Hunters in the Dark (24 page)

“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.

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.