The Map of Lost Memories

by Kim Fay

  Simone’s arm reached in, handing her the flashlight. It took a moment for Irene to make out the dimensions of the compartment, which was no more than three feet wide. Like the other floors inside the temple, this one was slick with moss. The ceiling was so low that her hair grazed along its surface. She used the beam like a searchlight, trailing it slowly along the walls. As she cast it downward, she saw the ground shimmer. “Simone,” she whispered.

  “What?”

  “I’ve found something.”

  “It must be the scrolls. The boys are petrified.”

  Irene saw another hint of golden color. She felt dizzy, and she was terrified she would pass out in the small space and they would not be able to get her out. She pressed one hand against the wall to steady herself. After a moment she was able to crouch and shine the light directly down.

  But instead of the scrolls, she found herself looking into a pair of wide, glittering diamond eyes set into the compassionate face of a fallen, four-armed bodhisattva. The Buddhist god was the size of Kiri, its skin glowing, its robe inlaid with pentagons of flat-cut rubies. Devastated, Irene crumpled into the darkness.

  “Irene?” Simone called. “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s not the scrolls,” Irene managed to say.

  “What is it?”

  “A statue,” she said, her voice choked. “Solid gold. It must be worth a fortune.” She attempted to catch her breath, but there was no oxygen left in the closed space. “Simone, what if the abbot’s not hiding the scrolls from us? What if he doesn’t know anything about them? He could have thought we were lying to him, and this statue was what we’re after.”

  “That’s exactly what he wants us to think.” But Simone, although consoling, did not sound entirely confident. She sounded as disappointed as Irene felt, as they both realized that it was probably a coincidence that Irene’s mother had painted this portion of the temple. And it was dumb luck that they’d begun their search in the exact place the abbot kept this statue hidden, just as it would be dumb luck if they managed to find the scrolls today. Or tomorrow. Or next year.

  Nightfall approached, a swift advance marked by a flight of dragonflies, and then swallows, and then the emergence of the bats that creaked like ancient floorboards overhead. Irene and Simone had searched the dance pavilion. They had searched the chamber outside the sanctuary and two of the accessible libraries as best they could. Their foreheads were scraped from peering into dark gulfs, and their arms ached from shoving and dragging stones. Their fingertips bled. They were dirtier than ever. After telling the abbot they had found the gold statue and assuring him it was not what they wanted, they had lost the attention of the young monks. They tried to convince themselves that this was part of the abbot’s strategy, to make them think there was nothing else worth looking for, but the absence of the nosy boys only added to their discouragement.

  Now that it was nearly dark, it would be futile to continue. It was time to go back to camp, but Irene paused with Simone in the doorway of the temple’s main entrance. She watched Louis and Marc, sitting on a low wall at the far end of the yard, sharing a flask and admiring their latticework of stakes and string. She knew what Louis was doing, and she did not blame him for it. He was on the lookout for the scrolls, but at the same time, he was claiming as much of this temple as he could for himself before anyone else came along. Just in case. She envied him, that he seemed willing to take a consolation prize.

  Earlier, Louis had set up torches, and they shed a thin blush through the low-lying twilight. Above her, bats moved restlessly beneath the eaves that overhung the entry, shifting in anticipation of their nightly departure. Irene said to Simone, “From the description in the diary, I thought we were going to find a memorial or some kind of testimony to a king’s passage through the region. Someplace small, the size of Banteay Srei at most. A place we could scour from top to bottom in a day. But this is a whole city.” She gazed at the inner grounds, from the dance terrace to the open sweeps of grass, still amazed by the immensity of it all. “We may as well be searching Shanghai.”

  “We need some rest. We’ll have better luck tomorrow. I can feel it.”

  Irene appreciated Simone’s determination. “You really do want us to find the scrolls together, don’t you?”

  “A part of me even admires you enough that I want you to have them. But I can assure you,” Simone said, “I will never let that happen.”

  Irene watched her stride off to join Louis and Marc. It was the same way she had abruptly walked away at Anne’s party the night they met in Shanghai. But Irene was too tired to be annoyed by Simone’s rebuff. She was so lost in her own exhaustion that she did not hear Xa approach until he spoke. “Miss? You go.”

  The thrashing of the bats’ wings grew louder, and the stifling air trembled beneath the eaves. “You speak English?” Irene asked, startled.

  “Go.” He looked at her as if she should know what he meant. “Kiri go.”

  She’d not had a chance to think about Xa’s request to take care of his son since he had made it, and she wished she had the words to explain this to him, to let him know that although she did not yet know how, she would keep her promise. “I’m sorry, Xa, I don’t speak Khmer.”

  In the grainy haze of dusk, Marc started toward Irene, carrying the flask.

  Xa shoved a scrap of paper into Irene’s hand. “You go.”

  The eaves whirred as if a fan had been turned on overhead. To keep from stumbling, Marc was watching the uneven ground as he walked. Behind him, Simone rested her head on Louis’s shoulder, as if they’d never been at odds. Furtively, Irene glanced into her palm and saw a single word in handwriting that she had known since she was a girl.

  Midnight.

  Thunder surged down from the eaves. “Go,” Xa insisted, grabbing her wrist and dragging her aside as the storm of bats rushed from the entrance and into the night, shattering like black raindrops in the shadows above the trees.

  Chapter 24

  The Puzzle Lock

  As Irene lay in the dark, waiting for midnight, the first of the rain dropped like pebbles onto the bowed canvas roof. The storm that followed shook the tent as if it were a raft in a typhoon on an open sea. She prayed that it would not pass too quickly. If she could hear nothing beneath its thunder, not even Louis’s snoring, then maybe they would not hear her leave the tent. The blackness was impenetrable, and each time she looked at the watch that Mr. Simms had given to her in Stung Treng, she was cautious, fixing a shelter under layers of clothing and a blanket before holding her flashlight to the jeweled face. Finally, it was 11:55. For what felt like the hundredth time, she checked that the two keys were around her neck and that the carnelian bracelet circled her wrist.

  She felt as large and loud as an elephant as she inched her way blindly around the others, along the edge of the tent. She squeezed through the door flap quickly, before a gust of wet air could wake anyone. She was thankful for the sheer exhaustion they all shared, the debilitating alloy of emotional and physical fatigue. Simone had finished one gin-tonic before passing out on her cot, and Louis and Marc had soon followed. Adrenaline was the only thing keeping Irene awake. She felt punch-drunk as she stood outside, hurriedly dragging on her flannel coat and oilcloth poncho.

  As she brushed against the tent, a runnel of water poured over the awning. Instantly, her boots were soaked through. Too late, she remembered her hat. Rain streamed down her face as she shielded her eyes with the flat of her hand, peering into the waterlogged darkness until she was able to see a blurry flickering. Anchored in the tide of rainfall, a small figure held a torch, its flame outlining the shell of an umbrella. Irene stepped into the seabed of the storm, and with the ground sucking at her boots, she plodded toward the light. When she reached it, she found Kiri waiting for her.

  Five years old and sent out alone into the night. His bare, scrawny arms were goose-bumped with cold, but he was grinning, the impish, ecstatic grin of a boy who has at last been invited to pl
ay with the older children. His torch was crafted from burning pitch stuck to the end of a stalk of bamboo. He handed Irene an umbrella of her own. It was slick with a thick coat of oil to keep water from leaking through. The sound of raindrops bounding off it made her feel as if she were inside a tom-tom. She offered the boy her flashlight, and he snatched it from her. Flinging his torch into the mud, he started toward the ravine.

  The center of the bridge was indiscernible in the torrent. For a moment she thought he might try to cross it. Horrified, she grabbed his arm to jerk him back, but he was only squinting around. Squirming free, he squatted on his haunches beneath the canopy of a tree. He patted the ground. She joined him to wait out the deafening rain. She had been grateful for it in the tent, but she now cursed it for causing yet another delay.

  Beneath her poncho, she twisted out of her coat, which she discovered was not hers but Louis’s. After emptying its pockets of bent cigarettes and a sterling hip flask, she gave it to Kiri. He put it on eagerly, although she had a feeling it was more for novelty than for warmth. He looked tinier than ever, sunk within the collar, his arms lost in the sleeves.

  As Irene sat with Kiri, she wondered if the child had been sent by his father, to prove that he could be useful to her. She wondered what Kiri knew about his mission, what Xa had told him and what Xa knew, and if either could even comprehend the whole fantastic story if she were able to articulate it to them. There was a man, very old and sick, who’d sent her halfway around the world in order to give her this night. A night that had somehow become entrusted to a five-year-old. She let Kiri hold the pocket watch, and his eyes widened at the fierceness of the tiger and the terror of the horse. Marc had taught him to whistle lively military tunes, and as they waited out the storm, he accompanied it with a reedy version of Sousa’s Gladiator march.

  Gradually, the rain eased. When it was penetrable, Irene stood. The flashlight’s battery was winding down, its shine little more than a flush of light, but the landscape was growing visible as the clouds drifted downwind. A clear, pale nocturnal light laid a course over the slats of the bridge. Kiri giggled as he slipped and slid across. With the shimmering treetops below her, Irene walked on the edge of the night.

  Beneath the star-filled sky, the temple was no longer a ruin. It was not destroyed by nature or trampled down by time. Dusted in a fine talc of moonlight, the guardian nagas arched proudly toward the sky. There was a sugared luster to the rain-soaked surface of the walls and the molten roots of the strangler figs. But as she stopped at the end of the causeway, it was the flames that entranced her, torches blazing around the open platform of the dance pavilion. The apsaras seemed to have come to life, their arms swaying with the motion of some long-ago song. The smell of burning eucalyptus filled the air, mingling with the grassy aftermath of the rain. At the bottom of the pavilion’s stairs, Kiri stared up at Clothilde waiting on a stone bench, wrapped in a thick blanket.

  Irene approached and sat down beside her. She asked, “Are you going to take me to the scrolls?”

  “I presume so, but I don’t know for sure. This is for you.” Clothilde held out a cloth bag. “He must love you very much to go to all this effort.”

  How loyal Clothilde had been. Irene said, “He must love you very much to trust you with this.”

  “I happened to be a woman for sale at the right time at the right price.” This was said without bitterness. “I still have more left to do tonight. I will see you soon.” Before Irene could ask any more questions, Clothilde walked away, farther into the temple’s tree-shrouded shadows, beyond the torches’ tenuous reach.

  Kiri’s eyes moved back and forth between the women. Should he follow Clothilde, or should he stay with Irene and see what was in the bag made of green Chinese brocade? Irene unhooked the buffalo bone toggle, and as she reached in, the boy’s curiosity trapped him. He came to her side and watched eagerly as she took out a metal box. It was too small to contain the scrolls, but it made her smile. “I remember this,” she said, running her fingers over the pair of overlapping brass locks. “He showed it to me when I was a girl.”

  Indifferent to the language barrier, Kiri nodded intently.

  “This is called a puzzle lock.” From around her neck she removed the chain that contained the two keys. “Here, hold this for me.” She gave the box to the boy, who took it solemnly, as if he understood how important this moment was. “These are pin tumbler locks, but they’re special. The keys won’t work unless you know the code. What a risk! What faith! He told it to me almost twenty years ago. What if I’d forgotten? But I haven’t forgotten. He knew I wouldn’t.”

  Her chest tightened with happiness. She rolled the dials into position. 1. 8. 5. 7. The year of Mr. Simms’s birth. She fitted the first key into its keyhole, and the second into the other. With Kiri gripping the box to hold it steady, she rotated both keys at the same time. The lock clicked. The shackle snapped free.

  Unable to resist, Kiri tore back the lid. His eyes moved quizzically from the book inside to Irene. It was no bigger than her hand. It had a cover of watered silk, and in the center “Diary” had been painted in elegant script. A page was marked with a stiff square of paper, and as she opened the book, she realized it was a photograph. She saw the back of it first. Penned in Mr. Simms’s hand, the same hand that had written “Midnight” on the note from Xa, were the words “Sarah and Irene, 1901.”

  Turning it over, she whispered to Kiri, “I was the same age in this picture as you are now.”

  But when he found that the box contained no genie or king’s crown, or any of the other magical things he might have hoped were inside, Kiri’s quicksilver attention strayed, back to the pocket watch, which he began to dismantle into a pile of springs and metal bits.

  Irene had not seen her mother’s face in such a long time, and she was stunned by how fresh the shock of death could feel, decades after the fact of it. Sarah had been nearing thirty when Irene was born, and so in this photograph she was only a few years older than Irene was now. The girl—me, Irene thought, disoriented by this new and unexpected vision of her past self—clung to her mother’s skirt as if she would never let go.

  Sadness rose within Irene, filling her, and she knew that to read the diary would be to drown in heartache. She also knew that she had no choice. She wanted no other choice. Steeling herself, she looked at the page marked by the photograph. At the top left was half a paragraph continued from the previous page.

  searched the entire day. We found a magnificent gold deity hidden in a stone closet but nothing that resembled our scroll.

  It was not “our scroll” that caught Irene off guard. After everything she had been through on her journey, after everything she had discovered, this—her mother’s involvement with the history of the Khmer—felt fated. It was her mother’s voice that unnerved her, the voice that had always sounded hoarse, from talking so much, Irene’s father used to tease. As her eyes moved over the sentences, Irene was not reading her mother’s tale but rather listening to it, the words so distinct it seemed inconceivable that Kiri did not hear them too.

  We were all disappointed and on the second day looked with less enthusiasm. There were many places where stones had fallen and a sheet of copper might be crushed beneath, but Patrik and Henry are not the kind of men to give up easily. We had no success in the morning, and it was after lunch that the strange event occurred. Now that I am back in Manila it seems a dream and I wonder if I am foolish to even write it down, but I feel I must make sense of it, especially since I cannot bring myself to tell Patrik about it.

  The men had gone off to explore the upper level of the temple and Madeleine and I were at the back of it when a stout old woman brought an unconscious girl to us. We determined from our guide that the child had eaten some kind of poisonous plant. The old woman seemed to be calling for nuns but we could not quite understand because she was hysterical and our guide spoke such atrocious French and the temple was home only to monks. Madeleine is a nurse and explaine
d to me that the girl needed to vomit the poison but we could not communicate that to the woman. The child was motionless and I felt the terrifying presence of the shadow that precedes death.

  All of a sudden Madeleine ordered me to fetch a kettle and heat water. I could see in her eyes that she had determined to save the girl. She extracted a charge of gunpowder from her pistol and mixed it with a cup of warm water and forced the girl to drink it. She turned the girl over her knee and pushed her finger into her throat. The mother was screaming and the girl was vomiting and the monks were silent as the temple’s stones. They must have thought we were trying to kill the child.

  This occurrence was unusual but it is not the strange event of which I am compelled to write. It was what followed that haunts me. The old woman wanted to take us to the girl’s home and thank us properly for saving her life. We did not travel for long from the back of the temple before we reached a set of stairs cut into a hillside. At the top we walked through a small orchard until we came to an opening that revealed the most incredible sight. A great white house was set on a green lawn. Another woman emerged, a Cambodian sister of some kind of religious order. Her head was shaved and she wore a robe that was a beautiful shade of gray. She looked at us as if we were ghosts and spoke to the old woman. Her tone did not sound angry but we knew something was wrong. Then to our astonishment she spoke to us in perfect lyrical French. She thanked us and Madeleine told her the girl’s mother should have her drink water. The nun said the girl had no mother.

  This is where my tale departs into the realm of fantasy. The sister told us that her convent is the keeper of the history of the king’s reign recorded in a library of palm-leaf books. Because the books are perishable they are copied every fifty years during a period of twelve lunar months known as the new kingdom. They are not copied by the sisters but by one child who is always a girl and an orphan. The girl is trained in Sanskrit and Khmer for this purpose. When she turns eighteen, the period of the new kingdom begins, and at the end of the twelve months the documents she has written are examined against the old for accuracy. In a ceremony that lasts three days the old books are burned and the girl becomes the new keeper of the library.