A Woman of Angkor

by John Burgess

  ‘Father, please, but no.’

  ‘All right, then! You’ve made your decision. Tomorrow morning I will begin proceedings with a magistrate to adopt Veng as my son. He will take your place in every way, in the family rolls, in temple ceremonies, in occupation. And in inheritance. You will get nothing from me. Do you understand that?’ The last words he shouted.

  ‘I don’t want a conflict, father.’

  ‘Clearly you do.’

  Nol called out the names of two male servants. They entered behind Sovan and took him each by an arm, whispering apologies as they did.

  ‘Put him out the door, and don’t ever let him back in.’

  The servants pulled at Sovan, lightly at first, then a bit harder, whispering more apologies. He gave in and let them propel him to the compound gate.

  There one of the servants said, as I had told him to: ‘Master Sovan, it would be good if you went around to the back...’

  He did, and there he found me. At my feet was a large straw bag.

  I embraced him. ‘Take this, then,’ I said. ‘Your basic things and garments. And go. It won’t be for long. Your father will get over this, I know it.’ That is what I said, but it was only to convince myself. ‘There are quarters awaiting you in the inn just behind the marketplace. That is, if you still want to go ahead with this. I would prefer that you come back inside, as a parasol bearer again.’

  ‘I have to go on with it, mother. Today the Architect let me draw. It was like there were entire buildings in my head waiting to be put down on the slate. He showed me how to...’

  I put a stop to this talk by hugging him again. Then I sent him on his way. But I had a servant trail along behind and report back to me. I was comforted to learn that my son had in fact settled in at the inn, and that the proprietor had pledged bath water and a good meal every evening.

  As it happened, my plans for his comforts came to nothing. The very next day, the Architect told my boy that he would live at the construction site, in a hut with the other assistants. Sovan dutifully packed up his things and moved. I took heart in knowing that he was in the hands of a good master, who would teach him many things and leave little opportunity for getting into trouble.

  35: Envy

  When our family was poor, I was always touched that my husband worked so hard to buy me shiny things, even if they were things I did not want. Whatever he brought home, I was grateful. But in his mind, that which he could provide was never enough. This trait did not abate as we rose in the world. No matter how much silver, how much property we amassed in those years, it seemed to him only a prelude to what we deserved. He was forever comparing to himself our holdings with those of other members of the court.

  With me safe from His Majesty’s attentions and his son banished, concerns of money rose again in his mind.

  Most of all, Nol wondered why he had ever seen value in owning land that would be behind, not in front of, the King’s new mountain-temple. It was true that there was some immediate gain after ground was broken. A few of the masons and foremen who arrived to take part in the great project built huts on our land and twice a year they paid rent that was split evenly between Nol and the village down the track. A small market began to operate, and each woman laying out her wares there paid a fee to him and the village. But it was not much and in any case there was no permanent arrangement. One day the mountain-temple would be finished, and all of these people would leave, and everyone would know that what Nol One-Ear owned had gone back to being just ordinary land, disadvantaged land, in fact – the mountain-temple would in perpetuity be turning its back on it.

  As for the land east of the temple, it was Nol’s great frustration that it was already mass-producing income for its owner. The majority of people involved in construction chose this place to build their huts. There was also a thriving market and shrines for offerings. Four hostels had opened, so that pilgrims could sleep near the temple’s future entrance, enjoy the excitement of the coming and going of elephants and building materials, and absorb some of the holy energy that priests, regardless of what my son might think, said was already radiating from the eastern portal. Within a year, this area was practically a city in its own right.

  Every few weeks, Nol’s duties took him through this bustling new area and each time he came back dispirited at what he saw.

  So after a while, he came to a decision. He would buy the eastern land.

  It was owned by the family of Kiri, keeper of the King’s sacred cattle. Now there was a simple job, Nol used to say. Basically all this man and his family have to do is feed and groom the animals, and then once a week splash some holy water on their hides and lead them in a herd around the palace! There could be trouble, of course, if any of the animals died, but Nol felt that ultimately a cow was just a cow, and that if the gods saw fit to call one from this life, it could quietly be replaced with another, with no one the wiser but Kiri and his scribe.

  One day, Nol consulted with his financial clerk about how much silver he could raise, on his own, not counting whatever wealth I might have. (Generally he avoided thinking about my numbers, and in conversations with him I always found it wise to understate what I had.) The clerk took some time doing the figures, combining the estimated value of houses, rice fields, jewellery, carved teak tables, silver vessels, a honey farm, stored rice, spare parasols, pig sties and various other assets. He gave Nol a summary written on a slate. The equivalent of twenty-eight hundred laks of silver! A hand at his heart, Nol gasped in delight. I happened to enter the room at this moment, and saw the enchantment that lingered on his face. He had not thought the sum would be anywhere near that, and before I knew it, he was taking my hand and leading me to the household shrine. There he said a prayer of thanks addressed to any god who might have played a role in assembling the fortune.

  But, you know, within an hour misgivings settled in. The land he had in mind was going to be quite expensive; it would be hard to part with a big chunk of his money.

  But a week of fretting led him to conclude he had no choice but to proceed. In his view, his standing was at risk. He served the King, close up, every day, and yet it was another man who owned the land so near the place that would host His Majesty’s essence eternally.

  So he sent word to Kiri’s household that he would like to pay a call. The next day he ordered up his best palanquin, with two bearers and the clerk to walk alongside. I saw them off. Two hours later, he came back, in a sour mood. This man Kiri had treated the offer of four hundred laks as a joke. Coarsely spitting betel as he spoke, Kiri had said that that was what his family took in in a single day. Surely it wasn’t, but I can imagine that the man was enjoying taunting Nol. Offer twenty thousand, and maybe we can talk, he said. No, forty thousand!

  In ensuing days, Nol recovered his spirits and began to plot a counter-move. He had his clerk do the sums again to figure if his worth really was twenty-eight hundred laks. ‘Only’ twenty-eight hundred was how Nol expressed it. The man did manage to get the figure a bit above three thousand, by marking up the presumed value of farmland and some of the jewellery and by assuming that the coming harvest would be larger than any before. But that was nowhere near the figures that Kiri was talking, of course. So, Nol decided to try other ways. He hired an agent to approach Kiri’s people on behalf of ‘a client who wishes to remain anonymous,’ in case the high price was motivated by jealousy of closeness to the King. But Kiri wasn’t fooled and he stuck by his impossible figures. Later Nol sent a man to the land office to have a look at the rival family’s title documents. He was hoping they’d contain some legal error that would allow a challenge to ownership, but there was no such thing. Other inquiries into the background of the Kiri clan turned up nothing useful for discrediting them.

  By now there was more bad news: those few tenants on Nol’s land were beginning to move away, saying it made more sense to be in the settlement on the eastern side, even if the rents were higher there.

  Then came word of an out
break of dysentery in the eastern settlement. A terrible one – it hit everyone at once. The privies were mobbed by frantic people, some of whom couldn’t wait and unburdened themselves right there on the street. Brahmin physicians were called urgently from the Capital’s hospitals, and they dispensed their chants and powders, but other than that they merely looked on in dismay and predicted that the problem could only but go away, with patience. But it did not. Week after week, people suffered incapacitating pain in the gut without warning. Pilgrims began staying away. Word began to circulate that there was a hex of some kind. It was not on the site itself, which was holy in a way that could not be denied, but on the people who owned it. It became advisable for members of Kiri’s family to keep out of sight there, and when they did come to collect rent or to see to some building project, they brought bodyguards.

  There was no such illness in the western site, on my husband’s land, and a few people moved there, built houses and regained their health. The little western market picked up. Nol happily collected some extra rent.

  At the height of the illness, Nol left again to call at the house of Kiri. He returned without a deal, but with some satisfaction. Kiri had lost his smug demeanour, he said, and had actually grown angry in Nol’s presence and threatened to file a petition with the King.

  ‘On what grounds?’ I asked.

  ‘This Kiri thinks I have something to do with the illnesses.’

  Oh! He said that, and I saw that now it was he who had a smug look on his face. I walked away, unsettled.

  It was a long time before I learned what had been going on. Nol was in fact behind the illnesses, but not directly. What he’d done was to tell his new son Veng to go to the market one night and have a word with the men there who took on assignments to deal with embarrassing problems in a confidential way. Tell them, Nol said, that there would be a fair sum of silver for them if suddenly it weren’t quite so pleasant to live in the eastern settlement. Veng looked askance at this instruction, but he was anxious to prove himself an enterprising son, so he steeled himself and went. When he came back he reported it was all taken care of. The men never said exactly what they were going to do, but Veng left thinking they might pick fights in the settlement and maybe bloody a nose or two. The next day Veng went to the market again to hear it from them, and he came back shocked. They had picked up a spade and gone to a privy, and there the youngest of them had been told to hold his nose and scoop up a bag-load of what was at the bottom. Then that young man was told to take the bag to the settlement after midnight and drop some of the contents into each of the eight drinking wells there. He did, and the gang’s members were amazed at how quickly this worked. The next day they strolled through the settlement, watching people in agony and found secret pleasure in knowing the cause. This gave them such a feeling of power that they sent the young man back three nights later to contaminate the wells again. The following week they sent him back yet again.

  But by this time the young man was growing careless. He neglected to do one of the wells. One of the Brahmin doctors noticed that people who lived near that one recovered, while everyone else remained sick. The Kiri family caught on. Three of the cattle keeper’s sons armed themselves and hid near one of the still foul wells to watch and several nights later, they saw a man approach and drop in something from a bundle he carried. They jumped up, seized him, and tore open the bundle. Gasping at the stink, they knocked the man around some. In the course of that, some of the muck got onto one of the son’s face, and this so infuriated him that he took out his knife and waved it around and asked the prisoner if he’d like to get this in the stomach, and when the man didn’t immediately beg for his life, its point was thrust straight in. There was tremendous bleeding, and before long, the sons had a corpse to show their father, not a prisoner.

  I learned all this, but I did not report any of it to the magistrates – how could I do such a thing to family members? But what a tragedy! A young man dead, even if he was a hooligan, and hundreds of people subjected to the worst kind of physical agony. When those pains begin, coming and going in waves, it can be as bad as child birth.

  The young man’s death of course was good luck for Nol, because otherwise he would have been exposed. But it put an end to his plot. Guards were placed around the wells and soon everyone in the eastern settlement was feeling fine. The few people who’d moved to the west gave notice and returned their things to where they’d been, and Nol felt angry all over again.

  His back began to hurt. He asked that I give him a massage. By now I knew what had happened. I held up my hands and said that I had strained them, that he should call someone from the market.

  36: Jugglers and balladeers

  Bopa never learned of her father’s frustrations about the land. That was because in those days she rarely saw him, or anyone else in the household. Myself included, I will confess it.

  How did I allow this to happen? The reasons I gave to myself back then seem absurd now: I had the distractions with His Majesty, I had my duties for the palace pantry, I was often travelling. And at those times that I did think to worry about her, I told myself that her dear heart and the scriptural teachings that she had absorbed (or so I thought) would help her find her way past temptations.

  Our family owes so much to Yan, Bopa’s maid. It was she who finally laid the true state of affairs before me.

  You will appreciate what an awkward position Yan was in. Any servant girl must think long and hard before making any judgment, any comment on the behaviour of her mistress. It is so much easier to pretend not to see. And what to do if there are two mistresses, each with a different view? Yan tried to be loyal to us both – I was the lady of the house and paid her wages, of course – but there were times that she found herself in conflict between the two of us.

  So early one afternoon, when Bopa was not to be seen, Yan came to me as I sat in my room going over accounts. I sensed immediately that something was wrong.

  ‘Yan, what is it? Are you not well?’ That was how I was, choosing until the very last to refuse to see. I knew very well that Yan would not come to me to complain of an illness.

  ‘Lady Sray, my health is fine.’

  Presently she came out with it: ‘It is about your daughter, Lady.’

  ‘Oh!’

  ‘As the Lady knows, her daughter spends much time these days at the concubine pavilion.’

  ‘Yes, yes, I do know that.’ I said that but in fact I did not really know. I knew only that Bopa was out of the house for long periods.

  ‘I am not sure that the Lady would approve of some of the things that go on there.’ She looked down, troubled. I began to worry what was coming.

  ‘Bopa sits with Rom and whatever junior girls are on hand and they gossip and laugh and play board games. Sometimes Rom brings in jugglers and acrobats, hired from the market. Or balladeers, who sing songs of country girls finding love with city boys.’

  ‘Oh! That doesn’t sound so bad.’

  But Yan was a strong girl and now she refused to let me bat aside the message she had come to deliver.

  ‘There is always honey wine, Lady.’

  ‘But everyone drinks some of that from time to time.’

  ‘It is more often than some, Lady. And at all times of day. Morning even.’

  ‘I see…Well, I will speak with Bopa when she comes back.’ I looked away from Yan now. I confess that I was thinking of myself as well as my daughter. It was shameful to be told this, and by a young girl.

  ‘Lady, I am sorry to say, but the Mistress Bopa is not out now. She is lying on her mat in her sleeping area. She is in such a deep sleep that it’s impossible to rouse her…’

  Together we hurried to the other side of the house. It was just as Yan had said: my little girl, sleeping, her mouth wide open. Snoring, drooling onto the mat! There was an awful stale smell of honey wine in the air. Ever since that day, I have been unable to tolerate that smell.

  Yan whispered: ‘Please, Lady. Please, you
won’t tell her that I brought you here...’

  ‘I will not. But you did the right thing. This cannot go on.’

  I told Yan that she could go, but she was not finished. There was more to tell. This was not the first time this had happened, she said. Usually Bopa slept it off at the concubine pavilion. But on this day, there had been a shocking kind of trouble there. One of the younger concubines, perhaps jealous of my daughter’s favour with Rom, had begun having her idea of fun once Bopa fell asleep. She had been poking her with a stick, laughing that there was no response. Then she began to draw patterns on her face with ashes from a cooking fire! Touching her head! Yan tried to shoo her away, and was shocked when this concubine, younger than she, turned and slapped her on the face, saying how dare a servant behave this way. So do you know what Yan did? She lifted Bopa and helped her stumble her way outside! There was an empty oxcart there, and she laid her in the back and pulled closed the straw shades, then went and found a driver. She told him not to look in the back, just to drive to our house. It was not a long way, and at the house she made the man go away and she helped Bopa inside, laid her down and washed the ashes from her face.

  Yan was weeping by the time she finished telling me this. I know she felt terribly remiss for not coming to me sooner. But, she explained, she had had hope that Sovan would straighten things out. He had lately been spending some time with his sister, despite his responsibilities at the construction site, taking her to places in the market, trying to entertain her so she would not go so often to the concubine pavilion. None of this had I noticed.