by Mark Slouka
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.
In our dreams we saw ourselves trading in duck eggs all the way down the river, saw our boats, which by now had multiplied into a grand armada, sailing daily into Bangkok, saw ourselves, in fine clothes made to accommodate our condition, living in a house in the capital with a view of the Royal Palace. The king himself, hearing of our success, would request another audience. We laughed when we said these things to each other as though to say, “It’s all a joke, no more, a bit of harmless foolishness to pass the time,” wary, I suppose, of offending the gods of fortune with our presumptuousness. But oh, the dreams we dreamed squatting in the dirt by the Meklong, our bare feet slippered with the runny green waste of the duck yard, our hands white-gloved to the wrists with drying clay and salt. Those, it seems to me now, were among the sweetest times we knew in Siam. How absurd we are, to ask of dreams that they fulfill themselves. As though the shadow, diminished and pale, could ever live up to the thing itself.
But we were not the only ones dreaming. Though momentarily stunned by our success, Robert Hunter had resumed his attentions. Like a horsefly, or a suitor who appears at the door day after day even though he knows his intended would just as soon throw herself into the river with a stone around her neck as marry him, he seemed to have made up his mind to get what he wanted or annoy us to death, one or the other. Week after week he appeared, uninvited, bringing gifts we did not need, doggedly telling stories that had long ago lost their charm, laughing at things no one else thought amusing. Week after week we would find him sitting on a bamboo mat in our house, sweating into his collar. Like a dog he would follow us as we went about our business. We didn’t know what to do. We began to feel sorry for him and, like most human beings, hated him for it.
We were too young to know the power of tenacity, the extent to which pressure, applied with enough single-mindedness of purpose, for good or ill, can shape the world around it. We were too young, too arrogant. Seething inside like a vat forever about to boil, Robert Hunter hunted us. He had no shame, no sense of reticence. Frustrated at one point, he would try another. Losing the trail, he would double back and begin again. If ten years had been needed to petition the king to allow us to emigrate, he would have given it ten years. If twenty, twenty.
But he didn’t need twenty years to tunnel into the Audience Hall. Or even ten. Less than two years after our return from Bangkok, Robert Hunter broke through the palace floor, so to speak, and caught the attention of a well-placed merchant who periodically spoke to one of the councillors to the king. A month later—mirabile dictu—he was granted an audience.
I like to imagine him before the throne, making his obeisances to the heathen king, his forehead leaving a damp stain on the stones at the monarch’s feet. I like to imagine him reciting, as we had: “Exalted Lord, Sovereign of many Princes, let the Lord of Lives tread upon his slave’s head …” It amuses me. It’s an interesting picture. But of course he would have had no difficulty doing whatever was asked of him. He had been prostrating himself for two years. He would have cleaned the floor of the royal stables with his tongue if that had been what was required to get us out of Muang Tai.
He was told to rise. With his eyes cast down from the royal presence, his mind racing madly, Robert Hunter made his request. He was Robert Hunter, a merchant, the citizen of a distant empire of unparalleled power called Great Britain. He had been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of two subjects of His Majesty, the so-called double boys from the village of Meklong, who had entertained his Royal Highness two years earlier, and so forth and so on. They were indeed one of the rare fruits of the world, a living symbol of the many wonders of the empire, et cetera, et cetera.
He had no idea what the king was doing, or thinking. Dimly aware that he was going on too long, he rushed to the point. He, Robert Hunter, humbly wished to ask His Majesty’s permission to take his subjects abroad—for a short time only and under his constant supervision—in order to exhibit these human wonders to the rest of the world.
Oh, the joy of it! The monarch, who had been looking at a spot on the floor a few feet to Robert Hunter’s left the entire time, inclined his head slightly to the right, at the same time raising his chin. He seemed concerned, even troubled. On his forehead a network of tiny creases had appeared, like miniature streams. A river of concern split the royal brow. Instantly, one of the official courtiers was at his side, his ear to the royal lips. The monarch was worried about one of the royal tortoises. It hadn’t been eating as it should. They must try something else. Immediately. Or perhaps it had come to His Eminence’s attention that the stone to the Westerner’s left was unsightly and discolored.
A great gong sounded. With a shout, the assembled courtiers threw themselves to the ground. The royal audience was over. The monarch had not deigned to reply.
• • •
A pair of sandals and a boulder in Tartarus would have been preferable to this. At least the son of old Aeolus, justly punished for his trickery, had known the will of the gods. But Robert Hunter, unlike Sisyphus, knew nothing. Returned to the base of the hill for no reason he could discern, he did the only thing he could. With hardly a glance at the flowering world about him (which must have seemed, by this point, as barren and dark as Hades
itself), he began up the slope again. Perhaps he was an American and not a Scotsman. Only in America did we ever encounter a zeal so refined, a God-driven avarice so pure. Only in the bubbling caldron of the New World could the basest motives have combined with the highest justifications to produce a disrespect—toward time, toward fate, toward the finite measure of our days—so perfect and profound.
Nearly three years had passed since Robert Hunter had first seen us swimming in the river. We were sixteen years old. He had gained nothing. To the contrary, he had been deposited outside the palace walls like a rejected parcel of goods, sent ignominiously packing without even the courtesy of a reply to his petition. He set his feet, began to push. The next time the monarch would listen.
And yet, though Robert Hunter would never know it (mercifully, for even he might have been staggered by the way his every effort seemed destined to pass him by and illuminate us) Rama III had heard him, or had heard enough, at any rate, to be reminded of our existence. Preoccupied with making plans to send a diplomatic mission to Cochin China for the purpose of regulating trade between the two nations, the monarch now determined that we should accompany it. We were a rare product, he pointed out, like a fruit; a living symbol of the wonders of his empire. The king of Cochin China would surely be diverted, as he himself had been, by our presence.
And so, for the second time in the span of our short lives, the royal emissary appeared in Meklong. We had been offered a great honor. King Rama III wished for us to accompany his diplomatic mission to Cochin China. When the time came, we would be sent for.