Lawrence Osborne: Hunters in the Dark

During the night, huddled inside the prasat as the rain pounded down, she had poured out all her rage in a brief explosion. He had told her everything finally and when it was done there was no point talking any further and she went over the sudden catastrophe in her mind as they skimmed across the half-lit Mekong in the longtail until the lights of Takeo came into view. What was surprising was that she was not truly surprised: something had been wrong all along. When the family driver appeared she walked silently to the car and got in and waited for something to happen between them as they drove back to Phnom Pehn. His apologies, however, were pointless; it’s in the nature of lies to catch up with the perpetrator and strangle him. But her? So, she kept thinking, I have to be destroyed for the sake of his lies. In the end they slept and it was past nine when they arrived back at Colonial Mansions. It began to feel like a small, nasty dream. She woke and told the driver that she didn’t need to go back home. He was to tell her father that she was fine. They had simply forgotten the time at Phnom Da and they had forgotten their money, too, at a café in Takeo. All he had to do was cancel her credit cards and she would come home later.

The driver seemed to hesitate, as if he had received very different instructions from her father. But in the end he relented and let the young mistress do what she wanted. He gave her the envelope of cash her father had entrusted to him and was glad to let the master and mistress do what they wanted and go their merry ways.

In the lobby there was a paradoxically dreamlike normality to everything. The boys in their laundered white shirts, the Chinese women doing their dutiful laps in the pool and the maids patiently spraying the ornamental palms. The rain pattered on the windows and two American embassy officials took their morning coffees under the photographs of colonial Phnom Penh and Hmong tribesmen. The man on duty smiled when he saw Robert and his silent noting of the disheveled clothes and hair was kept under perfect control as he searched for the key that had been left there earlier and finally handed it over.

“One of our staff,” he said politely, “found it in the lobby earlier this morning. You must have dropped it on your way out.”

“Of course. Thank you.”

A stroke of luck, then, as the world sometimes throws your way when things have reached their end. He felt a sullen wonderment.

“You might consider,” the man went on, “leaving it at the desk from now on. People lose their keys all the time.”

“Yes, it’s a good idea. Who found it?”

“One of the boys. It was lying on the floor.”

“On the floor?”

“Yes, sir.”

“I must have dropped it then.”

“Yes, sir.”

—

On their way to the apartment he glanced up at the third floor. There was something there, some riddle. He could feel it in his nerves. And yet he had come through the riddle unharmed. They went into the disordered room and he saw the bag on the bed at once and he opened it while she stumbled into the bathroom to have a shower and there was everything that he had lost a few weeks earlier. The first image that came into his mind was a boomerang whipping through the air: the usual cliché. Then he saw, too, the car keys laid next to the bag and, looking inside the bag itself, he found the two passports. She was in the shower now, sobbing and wailing, and he tried to think how the boomerang had found its way back to him; but that was impossible. He gathered up all his scattered and despoiled belongings and made them orderly and then he sat on the bed and waited for the rain to stop. When Sophal came out of the bathroom she had calmed down and what was left of the bitterness was a coldness that would last until something healed it. Time, he thought banally, and left it at that. His own actions had ceased to mean anything.

They went down together as the sun broke out and, as previously suggested, he left the key with reception but with no intention of ever recuperating it. In the room, they had merely decided to leave.

“I have the keys to his car,” he had said.

“How do you know it’s his car?”

“I just do.”

“Where is he then?”

“I don’t know.”

They had stared at each other for some time.

“How do you have the keys?” she had spat at him.

“I don’t know, but I have them.”

“They were just in your room?”

“Yes.”

It was so inexplicable she had given up.

“I don’t want to go home,” she had said. “I want to go away somewhere.”

“All right, we’ll go away.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know. Back the way I came.”

She had looked at the bag.

“What’s that?”

“The money. It’s all there.”

“Throw it away.”

He had nodded.

“All right. I’ll throw it away.”

“I mean it.”

“I said I would, didn’t I?”

Down in the street they saw the car parked under mango trees, the windscreen covered with drops of dried mud and crushed flies. The merriness of a Sunday morning flooded the streets around the day markets, the dogs running in packs, the drivers squatting in the shade of the magnificent trees. The sun brought a bright lucidity. They stood in it for a moment basking and warming themselves, and without knowing why they sensed that Davuth was not around and that someone had made them a mysterious gift. They climbed into the car and their mood lifted. A great zone of porcelain-blue sky had opened up at the apex. As they drove slowly out of the city the river was lit by the sun and the frangipanis seemed to turn into foam. Soon, the city had thinned and they moved along tattered roads among the trucks and the bikes with their angry dust. The rain had soaked everything but the man-made things had dried in an hour. “We’ll go back to Battambang,” he said quietly. “We can stay there a few days. Is that all right?” She said nothing, and it was her assent.

Through the whole afternoon they drove without speaking, until the river flashed in the distance and the billboards rose up by the road and showered them with images of a France that no longer existed. They came into Battambang as the dust dried and they stopped and went for a walk along the stagnant, softly luminous green river.

—

Here once again was the building of Electricité de Battambang and the old French mansions ranged along the road. The same boys lounged on the step banks, lulled by the chugging generators. They too lay down in the grass and they slept a little with their bodies close together. Small white clouds sailed across an open sky and he stared up at them and felt the crickets in the grass whispering as if from afar. Vaguely, he was considering crossing the border again if she would agree. They could spend a few days together in Bangkok perhaps. They could go to an island somewhere and her father could wire them some money when they ran out. Or he could keep the money he already had. He looked over and saw that she was lying serenely with her face upturned as if still deep in sleep. The sound of a fairground of some kind came wafting across the little bridge nearby. The faint call of a mosque, the mosque he remembered standing over the river upstream. He raised himself on his elbows and squinted at the sun. How long had it been since he had last been in this very spot? A few weeks, a few months — he couldn’t really say anymore. He had long ago stopped counting his days and the longer he stopped counting them, the faster they passed. He was not even sure why he had returned there. He didn’t know why he had the car and the money he had won long ago at the Diamond Crown in Pailin. It had been taken away from him and then returned to him, but by whom and why? It was like a wheel that had shifted in the dark, but so slowly that one didn’t notice it turning. He saw little spiders scattering through the grass as if alarmed by his shadow. We’ll go over the border, he thought. He roused Sophal and she opened her eyes and there was no emotion in them whatsoever. Down in the river the boys had jumped into the water with nets and fishing rods and some of them were swimming under the bridge, engulfed in its shadow. The sight of them made him think of his parents, far off in their wintery realm. In their heart of hearts they knew that he was alive.