Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

He didn’t want to waste any money now so he made his way back to the Paris — he was wet anyway and the humidity would never let him dry out — and on the way a Viet girl followed him slowly on a kind of damaged Vespa and called out “Why not, why not?” until giving up and turning away. On Kampuchea Krom the pavements had emptied, the trees poured with warm water. When he arrived back at the lobby a man asleep at the reception desk raised his head and looked up with an aimless eye at the barang. Two girls ahead of him on the stairs turned and asked him what room he was staying in. They smelled like Ivory soap and turmeric. He said he only spoke Romanian. Then, when he was back on his granite bed, he remembered that he had meant to eat and had forgotten. He lay down and felt slightly feverish and decided to leave the curtains open because the lightning flickering through the window would, against its usual proclivity, help him sleep and forget everything. And so it did.

The following day he got up early and went down to the restaurant on the ground floor of the hotel. Its doors were opened to the street and the sticky tables attracted flies. He ate some dried sand gobi in soya bean sauce and some kai lan in oyster sauce and after them some weak tea. The day had risen in a new spirit, with a low, aggressive sun and a dry, acid dust that came onto the tongue and the eyelashes. It was strange how at this time of year the city did not remain either wet or dry for long. The men there ate while silently reading newspapers with tin pots of Vietnamese coffee, the glasses beneath the metal filters lightened with condensed milk, and when he had tired of the tea he got the same coffee for himself and counted everything out carefully dollar-wise. He would have to survive on very little until he got a pupil or two. He sugar-loaded the coffee, which had a nutty, almost chocolate taste, and drank it down as slowly as he could. Soon the discomfort of the night and the bad sleep were dispelled and he came back to life and set to work calling the numbers which he had culled from the Language Tuition section.

None of them answered. Perhaps it was too early in the morning. He paid and strode out into the sunshine and walked slowly down Monivong until he reached the Victory Monument. The sky had lost all its monsoon darkness and he looked forward to a dry and bright spell. It seemed like a city of twenty-year-olds in which only the old possessed the shabbiness he had expected, as if they had emerged suddenly from a distant age of terror. He went ambling down Neak Banh Teuk Park toward the Samdech Chuon Nath statue, an old man with large ears seated cross-legged surrounded by nagas and lions. Robert paid it no attention. He pressed on along Hun Sen Park and past the massive Nagaworld casino and a fairground on the left called Dream Land, the Ferris wheel temporarily stilled, waiting for night, but the street vendors already there with their barrows of tiny steamed snails topped with artful crests of red chilies. He went inside Nagaworld for a few minutes to cool off and sat inside a kind of Chinese pavilion with plastic willows and painted blue-sky ceiling and stone waterfalls. He came out dried of sweat and circled around past the Landmark Hotel until he came alongside the Himawara Hotel, where the gold leaf of the palace was suddenly visible and the saline river could be felt in the nose.

There was a restaurant next to it, with tables set out above the river, empty at that hour. He sat there and ordered an omelette with cucumbers and pork and a fermented fish called tray prama . He made his calls again as he was drinking the next round of Chinese tea and this time a woman picked up. She was Khmer and spoke little English.

She said, “Dr. Sar coming back at eleven.”

He said it was for the English lessons.

“He will call you back, Mr….”

A name, he didn’t have a name yet. He had not even been asked to give one at the hotel, or maybe he had signed his usual signature, he couldn’t remember.

“Mr. Beauchamp,” he said quickly.

He pronounced the p.

She repeated it and he said “Yes.”

“Mr. Beauchamp, Dr. Sar will call you before lunch.”

So he was a doctor.

“All right, I’ll wait for his call.”

“Aw khun!”

He thought of continuing with the calls but his superstitious side was strong and he thought he might jinx this one and he didn’t want to jinx a doctor. A doctor might pay well enough, and he loathed the thought that he might have to break silence and call his parents for money. That was unthinkable. He went back out into the street and walked down alongside the river until he was by the Cambodiana Hotel and then the wide, milky water itself with the construction cranes shining on the far side as if sprinkled with silver dust.

Although the day was typical of those that follow a night of rain — the earth patted down and compact, the insects somehow uninterested in humans — the sky showed the first anxieties of the struggles that would return by nightfall. In the center of the blue void a great atomic cloud had formed, blindingly bright at the edges, and as it evolved upward it grew darker and yet more brilliant at the edges.

The tension in the air did not at first seem related to it, but soon one began to know better. In the street the long puddles brightened for a moment then grew dim, and the electricity which rippled through the air drew the eye upward to the slow-motion mushroom cloud and its impending crisis, which would not arrive for hours, maybe not even till the next day. Along the Tongle Sap the frangipanis and star trees were held in a total stillness, like things carved out of wax, and under them old ladies performed their t’ai chi to music boxes. The beauty of automata, the beauty of wax and stillness and sky-tensions. For the first time in twelve hours his clothes began to dry and become crisp again and the sun burned into his shoulder blades. He crossed the road and went into one of the spread-out café terraces with cane chairs that line the tourist stretch of Sisowath Quay. It was La Croisette. As he settled into one of the cane chairs the phone rang and a male voice said his new name with a gravelly amusement, as if he had heard it before but as if it didn’t matter. The doctor introduced himself in a slightly struggling but distinctly American-inflected English.

—

“I was glad to get your call, Mr. Beauchamp,” the doctor said. “My wife and I have been looking for an English tutor. Could we maybe meet up for lunch in an hour? Where are you?”

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.