God's Fool (10 page)

That night we were instructed in how many obeisances to make to the throne, how to address the monarch, how to answer, should he deign to ask us questions. We practiced bowing our heads to the floor under the watchful eyes of no less than a dozen men who patiently corrected us if we prostrated ourselves too quickly or rose too soon, who explained the importance of bowing in perfect unison, who demonstrated, again and again, the precise timbre and pitch our voices would have to assume when we addressed the king himself, who listened as we recited, for the sixth, the tenth, the fifteenth time: “Exalted Lord, Sovereign of many Princes, let the Lord of Lives tread upon his slaves’ heads, who here, prostrate, receive the dust of His golden feet,” then nodded and said, “Again.” To remonstrate with them was unthinkable. Everything about them—their dress, their manner, the quiet steel beneath the civility of their voices when they said, “And again”—reinforced one essential and incontrovertible truth: This was a world, for all its scented rooms and gilded spires, in which a man’s head could be separated from his body as easily as a bloom is cut from the stem.

In the morning we were led to a twelve-oared barge. Oarsmen in scarlet uniforms rowed us along the walls to the outer gate of the palace. Four powerful men carried us in a net hammock attached to long red poles across a courtyard nearly as broad as our village, passed through a second gate guarded by soldiers, then carried us down a wide avenue. We passed an open expanse where a dozen elephants were being taught to kneel by their keepers. Passing through a third gate, we were set down on the ground. Before us, soaring above the inner wall, rose the spires of the Royal Palace. We were informed that the king was in the Audience Hall, and almost ready to see us.

It wasn’t until a month later that those few moments in the Audience Hall came back to us; at the time, all we saw was a towering room, its walls and ceiling painted vermilion, its cornices blazing with gold, and a
row of columns leading to a throne high above the ground. As we approached I could hear the doubled drum of our hearts, beating as though to burst through the cages of our chests. And then the throne was above us, covered in golden plates. On it, shielded on three sides by gauzy curtains, under a canopy of gold umbrellas, sat King Rama III. He had a calm, round face. He pulled on his gown, then absentmindedly touched his neck with his right hand, small as a child’s.

Afterwards, the courtiers told us that we had conducted ourselves appropriately; that the king had been well pleased with us. They said we had answered all of his questions about ourselves to his satisfaction, and even, at one point, brought a small smile to His Highness’s lips. We remembered nothing. All we knew was that suddenly a gong like a crash of thunder sounded from somewhere in the audience hall and with a single, deafening shout the courtiers around us threw themselves to the ground. When we looked up the curtain had closed around the throne like a door. The king had disappeared. Our audience with Rama III was over.

And yet our day had hardly begun. Standing outside the Audience Hall, trying our best to answer the questions of the courtiers who now crowded around us, we were informed by the court officer assigned to us that we would be allowed to view some of the wonders of the palace until His Majesty’s wishes concerning us were made known. The Temple of Gautama, the royal stables, all these—with the exception of the sacred white elephants—would be shown to us. He clicked his fingers. The crowd of courtiers dispersed. But first—it was His Majesty’s express wish—we would be introduced to the king’s wives and consorts in the Royal Palace. They had heard of us well in advance of our visit and had been clamoring for an audience of their own.

A lifetime later, it is not the ponies from Yu-nau Province in China that I remember, or the paintings depicting the adventures of Rama. Or, more accurately, though I remember them, they have absorbed the shadow, the essence, of what preceded them in precisely the same
way the taste of raspberries can contain a lover’s face, or the scent of jasmine blooming in a schoolyard return the taste of blood to our mouths. The woodwork in the Temple of Gautama, the ruby-eyed statues of demons and men, of eight-legged tigers with human faces and long-necked birds with the wide, flat heads of serpents, these now come to me freighted with a meaning, a significance, no one else could know. Twenty years later, the hollow behind a woman’s knee would remind me of the slide of rubbed and oiled teak beneath my thumb, and even today—so old I remind myself of an elm or an oak, half its branches sapless and dead, waiting for the next good wind—I cannot recall the translucent skin of the Emerald Buddha, which we saw that afternoon in the Temple of Gautama, without a quick shock of shame and excitement.

We were taken by the court officer and three courtiers to the Royal Palace, led down hallways lined with statuary, past sumptuous tapestries and swelling, priapic columns studded with gems. At some point the courtiers stopped. The three of us continued on. Another hallway, another room, and the court officer handed us over to a pair of soft-looking men standing in front of a massive doorway, turned and left. Leaning their weight into it, they swung open the carved wooden portal and beckoned us in. The door closed slowly behind us like a stone rolling into place.

The room we found ourselves in was nearly as large as the Audience Hall, a great, cavernous space with gold ceilings and gleaming walls. A quick murmur of excitement greeted our entrance. Everywhere we looked, small groups of women (there might have been fifty or more in all), all of them young, lay about on divans and cushions, talking, laughing, fixing one another’s hair, busying themselves with some form of needlework we had never seen before. Even in my dazed state I could see they were exquisite—each one, though subtly different from the others, lovely in her own right.

One of the women, greeting us, called to us to come forward. We could hear laughter, whispers. Walking uncertainly toward the center of
the room, we noticed four or five women leaving by side doors hidden in the wall. The others, rising to their feet, quickly formed a circle behind us.

Every feminine allurement multiplied a thousand fold: bare feet with toes as delicate and perfect as gems; eyes so beautiful they froze the heart. Without even leaving the country, we seemed to have found ourselves in the paradise that Robert Hunter had warned us of. But that was not how it felt. Not at all.

They wanted to know how we moved, how we slept. They asked us to squat, then stand. Could we hug one another? Could we stand back to back? They wanted to see the bond between us. We took off our jackets, then peeled down our shirts. They gasped. Did it hurt? Was it strong? Could they touch it? I could feel my brother trembling. Out of the corner of my eye I could see more women streaming through the side doors, a never-ending flow. The room was almost half full, the circle pressing in, the din of young female voices and laughter everywhere around us. A thousand hands, it seemed, were touching our bond—the hard upper edge, the underside, the soft indentations where it met our ribs. Could we feel this? And this?

The questions changed. A strange sort of fever, reckless and frightening, seemed to be coming over the room. Were we strong? How strong? Could we lift a table? Could we lift her? Or her? Do it! Show us! A woman with a blood-red blossom in her hair, her lips slightly pursed as though taunting us, stepped out of the crowd. “Lift me, double boys. Show me how strong you are. Do it!” She lay in our arms and we lifted her up. I could smell her hair. She put her strong, pale arms around my neck. I could feel the softness of her pushed against my chest. And suddenly, shamefully, I felt myself reacting as any boy my age might be expected to react. I set her down, holding her carefully away from my body, praying no one would notice.

She knew immediately, from the tension in my body, the way I set her down. She looked about the circle of faces that seemed to have grown a mile deep around us. “Shall we see if they are men?” she asked, then turned in the roar of laughing and clapping women, but already hands
were upon us, pulling down our clothes, jerking them over our hips. I could feel my brother stagger. Any moment one of the king’s courtiers might enter, might see. I jumped when a woman’s hand closed around me as brazenly as any courtesan’s ever would. “This one shows promise,” she laughed, pulling me forward like a dog by a rope. “But see, they
are
different. This one’s not quite cooked yet.” I glanced at my brother’s face. He was staring straight ahead between the wall of laughing faces, his lips pressed tight like a man determined to ignore the rack. Tears were running down his face. And then, shriveled by fear, he began to dribble himself.

The woman screamed, a number burst into laughter.

“That will do.” The circle suddenly widened around us, then parted. A woman seemingly older than the rest, with a full, curved body and a calm, knowing face, appeared before us. She glanced at us standing there with our clothes around our ankles. The shadow of a smile passed across her face. “You may get dressed,” she said. We hastily pulled up our clothes. Raising her right arm, she bent her wrist as though indicating something on top of her head. Three women stepped into the space next to her, laden with colorful parcels. “Thank you for coming to visit us,” she said.

I glanced at my brother as we were led back through the Royal Palace, then reunited with our guide. He had wiped his face. Nothing had happened. We moved on, the three courtiers, carrying our gifts, walking behind us. I wanted to say something, but couldn’t. In the king’s stables, one of the stud ponies was tossing his coarse black mane and neighing. The men behind us laughed among themselves, pointing to the fifth leg that hung, dark as an intestine, nearly to the ground. My brother, though born and raised in the country, said nothing. Everything shamed him now.

That afternoon, in the Temple of Gautama, surrounded by the menagerie of imaginary creatures the royal sculptors had released from the wood, we were shown the Emerald Buddha. Speaking in tones adjusted to the silence, our guide informed us we could approach the altar.

Nearly transparent, the Buddha’s skin appeared thin as a soap bubble one moment, solid as stone the next. Contained and apart, settled deep in the heart of things, he seemed to give off a cool heat, an eternal, measured radiance. For two thousand years, I remember thinking, he had been watching the lives of men wax and wane. A hundred generations had passed before him. Children had grown old and died and others had taken their place and grown old in turn. Ten thousand voices, a million dreams, each particular to the dreamer—gone. And though each of them, in passing, had taken a part of the world with them, the Buddha remained unchanged, undiminished.

And for a moment, standing there beside my brother, staring into that light that now seemed to pulse, gently, like a heart at rest, I thought that if only I could remember this, absorb into myself some part of this vast, oceanic acceptance of the world and its ways, nothing would ever touch me again. And I would be happy.

Quite possibly I was right. But I never managed it. I spent my days as my nature demanded, thrown this way and that, too close to life. Acceptance, I came to believe, was for statues and monsters and gods. I gave up trying to see anything larger than a man. My brother never did.

IV.

We returned to Meklong laden with gifts, our pockets filled with the money we had made selling eggs in the vast marketplace outside the palace; my brother, typically, had refused to leave Bangkok without carrying out his plan. Everything we made, everything we were given—with the single exception of a miniature jade Buddha, no larger than my thumb, that would remain with us the rest of our lives and that sits, even now, in its niche in the wall above our bed—we turned into ducks. By the river near our houseboat we built a huge fenced enclosure with a pond, filled it with quacking and feathers. Twice a week we poled down the river to the Gulf of Siam to catch shellfish with which to feed our flock. They grew fat as Chaucer’s friars and set themselves to begetting long lines of offspring that followed them about the yard like miniature quacking trains.

Within a few months of our return from the capital, we had begun to prosper. We hired Ha Lung, the man who had given us work after our father’s death, to help us haul the vats of salt and clay, and to bring our goods to market. With his short bandy legs and boxer’s crouch, Ha Lung worked like an ox. Unlike some of the other villagers, who resented our good fortune and mumbled jealously among themselves, he seemed untroubled by the way the tables had turned or by the fact that he should find himself working for mere boys; if it ever occurred to him that we
were only a year older than the son and daughter he had lost to the cholera, he never said a word. A widower now, living with the one child—a daughter—who had survived, he seemed cheerful enough but rarely spoke during the long hours we worked alongside one another, plastering eggs or hauling crates. Only one time, I remember, did he stop in the middle of the path to the river. It was early in the morning. We had had a good week. The air smelled of grass and mud; the shadows seemed painted on the green water. On the boats, tied side by side, the crates were already piled thigh-deep.

As we came up behind him, carrying our load, my brother asked him what was the matter. “Your father would have been pleased,” he said, without turning to us, and suddenly the back of his bristly head blurred and ran, then cleared. “He would have been pleased,” he said again, and walked on.

Day by day and week by week, the miracle of our visit to the royal court receded like a shrine at the end of a long, straight road. Our lives resumed something of a normal pattern. Twice a week we brought our eggs to the floating market. Worried that a thief could find our savings underneath the floorboard and take everything we had, our mother began sneaking out in the darkness and secreting a portion of our money in a short piece of bamboo under some loose thatching. If we saved carefully, my brother and I believed, within a year’s time we would be able to build a second enclosure and expand still further.