Hunters in the Dark

by Lawrence Osborne

  How annoying men were, there was always this collusion which even they didn’t understand.

  “You should be more careful,” she said quietly. “You shouldn’t talk to strangers so easily.”

  “Why not?”

  “You just shouldn’t. It’s quicksand.”

  “Quicksand?”

  “That’s what my father says. It’s quicksand for naive boys.”

  “Oh, I’m not a naive boy.”

  “You’re not as naive as you seem, but you’re more naive than you think. That’s what matters. If I can see that, so can Mr. Tour Guide.”

  “Come off it,” he sighed, smiling to himself. “It’s not that easy. I’m not that easy.”

  “You’re wrong—it’s that easy. You should stay away from him.”

  “Bollocks,” he muttered.

  She didn’t quite get Britishisms.

  There’s a long road that goes east to Vietnam and at the end is a mountain with a temple and views over the Mekong. He wanted to go see it and make her see it too. It was surely feasible. He turned and looked through the open door into the living room, which was now almost dark, the lights of the swimming pool transforming the drawn curtains into a square of dark gold. A wave of nostalgia came over him and he thought of his parents going quietly about their honorable and unrelenting lives in a council house in Bevendean at the edge of the Downs. It was six in the morning there perhaps and his father might well be already in his surprisingly fertile English garden cursing the onset of frost. They ate their porridge together listening to the Today program on Radio 4. He had sent postcards by now to calm them and keep them, as it were, on his side. The postcards would be on the mantelpiece, displayed for some reason. So his disappearance was not yet total and his parents were not yet looking for him and lying awake at night wondering if he was dead. They were maybe worried about him leaving his job and soon the school and his English girl would be dropping by to ask them if they knew anything. They were reticent people who understood the laws of discretion and it was possible they would fend off those questions artfully. He didn’t know. His mother, certainly, would not be convinced by his assurances. She knew how unhappy he was. The first thing that would emerge in her mind when she woke would be her son. Just then, as his eyes were adjusting to the dark and just as he was imagining his mother rising into a cold English dawn, a shadow crossed the gold square and stopped for a moment and seemed to look into the room. Then it moved on and he heard the curious whale-like snorts of the swimmers who always did laps at that hour. He rolled over and his mouth was dry.

  “What’s wrong?” Sophal said.

  “It’s nothing. I was just thinking about my mother.”

  “Does she know where you are?”

  “I sent her a postcard—”

  She suddenly felt awake again. Did people still send postcards?

  “It’s better than nothing, I suppose. If you disappeared tomorrow would you send me a postcard?”

  “No.”

  “I knew it. I’d use telepathy.”

  He thought, Would I really not send one?

  They went out later and had dinner at a Viet place called Ngon near the Victory Monument, an open-air place with frangipanis and fans and tables with bowls of spices and stone mortars. They ate bowls of boun with vermicelli and fried nem and chilled coconuts with the tops lopped off. There was nothing more to say for the evening. Finally he did say, as if it didn’t matter and he had not been thinking about it for a while, “You know, I think we should go to Phnom Bayong after all. Your father will approve.”

  Along the river an hour later the lamps burned in a soft and solitary splendor, their stationary light enabling the eye to see the motion of the unlit waters below. They walked arm in arm underneath them and from the river came the sweet humidity that raised their spirits and made Sophal want to empty a bottle of vodka. High clouds soared above the city in monochrome, hammer-headed and seeming to swim like sharks upward toward a dimly present moon. At the horizon the pink flashes of lightning silent against the same clouds. There was no rain yet and the young girls sat with their boys in the gloom eating ice creams and watching them pass. The grass sloping down to the river made him dreamy too. He told Sophal about the river his father used to take him boating on. The very evocation of it in words made it materialize anew in his mind, from where it had been absent for a very long time—for a period, in fact, that felt emotionally like centuries. The river, the home country and its dull and heavy memories. The river was called the Ouse and it ran through the Sussex countryside from the village of Piddinghoe down to the sea at Newhaven. And, long ago, his father took him sailing on a small catamaran to show him how. The river ran between mud and chalk banks and in high summer there was a feeling of death and stillness upon it, abandoned tankers rusting in the shallows, the dragonflies playing over it just as they did here. The cemeteries dated from the Middle Ages, from the age of Stephen’s War, “when God and his angels slept.” The river smelled of salt and stewing algae. If only he had known it had been a premonition of Phnom Penh. Both places had an atmosphere of decay but the decay of each was different. The English kind was the sweet torpor at the end of a long and successful innings; it was recent and slightly weary. It was a kind of refusal to live violently and intensely. It was smugly moral. The Khmer decay, on the other hand, was long-standing but the Khmers themselves were quickly emerging out of it. There was no weariness or old age about them. At least that was his way of interpreting it. Perhaps mistakenly. The Khmers didn’t have time to lecture either themselves or others. They were young and wounded, but their wounds were so deep that they could be ignored for a while. Their sadness was of a different kind, too. It was from the 1970s, a time that every fifty-year-old could remember vividly. It was the sadness of generations which had entirely lost their youth for nothing and who had no choice but to forget. The sadness of England, however, lay precisely in her tremendous memory, in her refusal to forget anything. Increasingly, and now definitively, he felt that his affinity lay with the Khmers. They were indefinably alive. In their faces, in their eyes, there was the constant surprise of life itself, that horrifying and sweet wonder. Their ancientness took a different form from his own. It was almost as if it was physical and unconscious, thousands of generations compressed into gesture and speech patterns and quick understandings. They were more subtle than the English, but they were less cerebral. They were more alive, but less consciously joyous or boisterous. For centuries, and even now, the whites wanted to improve them, drag them into a future which for the whites themselves no longer existed. But the project would always fail. The pale ones would never understand the real substance. They floated like boatmen on the surface of the Khmer pond, the glassy, fragile consciousness of this race whom the whites despised and whom the most philanthropic among them subconsciously resented.

  As his father’s catamaran sailed quietly down to the open sea, he used to feel a kind of death wish, the urge to keep sailing across the Channel toward Dieppe and another life as a crook. It was as if when you didn’t know what to do with your life, a river could save you by making you purely unconscious. Even the way his father taught him nautical knots seemed to be a silent preparation for something furtive in the future, and his father was aware of it. When they were alone out at sea riding waves, his father asked him about his school and his friends, and everything that Robert said in reply to these questions merely served to illustrate how hopelessly alone and isolated he was. Nor did it seem that anything could be done about it. He was a lonely kid and his teachers often remarked upon the fact. He sometimes missed school altogether and went walking through the woods until it grew dark and he had to make his way home. He always lied about the reason for his lateness. “You’re a funny little bugger,” his father would say, and his bafflement was tenderly neutral. Looking back on it now, it seemed to Robert that everything had been a sign pointing to a future liberation far from his own home—because already then, all those years ag
o, he had been in the peculiar situation of not loving that home but of feeling that it didn’t suit him at all and never would. And so it had turned out.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Robert and Sophal parted ways by the Psar Rus and he headed back down to the river in a quiet mood, eventually turning along 106 and walking up in the drizzle alongside the lawned gardens. To the right, by shambolic tin walls and shaggy trees, the girls stood at the corners waiting for people like him and men slept inside waiting tuk-tuks as if the night was already over. Higher up the street turned to rubble and grit and litter and the dogs stood there watching him, assessing his strengths and weaknesses. An alley swung to the right toward 102 and as he passed into it he saw a young woman ahead of him picking her way gingerly through the long oblong puddles and scattered refuse from the day market. Thrown together inside the claustrophobic alley they walked a few yards apart until she turned left at the large trees and into the pool-like darkness around them and up toward the golden lights of the Mansions. He hung back a little to let her ascend the steps and then followed her into the lobby, where she didn’t stop at the reception desk, breezing past into the corridor that led to the stairwell.

  He went the opposite way, up to his apartment, but on the first floor he stopped midway and waited for her to reappear on the floors above him. Something about her was unusual. Not the shiny black dress or the heels, nor the tight white summer blouse and the careful pinning of the hair. It was that something about her was not unfamiliar.

  When she did appear it was on the third floor. Her hand was on the rail and then she stopped as well, halfway down the landing, and she saw him standing below her, looking up. When their eyes met he recognized her and she him and she flinched and stepped back from the rail, but not entirely out of view. Sothea, for her part, was astonished more than anything else and she didn’t know what to do but go forward until she was at Davuth’s door. Robert turned toward his own door, unlocked it and hung back, wanting to change his mind and go up and speak to her.

  He couldn’t think of any conceivable reason that she had appeared out of nowhere in his own building. He glanced back up at the third floor but she had slipped from view.

  Feeling rash, he decided to go up and find her. Once on the third floor, however, he found himself in an empty corridor with no Sothea. He walked down it slowly and peered through the windows of each unit and as he did so he felt a sickening giddiness and inertia. Here was a person who could expose him easily, but whom he could expose as well. And if Sothea was there, wasn’t Simon likely to be there, too? Perhaps even in one of these units on the third floor!

  There was only a faint echo of old Chinese music coming from one of these units and he went down to the ground floor and out into the street to wait for her. He went across the street and sat on the bags of cement that were stacked outside the Korean construction site and waited for some time until it was late enough for the motodop drivers to sullenly drive off empty-handed. The long wait began and as one o’clock came he heard, as if hours in advance of themselves, cocks crow in the gloom behind the embassy. The silent lightning kept him company, but even so Sothea did not reemerge until well after three. She was obviously still shaken and nervous because as she stood at the top of the steps she looked up and down Street 102 and when she saw that it was empty she started off down the same alley through which she had come a few hours earlier.

  He followed her, almost in disbelief, and they walked briskly onto the long, humid lawn bristling with crickets. She slipped into this darkness so effectively that he could barely see her until they came out on the far side. There was a bar there with a few drunken old Frenchmen sitting outside on cane chairs with their women and Sothea darted to a corner just behind the market, not looking behind but seeming to know that all was not well. He caught up to her as they turned into the smaller street and when he was a few feet away she turned and saw him and her eyes went wide with horror and she began to run. He called out, “No, wait!” and ran after her and to his surprise she relented almost at once because she couldn’t run in her heels.

  She slowed and then stopped and turned a second time, and this time she was composed and cold and ready to hit back.

  “It’s all right,” he said, and held up his hands, and she saw that he was not nearly as angry as she had expected.

  They took each other in for a while and then she sat down on the curb and he sat down as well and he felt the sweat massing on the palms of his hands. He had prepared nothing to say and now that he had to say something he couldn’t find any words at all. It was pointless demanding explanations, they both knew what had happened. Moreover, he knew that Simon had done all the planning and the execution. She had had nothing to do with it. Finally he said, “So where is Simon?” and left it at that.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “I know he’s at Colonial Mansions—I followed you from there.”

  “He’s not there.”

  “I think he is. I need to know which apartment he’s in.”

  “No, it’s someone else. Simon and me broke up.”

  “Then where did he go?”

  She shook her head and there was something final about it that was very real.

  “So you really don’t know?” he said.

  “Maybe he’s dead.”

  “What about my money? What about my passport?”

  “I dun know about that.”

  “You must have been with him when he spent the money.”

  “He spent some…We spent some—I am sorry.”

  He suddenly flew into a small repressed rage.

  “You two—you really fucked me over.”

  “Yes. It was bad thing.”

  “So now you say it was a bad thing.”

  It wasn’t even really my money, he thought.

  “I think you better make merit,” he said, half joking.

  “Yes, you right. It was bad thing.”

  “It was bad thing and now we’re here in the same city.”

  “Yes, it crazy.”

  “Is that all you can say?”

  “I said it crazy.”

  “You think it’s just crazy and that’s that?”

  “Yes, it crazy.”

  “Then it’s OK, it’s just crazy and not, you know, evil or malicious or anything really bad?”

  She shrugged and looked down at her feet and soon he calmed down and it was he who felt sorry for being a bully. He ought to have known—it was a small country, you ran into people again quite quickly, and Phnom Penh was small as well, for all its secrets.

  It was Simon he needed to find. But then again, did he really need to find him now? What would he do?

  “I see,” he ended up saying, and his hands went limp.

  She, however, roused herself and began to get up.

  “I’ll walk with you,” he said.

  They went slowly through the dead city and he asked her what she was doing now. She looked a lot more elegant than she had upriver, more composed and in command of herself, and she said she was working in a club and living with a friend of her mother’s in Toul Kork.

  “Why were you at Colonial Mansions?” he said.

  “I have a friend there. You know what I mean.”

  “It’s a coincidence, isn’t it?”

  “Lot of people live there.”

  “Yes, but still…”

  It was vexing, but he couldn’t push the issue. She strode on ahead of him and he had to quicken his feet to keep up with her.

  “Where are you going now?” he said.

  “Home.”

  “But—when was the last time you talked to Simon?”

  “Some time ago. I not gonna see him again.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “But if you see him—”

  She let him come up level with her and she looked at him carefully and she felt sorry for him, but she couldn’t tell him the truth. She had felt sorry for him when sh
e saw him at the river house, so lost and clueless.

  “What?”

  “Well, I want my stuff back.”

  She sneered, “You never get it back. Get new stuff.”

  “Can’t you help me get it back?”

  “No.”

  “Maybe I’ll go to the police then.”

  Finally she stopped.

  “Maybe,” she said, “the police are already near you. Did you know that?”

  “Why shouldn’t I go to them?”

  “I’ll say you liar. You won’t go to them—they are after you.”

  “They are? Why are they after me?”

  “I don’t know, do I? I think they are.”

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  He was bluffing and they both knew it. She suddenly stepped into the middle of the street and raised her hand—she had seen a motodop far off under the glistening wet trees.

  Then, as if relenting, she turned back to him.

  “Where you stay?” she said.

  “At the same place we were. The Colonial.”

  She seemed immensely surprised, though it had been obvious enough.

  “You better leave there,” she said adamantly.

  “Why should I?”

  “I said you better leave. I’m giving you advice.”

  “I won’t leave.”

  “All right.”

  The motodop swept up and, almost without stopping, scooped her up onto the backseat where she sat sidesaddle and flashed him a parting look before the bike turned and roared away toward the boulevard. She stared at him as it did, and she smiled and waved and there was a strange innocence and fatalism in both the smile and the wave. It was as far as he was going to get with her, even if he did see her again. He gave up and walked back to the Mansions, defeated by her agility, and went up to his apartment and stewed in his brooding uncertainty for a long time, smoking cheroots and eating pistachios as he often did late at night. He walked about the room spitting the shells aimlessly and he circled around the great and ominous idea that his enemy was only a few yards away from him on the third floor, incredible as it seemed. Simon, asleep on a bed identical to his own and under the same roof. But it was not clear what he should do. He could ignore him and they could carry on with their exchanged identities for as long as they needed. Or he could go up now and confront him and they could have it out and bring it to an end and go back to being who they were really were. He could get his passport back and return to Elmer and nothing would be said about it. He could do that, but as soon as he understood that he could do it, he didn’t want to. It was just that he was forced to. He couldn’t ignore Simon for long. They would meet in the street, word would get around and everything would be ruined. It wasn’t much that would be ruined, but it was something he had created by and for himself and he didn’t want to let it go so easily. He began to feel agitated and paranoid the more he thought about it, and soon he had wandered into the kitchen and picked up a knife from one of the drawers. He wrapped it in a tea towel and slipped outside onto the landing. Then he went to the stairwell and up to the third floor. He then went along the third-floor landing, past the flowering balconies with their French-style iron tables, and past the series of darkened and curtained windows where not a single light was on. He had a feeling that one of these doors would suddenly snap open and a confused and sleepy Simon would stick his head out and he would have him—for a moment—at his mercy. But since he didn’t know which door it was, he could only pass it, and then pause by the stairwell at the far end and feel his hand shaking. The sweat dripped onto the floor and a cloud of moths crazed by the landing lights danced around his head while he collected his thoughts and realized that he had better go back down and replace the knife in its drawer. He locked his door and turned off the lights then sat by the window and looked up at the third floor. But then again, maybe he had leaped to an absurd and exaggerated conclusion.