Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  “Maybe you’ll stay a while, now that you are here,” he said affably. Their plates were covered with mustard-seeded blood. “Do you not have a girlfriend back home—or something like that?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “That’s a shame. Maybe you are living in the wrong place. It’s always wise to live in the right place.”

  “I guess it is at that.”

  “What does your father say?”

  “My father?”

  “What does he say about you not having a girlfriend?”

  “He doesn’t say anything about it.”

  “Does he not, indeed? Does he not?”

  “Not at all.”

  “That is rather strange. Maybe he is under the impression—”

  “I’m an obscenity?”

  The doctor roared with laughter and raised his fork.

  Obscenity? Robert thought wildly. What did his father think he was? The doctor’s insinuation was strange, but it was a provocation to sound him out about his sexuality. It was better to ignore it.

  “Well, never mind, Robert. You are in our land now. You don’t have to pretend to be anything you are not.”

  “Pretend?”

  “You know what I mean. You can let your hair down here.”

  Again, the index finger was raised.

  “Garçon, let’s have some crème brûlées, by Buddha. Why not? Does anyone have anything against it? We’ll grow fat for a day then deflate to normal size.”

  The doctor now receded an inch or two from the edge of the table and took off his glasses and then wiped them with his starched napkin. He apologized for using the phrase “by Buddha,” which was entirely inappropriate and heretical, but he had taken to using it in the old days and he had stuck with it because he found it amusing. He discouraged his guest from doing the same.

  “Tomorrow night, when you come—here’s my card with the address—I’ll give you crème brûlées again, it’s our favorite dessert at home. I hope you won’t be bored. We are rather quiet people who enjoy our evenings in our garden. We rarely go out or throw dinner parties.”

  They drank green tea with the crème brûlées and Robert asked if Sophal would know why he was there when he came.

  “We’ll talk to her this afternoon. She’s not terribly enthusiastic about English lessons, I’ll admit, but she’ll go along with it because it pleases her mother and she doesn’t have to do it fanatically. We are thinking something like an hour every day or so. Would you be able to do that?”

  “An hour every day?”

  “Well, I know it’s a bit bold of me to suggest every day, but we’d be very grateful. It’s honestly what she needs to do in order to improve.”

  “I suppose I could.”

  “You sound a bit doubtful. I understand. I’ll be willing to make it worth your while. If you could do two hours, even more so.”

  “Two hours?”

  “Of course, I don’t know how much time you have—”

  “I have time,” Robert said. He held himself back from adding, “A lot of time.” How easy it was! They finished up their meal and walked through the Royal corridors to the Elephant Bar, on the far side of the lobby, which was more crowded than the restaurant. There was a pool table there, the arches were painted with images of elephants and there was a case of fine cigars with a hygrometer and little boxed posters of Jalisco and Gaulois.

  They went to the bar and ordered cosmopolitan flights and the doctor paid again. One of the three shots that made up the cosmopolitan was with black pepper; another with orange. The glasses were expertly iced and the little silver elephants around them seemed to be keeping an eye on Robert’s hands. He noticed how short and curiously shaped the doctor was. Like a bowling pin. From where did his inexhaustible good humor come? But it was a humor that was like light playing on the surface of oily water. Peer into it and all you saw was rainbow oil and reflections that moved constantly.

  The doctor sipped his overcolored drink and his lips were sugared.

  “It was pure luck, Robert, that you answered my ad. But do you really believe in luck?”

  “I can’t decide.”

  “It seems like an impossible idea, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ve never experienced enormous good luck, to be honest. Just once or twice.”

  “We all get lucky one time in our lives. And usually four or five times. I’ve had a stroke or two in the past. I should have been dead by now.”

  Some pretty barang girls looked over at Robert with a detached curiosity. Here the whites always looked each other over at a distance, suddenly aware of something deep within them that never needed to come into expression.

  “I am probably more superstitious than you,” Sar said. “It’s said that we are a superstitious people. But I think superstition is a biological trait in human beings.”

  “Like being honest, then.”

  “Yes, and like murder. Murder seems to be really universal, doesn’t it?”

  Robert laughed, though keeping his voice down.

  “You could say that, yeah.”

  “I do say it. Surely your literature studies have proved that to you.”

  “I see your point. But I try not to think about murder if I can help it.”

  “Neither do I. I do think about superstition, however. I’m not convinced, in short, that all superstition is superstitious.”

  “I’m only superstitious about ladders,” Robert said. “I’ll never walk under one.”

  “You might get hit by a pot of paint.”

  Sar was now carefully measuring the English boy. His tone, the way he paced his sentences. He was not as obvious as he had at first appeared. There were thin, layered depths to him. There was something about him that was affected and forced. His accounts of himself were not quite true. But they were not sufficiently false for the doctor to dismiss him out of hand. He was playing a role, but Sar felt tolerant toward those who played a role. He had had to play many roles himself during the terrible years. It was survival, and the roles a man assumed in order to survive did not seem to him a capital offense. Robert (or Simon to him) had level and transparent eyes that gave the lie to some of the less trustworthy things coming out of his mouth. Should one trust the eyes then? His father had always told him that the eyes never lie.

  He disguised his thoughts, however.

  “Now let’s drink to making Sophal speak perfect English in a matter of weeks.”

  “Maybe she should meet me first,” Robert said.

  “She’ll like you well enough. I do.”

  It was a promising start, and when they went out into the now-thunderous afternoon the doctor called a tuk-tuk for him, paid the driver upfront and said that they would expect him the following evening at eight.

  “Don’t bring anything, Simon. Just yourself.”

  “I will and I won’t.”

  “The girls will be thrilled to meet you.”

  Maybe they would be. The doctor had his own car and Robert rode in the tuk-tuk as far as the Paris then went up to his room and slept for an hour. The city was now sweltering and sunless but his mood was up. He had a good feeling about his prospects, which only a few hours ago had seemed as dark and uncertain as could be. His luck had turned. Luck always turned. He slept as if drunk. Thunder in the afternoon. Rain swept in while he was unconscious, beating down the dust and the people slipping under the trees. At six in the evening the electricity went off in all the streets around Kampuchea Krom and the roads overflowed with caramel water. He opened his eyes and felt happy. A drifter always knows when he has drifted far enough from the system to feel the thrill of surviving against the odds. The flood when it came would see him float like one of those little paper boats that even children know how to make.

  NINE

  The deluge lasted all night and through the following day. It was hardly worth getting up and he spent most of the day in bed reading the Herald Tribune and drinking from a bottle of Royal Stag which he had bought on
the street for a few dollars. He lay there naked with his clothes hung on wires to keep them clean and uncreased. The city, meanwhile, sank into a premodern gloom hour by hour, fragile and beautiful as it seemed to diminish into a lacework of newly created canals. When he went down to the lobby to buy some fried rice at the restaurant he saw the girls sitting glumly on the stairs with their iPhones, texting and chatting with nothing to do. The rooms were stifling. Yet the street was fresh with a menacing wind. The tuk-tuks still raced along them like boats, spewing dirty water on either side and the drivers laughing it off.

  He took one, eventually. Robert leaned over and handed the driver Dr. Sar’s business card with the address printed on it, a numbered street off Norodom Boulevard, and the driver handed it back to him with a nod. Water roared against their doors as they set off in entirely the wrong direction, eventually coming to the Wat Phnom, which was marooned in a virtual lake. The American embassy was high and dry to one side and at the unsubmerged street corners people stood in plastic capes stoically waiting for Noah’s flood to recede. They went past the generator lights of the Sunway Hotel and then crossed the little bridge by Street 106. Here by long park lawns and trees the sudden darkness was even stranger. On the bridge a few people also stood under beaten-down umbrellas paralyzed by the sudden disappearance of light and the pools emerging within the lawns behind the Phsa Reatrey market. The power had still not come back on by the time they reached Norodom.

  The usual illumination of that immense French street had been knocked out and the crowds had scattered with the downpour. They went down what was now a half-empty boulevard plunged in gloom, with restored villas and ruins alike behind high walls and sugar palms. The gardens were suddenly more magnificent than the houses they served. They splashed through the corners where the traffic hesitated in the dark and careered to miss collisions. The people standing there had taken off their shoes and carried them in one hand. It was as if they didn’t know what to do now with a lightless night. Tramp through it and hope for fun, soldier on and pray that nothing went wrong before first light? What did one do here when the lights went off and the streets became like this—hushed and ancient and the trees suddenly remarkable?

  They crossed the traffic circle around the monument. On its far side, Norodom continued. The streets became quieter, perceptibly more refined. At the corner of Street 334 they turned but only for a moment: the house occupied the entire corner. Behind cypresses and palms a dark yellow European house rose up with trims of white stucco. There was an ironwork gate with an electric bell, but none of the lights were on and it was hard to see anything clearly. The potential absurdity of the situation was suddenly obvious to Robert. It was possible that they had not been able to call him. He got out nevertheless and paid the driver and the man simply parked the tuk-tuk there on 334 and said he would wait for him. It was a narrow street darkened by spreading trees. Outside the villas of the affluent stood sentry boxes with all-night guards. The wall of the adjoining property was a dark and somehow menacing red.

  “There’s no need to wait,” Robert said.

  “No, I wait.”

  “I don’t want you to wait.”

  “But I will wait. I wait here.” What will you do if I do not wait? his face said.

  It was true.

  Robert turned, walked up to the gate on Norodom and rang the bell, the cascade of water slithering down his back. He could see a loggia of some kind with potted palms, a lone chain lamp suspended above it. The garden hissed with cicadas. To his surprise the door opened and a maid stood there holding a candle in a glass cage in one hand. She was old but subtly elegant in that small circle of light and behind her he could see the shadowed, unlit house with candles flickering inside it.

  “The power is off,” she said sweetly, “but the doctor and his family are waiting for you inside. It’s going to be a candlelit dinner.”

  She led him up a brick path under takien trees and the closer they got to the house the brighter the candlelit windows seemed. As the door opened he heard music, a piano being played quite well, and the doctor’s quick, rippling, girlish laughter. The Sars were sitting in their front room, among their Khmer antiques. At the far end of the room the piano was being played by their daughter. Kinderszenen, he was sure.

  He tensed and then resolved to be suave and calm. To be Simon, in effect. The room was lit with dozens of tea-light candles and there was a table set for four with painted terracotta dishes and a decanter of red wine that looked as if it had stewed badly in the oppressive heat. The windows were open in the hope of catching wet breezes, but the air inside the room had come to a numbing standstill and he felt his hands burst with perspiration. The doctor got up and a tall, thin woman next to him did the same and as they rose together the alarming difference in height between them made itself known.

  —

  “Simon, so here you are! Allow me to introduce—”

  The wife was younger, much younger. She had a peering, inquisitive face, half Chinese maybe, the eyes full of hope.

  “My husband has been talking about you nonstop. Now the power is out.”

  “Sit down, please,” the doctor cried. “Sophal!”

  They sat and the girl at the piano rotated on the stool, hesitated and then got up and walked over to the coffee table and the fabric sofas.

  Mrs. Sar asked Robert if he would like a glass of brandy.

  “It’s the best warm drink, isn’t it?”

  He accepted and the girl, small and willowy, alighted like some human-shaped moth on the padded arm of the sofa on which her parents sat.

  “This is our daughter,” the doctor said. “She knows all about why you are here.”

  The family laughed, as if among themselves.

  And in a moment the soft eyes of the girl were upon him, made even darker by the lack of electric light, made quietly bolder by this artificial privacy of candlelight. Her hair was immensely wavy for some reason and it reached down to her waist, its volume exaggerated by shadows. The hands folded on her lap, the feet unshod and loose in her own home. She had an effortless confidence in the hearth of her father. He couldn’t see any trace of the illness to which her father had referred, her hands rested perfectly still, the eyes were also as still as magnetic needles pointing north. She was dressed in cut-off jeans and a white T-shirt with the image of a Burmese pop star—Chit Snow Oo.

  “Did you get a tuk-tuk here in the rain?” she asked in perfect English.

  “I managed all right. I think the guy is waiting outside for me.”

  “Shall we tell the maid to get rid of him?” the doctor asked, obviously amused.

  “No, keep him,” his wife objected. “It’s going to rain all night and we’ll never find someone else.”

  “So be it,” from the doctor. “Now, shall we have some home-made prawn crackers?”

  Sophal turned to Robert more fully, perhaps as a matter of politeness. Robert had the sense, already, that she was playing a game with her father.

  “Daddy says you are living in Colonial Mansions. Are you?”

  “Yes, I took a small unit.”

  “I think they changed the name to Central Mansions. New owners from Hong Kong. I have some friends in there, maybe you know them. Mary O’Neil at the embassy?”

  “No, I haven’t met anyone yet.”

  She smiled archly. “Oh, you’re too busy, just like her. Maybe you’ll run into her.”

  “I might, yes.”

  “I love the pools there.”

  “You know it then?”

  “I know it very well. I sometimes go in pretending to be a guest and use the pools. No one’s ever stopped me.”

  Her English was indeed quite perfect—it was too awkward to bring the matter up, but how was he going to improve it?

  It was baffling.

  “I wonder how much you’re paying,” she went on. “The city is getting so expensive for barangs. Do you find it expensive?”

  “It’s all right for me.”
>
  “They say it’s more expensive than Bangkok now. For the real luxury.”

  “It’s Asia rising,” the doctor said with firm jollity. “The Chinese are pouring their money in here. Not that we’re rich yet. But they are.”

  “People say,” the daughter continued, “that barangs are also pouring into Asia looking for jobs these days. Do you think that’s true?”

  “I don’t know,” Robert said. “It might be.”

  The maid now brought in dishes and set them on the dining table.

  “One can see the way the wind is blowing,” her father said. “For our generation it’s a remarkable thing to witness. All we knew was poverty.”

  “It’s true,” said Mrs. Sar.

  “Everyone in the army’s rich,” the girl laughed.

  Robert upended the brandy glass. He would go along with this. There was money in it. The house was obviously an old French mansion. Teak floorboards from the old days, high windows and airy rooms. The doctor had filled it with antiques. With the rain sliding in sheets down the windows and with the candlelight it was cave-like and yet charming. The small family seemed almost lost inside it, like dolls in a doll’s house, but the doctor had put his medical certificates on display on a mantelpiece and the two servants were not deferential.

  Before long, the doctor rose and they rose with him and they went to sit at the table, where a French dinner had been laid out.