Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

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The Three Palaces. The Three Palaces of Prince Gautama are the Palace of Summer, the Palace of Winter, and the Palace of the Season of Wind and Rain. The Palace of Summer has floors of cool marble, interrupted by fountains, bathing pools, and narrow channels of moving water. The Palace of Winter is known for its cedar paneling and its thick carpets woven with images of fire and sun. The Palace of the Season of Wind and Rain has thick walls that shut out the sounds of Nature and enclose many Halls of Pleasure devoted to dancing girls, lutenists, acrobats, conjurers, and skilled actors performing staged plays. The Three Palaces are located in different outlying quarters of the city; they are connected by broad underground passages carefully guarded. Separate passageways lead to the King’s palace. Each palace, with its many courtyards and stairways, its hundreds of chambers, its far-flung gardens, parks, and bowers, is surrounded by high ramparts with four gates. Gautama has traveled many times along the underground passageways, but in his twenty-nine years he has never passed beyond the ramparts. Once, as a child, he rode with his father in the royal chariot into the depths of one of the royal parks. In the distance he could see the top of a wall. He pointed and asked his father what lay beyond. His father looked at him sternly, then swept out an arm and said: “Nothing is there. Everything is here.” He turned the chariot horse sharply and rode back along the path.

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Despondency. Gautama closes the gate in a trellis-wall and walks along a path in the Bower of Quiet Delights. The roof is composed of artfully interwoven twigs and branches, which soften the sunlight that comes quivering down past the leaves of asoka trees. Scarlet-orange blossoms fill the air with a scent that feels like a hand touching his face. The path leads to a dark pool with a stone fountain in the center; water rises from the mouths of twelve marble beasts and falls in a circle of soft splashes. Gautama lies on his side in the grass at the edge of the pool. The sound of the water in the fountain, the three white swans in the dark water, the smell of the asoka flowers, the spots of sunlight in the shade, all these soothe Gautama, who asks himself, for he is in the habit of questioning his own sensations, why he should need soothing. If in fact he does need soothing, then that is all he needs, for he’s well aware that he has everything else: a loving wife and son, concubines and dancing girls who thrill his senses, palaces and gardens, friends and companions, musicians, elephants, chariots, rare fruits carried in boats from China and Arabia and placed in a bowl before him. His life is a feast of pleasure. Yet here he is, lying on his side in the Bower of Quiet Delights, like an unhappy lover. But he is not an unhappy lover. What is he, then? A spoiled voluptuary? A restless malcontent, who wants, who needs, who longs for — what, exactly? But perhaps he is making a fundamental error. Perhaps solitude itself should be classified among the pleasures. If that’s the case, then he has come here simply in order to experience still another pleasure. Gautama thinks: I have everything a man can desire. It’s impossible for me not to be happy. He feels, forming on his lips, a melancholy smile.

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The Ramparts. The high walls that surround the Palace of Summer are made of cedar and are the thickness of three royal elephants measured trunk to tail. The walls are covered partway up by thick white-flowered vines that create the appearance of a vast hedge, above which rise the dark upper portions like mountains above the tree line. In each of the four walls stand two gates, one on the inside and one on the outside, connected by a passageway and guarded within by royal warriors armed with bows and two-handed swords. The outer gates are opened only to permit a changing of the guards. The inner gates are never opened. The gates, outer and inner, serve as a precaution against invasion, so that if the walls of the city should ever be breached, soldiers and citizens may be admitted to the safety of the palace grounds. The guards know that this is unlikely, since the walls of the city are impregnable, the armies of the King invincible. The deeper purpose of the gates is to conceal warriors trained to prevent escape, should the Prince ever venture to leave.

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In Which Chanda Visits the King. At midday in the Hall of Private Audience, Chanda walks with King Suddhodana along a row of polished pillars adorned with carved and painted lions, elephants, and parrots. He reports that the Prince emerged from the Bower of Quiet Delights on the morning of the second day, in a humor disquieting to those who know him well: his laughter was too bright and quick and failed to rise above his mouth to the level of his eyes. Gautama took part in an archery contest, which he won readily, disappeared for two hours in the women’s quarters, and returned with his brilliant laugh and dark gaze. The King asks what is troubling his son. Chanda reminds the King that Gautama has always had periods of abrupt withdrawal; even as a child he would grow suddenly grave and sit alone in the shade of a pillar. It is partly a question of temperament and partly, if he might venture to offer his unworthy opinion in so weighty a matter, something more. Impatiently the King orders him to continue. Chanda, choosing his words carefully, explains that the life of pleasure arranged by the King for his son, in order to attract him to things of this world, must inevitably lead to periods of satiety. At such times Gautama will draw back from pleasure the way a man who has slaked his thirst will turn aside from a well. The King’s philosophers have warned repeatedly against the revulsions inherent in a life devoted to sensation. The cure, in Chanda’s view, is to diminish the Prince’s dependence on a life of sensual excitement without increasing his attraction to a life of contemplation. What is necessary, he thinks, is a middle way: a life of modest pleasures and occupations — one or two women a night, daily wrestling contests and footraces, pleasant walks and conversations, a single glass of rice beer or wood-apple wine with dinner — that leave no stretches of empty time in which a man might be tempted to concern himself with dangerous questions about the meaning of existence or the proper way of conducting a life. The problem lies in enforcing such restraint. For the Prince, though gracious in all things, is accustomed to having his way. The King places his hand on Chanda’s arm. “I rely on you.” After all, Chanda is Gautama’s dearest friend, as well as a loyal servant of the King. Chanda, uneasy under the burden of such praise, wills himself not to pull his arm away.

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An Incident in the Park of Six Bridges. In the warmth of late afternoon, Gautama goes for a walk with Chanda in the Park of Six Bridges. Six streams flow through the park, each crossed by a bridge painted a different color. He would like to speak to Chanda of his spiritual disharmony, of the shadow that he carries inside him, but now, in the warm air, as they begin to cross the Yellow Bridge over the Stream of Happiness, his senses are wide open to the sound of the water moving over white pebbles and red sand, the soft light, the silk shawl moving against his bare shoulder, the sudden flight of a bird into the pale blue sky. His trouble is distant and has the vague shimmer of distant things. Besides, to unburden yourself to a friend is to place your burden on your friend’s back, and Chanda’s back isn’t as strong as his own. He glances at Chanda, who seems preoccupied. It occurs to Gautama that lately he hasn’t been sufficiently attentive to his friend, who may only be waiting for the chance to reveal a trouble of his own. But the thought, like the memory of his darkness, passes lightly across his mind. He is at peace with the world. The friends pass over the Yellow Bridge and enter a path under the shade of intermingled branches. Scents of green, like a fine mist, rise to his nostrils. Suddenly, before him, Gautama sees a leaf detach itself from a branch and begin to fall. He stops in astonishment. The leaf drifts slowly down. He cannot believe what he appears to be seeing. It’s as if a cloud should drop down from the sky, as if a rock should rise. Dimly he recalls an afternoon in childhood when something green came drifting down from a branch, but his father had said it was a trick performed by the court magician. He hears a noise in the nearby trees. Two Park Protectors, with green shoulder-scarves, rush onto the path. One reaches out and catches the leaf in midfall. The other thrusts out a sack, into which the first man drops the leaf. Both men bow low to the Prince and back away into the trees. It all happens so quickly that Gautama wonders whether he’s had one of those visions or dreams provoked by the heat of the day, by the bright drowsiness of a cloudless summer afternoon. He looks at Chanda, who avoids his gaze and begins speaking of the pavilion around the bend in the path, where they can sit awhile with a view of the Six Streams, the Six Bridges, and the distant palace with its turrets and gold cupolas.