Tatjana Soli - The Lotus Eaters

The first night Linh came back too early and saw a woman from the village leaving Darrow’s room. The lamplight outlined her figure as she stood outside, as full and rounded as the carved apsaras on the walls of the temples. Darrow came to the doorway and pulled on the cloth around her hips, reeling her back inside. After that, Linh made sure he did not come back till midnight.

“Where are you so late?” Darrow asked when Linh came in.

Linh did not like this man’s disingenuousness.

“Found a girlfriend?”

“I’m married.”

“Sorry. Of course not.” Darrow nodded. “Stay for dinner sometimes. I like conversation. And I cook.”

“You have friends.”

Darrow smiled. “Lovely, huh? My God, lovely. Naked, she’s the replica of the ancient statues here. Brought to life. As if no time had passed since this place was built.”

One hot afternoon, the air as heavy as stone, Linh sat alone on a terrace far away from where they worked. They had been up since before the sun to capture the light on the buildings at dawn. Sleepy, eyelids weighted, Linh heard only the stillness, broken by the occasional shrill cries of the monkeys who scampered across the warm stones in search of offerings of fruit. The monkeys were feared. They bit and sometimes were rabid, and the workers trapped them and roasted the healthy ones for meals.

He had knotted a piece of jute rope and slipped his hands through the circle, then proceeded to twist so that the rope bit a tighter and tighter figure eight around his wrists. At each tightening, he felt a burning and then relief, his mind filled only with the white-hot sting of his wrists instead of the deeper pain that was always there. So preoccupied by heat and pain, he did not notice Darrow passing by.

Darrow disappeared and then returned minutes later, drenched with sweat. “How about it?” he called to Linh from across a courtyard. Pretending ignorance, he climbed the stairs in his big, loping gait, carrying two beers. Linh was so dazed he did not notice Darrow’s heavy breathing, did not know that Darrow had run back to his room like a madman, torn open a cooler, grabbed two beers, then run back.

Bound, he nodded, too late to hide the fact of the rope.

Darrow leaned over with a knife and cut the twisted rope between the purpled wrists. Acting as if it all were the most normal thing in the world, he then pried the caps off the bottles and handed one over. He’d noted the freshness of the scars when Linh first arrived. Darrow knew the wreckage of war. “Let’s talk.”

Linh rubbed his hands against each other, felt the tug of his callused palm, blood slow like sand through his veins.

“You were Tran Bau Linh last we met. An SVA soldier.”

“That man is dead. Now I’m Nguyen Pran Linh.”

“Okay.”

“I shouldn’t have lied that I’d worked for you.”

Darrow rubbed his face. “A cursed day, the day we met.”

“Yes.”

“Does this”-Darrow waved his hand at the rope-“have to do with that night? You disappeared.”

Linh looked away. “I do good work for you?”

“Best assistant I’ve had.”

“Is that the price to keep my job? To tell you?”

Darrow took a long sip of his beer and looked across the nearby jungle. “You don’t trust me yet. That’s okay.”

“You’re happy here?” Linh asked.

“Like getting a chance to explore the pyramids. Gary ’s a good guy, but he doesn’t get it. I’ve had enough war, you know? Hell, of course you know. Just can’t quite get around to quitting. So what ever your reasons for being here are, okay by me.”

Linh took a slow sip of his beer. “You think you are in a peaceful paradise here. But you’re hiding in a graveyard. Their violence is simply past, ours is happening now. Each stone laid in place here is laid on top of blood. Violence all around you, but you don’t recognize it. It’s easy for you-you don’t belong here.”

“I didn’t make the war. I was just a mediocre photographer, headed toward wedding shots. War made me famous.”

“What about duty?”

“Far as I can see, you don’t belong, either. Officially disappeared.” Darrow stared at him. “So why not run?”

Linh bowed his head and was silent so long Darrow thought he would not answer.

“From what happened to me, there is no running. ‘Which way I fly is hell; myself am hell.’ ”

Darrow was speechless at his Milton-quoting, AWOL soldier-turned-assistant. What in the world more would he find out about this man?

On their day off, Linh woke to the usual smell of cardamom-scented coffee being brewed but then smelled something else-sweet like the French bakeries in Saigon. He found Darrow outside nursing a skillet over an open fire.

“Pancakes,” Darrow said, not turning. “My wife sent me a box of mix. It even has dried blueberries in it. And a bottle of Vermont syrup. Get a fork.”

“You’re married?”

“She thought it would make me homesick. You know how women are.”

“I’ll never get over my wife’s love.”

Darrow looked at him. “I’m sorry…”

Linh waved away the apology. He didn’t want to be one of those people who couldn’t stand another’s happiness. “She would make my favorite, banh cuon, rice cakes, each time I left.”

When breakfast was ready, Linh looked down at the golden cake on his plate, the brown puddle of syrup.

“Dig in!” Darrow said.

Linh took a bite and gagged. The texture and the sweetness and the flavor, all peculiar. He poked at the blue pools of fruit in the cake with the prongs of his fork and felt queasy.

Darrow ate a stack of five cakes, along with cup after cup of coffee. “This takes me home.”

When he turned away, Linh threw the pancake into the bushes behind him. When Darrow turned around again and saw the empty plate, he smiled and plopped another on it, despite Linh’s protests. “You’re turning more American by the minute.”

Later in the morning, Veasna had a question about drop dates, and Darrow was nowhere to be found. After searching for an hour, they finally tracked him down to where he stood in front of the carved stone face of Avalokiteshvara, the Buddha of Compassion. Motioning Veasna away, Linh watched Darrow study the sculpture-blank, unseeing eyes, serene smile of the lips, the chips and cracks and lichen, shadows that changed the expression as the sun crossed it-until nightfall. Linh could work with such a man.

At his usual late hour, Linh returned from the village and stretched out on his mat. Darrow, as always, wide-awake and reading. Glass of scotch at his side, he insisted Linh join him with a small glass. Linh wet his lips with the alcohol-he would have drunk it even if it was poison to please-then closed his eyes and felt the walls spin. When Darrow came across interesting parts in his book, he read them aloud, regardless of whether Linh, muddled with drink, had fallen asleep or not, so that Linh acquired his knowledge of Mouhot’s history of the ruins in dreamlike segments. He would never be sure if the stories were real or his imagination.

The king of Cambodia, along with an entourage that numbered into the thousands, went elephant hunting through the dense forests northeast of the great lake, Tonlé Sap, in the year 1550. In some places, passage was so restricted that his slaves had to cut away vegetation and trees in order to pass through. They came upon a particularly thick, overgrown place through which they could make no progress. Finally they realized these were solid stone walls beneath the dense foliage-the outer wall of Angkor, rediscovered by the Khmers after having been forgotten since the twelfth century.

One day when work had finished early, Darrow rounded the corner of a building and ran straight into Linh, who quickly stuffed a scrap of paper away into his pocket. “What are you writing all the time?”