The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  “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.”

  Chapter 9

  A Trusted Colleague

  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 ha
d 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.”

  The only detail of her meticulous planning that Irene did not share with Simone was the one of which she was the proudest: an inconspicuous leather clothing trunk she’d had customized by Mr. Simms’s tailor. It was lined with false panels large enough to hold and hide the ten scrolls. More than once she had wanted to show the trunk to Simone, knowing that she would admire its ingenuity. But although they shared the same dream, to uncover the history of the Khmer, and although they shared the same need, to use that history to take back the lives they had lost, after their time on the ship, Irene suspected that Simone would attempt to stop her from taking the scrolls out of Cambodia. Irene tried not to think about this, for when she did she felt guilty about lying to Simone.

  As a tugboat nudged the Lumière toward its berth, Irene was joined on deck by Monsieur Boisselier. He leaned against the railing beside her and said, “I haven’t seen Madame Merlin all morning. I was hoping I would have a chance to say au revoir.”

  Irene tapped the ash of her cigarette into the humid air. “I doubt she’s eager to disembark.” She nodded toward the wharf, where in front of the customs shed a thicket of colonials waited, nearly all of them dressed in white: jackets, trousers, and cork helmets reflecting in the sunlight. Vietnam’s native Annamites milled around them, and among these barefoot rickshaw men stood a French police officer in a drab brown uniform and two European men with black cameras, hanging back, no doubt, for a better view. She said, “I’ve heard that reporters and a gendarme have been waiting since dawn.”

  “I suppose this means everyone is watching her now.”

  Irene felt sorry for Monsieur Boisselier, fidgeting with his watch, as pitiful as a beggar while he waited for the payment she had promised him. But his palpable concern gave her confidence that Roger had not told him about her temple, for if he knew, he would not need her money so badly. She reached into her map case for one of two envelopes she had put together earlier that morning. She handed it to him. It contained five hundred dollars. “Is that enough?”

  As he counted the money, his expression showed that it was more than he had expected.

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?” she asked. “Anything at all.”

  He gazed out toward the ocher buildings along the waterfront, punctuated by the jut of a steam crane into the white noon sky. Areca palms flanked the road, their fronds cutting welts of shadow into the sunlight on its paved surface. “This is only my opinion,” he said, “but when Roger Merlin spoke of his wife’s first love, I somehow had the feeling he was not speaking about a person.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Monsieur Boisselier ducked his head, perhaps afraid that she would think him a dotty old man. “It’s difficult to explain.” He tucked the packet of money into his coat pocket before she could change her mind and take it back. Then, as if he felt he owed her at least a bit more, he said, “Do you know of Marc Rafferty? I have heard that he’s here in Saigon. If you are looking for information, he’s your man. Perhaps he can tell you why Monsieur Merlin was having me watch his wife.”

  As soon as Irene saw Simone striding toward her, cigarette in hand, a white orchid trailing through her upswept hair, she knew how they were going to do this. They were not going to skulk into Saigon. They were going to arrive with nothing to hide. All eyes were on Simone as she crossed the deck. The Chinese robe she wore over her black shirt and trousers gave her an air of royalty. It was impossible not to pay attention to her, a flash of cobalt among the white, beige, and khaki traveling clothes of the other passengers. But it was more than the way she was dressed that caused people to watch her. They wanted to know what was going to happen the moment she stepped into Vietnam. Would she be accosted by the reporters and asked the question everyone wanted to know the answer to? Do you know who killed your husband? Would she be detained by the police? They were longing to break up the monotony of their own dull arrivals and, better yet, to see if Simone would be brought down a peg.

  Inside the customs shed, a row of officials sat behind a counter processing documents. The tin roof radiated streaks of thick, rippling heat, and the men were soaked with sweat, their hands so damp that they used scraps of muslin to blot moisture from their fingers each time they picked up a pen or stamped a page. As the Oriental passengers, even those from first class, were plucked from the line to show proof of vaccinations to the port doctor, the eldest of the officials examined Simone’s paperwork. The skin around his eyes was furrowed, as if he had been squinting at visas in this gloomy light all his life. Irene watched him over Simone’s s
houlder. The man seemed to be taking an unusually long time. Then, as if he were holding himself in check, he said, tersely, “So, here you are. Madame Merlin. Already a journalist has offered me a bribe to detain you so he might have the first interview. And it is my understanding that the commissaire himself has set aside his day for you. But do not take this to mean you are wanted here.”

  Simone looked confused, as if she had genuinely expected a warm welcome.

  “You are a traitor after all.”

  It was such a bald attack. Irene glanced at the customs agents processing passports on either side. They were pretending that they were not listening, but the nearby passengers were not even trying to hide their interest. The exchange would certainly be dissected over absinthe frappés in the nightclubs that evening.

  “And you,” Simone hissed so everyone could hear, “are a petty, powerless bureaucrat.”

  A stately colonial standing in line behind Irene barked with laughter. It was now the official’s turn for bewilderment. He had not anticipated this defiant response. “I have power enough to keep you out of this country.”

  Simone glared at the official. “People like you are the reason I joined the Communists. You are the reason the French are going to lose Indochina. How satisfying it will be, watching you scuttle back to Europe with your tail between your legs.”

  Although Irene admired Simone’s gall, bravado was one thing and stupidity quite another. She stepped forward. “Regardless of what you thought of Roger Merlin, monsieur, he was her husband and he has been killed. Brutally killed. She is distraught. A gentleman like you, surely you can forgive—”

  “Distraught!” Simone cried. “I’m not distraught. I’m insulted. How dare this puny man treat me like a pariah!”