Highways to a War (39 page)

We walked along the path above the river: deserted, because of the curfew. The fronds of a line of tall coconut palms hissed in a little breeze above our heads; dim lights showed in the small wooden houses on stilts on the banks. Somewhere a radio was playing Cambodian pop music, carrying across the great expanse of water.

Volkov opened his arms wide, as though embracing the darkness and the river odors, sweet and sour. “Aren’t you glad you stayed awake, man, even if we get shot at? Look at this old Khmer night: full of flower smells, full of sex, full of trouble!”

He was now swinging back towards joy. Joy was Dmitri’s for the asking, I thought: but never peace.

Jim Feng pushes aside a bottle of soy sauce and slides a black-and-white photograph across the table. It’s the usual news-style print, six by eight inches.

“I found this last night at the bottom of a carton,” he tells me. “I took it at the Phnom Penh Press Center one morning in February, in 1973. It’s probably the last picture taken of Mike and Dmitri together. And certainly the only one of the two of them with Ly Keang. I have not said this to you before, Ray: but I believe that she is the real reason that Mike has gone across the border.”

He glances at Harvey, who sits beside him. But Harvey’s expression remains noncommittal: he plays with the soy sauce bottle, examining it as though for flaws.

In the picture, Langford and Volkov are standing on either side of a young Cambodian woman. I know of her from the audio diary, of course, but have not seen a picture of her until now: there were none among Mike’s effects. I examine the photograph with interest. The three are posed in front of formal stone gate-posts, through which a nineteenth-century French colonial villa can be seen. Ly Keang proves to be as attractive as I’ve expected. She wears traditional dress: a white, high-necked blouse and a dark ankle-length sarong with an embroidered band around the hem. Her thick, loosely waving hair is pulled back from the forehead and temples to expose her ears; held by a comb on top and then falliing below her shoulders, it combines with her slender, hour-glass figure to recall an
apsaras
in a temple carving. The men, who are dressed in well-pressed sports shirts and slacks, are both in half-profile, turning to smile at her as though someone has just told a good joke. But she isn’t laughing at the joke; instead, she looks directly at the camera, her expression enigmatically solemn: even sad.

While I study the picture, Jim and Harvey watch me from the other side of the table. Although Jim doesn’t get in here to talk to me as often as Harvey does, both faces have grown very familiar, in these long afternoons in the Newsroom; I’ve only been in Bangkok for a week, but I feel I’ve known them both for much longer.

“So you think she’s still alive,” I say. “Somewhere inside Cambodia.”

Jim nods slowly a number of times. “She and Mike had only two years together,” he says. “Mike has never believed she’s gone; has never given up. Yes: I feel sure this is why he is in there, Ray—even though I have nothing to prove it.”

Jim’s use of the present tense when he speaks of Mike always makes me uneasy. I’m not sure whether he does it out of conviction, or with the stubborn, irrational idea that even to concede that Mike might be dead would finally end all hope.

The lunchtime crowd has thinned. It’s around three o‘clock: quiet, except for the buzz of traffic beyond the sunblinds, out on the road by the
klong.
The little fans whirr more distinctly in the ceiling, now that most of the voices have gone. Harvey looks at the photograph, straightening it on the white Formica with a big, careful thumb.

“What a lot of loss Mike had, over a lifetime,” he says. “And finally Ly Keang lost as well. Swallowed by Year Zero.”

“Yes,” I say. “But I wonder did loss choose him, or did he choose loss?”

My question is semi-rhetorical-out of habit. Harvey and I, in our sessions here alone, have both fallen into this mode when we analyze Langford and his fate. But now I see Jim studying us—first Harvey, then me—with an unwinking Chinese steadi ness that makes me a little uncomfortable. Anything that sounds like criticism of Mike makes him uneasy: his loyalty is total. He has the sort of decency and old-fashioned devotion that causes you to be careful of your words, and to guard against gossip. But Harvey and I, being story-lovers, are both inclined to wander into gossip’s territories. Despite our respective professions—or is it because of them?—both of us are subscribers to the notion that falsehood and truth, triviality and tragedy, all have their roots there.

“I think loss chose
him,”
Harvey says. “So maybe he was right to run away from it.”

“Bloody nonsense,” Jim says, and frowns. “Mike met the right woman late in his life, and then lost her. That’s all. In my case, I also have met the right woman tate—but I have married Lu Ying, and not lost her. I have been more fortunate.”

Harvey and I are silent for a moment, rebuked, looking into our beers. He and I still grieve for Langford, but our search for him has changed. Seeing him as almost certainly dead, what we want is to solve his mystery. But Jim’s determination not to give him up to death has made this indecent; premature.

The phone rings on the counter by the cash register, and the Chinese proprietress picks it up.

“You’re right of course, Jim,” Harvey says. His voice has taken on its mollifying tone. “Ly Keang could still be alive, and so could Mike. No one hopes so more than I do.”

The Chinese proprietress is holding the telephone receiver aloft, and calling to our table. Her upswept glasses flash. “For you, Mr. Feng. London on.”

 

 

Jim Feng has gone; the phone call has caused him to limp back across the square to the Telenews office. But Harvey and I sit on.

I suppose we’ve grown a little self-enclosed in the Newsroom, after a week of talk-filled afternoons: a little obsessive. Tented by the glowing orange sunblinds, the fervid glare from outside filtered and softened for us as time softens memory, we’re absorbed in a sort of theater, with Langford as our leading player: a player whose physical actuality we accept as being less and less likely. Because of this, our talk has taken on the coloring of postmortem; of valedictory. Now, uninhibited by Jim’s presence, we’re free to let it flow into these channels again.

“Mike was always trying to
replace
things,” Harvey says. “I can see why, can’t you? Loss kept dogging his footsteps. The favorite brother and the mother dying when he was young; the girl he wanted to marry as a boy disappearing. And then he lost Kim Anh, when he first came to Vietnam. So he probably decided after that to take no more chances: no more serious involvements meant no more loss. Bar girls were safe; they were transient; not serious. His one serious anchor was the friendship with Madame Phan. He was still visiting her in Saigon until the end. A sort of wise aunt, I suppose.”

We’ve ordered fresh beers, and he takes a long draught.

“I used to think that Mike really only knew where he was with other men,” he says. “With battle companions. And he could always deal easily with Asian children: with his orphans and street kids. Involved yet uninvolved. He was still like that in the year that I arrived in Phnom Penh. And he was leading a secret life there rather like the one he’d led in Saigon. At least, I thought of it as secret. But there was nothing particularly furtive about it—he just didn’t talk about it much. It was simply that he lived an off-hours existence that was separate from his professional one—and separate as well from the one he spent carousing with us. It was a life that brought him close to the local people, revolving around that apartment he rented from his driver Lay Vora, in the house near the Old Market.

“If you called on him—which I sometimes did—he’d be perfectly affable: he wasn’t inhospitable or evasive. But somehow you didn’t feel encouraged to seek him out there, even though it was only five minutes from the Hotel le Royal. Not many of his colleagues could understand his choosing to live in a place like that, when he could have afforded much better. The plumbing was pretty primitive in those old Chinese houses; we preferred the comforts of places like the Royal.

“The house was one of a series in a terrace, with the usual upstairs balconies and shutters. Vora and his wife, Bopha, ran a small photographic business in the ground floor, open to the street: I remember portraits on a board, and cane chairs for customers. Eventually I discovered that Langford had given them the capital to start the business. They had two teenage sons and a small daughter, and Langford was also paying for the boys to be educated at the best
lycée
in Phnom Penh. It was Vora who told me all this, when I got to know him: Mike never mentioned it. Vora doted on him, of course; and he and Bopha and their children had become Mike’s surrogate family. Langford ate most of his meals with them, and I suspect spent as much time in their apart-merit as he did in his own.

“And I began to discover that his philanthropy was no longer casual now, but constant and systematic. He was looking after a large number of street kids: successors to his tribe on Tu Do Street. These were the children of the refugees who were pouring into the city from the countryside, and he was paying some Buddhist monks to give them refuge in a pagoda. He was making a lot of money with his pictures at that time, but I don’t believe he ever saved anything. Certainly there was no evidence of it, except for Black Bessie.

“That apartment was the only home of his own Langford ever had. The house here in Bangkok doesn’t count; he was hardly ever there. In a way I can understand his attachment to Vora’s place: the Old Market was an attractive locality. It was between Norodom Boulevard and Post Office Square: a district that was a sort of axis. When you came onto Norodom, you could pick out at its far-off end the little green cone from which the city took its name: the Phnom of Penh, or Madame Penh’s Hill, with the worn old Buddhist stupa on top of it, like a memory. Norodom and Monivong Boulevards stretched away together, reaching towards riverine distances that ached in the brain. Metropolitan boulevards in a country town! Parisian in their scale yet always half-empty, punctuated by flame trees, cyclos pedaling at their edges, Norodom and Monivong waited for grandeur to arrive. What they’d get in the end would be terror.

“The Old Market itself was a complex of iron-roofed buildings and little green kiosks behind railings, selling everything from flowers and fruit to notebooks, pencils and clothing. Chinese shops dealt in tea, dried meats and pastries. The combined scents made you tipsy; the colored mountains of produce hurt your eyes. Rambutans, durians, mangoes, oranges, bunches of lotus buds: Cambodia’s horn of plenty, not yet run dry. Market officials collected the rents, and most of the stalls were run by Chinese or Sino-Khmers. They sat looking out from their kiosks with their faces whitened by sun screen paste: Langford used to say that this was intended to distinguish them from the dark brown Khmer peasants who traded outside the railings. The Khmers were trading there illegally, setting up tiny pavement stalls that held offerings of fruit and fish, their lamps burning there at evening like those on obscure shrines. When the military police appeared, they’d gather up their goods and run, and Langford used to like watching this comedy from his balcony.

“He’d sit there for hours on that balcony, surveying the whole life of the district. He clearly loved the apartment, and his life with Vora’s family. And when people pointed out to him that he could lose it all at any time, he showed an odd blind spot. Cambodia wouldn’t fall, he’d say; and even if it did, he’d never leave. He’d become like a lover: unable to accept that some final disaster could happen to deprive him of the loved one.

“The apartment was a statement; a confirmation. He’d furnished it himself, and a good many personal effects had been shipped up the Mekong from Saigon—including a collection of wood carvings, bronzes and paintings, selected with the help of Madame Phan. In his spare hours there, I see him as rather solitary; almost domestic. That’s the last way most people see a war photographer like Langford, of course; but it was true. The place was so incredibly neat. Cage birds out on the balcony; his Vietnamese and Cambodian artifacts arranged to advantage. Even a Burmese cat, called Sary. His papers, his photographs, his customs declarations and work diaries—all organized as though by a neat secretary. Well, Ly Keang changed all that.”

Harvey looks down at the photograph again, which still lies between us: at the laughing, black-and-white faces of Langford and Volkov; at the solemn face of the young woman.

“The Battambang Stringer,” he says, and lets out a soft breath of laughter, affectionate and regretful. “She was a one-off. I can understand how Mike felt about her.” He points with his big finger. “Look at that face,” he says. “It’s all there.”

It’s a shrewd, compelling face, as well as being attractive: strong yet delicate, with a wide, humorous mouth. Her exposed, well-shaped ears create a schoolgirlish touch: I would have thought her a girl of seventeen or eighteen, rather than a young woman of twenty-four. She’s typically Sino-Khmer, I’ll discover; it’s my ignorance of Cambodian characteristics that have made me see her as Indian. Probably the large, expressive eyes—which stare at me directly—do most to create the impression of Indian ancestry, despite their Chinese almond shape. She’s let her eyelids droop a little, and looks up under them with what seems a hint of mockery as well as sadness, leaving white half-moons exposed under the irises. Her long upper lip is drawn down taut. It’s a curious expression: is she actually sad, or just serious?

“She doesn’t look happy,” I say.

“Look again,” Harvey says. “There’s a joke behind this picture : Jim told me. Ly Keang was hardly ever serious. Mike always said that she laughed and fooled so much that she wouldn’t be able to stop laughing while this photograph was taken. He made a bet with her that she couldn’t. So this is her attempt at a hang-dog look: but you can still see her fighting back a giggle.”