Lawrence Osborne - Hunters in the Dark

“It’s the end of the rains,” she said, holding out her tongue. “I can taste it.”

The slopes were forest, singing with insects. Higher up, the surrounding plain appeared as a partial circumference with no signs of the present century. The sky’s blue flesh became richer and out of it poured a blinding sunlight. The steps ended in a cluster of temple outbuildings and a path that crested and then fell downward toward the ruins. At the highest point they rested again and Robert looked down at the endless flight of steps and he thought he saw a man standing there in the shade of a few trees. The figure was in a shabby dark suit and he was talking to a monk who had appeared out of nowhere and the two men were gesturing to each other in some manner. He squinted and then shaded his eyes and he thought, In this light one could hallucinate anything. He turned back to Sophal, who was looking the other way toward the ruins, which could not, in fact, be seen from that vantage point.

“I love it when there’s no one here,” she was saying.

“I wonder how many people have heart attacks on those steps.”

Leaning in, he kissed the glistening space between the shoulder straps. She flinched slightly.

His lips moved against her hot skin. “I think we’re being watched.”

“There’s always someone watching.”

No doubt it was true. Or half true.

She raised her eyebrows and her smile was slight, as if she for one didn’t mind being watched. As if that was a norm she could accept.

The downward path passed by some handsomely maintained new buildings, including a quadrangular pond. The paint white and gold and fresh. There were donation plaques from Buddhists in America. They came down into a kind of square with ancient trees and old people lying on the benches seemingly oblivious to them. Prayer flags moved in the wind and from the square they could look out over the dark green plain where the oval shadows of clouds moved like grazing cows. Behind them rose the ruins. Temples of Vishnu long toppled and scattered. They moved between the buildings in a gathering and claustrophobic heat and eventually climbed up through a weathered portal and onto the top of a flight of steps that led down to a terrace. Here they lay in the sun for a while. The wind flowed over them and there was no sound but that. Humans seemed not yet to have arrived in that landscape or to have left long ago — you couldn’t tell which. He reached over and laid his hand on her breast and the smile came back, the same slight, stone-carved smile that made her face so serene-looking and ancestral. She turned over and they began to kiss. Soon, however, he heard voices in the square and they got up and walked to the end of the terrace and sat there for a long time enfolded in each other until the clouds on the horizon advanced halfway across the plain. He could see her features in the stone faces above them. The bloodlines, ancient and unbroken, and the mouths with the same smiles. It was a matter of observation, not romantic fantasies. Then, as they watched the plain darken and a roll of thunder reached them, he felt a sudden wave of cold fear overtake him and he turned his head and looked up at the walls. There was no one there but it didn’t matter. There was something there, if not something in human form.

He said, “It’s going to rain, isn’t it? We should beat a retreat.”

He had never believed in the supernatural, but as they wandered slowly back through the ruins he permitted himself the feeling that comes with the nearness of ghosts. Inside the sanctuaries, candles had been lit which had not been lit before. There were flowers, dishes of sweets and incense, and the air had become denser with perfume. At the square the old people had roused themselves and watched them with less indifference. A few monks also sat there eating from plastic plates, though there were no tourists. They sauntered back up the hill to the covered platform where the steps began and sat there in the shade with some cold water they had bought from an old lady with an icebox near the pond. Sophal was thinking ahead to dinner with her parents that night. Should she invite the English boy as well? She was a little confused. She could never gauge how much her father could guess about her.

“What are you doing tonight?” she finally asked.

Robert shrugged and he was conscious of the gesture being lame. He was about to add something when she said, “You can come and have dinner with us tonight if you like. It’s a bit boring for you, but I’ll be there!”

“Then I’ll come.”

“I’ll call them when we’re driving back. You sure you don’t have other plans?”

“I never make plans.”

“Look,” she said, pointing to the steps below them.

The monk was still there, seated under an orange parasol, and it reminded him at once of the temple near Battambang where he had seen Simon. The other man in the shabby suit had disappeared but he had the feeling that this disappearance was not genuine.

“I’m so glad to be back in this country,” she said quietly. “Are you surprised by that?”

“Not at all.”

“This place is special. Don’t you think?”

“I can feel that.”

“I’m happy you can. But somehow you seem anxious. What are you anxious about?”

“I am?”

She had noticed all along that when she looked at him from the side his cheek twitched as if his jaw was clenched. His foot always tapped, his eyes always moved quickly.

“Yes. You are always nervous in some way.”

“Am I really nervous?”

“Yes, you are. There’s something nervous about you.”

Indeed, it was why she didn’t quite trust him.

“You’re always on the lookout.”

“I don’t think so—”

“You haven’t done anything bad, have you, Simon?”

“What do you mean?”

“You haven’t cheated any of your other students?”

He said, slightly annoyed, “I think I’m pretty relaxed. By English standards anyway.”

“Well, you are not a relaxed people.”

“We are what we are.”

“If you’re in trouble—”

“Why would I be in trouble?”

But his laugh was obviously forced.

“People,” she said, “get into all kinds of trouble.”

“Not me.”

On their way back, he was agitated. Sometimes he felt that he was inside a huge broken machine and that there was no exit from it. You’re out of my mind, he thought, remembering a poem about William Burroughs, or was it a line of Burroughs himself? I’m out of your mind. You’re out of my mind.

He slept alone for a while at the Mansions and then walked over to the Sar home to have dinner with the family — it was their specific request. The servants had laid out a table in the garden since the rain had not returned, and dull, dusty-looking stars twinkled above the city’s orange glare. There the three of them sat around candles in glass shells and their faces had a curiously conspiratorial look when he observed them from the windows of the house. The mother was holding forth about something, her hand rising for a moment to emphasize a point then sinking back to her knee. There were tall glasses of white wine. They were an eccentric family, without a doubt; but what made them eccentric was not eccentricity in itself. When he appeared the doctor rose and he made the same gesture with his finger that he had made at the Royal restaurant. They were sitting under a mango tree that looked to be at least a hundred years old, and as if reading his mind the doctor said, almost at once, “See, this is our tree that has been here since before the house was even built! The servants say a spirit lives inside it. They are correct, as it happens.”

—

It was very different from the meal of the first night. The food now was Khmer, delicate and smoky. Lap khmer salads soaked in lime and kdam chaa crab fried in Kampot green peppers and served with baguettes. The wife, for some reason, retired early and the doctor took out his cigar box and waxed philosophical. It felt to Robert as if he had many things bottled up inside him and that he had not expressed them to many people. As he drank, he became sharper and moodier, and the subject of conversation turned with baleful inexorability to the nation, to the nation which he wanted to explain to a young and impressionable foreigner.