God's Fool

by Mark Slouka

  One of the men began to say something, then stopped. Instinctively, faced with this thing, the group began to back away. The sound still coming from her throat, her lips pressed so unnaturally tight she appeared to be straining to keep something from escaping her mouth, my mother began to move toward them. By the time she had passed the mat on which we still lay screaming, her head had tilted back involuntarily and the point of the knife had gone deeper into the soft skin of her throat. The stream had thickened into a dark stem. On her soiled blouse, over her left breast, a dark blossom was opening.

  They backed out of our house into the rain, forgetting, in their haste, the vermilion umbrellas they had left inside the door. When, two years later, no one had returned to claim them, my father quietly sold them for a hundred baht each in the marketplace.

  In some ways, hardly a heroic tale.

  And yet, nothing if not that. Shy by nature, incapable of even speaking to these men from the capital who suddenly appeared in her houseboat like divine beings, carrying with them the air of the royal court, my mother could not even begin to conceive of resisting them. They were like gods. We were nothing. They spoke daily with King Rama II, who took his meals and listened to music on an island in the Garden of Night in the Royal Compound. We were a bit of dirt under the fingernails, a scattering of fish scales on the edge of a rack.

  His power was unlimited. His blood could not be shed. For the funeral of his father, he had commissioned a golden coach forty feet high and weighing over ten tons. One hundred and sixty men had been required to move it, another one hundred and thirty-five had been needed to act as brakes. No one outside the immediate royal family and his own inner circle was allowed to look at him. His own councillors were not allowed to touch him. His every whim had the gravity of law. Within three days of his succession to the throne, he had had the son of King Taksin, a celestial prince, beaten to death with a scented sandalwood club.

  For my mother to act as she did toward the royal physicians therefore must have seemed—to herself as well as to them—not only mad but unimaginable. One might as well attack a typhoon with a candle.

  And yet that, in a sense, was precisely what she had done. Leaning into the gale, she had done the only thing she could: She had held the candle to her clothes, watched as the flames paused, then leaped up her sleeves. A gesture born of utter despair. The wind died. The palms righted themselves. On the horizon over Bangkok, a star appeared through a rent in the clouds. Then another.

  The king’s physicians never returned. Busy collaborating with the court poets on a translation of the Hindu epic Ramayana, King Rama II forgot that he had sentenced us to death to avert the end of the world. An artist by nature, a man who insisted on personally sculpting the decorations for the buildings he commissioned, he lost himself in the adventures of Ramachandra and Sita and let us live.

  The world, as is so often the case, did not end. Our mother’s and father’s fears, like the terror that cramps the heart before dawn but winnows to a joke by breakfast, came to nothing. We lived, we grew, we wrapped our arms around each other and rolled laughing down the hills above the river, the sky and the grass spinning round our heads like the years. In a word, we survived. The sentence of death was extended, the full stop changed, as in most men’s lives, to a comma. The only mark it left on the visible world was a small, dark scar in the skin of our mother’s throat.

  II.

  Perhaps it comes down to this: our mother squatting before the fire, our brothers laughing from somewhere outside, the taste of rice and fish. Perhaps it’s the number of times our father pulled our ears or touched our faces, or the days (how many weeks or months would they make, added all together?) the three of us spent knee-deep in the sun-warm river, bent over the drying racks. What makes a home? Was it the familiar bump of our father’s boat when he returned in the afternoons? Or the way the floor would tip ever so slightly when he stepped aboard? He would strip his shirt and wash his arms in the basin, then cup his hands and gently pat water on his face and head. Was it the sound of the water raining down into the bowl?

  I barely remember those early years now. Our lives were not easy. Even if they had wanted to, my parents could not have made them so, and they showed no signs of wanting to. We were never coddled. We crawled, we walked, we ran. We fought other boys our age and older in the dirt where the market used to be. We learned to swim. With the possible exception of climbing trees, we could do anything anyone else could do, only better, since there were two of us. When the floating theater came to Meklong we went to see it, and though a lifetime has come between that night and this one, though the storytellers we listened to are all long dead, and the tumblers and the jugglers as well, I remember them all. We watched as a strong young man in fantastic dress fought invisible demons with a flaming sword, thrusting, parrying, the blade streaming sparks against the dark until suddenly, tilting back his head, he raised his arm and in one smooth movement swallowed the burning steel to the hilt. The crowd gasped. A number of women screamed. We had just started to cry when he drew the extinguished blade out of his throat, tossed his hair and plunged it quivering into the wooden stage.

  But these—the floating theatre, the giant pla buk that somehow made its way up the Meklong and tore up my father’s net, the purification fires burning on the eve of Songkran—these are the few boulders that rise above the river. The rest—the familiar voices, the songs, the thousand victories and humiliations of childhood—have sunk beneath the surface. I can hear them sometimes when the evening is still, quietly knocking against each other in the current. The small bones of memory.

  But my point is this: Our childhood was hardly different from anyone else’s in the world we knew, and a good deal happier than most. Our father was Chinese, and, like all the Chinese sons of Piatac, the soldier who long ago had rallied the conquered Siamese army and driven the Burmese out of Muang Tai, he enjoyed without qualm all the privileges to which his birth entitled him. Exempt from having to work in the rice paddies every year, able to buy his way out of military conscription with a small tax, he seized the opportunity offered him and prospered.

  His success alone, however—measured by a new net, a bit of cloth for my mother—would hardly have been enough to explain our happiness. Our parents, as far as we could know, seem to have had a genuine regard for each other. My father, though hardly a gentle man by nature, always treated our mother kindly, praising the food she prepared or the way she kept our house, discussing his business affairs with her as though she were a man, taking her side when she had been cheated in the marketplace rather than blaming her, as most men would have, for her inattention. In their years together, he never struck her.

  Our mother, for her part, quietly bore him nine children, working from the first muzzy gray of dawn to the deep mahogany light of dusk—sleep to sleep and season to season—without complaint or criticism. When Lun Li and the other women spoke of their husbands’ laziness while sweeping the planks in the mornings, she would nod in sympathy but refuse to join in, and they, noting that she did this without putting on airs or gloating, ascribed her reticence to fear and welcomed their timid sister back to the fold.

  A noisy, happy home, all in all. There was always a good deal of talk in the evenings, and more than a little laughter. Quiet in the company of others, our mother would grow almost lively in ours, and though he had never hesitated in letting us know the weight of his hand when it was necessary, my father could joke and smile when he wanted. On good nights, our brother told us, he would imitate Chong Lu getting caught in his own net, or Luang Bhirasi the day he almost stepped on a baby cobra, dancing like a man possessed before falling into the klong.

  Father. Where has he gone, I wonder. I imagine him leaning back, perhaps putting his hands behind his head as I do, as Christopher used to, as his son surely would have. I can almost see him, chuckling at the seven of us holding our stomachs from laughing, the little one wriggling on the mat, even my mother, the baby at her breast, sm
iling quietly into her hand. A man content. It’s dark outside. The still air moves, bringing the sounds of familiar voices, the creak of wood, the smell of fruit and mud and heat. He sighs, reaches for his cup. The moment passes.

  The cholera came to Meklong when we were eight. It came like a wave, a darkness. It came out of nothing—a small pain in the side, a sudden dizziness at the nets—and ate us alive. As in a dream, the small familiar figure in the market turned—and sank her teeth in our throats.

  Our younger sister Song was the first, followed by the two babies. I remember my father holding her head, trying to get her to sip from a cup. The young ones went quickly, held over buckets, retching. Zuo, our brother, who was two years younger than us, came next. He shat himself raw, cried quietly, and then was still. Our parents, disbelieving, rushed from room to room—washing, holding, emptying the pots of brown liquid, thin as river water, that flowed out of their children, listening as their babies one by one emptied themselves with small barking noises, slumped into whimpering sleep, and died. Li came next. And then our father, a strange look on his face, bent in the middle and started to shake.

  I don’t remember him dying. Our mother claimed, years later, that he talked to us almost to the end, reassuring us, comforting us, cleaning himself as best he could until he couldn’t raise his head or his arms and asked my mother not to let us in the room anymore. He was a strong man, and disrespectful of death.

  I killed the week it took him to die. I killed him too. Killed him retching over the pot, then shaking his head and trying to smile. Killed him making his little jokes while holding the wall to keep from slumping off the bucket. I buried him so deep that a full thirty years would pass before I saw him again.

  On a night in America, as far from Muang Tai as I would ever come, I woke in a house my brother and I would come to call our own to the talk of far-off thunder in a dream and, waking, couldn’t tell whether it was mumbling over the hills at our back or over the giant steps of the rice paddies thirty years ago. The rain never came, so perhaps the thunder I heard really was over Bangkok.

  I remember thinking how strange it was that I should dream of him after so many years. I couldn’t remember his face or his voice, and yet he had seemed so familiar, so utterly and completely alive, that I was struck with the thought that death is less than we make of it, that perhaps we simply live on—singing, arguing, swatting at flies—in other people’s dreams.

  It was night in Meklong. My brother and I were children again. We were in our houseboat. I could see a baby sleeping on a bamboo mat, our brother Nai eating jun fruit out of a wooden bowl. I could hear a baby crying, a man arguing with his wife. That must be Wei-Ling, I remember saying to myself. His houseboat is next to ours.

  Mother was in the dream, scooping pieces of fish and rice into the clay pot with her fingers. “Your father will be home soon,” she said to the fire, and I wondered to myself by what accident we had found ourselves home again. Just then the house rocked slightly and he walked in. I knew him instantly—his wide, kind face, his eyes, his movements. His familiarity broke my heart. He bent down to touch his sweating forehead to ours and I could smell the river. I looked past the netting. On the outside selling table, gleaming in the moonlight, was a small mountain of silvery fish.

  We sat down at the table. I looked at my father’s hands and started to cry. They were fisherman’s hands, with constellations of thin white cuts and miniature crosses and puckered scars. A fresh cut on the knuckle of his thumb was bleeding.

  “What is it?” he said to me. He noticed the cut. “This?” He began to suck on it.

  “I’m afraid,” I said.

  He put down his bowl and smiled. “There’s nothing to be afraid of,” he said.

  I looked out the door. Past the selling table, I could see vast rice paddies, striped with water. Mountain terraces dropped down to a long, narrow valley. A fire burned on the horizon. My father saw it too, and put down his food. He turned to my mother. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  And then we were in the paddies. The houseboat was gone. I could see the dark spears of the rice plants, like rents in the sky. The stars wavered and blurred and were still. In the distance the fire still burned, larger now.

  I tried to say something, but tears choked my throat. “I have to go,” he said. He smiled. “A nuisance is all it is,” he said, tipping his head toward the fire gusting up in the darkness, and his courage gripped my chest like a giant fist. “My brave boys,” he said, looking at us, then touched our faces, turned quickly, and started off, pushing hard through the knee-deep water, scattering stars. The night sky closed seamlessly behind him.

  I woke crying from my dreams for the first time in my life. Eng was awake. “Would you like to get some water?” he asked.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “I had a dream about Father.”

  He was silent.

  “Do you remember him?” I asked.

  “Hardly at all.”

  “Anything?”

  I felt him shrug. “I remember swimming in the river. And the time he got angry at Li.”

  “That’s all?” My brother, I realized, had buried him too.

  “I remember when he died,” he said quietly.

  But he didn’t really. He remembered—as I did now—the smell that filled the rooms when the cholera came. He remembered how very quickly they all went—our brother, our sisters, entire families—how the living, too weak to bury the dead, had thrown their bodies into the river where the current slowly turned them like huge fish, soft with mold. He remembered my mother washing and cleaning for days, mechanically. When our father died she took the small sack of baht and anything else worth money and went to the temple priest. In the name of the bodhisattva he took it all.

  To see him dying would have burned a hole in our hearts. But even if neither of us could bear to look at his death directly, enough years had passed that we could at least see the ghastly light it had shed around it. Lying in the dark next to my brother, I remembered now how high our father’s coffin had seemed to me on its wooden bier beneath the white canopy woven through with dying flowers, how distant the flutes and drums and gongs had sounded in the thick, scented air. I remembered the Buddhist priest reading a prayer, and the crimson cloth that was taken from the head of our father’s coffin and cut into five pieces—one for each of us left. I could see again the lighted tapers, flickering against the green of the jungle, the strange coolness of my mother’s hand.

  The priests took the coffin inside the temple. When at last they brought out our father’s body, washed and purified, and laid him on the wood, it wasn’t him at all, but someone much smaller and thinner, and when the priest lit the taper and the mourners set the wood ablaze, the vague dark mass at the center of the flames no longer seemed human at all but a crude effigy, nothing more, set there by the priests to fool us all.

  The year was 1819. The uparaja, the king’s brother, had died two years earlier. Across the river from the carved gold gables and the serpentining nagas of the Grand Palace, the Wat Arun—the Temple of the Dawn—was rising out of the earth as steadily as the event it was named for. We neither knew nor cared. Had someone come up to us as we stood by our father’s selling table in the weeks following his death—our hands slick with fish and smelling of the blachang we sold for ten baht a bowl—and told us that the king, who had designed the temple himself, had less than five years to live, or that Wat Arun would be completed only after his death by his son, it would have meant nothing to us. The capital, less than three days’ journey down the river, was a separate world: remote as the stars, vaguely mythical, as indifferent to our fate as a tiger to the snail beneath his paws. The earth spun, kings died, stomachs rumbled.

  That was the year we went to work. We never stopped. Our mother, desperate to feed the four of us who had survived, had first tried extracting oil from coconuts. Finding the labor hopelessly slow and unprofitable, she began gathering broken earthenware, fixing it as best she could, and selling
it for a few baht in the marketplace. It came to nothing. And then Ha Lung, who had been a friend of our father’s, and who had lost two of his own children, hired us to help him with his catch, and our fortunes changed. Eng and I worked well together, pulling or lifting nearly as much as a grown man, able to clean two fish at a time. A year later, we bought our own boat with the small amount of money we had saved and went out on the river alone. The other men, amused at the sight of us double-poling up the khlong, made room for us to pass. Our income increased.

  It was Eng, who had always had a nose for money, who first suggested we use our boat to buy cheap goods up along the river, then ferry them down to the floating marketplace. He had seen the other merchants selling their wares for a profit and saw no reason why we couldn’t do the same. People would be curious about us, my brother claimed, and give us their business. I agreed. And so, by slow degrees, we began to learn the delicate art of selling ourselves.

  It was just as my brother had said it would be. Curious to see the double boys, people crowded around our boat. And we obliged them, clowning for some, remaining stoic with others, helpfully pulling up our shirts (but not so often as to cheapen the effect), making them pay for their sympathy with baht, their revulsion with baht, their staring eyes and open mouths with baht. Soon we were saving a respectable amount every week. Returning home, we would give our mother the small sum we had made and she would take it, as she had once taken the money our father made, and add it to the small pile hidden beneath the floorboard in the bedroom.

  The credit, I’ll readily admit, was my brother’s. Shrewd as Poor Richard, he sensed our value long before I did, and nurtured it well; years later, he would bargain our fees in New York with Barnum as coldly, as successfully, as he had once bargained for embroidered cloth or wooden bowls in the floating market in Meklong. But his, too, was the blame. More flexible than his stupid brother, he gave away too much, bent to the needs of others too easily, resisted the staring world and its dollars and pounds too little.