The Chequer Board

by Nevil Shute

  Morgan said, “No.” He had the good sense to put up with this tirade.

  Utt Nee said, “Gunpowder. You learned the use of firearms before we did, and conquered our country.”

  Morgan said, “Well, you managed to kick us out in 1942.”

  Utt Nee laughed. “And now, you will say, these crazy people are talking of co-operating with this Major Williams to help the British come back again.”

  “I don’t know anything about politics,” said Morgan. “All I know is that it’s a bloody crazy world.”

  Utt Nee said, “I have lain awake night after night wondering who is mad, the British, or my countrymen who want the Japanese to stay in Burma, or myself.” He laughed cynically. “If we help the British to come back again, do you think that they will hang us all for fighting against them in 1942?”

  Morgan rubbed his chin. “I don’t know,” he said. “It depends how well the sense of humour’s worn.”

  Utt Nee said, “For myself, I am prepared to take the risk. I see no better chance of any sort of independence for my people now. I think, too, that we are strong enough to force a decent compromise between your way and ours.”

  Morgan said, “Looks as if our Government’ll have to pull the finger out and do a bit of thinking.”

  There was a step behind them. Morgan turned, and saw that the girl had come up into the house. Utt Nee said, “I have told him that I have decided to send him with Thet Shay to the Englishman.”

  The girl nodded. “It is the only thing to do.”

  Morgan said, “Let me get this straight. I see what you want; you will do nothing for this Major unless he sends you five hundred grenades, fifty Tommy guns or Sten guns, and two hundred rounds for each. That’s what you want to tell him?”

  “Radio sets and operators,” said Utt Nee—“we shall need those too.”

  The pilot nodded. “Radio sets and operators as well. Now, do you want me to tell the Major this, or is Thet Shay going to do the talking?”

  Utt Nee turned to the girl. “Do you remember, does this Major speak our language?”

  The girl wrinkled her brows. “I don’t know. He worked in Rangoon all the time. If he speaks any, it will not be very much.”

  Utt Nee said, “Thet Shay will do all the negotiation on our side. I do not think that you can help us, Mr Morgan.” He turned to the girl and said in Burmese, “Can we rely on Thet Shay and the Englishman understanding each other?”

  She said in the same language, “You had better ask Thet Shay that.”

  Utt Nee got up, went to the opening in the house that served as a front door, and called for Thet Shay. A young man in a longyi and a khaki tunic came; there was a long three-cornered conference between the leader and his lieutenant and the girl. Presently they turned and came into the room, to Morgan still sitting at the table.

  “This is Thet Shay,” Utt Nee said in English. Morgan half rose from the table; the Burman bowed towards him stiffly. “We have decided this. You are to take no part in the negotiation; that will only make confusion. My sister will go with Thet Shay to interpret with the Englishman. If he says he will give us arms, then I will come to see him with Colonel Ne Win, and we will arrange the details.”

  “If he says he won’t give any arms,” asked Morgan, “do you take me back and hand me over to the Japanese?”

  Utt Nee laughed. “I do not think we should do that. We are not on speaking terms with the Japanese at the moment.” He laughed again.

  “Well, I hope this Major Williams sees it your way,” the pilot said. “I’ll do what I can to help.”

  Utt Nee said, “I have told Thet Shay that you are to start at dawn. It will take you two days to get near Bassein, and perhaps another day to find this Englishman.” He walked over to the steps down to the ground, and then turned before going out. “You can bring your blankets up and sleep here in the house,” he said. “There will be a meal presently.”

  The pilot said, “That’s very good of you. Can I have my revolver back?”

  Utt Nee said, “No,” and went out.

  Morgan turned to the girl and to Thet Shay. He said to the girl, “Please, would you interpret for me a little? I want to tell Mr Thet Shay that I understand he is in charge of this party, that I will obey his orders, and that I will try to make no trouble.”

  The girl spoke in Burmese; the young man smiled and spoke. The girl replied, “He says that he hopes that you will get back safely to your countrymen.”

  Thet Shay went away, and Morgan went to get his blankets from the lock-up. When he came back, the girl was sitting on the steps. He passed her and put down his bundle in a corner of the house. He took a drink from a ewer in the corner, then he searched his pockets for a piece of paper. He had only an air letter, but the back of the sheet was large and fairly clean, and he had a pencil. He went hesitantly to the girl.

  “If you’re doing nothing,” he said, “would you tell me a few Burmese words?”

  She said, “Of course. What do you want to know?”

  He said, “Just a few words, useful things, you know. One feels such a fool if one can’t say anything at all.” He hesitated, pencil in hand. “To start with, would you mind telling me your name?”

  She said, “I am called Nay Htohn. You should call me Ma Nay Htohn—that is, Miss Nay Htohn.”

  He wrote it at the top of his paper; she helped him with the spelling. He said, “Now, what’s the word for water?”

  “Ye,” she said. He wrote it down.

  “Food?”

  “There is no word quite like that,” she said. “We speak of things. The word that everybody understands is Htamin, which is boiled rice. If you ask for Htamin you will get something to eat—unless you are with starving people.”

  He wrote it down, and went on to man, and woman, and latrine, and was greatly surprised when she laughed at that, just like an English girl. When he had written about twenty words he stopped. “I’ll learn these tonight,” he said. “If you are coming with us to Bassein, will you tell me some more tomorrow?”

  She said, “I will think of some that will be useful to you if you stay here long.” And then she said, “Is this the first time you have been in Burma?”

  “It’s the first time I have been away from England,” he replied, “except that I was in North Africa last year.”

  “How do you like it?”

  He laughed. “How would you like it if you were a prisoner and not quite sure how you were going to be treated?” He sat down on the steps, with the whole width of the flight between them. “I must say, it’s a lovely country. I’d like to come back here in peacetime and see it properly.”

  She said, “I wish you would. The only English people who come here are the ones who want to make money out of us—Government officials who come here for their job, or traders who come to buy things from our people as cheaply as they can, and then sell them for a high price in the outside world. Those are the only sort of English that we ever see. We never meet the ordinary English people-people like ourselves.”

  “I suppose you get missionaries out here,” he said.

  “Oh, we get a lot of those. Some of them are very kind and good, especially when they start hospitals and schools, and do not try to teach us their religion.”

  He said hesitantly, “You aren’t Christians, then?”

  She smiled tolerantly. “No. In Burma we are Buddhists. Surely you knew that?”

  “I know that most of the people are Buddhists,” he replied. “I thought that educated people like you and your brother might be Christians.”

  She nodded. “Some of my friends are Christian, but not very many. I studied your religion very carefully when I was at school, but I didn’t like it nearly so well as ours. I don’t think it is a very good one.”

  He asked curiously, “What’s wrong with it?”

  She smiled. “I’m not going to start a religious controversy with you, Mr. Morgan. When I was at school they told us that some Englishman once said t
hat it does not matter much what one believes so long as one believes in something. I think that’s very true. For ordinary people who are not concerned with dogma there’s not much difference between Buddhism and Christianity in the way that we are taught to live, only our way is much stricter than yours.”

  He was a little intrigued. “In what way?” he asked.

  She said, “Well, for one thing, you are allowed to drink wine and to kill animals. I don’t like that much. We have five elementary commandments; if you break them you will be reborn into a lower scale of life. You must not kill any living creature at all, you must not lie, you must not steal, you must not commit adultery, you must not touch any intoxicating drink. Those are the minimum commandments, the ones that everybody must observe if he wants to avoid being reborn as an animal. If you want to go forward you must do much more than that.”

  “You really think that you can become an animal in your next life?” the pilot asked. “You mean, like a pig?”

  “You make your own destiny,” she said. “Everyone does that. If you choose to live like a tiger or a pig, if that’s the sort of life you like, you will attain your desire in your next incarnation. If you strive earnestly for wider mental powers and a better life, then next time you will be reborn higher upon the Ladder of Existence. That is what we believe.”

  “I see.” He thought for a moment, and then asked, “What happens when you get to the top of the ladder? What happens when you are as good as you can be?”

  She said, “You can only reach that point after countless thousands of lives. But ultimately, if you receive the Final Enlightenment, so that you are wholly good and completely wise, so that everything you say or do is the perfection of truth and wisdom, you are then the Buddha.”

  “That’s the statue in the pagodas, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “The statue that you see in the pagodas is the last Buddha,” she replied, “Prince Shin Gautama. Twenty-eight souls have attained this perfection in the history of the Universe, and only four in this world; you see, it is not very easy. Prince Shin Gautama was the last, the twenty-eighth, and it is his example that we try to follow in our daily life.”

  “Rather like our Christ,” he said thoughtfully.

  “Exactly like your Christ,” she said. “But you believe that your Christ was a God, the son of a God who lives somewhere in the outer realms of space and who created you for this one life. I don’t quite understand that part of your religion. We have the same idea of a supremely perfect Being, but we believe that any one of us can reach that same perfection if we try hard enough to live a holy life, in age after age. We have the statue of Prince Shin Gautama in our prayer houses as an example, to remind us of what any one of us can attain to. Frankly, Mr Morgan, I like our idea better than yours, though for practical purposes there’s not much in it.”

  She paused, and then she said, “I think our religion is rather less debased than yours in some ways, too.”

  He did not feel able to embark on that one. He asked, “Is everybody in Burma a Buddhist?”

  She said, “Not everyone. Nine people out of ten are Buddhists, I should think, but the Karens are sometimes Christian, and the uneducated country people still believe in Nats, the spirits of the woods and trees, and they build little houses for them. I will show you on our way, tomorrow. But when men get educated and begin to think more deeply, then they come to the pagoda.”

  Utt Nee passed them, going up the steps into the house. The girl said, “I have been telling the Englishman about our savage religion.”

  The young man laughed. “My sister is very religious,” he said to Morgan. “Women think more deeply about these matters than most men. You must not let her offend you.”

  The pilot said, “She’s been very kind in telling me about it. I didn’t know a thing about all this before.”

  The girl said, a little wistfully, “Don’t they teach anything about our country in your schools?”

  Morgan said, “We learn a little, I suppose, but only facts. The names of rivers, and about rice coming from Rangoon, and things like that.”

  Utt Nee said, “Rice will be coming here in a few minutes. You will eat with us.”

  Turner watched Morgan get up from his long chair. Three men in longyis had appeared, and they squatted down on their haunches on the path at the foot of the steps. He left Turner in his chair, and went and spoke to them in Burmese. A slow conversation developed, evidently punctuated with jokes and repartee. Aften ten minutes there was a final sally, and the three got up and went away. Morgan came back to Turner in his chair. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Have a drink?”

  Mr Turner hesitated. “Got any beer?”

  The other shook his head. “It doesn’t keep out here. Whiskey?”

  “No thanks—I got to be careful. Got a lemon squash, or anything o’ that?”

  “Fresh lime squash, with a bit of ice in it?”

  “That’ll do fine.”

  Morgan called an order in Burmese back into the house, and came and sat down. “What did them chaps want?” asked Mr Turner.

  “Those? Oh, that was the headman from one of the villages and two of his pals, sort of shop stewards. I want some coolies to make up the road out to the rice mill. He came to fix the rate for the job.”

  The glasses came, borne by the barefooted Burman servant. Morgan sat, glass in hand, looking out over the river.

  “I was telling you about that evening before we started for Bassein,” he said. He sat in silence for a minute. “It’s a damn funny thing,” he said at last, “but you can usually tell when there’s something wrong. I couldn’t speak a word of Burmese at that time, but I was pretty sure that some of those chaps were against me. Utt Nee was for me all right, and Ma Nay Htohn. Thet Shay, I think, was very doubtful if it was a good idea to turn me over to this Major Williams; some of the rest of them I’m pretty sure were hostile to the whole thing.”

  He paused, “I got an idea into my head that Utt Nee sent his sister with the party, not so much to interpret as to see that I got there all right and wasn’t murdered on the way. I’m pretty sure that was behind it in his mind. I asked him that straight out once, but the old devil wouldn’t tell me. Anyway, we pushed off before dawn the next day for Bassein.”

  They went in single file along field paths between the squares of paddy—eight men, Morgan, and Nay Htohn. The arms the party carried were not very impressive. Thet Shay and one other man carried Japanese rifles, and Thet Shay wore Morgan’s revolver in its holster. One of the other men had an old muzzle-loading rifle with a very long barrel, and one had a very modern twelve-bore sporting shotgun; the other four were armed only with their dahs. None of them wore brassards or any sort of uniform. Morgan hoped that they knew sufficient of the movements of the Japanese about the countryside to keep out of their way.

  They marched all morning until nearly noon. They were then in a teak forest following a barely noticeable track; they halted and lay down, and boiled rice on a little fire of leaves and twigs, extinguishing the fire immediately it was done with. Morgan was very tired, although he was marching light, with only his blanket to carry; he was unused to marching in the tropics and was drenched with sweat. Utt Nee had given him a conical straw hat to wear and this had been a comfort in the sun; but he was very, very tired. Nay Htohn and the Burmans seemed as fresh as daisies.

  They ate their rice, and curled up for a sleep, leaving one man on watch. At about three o’clock they moved off up the path again, and marched till dusk.

  They camped for the night in a bamboo jungle, in a small clearing by a little stream. Again they made a little fire and extinguished it immediately their simple meal was cooked; then there was nothing to do but lie down, wrapped up in blankets, and wait for sleep. Nay Htohn directed the positions of their sleeping; it did not escape Morgan’s notice that the girl arranged matters so that he slept between Thet Shay and herself.

  Lying upon the grass, wondering what bugs would bite him in the ni
ght, watching the fine tracery of the bamboos against the starlit sky above him, Morgan heard the girl say, “What will happen when you get back to your Army? Will they send you back to England?”

  He replied, “I shouldn’t think so. I’ll probably get leave up in the hills, or something, for a week or two. But I’m not back yet.”

  “No. How do you live in England? Are you married?”

  He said, “Yes, I’m married.”

  “Is your wife very beautiful?”

  He said, “She’s the most beautiful girl I have ever seen.”

  “Have you got children?”

  “No.” He did not expand on that point.

  “What will you do in England when the war is over? What did you do before you became an airman?”

  “I didn’t do anything,” he said. “I joined the R.A.F. straight from school, when I was eighteen. I don’t know what I shall do. I was going to be an architect before, but I’d only just started. I don’t know.”

  “Will you do that in England?”

  “I don’t know—I suppose I shall. I hadn’t thought about it much.” He turned his head towards her. “What will you do?”

  She said, “I might go back and be a shorthand typist in a Rangoon office, as I was before. I don’t know, either.”

  “Have you lived in the country for long?”

  “My father moved up to Henzada when the Japanese came in, and I went there with him. That is a fairly large place. For the last year or so I have been mostly with my brother in the country districts. One cannot sit still and do nothing.”

  “You must find it pretty slow, after Rangoon,” he said.

  She laughed. “I miss the pictures dreadfully. Apart from that,” she said, “I rather like the country. Rangoon is quite dead now, and not pleasant if you do not want to go about and dine with Japanese officers.”