Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  She glanced over at Davuth sitting with his smoke and she saw the tension in his shoulders, the brooding droop of the head. There it was, the old world, the lovelessness. It was pathetic and dry and static and out of that immobility came a quiet hatred that was mysterious even to itself. Was that evil, then, in the Buddhist sense? She had exchanged barely a word with him in their shared language. It was as if he was forcing her to speak English with him. He’s not a real guide, she thought.

  They drove on and by midday they were in Takeo. At this time of year it was a riverine town with a quay and boats coming and going across the vast Mekong floodplain. By this seasonal waterfront a row of stalls had been set up alongside the jetties and here the pilots of the longtails sat in the shade waiting for infrequent customers. Behind them spread a desultory, ramshackle town with rows of shophouses and first-floor balconies with plastic columns. There was a messy, chaotic market where the butchers were in full swing. Traffic circles with sad lawns baked in the sun.

  They stopped at the quay. They got out and Davuth sauntered down to the pilots. He bargained with them with surly charm. A boat until dusk. So he did not, after all, know a man here with a boat. Unconcerned, Sophal and Robert lay on the wall and sunbathed in the glare of the dirty water that lapped below them. The floodplain looked like a limitless lake, an island sea with no visible farther shore. Its water was smooth and flat, rippled by slow, gentle swells. Here and there the tops of submerged trees popped up, crowned by feathery swarms of white birds. The upper branches were clotted with nests.

  This great body of surly, placid liquid created its own dark light, within which the floating beds of water plants and their flowers shone with a muted malevolence. The men who piloted the longtails looked over at the young couple on the wall with a soulful cynicism. City kids, easy money. On the far side of the waters lay the mysterious ancient town of Angkor Borei and the flooded temple mountain of Phnom Da, which, as Davuth had said, could only be reached by boat during the rains. These were the points of interest which the occasional barang visitors invariably wished to see, and once or twice a week each one of them made the eerie trip across the floodplain with a group in straw hats. Robert now gazed out at this featureless prospect and his heart sank a little. It looked like it would be a long and uncomfortable ride, to say the least. He stroked her warm shins and caressed the backs of her ankles and he could see that she was thinking the same thing.

  “It won’t be so bad,” he muttered, forcing himself to smile.

  But he didn’t know. He didn’t even know what they were going to see over there. Davuth, as far as he could see, was haggling with the boatman.

  In fact, he was telling him that he was ready to embark immediately and he was trying to put him off.

  He glanced at his watch and said, “No, we’ll leave at three.”

  “Why so late? It’ll be dark when you come back.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We need to have lunch. The young lady insisted on it.”

  He looked up at the upper-class girl on the wall and grumbled.

  “All the same, sir, it’ll be dark and it’s not good to be out there in the dark.”

  “Maybe, but there we are. I can pay a little extra.”

  But Davuth was thinking fast.

  “We might even stay out there tonight. In which case, it doesn’t matter. You can come back at once.”

  This sweetened the deal.

  “All right, at three,” he cried.

  He shook a few hands and it was a deal.

  He went off to the wall and told Robert and Sophal that under no circumstances would the stubborn vermin agree to leave before three o’clock. There was nothing he could so. He threw up his hands and laughed.

  “I suggest we go and have lunch near the market. We can pass three hours easily enough.”

  “But it’ll be dark when we come back,” Sophal said at once.

  “He said it wasn’t a problem. We also get to see the sunset. There’s nothing better than the sunset from Phnom Da. In fact, it’s the whole point of going to Phnom Da in the first place.”

  “Then I suppose we could,” Robert sighed.

  “Or we could leave tomorrow.”

  Sophal’s voice was hopeful, but Davuth waved the suggestion down.

  “No, that would be a waste of time. What is there to do in Takeo? Nothing! There isn’t even a single decent three-star hotel here. Not even a two-star.”

  They looked around for a moment and concluded that this was likely the case.

  “Then let’s get lunch,” Robert said brightly.

  They left the car there and walked in toward the market. They soon found a run-down place to eat some soup and satay and as they did so they looked up at the clock on the café wall and internally counted down the minutes. It seemed interminable, this unnecessary wait. But for Davuth it served a purpose. He needed to collect his wits and think a little more. He let them buy him lunch and during it he said very little, chewing his food methodically and listening to the radio behind the woks. It would be an hour to cross the water and maybe more, maybe two hours. The return would indeed be tricky, and in darkness. But it could be done.

  The boy’s eyes had flared up a beautiful dark blue. Did he really like this little Khmer girl? It was hard to say. Davuth bantered with them.

  “So you like our country and want to stay?”

  “I like it,” Robert said.

  The Vikings—they had eyes like that.

  When they had finished their Vietnamese coffees they walked back down to the quay in the sticky afternoon heat. As they approached the water’s shimmer, clouds gathered far off over its horizon. Davuth went down and got hold of the boat and paid the man up front for a one-way trip. “What about the return?” the pilot asked hopefully. Davuth shook his head impatiently and said, “We’ll talk about it later.” They went down into the longtail one by one and Davuth sat next to the pilot and the other two seated themselves behind the prow. It had not been that difficult to arrange, Davuth reflected as they set off across the harbor filled with water plants and oil, and headed out into the floodplain with the sun on their right.

  —

  Halfway across they lost sight of land altogether. Here the trees sticking out of the surface were white as bone and draped with creepers. Driftwood floated idly past them, a few household items, broken birds’ nests and strands of dark yellow flowers like garlands tossed from an abandoned wedding feast. The pilot asked no questions above the roar of his engine. Shaded by his jungle hat, Davuth watched everything pass by: the dead fish lying on their sides in the sun, the crowns of interlaced branches. As they approached Angkor Borei he saw the red roofs of distant houses on dry land and now they seemed improbable and exotic. The land there was under shadow. The rains were coming back, but they were doing so incrementally. They swept into a wide, obviously ancient canal that curved around. On the banks lay upturned little boats, knee-high shrines and men fishing with poles at the edge of pale and impenetrable mangroves.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Angkor Borei was little more than a municipal museum with stone replicas of Vishnu statues standing in a shabby garden. While Davuth remained with the pilot at the jetty, Sophal and Robert walked around it wondering why they had been taken there. From the back wall they looked down, however, at an idyllic river scene which might not have changed much in centuries. Children swimming naked in the shallows, boats tethered within the reeds; the sun blazing on the water. They went into the dark and stuffy museum and peered at a few exhibits of prehistoric artifacts. There were aerial photographs made in the 1930s by a French archaeologist named Pierre Paris showing the canals of the ancient city which had been called Vidhapurya. A guide appeared out of nowhere and began to beguile them. He told them about the mysteries of the lost kingdom of Funan, whose capital they were now standing in. “One dollar,” he asked politely in the middle of this discourse, holding out an even politer hand. Robert paid him and the young man shadowed them as they wen
t from case to case. He seemed to understand that they didn’t really want to be there.

  There were exhibits of piled human bones from funerary sites, beautiful pottery and stone friezes depicting Vishnu.

  “I feel a little claustrophobic,” Sophal said at last, and Robert thanked the guide to dismiss him and took her back outside. The sun had ripened and the skies were half clouded. Next to the museum stood a decomposing French colonial mansion of moss-thickened vaults and balconies, not dissimilar to an antebellum plantation house of the American South. They walked around it and mosquitoes came and nipped their necks and they found themselves wanting to go back to Takeo.

  “But the temple will be special,” Robert said at last. “Let’s just go there now.”

  “Let’s. I’m being bitten alive.”

  The mosquitoes, in fact, launched a major assault as they clambered back into the longtail and the pilot uttered a ritual cure aimed at these well-known belligerents.

  “The mosquitoes of Angkor Borei—they are the worst!”

  They crossed the floodplain in about half an hour.

  Before they arrived at Phnom Da, however, the conical hill appeared with the dark ruined prasat at its summit. At the bottom was a dark mud beach with a few shacks scattered in the jungle behind it. There was a small bridge over an estuary, a few fires in the clearings, woodcutters or fishermen squatting under thatch. It looked like a dozen people and no more. The pilot left them there and Davuth made an abrupt sign for him to leave, but the man simply hung back near the bridge and waited. Davuth knew he would not depart without a return fare. He turned back to his charges and cheerfully pointed to the path that led up from the beach through the woods toward the stone steps of the temple. He said it would be a long, sweaty hike up to the top, and it looked likely that it would be. They saw that the hill was now an island entirely surrounded by water. The dry-season roads that connected it to land had disappeared and there was just the little bridge.

  It was Sophal who led the way. By the time they were at the foot of the steps the forest had closed in all around them and the heat, though now decreasing, made the prospective climb forbidding. Bringing up the rear, Davuth encouraged them. It was not, he said, as bad as it looked. They climbed for half an hour and then rested.

  Davuth told them a few stories he had cribbed from a guidebook and they listened as if he knew what he was talking about. He sat with his hands hanging between his knees. Already the hamlet by the water seemed a long way off. The sun began to dip toward the horizon as they soldiered on toward the summit. When they got there it was shining almost horizontally through the jungle into the prasat and its tumbledown shrine.

  Two human figures were there. A young cowherd stood in the long grass at the edge of the clearing with four or five animals grazing. At the door to the temple an old man with disfigured ears sat begging in a monk’s robe. They walked around the prasat. Its bricks were as dark as brewed tea. The interior shrine was made of concentric rectangles of cracked stone rising to an open skylight. Wildflowers washed against the outer walls, dark gold and blue.

  They sat on pieces of stone and waited for the dusk to come down. But the sea could only be seen through gaps in the dense jungle. Soon, the old man and the cowherd moved off, as lethargic as the longhorn cows. They could hear the bells of the latter tinkling as they receded down the hill. When they were alone, Davuth offered them a sip from his whisky flask and they watched the sun decline into a rising bank of rain cloud. Farther down the hill, Davuth said, stood a small seventh-century temple known as Ashram Maha Rosei, or the “sanctuary of the great ascetic.” Built of laterite, it was considered architecturally unique in Cambodia because of its remarkable Javan and Indian style—it was thought that parts of the Mekong were once ruled by Java. He seemed to know all about it. And indeed, Davuth had spent half the night reading up on the matter.

  “Let’s go and see it,” he said, standing and brushing off the dust from his seat. “Then we’ll go down and find the boat.”

  Robert, however, was feeling tired of the place already and refused to move.

  “It’s all right,” he said. “Sophal, you go and look.”

  Reluctantly, she agreed. “I’ll just be ten minutes. I’ll take some photos for you.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll be back in a minute.”

  She felt awkward leaving him, and she didn’t want to be alone with Davuth, but it was only a few hundred yards down the hill and there was no one else there.

  Davuth led the way and he plucked out a switch from the undergrowth and playfully flicked it left and right as they made their way down a forest path. “Over there,” he said vaguely, pointing toward the east, “is Vietnam.” She wondered why guides always felt the need to point out the most mundanely obvious things, as if they were in danger of being left out of consciousness. When the path dipped more steeply on its way to the forgotten temple she looked up through the gaps in the trees and saw a soaring dusk cloud rising into the indigo sky. Its edges were brilliantly lit as if electrified from within, its apex snow-white and supremely elegant as it evolved ever upward. How far did such formidable clouds reach in their ceaseless straining for height and power? They seemed to be driven by awareness and desire for dominance. At its core, the cloud was almost black and one could taste the imminent rain on the lips. Davuth, too, stopped for a moment and looked up at it and his eyes went pale and empty and languid. For him, everything in the sky was an omen. Signs became material in the heavens and they were fashioned by multitudes of gods.

  —

  Robert also watched it, lying on his back on a carved plinth that must have been well over a thousand years old. He shaded his eye to look at it directly. One last slowed-down flash of light before dusk. A flicker of lightning from somewhere else. The forest quivered. He was glad to be alone for a while, to be cut off from living things. From a fair distance he could still hear the tinkle of the cowbells, the animals lumbering downward.

  The recent days had been the loveliest so far and now he could see a little more clearly the uphill and pleasant path that might lie before him. His prospects, it was true, had no solid footing, but did they need to have one in this place? He could stay here until the ground solidified under his feet a bit. Sooner or later other doors would open to a charming and undesperate young man. The doctor was right: it was a country fast becoming rich and corrupt in novel ways. There would be unexpected openings in the years to come and those who stuck around and were patient would be able to profit from them almost unnoticed.

  Gradually, he had lost his bearings in the face of these temptations. He had come to appreciate the power of secrecies and dissimulations practiced on a daily basis. Below him, vast as a labyrinth in a nightmarish myth, an ancient and subtle culture that the whites had settled on like flies on the surface of oily water, trembling and nervous and falsely righteous. The con men and the opportunists were little different from the pasty evangelicals and NGOs and savers of souls who you saw next to them huddled around tables in expensive restaurants every night. Indistinguishable to the Khmers. He was one of them and he no longer minded; con man or Baptist hustler saving children, it was not a chasm separating the two. The motives behind the two were not as dissimilar as either assumed. They both wanted a better life in a country where they could do what they wanted, where they remained unexamined. They were both frauds in their way, interlopers exploiting their whiteness. It was disgusting and comic, but in the end no one was going to punish either of these eternal types. The Samaritan and the criminal.

  He himself could spend a lifetime here living off other people’s money. It could be done. He could be Simon for the rest of his life, living off that man’s unstable identity, and eventually he would actually become Simon. Unless, one fine day, Simon actually showed up. But he had an intuition about that. He sensed that it would never happen. Once a man cons you, he avoids you.

  Then what if he was safe from no
w on?

  When the first stars appeared he shook himself out of his reverie and sat up and saw behind him the moon which had risen over the Mekong. Shadowy longtails skimmed silently across the waters. He had forgotten the time a little and he realized now that almost an hour had passed. So they had not returned from Ashram Maha Rosei.

  —

  He went to the edge of the clearing and called out. Then he thought about the boat waiting for them on the mud beach far below. Would the man really wait for them so long and in the dark? He noticed how quickly the light was draining out of things and he wondered to himself if a certain urgency might be called for. Nevertheless, he ventured onto the path with an annoyed reluctance, not wanting to climb down merely to have to climb back up. And the mosquitoes were now out in force. He clucked and called out again and then cursed quietly and resolved to go find them. He swept down the overgrown path occasionally calling her name and feeling an increasing surprise that nothing came back at him. They must be inside the shrine, then, buried in masonry and out of earshot.

  At the temple there was no one. He peered inside the unlit core and caught a whiff of stale incense and ash. He quickly looked around. It was a nuisance that they had gone off without telling him, leaving him alone in the jungle. But perhaps the best thing was to wait there.

  He sat on the threshold of the shrine and soon he heard a clicking sound from a little farther down the hill. He got up and went back to the path and looked down into the gloom. Almost at once he saw a flicker of light, like a lighter being flicked on, and when it repeated he called out. It was now too dark to see anything but the vague shimmer of the Mekong below and the spark of light going on and off. A wave of fear came over him and he plunged down toward it with a hoarse yell, which to his surprise was simply her name. He came down into the thick undergrowth and when he was close enough to see that it was indeed a lighter he saw that they were sitting together under a tree, and that Sophal had her back to him and that she was sobbing.