Hunters in the Dark (17 page)

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.

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?

Later it seemed to her that this might have been the moment in which she decided to leave Europe, but in reality she had never been quite happy there. Easy to love Paris, yes, easy to love Sunday-morning walks on the Île de la Cité with her Frenchman and the pastries at Stohrer on the rue Montorgueil and a hundred other things great and small. But even with Claude she always felt alone. She was not really in love with him. Her favorite place in the city, after all, was the church of Saint Gervais and Protais, near the river, whose back door was always left open late at night. She would go there and sit alone in the pews and feel the musty medieval ghosts in that Gothic nave. She was sure she could have been a psychic if she had wanted to. An upper-middle-class Khmer girl with a little family money but no inner reason to be in that world apart from a medical education and a taste for escape. What she had escaped from was her own family. The gloom that surrounded them like an invisible miasma. They were people who frequently liked to quip, “It's a miracle we're alive!” But if it was a miracle, who could explain it, and why should other miracles not exist? “Do I believe in miracles?” she began to ask herself. “Me, a doctor in the making, a rational agent?” Could a body really remain perfectly preserved for years in a sealed room? Her father said yes. But it was a miracle anyway.

It was now her own life as a temporary emigrant that began to feel insubstantial. All along, it had been her father who drove her from behind, who constantly admonished her to succeed in Europe. She was doing it for him. Even listening to classical music—it was his urging, his idea. It was he who had driven her to be ambitious and study in Paris. In reality it had been his own dream and she was the one who now had to fulfill it. Not being her own dream, however, it sat uneasily with her. She was not, in fact, ferociously ambitious. She wanted to drift and roam and roll through childish adventures, not get up for 9 a.m. lectures and dissect cadavers in cold rooms. Yet she also thought having dreams, the very concept of having a dream, was childish and absurd. Why did one need to have illusions like that in order to just live? Living was not a project with a propaganda film driving it. It was pulled along by mystery and pleasure, not by a desire to have a big house in Neuilly by the time she was forty.

And increasingly, finally, the enchantment of Paris began to wear off. The sullen bitterness under the surface, the men pissing in the streets defiantly, the feel of quiet decay. It was a slow-motion decay which had gone hand in hand with a slightly hysterical campaign of urban renewal and antiseptic respectability. But the men were still pissing in the street and there was still a feeling of stasis and creeping old age. Europe dying on its feet of torpor and smugness and debt. Half the people her own age were unemployed, living in a state of dependency. At the hospital they were continually handing out free antidepressants to middle-class brats who didn't want to pay for them. It would have been morally shocking in Phnom Penh, of course, and privately she
was
shocked. But her boyfriend scoffed at her. Why shouldn't they have free Paxil for their imaginary mental disorders? “You're all brainwashed to accept it,” she retorted. “You have no connection to real life. You're on life support and you don't even know it.” Work isn't everything, he would sometimes say, thinking that she would agree with him, given her wonderfully lazy proclivities. And yet she knew it was false. Work indeed was everything and she began to wonder if she would ever have work that meant something to her. She didn't want to be a doctor, however. Working full-time as a doctor in Paris had the vague feeling of living as a tourist in an expensive boutique now designed merely for other tourists. What her father didn't understand because he lived mentally in another age was that now it was Europe that was adrift and listless. Her sense of moral superiority was also adrift—how often Sophal had to listen to overheated journalistic lectures about trafficking and servitude in her own country from these fleshy know-it-alls, who in reality knew nothing at all about anything. Thank God, she began to think severely, you're here to save us. To make us more like you.

She returned to the bedroom and kissed Robert on his cheek and walked back out into the fresh, wet early morning and downstairs to the lobby, where the boys were all asleep like figures in a painting. The rain had finally stopped and she walked down to Norodom and went along the boulevard in the lonely coolness, glad to be alone again and wondering about what had happened. It didn't occur to her to think about whether she had enjoyed it. Enjoyment was not the issue yet. There was something graver at stake. But this grave thing was—apart from being grave—distressingly unclear. It was about whether she had thrown herself into a well.

She found the first open café in a side street and sat at an outside table with a double espresso and a croissant and smoked her Wonders as the traffic began to thicken and a pale light spread across the facades of the travel agents and two-bit boutique hotels and chic bakeries. There must be a moment when happiness begins—an actual, precise moment—and she began to think that she was experiencing that moment now. She let the smoke calm her and still her shaking hands.

When they had calmed she remembered other moments like this in the past. When her French boyfriend had asked her to come with him to see his family in Avignon. But on that occasion she had refused. The prospective happiness had been too elaborate, too planned, and her prim refusal of it had made complete sense only hours afterward. One didn't become happy so easily. She was convinced, perhaps childishly, that it had to be unexpected. That was the problem with her whole European phase: where was the unexpected?

Simon was the unexpected incarnate.

She walked home then and let herself in through the outer gate and went through the dripping garden as the maids were beating the carpets in the damp air. They looked up at her with amused complicity, those two old women who had known her since she was small. She went up to her room and fell onto her bed in her clothes and slept into the late afternoon, and when she woke the koel birds were announcing an early evening of mosquitoes and low sun and drinks with ice at the edge of growing shadows.