Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  He would wait for weeks for relatives to appear; they rarely did. The remains were forwarded to the embassy and nobody looked very seriously at the paperwork. But he was paid nothing and it was expected of him. Over the years he had taken advantage of the situation. The missing rings and wallets and brooches and credit cards were never a subject of inquiry by his superiors. Quietly, he sold them on the black market and saved up for his daughter’s college fund. Everyone has to live, no matter how they do it.

  He made himself a coffee in the station kitchen and called the maid and told her she could stay home that day. He knew that someone would call from the river in about two or three hours and he waited patiently for that call while he sipped his coffee and watched the sun rise over the dust-blown road. His officer was away for the morning having a medical examination. He went out into the first rays of the sun and sat in a chair and looked over at the SUV, which he had cleaned thoroughly. While it was still dark he had driven to his house, burned the towel and the newspapers from the back and then taken the money and the passports and put them in the safe in his room. Before coming to the station he took out the passports, looked them over again and decided to take them with him to the station. He looked at them again now. The American’s was covered with stamps from many countries. The Englishman’s had nothing in it. They looked like men who were polar opposites and yet their passports were together. They were not together for reasons he yet understood, but the face of the Englishman had something sympathetic and unnerving about it. The eyes were so straight, there was no deviance in them, and he was only twenty-eight. His passport had been issued in London that same year. He did not look like the usual drifters who passed through Battambang—far from it. He looked like a wide-eyed innocent from a small town somewhere, but even the innocent can be driven mad by experience.

  Now the American was dead, and where was the Englishman? No one would ever give up their passport willingly.

  The American and his girl—he had seen them somewhere. At one of the bars on the water, maybe, long ago. A man spinning in his happiness in expensive clothes. He remembered the clothes, as one does in this country. A well-tailored man stands out.

  “They all die like that,” he said aloud. Casually, as if it were nothing.

  He looked at his watch, and as he did so, the phone rang and it was the owner of a riverside café saying there was a body near the piers under the temple at a place he knew a mile downriver. He drove there calmly. The body had become entangled in the beams of the jetty and hung there while a swarm of construction workers fussed around trying to disentangle it. Finally they succeeded and the limp rag doll was brought to terra firma. The American’s skin had changed color and something had taken a bite out of his left shin. They laid him on the mudflat and Davuth stood there and took notes and asked everyone to clear off and go stand farther away. Then he had an ambulance called and the body was transferred to the police station. There it was laid in the garage while a few photographs were taken and the coroner came and he and Davuth talked alone in the field behind the station. The man was an old collaborator and they saw eye to eye in these matters. Autopsies were obligatory but sometimes they were slyly overlooked. The man observed that the American seemed to have suffered damage to the head but it might have happened in the water. Indeed it might, Davuth agreed, and they had a smoke and talked about other things and soon they walked back to the garage and Davuth suggested they cremate the body that day and have done with it. The coroner was in agreement. Another barang who had gotten high and thrown himself into the river in a moment of ecstasy or despair—for were those two states not often one and the same? They would quietly split any proceeds between them and life would flow on and the usual busybody from the embassy would drive up and ask about those same belongings. “We couldn’t find anything,” Davuth would say and life, yet again, would flow on nowhere toward its mysterious and nihilistic destination.

  —

  Late in the afternoon he took the body to a wat and had it cremated by the monks he knew. They said prayers and he gave them a small donation out of the money he’d made and then he waited patiently while the ashes were packaged and he asked them to keep them there for a week while the paperwork went through. He had his customary cheroot and walked back out into the early evening and he saw that at the top of the hill the young monks were lounging about outside their dorms and looking down—as if at a sport—at the bridge that was being built across the river. He went up there out of curiosity and sat on a wall and looked at the same thing. The half-built bridge, the curve of the river. Women washed clothes in the shallows, their long hair unfurled. A horse stood there with them, its head dipped toward the water, and young boys swam in a deeper pool near the bridge. The workers were drifting away at their day’s end. Some had built fires and were cooking fish in the open. He looked up at the huge trees that towered above the dorms and one of the boy monks offered to show him something unusual for a little tip.

  They walked in among the trees and it was as if night had arrived here first, bringing with it the stirred nocturnal insects and the stillness. Yet the sky was blue; there was no rain. The boy took him to the densest part of the trees and made him stand still and look up and then he abruptly clapped his hands and there was a generalized stirring in the treetops and, as if with one will, the thousands of bats hanging there erupted into life and rose into the air with a noise like locusts.

  The boy turned to see his reaction and the policeman rolled back on his heels for a moment and a dark superstition came into his mind and wrecked everything there.

  But then he let out a laugh and shook his head. The monks were watching them and their faces, by contrast, were immensely grave. To them it was not quite a joke or a stunt. Davuth controlled his fear as the bats then came whizzing down into the lower parts in a crazed confusion and when they had finally calmed he strode back out to the embankment and walked down to his car with something resolved in his mind. He drove back to his house and saw that his daughter had returned from school. She was seated at the kitchen table doing her schoolwork. Calm and self-contained, like many girls at that age.

  He kissed her forehead and she looked up for a moment and he passed into his room where the safe was and closed the door. He took a quick cold shower, then opened the safe and looked at the money and then at the passport of the Englishman. It was not avarice he felt as he went through the possibilities that had now opened before him. Something told him that a road lay ahead of him and that the road was made for him and no one else. The Englishman was also on the road and the money Davuth had inherited was not the end of the money that could be had. That barang was now a nonperson, a man who had ceased to exist. Did that not make him uniquely vulnerable? He, Davuth, on the other hand, would be invulnerable when hunting him down. The idea gave him a twisted pleasure.

  Then he locked everything in the safe and went into the kitchen and made his daughter dinner. They had a housekeeper who could come whenever needed and the old woman often looked after the girl when he was away on cases. He would call her in the morning. For now he made fried rice heavily sauced with prahok, the fermented fish paste. His daughter looked up and watched him with big cool skeptical eyes. She sensed everything about him.

  “What did you do at school today?” he asked.

  She told him, unconvincingly.

  “I might be going away for a few days,” he said as he sat down with the rice and the prahok. “It’s just another job.”

  “Are you looking for a bad man?”

  “Not really. It’s just a job.”

  “But is it a bad man?”

  He shrugged. “What is a bad man?”

  They ate in silence and he glanced through her exercise book. It was filled with figures of algebra, simple calculations, diagrams he could not understand. His own schooling had been interrupted by the Revolution and never resumed, but those abstractions, he always felt, were reprieves from the relentless realities of life, small delusions
that paid no dividends. They had never been of any use to him, but later they would be of use to her. Education was a magic that some could use.

  “Never mind about bad men,” he said, and stroked her hair. “You don’t need to think about that.”

  He closed the book and gave her permission to watch television for a while. As she did so he took a beer from the fridge and went out into his little garden. He sat there looking at the clear moon and its portentous halo—a sign, surely, of ominous things to come. He felt the pressing smallness and meanness of that garden now, the evidence that he was just scraping by for all the perks he creamed from his profession. It was never enough. He wanted a house with a swimming pool and an iron gate, many things that did not come easily to lowly men. He would have to retire soon and then his slowly augmenting fund for his daughter would come to a standstill. It was not far off and he had to make the most of his remaining days of corruption and opportunity and profit. They were numbered like the fingers of his hands and as his commander had taught him to do long ago, one had to chop those fingers off one by one without thinking too much about the pain.

  He thought about this later, too, when he was alone watching DVDs after his daughter had gone to bed. An HBO series called Vikings, which he had grown fond of. The Vikings, barangs of the far north in a distant time, went about with their axes assailing the English, cutting into their flesh with pleasure. Had it really been like that, the killing days? The men with blades smiling like the Vikings—seemingly all the time—and wading through fields and villages of wattle with an intention that was, after all, inscrutable. How they hated the English Christians. They loved to spit on their crucifixes. It was fascinating—the pleasure of the desecration. Did they really enjoy the releasing of blood and the insolent disturbance of Dhamma?

  He had to think this over since it had been such a theme in his own life. And it was at night that his memories came alive again and when he became aware that the ghosts of the murdered came alive as well and roamed across the land. It was known to everyone in the villages. His own past, too, was reenacted nightly in this way. He sometimes thought that in a demented way his past was very short, almost nonexistent. He had been a child in the sixties, in the happy time. But what did he remember of that?

  The devious King Sihanouk in white and the music of Ros Sothea. The song called “Venus.” But the Angkar said it was all an illusion. There was no happiness then, it had all been a facade.

  Later, it seemed that his life had begun with the Revolution and many men had said the same thing. Their lives began on April 17. It began then on that day, but when would it end? Where would his soul migrate to?

  I’ll be an ant, he sometimes thought. I’ll be crushed by the heel of a schoolgirl on her way to school. I’ll be the size of a crushed seed.

  “The blood debt must be paid with blood,” the Angkar used to say. “To show you mercy is no gain, to destroy you is no loss.”

  Even before 1975, before he had become a kamabhipal for the Angkar, visions came to save and destroy him. They lay in the fields in terror when the B-52s came upon them. They avoided touching the ground with their faces so that the vibrations of the bombs would not give them nosebleeds. On the far horizons of those summer days the red dust rose in a wall to the height of half a mile. Beautiful, astonishing. Silent and somber beyond the cassava fields. It was like the oncoming of Vishnu, destroyer of worlds.

  Through his village in the midst of these dust storms of bombs came the spindly boys in black with their weapons. The servants of the Angkar. So it had begun for him a long, long time ago, the eradication of his heart. Long before the war and the camps and the triumph of the Angkar. Life, then, was a mystery, but it was a cheap one. “We are all under one sky,” his father used to say, meaning that all suffer the same in the end. But it was not true.

  When he became a kamabhipal he saw every day that the “old people” survived and the “new people,” the “April 17 people,” the doctors and the university people, the ministers even and their families, were crushed and dissolved with whips and their throats were cut with palm fronds. He worked for months at a secret camp in the forest, learning the new ways. He learned to lie under floorboards and listen to the conversations of villagers. The next day they could be denounced, dragged down to the river and cut apart with machetes. Their bodies went downriver.

  Davuth was a peasant and so he had been one of the “old people.” His class were the builders of Angkor long ago, the salt of the earth, the wielders of threshers and fish traps. The ones whose faces were carved in stone a thousand years ago. People were not all under one sky.

  The ghosts now walking quietly through the tobacco knew that better than anyone. The killers lived under a different sky. He looked up now and saw that the stars had reappeared and their glacial brilliance made him frown. It felt as if he could look right through them into the meaningless chasm beyond, and when he did he felt strangely reassured. It was not nothingness that instilled fear in him, it was the morbid idea that life had meaning after all.

  Dhamma

  SIXTEEN

  Sophal watched the halo around the moon and she ran her hand along the curve of Robert’s spine and her thoughts moved back and forth like a comb moving through thick hair that it cannot disentangle. Hours passing in repetition, and there was no forward movement. She couldn’t sleep and the rain distracted her, it never seemed to give her a break. The streets slowly filling like saucepans, the rot beginning again and the men wading along them looking for small opportunities. But still the moon was there despite the clouds (there was no accounting for that) and she watched it drily, wondering if it would explode one fine night and finally leave her alone. The English boy slept like a miner. He slept like that but he never did any real work. Some part of her regretted her rashness in sleeping with him so quickly, but she had drunk too much too quickly and as the evening had progressed she had felt how lost and childish he was. But now she seemed to feel him more clearly. There was something also off-center about him, something spinning without wheels. She didn’t believe in his name, and his descriptions of his past did not quite ring true.

  Did such things matter? No one ever knew much about another person. Charm was sometimes more than enough. She got up and went to the bathroom and for some strange reason began brushing her hair. Naked, she looked oily and burnished in the mirror, like something distant and far-off, and she could not recognize herself for a moment.

  The previous year, she had been a medical student in Paris. Her father could imagine nothing better than her one day becoming a doctor like himself. A doctor with French qualifications. One night she had been called out to accompany a medical team who wanted her to go with them to the hard suburb of Kremlin-Bicêtre to unlock the apartment of a Khmer man who had gone missing seven years earlier. She went at three in the morning, the same rain. The social workers broke down the door and found a neat and orderly apartment, very Khmer in its tastes, and in the center of the small kitchen the caretaker from Takeo who had been made redundant in 2002, hanging by a gardening rope.

  The electricity had been cut off and the place was cold and dark and the body, by some chemical miracle, was perfectly preserved. They held up torches and took notes and waited for the police to arrive and cut down the body. A lonely and unknown Khmer man of forty-three made redundant during a management restructuring. They knew his name. Chann Ong. His name meant “the moon.” The surname, Hokkien Chinese. He had killed himself and his body was discovered that night, seven years after the event. Her superstitious mind pondered it, though she said nothing to the Frenchwomen with her.

  She touched the naked foot, like the foot of a mummy which has not lost its color entirely. They catalogued everything in the apartment. His twelve Buddhist books, his dusty toiletries, the old Pan Ron records. His bed had been made and the towels folded and left on it. A doll’s house for a dead man.

  No one could explain how a cadaver could remain preserved for seven years. Before
hanging himself Chann Ong had sealed all the windows tight and placed a towel under the door. So the room had been almost airless. No flies, no air, no bacteria? But still they could not explain it. She thought to herself, “It was his death wish,” and something in her stirred, she suddenly wanted to go home. It was not a feeling she had had before. They cut down the body and she felt like crying in front of all these quietly appalled French people, for how could they understand anything that had gone through Chann Ong’s mind as he sealed his death chamber and climbed that kitchen chair? It was not just the despair of losing his job and writing the dozens of angry letters to the management in order to receive desultory brush-offs. There was an anterior history, a shared history that was written upon the unconscious, and she understood it.

  When she told her father this story he immediately asked her his age. Then he nodded and said that it was self-explanatory. Chann Ong was “one of us.” One of the people of Year Zero, the first year of the Revolution—or the April 17 people, as the unindoctrinated or “old people” were known.

  It was brushing her hair in the Englishman’s mirror that made her think of Chann Ong and so he was not, then, entirely forgotten in his own land. Where was his ghost, then—here or there? Wandering the boulevards of Phnom Penh or those of Paris? She stood up straight and stared into her own eyes and remembered the crinkled soles of his feet and the certainty that it was a sign from the afterlife to her.

  That night she drove home to her flat in Marx Dormoy along empty streets and her gloom deepened. She wanted to be home. It was she who wrote to the Khmer embassy and told them about Chann. No one knew what to do with a perfectly preserved corpse—superstition had entered the equation. In bed, she told her French boyfriend about it and became slightly hysterical. But nerves never healed a situation. He told her, in his calm European way, that ghosts didn’t exist and she thought cruelly, The divide between us is enormous, isn’t it?