“I never make plans.”
“Look,” she said, pointing to the steps below them.
The monk was still there, seated under an orange parasol, and it reminded him at once of the temple near Battambang where he had seen Simon. The other man in the shabby suit had disappeared but he had the feeling that this disappearance was not genuine.
“I’m so glad to be back in this country,” she said quietly. “Are you surprised by that?”
“Not at all.”
“This place is special. Don’t you think?”
“I can feel that.”
“I’m happy you can. But somehow you seem anxious. What are you anxious about?”
“I am?”
She had noticed all along that when she looked at him from the side his cheek twitched as if his jaw was clenched. His foot always tapped, his eyes always moved quickly.
“Yes. You are always nervous in some way.”
“Am I really nervous?”
“Yes, you are. There’s something nervous about you.”
Indeed, it was why she didn’t quite trust him.
“You’re always on the lookout.”
“I don’t think so—”
“You haven’t done anything bad, have you, Simon?”
“What do you mean?”
“You haven’t cheated any of your other students?”
He said, slightly annoyed, “I think I’m pretty relaxed. By English standards anyway.”
“Well, you are not a relaxed people.”
“We are what we are.”
“If you’re in trouble—”
“Why would I be in trouble?”
But his laugh was obviously forced.
“People,” she said, “get into all kinds of trouble.”
“Not me.”
On their way back, he was agitated. Sometimes he felt that he was inside a huge broken machine and that there was no exit from it. You’re out of my mind, he thought, remembering a poem about William Burroughs, or was it a line of Burroughs himself? I’m out of your mind. You’re out of my mind.
He slept alone for a while at the Mansions and then walked over to the Sar home to have dinner with the family—it was their specific request. The servants had laid out a table in the garden since the rain had not returned, and dull, dusty-looking stars twinkled above the city’s orange glare. There the three of them sat around candles in glass shells and their faces had a curiously conspiratorial look when he observed them from the windows of the house. The mother was holding forth about something, her hand rising for a moment to emphasize a point then sinking back to her knee. There were tall glasses of white wine. They were an eccentric family, without a doubt; but what made them eccentric was not eccentricity in itself. When he appeared the doctor rose and he made the same gesture with his finger that he had made at the Royal restaurant. They were sitting under a mango tree that looked to be at least a hundred years old, and as if reading his mind the doctor said, almost at once, “See, this is our tree that has been here since before the house was even built! The servants say a spirit lives inside it. They are correct, as it happens.”
—
It was very different from the meal of the first night. The food now was Khmer, delicate and smoky. Lap khmer salads soaked in lime and kdam chaa crab fried in Kampot green peppers and served with baguettes. The wife, for some reason, retired early and the doctor took out his cigar box and waxed philosophical. It felt to Robert as if he had many things bottled up inside him and that he had not expressed them to many people. As he drank, he became sharper and moodier, and the subject of conversation turned with baleful inexorability to the nation, to the nation which he wanted to explain to a young and impressionable foreigner.
“I have been reading a new book about the seventies, by a man who I greatly respect. A filmmaker. Perhaps you know him?”
The name Rithy Panh, however, meant nothing to Robert.
“No matter. He wrote it in French. He made a film about the S-21 camp. He is interviewing the commandant, Duch—a mass murderer—and he makes a remarkable observation.” The doctor sat back in his chair and looked over at his daughter, waiting for her to say something. He had drilled these things into her since she was little but he seemed to want to know if she understood it after all. “He says that Duch hated Vincent van Gogh but had a noble love for Leonardo da Vinci, and in particular the Mona Lisa. Why does Duch the fanatic Communist and killer love the Mona Lisa? Because, Duch says, she looks like a Khmer woman. There’s something Cambodian in her portrait. An heiress of the kingdom of Angkar perhaps? Or is it because the works of the Renaissance are so mathematical? Duch, you see, was a math teacher before he became one of the world’s most famous torturers. It’s so strange to me that someone like that would have an opinion about the Mona Lisa. He then says that Vann Nath, the man who painted all the images in the museum today, a man who survived the prison—one of only seven people to come out alive—was not a great painter. I think that made me angrier than anything. Vann Nath owns a restaurant these days—we should go over one day and eat there. He is a gentleman.”
“Daddy—” Sophal began.
“What is it?”
“Don’t you think Simon might be a bit overwhelmed by all this?”
“He lives here, doesn’t he? Don’t you, Simon?”
“Yes, sir.”
The “sir” was a little absurd, and the doctor laughed.
“You don’t have to call me sir, Simon. Are you overwhelmed?”
“Not at all.”
“See, he’s not overwhelmed. I can talk about my own country, can’t I? I want to tell you about this book. It’s a remarkable book. He talks about the nation. He says the nation is mysterious to him—as it is to me. What can you say about a nation that killed a quarter of its own population in three years? Such a nation, he says, is enigmatic, impenetrable. It’s a sick nation, maybe even an insane one. I quote word for word. But the world, he says, remains innocent. That’s the strange thing. The crimes of the regime were still human all the same. Those crimes were not a historical oddity, a geographical eccentricity. Not at all. The twentieth century, he says, reached its fulfilment in Cambodia in the Year Zero. The crimes in Cambodia can even be taken to represent the whole twentieth century. They were committed by the most educated people in the country, people who’d studied in Paris. The scholarship boys. The lucky ones. People who knew they were right and educated and well traveled. It was in the Enlightenment that those crimes took place. That’s what is so hard to understand.”
The doctor began to light his cigar. He smoked too much, that was his indulgence in late middle age, and a customary one at that. It made him feel more French, more relaxed.
“I think it was here that all the tendencies of your culture, Simon, reached their maximum point. Do you see what I mean? It all came from you. Had those boys not gone to the Sorbonne, if they had stayed in Buddhist schools, we would have had the usual Southeast Asian corrupt monarchy with a few minor crimes here and there, but nothing more. There would have been no exterminations, no total control. We would have stayed sane. At the prison here they used to conduct experiments, draining all the blood from women to see what would happen. They had already marked “to be destroyed” in the margins of their files. But it was not just us; it was a very European experiment. You destroy people in order to make ideas live. It’s a uniquely Western kind of behavior. Pol Pot was a good student, remember, and a very good carpenter. A gentle boy. He lived for ideas, which is why you had women being drained of all their blood in a converted school. We may have been insane then, but the insanity was not all ours. It was a way of looking at history that completely denied history. There are those who say we’ve always done that anyway—but not with an end in mind. We never wanted to make a perfect society. We are fatalists. We don’t believe in future perfection.”
When you thought about it, the domination of the nation by Western ideas and moods and movements and moral ideologies w
as a devastating spectacle. The doctor, however, was not recriminating. It was a salient thing about the Khmers, the lack of bitterness they had about it.
“First, you drop half a million tons of bombs on us, then you give us a deadly ideology like Communism which exterminates a quarter of the population, then you send your missionaries here to lecture us about our sexual behavior. I saw on CNN—it was Mira Sorvino, some actress I am sure you know, weeping outside a peasant’s house and screaming at them not to sell their children into indentured servitude. It was all for the camera. The peasants had no idea what she was talking about. But white people are remarkable people—they love charging around on crusade saving everyone. The carpet bombing and the missionaries and the NGOs—all unconsciously connected. You know all these anti-trafficking types. Most of them are evangelicals, missionaries. They seem wonderfully unable to find any trafficked people, but when they do get someone they force them into twenty hours of Bible study a week. No one ever mentions that. We’re like Africa in the nineteenth century to the men from Texas. We’re the place they do their conversions and fund-raising. They themselves live very well here, of course. Tax-free. I’m not saying they aren’t nice people who want to do good. But Duch was a nice boy who wanted to do good. They all think they are right and want to do good. It’s irrelevant. You’ve turned us into your experiment, that’s what I say. We’re just Cambodians after all. Too poor and weak to say no. We always need something from you. It’s only my daughter’s generation that is starting to say fuck off. I see a change in them—a stirring. I am very relieved to see it. They don’t seem to want to be your victims and experiment anymore. Am I talking rubbish, my dear Simon? Forgive me, it’s the wine. My wife says that not only do I smoke too much, but I drink too much as well.”
“It’s perfectly all right,” Robert said.
He was enjoying it immensely.
“Well,” Sar said, blowing out a complete smoke ring, “time will tell. If I am talking rubbish, time will tell. And I never talk to anyone anyway. The white people would be horrified if they heard. But we came to help—we’re sincere. You know how people think.”
The doctor laughed and flicked his ash. They began to eat chocolates and brandy and the stars became noticeably clearer. The talk became gentler and more personal. Robert felt more at home, and for a moment he thought that he could also belong to this family one day. It was far from being an impossible idea.
NINETEEN
Davuth came down to the river at about noon and began his search for the man called Thy. He was not difficult to find. “He’s always up in the bar getting drunk,” the other boatmen told him.
There indeed Davuth found him, sitting alone and drinking shots of Sang Som diluted with dirty ice. He collared him in a friendly way and they got talking. The rains had held off that day and the whole room, the whole disheveled river hamlet, was filled with burning, corrosive light. Davuth was in his one good suit, neat and combed and shaved, and he had the look of a mildly respectable contractor on his way to the city. He had been up since dawn and he felt sharp and prepared. He had left his car with a man he knew and walked unnoticed into the jetty area. It was a new adventure, but it was it was more than a mere adventure. It was the beginning of a new life.
“You can take me down to the city,” Davuth said to the drunk now, “and I’ll pay you what the American pays.”
Thy looked away and into his dirty ice as if mention of the American was mysterious bad luck.
“He pays better than anyone.”
“Yeah, well, I’ll pay the same.”
It was a deal and Davuth asked him sternly if he was sober.
“Of course I’m sober,” Thy said defiantly.
They went down to his boat tied up at the jetty and set off with the sun at their backs. Davuth sat next to him in the cabin and they chatted with rum and cigarettes and Thy told him all about the young barang he had taken down to the city a short while ago.
“How about that American?” Davuth asked. “I heard about him. Wasn’t he some drug dealer down here?”
“He was but he took off. I heard—”
Thy’s face tightened and he glanced down at the hands of the policeman, which were resting passively but somehow dangerously in his lap.
“You heard what?”
“I heard they fished him out of the river.”
“They did?”
“He must have crossed the drug dealers in Pailin.”
“I guess he must have.”
“It’s not a smart thing to do.”
“It’s the stupidest thing to do, all right. But you had a few dealings with him. Tell me about him.”
“Why?”
“I’m just curious. I heard a lot of stories.”
Thy was now drinking heavily. There was a chance, surely, that they would capsize at some point but it couldn’t be helped. Davuth poured out the booze and Delons.
“He was a dealer, I’m sure. But I liked him. He was all right. He paid me good. You can’t ask more than that.”
“No, you can’t ask more than that.”
“He paid me for odd jobs. Between you and me—”
“Yes?”
“A few drop-offs, you know—that kind of thing.”
“I see.”
“Yeah, it was all right. He wasn’t a tightfist.”
“You can’t ask more than that.”
“You bet you can’t. He paid dollars.”
Davuth said that that was the best a man could hope for: dollars with no questions asked.
“You got that right,” Thy said.
“And that British boy you took down to the city—”
“Ah, he was a queer one.”
“Why so?”
“Slept most of the way. Maybe he was stoned when we loaded him on the boat.”
“You and the American?”
“Yes.”
“Why would you do something like that?”
The boatman looked over at Davuth and his eyes went blank.
“Don’t ask me!”
“How strange,” Davuth drawled. “Did the kid know where he was going?”
“He seemed to have no idea.”
“I’ll be damned—”
“He just got off at the jetty where the American told me to let him off.”
“Then take me to the same place.”
“You said you’d pay the same.”
“It’s a promise.”
They drank a fair bit more on their way to the jetty. Somehow the day had passed altogether by the time they got there and the lights had come on in the waterfront shacks and birds swarmed the mulberry trees with a deafening chirping and fluttering. Davuth paid and they went together up to the bank, the boatman staggering and mocking himself, and Davuth took his leave brusquely and went in among the drivers who were hanging out under the babbling trees. He sifted through them asking about the English boy and seeing if any of them remembered him. Since there were very few of them it didn’t take long for him to find the one who had driven Robert into Phnom Penh. Davuth took him to one side and used all his matey charm on him. He offered a pretty good tip if the man could take him to the same hotel he had taken the young barang to.
“Sure,” the man said cheerfully. “It was the Sakura, if I remember correctly.”
“Then let’s go to the Sakura.”
—
It was a chaotic drive. The road was clogged with long-distance trucks. The dusk came upon them. The man chatted glibly. Davuth listened to the stories about his family and then casually asked him if he had noticed anything odd about the young barang he had taken to the Sakura that night. The driver caught Davuth’s eye in the rearview mirror and he wondered if the barang had contracted a debt he couldn’t pay. The man in the backseat looked like a genial enforcer. The driver prevaricated and then admitted that he couldn’t remember much about the foreigner except that he looked quite broke.
“I see,” Davuth said quietly. “But he paid you all the
same?”
“He did pay me. He paid twice what you paid.”
They laughed. Davuth leaned over and passed another two dollars to the man. When they came into the city the driver remembered that it had not been the Sakura after all but the Paris on Kampuchea Krom. When they got there Davuth asked him again about the Englishman and the driver said he had had no bags with him. It was an extraordinary thing. A barang with no bags.
Yes, Davuth said to him, it’s an extraordinary thing. With that, he turned and walked boldly into the lobby of the Paris, ignoring the drivers outside. The two girls on duty at the reception desk looked up with an instinctive alarm. Davuth gave off an energy that commanded alertness and wariness, if not a slight distaste that the person seeing him for the first time could not quite pin down. A briskness in the hands, a crisp gait that was nevertheless rarely hurried. He never put women at ease. He set down his bag and smiled, however.
“I’d like a room,” he said.
One of the girls took him up to the fifth floor.
“Have you been here before?” she asked him as they climbed the stairwells. On the higher landings the dolled-up girls parted for them sullenly.
“I don’t come down much to the city these days. My daughter’s at school and I never have the time.”
“Lucky you.”
“She’s a lovely girl.”
“Here on holiday?”
“Business.”
“Ah, I see. Business…”
They came to the fifth-floor landing and its row of tarnished doors and smell of ashtrays, and as they went down it he said, “Did you have a barang staying here recently? A young kid named Robert?”
She stopped and their eyes met in the semi-gloom near an exit light.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“Maybe that wasn’t his name.”
She took out the key and continued walking to the door, which she opened quietly.
“Maybe it was Simon, his name.”
“I don’t remember all the names,” she said.
“You have a lot of young guys staying here for the girls?”
“All ages.”
“But not a lot of young barangs?”
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