Rosarin, Rosarin, Rosarin, I will keep calling your name in my heart. When I wake up in the morning I wonder if you’re still asleep or if you’re awake, if you’re alone or if you’re in someone’s embrace. I wonder what you’re doing, what you’re eating, how you’re sleeping.
My dear Rosarin, the worst thing about being so far from you is that I don’t have any news about you (crossed out). But the greater the distance between us, the clearer your image is in my head. In my mind you’re even more beautiful, and the reality of my life becomes uglier by the day.
I have no idea how I could have endured the passage of time had I not had the hope of returning to see you. I (crossed out)… I miss you with every breath I take. The torment of not seeing you burns me like I am burning in hell. How long can we bear this? We (crossed out)… I will come and see you, dear Rosarin, no matter what happens. I will come to you, if not in life then in death.
Chareeya flicked through a couple more letters addressed to this person called Rosarin without paying much attention and then put them back in the tin box. Next, she stuck her head into the recess, magnifying glass in hand, in a last-ditch effort to look for the Olympian-like vaulting spider. But she saw only darkness. She put the box back in its place, fitted the plank into the slot, and for the rest of her life never told a soul what she had found.
Lika, do you think there’s an ancient city under the riverbanks? / What? / And strange insects living there too… / Strange? In what way strange? Chalika looked up from her book. Strange like having a diamond bum / A diamond bum is too strange, I think / Right, Chareeya pursed her lips: But I saw it, Lika, I really saw it, just now, a spider with a sparkling diamond bum / Maybe, but how do you know if the diamond isn’t actually the bug’s eggs? / Diamond eggs? / Yes / Then there must be others like it and they’re looking for a place to lay eggs in our garden, tens of thousands of diamond eggs, Lika!
Nervously, greedily, and leaving her ten-year-old sister on the fuzzy threshold between reality and the dream of a novel she was reading, Chareeya got up and dashed into the garden to hunt for a clutch of tiny eggs that glittered in the dark. But the vaulting emerald spider had slipped through her hands and was never seen again.
That was one of Chareeya’s final expeditions in her career as an entomologist though, for another year or so, she still abducted fireflies and tried to invent a bio-lamp, and she still collected wet garbage to feed her colony of baby shrimps. Months later, she channelled all her energy into tap dancing, utterly committed to following the example of a foreign woman she had seen on television, having decided that her true calling was to be a Broadway star. This sudden change of heart took place just days after her fateful dive into the riverbed in search of a lost city.
It was the hottest day in five hundred years. The crickets had been shrieking since noon and the blaze heated the river into a fine vapour that hung low like wintry mist. The heat tormented Chalika until she became fed up with the irredeemable naivety of a foreign-educated hero in the romance novel she was reading, making her wonder what kind of education they provided overseas and why those who went to all the trouble of going abroad returned even more gullible than when they had left.
But, all of a sudden, the insects closed their wings and went quiet. Chalika looked up at the lampu tree, its leaves had shrunk from the heat even though it was standing in water. Beads of sweat slowly trickled down her back. The soft breeze that had touched her skin a moment ago was also gone, leaving only the unruffled surface of the river, its sheen resembling a giant mirror that reflected a mass of black clouds overshadowing the blue patches of sky. Just like that, Chalika stood up and screamed. She screamed when she could no longer see her sister who had been swimming right there just a moment ago. She screamed when she saw the black clouds race across the sky, when the strangers from god-knows-where crowded along the bank, when the boy who had been fishing nearby ran to the river. She screamed and screamed a cacophony of unknown words until that boy plunged into the unruffled water.
To escape the heat that scalded the tip of her nose, Chareeya had lowered herself into the water in a leisurely manner. She had looked up and seen large and small bubbles racing out of her nostrils like silver constellations rising towards the sun and melting at the surface. At that moment, she had realised that the submerged ancient city must have been somewhere around there, storm-tossed and lying in ruins like Atlantis, which Uncle Thanit had told her about the other day. She spun around, squinted through the murky water, but couldn’t see much except the shimmering, shapeless haze of sunlight filtered through the surface and illuminating a dead tree.
Two jellyfish bobbed past in slow motion. Chareeya thought they were like Chalika and herself, swept upstream from the ocean. She tried to signal to them: not that way, Charee-Lika, the ocean is the other way. But the jellyfish paid no heed and kept moving their transparent figures further up river. A bird was cawing from the shore, repeating a nebulous note. Four or five carp fish twisted and turned, their silver scales flashing rhythmically like Morse code.
Chareeya spun around again and scanned the aquatic surroundings for signs of the lost city, or a cluster of emerald spiders with diamond bums – maybe they were an amphibious species after all. She heard the humming of underwater currents, the strange bubbly sound of air escaping from her body, the pounding of her own heartbeat echoing in the water, and she saw something moving in the corner of her eye. It was a big manta ray. Chareeya stayed still, hoping it would swim closer so she could take a good look at it. But it went gliding in the other direction. A little further on she saw a boy waving his hands frantically and looking around in search of something. Please don’t see me, Chareeya prayed. Closing her eyes, she held her breath and drifted weightlessly, disguising herself as a river weed.
Water engulfed Pran and shielded him from the earsplitting screams of the girl on the shore. Her yelling became vague, distant, as if it had been yanked back to the other end of the horizon. He waved his arms around and peered into the cloudiness, but he saw nothing except the shimmering, shapeless haze of sunlight filtered through the surface and illuminating a dead tree.
And then he saw something moving in the corner of his eye. It was a manta ray, and only when it glided past him did he see the river weed, floating at a peculiar angle between the sludgy riverbed and the surface. Pran fixed his eyes on it and realised it was a girl, her eyes closed, her limbs weightless, her skin emitting a strange halo, and her long wavy hair billowing upward like black flames. The boy swam towards her and for a moment he thought she had opened her eyes. It was in that instant that Pran remembered the only person in the world who had ever thought of adopting him as her brother. But when he approached, the girl’s eyes remained shut. She was unconscious.
In her state as a river weed, Chareeya didn’t see the boy approach. Only when he grabbed her from the back did she suddenly become so alarmed that, oblivious to the fact she was underwater, she shouted, Leave me alo… The rush of water shoved her voice back into her body. Chareeya choked, thrashed about, struggled, and Pran was so focused on bringing her to the surface that he didn’t understand she was resisting him. Dazed and in a rage, Chareeya shouted again, Leave me a… And, again, the bubbles of words were silenced by water. She saw the two jellyfish, wriggling together in the shadows, further and further away. They were the last things she saw.
She was heavier than he had imagined. Pran felt as if it took him forever to heave her, with what little muscles and strength he had, up from the water and towards the gazebo. With his last drop of energy, he hauled her on his shoulder and started walking back and forth. He didn’t know that he, too, was choking, didn’t know that one of his legs was gripped by cramp, didn’t know whether the water streaming down his face was river water or his own tears. And he didn’t know why he was trembling in such heat, or where the fear that gripped his heart had come from.
But the world became calm when he heard her cough. Her body stirred lightly on his shoulder. Pran w
as gently putting her down when he saw that the elder sister had stopped screaming and was now sobbing nearby. The girl opened her eyes, trying to blink away the circles of rainbows that glistened on her eyelashes. Chareeya now stared at Pran’s angular face, which was on the verge of leaving childhood, at his moving but soundless lips, at his penetrating eyes that betrayed a hint of melancholy.
She remembered and didn’t remember that time she had wanted to bring home a boy she had met and adopt him as her brother. She remembered and didn’t remember that Pran was that boy in the blue twilight who had appeared amidst the ruined petals of the flame tree flowers. She remembered and didn’t remember that she had met him before, if not here in this life then somewhere else, in some other life.
The sky hung so low that it seemed as if an outstretched hand could touch it. Falling leaves, like yellow dots, left marks on the eddying black clouds above. The last rays of sunlight idly shone on part of Pran’s face, and those penetrating eyes softened into the kind gaze of a father looking at his newborn for the first time.
It was like something she had planned a long time ago, and she made it sound as if it was the most natural thing to say: It’s about to rain, would you like to come to my house? Chareeya whispered to him as a bright smile lit up her face.
And the little girl finally took the boy home.
VII
Four Orphans and the Tree of Dreams
A ll kinds of sounds found their way back into the house again. To begin with, Uncle Thanit played Satie’s Gymnopédies, one number after another, basking the house in a soundscape so ethereal that the girls hardly perceived there was anything in the air. Once everyone, including Pran, developed the habit of sitting around in the living room to read or do their homework, Uncle Thanit decided it was time to guide the children into the world of music.
He switched to more accessible compositions such as Beethoven’s Spring Sonata and Borodin’s String Quartet No.2, in which a few instruments created a sound so sweet that the gardenias suddenly blossomed and Chalika, who still couldn’t understand why a tornado was generated around her every time she saw the military cadet who lived three doors down, was compelled to bite her lips and stifle a cry.
Then came a lesson in the music of overwhelming passion: the tremors that shook the heart in Brahms’s Symphony No.4, a piece that drove Chareeya to dig manically for the Dvaravati beads again only to find a lost earthworm in the dark pit; or those desolate Nocturnes by Chopin; or the funereal dirge for the heart that dies whilst looking for love in the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No.7, which infected the children with inexplicable gloom; or the brokenhearted melody of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2, which from its first movement left a bittersweet aftertaste in the mouth, like raw tamarind, that took days to disappear.
For years, the house was held together by the tender anguish of Romantic music. They slowly inched their way to the fanciful imagery of Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”, which forever changed the way they perceived the magic of moonlight. And there was the post-First World War desolation of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, a melodic portrait of death that was more beautiful than life itself. A year later they arrived in the early 20th century with Janáček’s In the Mists, which bemoans the grief of a father who lost his daughter with the outpouring of a million emotions, to Dutilleux’s The Tree of Dreams through which complex layers of sorrow became mixed up with objects in the house and compelled the children to wander restlessly and forget their homework.
Along the way they also heard the passionate lamentations of countless operas with a succession of heroines who kept killing themselves in screaming fits at the end of every final act. They also heard the hot breath of Piazzolla’s tango, and occasionally the acidic jazz of Miles Davis.
Not only was Uncle Thanit a connoisseur of classical music with deep insights in the art, he was also an animated, soulful and well-rounded storyteller with a large repertoire of stories that he shared with the children in his smooth and engaging voice. Sometimes the story itself wasn’t interesting, but the way he told it made the children beg him to repeat it again and again. Some stories they heard only once, and yet they were etched into them well into adulthood.
He told them factoids about certain movements of certain compositions, stories from operas; tragedies with climaxes triggered by banal fate, triangulated romance, misunderstanding or images derived from divination. He told them how great music was conceived not out of the imagination but out of the composer’s despair and decrepitude: of Beethoven’s secret love, documented in the single letter he wrote to a woman whose identity remains a secret, though his desire was revealed in all its nakedness in hundreds and thousands of melodies fraught with agony and disquiet, or of the solitude that devoured Chopin’s soul until there was nothing left of him except his two hands, which had to be severed from his body after he died so that his sister could smuggle them back to his mother. He told them about Mozart’s Requiem, a paean for the soul written with such unwavering belief that it could prove the existence of God, and how it was performed at the funerals of kings and dignitaries but not at the composer’s own because he had died a pauper and was buried without even a gravestone.
There were fantastic stories unrelated to music: a library so enormous that it contained all knowledge of the past, present and even the future, and how it had been burned to ashes by a drunkard, leaving humanity in a pit of stupidity forever after; a desert made of fine diamond dust that rippled like waves in the wind; a man whose body was covered in warts, who looked like an ancient tree, and who had to keep walking through all eternity because if he stopped, his feet would grow roots and he really would become a tree.
And the great white snake that made its way alone through the galaxy and was often spotted by astronauts; the twin stars that roved aimlessly around the universe before their trajectories brought them together for a day every year, so they could flicker pale light at each other before drifting apart again; the savagery of the Crusades; the Vedas; dark matter; the Rosetta Stone and its missing piece; solar storms; invisible particles; the balance of the imbalance of power; Zoroastrianism; black holes; and civilisations reduced to legends.
And other stories: an old lady that went around collecting the shadows of dead people who didn’t know who they were or what to do next and cast them in a play so they could have half of their lives back; the story of a tomcat who never cried but every time it died, each of its owners wept and sobbed, until one day the cat fell in love with a she-cat and when she died the cat cried for the first time and then died for the last time, without ever being reborn again; and, finally, the story of a bizarre tribe of humans who fed on a preternaturally sweet lotus that made them forget the bitterness of life and refuse to return home to their loved ones. Many years later, when Pran had grown up, that last tale was still the one he could never forget.
A magical world slowly took shape, its translucent outline becoming clearer and clearer, between the intervals of each song. When the music resumed, Chareeya’s real world and imaginary world vanished, leaving her motionless, eyes shut, as she took in every note with every atom of her body, and it was impossible to tell if it was she that was rapaciously consuming the melodies or if it was the music that was eating her alive. Meanwhile, Chalika read her novels and did her chores, and Pran stared blankly into space, just letting the sounds enter him and leave as they wished.
Since that afternoon when Chareeya had brought him home to avoid the rain, Pran had become a regular guest at the house. Later, when Uncle Thanit started his pesticide-free vegetable garden by the river and asked the boy to help so he could earn some money, Pran dropped by every day after school and even on the weekends. He rode his bicycle to pick up the sisters from school, with Chareeya riding pillion while Chalika was next to them on her own bike, and he became their personal bodyguard against the menace of stray dogs and boys from the other side of town who were drawn by the reputation of Chalika’s beauty and who hid in the shade ste
aling dreamy looks at her. Along the way, Pran picked flowers for the girls to put in a vase on the dining table.
As soon as they arrived, Pran would start working in the garden: pruning, watering, weeding, mixing manure, spraying biopesticides, and wrapping sheets of newspaper around young shoots to protect them from worms. When he finished he would come inside the house to listen to music he’d never heard before, do his homework, repair broken household appliances, and help Chareeya with her art projects or even her embroidery. He would stay until dinner, which was cooked by Nual the nanny after Aunt Phong quit to become a lottery vendor in Bangkok – Nual, who by then was the mother of two children and still had three men sharing fatherhood, each taking turns to visit and contribute to child support.
VIII
The Universe on the Wall
O nce a month the four orphans squeezed into Uncle Thanit’s beaten up pickup truck and headed to Bangkok. They shopped for books and records, watched a movie if the programme caught their interest, or, on rare occasions when they got lucky, attended a concert or ballet performed by visiting foreign artists. Or else they would drop in at the few galleries in town, or wander around admiring the splendour of the temples that dotted the streets of Bangkok.
Chareeya’s favourite attraction was the giant mural at Suthat temple. She would pester Uncle Thanit to take her there when the group had run out of ideas as to what to do next. In the afternoon, when the prayer hall was empty, Chareeya would lie down, her feet pointing towards the wall, a position that allowed her to take in the entire mural at a wide angle without getting a stiff neck. Sometimes, in a moment of strange premonition, Pran would lie down next to her, in silence, and together the two children set out on a voyage into an exhilarating universe that no one else knew existed or had ever heard its sound; an alternate universe that rolled out in swift succession across the temple’s wall, through eternity.
The Blind Earthworm in the Labyrinth Page 5
