Saigon, Hanoi, and Pnompenh
French Indochina was ruled from Hanoi, not Saigon. After visiting the picturesque Rue Catinat, after seeing Mediterranean-type houses surrounded by iridescent green gardens shaded by tamarind trees with huge brownish pods and royal poincianas with scarlet and orange flowers, and deciding that Saigon reminded them of a French provincial town laid out in geometric patterns, they were off to the administrative capital.
The letters of recommendation from the Guimet Museum and André’s own missive had indeed preceded them, but after they checked into a modest European hotel, put on their best tropical white, and showed up at L’École Française d’Extrême-Orient, they were told Henri Parmentier was out of town. In any case, Monsieur Malraux would have to see Monsieur Finot first.
André made an appointment with the director of the college, and at the appointed hour was whisked into the office of Louis Finot—a man in his fifties with the sallow look that, André had noticed, many Europeans seemed to have after living a few years in the tropics. Finot rose from his desk facing the window, which framed a clump of palms, and a wall stained blue-green by rains and cordially greeted his visitor. The letters of recommendation from Paris were in front of him.
André eased into the conversation by talking about art and the disintegration that was taking place in antique works. Primitive art raised stupendous questions, he said, and challenged the very foundation of Western optimism. He was careful not to sound too obscure nor too eager.
“Archeology is not my discipline,” the director warned.
Finot knew little about Khmer art, but after listening to the young amateur archeologist, he was perspicacious enough to find the Malraux “mission” improvised if not a bit shady.
“You intend to explore the regions lying along the line of the ancient Royal Road of the Khmers?” Finot summed up.
“That’s right.”
“I may as well tell you that the trail—not to mention the road itself—is wiped out over long stretches, and near the Dangrek range disappears completely.”
“I am sure I will find it,” André smiled.
“Well, let’s hope so, for your sake. It is my duty, my official duty, to warn you of the danger you will incur.”
As the director read the letters of recommendation in front of him, it occurred to André that the man’s pallid and pasty appearance was probably due to an abscess of the liver.
“When will you be starting out?” Finot asked.
“As soon as possible.”
Finot said he would of course issue the supply warrant that would allow André to procure native carts and drivers through the resident deputy in Siem Reap.
As the director got up, André realized he could not pretend to be both a detached scholar and a fearless adventurer. Also, he was smart enough to understand the director’s warning.
“You can pass by my office tomorrow,” Finot said, escorting him to the door. “The supply warrant will be waiting for you.”
To while away the week until Professor Parmentier returned, they visited the town, the governor-general’s residence behind the old citadel, the mixed quarter at the bottom of the Paul Doumer Bridge, the three European quarters, the elegant Rue Paul Bert with, at the eastern end, the military headquarters, and the Vietnamese and Chinese markets around the Rue de la Soie. Merchants in minuscule stalls steamed, grilled, stewed, broiled, and stir-fried an assortment of food and, to entice customers, wafted the fascinating, spicy smells toward strolling passersby with palmleaf fans. They saw Vietnamese women in silk pajamas and with lacquered teeth, and “boys” who always wore black turbans. Both Clara and André were struck by the pallid faces of the European women. Apparently it was the height of colonial chic to look like a figure in a wax museum. Europeans didn’t walk; they had themselves transported in rickshaws pulled by spindly-legged coolies.
When it wasn’t raining, Clara and André walked, defiantly. When afternoon downpours threatened, they stayed at the hotel. They were too poor by now to buy the raingear that would protect Clara’s spare wardrobe and André’s one tropical suit.
They were surprised by the throngs of children and the noise in the street, the corner soup-seller blowing on the charcoal in his brazier, the chauffeurs driving barefooted, an irritated European dressing down a hotel doorman, getting angry at his “boy,” at his Vietnamese mistress. They did their tourist shopping, buying beautiful gray bowls and stoneware spoons from street vendors. In one side-street they discovered a freak show. Craning their heads in front of a house with ornate Chinese doorpost carvings, they managed to see windows with odd animals—a three-legged hen, a turtle whose shell had been removed. “Come in, the lady will be happy to see you,” an adolescent cried out.
The lady was old but was indeed happy to have a visit. She had shared a French doctor’s life once, she said. The ceiling was painted, and in one corner she had a replica of the Eiffel Tower and everywhere wind-up toys.
In the backyard she showed them a mechanical dwarf dressed as a Western youth. Clara touched the automaton’s chin and felt the crabbed imitation of human skin. The lady grinned. “I collect monsters,” she said.
The hotel room had shutters but no glass panes. The bed, however, came with mosquito netting. Taking an afternoon siesta while André was meeting school officials, Clara felt her fears drain away. Since her dunking in the Malaysian sewer, she felt in an odd way cleansed. They were in the fabulous Orient. Street odors and noises were already familiar. White people complained ritualistically about the climate, but André and she found Vietnam not much more sweltering than Greece. True, it was more clammy, but Clara’s fair skin seemed to adapt well to the humidity. If anything, the heat inspired their lovemaking with novel voluptuousness.
Early on, both had been inhibited and sensitive about their physical flaws. Whether André’s mother thought she was preparing her son for life’s hard knocks or was reacting to her own conjugal disappointments, she had always told André he was ugly. He had big ears and his loose build was sometimes ungainly, but, as the wife of his first publisher would tell Clara, “At thirty, you’ll see, he’ll be handsome.”
The feminine fashion required hip-length jackets flared or waisted over long narrow skirts; hats; muffler; and the new buckled shoes, the accessory of 1922. Clara was keenly aware that she didn’t have the boyish figure that the decade demanded. She had tried with low-slung belts and oppressive bras to attain the flat-chested flapper look, but he grazed her most sensitive nerve when, seeing her naked for the first time, he expressed his astonishment at not finding her looking more like an ephebe.
André had lost his virtue the traditional way, with little Monmartre prostitutes, the year before he met Clara; she had tried sex with a boyfriend the year she turned twenty-two. Identified only as Jean in her memoirs, the young man was in the army, a pastor’s son from southern France, a friend of her brother Paul.
Clara had her hair cut in the new short fashion and went dancing with Jean in skirts as short as Chanel demanded. Jean called her his “little princess,” read poems to her, and had her all flustered when he kissed her and let his hand slide up her new silk stockings.
She had asked Maurice whether she should become engaged. “Why not,” he had answered.
From his training camp, Jean wrote her letters every day.
“My parents will never accept us getting married,” he told her. He wanted to be important to her, and after their first confused tryst, said, “You must understand, we can’t go on like this. I must mean more to you than sex.”
“I don’t care,” she whispered.
He became angry. “I can’t be the love of a woman who tells me she doesn’t care.”
That was not how she had meant it. But after that they quarreled all the time. He was late for their dates and implied that other women were panting after him. When the year-long engagement was over, she told herself she would die of sorrow. Instead she went to Italy and spent four months studying art in Florence.
They sipped rum-sodas, the national drink among expatriates, on faculty verandas and improvised themselves as archaeologists. Suspicions were aroused when André asked about shipping heavy baggage from Pnompenh back down the Mekong River for forwarding from Saigon. Offhandedly, school officials warned them. A governor-general’s regulation of 1908 declared that all “discovered and undiscovered” monuments in Siem Reap, Battambang, and Sisiphon provinces must be left in situ. A new decree further protecting Khmer antiquities was not only on the legislative agenda, as André knew all too well, but was supposed to have been enacted in Paris a few weeks before.
The risk only added to André’s determination and sense of adventure. Besides, Professor Parmentier turned out to be a delightful old fogy. André had done his homework. The moment he met the chief of archeology, he charmed the goateed scholar with his erudition and enthusiasm. A cocktail party was called for, Parmentier decreed, before the young couple went off to prove their devotion to archeology.
“Perhaps I will accompany you to Angkor,” Parmentier beamed.
Finot was at the cocktail party, but it was Parmentier who held forth. He had no high opinion of such steamy authors of exotica as Pierre Loti, whose novels had enchanted Clara and André in Paris.
“Loti speaks of vultures crowding in banana trees,” Parmentier cried, “when everybody knows a banana branch will bend too much to support a single vulture.”
The professor spoke both authoritatively and lyrically about the Khmers, of all Asians the only people to show a true genius for architecture. While the Annamese, as the Chinese called the Vietnamese, had been under China’s domination for over a thousand years, the Cambodians had fallen under the gentler sway of India.
“The monsoons and the alternating trade winds favored maritime relations,” Parmentier said. “Like Burma and Thailand to the east and Malaysia on the other side of the Gulf of Siam, Cambodia virtually owed its existence to the creative influence of India.”
“Not conquest or invasion, but trade and, in its wake, Buddhism, the merchants’ religion,” he continued. “No forced conversions but ideas that various tribes adopted because the people found them useful. Indian Brahmins brought Hindu deities, Sanskrit language and literature, and the Indian alphabet, but not the strict rules of caste and society of their homeland.”
More positive than the peoples of India, who avoided any precision that might hinder the flight of the imagination, the ancient Cambodians took literally the idea that a temple should be an image of the cosmos and therefore built their temples in the form of a mountain.
“In the heart of the jungle,” Parmentier enthused, “five towers with slender spires dominate the great building of Angkor Wat, a temple of Vishnu that you may call the Parthenon of the East because of the perfect harmony of lines and sculptural decorations. Khmer sculpture is the most exquisite in the Orient. Indeed, it compares favorably to classic Greek art.”
André told the professor how he had discovered art when he was seven. What had struck him while walking through the Louvre were Leonardo da Vinci’s paintings because they had pretty skies. “for years, I thought Leonardo was a sky specialist.”
One Sunday when his mother had visited a friend at the Place d’Iena he had been allowed to cross the square and see the Guimet. What he found were as yet unsorted Asian art and artifacts that Guimet, the industrialist and amateur archeologist and musician, had brought back. Another temple of eccentric exotica where the adolescent André had daydreamed was the Trocadero Museum across the Seine from the Eiffel Tower. Here visitors could see a plumed helmet from the kingdom of Hawaii exhibited next to an absurd miniature of a palace in Cadiz, next to Montezuma’s headdress.
André told Parmentier how the famous Angkor “smile” of the Banyon period had struck him at the Guimet. Buddha was carved with his eyes lowered, as though absorbed in meditation, while a faint smile on his lips reveals the serene detachment of those who have given up all worldly things and aspire to nirvana.
“The inner walls of Angkor are decorated with relief panels depicting scenes from the mythological life of Vishnu,” the professor said. “The effect is overwhelming. An American has said these reliefs have the character of an exotic, noble, and measured ritual ballet not unlike the dance performed today by the court dancers of Pnompenh.” Clara told Parmentier how the performance of the Royal Ballet of Pnompenh had enchanted her and André.
The conversation turned to the apsaras, of which, the professor informed them, there were 1750 life-sized figures at Angkor Wat. “To some observers the celestial dancers seem affected and monotonous,” he smiled, “to me they are Grace personified, the highest expression of femininity ever conceived by the human mind.”
When André was out of earshot, Parmentier leaned toward Clara and with a nod toward her husband said, “So young and so wealthy. So disinterested too.”
The professor gave them his enthusiastic endorsement and said he would telegraph ahead and arrange for his man at Angkor to meet them and perhaps help them get native guides and provisions. Before the evening was over, Parmentier was so infatuated with the young couple that he insisted on coming with them as far as Pnompenh.
The rainy season was exceptionally long in Southeast Asia in 1923, and the Mekong was still swollen in early December when, after picking up Louis Chevasson in Saigon, the quartet sailed up the delta toward Pnompenh.
André and Louis wore identical tropical suits, wing-collared white shirts, black string ties, and pith helmets. The diminutive Clara thought herself too ridiculous in a cork helmet and defiantly wore a Chinese peasant’s cone-shaped straw hat. Parmentier, who had his Cambodian “boy” with him, covered his white locks under a tropical helmet that had seen better days.
Louis and André had been friends since the sixth grade in L’École de Bondy, a rather modest private school where the principal and a teacher named Monsieur Malaval taught twenty students in two classes. Louis had been a short, dark boy who lived around the corner from Grandma Adriana Romania’s grocery store.
In 1914, they had been only three weeks from the start of their final year at Bondy when the guns of August thundered. The German blow came on the front where French generals had said it couldn’t happen—through Belgium. By the third week of August, the main force of the German army was sweeping over the Franco-Belgian border. The German advance wavered before Paris, and on August 30 General Alexander von Kluck turned his army southeast, passing to the east of Paris instead of enveloping the city. The French and the British forces rallied and fresh forces, transported to the front in six hundred Paris taxicabs, rumbled through Bondy to strike the flank of Kluck’s army on the Marne. André and Louis saw the taxis roll east on the Meaux highway. At night they could hear the big guns.
On September 6, 1914, when the French and British stood and fought and produced the “miracle” of the Marne, the Germans were less than thirty miles from Bondy.
By then Bondy, France, and Europe had settled into war. André could hold his head as high as any. Fernand Malraux and his mistress Mademoiselle Godard might be the parents of a baby boy, but the thirty-eight-year-old entrepreneur had been among the first to volunteer. André’s half-brother was named Roland.
Professor Malaval celebrated the “miracle” of the Marne by taking his class on a tour of the previous week’s battlefield. There had been little time to bury the dead; the bodies were piled up, soaked with gasoline and burned—a sight Malaval spared his charges by ordering lunch. “At lunchtime,” André would write in the Antime-moires forty years later, “bread was handed around to us, which we dropped, terror-stricken, because the wind covered it with a light sprinkling of ash from the dead piled up a little farther off.”1
Peace gave André a second half-brother. Fernand Malraux returned a tank commander and, true to his promise, married the mother of his two young sons. He did not bring his new wife to Clara and André’s wedding, but one weekend, when Clara and André were not invited to the Golls or the Kahnweilers, they took the train to Orleans to visit André’s father and family in the house he had bought. For the first time André met his stepmother.
Fernand was in semi-retirement and, with Roland intensely interested in this adult half-brother and little Claude perpetually crying, the war veteran talked endlessly about the pleasures of being French and on lurking alien dangers. Clara didn’t try to argue with her father-in-law, but on the way back to Paris tore into André. She might lack Fernand’s firsthand experience of German perfidy and her husband’s notion that a certain historical perspective was necessary in order to understand this latest conflict, but to her, she said in an angry crescendo, the organized murder of nine million Frenchmen, Germans, Russians, Serbians, Americans, Italians, Englishmen, Turks, and Belgians had been a meaningless if not criminal slaughter.
They were outside the Gare d’Orleans looking for a taxi when André said he had found the charge of the Saint-Cyr cadets in the beginning of the war admirable.
“I know that charge. One of my brother’s friends was one of its victims.”
André maintained that the gesture had been gallant.
She said he was wasting his rhetoric of fustian chivalry, honor, and sacrifice on her. In fact, she had no trouble imagining Maurice’s friend shouting “Follow me!” over his shoulder and running up the hill in his royal blue uniform jacket, scarlet trousers, and silly parade kepi that the dumbest of German infantrymen would have no trouble keeping in his gunsight.
“The gesture was beautiful,” André maintained.
“It was useless. It was the gesture of a murderer.”
A cab pulled up to them. They got in.
“You have no sense of grandeur, no sense of nuance,” André continued.
“When you defend a gesture like that you’re as stupid as the Saint-Cyr cadets.”
“And you, when you talk like that, you’re such a Jewish coward.”
Calmly she asked the taxi driver to stop. When he did, she got out.
The cab moved off.
She walked. André came running back toward her. “You’re crazy.”
“You called me a Jewish coward.”
“You started it. You told me I was just as dumb as a military cadet.”
“I admit I’m wrong there,” she sighed. “You’re not that stupid. But at least when I insult you, I don’t use stereotypes.”
They argued the rest of the evening, storming upstairs without saying hello to Mme. Goldschmidt, slamming doors, bickering in the shower. Exhausted, they finally agreed they were saying the same thing, that the war had made them challenge the views they grew up with. The whole of Europe had been lied to. The generals had lied about the nature and the length of the war and the politicians had lied about its causes. That was what separated them from the previous generations, what increased the distance between the old and the young, what made the new artists hate all forms of authority, all traditional modes. They told each other they could never go back to what they repudiated, their parents’ burned-out order. Because even if in a weak moment they might be tempted, the lecturing and sermonizing they’d be subjected to would make them run away again.
Parmentier commented on the dense settlements along the Mekong, the Cambodian stilt huts, and on the complicated river itself. The river may start in China and be navigable only below Savannakhet; the most interesting feature was nevertheless the Tonle Sap lake where they were heading. At floodtime, water from the Mekong flowed into the Tonle Sap to make it three times its normal size. As the Mekong floods subsided in early spring, the lake re-established its normal flow, thus acting as a natural flood protection for the entire delta. The Khmers believed the Mekong flowed both toward its source and toward the sea, and on the day they observed the flow change the king went out in a boat to cut a ribbon stretched from shore to shore. “When the waters recede,” Parmentier said, “Cambodians walk out and with their bare hands pick up the fish that, when marinated in huge barrels, produce the nuoc-mam fish sauce without which no Cambodian or Vietnamese meal is complete.”
In Pnompenh, where the professor would leave them, Clara, André, and Louis visited the royal museum and made last purchases before transferring to a riverboat for the trip to Tonle Sap. What they saw at the museum left them speechless—and their tour guide indifferent.
The man’s European condescension and asinine commentaries, Clara would remember, made them almost feel good about their planned poaching. “When I asked this ‘authority’ which artwork he’d prefer—meaning really which one would he steal—he told me, ‘Oh, I couldn’t care less about their beauty. You know, I’m an architect.’”
André found Pnompenh full of rancid odors. Treetrunks along the river’s edge had rings of dried froth marking the last monsoon rains. Everything smelled of warm mud drying in the sun and decaying animal matter. After meeting Victor Golubev, however, André and Clara agreed there was at least one clever European in Pnompenh. Only slightly older than they, Victor was a rather delicate intellectual with nervous dark eyes who (as he said) wore two if not three hats. A teacher at the French college and an archeologist, he was also the sometime correspondent for L’Impartial, Saigon’s major daily. “Don’t be fooled by the title,” he smiled, “the newspaper cannot write anything with impartiality. It’s partially owned by the governor.”
They couldn’t afford tents. The nights would be warm enough in any case, so they bought field cots and tulle for mosquito netting. Golubev approved of Clara’s homemade jungle suits, and his Cambodian servant introduced Clara and André to a young man who said he knew how to cook white people’s food, how to bake bread, sew and iron, and wasn’t afraid of the jungle.
“What’s your name?” André asked.
“Xa,” he replied in broken but enthusiastic French. The bright-eyed youth was no more than eighteen, Clara guessed.
She and André reasoned they would surely need someone who spoke the language and wasn’t afraid of the bush. Xa was thin but sturdily built. His bare feet in his leather sandals were wide and calloused. His skin was light brown. Around his waist was a krama—the Cambodian all-purpose scarf. Clara liked the way he smiled, sure of himself; André sensed his resourcefulness. Xa was hired. After all, the treasure hunt was supposed to make them rich.
To transport their loot back to civilization they bought three huge, coffin-shaped chests made of camphorwood, which, Xa said, was the strongest wood there was.
With Xa helping, Clara, André and Louis were getting their gear aboard the riverboat that would take them to Siem Reap, the debarkation point for the Angkor Wat complex, when a European police captain came running. He exchanged a few words in Annamese with Xa. The boy seemed terrified and moved aside.
“I must warn you that your boy has been in jail,” the official told André.
“What for?”
“Gambling, petty theft. You’d better look for another.”
“I’ll think about it.”
“And certainly not give him an advance.”
The captain was gray, from his stubbly hair to his canvas shoes. White people in the protectorate could not be imprisoned for debt, he told them. Natives could. “Anyhow, I’ve explained things to the boy,” he continued. “He’ll … well, he’ll transmit your instructions to his successor.”
The gendarme opened his mouth as if he had some further message. But with a little grunt, the captain only saluted and slowly strolled away along the dock, looking back to see how the European trio resolved the dilemma he had created.
Xa came over, humbled and anxious. His face had the look of a prematurely aged child, serious beyond his years.
“I don’t give a damn about what the police just told me,” said André. “All I ask is that you behave yourself with us.”
Xa stared at André.
“You understand?”
“Yessir.”
“You heard the captain tell me not to give you any advance. Well, here are five piasters.”
Clara liked her husband’s gesture. But when she looked down the quay, she saw the police captain was watching André handing Xa the money. Clara sensed they had made an enemy of the last white man before the bush.
There was one more representative of the law. At the sleepy anchorage of Siem Reap, a police sergeant who introduced himself as Brigadier Cremazy and told them he was also Director Finot’s resident deputy, greeted them with an automobile, offering to take them on a tour of the Angkor Wat.
André handed the man Finot’s warrant for supplies. Siem Reap was perfumed with rancid fish sauce. Men and women bathed in the palm-shaded river that meandered through town, lifting up their garments with extreme modesty as they allowed their bodies to sink into the brown water. The houses were shacks standing on piles above their refuse. Beside each was a receptacle raised on a post with offerings for wandering and neglected souls, people who had no descendants to provide for them. The women were dressed in saronglike skirts of plain colors with a blouse hardly reaching the midriff. They came sauntering out of the most squalid hovels clean, bright, and pretty and with a ready smile of welcome.
André couldn’t wait to get to Angkor Wat and at each turn of Cremazy’s automobile strained to catch a glimpse of the temple towers beyond the treetops unevenly bent toward the west by the lake breezes.
Before the tour, however, Cremazy stopped at his residence to offer aperitifs and advice and to have them meet friends who would put them up at their bungalow for a night or two. The closer they got to the bush, Clara thought as their gray-bearded host poured Cinzano, the more punctiliously European rituals were observed.
“You will need oxcarts, drivers,” said Cremnazy, lifting his glass. “And you will need a guide.”
The veranda was hot and airless. André sipped his drink and, although he already had Xa, agreed that hiring a local guide might perhaps not be a bad idea.
“Well, you know, what you’re out to do isn’t an easy little jaunt. I may as well tell you straight, those supply warrants don’t cut much ice in these parts, Oh, I know the fellows they send out on research don’t like to be told their business. Still …”
“Yes?”
“Well, it’s just that what you’re out to do isn’t an easy little jaunt.”
When André asked point-blank if Cremazy wouldn’t execute the supply warrant, the resident deputy backed down. “You’re sent out on an exploring job, well and good,” Cremazy said. “You’ll be given everything you need; don’t you fret about that. Orders are orders, as they say.”
André was ready to depart immediately, but Cremazy and his friends insisted they spend at least one night at the bungalow while wagons, drivers, and horses were organized. André asked Xa and Louis to get to work on this right away while Clara and he took up their host’s offer of visiting the Angkor Wat. A couple of hours spent visiting the grandest and most complete monument left by the Khmers was probably the best initiation they could ask for.
Sitting with his drink at a rattan table, Cremazy added to his growing list of don’ts the suggestion that Monsieur and Madame Malraux call off their trip. “Go back to one of the big towns—Saigon, for example—and wait a bit,” he said. “And, mind you, I know what I’m talking about.”
André wasn’t sure he understood what the man was trying to tell him. “You don’t think I’ve come halfway around the world just to twiddle my thumbs in Saigon like a little tourist?” André said.
“As for coming halfway round the world, we’ve all done that in our time” was Cremazy’s answer.
The more André listened, the more he realized there was little love lost between Cremazy and Finot. At one point the sergeant said he was not paid to give away secrets to André or anybody. Whether this meant he was angry at the administration in Hanoi or that he knew shortcuts he wasn’t sure he’d give away for free André never found out, because their host pronounced himself ready for the Angkor Wat visit.
Clara felt the heat and the drinks on the veranda were having their effect on her. By the time she and André piled into Cremazy’s car she was pretty tipsy. Honking his way past huts and villagers, the sergeant drove out of town on a road of red clay. The chirping of the cicadas was so shrill as to be audible above the rattle of the engine. Cremazy waved his hand toward a sudden glimpse of the horizon and, quoting Professor Parmentier, said, “Angkor Wat is dedicated to Vishnu, and it is the Parthenon of Southeast Asia.”
Rows of stone lions guarded the causeway across the moat to the temple with its central tower and four towers in each corner of the great pyramid, symbolizing the sacred cosmic mountain. Cremazy and his guests began to walk toward the main rectangular enclosure. The aggressive usurper King Suryavarman II, whose rule extended the Khmer empire to encompass Siam and much of the Malay Peninsula, built the temple in the first half of the twelfth century. Clara had the impression she was in front of a baroque Versailles, a masterpiece of elaborate symmetry. André would remember their shoes getting caught in dislocated flagstones.
By the time they followed Finot’s deputy through the towering gate pavilion whose winged roof rode down in steps to the level of the enclosure roof, André knew that Cremazy disliked and distrusted Cambodians. By the time they reached the central tower and the Shiva shrine with its enthralling stonework, André could barely contain his sarcasm at the inanities of the brigadier’s guided tour.
André escaped the dim-witted observations by overwhelming the police sergeant with his own commentary. The lumpiness and stiffness of the free-standing sculptures clearly showed the genius of the artists who had worked here eight hundred years before.
“Their genius was for relief, sergeant. Every space is filled with pattern, the reliefs of celestial concubines.”
“Is that what they are?” Cremazy asked.
“Asparas they are called in the Hindu tradition.”
“There are exactly seventeen hundred fifty of them.”
“Did you count them?”
“Parmentier did. He told me. I’ve got a head for figures.”
The asparas were all carved standing in only slightly varied postures, hands and arms frozen in one of a dozen correct gestures. Framed in floral decorations, the reliefs illuminated not only the upper walls of the exterior galleries but also every angle and every window of the temple.
“And look,” André sighed, “all display the famous smile.”
Cremazy nodded.
“When we die,” André explained, “we are, according to our merits, either punished in hell or carried off to the mountain peaks of heaven where the asparas, filled with unquenchable lust, await us.”
Clara wanted to know what heavenly delights awaited women when they died.
André gave her a queer look. “The Hindu has no difficulty imagining himself born as a woman or bird in his next life.”
“Then why does he treat women and birds as inferiors?”
“Societies who believe in reincarnation should not have hierarchies,” André said with finality, “but they do.”
Cremazy said he was a Catholic.
The temple was incompletely cleared. They wandered down identical passages and through identical courtyards, and then suddenly faced a wall, a wave of vegetation, in which the heavenly goddesses disappeared with decorous gestures. Back to the center, Clara decided to sit down for a minute and to let the two men inspect the open colonnaded gallery with its groups of divinely beautiful female courtiers.
Parmentier had taught Cremazy the exact number of celestial girls, and, as the sergeant said, he had a head for mathematics, because when he followed André’s admiring gaze, he grinned and said, “Three thousand five hundred gorgeous breasts!”
1 André Malraux, Antimemoires.