There Is Nothing Beyond The Jungle

The end of the rainy season brought near disaster to the town of Bott. An angry sky released an onslaught of water that came down upon the little town with a fury and threatened to wash everything away. The people welcomed the rain at first because the previous month had produced very little in a time where they needed it badly for the rice harvest. When they saw the water was rapidly filling the river and irrigation canals they began to worry. Soon the fields where green rice shoots had once proudly stood now were turned into giant lakes. All of the schools were inundated with water, and the boatmen now carried people from one end of town to the other instead of up and down the river. It was eerie sight to see their long wooden boats sailing silently alongside immobilized four and two wheeled vehicles. The market remained dry, and the people gathered there under the wood and corrugated steel shacks to talk about they could do. What was going to happen to the rice? If the water did not go down soon, there was fear that the whole harvest would be lost. The farmers encouraged each other to buy fruit and sticks of incense as offerings for their household shrines. Surely Buddha will protect us, they thought. The only reasonable course of action was to pray.

At the high school, Teacher Bory lay in his bed and listened to the pelting sounds of the morning rain hitting the tin roof. Both his house in Angkor Chum and the teacher’s dormitory in Bott were flooded with brown water, which cooled and heated with the passing of the sun. When the rains stopped, he would have to walk to the classrooms through water up to his knees, his feet sinking in slimy black mud. He knew this, but it did not bother him as much as it should have. It was Sunday, and most of the other teachers had gone home for the weekend. The jumbled sounds of a television drifted in through an open door, and a heated announcer’s voice meant that someone was watching a kickboxing match. Teacher Bory felt no desire to get up; his mind was preoccupied.

Teacher Bory had both a problem and a cause for celebration in his current affairs. He had recently found himself looking at a student more than usual during one of his classes, and he could not fathom why he had not noticed her before. Since the monsoon rains came now at night, the afternoon sun had a chance to shine on the girl’s face and hair. The illumination had first caught his attention, and now he was ensnared. Perhaps she noticed that he was looking at her as well because she soon began to stay after class to ask questions. Questions turned into conversations, and conversations turned into smiling, laughter, and amorous glances. Teacher Bory could not remember any other time when a woman, other than his mother, had shown interest in him. He was desperate to demonstrate that the affection was mutual, and to show her how he felt he bought a gold necklace. He had saved up a small but not inconsiderable amount of money over the past few years from teaching, and he thought the gift was money well worth spent. Upon giving her the necklace, he studied her face as it lit up with delight. This was a cause for celebration. What made Teacher Bory even happier was the fact that the teenage girl had come to his classes several times wearing the necklace. He swelled with pride every time he saw the hint of gold around her neck. The elation he felt was the problem; he was in love.

The object of Teacher Bory’s affection sat in 10D, a class that met every Tuesday morning and Thursday afternoon. Her name was Channa. Ostensibly assiduous, she came to the private English classes he held and spoke to him more than the other bored-looking students. While the other students sprawled over their notebooks and played games on the their cell phones, she sat upright in the center front row next to her best friend. She was always the first to stand up when Teacher Bory came into class, and the last to leave. Her notes were made with ruler precision, and her glasses were well polished. She was not the prettiest girl at school, for the glasses concealed a dimpled face on someone who was shorter than average. She did have enough charm to attract the male teachers who taught her. In fact, most everyone thought her rather clever. She went to private classes because she could afford to, and she had enough ambition to know that a better life for her lay elsewhere than the tiny district town of Bott.

Teacher Bory looked at his dark brown feet that were calloused and riddled with mosquito bites. Imagining Channa’s clean white cuticles next to his made him smile. There was only one other teacher there with him, and Teacher Bory felt like talking. He began to explain how he felt about Channa. “I feel love for the first time,” he said.

“Is she interested in you?” the other teacher asked. His name was Teacher Oem.

“I think so. She sends me text messages on my mobile every day. Sometimes she asks about English, but other times she asks about me.”

Teacher Oem began to leer. One could tell he had something bawdy on his mind. “Maybe you could arrange to have a private class, just you and her?!”

Teacher Bory laughed and kept a smile on his face. He was happy to be in love with Channa. He was also happy to have a reason for being in Bott. He had otherwise no real attachment to it. Teacher Bory had grown up in Angkor Chum, and had lived there most of his life. When he graduated from high school, he went to the Regional Teachers Training Center in Battambang to become an English teacher. He had hoped that upon completion of his training he could go back to his old high school and teach there. His family and friends were all in Angkor Chum, and he could live comfortably in his own house. When he went to see the assignment officer, he received a very different view of his future.

Teacher Bory sweated profusely in the sweltering office while he waited for the bureaucrat to announce where he would be sent. The man sitting across a desk from him was going through a stack of papers that no doubt had to do with his progress reports and teacher request forms. A portrait of King Sihanouk the elder, his wife, and Sihanouk the younger hung on the wall under an open window, and a slight breeze made the heat of the room barely tolerable. The heavy-set man with thinning hair, jowls, and a proclivity for taking long pauses kept reading, turning back to the computer to click on a few things, and then shuffling the papers again. The chair squeaked every time he made the slightest movement, and Teacher Bory wondered when this would end. Finally, the man spoke.

“You have two choices. You can either go to Srei Snam or to Bott.” His tone was flat, resolute. Teacher Bory was rather dismayed.

“I cannot go to Angkor Chum? That is my home.”

“We have too many teachers there already.” The assignment officer paused for a moment and then grinned. He showed his teeth as he spoke. “Though I am sure, if necessary, we could find a place for you there. How badly do you want to go?”

Teacher Bory sighed and looked at his feet. He had no money to pay the bribe that the assignment officer wanted. He finally agreed to go to Bott, for that was the closest town to Angkor Chum that he could go to. And thus his life began anew in a small rural community north of the Tonlé Sap.

Instead of living with his family, he lived in a yellow concrete dormitory with the other male teachers. He had few possessions aside from some books, his bed, his mosquito net, and his motorbike. The other teachers provided companionship, for they were also in the same situation. Far from their homes and families, they faced the difficult challenge of teaching in an understaffed high school. All of them had to teach far more classes than they should have. In addition, they were also forced to hold private classes outside of the regular ones. Teacher salaries were low, and this was the only way they could make enough money to feed themselves every day. In his first year, Teacher Bory made twenty-five dollars a month. Rather than give this to him on a monthly basis, the government supplied it in an annual lump sum. Most of his day-to-day expenses were paid for with money that he had to make from private lessons. He was overworked, for his usual day involved teaching from seven in the morning to seven at night. Sundays were his only day off, and he mostly slept.

Teacher Bory did not have much to be happy about in Bott, but his love for Channa was something that he held onto. It was like a dream pulled together from the bits and pieces of the subconscious; all the karaoke videos, pop songs, movies that celebrated romantic love he had seen were pieced together into a single fantasy where he was the star. Had this fantasy been turned into a film, the title of it would have been “Teacher Bory in Love.” He spent most his spare time within this fantasy, so much that at least he forgot where he was once or twice.

Choosing Channa as a future wife made sense to Teacher Bory because he thought her beautiful and it was a monetarily advantageous decision. Simply put, finding a wife in Bott was a bargain. The families of the girls living in Angkor Chum demanded a far higher bride price than the ones in Bott. For a poor teacher, this would have been easy if it were not for the fact that he was in love with a girl from a somewhat wealthy family. Of course, Teacher Bory knew exactly who her family was. None of the other teachers could figure why he fell in love with a rich girl knowing the obstacle that this would present. Surely, she would go off to some university when she was finished with her studies here. She would leave him and her former life behind and begin a new one in the city somewhere. Some of the other teachers had high hopes for her. She will go to Phnom Penh! Maybe she will come back to Bott as a rich woman. None of these grand speculations included Teacher Bory. He was so inveighed by his own visions of love that he could not believe that an alternate future in which he was not married to Channa. He had begun to watch couples on television, and thought of his own future wedding lit up in Technicolor gaiety. From love come would come happiness, flowing into his heart from institutional unity and finally giving him a reason to be happy in an otherwise miserable situation.

As time wore on, the floods went down and the town returned to its normal state. When the cool dry season arrived, a wind swept down from the Himalayas during the night and caused a sudden need for light blankets. Columns of workers began to appear on the side of the roads, armed with hoes and sickles and walking towards the fields. All were dressed in rubber sandals, long pants dirtied by mud, long shirts, straw hats, and red kromahs tied around their heads to protect themselves from the sun. Once they reached their chosen position, they waded across the canal in water up to their waist. As soon as they got to the other side, they began to work. Standing in ankle deep mud, they bent over the tall green plants and began to cut them down leaving only the their stumps. They stuffed them into bags, and when they had gotten enough they waded back to the other side of the canal. Taking a few dozen of them at a time, they tied them into bundles and placed them on the side of the road to dry. Every few hours, a wooden bullocks cart came along and collected the dry bundles. The cart then took the bundles to a threshing machine. The giant blue monster separated the little green pellets of s’rou from the rest of the rice plants as it spewed gasoline fumes. The waste was given to the cows to eat, while the s’rou was sifted and laid out in the sun. Eventually it was collected by a giant truck and taken to Vietnam to be processed.

With all this work to be done, attendance at the school dropped. The sons and daughters of the land traded their books and pencils for tools, and stopped going to classes for at least two months. There were enough students whose families worked in the market, and therefore did not need to work in the harvest, to keep the school going. Even as numbers dwindled, Teacher Bory carried on. He taught his classes from behind the teacher’s desk, and lectured the students with long readings that they had no chance of understanding. His voice was sleepy, and all it accomplished was to induce hunger and weariness. He played volleyball with the other teachers, watched the television, played cards, and drank rice wine to alleviate the boredom of being in such a situation. When wedding season began, he skipped his classes to go and get drunk from canned beer in the middle of the afternoon. In the morning he would still be hung-over, and would stagger to class with his clothes rumpled and smelling of bodily odor. The students would usually ask him to stop teaching after about an hour. They could not concentrate with him garbling his words and swaying from side to side as he read from the Teacher’s book. And through all of this, Teacher Bory’s love for Channa grew inflated until it was ready to burst.

Everything seemed to be going well until he noticed that Channa was flirting with another man. It could have been anyone; Another student, a different teacher, the school director, or from someone outside of the school, but it had to be Teacher Oem. He was responsible for making announcements to the students in the morning and working with the class monitors. He was considered handsome, and was admired by many of the young women at the school. There he was, chatting and laughing outside the classroom not knowing that Teacher Bory was watching both of them from an open window. A friend, even more a confident, threatening to steal away one’s love was always worse than a perfect stranger. The betrayal made it worse. Teacher Bory tried to keep his eyes focused on the teacher’s book sprawled across the desk, but he could not help steal a glance outside to see if they were still there. He kept his cool, but his blood was boiling beneath the collar. When the two of them disappeared from view, the image of Channa squinting her eyes and racked with laughter burned in his head. It was driving him mad! He tried his best to concentrate on the lesson, but wound up ending it in a hurry. With the class dismissed, he sat on his motorbike and tried to think about what to do next.

The obvious choice was to confront Teacher Oem with what he had seen, and to demand if he was trying to deliberately steal Channa away from him. No, this was not a good plan, he thought. She must laugh and flirt with many people, but it is only me that she loves. This is true, is it not? There had to be a way to prove that her love was meant for only one. Teacher Bory came up with a plan that he thought was fitting, but which others would have considered swollen with temerity. This plan would guarantee Channa’s hand in marriage. He would go to her house, and meet with her family. He would tell them that he had a large sum of money given to him by the government in compensation for some land they had purchased. The money would be the family’s, fulfilling the customary bride price of the groom’s family. It was a handsome amount, one that could not be refused very easily, and would it matter if he did not have the money right then and there? Surely by the time Channa finished school he would be able to save enough from teaching to give it to them. Teacher Bory began to grin from ear to ear. It would work, how could it not? The film heroes always exercised an audacious effort to win the girl. The same would work for Teacher Bory. He was so excited by what he had thought of that before he knew what he was doing, he put the key in the ignition and rode straight to Channa’s house.

Teacher Bory now sat on a thin straw mat in a big open room. Some large wooden benches sat imposingly in the corner, but Channa’s mother refused to sit in them. They were more for decoration. Channa’s father bought and sold meat in the market, and her mother worked at a stall there as well. They owned some land, but hired other people to work it during the planting and harvesting seasons. They had done very well for themselves, and their house was the largest in the commune. Both Channa’s mother and grandmother had taken a break from their work to meet with Teacher Bory and listen to his proposal. The grandmother sat with her legs tucked to one side and serious look on her face. Her shaved head gave her a kind of monk-like presence. Her daughter struck a similar pose with a younger, softer face and black hair in a bun behind her head. Neither of their faces revealed any emotion while Teacher Bory spoke.

The two matronly figures listened to teacher Bory speak, nodding here and there and listened to his argument. When at last he had finished, the two of them looked at each other and burst out laughing. It took them a while to stop before the mother started speaking. “We have known for some time that you were in love with our daughter. Did you really think that we wouldn’t notice the necklace you gave her? We thought that it was just a crush you had, and that you would get over it soon enough. But this! The declaration of your love for our daughter, and the absurdly concocted lie that you have enough money to give us.”

Teacher Bory felt the blood rush to his face.

The grandmother continued. “We know all the families whose land was recently bought by the government in Angkor Chum. What they got was far less that what you claimed, so either you are exaggerating your wealth because you don’t have any of the money, or what you do have is far below what you claim. In either case, you are still a poor high school teacher, and we both agree that our daughter has no business getting mixed up with you.”

The two women got up to go back to their work, but Teacher Bory still sat on the floor. This was a moment in his life unlike any other. In just over five minutes, the one reason he had for wanting to stay in Bott was destroyed, obliterated before his very eyes. Had this really happened? Was it all part of some terrible dream with stimuli matching the real world in every possible way? The movie had ended, and it was time for everyone in the theater to go home. A fog enveloped around his head. It was as if time stood still for a second, and his life was split into two very distinct parts: the moment before the women stopped speaking, and the parts afterward. Incredibly, he slowly realized that women had stood up and that he was expected to leave now. He was on autopilot, his mind was full of emotions he could not make heads or tails of. Through all of this, he was able to still able to go home and cook dinner, but neither felt, nor heard anything around him at all. If you asked him about that afternoon, he could tell you only that he remembered the food sliding down his throat and the sound of his head falling on the pillow.


*


Teacher Bory and Teacher Oem once again sat in their dormitory while the rain fell outside. Teacher Bory had told his friend what had happened, and they were both resigned to the fact that Channa would probably never marry either of them. While Teacher Bory contemplated the destruction of his one warm feeling for Bott, Teacher Oem sat in silence. Suddenly he started to speak.“There is nothing beyond the jungle.”

“What?”

“I heard it from a foreigner. I was in Siem Reap walking along the river on my way to my aunt’s house. A foreigner suddenly popped out of a hotel, and we crossed paths. I wanted to practice my English so we started chatting. I asked him where he had been in Cambodia, and the only thing he kept saying was “in the jungle.” Finally he turned to me and said that searching for anything beyond the jungle was useless. He made this long speech about how he imagined the jungles in Asia to be full of tigers, elephants, and lost settlements of humanity; all the stuff he read about in books. But when he finally came here, he searched for all of this in vain. There were no forgotten tribes or anything of the sort. As he walked, the jungle stopped and became rice fields. Then there was just more jungle. It went on like this, until he stopped and declared, ‘There is nothing beyond the jungle.’ I could have told him that. He had a special fascination with tigers, and he kept going on about them as if they were some mythical animal. The whole thing was simply ridiculous! I was glad to finally say goodbye to him, even though I did get to practice my English.”

Teacher Bory felt somewhat sympathetic to that foreigner for some reason. The image of some hulking white explorer trudging through the undergrowth was tragic, if a little silly. The fortunes of both himself and the foreigner had taken a similar turn. They had both chased after something as elusive and dangerous as a tiger in the jungle, only to be disappointed when it did not appear. Yet the two men would continue chasing after tigers, even though the chance of spotting one was very rare. But even if they were to finally find their long sought after beast, what would they do with it? Smile and take its picture? Surely the tiger would want something in return, something they would not want to know of.

Teacher Bory carried on teaching classes, fatalistic about his predicament. Channa continued to be eager to please. She continued to flirt with Teacher Bory, but there was something different about the way that he saw her in class. Instead of the smiling, unctuous young woman before him, he imagined her with long fangs, striped fur, and ears that rotated back and forth when they recognized familiar sounds. With a grin that stretched from ear to ear, he found her less appealing than he had before he heard the story of the foreigner. He grinned back. It helped him put her out of his mind, and so he turned his attentions elsewhere.