Steven Millhauser - Voices in the Night - Stories

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The Sorrows of Yasodhara. Gautama’s wife, Yasodhara, whose beauty is famous throughout the Three Palaces, is not unhappy because her husband roams among the concubines. She understands perfectly that the concubines, like the dancing girls, have been provided by King Suddhodana for the amusement of his son. She herself is skilled in the Eighty-Four Paths of Love, as surely as she is skilled in lute-playing and astronomy, and does not doubt the sexual pleasure she gives to her husband. Sometimes, for his delight, she dyes her lips with red lac, rubs over her body a lotion made of the ground dust of sandalwood, and places jewels along the parting of her hair. At other times, when she steps from the Pool of Everlasting Youth, her hair glowing like black sunlight, her hips shining like rivers, she feels her power drawing the Prince to her. Nor is she unhappy when he seeks out solitary places and speaks to no one. Yasodhara is never lonely, for she is surrounded by her handmaidens and friends, she delights in her young son, and she loves the life of the Three Palaces — the music and dancing, the troupes of visiting actors, the great feasts, the sporting competitions, the walks in the garden with teachers and philosophers who speak to her of right speech, right conduct, and the nature of the heavens. She herself is sometimes overcome by a desire for solitude and silence, for a withdrawal from a life of pleasure into the chamber of her own being, and she therefore understands that Gautama must sometimes forsake the world of the court, and even his own wife, in order to be alone with his thoughts. None of these things causes her unhappiness. No, Yasodhara, the happiest of all women, is unhappy only when she is most happy: when, lying with her beloved husband, staring into his eyes as he strokes her cheek tenderly, she sees in his gaze the shadow. It is the shadow of apartness, the shadow of elsewhere. She feels it in him when they walk together hand in hand in the Garden of Happiness, she feels it in him when, reaching gently for her face, he is not there. He is there, but he is not there. She hears it in his laughter, sees it in the curves of his beautiful shoulders. When he gazes into her eyes and whispers “I love you,” she hears, deep within his words, the cry of a man alone in the dark. These are the sorrows of Yasodhara.

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Chanda’s Plan. As Chanda watches the door close behind his friend, in the earthen wall that surrounds the Lake of Solitude, a picture appears in his mind: a young woman weeping. He doesn’t understand this picture, but he feels a familiar excitement, for that is how ideas always come to him: as pictures that he gradually begins to understand. He returns to the Summer Palace, descends to the underground passageways, and summons a charioteer to take him to the royal palace. King Suddhodana is out hunting in the forest; Chanda is forced to wait in one of the pillared recesses of the Hall of Patience. It is here, beneath a painting of a war elephant with swords fastened to its tusks, that the picture in his mind reveals its meaning. Later that day, as he walks beside the King in the Hall of Private Audience, Chanda presents his plan. The Prince’s continual retreats, his craving for solitude, his despondency, his dissatisfaction — what are these but signs that the pleasures of the world are growing stale? None of this is new. The King and he have discussed such matters before. What’s new is the intensity of the dissatisfaction, the sense that an inner crisis is at hand. The remedy has always been to heighten the old pleasures and to provide new ones. Chanda reminds the King of the young concubines trained by master eunuchs in the Twenty-Four Forbidden Paths of Love, of the recently constructed Theater of Shadow Puppets in the new wing of the palace. And always the result is the same: his friend is drawn back to the world of pleasure for a time, only to turn away more violently when the revulsion comes. Chanda’s new plan takes into account the failure of pleasure as a strategy for binding the Prince to the sensual world. What he proposes is to entice Gautama by other means — by nothing less, in fact, than un-pleasure itself, which is to say, by the seductions of unhappiness. It is, he admits, a dangerous proceeding. After all, every sign of unhappiness is rigorously excluded from the life of the Three Palaces. A single tear shed by a concubine is punished by banishment. An attendant who falls to the ground, breaks an arm, and fails to continue smiling is immediately removed from the Prince’s retinue. People, horses, peacocks never die: they disappear. Gautama walks in a world without pain, without suffering. Precisely for this reason, Chanda feels certain that a place set aside and devoted to sadness can have only an alluring effect on the dejected Prince, who will be drawn to it as other men are drawn to the hips of a concubine moving artfully among transparent silks. If His Royal Eminence in the wisdom of his Being would be willing to entertain the possibility — but the King interrupts with an impatient wave of his hand and grants permission. He is, he confesses, growing so desperate over the condition of his son that his own unhappiness is increasing. Only last night, while pleasuring a new dancing girl for the third time, he found himself suddenly thinking of his son shut away behind the wall of a private bower. The girl, skilled in the ways of delight, looked at him with a flash of fear — the fear of someone who expects to be punished for failing to give sufficient pleasure. The King calmed her and returned to his bedchamber. Perhaps Chanda’s enigmatic remedy will cure more than one man.

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A Family Stroll. Gautama, walking along a pebbled path with his wife and son, wonders whether this is a moment the boy will remember: the three of them walking together in the morning, the pink pebbles catching the light, the shadows of father and mother and son thrown out in front of them and flowing together as if the three separate beings were one moving body, the different sounds of their feet on the path, the mother’s white silk parasol shading her face but sometimes slipping to reveal a lustrous strip of hair and a crimson acacia flower. Gautama looks at his son with pride, admiring Rahula’s dark intelligent eyes, the cheekbones like polished stone, the ruby hanging from his ear. He reproaches himself: he hasn’t seen the boy for five days. Here on the path, Gautama feels his fatherhood. He turns to his wife and looks at her tenderly. She draws back and lowers her eyes. Startled, he asks if anything is the matter. “Nothing, my lord,” she answers. “Only, you looked at me as though you were saying goodbye.”

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From the Balustrade. The Prince stands with his hands on the railing of the second-story balustrade of the northwest wing of the Summer Palace, looking out at a broad garden planted with flower beds shaped like six-pointed stars and with ornamental fruit trees resembling swans and small elephants. At the far side of the garden stands a low wall, and on the other side of the wall a procession is making its way slowly in the direction of the Joyful Woods. He sees elephants with festive red stripes painted on their heads, chariots drawn by high-stepping white horses, two-wheeled carts pulled by yoked rams and piled with sections of cedarwood trellis painted yellow and red and blue. Gautama has promised his father not to ride after the daily processions, not even to inquire about them, for their mission is a secret and will be revealed in due time. Although he is mildly exasperated at being treated like a child, he’s also deeply pleased: he has always liked secrecy and its excitements, the sense of a revelation about to come. He remembers a day in his childhood when his father handed him a gift, concealed in a small ivory box decorated with a border of carved tigers. For a long time he held the box in his hands, while faces looked down on him and voices urged him to slide back the top. Evidently the trellises are intended for a large enclosure. Some of the workmen’s carts, with their two high wheels, carry long, polished pillars that gleam in the sun. Beside the carts walk young laborers with bare chests. There are other paths to the Joyful Woods; Gautama is aware that his interest is being deliberately piqued. He is aware of another thing: his father, Chanda, and Yasodhara have begun to worry seriously about him. They are continually casting sideways looks in his direction, suppressing anxious questions, turning him over in their minds. He can feel, like the touch of a hand, their troubled silences. Their solicitude has begun to interest him. Should they be worried? Now they’re trying to draw him out of himself by means of a procession with a secret. They would like to distract him, to seduce his attention. He, for his part, would be delighted for them to succeed. Sometimes he is bored, bored with everything. It’s an emptiness he does not know how to fill. At such times, even his inner shadow bores him. The sky bores him, and the earth bores him, and each blade of grass on the earth bores him, and that two-wheeled cart bores him, and his boredom bores him, and his knowledge that his boredom bores him bores him. As he watches a royal guard seated on an elephant adorned with topazes and emeralds, he remembers sliding back the top of the ivory box. But although he can see his fingers on the ivory lid, although he can see the row of carved tigers, and the faces looking down, for some reason he cannot remember what he found inside.