched out and touched my enemy on his hands that were small and thin-fingered. As I looked at them I found it irredeemably strange to think that these same hands would kill me if given the chance and had probably killed or arranged the killing of others. And it was of course naive to be surprised that none of this was evidenced in his face. When he exhaled he angled his head slightly and assumed an air of nonchalance, but it was undermined by the tautness of his shoulders and the tight splay of his left hand on the desk. Donovan never lost his smile as he fed me the questions and listened to the answers, sometimes nodding his head as if to convey his acceptance of them.

The prisoner did what I imagine all prisoners must do in such a situation, persisting in a story that moderated his importance, giving information that was already known and keeping close to whatever his questioner needed to know without the ultimate revelation. So he only knew small things, the part of the whole for which he was responsible, and it would always be someone else, someone more important than him, who knew the real answers to what he was being asked. And all the time Donovan displayed a patience that surprised me as the interrogation journeyed through successive cigarettes and when he answered the questions the prisoner looked at Donovan not me.