A Woman of Angkor

by John Burgess

  Early the next morning, we heard distressed voices again. Outside, two women were carrying the bloodied body of a boy. An arm dangled. I watched, horrified. The boy was hardly older than my own Sovan. Soon we learned that the boy had climbed the compound wall during the night in hopes of being a hero, of getting rice for his family from an uncle outside. Two hours later, soldiers dropped his body inside the gate. He was dead, a spear wound in his side.

  I filled a bowl with uncooked rice and hurried to the boy’s house. But at the door I was stopped by harsh words from a woman inside: ‘Stay away from here, stay away! We had no trouble before you and your canal dredger came into service. You have brought some wicked spirit to this place.’

  I accepted the rebuke silently, feeling I had done exactly that.

  I put the bowl down at the door and stole away. That night, as I lay close to Bopa, trying to sleep amidst the mosquitoes’ song, it came to me that with talk like that, the neighbours might be as much a danger as the soldiers. Mr Narin – he would stand up for us. But I had not seen him. He could only have been bound and taken away with the other men.

  7: The prince’s aspiration

  We are taught that everything in this world is transient, and that we must accept the inevitable changes. It is easy, I think, to live by that creed concerning some things, such as age. Yes, all women grow old and feeble, but the change comes so gradually that we hardly notice, we adapt to each little step. It is another thing altogether when a change, a big one, comes in an instant, as it did with the soldiers that day. One moment we could come and go as we pleased; the next we were no freer than captured thieves in cages by the market.

  Far away, out of my sight, beyond my knowledge, events had begun that would have deep bearing upon me and my family. Some had occurred just in previous days; others had been building for months or even years, each unimportant in itself, but compounding themselves. It was like with a trickle of water flowing at a paddy field’s side. You pay it no attention. But that trickle combines with others from other fields to become streams, then rivers, the waters flowing great distances to join with those of yet more rivers. Those tiny trickles, each nothing in itself, come together to be a calamitous flood.

  Many people played a role in the prince’s visit to the Chaiyapoom estate, and often with the best of intentions. Let me tell you about one of the most important, the Brahmin.

  His name was Subhadra. We imagine that priests of this rank are guided by Heaven’s law in every thought and action. But I gradually came to know that he was a man like any other in many ways, that though he had taken holy vows, he passed through life making compromises, sometimes obeying commands with which he did not agree, sometimes pretending he had not heard them. I think that, like me, Subhadra would have preferred to have lived out his years in obscurity.

  At the time he appeared at our house, he was still new to the Capital. He was a country man, with the accent to prove it (though I was too anxious that first day to notice it). In the western part of the Empire, there is a small hermitage, one of those isolated places where for many generations a single family of Brahmins has been in charge. It was here that Subhadra was born, raised and initiated into the priesthood. I think he had no ambitions, if that is the right word, beyond remaining in prayer and service at this place. In time, he would become abbot. But then one day Prince Indra’s father came calling. He had raised the prince in the same kind of rural seclusion, in an estate two hours’ journey from the hermitage. My son insists on moving to the Capital, he told the priest. He is a grand nephew of the King, you know, and he thinks this means his future is there, in the great city. I can’t talk him out of it and now he’s been granted a palace.

  At first it seemed as if the father had come to seek advice but then, as the third cup of tea was sipped, the real purpose was revealed: Would you, Brahmin, consider going along as adviser and tutor? Just for a while, until he finds his place. He needs a steadying hand.

  I came to know Subhadra well and can say that he was a man with a genuine vocation to help. But at this moment it was not only a question of help. In theory, it was Subhadra who was the superior in this talk over tea, this blessed man, learned of the sacred texts. But he knew very well that his family’s hermitage, indeed, an entire way of life, existed at the pleasure of the visitor, a benevolent man who was the current head of a land-owning family that for generations had donated rice, cooking oil and white sampots, enough to support forty people in prayer. What would become of all that spiritual toil, all those efforts to touch the rays of Heaven, if support fell victim to a wealthy man going away disappointed?

  Subhadra said yes, and who can say how much considerations such as that cooking oil weighed on him. He said yes even before hearing a promise that if Indra became successfully established in the Capital, there would be a special grant to the hermitage. Land would be set aside at the donor’s estate, its production reserved entirely for the priestly family.

  Now Prince Indra was away on a hunting trip when the request was made, so it was decided that Subhadra would not wait to meet his charge, but would leave right away for the Capital to begin arrangements. Ten days later he stood in front of what had been described to him as Indra’s palace. The priest once told me that it was when he peered in from the front gate that he got his first inkling of just how hard this job was going to be. The gate’s doors were rotten, barely hanging on their hinges. The palace was in fact a set of old military outbuildings that had lain empty and mouldering for a decade. Stray dogs and lunatics slept in them; much of the timber had been stripped as firewood. And whether this place was truly in the royal sector at all was not clear. That was how far from the King’s compound it was.

  But Subhadra was the kind of man who would say to himself, never mind, it must always be this way for a newcomer prince starting out. He began organizing to make the place liveable. He brought in priests who specialized in blessing domestic spaces. For hours they chanted, they splashed holy water, they ran holy twine from post to post and generally made peace with the spirits, friendly and otherwise, who were about to be displaced. After that, a team of carpenters, thatchers, mat makers and wood carvers got to work. The bills were steep and the craftsmen not always the most honest or skilled – you will recall how poorly built the houses seemed to me and Bopa on our first visit to the compound. I take that now as another sign of the priest’s inherent decency, that he was trusting, that he lacked the city wiles to avoid being cheated. In any case, the prince’s father sent payment in silver without complaint.

  For a long time there was no fit place in the compound for a Brahmin to sleep, so Subhadra lodged at a temple nearby. One evening, as he sat outside its wooden guesthouse, taking in the air after the last rice of the day, he got the full grasp of his job’s challenge. It happened because two priests were taking their own meal by lamplight inside. Subhadra heard his name and turned to respond, then realized he was not being greeted, but talked about. One of the priests was saying what sympathy he felt for the country Brahmin. It seemed that for two years, court officials who oversaw palace assignments had been refusing to designate anything for this Prince Indra at all. When finally they gave in, they chose something so run-down that they hoped he would never come. The reason, this priest continued, was that, sight-unseen, the prince had a reputation in the Capital. He was believed to be a rather impetuous young man, forever at odds with his elders. He drank, he chased after village girls, he spent his father’s silver. He had his own ideas about everything, it seemed. Even his spiritual life was suspect – he had consulted with a blind jungle mystic in secret. And it was better not to be around him when he was armed. There was at least one prince of the realm who had scars on his face from an altercation with this Prince Indra.

  Subhadra stood up and stole away, reluctant to hear more. I can picture him – perhaps he got as far as the temple’s pond, and there he stood, gazing on placid water topped by lily pads. I wonder if this was one of those rare times when he
had an uncharitable thought. Certainly I would have. Namely, was it by chance that Indra’s father had come asking for help at a time when his son was away hunting and not available to meet? Perhaps he smiled at his own naiveté. How was it that over all the years the patron had been coming to the hermitage, all the priest had learned, through overheard remarks by the man’s retainers, was that the prince was very spirited and had been somewhat difficult to raise?

  I have no doubt that Subhadra gave not a thought to backing out. He had made a promise, and in any case he was a man who believed deeply in the reforming powers of prayer and education. So, in the following days he began forming in his mind a programme to mould the character of his charge. After Indra took up residence, he was told in no uncertain terms that the first task of a young prince come to the Capital is to show the royal court that his life is founded on respect and religious orthodoxy, that he aspires to be as cultured, as charitable, as anyone there. He cannot expect instant acceptance. He must build up a record over time that will make sceptics wonder why they ever doubted. So, on the priest’s instruction, regular donations of silver flowed from Indra’s treasury to a fund for construction of a new hospital in the city, where Brahmin physicians would treat patients free of charge. Any beggar who appeared at Indra’s gate was fed. If the prince suggested going outside the city for martial sport, Subhadra proposed instead going to a temple with offerings of rice and fruit and passing the night there in vigil. Certainly no drinking in market stalls was allowed. And no ostentation. That new palace gate installed under Subhadra’s supervision was plain compared to others in the royal sector. It had no gilding, lest other nobles passing by think that Indra believed himself to be already their peers. Likewise, the equipment of office that was acquired was meant to convey earnest humility. The palanquin on which slaves carried the young prince in procession was not new but the refurbished cast-off of another princely family.

  And of course there was extensive instruction in the texts. Each afternoon, the prince sat, sometimes restless, on the mats of the tiny chapel that the carpenters had built in his palace. With the scent of incense inspiring pious thoughts, the priest led him line by line through the Hindu classics. Subhadra put particular stock in one passage, found in Lord Krishna’s sermon to the warrior King Arjuna on the eve of battle.

  Greedy desire and wrath born of passion,

  These are the great evil, the sum of destruction.

  They are the enemy of the soul.

  All is clouded by desire, as fire by smoke,

  As a mirror by dust, as an unborn babe in its covering.

  They are favourite words of mine as well – though I have always wondered how the covering of an unborn babe can be likened to greedy desire.

  8: The toy battle club

  When instructing Indra, Subhadra often spoke as if the King, Lord of the Seventeenth Reign, was paying personal attention to the young prince’s progress. In fact the King had far too many grandnephews to keep them straight. And in any case, he was oblivious to the most basic of things that occurred outside the palace walls. By all accounts, our sovereign of those times was content to pass his days behind closed, guarded gates. He was the orchid-loving King. He spent most of each morning tending the plants outside his sleeping chamber, pruning, watering, addressing them as living beings. Afternoons he spent at the palace dance pavilion, watching rehearsals, sometimes making suggestions about staging, before returning for more time with his beloved plants. His life had always been like that; he had done nothing to make himself King. It simply happened, six years earlier, by virtue of being brother to the previous monarch, whose heart stopped beating one afternoon as he lay with a concubine fifty years his junior. By the time word reached potential pretenders, the palace priests had designated and blessed the orchid lover, in the belief that he would be steered by their constant advice. When he was moved to the palace, he showed right away that he would. His only initiative was to ask if carpenters might build a covered nursery outside the window of his sleeping chamber, and when that was done he resumed his life precisely as before.

  Still, how people loved this King! They loved him because they sensed that from behind the palace walls he loved them back. At festival times, he offered large gifts to the Capital’s common folk – rice, palm oil, straw bags for market shopping, all placed in stacks just outside the royal quarter. If the gifts were all taken before evening, then more were put in their place. But love, of course, cannot be bought with material things. People felt as they did because everyone, even a slave in the market who heard only stories passed from person to person to person, could sense that the King took to heart the lessons of Heaven that the Empire was a family in which he was benevolent father. Those orchids? They embodied the pureness of the royal heart. That submission to the palace Brahmins? It was not that but submission to Heaven’s will. On a simpler level, no tales ever made their way from the palace of the King growing angry, beating a retainer, or deciding on a petition in a way that enriched a relative. In those rare times when he moved in procession through the city, he looked out from atop his elephant with a gentle smile that could only be born of compassion.

  But those same people who gave their love also thought it no surprise that the reign of a King who had never held a battle sword, only a pruning knife, had brought trying times for our race. We Khmers have of course been blessed from the time the first of us was born from the union of a Brahmin from India and a maiden daughter of the Naga King. We have multiplied, inhabiting as we do a realm so fertile that a plant placed in the soil simply grows on its own. But in the days of which I speak we had come under pressure from beyond our borders. It was said that the peoples there lived in league with demons. In the far northwest, at the edge of the Upper Empire, were the Siamese, who claimed knowledge of a way to break the cycle of reincarnation. Each year, they sent tribute to our Capital, but every so often there filtered out reports of rebellious stirrings in their territories. To the east, on land that abutted the great Saltwater Sea, lived the Chams. Do you know, they claim to worship our gods, but they speak a strange language, wear strange caps and garments and eat even stranger food. The Chams had grown bold to build forts closer to our frontier, and to tax and sometimes seize the Chinese vessels that passed through their waters enroute to our ports. We began to experience shortages in the market.

  People should stand together in trying times, but the fact is that not all of us did. Bandits plagued our roads. Here in the Capital it was not unknown that neighbour killed neighbour and paid no price for it, like the son of the rich man who had summoned Kumari. Even some of the Empire’s own princes, lords of estates in outer districts, were behaving in shameful ways. They began to short-change the royal storehouses of rice they owed. They dared to bestow rank on their own, without a word of permission from the Capital.

  So there was much talk in those days of how those peoples beyond our borders could be held at bay and the criminals within brought to heel. Might some mighty commander emerge who, misty-eyed with loyalty, would bow at the King’s feet, receive one of those blessed orchids, then lead our armies to victory? These yearnings came to figure in Subhadra’s plans for how to rehabilitate his prince. No, he never saw Indra as that great commander. He merely formed the idea that a modest role could be won for him in restoring security and imperial cohesiveness. In view of his notable martial skills, the prince might be dispatched to some distant frontier district to command a military unit there. With that, the Brahmin would return home to the family hermitage, his task completed, his obligation cleared.

  But such an appointment could be sought only after the prince had put an end to his bad reputation and shown that his true character was imbued with obedience and humility.

  One day, Indra presented the priest with a way to do that. During a session with the texts, Indra declared: I have wronged a prince, a prince named Teng. I must perform a pilgrimage to his estate and make amends.

  You recall that I mentioned a prince
of the realm with a scar on his face? That was this Teng. He had come to have the mark because one evening, when Indra was just eight years old and Teng perhaps twice that age, Indra approached him at a temple festival and with no preliminaries delivered some insult. Teng turned toward him, prepared to laugh it off, I’m sure, and instead he got a blow to the face with a toy battle club. This from a boy half his size! Such was the fighting spirit our prince possessed, even long before he became an adult. The blow landed hard enough to open a cut on Teng’s jaw. Indra’s father was on the scene instantly, aghast, and delivered all manner of apologies and a formal offer of compensation. I suppose that Teng was too proud to accept the payment. What man would want to admit being bested by a child? Teng simply walked away. But later, the wound grew infected, and when it finally healed, it left a small scar on his jaw. No one ever mentioned this to his face, of course, but when people met Teng, they could not help but notice the scar. So it was that almost everyone knew the story of how an eight-year-old boy had placed it there.

  What was the reason behind the fight? I will tell you. You will see that it shows that our prince already had concerns that normally wait until later years. He insulted Teng because there was a rivalry between the two princes’ families over property, including rights to the Chaiyapoom Estate, in the Upper Empire, the place where my husband grew up. Men of Indra’s bloodline had been its lords in previous generations. It was now the realm of Teng, who had seized it years earlier citing lineage flowing back to a previous King. If the Brahmin knew more than this about the dispute, I would be surprised. He would not have cared about details or legalistic questions of right and wrong, only that as a boy Indra had allowed hatred to defile his heart.