Wild, and on the spur of the moment! But the man who came down the street to reclaim the car was not Davuth.
Ouksa dropped the ice cream at his feet and rushed down to greet Robert and a nice-looking girl he had with him. They met right at the car itself, in a whirl of teenage boys in party hats.
“You!” Ouksa shouted, and his mood had to change into a different gear. Robert, stunned, simply shook his head.
“It’s Ouksa,” he said to the girl. “My driver from the first day.”
They shook hands and the driver began to think as fast as he could. In the first place, he said nothing about recognizing the car.
“I was just walking down the street,” he said, smiling his smile.
“My friend and I are just leaving.”
“Leaving? Leaving where?”
“Back to the border.”
“In that Khmer car?”
“It’s what we have.”
“But why didn’t you call me? I could have driven you!”
“I didn’t have a number.”
Ouksa felt a keen anxiety now.
“Shall we have a drink?”
Robert tried to remember the hour.
“We haven’t got time. The border closes in two hours.”
“You’ll never make it.”
“Of course we’ll make it. It’s not that far.”
“A quick drink—”
“Sorry, it’s impossible.” Robert turned to Sophal. “Isn’t it?”
“Totally,” she said.
“No, no, you can’t leave like this. Not after such a coincidence!”
Robert opened the car and the driver became a little frantic.
“Just one drink—”
“I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you drive us to the border then? We don’t need the car anyway. You can keep it.”
“What?”
“You can keep the car.”
“Keep the car?”
“Yeah, you can keep it. I want you to keep it.”
It was a huge windfall and Ouksa blinked and picked at his mouth.
“Then I’ll drive you!” he cried.
They all laughed and Sophal got into the backseat.
“I can’t believe I ran into you,” Ouksa rambled on in Khmer. “It’s because I prayed to Buddha last night. I was in the hospital and I prayed. Buddha listened this time. He didn’t ignore me.”
He took the driver’s seat and Robert sat next to him. As he turned to speak to Sophal he noticed the bag sitting next to her and he recognized that as well. So it was a bonanza, and the Lord Buddha had laid it at his door. He felt suddenly elated and hopeful about his wife. Such a large bounty and in the space of a few minutes—he was reentering the loop of luck. Soon, moreover, they were out of the town and on the road to Pailin, where the monkeypods were now red from the dried dust again. It was a ninety-minute drive.
It was a road he traveled daily in his taxi searching for fares at the border and he knew every inch of it. He knew all the villages and bars on the way and he knew how long it took to get to the border from any given point. As he drove it now he kept an eye on the position of the sun and he wondered where he could force a stop en route. In fact, he knew just the place. A village to one side of the road where drivers often stopped for a drink. They made such good speed that when they came to it, he told them out of the blue that they could easily stop for fifteen minutes and go to the toilets. The Khmer girl was unwilling but Robert relented. He was sure the Englishman wanted to stop.
They went into a shack bar a few yards from the road and Sophal stayed outside to look at the dusk. Behind the bar was a field, and around it tall sugar palms and ponds. There was no one there and the great music of the dusk-lit fields overwhelmed them. Ouksa offered Robert a cigarette and they stood at the bar for a while smoking and Ouksa thought of a sudden act of violence. Something there and then. The idea for it had come suddenly. He tensed and it was as if he was falling through empty space, his senses scattering and his temples beginning to sweat. Across the fields swallows dipped and whirled and he felt his hands clenching around a long-bladed penknife he always had in his pocket for self-defense. He thought of the sordid injustice he had suffered at the hands of Davuth, the humiliation and the abjection. He had not killed anyone for the pleasure of it, it was fate and nothing but. Not a moment of hatred or spite. A man killed to feed his wife and buy her antibiotics. But now he would do it again just to seize his moment—and why should a man not seize his moment? If he didn’t he was just a dog.
He said, “Shall we walk out a bit into the field? I like this time of day.”
“It’s the best time,” Robert agreed.
They began to walk out along the bank between two paddies.
The buffaloes knee-deep in water looked up and their expression was mild and murderous at the same time, their horns as if pricked like ears.
“I hope you are coming back soon,” Ouksa said when they were halfway to the far side and they were outside the zone of light cast by the café. It was surprising how quickly darkness moved in, snuffing out the usual securities. As it grew darker, Ouksa became mentally bolder. His mind went wild and reckless and he felt invincible.
“I hope so too,” Robert said.
He was enjoying the fresh onset of dusk and the wind coming in from the higher ground nearby. For the first time in weeks he felt that nothing could happen to him now.
“When you do, you call me, OK?”
“Sure, I’ll call you.”
They came to the sugarcane at the far side and from there, surprisingly, the café looked quite tiny and remote. Had they really come that far?
Ouksa gripped the handle of the knife and silently opened the blade inside his front pocket. The café’s jukebox started up and a thin Khmer pop song came floating across the emptiness. They were surrounded by darkly reflective water touched by orange sun. It was the only moment Ouksa would have to recuperate all his losses and make good. He stepped closer to Robert and pretended to gaze back at the café. One movement and it would all change and he would be the victor.
But then, out of the blue, Robert began to talk. Ouksa could not be sure, in fact, that the barang had not been reading his mind all along. Was there not an air of sorcery about these people?
Robert was talking very calmly.
“Ouksa, listen to what I have to say. You remember the money I won at the casino that day? I still have it, it’s in the car. But I’m not going to take it into Thailand. I’m going to leave it here. I want you to have it. All of it. It’s in the bag on the backseat of the car. I’ll leave it there and you can have it. Do you understand what I’m saying? Just take all of it for yourself.”
“Why?”
“Because the girl says it’s haunted.”
“She does?” Ouksa guffawed and rocked back on his heels. “That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard.”
“But you told me about the Ap. You believe in that, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, she doesn’t want it and neither do I. If you believe in the Ap you can believe anything.”
“Why does she say it’s haunted?”
Robert shrugged and turned to him and smiled. He didn’t know himself. But in fact he was now speaking as much for himself as for Sophal. In the dark of his own mind he had come to believe it. Karma swirled around all things, lending them destinies over which mere desire had no control. It made one’s little calculations irrelevant. If they took the money and went to Bangkok something inherent in those soiled notes would follow them there and an unpredictable outcome would play out. He was now so sure of it that he was anxious to get rid of the money.
It’s your country, he wanted to say.
“Then maybe it is haunted,” Ouksa muttered. “Maybe I am entering a magic place.”
He thought it over. Yes, maybe—he would have to spend it as quickly as he could. It was possible that it was evil money. He threw his cigarette far out into th
e ponds and watched it go out with a hiss. All one could do was hunt in the dark, there was no other course of action.
They walked back to the car and the first stars had come out. The girl was sitting on the hood of the car and looking upward at the luminosity. She was thinking, for some reason, of the man who hanged himself in Paris long ago. They drove in silence to Pailin. They passed the Hang Meas with the life-size deer shining on its roof. The red lanterns were still out and the girls in long dresses walked across its car park. Dead leaves swirled through the air, lit rose by the lanterns. At the border the crowds had thinned out and the drivers on the Cambodian side, who waited there all day for fares, were beginning to walk reluctantly back to their idle cars. The lamps that exposed the no-man’s-land between the two sides were still lit, however, and the last departures for Bangkok, in their crocodile shoes and plastic umbrellas, ambled over it with an air of exultant financial defeat. There was a gambling bus waiting for them on the far side and it seemed to Robert and Sophal that they might as well join it if they could. Ouksa parked the car and Robert reached back into the bag on the backseat and took out his British passport, leaving Simon’s behind. He met Ouksa’s cool eye and the two men were curious about each other.
“Whatever happened to Simon?” Robert asked as he got out of the car. “Did you ever see him again?”
“Never. I wondered about him too.”
“What do you think?”
All three walked slowly toward the visa line, where the gamblers were laughing in a vodka-fueled way.
“Can never say with barang like that. They come and go. You know what I mean? They come and go like clouds.”
“Maybe the Ap got him.”
But Ouksa didn’t laugh as Robert had expected.
“Perhaps she did, yes. It’s possible.”
“You think so?”
“Yes, I think.”
“Well, if you see him, please give his passport back to him. I don’t feel any ill will toward him. He was just being who he is.”
“OK, I will do that. If I see him.”
“Do you think you will?”
“It’s possible. But maybe not.”
They shook hands in the half-light and Ouksa remained with the car as they walked over toward the uniformed men with pitted faces who would see them off. He leaned back against the side of the car and wondered how a man could remain so beautifully ignorant and innocent. It defied belief. He thought, too, of the days that would come now. The amazement and gratitude of his wife when he showed her the money, the medical treatments for her that he would now be able to afford. Life would be good again for a few weeks or even a few months. And if one night the ghost of Simon appeared at their door demanding atonement, he would apologize and explain everything to him. And then, most probably, life would return to its normal darkness. The rains and dry seasons, the silent lightning and the clouds which rose every night at certain times of the year—as they were doing now in the night sky above the border—into towering shapes that suggested demons and spirits.
Acknowledgments
A few years ago I spent some evenings in the rooftop studio of the painter Vann Nath, long famous around the world for his eyewitness images of the Tuol Sleng extermination camp, S-21. Although this novel is not about the Khmer Rouge period, the germ of it nevertheless lay in our long conversations in the hammocks of the studio upstairs from his restaurant in Phnom Penh. The space was filled with canvases which perhaps have not yet seen the light of day; images of sadism that didn’t seem to have come from such a gentle and forbearing man. He was one of only seven men who had survived S-21, largely because he displayed an enviable talent for rendering the cherubic face of Pol Pot himself. There was something in his fatalistic sense of humor and unrelenting memory that seemed to open a door into a hidden world—and so, in a far humbler capacity, I dedicate this novel to his memory.
Lawrence Osborne
November 12, 2014
Bangkok
Also by
LAWRENCE OSBORNE
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Hunters in the Dark Page 28