Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

It was probably true. He was disaster incarnate, lumbering through the world without a clue and destroying everything around him without knowing it. But the idea that this quality projected an aura — it might have been true.

“But then,” she went on, “there are disasters and disasters. What kind of disasters do you bring on?”

“None that I am aware of.”

She pouted. “I don’t believe it. You’re a disaster on two legs.”

“On four legs,” he said.

—

They ate clafoutis for dessert. His body broke into an uncontrollable sweat. It ran between his eyes and he looked up at the clouds and caught the far-off lightning. He felt a hundred years old and he drank most of the bottle without remembering his manners. All his life he had drunk when he felt nervous and now he felt nervous again with her. Any minute, he had decided, she was going to unmask him and then there would be a miserable and wretched scene. He had decided he wasn’t going to grovel and apologize. He was going to laugh it off and be a boor and tell her a tall story and that would be that, they would part and it wouldn’t matter.

“I think I said before,” she was saying, “that you don’t seem like a teacher. I never asked you what you teach — it’s rude of me.”

“It’s all right. English literature.”

He didn’t say it with much enthusiasm.

“Is that a hard one to teach?”

“I have the feeling it’s a dinosaur subject. The children aren’t interested in it anymore. I feel like I’m just talking to a wall most of the time.”

“They’re more interested in the Internet?”

“I don’t know what they’re interested in. It’s not like I’m so much older than them — but it feels like two or three generations. They’re on a different planet.”

“Then you should change jobs.”

“There’s something sad about it,” he admitted. “Do you know who John Donne is?”

Slowly, she shook her head.

“You think all the time that these famous writers are universal and then you realize that no one outside of a very small culture has ever heard of them, not even in your own country. If Khmers read John Donne I’d be delighted and amazed. But when fifteen-year-old English boys don’t even know the name…”

“Is it surprising?” she asked.

“That they’re forgotten? Maybe. Then what am I doing with my life? Teaching forgotten things to those who won’t remember.”

She shook her head. “No, you’re a teacher. That’s your mission.”

“Not now anyway. Let someone else do it. I’ve decided to be in the present and nowhere else. Like everyone else.”

“Maybe you could teach John Donne in Cambodia — be the first one.”

“A brilliant idea which no one will go for.”

But long ago the French had probably taught Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo to little Khmer children in stuffy schoolhouses. It could be done for a while, futilely and nobly. He thought of the room where he taught in Elmer, with its walls covered with pop posters of Great Writers intended to make them more appealing to teenagers who would never, in fact, find them appealing. Shakespeare in a hip beard, Wordsworth in psychedelic colors. The hint that they took drugs and had orgies. The hard, yet wandering look in those teenagers’ eyes as he walked back and forth with an open book, reading paragraphs of George Eliot. It was comical, but there was no other way. His rage built up over a long time but it was a rage against the years he himself had spent mastering this material. He had to justify it somehow. He could not just admit that it had been a waste of life and time.

—

They went for a walk in the rain by the river and it seemed like the first night they had been together, only the city seemed larger and brighter and fuller. They planned out their picnic to Phnom Chisor as they sat on the promenade wall and looked up at the white kids eating pizza at the FCC.

“Are you really going to find a job here?” he asked. “I got the feeling you missed Paris.”

“I went for an interview at a hospital today. It went well. I can find a job — they need doctors here — but that’s not the problem.”

“What’s the problem then?”

“I don’t know. I’m never happy in any one place. Perhaps the world got too small.”

“That’s exactly the problem.”

They walked down to 130 and got ice creams on the street. The quay was lazily alive with drifters and amorous strollers dragging their feet under the frangipanis; they walked over to a man selling toy birds on the curb, transparent birds filled with throbbing colored lights which gave off a manic chatter like an aviary of living animals. It was astonishingly realistic and yet the birds glowed red and blue and violet. It was there that they ran into one of her friends, a Dutch artist who was walking home with two models for a night of painting. His name was Horst and it was not his name. They tagged along and soon they were climbing up a dark stairway to a terraced studio with paintings all over the floors and jam jars filled with fresh joints. They sat on the floor of the terrace with the glow of nearby neon flashing on and off and the sound of real caged birds in the unit above and the Khmer girls took off their clothes and posed and they drank a lot of vodka together. Horst was a small man filled with electric energy. He had been married four times to courtesans, three of them in Africa, and had washed up on the shores of the Tongle Sap in search of further illuminations. He paid his girlfriend, who was not there, two thousand dollars a month to share his bed and his canvases, though the canvases were more important to him than the bed. His career was successful and he made a small fortune selling his work in upscale galleries in Amsterdam. At night he trawled the bars and clubs looking for faces who could fill his nightmare paintings and by and large he found them. Now he sent one of the girls down to get them oysters and she returned with a vast plate of crustaceans wrapped in cellophane and bedded on crushed ice. They ate them on the floor with lemons and iced beers and hot green dipping sauce. Horst took off his clothes as well and soon they were all naked and smoking the joints while Horst painted the two girls. It was three in the morning when they came down. They went home separately and agreed to meet early the next morning at Colonial Mansions.

—

She was there with her family driver at seven. They had a coffee by the pool amid chattering pintails.

“I didn’t sleep,” she said cheerfully. “And yet I don’t feel tired at all.”

“It’s far too early — but I don’t feel tired either.”

She had brought her swimsuit and they went into the pool for a while and sipped their coffee at the edge with their bodies submerged. Then, at about eight, they headed out of the city in a clear blue morning tinged with yellow dust and found the long, straight road that swept past the darkened temples of Ta Phrom toward Chisor.

At Ta Phrom they stopped and walked away from the dusty car park into the piles of stones and soon they had come to the great back wall which seemed to be shored up with wildflowers. A group of children had followed them with expertly desperate eyes and they murmured continuously to Sophal in Khmer as they wandered across to a new temple in the short shadows of morning. It was the hour when the grass is alive and butterflies swirled around them. She took his hand as they circled back to the ruins and picked their way into a sanctuary lit by a high skylight and then back to the car park where the driver waited. Between the pale yellow straps of her dress her shoulder blades had become lustrous with moisture and the silver watch on her wrist sparkled against a skin that now looked as dark as cinnamon bark. At Chisor, the vendors were not yet there and the vast steps leading to the top of the little mountain were empty. They began to climb and when they had cleared the treeline they stopped and sat on the steps next to a homemade shrine and felt their heartbeats. The horizon was flat and green, slightly hazed, and at its farthest limit the mauve clouds gathered in a line of tension.