The Map of Lost Memories (23 page)

While she dug through her map case again, Irene was aware of Marc observing her. She unfolded a paper scored with words that she had copied down when she was a girl. “This is what Mouhot wrote:
The region in which we are now traveling is rich in floral and faunal specimens. A superstitious dread of the jungle has kept it free from natives. The story of the district is quite like that of other regions of Indo-China. The forest is haunted by a million ghosts and it is bristling with enchanted cities. But that fact seems hardly worth recording inasmuch as any uninhabited place will be bristling with enchanted cities as long as men have the fecund imaginations necessary to construct them out of moonshine and stardust. One hears these reports so frequently that he begins to doubt his own common sense. It seems a concession to ignorance that I should be wasting this much time and space in recording a fable that is so lacking in originality of plot and refinement of expression
.”

Irene looked up, and the temple was still in front of her. Not a fantasy, not a mirage, it soared into the sky. “Three days after he wrote that, Mouhot discovered Angkor Wat.” She took Marc’s hand and held it to her cheek. She could smell the sweetness of tobacco on his skin. “It didn’t exist, and then it did. One day it wasn’t, and then the next day it was. That is how I can believe the history is out there.”

Irene rolled over on the mattress, the humidity trapped within the mosquito net clinging to her skin. The ceiling fan revolved lethargically, which was its most energetic speed, and she could not even feel a ripple through the gauze. Not quite awake, she blinked and saw Marc, hazy in the open doorway of their room at the Manolis Hotel.

“What time is it?” she asked.

“Almost seven.”

They had arrived in Phnom Penh from Angkor Wat the previous afternoon and fallen asleep before dinnertime, so tired that when Irene tossed awake from the heat in the middle of the night, one of her shoes was still on, and Marc, sprawled beside her, was wearing his shirt, which he had managed to unbutton but not take off.

Now he was clean-shaven and dressed in fresh clothes, and she asked, “Where are you going at this hour?”

“I’ve already been out,” he said. “I’ve been asking around. Henry has a villa on the road to Siem Reap. He’s been out there for almost two weeks, but he’s booked on the
Alouette
for the day after tomorrow.”

This was the same steamer they planned to be on, if Louis could organize their permits in time. “Did you see him?”

“No,” Marc replied.

Irene raised the mosquito net and tied it to the front post of the tester bed, a scarred, hulking piece of mahogany furniture that looked as if it had been dragged all the way to Cambodia from a mountain lodge in Europe. “I know he’s here, but I hate to think about it,” she said, wishing for a cup of coffee to clear the debris of her long, heavy sleep from her mind. “I hate thinking about him crossing the ocean. It’s so cold on the water at night. I keep imagining the sea air, what it must have felt like, aching in his bones.”

“I’ll go with you.”

She was touched by the offer, aware of how reluctant Marc was to see his father. She shook her head. “I’m not ready.”

“Don’t you want to know what he’s up to?”

“You all know such a different man than I do. He’s not
up to
anything, Marc. I know exactly why he’s here. I knew the second I heard, but I couldn’t admit it to myself. He’s too close to risk waiting for me back in Seattle.”

“Too close to what?” Marc asked, reaching behind him to shut the door, as if he already knew the answer and did not want it to be overheard.

“His death. And I’m not ready to face that, Marc. Not yet, not after yesterday. Yesterday was perfect. I want to hold on to it for a while longer.” She stared up at the fan and wondered why she couldn’t feel even the slightest breeze as it paddled against the incoming tide of already warm air through the open window. “Do you think that makes me a terrible person?”

“You tell me you helped kill a man, and it doesn’t occur to you that I
might judge you for that. But this is why I would think you are terrible? Because you want one more day?”

Irene lowered her head into her hands. She felt the floorboards shift as Marc crossed the room. He knelt in front of her and said, “I hope he knows how lucky he is to be loved by someone as terrible as you.”

“I’ve read the accounts, I know what the French say—that the Cambodians have no ambition. But really, hasn’t that always been what colonials say about the natives?” Irene asked. “I just thought the French were envious because this was the one place they knew they could never get the upper hand. How could they, given what the Cambodians have come from? But I never expected it to be like this. I truly didn’t expect to see so many people like her.”

Sitting over lunch with Simone and Marc in an arcaded café on the Quai de Vernéville, a drowsy boulevard that ran alongside the torpid canal that encased the European quarter, Irene watched a young Cambodian woman walk past. Her gait was slow and without purpose in the looseness of her
sampot
, a piece of fabric that was neither trousers nor skirt, wound around her waist and drawn up between her legs. With her wide features and shorn black hair, which stood as stiff as a bristle above her forehead, she could have been male or female. Only her blouse gave her gender away.

“It’s as if she doesn’t even see a point in lifting her feet.” Irene examined the woman’s expression, the deadness in her eyes, as she stared straight ahead, avoiding the foreigners. “She looks tired. And unhappy. They all do. It’s as if they have no idea that they’re descendants of such nobility.”

Simone and Irene had spent the morning at the customs warehouse, sorting through the crates Irene had shipped from Seattle, and now Simone was cross-referencing those supplies with her own list of benzene, gaiters, and mackintosh water bags. “Most of them know what the government wants them to know, and it gets worse every year,” she said, annoyed, drawing a dark black line through “wicks.” “Unfair land taxes
and random punishments for crimes that can’t be anticipated. The undermining of traditions. And that’s the least of it. Unhappy? Of course they’re unhappy!”

Simone had been irritable all morning, and Irene, still a bit woozy from her visit to Angkor Wat, as if the temple were a particularly strong drink she’d had one too many of, was trying to ignore her mood. “You sound as if I’m faulting them, Simone, but I’m not. That’s the last thing I want to do. In fact, I want the opposite. The scrolls have the potential to bring them the kind of recognition they deserve, not just from the outside but from within too. By knowing how their story ended, they can know how to start over. The scrolls could turn out to be just the thing to show the Cambodians how they can be capable of it all again. The art. The architecture. Just imagine it.” Stirring her asparagus soup, Irene looked across the street, where flame trees spread their carmine branches above the shore of the canal. Three Cambodian men were squatting on the deck of a sampan, halfheartedly playing cards. A clay jug that had been full of rice whiskey was now discarded next to an ugly yellow dog passed out at their bare, splayed feet. “Honestly, though, Simone, don’t you wonder at all how the French have been able to take their pride away from them so thoroughly?”

“You’re being naïve, Irene,” Marc said. “The French have bigger guns.”

“They
have
guns,” Simone said, so sharply that Marc observed her with wariness as he continued. “They would kill every last Cambodian if they sensed a hint of resistance. I saw it too often in China. It’s disgusting, how many excuses a colonial government can come up with for a massacre. The Cambodians wouldn’t stand a chance.”

“But what about Angkor Wat? There’s no reason they shouldn’t live there. Why not reclaim it?” Irene asked, even though, as she was speaking, she knew exactly why not. She understood that what you wanted, no matter how badly you wanted it, did not mean anything if it was also wanted by someone more powerful than you. “There’s no point in them living here! A hill, that’s all the Cambodians have of a heritage in Phnom Penh. A hill with a Siamese-style stupa guarded by Chinese Fu dogs on a spot where a woman buried some sacred Buddhist relics in the fourteenth
century. Not to mention a tinfoil royal palace for a puppet king that may as well have been built in Bangkok. They’re heirs to the Khmer, and the only evidence of that is the king’s dancers.”

“Angkor Wat is too symbolic,” Simone said. “The government would never let them have that kind of foothold.” She scowled. “What could possibly be wrong this time?” She was being summoned by a Cambodian man in a blue button-down dress shirt and matching
sampot
, who was standing beyond the low whitewashed wall of the café terrace. Irene had already seen him twice that morning, coming and going at the warehouse. He was helping with the final arrangements for the equipment they still needed for the expedition—more axes and an elaborate first aid kit and what seemed like miles of sturdy rope—but every time he ambled up to Simone, she became more exasperated and he more sullen. Now she hissed, “On the surface, yes, the Cambodians are no longer impressive, but essentially, they’re no different than they have always been. That’s what gives them more strength than they receive credit for. If only people would see their possibility in that. The problem with you, Irene, is that you can’t stop focusing on the least important part of what they used to be.”

Marc watched Simone stride away. “I liked her better in the car. She was amiable.”

“She was doped on Luminal,” Irene said, growing concerned about more than just Simone’s disposition. Given her evident displeasure as she spoke rapidly with the man in Khmer, Irene added to her list of growing worries that there might be trouble with the last supplies needed for travel into the uplands, or that Simone was on the verge of doing something reckless again that might cause them to miss the steamer. With these concerns compounded by the issue of getting permits on time and the possibility that Louis would tell one of his colleagues about the temple now that he and Simone had had a falling-out, Irene was completely drained. “Louis found the bottle when they were unpacking at the hotel,” she said. “She must have stolen it from the hospital.”

“So she’s going to be this temperamental for the rest of the trip?”

“Probably, if Louis keeps her clean.”

“How pleasant for us in the middle of the jungle.” Marc stirred his
sugarcane juice, watery with melted ice. “But you know, Irene, I think I know what she means.”

“What are you talking about?” she asked.

“Their history, their past, whatever you want to call it.” He turned from Simone to the fishermen. “It’s in the way they’re sitting, and how their hair is pulled back at their necks. It’s fascinating. Take away that bottle of rice whiskey and give them fishing poles, and I’d swear they were one of the carvings we saw at the Bayon.”

After leaving Angkor Wat, Irene had taken Marc to the nearby Bayon temple, where the galleries were wrapped in bas-reliefs of Khmer daily life. But rather than warriors and kings, these were detailed depictions of women cooking over charcoal braziers and men carrying loaves of palm sugar to market. As her eyes roamed from Marc to the men on the boat, Irene was able to see what he did: their bony figures transformed into sculpted stone.

Irene had not expected Marc’s growing interest in the Khmer. To share a past was one kind of intimacy, and more than she had hoped for. To share a passion was a good fortune beyond her belief, and she felt a thrill at this prospect, as he pointed out a matron at her wooden-wheeled cart, roasting scrawny fish over cinders, and said, thoughtfully, “Look at the style of her
sampot
. Did you see the looms beneath the huts as we were driving back from Siem Reap? Just like on the sculptures at the Bayon. I doubt the techniques or patterns have changed over the centuries.” He rose in his chair to acknowledge Simone’s return and said to her, “Their strength lies in the way their past is still present in their day-to-day lives. That’s what you mean, isn’t it? Despite what’s been taken from them, and what’s been inflicted on them, they’ve persisted in living the way they have always lived.”

Simone’s annoyance appeared to lessen, and she nodded.

But this did not appease the anger Irene felt about how little regard the colonial system had for what the Cambodians should still be. “Managing to hold on to the minutiae of their daily lives hasn’t given them any advantage. Their kingdom, their ability to create such a kingdom, surely that’s where any remaining power lies.”

“The Egyptians, the Mayans—civilizations disappear. It’s the law of
nature,” Marc asserted, slipping back into their discussion from the previous day. “There’s always a time to let go. A time to move on.”

What Irene was beginning to feel at discovering the position the Cambodians had been forced into by the French was something greater than disappointment. It was sadness that her beloved Khmer had been reduced to this, and a growing fear that what she might in fact end up learning from the scrolls was that the Cambodians had fallen so hard centuries ago that their defeat had become a trait, like hair color or height, inherited and passed down and accepted without question throughout the generations, so that when colonization arrived, it did not come as a surprise, and fighting back was not a consideration. Sickened by the thought of their being so beaten down, she asked, “Do you really think that fate has that much influence on the rise and fall of a culture?”

“It’s hardly fate,” Marc said. “History has its natural rhythms. Maybe, somehow, the Cambodians know this. Have accepted it, even. Their time for distinction has come and gone.”

Simone slapped her notebook shut. “I let you see Angkor Wat, and this is what the two of you conclude? That the Khmer are so confined by one aspect of their heritage that they don’t have any other way of rising out of this? How can you claim to care about the Khmer, Irene, if you can’t conceive that their time could come again? Their time
will
come again.”