The Map of Lost Memories (22 page)

“My mother had her weaknesses. Henry was one of them. Honesty was another. She couldn’t tell a lie.”

“Didn’t she lie to William Rafferty?”

Marc ran his fingers through his hair, and the cuff of his sleeve fell open, drawing her eyes to his tan wrist. “I don’t think she did,” he said.

“But she lied to you?”

“She never called him
your father
. She always said,
Tell William it’s time for supper. Run down to the factory and take William his lunch
. After he died, she told me the truth. She didn’t weep to gain my sympathy, and she didn’t apologize. I respected her for that. I even respected Henry for taking responsibility. He was a lousy father, but he never hurt my mother. He gave her a good job and bought her house back. He could have humiliated her, but he never demanded that I take his name or even told anyone that I was his son, although by the time I was eighteen all of Shanghai had figured it out. There was a brief time when I looked just like him.”

With each new loss—her father, her job, and soon Mr. Simms—Irene’s world crumbled a bit more. Now, with Marc’s revelations, she
could feel it being shored up. She felt it straining within her to take on a new shape. He started to speak again, but she stopped him. It was too much for her, the realization of how her understanding of her own life was going to change with every word he spoke. Slowly, she must do this slowly. She tugged at the neckline of her blouse. It really was too hot out here. She raised the gun again and took aim. She tried to focus on the banana palm rippling in the heat. Marc was studying her expectantly, the way he had before she kissed him in the street in Saigon. The gun slipped against the sweat of her hands. “Shoot the damn thing,” he said.

The gunshot cleaved the torpid hush from the day. A hurricane of panicked birds’ wings beat the air. Then came a dazzling silence.

“Did that help?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

Marc stared across the field of low sumac, at Simone and Louis leaning against the car, looking back. She in a white cotton dress and he in his white linen suit, they were brushstrokes of light on the brown canvas of the day. Marc’s laugh was low and brief. “Where the hell’s a hotel when you need one?”

They had been driving steadily for hours through the Cambodian countryside when Irene said, “Stop the car.”

“Is something wrong?” Marc asked.

She had made out a shape in the darkness. “Stop, now.”

Marc pulled over to the side of the road and cut the engine. Irene walked through the translucent rays of the headlights to the bridge ahead of them. At the front of each of its balustrades the stone hood of a cobra surged toward her, like a cape flung into the sky. “The
naga
,” she said, telling the night what it already knew, that these were the mythical serpents that protected Cambodia’s rivers. They guarded the Khmer temples and this highway into Phnom Penh, its lights shining on the black horizon. In the galleries of the Brooke Museum, she had held
nagas
, creatures of cast bronze and rosewood that had been brought from this very country, serpents whose arched bodies were still gritty with the iron red dirt of
Cambodia. But it was a different thing to touch one here, in the land where it was born.

When they’d crossed the border, the landscape had not changed, and although Irene knew they were in Cambodia, she had not felt it. Until now. She laid her hand flat against the cobra’s stone heart. The half-moon hung askew over the river, and beneath the bridge, a fluorescence of green traced the path of the curving shoreline.

Simone walked up behind her. “This
naga
was built by the French. An attempt at cultural understanding designed by urban planners with a romantic streak.”

“I’ve waited all my life to come here. Let me have this moment. Please.”

“They’re good at convincing themselves they care. They think a few statues are all it takes. They don’t understand. They can’t, they’re too caught up in their version of progress. But you, I don’t know why, but somehow I still think there’s hope for you.” Simone removed Irene’s hand from the statue and steered her back toward the car. “I know what you’re thinking, Irene, but this isn’t your moment. Not on this bridge with this chunk of cement. This isn’t the moment when you realize you’re in Cambodia, but I can give that to you.” She asked Marc, “Are you tired?”

He waved an empty thermos. “I’ve had enough coffee to keep an elephant awake until Christmas.”

“Angkor Wat is always spoken of in comparison,” Simone said. “To the Taj Mahal or the lost cities of the Incas. I’ve heard it compared to Versailles and the Egyptian pyramids. But I’ve been to Versailles. I’ve been to Egypt. There is nothing else like Angkor.” Simone leaned into the car. “Can you drive through the night?”

Marc said to Irene, “If you want me to.”

“You want to go now?” Irene asked Simone, amazed by her audacity at even suggesting such a delay after what she had done in Saigon.

“Simone,” Louis said, “don’t be rash.”

But even while Irene knew all of the reasons she should not spare an extra day, she looked with longing beyond the bridge, at the road that led through Phnom Penh to Angkor Wat, less than two hundred miles away.

“We can be back here by early tomorrow afternoon,” Simone said. “What do you think?”

“I think this isn’t the time,” Louis admonished.

“I’m not asking you,” Simone said.

“We have to find out what Simms is up to. It will take at least two days for gathering the permits and requisitions, and you’ll need time to organize the supplies. You know the steamer only leaves on Sundays,” Louis reminded her. “If we miss it, we’ll lose a week.”

Irene tipped her head toward a sound in the distance, the urgent thud of a drumbeat, discordant against a breaking-glass xylophone chime. She had been so focused on her lost temple in the far northeastern jungle that she had forgotten how close they would be to the center of Khmer civilization. It was only five hours away. Simone was watching Irene expectantly. How easy it would be for Irene to tell herself that they should go in order to pacify Simone, as an attempt to keep her from falling to pieces again. But the truth was that Angkor Wat was the ultimate reason Irene had come to Cambodia—the reason she was searching for the scrolls. The scrolls mattered only because they would tell her what had happened to the ancient temple city that she had yearned to visit for as long as she could remember. “Actually, Louis, this
is
the time. Now, right now.”

Dawn lay in wait, and the world was clasped in purple shadow. The moon was falling behind Irene, casting its light over her shoulders, skimming the waters of the moat. Beyond the stone wall, far down the causeway, the silhouettes of three peaks stood like mountains in the pale, starry garden of the dying night. Marc started walking toward them. Irene touched his sleeve. “Wait,” she said. “Not yet. There’s something we need to see.”

She guided him through the shadows of the entry tower to the head of the causeway that stretched across the many-acred grounds of Angkor Wat. He sat down, and she tucked herself in front of him, her back settling against his chest, his chin resting on her shoulder as he listened to the chanting of Buddhist monks. “It’s as if we’re in a church,” he said.

Except for the unseen monks, they were alone. They had left Louis at his office in Siem Reap to gather survey maps of Stung Treng province,
and Simone to sleep in one of the rest houses outside the temple walls. Having had only a day in the hospital, she was still weak.

“Angkor wasn’t built like most Khmer temples,” Irene told Marc. “That shadow ahead of us, that’s the entrance. It faces west.”

“Why does that matter?”

“Watch.”

The morning was windless, and the violet sky quiet and flat as the moat. Marc’s arms enclosed her as they looked out to the base of the temple, where mist lifted its curtain off the lower galleries, uncovering the hazy robed figures of monks walking where dancing girls and warriors once served a king. Shadows shifted from gray to gold. Out of sight, sunlight scaled the temple’s back walls, curving up from the east. Light traced the massive bud-shaped towers. Simone had been right, this was Irene’s arrival in Cambodia, her entire being narrowed to a single pinpoint of expectation as the pinnacles atop the towers sparked and burst into flame. She leaned forward, watching a city rise from the depths of the planet. In an instant the fire was extinguished and the sun owned the sky. Angkor Wat exposed its colossal sandstone expanse, revealing itself for what it was—the largest temple in the world.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Marc said. “I’ve never dreamed of anything like it.” He studied the towers and terraces. The temple was like a Russian nesting doll, its highest, third-level central sanctuary within the ring of the second level within the ring of the first, all of it enclosed within the outlying walls and the moat. “How big is this place?”

“Five hundred acres,” Irene said. “This causeway is more than a thousand feet long. Inside, on the first level alone, there are thirteen thousand square feet of bas-reliefs.” She knew every measurement of this temple. Every gallery, every sanctuary, every sculpture, if it had been chronicled or sketched or photographed. As a teenager, she had sat in the professor’s office late at night in the museum while her father made his rounds; through tracing paper, her pencil had re-created the image of a fly whisk or sword, until she knew each detail, each rosette twined like scrimshaw over the vaulted ceilings, as if she had created it herself. Her eyes rose to the temple’s crimped summit, the towers obscured in the vaporous sunlight. “They were gilded. Can you picture anything that large covered in
gold? And there was lacquer and brass and wood, so much wood, but it’s all gone, disintegrated over time.”

“You lived halfway around the world. How did it happen, the way you feel about this place?”

This was essentially the same question Simone had asked her on the ship out of Shanghai. It felt good to be among people who cared about what was most important to her. Irene eased out of Marc’s embrace in order to retrieve a leather-bound tablet from her map case. How well she knew the thickness of the paper, the slight roughness to the surfaces that seized the sheer liquid shape of watercolor paint. Her mother’s name, Sarah Blum, was written inside the cover. Irene opened it and showed Marc a painting of white flowers on an altar set before a bodhisattva, the deity seated in the traditional lotus pose of meditation. “My mother,” she said. “She gave it to me.”

“This is all Angkor Wat?” he asked, as she turned the pages.

“Some of it. These galleries. And this peak. But Angkor Wat was originally Hindu, you’ll see that in the carvings, and a lot of what she painted are Buddhist images. I’m guessing the rest of these are from other Khmer temples along the Petit or Grand Circuit. Maybe even farther out on the Royal Road. She loved to explore.” Irene closed the tablet. “It’s something else to look forward to. Walking into a temple one day and recognizing it from my mother’s paintings.”

“So it wasn’t Henry who ignited your passion?” This seemed to give Marc some kind of satisfaction.

“He kept it alive after she died.”

“And how do the scrolls fit into Angkor?”

Irene luxuriated in the view of the temple’s peaks, the simple grace of the central tower, dedicated to the god Vishnu, perforating the sky. “Scholars have managed to decipher hundreds of inscriptions on the temples,” she told him, “and we still know so little. They figured out the genealogy of more than thirty Khmer kings, and they deciphered the gods the temples were dedicated to. But nothing about why the capital moved around so often after Angkor was abandoned. Nothing about
why
it was abandoned. As for what it was like to live here, there’s only one eyewitness account—the journals of a Chinese envoy. The details are invaluable.
He wrote that twice a day the king would come out from his palace and sit on a lion’s skin, wearing a garland of jasmine wrapped around his head like a crown. He took his audience with commoners as well as functionaries. This was highly unusual for a king. Can you imagine Louis the Fourteenth doing such a thing? And whenever he left Angkor, the blast of a conch shell announced his coming, and hundreds of girls lined the way. They all held candles, even if it was light out. His royal wives followed in chariots carrying parasols coated with gold.” Irene dropped her gaze to the expanse of grass spread out before them, with its water buffalo, egrets, and two boys prodding sticks into the lily pads in one of the marshy ponds. “Somehow, it all changed drastically. No more god-kings, no more stone palaces, no more roadways and waterworks.”

“Civilizations end,” Marc said as he rolled a cigarette. “What’s different about this one?”

“If you take a look at modern Cambodian court life, everything from the syntax of the official language to the style of murals painted on the palace walls, it’s as if Khmer culture never existed. It hasn’t influenced anything. Rome fell, but Italy continued to create incredible works of art. Think about the Renaissance. But the Khmer fell—then nothing. This country has created nothing of value since. Why not?” Frustration contracted her voice. It exhausted her, every time she tried to make sense of this. “What happened to deplete Cambodia of its talent so completely? That’s what I want to know.”

“This place is like the skeleton of some prehistoric animal. The dinosaur that takes its last breath and in an instant its entire species is extinct.” He took hold of her wrist, rolling the carnelian bracelet that she always wore between his fingers. “You say people have been seeking answers for decades. What makes you positive an answer is even out there?”

Irene heard something deeper than just curiosity in his question. She felt a current passing between them as Marc listened to her. “After Angkor Wat fell,” she said, “it became a mythical place. In the fifteen hundreds there were vague tales of European missionaries who saw a hidden city of vaulted towers. One Portuguese writer described how a Cambodian king came across ‘a wonderland’ while hunting for elephants. But even though the rumors were passed along by Spanish soldiers and Dutch merchants,
no one believed them. If such a place existed, wouldn’t the world know about it? And anyone who saw the bush village that Phnom Penh was before the French arrived was especially skeptical. Then, in 1860, Henri Mouhot came along.”