Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  Later it seemed to her that this might have been the moment in which she decided to leave Europe, but in reality she had never been quite happy there. Easy to love Paris, yes, easy to love Sunday-morning walks on the Île de la Cité with her Frenchman and the pastries at Stohrer on the rue Montorgueil and a hundred other things great and small. But even with Claude she always felt alone. She was not really in love with him. Her favorite place in the city, after all, was the church of Saint Gervais and Protais, near the river, whose back door was always left open late at night. She would go there and sit alone in the pews and feel the musty medieval ghosts in that Gothic nave. She was sure she could have been a psychic if she had wanted to. An upper-middle-class Khmer girl with a little family money but no inner reason to be in that world apart from a medical education and a taste for escape. What she had escaped from was her own family. The gloom that surrounded them like an invisible miasma. They were people who frequently liked to quip, “It’s a miracle we’re alive!” But if it was a miracle, who could explain it, and why should other miracles not exist? “Do I believe in miracles?” she began to ask herself. “Me, a doctor in the making, a rational agent?” Could a body really remain perfectly preserved for years in a sealed room? Her father said yes. But it was a miracle anyway.

  It was now her own life as a temporary emigrant that began to feel insubstantial. All along, it had been her father who drove her from behind, who constantly admonished her to succeed in Europe. She was doing it for him. Even listening to classical music—it was his urging, his idea. It was he who had driven her to be ambitious and study in Paris. In reality it had been his own dream and she was the one who now had to fulfill it. Not being her own dream, however, it sat uneasily with her. She was not, in fact, ferociously ambitious. She wanted to drift and roam and roll through childish adventures, not get up for 9 a.m. lectures and dissect cadavers in cold rooms. Yet she also thought having dreams, the very concept of having a dream, was childish and absurd. Why did one need to have illusions like that in order to just live? Living was not a project with a propaganda film driving it. It was pulled along by mystery and pleasure, not by a desire to have a big house in Neuilly by the time she was forty.

  And increasingly, finally, the enchantment of Paris began to wear off. The sullen bitterness under the surface, the men pissing in the streets defiantly, the feel of quiet decay. It was a slow-motion decay which had gone hand in hand with a slightly hysterical campaign of urban renewal and antiseptic respectability. But the men were still pissing in the street and there was still a feeling of stasis and creeping old age. Europe dying on its feet of torpor and smugness and debt. Half the people her own age were unemployed, living in a state of dependency. At the hospital they were continually handing out free antidepressants to middle-class brats who didn’t want to pay for them. It would have been morally shocking in Phnom Penh, of course, and privately she was shocked. But her boyfriend scoffed at her. Why shouldn’t they have free Paxil for their imaginary mental disorders? “You’re all brainwashed to accept it,” she retorted. “You have no connection to real life. You’re on life support and you don’t even know it.” Work isn’t everything, he would sometimes say, thinking that she would agree with him, given her wonderfully lazy proclivities. And yet she knew it was false. Work indeed was everything and she began to wonder if she would ever have work that meant something to her. She didn’t want to be a doctor, however. Working full-time as a doctor in Paris had the vague feeling of living as a tourist in an expensive boutique now designed merely for other tourists. What her father didn’t understand because he lived mentally in another age was that now it was Europe that was adrift and listless. Her sense of moral superiority was also adrift—how often Sophal had to listen to overheated journalistic lectures about trafficking and servitude in her own country from these fleshy know-it-alls, who in reality knew nothing at all about anything. Thank God, she began to think severely, you’re here to save us. To make us more like you.

  She returned to the bedroom and kissed Robert on his cheek and walked back out into the fresh, wet early morning and downstairs to the lobby, where the boys were all asleep like figures in a painting. The rain had finally stopped and she walked down to Norodom and went along the boulevard in the lonely coolness, glad to be alone again and wondering about what had happened. It didn’t occur to her to think about whether she had enjoyed it. Enjoyment was not the issue yet. There was something graver at stake. But this grave thing was—apart from being grave—distressingly unclear. It was about whether she had thrown herself into a well.

  She found the first open café in a side street and sat at an outside table with a double espresso and a croissant and smoked her Wonders as the traffic began to thicken and a pale light spread across the facades of the travel agents and two-bit boutique hotels and chic bakeries. There must be a moment when happiness begins—an actual, precise moment—and she began to think that she was experiencing that moment now. She let the smoke calm her and still her shaking hands.

  When they had calmed she remembered other moments like this in the past. When her French boyfriend had asked her to come with him to see his family in Avignon. But on that occasion she had refused. The prospective happiness had been too elaborate, too planned, and her prim refusal of it had made complete sense only hours afterward. One didn’t become happy so easily. She was convinced, perhaps childishly, that it had to be unexpected. That was the problem with her whole European phase: where was the unexpected?

  Simon was the unexpected incarnate.

  She walked home then and let herself in through the outer gate and went through the dripping garden as the maids were beating the carpets in the damp air. They looked up at her with amused complicity, those two old women who had known her since she was small. She went up to her room and fell onto her bed in her clothes and slept into the late afternoon, and when she woke the koel birds were announcing an early evening of mosquitoes and low sun and drinks with ice at the edge of growing shadows.

  SEVENTEEN

  She went out that night to a party at the house of a French artist on a street not far from her own house. She walked there along Pasteur, past the upscale lounge-style restaurants and the Japanese bars. Like her father’s house, it was a massive old French villa which the owner had restored with his personal fortune. In his garden, the Frenchman had placed artworks by several well-known Khmer artists and surrounded them with an open bar lit with Vietnamese lanterns. Inside, the ground floor had been converted into the evening’s playground and there she whiled away a few hours drinking vodka cocktails and finding her friends. It was the sort of evening she was becoming used to during her time of “unemployment.” With no pressing financial worries, no rent to pay, she could do what she wanted with her evenings and she had consequently fallen into a lulling rhythm of long nights and late risings and mild hangovers. She knew it would pass eventually, but for the moment she felt it was exactly what a twenty-five-year-old should be doing with her life. There were no pleasant surprises, but no unpleasant surprises either. She was now in her own culture and she could float or sink according to its own laws of gravity.

  She went up to the balcony that looked down onto the garden and a friend of hers found her at eleven, sitting alone and watching the handsome boys in the garden. It was an old school friend, a girl who now worked at the American embassy as a translator, a girl who had suddenly become fatter than herself. The wearisome chatter began.

  “I haven’t seen you in a while,” the girl began.

  “I’ve been looking for work.”

  “We thought you had a boy. Someone saw you with a boy—last night.”

  Sophal gave a slight start and then laughed it off. “That was quick!”

  “Someone was at China House and saw you with a barang boy.”

  “I can’t wriggle out of it.”

  “So, who was it?”

  The girl snuggled up closer.

  I’m not going to play games, Sophal thought griml
y.

  “An English boy I met. He’s my English tutor.”

  A ripple of laughter. “No way!”

  “My father hired him.”

  “But you had other ideas. That was a fast move.”

  “It wasn’t a move. We just hung out.”

  “Uh-huh. Is he here?”

  “Of course he’s not here.”

  “Why of course?”

  “I didn’t ask him anyway.”

  The girl was sure she would know him. She knew all the eligible barangs.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Do I really have to tell you, Arunny?”

  “Of course you do.”

  It was tiresome, but in the end it was better to get it over and done with. Sophal didn’t really care either way.

  “His name’s Simon Beauchamp. He’s teaching English for a year, I guess. He used to work in a bank.”

  “It sounds familiar.”

  “Really? He’s only just got here—”

  “Is that what he said?”

  “Pretty clearly.”

  “I could have sworn—I’ve heard the name before. But it was last year. More than a year ago.”

  “Then it couldn’t have been him.”

  “Is he blond?”

  “He’s got blondish bits.”

  “I think I met him.”

  Sophal put down her drink and her weariness vanished.

  “You met him?”

  The girl tittered and rolled her eyes.

  “I think I did. Simon—yes, I’m sure I met him.”

  “Where?”

  “At a party somewhere. On a boat in the river. Some German guy—you know those parties.”

  “Who was he with?”

  “I think he was with some Khmer girl.”

  So that was it.

  “But you’re not sure?”

  “Well,” the girl snorted, “I couldn’t swear to it, obviously—”

  “What could you swear to?”

  “Nothing much. It just rings a bell—the name.”

  Sophal was angry for a moment.

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  “There’s nothing to believe,” the girl retorted. “I’m just telling you what I remember. Lighten up, Sophal. These guys are all the same. They tell you what you want to hear.”

  Sophal supposed this was true.

  “So you mean he’s been here longer than he said?”

  “Well, yeah.”

  “It’s a possibility, isn’t it?”

  Her voice was sad for a moment and the girl flinched.

  “It’s no big deal,” she offered. “I just met him at a river party. I mean, I didn’t do anything with him!”

  “I didn’t say you did. It’s just annoying.”

  “Men are annoying, didn’t you know?”

  “I don’t find them that annoying. It’s myself I find annoying.”

  “Why don’t you invite him now and I’ll tell you if it’s him?”

  Sophal threw up her hands.

  “God, I hate things like this. I don’t care if he was here last year. He had his reasons to lie.”

  “I dare say,” the girl said sarcastically.

  “I knew it. I had a feeling—”

  “One always does.”

  “It’s true.” Sophal paused. “Shall I invite him?”

  “No. Let’s get drunk. Invite him later.”

  —

  But for the rest of the evening Sophal let it prey upon her mind. The one thing that had never occurred to her was that Simon had lied about the length of his sojourn in her city. That lie seemed more fantastical than others he might have told and deep down she didn’t quite believe it. Naïvéte is hard to simulate. And if Simon was one thing, it was naive. She had never seen naïvéte like it.

  It was like snow with only a tinge of dirt.

  The following day she called him and when he didn’t pick up she sent him a text message. She invited him to meet her at a venerable French restaurant called Van inside the old Banque d’Inchochine building. She said it was her treat and to wear a nice shirt. He accepted. She stayed in all day studying, then told her father that she was going to Van for an English lesson. “With Simon,” he said with a smile. She went back upstairs and dressed in an Agnès B dress she had bought in Paris and which fitted her perfectly and a pair of steely pearl earrings. It was a different look, a rich girl’s look, and she knew how to do it. It was a look that had a bit of thunder and lightning to it. She had never been glamorous or even pretty in her own estimation but she knew how to carry the color black. She put on a thin layer of lipstick.

  That night a few protests erupted around the city. She heard the staccato pop of sporadic gunfire, the far-off din of violence. On her way to the restaurant she passed the remains of shattered barricades littered with shoes, bloody T-shirts and tear-gas cartridges. Police stood at the corners in their plastic face visors, weapons tilted on hips. The acrid taste of the gas had not yet dissipated. Yet a few blocks away it was as if nothing was happening. Van, in any case, was one of the older and pricier French places which ambassadors, sundry diplomats and businessmen liked to frequent when they wanted to sink into no-nonsense old-school French food. Tournedos Rossini, as at Le Royal, with wedges of foie gras and perch quenelles and timbales de crevettes downed with bargain-price bottles of Duhart-Milon. The restaurant was wainscoted and the floors creaked when the shy, silent Khmer waiters dared to cross them. It was almost always half empty but its small outdoor terrace overlooked the wide square by the colonial post office.

  She got there first and was shown to the outdoor table which she had specified. She ate there with her parents and they knew her well. The square was alive with motodops and streaming crowds. From the table by the wall she could even look down at the nocturnal girls sitting on stools outside the wild bars on Street 102. It was an alien energy which threw the quiet European terrace into relief, but it often happened that it still unsettled the diners’ subtle feeling of superiority, especially if they were visiting Europeans. Not Sophal. She sat there now and ordered a Kir Royale. They made them thick and sweet here and she liked them that way. She could smoke outside and she liked the slight swish of the mosquitoes around her bare shoulders. She had, in fact, been coming there since she was little, and the waiters were subtly indulgent to her. One of them lit her cigarette for her. Then she saw Robert walking across the square with his shoulders slightly hunched, in the same linen trousers he always wore. The shirt he always wore. Men did love their lazy uniforms. He even saw her on the terrace and they waved and she saw for a moment the dirty-snow naïvéte in his face. She was becoming surer that her friend had made a banal mistake. They always took too many drugs at parties with foreigners.

  Robert came into the monochrome-tiled downstairs lobby with the old heavy-set green doors of the bank. There was a shrine there and a kitsch statue fountain of a European angel. Inside, Khmer statuary, a droplet chandelier and steep polished wooden stairs which led up to a claustrophobic landing where the glass windows of a fridge displayed to passing diners prime cuts of Australian beef. The chandelier-lit main room was robed with sashed cotton curtains and there was an ancient phonograph on a pedestal, but no guests except a table of elderly French tourists. A waiter escorted him to the terrace. There was no one there either but Sophal and he was for a moment taken aback by the almost brutal elegance of the black dress and the earrings and the color of the mouth that was smiling back at him.

  —

  He had been walking along the river all day. His face was burned and tanned at the same time and it made him look older and more rugged, more worn in. It was a look she liked in white men. When they burned off their pallor they seemed to come visually alive, and alive in other ways too. He made a quick joke about the formality of Van and she shrugged and said it was her father’s favorite restaurant.

  The terrace seemed submerged in trees, in frangipani flowers; the walls of the building exactly the same so
rbet yellow as her father’s house with the same white stucco. An Italian villa of some kind. Only the vast and violent clouds gave away the true location.

  “Steak Rossini?” Robert said.

  “There’s nothing wrong with it.”

  “I ate it last time with your father.”

  He sat and took her hand and turned it for a moment and kissed the back and the light sweat came off on his mouth.

  “You look like—I don’t know what.”

  “Don’t say princess.”

  It was the word he’d been about to use.

  “Something like a princess.”

  She called the waiter.

  “Two Kir Royales. Actually, no, this time I’ll have mine de mure. I always go from blackcurrant to blackberry.”

  Robert glanced at the empty glass in front of her.

  “I’ll have the blackberry one as well then.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You can have it with red too,” she said. “It’s called a Communard.”

  “I think not. Anything with a name like that here—”

  She took his hand back and kissed it in turn.

  “It was probably the only cocktail allowed in the seventies. I’ll ask my father about that.”

  Fireworks began over the river, half obscured by the Banque d’Inchochine building. People stood still in the square and watched. A fairy atmosphere descended and the chemistry between them had slightly altered; a night’s sleep, a few hours to reflect. It was now a closer bond, to their surprise. It was she who talked. Some amuse-bouches came and they attacked them with little silver forks. Beyond the glass doors the rich old tourists ate by candlelight, sepulchral, and their motions with knives and forks were in comical slow motion. The chandeliers twinkled with a subdued melancholy which suggested that they had been there far longer than even these aging tourists had been alive. Robert, in any case, was glad to be above and beyond the sweaty real city for an hour and with someone else paying. He had walked for miles that day, past the Sofitel and along the jumbled river, and he couldn’t really tell her why. A confusion, a disorientation. An incoherent desire to walk out of the city altogether. He had sat on a bank of weeds some miles out of the center and felt each minute passing like a miniature century. A migraine throbbed through his head and he felt himself wishing that he was somewhere else. Vietnam, perhaps, or even China. Just somewhere farther on where not even one person knew him and where he could be himself again. Sooner or later he would have to do that anyway. When he looked at Sophal’s face he felt a sullen guilt and he wanted to just tell her everything in a few brutal sentences. But it would never happen. The deeper he sank into his own lie, the deeper he would drag her until they were both so deep in, it would no longer be worth trying to crawl out of it.