Hunters in the Dark Read online

  —

  He took a motodop back into Pailin. The town was now almost asleep and in the Hang Meas restaurant he ordered a pho and a Lao beer and pork satay with cucumbers. The karaoke was still going strong and the grounds were alive with roaming Khmer girls in heels, their eyes finding him with ease and laying upon him a dallying charm. He drank on with the dark Lao beer all alone in that restaurant with the red lanterns stirring quietly as the wind picked up, the long tassels moving slowly back and forth like horse tails. Two thousand. It was something from the half-forgotten realm of sorcery. Years ago, he thought, you got an education for nothing and now here you are, boy, a rabbit shooting out of a hat, all set up with no future at all but with a stroke of luck that has served you right. It was a fine thing and no one saw it coming. Moreover, he resolved never to set foot in a casino ever again. He was not going to lose what he had won so flippantly. He was going to hold on to it and plant it for a while and, if possible, make it flower.

  TWO

  Across the fields of grass came the winds that had no obstacle, the summer breezes that still tasted of the Downs and distant fuel. The heads of the tall grasses rippled and they made a green horizon that moved with this spirit, and he ran through the stalks on his bloodied feet until the wind forgot him and he was alone on the rise that culminated in the Stensons’ barns. He woke just as he saw them. The room in which he found himself was bathed in early sun, the curtains flapping because he had left the windows open. The heat came upon him as if suddenly. He found his skin already drenched and acclimatized and the cocks crowed in the Khmer gardens across the road where sugarcane grew along the verge.

  He got up and showered and dressed, his fingers shaking because he was not yet sure how real or unreal it was. The plants coated with dust and the skies already beginning to darken at the silver edges. Packing neatly he went down fully ready to move and asked the sleepy boys if they could find a car to take him on to Battambang.

  “No can,” they said, sadly shaking their heads.

  “Of course you can.”

  “No can. It no can.”

  “Just call a car—I’ll pay one dollar.”

  “No dollar, no car.”

  It went on for some time.

  It took fifteen minutes to organize the car and he went into the restaurant and ordered Nescafé and pho and another pack of Alain Delons with a glass of watermelon juice. He sat there by the window looking out at flame vines hanging above a pool of shade. The hotel now seemed to be ruinously empty but for cleaning staff and hordes of boys in pressed white shirts, and from afar came the vibrancy of the mountains that were nevertheless burned half black and the white glare of frangipani.

  At this hour the stillness and the quiet vitality of things had returned. You thought of home, but with a distant sadness. He wondered where he would go. Battambang was just the next city along. He knew nothing about it, it was just a place to go. Drifting, and drifting consciously. One could drift for a long time and not mind and where life was cheap and unhurried it rarely mattered. He decided then to go and walk around Pailin since the car was not going to arrive for some time. He told this to the girls. They smiled and said nothing and he went out into the heat with a curious determination.

  —

  He walked up the main road, up and up until he was at a Victory Monument exactly like the one in Phnom Penh. From here a road led up to a temple on a small hill called Phnom Yat. It was announced by a gigantic Buddha statue which looked down on the town. A giant in a gold tunic, a clean pink skin, the immense hand raised in the mudra of ayodha. He climbed up the steep shaded path to the temple steps, with a line of blue demons pulling the naga serpent like a tug of war. And so into the walled plateau filled with life-size figures brilliantly painted. Trees hung low among the pavilions and the broken green glass floors, and they tossed and hissed in a burning high wind. He passed a basin of black water with three stone human heads half buried in it. Next to it was a depiction of Buddhist Hell: white figures in black loincloths being tortured. A man having his tongue pulled out with a pair of pincers. The local Khmer Rouges must have known it well. Higher up, bodhisattvas, princesses playing long lutes (he didn’t know, he had to guess). A figure of a corpse lying on the earth while vultures tore out his intestines. At the top he came into a little court with three-headed elephants and tall gold flag posts and here the tree-dotted plain appeared with the mountains around it. A polished gold-plated tapered pagoda with tinkling coinlike chimes around the top mast, a reminder that the temple had been built by Shan Burmese immigrants.

  He sat on the wall and watched the shades of quick clouds speeding across the plain. There was no sound but the wind-tormented trees and the chimes of the pagoda. Why not here, then, he wondered—a place to linger? It was a place with its own solitude and austerity and he liked it. It seemed to have an idea about death and about suffering. He could feel it very clearly. He didn’t know what it was and he didn’t need to know. The monks half asleep in the shade, the shrill chimes and the scenes of Hell just below the mirror-bright gold spire. There was something that beckoned him deeper in.

  He walked slowly back down the hill and went to the market, alongside which the notorious brothels were supposed to lie. There was nothing there, and it was clear there would be nothing there later either. The former life of the town had moved on, it was taking a different shape. He returned to the hotel and asked the girls if his car was there yet. It was on its way. He sat in the lobby and drank a Sprite.

  —

  When the car finally rolled into the Hang Meas courtyard with its monumental gold cockerel he saw that it was the same man who had driven him from the border the day before. So it seemed that everyone knew everyone in this incestuous land. The Toyota was caked in dust the dark red of ground chili powder.

  It was now ten. Robert went out into the hot sun and they shook hands and he said “Battambang” and they haggled and settled on a price.

  “Where you hotel in Battambang?”

  Robert shrugged because he had no idea. That too was settled. The driver knew the best place for seven dollars, and there was no luxury option in Battambang. The dollars were handed over and they had a coffee together outside. As they sat on plastic chairs without shade the sun made him dry and still and happy and the driver looked him over with a cool shrewdness. It was certain enough that wanderers like himself had passed this way before. They represented a living to some, to the drivers and guides especially. The driver asked Robert now if he needed a guide. Didn’t everyone need a guide in Battambang? But the other shook his head and said that he was just passing through and had no thoughts of visiting things. He didn’t even know there were things to visit. Oh yes, sir, there were things to visit. The temple of Wat Ek Phnom and the temple of Sampeau and others. There was an all-inclusive price and Mr. Deth knew all the history.

  “Your name is Deth?”

  But the driver saw no joke in it, not at all.

  “My name Deth. I know all facts and the temple.”

  “So I’m going to Ek with Deth?”

  “I very safe driver man. All hotel recommend Mr. Deth.”

  —

  On the road with Mr. Deth. He shaded his eyes and looked up at the deer on the roof of the Hang Meas. One couldn’t say what they were for or what they meant. The deer of Buddha’s park twenty-five centuries ago. Deth played Thai music on his radio and the windows were rolled down because it was not yet high heat and the fields offered a cooler wind.

  They went through wide meadows filled with bales. The hay was already roasted dry and dark. By the road great acacias and cherry trees shadowed the pitted surface, robusta coffee bushes with umbrella forms. The sky was untouched by clouds. Kapoks with pagoda-shaped tops cooled the walls of polychrome temples. The land near Battambang was charred black. The fields smoldering as far as the eye could see, since the farmers had burned the topsoil, leaving ghostly papaya trees standing in the smoke. They churned the iron-red dust and children in t
he yards of stilted houses watched them go by and the strange demonic charred darkness of the hills began to disquiet him. Yet the dry season was ending. The trees on the plain were entirely solitary, gaunt in their apartness and they threw no shadow onto the chocolate earth. Through this paradoxical dark brightness the people moved with a vivid lethargy and calm. Bicycles floating, the women with poles slung across their shoulders and masked by their krama, glancing up without animus. It was a day of dust, and yet the rain would come later.

  —

  The first things he saw in Battambang were faded billboards looming over the river advertising ABC beer. That river was green and still, men asleep on the grass slopes on either side. Under that vast sky now puffed with plume-white rococo clouds they seemed becalmed. Deth stopped and they got out and stretched for a bit. They were on a boulevard laid out alongside the river, with new cement benches inscribed with the words Diamond Cement. There were cream-cake French facades on the far side of the road, old shophouses. There was a generator chugging on the riverbank, and a series of nets lying idle. A bridge baked in the sun and along the embankment lay a sprinkling of trash and glass sparkling amid the high grasses. The traffic circles with their whitewashed curbs buzzed with a soft rotary motion of bikes, and the air was light and dry and saline with the near-invisible dust. He liked it at once. There was a dried-out fountain with sculptured nagas and a mosque singing somewhere up the river. He couldn’t imagine leaving in a hurry, any more than he could imagine arriving in one.

  —

  At the Alpha Hotel, Robert went up to his cell-like room and had a cold shower. He had paid off Deth and they had parted amicably, though the Khmer was a little clingy as they did so. Did Monsieur want a driver for the following day? He had declined, but now he wondered if he had done the right thing. He heard arrogant French voices wafting up from the lobby. Arrogant merely because they assumed they were understood when they were not. He lay on the bed and smoked: the Delons, he decided after all, were raw and bad. There was a sign on the door which said, Do not to bring the explodes or the cars into the room. After a short rest he went down to the bar, which was entered through a lobby filled with marble Buddhas and disturbingly exuberant fish tanks. Little red lanterns swung in the wind from the open doors, as they had at the Hang Meas, and above there was a polished wood ceiling with Chinese paintings of birds. The place, he could sense, was about to be remodeled into something more modern. A year from now it would look completely different. He got a shot of Royal Stag and watched the French group of middle-aged women trying to order from a garbled menu.

  “C’est quoi, dove on fire?” one of them asked the waitress.

  “Chicken fire,” the girl said slowly.

  “Et Salad bin Laden?”

  —

  When the day had cooled he walked down to the river along a straight road by a temple complex. Where it greeted the water there was a sign for Electricité de Battambang and a row of rather grand French government buildings, each dedicated to different indispensable functions. “Battambang Water Supply” announced by a grandiose sign of gold decoration, with the water tanks rising behind it, the Provincial Hall like a viceroy’s villa. Mansions with guardian lions and cannons at the gates, but with a slight suffocation, a feeling of termination and decay. A faded park with a statue of an ape rising from the long grass and a tricerotops dinosaur. A legless beggar on a skateboard followed him for a while on this road, saying nothing, just paddling indefatigably with his arms as they went under the tall trees that almost met in the middle and formed a very French vault.

  There was a shimmering in the air: the eternal frangipanis. He walked for a few hundred yards until the skateboarder gave up, his arms exhausted, and the Englishman sat down on the bank among white flowers and tall lush grass blades and caught a little repose. The place was so quiet that he could lie there until the sky began to darken and the sound of the cicadas rose in the high grass as dusk approached.

  Looking down the river it seemed almost rural, with only a girdered railway bridge in the distance. People had begun to walk under the trees at the top of the bank as if in a passeggiata and a longtail came puttering down the river. The Sangker was unusually high because of a downpour earlier in the week. He got up and walked as far as a long cable slung across the river, though submerged deep in the middle, and on the other side he saw huts on stilts and little boys throwing themselves nonchalantly into the water with fishing lines wrapped around their wrists. Stumps of archaic trees separated the drifts of trash. Farther back were new hotels, the Ty King and the Classy. They seemed to have come out of nowhere, crystallizations of alien capital. The lights in front of the French palaces came on but the windows offered nothing but a kind of administrative torpor and as he made his way back to the Electricité de Battambang he wondered about the stern and splendid functionaries who must have once inhabited them.

  It made him think of his own shabby clothes, his semi-poverty. He hated being poor as much as he hated how predictable he was. His blond hair always cut in the same way, thrown casually to the right of a parting all his life. The clothes that never varied because he hated thinking about them. His life never seemed to go into surplus, into wonderful excess. He never had a surplus, never had a truly fine pair of shoes or a shirt that wasn’t strictly necessary. His girlfriends came and went too easily; acquired in fits of absentmindedness and lost in the same way. It baffled him. But when he was lucid he realized that he was waiting for something different. Beyond his own life there was, without question, a parallel one that he might one day acquire. It was a fantasy that could not be defended.

  Like his father, he had a fear of being in deficit and in need. It was a fear that came from nowhere, it had no real source. “It’s just my character,” he used to think. He never bought himself anything extraneous or luxurious. Just those cut-price tickets to Reykjavik and Athens. Yet he was never broke, never in trouble. He always looked ahead and made sure that he had those extra pounds under the bed just in case. He never jumped off cliffs with empty pockets.

  But here such calculations didn’t matter so much, and maybe that was why he had warmed to the country. Almost everybody was poorer than himself. He had arrived in Bangkok a month earlier not even knowing where he was going to stay and he had been able to live in that tangled city quite well for almost nothing: a flophouse in Ekkamai and salted fish grilled on the street with kanom jeen noodles and lettuce for ninety baht every night and nothing to do but walk around by himself and meet the occasional hippie girl at pavement eateries. He was sure, however, that it had been the happiest month of his life thus far. The happiest and also the vaguest: the two were connected.

  —

  After two weeks in Bangkok he moved down to an even seedier place, the Rex, on Sukhumvit near Soi 38. His money began to run down. He had come there without any plan or vision, and a two-month summer holiday was always hard to fill satisfactorily. He called his parents and they sent him a little more money. “What are you doing there?” his mother asked, sounding as if she were on another planet. “It doesn’t sound like a holiday to us, Bobby.” What did it sound like to them?

  He was beginning to like the heat and the pace, the day-by-day gentle sinking into his own laziness. The other backpackers whom he met at the outside café in the passageway in Soi 39/1—a place he went every day for lunch—told him about Laos and Cambodia. They portrayed Cambodia as a tough paradise where you could live even cheaper than you could in Bangkok. He learned all about the gambling buses that went to the border from Lumpini Park every morning at 5 a.m. and the $3 flophouses in Battambang where you could live “like a fish.”

  Some nights he went down to the dingy eatery on the ground floor of the Rex and sat among the lonely old white men and their solemn girls eating spring rolls and drinking Coke. Even this place was better than being at a loose end at the pub in Elmer, the Jack and the Beanstalk. Even the girls here were more beautiful than the ones in the Jack and the Beanstalk. He read
novels that he bought in the secondhand shops and later at night, with a few baht, he went down to Nadimos, a Lebanese restaurant on Soi 24, and sat outside next to a fake temple wall and smoked a shisha pipe with a Lebanese coffee in a copper pot and daydreamed. The towers all around shining with lofts and gardens, the ridiculous lions of the Davis Hotel across the street and the fat Arabs with their enviable molls lounging with their shisha and looking remarkably well maintained. There was a life here that he had never imagined. Even Bangkok was not at all what he had expected. It was not the city of Hangover II or The Beach. It purred with affluent leisure and women dressed to slay. It was a shop window with no glass. One could feel the sucking tide of Asian money flowing through it.

  It was in those moments at Nadimos under the awnings when the evening rain fell, smoking his shisha, that he realized how much he hated where he came from. He was certainly beginning to realize that he didn’t want to go back. Night by night the thought grew in immensity inside him until it no longer felt quite as incredible.

  To begin with, there was no future for him in the little village of Elmer. It was like a posting on a colonial frontier, except that the frontier was merely East Sussex. Elmer had a green like most English villages. There were timbered pubs and gardens that petered out into cornfields, and paths with stiles and fields with stooks in summer. You could walk around it in three hours.

  There was a railway station and an abattoir. It was sweet with old secrecies and it was home and would be for a long time. He hiked among the abandoned flint farmhouses above Bevendean when he dropped in on his grandparents. He had been going there all his life and it was like turning over stones that have been turned over already a hundred thousand times and yet what else was there to do but turn them over? He talked politics with his grandfather, an old trade unionist with a dark red china bust of Lenin on his front-room mantelpiece. Old Albert had once been a trombonist on a Cunard cruise ship and later a chauffeur for a famous professor at the University of Sussex. He was filled with quiet disdains. “Those blummin’ people,” he would say vaguely to his grandson, referring to the classes above him who were perhaps dying out as quickly as his own class. He complained bitterly about the trashy hip-hop blasting from the house next door as he was quietly trying to practice Count Basie tunes on his trombone in the basement. “Those blummin’ people, they play their blummin’ noise all night long at weekends. They’ve got no jobs.” The old man told him he should go and live in London. But Robert himself had never wanted to live there. He was not suited to a city like that. He had always wanted a quiet life with his books and a hint of woodland and sea out the window. Too quiet and withdrawn, his parents had decided. They ceased preaching to him about his ambitions. He didn’t have any.