Hunters in the Dark (7 page)

Out in the rain there was a street almost in rubble. Wide, sultry, open to vice. Short-term hotels with little white neon signs were still open and freelance girls trawled the flooded pavements in pressed white shirts and black hair combs. He went onto some sites where people posted services ads and personals and looked through the Language Tuition section.

It was free to register and put up an ad, but in the Language Tuition Sought section there were quite a few people asking for English lessons at about ten dollars an hour. He scribbled down the phone numbers of six or seven and went out into the rain again and walked down 63 for a while until he came to a shop selling cheap phones and SIM cards. He got a ten-dollar one and a one-dollar SIM and fixed his new number up inside the shop so that it worked before he made his way out.

He didn't want to waste any money now so he made his way back to the Paris—he was wet anyway and the humidity would never let him dry out—and on the way a Viet girl followed him slowly on a kind of damaged Vespa and called out “Why not, why not?” until giving up and turning away. On Kampuchea Krom the pavements had emptied, the trees poured with warm water. When he arrived back at the lobby a man asleep at the reception desk raised his head and looked up with an aimless eye at the barang. Two girls ahead of him on the stairs turned and asked him what room he was staying in. They smelled like Ivory soap and turmeric. He said he only spoke Romanian. Then, when he was back on his granite bed, he remembered that he had meant to eat and had forgotten. He lay down and felt slightly feverish and decided to leave the curtains open because the lightning flickering through the window would, against its usual proclivity, help him sleep and forget everything. And so it did.

The following day he got up early and went down to the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. Its doors were opened to the street and the sticky tables attracted flies. He ate some dried sand gobi in soya bean sauce and some kai lan in oyster sauce and after them some weak tea. The day had risen in a new spirit, with a low, aggressive sun and a dry, acid dust that came onto the tongue and the eyelashes. It was strange how at this time of year the city did not remain either wet or dry for long. The men there ate while silently reading newspapers with tin pots of Vietnamese coffee, the glasses beneath the metal filters lightened with condensed milk, and when he had tired of the tea he got the same coffee for himself and counted everything out carefully dollar-wise. He would have to survive on very little until he got a pupil or two. He sugar-loaded the coffee, which had a nutty, almost chocolate taste, and drank it down as slowly as he could. Soon the discomfort of the night and the bad sleep were dispelled and he came back to life and set to work calling the numbers which he had culled from the Language Tuition section.

None of them answered. Perhaps it was too early in the morning. He paid and strode out into the sunshine and walked slowly down Monivong until he reached the Victory Monument. The sky had lost all its monsoon darkness and he looked forward to a dry and bright spell. It seemed like a city of twenty-year-olds in which only the old possessed the shabbiness he had expected, as if they had emerged suddenly from a distant age of terror. He went ambling down Neak Banh Teuk Park toward the
Samdech Chuon Nath
statue, an old man with large ears seated cross-legged surrounded by nagas and lions. Robert paid it no attention. He pressed on along Hun Sen Park and past the massive Nagaworld casino and a fairground on the left called Dream Land, the Ferris wheel temporarily stilled, waiting for night, but the street vendors already there with their barrows of tiny steamed snails topped with artful crests of red chilies. He went inside Nagaworld for a few minutes to cool off and sat inside a kind of Chinese pavilion with plastic willows and painted blue-sky ceiling and stone waterfalls. He came out dried of sweat and circled around past the Landmark Hotel until he came alongside the Himawara Hotel, where the gold leaf of the palace was suddenly visible and the saline river could be felt in the nose.

There was a restaurant next to it, with tables set out above the river, empty at that hour. He sat there and ordered an omelette with cucumbers and pork and a fermented fish called
tray prama
. He made his calls again as he was drinking the next round of Chinese tea and this time a woman picked up. She was Khmer and spoke little English.

She said, “Dr. Sar coming back at eleven.”

He said it was for the English lessons.

“He will call you back, Mr….”

A name, he didn't have a name yet. He had not even been asked to give one at the hotel, or maybe he had signed his usual signature, he couldn't remember.

“Mr. Beauchamp,” he said quickly.

He pronounced the
p.

She repeated it and he said “Yes.”

“Mr. Beauchamp, Dr. Sar will call you before lunch.”

So he was a doctor.

“All right, I'll wait for his call.”

“Aw khun!”

He thought of continuing with the calls but his superstitious side was strong and he thought he might jinx this one and he didn't want to jinx a doctor. A doctor might pay well enough, and he loathed the thought that he might have to break silence and call his parents for money. That was unthinkable. He went back out into the street and walked down alongside the river until he was by the Cambodiana Hotel and then the wide, milky water itself with the construction cranes shining on the far side as if sprinkled with silver dust.

Although the day was typical of those that follow a night of rain—the earth patted down and compact, the insects somehow uninterested in humans—the sky showed the first anxieties of the struggles that would return by nightfall. In the center of the blue void a great atomic cloud had formed, blindingly bright at the edges, and as it evolved upward it grew darker and yet more brilliant at the edges.

The tension in the air did not at first seem related to it, but soon one began to know better. In the street the long puddles brightened for a moment then grew dim, and the electricity which rippled through the air drew the eye upward to the slow-motion mushroom cloud and its impending crisis, which would not arrive for hours, maybe not even till the next day. Along the Tongle Sap the frangipanis and star trees were held in a total stillness, like things carved out of wax, and under them old ladies performed their t'ai chi to music boxes. The beauty of automata, the beauty of wax and stillness and sky-tensions. For the first time in twelve hours his clothes began to dry and become crisp again and the sun burned into his shoulder blades. He crossed the road and went into one of the spread-out café terraces with cane chairs that line the tourist stretch of Sisowath Quay. It was La Croisette. As he settled into one of the cane chairs the phone rang and a male voice said his new name with a gravelly amusement, as if he had heard it before but as if it didn't matter. The doctor introduced himself in a slightly struggling but distinctly American-inflected English.

“I was glad to get your call, Mr. Beauchamp,” the doctor said. “My wife and I have been looking for an English tutor. Could we maybe meet up for lunch in an hour? Where are you?”

Robert looked across the road and said, “At the river.”

“The river? Whereabouts?”

“Near a place called the Wagon Wheel.”

“All right. Why don't you meet me at Le Royal Hotel at twelve?”

“I could do that.”

“Are you English?” the doctor asked.

“I am. Is it a problem?”

“Good, I thought you were. We wanted someone English.”

“Well, I am English.”

“We can have lunch at the Royal restaurant. I suppose you know it. The table will be under my name, Dr. Sar. They know me.”

“All right.”

“I'll see you there. I think my wife wanted to meet you too but she can't come to lunch.”

“Next time then. I'll see you there, Dr. Sar.”

“Twelve. If I am late, please do have a drink on me.”

“I'll do that.”

The man said, “Au revoir!”

Dr. Sar. It was such a resounding name. To kill the next two hours Robert went to the National Museum and wandered through the galleries of Angkorian art. The place was hot and almost empty and finally he came to a huge statue of Vishnu from the obscure temple of Phnom Da in Takeo Province in the south. He sat down on the floor in the lotus position.

The god's hands clutched a flame, an antelope skin and a flask, and on either side of him stood two smaller figures of Rama and Balarama. Carved from a single block of sandstone, only five of his eight hands were still attached to surviving arms but all of them were carved with finesse, the individual nails carefully grooved. Like a young pharoah, the god wore a tall cylindrical hat and a folded loincloth, his physique slender and lifelike, with wide shoulders and a little bulging belly. The surface had turned a dark green from the unhappy centuries.

Robert, however, found himself thinking not about unhappiness but its opposite. Vishnu, destroyer of worlds, might have something to do with happiness but he didn't know what it was. The missing hands seemed to be the clue. They must exist somewhere even now, relics mounted in distant American or Chinese homes or buried in dusty museums on the far side of the world. Timeless. Where, though, did these oval faces, aquiline noses and almond-shaped eyes come from? Even the tear ducts, the pupils and canthi of the eyes were perfectly carved. The figure of Balarama, the elder brother of Krishna, which stood to the right of Vishnu, was arresting. His left eye had been obliterated but his gentle smile was still intact, as was the symbolic swing plow he carried. His figure was boyish, tilted at the hips. Rama, meanwhile, held a tall bow and gazed down at Robert with a haughty gentility. As an avatar of Vishnu, he was associated with knowledge and eternity. He also partook of the enigma of happiness.

Robert walked to Le Royal after getting directions from the museum staff. It was a stiff walk, but he had an hour to waste anyway, and as he made his way through Street 102 he saw a lovely shaded colonial-looking apartment block called Colonial Mansions with a pool shining behind glass doors. If his fortunes improved he made a resolution to look in and see how much it would cost to live there. At Le Royal, on the far side of the park behind this building, the staff had stepped out onto the gravel driveway and were peering up at the sky as if something unpleasant had just happened or was about to happen. In his decent clothes he passed through them with a mere nod and a smile, and he felt a sudden pleasure at this automatic respect, which he had never enjoyed from anyone before. He had a different step now, a more confident stride. It had come to him quite suddenly. The grand hotel was gearing up for lunch and in the lobby the upscale barang types and the businessmen from Seoul and Shanghai were there in their dark suits. He slipped in among them and a few of the women looked up and checked him out with a quiet appreciation. He saw it, he felt it, and it made him smile. He was aware of himself looking quite glamorous, burnished by sun and idleness and a youth much less latent. Blending in, he passed through them with a quicksilver pleasure.

A long corridor to the left of the lobby led to the Royal restaurant, and the table was waiting in a still-empty room. It stood next to a door-size beveled mirror with a view of a pool. The staff looked him over without any trace of snobbery and he took the table and ordered a Singapore Sling and a tall glass of iced water. He did it without missing a beat. It was curious how naturally it came to him. Maybe Simon had been right—he was a good sport. Now stilled and appeased in some way, he stretched out his legs under the table and looked around. The walls were covered with French colonial lithographs, scenes of moonlit picnics and elephant rides, images with titles like
Pique-Nique sur le Bassac
and
Éléphants au bord du Tonlé Sap
. There were old photographs of dance troupes in traditional costumes, like child-women with painted white faces,
Des danseuses du roi se préparant à la danse.
It was a world within a world, and the world to which it had once belonged had entirely disappeared. The foreign correspondents had all lived here during the war in 1975. Even now there was something not quite right about it. The boys in bow ties and awkward waistcoats, the chandeliers moving slightly in the subtle gusts from the air conditioners. The ceiling's painted panels. Yet it was not a decor he felt out of place in now. He thought, with a quiet astonishment, that this would not have been true only a week earlier. It was like stepping into a grand house to which, although it appeared unfamiliar at first, he had been subconsciously accustomed all his life. From beyond the walls the koel birds could be heard in the towering trees arranged around the two colonial pools. High above which, on the room balconies, were little signs that read
Please do not feed the monkeys.
It was the life of the rich, the tropical rich, and all one had to do was look the part and not hiccup.

Robert felt sweat spreading slowly all along his shoulders, his hand was unsteady on the stem of the water glass.

“Keep it steady,” he told himself. “No passing out here. No scenes.”

The doctor, as it transpired, was late—he was a busy man—and Robert was alone until 12:20, sipping down his Sling and getting quietly tipsy on a stomach that now felt empty. The dining room filled and the music was turned up. Until, as if announcing Dr. Sar, the doors finally swung open and the man himself walked in, a small and hairless head of about sixty-five with a body wrapped up in a white suit. He carried a briefcase and a strange-looking paper parasol which he had folded. One could imagine him stepping into the sun and suddenly unfolding it to protect his pale Chinese skin. The eyes were fast. He spotted Robert at once and came over rocking slightly from side to side on bowed legs. Yet the face was actually quite young, almost wrinkleless, and one didn't see at first the incredibly fine wire spectacles that lay across the bridge of his nose.

“You are Beauchamp, then?”

There was a laugh and a handshake and down went the briefcase into the arms of a waiter.

“Welcome, Dr. Sar,” the boys intoned, bowing.

“They know me here,” Sar added unnecessarily.

It seemed that he sometimes took wealthy clients here to break bad news to them and, by Buddha, it was better than doing it at the clinic.

He looked over the foreigner with a careful attention to detail. The boy's clothes didn't quite fit, and there was a dogged rigor in his eyes. So he had come to put on a show for the doctor. He needed the money.

“The truth is,” Sar said almost at once, as the salmon carpaccio was brought in and a bottle of Perrier was broken open as if it was champagne, “that my wife and I are looking for a language tutor for our daughter. She's twenty-five. She just came back from a year of medical practice in Paris. A place called the Hôpital Dieu. Do you know Paris, Mr. Beauchamp?”

The eyes twinkled and Robert decided that lying was better than not.

“I do, yes.”

“Mrs. Sar and I are terrible French snobs, I am afraid. Even though I applied myself much more to English. Not that I speak well or anything—”

Robert's protests were waved away.

“No, no, I know how badly I speak. But anyway. My daughter has never learned it properly, since like us she is French-mad. But now she finds that her sorry English is stopping her progress here. The tyranny of English reached us a long time ago, I am afraid to say. I am against it myself—but what can one do against a whole age? At least at the Royal we have Tournedos Rossini for lunch.”