by Kim Fay
Marc pushed away from the mahogany desk, where he had been reading through the small collection of books about the Khmer that Irene had brought with her. Around the books and tucked into them, his notes were scribbled on letter paper provided by the hotel. “I didn’t know your families knew one another.”
“Like everything else, neither did I.” She unlatched the tall slatted doors that opened onto the balcony. A downy rain had started as she was walking back from the museum, and the rattan furniture outside was slick with a fine mist, despite the awning above. She retrieved her packet of cigarettes from where she had tucked it into a pot of withering marigolds.
Marc said, “I know it doesn’t make sense, but do you think there’s any way Henry could have something to do with this nationalist party of hers?”
“At this point anything is likely, but I don’t think so. My guess now is that Simone is part of this expedition because of some relationship Mr. Simms had with her mother. Something happened over here, before we were born, presumably to do with the temple we’re after. It could be why he wanted me to get her out of Shanghai.”
“Why wouldn’t he tell you that?”
“I’m not sure. He’s always been a manipulator. I just didn’t see any of this coming because he’s never manipulated me.” Irene should have been angered. Instead she felt honored, at being at the heart of this mechanism Mr. Simms had set in motion. “As for Simone’s politics, I have a feeling that they’re an unlucky coincidence. It all seems to be tangled together because we’re all tangled together.” Tipping ashes onto the dead moths in the flowerpot, she sighed. “A revolution to call her own. Who would have guessed that that’s what she really wants from this? I still can’t quite believe it.”
Marc joined Irene on the balcony. Leaning against the railing, they looked down at the French tricolors hanging damp and limp from iron posts dotted along the riverfront promenade on the opposite side of the wide Quai Lagrandiere boulevard. “If it makes you feel any better, I was Shanghai’s watchdog, and I didn’t know Simone was planning anything.”
The worst part of this for Irene was that she knew the exact cause of her blindness. “Simone told me what I needed to know to see this coming, and I didn’t listen because I wanted to hear something else. I wanted someone who understood me. Who desired what I desired. I felt unmoored after everything that happened in Seattle.” She traced his shoulder, searching for direction as her finger circled the compass that showed beneath the cotton of his white shirt. “I thought that once we found the scrolls, we could reach some kind of compromise. I thought she was homesick and defeated. I felt sorry for her. I thought I was saving her. But Marc, she killed her husband. She saved me that night. It’s unforgivable, how wrong I allowed myself to be about her.”
“You weren’t wrong. She does share your desire. Both of you plan to use the scrolls to fulfill a dream. The problem is that you have such different dreams.” He caught her hand and stilled it, and while she was comforted by his closeness, it unsettled her too. He asked, “What are you going to do now?”
“She does love her sedatives. Maybe I can drug her and make a run for it.”
He nodded appreciatively. “Good girl. Never lose your sense of humor, especially here in the gallows.”
“If I could figure out her reasons for thinking it will do any good to hand the scrolls over to the Cambodians, if I could understand how the scrolls can make a difference in what the revolutionaries are trying to accomplish, then I’d have a better chance of knowing if there’s any validity in what she wants to do. Of knowing what I’m truly up against.”
Marc was thoughtful as he looked out at the leather brown Tonle Sap River. Although the day was well under way, there was no commerce on the docks, only vacant fishing boats and a Cambodian boy sprawled in a canoe. Finally, he said, “When Angkorian society began, Paris and London were not much more than elaborate villages. Europe was crawling with barbarians, and here were the Khmer engineering sophisticated irrigation systems and constructing the biggest temple in the world. I didn’t know about any of this until I started reading.” He waved inside, at the books on the desk. “I’ve lived in the Orient all my life, I’ve lived under a colonial government all my life, and I’ve never questioned one empire usurping another. It’s the way of the world. But when we were walking through Angkor Wat, I found myself wondering about what is lost when one culture is systematically annihilated so another can thrive in the name of progress. Think about it, what might have happened if Cambodia hadn’t eventually been taken over by Siam and then France—what the Cambodians could offer the world if they’re given the opportunity to follow through with what they’re meant to become.”
This was counter to everything Marc had said about inevitability, and Irene struggled against disbelief as she asked, “Do you think she’s right? Do you think the scrolls should be given to the Cambodians?”
He was momentarily puzzled by her question. “I didn’t know this had anything to do with right and wrong. As for what I think, I’ve already told you, history has its course, and there’s not much to be done about it. I’m simply trying to help you find your way through that minefield of a brain of hers. I thought that’s what you wanted.”
“But what if it’s possible?”
“What?” he asked.
“That this is about opportunity. That the Cambodians might create something of value again if only they’re given the chance. Can you imagine how glorious that would be? Can you imagine being part of such a resurrection? Theoretically, what you’re saying has logic. And I don’t know, maybe what Simone is saying does too.”
“Don’t tell me you’re planning on becoming a revolutionary?”
Irene wished she could find this funny. “The more rational her argument becomes, the more legitimate her threat becomes.”
“So you think she’s sincere?” Marc frowned, as if this had not occurred to him. “This isn’t just a melodramatic reaction to Roger’s death?”
Irene snuffed out her cigarette in the marigold pot. “That’s what I plan to find out.”
Down at the end of the waterfront, the customs warehouse was dark and smelled of stale lager, cigarette butts, and river-soaked wood. Irene walked through it quickly, holding her breath. On the wharf outside the rolling doors, next to a bearded customs agent, Louis stood with a manifest in one hand. He was barking at two coolies who struggled to haul a crate into the hold of the Alouette. The words BROOKE EXPEDITION, SEATTLE, USA bobbed with their effort. Irene had ordered this stamped on each of the containers she’d sent over, since association with the museum would add credibility. She stepped between the two men. “Excuse me. Louis, I need to talk with you.”
They had not seen one another since he dragged Simone from the hotel restaurant the previous night. He glanced from the coolies to the list, and when she saw “tinned provisions” on the paper, she knew exactly what the crate contained—peaches and applesauce, Van Camp’s pork and beans, and Campbell’s oxtail soup. She had bought it all from a grocer who supplied Alaska mining camps in Seattle. “I’ll meet you back here in half an hour,” he said to the agent.
As soon as the man was out of sight, Irene accosted Louis. “How long have the two of you been planning this?”
“What this?” he asked, guiding her to the side of the warehouse, not for privacy but for shade.
“A revolution.”
Louis laughed. “What in God’s name would I want with a revolution?”
“Why else would you be—”
He cut her off. “I’ll tell you what, Irene. Let’s not talk around this. You admit what you’re going to do with the scrolls, and I’ll be frank with you.”
Across the quay, balconied French villas dozed in the heat. Down the cobbled embankment, sun-bleached sampans had collected like driftwood in the muddy shallows of the boat landing. One view belonged to a world Simone intended to topple. Another to a world she hoped to raise from the ashes. How peacefully they seemed to reside toge
ther. How dangerously easy such an illusion was to believe. Irene had nothing to lose by conceding to Louis. “I’m going to take them to America and use them to buy a curatorship. New York is the obvious choice, but I’ve been thinking about San Francisco. The Ethier Museum. It’s competed with the Brooke for years, but it never stood a chance. It didn’t have me. But with the scrolls and me, within five years I will transform it into the most notable museum of Oriental art in the world. In ten I’ll have filled its galleries with at least half the Khmer relics now in the halls of the Guimet, not to mention everything I acquired for the Brooke. I will give the Khmer the prominence they deserve.”
“So you do have a solid plan.” Louis folded the list of supplies still in his hand and tucked it into his pocket. “Simone thinks she is going to sell them for the money she needs for a revolution here in Cambodia.”
“Money? She wants money? But I’ve offered her fifty thousand dollars for helping me.”
“You know those scrolls could be valued at up to a million.”
“Fine. I’ll talk to Mr. Simms.” Irene had negotiated acquisitions worth a king’s ransom before. “I’ll get her whatever she wants. Money.” Relief washed over her. “Why didn’t she tell me? Or did she really think she could persuade me to join her cause?”
“She thinks she can persuade both of us,” Louis said, removing his straw hat. He rubbed his fingers over the red crease of the band’s imprint along his forehead. The rest of his face was ruddy from heat, sweat darkened the rim of his collar, and his string tie had come loose from its knot. He looked as worn down as Irene felt. “She thinks it’s only a matter of time before we come to our senses. As for your generous offer, she’s refusing to sell them to just anyone. She plans to sell them to the government.”
Squinting up the promenade, where two foreigners in rumpled suits stood smoking in the shelter of a magnolia tree, Irene said, “But the French are the last people she’d want to get their hands on them.”
“You’re not thinking like Simone. When they look at those scrolls, she wants them to think about how they financed the downfall of their colony.”
Irene had no patience for Freud or any other psychoanalytic fad chasing socialites around America, but she knew the terminology. “Is she delusional?”
“Does it matter?”
“But if she’s selling them to the government for spite? It’s shortsighted. It’s—”
“What, Irene? It’s what? The same as you thrusting them in the faces of the trustees who wronged you? To shame them into regretting how they underestimated you?” Coolly, he said, “I believe therein you will find the definition of spite.” He straightened his jacket, securing an undone button, and then he began to fix the knot in his tie, as if by putting himself to rights he could banish his annoyance. But when he spoke again, his voice was still sharp. “What in the hell is wrong with the two of you? If these scrolls exist, they’re a greater understanding, not only of the Khmer, but of civilization, its evolution, and you’re treating them like cheap glass beads. As if they’re worth nothing more in trade than a chunk of your petty pride.”
Louis was no longer the lovesick satellite that Irene had watched tearfully orbiting Simone in Saigon. He was his own man, with his own convictions. There was danger in this, but at the same time Irene liked him the better for it. “The government won’t pay her,” she said. “They’ll demand she hand them over. You know the laws.”
Late in the previous year, after another bodhisattva from Angkor Wat had showed up at the Fogg Museum in Cambridge, the governor-general of Indochina had issued a decree: All ancient edifices found in the French-controlled provinces of Cambodia were now “monuments of public interest.” Anyone caught trying to take even a stone from one of the temples out of the country would risk imprisonment. Simone would have to make her deal from another country, where French law did not apply, and even then, the trade-off, exchanging the scrolls for the money, would be a gamble. “Although now that I think about it,” Irene added, “if she does manage to sell them to the government, how ideal that would be for you, since the Conservation d’Angkor is under their control.”
“It wouldn’t do me any good,” Louis said. “They’d send the scrolls back to France.”
Given all that she had been through in Seattle, Irene could understand his grievance. “It must be demoralizing, having them take everything of value away.” She glanced toward a fishing boat drifting past the end of the dock, distracted by the red and aqua gloss of its reflection wavering in the dark brown water. When she looked back, Louis was examining her in a way that made her feel as if he were reevaluating his opinion of her.
“Have you read Marchal on the subject of in situ?” he asked. “ ‘Angkor’s admirable sculptures receive their full values only from their situation. Detached or broken they lose all meaning and are nothing but insignificant fragments.’ All of the experts determined this years ago. La Jonquière with his inventory of Khmer monuments. Aymonier with his rubbings of Sanskrit inscriptions. Carpeaux with his photographs of Angkor Wat. But this administration has never been able to understand the irreparable damage of archaeological diaspora.”
“Then you do want this government overthrown.”
“I want this government to stick with governing and leave Angkor to us. Leave the monuments for us to study and decide what is best for them. There is no reason for a single artifact ever to have left this country.”
“That’s not true,” Irene protested.
“Naturally you would say that, raised by Henry Simms.”
“That’s not what I mean. If nothing left Cambodia, I wouldn’t know the Khmer. If people hadn’t taken statues, if my own father hadn’t brought back apsaras for the Brooke Museum, my mother would never have been able to give me their remarkable world.” The shadow narrowed with the passage of the sun, and Irene stepped closer to the warehouse. “That was how I survived as a girl. I would not have survived.”
“We are not talking about your survival, Irene. If I had the money you’re so casually willing to give Simone, I’d have a good chance of keeping the scrolls here. That kind of money buys control over an object.”
“I don’t know why you’d want that. You’ve seen the museum. It doesn’t even have walls. They wouldn’t be safe.”
“I wouldn’t put them in the museum. I would establish an institute, a place where I would be more than just the assistant curator of a poor relation outpost of L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient. What does a government school of research based out of Hanoi know about the best interests of the archaeology of Cambodia? I should have taken you to the conservation depot at Angkor Wat. It’s like a salvage yard. But right now I don’t have the authority to do anything about it. If I were the director of a privately funded foundation, however, that would change matters. With enough money, I could keep the remains of the Khmer Empire intact. It’s such a shame that you’re so, what was that word you used? Shortsighted. You can’t see what a good life you could have for yourself here. A life with me on your side.” He brushed at a streak of dust on his sleeve, frowning when he realized the effort was useless. “As it is, I intend to make sure that neither you nor Simone gets your way.”
Based on the story Irene had crafted about a search for ancient Khmer trade routes, the travel permits were approved, which meant the expedition, fractured as it was, would depart the next day. She was ready to leave Phnom Penh, and not just because she was eager to hunt for the temple. As she made her way from the warehouse back to the hotel, she was once again painfully aware of the bleak demeanor of the Cambodians she passed. Perhaps they smiled and laughed when they were alone, but in the European quarter, they eyed her warily, with hostility even. She had never dreamed she could feel unwelcome among these people when they meant so much to her. All she wanted was to find a way to rescue and preserve the best of what they had been. She was going to build an entire museum around their history. She was going to bring their culture prestige, and still they ey
ed her as if she, like the French, was responsible for their poverty and subjugation.
In the refuge of her room, she found a note from Marc, who had gone to visit the museum. She took a nap, which offered meager deliverance from the midday heat. Waking, she lay in bed, waiting for the rest of the day to pass. She hadn’t had an appetite since the previous night, but when the odors of garlic and grilled shrimp wafted through her open window from a food cart in the street, her sudden hunger drew her downstairs.
Beyond the wide doorway of the hotel lobby, colonials passed in open motorcars. Drawn outdoors by the cooling sway of late-afternoon air, Buddhist priests trailed orange robes as they walked by deep in conversation. It had rained again, and indistinct voices were punctuated by the tcho-kay cry of the gecko lizard. Irene made her way to the dining terrace, where florid Frenchmen were getting a head start on the night’s drinking. As a waiter approached to take her to a table, she saw Murat Stanić in the far corner.
It was that time right before tropical nightfall, when details sparked like fireflies—the filigree of wrought iron on lampposts on the promenade, the sage green ankle-strap shoes worn by the woman sitting beside Stanić. Although the woman’s face was lowered, hidden by a cloche hat the same color as the shoes, Irene could tell from her sleek black hair that she was an Oriental. They were talking intently with their heads close together, keeping their conversation safe between them. Preoccupied with Simone’s overdose, Angkor Wat, her feelings for Marc, the arrival of Mr. Simms, and now, of all things, a revolution and the stated opposition of Louis Lafont, Irene could hardly fault herself for forgetting that Stanić was coming to Phnom Penh. But there he was on the terrace of her hotel, reminding her that even if she, Simone, and Louis could miraculously find common ground, her journey was still burdened with more complications than she dared to consider.