Robert looked across the road and said, “At the river.”
“The river? Whereabouts?”
“Near a place called the Wagon Wheel.”
“All right. Why don’t you meet me at Le Royal Hotel at twelve?”
“I could do that.”
“Are you English?” the doctor asked.
“I am. Is it a problem?”
“Good, I thought you were. We wanted someone English.”
“Well, I am English.”
“We can have lunch at the Royal restaurant. I suppose you know it. The table will be under my name, Dr. Sar. They know me.”
“All right.”
“I’ll see you there. I think my wife wanted to meet you too but she can’t come to lunch.”
“Next time then. I’ll see you there, Dr. Sar.”
“Twelve. If I am late, please do have a drink on me.”
“I’ll do that.”
The man said, “Au revoir!”
Dr. Sar. It was such a resounding name. To kill the next two hours Robert went to the National Museum and wandered through the galleries of Angkorian art. The place was hot and almost empty and finally he came to a huge statue of Vishnu from the obscure temple of Phnom Da in Takeo Province in the south. He sat down on the floor in the lotus position.
The god’s hands clutched a flame, an antelope skin and a flask, and on either side of him stood two smaller figures of Rama and Balarama. Carved from a single block of sandstone, only five of his eight hands were still attached to surviving arms but all of them were carved with finesse, the individual nails carefully grooved. Like a young pharoah, the god wore a tall cylindrical hat and a folded loincloth, his physique slender and lifelike, with wide shoulders and a little bulging belly. The surface had turned a dark green from the unhappy centuries.
Robert, however, found himself thinking not about unhappiness but its opposite. Vishnu, destroyer of worlds, might have something to do with happiness but he didn’t know what it was. The missing hands seemed to be the clue. They must exist somewhere even now, relics mounted in distant American or Chinese homes or buried in dusty museums on the far side of the world. Timeless. Where, though, did these oval faces, aquiline noses and almond-shaped eyes come from? Even the tear ducts, the pupils and canthi of the eyes were perfectly carved. The figure of Balarama, the elder brother of Krishna, which stood to the right of Vishnu, was arresting. His left eye had been obliterated but his gentle smile was still intact, as was the symbolic swing plow he carried. His figure was boyish, tilted at the hips. Rama, meanwhile, held a tall bow and gazed down at Robert with a haughty gentility. As an avatar of Vishnu, he was associated with knowledge and eternity. He also partook of the enigma of happiness.
—
Robert walked to Le Royal after getting directions from the museum staff. It was a stiff walk, but he had an hour to waste anyway, and as he made his way through Street 102 he saw a lovely shaded colonial-looking apartment block called Colonial Mansions with a pool shining behind glass doors. If his fortunes improved he made a resolution to look in and see how much it would cost to live there. At Le Royal, on the far side of the park behind this building, the staff had stepped out onto the gravel driveway and were peering up at the sky as if something unpleasant had just happened or was about to happen. In his decent clothes he passed through them with a mere nod and a smile, and he felt a sudden pleasure at this automatic respect, which he had never enjoyed from anyone before. He had a different step now, a more confident stride. It had come to him quite suddenly. The grand hotel was gearing up for lunch and in the lobby the upscale barang types and the businessmen from Seoul and Shanghai were there in their dark suits. He slipped in among them and a few of the women looked up and checked him out with a quiet appreciation. He saw it, he felt it, and it made him smile. He was aware of himself looking quite glamorous, burnished by sun and idleness and a youth much less latent. Blending in, he passed through them with a quicksilver pleasure.
A long corridor to the left of the lobby led to the Royal restaurant, and the table was waiting in a still-empty room. It stood next to a door-size beveled mirror with a view of a pool. The staff looked him over without any trace of snobbery and he took the table and ordered a Singapore Sling and a tall glass of iced water. He did it without missing a beat. It was curious how naturally it came to him. Maybe Simon had been right—he was a good sport. Now stilled and appeased in some way, he stretched out his legs under the table and looked around. The walls were covered with French colonial lithographs, scenes of moonlit picnics and elephant rides, images with titles like Pique-Nique sur le Bassac and Éléphants au bord du Tonlé Sap. There were old photographs of dance troupes in traditional costumes, like child-women with painted white faces, Des danseuses du roi se préparant à la danse. It was a world within a world, and the world to which it had once belonged had entirely disappeared. The foreign correspondents had all lived here during the war in 1975. Even now there was something not quite right about it. The boys in bow ties and awkward waistcoats, the chandeliers moving slightly in the subtle gusts from the air conditioners. The ceiling’s painted panels. Yet it was not a decor he felt out of place in now. He thought, with a quiet astonishment, that this would not have been true only a week earlier. It was like stepping into a grand house to which, although it appeared unfamiliar at first, he had been subconsciously accustomed all his life. From beyond the walls the koel birds could be heard in the towering trees arranged around the two colonial pools. High above which, on the room balconies, were little signs that read Please do not feed the monkeys. It was the life of the rich, the tropical rich, and all one had to do was look the part and not hiccup.
Robert felt sweat spreading slowly all along his shoulders, his hand was unsteady on the stem of the water glass.
“Keep it steady,” he told himself. “No passing out here. No scenes.”
The doctor, as it transpired, was late—he was a busy man—and Robert was alone until 12:20, sipping down his Sling and getting quietly tipsy on a stomach that now felt empty. The dining room filled and the music was turned up. Until, as if announcing Dr. Sar, the doors finally swung open and the man himself walked in, a small and hairless head of about sixty-five with a body wrapped up in a white suit. He carried a briefcase and a strange-looking paper parasol which he had folded. One could imagine him stepping into the sun and suddenly unfolding it to protect his pale Chinese skin. The eyes were fast. He spotted Robert at once and came over rocking slightly from side to side on bowed legs. Yet the face was actually quite young, almost wrinkleless, and one didn’t see at first the incredibly fine wire spectacles that lay across the bridge of his nose.
“You are Beauchamp, then?”
There was a laugh and a handshake and down went the briefcase into the arms of a waiter.
“Welcome, Dr. Sar,” the boys intoned, bowing.
“They know me here,” Sar added unnecessarily.
It seemed that he sometimes took wealthy clients here to break bad news to them and, by Buddha, it was better than doing it at the clinic.
He looked over the foreigner with a careful attention to detail. The boy’s clothes didn’t quite fit, and there was a dogged rigor in his eyes. So he had come to put on a show for the doctor. He needed the money.
“The truth is,” Sar said almost at once, as the salmon carpaccio was brought in and a bottle of Perrier was broken open as if it was champagne, “that my wife and I are looking for a language tutor for our daughter. She’s twenty-five. She just came back from a year of medical practice in Paris. A place called the Hôpital Dieu. Do you know Paris, Mr. Beauchamp?”
The eyes twinkled and Robert decided that lying was better than not.
“I do, yes.”
“Mrs. Sar and I are terrible French snobs, I am afraid. Even though I applied myself much more to English. Not that I speak well or anything—”
Robert’s protests were waved away.
“No, no, I know how badly I speak. But any
way. My daughter has never learned it properly, since like us she is French-mad. But now she finds that her sorry English is stopping her progress here. The tyranny of English reached us a long time ago, I am afraid to say. I am against it myself—but what can one do against a whole age? At least at the Royal we have Tournedos Rossini for lunch.”
“Ah.”
“Have you ever had them? Of course not, you are too young. You’ve been raised and brainwashed by doctors. You are all vegetarians now, or worse. Let me take you back in time then. Tournedos Rossini. Steak with foie gras riding on its back. I am a doctor eating such things. My wife does not know. Shall we have two orders of that? And no salads, please!”
“No salads,” Robert said, and they seemed to instantly agree on something—but it was not the undesirability of salads.
A waiter brought to the table what looked like a cologne bottle, with a label that read Huile d’Olive. He set it down.
“So I put out an ad,” Sar went on, his hands relaxing on the surface of the tablecloth. “I thought there must be a fair number of nice educated young foreign men in a city like this—and one of them might be the right person to teach my daughter perfect English. Between you and me, however, we want—how can I say it?—a gentleman. We are not going to hire someone in cargo shorts and flip-flops who wants a few months bumming around Cambodia.”
“I understand.”
“I interviewed a few fellows. They showed up in shorts.”
“I’m sorry to hear it.”
The doctor expelled a heavy sigh tinged with a kind of macabre hidden humor.
“This is the way it is these days. Well, I won’t have it in my house. Do you wear shorts, Mr. Beauchamp?”
“Never.”
“Not even at the beach?”
“I never go to the beach.”
“Excellent answer, by Buddha.” The doctor finally laughed. “I think that merits a glass of Sancerre, don’t you?”
“I do.”
The doctor’s hand rose and the ordering of the Sancerre consisted of two quick motions of his index finger but no click. A whole world of sly provincial wealth was expressed in that gesture, an authority whose true root was obscure to an outsider.
“They know me here. They know what I drink.”
He’s easy, Robert thought, and he relaxed. The doctor looked like he would give him some work. He just had to be a gentleman.
“Naturally,” Sar was continuing, “we need to know a little about you. My daughter has been rather ill lately so she is staying at home with us. Nervous exhaustion, I think.”
“Was she working here?”
“Not yet. She is looking. Her time in Paris didn’t do her much good. I don’t know what she got so exhausted from—I have scratched my head over it for weeks. My wife says—but she always has a theory. It’s easy to have a theory, isn’t it?”
“It is, yes.”
“I say there’s no point having a theory. Just give me an explanation and a plan of action. I thought working on her English would do her the world of good. The social scene here—”
He pulled a face which, unexpectedly, made his face much handsomer. The wine arrived and they made a silent toast, but the doctor had not let go of his train of thought.
“—I mean, for kids of good family. The high-society kids. Well, it’s appalling. They can do what they want. Sophal hangs out with the sons of air force generals and suchlike. The children of the rich. I can’t seem to talk any sense into her. They do a lot of drugs and do what they want and no one will touch them. The boys are utterly worthless. They can kill any homeless person they want and nothing will happen. It’s difficult to explain to you, you being a foreigner. I can’t stand the thought of her ending up with one of them. I thought if she got her English up to speed…”
The doctor emitted his second sigh and the Tournedos Rossini arrived, the foie gras laid carefully on their surfaces. It was service au guéridon, the steaks prepared tableside.
“Then her chances for happiness will increase?” Robert said to himself.
“Wrong wine for steak,” Sar laughed, “but I don’t care. Do you care, Mr. Beauchamp?”
“I don’t care, no.”
“Then we don’t care. If we don’t care, no one does!”
“It’s delicious wine—thank you.”
“Thank you for coming to a job interview at such short notice. Bon appétit. Now tell me about you. What brought you to Phnom Penh?”
On his long walk over from the National Museum Robert had prepared his story. He thought it best to be at least half truthful. The issue was whether he should own up to being a teacher; it had its pros and cons.
In the end he decided against it. English teachers were a dime a dozen in this city and in most cities like it. They formed a kind of sub-society all over the Far East, a loose confederation of dubious individuals with their own social niche and their severe reputation for being mangy and broke, though somewhat successful with the girls. Several of his friends at college had gone on to pursue that way of life in places where the koel birds sing and nothing more was ever heard of them. The tropical English teacher in his cargo shorts and flip-flops and his bad haircuts, saving his pennies by eating local every night and scouring his adopted city for sexual scraps and tidbits: easy to find here and free for the young. No money, yet still plenty of honey. But that was not his niche and he intended to stay as far away from it as he could. The clothes he had unexpectedly inherited, strangely enough, had nudged him into other ideas. It seemed absurd, in fact, to step down from them. He didn’t really want to go this route at all, it was just that he couldn’t think of any other way to make some quick cash. It was ironic, given that it was the only skill which he actually possessed. The doctor, meanwhile, seemed to sense—or rather wanted to believe—that this artfully disheveled youth was more than he appeared.
“The truth is,” Robert said, “I’m just traveling around Asia for a few months. I know it’s a horrible cliché—but there we are. I was working at a bank in London and got absolutely fed up with it.”
“A bank, you say?”
“Just a company that audits banks, actually. Terribly boring.”
“I see. What was the company called?”
“Deloitte.”
“Well, all you young people seem to be traveling these days. Sophal says she wants to travel as well. Travel where? I ask her. She has no idea. Anywhere as long as it’s travel. I can’t really understand it myself, but then I am not twenty-five anymore. What is the point of travel just to travel? How old are you, if I may ask?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“A fine age, a fine age. A fine age for a man if you ask me.”
A fine age for anyone, Robert might have replied.
“At twenty-eight,” Sar added, “you can do whatever you want. Or you can nowadays. When I was twenty-eight it was rather a different matter. When I was thirty I was in the countryside being whipped.”
This seemed like an unpleasant topic so Robert steered the conversation away from it. He talked on about himself. Outside, the light visible through the windows dimmed a shade and Robert knew that the sunny part of the day was already over. He talked about England, life in London—tedium, monotony, gray skies, high taxes, the usual things that people living far away always like to hear about, as if they simultaneously both damaged and solidified the sterling image of Albion. He began to talk about his parents, but then stopped, thinking that he was overstepping the mark.
“No, no,” Sar objected, “do go on.”
“My father worked in a bank as well and my mother wrote plays for the radio. They live in East Grinstead.”
“East Grinstead?”
A thin smile came to the old man’s lips. He always seemed to know more than he immediately let on.
“Are they aware that you are running around the world?”
“They disapprove, if that’s what you mean.”
“I would disapprove too if I were them.”
Robert decided to find this amusing.
“It’s only for a short while. I wanted to see the world a bit.”
“Where are you living, by the way?”
“I found a place called Colonial Mansions. It’s just around the corner.”
“I know it well. The American embassy sets up many of its employees there. It’s not terribly cheap, is it?”
Robert shrugged.
“It’s all right. It’s cheaper than East Grinstead.”
“Maybe you should come around for dinner at our house and meet everyone. Would you do that?”
“Certainly.”
“Not tonight, Sophal is out doing music. What about tomorrow then?”
“All right.”
Robert’s voice wavered and he sensed some tensions coming to him from afar, like something clammy and malevolent carried over a body of still water.
“I’ll have my wife ask the cook to make something Khmer. Do you like Khmer food?”
“Of course.”
“Some barangs won’t eat it. They survive on steaks and milkshakes.”
Robert shook his head. “I find that hard to believe. It’s so delicious.”
“I’m glad you think so. You seem like you’ve been here a long time.”
“A few weeks. But it feels like a few days.”
“A few weeks already. You don’t sound too sure.”
“Maybe I’ve lost track of time.”
Robert smiled but the doctor did not return the gesture.
He said, instead, “That’s what happens when you come here when you’re young and you’re not Khmer. It makes the time fly by. Everyone says so and I believe it.”
—
From the shadowed corners of the room the boys in the bow ties watched them with a wary aloofness that found its only expression in the permanently upturned corners of their mouths. There was a fixity about them, a muted beauty which made them, strangely, unapproachable. They stood there watching the Englishman in his odd clothes listening to the old Khmer doctor, whom they knew for his kindness and dottiness, and they reminded Robert of the children he taught in Elmer and who sometimes walked home with him across the railway bridge to his cottage at the edge of the woods. Their eyes moved as slowly as marbles rolling on a gradient which the eye could not detect and they spoke reluctantly only when they were spoken to, but there was thought and a subtle malice in their stoniness and gravity. It was a form of respect that does not shrink from quietly judging. The children were always curious about him and he was sure that they felt sorry for him: he was a forlorn figure to them. They could smell his loneliness and mediocrity, and in a perverse way it drew them to him. The doctor, for his part, could sense the same thing but it didn’t draw him to Robert. It made him aware that there was an opportunity here.
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