Chang and Eng

by Darin Strauss

  He understood, and began to kneel down, but I did not follow. He was left somewhat hanging between the couch and the floor, and he turned to me with a look of entreaty (now he remembered my presence). I went to the floor with him; in a second, we both were kneeling.

  Adelaide, cheeks afire, tears rambling down the long terrain of her face, leaned over and shook her mother. “Wake up, Mama, wake up!”

  “Huh?” said Mrs. Yates, and she shook her head. Ripples crossed her cheeks, wave upon fleshy wave over her face.

  Chang turned to Adelaide. “Will you marry me?” he asked.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  King Rama III

  January 1819

  Siam

  Gongs and flute players filled the air outside our houseboat with their high-pitched noise from the decks of the King’s large junk. This lumbering ship that would bear us to Bangkok and the King and away from the safety of our family had a gilded prow and a hull of painted tigers. Chang and I were seven years old, and being taken to the King’s court to die.

  Nothing moved around us. No other boats floated on the river, no birds flew in the air. The only people who stood on the shore to see us off were Mother and her sisters, all of whom were crying. I tried to wave at them before the men brought us inside.

  I was scared. I couldn’t look any of the strangers in the eye, not the flutists standing erect in the official royal musician stance (legs approximating the profile of a longbow, with the hind shank straight, the front one bent), not the five sad-faced and scabbyknuckled rowers aligned along the length of the boat, and certainly not the stoic bald guards carrying us by our arms from our home. We were thrown in a dark little room with a little porthole. The chamber was seven of our footsteps by five of our footsteps. The door was locked. Our ligament was not yet long enough to allow anything but face-to-face positioning.

  Without a blanket on the damp wood floor, the breeze from the porthole swept up our homemade frock to bite our backsides. The bruises on our ligament pounded and the knife cut burned as if on fire. My brother and I decided to try to sleep. Neither of us voiced the questions we so desperately wanted to ask. A shriek of compressed air from flutes outside signaled a rude bon voyage. For an unknown fate we were leaving our home against our will. I closed my eyes and wept.

  My imagination conjured a horrific King’s court: skeletons wrestling fat women, worms shooting from women’s noses, young children connected as Chang and I were—four, five of them bound by one ligament. After some time I was shaken from this nightmare. Chang’s head was down, and he was convulsing. I thought he had again fallen into unconscious seizures. I called his name, and he looked up quickly, with wide eyes. He had been awake the whole time.

  Chang jerked his hand out from between his legs. One of his despicable habits had begun.

  A bolt of something, half embarrassment and half disgust, shot through me.

  “If you must play with something, let’s play with In.” Appalled, I handed him Mother’s rag doll. I had been clutching it since they took us away.

  “I do not want to play with In.” Chang made a face and began discreetly to slide his hands toward his groin, as if I would not notice. We were nearly nose-to-nose, and he was discreet at least two more times. His eyes were less than bright, the way they would get years later whenever he took drink.

  The doll, In, meanwhile, was purple and unwrinkled, with dark stones for eyes. He was worn soft except around the seams. His left arm was bigger than his right. We pulled In back and forth, and before I knew what had happened, the fabric ripped. We had pulled him apart; I now held the head, Chang the body. We looked at it, and at each other. There was nothing to say on the subject. My brother and I considered the torn little man and then started crying. Water rasped against the hull. I actually had this thought: I am too young to die.

  Our crying must have been loud, because the man who had taken us from our home opened the door to our cell and entered. He was breathing heavily, wiping his sweaty bald head with his palm. The man’s scalp was shaded where hair follicles had refused to clear fully away.

  “Please,” he said. “The King will not want to see you crying. I am to bring you to the King once we reach land.”

  We stared at him, and he at us. I stared especially at his round bowl of a stomach. He looked down at his chest.

  “What are you looking at?” he asked. The room was dark except for a stripe of sunlight that stretched from the open door to the wall. “I am a sergeant, you know.” He came in and half shut the door.

  “We were not looking at anything,” I said through tears.

  He brought his palms together in front of his mouth, with his fingers straight and touching, the way an American child would pray, and he bounced his hands against his chin. “Are you trying to be clever?” he asked.

  “No,” we cried.

  He screwed up his eyes. He was fixed on our ligament.

  “Does it hurt?” he asked.

  We couldn’t answer. Tears were falling.

  He asked: “May I touch it?” Leading with his outstretched hand, he had already started his descent. He petted us on our stabbed and sore band and shook his head.

  “Is the King going to kill us?” More teardrops.

  “Are we going to see Mother?” asked Chang.

  “I cannot presume to speculate what His Majesty is going to do.”

  “We didn’t do anything wrong,” Chang said.

  No response.

  The guard breathed through his nose and squinted. Then he asked if we’d like to join him on deck.

  Chang and I stood on the prow, wiping tears from our cheeks as the ship skimmed the shore. We neared our capital. Smells and sounds led the eye toward a herd of buffalo tramping at the edge of a rice field. At their side, two young elephants loped close across a clearing, mocking the hurry and relative insignificance of their smaller cohorts.

  Our boat wound between rows of wide brown houseboats and little floating shops (whose patrons came out to wave at this royal craft), and overtook a fleet of huge Chinese junks just arrived from Peking.

  Before long we entered Bangkok, the Village of the Wild Plums.

  Golden temple spires formed an artificial horizon above mean huts and wooden hovels on piles and floating pontoons. Here and there the sea lanes were decorated with fruit trees, palms, and a sacred fig tree just like the one under which Buddha, we learned later, had found enlightenment. We followed the river through the center of the city, and on each side there were strings of houseboats, every boat bigger and more sturdy than Father’s, each supported by a raft of bamboo and moored to the muddy shore.

  This was all otherworldly to us. We continued crying for our mother.

  The estuary of the river was mobbed with small, darting boats. The capital had no roads, just the Mekong and its canals, which were thick with bare-chested ancient vendors hawking their wares by screaming into the air, and with bald monks in orange cloth vestments. Further on, thousands of these holy men prayed from their knees on a small hill that had been furrowed into a series of steps and was now overlaid in orange cloth. Above and behind this tiered hill was a large golden Buddha sitting inside a painted-metal replica of a purple flower.

  Our junk was met by a rowboat carrying another two representatives of the King. This rowboat guided us to a special landing by the wall that enclosed the palace. The wall seemed miles long, and was whitewashed and battlemented and tucked in from the shore. Multicolored spires and flat golden roofs peered out from within, and granite lions placed every few feet along the top of the enclosure roared at the world from behind red glass eyes.

  It was all new to us, the spires, the outfitted hillside, even the elephants, but none of it impressed me; I was sick with longing and panic, and our ligament hurt. The gloom and dread in an abducted child exceeds the majesty even of the fiercest granite lion. Chang looked especially frail; his eyes kept closing.

  He didn’t respond when I whispered his name.

 
“Get off the boat,” we were told. On the shore, the ground was so solid below my feet I felt I’d landed on another planet.

  As we walked, Chang looked even worse than Father had when he’d agreed to sail away with us to China.

  Four palace officials brought us under an old gum tree and threw a scratchy gray blanket over our heads. I heard a mewling voice: “His Majesty wants no one to see it before His Highness does.”

  The royal officials led us with the blanket over our heads through some kind of entrance, then around a short dank passageway.

  They removed the cloak. It was dark. We could make out a pair of tall, roundish shadows in front of us—guards, likely, frightening as the unattached monsters I dreamt about. Even face-to-face, with our double width Chang and I spanned the unlit corridor—our backs scraped the chalky walls—and all at once, in sorrow and desperation, we formed the confused idea to get away. Thrashing around, skinning our knuckles, we started to run.

  The men thwarted us before we’d taken two steps, grabbing us by the arms and squeezing.

  The passageway opened into a wide, well-lit chamber. The scene looked as if it had been the site of some devastating fire. The granite floor was scorched black, with swatches of anomalous pinks and oranges. I thought I heard the whine of a cat from somewhere.

  My foot suddenly felt cold. Chang and I were ankle deep in one of the puddles that lay throughout the room. Looking up, I saw the King himself standing in the chamber; I did not know at the time that He was royalty, but His three-foot-tall golden crown made it obvious He held an exalted position.

  The King was staring at us in blinking disbelief, surrounded by a clan of green-robed subordinates. His Highness’ was a fat stomach of a face, swollen and expressionless, with a small belly-buttonshaped mouth. Despite the presence of King Rama, or perhaps because of it, we raced back toward the exit, running straight into the arms of the four men who had escorted us.

  One of the bald attendants managed to grasp our shredded frock from behind, and another to take our arms in his hands.

  Another man from the pack stepped toward us, and he unsheathed a saber with a curved blade. He advanced, blade first. At this, the King turned on his heels and withdrew from the chamber; His robed party followed. Chang and I were left alone with these three men—two holding us still, the other drawing near with his sword.

  One of the men who clutched us said, “Approach from the middle attitude.”

  “No,” said the man with the sword. He wore a long braid from the top of his stubbly head.

  The swordsman stood before us with his sword high—the upper attitude, perhaps.

  “This is it, brother.” Chang closed his eyes but could not stop his tears.

  No, I said to myself. Not yet.

  One of the men behind us pressed my hand against my coccyx, and the guard squeezed harder. I tried to backpedal and failed.

  The swordsman’s open grin showed an incomplete row of brown teeth—(I thought briefly of Mother)—and he took the weapon in his left hand and made a flicking movement with his right.

  I felt a sharp pain in my head, then came darkness.

  We awakened to find ourselves in a dark cell, a smaller adjunct to the chamber proper, accessible through a trapdoor, which I did not learn about until later. The cell had no windows, no blankets or berth on which to sleep. What it did have was a locked door, and a persistent drip from the low ceiling. In the corner, a crouching cat meowed. I tried to sleep but could not. Chang, however, seemed to have no problem dozing off. After studying the cell for the fourth time, I turned to my sleeping twin and was disturbed by the changes of the last twenty-four hours on his face.

  “Chang,” I said. “Brother.”

  He looked even worse than he had when we arrived off the boat; his pallor was ashen, his eyes in a constant fight to open.

  In fear, and also to comfort my brother, I began reciting something Father used to say when he was teaching us to fish. “Mekong Fishermen stay abreast of change.” The adult words comforted me, even if I barely understood them. “Rivermen’s judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the influence of fate. Mekong Fishermen stay abreast of change.”

  “Shh,” Chang said. He fell into and out of sleep. Our band was still sore.

  After some time I managed to summon over the limping cat from the corner. I named the cat In. In the cat had only three legs. It staggered around, making water and defecating. The cell began to reek.

  My brother opened his eyes and looked at me with a face unfocused from sleep. “When do you think we can leave here, brother?”

  “How am I to know?” I chafed, rubbing at our inflamed band. “Tell me, Chang, how am I to know?”

  Before I finished my question, Chang was back in slumber, his face contorted in pain. I petted his sweating head. I brushed a hair from his eye, which opened with a start.

  “When do you think we can leave here, brother?” he asked, blinking.

  After some time, an hour perhaps, I heard rattling from beyond the trapdoor. I nudged Chang awake. “Please don’t,” he said, and fell back asleep.

  We will not leave here, I thought, until the King kills us.

  Just then a bald guard entered our cell and closed the door as if he was entering his own bedroom. Wrapped in a black raiment, the man carried a tub of water and appeared horrified. Draped over his shoulder were what seemed to be articles of clothing. The man had to hunch his shoulders to fit under the ceiling, and as he did so I saw he was our familiar bald captor, round and tense-looking.

  “There are things you must know,” he said.

  Chang waked. He asked the man, “What is your name?”

  The man scratched at the back of his bald head. “Nao,” he said finally.

  “We are Chang and Eng,” my brother said.

  Nao stared at us, gathering the mettle to look into our eyes for the first time. “Always bow in the King’s presence,” he said. “And you are never to look Him in the eye, never to address Him directly, but, rather, to talk to the royal ‘listener.’ ”

  Nao put the tub of water down.

  He gave us the least tender bath in the history of Siam, with warm water and leaves, and handed us black wool pants and green silk jackets modified to accommodate our ligament. The special hole in the jacket was a little constricting, but I was happy to have new garments; these were our first pants. Soon two other men came to brush our hair, which grew down to our chins. Three more arrived to supervise.

  “Is the King going to kill us?”

  We were given confusing, barked instructions in court protocol, told how often and when to make obeisance to the Throne, and how deeply; how to look away when addressed by the King; and how to sing the Song of Siam, which we most likely would have to recite on command.

  “When is the King going to kill us?”

  They had us practice genuflecting. We stretched our bond, painfully trying to synchronize our bows and touch our heads to the damp ground. We could not bow, but only wrangle into a position more lying than kneeling, with our faces chin-to-chin.

  We were told it was time to meet the King of Siam.

  I whispered Father’s words to Chang and to myself: “Judgment helps one to make the appropriate decision at the appropriate moment and diminish the infiuence of fate.” We were seven years old.

  Chang and I were led through a trapdoor to the larger chamber, where more attendants who would not look at us stood waiting. These wore towering golden hats and held their swords before them in a two-handed grip. They were shirtless.

  The men marched us outside, into the sunlight and beyond the retaining wall, to a twelve-oared barge on the banks of the river. The boat was piloted by sailors dressed in vermilion silk. We stood at the bow as the boat traced the perimeter of the outer wall of the palace, docking at a gate with metal spikes.

  “Get on that,” one of the bare-chested attendants said, and pointed to a large hammock fastened to
four poles. A pair of giants carried the poles. And comely, large-breasted women wrapped in blue scarves handed us plates of prawns and told us to eat before we entered the royal gardens.

  Never before had we reclined on a hammock, smelling a king’s flowers that stood tall with the rising sun. My brother and I were very young, and not only according to the calendar; never had I imagined accepting prawns from the delicate hand of a winsome housegirl. We were carried over the spangled gardens and through a second gate patrolled by sentinels in puffed red costume, then along a sandy avenue flanked on either side by rows of black cannons, and past a grassland where wardens led a dozen gray elephants around in a circle. We finally came to the National Assembly Hall, and the third and final gate. “Get down from the hammock!” a guard roared.

  Three buildings met us on the other side: the steepled royal palace, its golden roof shining in the sun; the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, a tableau of stepped red and green spires and richly gilded roofs; and the sprawling Hall of Justice, where the King was concluding a legal case.

  We entered the Great Hall expecting to die.

  The main parlor was a towering dome, the ceiling and walls a deep red embellished with friezes of gold. The floor was a dark gray marble that shone like river water in the morning. A string of two-story columns linked by engraved balconies spanned the rear wall, and stuffed lions snarling in an everlasting silent roar stood nobly atop ivory pedestals in each corner. There were more people crowded into this assembly than we had seen in all our lives.

  The seat of state itself was raised high off the ground by a series of semicircular carpeted steps. This perch of honor was decorated in jade dragons and golden plates, and surrounded by red curtains, drapery that measured from the floor to just below the etched ceiling, where it met a canopy of twenty golden parasols hanging overhead like gilded cloud cover.

  On the throne in His shapeless golden gown and red sash squatted chubby King Rama. At the King’s side sat a little girl in a red silk cape, a princess probably, nervous and diminutive in the plush red seat of a petite throne, her coal-black hair in a loose train over her shoulder.