The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  During the final day of the voyage, the sky was claustrophobically low, and the river, though rising from the monsoon rains, remained thick with boulders and marsh. Irene could not fathom how the captain would steer the steamer, but as late morning passed into early afternoon, he negotiated the braided waters at the frenzied direction of the pilot until at last she saw it, the confluence of the Mekong River with its sleek bronze tributary the Sekong. It was just past this junction that the colonial outpost of Stung Treng had been built, on the foundation of a primitive hill tribe village, on a passage between India and China.

  This was one of the few legitimate sections of an ancient Khmer trade route that Irene had incorporated into her bluff about the purpose of the expedition, a still-used byway through which gold, ivory, kingfisher feathers, and rhinoceros horn had once traveled. Otherwise, this no-man’s-land was considered to be as lacking in Khmer heritage as the European continent. It was easy for Irene to appreciate this belief as Stung Treng came into view. The town’s strand of shabby stucco buildings showed their dirt in the afternoon sun, and at the end of the unimpressive main street, shacks were propped up on crooked stilts within groves of tall, taut sugar palm trees.

  Locals in odd combinations of Oriental and Occidental attire began to gather on the embankment, hazy in the reflection of sunlight off the water. As the steamer approached, Irene made out a white pith helmet worn by a large, bulky European, who was using a cane to whack his way through the crowd. Coolies dropped into the river with thick mooring lines tight between their teeth, while the man in the helmet loomed above them. He wore a white dinner jacket, unbuttoned with nothing beneath it, revealing the flab of his chest coated in a moss of rust-colored hair. He had tied a maroon sarong around his fat waist, and on his feet Irene saw that he wore two-toned, wingtip dress shoes.

  “Benoit Ormond,” Simone said, coming up behind Irene.

  “The commissaire?”

  Observing him press a finger to his nostril and blow snot to the ground, Simone said, “You can see how fortunate the natives are to have his civilizing influence.”

  The commissaire for each district in Indochina was its gatekeeper, and this one would fulfill the expedition’s requisitions for oxcarts, horses, porters, and a camp cook, as well as give final approval for the travel permits issued in Phnom Penh. Irene had been worried that the commissaire of Stung Treng would find their arrival suspicious. After all, they were not the usual assembly of explorers. But looking at Ormond, who had transferred his attention to scratching his buttocks with his cane, she felt that he would not find much out of the ordinary. This should have eased her mind, but instead she wondered what it meant, that the French saw no need to entrust the guardianship of this territory to someone more serious.

  “Fine, fine, this is all in order. I’ll put the boys to work on the oxcarts in the morning.” Ormond waved the expedition’s documents at a Cambodian youth whose reddish mop of hair matched his. “They’ll be loaded and ready to go with the horses and oxen by nightfall. And you can take my guide, Xa. The best in the region.” He leaned back in his chair and held out his empty glass. “Boy, bring me another bottle. Three weeks without wine waiting for the Alouette. Damn the rains. A Frenchman without his vin rouge. Is there any greater tragedy?”

  Ormond had invited the expedition for dinner at his mildewing villa at the far end of Stung Treng, on a bluff hanging over the Sekong River. Having made their way through spicy fish stew, too much wine, and a gummy rice pudding, they were now settling into the screened verandah. Mr. Simms and Clothilde were not with them, but they had been joined by a middle-aged anthropologist named Lisette, who had been living in the province for longer than I care to remember, darlings, how delightful to have fresh faces in our little settlement. After nearly a week on the river, Irene welcomed how firm the earth felt beneath her. She was relaxed, or as relaxed as one could feel on the brink of what might turn out to be the most important archaeological discovery of the century.

  As Irene passed Marc to take a seat in the circle of chairs that Ormond had haphazardly arranged, she brushed her fingers along his upper arm. She was wearing an amethyst sheath, clinging to her beneath a sheer mantle of the same glassy color. She’d had it especially made for museum receptions, modeled after one of her favorite paintings, Erté’s Moonlight. On the steamer Simone had warned her that after a few days in the jungle, her feet would be septic, her face a rash of insect bites, and her dignity, along with her modesty, all but gone. Irene wanted to be beautiful for Marc tonight, so he would have something to envision once the jungle took hold of her.

  Irene was not the only one wearing formal clothes. Louis and Marc were also dressed, each in his own style, as if for an evening in Shanghai, and Simone’s maroon, velvet-lined robe matched her low boots. Perhaps these efforts to appear civilized were an instinctive attempt to foster peace. Irene hoped so, for they could not afford an argument in front of Ormond like the one that had occurred on the steamer.

  “Shall we listen to music?” Lisette asked. She had used kohl to give herself the eyes of an Asiatic, and with her salt-and-pepper hair, she looked like a Siamese cat.

  “Mmm, indeed, I am in the mood for Ravel,” Ormond said. And then to the room in general, “I hope you will pardon my ignorance, but I’m still not quite clear on what you’re doing up here.”

  “We’re investigating Khmer trade routes,” Louis said in a professional tone, as he began to explain the pretext Irene had invented to justify their journey. “Particularly from the periods of Suryavarman the Second and Jayavarman the Seventh. We hope to give scholars a new way of understanding the region’s historic mercantile systems.”

  “We have photographs we’d like you to look at,” Irene added. “Markers from the Royal Road.”

  How ideal it would be if there were similar stones in this area. How tedious it was to have to sit through this evening. Catching Marc watching her, Irene wished they could go to their room, a real room in Ormond’s villa with a real bed—a luxury after the discomfort of the steamer’s hard, narrow berths. She wished they were already deep into the jungle. She wished she knew if the scrolls existed. She was a bit light-headed from eagerness and anxiety and alcohol. She set her glass aside.

  “Fascinating stuff,” Ormond said, without interest. “There’s always someone up here chasing after something. Glow-in-the-dark centipedes. Savages to study. Did you see the article in National Geographic on the Moi? Why do Americans have such a fascination with bare breasts?” He threw a half-eaten dinner roll at another young houseboy, who had fallen asleep in the corner. With a start, the boy resumed operating the punkah, tugging the rope back and forth so that the wide sailcloth fan swept the air overhead. “The real point of my question is that I don’t understand what the assistant curator of the Angkor Wat temples, Henry Simms’s son, Roger Merlin’s widow, and a young lady from the Brooke Museum are doing in my province.” He uncorked a bottle and took a whiff. “Bah, piss of cat! Another one spoiled!”

  Irene did not have to look at the others to know that they were instantly alert.

  “And that girl,” Ormond said, “the Cambodian. I remember when Clothilde was a penny prostitute working the Chinese traders here in Stung Treng.”

  Attempting nonchalance, Irene said, “She doesn’t work for pennies anymore.”

  In his sea captain’s jacket and a sarong that was possibly made from damask curtains, Ormond—no fool, it turned out, despite his appearance—looked around, expectantly. “And for the pièce de résistance, you plan to leave a dying man in my house while you go in search of these trade routes of yours. And not any dying man. The notorious Henry Simms.”

  Irene’s mind raced. Murat Stanić? Clothilde? How else would a commissaire in one of the farthest regions in the country know who they all were?

  All of a sudden, Lisette laughed, a throaty, cigarette-singed trill. “Don’t let him bully you,” she said, as she removed a black record from its paper sleeve. “He knows you�
�re hunting for the temple. That’s all anyone comes up here hunting for. Bugs and that temple.”

  The henna light from the oil lamps twitched against the gauze walls of the mosquito netting. Marc’s foot shifted slightly against Irene’s. From across the room, she felt Simone flinch. She forced herself not to panic while Louis asked, “A temple? There’s a temple around here?” His surprise sounded pathetically false. “What kind of temple? Is it worth looking for?”

  Ormond guffawed, rubbing at a liver spot on his forearm. He pulled another bottle of wine from a box, where it had been packed in cloth embroidered with dainty English lavender. “Don’t you think if there was anything of value up here, it would already have been exploited? This isn’t the moon.”

  Irene thought back to the thatched Stung Treng market that they had walked through on their way to Ormond’s. Along with typical local goods, such as palm oil and tight tubes of betel leaves, she had seen cheap Japanese fans and tins of Chinese pastes used to color a woman’s lips. Inhaling the reek of fermented fish, she had watched a matron bargain over a container of Joncaire Paris face powder, the round box patterned in aqua and gold, with the words Un peu d’Orient in coy, slanted script. A carton of Hatamen cigarettes, made in British factories in Shanghai, had lain near the trader’s feet. All of these goods came through from Laos, Siam, Vietnam, and Burma, as well as China, India, and Malaya.

  Clothilde had known about the temple since she was a girl. This cat-eyed anthropologist knew about it. Ormond wasn’t admitting it, but he knew too, Irene was sure of it. And he was right. Stung Treng may have been a poor backwater, but how could anything of significance stay a secret when it lay so close to a crossroads such as this?

  While Louis offered many assets to the expedition, lying on the spot was not one of them. Marc stepped in, taking control of the conversation. “I suppose there’s no harm in us having a look around while we’re here.”

  Ormond eyed him with distrust. Then, so casually it was laughable, he said, “Do as you please. It doesn’t matter. You won’t make it past Leh. If you try, I can’t guarantee your safety. Tell them, Lisette,” he said, sternly.

  The woman seemed confused. In coming to Ormond’s, she could not have been expecting anything more than a break in the monotony of Stung Treng’s meager social life. “I’ve been studying Mon-Khmer dialects for almost a decade. I’ve traveled all over these provinces, but recently the village of Leh has become a fortress,” she explained with little conviction. Setting the gramophone record on the felt surface of the turntable, she continued, “There are rumors that the natives have discovered mineral deposits and are selling them to the Chinese. Gold, yes, I believe that’s what it is. Gold. The military is still trying to figure out what to do about the situation.”

  “There’s nothing to do,” Simone said, quickly. “The deposits are theirs. They can sell them to whomever they like.”

  Louis scowled at her. Now was not the time for proselytizing. But Irene had a feeling Simone was doing something different. If there was gold in these jungles, the government would not spend any time at all thinking about what it should do. It would swarm over the area, and Simone knew it. “With enough money, they could shift the power in this region.” She was diverting as only she could divert. “That would certainly affect your position, Monsieur Ormond.” Muddling as only she could muddle.

  As if she had just remembered, Lisette added, “The villagers have guns.”

  Raised in Shanghai, Marc knew how to steer a man. “As long as we’re talking clarity, Ormond, there’s something I’m not clear on. Have you even looked? If there’s a Khmer temple somewhere around here, wouldn’t that be prestigious for your district? For you? Isn’t this the sort of thing a man in your position hopes for?”

  “One wonders if such a thing is feasible: a tribal council based on a unification of principles,” Simone expounded, distracting Ormond as he attempted to concentrate on Marc.

  Irritably, Ormond said, “Yes, such glory for me and my forests. But what would my forests become? Every fortnight when the Alouette arrived, it would dump off more archaeologists, more fortune hunters. And tourists! Loud, insatiable tourists.” With undisguised fondness, he gazed out through the screen, where locals had gathered in the tall grass to watch the visiting foreigners. Or was it to admire their redheaded leader? Through the mosquito netting, the dark, hunched figures wavered like figments of one’s imagination. “I have heard about what is happening at Angkor Wat,” he said. “The schoolmistress spinsters from Iowa and Lyons riding through the ruins on the backs of elephants. Phhttt.”

  Interested to see what they could lead Ormond to reveal, Irene feinted around Marc to fuel his growing temper from another angle. She called upon the cheap but consistently surefire act of girlish innocence. “I’d be too curious,” she said, enthusiastically. “Aren’t you even a bit curious? After all, a Khmer temple all the way up here would be quite a find.”

  Simone leaned toward Ormond and said with the tiresome vagueness that Irene continued to suspect was intentional, “It’s a fascinating thought, don’t you agree, a government system that combines the various local tribal principles?”

  Regaining his composure and making his best effort to enter the game, Louis said to Irene, “To hell with old trade routes. This could be the discovery of the century. Do you realize what this could mean for us?”

  “That’s what I’m think—”

  “I know exactly what it could mean,” Ormond interrupted, violently tugging the cork from a bottle. “The last lost temple of Cambodia. The next Angkor Wat.” He waved the open bottle, and wine splashed to the floor. “Some say it’s deep in the Damrek Mountains, and others that it’s hidden in the Cardamom foothills. Well, well, what do you know, it’s right here in my own backyard. Ha! Why can’t people keep their grubby hands off this country!”

  “That’s my feeling too,” Simone announced.

  With a look of regret, Lisette turned up the gramophone, as if it could drown out the damage she had done by mentioning the temple. But as Ravel’s sad birds soared into the margins of the verandah, Ormond shouted over the music, panting, his expression stricken, “Why can’t you people leave my territory be!”

  No one spoke. There was no need to. Ormond had given himself away. He was the reason no one got past Leh. Not because he greedily wanted the temple for himself, but because he wanted his remote kingdom left alone. It was this, Irene now knew, that explained how the scrolls could have been kept a secret for so long.

  Chapter 18

  Crossing the Line

  From the back porch of Ormond’s villa, where she was sitting with Mr. Simms, Irene watched the heat leaving the day in scalloped waves. Lapwings raced across sandbars, their velvet heads as dark as ravens’, and in the distance, the fawn shadows of women bathed in the river’s edge, flanked by a bank of mud and purple iris. With her departure only a few hours away, he had asked her to meet him alone. Now, he held out a brass pocket watch.

  “I have already set it for you,” he said, in a rare state, drugged and comprehending. “I want you to wind it in the mornings and keep it with you at all times.”

  Ready for the rest of the story, for the final pieces of the puzzle he was assembling, she examined the etching on the back of the watch, a ferocious tiger swallowing a terrified horse. The blood that sprayed from the wounded animal was made of excellent-quality Chinese glass. “Didn’t I see this in the market yesterday?” she asked.

  He smiled, sheepishly, as if he had rounded the corner of his old age and careened back into his younger self, caught with his hand dipping into a cookie jar or the collection of his old rival-pal Henry Huntington. “Today has been one of my better days. Clothilde had the boys fashion a palanquin for me. I looked quite regal riding through town.”

  Even in a remote jungle trading post, on the threshold of death’s door, he could not resist the hunt for a treasure. They were physically wrenching, these blunt realizations of how much she was going to
miss him. Irene felt a foreboding sense of grief at the thought of leaving him, even though he would be well taken care of while she was away. Clothilde had already consulted with the town doctor and chosen two local women to keep vigil. Lisette, the anthropologist, had offered to help as well.

  “These are also for you,” Mr. Simms said, pressing a pair of keys into her palm.

  “From the market too?”

  “No, these I brought with me.” Strung like charms on a gold chain that could be worn around one’s neck, they were not door keys but keys to something much smaller, a jewelry or safe-deposit box perhaps. His withered fingers strayed from her palm to the carnelian bracelet on her wrist, the one that he had given her from the box her father left for him. “I’m glad you wear this. It might be helpful. In fact, I think it could be very helpful. Don’t take it off,” he instructed. “Oh, my sweet girl, I am putting all of my faith in you.” As twilight descended and the air grew thick with the odor of sodden roots trapped in the mudflats, Mr. Simms became pensive. “Tell me the truth, Irene, are you going to find them?”

  “Am I going to …?” She’d thought he had summoned her to tell her at last what she was going to find. She had thought that was what he was leading to with his gifts. But he now appealed to her with a look of anticipation, his tone disconcertingly beseeching, as if she was the one who had possessed and withheld the answer all along. Dismayed, she laid her hand over his. “I am,” she said, for what was the point in expressing her doubts? She did not know how much longer Mr. Simms could fend off death. In case she did not make it back in time, she would not be able to live with herself if she let him spend his last days without hope.

  It seemed to take all of his effort simply to hold his head up, and as she looked at his shrunken posture, she understood that it was finally time to stop waiting for him to get better. It was time to stop believing that he was going to make everything clear, and to accept the situation as it was. Even if he lived until she returned, he might never again be lucid enough to explain himself, or to understand the outcome of her journey, whatever that might be. Now that the moment to embark had arrived, after all he had put her through, it turned out he was sending her into the jungle armed with nothing more than a bracelet, a watch, and a set of toy-box keys. As for the at-odds team he had assembled for her, their only unified act had been their half-baked manipulation of Ormond, which had resulted not in accord but instead in a new disagreement: How were they going to deal with the village of Leh?