The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  The sky splintered, and thunder exploded through. A roar of approval flew up from the men and women in the dining room.

  “He removed it and he found—”

  The ground seemed to open deep beneath them, releasing a detonation from the earth’s core. The hotel shook. The lights went out. Through the pounding rain, the colonials cheered louder.

  Irene felt a hand on hers. It was Louis, asking, “What did he find?”

  Irene whispered, “What if it was Reverend Garland’s diary?”

  Around the room, matches flared, and candles began to flutter. Kerosene lamps were lit, and as a waiter set one in the center of their table, their faces took on an eerie, quavering orange pallor.

  “What are you talking about?” Simone asked.

  With the fans stilled, the air grew heavy. Lightning stripped darkness from the sky. “The diary. What if that’s what my father found in the missionary’s trunk? He told me it was a book.”

  “What kind of book?”

  “I don’t know. That damn book. That’s all I ever heard him call it. I’d forgotten that it had belonged to a missionary.” Her mind raced, calculating. “If that missionary was Reverend Garland, that would mean my father found the diary before I was born. It could mean that Mr. Simms knew about it all the way back then, and not just after my father died.”

  “Why would he have known?” Marc asked.

  “And what does any of this have to do with the kidnapping?” Louis asked.

  “Mr. Simms was also living in Manila then. That’s when he became friends with my parents,” Irene explained. “There was a gangster there too. An Englishman named Lawrence Fear.”

  Simone sat forward. “Fear?”

  “I know. A criminal named Fear. It sounds like something from a dime novel, doesn’t it?”

  “What happened?” Simone asked, urgently. “What did he do?”

  “My father had shown the book to one of the dealers he worked with, to find out what it was worth, and he figured the dealer must have told Fear. Fear had people fishing for information for him all over the Orient. When he learned of the book, he waited until my father was out of the house and sent his men for my mother. She was eight months pregnant with me, but that didn’t matter to them. They locked her up in a warehouse on one of the wharves. My father brought the book immediately, but something went wrong and Fear shot my mother. I remember the scar, above her breast.”

  “Simms,” Louis prodded. “How does Simms fit in?”

  “He went with my father to help. They knew they’d be searched, so they weren’t carrying guns. Mr. Simms killed Fear with an iron bar he’d found, and another man with Fear’s own gun before the rest ran away.”

  “Everything he’s told me about you,” Marc said, dazed as he absorbed this loose scrap of his father’s history, “but he never said anything about this.”

  “I was told that the book disappeared,” Irene said, “but what if that’s not true? What if my father kept it all those years until his death?”

  “Why would he take it and not tell anyone?” Louis asked.

  “I don’t know,” Irene said.

  “Lawrence Fear.” Simone repeated the name, as if it were a foreign term she was trying to interpret.

  As swiftly as it had blown into the city, the squall was moving on. The growl of thunder began to fade, and Irene contemplated the possibility that Reverend Garland’s diary and the book her father had found in the missionary’s trunk were one and the same. It didn’t make sense: If they’d had the diary, her father and Mr. Simms would have gone after the lost temple back then, and she could think of no reason why Mr. Simms would have her hunt for it again. Still, she could not shake the thought.

  “I took you to Angkor Wat,” Simone murmured, fidgeting with the fringe of her dress. “I let you have that, because I really did think that, deep in your heart, you’re one of us.”

  “Simone,” Louis said, with warning.

  “Once she sees it, I thought, then I won’t have to convince her.” Simone drained her wineglass. “She’ll know. She’ll want their resurrection as much as I do. But I didn’t understand. This goes too far back for you. In the womb! Of course you’re like Henry Simms. Of course the opinions of men like him matter to you. You can’t help yourself. I knew this was going to be a struggle, but … And my mother. My mother! How does she even fit into this?”

  Marc and Louis looked to Irene for an explanation, but Irene shook her head, silently letting them know that she had no idea why Simone was talking about her mother. Speechless, the three of them watched Simone as she began to whisper, “No.” Her head tipped from side to side, her dress shimmying as she repeated herself. “No!” she shouted, shearing conversation from the room.

  “Simone?” Louis said, tentatively this time.

  “What did she take?” Marc held up his hand, dismissing the rapidly approaching front-desk madame. “Simone, did you take anything tonight?”

  “You’re still not well,” Louis said to her. “You shouldn’t have had so much to drink.”

  The madame crossed her arms over her brick-house torso and planted herself a few feet away.

  One of us—it rustled into Irene’s thoughts.

  “My mother, of all things,” Simone muttered.

  “What about your mother?” Marc asked. When Simone did not respond, he said to Louis, “She’s almost delirious. This is more than too much to drink.”

  Defiantly, Simone said, “They know they can trust me. They told me about … I know Simms intends to leave a fortune to L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient.” Breathing heavily, she turned to Louis. “You promised you wouldn’t tell her, and you did. Now you think you can trick me, as if this revolution—”

  Louis caught Simone by the arm and lifted her from her chair. “It’s time to go.”

  The agitation in Irene’s thoughts amplified as Simone’s words from the night on the steamer when they were sailing out of Hong Kong broke through. There are reasons a revolution is necessary, Irene. I didn’t believe in it solely because he told me to.… I knew what I was doing. I have always known what I am doing.

  Simone mumbled, “If you think you can trick me into giving up the scrolls by funneling Simms’s money to me through some lackey pretending to work for the government—”

  “Enough!” Louis pulled Simone away from the table.

  The front-desk madame looked worriedly at the hotel owner, but the Brillo-haired Greek shrugged and took another whiff of his snuff.

  Irene remembered Simone berating the official in the customs shed back in Saigon. People like you are the reason I joined the Communists. You are the reason the French are going to lose Indochina.

  Simone struggled against Louis, and Marc stood. “Let me help you.”

  “No.” Louis was much stronger than he appeared to be. Already, he had Simone halfway across the room.

  Then there was today in the café. Their time will come again. Irene reached for a drink, but her hand was shaking, and the glass shattered as it hit the tile floor. “Shit.”

  “What?” Marc asked. “What in the hell is going on?”

  Incredulously, Irene said, “I think Simone wants the scrolls for the Communists.”

  Chapter 15

  A Great Cambodian Adventure

  For her confrontation with Simone, Irene chose the one kind of place where she had always felt sure of herself. As she heaved open the front door of the Musée Albert Sarraut, she pressed her palms against the carvings on its surface, the same floral pattern found on stone pillars and lintels throughout the Khmer temples. Inside, a Cambodian slouched in a hammock. He opened one eye, halfway. It was not yet 7:00 A.M. Her stare dared him to turn her away. He could not be bothered to confront a wild-eyed white woman at such an early hour and retreated back into his sleep.

  Although the morning was already liquid with heat, the rose-hued vestibule was cool. Irene had never been inside a museum that was not cool, and she savored the familiar su
bterranean atmosphere. She crossed the hall to the opposite door, and when she pushed it back, a reflection of sunlight pooled at her feet. It was as if someone had poured warm water over her sandals. She entered the courtyard. Simone had not yet arrived, and Irene was both relieved and amazed as she studied the galleries that framed the lotus ponds, four dark green water gardens that fanned out from a central gazebo. Unlike any museum she had ever been in, there was not a single interior wall to protect the centuries-old statues of Siva and Brahma, nor even screens to pull closed against the elements.

  Irene waited on a wooden bench in a well of shade, where she watched sunlight crawl across the red-tile roof, lifting a vaporous film from the air. Pillars showed their sharp angles, and as morning levered the sun farther into the sky, light billowed around pedestals scattered like pilings in a shallow stone sea. It rose like a tide over the bare feet of Vishnu, easing up his polished calves to the smooth hem of his sampot. Simone’s yellow dress seemed to glow when she arrived from the entry hall, clutching the note Irene had slipped under her hotel room door. The paper said only “Musée Albert Sarraut.”

  Too tired to accuse, Irene simply asked, “You still want a revolution, don’t you?”

  “You should know that I’m through with the Communists,” Simone announced rapidly, as if she too had been up all night and still did not know how to begin. “They’re as bad as the colonial government. Everything is politics to them. Everything is about power. About who has the power. Not only over the country but within the party too. Roger spent as much time battling Voitinsky as he did the Municipal Government.”

  “If this isn’t about Communism, then I don’t understand what happened last night.”

  Making her way through the statues, Simone stopped to lay the back of her hand against the cool cheek of the goddess Lakshmi. “I’ve never cared about power, but I’ve always cared about Cambodia, even when I was a girl, even before I met Roger and understood what my feelings could accomplish. After I came back from my first trip to France, I would think about the architecture here, the wrought-iron balconies and forest green shutters, and I could never figure it out. Why would a person come this far and then make every effort to feel as if he had never left Marseilles? What purpose could there be in taking a ship halfway around the globe only to eat crème brûlée in a café where the tables were covered in bobbin lace from Normandy? The French have done a remarkable job of paving their culture right over the top of the Khmer’s.”

  Irene could not remember if Simone had always talked like this. The French. Their culture. As if she belonged to an entirely different nationality. Despite how Irene felt about the way colonialism was stifling the Cambodians, she said, “They’re restoring temples. Surely there’s value in that.”

  Tracing her finger along the engraved braid that framed Lakshmi’s high brow, Simone said, “I’m not talking about their pretentious efforts at archaeology to bolster the soiled reputation of the French Empire. I’m talking about the present day. Give them another generation of mission civilisatrice, and any last trace of Khmer culture will be erased. All that will be left is this museum and an amusement park called Angkor Wat with one of your Coney Island roller coasters swooping over the lotus ponds.”

  “And how do you think the scrolls can change that?”

  “Shouldn’t the Cambodians be the ones to decide what kind of life they’re going to live? What kind of future their country will have?” Simone tipped her head in thought, and it was as if she were consulting the sculpted goddess beside her rather than Irene when she asked, “Shouldn’t they be the ones to choose if they’re going to replace amok with bouillabaisse? Sampots with Brooks Brothers suits? Shouldn’t their history—their own history—belong to them, to do with as they please?”

  “And what is that?”

  “Start a nationalist party and take their country back.”

  It was such an unprotected, unrepentant statement; Irene had to force herself to hold Simone’s gaze. She felt an immediate shame that any of this came as a surprise. She thought about everything Simone had told her in Shanghai: how she had organized arms shipments with the gunrunner Borodin, and had helped found the workers’ Shanghai Chronicle, and was the confidante of the wife of Chiang Kai-shek, but mostly her declaration, “I am valuable.” In retrospect, Irene could too easily see that this had not been said to soothe Simone’s wounded ego. Searching for something to say that might encourage answers without provoking Simone, Irene said, “I had such idealistic ideas about what I was going to find over here, what I would discover about the Cambodians that no one else had. I didn’t realize how inadequate a decade of study could be compared to a single day in the streets.”

  “That’s exactly it, Irene. The Cambodians are more than they’re given credit for. They care about traditions, and they’re willing to work hard to feed their children. How different is that from any of the Europeans over here? But there’s no point in hard work, since everything they earn is taken away from them. The government sees them as nothing but the labor they provide the rubber plantations. The colonials are doing everything they can to drain the Cambodians of any last excellence they might have in them. It’s because they know. Given a pittance of their old superiority, the first thing the Cambodians would do is kick the French out of their country.”

  Irene stood. “You still haven’t explained how the scrolls fit into any of this.”

  Simone crossed her arms. “And you still haven’t explained how Lawrence Fear and my mother fit in.”

  Again, this reference to her mother. And what could Lawrence Fear possibly have to do with anything? “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Irene said.

  “You’re honestly telling me that you don’t know about Madeleine and Sarah and their great Cambodian adventure?”

  Irene’s eyes jumped from Simone to the impassive statue beside her to the red hibiscus flickering in the cloud shadows of the courtyard—trying to comprehend. Why had Simone Merlin, hell-bent on taking the scrolls to start a nationalist party, just said Sarah, Irene’s mother’s name?

  “Oh,” Simone gasped. “You really don’t know, do you?”

  Irene shook her head.

  “Fear. It’s a name you’ve never forgotten. Well, I can’t forget it either, although I didn’t know it was a name until last night. When my mother died, I found a letter among her belongings, from a woman named Sarah in America. Do you remember how it was when your mother died? How you gathered everything you could? The memory of her perfume. The way she kissed your forehead when she put you to bed. Her smile. You fought to keep her alive.”

  “I remember.”

  “I memorized this.” Simone unfolded a worn sheet of paper, glanced at it, and then recited from memory. “My dearest Madeleine. I have learned of the tragic loss of your son. I am so sorry. Some days the thought of what might have happened to my unborn daughter is too much to bear, and I cannot fathom the pain you are now suffering. There is no greater loss than that of a child. I will never be able to thank you enough for helping to save us from Fear in Manila.”

  Irene tried to shut out the scratching noise of the bats in the rafters, but as Simone held out the letter, their shuffling grew louder. She noticed Simone’s nails, bitten down to the raw red quick. Her body did not know what to do, tense or wilt, as she recognized her mother’s handwriting on the same oyster-colored stationery she had used for all of her correspondence, even notes left for the milkman or tucked into Irene’s lunch pail.

  Simone said, “I remember thinking that it was such a strange thing to write. For helping to save us from Fear. Especially since Fear was capitalized. Do you see how it’s capitalized? I thought that was a mistake.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “No, it wasn’t. I will always treasure our great adventure in Cambodia. I cannot know why you agreed to keep the secret, but I know why I did, and I am not sorry. I hope you still feel the same. Patrik sends his love, as do I. Your devoted friend, Sarah. Do y
ou see the date, Irene? 1897. This was written two years before my parents were married.” She scanned the letter, as if searching for hidden answers. “I’ve never understood it, Irene. My mother never told me about having a son who died.”

  “I was told that Mr. Simms saved our lives. He’s the one who killed Fear. How could your mother have saved us? What could she have done?”

  Simone thought this over. “She served as a nurse during the Franco-Chinoise War. She was at the hospital night and day during the uprisings in Siem Reap. You said your mother was shot. Mine could have treated the wound.”

  “What would she have been doing in Manila?”

  “The same thing your parents were doing. Traveling,” Simone speculated. “Exploring new places. It’s not an unrealistic thought, Irene. Do you understand what this could mean? If my mother was in Manila, if she was with them for some reason, and if she helped your mother, then she must have known Henry Simms. If you’re right, what you said last night, if your father had Reverend Garland’s diary before you were born—”

  “I don’t know if that’s true.” In the bright daylight, without the urging of a storm, Irene was reluctant to jump to this conclusion.

  “But if it is. If it is!” Whatever politics Simone believed in, whatever larger-than-life hopes she had for the revival of the Khmer Empire, they were forgotten for an instant as she said, excitedly, “A great Cambodian adventure. Irene, promise me that you’ll tell me if you find out what that means.”

  “A Cambodian nationalist party?” Marc whistled. “Did she tell you how she plans on doing this?”

  Irene stood inside the closed door of their hotel room. The yellowing glass lamps were not turned on, as if dimness could equal coolness. It couldn’t. She peeled off her blouse, but her camisole was still too warm for the sticky late-morning heat. “We didn’t make it that far. We were interrupted by the discovery that our mothers might have had some kind of Cambodian adventure together. A great Cambodian adventure. Possibly with your father. Possibly having to do with the diary.”