Voices in the Night

by Steven Millhauser

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  The Three Palaces. The Three Palaces of Prince Gautama are the Palace of Summer, the Palace of Winter, and the Palace of the Season of Wind and Rain. The Palace of Summer has floors of cool marble, interrupted by fountains, bathing pools, and narrow channels of moving water. The Palace of Winter is known for its cedar paneling and its thick carpets woven with images of fire and sun. The Palace of the Season of Wind and Rain has thick walls that shut out the sounds of Nature and enclose many Halls of Pleasure devoted to dancing girls, lutenists, acrobats, conjurers, and skilled actors performing staged plays. The Three Palaces are located in different outlying quarters of the city; they are connected by broad underground passages carefully guarded. Separate passageways lead to the King’s palace. Each palace, with its many courtyards and stairways, its hundreds of chambers, its far-flung gardens, parks, and bowers, is surrounded by high ramparts with four gates. Gautama has traveled many times along the underground passageways, but in his twenty-nine years he has never passed beyond the ramparts. Once, as a child, he rode with his father in the royal chariot into the depths of one of the royal parks. In the distance he could see the top of a wall. He pointed and asked his father what lay beyond. His father looked at him sternly, then swept out an arm and said: “Nothing is there. Everything is here.” He turned the chariot horse sharply and rode back along the path.

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  Despondency. Gautama closes the gate in a trellis-wall and walks along a path in the Bower of Quiet Delights. The roof is composed of artfully interwoven twigs and branches, which soften the sunlight that comes quivering down past the leaves of asoka trees. Scarlet-orange blossoms fill the air with a scent that feels like a hand touching his face. The path leads to a dark pool with a stone fountain in the center; water rises from the mouths of twelve marble beasts and falls in a circle of soft splashes. Gautama lies on his side in the grass at the edge of the pool. The sound of the water in the fountain, the three white swans in the dark water, the smell of the asoka flowers, the spots of sunlight in the shade, all these soothe Gautama, who asks himself, for he is in the habit of questioning his own sensations, why he should need soothing. If in fact he does need soothing, then that is all he needs, for he’s well aware that he has everything else: a loving wife and son, concubines and dancing girls who thrill his senses, palaces and gardens, friends and companions, musicians, elephants, chariots, rare fruits carried in boats from China and Arabia and placed in a bowl before him. His life is a feast of pleasure. Yet here he is, lying on his side in the Bower of Quiet Delights, like an unhappy lover. But he is not an unhappy lover. What is he, then? A spoiled voluptuary? A restless malcontent, who wants, who needs, who longs for—what, exactly? But perhaps he is making a fundamental error. Perhaps solitude itself should be classified among the pleasures. If that’s the case, then he has come here simply in order to experience still another pleasure. Gautama thinks: I have everything a man can desire. It’s impossible for me not to be happy. He feels, forming on his lips, a melancholy smile.

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  The Ramparts. The high walls that surround the Palace of Summer are made of cedar and are the thickness of three royal elephants measured trunk to tail. The walls are covered partway up by thick white-flowered vines that create the appearance of a vast hedge, above which rise the dark upper portions like mountains above the tree line. In each of the four walls stand two gates, one on the inside and one on the outside, connected by a passageway and guarded within by royal warriors armed with bows and two-handed swords. The outer gates are opened only to permit a changing of the guards. The inner gates are never opened. The gates, outer and inner, serve as a precaution against invasion, so that if the walls of the city should ever be breached, soldiers and citizens may be admitted to the safety of the palace grounds. The guards know that this is unlikely, since the walls of the city are impregnable, the armies of the King invincible. The deeper purpose of the gates is to conceal warriors trained to prevent escape, should the Prince ever venture to leave.

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  In Which Chanda Visits the King. At midday in the Hall of Private Audience, Chanda walks with King Suddhodana along a row of polished pillars adorned with carved and painted lions, elephants, and parrots. He reports that the Prince emerged from the Bower of Quiet Delights on the morning of the second day, in a humor disquieting to those who know him well: his laughter was too bright and quick and failed to rise above his mouth to the level of his eyes. Gautama took part in an archery contest, which he won readily, disappeared for two hours in the women’s quarters, and returned with his brilliant laugh and dark gaze. The King asks what is troubling his son. Chanda reminds the King that Gautama has always had periods of abrupt withdrawal; even as a child he would grow suddenly grave and sit alone in the shade of a pillar. It is partly a question of temperament and partly, if he might venture to offer his unworthy opinion in so weighty a matter, something more. Impatiently the King orders him to continue. Chanda, choosing his words carefully, explains that the life of pleasure arranged by the King for his son, in order to attract him to things of this world, must inevitably lead to periods of satiety. At such times Gautama will draw back from pleasure the way a man who has slaked his thirst will turn aside from a well. The King’s philosophers have warned repeatedly against the revulsions inherent in a life devoted to sensation. The cure, in Chanda’s view, is to diminish the Prince’s dependence on a life of sensual excitement without increasing his attraction to a life of contemplation. What is necessary, he thinks, is a middle way: a life of modest pleasures and occupations—one or two women a night, daily wrestling contests and footraces, pleasant walks and conversations, a single glass of rice beer or wood-apple wine with dinner—that leave no stretches of empty time in which a man might be tempted to concern himself with dangerous questions about the meaning of existence or the proper way of conducting a life. The problem lies in enforcing such restraint. For the Prince, though gracious in all things, is accustomed to having his way. The King places his hand on Chanda’s arm. “I rely on you.” After all, Chanda is Gautama’s dearest friend, as well as a loyal servant of the King. Chanda, uneasy under the burden of such praise, wills himself not to pull his arm away.

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  An Incident in the Park of Six Bridges. In the warmth of late afternoon, Gautama goes for a walk with Chanda in the Park of Six Bridges. Six streams flow through the park, each crossed by a bridge painted a different color. He would like to speak to Chanda of his spiritual disharmony, of the shadow that he carries inside him, but now, in the warm air, as they begin to cross the Yellow Bridge over the Stream of Happiness, his senses are wide open to the sound of the water moving over white pebbles and red sand, the soft light, the silk shawl moving against his bare shoulder, the sudden flight of a bird into the pale blue sky. His trouble is distant and has the vague shimmer of distant things. Besides, to unburden yourself to a friend is to place your burden on your friend’s back, and Chanda’s back isn’t as strong as his own. He glances at Chanda, who seems preoccupied. It occurs to Gautama that lately he hasn’t been sufficiently attentive to his friend, who may only be waiting for the chance to reveal a trouble of his own. But the thought, like the memory of his darkness, passes lightly across his mind. He is at peace with the world. The friends pass over the Yellow Bridge and enter a path under the shade of intermingled branches. Scents of green, like a fine mist, rise to his nostrils. Suddenly, before him, Gautama sees a leaf detach itself from a branch and begin to fall. He stops in astonishment. The leaf drifts slowly down. He cannot believe what he appears to be seeing. It’s as if a cloud should drop down from the sky, as if a rock should rise. Dimly he recalls an afternoon in childhood when something green came drifting down from a branch, but his father had said it was a trick performed by the court magician. He hears a noise in the nearby trees. Two Park Protectors, with green shoulder-scarves, rush onto the path. One reaches out and catches the leaf in midfall. The other thrusts out a sack, into which the first man drops the l
eaf. Both men bow low to the Prince and back away into the trees. It all happens so quickly that Gautama wonders whether he’s had one of those visions or dreams provoked by the heat of the day, by the bright drowsiness of a cloudless summer afternoon. He looks at Chanda, who avoids his gaze and begins speaking of the pavilion around the bend in the path, where they can sit awhile with a view of the Six Streams, the Six Bridges, and the distant palace with its turrets and gold cupolas.

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  Chanda Alone. Alone in his chamber, Chanda sits motionless on a rice mat, in a shaft of sunlight that warms his face and bare chest. The rest of his body is in shade, and Chanda thinks how fitting it is that he should be divided in half this way: the outward sign of his inward division. For if it’s true that he is the closest companion of Gautama, the Prince’s dearest and truest friend, if it’s true that he would do anything for Gautama and would happily die for his sake, it’s also true that he spies on his friend and reports secretly to the King. How has it come to this? Chanda’s love for Gautama is not in doubt. They have been close companions since earliest childhood, and his love has only deepened with the years. It isn’t too much to say that Chanda lives for Gautama, finds the meaning of his life in his friend’s happiness. The feeling that moves in Gautama flows out of him and into Chanda, who therefore knows him from the inside out. If Gautama experiences a single moment of discontent, Chanda lies awake all night. How is it, then, that he watches his friend secretly and reports to the King? He answers his own charge by saying that everything he does is for the sake of his friend—that his secret meetings with the King are intended to cure Gautama’s unhappiness. He understands the paradox hidden in his argument. He is arguing that his loyalty to his friend runs so deep that he’s willing to be disloyal for the sake of loyalty. But although Chanda’s nature is fervent and extreme, he is trained to think clearly, and he knows perfectly well that an act of disloyalty is not the same as an act of loyalty. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that, by doing the King’s bidding, he is being a faithful subject: he is obeying a higher loyalty. But Chanda doesn’t believe in a loyalty higher than that of friendship. It is possible, of course, that he is disloyal by nature, a corrupt man, a treacherous friend, a creature who serves his own interests and cares only for himself. Chanda, despite a modesty that is sometimes excessive, despite a willingness to condemn himself utterly, doesn’t believe he is this kind of man. What, then, is the truth? The truth is that a secret divides him from Gautama, a secret that, for his friend’s sake, he can never reveal. All members of the court know the secret, which the King revealed to Chanda in a private audience many years ago, after swearing him to silence on pain of death. The secret goes back to the time of Gautama’s birth, when a prophecy was uttered by a sage.

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  The Tears of a Sage. When the Prince was born, a sage came to the royal palace to welcome the newborn son. As he held the child in his arms, the sage began to weep bitter tears. The King, trembling with fear, begged the venerable man to tell him what terrible misfortune was destined to befall his son. The sage answered that the child was destined for greatness. For if the child lived in a palace, he would one day rule the entire world; but if he renounced worldly things and chose the life of an ascetic, he would become an enlightened one. “But why are you weeping?” asked the King, himself alarmed at the possibility that his son might forsake the greatness of the world for a life of poverty and contemplation. “Because,” said the sage, “I will never live to see the Awakened One.” From that moment, the King vowed to attach his son to the pleasures of the world.

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  A Cat in Sunlight. One afternoon, a few days after his walk with Chanda in the Park of Six Bridges, Gautama is strolling along a portico in one of the courtyards of the northeast wing of the Summer Palace. Here lie the chambers of the musicians. From the open doorways he can hear the strings of lutes, the thump and tinkle of tambourines, the birdsong of wooden flutes, the calls of conch shells. The day is bright and hot, and he sees the young men taking their ease in their chambers, sitting on mats dyed red and green, or lying back on divans, their bodies naked to the waist, their shoulders glistening. His mood of darkness, his longing to sit apart and brood over the meaning of things, has left him so completely that he can recall it only in a general way, as one might recall gusts of rain in the middle of a blue afternoon. He feels a warm affection for the musicians, in part because they possess the gift of transforming pieces of wood and shell and animal hide into sounds more beautiful than silk or gold, but above all because they are solitary beings who from time to time renounce their solitude and come together to form a miniature kingdom. In the warmth of the shady portico he feels a drowsy well-being, a welcoming of the sunlight and the shade, the doorways with their drawn-back curtains, the jewels brightening and darkening on his fingers, the white swan-cloud in the blue sky, the pebbled paths in the green grass, the sound of his bare feet slapping softly against the marble walk. He turns left as the portico follows the shape of the courtyard. Here the sun strikes in such a way that he sees a pleasing pattern of shady pillar-sides and sunny pillar-sides, like a wall painting in one of the corridors of his father’s palace. At the foot of a pillar, he sees a white cat asleep in the sun. Its back is beautifully curved, its head is bent gracefully into its hind paws, and its tail lies across its hind flank, so that it forms a perfect circle. As Gautama draws near, the white circle begins to come apart. The cat stretches: its front legs reach forward, its hind legs reach back and back, its body shudders with delight. Swiftly it draws in its legs, lays one paw across its face, and is still. Gautama walks on, but he is no longer at ease. Is he not that cat? He stretches himself in the sun of his pleasures. He curls up in the contentment of his days. He lies asleep in the sun. And if he should wake? The strings of the lutes, the jingling disks of the tambourines, seem to grow louder. They scrape against his nerves like knives on stone. Impatiently Gautama crosses the courtyard, enters a cool hallway, and steps out onto a path.

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  The Two Swans. Through an arched doorway in an earthen wall, the Prince enters a small wood that leads to the Lake of Solitude. He sits on the grass at the edge of the lake, in the shade of a high mimosa tree. Swans glide among the white, red, and blue lotuses. Under the swans glide the other swans, the upside-down swans that he has loved since childhood. Two cranes stand in the water near the opposite shore. Gautama waits for the calm to descend. All about him is calm: the mimosa blossoms, the swans under the swans, the two cranes, the smooth water. All will enter him and calm him, as surely as he entered through the arched doorway. He waits under the mimosa tree, his legs crossed, his palms on his knees. The sun moves across the sky, but the calm does not come. It is there, outside him, all around him, but he himself is unquiet. Stubbornly he sits at the edge of the lake. Was it a mistake to have come here? What is he looking for? Nearby, a swan lifts its wings as if to fly, but does not fly. The wings, dipping, stir the water. Under the swan, the other swan is broken. Gautama thinks: I am the swan who does not fly. He thinks: I am the swan under the swan in the dark water. The air is still. The swan over the swan and the swan under the swan glide closer. He can see the two beaks, dark orange in the mimosa’s shade, the glassy bee-black eyes. As the double swan comes closer, it grows larger, it becomes more and more of itself, until it rises before him with outstretched wings. He can smell the wet feathers like sweat. The four wings spread wider and wider until they touch the ends of the lake, it is a swan-god, a swan-monster, the feathers are passing into his mouth and eyes, he can’t breathe, in a voice that issues from all sides the swan says: “You are wasting your life.” Gautama shuts his eyes tight and presses back against the tree. A moment later he opens his eyes. Before him he sees the calm lake, the swan gliding over the swan, among the lotuses, on a summer afternoon.

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  The Sorrows of Yasodhara. Gautama’s wife, Yasodhara, whose beauty is famous throughout the Three Palaces, is not unhappy because her husband roams
among the concubines. She understands perfectly that the concubines, like the dancing girls, have been provided by King Suddhodana for the amusement of his son. She herself is skilled in the Eighty-Four Paths of Love, as surely as she is skilled in lute-playing and astronomy, and does not doubt the sexual pleasure she gives to her husband. Sometimes, for his delight, she dyes her lips with red lac, rubs over her body a lotion made of the ground dust of sandalwood, and places jewels along the parting of her hair. At other times, when she steps from the Pool of Everlasting Youth, her hair glowing like black sunlight, her hips shining like rivers, she feels her power drawing the Prince to her. Nor is she unhappy when he seeks out solitary places and speaks to no one. Yasodhara is never lonely, for she is surrounded by her handmaidens and friends, she delights in her young son, and she loves the life of the Three Palaces—the music and dancing, the troupes of visiting actors, the great feasts, the sporting competitions, the walks in the garden with teachers and philosophers who speak to her of right speech, right conduct, and the nature of the heavens. She herself is sometimes overcome by a desire for solitude and silence, for a withdrawal from a life of pleasure into the chamber of her own being, and she therefore understands that Gautama must sometimes forsake the world of the court, and even his own wife, in order to be alone with his thoughts. None of these things causes her unhappiness. No, Yasodhara, the happiest of all women, is unhappy only when she is most happy: when, lying with her beloved husband, staring into his eyes as he strokes her cheek tenderly, she sees in his gaze the shadow. It is the shadow of apartness, the shadow of elsewhere. She feels it in him when they walk together hand in hand in the Garden of Happiness, she feels it in him when, reaching gently for her face, he is not there. He is there, but he is not there. She hears it in his laughter, sees it in the curves of his beautiful shoulders. When he gazes into her eyes and whispers “I love you,” she hears, deep within his words, the cry of a man alone in the dark. These are the sorrows of Yasodhara.