by Mark Slouka
“They’re not coming into my house,” my brother said.
“I know that,” I answered. “They’re coming into mine.”
Without our being aware of it, a train of events had been set in motion, though it would sometimes seem to me, in the years to come, that the train had actually departed the station on the day we were born, that it had been there all along, running on invisible rails over seabeds and continents, and that the events of those days had simply made it visible to us. It hardly mattered. Predestined or newly born, our fate came rushing out of our past and hurtled by, leaving us standing, like twin travelers on the prairie, watching the lantern in its final car disappear into the dark.
We had topped a rise, and begun the long descent to war.
PART TWO
I.
Muang Tai, or Siam to a farang like me, is a dream now. The brown Meklong, turgid and ripe. The sun. The particular rankness—the essence of childhood, and not unpleasant—of water and waste and things drowned in the roots. The palm-thatched houseboats, tied each to each along the banks. The warm smell of the bamboo mats; the seething of the rain. We swam in the river a thousand times, laughing at the old women who assured us that Akuna would drag us down by our skinny ankles to join the company of the dead he kept under the shelves of rock, their mouths forever open like fish and their eyes as white as clouds; when we were older we grew bolder still, diving under the fishing boats as they came upstream, swimming smooth and fast as eels. Our father told us not to, but we didn’t listen.
Muang Tai was fish on the drying racks and the sweet smooth flesh of the lamyai scooped with a fingertip from a hard brown shell. It was the familiar outline of the branches of the shoreline trees at dusk—a pig’s head on a stick, a laughing man with a broken arm, a sad man with twigs in his hair; it was a trunk along the river path, a wrinkled old boll like an elephant’s eye.
Muang Tai was the great, lumbering beetles we tied to strips of river grass and fought against each other in the dirt. They had great purple jaws like scimitars and we would play with them for hours, or so it seemed, listening to the minute clicking of their jaws, moving them this way and that, lifting them up into the air like puppets whenever they seemed about to get a real hold. Though of the same tribe they hated each other instinctively (though it occurs to me now that it might have been as much their predicament as their nature that made them what they were), and we would fight them on and off for days sometimes, keeping them in crude cricket cages we made ourselves, feeding them bits of fish and fruit, until the day Eng’s beetle, a slightly smaller variety, closed its jaws on mine and neatly scissored off its long, whiplike antennae. Hardly an oversensitive child, I crushed it with a stick to allay its suffering, but the image of it blundering around, turning in small circles, stayed with me, and I never played the game again.
And then there was the sadness of the leaf cups, each with its little candle, sent down the river on Loy Krathong. And the heavy, head-shaking walk of the buffalo in the paddies. And the day my father saw a half-grown python looped like a small tree around something on the riverbank. When we threw sticks at it, it vomited up the small dog it had almost swallowed, and slipped, as though through a crack, into the water, a reticulated chain of velvety black and brown and yellow that gleamed a pure peacock blue where it passed through the sun. Left behind in the mud, covered in a smooth, unctuous cream, the dog looked like something that had been born too early, or had long ago drowned in milk. I did not feel sorry for it.
It’s been sixty-three years now since we stepped aboard the Sachem with hardly more than Mr. Melville’s carpetbag to our names. Nearly a lifetime. We received little news of our mother or our brother Nai: a letter a year, if that, less as the seasons passed. And just as the time came when the language of home grew wooden and strange in our mouths, when we had to work to remember the names of the most common things and finally gave up trying, so it was with those we had left behind. Year by year, as if by some chemic process inexorable as the rusting of steel or the greening of bronze, their touch, their anger, their familiar essence faded, until those we had known as intimately as we knew our own skin had been reduced to little more than a name, an occasional sorrow, and a small collection of hardened memories, unrecognizable under the verdigris of the years.
We didn’t intend it that way. We would have had it otherwise. But the plantain-leaf boats we released on Loy Krathong went each their way. Some, pushed out too hard by their eager owners, or swamped by the waves from a fisherman’s boat, winked out early. Some, caught by an invisible loop of current, came back around. And some—a relative few, admittedly—just kept going, receding farther and farther into the dark, their tiny flames bobbing precariously on the black water until they had disappeared from view. And we from theirs, I suppose.
I would have stayed. As would Eng, though he would never admit it. But Hunter, behind his Scots reserve, was as ruthless as Barnum would ever be, and Coffin, despite his Presbyterian posturing, could hear the ring of bullion at ten miles. Hunter knew he’d spotted a goldmine the afternoon he saw us, as he put it, swimming in the Meklong River like some strange animal with two heads and four arms, and Coffin, having wheedled the affections of King Rama III, knew how to grease the path whether it wanted greasing or not. The king’s permission was secured. We were promised a salary and a chance to see the world. My mother, who would be losing not only her two oldest sons but their income as well, was offered three hundred pounds. She did not say no.
When I think of her now I see her as she was then, as though time had simply stopped in Meklong when we left it. And more and more, I find myself remembering not the person I once knew in life but the one I came to know in dreams. I’d seen her in my sleep, talked with her, scores of times over the years, but it wasn’t until after her death that I realized that those ghostly meetings—without the ballast of flesh and blood to balance them—had quietly taken over the territory of the past. Now, when I thought of her, I found it easier to recall the person I’d seen standing in the moonlight by the tobacco sheds in a dream than I did the distant figure crying on the pier in Bangkok in 1829 as the boat carrying her two boys and their pet python moved off into the harbor.
If someone had told us we would never see her again, we would not have believed them. But then, how many of us, stopped by some Elijah on the pier when we were young, would have believed that our lives would take the turns they did?
When she was five or six, my Nannie began asking about her grandparents, as children will. She wanted to know about her grandmother in particular—what she looked like, whether she got mad at us when we were boys—and Eng and I did our best. We dusted off the old anecdotes, untangled their strings, made them jump about. We described the Grand Palace in Bangkok, with its blue-and-orange tiled ceilings and gold mosaic walls. We told the tale of King Trailok’s beloved boatman who, upon running his lord’s barge aground on one of the bars of the river, insisted, over his lord’s offers of leniency, on being put to death. We repeated again the threadbare tale of how our mother, a fishmonger’s wife, sent away the king’s physicians who wanted to separate us at birth, how this quietest of women, who often smiled but seldom spoke, had stood at the door of our houseboat, a stick she’d taken from the fire in one hand and the knife my father used for cleaning fish in the other, and told them to leave.
Nannie’s curiosity was limitless; not so my inventiveness. Strangely touched by her interest in a woman she had never met, aware as well of how much it would have meant to our mother to know that a daughter of ours would one day ask about her, I struggled on, filling in the chinks as necessary, tidying up the thatching, feeling all the while that my memory—our memory, for Eng remembered even less than I—had betrayed us all. This was not our mother. In the age-old battle between language and time, I thought to myself, neither wins. Time hurries off with its prizes; our words are all that’s left us.
But then something unexpected happened. As we continued to tell our tales ove
r the course of those two weeks, the inadequacy of our words became less troubling, their failure to capture the truth less obvious. They came to seem, if not true, then good approximations of the truth, and so, our consciences partially salved, we sailed on; we offered them to the children who gathered in the parlor by the old double chair every evening to listen—stories that had never really happened, about people who had never quite lived—and they, by some miracle of transubstantiation greater than all the breads and fishes, took the stories we told and fashioned them into something very much like truth. After listening for the twentieth time to the story of our mother and the king’s physicians—a story so much deeper, sadder, and more beautiful than I could ever begin to tell—Nannie turned to us one winter night as we chunked up the fire and said, simply, “Grandmother was very brave.” And there it was: a nugget of truth in the gravel of our tales.
“She was that,” I said, blinking away the tears that had suddenly come to my eyes. “She was that, child. The bravest woman I ever knew.”
We were born with our heads between each other’s legs (and not up our asses, as Gideon once informed us in the heat of an argument) on a hard bamboo mat on a houseboat tied to the shore of the Meklong River in ancient Siam, the exotic Orient, land of tigers and peacocks and little yellow people very much like us. Like little Tom Thumb and Anna Swan and Mr. Nellis, the Armless Wonder, we’d been blessed by God’s inattention, undercooked or too well done, a pinch of dough forgotten or triple what was asked for, a batch half-divided and sent on its way. Unlike them, we had the added blessing of our place of birth to be thankful for, which in the minds of our newly adopted countrymen, as old Phineas Barnum well knew, called up a wonderful hash of pagodas and harems, child kings and barbarian hordes. Ancient Siam, made visible in the cast of our skin and the shape of our eyes, was as far from State Street as you could get. It was sin and opium smoke. It was elephants with diamond collars and dark-eyed beauties with rubies in their navels. Siam was everything unfamiliar, everything our God-drunk countrymen feared and desired, and we were its exotic export, otherness distilled and hyperdistilled. And so they came in droves to stare and poke and prod. And pay. And pay again. We made nothing. We grew nothing. We were like priests, offering absolution for sins we had never known and could barely understand. For six years, like whores in the marketplace, we peddled the wares of God.
It might have been otherwise.
I can see our birth—I was there, after all—the small, tilting room with the bamboo mat, the smell of the water and our mother’s sweat, the women’s excited chatter when we gushed at last into this world, tight as a doubled nut slipping its shell. Twins. And two little buds in the mass of slippery legs and arms. Sons. For the first ten seconds of our lives, we were good fortune. And then the growing silence, the confusion as they attempted first to untangle us, the cries of fear at the band of flesh, suddenly visible, that grew between us like some unnatural plant.
They ran. Ran from a band of skin hardly two fingers wide at the time, ran—these women who had known my mother for years, and who would know her for years to come—as from something unclean. Our mother, as she always had and always would, did what was necessary. Left alone on a mat with a pair of unwashed twins crying between her legs, she pulled herself over to the knife the women had dropped in their rush, cut the twin ends of the blue, ropy cord that bound us to her, then tied off the ugly little tails that remained with a bit of string she found on the floor. Seeing how things were, she carefully untwisted us so we could lie head to head and settled herself to wait for the afterbirth. The rain began, hissing in the palm fronds, turning the shoreline outside the windows a pale, watery gray. By the time my father came home (no one had had the courage to get him), she had washed and suckled us and put us to bed.
I wonder what they talked about that night. From all I know, they took our birth for the fact it was and went on with their lives. They had three children already. Now they had two more. In many ways, the peculiar nature of our birth was like the weather: One might wish it to be different, but typhoons would be born in the Bay of Bengal and the river would flood when the monsoon came whether one wished it or not. Our father, I suspect—though I hardly remember him at all—shook his head over our common bond, noted that we looked healthy and strong, let us grasp a finger each, and returned to his selling table outside our door.
Others were less sanguine. News of our birth reached Bangkok almost before my father’s boat had bumped against the house that May afternoon, and like any new event, whether celestial or earthly, it had to be worked into the tissue of superstitions that made the people feel secure. The learned men of the royal court put their heads together and lo! there was light. If an unnatural birth was a bad omen, they reasoned, a birth such as ours, of such surpassing strangeness, could only prophesy the end of the world. The sun would turn black in the sky. Rama II himself, the Lord of Life, decreed it: We would have to be separated or put to death.
We were neither.
They came three weeks later in a pouring rain, their sandals slap-slapping in the mud: a group of five men, three holding vermilion umbrellas with gold tassels—a thing never before seen in our village—and two in the yellow robes of the Buddhist priests. They stopped on the shore at the foot of the walk to our house. The gaggle of soaked villagers who had been leading them pointed up the plank and stepped away. “We have come to see the marvel,” said one to my mother, who, all unsuspecting, wordless with astonishment at this august delegation standing before our houseboat, invited them in. My father was out fishing.
I can see her running ahead, shame quickly outstripping amazement at the thought of her clothes, the smallness of the rooms. Our poverty, I imagine, must never have been as visible to her as it was in those few moments. The room where we lay sleeping on a mat by the wall, despite the open windows, smelled hot and rank. We had shat ourselves. Quickly drawing the soiled cloth from under us, she wiped us with a clean edge, slipped a fresh cloth under our bottoms and ran out the back door just as the boat gave a telltale heave and the group stepped aboard. Anyone watching from the opposite bank would have seen our mother burst out the side door as though the boat were under pressure, make two quick swipes with the cloth in the river, drop it on the plank in the rain, and rush back in. By the time the men had filed into the main room, led, no doubt, by our screaming (they were prepared for the ill manners of the peasants, and the stunned awe their own appearance could provoke), she was there to greet them in a fresh skirt, her head bowed low between her raised arms in the wai she had been too startled to offer earlier. A bowl of bright red ngáw fruit sat on the table.
They wasted little time. Ignoring the fruit she offered them, they walked over to where we lay crying under the faded yellow cloth we had succeeded in pulling over ourselves. One of them, a small, wizened-looking man with a pointy beard, asked my mother to remove the cloth.
A shocked murmur greeted our appearance. This was ghastly, an evil omen indeed. One of them, bolder than the rest, ran his smooth finger across our bridge, then flipped us over. We screamed. My mother began to step forward—though whether to stop them or help them is unclear—then paused. Consensus was immediate. We would have to be separated. If we lived, a case could be made that the threat had been forestalled; if we died, the king’s decree would have been carried out.
But if the desired end was undebatable, the means by which to achieve it were not. Something of an argument ensued among the three physicians, during which my mother at first stood awkwardly off to the side like a young girl hoping to catch the boys’ attention, and then, perhaps unable to think of anything else to do, went to the fire. One maintained the bond between us was dead flesh, or very nearly so, and therefore susceptible to sawing or burning. The second, reaching for a piece of fruit, disagreed. Sawing through the flesh would be too crude; the ligament, he pointed out, squatting by our side, was of considerable thickness. It might link us more vitally than his colleague assumed. A clean incision w
as therefore of the utmost importance, and while the idea of burning had some merit, the operation would have to be performed as swiftly as possible. A hot wire applied here and here, he believed, running a long fingernail down the twin bases of our bridge where it attached to our fist-sized chests, would have the greatest chance of success. The monks in their yellow robes had said nothing. The rain had increased.
Nonsense, interrupted the one with the pointy beard. To do as his colleagues suggested they might as well put us in a sack with a good-sized stone and throw us in the river. We were much too young to survive such extreme measures. No, to have any hope of success the thing would have to be done by degrees. He paused strategically, then pointed at us, still wailing on the mat. Notice how they are of approximately the same size and weight. Hang them over a fine gut cord, one on either side. Take them off only to bathe and feed them. Within a few weeks their weight will force the cord up through the ligament, successfully separating them, but the process will have been so slow that the wound will have had time to …
They turned as one toward the strange, almost inhuman sound coming from the other side of the room. Our mother stood with her back to the fire. In her left hand, hanging by her side, was the blackened stick with which she had been prodding the flames. In her right she held my father’s cleaning knife, its point at her throat. The steel, they could see, had already pierced the skin; a thin, dark stream was winding its way down her throat and into her shirt. She seemed unaware of the sound that came from her—a perfect joining of rage and despair, a monotonous internal whine like the sound one might hear from a child tormented by bullies in some empty schoolyard, tormented beyond fear, beyond tears, past caring for its own preservation. It didn’t stop.