God's Fool

by Mark Slouka

  V.

  We sailed into the Gulf of Siam aboard a five-hundred-ton Siamese junk of marbao and teakwood. From the moment we stepped onto the hard and polished deck, we knew we had entered a new kind of world, a world of salt and wind, of horizons straight and sharp as a strip of bamboo. We watched the crew drag up the anchor like a great barnacle-encrusted beast. The canvas, receiving the wind, snapped impatiently, then bellied out. The beams under our feet groaned mightily. And Bangkok began to grow smaller in our eyes. We stayed on the bow that entire first day as clouds covered up the sky, not even realizing how the wind quietly flayed our unaccustomed skin. That evening we watched the taper-thin horizon glow orange as though somewhere, beyond the edge of the earth, the sea were on fire. Perhaps it was.

  For six weeks we sailed south, stopping for days at a time in ports along the Cambodian coast. At Vung Tau, a rocky promontory jutting like a stubborn chin into the gulf, we headed up a vast and muddy river. Huge and boiling, it hissed against the banks. Whirlpools sucked at the air; unseen currents formed whorls in the brown water, then vanished. A week later we dropped anchor below the city of Saigon. News of our arrival had preceded us. Fourteen elephants, sent by the governor of the district of Kamboja to transport us further, stood in the warm, hard rain, their massive heads bent like supplicants to the royal court. We were hoisted, with some difficulty, upon a broad, blanket-covered back, and tipping and swaying like a small craft in heavy seas, our outer legs hanging over the side, we began to move.

  There were no premonitions, no prophetic dreams. If everything seems dark to me now as I see that caravan, once again, winding through the hissing rain toward Saigon, it is only because I know now what awaited us. At the time, I am convinced, my brother and I noticed nothing, neither the tension in the straight backs of the men in front of us nor our ambassador’s suddenly careful, measured formality.

  When wolves are afraid, so the saying goes, the wise man bars the door. We should have noticed. A gray-haired nobleman admired for his easy grace and impeccable manners, a direct confidant of Rama III, our ambassador had bantered with us twice on the deck, genially listening to our sixteen-year-olds’ nonsense while his personal guard stood impassively by, apparently accustomed to his ways. We had taken to him immediately. And yet even we could not help sensing, under the pleasant exterior, a soul of exceptional temper and strength. He had been a warrior during the reign of Rama II. The king himself, we had heard, at times deferred to his judgment. We had heard he was fearless. It wasn’t true.

  Of course, it’s possible that our ambassador himself—that none of them, in fact—knew what manner of world we were entering; that they walked carefully, like a cat in the open, simply because they felt exposed, uncertain, because the rain fell so relentlessly or because the servants in their drenched, elaborate costumes responded to the barked commands of their leader with an alacrity that seemed inspired by something more persuasive than duty or obedience. There was nothing obvious. The wai which had greeted the representatives of our king, though of the proper depth, had seemed just slightly hurried, as though such things were unimportant, a mere formality. Coming from underlings, there was something disconcerting in this obeisance without respect, and though our ambassador’s smile remained in place, I fancy I remember his eyes slowly taking in the soldiers with their hard, impassive faces, waiting stolidly in the rain. There was something wrong here. An empire, he knew, drew its nourishment from the imperial root. He had caught, I suspect, the first faint suggestion of rot.

  For an hour or more we moved through the rain. Just beyond my knee I could see our elephant’s left eye, recessed far back in the thick, wrinkled skin, blinking at the rivulets streaming down between the small, stiff hairs that covered its head. It appeared sentient, terrified, and for a moment I felt as though I were looking at a human being trapped inside a tree, peering out from a knothole in the bark.

  I found myself counting the number of times it blinked. I had reached fifty-six—for some reason I still remember this—when the dripping curtain of the jungle slipped back as if pulled aside by invisible hands and we were on a wide avenue lined with shops and stalls and small wooden buildings. People were coming out of the buildings to stare, the rain, rushing off their peasant hats, nearly veiling their faces. Within minutes we were passing through a milling, pushing crowd. Here and there, below the sea of straw, behind the ropes of water, I would catch a quick glimpse of a glistening chin, a stubbled jaw, a long tooth in a gaping mouth.

  A horizontal forest of thin arms, streaming water, reached out to us; I could hear a thousand voices, shouting something we couldn’t understand.

  “What do they want?” my brother yelled to me above the roar. I didn’t have time to answer. Our elephant had stopped in front of a huge wooden edifice. Soldiers appeared out of nowhere, beating back the crowd with small rattan whips. Strong arms reached for us, dragged us off the elephant’s back. The crowd surged forward. I saw men and women beaten to the ground, kicked between the legs. One after another they curled up like snails into a shell of arms and knees. I saw a girl, struck in the throat, suddenly jar to a stop, a look of utter surprise on her face, then fall. A woman with a huge, welling cut from her nose to her jaw was stumbling about the thinning crowd holding her hands beneath her chin to catch the blood, looking for her hat.

  • • •

  This was our entrance into Saigon. That afternoon, a guard of a hundred soldiers was posted around us for our protection. They were to be with us for the rest of our stay. For three days they followed us everywhere. They surrounded us as we walked through Saigon’s main bazaar while the official delegation was conducting its business. They waited, eight deep, just outside the door of the governor’s residence as we prostrated ourselves, touching our brow to the cool stone floor. Slovenly and undisciplined, with the dull, uncomprehending eyes I had seen before only in the perennially malnourished or preternaturally stupid, they seemed to wake from their lethargy only to strike, to give pain, and having knocked off the hat and elicited the screams of the man or woman deemed to have approached too close, they slipped back into sleep. It did no good to argue with them. They didn’t understand a word we said, and wouldn’t have listened if they had. Instinctively stepping forward one afternoon to interfere in the beating of an old man who was crawling about on all fours in the road, too foolish or gone in the head to beg for mercy or to protect himself, we were faced with raised arms and blank, expressionless faces. At any moment, one felt, the guard could turn inward and devour its own.

  When we turned to our ambassador for help, describing to him what we had seen, he explained that there was nothing he could do. We were in a foreign land. We must control ourselves at all costs. As emissaries of the king, we must see our mission through to its conclusion. He sighed. These are not your people, he said. The fates of foreigners should not concern you.

  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 th
rough 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.