Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  One had to have a future. But, as it happened, he didn’t have one. The drawn-out economic crisis was gradually overwhelming the once eternal-seeming middle class and eroding it day by day. He was one of the eroded. His parents were barely middle class anyway. His father had been a customs official at Gatwick Airport. Their money was in a converted council house. The only thing that Robert had in his name was the fact that he had always wanted to be a teacher. He went every day to his little provincial schoolroom and stood in front of a blackboard and drew diagrams illustrating the connections between great English writers and kept the kids awake with the occasional sharp word. But to what end? It was little more than ventriloquy. Every day there was a long walk home to a cottage with odorous carpets and a kitchen with a hot plate. An evening playing YouTube videos and old jazz and waiting for something to come on the TV. The sweet bird of youth, in his case, had nowhere to perch and had not taken flight to begin with. His youth was a wingless dodo. One could go on and on and that bird would still not sing. You waited for life to begin and yet for some reason it did not begin. It hesitated while you wondered about the risks. You stood in the wings of your own play, afraid to walk onto the boards and begin.

  He had a sense, meanwhile, that the country’s fortunes were not going to recover for a very long time, perhaps centuries. He was never going to be as comfortable as his father, or even his grandfather. The machine of progress had begun to go backward, and like an Irish navvy a century ago he was better off emigrating. Only there was nowhere to emigrate to. Nowhere that would take him in and give him employment. The world which had once been wide and commodious with America on the horizon had gradually become small and anxious and walled-off. His parents didn’t understand it, and neither in a way did he.

  —

  The embankment lamps came on. How had the day passed so quickly? The swallows were out. Along the roads came the bulbs of pushcarts. It must have been that most surprising thing, contentment, an onset of happiness. The happiness that never is.

  The bridge was alive with motodops. The hive stirred and he felt as if his childhood had been returned to him. Only twenty-eight, and there was no reason ever to feel otherwise. So what a con his life had been up to then, burdening him with things that were not his, and how long it had taken him to find a place which disburdened him. But there it was. Now it was the first cool hour and the phone shops on the far side of that road and the clinics with their blue crosses—Clinic Nouvel!—were as alive as little bazaars. He got up and walked back the way he had come. In front of the guardian lions and the cannons was a pedestrian bridge, people lounging over the river. Below, blossoming cafés, outdoor tables, the thin, elegant young men in their clinging ironed shirts. A place called the River where the handsomer set gathered, the fans stirring a hundred paper napkins. The nights here were soft and aimless and endless. He walked back into the town center. On the pavements, families drinking cans of winter-melon tea with straws. On the televisions, Khmer music and soap operas and the children transfixed. There were fairy lights strung across the streets and beggars hanging by the river wall moving toward him as if they knew already how soft and young his thoughts were. They came out of the darkness with toys and books about Pol Pot and the eternal words one dolla.

  He moved through the twilight quietly until he was at the White Rose on Street 2, a place marked in all barang guidebooks. It was empty so he went to the first-floor balcony. He sat under painted lampshades and plastic vine leaves and ordered lok-lok, fried morning glory, a baguette and an Angkor beer. In the Lean Hoa Chinese School opposite, a mass of schoolgirls scattered in slow motion toward the gates: they looked up at him. There was always a curiosity in the eyes here. It had not yet been eradicated by familiarity or contempt. A few drops of rain fell and there was a flash of soundless lightning. By the time he had walked back to the hotel it had become a fine warm drizzle. A small group of drivers waited in the courtyard playing cards by flashlights attached to their heads. Robert hesitated before going up to his room; he wasn’t quite ready for boredom. The sister hotel to the Alpha, divided from it merely by a flimsy wall, was the Omega; it was a riot of lecherous neon advertising the massive KTV next to it and a sauna in the lobby, whose denizens—in the absence of any clients—sat around on the sofas looking up at a TV. The Alpha and the Omega. But it was at the Alpha that he lingered. He soon found a kid called Ouksa who agreed to drive him around the next day for a few dollars. He had no plan but he wanted to visit a temple and say a prayer for his parents.

  The “kid” was in fact about the same age as himself, in square-tipped shoes and a knock-off Tommy Bahama camp shirt with a black-and-white Mojave tile pattern, and he said he often drove the Chinese people staying at the Alpha or the Omega, but usually the Omega.

  “I can start at six,” he said hopefully.

  “I think nine is a better time,” Robert said. “Come at nine.”

  “Where we going?”

  “We’ll go to a temple. Do you know a temple?”

  The kid held up four fingers.

  “There’s four temples?”

  “Four I know.”

  “Then we’ll think about it tomorrow.”

  Ouksa shook his head for some reason.

  “I can take you winery.”

  “I’ll think about the winery too.”

  “Think about it. You can drink wine.”

  “Well,” Robert said irritably, “I don’t really want to drink wine in Cambodia. Who does that?”

  “Many, many.”

  THREE

  But in the morning the heavy rain had come at last and the river flickered with more forceful lightning. The drivers sat disconsolately in the Alpha lobby and drank Yaa Dong medicinal liquor and waited for the weather to break. Robert sat with them and bought Ouksa a few coffees and they talked about his girl and the abominable price of car parts. It was amusing enough. The boy seemed to have ironed himself into one long crease for his payday, his hair slicked and the Brut pungent on his cheeks. He had clean hands and girlish nails properly cared for. From time to time he glanced out at the rain and the lax banana fronds flapping in slow motion and his eyes rose in a silent disdain. He was training to be an engineer and he drove a taxi in his spare time.

  His spare time, as it turned out, was quite ample. In Battambang the days were long and, as Robert now thought, gently uphill. Ouksa had a contract with a Chinese company that manufactured plumbing parts on the outskirts of town. He took the middle managers around and showed them a good time in the evening. He took them to Kirin, a club where the girls were all dressed like government officials. Did he know it? The Chinese were very into that. They tipped him recklessly and with the proceeds he bought his girl silk dresses and Nokia phones. Such were the visitors from Harbin, flabbergasted in their short-sleeved shirts.

  “The barangs, they stay in Angkor place. There were four barangs from Siem Reap yesterday but they left.”

  “I think I saw them,” Robert said.

  “They did not like. I took them to Kirin and they did not like. I am going to take you to temple Phnom Ba Nan. At the top it is many hippies.”

  A great atomic cloud had formed, bright silver at the edges, and as it evolved upward it grew darker. The thunder did not seem related to it. In the street the long puddles brightened for a moment then grew dim, and the electricity which rippled through the air drew the eye to the slow-motion mushroom cloud and its impending crisis.

  Ouksa’s face was smooth, open and yet impervious to camaraderie. His fake gold watch had a charm, his eyes were slow and accurate. They didn’t miss a mote of dust.

  “I gave you good discount,” he said sheepishly, and as if to reward this acknowledged fact Robert ordered more Nescafé and crêpes.

  “If you are happy with service, maybe you will take it day after. Or are you go to Phnom Penh?”

  “I don’t know, I might.”

  “Thirty dollar take you and come back.”

  “Maybe I won�
�t come back.”

  “It OK, stay. I can take you Hotel de Paris!”

  “You can take me everywhere, I guess.”

  “Au kun, if you want it.”

  After they had eaten the crêpes Robert sauntered to the bar and bought some cigarettes and a bottle of Stag for the road. When he returned to the table, Ouksa asked him where his wife was.

  “Not got one, as it happens.”

  “You such a good-looking man, I don’t believe.”

  “No one wants to marry a schoolteacher. There’s no money. You understand that, I’m sure.”

  “Sure, no money, girls run away. Same here.”

  He sniffed glumly at the window for some reason.

  “Where do you live, Robert?”

  “In England. You know England?”

  Ouksa made a knowing nod. “Of course I know it. Man United.”

  “More or less, yeah, that’s about it.”

  “So you come here for better living.”

  “More or less, you could say.”

  “Long way you come. You have girl here?”

  “No girl yet.”

  Ouksa grew a little bolder.

  “But you at White Rose last night!”

  “Word gets around, I see.”

  “Rainy season—no barangs. So you are news.”

  “I see, I’m news, am I?”

  “Yes, sir. Everybody see you.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  “Next time I take you to Kirin Club.”

  “That’s OK, Ouksa. We can leave the girls to the Chinese.”

  “Aw, they prefer you, Mr. Robert.”

  “But do I prefer them, Mr. Ouksa?”

  “You never try Khmer girl? Very sad. We can go to Savuth Club. Girls are dressed to be farmers, all in black. Very kink.”

  The rain cleared and they went out to the car and turned on the air-conditioning and waited for a while, then set off through the puddles and mud toward Phnom Ba Nan.

  The roads had turned to chaos and they pulled in at the winery after all, a place called Chan Thay Chhoeung. They could wait a while and let it dry out. There was a kind of rose garden with tables for drinkers and a reception with bottles of Chardonnay and Shiraz. They sat in the garden under a shade and played cards with Ouksa’s battered pack. Then, after an hour, the clouds parted and a moist, heavy sunshine came down. The road improved and Ouksa put on his sunglasses and said, “It hot again.”

  —

  The ruins of Ba Nan lay at the top of a steep hill which had to be climbed on foot. The site was deserted after the rain, and it was probably deserted most of the time anyway. Even the hawkers had scattered. They parked under the monkeypods. Ouksa waited for him at the foot and Robert set out to climb the two or three hundred steps to the top, watching him as he went. A barang guarded by nagas, slow-footed among the hungry. It made him smile. It was torture for nothing, for very little. And sure enough halfway up Robert stopped and rested. He was young but he was out of shape. Soft and sweet, like some kind of fruit that has ripened too early. So Ouksa thought, and after all he was the same age.

  Halfway up the hill, the forest was quiet. A monk sat just above him with crazed eyes, motionless under a parasol. At the bottom of the steps the beggar mites had reappeared with their matted hair, but looking up at him they were thinking that he was not really worth the bother of a climb. So he went on alone, suddenly dark at heart, the mosquitoes stinging his neck, and he came above the flat canopy and into a magnified light and a forest horizon that had no gaps, seamless as a flat layer of algae resting upon water.

  Ba Nan was strewn all across the hilltop. Its tea-dark blocks scattered into piles which no one had disturbed for a thousand years. He walked through it knowing that he must be alone, since no one had come up with him. The heat made him dizzy. Tall dark pink flowers grew up among the stones. Sprawling prickly-pear trees stood between the prasats and on every one of their paddle-shaped cladodes spells and graffiti had been carved, the letters turned white with hardened sap. Yet there were blue signs which read No Touching and Writing. So the spells were written on the cactus blades.

  He took pictures. Trees rose over the ruins, tossing and hissing like the trees at the temple in Pailin. But these were far older. Dark clouds loomed over them, sparkling with menace. The apsaras slowly fading away, the lintels carved and faded. Inside one of the claustrophobic prasats a huge but beautiful carved female foot, severed and orphaned forever. At the edge of the platform, then, he looked down at the silvery haze of the fields and the tall sugar palms and soon he heard voices and looking up he saw two soft-drink hawkers picking their way like herons across the stones toward a barang standing alone at the far edge of the complex and smoking a cigarette. He was aware that the man must have been watching him all along, but there he stood in elegant summer whites, dark blond and incongruous and indifferent all the same. Robert heard the peddlers cry Choum reap and the man took the cigarette out of his mouth and said something to them in Khmer. They turned away and the solitude of the two foreign men was resumed, the man in whites simply returning to his contemplation of something on the distant horizon.

  One might be surprised to meet another Westerner in the ruins of Ba Nan, and he was sure this one was a fellow English speaker. But the surprise was not curiosity, it was just the elegance of the whites and the manner and their dainty anachronism.

  He turned and walked back to the top of the steps. The monk was still sitting there under his broken parasol but he now saw that a small shrine lay to one side of the steps and that a lone incense stick burned there. Another monk had appeared and reclined there, shaded by a piece of tin on a stick. Black butterflies, stirred by the sun, began to swing lazily across the steps, circling their heads, and from the undergrowth came the susurration of revived cicadas. In the shrine behind him, a fortune-teller was reading texts to a small cluster of women and children. Suddenly they all laughed. The plain now shone far below and he felt for a moment an unsteadiness in his calves. He reached out and held himself firm against a huge carved jamb. The drink sellers were talking behind him and he turned to see them putting up a plastic umbrella and come toward him. In that moment he came to a decision, but it was unclear what it was going to mean—it was a decision about the plane ticket and the plan to drive back to Bangkok the following Wednesday. In the space of a few minutes that plan had dissolved and he knew that he would be staying on a little, now that he could afford it—a week, a few weeks, however long his winnings would last here. He would explain it to his parents by phone if he had to. One could always come up with an excuse about travel delays or minor illnesses. He could say that he had the runs and was laid up in bed for a few days. Many such things would sound entirely plausible. He began to descend the steps, followed by two young girls who had suddenly appeared waving paddles made of pieces of cardboard torn from commercial boxes. They came toward him and when they were a step from him they began waving the paddles as fans to cool him. They followed him down, fanning his back and giggling. It would cost him 2,000 riels. Soon he saw Ouksa waiting patiently at the foot of the steps in all his starched composure with his hair parted laboriously to one side and his dramatic scent. One didn’t know what to make of him. The way his eyes lifted slowly to find the man who was paying him, and to whom he was only partially obsequious.

  “How was it?” he said as Robert came down into the clearing where the car stood and the children swarmed around him crying One dolla, one dolla.

  “It was a hell of a place. There was a white guy up there too.”

  “Oh? I not see that one.”

  “He was doing what I was doing, I guess.”

  It was noon and the heat made him fumble inside his own mind. He paid the two fanners a dollar and they cocked their heads with pleasure. He wondered about lunch. He wanted to invite Ouksa and make him feel more at ease. The flies tormented him, but they could not be discouraged.

  “Why don’t we go and eat somewhere?”

>   “Why not. We can go to Wat Ek Phnom and buy some things.”

  “I’d say I owed you lunch.”

  —

  They drove back into Battambang, shadowing the river promenades again. They went past the Masjid Dhiya mosque, and then northward out of town toward Wat Ek Phnom. The temple lay next to a pond filled with bursting water lilies. It was clear that these temples were all part of a known tourist circuit through which a privately rented car was bound to pass with the driver peddling cultural information. Ouksa, however, did not provide it. He sensed that this white man was as empty as himself and it suited him fine.

  They had bought some chicken skewers and Cokes on the way and they walked to the edge of the pond and sat. The new part of the temple was a riot of gold leaf and dubious taste; the ancient prasat rose from shattered piles of blocks. They sat and ate and there was somehow nothing to say for a long time. A monumental chalk-white Buddha sat among the weeds on an unfinished brick pedestal, his hands raised in a mudra. Water-lily flowers opened in motionless heat on the surface of the water. Ouksa lay down, taking a small liberty with his young and easygoing employer, and they listened to a plane droning in the far distance and gardeners in straw hats raked the edges of the flower beds.