A second excerpt from The Season of Breath. In chapter 7, it’s the last day in Bangkok before heading off to the islands. Chu suggests spending it “like tourists,” on the Chao Phraya boat, all the way to Wat Arun.
IN THE AFTERNOON, we took the boat. It was Chu’s idea: one last day in Bangkok, “like tourists.” She has never been a tourist in her own city, and I stopped being one a long time ago. That day, we gave it a try.
At the Sathorn pier, under the Taksin Bridge, the water of the Chao Phraya is brown and thick, with clumps of water hyacinth drifting down toward the sea like little green rafts. The pier never stops moving. You don’t stand on it so much as negotiate with it.
The orange-flag boat came in backward, in a great churning of engine. A boy in a blue shirt jumped onto the pier with a rope; another pulled out a whistle and started blowing it without stopping. Here, you board the way you’d jump onto a moving train. Thais do it without thinking, still chatting on the phone. An old lady with two bags of groceries stepped aboard ahead of me, light as a bird.
Me, I hesitated. Half a second. Long enough to judge the distance between the pier and the deck of the boat, which kept rising and falling. Long enough to feel, in my chest, that I didn’t have the air to jump AND catch myself. The whistle kept whistling. Behind me, someone pushed, not unkindly.
Chu’s hand came to rest on my elbow. She didn’t pull. She just laid her hand there, the way you rest a hand on a piece of furniture you’re moving. And I jumped.
Once aboard, I sat down on the first bench and breathed through my mouth, slowly, watching the water, as the boat pulled away. My heart was pounding against my ribs. Nobody looked at me. The old lady with the groceries was already peeling a mandarin. The boy had put his whistle away. For everyone else, nothing had happened, and it’s true that almost nothing had.
At the back of the boat, a few seats were marked with a small sign: reserved for monks. A monk in a saffron robe sat down there, alone, and nobody sat beside him. Chu explained to me in a low voice that a woman must never touch a monk, or hand him anything directly, even on a packed boat. If she wants to give him something, she sets it down in front of him, or goes through a man. And with that she slipped away from him with a dancer’s grace, without seeming to, while the boat rolled.
Chu sat down next to me. She was looking at the riverbank. Her hand was still on my elbow.
Then the river wind came, and with it, the air. An air that isn’t the city’s, an air that comes from far away, from the sea perhaps, smelling of water, diesel and the jasmine of an offering set on the bow. I took it in by the mouthful. On the river, I breathe better. I don’t know if that’s true, or if it’s because there are no steps to climb.
We got off at Tha Tien. We sat on a café terrace facing Wat Arun, on the other side of the water. The temple rose in the late-afternoon light, bristling with porcelain, its steps so steep you almost climb them on all fours. Tourists were scaling them, tiny, clutching the handrail.
“Do you want to go up?” Chu asked.
It was a joke of a question. I took it as a joke.
“I climbed it ten years ago. I remember the view.”
That’s not true. Ten years ago, I wasn’t in Thailand. But I could have climbed it ten years ago, and I remember very clearly the view I would have had.
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This excerpt comes from chapter 7, “The River,” of The Season of Breath, the true story of a man from Liège who goes to live a season in Thailand with an illness no one can see. The book is available in English.
