Hunters in the Dark (12 page)

She had intended to go back to the house and practice the piano, but as the skies darkened she lost interest in the thought of Brahms and asked the charming boy if he'd like to go to one of the Chinese places on Monivong and then maybe a bar on the other side of the river. He seemed an idle type, and not as busy as she'd thought at first. His days empty and long and confused; like hers, in other words. He said he'd love to.

As he smiled his consent there was a quick sympathy between them, a little flash in the dark.

They took another tuk-tuk up to Monivong. When she was alone, she said, she loved coming to the kitsch Chinese seafood places at the far end of this boulevard, which lay well beyond the tourist city. They were places which her parents liked as well: Khmer, familial, with a touch of Chinese garishness. On the far side of Sihanouk, in the darker stretches of the boulevard, there were a score of these places identifiable by their stark white glare, their gold-and-red interiors and their fish tanks on the street.

There was Lyky, with its bright white interiors and glass-screened private booths and, farther down on the same side, Man Han Lou, a place of nacre cabinets and palms with its live fish tanks outside. It was there, in the end, that they ate. It was like a spare Chinese tearoom of former decades. They ordered sea bass barbecued in rock salt and rice
prahok,
because, she said, he had obviously never tried the national dish.

When it was finally dark outside strings of blue lights came on in the windows. They were content to talk about food for a long time; the ordinariness of the subject was a relief. The
prahok,
meanwhile, was a little mound of rice with flecks of red in it and when he put a forkful in his mouth the intense fermented saltiness of the ground-up fish made his eyes water.

“That's—that's something else.”

“I think it's garum,” she said. “Some people say the Romans brought it here once upon a time.”

“It's vile. But it's delicious-vile.”

“That's the supreme delicious.”

“Or the supreme vile?”

“It's both. My father has to eat it every day. I can't quite.”

“It's like eating dead eels made into a paste.”

“That's not far off. Afterward we'll go for a drink and get the taste out of your mouth.”

Her eyes were merry, she had it all planned out.

“I'll be awake for a week,” he said. Tears were on his cheeks.

They went over the Japanese Friendship Bridge on motodops, struggling through the swarms of bikes which from the air must have looked like ants competing for traffic space on a single banana leaf. He was behind her and could see the slim arch of her back in its white cotton dress bobbing and weaving ahead of him and the flicks of her hair as the river wind caught them halfway across. It was later than he had realized. How much time had gone by chatting over Vietnamese coffee?

The sun had begun to change color and dip toward the Tongle Sap, turning the water so bright that the longtails skimming across it were almost invisible. He felt a sharp exhilaration. The haze above the riverine construction sites burned a milky white, calm with a poisonous sultriness.

He followed her bike as it turned right on the far side of the bridge and moved quickly along a rural-looking road with small factories and warehouses and walls on either side. At its farthest end, where the road again turned right, there was a large beer garden called Golden Chroy Chang Var, with the girls seated outside in silk gowns. They were just gearing up for the evening trade. Here Sophal slowed, looked back at him and made an obscene but friendly gesture at the girls.

The road met up with the river and shadowed it and soon they were close to the machines and the cranes and the half-built skeletons of girders. Between the road and the water there was a string of shack bars held above the river by stilts and beams. The riverside was being redeveloped, and half of them had already been destroyed. In a few months they would all be gone, to be replaced by a treeless, shadeless river walk where no one would ever go. They stopped outside the last one in the row and went into an open-plan bar alive with a brisk wind. There was no one there. They went out onto a balcony with old leather chairs and a coffee table and fell into them with their legs up on the rail.

It was a sundowner bar, with waving reeds around it.

“I should be home playing Brahms,” she said after they had been drinking beers for a while. “But suddenly I'm bored with it. There's a party later at a friend's studio. A Dutch painter. Want to come?”

“All right, I could I guess. I don't go to parties much.”

“It's a small city, Simon. Soon you'll know everybody who you're ever going to know. It's either depressing or comforting—depending on how you look at it.”

“I'm just going to go along with it. If it's depressing I'll take a lot of pills—they're cheap here, no?”

“That's wisdom for you. That's what you ought to do.”

“I'm not leaving any time soon either. I like the sunsets here. I like a lot of things. I keep waiting for the homesickness but it never comes. It will come eventually, I suppose. Or maybe not. These old barang guys here don't seem to feel it.”

“I never asked them, myself.”

“I don't want to be one of them, though. That's my worst nightmare. I can't imagine turning into one of them.”

“But maybe they're happy—that's why they stayed.”

“Yeah, I guess. They feel at home, whatever that means.”

“That's a good reason to live somewhere—I
don't
think. You're like me, though, you're at a loose end. My father thinks it's a disaster. A generational disaster. He thinks we're all at a loose end.”

“Maybe we are. A generation of drifters.”

She blew between her teeth. “That's a massive generalization. I don't think it's true at all. Why, are you a drifter?”

“Well, I never thought of myself as one. God no. Anything but.”

“You
look
like a drifter. You feel like one.”

“Really?” he said. He was a little incredulous.

“It's just my instinct,” she said. “My instinct is you're a bit of a drifter.”

He denied it again, but she was teasing.

“Look at you,” she said. “Your clothes are all wrong. I
have
to take you shopping or something. You're dressed like an extra in a film. I should take you to Uniqlo or Muji or something. Unfortunately they don't have any branches in Cambodia. No, I'm teasing. You look very beautiful in your clothes. But I wonder where you got them.”

“A tailor,” he said. “I don't want to look like the usual barang slob.”

“So that's it.” She laughed. “No wonder my father likes you.”

The lights of the city came on over the far side of the river. Longtails with bales of okra passed underneath, the men looking up for a moment, and the wide power of the Mekong nearby could be sensed. The hour of sunset and they switched to sangria. He thought wistfully of all the people he had left behind in his old life. Now he began to wonder if any of them would notice his absence in the longer term. In the shorter term, of course, they would, but in the longer term, in the grander scheme of things, it was not so certain. As long as he kept his parents informed, meanwhile, nothing would happen. He was now sure of it. The friends and his job would all pass away. The friends, few in number; the job, minor. People walked out on minor jobs all the time.

It was an inexplicable callousness, but it had just come upon him out of nowhere. How had it come about so easily? It had not even surprised him. It's one thing to hate your life, but to merely dislike it—that was a greater mystery. There was no explaining that, because the dislike was total, not partial. There was no explaining
that
to even the most cynical Khmer girl. But somehow—a small miracle in itself—they understood it anyway and at a certain moment the questions died away.

They did now. Sophal told him about her father.

“He was a doctor for the Khmer Rouge, if he didn't tell you. He didn't choose to be—he was only thirty at the time. They overran his clinic and he had the choice to work for them or disappear. He chose not to disappear. As people usually do.”

“It must have been a terrible experience.”

“Everyone has their stories. His is not the worst, believe me. He and my mother came out alive.”

“I'm glad they did.”

“Ah, are you really a flatterer, Mr. Beauchamp?”

“Not really. I mean I'm glad they're alive.”

“Because they're alive, I'm alive. Are you glad about that too?”

“Absolutely.”

“I'm hungry again. I have a place we can go and eat
arepas
.”

“What?”

“
Arepas
. South American things. And mojitos.
Arepas
and mojitos.”

He thought that sounded excellent.

“OK. We'll go South American.”

“Sí, señor.”

They walked back to the dusty and now-dark road and felt the cement dust on their lips. It seemed to be everywhere. The workers from the sites were walking through clouds of the same dust back to the main road, a long line of white eyes under the trees. It was like a street far out in the country, in the villages. The mulberry trees and the bats winging through them. She walked beside him with a soft apprehension, her bare shoulders inviting an initiative which he was too shy to take. They passed a school called the Chroy Chang Var, a tiled French building with a large garden. They wandered in for a moment to look at a curious circle of half-life-size mythological figures in the middle of the garden. They could feel bats and sleepy guards momentarily stirred in the shadows. She turned to him for some reason with an enormous smile. At the bend in the road the karaoke girls were still there sitting on plastic chairs and lit by the glare of their Galaxies. One could smell fields nearby, burning hay and rubber. They walked past the clubs until they were among weeds and low white walls, alone in the dust, and the city was just an orange glare above the treeline. She brushed against him and something in him flared up silently. He was about to take her hand when she said, “It's not much of an English lesson, mistah.” He shook his head and they smiled and entered their conspiracy as quietly as two people entering a church by the side door in the middle of the night.

On the other bank of the river they found the China House and went in happy and sweaty and dusty and sat at the bar and ordered the long-anticipated mojitos with the
arepas
. It was an old Chinese shophouse with red lanterns and wooden floors, the bar alive with ice buckets and mint and miniature straw parasols. They rubbed the iced towels over their faces and a dark red dirt came off on the material. Within ten minutes they had sunk down the second round of mojitos and eaten the mint. Within twenty, they were in a world of their own.

They went upstairs and lay on one of the covered divans with their shoes off and ate curries and jasmine rice with gin and tonics. They hadn't spoken for an hour.

“Shouldn't you be back?” he finally asked.

“No, we're going to Pontoon. I'm taking you to Pontoon. It's where the bad boys go.”

“Are we bad boys?”

“We're not bad or boys. But we're going to Pontoon anyway.”

He looked at his watch and then remembered it wasn't there and she noticed the odd gesture.

“You don't have a watch,” she cried. “But you looked for it. That was quite cute.”

“Strange—I must have left it at the hotel.”

“Really? Maybe you don't have one, Mr. Simon.”

“A man without a watch,” he muttered. “Disreputable, eh.”

“It's better not to have one in this town. It'll get you into trouble. You should leave it at home every night from now on.”

“All right, I'll take your advice.”

Her foot had crossed over to his side and touched his. They were slipping downward and the Chinese screens around them blurred in his vision. An hour later they were in a tuk-tuk to Pontoon, a fresh and bright rain falling all around them.

Outside the club was a small crowd of Khmer drivers. They pushed their way to the doors and the bouncers nodded them through after glancing at Sophal's ID. At the end of a dark corridor lay an immense horseshoe bar with sofas around it. They danced for a while, Sophal raising and lowering her arms with her fingers extended in the positions of classical Khmer dance, and then they sat at the bar among the punters and the girls on the make and the waify NGO men who moralized by day and picked up girls by night. She ordered a bottle of white rum and they drank that with huge pieces of ice and Coke and watched the aid workers and diplomat staffers from India and Africa and Europe elided into a great pleasure-seeking confusion which the Khmer girls preyed on with a nimble awareness of the smallest advantage and disadvantage. It was amusing for an hour. But without a watch, he reflected, there was no way of knowing how long it was amusing for. When they came back onto the street, in any case, it felt much later. The streets had gone into that delicious comatose state of the late nights, the pavements given over to noodles and fried squid and cats, the tuk-tuks moving through the rain more silently. The desultory, lazy atmosphere of sex and loose ends and straying curiosity. There was no violence in the air at all, just a rambling sense of restlessness and anticipation. Soon, later still, the street people would come out of the shadows, the scavengers and sweeps and drifters who sifted through the city's rubbish and detritus in the hours before dawn, but they too had a listless gentleness.

He offered to walk her home to her parents' house and as they walked along the boulevards the lights went out again and the roads filled with their indolent floods. They came to the gates and she said, “We could go to Colonial Mansions instead—for a bit. I'll tell Daddy we couldn't find a driver with the blackout.”