God's Fool (11 page)

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.

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.