God's Fool (12 page)

But they did concern us.

For nearly a week we pretended to be ill, so as not to have to go outside. I knew my brother. For days I had been watching him grow quieter and quieter. For days—almost since our arrival—I had been following the change in him; bit by bit, the fat was disappearing from his gestures, the ease from his voice. By the fourth or fifth day in Saigon he hardly spoke; slept without moving. Every movement now was a small violence. I knew what would happen. Like water in a sealed drum, his anger would freeze until it burst.

If he went, I’d go with him. And we would both go down. And so I proposed feigning illness until the message our ambassador had sent on to Hue, requesting an audience with the king, had been answered. For six days we lay side by side in a big bed, complaining of headaches and stomach pains for the benefit of the physicians, downing the bitter potions they prescribed for our nonexistent malady, whispering quietly to pass the hours. We played memory games, trying to remember every detail of some event years gone. We searched for shapes in the wood above our heads. We talked endlessly of what we would do on our return home. We slept. In some ways it was like being children again, except that everything outside us had grown dark and wrong: Our mother and father had been replaced by strangers; what had once been a sanctuary was now a steel-tongued trap. We could hear the guards on the street below our window: long silences punctuated by a single word, the hawking spit of betel, the creak of a board.

Many years later, when a journalist from the
Hartford Courant
, apropos of nothing, asked us if we had ever been in prison, I answered yes, and my brother did not correct me.

On the seventh day, having heard that a message had come from the Royal Palace in Hue, we emerged from our rooms. We had been instructed to embark for Touran, a village up the coast, there to await His Eminence’s further instructions. We left Saigon two hours later.

The marketplace, when we passed through it later that May afternoon, was nearly deserted; swarms of flies sparked about the shaded stalls. The sun, after days of rain, had emerged. Everywhere we looked the palm-thatched roofs of the city smoldered as if the world were about to burst into flame. Steam rose from the dirt of the roads; carts passed, trailing smoke like censers. Led and flanked by a small army of soldiers—absurdly, for no crowds appeared—our elephants walked past the shops selling Chinese silks and porcelain. Toward the end of the avenue, I remember, we passed a small stall shaded by strips of cloth strung over poles. Inside I could see a man carefully flaying a python with a small, curved knife. Winding the skin in a thick bandage about his arm as he worked, he made a quick cut, loosened it from around his fingers,
and tossed it on a pile in the sun. It fell like a fat ribbon on a pile of ribbons just like it, and the jungle closed around us.

Five days later we reached the port of Touran in a driving rain. A message from the King informed us that a mandarin would be arriving the following day with four galleys to take us on to Hue.

The galleys we boarded the next morning, though a hundred feet long, were more like spears than boats. Forty men waited at the oars of each one. When all had been made comfortable on the cushions piled amidships, four men stood in the stern of each boat, each holding aloft two lengths of bamboo. A cry went up. One hundred and sixty oars emerged from the water, hovered, poised. At the sound of the bamboo cracking together, the boats leaped forward. At the end of the stroke, the bamboo cracked again. The oars reached for more, caught and surged. Less than twenty-four hours later we were at the mouth of the river Hue, our boats cutting past the fort, in which we could see lines of soldiers watching us pass. A few hours after that, we were in the capital.

A high-ranking mandarin with a retinue of soldiers conducted us to a house that had been prepared for our arrival. No sooner had we entered the magnificent wooden structure with its curved banisters and ornate furniture than we heard barricades sliding into place. The doors, we were told, had been blocked, all entrances secured. Though free to leave the territory of Cochin China at any time, we would, for the duration of our stay, be considered prisoners of the king: a precautionary measure only, we were assured, a formality of sorts, designed to prevent any possible misunderstanding with the populace. The people were unfamiliar with foreigners and might respond in unexpected ways. We looked outside. Soldiers surrounded the building.

The mandarin smiled. Our every wish would be answered, he said. His Eminence would grant our ambassador and two senior diplomats an audience in due course. In the meantime, entertainment would be provided to compensate us for our long journey. Entertainment, he felt certain, unlike any we had ever known.

I find it amusing now, sixty years later, to think that one of the great
horrors of my life should have been presented to me as entertainment. That it should have been offered, like a glistening monstrosity on a silver platter, as legitimate compensation for our weariness. The world, it would seem, loves a good joke.

The original performance planned for us, we soon discovered, had unexpectedly fallen through. Only a week before our arrival—fortuitously enough—the king’s forces had suppressed an armed rebellion in the provinces—a minor affair, we were assured. The leader of the uprising, a former general in the military, had been captured alive. We were to be honored guests at his execution. As representatives of Rama III, whose recent military successes in Cambodia and down the length of the Malay Peninsula had not gone unnoticed, we would surely appreciate the rigor with which an equally great empire enforced the lesson of obedience to the throne.

The unnamed traitor, we learned, was to have entertained us in the traditional manner. In the first act, securely trussed but free to scream, he would be lowered on ropes, feet first, into a vat of boiling water. The descent would be stopped at the knees. In the second act, still fully conscious (the criminal must be aware of himself throughout, must feel the weight of his crimes), he would be seated on a sharp steel pike. His own weight, and time, would kill him, driving home the metaphorical point—so essential for the people—that his own deeds had been responsible for his fate.

But it was not to be. To the fury of all concerned, apparently, the prisoner had somehow managed to poison himself in his cell. The performance had to be canceled. Informed of these developments while sitting in the plushly appointed meeting room downstairs, our ambassador, as usual, betrayed nothing, neither the weakness of disgust nor the cravenness of feigned disappointment. Flicking a speck of dust off his lap, he strolled out across the chasm, walking the line between sympathy and disinterest so confidently that he seemed at one and the same time to be commiserating with his hosts and trying his best to keep from being bored by their troubles.

But our hosts would not be deterred so easily. At mid-afternoon of
the next day we were escorted to a garrisoned fort a short distance away from the official quarter in which we had been housed. Guards ushered us in. Walking up a flight of dark steps, we came to a bare inner hallway that seemed to run the entire circumference of the building, then passed through a pair of nondescript wooden doors. For a moment, the sudden brightness blinded us. Directly below us, bright as a coin in the sun, was a sandy arena, open to the sky. Around it, rising into the shadow of the vast, circular roof, were twenty or more tiers of wooden benches arranged in a semicircle. Far below, at the exact center of that vast open space, chained to a stake like the hand on a watch, was a full-grown tiger.

The great beast was lying in the sand. We were just seating ourselves, wondering whether this was the new entertainment that had been prepared for us, when the mandarins and their retinue of soldiers arrived. The man who had welcomed us the day before took his place next to our ambassador. The seats filled quickly. I could see our ambassador, sitting on a silk cushion, lean over to ask his host a question, to which the other smiled and pointed to the great block of sun filling the open gates of the fort. And then I felt them, shaking the wood on which we sat. I glanced at my brother. He sat still and unbreathing, a study in disbelief.

They came through that gate in four ranks of fifteen, regally adorned, ridden by keepers in uniforms that sparked in the sun. Still not understanding, believing that we would be shown some pantomime of battle, some rehearsed and bloodless allegory of terror vanquished by monarchical strength, we found ourselves looking at the tiger below us. Why didn’t it snarl? we wondered. Or lash its tail? Or pace about?

Always slightly quicker than my brother to credit a horror, I understood a split second before he did. A great spasm of sympathy gripped my chest. It didn’t move much because its claws had been torn from their sheaths; it didn’t snarl because its jaws had been sewn shut, leaving only enough room, presumably, for food to be thrust between its teeth with a stick. It could barely move, much less fight. It took a few steps, its whiskered chin glistening with drool, then began to rub the side of its head in the dirt. From all around us now came a rising chorus of angry
voices. Why didn’t it do something? Why didn’t it move? Men were standing up. Someone threw a whip into the arena. It fell to the sand like a shot bird.

I looked at Eng. Tears were running down his face. For some minutes I’d been aware of a muffled trembling coming through our bond, deep as a fever. There was nothing I could do. “It will be all right,” I said nonsensically. “Don’t look.” And reaching over with both hands I pushed gently on his back and head. Like a child he allowed himself to be bent over.

I tried to look down with him, but couldn’t. Raising my head, I could see the ranks of behemoths, each as big as a small house. Their keepers, looking like toy soldiers beside their hulking charges, now stood beside them. Thirty yards away, the tiger still hadn’t moved. Standing square like an old dog, its great skull sunk down between its shoulders, it suddenly heaved a thin rope of vomit onto the dirt and sat down.

It was at that moment that one of the bull elephants, a giant with great, brown-yellow tusks, broke ranks. Trumpeting wildly, it began to back up. Ignoring the lilliputian keeper running alongside it screaming orders and beating its sides with a rattan whip, it started around the perimeter of the circle.

It all seemed to happen at once: the elephant, headed off by three others, was brought under control. The keeper was kneeling in the dirt. A man was standing to his side. I heard someone laugh and glanced to my right. A sound like a blade splitting a gourd. I glanced back. Something dark was rolling in the dirt like a ball of rags. I couldn’t see what I was seeing. A soldier was doing something; another was kicking dirt over a welling scratch in the sand; two others, ahead of him, were dragging the keeper’s headless body to the side. And then my stomach heaved and I was quietly ill on the boards between my legs.

It fought. Impossibly, even absurdly, out of some deep well of instinct, it fought. One by one they were made to charge the stumbling cat throwing itself about like a hooked fish at the end of its chain. And as they came on, it threw itself against them, batting at their faces with
plate-sized paws that should have held and raked to the bone, pushing its useless jaws against their necks, spinning and turning in the air each time it was thrown yet somehow managing, again and again, to roll from under the legs, thick and heavy as Doric columns, that sought to trample out the little life it had left.

The arena was weirdly silent; no one moved. It was as though the battle were taking place at the end of a long, dark tunnel, and I was the only one watching this cat, somehow grown beautiful again, quietly throwing itself at a moving wall. And suddenly, for just a moment, the gears seemed to stall, to hesitate, and in that moment I caught a glimpse of the impossible like some shy forest creature at the edge of a clearing at dusk. And then it was gone. The gears meshed. The tenth or twelfth or twentieth giant, wrapping a python trunk around the tiger’s neck, threw it high into the sun and it fell, with a horrible tearing sound, onto an upturned tusk. A slick white point thrust obscenely out its back. The battle was won.

Trumpeting wildly, flinging its head from side to side like a dog with a rat, the elephant slid the cat from its tusk and slowly trampled it to a crushed brown mat of blood and bone and fur. My brother wept. But I had seen something. With my own tears still stinging my eyes and the acid taste of vomit in my throat, I understood, for the first time, that resistance—when our defeat has been predestined and the gods themselves are thundering in our ears, baying for our blood—is as close to the sacred as we are permitted to come in this life. And I thought then (but I was a child still, and fear had made me brave), that though we all—each and every one of us—came into the world with our mouths sewn shut and our claws pulled out, I for one would never give in. I would never accept the rock simply because it was harder than flesh, never capitulate to the laws of necessity simply because they were irrefutable, never cravenly bow to reason (or its whispering kissing-cousin, fate), merely because they could not be avoided. I would run out the length of my chain, by God. I would split my jaws on the world’s thick hide. And I have.

VI.

And so we returned to Meklong—an odd, inverted journey under a leaden, gathering sky, first down the Hue to the port of Touran, now dry and still, then on to Saigon for an interminable week of discussions of which we were not a part, then back down the Saigon River, around the chin at Vung Tau, and finally, like Orestes fleeing the Furies to Patmos, up the endless green of the Cambodian coast to Bangkok. Two days later we were home.

Nothing had changed. Ha Lung had reinforced one of the enclosures, begun building a second. Everyone we knew, it seemed, was well. Our mother welcomed us with tears of relief in her eyes, and that evening gave us an accounting of the money Ha Lung had made while we were gone. We had done well. When neighbors came by to hear of our journey we put them off, explaining we were tired. We didn’t speak about what we’d seen. We let it stay inside, like a bullet lodged too deep to touch, hoping time would absorb it, too young to know that though the bandage drops away and the scar fades, every buried thing becomes a seed.