God's Fool (9 page)

Five years had passed since the cholera came to Meklong. My brother had saved us. Long before the death of King Rama II, we were no longer hungry.

III.

The facts are these: Robert Hunter never found us, never discovered us, never rescued us, as he liked to claim for the benefit of those fresh-faced newspapermen who clustered around him, eager for our story, and who kept his ever-hungry purse well fed and fat. We found
him
that steaming afternoon in 1824, stumbling along the bank of the Meklong like some exotic fool, his face like a sundial and his skin as damp and freckled and pale as a flower.

The descendant of a British merchant ignominiously kicked out of Virginia after the Revolutionary War, Hunter had ground ashore in Muang Tai. Hardheaded and arrogant beneath his dour Scots reserve, he could be persuasive, even charming when he wanted to be. In no time at all he had acquired a warehouse across the river from Bangkok, established contacts in the Royal Palace, and begun scouring the countryside for goods and artifacts with which he hoped to resuscitate his flagging export business.

We would be his finest export, his salvation, his passage from the obscurity to which his fate and his talents had consigned him.

We were thirteen years old. We had gone for a swim in the river that afternoon and were climbing back on board our boat when we heard someone call and turned just in time to see a tall dark figure, hurrying toward us down the bank, catch his toe on a root and pitch forward into
the grass. It was his manner of falling—as though someone had nailed his feet to the earth and at the same time given him a violent shove in the back—that impressed us. In a moment he was up again, wiping haplessly at the mud on his clothes, waving his arms, rushing on as though nothing had happened. When he came to the marshy edge of the water he beckoned to us to come nearer. We had never seen a Westerner before. Against our better judgment, we poled closer, thinking we could always hit him on the head if he tried to board the boat.

Would that we had.

What could he have been thinking, I wonder, stumbling about the country in that dark suit and high collar as though taking a late September stroll through Edinburgh. Standing on the shore, he called out all manner of impertinent questions, gesticulating wildly, drawing pictures in the air to supplement his ignorance of our language. In short order he learned that we were merchants, that we had a sister and brother, that we lived with our mother on a houseboat in the village of Meklong just around the bend. He asked if he could come visit. We didn’t know what to say. To refuse someone hospitality, in our culture, was wrong, and yet the thought of bringing this creature, even now standing up to his ankles in the mud (for we had not failed to notice that he had quietly moved forward as he spoke, as though creeping up on a wild animal), into our home, seemed less than appealing.

Seeing us hesitate—we must have seemed the bird of fortune to him, insecurely limed and poised to lift off the branch—he suddenly rushed forward, straight into the Meklong. The man was insane. We gripped our poles to push away, fully intending to make his eyes bulge with a knock to the head if he succeeded in reaching the boat, when he began waving something in his right hand, calling “Baht, baht, baht” like a parrot, and we stopped, though still wary, and let the madman, stumbling waist-deep in the current, fill our hands with money. His face above the collar was distended, a mass of swollen bites. Standing by the boat, pimpled and staring, he suddenly put me in mind of some large, exotic fish, come to inquire about the upper world. I whispered to my brother and we began to laugh.

Unabashed, Robert Hunter asked again if he might come and visit.

He came the next week, and the week following, and the week after that, bringing gifts: a new brass pot and a pair of red embroidered slippers for our mother, a gilded cricket cage he claimed had come all the way from Singapore, thin-skinned plums that burst in our mouths. Sitting awkwardly in our houseboat, he showed us coins with unfamiliar symbols, spun strange, broken tales of the sea and of foreign lands larger and grander than we could ever imagine, countries where ordinary men could live like kings and unimaginable wealth was to be had for the asking. We knew nothing. Though we wondered why a man would ever leave such a place to traffic in bowls and folding boxes (and worried, for a time, that he must have been guilty of some odious crime, for which the leaders of these countries had expelled him), we listened nonetheless, and gradually found ourselves taken in.

Starched and stiff as a shirt, Hunter was enough of a man of the world to know that every paradise, to be appealing, must have its serpents; being who he was, he made certain the serpents did his bidding. The women of these lands, he told us one day as the three of us walked down the bank to check our dipping basket, were often as scandalously obliging as they were beautiful, willing to allow the most shocking liberties to their person by anyone who took their fancy. They were not at all like the women we knew. He watched as we levered the dripping basket out of the river and swung it toward the shore, the trapped fish flopping in the mesh. He hadn’t wanted to mention these things in front of our mother, he said, but he had noticed that we were almost men, and therefore old enough to be warned of the ways of the world.

We saw none of this. We liked Robert Hunter. Boys ourselves, we were flattered to have a grown man—and a foreigner at that, a thing quite literally unknown in those parts—visiting our houseboat, calling our names, bringing gifts. And Hunter, for his part, was smart enough to move slowly, to prepare the soil, to nurse his seedlings and wait—for years if necessary—for the harvest that would be his. Any doubts we might have harbored about his motives faded as the monsoons came and
went and Robert Hunter continued to appear at our home, a small, tight smile on his face and a gaudy gift in his hands.

We had no way of knowing, as he did, that securing our mother’s permission was only the first, and smallest, hurdle. Like all the people of Muang Tai, we were the monarch’s personal possessions; to take us abroad, he would need the king’s permission as well. And so that is what he set out to get. For months and then years—indefatigable, patient as death—he wormed his way into the bureaucracy that was Bangkok, doing favors, probing for weaknesses, studying the vast and intricate foundation of deference and loyalty on which the monarchy was built as though it were a language. For three years he studied its syntactical arrangements, its tonal shades. For three years, everything he did was judged as worth his time, or not, by whether it would further his goal; for three years, his every deed and gesture was balanced and calibrated to a single target. He would tunnel, with the help of Almighty God who watches over Presbyterians in heathen lands, into the Royal Palace. In another man, at another time, with a different goal, I suppose this kind of mad determination would have been almost admirable.

As it was, we got there first.

Ironically enough, Robert Hunter, with his subterranean machinations and squirrelings, may have been responsible for our turn of fortune. A whisper among the servants, overheard perhaps by one of the royal consorts, rose like a bubble in a vat through the hierarchy of consuls and courtiers and ministers until at last, days or weeks or months later, it reached the royal ear. Rama III was in the royal garden, offering squares of plum and snail meat to the palace tortoises, watching them stretch their wrinkled velvet necks, then bend their wizened heads to his outstretched palm. Curious, the king inquired about us, and the tortoises, solemn as sages whose worries had cast them under a spell, raised their leathery heads as though listening as well. Bring them to me, he said, slowly stroking the soft skin of a long neck with the back of his fingers.

He had been on the throne just over a year. A hard man with a soft
heart, he had no interest in ballet or the theatre, but devoted himself, instead, to the art of war. Whereas Rama II would sit on an island in the Garden of Night, listening to the poets reciting their verses, contemplating the doubled reflections of the candle boats drifting past the Chinese pagodas and European pavilions he himself had designed, his successor drew most of his pleasure from conquest. Within months of ascending the throne, he had invaded the Lao territory to the north, subdued part of Cambodia, sent his armies down the Malay Peninsula. A devout Buddhist, he devoted a good deal of time to denouncing the Protestant missionaries who, with Robert Hunter–like tenacity, persevered in trying to save our souls despite having failed to win a single convert in eighteen years. But aside from feeding his tortoises and heaping mud on the sweating sons of Martin Luther, his pleasures outside of war were few, his curiosity limited. Word of us, however, had apparently been enough to break through the crust of royal indifference.

Our mother received the summons, delivered by an official emmissary of the royal court to our houseboat in Meklong, while we were on the river. Believing, at first, that the new monarch had decided, after fourteen years, to revive the sentence of death, she could hardly bring herself to speak. The messenger, seeing her trembling, assured her this was not so. His majesty was intrigued, nothing more.

Within minutes of his departure, grown men, confederates of our father, had been sent out on the river; they found us a half-day away, bargaining with a shrunken old man for a pair of ducks with which to expand our egg-laying business. Four men whisked us on board a long, thin boat; another jumped on ours—he would follow in due course. Late that night we were home, our houseboat riding low in the water with the weight of excited, chattering neighbors. Nothing remotely like this had ever happened in our village. If it hadn’t been for the witnesses who had seen the royal emissary actually walk up the plank to our boat, leaving the two powerful men who were with him waiting on the shore, we would have thought our own mother mad.

We were prepared for the royal audience, lectured on proper behavior and deportment by Fang Chu, one of our neighbors in Meklong,
whose father, it was said, had once worked for a man who had sold slaves to the palace under Rama II. Our mother, with the help and advice of the village women, sewed beautiful new jackets with a concealed rent below the armpit to accommodate our condition. She bought us new shoes. Four days later, on the morning of our departure, she combed our hair and braided it into long Chinese queues.

It was my brother who, despite everything going on around us, had the presence of mind and the nerve to insist on bringing the duck eggs. We had been doing very well with them. Dipped in a mixture of clay and salt, then covered with ashes, they would keep their freshness for up to three years. The royal visit, my brother argued coolly, might gain us nothing; at the marketplace in Bangkok, however, we could sell our eggs at a considerable profit, then use the money to buy goods only found in the capital. These we could then sell on our return home. If worst came to the worst, we would at least make enough to expand our business. We might never have another chance.

And so my brother and I set out to meet the official junk, already waiting like a beached whale at the predetermined point an hour down the river, dressed in emerald-green jackets, our hair in queues, and pulling a cart of preserved duck eggs: an example of how, in life as in nature, small things attach themselves to large ones. We had expected resistance, prepared arguments and entreaties. The officials chosen to escort us to the Royal Palace, however, had only one thing in mind: to deliver us, unharmed, into the king’s presence at the appointed hour. It was not their place to question us. We had been summoned; that was enough. The duck eggs might represent some small part of our appeal. We watched in amazement as two men brought them onto the boat as delicately as newborn kittens and stacked them in an inner room where no harm could come to them. Had we appeared on the shore that morning with twenty quacking ducks and a pair of oxen, I’m convinced they would have taken them as well.

The capacity for wonder shrivels with age as surely as muscles grow soft. We were fourteen years old; nothing could have prepared us for the things we would see. The river widened as though it would cover the
earth. Gleaming rice paddies appeared, so vast we could barely make out the workers stooped far out over the water. Herds of black buffalo, their massive shoulders hunched, walked along the roads, driven by men with sticks. We passed so close we could hear the slap-whip of their tails against their sides.

Approaching the city, we felt as though we were sailing into the seething heart of some giant hive or anthill. The river seemed narrower here. Houseboats and floating shops by the hundreds crowded in from the shore. Men in vessels of every size and description poled this way and that, making way for us as we passed. In the crowds along the shore, scattered like flowers in a field, we could see the bright yellow robes of the monks. A thousand voices, shouting, laughing, arguing at once, many speaking in languages unfamiliar to us, were crying their wares: We recognized the call for
blachang
and dried fish, clothing and earthenware, as well as the names of what sounded like medicinal herbs—words unfamiliar to us. My brother pointed. There, rising high above the clustered houses, like something out of a dream, was a slim golden spire, glinting in the sun.

The landscape drifted by, revealing, by degrees, the magnificent temple below it. Further off we could now see another, very much like it, then another, grander still. Gathering up our courage, we asked the fatherly-looking man who had welcomed us that morning, and who now stood, expressionless, a short distance away, watching the river pass, whether this was the Royal Palace. He didn’t laugh at us. He didn’t smile. Bending down deferentially, he explained: These temples, though beautiful, were very much like each other. There was nothing like the Royal Palace—in this world or the next.

From the moment our boat was met by representatives of the king, who presented us with a gift of fruit and tea, then quickly covered us with a silken tent and hurried us away, explaining that none might see us before the king had satisfied his royal curiosity, we walked and spoke as in a dream. A dream of unimaginable splendor; of worlds within worlds; of rooms so vast and silent one could not be certain whether the figure sitting by the carved door on the other side was human or not, yet
could hear the hissing of the flame at his side. A dream of power so profound, so quiet, the closing of an eye in frustration or boredom could close a life.