Lawrence Osborne: Hunters in the Dark

Across the fields of grass came the winds that had no obstacle, the summer breezes that still tasted of the Downs and distant fuel. The heads of the tall grasses rippled and they made a green horizon that moved with this spirit, and he ran through the stalks on his bloodied feet until the wind forgot him and he was alone on the rise that culminated in the Stensons’ barns. He woke just as he saw them. The room in which he found himself was bathed in early sun, the curtains flapping because he had left the windows open. The heat came upon him as if suddenly. He found his skin already drenched and acclimatized and the cocks crowed in the Khmer gardens across the road where sugarcane grew along the verge.

He got up and showered and dressed, his fingers shaking because he was not yet sure how real or unreal it was. The plants coated with dust and the skies already beginning to darken at the silver edges. Packing neatly he went down fully ready to move and asked the sleepy boys if they could find a car to take him on to Battambang.

“No can,” they said, sadly shaking their heads.

“Of course you can.”

“No can. It no can.”

“Just call a car — I’ll pay one dollar.”

“No dollar, no car.”

It went on for some time.

It took fifteen minutes to organize the car and he went into the restaurant and ordered Nescafé and pho and another pack of Alain Delons with a glass of watermelon juice. He sat there by the window looking out at flame vines hanging above a pool of shade. The hotel now seemed to be ruinously empty but for cleaning staff and hordes of boys in pressed white shirts, and from afar came the vibrancy of the mountains that were nevertheless burned half black and the white glare of frangipani.

At this hour the stillness and the quiet vitality of things had returned. You thought of home, but with a distant sadness. He wondered where he would go. Battambang was just the next city along. He knew nothing about it, it was just a place to go. Drifting, and drifting consciously. One could drift for a long time and not mind and where life was cheap and unhurried it rarely mattered. He decided then to go and walk around Pailin since the car was not going to arrive for some time. He told this to the girls. They smiled and said nothing and he went out into the heat with a curious determination.

—

He walked up the main road, up and up until he was at a Victory Monument exactly like the one in Phnom Penh. From here a road led up to a temple on a small hill called Phnom Yat. It was announced by a gigantic Buddha statue which looked down on the town. A giant in a gold tunic, a clean pink skin, the immense hand raised in the mudra of ayodha . He climbed up the steep shaded path to the temple steps, with a line of blue demons pulling the naga serpent like a tug of war. And so into the walled plateau filled with life-size figures brilliantly painted. Trees hung low among the pavilions and the broken green glass floors, and they tossed and hissed in a burning high wind. He passed a basin of black water with three stone human heads half buried in it. Next to it was a depiction of Buddhist Hell: white figures in black loincloths being tortured. A man having his tongue pulled out with a pair of pincers. The local Khmer Rouges must have known it well. Higher up, bodhisattvas, princesses playing long lutes (he didn’t know, he had to guess). A figure of a corpse lying on the earth while vultures tore out his intestines. At the top he came into a little court with three-headed elephants and tall gold flag posts and here the tree-dotted plain appeared with the mountains around it. A polished gold-plated tapered pagoda with tinkling coinlike chimes around the top mast, a reminder that the temple had been built by Shan Burmese immigrants.

He sat on the wall and watched the shades of quick clouds speeding across the plain. There was no sound but the wind-tormented trees and the chimes of the pagoda. Why not here, then, he wondered — a place to linger? It was a place with its own solitude and austerity and he liked it. It seemed to have an idea about death and about suffering. He could feel it very clearly. He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t need to know. The monks half asleep in the shade, the shrill chimes and the scenes of Hell just below the mirror-bright gold spire. There was something that beckoned him deeper in.

He walked slowly back down the hill and went to the market, alongside which the notorious brothels were supposed to lie. There was nothing there, and it was clear there would be nothing there later either. The former life of the town had moved on, it was taking a different shape. He returned to the hotel and asked the girls if his car was there yet. It was on its way. He sat in the lobby and drank a Sprite.

—

When the car finally rolled into the Hang Meas courtyard with its monumental gold cockerel he saw that it was the same man who had driven him from the border the day before. So it seemed that everyone knew everyone in this incestuous land. The Toyota was caked in dust the dark red of ground chili powder.

It was now ten. Robert went out into the hot sun and they shook hands and he said “Battambang” and they haggled and settled on a price.

“Where you hotel in Battambang?”

Robert shrugged because he had no idea. That too was settled. The driver knew the best place for seven dollars, and there was no luxury option in Battambang. The dollars were handed over and they had a coffee together outside. As they sat on plastic chairs without shade the sun made him dry and still and happy and the driver looked him over with a cool shrewdness. It was certain enough that wanderers like himself had passed this way before. They represented a living to some, to the drivers and guides especially. The driver asked Robert now if he needed a guide. Didn’t everyone need a guide in Battambang? But the other shook his head and said that he was just passing through and had no thoughts of visiting things. He didn’t even know there were things to visit. Oh yes, sir, there were things to visit. The temple of Wat Ek Phnom and the temple of Sampeau and others. There was an all-inclusive price and Mr. Deth knew all the history.

“Your name is Deth?”

But the driver saw no joke in it, not at all.

“My name Deth. I know all facts and the temple.”

“So I’m going to Ek with Deth?”

“I very safe driver man. All hotel recommend Mr. Deth.”

—

On the road with Mr. Deth. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the deer on the roof of the Hang Meas. One couldn’t say what they were for or what they meant. The deer of Buddha’s park twenty-five centuries ago. Deth played Thai music on his radio and the windows were rolled down because it was not yet high heat and the fields offered a cooler wind.

They went through wide meadows filled with bales. The hay was already roasted dry and dark. By the road great acacias and cherry trees shadowed the pitted surface, robusta coffee bushes with umbrella forms. The sky was untouched by clouds. Kapoks with pagoda-shaped tops cooled the walls of polychrome temples. The land near Battambang was charred black. The fields smoldering as far as the eye could see, since the farmers had burned the topsoil, leaving ghostly papaya trees standing in the smoke. They churned the iron-red dust and children in the yards of stilted houses watched them go by and the strange demonic charred darkness of the hills began to disquiet him. Yet the dry season was ending. The trees on the plain were entirely solitary, gaunt in their apartness and they threw no shadow onto the chocolate earth. Through this paradoxical dark brightness the people moved with a vivid lethargy and calm. Bicycles floating, the women with poles slung across their shoulders and masked by their krama, glancing up without animus. It was a day of dust, and yet the rain would come later.