The Tapestries (28 page)

S
hortly before sunset, the eunuch returned. A few steps behind him marched four male servants from the royal stables. A wooden palanquin, shaped like an armchair and suspended from stout bamboo poles, creaked on the men's shoulders.

During the time the former chamberlain was gone, Lady Chin had managed to step outside her apartment to wait for him on the steps. Sometime in the afternoon, a heavy rain had come. The tamarind tree dripped water like a rusty cask, and the moist air was heavy and cool.

Ung had changed into a black satin robe embroidered in white with ancient characters, front and back. The stark colors of his tunic, its long graduated panels, and the way he swayed his hips when he moved made her smile.

Bubbling with excitement, he slid his hands under her arms and lifted her, at the same time shouting for the men to lower their conveyance. She strove to move forward, but her feet merely dragged against the ground. Once inside, Lady Chin lay back against the soft cushions of the chair, aware of her grubby appearance. In her two weeks inside the Apartments of Peace, she had molted like a snake.

The dead skin that clung onto her garments danced in the twilight like drowsy moths.

They started down the street and in no time were swept into a mass of spectators and palace officials. Ahead, a group of Buddhist monks dressed in saffron robes sounded intricate rhythms on gongs made of tortoiseshell. Their chanting rose above the boisterousness of the crowd. Tall men with curly hair and wild eyes chattered in French with their equally towering women, whose low-cut decollete accentuated their generous cleavage. They responded with clattering laughter. Dogs howled, roosters crowed.

The deep pain was gone; now all she felt was a tingling sensation. It seemed to her that the tumor was tickling its fingers against the wall of her womb—an entity waiting to burst out. Merriment resounded in her ears, as if everyone were laughing with their mouths open. Nothing on Earth could dim the excitement of this evening's welcoming reception inside the king's chamber.

Through the throng, Lady Chin could see the rough stone wall of the Imperial Palace, also known as the Golden City. Her quarters in the Apartments of Peace stood on the northeast corner of the fortress, outside the confines of this hub of royal activity. On the opposite side was the Golden City's main entrance, the majestic Meridian Gate. To enter, they would follow a pathway teeming with carriages, pedestrians, and other palanquins along the city's border. That evening, to honor the emperor, the royal soldiers who guarded this enclave had been instructed to leave its doors open until midnight, as the festivities would continue until the morning.

“Come,” the eunuch said to the lead porters of her conveyance. His hand rose high, showing the soldiers the two ivory emblems that bore the king's seal—the royal passes that would allow them to enter the inner sanctum.

Lady Chin looked up. The road before her widened into a limestone court. On both sides stretched rows of redbrick balustrades, decorated with carved fretwork and adorned with torches in the shape of lotus blossoms. In the background, the Meridian Gate's mass blended into the night.

Every time she entered the vaulted corridor beneath the gate, she felt the air become balmy and perfumed with sandalwood smoke. The structure was built from large blocks of blue granite, reaching twenty feet in height. On either side spread out the two annexes.

Like an enormous turtle bearing a castle on its back, the Meridian Gate was topped by the Tower of Five Phoenixes. Its golden roofs, ornamented with carved dragons and pointed tips, crowned a circle of five buildings. All were connected by a labyrinth of open and closed galleries. The large front room, facing the courtyard, commanded a view of the surrounding mountains and villages. There, the emperor sat enthroned during important occasions.

Above the royal chamber was a large hall, covered with elegant copper plaques and reserved for the ladies of the palace. Lady Chin recalled a secret staircase in the back that led to it. From behind a finely carved grille, the ladies could watch without being watched.

She closed her eyes and allowed her senses to absorb the surrounding revelry. She thought of the tinkles of laughter that had echoed down the hallway, and the lingering taste of sweet rice wine. It had been a long time since she had been part of such festivities, but the impressions in her mind were still vivid.

She opened her eyes as the porters descended a long bridge. The faint lotus fragrance wafted through the air, and the view opened before her—the shimmering landscape of the Golden City, which in turn enclosed the Purple Forbidden City.

She gasped. In the deepening evening, the Imperial Palace was aglow with thousands of light bulbs, sparkling in hues from pastel pink to gold to purple. Here and there, she could distinguish glittering candlelight and illuminated lanterns, mere pinpricks of light in comparison to the splendor and power of electricity. This was the first time the palace had been lit by electrical current, installed in honor of the king's return.

Over a vast area outside the palace, landscapers had built a royal golf course. Green grass, trees, and shrubs were brought in, and artificial ponds and barren sand fields were now being added, the eunuch explained. Nearby, a stable housed the latest in modern automobiles. Her entire life, she thought, she had known this place as well as she knew her own countenance. Yet so much had changed in the past few weeks, she could hardly recognize the face she saw in the mirror, let alone the sights around her.

At the entrance to the Purple Forbidden City, the heart of the citadel, where the royal family lived, Lady Chin and her escorts were stopped by a troop of soldiers. The porters could proceed no farther. Here, outside of the Great Golden Gate, sat a red-lacquered and gilded altar bearing the traditional five offerings to the Buddha in water, incense, flowers, rice, and candles, along with His Majesty's ancestral tablets and other objects of worship. Lady Chin and Ung joined the guests performing the five ritual prostrations at the altar, while the non-Buddhist French and the younger Vietnamese mandarins left their cars in a field behind the Hall of Supreme Harmony and simply strode inside.

Lady Chin reflected that since the young king had gone to his boarding school in France, the Purple Forbidden City—perhaps the whole citadel—had begun to fall apart. Although many mandarins held on to the ancient traditions, the Court at Hue was overrun by Frenchmen. Most of the older officials had left their positions and joined revolutionary troops, such as the Indochinese Communist party led by the socialist Ho Chi Minh. Rebellions fomented in many regions in spite of the severe consequences—punishment by guillotine. The regions outside of Hue were beset with thieves, robbers, whores, and other malefactors. Every time a nobleman abandoned the safety of the citadel, he, like her husband and son, risked his life.

Lady Chin and Ung watched hordes of foreigners walk past the place of worship, ignorant of what it meant. She wondered how a young emperor who had spent his adolescence in a far-off land and was not attuned to the politics of the Royal Court could prepare to govern a crippled system such as this. She was far from educated, but it seemed to her that the way her glorious past had been interrupted by the murders of her husband and son was a microcosm of what was happening to her country.

Crossing into the inner palace, she had to cling to Mr. Ung for support, lest the arriving guests knock her down in their rush. The King's Chamber, the first building behind the Great Golden Gate, was a place that only a four-hundred-year tradition of architecture could have constructed. Multicolored lights led the guests across a rectangular esplanade and into a colossal hall.

On either side of the hall's entrance, glass partitions revealed a pair of bronze lions—the gatekeepers, side by side in their crouching stance. The intricate carving that made up their pensive features represented the passionate art of a bygone era.

The ballroom was slowly filling up. The traditionalists were clad in colorful silk ceremonial robes with headdresses, cummerbunds, and boots. The colors of their gowns denoted their station and rank in the court. Sky-blue royal robes embroidered with a large dragon were for the highest ranking, mandarins of the second tier wore orange jade, and the third rank sported green jade. Lower-ranking courtiers were not allowed to enter the main ballroom. They twirled and mingled in the front hall with men in suits and ties and women in long, slinky dresses. The royal family was also here, but presumably inside and on the top dais.

Lady Chin found herself awestruck by the display. The blazing lights reflected off the gold in the walls to spin kaleidoscopic images before her dazzled eyes, while the loud foreign music made her knees weak. Being a lady-in-waiting and accompanied by a eunuch, she knew that she could gain access to almost every room in the palace. The armed guards assumed that she was here on behalf of the Queen Mother. Her ivory pass and the blue of her uniform put her in a category far above the other courtiers and mandarins.

But that knowledge did not make her feel any better.

Lady Chin searched for an empty space to stand in the crowded hall. Without looking back, she was aware of Ung's presence, his warm body supporting her. She could barely hear his voice, even though he seemed to be shouting over the music.

“We must go toward the back and reserve a private room behind the bamboo partition, so that you can be comfortable watching the festivities away from the crowd. But I warn you, you will not leave until we catch at least a sight of His Majesty.”

“Would you lead the way, then?” she asked, grabbing his arm.

T
hey walked through a series of corridors that wrapped around the ballroom in the form of dragon's claws clutching a jade ball. She could see a portion of the sky above the walled garden; the yellow moon, sallow compared to the brilliant light on Earth, floated over a hedge of tall areca palm trees. The apartments neighboring the King's Chamber radiated the heat of the electric lights. Around her, the odors of perfumes and exotic cooking competed with the evil-smelling fumes of cigarette smoke, gasoline, and burnt gunpowder from the firecrackers.

Never had the Imperial Palace seemed so chaotic, so contemporary, and so congested. Even with gentle breezes drifting now and then from the Ngu Binh Mountain, her lungs were starved for air. A middle-aged Frenchwoman with marcelled hair and a powdered face drew in a mouthful of smoke from the tip of her long ivory cigarette holder. She looked incredulously at Lady Chin and the eunuch as they walked by. They ventured up to the second floor. A few hallways guarded by the palace soldiers led them into a private rectangular box, which was furnished with a row of armchairs.

Lady Chin strained to keep up with the old man. Her strength was ebbing, but she was not about to collapse inside this sanctuary. If she expired here, her death would be seen as a wicked omen for the royal family, whom she had served faithfully over a thirty-year span of her life. She would not want to cast such a shadow over them.

She sat. Her chest hurt. Her knees wobbled. A bitter, burning fluid rose to the back of her throat; still, she began to relax in this safe surrounding. From this booth she could spy on everyone in the ballroom without feeling like a small duck that was about to be crushed by the overzealous dancing feet of the guests.

“Well,” the eunuch said to her once they settled on their seats, “what do you think of all this? “

She swallowed the acidic fluid. “It strikes me suddenly that I have become too old to appreciate the flood of Western culture. The world has changed so rapidly. There was a time I could smell the sweet smoke of incense and opium anywhere in the fortress, but that has long passed. I have only sympathy for the two Queen Mothers, who no doubt must have suffered a great deal with these changes, especially at their age.”

“Shush! Shush!” said the old eunuch, pointing to the window. From a raised platform at the end of the hall, partially obscured behind a series of bamboo screens, the recognizable shape of her employer, Lady Thuc, came into view. The emperor's mother, Queen Huu Thi, and two other ladies were accompanying her in a game of mah-jongg. Their shimmering, wide-sleeved robes matched the gold in the furniture.

The emperor sat on a throne a few feet away from his mother. He had grown tremendously from the mental picture she had of him: a tiny boy in a dark school uniform and white knee-length socks. The new king Bao Dai was a handsome young man of nineteen, dressed in a gray Western suit. His hands, unlike those of his father, King Khai Dinh, were free of jewelry. His short crop of dark hair was combed back with pomade, and his full lips bloomed with the vigor of youth.

“How handsome His Majesty is,” she said, studying him. “However, he is not what I envisioned as royalty.”

“All I can say,” the old man replied in a hushed voice, “is that the emperor is the new image this country so desperately needs. But look over there,” he said, pointing at a stout stranger in a single-breasted blue jacket with a thin, carefully trimmed mustache that ridged his upper lip. Next to him was the same Frenchwoman she had seen earlier outside the ballroom, with the powdered face and soft, wavy hair. “That couple is Madam and Monsieur Charles, the ex-ambassador.”

“His Majesty's adoptive parents,” she added. She had heard their names mentioned repeatedly during her long years of serving the Queen Mother.

“Indeed. In Paris, they have an elegant building on Bourdonnais Street, where His Majesty has spent the past ten years learning political science—”

“At le Lycee Condorcet puis sciences politiques,” she interrupted.

The old man raised an eyebrow. “How do you know its name, madam?”

“That was the very school my husband and I planned for Bui to enroll in, once he passed their admittance examination. We were planning a career for him in politics.”

A wave of grief brought along the never-ending realization of her loss. What had she done in all the years they had been gone? How did she get here, unclean and disheveled like a discarded rag? She struggled for air, feeling as though she were drowning amidst the strange music. She was swept by nausea as she thought of her son.