Hunters in the Dark

SIXTEEN

Sophal watched the halo around the moon and she ran her hand along the curve of Robert’s spine and her thoughts moved back and forth like a comb moving through thick hair that it cannot disentangle. Hours passing in repetition, and there was no forward movement. She couldn’t sleep and the rain distracted her, it never seemed to give her a break. The streets slowly filling like saucepans, the rot beginning again and the men wading along them looking for small opportunities. But still the moon was there despite the clouds (there was no accounting for that) and she watched it drily, wondering if it would explode one fine night and finally leave her alone. The English boy slept like a miner. He slept like that but he never did any real work. Some part of her regretted her rashness in sleeping with him so quickly, but she had drunk too much too quickly and as the evening had progressed she had felt how lost and childish he was. But now she seemed to feel him more clearly. There was something also off-center about him, something spinning without wheels. She didn’t believe in his name, and his descriptions of his past did not quite ring true.

Did such things matter? No one ever knew much about another person. Charm was sometimes more than enough. She got up and went to the bathroom and for some strange reason began brushing her hair. Naked, she looked oily and burnished in the mirror, like something distant and far-off, and she could not recognize herself for a moment.

The previous year, she had been a medical student in Paris. Her father could imagine nothing better than her one day becoming a doctor like himself. A doctor with French qualifications. One night she had been called out to accompany a medical team who wanted her to go with them to the hard suburb of Kremlin-Bicêtre to unlock the apartment of a Khmer man who had gone missing seven years earlier. She went at three in the morning, the same rain. The social workers broke down the door and found a neat and orderly apartment, very Khmer in its tastes, and in the center of the small kitchen the caretaker from Takeo who had been made redundant in 2002, hanging by a gardening rope.

The electricity had been cut off and the place was cold and dark and the body, by some chemical miracle, was perfectly preserved. They held up torches and took notes and waited for the police to arrive and cut down the body. A lonely and unknown Khmer man of forty-three made redundant during a management restructuring. They knew his name. Chann Ong. His name meant “the moon.” The surname, Hokkien Chinese. He had killed himself and his body was discovered that night, seven years after the event. Her superstitious mind pondered it, though she said nothing to the Frenchwomen with her.

She touched the naked foot, like the foot of a mummy which has not lost its color entirely. They catalogued everything in the apartment. His twelve Buddhist books, his dusty toiletries, the old Pan Ron records. His bed had been made and the towels folded and left on it. A doll’s house for a dead man.

No one could explain how a cadaver could remain preserved for seven years. Before hanging himself Chann Ong had sealed all the windows tight and placed a towel under the door. So the room had been almost airless. No flies, no air, no bacteria? But still they could not explain it. She thought to herself, “It was his death wish,” and something in her stirred, she suddenly wanted to go home. It was not a feeling she had had before. They cut down the body and she felt like crying in front of all these quietly appalled French people, for how could they understand anything that had gone through Chann Ong’s mind as he sealed his death chamber and climbed that kitchen chair? It was not just the despair of losing his job and writing the dozens of angry letters to the management in order to receive desultory brush-offs. There was an anterior history, a shared history that was written upon the unconscious, and she understood it.

When she told her father this story he immediately asked her his age. Then he nodded and said that it was self-explanatory. Chann Ong was “one of us.” One of the people of Year Zero, the first year of the Revolution — or the April 17 people, as the unindoctrinated or “old people” were known.

It was brushing her hair in the Englishman’s mirror that made her think of Chann Ong and so he was not, then, entirely forgotten in his own land. Where was his ghost, then — here or there? Wandering the boulevards of Phnom Penh or those of Paris? She stood up straight and stared into her own eyes and remembered the crinkled soles of his feet and the certainty that it was a sign from the afterlife to her.

That night she drove home to her flat in Marx Dormoy along empty streets and her gloom deepened. She wanted to be home. It was she who wrote to the Khmer embassy and told them about Chann. No one knew what to do with a perfectly preserved corpse — superstition had entered the equation. In bed, she told her French boyfriend about it and became slightly hysterical. But nerves never healed a situation. He told her, in his calm European way, that ghosts didn’t exist and she thought cruelly, The divide between us is enormous, isn’t it?

Later it seemed to her that this might have been the moment in which she decided to leave Europe, but in reality she had never been quite happy there. Easy to love Paris, yes, easy to love Sunday-morning walks on the Île de la Cité with her Frenchman and the pastries at Stohrer on the rue Montorgueil and a hundred other things great and small. But even with Claude she always felt alone. She was not really in love with him. Her favorite place in the city, after all, was the church of Saint Gervais and Protais, near the river, whose back door was always left open late at night. She would go there and sit alone in the pews and feel the musty medieval ghosts in that Gothic nave. She was sure she could have been a psychic if she had wanted to. An upper-middle-class Khmer girl with a little family money but no inner reason to be in that world apart from a medical education and a taste for escape. What she had escaped from was her own family. The gloom that surrounded them like an invisible miasma. They were people who frequently liked to quip, “It’s a miracle we’re alive!” But if it was a miracle, who could explain it, and why should other miracles not exist? “Do I believe in miracles?” she began to ask herself. “Me, a doctor in the making, a rational agent?” Could a body really remain perfectly preserved for years in a sealed room? Her father said yes. But it was a miracle anyway.

It was now her own life as a temporary emigrant that began to feel insubstantial. All along, it had been her father who drove her from behind, who constantly admonished her to succeed in Europe. She was doing it for him. Even listening to classical music — it was his urging, his idea. It was he who had driven her to be ambitious and study in Paris. In reality it had been his own dream and she was the one who now had to fulfill it. Not being her own dream, however, it sat uneasily with her. She was not, in fact, ferociously ambitious. She wanted to drift and roam and roll through childish adventures, not get up for 9 a.m. lectures and dissect cadavers in cold rooms. Yet she also thought having dreams, the very concept of having a dream, was childish and absurd. Why did one need to have illusions like that in order to just live? Living was not a project with a propaganda film driving it. It was pulled along by mystery and pleasure, not by a desire to have a big house in Neuilly by the time she was forty.

And increasingly, finally, the enchantment of Paris began to wear off. The sullen bitterness under the surface, the men pissing in the streets defiantly, the feel of quiet decay. It was a slow-motion decay which had gone hand in hand with a slightly hysterical campaign of urban renewal and antiseptic respectability. But the men were still pissing in the street and there was still a feeling of stasis and creeping old age. Europe dying on its feet of torpor and smugness and debt. Half the people her own age were unemployed, living in a state of dependency. At the hospital they were continually handing out free antidepressants to middle-class brats who didn’t want to pay for them. It would have been morally shocking in Phnom Penh, of course, and privately she was shocked. But her boyfriend scoffed at her. Why shouldn’t they have free Paxil for their imaginary mental disorders? “You’re all brainwashed to accept it,” she retorted. “You have no connection to real life. You’re on life support and you don’t even know it.” Work isn’t everything, he would sometimes say, thinking that she would agree with him, given her wonderfully lazy proclivities. And yet she knew it was false. Work indeed was everything and she began to wonder if she would ever have work that meant something to her. She didn’t want to be a doctor, however. Working full-time as a doctor in Paris had the vague feeling of living as a tourist in an expensive boutique now designed merely for other tourists. What her father didn’t understand because he lived mentally in another age was that now it was Europe that was adrift and listless. Her sense of moral superiority was also adrift — how often Sophal had to listen to overheated journalistic lectures about trafficking and servitude in her own country from these fleshy know-it-alls, who in reality knew nothing at all about anything. Thank God, she began to think severely, you’re here to save us. To make us more like you.

She returned to the bedroom and kissed Robert on his cheek and walked back out into the fresh, wet early morning and downstairs to the lobby, where the boys were all asleep like figures in a painting. The rain had finally stopped and she walked down to Norodom and went along the boulevard in the lonely coolness, glad to be alone again and wondering about what had happened. It didn’t occur to her to think about whether she had enjoyed it. Enjoyment was not the issue yet. There was something graver at stake. But this grave thing was — apart from being grave — distressingly unclear. It was about whether she had thrown herself into a well.

She found the first open café in a side street and sat at an outside table with a double espresso and a croissant and smoked her Wonders as the traffic began to thicken and a pale light spread across the facades of the travel agents and two-bit boutique hotels and chic bakeries. There must be a moment when happiness begins — an actual, precise moment — and she began to think that she was experiencing that moment now. She let the smoke calm her and still her shaking hands.

When they had calmed she remembered other moments like this in the past. When her French boyfriend had asked her to come with him to see his family in Avignon. But on that occasion she had refused. The prospective happiness had been too elaborate, too planned, and her prim refusal of it had made complete sense only hours afterward. One didn’t become happy so easily. She was convinced, perhaps childishly, that it had to be unexpected. That was the problem with her whole European phase: where was the unexpected?

Simon was the unexpected incarnate.

She walked home then and let herself in through the outer gate and went through the dripping garden as the maids were beating the carpets in the damp air. They looked up at her with amused complicity, those two old women who had known her since she was small. She went up to her room and fell onto her bed in her clothes and slept into the late afternoon, and when she woke the koel birds were announcing an early evening of mosquitoes and low sun and drinks with ice at the edge of growing shadows.

SEVENTEEN

She went out that night to a party at the house of a French artist on a street not far from her own house. She walked there along Pasteur, past the upscale lounge-style restaurants and the Japanese bars. Like her father’s house, it was a massive old French villa which the owner had restored with his personal fortune. In his garden, the Frenchman had placed artworks by several well-known Khmer artists and surrounded them with an open bar lit with Vietnamese lanterns. Inside, the ground floor had been converted into the evening’s playground and there she whiled away a few hours drinking vodka cocktails and finding her friends. It was the sort of evening she was becoming used to during her time of “unemployment.” With no pressing financial worries, no rent to pay, she could do what she wanted with her evenings and she had consequently fallen into a lulling rhythm of long nights and late risings and mild hangovers. She knew it would pass eventually, but for the moment she felt it was exactly what a twenty-five-year-old should be doing with her life. There were no pleasant surprises, but no unpleasant surprises either. She was now in her own culture and she could float or sink according to its own laws of gravity.

She went up to the balcony that looked down onto the garden and a friend of hers found her at eleven, sitting alone and watching the handsome boys in the garden. It was an old school friend, a girl who now worked at the American embassy as a translator, a girl who had suddenly become fatter than herself. The wearisome chatter began.

“I haven’t seen you in a while,” the girl began.

“I’ve been looking for work.”

“We thought you had a boy. Someone saw you with a boy — last night.”

Sophal gave a slight start and then laughed it off. “That was quick!”

“Someone was at China House and saw you with a barang boy.”

“I can’t wriggle out of it.”

“So, who was it?”

The girl snuggled up closer.

I’m not going to play games, Sophal thought grimly.

“An English boy I met. He’s my English tutor.”

A ripple of laughter. “No way!”

“My father hired him.”

“But you had other ideas. That was a fast move.”

“It wasn’t a move. We just hung out.”

“Uh-huh. Is he here?”

“Of course he’s not here.”

“Why of course?”

“I didn’t ask him anyway.”

The girl was sure she would know him. She knew all the eligible barangs.

“What’s his name?”

“Do I really have to tell you, Arunny?”

“Of course you do.”

It was tiresome, but in the end it was better to get it over and done with. Sophal didn’t really care either way.

“His name’s Simon Beauchamp. He’s teaching English for a year, I guess. He used to work in a bank.”

“It sounds familiar.”

“Really? He’s only just got here—”

“Is that what he said?”

“Pretty clearly.”

“I could have sworn — I’ve heard the name before. But it was last year. More than a year ago.”

“Then it couldn’t have been him.”

“Is he blond?”

“He’s got blondish bits.”

“I think I met him.”

Sophal put down her drink and her weariness vanished.

“You met him?”

The girl tittered and rolled her eyes.

“I think I did. Simon — yes, I’m sure I met him.”

“Where?”

“At a party somewhere. On a boat in the river. Some German guy — you know those parties.”

“Who was he with?”

“I think he was with some Khmer girl.”

So that was it.

“But you’re not sure?”

“Well,” the girl snorted, “I couldn’t swear to it, obviously—”

“What could you swear to?”

“Nothing much. It just rings a bell — the name.”

Sophal was angry for a moment.

“I find that hard to believe.”

“There’s nothing to believe,” the girl retorted. “I’m just telling you what I remember. Lighten up, Sophal. These guys are all the same. They tell you what you want to hear.”

Sophal supposed this was true.

“So you mean he’s been here longer than he said?”

“Well, yeah.”

“It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

Her voice was sad for a moment and the girl flinched.

“It’s no big deal,” she offered. “I just met him at a river party. I mean, I didn’t do anything with him!”

“I didn’t say you did. It’s just annoying.”

“Men are annoying, didn’t you know?”

“I don’t find them that annoying. It’s myself I find annoying.”

“Why don’t you invite him now and I’ll tell you if it’s him?”

Sophal threw up her hands.

“God, I hate things like this. I don’t care if he was here last year. He had his reasons to lie.”

“I dare say,” the girl said sarcastically.

“I knew it. I had a feeling—”

“One always does.”

“It’s true.” Sophal paused. “Shall I invite him?”

“No. Let’s get drunk. Invite him later.”

—

But for the rest of the evening Sophal let it prey upon her mind. The one thing that had never occurred to her was that Simon had lied about the length of his sojourn in her city. That lie seemed more fantastical than others he might have told and deep down she didn’t quite believe it. Naïvéte is hard to simulate. And if Simon was one thing, it was naive. She had never seen naïvéte like it.

It was like snow with only a tinge of dirt.

The following day she called him and when he didn’t pick up she sent him a text message. She invited him to meet her at a venerable French restaurant called Van inside the old Banque d’Inchochine building. She said it was her treat and to wear a nice shirt. He accepted. She stayed in all day studying, then told her father that she was going to Van for an English lesson. “With Simon,” he said with a smile. She went back upstairs and dressed in an Agnès B dress she had bought in Paris and which fitted her perfectly and a pair of steely pearl earrings. It was a different look, a rich girl’s look, and she knew how to do it. It was a look that had a bit of thunder and lightning to it. She had never been glamorous or even pretty in her own estimation but she knew how to carry the color black. She put on a thin layer of lipstick.

That night a few protests erupted around the city. She heard the staccato pop of sporadic gunfire, the far-off din of violence. On her way to the restaurant she passed the remains of shattered barricades littered with shoes, bloody T-shirts and tear-gas cartridges. Police stood at the corners in their plastic face visors, weapons tilted on hips. The acrid taste of the gas had not yet dissipated. Yet a few blocks away it was as if nothing was happening. Van, in any case, was one of the older and pricier French places which ambassadors, sundry diplomats and businessmen liked to frequent when they wanted to sink into no-nonsense old-school French food. Tournedos Rossini, as at Le Royal, with wedges of foie gras and perch quenelles and timbales de crevettes downed with bargain-price bottles of Duhart-Milon. The restaurant was wainscoted and the floors creaked when the shy, silent Khmer waiters dared to cross them. It was almost always half empty but its small outdoor terrace overlooked the wide square by the colonial post office.

She got there first and was shown to the outdoor table which she had specified. She ate there with her parents and they knew her well. The square was alive with motodops and streaming crowds. From the table by the wall she could even look down at the nocturnal girls sitting on stools outside the wild bars on Street 102. It was an alien energy which threw the quiet European terrace into relief, but it often happened that it still unsettled the diners’ subtle feeling of superiority, especially if they were visiting Europeans. Not Sophal. She sat there now and ordered a Kir Royale. They made them thick and sweet here and she liked them that way. She could smoke outside and she liked the slight swish of the mosquitoes around her bare shoulders. She had, in fact, been coming there since she was little, and the waiters were subtly indulgent to her. One of them lit her cigarette for her. Then she saw Robert walking across the square with his shoulders slightly hunched, in the same linen trousers he always wore. The shirt he always wore. Men did love their lazy uniforms. He even saw her on the terrace and they waved and she saw for a moment the dirty-snow naïvéte in his face. She was becoming surer that her friend had made a banal mistake. They always took too many drugs at parties with foreigners.

Robert came into the monochrome-tiled downstairs lobby with the old heavy-set green doors of the bank. There was a shrine there and a kitsch statue fountain of a European angel. Inside, Khmer statuary, a droplet chandelier and steep polished wooden stairs which led up to a claustrophobic landing where the glass windows of a fridge displayed to passing diners prime cuts of Australian beef. The chandelier-lit main room was robed with sashed cotton curtains and there was an ancient phonograph on a pedestal, but no guests except a table of elderly French tourists. A waiter escorted him to the terrace. There was no one there either but Sophal and he was for a moment taken aback by the almost brutal elegance of the black dress and the earrings and the color of the mouth that was smiling back at him.

—

He had been walking along the river all day. His face was burned and tanned at the same time and it made him look older and more rugged, more worn in. It was a look she liked in white men. When they burned off their pallor they seemed to come visually alive, and alive in other ways too. He made a quick joke about the formality of Van and she shrugged and said it was her father’s favorite restaurant.

The terrace seemed submerged in trees, in frangipani flowers; the walls of the building exactly the same sorbet yellow as her father’s house with the same white stucco. An Italian villa of some kind. Only the vast and violent clouds gave away the true location.

“Steak Rossini?” Robert said.

“There’s nothing wrong with it.”

“I ate it last time with your father.”

He sat and took her hand and turned it for a moment and kissed the back and the light sweat came off on his mouth.

“You look like — I don’t know what.”

“Don’t say princess.”

It was the word he’d been about to use.

“Something like a princess.”

She called the waiter.

“Two Kir Royales. Actually, no, this time I’ll have mine de mure. I always go from blackcurrant to blackberry.”

Robert glanced at the empty glass in front of her.

“I’ll have the blackberry one as well then.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You can have it with red too,” she said. “It’s called a Communard.”

“I think not. Anything with a name like that here—”

She took his hand back and kissed it in turn.

“It was probably the only cocktail allowed in the seventies. I’ll ask my father about that.”

Fireworks began over the river, half obscured by the Banque d’Inchochine building. People stood still in the square and watched. A fairy atmosphere descended and the chemistry between them had slightly altered; a night’s sleep, a few hours to reflect. It was now a closer bond, to their surprise. It was she who talked. Some amuse-bouches came and they attacked them with little silver forks. Beyond the glass doors the rich old tourists ate by candlelight, sepulchral, and their motions with knives and forks were in comical slow motion. The chandeliers twinkled with a subdued melancholy which suggested that they had been there far longer than even these aging tourists had been alive. Robert, in any case, was glad to be above and beyond the sweaty real city for an hour and with someone else paying. He had walked for miles that day, past the Sofitel and along the jumbled river, and he couldn’t really tell her why. A confusion, a disorientation. An incoherent desire to walk out of the city altogether. He had sat on a bank of weeds some miles out of the center and felt each minute passing like a miniature century. A migraine throbbed through his head and he felt himself wishing that he was somewhere else. Vietnam, perhaps, or even China. Just somewhere farther on where not even one person knew him and where he could be himself again. Sooner or later he would have to do that anyway. When he looked at Sophal’s face he felt a sullen guilt and he wanted to just tell her everything in a few brutal sentences. But it would never happen. The deeper he sank into his own lie, the deeper he would drag her until they were both so deep in, it would no longer be worth trying to crawl out of it.

“My father likes you more and more,” she was saying. “He likes the idea of you more than anything, I think. I’ve always thought the idea of a person and the person himself are more or less the same.”

“I wish I could talk him out of that. I don’t really understand—”

“He says, by the way, I should take you to Phnom Chisor. It’s only an hour away and we could take the family driver. Like a picnic. Would you like to do that?”

“A day trip?”

“Yes, and you might even like it. Of course I don’t know what you like. It’s a ruined temple, like Angkor but lonelier.”

“I like ruins. Or I think I like them.”

“We’re famous for our ruins. People who come here are more interested in our ruins than they are in us.”

“They have to be interested in something.”

“But not you — you don’t seem interested in anything.”

“I’m a bit aimless, it’s true.”

“I know you’re a pathless wanderer. I can tell.”

“Is that your phrase?”

She said, “That’s my phrase, yes. I’m always right too.”

He threw up his hands and smiled. “Then I’m a pathless wanderer. Is there a cure?”

“Marriage.”

“Then I’ll have to be pathless for a while—”

“You’ll be thirty soon. Then it’s almost too late.”

“Is it? Not in my country, it isn’t.”

“You’re not in your country.”

He put down his knife and fork and said he wanted to buy her a bottle of wine. A Bordeaux, no?

“Big spender!” she cried.

The Duhart-Milon, then.

It was a mad expense, but he calculated he could just about manage it and survive. He ordered the wine and she told him it was entirely unnecessary but that she was glad he had. She needed a serious drink and a bottle of Duhart-Milon was it. When it came they went quiet and it was poured and they raced into it with a childish pleasure.

“I love getting drunk like this,” she said. “In the dark on a terrace. With a silly boy.”

“So now I’m silly too?”

“Yes.”

In fact, the wine had gone to his head immediately.

“Shouldn’t I be teaching you English?”

“Go ahead.”

“I forgot the lesson.”

“Then there is no lesson today. You’ll have to make it up to me.”

“You’ve been speaking English since you were three.”

“Two.”

“So your dad is wasting his money.”

“Isn’t that his problem?”

“Well, I suppose it is.”

Robert cut into his timbale and he thought ahead for some reason — to the following day, to the following decade.

He said, “It seems quite unreal here. Has your father been coming to this place for years? It seems like his kind of place.”

“All of us have been coming here for years. It’s our place.”

“Your father seems very kind. He didn’t need to give me that money. I didn’t want to take it—”

“I wouldn’t worry about that. He wanted to help you.”

“That’s just the thing — I don’t understand why.”

“There’s nothing to understand. It’s a feeling — he has a feeling for you. It’s enough for him.”

“I’m not even teaching you English. He knows perfectly well you speak it perfectly.”

“Perfectly.”

“So it’s just a ruse, isn’t it? Perhaps I shouldn’t mind. I should just shut up and take the money.”

“That’s pretty much what you should do, Mr. Beauchamp.”

“In a way I did.”

She fed him a forkful of green beans.

“You have a charmed life. There’s something charmed about you. People do things for you — don’t they?”

“I wish they did. I don’t think they do.”

“You land on your feet anyway. They think you’re helpless and have to be helped.”

“I am kind of helpless.” He looked at her archly.

She said, “It’s your greatest asset. You never know what’s going on. There’s a definite charm in that, but I’m not sure it lasts forever. For the moment you’re doing very well.”

“You make me sound rather awful.”

“Awful’s an old-fashioned word. You’re not that, you’re something else. The maids say something amazing about you. They say you have an aura of disaster about you.”

She covered her mouth with her hand as she laughed.

“Jesus,” he sighed.

“They’re country women. They can see these kinds of things.”

It was probably true. He was disaster incarnate, lumbering through the world without a clue and destroying everything around him without knowing it. But the idea that this quality projected an aura — it might have been true.

“But then,” she went on, “there are disasters and disasters. What kind of disasters do you bring on?”

“None that I am aware of.”

She pouted. “I don’t believe it. You’re a disaster on two legs.”

“On four legs,” he said.

—

They ate clafoutis for dessert. His body broke into an uncontrollable sweat. It ran between his eyes and he looked up at the clouds and caught the far-off lightning. He felt a hundred years old and he drank most of the bottle without remembering his manners. All his life he had drunk when he felt nervous and now he felt nervous again with her. Any minute, he had decided, she was going to unmask him and then there would be a miserable and wretched scene. He had decided he wasn’t going to grovel and apologize. He was going to laugh it off and be a boor and tell her a tall story and that would be that, they would part and it wouldn’t matter.

“I think I said before,” she was saying, “that you don’t seem like a teacher. I never asked you what you teach — it’s rude of me.”

“It’s all right. English literature.”

He didn’t say it with much enthusiasm.

“Is that a hard one to teach?”

“I have the feeling it’s a dinosaur subject. The children aren’t interested in it anymore. I feel like I’m just talking to a wall most of the time.”

“They’re more interested in the Internet?”

“I don’t know what they’re interested in. It’s not like I’m so much older than them — but it feels like two or three generations. They’re on a different planet.”

“Then you should change jobs.”

“There’s something sad about it,” he admitted. “Do you know who John Donne is?”

Slowly, she shook her head.

“You think all the time that these famous writers are universal and then you realize that no one outside of a very small culture has ever heard of them, not even in your own country. If Khmers read John Donne I’d be delighted and amazed. But when fifteen-year-old English boys don’t even know the name…”

“Is it surprising?” she asked.

“That they’re forgotten? Maybe. Then what am I doing with my life? Teaching forgotten things to those who won’t remember.”

She shook her head. “No, you’re a teacher. That’s your mission.”

“Not now anyway. Let someone else do it. I’ve decided to be in the present and nowhere else. Like everyone else.”

“Maybe you could teach John Donne in Cambodia — be the first one.”

“A brilliant idea which no one will go for.”

But long ago the French had probably taught Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo to little Khmer children in stuffy schoolhouses. It could be done for a while, futilely and nobly. He thought of the room where he taught in Elmer, with its walls covered with pop posters of Great Writers intended to make them more appealing to teenagers who would never, in fact, find them appealing. Shakespeare in a hip beard, Wordsworth in psychedelic colors. The hint that they took drugs and had orgies. The hard, yet wandering look in those teenagers’ eyes as he walked back and forth with an open book, reading paragraphs of George Eliot. It was comical, but there was no other way. His rage built up over a long time but it was a rage against the years he himself had spent mastering this material. He had to justify it somehow. He could not just admit that it had been a waste of life and time.

—

They went for a walk in the rain by the river and it seemed like the first night they had been together, only the city seemed larger and brighter and fuller. They planned out their picnic to Phnom Chisor as they sat on the promenade wall and looked up at the white kids eating pizza at the FCC.

“Are you really going to find a job here?” he asked. “I got the feeling you missed Paris.”

“I went for an interview at a hospital today. It went well. I can find a job — they need doctors here — but that’s not the problem.”

“What’s the problem then?”

“I don’t know. I’m never happy in any one place. Perhaps the world got too small.”

“That’s exactly the problem.”

They walked down to 130 and got ice creams on the street. The quay was lazily alive with drifters and amorous strollers dragging their feet under the frangipanis; they walked over to a man selling toy birds on the curb, transparent birds filled with throbbing colored lights which gave off a manic chatter like an aviary of living animals. It was astonishingly realistic and yet the birds glowed red and blue and violet. It was there that they ran into one of her friends, a Dutch artist who was walking home with two models for a night of painting. His name was Horst and it was not his name. They tagged along and soon they were climbing up a dark stairway to a terraced studio with paintings all over the floors and jam jars filled with fresh joints. They sat on the floor of the terrace with the glow of nearby neon flashing on and off and the sound of real caged birds in the unit above and the Khmer girls took off their clothes and posed and they drank a lot of vodka together. Horst was a small man filled with electric energy. He had been married four times to courtesans, three of them in Africa, and had washed up on the shores of the Tongle Sap in search of further illuminations. He paid his girlfriend, who was not there, two thousand dollars a month to share his bed and his canvases, though the canvases were more important to him than the bed. His career was successful and he made a small fortune selling his work in upscale galleries in Amsterdam. At night he trawled the bars and clubs looking for faces who could fill his nightmare paintings and by and large he found them. Now he sent one of the girls down to get them oysters and she returned with a vast plate of crustaceans wrapped in cellophane and bedded on crushed ice. They ate them on the floor with lemons and iced beers and hot green dipping sauce. Horst took off his clothes as well and soon they were all naked and smoking the joints while Horst painted the two girls. It was three in the morning when they came down. They went home separately and agreed to meet early the next morning at Colonial Mansions.

—

She was there with her family driver at seven. They had a coffee by the pool amid chattering pintails.

“I didn’t sleep,” she said cheerfully. “And yet I don’t feel tired at all.”

“It’s far too early — but I don’t feel tired either.”

She had brought her swimsuit and they went into the pool for a while and sipped their coffee at the edge with their bodies submerged. Then, at about eight, they headed out of the city in a clear blue morning tinged with yellow dust and found the long, straight road that swept past the darkened temples of Ta Phrom toward Chisor.

EIGHTEEN

At Ta Phrom they stopped and walked away from the dusty car park into the piles of stones and soon they had come to the great back wall which seemed to be shored up with wildflowers. A group of children had followed them with expertly desperate eyes and they murmured continuously to Sophal in Khmer as they wandered across to a new temple in the short shadows of morning. It was the hour when the grass is alive and butterflies swirled around them. She took his hand as they circled back to the ruins and picked their way into a sanctuary lit by a high skylight and then back to the car park where the driver waited. Between the pale yellow straps of her dress her shoulder blades had become lustrous with moisture and the silver watch on her wrist sparkled against a skin that now looked as dark as cinnamon bark. At Chisor, the vendors were not yet there and the vast steps leading to the top of the little mountain were empty. They began to climb and when they had cleared the treeline they stopped and sat on the steps next to a homemade shrine and felt their heartbeats. The horizon was flat and green, slightly hazed, and at its farthest limit the mauve clouds gathered in a line of tension.

“It’s the end of the rains,” she said, holding out her tongue. “I can taste it.”

The slopes were forest, singing with insects. Higher up, the surrounding plain appeared as a partial circumference with no signs of the present century. The sky’s blue flesh became richer and out of it poured a blinding sunlight. The steps ended in a cluster of temple outbuildings and a path that crested and then fell downward toward the ruins. At the highest point they rested again and Robert looked down at the endless flight of steps and he thought he saw a man standing there in the shade of a few trees. The figure was in a shabby dark suit and he was talking to a monk who had appeared out of nowhere and the two men were gesturing to each other in some manner. He squinted and then shaded his eyes and he thought, In this light one could hallucinate anything. He turned back to Sophal, who was looking the other way toward the ruins, which could not, in fact, be seen from that vantage point.

“I love it when there’s no one here,” she was saying.

“I wonder how many people have heart attacks on those steps.”

Leaning in, he kissed the glistening space between the shoulder straps. She flinched slightly.

His lips moved against her hot skin. “I think we’re being watched.”

“There’s always someone watching.”

No doubt it was true. Or half true.

She raised her eyebrows and her smile was slight, as if she for one didn’t mind being watched. As if that was a norm she could accept.

The downward path passed by some handsomely maintained new buildings, including a quadrangular pond. The paint white and gold and fresh. There were donation plaques from Buddhists in America. They came down into a kind of square with ancient trees and old people lying on the benches seemingly oblivious to them. Prayer flags moved in the wind and from the square they could look out over the dark green plain where the oval shadows of clouds moved like grazing cows. Behind them rose the ruins. Temples of Vishnu long toppled and scattered. They moved between the buildings in a gathering and claustrophobic heat and eventually climbed up through a weathered portal and onto the top of a flight of steps that led down to a terrace. Here they lay in the sun for a while. The wind flowed over them and there was no sound but that. Humans seemed not yet to have arrived in that landscape or to have left long ago — you couldn’t tell which. He reached over and laid his hand on her breast and the smile came back, the same slight, stone-carved smile that made her face so serene-looking and ancestral. She turned over and they began to kiss. Soon, however, he heard voices in the square and they got up and walked to the end of the terrace and sat there for a long time enfolded in each other until the clouds on the horizon advanced halfway across the plain. He could see her features in the stone faces above them. The bloodlines, ancient and unbroken, and the mouths with the same smiles. It was a matter of observation, not romantic fantasies. Then, as they watched the plain darken and a roll of thunder reached them, he felt a sudden wave of cold fear overtake him and he turned his head and looked up at the walls. There was no one there but it didn’t matter. There was something there, if not something in human form.

He said, “It’s going to rain, isn’t it? We should beat a retreat.”

He had never believed in the supernatural, but as they wandered slowly back through the ruins he permitted himself the feeling that comes with the nearness of ghosts. Inside the sanctuaries, candles had been lit which had not been lit before. There were flowers, dishes of sweets and incense, and the air had become denser with perfume. At the square the old people had roused themselves and watched them with less indifference. A few monks also sat there eating from plastic plates, though there were no tourists. They sauntered back up the hill to the covered platform where the steps began and sat there in the shade with some cold water they had bought from an old lady with an icebox near the pond. Sophal was thinking ahead to dinner with her parents that night. Should she invite the English boy as well? She was a little confused. She could never gauge how much her father could guess about her.

“What are you doing tonight?” she finally asked.

Robert shrugged and he was conscious of the gesture being lame. He was about to add something when she said, “You can come and have dinner with us tonight if you like. It’s a bit boring for you, but I’ll be there!”

“Then I’ll come.”

“I’ll call them when we’re driving back. You sure you don’t have other plans?”

“I never make plans.”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the steps below them.

The monk was still there, seated under an orange parasol, and it reminded him at once of the temple near Battambang where he had seen Simon. The other man in the shabby suit had disappeared but he had the feeling that this disappearance was not genuine.

“I’m so glad to be back in this country,” she said quietly. “Are you surprised by that?”

“Not at all.”

“This place is special. Don’t you think?”

“I can feel that.”

“I’m happy you can. But somehow you seem anxious. What are you anxious about?”

“I am?”

She had noticed all along that when she looked at him from the side his cheek twitched as if his jaw was clenched. His foot always tapped, his eyes always moved quickly.

“Yes. You are always nervous in some way.”

“Am I really nervous?”

“Yes, you are. There’s something nervous about you.”

Indeed, it was why she didn’t quite trust him.

“You’re always on the lookout.”

“I don’t think so—”

“You haven’t done anything bad, have you, Simon?”

“What do you mean?”

“You haven’t cheated any of your other students?”

He said, slightly annoyed, “I think I’m pretty relaxed. By English standards anyway.”

“Well, you are not a relaxed people.”

“We are what we are.”

“If you’re in trouble—”

“Why would I be in trouble?”

But his laugh was obviously forced.

“People,” she said, “get into all kinds of trouble.”

“Not me.”

On their way back, he was agitated. Sometimes he felt that he was inside a huge broken machine and that there was no exit from it. You’re out of my mind, he thought, remembering a poem about William Burroughs, or was it a line of Burroughs himself? I’m out of your mind. You’re out of my mind.

He slept alone for a while at the Mansions and then walked over to the Sar home to have dinner with the family — it was their specific request. The servants had laid out a table in the garden since the rain had not returned, and dull, dusty-looking stars twinkled above the city’s orange glare. There the three of them sat around candles in glass shells and their faces had a curiously conspiratorial look when he observed them from the windows of the house. The mother was holding forth about something, her hand rising for a moment to emphasize a point then sinking back to her knee. There were tall glasses of white wine. They were an eccentric family, without a doubt; but what made them eccentric was not eccentricity in itself. When he appeared the doctor rose and he made the same gesture with his finger that he had made at the Royal restaurant. They were sitting under a mango tree that looked to be at least a hundred years old, and as if reading his mind the doctor said, almost at once, “See, this is our tree that has been here since before the house was even built! The servants say a spirit lives inside it. They are correct, as it happens.”

—

It was very different from the meal of the first night. The food now was Khmer, delicate and smoky. Lap khmer salads soaked in lime and kdam chaa crab fried in Kampot green peppers and served with baguettes. The wife, for some reason, retired early and the doctor took out his cigar box and waxed philosophical. It felt to Robert as if he had many things bottled up inside him and that he had not expressed them to many people. As he drank, he became sharper and moodier, and the subject of conversation turned with baleful inexorability to the nation, to the nation which he wanted to explain to a young and impressionable foreigner.

“I have been reading a new book about the seventies, by a man who I greatly respect. A filmmaker. Perhaps you know him?”

The name Rithy Panh, however, meant nothing to Robert.

“No matter. He wrote it in French. He made a film about the S-21 camp. He is interviewing the commandant, Duch — a mass murderer — and he makes a remarkable observation.” The doctor sat back in his chair and looked over at his daughter, waiting for her to say something. He had drilled these things into her since she was little but he seemed to want to know if she understood it after all. “He says that Duch hated Vincent van Gogh but had a noble love for Leonardo da Vinci, and in particular the Mona Lisa. Why does Duch the fanatic Communist and killer love the Mona Lisa? Because, Duch says, she looks like a Khmer woman. There’s something Cambodian in her portrait. An heiress of the kingdom of Angkar perhaps? Or is it because the works of the Renaissance are so mathematical? Duch, you see, was a math teacher before he became one of the world’s most famous torturers. It’s so strange to me that someone like that would have an opinion about the Mona Lisa. He then says that Vann Nath, the man who painted all the images in the museum today, a man who survived the prison — one of only seven people to come out alive — was not a great painter. I think that made me angrier than anything. Vann Nath owns a restaurant these days — we should go over one day and eat there. He is a gentleman.”

“Daddy—” Sophal began.

“What is it?”

“Don’t you think Simon might be a bit overwhelmed by all this?”

“He lives here, doesn’t he? Don’t you, Simon?”

“Yes, sir.”

The “sir” was a little absurd, and the doctor laughed.

“You don’t have to call me sir, Simon. Are you overwhelmed?”

“Not at all.”

“See, he’s not overwhelmed. I can talk about my own country, can’t I? I want to tell you about this book. It’s a remarkable book. He talks about the nation. He says the nation is mysterious to him — as it is to me. What can you say about a nation that killed a quarter of its own population in three years? Such a nation, he says, is enigmatic, impenetrable. It’s a sick nation, maybe even an insane one. I quote word for word. But the world, he says, remains innocent. That’s the strange thing. The crimes of the regime were still human all the same. Those crimes were not a historical oddity, a geographical eccentricity. Not at all. The twentieth century, he says, reached its fulfilment in Cambodia in the Year Zero. The crimes in Cambodia can even be taken to represent the whole twentieth century. They were committed by the most educated people in the country, people who’d studied in Paris. The scholarship boys. The lucky ones. People who knew they were right and educated and well traveled. It was in the Enlightenment that those crimes took place. That’s what is so hard to understand.”

The doctor began to light his cigar. He smoked too much, that was his indulgence in late middle age, and a customary one at that. It made him feel more French, more relaxed.

“I think it was here that all the tendencies of your culture, Simon, reached their maximum point. Do you see what I mean? It all came from you. Had those boys not gone to the Sorbonne, if they had stayed in Buddhist schools, we would have had the usual Southeast Asian corrupt monarchy with a few minor crimes here and there, but nothing more. There would have been no exterminations, no total control. We would have stayed sane. At the prison here they used to conduct experiments, draining all the blood from women to see what would happen. They had already marked “to be destroyed” in the margins of their files. But it was not just us; it was a very European experiment. You destroy people in order to make ideas live. It’s a uniquely Western kind of behavior. Pol Pot was a good student, remember, and a very good carpenter. A gentle boy. He lived for ideas, which is why you had women being drained of all their blood in a converted school. We may have been insane then, but the insanity was not all ours. It was a way of looking at history that completely denied history. There are those who say we’ve always done that anyway — but not with an end in mind. We never wanted to make a perfect society. We are fatalists. We don’t believe in future perfection.”

When you thought about it, the domination of the nation by Western ideas and moods and movements and moral ideologies was a devastating spectacle. The doctor, however, was not recriminating. It was a salient thing about the Khmers, the lack of bitterness they had about it.

“First, you drop half a million tons of bombs on us, then you give us a deadly ideology like Communism which exterminates a quarter of the population, then you send your missionaries here to lecture us about our sexual behavior. I saw on CNN — it was Mira Sorvino, some actress I am sure you know, weeping outside a peasant’s house and screaming at them not to sell their children into indentured servitude. It was all for the camera. The peasants had no idea what she was talking about. But white people are remarkable people — they love charging around on crusade saving everyone. The carpet bombing and the missionaries and the NGOs — all unconsciously connected. You know all these anti-trafficking types. Most of them are evangelicals, missionaries. They seem wonderfully unable to find any trafficked people, but when they do get someone they force them into twenty hours of Bible study a week. No one ever mentions that. We’re like Africa in the nineteenth century to the men from Texas. We’re the place they do their conversions and fund-raising. They themselves live very well here, of course. Tax-free. I’m not saying they aren’t nice people who want to do good. But Duch was a nice boy who wanted to do good. They all think they are right and want to do good. It’s irrelevant. You’ve turned us into your experiment, that’s what I say. We’re just Cambodians after all. Too poor and weak to say no. We always need something from you. It’s only my daughter’s generation that is starting to say fuck off. I see a change in them — a stirring. I am very relieved to see it. They don’t seem to want to be your victims and experiment anymore. Am I talking rubbish, my dear Simon? Forgive me, it’s the wine. My wife says that not only do I smoke too much, but I drink too much as well.”

“It’s perfectly all right,” Robert said.

He was enjoying it immensely.

“Well,” Sar said, blowing out a complete smoke ring, “time will tell. If I am talking rubbish, time will tell. And I never talk to anyone anyway. The white people would be horrified if they heard. But we came to help — we’re sincere. You know how people think.”

The doctor laughed and flicked his ash. They began to eat chocolates and brandy and the stars became noticeably clearer. The talk became gentler and more personal. Robert felt more at home, and for a moment he thought that he could also belong to this family one day. It was far from being an impossible idea.

NINETEEN

Davuth came down to the river at about noon and began his search for the man called Thy. He was not difficult to find. “He’s always up in the bar getting drunk,” the other boatmen told him.

There indeed Davuth found him, sitting alone and drinking shots of Sang Som diluted with dirty ice. He collared him in a friendly way and they got talking. The rains had held off that day and the whole room, the whole disheveled river hamlet, was filled with burning, corrosive light. Davuth was in his one good suit, neat and combed and shaved, and he had the look of a mildly respectable contractor on his way to the city. He had been up since dawn and he felt sharp and prepared. He had left his car with a man he knew and walked unnoticed into the jetty area. It was a new adventure, but it was it was more than a mere adventure. It was the beginning of a new life.

“You can take me down to the city,” Davuth said to the drunk now, “and I’ll pay you what the American pays.”

Thy looked away and into his dirty ice as if mention of the American was mysterious bad luck.

“He pays better than anyone.”

“Yeah, well, I’ll pay the same.”

It was a deal and Davuth asked him sternly if he was sober.

“Of course I’m sober,” Thy said defiantly.

They went down to his boat tied up at the jetty and set off with the sun at their backs. Davuth sat next to him in the cabin and they chatted with rum and cigarettes and Thy told him all about the young barang he had taken down to the city a short while ago.

“How about that American?” Davuth asked. “I heard about him. Wasn’t he some drug dealer down here?”

“He was but he took off. I heard—”

Thy’s face tightened and he glanced down at the hands of the policeman, which were resting passively but somehow dangerously in his lap.

“You heard what?”

“I heard they fished him out of the river.”

“They did?”

“He must have crossed the drug dealers in Pailin.”

“I guess he must have.”

“It’s not a smart thing to do.”

“It’s the stupidest thing to do, all right. But you had a few dealings with him. Tell me about him.”

“Why?”

“I’m just curious. I heard a lot of stories.”

Thy was now drinking heavily. There was a chance, surely, that they would capsize at some point but it couldn’t be helped. Davuth poured out the booze and Delons.

“He was a dealer, I’m sure. But I liked him. He was all right. He paid me good. You can’t ask more than that.”

“No, you can’t ask more than that.”

“He paid me for odd jobs. Between you and me—”

“Yes?”

“A few drop-offs, you know — that kind of thing.”

“I see.”

“Yeah, it was all right. He wasn’t a tightfist.”

“You can’t ask more than that.”

“You bet you can’t. He paid dollars.”

Davuth said that that was the best a man could hope for: dollars with no questions asked.

“You got that right,” Thy said.

“And that British boy you took down to the city—”

“Ah, he was a queer one.”

“Why so?”

“Slept most of the way. Maybe he was stoned when we loaded him on the boat.”

“You and the American?”

“Yes.”

“Why would you do something like that?”

The boatman looked over at Davuth and his eyes went blank.

“Don’t ask me!”

“How strange,” Davuth drawled. “Did the kid know where he was going?”

“He seemed to have no idea.”

“I’ll be damned—”

“He just got off at the jetty where the American told me to let him off.”

“Then take me to the same place.”

“You said you’d pay the same.”

“It’s a promise.”

They drank a fair bit more on their way to the jetty. Somehow the day had passed altogether by the time they got there and the lights had come on in the waterfront shacks and birds swarmed the mulberry trees with a deafening chirping and fluttering. Davuth paid and they went together up to the bank, the boatman staggering and mocking himself, and Davuth took his leave brusquely and went in among the drivers who were hanging out under the babbling trees. He sifted through them asking about the English boy and seeing if any of them remembered him. Since there were very few of them it didn’t take long for him to find the one who had driven Robert into Phnom Penh. Davuth took him to one side and used all his matey charm on him. He offered a pretty good tip if the man could take him to the same hotel he had taken the young barang to.

“Sure,” the man said cheerfully. “It was the Sakura, if I remember correctly.”

“Then let’s go to the Sakura.”

—

It was a chaotic drive. The road was clogged with long-distance trucks. The dusk came upon them. The man chatted glibly. Davuth listened to the stories about his family and then casually asked him if he had noticed anything odd about the young barang he had taken to the Sakura that night. The driver caught Davuth’s eye in the rearview mirror and he wondered if the barang had contracted a debt he couldn’t pay. The man in the backseat looked like a genial enforcer. The driver prevaricated and then admitted that he couldn’t remember much about the foreigner except that he looked quite broke.

“I see,” Davuth said quietly. “But he paid you all the same?”

“He did pay me. He paid twice what you paid.”

They laughed. Davuth leaned over and passed another two dollars to the man. When they came into the city the driver remembered that it had not been the Sakura after all but the Paris on Kampuchea Krom. When they got there Davuth asked him again about the Englishman and the driver said he had had no bags with him. It was an extraordinary thing. A barang with no bags.

Yes, Davuth said to him, it’s an extraordinary thing. With that, he turned and walked boldly into the lobby of the Paris, ignoring the drivers outside. The two girls on duty at the reception desk looked up with an instinctive alarm. Davuth gave off an energy that commanded alertness and wariness, if not a slight distaste that the person seeing him for the first time could not quite pin down. A briskness in the hands, a crisp gait that was nevertheless rarely hurried. He never put women at ease. He set down his bag and smiled, however.

“I’d like a room,” he said.

One of the girls took him up to the fifth floor.

“Have you been here before?” she asked him as they climbed the stairwells. On the higher landings the dolled-up girls parted for them sullenly.

“I don’t come down much to the city these days. My daughter’s at school and I never have the time.”

“Lucky you.”

“She’s a lovely girl.”

“Here on holiday?”

“Business.”

“Ah, I see. Business…”

They came to the fifth-floor landing and its row of tarnished doors and smell of ashtrays, and as they went down it he said, “Did you have a barang staying here recently? A young kid named Robert?”

She stopped and their eyes met in the semi-gloom near an exit light.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Maybe that wasn’t his name.”

She took out the key and continued walking to the door, which she opened quietly.

“Maybe it was Simon, his name.”

“I don’t remember all the names,” she said.

“You have a lot of young guys staying here for the girls?”

“All ages.”

“But not a lot of young barangs?”

“A fair number. They like the girls too.”

Davuth smiled.

“So it’s rumored. But you’d notice a good-looking young one.”

He closed the door behind them and threw his bag onto the bed. He went up to her and passed a ten-dollar bill into her hand.

“He hasn’t done anything wrong,” he said. “I just want to know if he was here.”

She nodded and absorbed the bill.

“Which room?”

“The one next to this.”

“Can I change rooms?”

She hesitated. “I think there might be someone in there.”

They listened, and the comical nature of the pause made them both smile. An old Chinese guy getting off with one of the spinners?

“I think it’s empty,” she said. “Let me call down and check.”

When she had done so she took him next door to the other room and let him in. He threw his bag onto the bed a second time and strode to the windows, pulled open the curtains and looked down at the boulevard alive in its evening glory. The trees glittered with a golden light. The KTV was lit up. One forgot how both Chinese and French parts of the city felt as night fell. He thanked the girl and asked her again if she remembered anything about the barang occupant of the room and then asked her, in a different tone, if she wouldn’t mind keeping this all between them. He assured her that there was no sinister reason for his asking this. It was just discretion, which benefited everyone. She agreed and he watched her slip away with a malicious satisfaction in the power of ten-dollar bills. Then he locked the door and set to searching the room on his hands and knees.

The carpets had not been cleaned in a while and yet after half an hour he had found nothing. He went through the bathroom, found nothing again, and then showered. Drying off, he lay on the bed and smoked and looked up at the yellowed furnishings. So the English barang had moved on, but to where had he moved? Davuth had refrained from asking the girl point-blank; it would make him look suspicious. Now he went down to the lobby and found that the girls had left for the night and a male clerk was there. Man to man was a little easier. He tried the ten dollars again and got the man to talk about recent arrivals and departures and soon he had found S. Beauchamp in the book but no forwarding address. The man told him to try the drivers outside. The same guys were always there.

Davuth went into the street and the drivers tossed him a few words. He lit up and puffed a bit and waited for them to calm down. He strolled over and asked if they knew the English boy. One of them said that he had taken him around a bit.

“A blond kid about twenty-eight?”

“I took him to Colonial Mansions.”

“What’s that?”

The man offered to take him there.

“Then let’s go,” Davuth said. “Is it a hotel?”

“It’s serviced apartments.”

“Fine,” Davuth cried, and patted the man on the back.

He was rather enjoying himself now.

They drove through a dry, early-winter evening with the rain now holding off. The boulevards swarming, the lights temporarily reliable and on. The rain would come later that night, but for now it was merciful. The lovely nights of winter were coming.

—

The new karaokes overflowed, the Koreans and Japanese and Chinese abundant. The tuk-tuks filled with barang families and haughty Khmer-Chinese girls in long silk dresses studiously turned away from eye contact.

He had come along that same boulevard many times thirty-five years earlier and he always remembered whenever he was there. The people alive now, the young, did not understand anything about the city they inhabited. They didn’t know its underlying nature. It was as if centuries had passed since then. In Year Zero of the Revolution that same teeming city had been almost entirely empty. The government ministries, the S-21 prison, a few posts here and there — at night it was as dark as the countryside, you could walk through it without meeting any human life. It was a city of torches and whispers. There were fires at the corners, patrols threading their way through the labyrinth. Strange to recall, he had felt very safe there. It was not unlike the village from which he had come. On sandals cut from old tires, one could walk silently, one could go unnoticed. Even the electric light of the present incarnation of the city struck him as faintly incredible, absurd. A complicated joke designed to humiliate the previous generations. When he thought of the things he had seen as a teenage soldier along those same wide streets it made him wonder if sanity was even possible in this world. The men casually shot at street corners during comatose sunlit afternoons and were taken away on carts. An eighty-year-old grocer begging for his life under the trees on Street 19, then bayoneted by teenagers. Just momentary visions glimpsed for a split second, like the symbols on playing cards. The nights when the city sank into silent darkness, seemingly unpopulated. The buildings emptied out, where they roamed and slept and played cards and shot dogs. Rumors: a foreigner being held at S-21, one of two Australian yachtsmen captured off the coast, forced into a tire on Mao Tse-tung Boulevard and burned alive.

Davuth had been attached to the M-13 camp in the jungle so he was already habituated to this system. To save you is no gain, to kill you is no loss! The blood debt! He wondered now — speeding along this capitalist boulevard — if he had ever believed in Communism. For what was Communism? The movement had begun one fine day in 1968 with the attack on Bay Daram, a few miles from his parents’ house in Battambang. It had even emerged, then, from his own region. He was only ten but news of the attack went around like wildfire. It was the first modest move of the Angkar, the first blood drawn. But the Angkar was deeper than Communism; it came out of the distant past. Under the Angkar, sleep itself was prohibited. Ever since he had had trouble sleeping. He thought of it as “rest,” as if the illegality of sleep had been established in his subconscious and could not now be uprooted. And so for the rest of his life he had been almost continuously wide awake. How many nights he and his patrol had wandered across the city hunting in the dark for traitors, for bourgeois elements, for saboteurs and trash who he already knew did not exist. They had freedom to kill whoever they wanted. If they heard a noise in an empty building they went in and killed the rats and the dogs, and sometimes an old woman sleeping on newspapers. The hunt itself was the meaning of Angkar.

The Leader had been right, cities are whores. They put on their gay makeup and forget. Davuth didn’t mind; it was the way of the world.

—

At Colonial Mansions he paused for a moment and glanced up at the cream facade. In the lobby there was no one. The receptionist gave him a cool and unwelcoming stare. It was a barang dormitory, for sure.

“I’d like to see a unit I could rent for a week.”

“We’d need a deposit,” the boy said indifferently.

Davuth agreed to it and they went up and looked at a unit on the fourth floor. He asked if the place was full at that moment.

“Ninety percent,” the boy said.

It was much more comfortable than the Paris. The barang had money. When they had left the unit Davuth stepped to the balcony alcove and looked down at the pool. The windows opposite were lit, comfortable sitting rooms and bedrooms with bright tropical curtains. Around the pool the deck chairs were empty and in it a Chinese woman, as always, swam lengths, making no sound whatsoever. A curious place. The best thing would be to book the unit for a week and take his time. He resolved to do that, then went down with the clerk and sat in the lobby café and ordered an orange juice. It was still quite early and from time to time guests and residents came in and walked up to their apartments through the swimming-pool area. He asked if he could smoke, was told that he could not, then demanded an ashtray and smoked anyway. Two hours passed. Young Korean girls came in and out, employees of some large construction company nearby, and a handful of aging barangs with Khmer girlfriends. The usual trade. He flexed his fingers and thought to himself that his daughter was right and that he really ought to give up smoking. Now was the time.

When it was clear that he was waiting for nothing he booked the unit at the Mansions, paid for it in cash and took the same tuk-tuk back to the Paris. The rain exploded over the streets. The driver asked him if he really wanted to go back to his room.

“You have a place to go?” Davuth said.

It was on Street 282, the driver said. Near the stadium.

All right, Davuth said wearily. A long time since he had enjoyed himself with anyone. Months, maybe. Now was the time for that too.

The downpours always caused the traffic to knot up and paralyze everything. They crawled through chaos toward the stadium and even on the lonely streets leading to it the vehicles were trapped in slow-motion convulsions, the surfaces suddenly turned into water. Down came the plastic wraps on the tuk-tuk but he was soon soaked anyway. He gave in to the moment. One got soaked and there was nothing to be done. At the end of Street 282 there was a darkened corner where it met the main road alongside the stadium and there on the left was a doorway with a group of men huddled under plastic ponchos. There was an entrance with a doorman holding a flashlight and roaring gutters all around.

He ran into the doorway and the doorman shone the light into his face and ushered him into a corridor. At the end of it rose a flight of steps and a single light fixed to the wall. The man told him that the power might go out at any moment but led him all the same to the stairs and swung the beam of the flashlight up them, indicating permission and normality.

Davuth shook off the rain and wiped his face and waited to regain his composure and then went up the steps to a landing plunged in darkness and stagnant heat. At its far end, reassuringly, the pink lights projected their aura of harmony and calm.

TWENTY

He went to the end of the landing and turned into a larger room where the mama-san sat with her pot of steaming tea behind a desk with a good-luck cat and a gold Buddha. The only customer in the rain, he caused a mild stir and the mama-san told him how brave he was to venture out in such filthy weather. She took his ten-dollar entrance fee and told him amicably to just wander down and look at the girls behind the glass window. They only had a dozen in that night, most of them had stayed away because of the difficulty in getting around in tuk-tuks. Take your time, she said, and went back almost immediately to her knitting. He wandered down toward the window, which was lit softly, and he saw the girls sitting on two rows of seats, one higher than the other, texting into their phones and not looking up until they saw him in front of them.

The rain was loud here and he stood there indecisively while some of them smiled at him and waved and made come-on motions with their hands. There was a minder on his side of the glass to help him with his choice. He scanned the faces one by one and he found a girl that he liked and motioned to the minder; she was a slightly plump girl with a glossy fringe. The minder went into the room and pointed to her and she got up.

Davuth went back to the mama-san and asked her how much it was.

“It’s between you and the girl,” she said flatly.

He knew it was about twenty dollars for a local for an hour. The mama-san gave him a room key and said the girl would bring towels. He could go to the room now and wait for her.

“You can even take a little more time,” she said. “There’s no other customers.”

Davuth took the key with its number tag and went back out onto the landing. His back was still soaked and his hair was dank. I must be repulsive to such a pretty girl, he thought. The rooms were at the other end, arranged around the stairwell, and he went up to the next floor and found the room. It was a stifling, tiny hotel room with a tiled floor and a wooden bed. He turned on the light in the bathroom and then the ancient AC unit above the door and then slowly took off his soaking clothes and laid them over the television. Then he sat on the bed and waited.

While he was doing this, the girl had risen from her chair behind the glass and was about to exit the room when another girl at the end of her row held up her hand and asked her if she could take the client.

“What?” the minder cried.

“I’ll give you the fee,” the other girl said to the one Davuth had chosen.

It was such a surprising offer that the girl chosen simply looked at the minder and shrugged.

“Well, all right then,” she laughed.

The minder looked over to the mama-san.

“What if the client is angry?” he whispered to both girls.

The intruder said, “He won’t mind. He won’t care. There’ll be a blackout any moment now anyway.”

There was a general burst of cynical merriment and the girls nodded and one of them said, “Try it and see if he complains. He’s probably a cheap bastard anyway.”

The replacement girl had the Thai nickname Pom, a ruse to make the Japanese men think she was Thai. There was little similarity between them and so there was a risk that the client might throw a fit but she was determined to try it anyway. She went into the bathroom and powdered her face and took one of the condoms and a towel and went back out and arranged everything with the mama-san. They were allowed not to tell management how much they obtained from a client and so it was up to them to get the most they thought they could. The Koreans and Japanese overpaid and so they were the most popular clients. Obviously, Khmers paid a lot less and consequently they were much less desirable, though they were more likely to accept a darker-skinned Khmer girl. It was why the chosen girl had relinquished her client so readily. Pom knew what she could get from a Khmer man dressed like this one and as she made her way down the corridor she made that calculation easily. She would ask him for way too much and see what he did. But there were other considerations at work. The reality was that she had recognized him. Her heart was racing and her skin had gone hot all over her face and neck. She had seen him only once before, though it was not a face one could easily forget. She came to the door and she paused and listened. He was sitting quietly in the room doing nothing. She wondered if she should wait until the lights went out, as they surely would. Then, deciding to risk it anyway, she put her hand on the handle of the door and pushed it. At that very moment, as if the gods had been listening all along, the lights did go out and there was an amused groan from the ground floor. She slipped into the room as the air con gave out and closed the door behind her and locked it. The man looked up and saw little more than a shadow carrying a folded towel with a condom placed upon it.

“Blackout,” she said and they sighed together and the mood was not at all bad between them. She put down the towel and went to the bathroom and opened the little window above the sink.

“It’s just my luck,” Davuth said, and sat there quite sadly, waiting for his small miracle to come and go.

“The girl you chose,” she said. “She got sick suddenly. Headache. So I came instead. Is it all right?”

As she had expected, he shrugged passively.

“Doesn’t make much difference now, does it?”

“I guess not!”

“What’s your name?”

“Pom.”

“It’s a Thai name.”

“But I’m Khmer. It’s just for the Japanese.”

“Everything for the Japanese,” he muttered.

She came onto the bed after a cold shower and rubbed herself dry with the bare towel. He had already done the same. His muscular body lay on the bed expectantly and he did nothing but try to see her face as she came next to him and placed her hand on his chest. He could feel how emotional she was and he tried to figure out why. But there was no explaining it. She asked him where he was from, what his name was. He didn’t lie. There was no point lying to a girl like that. They spot a lie in a second or two. They know men better than they know the backs of their own hands.

“What do you do?” she asked as she laid her head on his chest as if listening to his insides.

“I’m a policeman up in the country.”

She asked him if he was down on business and he said, as vaguely as he could, that he was. She asked what town he was from.

“Near Battambang.”

“I guess you need some entertainment,” she said.

“I need some entertainment, as you say.”

Yet he didn’t make a move, he just sat there in the dark as if thinking.

“Are you tired?” she asked after a while.

“Sure I’m tired. What does it look like?”

“It’s fifty for the hour,” she tried.

“Don’t try that with me. It’s twenty.”

“It’s fifty today. Today is a special day.”

“What’s special about today?”

“It’s blackout day — didn’t you notice?”

It took a while for the heat to come back into the room. About thirty minutes before they began to sweat and feel short of breath. That was the moment he chose to agree to her fifty and pull her on top of him.

It was not as perfunctory as she had been expecting, and she didn’t care either way. She wanted to know something about him that could not be obtained in any other way. It had not been that long since she was running alone through the sugarcane and when she had run about half a mile she had stopped and crouched and waited until the unknown figure appeared at the trench where Simon lay and calmly smoked a cigarette. Even from such a distance his face was unforgettable and when she saw it again she felt a nauseating surprise but no real astonishment.

He paid and took his shower and came back to the bed.

She said, “Where are you staying?”

He told her and even gave her his apartment number. The implication was that she could come and visit him any time she liked.

“Maybe I’ll come by then,” she said.

“It’s better than me coming here. I don’t like these places.” The slight disdain in his voice enraged her.

He rose and got dressed and she did the same. She had what she wanted, but she was not sure why she wanted it. She didn’t know yet how she was going to use it.

Fifty dollars was left on the bed.

Picking the money up, she escorted him to the stairs, where the rain was now pouring in uncontrollable torrents.

“That was very nice,” he said humbly.

“You’re welcome. Do you have a phone number I can call you on?”

“I got a new number yesterday.”

When she had taken it down she kissed him on the cheek and told him to be careful in the flooded streets, making it clear that she wouldn’t come down to the pavement with him. Davuth stumbled into the rain and saw that the tuk-tuk had patiently waited for him, the driver huddled between the plastic flaps with a soaked newspaper. That night, he slept beautifully and his dreams were not even the usual nightmares — just the elegant forms of Viking longships and the mountains of stone and wild grass through which the cataracts of Scandinavia fall like those of Hawaii or Java.

—

The next day he took the unit at Colonial Mansions and passed the morning sitting at the balcony with his smokes. The unit was furnished and there was nothing to worry about. No one remembered him from his previous visit, not even the boy who had shown him around. People were so unobservant; they missed every passing clue. By midday the Englishman had not shown up and Davuth walked instead to Vong.

The tailor was at his table and Davuth had no trouble being affable and quick-talking with him. He gave Vong a facile line about meeting a young Englishman in a bar who had recommended him.

“I’m sure you remember him,” he joked. “Blond and rather good-looking. I’m sure he throws his money around a bit.”

“It could be.”

“He calls himself Beauchamp and gets his clothes made here.”

“There’s one by that name who comes here. There are two of them, in fact.”

“I know all about it. Two of them. Were you not a little curious?”

“It’s none of my business, now that you mention it. Is it your business?”

“It could be my business.”

“Are you a detective?”

“That I am. One of them has run away—”

“With some money or some drugs?”

Davuth laughed in his homely way.

“I don’t know yet. Does our English friend have a lot of money to spend on clothes?”

“Not that much.”

“When was he last in?”

“Last week.”

“Colonial Mansions, isn’t it?”

“You know already.”

“But which unit?”

“It’s 102. You could always ask them.”

“That wouldn’t be very discreet.”

Davuth asked him what Beauchamp had ordered.

“Shirts, trousers. He wasn’t very particular.”

“He’s a nice young man, isn’t he?”

“As nice as they make them. The other one, though…”

“Yes, he’s a different kettle of fish. Still, they all look the same, don’t they?”

“They certainly do.”

“I feel I should order a shirt — just to say thank you.”

“Shall I measure you up?”

“No time. Maybe next time.”

Davuth looked quickly through the window into the street. His eyes shone a dark mahogany as the blue outer light hit then. The tailor felt that he had done something vile without realizing it, but it was too late. The detective was already on his way, cheerful and smooth. Vong watched him amble down the street without any pressing urgency. An odd bird, and a calculating look in his eye.

—

Davuth walked back to the Mansions and went up to the first floor. He walked down the line of doors until he was at 102. There he stopped for a moment, looked along the corridor and peered through the patterned lace curtains into a largely invisible room.

Lingering only for a moment, he carried on down the corridor then climbed up to the floor above and circled round to the opposite side, from where he could look down at the same door. His own unit was on the floor above this, the third, and from his own balcony he had a fair view of 102. How easy it had been. He went up to that balcony then and sat there for an hour and saw no one come or leave. But patience was one of his hard-won virtues. He had honed it during years of sadism and war. In soft and comfortable times its power was magnified tenfold. He could sit there for days if he had to, or even weeks. He was crocodilian and he rarely felt tired or bored: those states had been made alien to him long ago. And so he waited for the light in 102 to come on or the door to open or a tall and slender blond to appear on the landing, wearing the clothes of Simon Beauchamp, who was now dead and turned to dust.

TWENTY-ONE

When he did so, Davuth was not at his balcony but downstairs in the lobby, where he sat at a table by himself with a glass of Sang Som. He had asked the receptionist to go into the closed café and get him some ice for his glass and he sat there with the glass, the ice, his own bottle of Sang Som and an ashtray, placid and watchful and totally sober. The rum burned his tongue and he enjoyed its ferocity, the way it seared the inner lining of his cheeks then gave up the ghost as it slithered down his throat. The cursed rain was back and the lights around the pool were going off one by one like a city closing down for the night. He always enjoyed those moments of closure and incoming darkness and it was usually when he took to the bottle in his cold and controlled way. He was raising his glass, in fact, when Robert and Sophal came through the glass doors and swept across the lobby arm in arm. He knew at once that it was the Englishman though he was surprised to see him with a very young and attractive Khmer girl. They always managed to snag one, didn’t they? He lowered his glass and smiled at them with his eyes and they could not fail to notice him. “Good evening,” he said in English and tipped his glass as if toasting them.

“Good evening,” Robert called back and they paused for a moment before crashing through the doors into the pool area.

“So that’s what you look like,” Davuth said to himself. The boy was not as shy or furtive as he had expected, not as weak. He had no experience with the English, only a few Americans and Germans and the odd Frenchman, and most of those he had met when they were already dead. In one sense, it was the ideal way to get to know them. The dead reveal everything about themselves without any artifice, or so it seemed to Davuth.

Half an hour later they came down in their swimsuits and jumped into the uninviting water and swam to the far end, where Davuth saw they had positioned a bottle of wine. There they bobbed about drinking and laughing and caressing each other, the young in love with being young. He watched them with a detached fascination that — for a while — had nothing to do with his intentions. But, in any case, when he considered his intentions he found that he didn’t have any. He was making it up from day to day, adapting to what happened or didn’t happen, as the case might be. He could tell from their cursory glances at him (which felt distinctly downward) that he had registered in their eyes as little more than the usual country bumpkin. It enraged him for a moment but then he settled back and admitted that in a sense they had a point and there was nothing he could do about it. That’s what he was and he minded it much less than someone else might. The Revolution, at least, had taught him not to be ashamed of his origins and he kept that feeling alive day by day, decade after decade, secretly and malignantly. The girl especially had looked at him with a sudden contempt, as if he didn’t even have the right to speak up as they walked across the lobby. “Who is he?” she would have been thinking as they climbed up to 102. That bumpkin who so insolently wished them a good evening in an English he obviously didn’t speak, alone with his cheap and tawdry Sang Som, the drink of truck drivers and policemen. That little snob had not even concealed her surprise and resentment. She didn’t even know who she was really with, in all likelihood.

He left them there and went up to his apartment and later, still curious, he stepped out to the balcony and looked at the two heads in the pool. He had formed the unconscious idea that the Englishman had money locked up in his unit, money that was in some way connected to the dead American, and he was certain that he could be blackmailed or intimidated to surrender it to him without too much fuss. But all was uncertain and vague. He didn’t know either way; it was a shrewd and logical guess relative to the circumstances. He obviously had enough money for clothes at Vong and an apartment at Colonial Mansions and he had no passport. There had to be reasons for these things.

—

He made up his mind to get to know them, but in a very casual and unobtrusive way. The next day he watched them go out together and he again sat in the lobby with his bottle of Sang Som and waited for the boy to come back to the Mansions. He did so after lunch. Once again, Davuth raised his glass and because it was the second time the boy stopped and came over with a lopsided smile and cocked his head and said, “I’m sorry, do I know you?”

“No, sir,” Davuth said in his gimcrack English. “But I saw you last night with lovely lady friend.”

“You did, yes. But do we know you?”

“Me? I think not.”

“I just wondered—”

“Have a drink. I am all alone in this Mansions and always drink alone in this lobby. I have my own bottle, as you can see.”

“I don’t know,” Robert said.

“Sit and have a drink. Why not?”

There was a playful finality to those last two words and so Robert gave in, slightly curious anyway. His instinct told him that the offer was best not avoided or refused rudely. The man had level, steely eyes that gave off an indistinct heat.

“All right,” he said, “I will.”

“Please,” Davuth shouted across the room in Khmer, “one more glass for my friend.”

It was brought.

Davuth poured, and then used the tongs in the ice bucket sitting on the table next to him.

“I like mine icy cold — and you?”

“I like it cold too.”

“My name Davuth. And you?”

“Simon.”

“It’s nice American name.”

“English.”

“You holiday or business?”

“Holiday,” Robert said. Then, “Well, business too. I am thinking of living here.”

“Very nice and welcome. Well, chin.”

“Chin-chin.”

They tapped glasses and sipped.

“You look like a bright young fella,” Davuth said.

“I don’t know about that.”

“You found nice Khmer girl all right.”

“I don’t know how.”

Davuth gave him his brightest smile.

“You are young, handsome. They will love it.”

“Are you staying here?” Robert asked, to change the subject.

“I am tour guide. I have a deal to stay here.”

“A tour guide?”

“I know everything.”

“Everything?”

“If you want Angkor Wat, I can take you. Vietnam, I can take you.”

“That must be good business.”

“Yes, sir. I can take them to every place and translate for them. This is why I wait here in the lobby.”

“I see.”

Robert accepted a second shot almost at once.

Davuth said, “I wait here and they come and find me! The Americans are the best. They pay upfront — unlike the Chinese who pay downback. It’s my joke. They pay after and never happy. What about you?”

“I don’t really take tours. I’m sorry.”

“But you will change your mind one day.”

“I will?”

“You will. You will take a tour somewhere with Davuth. It’s the best one you can have. And it’s romantic for your girlfriend.”

“She probably wouldn’t find it romantic.”

“Oh, we’ll talk. I have a lot of options. Good price for you. Very romantic.”

They drank on, and Robert began to like him. He was unlike any Khmer he had met so far, rough, fast-talking, manly in his way. He seemed quite ancient although not yet out of his fifties. The eyes and their crow’s-feet had gone ancient and shriveled and yet they were also intensely alive and witty and through them Robert felt himself mocked, but gaily and without deep judgment or animosity. Davuth, he felt, was much deeper than himself because he had lived a much more dangerous life. The gift of a dangerous life: swiftness of thought, a fine capacity for hatred. You didn’t meet that type in developed areas anymore. In rural southern Italy you might, wandering the roads. You might in Serbia or the darker French towns, where strange military types still surface for a moment, veterans of wars they won’t admit to. You might come across one in the poorer islands in Greece, mending nets. But Davuth, although Robert didn’t know it, came from a recent war and it was a native one. He had come through it and he had learned how human beings worked on the inside. He looked right through Robert and into empty space and appeared unsurprised at how transparent an educated man can be, how docile and primitive and ignorant. There was no respect in his attitude at all. Davuth, for his part, had seen educated people begging for their lives from armed illiterate children by burning roadsides and he had not forgotten the looks on their faces, the way they had tried to explain why their palms had no blisters. It was one of those pathetic things you never forget. The children would listen, uncomprehending, then shoot them in the head with Kalashnikovs and laugh as the bodies went into convulsions. All that education and restraint for nothing. A demented child can blow all that classical music and Marx and mathematics out of you in a split second, just because he feels like watching your convulsions. Look to your own salvation, the Buddha said. He wouldn’t look out for yours, there was just yourself and your inner compass and the ability to plan ahead.

“All the same,” he said, “I can fix thing for you around town if you tell me what you need. I’m a fixer as well as a tour guide. Everyone here needs a fixer — I mean every barang like yourself.”

“You can give me your card if you like.”

“They’re up in my room. But I can give you my number.”

Robert hesitated for a moment but took it down anyway. There was no harm in it and one did need a fixer. It would be doing a hard-up local a favor if he could ever afford to do it. What would it cost, anyway? Fifty dollars? He could do that at some point. He even asked Davuth point-blank now what a trip down to the Mekong near the Viet border would be and the guide poured him another drink and just said that he could give him sixty for the day and his meals and all would be fine with him. It wasn’t much, he added, to take the girl on a romantic trip and there was a temple down there that no one knew about, the temple of Phnom Bayong, near the village of Kirivong. They could hike there for hours and look down on the Mekong and feel like they had come somewhere different.

Robert began to agree with him, though outwardly refusing.

“I’ll run it by the girl,” he said.

“I think that girl — that girl will say yes.”

The Englishman thanked him for the drinks — it was far too much — and said he might see him later.

“You might see me later,” Davuth said. “In fact, I’m sure of it.”

“Then I will.”

Robert went up to his room, drew the curtains and lay on the bed in a slight stupor. He hadn’t realized that Sang Som was so strong even with ice. Despite the AC he felt hot and damp and something in the chance encounter had rattled him. The fingers, perhaps, fat and powerful and elegantly assured. The eyes full of humor and doubt. An hour later, he went to meet a Vietnamese businessman he was giving lessons to and didn’t return to Colonial Mansions until nightfall. This time it was Sophal who was waiting for him in the lobby and he told her about the tour guide he had met there a few hours earlier.

“It was the same guy from last night.”

She frowned and there was a sudden anxiety in her voice.

“Him?”

“Looked a bit rough to you?”

“He looked like a con man. I wouldn’t talk to him, no.”

“Not at all,” Robert protested. “He’s a riot. You should meet him.”

“I don’t want to meet him.”

“I’m sure he wants to meet you. He suggested taking us on a tour.”

“You said no, I hope?”

“Of course I said no. But he’s sort of funny. I quite like him.”

“Don’t even think about it!”

They went up to the room and made love. The heat of the day seeped through the flimsy curtains and made them feel washed out and spectral, but the thread of the conversation begun lightheartedly in the lobby was not broken and sure enough it resumed eventually.

“I said no to the tour, as I said. But all the same—”

She said, “What is he doing hanging out in the lobby like that? It doesn’t feel right.”

“He says he’s fishing for clients.”

She snorted. “That’s one thing to dislike.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Remember, you’re not local. You don’t pick up on these things.”

“What things?”

“The vibe. He looked at me—”

“He’s just a horny old man. I’m sure they all look at you like that. We can’t hold that against him, can we?”

“You think I want to be holed up in a car with that for hours on end?”

“I suppose not,” he admitted reluctantly.

Moreover, he was not sure why he wanted to go on that tour now. It just seemed like a fairly good idea for a romantic weekend, but more than that it was an added layer to his disguise, a distraction from the question which he now imagined was turning inside Sophal’s mind about his identity. The more normal things they did together, the less she might brood about Robert and his loose ends. This was how he was thinking, in any case, though it was more a blind probing than a train of thought. He thought it would be clever to kick up a little dust and commotion because of late he had begun to feel a quiet suspicion in her. It was her instinct cutting in and the only way to foil instinct is to spoil, entertain and divert. She lay now against his chest with her hand resting on the area of the heart and he could feel her aroused attentiveness and wariness. He was correct. Sophal had bristled at the mention of a tour in the east with a man like that and she began to wonder at once why he had suggested it. His breath still smelled of that cheap rum and it was obvious who he had been drinking with. Why, though, would a man like Simon sit down and drink rum with a man like the tour guide? What would they have to talk about?

How annoying men were, there was always this collusion which even they didn’t understand.

“You should be more careful,” she said quietly. “You shouldn’t talk to strangers so easily.”

“Why not?”

“You just shouldn’t. It’s quicksand.”

“Quicksand?”

“That’s what my father says. It’s quicksand for naive boys.”

“Oh, I’m not a naive boy.”

“You’re not as naive as you seem, but you’re more naive than you think. That’s what matters. If I can see that, so can Mr. Tour Guide.”

“Come off it,” he sighed, smiling to himself. “It’s not that easy. I’m not that easy.”

“You’re wrong — it’s that easy. You should stay away from him.”

“Bollocks,” he muttered.

She didn’t quite get Britishisms.

There’s a long road that goes east to Vietnam and at the end is a mountain with a temple and views over the Mekong. He wanted to go see it and make her see it too. It was surely feasible. He turned and looked through the open door into the living room, which was now almost dark, the lights of the swimming pool transforming the drawn curtains into a square of dark gold. A wave of nostalgia came over him and he thought of his parents going quietly about their honorable and unrelenting lives in a council house in Bevendean at the edge of the Downs. It was six in the morning there perhaps and his father might well be already in his surprisingly fertile English garden cursing the onset of frost. They ate their porridge together listening to the Today program on Radio 4. He had sent postcards by now to calm them and keep them, as it were, on his side. The postcards would be on the mantelpiece, displayed for some reason. So his disappearance was not yet total and his parents were not yet looking for him and lying awake at night wondering if he was dead. They were maybe worried about him leaving his job and soon the school and his English girl would be dropping by to ask them if they knew anything. They were reticent people who understood the laws of discretion and it was possible they would fend off those questions artfully. He didn’t know. His mother, certainly, would not be convinced by his assurances. She knew how unhappy he was. The first thing that would emerge in her mind when she woke would be her son. Just then, as his eyes were adjusting to the dark and just as he was imagining his mother rising into a cold English dawn, a shadow crossed the gold square and stopped for a moment and seemed to look into the room. Then it moved on and he heard the curious whale-like snorts of the swimmers who always did laps at that hour. He rolled over and his mouth was dry.

“What’s wrong?” Sophal said.

“It’s nothing. I was just thinking about my mother.”

“Does she know where you are?”

“I sent her a postcard—”

She suddenly felt awake again. Did people still send postcards?

“It’s better than nothing, I suppose. If you disappeared tomorrow would you send me a postcard?”

“No.”

“I knew it. I’d use telepathy.”

He thought, Would I really not send one?

They went out later and had dinner at a Viet place called Ngon near the Victory Monument, an open-air place with frangipanis and fans and tables with bowls of spices and stone mortars. They ate bowls of boun with vermicelli and fried nem and chilled coconuts with the tops lopped off. There was nothing more to say for the evening. Finally he did say, as if it didn’t matter and he had not been thinking about it for a while, “You know, I think we should go to Phnom Bayong after all. Your father will approve.”

Along the river an hour later the lamps burned in a soft and solitary splendor, their stationary light enabling the eye to see the motion of the unlit waters below. They walked arm in arm underneath them and from the river came the sweet humidity that raised their spirits and made Sophal want to empty a bottle of vodka. High clouds soared above the city in monochrome, hammer-headed and seeming to swim like sharks upward toward a dimly present moon. At the horizon the pink flashes of lightning silent against the same clouds. There was no rain yet and the young girls sat with their boys in the gloom eating ice creams and watching them pass. The grass sloping down to the river made him dreamy too. He told Sophal about the river his father used to take him boating on. The very evocation of it in words made it materialize anew in his mind, from where it had been absent for a very long time — for a period, in fact, that felt emotionally like centuries. The river, the home country and its dull and heavy memories. The river was called the Ouse and it ran through the Sussex countryside from the village of Piddinghoe down to the sea at Newhaven. And, long ago, his father took him sailing on a small catamaran to show him how. The river ran between mud and chalk banks and in high summer there was a feeling of death and stillness upon it, abandoned tankers rusting in the shallows, the dragonflies playing over it just as they did here. The cemeteries dated from the Middle Ages, from the age of Stephen’s War, “when God and his angels slept.” The river smelled of salt and stewing algae. If only he had known it had been a premonition of Phnom Penh. Both places had an atmosphere of decay but the decay of each was different. The English kind was the sweet torpor at the end of a long and successful innings; it was recent and slightly weary. It was a kind of refusal to live violently and intensely. It was smugly moral. The Khmer decay, on the other hand, was long-standing but the Khmers themselves were quickly emerging out of it. There was no weariness or old age about them. At least that was his way of interpreting it. Perhaps mistakenly. The Khmers didn’t have time to lecture either themselves or others. They were young and wounded, but their wounds were so deep that they could be ignored for a while. Their sadness was of a different kind, too. It was from the 1970s, a time that every fifty-year-old could remember vividly. It was the sadness of generations which had entirely lost their youth for nothing and who had no choice but to forget. The sadness of England, however, lay precisely in her tremendous memory, in her refusal to forget anything. Increasingly, and now definitively, he felt that his affinity lay with the Khmers. They were indefinably alive. In their faces, in their eyes, there was the constant surprise of life itself, that horrifying and sweet wonder. Their ancientness took a different form from his own. It was almost as if it was physical and unconscious, thousands of generations compressed into gesture and speech patterns and quick understandings. They were more subtle than the English, but they were less cerebral. They were more alive, but less consciously joyous or boisterous. For centuries, and even now, the whites wanted to improve them, drag them into a future which for the whites themselves no longer existed. But the project would always fail. The pale ones would never understand the real substance. They floated like boatmen on the surface of the Khmer pond, the glassy, fragile consciousness of this race whom the whites despised and whom the most philanthropic among them subconsciously resented.

As his father’s catamaran sailed quietly down to the open sea, he used to feel a kind of death wish, the urge to keep sailing across the Channel toward Dieppe and another life as a crook. It was as if when you didn’t know what to do with your life, a river could save you by making you purely unconscious. Even the way his father taught him nautical knots seemed to be a silent preparation for something furtive in the future, and his father was aware of it. When they were alone out at sea riding waves, his father asked him about his school and his friends, and everything that Robert said in reply to these questions merely served to illustrate how hopelessly alone and isolated he was. Nor did it seem that anything could be done about it. He was a lonely kid and his teachers often remarked upon the fact. He sometimes missed school altogether and went walking through the woods until it grew dark and he had to make his way home. He always lied about the reason for his lateness. “You’re a funny little bugger,” his father would say, and his bafflement was tenderly neutral. Looking back on it now, it seemed to Robert that everything had been a sign pointing to a future liberation far from his own home — because already then, all those years ago, he had been in the peculiar situation of not loving that home but of feeling that it didn’t suit him at all and never would. And so it had turned out.

TWENTY-TWO

Robert and Sophal parted ways by the Psar Rus and he headed back down to the river in a quiet mood, eventually turning along 106 and walking up in the drizzle alongside the lawned gardens. To the right, by shambolic tin walls and shaggy trees, the girls stood at the corners waiting for people like him and men slept inside waiting tuk-tuks as if the night was already over. Higher up the street turned to rubble and grit and litter and the dogs stood there watching him, assessing his strengths and weaknesses. An alley swung to the right toward 102 and as he passed into it he saw a young woman ahead of him picking her way gingerly through the long oblong puddles and scattered refuse from the day market. Thrown together inside the claustrophobic alley they walked a few yards apart until she turned left at the large trees and into the pool-like darkness around them and up toward the golden lights of the Mansions. He hung back a little to let her ascend the steps and then followed her into the lobby, where she didn’t stop at the reception desk, breezing past into the corridor that led to the stairwell.

He went the opposite way, up to his apartment, but on the first floor he stopped midway and waited for her to reappear on the floors above him. Something about her was unusual. Not the shiny black dress or the heels, nor the tight white summer blouse and the careful pinning of the hair. It was that something about her was not unfamiliar.

When she did appear it was on the third floor. Her hand was on the rail and then she stopped as well, halfway down the landing, and she saw him standing below her, looking up. When their eyes met he recognized her and she him and she flinched and stepped back from the rail, but not entirely out of view. Sothea, for her part, was astonished more than anything else and she didn’t know what to do but go forward until she was at Davuth’s door. Robert turned toward his own door, unlocked it and hung back, wanting to change his mind and go up and speak to her.

He couldn’t think of any conceivable reason that she had appeared out of nowhere in his own building. He glanced back up at the third floor but she had slipped from view.

Feeling rash, he decided to go up and find her. Once on the third floor, however, he found himself in an empty corridor with no Sothea. He walked down it slowly and peered through the windows of each unit and as he did so he felt a sickening giddiness and inertia. Here was a person who could expose him easily, but whom he could expose as well. And if Sothea was there, wasn’t Simon likely to be there, too? Perhaps even in one of these units on the third floor!

There was only a faint echo of old Chinese music coming from one of these units and he went down to the ground floor and out into the street to wait for her. He went across the street and sat on the bags of cement that were stacked outside the Korean construction site and waited for some time until it was late enough for the motodop drivers to sullenly drive off empty-handed. The long wait began and as one o’clock came he heard, as if hours in advance of themselves, cocks crow in the gloom behind the embassy. The silent lightning kept him company, but even so Sothea did not reemerge until well after three. She was obviously still shaken and nervous because as she stood at the top of the steps she looked up and down Street 102 and when she saw that it was empty she started off down the same alley through which she had come a few hours earlier.

He followed her, almost in disbelief, and they walked briskly onto the long, humid lawn bristling with crickets. She slipped into this darkness so effectively that he could barely see her until they came out on the far side. There was a bar there with a few drunken old Frenchmen sitting outside on cane chairs with their women and Sothea darted to a corner just behind the market, not looking behind but seeming to know that all was not well. He caught up to her as they turned into the smaller street and when he was a few feet away she turned and saw him and her eyes went wide with horror and she began to run. He called out, “No, wait!” and ran after her and to his surprise she relented almost at once because she couldn’t run in her heels.

She slowed and then stopped and turned a second time, and this time she was composed and cold and ready to hit back.

“It’s all right,” he said, and held up his hands, and she saw that he was not nearly as angry as she had expected.

They took each other in for a while and then she sat down on the curb and he sat down as well and he felt the sweat massing on the palms of his hands. He had prepared nothing to say and now that he had to say something he couldn’t find any words at all. It was pointless demanding explanations, they both knew what had happened. Moreover, he knew that Simon had done all the planning and the execution. She had had nothing to do with it. Finally he said, “So where is Simon?” and left it at that.

“I don’t know,” she said.

“I know he’s at Colonial Mansions — I followed you from there.”

“He’s not there.”

“I think he is. I need to know which apartment he’s in.”

“No, it’s someone else. Simon and me broke up.”

“Then where did he go?”

She shook her head and there was something final about it that was very real.

“So you really don’t know?” he said.

“Maybe he’s dead.”

“What about my money? What about my passport?”

“I dun know about that.”

“You must have been with him when he spent the money.”

“He spent some…We spent some — I am sorry.”

He suddenly flew into a small repressed rage.

“You two — you really fucked me over.”

“Yes. It was bad thing.”

“So now you say it was a bad thing.”

It wasn’t even really my money, he thought.

“I think you better make merit,” he said, half joking.

“Yes, you right. It was bad thing.”

“It was bad thing and now we’re here in the same city.”

“Yes, it crazy.”

“Is that all you can say?”

“I said it crazy.”

“You think it’s just crazy and that’s that?”

“Yes, it crazy.”

“Then it’s OK, it’s just crazy and not, you know, evil or malicious or anything really bad?”

She shrugged and looked down at her feet and soon he calmed down and it was he who felt sorry for being a bully. He ought to have known — it was a small country, you ran into people again quite quickly, and Phnom Penh was small as well, for all its secrets.

It was Simon he needed to find. But then again, did he really need to find him now? What would he do?

“I see,” he ended up saying, and his hands went limp.

She, however, roused herself and began to get up.

“I’ll walk with you,” he said.

They went slowly through the dead city and he asked her what she was doing now. She looked a lot more elegant than she had upriver, more composed and in command of herself, and she said she was working in a club and living with a friend of her mother’s in Toul Kork.

“Why were you at Colonial Mansions?” he said.

“I have a friend there. You know what I mean.”

“It’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

“Lot of people live there.”

“Yes, but still…”

It was vexing, but he couldn’t push the issue. She strode on ahead of him and he had to quicken his feet to keep up with her.

“Where are you going now?” he said.

“Home.”

“But — when was the last time you talked to Simon?”

“Some time ago. I not gonna see him again.”

“You can’t know that.”

“Yes, I know.”

“But if you see him—”

She let him come up level with her and she looked at him carefully and she felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t tell him the truth. She had felt sorry for him when she saw him at the river house, so lost and clueless.

“What?”

“Well, I want my stuff back.”

She sneered, “You never get it back. Get new stuff.”

“Can’t you help me get it back?”

“No.”

“Maybe I’ll go to the police then.”

Finally she stopped.

“Maybe,” she said, “the police are already near you. Did you know that?”

“Why shouldn’t I go to them?”

“I’ll say you liar. You won’t go to them — they are after you.”

“They are? Why are they after me?”

“I don’t know, do I? I think they are.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

He was bluffing and they both knew it. She suddenly stepped into the middle of the street and raised her hand — she had seen a motodop far off under the glistening wet trees.

Then, as if relenting, she turned back to him.

“Where you stay?” she said.

“At the same place we were. The Colonial.”

She seemed immensely surprised, though it had been obvious enough.

“You better leave there,” she said adamantly.

“Why should I?”

“I said you better leave. I’m giving you advice.”

“I won’t leave.”

“All right.”

The motodop swept up and, almost without stopping, scooped her up onto the backseat where she sat sidesaddle and flashed him a parting look before the bike turned and roared away toward the boulevard. She stared at him as it did, and she smiled and waved and there was a strange innocence and fatalism in both the smile and the wave. It was as far as he was going to get with her, even if he did see her again. He gave up and walked back to the Mansions, defeated by her agility, and went up to his apartment and stewed in his brooding uncertainty for a long time, smoking cheroots and eating pistachios as he often did late at night. He walked about the room spitting the shells aimlessly and he circled around the great and ominous idea that his enemy was only a few yards away from him on the third floor, incredible as it seemed. Simon, asleep on a bed identical to his own and under the same roof. But it was not clear what he should do. He could ignore him and they could carry on with their exchanged identities for as long as they needed. Or he could go up now and confront him and they could have it out and bring it to an end and go back to being who they were really were. He could get his passport back and return to Elmer and nothing would be said about it. He could do that, but as soon as he understood that he could do it, he didn’t want to. It was just that he was forced to. He couldn’t ignore Simon for long. They would meet in the street, word would get around and everything would be ruined. It wasn’t much that would be ruined, but it was something he had created by and for himself and he didn’t want to let it go so easily. He began to feel agitated and paranoid the more he thought about it, and soon he had wandered into the kitchen and picked up a knife from one of the drawers. He wrapped it in a tea towel and slipped outside onto the landing. Then he went to the stairwell and up to the third floor. He then went along the third-floor landing, past the flowering balconies with their French-style iron tables, and past the series of darkened and curtained windows where not a single light was on. He had a feeling that one of these doors would suddenly snap open and a confused and sleepy Simon would stick his head out and he would have him — for a moment — at his mercy. But since he didn’t know which door it was, he could only pass it, and then pause by the stairwell at the far end and feel his hand shaking. The sweat dripped onto the floor and a cloud of moths crazed by the landing lights danced around his head while he collected his thoughts and realized that he had better go back down and replace the knife in its drawer. He locked his door and turned off the lights then sat by the window and looked up at the third floor. But then again, maybe he had leaped to an absurd and exaggerated conclusion.

Sothea — he knew nothing about her. Perhaps she had told the truth.

That bitch, he thought more calmly.

The following day, when he called Sophal, he told her that they ought to leave the city as soon as possible, even if it was only for a few days. In fact, having gotten up late, he went down to the lobby for his coffee and found Davuth almost at once. The policeman was dressed in a pale blue shirt and he looked much more handsome than he had the day before.

TWENTY-THREE

“I’ve thought it over,” Robert said as he sat down opposite Davuth and ordered a bagel and cream cheese with his coffee. The policeman looked up from his paper calmly and there was a faint merriment in his eyes, an unflappable disdain and patience. He knew at once that he had him. Robert fumbled with his words and they tumbled out too quickly. The sun distressed his eyes and he felt a headache coming on. “I’ve decided that I’d like to take you up your offer to go to Phnom Bayong. Can you give me a decent price? I’d pay you up front if you could bring it down a bit — I know you can. Can’t you?”

“I said sixty, didn’t I?”

“Yes you did.”

“So how much would you like me to bring it down by?”

“What about forty?”

Davuth was drinking a tall, ice-filled Coke through a straw and the crushed ice burbled as he sucked on it now.

“I don’t like bargaining about my prices,” he said coolly, looking Robert in the eye. “It’s not what I usually do.”

“Of course. But the thing is — my girlfriend and I are a bit hard up right now. However, we might need someone later on too. I mean—”

“I see what you mean. I like you, Simon. I’ve enjoyed our talks. So it’s fine by me if we say fifty. Can you do fifty?”

“I suppose I can.”

“Fifty is for a whole day. And there is a strong possibility that we will get stuck down there for a night, in which case I will not charge you any more than fifty.”

“Stuck?”

The policeman grinned and opened his palms. “The Mekong is flooded at this time of year. It’s a floodplain. We’ll have to take a boat part of the way.”

Robert’s face fell. “Oh, a boat. I hadn’t quite bargained on a boat.”

“Of course, the boat will be extra. Boats are not cheap.”

“That rather throws a wrench in the works then.”

“It’s all right. I have a friend down there who can throw in the boat. He owes me a favor.”

“Well, if you say so…”

It didn’t seem quite right and Robert was about to cancel the whole thing, but then he thought of his desperation to get out of the city now and he nodded and went along with it. It didn’t seem particularly advisable to owe something to a man like Davuth, but now there was little choice.

“If the water rises we might get cut off. We might have to spend a night down there. Or we might get back too late and have to spend a night in Takeo.”

Robert said he didn’t really know where that was.

“Never mind. You’re not the guide! I know where it is and I know where we can stay if we have to.”

Takeo. The word had a dismal ring to it.

“You seem to be saying,” Robert ventured, “that it would be better to spend a night in Takeo and make it a two-day affair.”

“That, in fact, is what I would recommend.”

“But we can’t afford that, because that would make it a hundred dollars.”

Davuth smiled again. “I might be able to give you a special break. But you pay for my hotel that night and gas for the next day.”

Since that was reasonable, Robert agreed.

“It’s not very much,” the policeman went on affably. “Just a few more dollars. I can give my time for you and your lady friend.”

“I didn’t realize there would be a boat, though. I hate boats.”

“It’s not a long ride in the boat. You and your girl will enjoy it. Unless it rains!”

“It will rain.”

“Then you can sing in the rain.”

“Sing in the rain?”

Davuth laughed and his head rolled back a little.

“Simon, have you seen a series called Vikings? It’s on HBO.”

The Englishman seemed irritated.

“No, not yet.”

“Ah, it is very good. They terrorize the Christians and have human sacrifices. They shave the sides of their heads. But you know they are good guys. They are like a loud football team.”

“Vikings?”

“Yes, it is barang history. I thought about it a lot.”

“I can’t believe you watch HBO.”

“I found it in the market in Pursat!”

“It’s amazing what you can find in the market in Pursat.”

“Everything.”

“Well, never mind about Vikings. When d’you think we can leave for Takeo?”

“Tomorrow morning will be sunny. No rain.”

Robert thought it over. Then he called Sophal and they talked. She sulked, but it was clear that her previous opposition to the idea had somewhat abated. She could sense that he wanted it and finally she agreed. “I’ll have to tell my father right now,” she said. “He won’t be thrilled.” He closed the phone triumphantly and said to Davuth, “You’re on. Let’s get out of here early. Say six?”

“Any time you like.”

The rest of the day Robert spent swimming at Le Royal, where he lay low, ordering sandwiches from the bar and drinking tonics with lemon, apprehensive at the idea of running into Simon or Sothea. He was the aggrieved party but now he had no wish to see them at all; it would be an unpleasant scene anyway and nothing good would come of it. Far better to let sleeping dogs lie and for all their cards to fall where they might. He no longer cared. He didn’t even care about his passport because if he ever needed a passport again he had resolved to simply go to the embassy on Street 240 and say he had lost his. But in the meantime he was Simon, and Simon had an easy life. Simon had time on his hands and did not worry about the clock. He had spent his whole life not working so he was used to this regal idleness. He took it in his stride.

As he did laps in the pool he eyed the rich barangs dozing on the loungers and he felt that in some way he belonged in their company. It was not a bad life out here when you got a little cash rolling. There were, in any case, far worse lives out there. After a while, it became sinister, the soft edges, the senses of timelessness, the lack of struggle. You went to seed quite quickly, but by the same token you didn’t mind as much. You looked in the mirror less and less and, in fact, you thought about others less and less. These were positive developments. But you couldn’t escape the going to seed. It was mental in the first place, which meant that it couldn’t be corrected. You woke, Robert continued thinking, every morning in the beautiful heat to the sound of the koel birds and you took your coffee in the sun among the tanagers. You drifted through the days and the nights and you forgot about the European Union and the council tax and the first gray hairs in your brows and the emerging sadness in the eyes. Or rather than forget them you failed to remember them anymore. Here it was a leaping from one hour to the next, and inside those hours were all the pleasures you needed and which elsewhere were so much harder to obtain.

When the day died away he dried off and roamed the streets as he usually did, stopping on corners in the dusk to gobble down prahok and cold beers and, on Street 130, the same fresh oysters he had enjoyed on the terrace of the Dutch painter. He went to the cinema and watched a ghost epic with screaming teenagers and old women who covered their eyes when the phantoms burst onto the screen. Afterward, he was less spooked and unsettled. The rain, the gutters racing. He went back to the Viet cafés and took a sweet Vietnamese coffee with condensed milk and smoked until his eyes watered and he felt the supreme, stationary happiness of which the many bodhisattvas have spoken.

TWENTY-FOUR

He didn’t see anyone on his way back to his apartment and that night he slept with a generic Ambien and a bottle of gin by the bed. In the end, he didn’t touch the bottle and his dreams were logical and free of menace. It was always England in his Eastern dreams and by now he had come to accept that if he did not go back they would be of England for the rest of his life. And so: he came up to a farm called Eddington on the crest of the hill above his grandmother’s house — it was said to be named after Alfred the Great’s stirring victory over the Danes — and looked down at the Brighton racetrack in the distance, the place that Graham Greene had immortalized, and the Bevendean council houses with their sloping gardens of rhubarbs and runner beans and the cornflowers and poppies that had frothed up around the fields of wheat. He always came here in moments of crisis. He looked out and saw chalk paths — brilliantly white — cut into the grass and the stiles dividing the fields. And there was a man striding along the hill, his black coat flapping about his legs and some kind of crazy tam-o’-shanter on his head. The man came to a stop and then looked at him and Robert shaded his eyes and, for no reason, the light outside was inside his head and he heard larks high above the fields, that thin, warbling, continuous sound that he knew from childhood and that was, in a sense, always inside him as well. He looked up, at the broken and gaping roof, and as he did so a cloud moved across it and the sun dimmed—

In reality, his eyes opened and he heard something beating against the shutters — little wings — and he thought, Eddington, isn’t that where the king fought the Vikings? So it’s the Vikings!

He packed for a four-day trip, for who knew how long it would really last. In a sense the longer it lasted the better. He took his new shirts and a pair of swimming trunks he had bought for a dollar in the Psar and a banded straw hat from the same place. It only made him realize how tremendously little he owned in this world. He glanced up at a clock. It was five thirty and he had time for a coffee in the lobby and even a swim if he wanted, and yet in the end he had just the coffee and took it out onto the front steps to wait for Davuth and Sophal. The weather had changed for the better, just as the guide had said it would. He sat and sipped his coffee and laid his bag next to him. A blue sky emerged. Construction workers filed through the clear, dustless alleys and their feet were almost soundless. Fifteen minutes later Sophal arrived in a tuk-tuk with a small traveling bag and a large hat and when their eyes met it was a moment of peacefulness and reassurance. She asked one of the Colonial Mansions boys to bring her out a coffee and she sat down next to him and they soaked up the cool while the street came into definition. There was an apprehension just before the expected appearance of their curiously domineering guide, and within it they were thrown closer, like children about to be reprimanded.

“You seem nervous,” she said. “Are you anxious to leave?”

“I am. I don’t know why.”

“You shouldn’t be so anxious. It’s just an escape.”

“Yes, and it was my idea—”

She nudged him and said, “Yes it was, and now we’re stuck with it!”

But somehow it wasn’t entirely his idea. He began to feel foreboding and doubt; when the redoubtable guide appeared at long last, Robert felt an immense relief but also an even greater uncertainty. They got up and they shook his hand and Davuth looked them both rather searchingly in the eye and asked if they had slept well.

—

Davuth himself had risen early and prepared himself meticulously. He had put his rooms in order and left everything spare and neat. He had crammed the bag with the money he had taken from the barang’s car that night into the apartment safe, and when he recounted it now he was surprised to find that he had spent so little of it. He had made himself a coffee in the unit’s kitchen then gone outside to sip it, looking down at Robert’s door. It gave him a feeling of delicate power.

He had become, over the years, remarkably attuned to the fear in others. As he opened the back doors for them now and they got into the car he could smell it on them — and yet it was not a conscious fear, it was more an anxiety that they were being taken somewhere they didn’t know. It was strange, indeed, how human beings liked to be taken places they didn’t know. It was the impulse that lay behind a lot of otherwise inexplicable events. He thought this, at least, as he drove smoothly and quite slowly through the still-sleeping city. The air was like spring in a northern country. As they passed the lovely train station he saw birds rising and then falling from the roofs in wave-like formations. In the public gardens the frangipanis stood stock-still and cool like giant storks, exuding an atmosphere of composure and haughtiness. Farther out, the traffic was beginning and he went more quickly; the dust was quiescent. His two young passengers lay back on the seat and watched the grinding suburbs roll by. It was the same road they had taken to Phnom Chisor that day, the same factories and dusty verges and the fields opening up to vistas of sugar palms. Yet it looked completely different. Great pools in the paddies reflected a cloudless sky.

They passed Ta Phrom and pressed on until they were at the great roadside brick structures known as Prasat Neang Khmau, “Black Lady” in Khmer. Davuth parked under some trees and they got out in the delicious sparkling air and walked over to the two towers. He told them, with an air of confidence, that the name referred to the goddess Kali.

“Tenth century,” he said, smiling and leading them right up to the brick, upon which he laid a hand. “Splendid!”

They walked around the towers while Davuth smoked and watched them with a jovial expression. Like them, he felt the clear and dry air as something fresh and new, perhaps a harbinger of the rainy season’s imminent end. In the secrecy of his own thoughts he had not yet decided anything. He had no plan whatsoever, he had resolved merely to see what happened moment by moment, but this very plan — or nonplan — felt so right, and so inevitable, that he went along with it happily. So he smoked and sat by the dry road and watched the longhorn cattle in the fields glowing cream in the sun and he felt at peace with himself and with everything that was going to happen from now on.

Sophal took some pictures of Robert standing by the towers and they then wandered around the bright modern temple next to them.

“It’s better now,” she murmured. “I feel better. It’s so dry in the sun. I’m glad I came.”

“See?”

“I should have trusted you — Mr. Tourist.”

“You should have. I know best.”

“No, but it’s OK. Sometimes you do.”

It was strange, to her, that the early hours of a day could bring a new magnetic charge. As if a magnet had swept across the earth rearranging secret filings inside all living things. You had to be out in the countryside to feel it. Your senses were aware of it; you felt an almost appalling calm. The moments were pure pleasure, ticking away like the drops of a water clock. It was then that the boy to whom you were drawn came closer, suddenly filling all of your consciousness.

She was swept by a wave of accepting love, though she was not sure if that was what it was. Her father always said that in this traumatized country no one ever loved. He said it was a sentimental country with no love. No empathy, no trust. But she was beginning to disbelieve it. The generations change, she thought as she tasted slightly bitter iron dust on her lips and smelled woody incinerators from distant and invisible fields. The sun’s glare made her quiver and blink and feel wonderfully alive. The generations change and love comes back into a people, even into a people that has been raped. Suddenly, one morning, it happens — the atoms shift, the animal life reasserts itself quietly and by some miracle life goes back to what it was meant to be. It happens inside the heart where no one can see it. The crucible comes alive again and there is a stirring inside the once-cold ashes. It is lovelessness that is short-term and narrow and destined not to endure because it has nowhere to go. If life is a stream, it is the dam made of rubbish and twigs. It cannot last. It breaks, twig by twig, and the movement begins again because it has to. There is nowhere else for it to go. Life moves.

She glanced over at Davuth sitting with his smoke and she saw the tension in his shoulders, the brooding droop of the head. There it was, the old world, the lovelessness. It was pathetic and dry and static and out of that immobility came a quiet hatred that was mysterious even to itself. Was that evil, then, in the Buddhist sense? She had exchanged barely a word with him in their shared language. It was as if he was forcing her to speak English with him. He’s not a real guide, she thought.

They drove on and by midday they were in Takeo. At this time of year it was a riverine town with a quay and boats coming and going across the vast Mekong floodplain. By this seasonal waterfront a row of stalls had been set up alongside the jetties and here the pilots of the longtails sat in the shade waiting for infrequent customers. Behind them spread a desultory, ramshackle town with rows of shophouses and first-floor balconies with plastic columns. There was a messy, chaotic market where the butchers were in full swing. Traffic circles with sad lawns baked in the sun.

They stopped at the quay. They got out and Davuth sauntered down to the pilots. He bargained with them with surly charm. A boat until dusk. So he did not, after all, know a man here with a boat. Unconcerned, Sophal and Robert lay on the wall and sunbathed in the glare of the dirty water that lapped below them. The floodplain looked like a limitless lake, an island sea with no visible farther shore. Its water was smooth and flat, rippled by slow, gentle swells. Here and there the tops of submerged trees popped up, crowned by feathery swarms of white birds. The upper branches were clotted with nests.

This great body of surly, placid liquid created its own dark light, within which the floating beds of water plants and their flowers shone with a muted malevolence. The men who piloted the longtails looked over at the young couple on the wall with a soulful cynicism. City kids, easy money. On the far side of the waters lay the mysterious ancient town of Angkor Borei and the flooded temple mountain of Phnom Da, which, as Davuth had said, could only be reached by boat during the rains. These were the points of interest which the occasional barang visitors invariably wished to see, and once or twice a week each one of them made the eerie trip across the floodplain with a group in straw hats. Robert now gazed out at this featureless prospect and his heart sank a little. It looked like it would be a long and uncomfortable ride, to say the least. He stroked her warm shins and caressed the backs of her ankles and he could see that she was thinking the same thing.

“It won’t be so bad,” he muttered, forcing himself to smile.

But he didn’t know. He didn’t even know what they were going to see over there. Davuth, as far as he could see, was haggling with the boatman.

In fact, he was telling him that he was ready to embark immediately and he was trying to put him off.

He glanced at his watch and said, “No, we’ll leave at three.”

“Why so late? It’ll be dark when you come back.”

“It doesn’t matter. We need to have lunch. The young lady insisted on it.”

He looked up at the upper-class girl on the wall and grumbled.

“All the same, sir, it’ll be dark and it’s not good to be out there in the dark.”

“Maybe, but there we are. I can pay a little extra.”

But Davuth was thinking fast.

“We might even stay out there tonight. In which case, it doesn’t matter. You can come back at once.”

This sweetened the deal.

“All right, at three,” he cried.

He shook a few hands and it was a deal.

He went off to the wall and told Robert and Sophal that under no circumstances would the stubborn vermin agree to leave before three o’clock. There was nothing he could so. He threw up his hands and laughed.

“I suggest we go and have lunch near the market. We can pass three hours easily enough.”

“But it’ll be dark when we come back,” Sophal said at once.

“He said it wasn’t a problem. We also get to see the sunset. There’s nothing better than the sunset from Phnom Da. In fact, it’s the whole point of going to Phnom Da in the first place.”

“Then I suppose we could,” Robert sighed.

“Or we could leave tomorrow.”

Sophal’s voice was hopeful, but Davuth waved the suggestion down.

“No, that would be a waste of time. What is there to do in Takeo? Nothing! There isn’t even a single decent three-star hotel here. Not even a two-star.”

They looked around for a moment and concluded that this was likely the case.

“Then let’s get lunch,” Robert said brightly.

They left the car there and walked in toward the market. They soon found a run-down place to eat some soup and satay and as they did so they looked up at the clock on the café wall and internally counted down the minutes. It seemed interminable, this unnecessary wait. But for Davuth it served a purpose. He needed to collect his wits and think a little more. He let them buy him lunch and during it he said very little, chewing his food methodically and listening to the radio behind the woks. It would be an hour to cross the water and maybe more, maybe two hours. The return would indeed be tricky, and in darkness. But it could be done.

The boy’s eyes had flared up a beautiful dark blue. Did he really like this little Khmer girl? It was hard to say. Davuth bantered with them.

“So you like our country and want to stay?”

“I like it,” Robert said.

The Vikings — they had eyes like that.

When they had finished their Vietnamese coffees they walked back down to the quay in the sticky afternoon heat. As they approached the water’s shimmer, clouds gathered far off over its horizon. Davuth went down and got hold of the boat and paid the man up front for a one-way trip. “What about the return?” the pilot asked hopefully. Davuth shook his head impatiently and said, “We’ll talk about it later.” They went down into the longtail one by one and Davuth sat next to the pilot and the other two seated themselves behind the prow. It had not been that difficult to arrange, Davuth reflected as they set off across the harbor filled with water plants and oil, and headed out into the floodplain with the sun on their right.

—

Halfway across they lost sight of land altogether. Here the trees sticking out of the surface were white as bone and draped with creepers. Driftwood floated idly past them, a few household items, broken birds’ nests and strands of dark yellow flowers like garlands tossed from an abandoned wedding feast. The pilot asked no questions above the roar of his engine. Shaded by his jungle hat, Davuth watched everything pass by: the dead fish lying on their sides in the sun, the crowns of interlaced branches. As they approached Angkor Borei he saw the red roofs of distant houses on dry land and now they seemed improbable and exotic. The land there was under shadow. The rains were coming back, but they were doing so incrementally. They swept into a wide, obviously ancient canal that curved around. On the banks lay upturned little boats, knee-high shrines and men fishing with poles at the edge of pale and impenetrable mangroves.

TWENTY-FIVE

Angkor Borei was little more than a municipal museum with stone replicas of Vishnu statues standing in a shabby garden. While Davuth remained with the pilot at the jetty, Sophal and Robert walked around it wondering why they had been taken there. From the back wall they looked down, however, at an idyllic river scene which might not have changed much in centuries. Children swimming naked in the shallows, boats tethered within the reeds; the sun blazing on the water. They went into the dark and stuffy museum and peered at a few exhibits of prehistoric artifacts. There were aerial photographs made in the 1930s by a French archaeologist named Pierre Paris showing the canals of the ancient city which had been called Vidhapurya. A guide appeared out of nowhere and began to beguile them. He told them about the mysteries of the lost kingdom of Funan, whose capital they were now standing in. “One dollar,” he asked politely in the middle of this discourse, holding out an even politer hand. Robert paid him and the young man shadowed them as they went from case to case. He seemed to understand that they didn’t really want to be there.

There were exhibits of piled human bones from funerary sites, beautiful pottery and stone friezes depicting Vishnu.

“I feel a little claustrophobic,” Sophal said at last, and Robert thanked the guide to dismiss him and took her back outside. The sun had ripened and the skies were half clouded. Next to the museum stood a decomposing French colonial mansion of moss-thickened vaults and balconies, not dissimilar to an antebellum plantation house of the American South. They walked around it and mosquitoes came and nipped their necks and they found themselves wanting to go back to Takeo.

“But the temple will be special,” Robert said at last. “Let’s just go there now.”

“Let’s. I’m being bitten alive.”

The mosquitoes, in fact, launched a major assault as they clambered back into the longtail and the pilot uttered a ritual cure aimed at these well-known belligerents.

“The mosquitoes of Angkor Borei — they are the worst!”

They crossed the floodplain in about half an hour.

Before they arrived at Phnom Da, however, the conical hill appeared with the dark ruined prasat at its summit. At the bottom was a dark mud beach with a few shacks scattered in the jungle behind it. There was a small bridge over an estuary, a few fires in the clearings, woodcutters or fishermen squatting under thatch. It looked like a dozen people and no more. The pilot left them there and Davuth made an abrupt sign for him to leave, but the man simply hung back near the bridge and waited. Davuth knew he would not depart without a return fare. He turned back to his charges and cheerfully pointed to the path that led up from the beach through the woods toward the stone steps of the temple. He said it would be a long, sweaty hike up to the top, and it looked likely that it would be. They saw that the hill was now an island entirely surrounded by water. The dry-season roads that connected it to land had disappeared and there was just the little bridge.

It was Sophal who led the way. By the time they were at the foot of the steps the forest had closed in all around them and the heat, though now decreasing, made the prospective climb forbidding. Bringing up the rear, Davuth encouraged them. It was not, he said, as bad as it looked. They climbed for half an hour and then rested.

Davuth told them a few stories he had cribbed from a guidebook and they listened as if he knew what he was talking about. He sat with his hands hanging between his knees. Already the hamlet by the water seemed a long way off. The sun began to dip toward the horizon as they soldiered on toward the summit. When they got there it was shining almost horizontally through the jungle into the prasat and its tumbledown shrine.

Two human figures were there. A young cowherd stood in the long grass at the edge of the clearing with four or five animals grazing. At the door to the temple an old man with disfigured ears sat begging in a monk’s robe. They walked around the prasat. Its bricks were as dark as brewed tea. The interior shrine was made of concentric rectangles of cracked stone rising to an open skylight. Wildflowers washed against the outer walls, dark gold and blue.

They sat on pieces of stone and waited for the dusk to come down. But the sea could only be seen through gaps in the dense jungle. Soon, the old man and the cowherd moved off, as lethargic as the longhorn cows. They could hear the bells of the latter tinkling as they receded down the hill. When they were alone, Davuth offered them a sip from his whisky flask and they watched the sun decline into a rising bank of rain cloud. Farther down the hill, Davuth said, stood a small seventh-century temple known as Ashram Maha Rosei, or the “sanctuary of the great ascetic.” Built of laterite, it was considered architecturally unique in Cambodia because of its remarkable Javan and Indian style — it was thought that parts of the Mekong were once ruled by Java. He seemed to know all about it. And indeed, Davuth had spent half the night reading up on the matter.

“Let’s go and see it,” he said, standing and brushing off the dust from his seat. “Then we’ll go down and find the boat.”

Robert, however, was feeling tired of the place already and refused to move.

“It’s all right,” he said. “Sophal, you go and look.”

Reluctantly, she agreed. “I’ll just be ten minutes. I’ll take some photos for you.”

“I’ll be here.”

“All right,” she said. “We’ll be back in a minute.”

She felt awkward leaving him, and she didn’t want to be alone with Davuth, but it was only a few hundred yards down the hill and there was no one else there.

Davuth led the way and he plucked out a switch from the undergrowth and playfully flicked it left and right as they made their way down a forest path. “Over there,” he said vaguely, pointing toward the east, “is Vietnam.” She wondered why guides always felt the need to point out the most mundanely obvious things, as if they were in danger of being left out of consciousness. When the path dipped more steeply on its way to the forgotten temple she looked up through the gaps in the trees and saw a soaring dusk cloud rising into the indigo sky. Its edges were brilliantly lit as if electrified from within, its apex snow-white and supremely elegant as it evolved ever upward. How far did such formidable clouds reach in their ceaseless straining for height and power? They seemed to be driven by awareness and desire for dominance. At its core, the cloud was almost black and one could taste the imminent rain on the lips. Davuth, too, stopped for a moment and looked up at it and his eyes went pale and empty and languid. For him, everything in the sky was an omen. Signs became material in the heavens and they were fashioned by multitudes of gods.

—

Robert also watched it, lying on his back on a carved plinth that must have been well over a thousand years old. He shaded his eye to look at it directly. One last slowed-down flash of light before dusk. A flicker of lightning from somewhere else. The forest quivered. He was glad to be alone for a while, to be cut off from living things. From a fair distance he could still hear the tinkle of the cowbells, the animals lumbering downward.

The recent days had been the loveliest so far and now he could see a little more clearly the uphill and pleasant path that might lie before him. His prospects, it was true, had no solid footing, but did they need to have one in this place? He could stay here until the ground solidified under his feet a bit. Sooner or later other doors would open to a charming and undesperate young man. The doctor was right: it was a country fast becoming rich and corrupt in novel ways. There would be unexpected openings in the years to come and those who stuck around and were patient would be able to profit from them almost unnoticed.

Gradually, he had lost his bearings in the face of these temptations. He had come to appreciate the power of secrecies and dissimulations practiced on a daily basis. Below him, vast as a labyrinth in a nightmarish myth, an ancient and subtle culture that the whites had settled on like flies on the surface of oily water, trembling and nervous and falsely righteous. The con men and the opportunists were little different from the pasty evangelicals and NGOs and savers of souls who you saw next to them huddled around tables in expensive restaurants every night. Indistinguishable to the Khmers. He was one of them and he no longer minded; con man or Baptist hustler saving children, it was not a chasm separating the two. The motives behind the two were not as dissimilar as either assumed. They both wanted a better life in a country where they could do what they wanted, where they remained unexamined. They were both frauds in their way, interlopers exploiting their whiteness. It was disgusting and comic, but in the end no one was going to punish either of these eternal types. The Samaritan and the criminal.

He himself could spend a lifetime here living off other people’s money. It could be done. He could be Simon for the rest of his life, living off that man’s unstable identity, and eventually he would actually become Simon. Unless, one fine day, Simon actually showed up. But he had an intuition about that. He sensed that it would never happen. Once a man cons you, he avoids you.

Then what if he was safe from now on?

When the first stars appeared he shook himself out of his reverie and sat up and saw behind him the moon which had risen over the Mekong. Shadowy longtails skimmed silently across the waters. He had forgotten the time a little and he realized now that almost an hour had passed. So they had not returned from Ashram Maha Rosei.

—

He went to the edge of the clearing and called out. Then he thought about the boat waiting for them on the mud beach far below. Would the man really wait for them so long and in the dark? He noticed how quickly the light was draining out of things and he wondered to himself if a certain urgency might be called for. Nevertheless, he ventured onto the path with an annoyed reluctance, not wanting to climb down merely to have to climb back up. And the mosquitoes were now out in force. He clucked and called out again and then cursed quietly and resolved to go find them. He swept down the overgrown path occasionally calling her name and feeling an increasing surprise that nothing came back at him. They must be inside the shrine, then, buried in masonry and out of earshot.

At the temple there was no one. He peered inside the unlit core and caught a whiff of stale incense and ash. He quickly looked around. It was a nuisance that they had gone off without telling him, leaving him alone in the jungle. But perhaps the best thing was to wait there.

He sat on the threshold of the shrine and soon he heard a clicking sound from a little farther down the hill. He got up and went back to the path and looked down into the gloom. Almost at once he saw a flicker of light, like a lighter being flicked on, and when it repeated he called out. It was now too dark to see anything but the vague shimmer of the Mekong below and the spark of light going on and off. A wave of fear came over him and he plunged down toward it with a hoarse yell, which to his surprise was simply her name. He came down into the thick undergrowth and when he was close enough to see that it was indeed a lighter he saw that they were sitting together under a tree, and that Sophal had her back to him and that she was sobbing.

Davuth sat facing the other way, toward Robert, and his thumb flicked the lighter on and off. When it was on, his face was lit from below, calm and smiling. He seemed to have been sitting like this for some time, waiting for the Englishman to show up. In his lap lay a regulation police pistol with the barrel against his knee but not pointing at anything. It looked like something carved from soapstone. Davuth left the lighter on now and then he invited Robert to sit down as well. The latter understood everything within a few seconds and his mind went wild with rage. He looked around for a heavy stone to use, to launch himself into an attack and smash the policeman’s head. But in that flicker of instant calculation he realized how lost the cause was. Even if he managed the move in a second he would be too late. He was snared, and Sophal had been snared already. They had walked into it blind. They had walked off a cliff and it was too late. The policeman, then, knew that Robert understood and he smiled peaceably. Let’s be reasonable, Davuth seemed to be saying, and after a few moments Robert did sit down and Davuth talked for a while.

“I know who you are,” Davuth began. “The easiest thing is you just give me your apartment key. I am going back to the city. By the time you get there yourselves I will be”—he made a strange gesture with his fingers, like falling snow—“long gone.”

It was said very gently. Nobody would come to any harm and since he, Davuth, had his passport it would be a foolish thing to pursue him or go on his own account to the police. Nobody would listen to him anyway.

“Also, what is the code to the safety box in your apartment?”

Robert gave it, and he handed over his phone at the same time.

“This is absurd,” he said, and took out the key and threw it over to Davuth. “You didn’t have to do all this just to get a key.”

“No, I thought it through very carefully. I want to be invisible — and you want to be invisible as well. This way you can carry on being invisible. I don’t care what you do. You are nothing to me.”

“There’s nothing in my room.”

“You’ve been throwing your money around. There’s enough to keep me happy.”

“There’s nothing there at all.”

“Well, I am not going to believe that now. You can say what you want. I know you went to the Diamond and won a lot of money.”

“All right, whatever you say.”

“You barangs. You think you can get away with it.”

Robert talked to Sophal but she said nothing back. Her shirt was ripped and her hair was tangled. There had been a struggle. The policeman offered him a cigarette and he declined. Davuth got up and dusted off his trousers and walked off nonchalantly until he was at the path and the forlorn couple were plunged in darkness. He felt it was appropriate to say a few more words but he could not think what they should be. People talked far too much anyway. He felt the key in his pocket and memorized the code and was happy that it had all gone so smoothly for him. He had enjoyed the girl as well, she had not put up much resistance in the end. Those types were always soft at their core. They had not had to struggle to survive. He looked down at them from the slight advantage of the path and he felt a twisting, momentary pity. But at least they were alive and, in his case, unharmed. They had gotten off lightly.

“You can get a boat at daybreak,” he said, in a more conciliatory tone. “There’ll be one at the beach.”

“There’s nothing in the room,” Robert called back mockingly.

“I’ll see about that. So long, bye-bye then.”

Robert stood as well, then sat down and put his arm around Sophal. There was no reason to delay this fortunate departure.

Davuth thought for a moment before striding away, and tossed the lighter in their direction as a small mercy. A few minutes later he was at the top of the hill in the menacing shadow of the prasat, where bats now wheeled in the humidity. The steps on the way down were covered with leaves and at the bottom the jungle seethed with fireflies. He composed himself, dried his forehead with his handkerchief and walked down to the shacks where a couple of kerosene lamps burned from the rafters. There was no one out and about, just the cows tethered to a few trees and their eyes shining at a measured distance. He stood at the edge of the water and raised his arm.