Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  “I suppose you’ll leave tomorrow,” Simon said. “My boatman can drop you off in the city and just tip him a twenty if that’s all right.”

  “I’m grateful—it seems cheap.”

  “It’s not cheap at all. But if you think it is, that’s great. I might even come with you, though I think we have things to do up here tomorrow. Meanwhile, I have a bit of red opium left over from last night. Shall we smoke it and be hippies?”

  “Let’s.”

  —

  As they lit the pipe Robert felt ants crawling across his naked feet, things crawling between his toes, and he didn’t mind. The air had suddenly become deliciously cool and the heat and bustle of the day had receded even mentally. So this was what it was like here. The days pinned you down in stress, sweat and misery and then the nights came along to rescue you and set you back on your feet. Nights were the key to survival, the way out of the stultifying labyrinths of the days. Without the nights humans would shrivel up like cockroaches and die. Simon won the game and they began another, and as they did so they puffed at the pipe, which Simon had prepared with delicate dexterity. It tasted sweet, like stewed plums, and the smoke passed easily into Robert’s lungs and out again into the air.

  “It’s tasty” was all he could say. “I’ve never—”

  “It’s hard to get these days. It became an unfashionable addiction at some point. I can’t imagine why. It’s so mild and pleasant.”

  “It’s like something for children.”

  “In a way, yes…”

  Robert began thinking about the boat the next day.

  “Maybe I should go early,” he said. “That’s what everyone recommends here, isn’t it? Get up early and avoid the heat.”

  “Generally that’s what we do. Shall I call him now?”

  Simon made the call and spoke in Khmer.

  “Six all right for you?” he called over to Robert.

  Robert nodded and so it was decided. He would probably have an opium-and-beer hangover but it didn’t matter.

  “Where does the boat go exactly?”

  Simon put down the phone and extracted his pleasure from the pipe, which he held with three fingers as if an ancient Chinese man had shown him how to do it properly.

  “Where you want. We usually go down to a small town a few miles out of the city and taxi in from there. The piers in Phnom Penh can get way too busy with all the tourist boats.”

  “I’ll do that then.”

  “You’ll be there for lunch. Do you eat lunch, Robert?”

  “I can’t remember. I can’t—”

  “I know a place you could go. Right on the river.”

  “Yes, on the river.”

  Robert felt light-headed. The lights along the far side of the river had begun to seem more spread out and their reflections in the water shimmered more violently. The outlines of the trees had grown more imposing in some way.

  “I’ll write it down for you,” Simon went on. “You can go there and eat fish amok. Very nice.”

  Simon rose and walked over to the paraffin lamp hanging from the rafters and lowered the flame. He half turned and glanced down at the stoned visitor who had stretched out his legs and sidled onto the entire length of the sofa he was seated on. The music had stopped and it was just the insects now, the sound of the fields. The pipe lay in the center of the table on a dish that seemed to serve that specific purpose, its wisp of smoke perfectly vertical. A life of casual idleness was expressed in that single upright line of smoke and it was a life which, looking at it, Robert suddenly wanted for himself, even though he was repelled by its uselessness. It couldn’t be that hard to attain. He thought: I am in some kind of fairy tale and nothing can be that hard to attain. All I have to do is wish for it on a star. Simon came back to his own sofa, fell into it and restocked the pipe so the smoking of it could go on. He lit it up again and passed it at once to his guest. The conversation between them had now run dry, but without awkwardness. Like a stream that peters out at its appointed place and time, without drama. It no longer mattered. It is always the way when conversation no longer matters. It dies its natural death with a quiet submission to fate. Robert felt himself falling backward into the rough fabric of the sofa while the ants ate his feet alive. He thought to reach down and scratch the skin or crush the ants but when he raised his hand to do so he found that he could not.

  “You can sleep down here,” Simon said at last, and his words came to Robert like something whispered at the far end of a long tunnel.

  Robert rolled slowly onto his back and his mind let go of the unfinished chess game and the ants. He stared up at one of the shiny black fans. The mosquitoes were audible, their beating wings as loud as rotary blades. Out in the darkened rows of sugarcane the rabbits nibbled at the edge of the covering shadow, their eyes shining for a moment as they turned and listened to birds of prey. He placed a hand over his eyes and felt his mouth go dry. He remembered the bats which Ouksa had roused earlier that day, their wings beating just like the insects now. What world, then, did they inhabit?

  SIX

  He came over the Downs in the tall grass and the flint walls of the old barn stood high on the crest almost with a view of the sea through a gap in the hills. There were large holes in the walls filled to bursting with stinging nettles and through these a small boy could step. Inside it was gloom and fragrance but he always hesitated because he was alone. Around the barn the grass quivered and rippled and there were momentary patterns upon its silvery surface. He reached out and ran his hand along the rough flints and he drifted through the cornflowers at the bottom of the walls. Why always here, under this same apex sun which made the shadows stand still only a millimeter from the forms that cast them? The terror of the cows standing in their isolate shadows too all over the hillsides, in gleaming rivers of half-dried mud. Look up at the sun and you wake at once, always the same.

  He did so then and he saw the blueness of a morning sky, almost the same as the sky of England and childhood. It, and not his eyes, seemed to blink. Then, almost at the same moment, he heard water and sensed it close by. The lapping of lake waves, weak but ploddingly insistent. The horizon tilted, then righted itself: he was on a boat.

  It must have been the boat that Simon had called for him. Though his head still hummed from the night before he got onto his elbow and forced his eyes to work again. He was on the deck of a small shabby fishing boat with a motor at its rear end and above him in a ramshackle cockpit a man stood at the wheel smoking a half-crushed cigar. He was naked but for a pair of shorts and dark blue tattoos ran all down his back.

  Robert was lying on a mattress, like that of a sunbed, and the early-morning sun had burned his nose a little. Water, he thought. I need a bloody drink. He got up with difficulty and steadied himself and made his way forward to the cockpit. The man turned without surprise and motioned to a thermos lying in the shade. It was hot coffee with sugar and milk.

  “Good morning,” Robert said as loudly as he could.

  A godsend, the coffee.

  The man grinned and made a playful salute with one hand. Robert unscrewed the thermos’s cap and fell gratefully into the coffee. He sipped it cautiously at first then took larger mouthfuls.

  Instantly, he revived. They were on a vast toffee-colored lake. Across it a saline wind swept, warm and menacing, and far off on the horizon he could see systems of nets laid low against the water. There was no land to be seen, they had left it far behind.

  He sat half in the sun and gulped down the whole thermos. It was only gradually that he became aware that he was wearing clean clothes and that they were not his. He looked down and spread his hands over his warm lap. He was wearing off-white linens, freshly laundered. He felt in the pockets and there was a hundred-dollar bill. The shirt was a soft dark cream linen with heavy buttons. He got up and turned once as if looking at himself in a mirror. Incredible. Espadrilles too.

  He called out to the pilot.

  “Where is Simon?”
<
br />   The man waved a silent hand but didn’t turn again.

  All right, Robert thought, he doesn’t speak a word of English. That’s to be expected, I suppose.

  He took out the hundred-dollar bill and looked it over. Then he thought about his backpack. It was nowhere to be seen on the deck.

  “So that’s it,” he said aloud.

  Exhilaration came upon him, and then a back-pedaling panic.

  He leaned against the boat’s side and let his senses clear and soon he saw low shimmers of green on the leftward horizon. It’s a small country, he thought, and no one is more than four hundred miles from anyone else. For some reason he didn’t yet care about the backpack and yet he knew instinctively that it was not on the boat and that there was no use looking for it. There was no point asking the pilot about it and there was no point asking him to take him back to the house by the river. He did not even know where the house was or where the jetty was or what the river was called. He would never be able to find it, and the pilot would never take him anyway even if he understood.

  He lumbered to the rear of the boat and looked down into the toffee waters being churned by the motor. A five-mile swim in any direction. He shaded his eyes and saw that the shimmers of jungle on the horizon were in any case coming closer. But there was no way of calculating how long he had been on board this boat, or for how many hours they had been plowing through this featureless wasteland. It could have been for several hours. It could, for that matter, have been for half the night. There was no way of knowing. Nor was there any way of knowing if a gentlemanly favor had been done him, or the reverse—one barang gentleman to another.

  —

  Toward noon, to judge by the position of the sun (he had no watch, he discovered) the boat began to near land—the same low forest and waterlogged banks of reeds and flat grass—and soon he saw people walking along a road, bicycles flashing in the sun.

  The pilot turned to him and said something, the name of a place perhaps, Prek Pnov, and he stood up and walked to the bow, which would touch land. There were long shelving banks of dirty wet grass and reeds, and above them a scrim of slum shacks made of tin. There were a few children with mechanical toy birds and fishing rods standing at the tip of a line of planks that led up from the water’s edge into the shanty. It was not quite the city but over the slum and the river soared a modern bridge which suggested its presence. The thick dust of the country roads hung above Prek Pnov, the dust which dries in an hour and then rises to envelop the head, and through it he could see the gold tints of a ramshackle wat covered with wooden scaffolding and high sad trees caked with cement powder.

  When the boat came to, Robert stepped onto the planks and looked down at the mysterious pilot, who seemed unconcerned. This was not a stop that any commercial boat would use; it must have been a secretive place that Simon used to get ashore while going about his equally secretive business.

  “Where’s Simon?” Robert asked again, but now more clearly and forcefully. “Where’s my bag?”

  The pilot smiled with a vast charm.

  He had already unmoored the boat again and the craft was moving away from the path of planks as suddenly as it had arrived. As it did so the children closed in on Robert and began to pester him. One dolla, one dolla.

  “Oh, OK then,” Robert called after the pilot, “you dump me here and then you just leave like that? Just like that? What am I supposed to do now?”

  The pilot waved cheerfully. Nothing to be said or expressed, just the fact and the consequences that sprang from it.

  “Come back,” Robert shouted after him, waving too, but not in the same friendly way. “Come back right now!”

  He knew already that no such thing could happen. The men in the cluster of longtails below him stared and slowly their ironic smiles gained traction in Robert’s mind and he desisted. “Damn and fuck it,” he muttered and brushed past the children and began to climb the precarious gangplank through slopes of colorless plastic trash. The planks snaked through shacks on stilts, up into the shadow and heat of a single alley that wound its way through the slum.

  He was just at a loss, and aboard the boat he had not been able to think anything through. He moved as an automaton until he was clear of the river and he thought wildly, in great leaps: go back up the river by car and find the house again or press on and see what happened. But there was no sense in going back, he knew there was nothing behind him and, far more importantly, he didn’t want to go back. Secretly, he was thrilled. From now on he could tell himself that he was a victim of circumstance.

  He laughed and the people out on the alley sitting around with their lunch saw it and laughed along immediately. It was the Khmer way. Their surprise was not melodramatic. It came out in that subdued collective laughing. He was in an alley filled with little shops and two-story houses where the balconies were crowded with makeshift altars of bowls of fruit and decorative piles of beer cans. Great round earthenware urns stood outside the doors. As he turned and decided to walk to the right, his head narrowly missed a line of tiny fish impaled on a wooden pin that dangled from an awning rod. The children burst into laughter. He ducked and laughed along and moved awkwardly toward the cheap gold chedi of the temple which he could see over the roofs.

  The wat looked like a half-abandoned construction site. But there were gold guardian lions erect and snarling in the sun and chedi which had been restored. The naga heads on the stairs had been repainted gold and green and there were smaller lions posted on the roofs. He walked in, seeing nobody and now no longer followed by the children, passing venerable trees whose shade covered a ground of rubble and grass.

  He came out onto the road, and he could sense at once that it was the main route into the city. In fact it was the Battambang highway. Chaotic traffic pressed through it, a medley of motorbikes in swarms. The sun beat down on tangled cables and pink bricks and forlorn flag posts.

  He walked along the dust bordering the tarmac until he came to a small shop with a curious sign for a thing called “Alexand” brandy with a black head of a Greek warrior. He stepped into its shade and felt the sweat and burn on his skin. He cashed in the hundred-dollar bill for an Angkor beer. As he stood by the road, tuk-tuks and motodops began to stop. In his nice linens he appeared a profitable target but he soon beat the motodops down to five dollars for the run into town. Since he had no baggage they assumed he lived there. No, he said, I’ll go to a hotel, you know one? The motodops were not as wise to the hotels as the tuk-tuks but they knew a few flophouses.

  It was a choice, according to them, between the Sakura and the Paris. Both had girls. The Sakura was cheaper but the Paris had a nice location on Kampuchea Krom Boulevard and a restaurant on the ground floor. It was a difference of about five dollars. He chose the Paris.

  They drove in through the heat of the day. The rain, the driver said, would not come in until the late afternoon that day. The suburbs, meanwhile, lay in a sullen calm and he went over in his mind the dozens of theories he had established as to what had happened. The most likely, to his taste, was that Simon had helped him on his way and would send on his things as soon as he sent word where he was staying. There must have been a reason why he had held on to the backpack, a reason that was not injurious, but, as it happened, no such reason came easily to mind.

  SEVEN

  On the outskirts of central Phnom Penh the light dimmed and clouds began to mass and they crawled through a river of traffic toward a thing called the Japanese Friendship Bridge. It was two o’clock. He could see already that it was a small, low-lying city with the great river pouring through it. They went past Chinese factories and loading bays, the metal boxes covered with Chinese characters, an office for Bruntys cider, mounds of rose bricks, the shapes of metal silos and the gleam of the pale green-tinted river below. They passed under the bridge, the tarmac shattered as if by mortars. The afternoon hysteria of car horns and the cafés along the streets filling up with anxious men in white shirts. A city with pools of
slow life from another age. The trees along the roads then, the echoes of provincial France, a disappeared France of green shutters and dark yellow walls. The long pale gray walls of the French embassy topped with rings of barbed wire and a riverine boulevard swirling with dust and violent wind.

  The river curved slowly, dividing the city they were on from a farther shore where half-constructed buildings rose up out of a slightly silver haze. New hotels, towers of dreary metal. They turned inland at a street market of some kind and passed alongside a baked city park, the frangipanis creamy in the sun. The driver glanced at his fare in the vibrating mirror. He looked like a young man about town, a rake down for the weekend. In fact, he looked vaguely familiar. But why did he have no money, so little that he had to stay at the miserable and ill-reputed Paris Hotel? But maybe he wanted a hotel with girls for the weekend. That must be it. But then, where had he seen his face before? Or something about the way he dressed. Most barangs dressed like beggars. This one dressed as if to hide the fact that he was a beggar. If he waited outside the Paris Hotel for a few days he might get another ride out of him. He might need something illegal like a passport.

  Robert was not thinking about such things at all. He was watching the rotary swirls of girls on motorbikes, the back riders sidesaddle and helmetless. People massed on the pavements under the shade of mango trees. The great heat slowing down even facial muscles. He was not as dismayed as he had expected to be. The city was, one could see, young and upbeat and fierce, and yet its traffic had a slow, almost choreographed motion to it. They sped leftward into a large boulevard, wide and French—Norodom—and he could see old European villas and mansions set behind walls topped with broken glass and a dark monument at its distant end like a gloomy relic of Angkor. A quiet motor seemed to organize the city. The bikes whizzing in both directions simultaneously never quite collided. The tuk-tuks snaking their way through this chaos never quite came to grief. Almost, but not.