Lawrence Osborne: Hunters in the Dark

—

The first things he saw in Battambang were faded billboards looming over the river advertising ABC beer. That river was green and still, men asleep on the grass slopes on either side. Under that vast sky now puffed with plume-white rococo clouds they seemed becalmed. Deth stopped and they got out and stretched for a bit. They were on a boulevard laid out alongside the river, with new cement benches inscribed with the words Diamond Cement . There were cream-cake French facades on the far side of the road, old shophouses. There was a generator chugging on the riverbank, and a series of nets lying idle. A bridge baked in the sun and along the embankment lay a sprinkling of trash and glass sparkling amid the high grasses. The traffic circles with their whitewashed curbs buzzed with a soft rotary motion of bikes, and the air was light and dry and saline with the near-invisible dust. He liked it at once. There was a dried-out fountain with sculptured nagas and a mosque singing somewhere up the river. He couldn’t imagine leaving in a hurry, any more than he could imagine arriving in one.

—

At the Alpha Hotel, Robert went up to his cell-like room and had a cold shower. He had paid off Deth and they had parted amicably, though the Khmer was a little clingy as they did so. Did Monsieur want a driver for the following day? He had declined, but now he wondered if he had done the right thing. He heard arrogant French voices wafting up from the lobby. Arrogant merely because they assumed they were understood when they were not. He lay on the bed and smoked: the Delons, he decided after all, were raw and bad. There was a sign on the door which said, Do not to bring the explodes or the cars into the room. After a short rest he went down to the bar, which was entered through a lobby filled with marble Buddhas and disturbingly exuberant fish tanks. Little red lanterns swung in the wind from the open doors, as they had at the Hang Meas, and above there was a polished wood ceiling with Chinese paintings of birds. The place, he could sense, was about to be remodeled into something more modern. A year from now it would look completely different. He got a shot of Royal Stag and watched the French group of middle-aged women trying to order from a garbled menu.

“ C’est quoi, dove on fire?” one of them asked the waitress.

“Chicken fire,” the girl said slowly.

“ Et Salad bin Laden?”

—

When the day had cooled he walked down to the river along a straight road by a temple complex. Where it greeted the water there was a sign for Electricité de Battambang and a row of rather grand French government buildings, each dedicated to different indispensable functions. “Battambang Water Supply” announced by a grandiose sign of gold decoration, with the water tanks rising behind it, the Provincial Hall like a viceroy’s villa. Mansions with guardian lions and cannons at the gates, but with a slight suffocation, a feeling of termination and decay. A faded park with a statue of an ape rising from the long grass and a tricerotops dinosaur. A legless beggar on a skateboard followed him for a while on this road, saying nothing, just paddling indefatigably with his arms as they went under the tall trees that almost met in the middle and formed a very French vault.

There was a shimmering in the air: the eternal frangipanis. He walked for a few hundred yards until the skateboarder gave up, his arms exhausted, and the Englishman sat down on the bank among white flowers and tall lush grass blades and caught a little repose. The place was so quiet that he could lie there until the sky began to darken and the sound of the cicadas rose in the high grass as dusk approached.

Looking down the river it seemed almost rural, with only a girdered railway bridge in the distance. People had begun to walk under the trees at the top of the bank as if in a passeggiata and a longtail came puttering down the river. The Sangker was unusually high because of a downpour earlier in the week. He got up and walked as far as a long cable slung across the river, though submerged deep in the middle, and on the other side he saw huts on stilts and little boys throwing themselves nonchalantly into the water with fishing lines wrapped around their wrists. Stumps of archaic trees separated the drifts of trash. Farther back were new hotels, the Ty King and the Classy. They seemed to have come out of nowhere, crystallizations of alien capital. The lights in front of the French palaces came on but the windows offered nothing but a kind of administrative torpor and as he made his way back to the Electricité de Battambang he wondered about the stern and splendid functionaries who must have once inhabited them.

It made him think of his own shabby clothes, his semi-poverty. He hated being poor as much as he hated how predictable he was. His blond hair always cut in the same way, thrown casually to the right of a parting all his life. The clothes that never varied because he hated thinking about them. His life never seemed to go into surplus, into wonderful excess. He never had a surplus, never had a truly fine pair of shoes or a shirt that wasn’t strictly necessary. His girlfriends came and went too easily; acquired in fits of absentmindedness and lost in the same way. It baffled him. But when he was lucid he realized that he was waiting for something different. Beyond his own life there was, without question, a parallel one that he might one day acquire. It was a fantasy that could not be defended.

Like his father, he had a fear of being in deficit and in need. It was a fear that came from nowhere, it had no real source. “It’s just my character,” he used to think. He never bought himself anything extraneous or luxurious. Just those cut-price tickets to Reykjavik and Athens. Yet he was never broke, never in trouble. He always looked ahead and made sure that he had those extra pounds under the bed just in case. He never jumped off cliffs with empty pockets.

But here such calculations didn’t matter so much, and maybe that was why he had warmed to the country. Almost everybody was poorer than himself. He had arrived in Bangkok a month earlier not even knowing where he was going to stay and he had been able to live in that tangled city quite well for almost nothing: a flophouse in Ekkamai and salted fish grilled on the street with kanom jeen noodles and lettuce for ninety baht every night and nothing to do but walk around by himself and meet the occasional hippie girl at pavement eateries. He was sure, however, that it had been the happiest month of his life thus far. The happiest and also the vaguest: the two were connected.

—

After two weeks in Bangkok he moved down to an even seedier place, the Rex, on Sukhumvit near Soi 38. His money began to run down. He had come there without any plan or vision, and a two-month summer holiday was always hard to fill satisfactorily. He called his parents and they sent him a little more money. “What are you doing there?” his mother asked, sounding as if she were on another planet. “It doesn’t sound like a holiday to us, Bobby.” What did it sound like to them?

He was beginning to like the heat and the pace, the day-by-day gentle sinking into his own laziness. The other backpackers whom he met at the outside café in the passageway in Soi 39/1—a place he went every day for lunch — told him about Laos and Cambodia. They portrayed Cambodia as a tough paradise where you could live even cheaper than you could in Bangkok. He learned all about the gambling buses that went to the border from Lumpini Park every morning at 5 a.m. and the $3 flophouses in Battambang where you could live “like a fish.”

Some nights he went down to the dingy eatery on the ground floor of the Rex and sat among the lonely old white men and their solemn girls eating spring rolls and drinking Coke. Even this place was better than being at a loose end at the pub in Elmer, the Jack and the Beanstalk. Even the girls here were more beautiful than the ones in the Jack and the Beanstalk. He read novels that he bought in the secondhand shops and later at night, with a few baht, he went down to Nadimos, a Lebanese restaurant on Soi 24, and sat outside next to a fake temple wall and smoked a shisha pipe with a Lebanese coffee in a copper pot and daydreamed. The towers all around shining with lofts and gardens, the ridiculous lions of the Davis Hotel across the street and the fat Arabs with their enviable molls lounging with their shisha and looking remarkably well maintained. There was a life here that he had never imagined. Even Bangkok was not at all what he had expected. It was not the city of Hangover II or The Beach. It purred with affluent leisure and women dressed to slay. It was a shop window with no glass. One could feel the sucking tide of Asian money flowing through it.