What the Brick Kept in Me

I went back to Ayutthaya to look at the brick, and I have to admit I could not, at first, find it. Not the brick itself — the stupas stood where they had always stood, red and patient along the river that once made this the great capital of Siam, the city armies burned in the eighteenth century and never rebuilt to what it was. What I could not find was the thing I had come to see. I had carried an image of these ruins in me for years, and the ruins in front of me refused to match it. I walked the same lanes twice, ashamed, as a man is ashamed who cannot recognize a face he swore he loved.

Then I understood that I had been searching in the wrong place. The Ayutthaya I wanted was not at Wat Mahathat or in the historical park; it was inside me, in that wide storeroom of the mind where everything seen is kept and nothing quite stays still. I had not returned to a city. I had returned to a memory of a city, and stood inside my own remembering as one stands inside a vast hall, calling up rooms, and being answered by rooms I did not know I still held.

And the question that came was about time, which I have never been able to hold in my hand. The brick was three centuries old and it was also, in front of me, entirely present. The past that made it was gone — genuinely gone, unrecoverable, no army marching, no court in session — and yet the past was the only reason I was standing there at all. I could not say where the old city was. It was not in the stone, which is only stone. It was in me, and I was uneasy about that, the way one is uneasy holding something that keeps slipping out of the tense one puts it in.

I bought roti sai mai from a woman at the edge of the park — the pale spun sugar you roll into thin bright crepes — and ate it walking, and the sweetness was so ordinary, so exactly of this afternoon, that for a moment the whole freight of history lifted off me. The river went by with its old indifference. Charcoal smoke from a grill drifted across the wall. I was glad, in the plain way one is glad of small warm things, and my gladness had no date on it at all.

Later, at the tree where roots have grown down around a stone Buddha's head and held it there for two hundred years, I stopped and did not think about the sack of the city or the meaning of ruins. I only noticed that the head was calm and the roots were tender, and that this was the thing I would keep — a face held gently in the wood, long after the hands that carved it and the kingdom that lost it were gone — and that my heart, which had come here restless, was restless still, and would carry this one image out with me like a coal I could not set down.