The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  Stepping inside, she was struck by the stench of bats, which instantly made her eyes burn. The smell was so ripe, it felt as if the walls were made of it. With the dirty, bloodstained cotton of her sleeve, she covered her mouth, and with her other hand, she groped through the air in front of her, slowly walking forward. She had taken only two steps when her fingers jammed against stone. Something had collapsed, which explained why she could not see the opposite doorway at the far side of the gopura. She backed out and inhaled the green peat of the jungle.

  Determined, she propelled herself up and over the wall to the left of the gopura, tipping headfirst onto the ground on the other side. She managed to catch her balance only by landing painfully on her wrists. As she stood, she saw that the inner field was enormous, acres sprawling beneath the encroachment of the forest. Although still thick with foliage, these grounds were not as unruly as the outer area, and there was a central causeway, this one much longer and cleared of debris, that led to a freestanding, covered terrace. Beyond this low structure the temple rose stories high, and Irene stared with amazement at its five towers depicting the peaks of the mythical Mount Meru. The temple was so much bigger than she had expected it would be. As her eyes dropped to the lowest level, she made out the open arcades that encased it, and she knew what lay beyond them. Layers of alcoves and nooks, and at the core, a sanctuary—the obvious place to contain the scrolls described in Reverend Garland’s diary.

  She hurried toward the temple but froze when she reached the covered terrace. It was the kind of traditional dance stage used by kings for royal ceremonies, and through crusts of black lichen, the foundation that supported it revealed a garnish of upturned hands and coy smiles. Wrapped in vines, dozens of apsaras mimed their forgotten dance around the base of the platform. They caught Irene unawares. These figures had existed for centuries, surviving against all odds in this improbable, far-off temple. And yet she had seen them before. They were replicated exactly in her mother’s watercolor tablet, which Irene was carrying at that moment in her map case.

  Although the late-afternoon sun was obscured by the high, overlapping fronds of rattan palms, the air was hot and insufferably stuffy, and Irene squatted down, to steady herself and to absorb this proof that her mother had been here. With her head tucked to her knees, she heard Simone’s voice—“This must be it”—and the sound of running, boot soles slapping quickly against stone.

  Irene turned in time to see Louis racing through the trees, no doubt sprinting after Simone. Irene bounded after him, around the terrace and along a side pathway, to a set of steep stairs. They led up to a small entryway into the temple, this one cleared and opening onto an alfresco gallery that ran the length of the building. Within the arcade, the green daylight did not penetrate more than a few yards, and Irene could barely distinguish the shadowed Buddhas cut into the walls.

  Spotting Louis ahead of her in the corridor, she overtook him, snatching his flashlight as she darted past and into an open-ceilinged room that took her deeper into the temple. She caught up with Simone in a courtyard, and together they reached the threshold of the central hall. Like the gopura, the vast chamber was as black as a moonless night inside. Irene ran the beam up a wall, whose false stone windows let in no light. Entering, she felt the mossy cushion of the floor beneath her feet. Water dripped from what sounded like a very high ceiling. The flashlight’s humming battery accompanied the squeak of bats overhead. Side by side, Irene and Simone took one careful step at a time. As they walked ten feet, then twenty, and then more, the air grew dank, as if they were in the far reaches of a cave.

  “Do you smell that?” Simone asked.

  “Incense,” Irene whispered. Even through the stink of bats, she could detect the spiced ceremonial perfume that was burning somewhere within the space. She moved the light slowly through the darkness, and as it advanced over a knee-high upheaval of stones, Simone said, “Stop. Go back. No, more to the left.”

  “What is that?” Marc had tracked them down, the dim passages of an overgrown temple probably not much different to him from Shanghai’s lightless back alleys.

  Irene shoved the flashlight into Simone’s hands and cautiously started to climb the fallen stones.

  “It looks like a door,” Louis said.

  Irene dug her boots into the crevices and made her way up the pile and down the other side. “A wooden door!” she said in a reverent whisper, as Simone steadied the light on a pattern of flower petals wrapped within a geometry of intertwining circles. Irene ran her hands along the ruffled carvings.

  “This is it!” Simone gasped. “Mon Dieu, this is really it! A wooden door.”

  Irene patted the sculpted timber, feeling for a handle.

  “The Khmer used wood,” Louis explained to Marc, his disembodied voice husky with emotion. “Window frames, shutters, ceiling beams, doors like this.”

  Simone clambered over the stones behind Irene, methodically steering the orb of light.

  “But it was all destroyed by time or in the fires set by the Siamese,” Louis continued. “There aren’t any traces of it left, let alone a piece as large and as intact as this. Nothing like this has been found in a temple before.”

  “I’ve got it,” Irene said triumphantly, wrapping her fingers around a thick iron ring.

  The hall was as wet as a sauna, and sweat made her hands slippery. She had to pull the handle with her entire weight, while Simone leaned against the edge of the door and pried it with the lever of her own body. The door groaned, resisted by the uneven floor. As they managed to open it, an orange glow slowly emerged through the widening entryway, until they could all see into a windowless chamber, where Kiri was sitting in a corner, holding an oil lamp. From the light it cast, a second door was visible in the opposite wall of the small, enclosed space. The boy must have entered through a back passageway. Following his stare, Irene saw that he was watching Clothilde, transfixed.

  In the center of the room, Clothilde stood before a wide pedestal with her eyes closed. She did not acknowledge them as they pushed their way through the narrow opening, filling the doorway with their awe. Holding three sticks of burning incense between her palms, she touched her hands to her forehead three times and then planted the incense in a ceramic dish on the altar that had been built on the top of the stone base.

  Irene clenched her fists, one wrapped tightly inside the other, and held them to her lips, afraid that if she opened her mouth she would scream. Afraid she would erupt after all these weeks—no, all the years—of wanting something that was now, finally, within her grasp. This room had to be the sanctuary written about in Reverend Garland’s diary. Its walls and ceiling were made of copper that quivered in the lamplight, setting ablaze the offerings of coconut milk, rice, and jasmine set out on a tray on the pedestal beneath the object of Clothilde’s worship.

  Walking slowly around the sculpture, Irene examined it from all sides. The sloping flatness of the face in profile. The shadows beneath the closed eyes. The high brow, with a fine scoring that drew the hair back into a topknot. Pendants were carved into the long lobes of the ears, and a faint mustache skimmed the upper lip. The rose-hued stone was nearly the color of human flesh. The mouth was serene in a smile of rest and meditation.

  Tenderly, Simone touched her fingers to the sculpture’s firm cheek.

  “You know who it is, don’t you?” she asked.

  “Jayavarman the Seventh,” Irene whispered.

  She knelt, not to pray to the last great king of the Khmer Empire but to look more closely at the ledges that protruded from the stone base. An inch in depth, they were much like the gallery ledges used to display paintings on the walls of museums. She circled the platform, counting rows of three ledges on each of the wide sides and rows of two on each of the narrow sides. Ten in total. The quantity matched the description in Reverend Garland’s diary, as did the measurements of the ledges. Each was ideal for holding an unrolled scroll the size of a sheet of writing paper. Irene lingered over the vi
sion of the scrolls wrapped around the statue, mooring it in place. She did not have to light incense and ask Jayavarman for a blessing, for the blessing was being given to her right now. “Where are they kept?” she asked Clothilde.

  So deep within the temple, protected from the jungle shrill of insects and birds, the sanctuary was as silent as a crypt. Perhaps it was the deadness of the air that made it so Irene did not feel Simone’s presence right behind her. Or perhaps, at Irene’s question, Simone had simply stopped breathing. Irene would not have known that Louis and Marc were there if they had not been within her line of sight. Even Kiri’s usual chatter was silenced.

  “Henry asked me to bring you to this temple, and I’ve done that,” Clothilde answered, bending down and feeling the ledges with her fingertips, as if discovering them for the first time. “As I told you, I came here to make offerings for the lunar new year when I was a girl. But I have never seen any scrolls.”

  Chapter 23

  Midnight

  In its persistent, stone-tumbled, thirteenth-century voice, the King’s Temple called to Irene, its summons edging through the spongy heat of too many bodies asleep in the confined space of the one tent the group had managed to repair. It sidestepped Louis and Marc, unconscious on reed mats on the floor. It moved cautiously past Clothilde, curled in a corner like a cat, and crept around Simone, sprawled on a cot, cradling her bound-up wrist. It wanted only Irene.

  Sometime during the night, while she had tossed and turned with fitful sleeplessness, a window flap had been tied back, but the tent still stank of sweat and rot. There was not a piece of clothing among them that was not mildewing. Through the window’s white netting, she could see the first tendrils of dawn. Taking her clothes outside and dressing quietly so she would not wake the others, she heeded the temple’s whispered invitation.

  As if in a dream, she passed the tarpaulin lean-to where Xa, Kiri, and the coolies slept with the wounded Brau and followed the path that led to the ravine. To her great relief, she found that she had not imagined the bridge. Glossy with dew, it was real, just as the cuts on her hands and the sides of her body were real, set ablaze as she began to sweat. She crossed the bridge easily this time, taking long, careful strides so the bamboo strand did not swing with the shift of her weight.

  She bypassed the gopura and made her way to the central yard. With the fever of first discovery behind her, she stood and savored the grace of the temple’s crumbled architecture, the solitary outline of each tower against the sky. It felt lonesome as a place can feel only when light has crested the horizon but the sun has yet to appear. White shadows of mist were like the invisible ghosts of pilgrims centuries gone. Chanting echoed over the damp grasses, through the fog that skimmed the courtyards—the prayers of the small community of monks who tended the temple and lived at the back of its grounds.

  Wanting to take in as much of it as she could, Irene walked to a stone bungalow built up against a wall. It overlooked the dance pavilion and behind that, the temple. The scrolls are in there somewhere, she thought, as she sat on the steps. They are lost behind a fallen stone or safeguarded in another room, but they are there. Although their search of the sanctuary had been fruitless the afternoon before, her faith in the scrolls’ existence was stronger than it had ever been.

  Her muscles ached, and the cuts from the bridge throbbed, but she felt contentment. Until now, she had known herself only as a person who yearned. A woman who had what she wanted was a stranger to her. But here, in this faraway temple, that stranger was finally within sight.

  Wrapping her arms around her knees for warmth, she watched a deer wander into the pavilion, grazing on weeds growing up through the stones. Its spotted coat was silver in the dawn light. Insects scratched noisily at the leaves in the depths of the jungle, and birds clamored all around her, but still she heard Marc’s footsteps. Like hers, his hair was matted, and his clothes were creased and stained. As he approached, the deer lifted its head. Its dark brown eyes were wide, but it was not wary. Marc sat beside Irene and took her hand.

  “By the end of the twelfth century, the Cham had overtaken Angkor,” Irene began, needing to explain exactly what this place meant to her. “Jayavarman the Seventh was a prince in exile. He was nearly sixty when he led his armies to the capital and took back the Khmer Empire. There are records of the naval battle on the Great Lake. They say its waters flowed with blood. He ruled for forty years, and there was no reason during that time for him to build a temple here. The hill tribes were his enemies. There’s no accessible water route, no major land route, but …” She hesitated. She knew how irrational she was going to sound, but if she could not trust him with her small madnesses, what was the point in letting him into her life? She said, “If this temple was anywhere else in Cambodia, if it was in the boundaries of the known Khmer Empire, it would have been found by now. It would not have been here waiting for me. I know that’s not what happened. I know that seven hundred years ago a king didn’t build this temple for me to find, but that’s how it feels.”

  “If you didn’t want the scrolls, this temple would be enough for you, wouldn’t it?”

  “More than enough.”

  “And if you don’t find them?” Marc asked.

  Irene refused that possibility. “Once I find them, I’ll know what to do with them, and once I know what I’m going to do with them, I’ll know how my old life ends and how this new one begins.”

  “Are you thinking about not taking them back to America?”

  Irene was still adjusting to her new and fluctuating feelings for Cambodia. This country that she had thought she knew so well from afar was a place of contradictions and uncertainties, fresh challenges and possibilities, now that she was here. The Brooke Museum, that awful day when she had stood in front of the board of trustees—it all seemed like such a distant memory, cold and faded when compared to this lush, overheated part of the world. “I’m not sure what I’m thinking anymore,” she said. “All I know is that when you’ve wanted one thing for so long, it feels as if you’re betraying yourself to even consider changing your mind.”

  “I understand that,” Marc said, brushing his lips over her sunburned forehead. “I had never wanted to meet you. Then you walked into my bar. After we talked that first night, I knew I was going to betray myself. I was going to betray the promise I’d made to turn my back on you if you ever appeared in my world. Somehow I felt it would be worth any pain that would come with having you in my life.” Carefully, he wrapped his arm around her and held her to him. “I was right.”

  Irene knew he would always struggle with his feelings about her relationship with Mr. Simms, but at this moment, his confession assured her that they could overcome them. She rested against him, and beneath the roughness of his shirt, she could feel the laces that bound his ribs. His hand lay softly over the bandages clinging to her sides. The jungle had encroached upon the two of them, as it had on the temple’s ruins, and she was aware of how their wounds had become an abiding part of who they were.

  While the fog thinned in the growing heat, light rose in the sky. With it came a deep thundering, and Irene and Marc watched as the auburn flash of gibbons stampeded through the canopy of the trees, swinging from branch to branch, howling their exhilaration to the sun as it slowly emerged.

  Louis and Simone met Irene and Marc at the dance pavilion at eight o’clock, the time they had agreed upon when discussing a plan of action over the campfire the night before. From what they had been able to discern before darkness fell, the temple grounds encompassed acres, and the temple itself consisted of dozens of structures. Aside from the sanctuary, there was no single logical place to look for the scrolls. If there had been, Irene would have started searching at dawn. But since it would be a waste of time to approach this randomly, they decided to begin their reconnaissance, and assess the situation, by paying their respects to the temple abbot.

  The abbot’s presence in this remote place had come as a surprise to Marc, but Irene and t
he others knew that long before Jayavarman VII reclaimed the Khmer Empire for its people, he had been influenced by his wife’s devout Mahayana Buddhist beliefs. It was not unusual to find an active monastery in a temple that bore the Buddha’s image, no matter how far-flung that temple was. Even Angkor Wat had been inhabited by monks when Henri Mouhot discovered it.

  Leaving one coolie in camp to watch over the Brau, whose leg was slowly healing, Xa had joined the other remaining porters, supervising the transfer of equipment over the bridge to the temple. Clothilde had gone with Kiri and May-ling in tow to visit her aunties in Kha Seng. And so it was that their meager, dirty, bloody, and broken-boned foursome carried the offerings of tobacco and gold-leafed Buddhist images to the back of the temple’s walled property, where huts of wood and palm thatch were built among stone pavilions. As they waited for the abbot, novitiates in topaz robes loitered in twos and threes, holding taffeta parasols aloft to protect themselves from the sun. The boys studied the foreigners openly, while out of the corner of her eye Irene noted the chedi, a bell-shaped edifice that spiraled toward the sky. She knew it was devoted to religious relics and would be an ideal hiding place for the scrolls. But she couldn’t see into it from where she stood, nor could she edge closer to it without every one of the attentive young monks heeding her move.

  When the old abbot arrived, sampeahs were performed, heads bowing toward the dirt at his bare feet. They were invited to join him in his open-walled sala, where he sat cross-legged on a reed mat. They were all tense in their impatience to start hunting for the scrolls, and Simone spoke rapidly through the ritual of asking after the abbot’s health and the health of his followers. Irene noticed that a new sense of confidence came across in Simone’s demeanor, reflecting the strength that seemed to build in her with every hour she remained sober. Simone was visibly self-assured as she explained, in the formal Khmer used by religious orders, the same story they had told the chief of Leh: They were scholars, and Ormond had enlisted them to retrieve the scrolls and keep them from being exploited by the government.