The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  Now he was clean-shaven and dressed in fresh clothes, and she asked, “Where are you going at this hour?”

  “I’ve already been out,” he said. “I’ve been asking around. Henry has a villa on the road to Siem Reap. He’s been out there for almost two weeks, but he’s booked on the Alouette for the day after tomorrow.”

  This was the same steamer they planned to be on, if Louis could organize their permits in time. “Did you see him?”

  “No,” Marc replied.

  Irene raised the mosquito net and tied it to the front post of the tester bed, a scarred, hulking piece of mahogany furniture that looked as if it had been dragged all the way to Cambodia from a mountain lodge in Europe. “I know he’s here, but I hate to think about it,” she said, wishing for a cup of coffee to clear the debris of her long, heavy sleep from her mind. “I hate thinking about him crossing the ocean. It’s so cold on the water at night. I keep imagining the sea air, what it must have felt like, aching in his bones.”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  She was touched by the offer, aware of how reluctant Marc was to see his father. She shook her head. “I’m not ready.”

  “Don’t you want to know what he’s up to?”

  “You all know such a different man than I do. He’s not up to anything, Marc. I know exactly why he’s here. I knew the second I heard, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. He’s too close to risk waiting for me back in Seattle.”

  “Too close to what?” Marc asked, reaching behind him to shut the door, as if he already knew the answer and did not want it to be overheard.

  “His death. And I’m not ready to face that, Marc. Not yet, not after yesterday. Yesterday was perfect. I want to hold on to it for a while longer.” She stared up at the fan and wondered why she couldn’t feel even the slightest breeze as it paddled against the incoming tide of already warm air through the open window. “Do you think that makes me a terrible person?”

  “You tell me you helped kill a man, and it doesn’t occur to you that I might judge you for that. But this is why I would think you are terrible? Because you want one more day?”

  Irene lowered her head into her hands. She felt the floorboards shift as Marc crossed the room. He knelt in front of her and said, “I hope he knows how lucky he is to be loved by someone as terrible as you.”

  “I’ve read the accounts, I know what the French say—that the Cambodians have no ambition. But really, hasn’t that always been what colonials say about the natives?” Irene asked. “I just thought the French were envious because this was the one place they knew they could never get the upper hand. How could they, given what the Cambodians have come from? But I never expected it to be like this. I truly didn’t expect to see so many people like her.”

  Sitting over lunch with Simone and Marc in an arcaded café on the Quai de Vernéville, a drowsy boulevard that ran alongside the torpid canal that encased the European quarter, Irene watched a young Cambodian woman walk past. Her gait was slow and without purpose in the looseness of her sampot, a piece of fabric that was neither trousers nor skirt, wound around her waist and drawn up between her legs. With her wide features and shorn black hair, which stood as stiff as a bristle above her forehead, she could have been male or female. Only her blouse gave her gender away.

  “It’s as if she doesn’t even see a point in lifting her feet.” Irene examined the woman’s expression, the deadness in her eyes, as she stared straight ahead, avoiding the foreigners. “She looks tired. And unhappy. They all do. It’s as if they have no idea that they’re descendants of such nobility.”

  Simone and Irene had spent the morning at the customs warehouse, sorting through the crates Irene had shipped from Seattle, and now Simone was cross-referencing those supplies with her own list of benzene, gaiters, and mackintosh water bags. “Most of them know what the government wants them to know, and it gets worse every year,” she said, annoyed, drawing a dark black line through “wicks.” “Unfair land taxes and random punishments for crimes that can’t be anticipated. The undermining of traditions. And that’s the least of it. Unhappy? Of course they’re unhappy!”

  Simone had been irritable all morning, and Irene, still a bit woozy from her visit to Angkor Wat, as if the temple were a particularly strong drink she’d had one too many of, was trying to ignore her mood. “You sound as if I’m faulting them, Simone, but I’m not. That’s the last thing I want to do. In fact, I want the opposite. The scrolls have the potential to bring them the kind of recognition they deserve, not just from the outside but from within too. By knowing how their story ended, they can know how to start over. The scrolls could turn out to be just the thing to show the Cambodians how they can be capable of it all again. The art. The architecture. Just imagine it.” Stirring her asparagus soup, Irene looked across the street, where flame trees spread their carmine branches above the shore of the canal. Three Cambodian men were squatting on the deck of a sampan, halfheartedly playing cards. A clay jug that had been full of rice whiskey was now discarded next to an ugly yellow dog passed out at their bare, splayed feet. “Honestly, though, Simone, don’t you wonder at all how the French have been able to take their pride away from them so thoroughly?”

  “You’re being naïve, Irene,” Marc said. “The French have bigger guns.”

  “They have guns,” Simone said, so sharply that Marc observed her with wariness as he continued. “They would kill every last Cambodian if they sensed a hint of resistance. I saw it too often in China. It’s disgusting, how many excuses a colonial government can come up with for a massacre. The Cambodians wouldn’t stand a chance.”

  “But what about Angkor Wat? There’s no reason they shouldn’t live there. Why not reclaim it?” Irene asked, even though, as she was speaking, she knew exactly why not. She understood that what you wanted, no matter how badly you wanted it, did not mean anything if it was also wanted by someone more powerful than you. “There’s no point in them living here! A hill, that’s all the Cambodians have of a heritage in Phnom Penh. A hill with a Siamese-style stupa guarded by Chinese Fu dogs on a spot where a woman buried some sacred Buddhist relics in the fourteenth century. Not to mention a tinfoil royal palace for a puppet king that may as well have been built in Bangkok. They’re heirs to the Khmer, and the only evidence of that is the king’s dancers.”

  “Angkor Wat is too symbolic,” Simone said. “The government would never let them have that kind of foothold.” She scowled. “What could possibly be wrong this time?” She was being summoned by a Cambodian man in a blue button-down dress shirt and matching sampot, who was standing beyond the low whitewashed wall of the café terrace. Irene had already seen him twice that morning, coming and going at the warehouse. He was helping with the final arrangements for the equipment they still needed for the expedition—more axes and an elaborate first aid kit and what seemed like miles of sturdy rope—but every time he ambled up to Simone, she became more exasperated and he more sullen. Now she hissed, “On the surface, yes, the Cambodians are no longer impressive, but essentially, they’re no different than they have always been. That’s what gives them more strength than they receive credit for. If only people would see their possibility in that. The problem with you, Irene, is that you can’t stop focusing on the least important part of what they used to be.”

  Marc watched Simone stride away. “I liked her better in the car. She was amiable.”

  “She was doped on Luminal,” Irene said, growing concerned about more than just Simone’s disposition. Given her evident displeasure as she spoke rapidly with the man in Khmer, Irene added to her list of growing worries that there might be trouble with the last supplies needed for travel into the uplands, or that Simone was on the verge of doing something reckless again that might cause them to miss the steamer. With these concerns compounded by the issue of getting permits on time and the possibility that Louis would tell one of his colleagues about the temple now that he and Simone had had a falling-out, Irene was completely drained. “
Louis found the bottle when they were unpacking at the hotel,” she said. “She must have stolen it from the hospital.”

  “So she’s going to be this temperamental for the rest of the trip?”

  “Probably, if Louis keeps her clean.”

  “How pleasant for us in the middle of the jungle.” Marc stirred his sugarcane juice, watery with melted ice. “But you know, Irene, I think I know what she means.”

  “What are you talking about?” she asked.

  “Their history, their past, whatever you want to call it.” He turned from Simone to the fishermen. “It’s in the way they’re sitting, and how their hair is pulled back at their necks. It’s fascinating. Take away that bottle of rice whiskey and give them fishing poles, and I’d swear they were one of the carvings we saw at the Bayon.”

  After leaving Angkor Wat, Irene had taken Marc to the nearby Bayon temple, where the galleries were wrapped in bas-reliefs of Khmer daily life. But rather than warriors and kings, these were detailed depictions of women cooking over charcoal braziers and men carrying loaves of palm sugar to market. As her eyes roamed from Marc to the men on the boat, Irene was able to see what he did: their bony figures transformed into sculpted stone.

  Irene had not expected Marc’s growing interest in the Khmer. To share a past was one kind of intimacy, and more than she had hoped for. To share a passion was a good fortune beyond her belief, and she felt a thrill at this prospect, as he pointed out a matron at her wooden-wheeled cart, roasting scrawny fish over cinders, and said, thoughtfully, “Look at the style of her sampot. Did you see the looms beneath the huts as we were driving back from Siem Reap? Just like on the sculptures at the Bayon. I doubt the techniques or patterns have changed over the centuries.” He rose in his chair to acknowledge Simone’s return and said to her, “Their strength lies in the way their past is still present in their day-to-day lives. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? Despite what’s been taken from them, and what’s been inflicted on them, they’ve persisted in living the way they have always lived.”

  Simone’s annoyance appeared to lessen, and she nodded.

  But this did not appease the anger Irene felt about how little regard the colonial system had for what the Cambodians should still be. “Managing to hold on to the minutiae of their daily lives hasn’t given them any advantage. Their kingdom, their ability to create such a kingdom, surely that’s where any remaining power lies.”

  “The Egyptians, the Mayans—civilizations disappear. It’s the law of nature,” Marc asserted, slipping back into their discussion from the previous day. “There’s always a time to let go. A time to move on.”

  What Irene was beginning to feel at discovering the position the Cambodians had been forced into by the French was something greater than disappointment. It was sadness that her beloved Khmer had been reduced to this, and a growing fear that what she might in fact end up learning from the scrolls was that the Cambodians had fallen so hard centuries ago that their defeat had become a trait, like hair color or height, inherited and passed down and accepted without question throughout the generations, so that when colonization arrived, it did not come as a surprise, and fighting back was not a consideration. Sickened by the thought of their being so beaten down, she asked, “Do you really think that fate has that much influence on the rise and fall of a culture?”

  “It’s hardly fate,” Marc said. “History has its natural rhythms. Maybe, somehow, the Cambodians know this. Have accepted it, even. Their time for distinction has come and gone.”

  Simone slapped her notebook shut. “I let you see Angkor Wat, and this is what the two of you conclude? That the Khmer are so confined by one aspect of their heritage that they don’t have any other way of rising out of this? How can you claim to care about the Khmer, Irene, if you can’t conceive that their time could come again? Their time will come again.”

  “I’m sorry, Simone, I want to, I do, but—”

  “Mon Dieu, that man is a nuisance!”

  The Cambodian had returned to the railing, curling his fingers in a downward wave, beckoning. Simone went back to him. Marc and Irene looked uneasily at one another, like chastened schoolchildren. “I hope Louis sorts out our paperwork,” Marc said. “If this is what we’re in for, I don’t think I have the stamina for another week of waiting for the steamer to come around again.”

  Irene watched a rickshaw sluggishly approaching Simone and the Cambodian. It was laden with the oiled canvas tarpaulins the expedition would need for protection from the rain. Irene was too far away to see what was wrong with them, only that Simone did not approve. “It’s frustrating, not having any contacts of my own for the rest of the supplies,” she said. “It makes me nervous, having to rely on her so completely right now.”

  “The way she’s behaving, it seems as if it’s about more than having a few pills taken away,” Marc said. “What else do you think is wrong?”

  “Welcome to the rabbit hole. I could sit here guessing for a year and the only thing I’d know for sure is that whatever I concluded, if Simone is involved, I wouldn’t be right.”

  Irene and Marc did not have to wait long to learn the reason for Simone’s ill temper. Halfway through dinner, in the middle of a discussion about the difficulties of river travel because of the lateness of the monsoons this season, Simone shushed Louis—“I think we’ve heard enough about rapids for tonight”—and leaned toward Irene. “I’ve been waiting all day for you to mention his name,” she said, her voice smudged by the two glasses of Bordeaux she’d had with her cassoulet. “In Saigon, when you learned that Henry Simms was here, I thought you were going to run all the way to Cambodia to find out what is going on. Now we’ve been here an entire day, he’s living in a villa less than a mile outside of town, and my contacts tell me you haven’t gone to see him.”

  Instinctively, Irene scanned the dining room, but the Cambodian in the blue dress shirt was not skulking in one of the corners. “What else have your contacts told you?”

  “That he’s nearly dead.”

  Marc’s leg braced against Irene’s beneath the table. Her wariness slipped from the room’s depths to the open terrace doors, where large winged insects soared in, drawn to the apricot burn of the electric lamps. Light flickered with the shadows of thick, flapping moths and the uneven swing of the electric fans. A storm was approaching, and waiters dashed around the patio, bringing in cushions, candleholders, and plants.

  “He has cancer,” Irene said.

  Tonight, Simone had chosen to resemble an American flapper, in a dress that swayed with beaded fringe every time she moved. She had even found time to oil her hair into pin curls, and she twisted a lock around her finger as she said, “When you and I first met, Irene, I assumed you and Henry simply had a business arrangement. Two people in the same circle whose paths crossed at the right time and who made a deal for the scrolls. Then you showed up in my hospital room with his son.”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to bring that up,” Irene said.

  Coolly, Simone appraised Marc. “In love, of all things, with Henry Simms’s son.”

  Heat rushed to Irene’s face, and her eyes darted away from Marc’s. She had not been hiding her feelings for him—they were sharing the same hotel room, after all—but still she felt exposed. She held out her after-dinner cigarette to Louis, the only one she could face without embarrassment. “What do you want from me?” she asked Simone.

  “Clarification. Let’s start with the story behind you and Henry Simms.”

  There was obviously more to Simone’s challenge than finding out how Irene and Mr. Simms were bound to one another. Irene could hear her digging for something deeper. Watching Simone take a third glass of wine, thinking about how argumentative she had been all day, and knowing how distrustful she was of Mr. Simms, Irene felt her instincts tell her to make peace. And to tread cautiously. My contacts. They were in new territory. Simone’s territory. “All right,” she said, “if that’s what you need from me tonight.” She wished
she had ordered something stronger than the Cointreau digestif in the tiny cordial glass before her. She drank the citrus-flavored liqueur in one gulp, as if it were a shot of whiskey. “I was kidnapped before I was born.”

  Outside, beyond the patio, clouds approached low and fast, and the moonlight was obscured. The gramophone crackled with the wet electricity in the air. Ain’t nobody’s business if I do. There was a shift around the table, a collective movement toward Irene, who had never told this story to anyone. She had never had anyone to tell it to who would not be shocked or, more likely, horrified. But these people—Marc, Simone, and Louis—they might not even find it unusual.

  “My parents were living in Manila,” she told them. “Whenever my father was away in a port, he scoured curio shops. He bought porcelain vases, terra-cotta statues, wood-block prints, whatever caught his eye, and sold it to dealers.” As thunder rumbled its deep-throated imitation of the world’s end, she had to raise her voice to explain. “But he wasn’t an expert. He never wanted to be. He called himself a scavenger, and that was what he loved most about the hunt. The element of surprise.”

  As Irene sifted through the details of her parents’ story, the rain fell, a thick wall toppling against the hotel. Although it lapped onto the terrace, threatening to flood the dining room, the louvered doors remained open. Waiters served wine, the front-desk madame worked the gramophone beside the dance floor, and the hotel’s Greek owner inhaled snuff with a turbaned guest. Despite the distraction of drunken conversations and raucous laughter competing with the storm, Marc, Simone, and Louis were intent on only one thing.

  “Go on,” Marc urged.

  “My father was on shore leave in Borneo when he learned about the death of a missionary who was said to collect tribal artwork. He asked to view it. There wasn’t much, some crude carvings of Jesus, the usual shrunken heads and bone pipes. But he did find a trunk of botanical drawings, a catalog of the flora of Sarawak. He thought it might be of interest to a university. When he got the trunk back to Manila, he discovered a false panel. He removed it and—”