The Map of Lost Memories (14 page)

“I was trying to sleep.” Simone followed Irene inside and stood next to the writing table. She tapped her fingers anxiously on Pierre Loti’s
A Pilgrimage to Angkor
, which Irene had been rereading earlier that afternoon. Beside her, the curtain was drawn back, away from the porthole. The storm had worn itself out, and the sky had cleared of all but a lingering stream of transparent clouds. Moonlight reflected up off the plane of water and tunneled through the thick glass, casting a sheer hoop of light on the opposite wall.

“I want to sleep,” Simone said, “but he won’t leave me alone.”

Feeling as though she were looking through the lens of an enormous telescope, Irene gazed out the porthole. In the distance, she saw the wink of a lighthouse, hovering at the rim of the night like a fallen star. She could feel Simone’s emotional fatigue, and she sought to relieve it. “Let’s not talk about him. Think about something else. Think about Cambodia. Tell me another story like the one about Touit.”

Simone sat down once again on the floor, her back against the wall. “What is there to tell? She cleaned our house and cooked our meals and took such good care of me. She even loved me. And how did my parents reward her? Her salary was less than the pocket money I was given for simply being their child. There are reasons a revolution is necessary, Irene. I didn’t believe in it solely because he told me to.” Her hands tightened into fists. “I don’t care what that newspaper says. It’s not true. I am not a victim. I knew what I was doing. I have always known what I am doing.”

“Who cares what a government sympathizer wrote about you? In the
North-China Daily
, of all tabloids.”

“I have never done anything I don’t believe is right. I will never do anything I don’t believe is right. You must understand that, Irene.”

“A story,” Irene whispered. “Tell me a story.”

“All right, yes, a story.” Simone sighed, heavily. “After I would finish with my tutor, Touit would pack a picnic for me, bundles of rice and chicken wrapped in banana leaves. I would carry it out to the temples, and
the best part of my education would begin. Do you know of Monsieur Commaille?”

“I do.” Jean Commaille had been the first director of the Conservation d’Angkor, where statues and steles rescued from the temple were taken to be restored and studied. He was also credited with clearing the jungle away from Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom. He had been killed during an anti-French peasant uprising in 1916.

“I was his sidekick,” Simone said with a small smile. “Sidekick, yes, that was what Monsieur called me, from the day he met me, when I was only four years old. He gave me my own scalpel, and he showed me how to scrape away the lichen from the carvings. He was like a surgeon, such precision. He could spend an entire day working on a meter of stone. That is such an important lesson for a child. Patience. Not that I was ever good at this. I am still a miserably impatient person. When the day became too hot, we would sit in the shade and eat mangosteens, and he would teach me to read Sanskrit, using the
Ramayana
and
Mahabharata
so that I would understand the legends from the bas-reliefs on the temples.

“I missed him greatly when he died. Monsieur Marchal, who took his place, was good enough at his job, but he didn’t have time for children. Though I was no longer a child by then. I was almost fifteen.” She pressed her head back against the wall, where it lay in a blue gauze of moonlight. “It was lovely, Irene, being there at the beginning, when it was all being discovered. I remember when France annexed the temples from Siam. My father was so excited he gave me my own glass of champagne. I was six, and as drunk as a sailor. My mother was furious!”

Irene had settled into the chair beside the bed. “I’m envious,” she said. “I spent my childhood among fishermen and totem poles.”

“What about the museum?”

“It was wonderful. But I don’t think it was the same as having the real thing.”

“It was enough to bring you all this way. I find your interest far more intriguing than mine. How can a child raised around the temples not succumb to their spell? They are a fairy tale set free from its page. They are the imagination sprung to life. I hate to say that I’m predictable, but aren’t
my feelings a natural result of my upbringing? But a girl from Seattle, how does she manage to fall in love with the Khmer?”

No one had ever asked Irene this. Not any of the curators or collectors she had worked with over the years. Not either of the two young men who had claimed to be in love with her years ago. She felt an uncharacteristic shyness as she said, “Before I was born, my father was a merchant seaman. Most of the wives stayed home, but my parents hated being apart for long periods of time. My mother came out to the Orient with him on one of his voyages, and she loved it so much, she stayed.”

“In Cambodia?” Simone asked.

“No, Manila.”

“What do the Philippines have to do with the Khmer?” Simone asked, her head tipped in genuine interest.

Intent on keeping Simone from thinking about Roger, Irene answered, “That’s where my parents were based. My mother loved to travel, and my father took her with him whenever he could. Java, Malaya, Formosa, Cambodia. He even took her to Angkor Wat. I have some watercolors she did of the temples. They’re beautiful. I can show you sometime if you’d like. When my parents were in Phnom Penh, she heard about the palace dancers. That their ballet was the most elegant in all the Orient. But the king was away and they had gone with him. She was disappointed. Then when I was nine, she read that the troupe was coming to dance in San Francisco. This was a year before the exposition in Marseilles. People speak of that performance in France as if it were the first, but it wasn’t. I know. The first time they danced in a Western country, I was there.

“We took the train, the three of us. San Francisco was so loud compared to Seattle. And bright, I’d never seen so many colored lights, flashing everywhere I looked. I’d never stayed in a hotel before either, or gone to a theater. And I’d certainly never heard the words
opium
and
bordello
.” She laughed, recalling her mother and father talking when they thought she was sleeping, as they sipped Sidecars from “room service,” which was what they called drinks mixed from his portable leather cocktail kit.

“And the dancers,” Irene whispered. “I remember how they flowed onto the stage, as if their bodies were the current of a river. There was a
sound like seashells tumbling around inside a glass jar. It made it seem as if the entire theater was shivering.”

“All of the silver on their costumes,” Simone said, softly.

Irene was moved to see the significance of her memory reflected in Simone’s expression. “I can still feel it here.” She laid her hand flat over her breastbone. “My mother told me the dancers were the spirits of the
apsaras
in the Brooke Museum. They were a link between the human and the divine, and I believed her. A week after we got back from San Francisco, her appendix burst. A neighbor found her on our back porch. By the time I came home from school, she’d already been taken away.”

Simone sat forward, wrapping her arms around her knees. “My parents were killed in an automobile accident.”

The moon had risen higher, and its circle of light melted into a diffuse glow. The shadows no longer advanced with the reflection of the sea. “How old were you?”

“Sixteen. I had an aunt in Paris. She wanted me to live with her, but my parents were buried in Siem Reap. Whenever I thought about leaving, I would find myself thinking about the temples. About what happened to the stones when they were left to the jungle. How they disappeared and were forgotten. I was sent to boarding school in Saigon instead, and soon after that I met Roger. He saw me sitting in a café one day. I’d escaped from my classes. I was good at that, escaping and roaming around the city by myself. I had no friends. I was a strange girl. I’d begun to dress differently. A soldier’s jacket over my school uniform or a derby given to me by a lecherous old man on a tram. It infuriated the nuns and embarrassed my schoolmates, but for me it was a form of camouflage. That’s ridiculous, I know, since naturally it made me stand out. But somehow it gave me comfort,” she confessed, looking down at her baggy sweater and trousers.

“It wasn’t only my appearance that intrigued Roger,” Simone went on. “He told me he’d never met such a melancholy girl before. He hated jolly women. And he thought I was incredibly smart. No one had said that to me since my parents died, and the nuns thought I was arrogant and discouraged me. Roger, though—with his brilliance and his refusal to apologize for anything he thought—he told me,
me
, that I was brilliant too.” Simone pulled her fingers into her sleeves and tucked her bundled
fists beneath her chin. “He shouted about everything all the time, Irene. I was so upset about my parents’ deaths, but I couldn’t even cry for them. I was afraid of what might happen if I did, of not being able to stop. But when Roger yelled, when he kicked the doors and walls, even when he hit me, I felt as if he were releasing the anger trapped inside me.

“It all happened quickly. By the time I was eighteen, I had left school and we were married, and when he decided to go to Shanghai, I realized that staying near my parents hadn’t helped me. I hadn’t been to visit their graves, and as time passed, it was too painful to even think about returning to the temples. Once we moved, I was so busy working for the party I was able to not think about them at all, at least for a while. But the party changed. Or maybe I changed. I gradually understood that Roger had never wanted what I wanted for Cambodia. Once I lost my daughter, the way I lost my daughter, suddenly I could think of nothing but returning to my homeland. Then,” she said, “you came along.”

The time had come. Irene could trust Simone. They were the same, each of them with a passion for the Khmer secured tightly atop her loss and grief. She crossed the room to the cupboard and switched on the lamp beside it. She unlocked the cabinet and then the box inside. “I want to show you something,” she said. From the box she took Reverend Garland’s map. She opened it on the floor and beckoned Simone closer. As they knelt over the map, Irene’s finger followed the meander of the Mekong River from Phnom Penh up to Stung Treng and into the jungle of northeast Cambodia. “This is where we’re going. To this village, Kha Seng, right here. This is where we’re going to find the temple.”

On the third day out of Hong Kong, Irene saw the coast of Vietnam for the first time. It was mountainous and unpopulated, and she would not have known that the steamer had sailed beyond China if the steward had not told her. She sat forward in her deck chair, clutching the black coffee he had brought, and tried to tell the two countries apart. From a distance, one was as stark as the other.

The rugged mountains were wrapped in a deceptive haze that looked as cool as an autumn afternoon, but the sea air was hot and stiff enough to hold gulls aloft miles out from shore. The water was flat and seemingly impenetrable, as if saturated with ink. As they continued toward Saigon, Vietnam did not leave the ship’s sight, the unbroken malachite fringe of it by day and the flickering of
its lighthouses at night, until one morning Irene walked out on deck to see that the
Lumière
had broken free from the clinging embrace of the South China Sea.

The steamer had cruised into the tidewaters of the Saigon River, with its maze of tributaries like the
naga
, the mythological, many-headed snake worshiped by the Khmer. Faded violet flowers dappled the muddy estuaries, and low jungle spread out on all sides from the flat, marshy banks. The day was already hot, and although the steamer churned up a sluggish breeze, Irene’s linen dress clung to the perspiration trickling between her shoulder blades. Rice fields, pagodas, and water buffalo gave way to factories, spewing clouds of dingy smoke that darkened the sky. Scattered between the godowns, the native huts hitched up on sapling poles did not appear strong enough to support their thatched walls, let alone the men and women squatting in the shade beneath. Naked children splashed in the water, waving without a hint of bashfulness as the steamer floated by.
“Vive la France!”
one boy shouted as he flopped into the water.

The hours passed, and the river curled around on itself, then back on itself again. It seemed to loop toward Saigon, where heat-ruffled spires approached and receded, shimmering from a new direction with each turn. At moments it was as if they were heading back out to sea, and then the ship would revolve one more time, stitching its way toward the city. As Saigon blazed into view, Irene thought about the camaraderie that had slowly deepened between her and Simone during the past days.

By showing Simone the reverend’s map, Irene felt as if she had brought about a détente, an unspoken agreement to not talk about Roger—to not even think about him, for they were finally engrossed in the expedition. Monsieur Boisselier was no longer a necessary distraction for Simone as the two women pored over the reverend’s diary, looking for a flaw. They found none. They reviewed their plans, how they would hire a car in Saigon to take them to Phnom Penh, and how once in Phnom Penh they would collect the supplies that Irene had sent ahead from Seattle and obtain permits and boat tickets for their journey up the Mekong River to Stung Treng. They discussed the threats of malaria, pit vipers, and tigers, and what it was going to be like to hold the scrolls for the first time.

Irene had examined dozens of expedition reports, and her list of what was needed was thorough. It contained not only the expected tents, mosquito netting, and quinine tablets but also items to help make their journey more civilized, such as a bucket shower and the kind of earthenware pot that could be converted into a campfire stove. She showed Simone her copy of Galton’s
The Art of Travel
. It had been a gift from her father, and she cherished it for its wealth of information, from remedies for blisters and snakebite to instructions for finding one’s direction by the growth of trees or shape of anthills. Listening to Irene discuss all of this, Simone declared, “
Très impressive
, and surprising, I must confess. Yes, Irene, you continually surprise me.”