Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  The xylophone and the drumbeats become increasingly feverish; the dancing gets faster. Everyone in the room wears a smile or a look of astonishment. The guerrilla soldiers on three days’ leave and the dissidents in from Bangkok and the people in from the jungle camps: they watch this man dance himself into a woman, his body lithe and beautiful, his face beaded with sweat.

  I don’t know if he dances for thirteen minutes or for thirty-five. I’m lost in the close room, the faces around me, the man at my side watching the dancer and sometimes watching me. Keenly aware of his eyes, I ignore him and feel the full measure of my delight. I am happy in his presence.

  After the dancer falls into a motionless pose, he raises his hands to his mouth and blows out the candles. The people laugh and clap hard, clap harder, like a herd of horses stampeding into the room. We all cheer for him. As everyone smiles at the dancer, my translator smiles at me. People begin to stand up, then flood out of the room, but we remain sitting.

  The long, serious drink we’re taking of each other’s face is interrupted by one of his friends—I have noticed them, too, these hoverers—who bends down and whispers something into his ear. My companion turns to me and says briskly, “Excuse me,” then springs up off the parquet floor and leaves the house. I get up tipsily, laughing, wondering where he’s going.

  He has disappeared. I stand on the raised terrace, picking through the faces. I don’t know his name. Now that he’s gone, my high quickly metamorphoses into morose-drunk-and-rattled.

  I scan the crowd again. Among the Burmese people are white faces, too, mostly belonging to women: Angie, the activist who rents this house; Marla; Charlie the filmmaker, very fetching in a formfitting blouse and jeans, spiky heels at the bottom and a cascade of blond hair at the top. There’s another woman who works with Burmese migrant workers, a feminist academic from Britain, and an activist, married to a Burmese revolutionary, who started a Burma-focused NGO years ago and continues to run it. Her name is Anna; she invited me to her office to browse through her library of Burma books. She and Charlie are the most welcoming and relaxed of the foreign women I’ve met in Chiang Mai and Bangkok. A few of the others here tonight, upon meeting me, radiated such grim antipathy that I shrank away, removing myself from their company. I am at the bottom of the pecking order here.

  How did these women fall through the world and land on the border? How did they decide to stay? Technically, “the border” refers to military encampments in the jungle—sometimes on the Thai side, sometimes on the Burmese side—and to refugee camps and Thai frontier towns: Mae Sai, Mae Sot, Mae Sarieng, Mae Hong Son and, farther south, Ranong, Sangkhla Buri, all the places for crossing over. But the border is also a mental and emotional state.

  Even when people spend most of their time in Chiang Mai or Bangkok, they still talk about living on the border, or going there, or what was happening when they were last “on the border.” Though contemporary Burma may be the yearned-for home and the heart of memory, it’s not the first point of reference. The border is the invisible, shifting country they inhabit now. Most of the Burmese exiles move around a lot, partly because of work but also to avoid the Thai immigration police. None of them are here legally. Even my mystery companion talked about traveling from elsewhere to come to this party, and about going to a different place on the border after a few days of respite.

  There he is. With the guitar. He takes a swallow from a plastic cup, hands it to one of his friends, then starts toward me with a purposeful though weaving stride. I quickly descend the steps of the terrace, not wanting to be Juliet. He stares at me with burning eyes. Oh, no. No!

  He stops walking. He has to break his gaze in order to carefully put his fingers around the frets. He begins to play, poorly, and sing, better—he has a rich, resonant voice—but I do not want to be serenaded. At least not in front of a crowd of people who know that I am a writer: a serious person.

  But he does not care about my reputation. Or his own, apparently. The two men he left ten steps behind him are grinning indulgently, as are a few other revelers nearby, who watch the scene unfold. Loudly and goofily, he sings the chorus of a pop song about a brown-eyed girl.

  I am mortified. I laugh, trying to make a joke of the whole thing.

  His fingers jump off the frets. He takes an unsure step backward and squints at the neck of the guitar. “Oh! Too bad. The A string has broken again!”

  “How unfortunate.” I laugh some more. Thank God.

  “Very sad,” he agrees mournfully, but tries a few more bars before giving up. He walks past me and up the steps to the terrace, where he collapses into a low-slung wicker chair. I follow and sit in the chair beside him. He puts down the guitar and pats his shirt pocket. “Too many of us smoke cheroots. It’s not good.”

  Again he smiles that sexy smile. In response, a current of lust snaps through my belly, makes me sit up straighter, more sober than I’ve felt for hours.

  He says, “I do not smoke cheroots.” He taps his jacket pocket. “I surrender to Thai consumer society and smoke Marlboros instead.” He pulls out his pack of cigarettes and proffers it.

  “No, thanks. I don’t smoke.”

  “Better.” He lights up. “Come tomorrow. I will see you tomorrow, yes?”

  “Well, I don’t know. Where will you be?”

  “Here. Just come here in the morning. For tea. Or coffee.”

  “You’re staying here, in this house?”

  “I stay here when I come to Chiang Mai. Me and some of the other men.”

  I wonder about Angie, the activist who rents this place. What is it like to let a group of revolutionaries regularly stay in one’s home? Marla does the same thing; she has a spare room at her house in Bangkok, and Burmese dissidents and refugees often occupy it, coming or going from one place to another. I doubt that I could ever be so generous. I’d never be able to get any writing done.

  I’m such a hypocrite. How often am I a part of that vagabond stream? I cannot count the times I’ve taken succor in other people’s homes, depended on their comfortable domestic worlds. When will I pay back the debt of hospitality that I owe to the universe?

  My translator asks, “Why are you smiling?”

  “Because I wish I could stay in this house, too.”

  “Maybe you should ask Angie.”

  “No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. I just mean her house is lovely.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “By the way, what is your name?”

  He flinches. “I told you my name already!”

  “No, you didn’t.”

  “I did. When we were listening to the music.”

  “Really? I don’t think I heard you. I’m sorry.”

  He stares at me, as though reconsidering his first impression. “My name is Maung.”

  “And you already know my name.”

  “Yes, I do. Karen.” He puts the accent on the second syllable. I don’t correct his pronunciation.

  “Will you come tomorrow for tea? Or we could have dinner.”

  “Maybe tea. I’ll see how I feel in the morning. I am going home—to my hotel—now.” When I stand up, I have to make a conscious effort not to sway.

  “I will walk you to your hotel.”

  “No, no. That’s all right. It’s not far.” A lie. “I’ll just catch a songtow at the bottom of the hill. Not to worry.”

  He walks me through the dregs of the party, toward the gate. I say goodbye to people as I pass them, feeling conspicuous and awfully drunk. I’m thinking about the dogs, and rocks to throw at them, and finding a bamboo cane before I leave the compound. But it’s too awkward. If I tell Maung that I want a stick for the dogs, he’ll insist on coming with me—to protect me, of course—and that could lead to all sorts of inebriated lustful foolishness. Bad enough to have been serenaded; how much worse to take a revolutionary to bed on the first meeting!

  I wave goodbye to Maung gaily, as if I were going for a picnic in the dark. I’m barely past the prop
erty line of the house when I hear the dogs barking down the road.

  CHAPTER 17

  THE CHAMELEON HEART

  In the morning. I find Angie’s house with irritating ease. The garden compound has been cleaned up already, and a small group of people are gathered on the terrace. I am curious to see Maung again. Will the attraction prove as strong in the warm, revealing light of day? Maybe last night was pure drunken revelry and the only real thing about it now is a pounding headache and dehydration.

  People are chatting, eating Thai coconut sweets, and drinking tea. One of the Burmese men makes a spot for me on a bench—beside Maung. Everyone laughs about being hungover and agrees that our hostess gave a wonderful party. Maung stands and asks me what I take in my tea—all the fixings are on the table just inside the house—and brings me the warm cup. We touch fingers as he hands it to me. When his phone rings, he walks down into the garden to talk, but I can feel him watching me as I talk to Jenny, an Englishwoman who works for the Burma Border Consortium, an organization that brings food and aid to Burmese refugees and dissidents.

  It’s hard to be present for the conversation when I feel an invisible umbilical cord stretching between myself and a man I don’t know. But I nod and try to listen to this intelligent woman talk about her work. She tells me she is married to a Burmese man who is a member of the ABSDF. Her husband is here; he’s the one who pointedly made a spot for me on the bench beside Maung.

  Without expecting much of an answer, I ask Jenny, “How did you decide to make a life here?”

  Her reply is striking. “I decided I didn’t want to be an observer anymore. I wanted to be a participant, whatever that meant. The Burmese struggle is … remarkable. It made me think about human solidarity. Does that sound out of date? I suppose it is. But I guess I came to the point where I didn’t want to just watch the struggle. I wanted to struggle with them. And so, in a way, I do.”

  I do. Two small, fateful words.

  Maung returns from the garden. I shift places to try to put some distance between us, but within five minutes he insinuates himself into the chair next to mine, looks me straight in the eye, and smiles, as if to say, “It’s not that easy to get rid of me.” As a newcomer to this society of foreigners who do Burma-centered work, and as someone who doesn’t know any of the Burmese people here, I try to be quiet in conversation, and respectful. Not too talkative. “Inconspicuous” is not an adjective I can claim as my own, but it is a state I aspire to on occasions such as this.

  Maung makes being inconspicuous impossible. He flatters me, he stares at me, he sticks to me. He asks three times if I want another cup of tea, and when I finally say yes he leaps up to get it. His charm is a catalyst; I can’t help reacting. Whatever comes out of my mouth charms him right back. I’m not even trying! I’m trying not to, in fact, but we flirt with each other in small but obvious ways. Angie, our hostess, glares at me from time to time. I want to tell her it’s not my fault—I can’t help the torrential flood of pheromones and the girlish smile.

  Maung’s friend—Jenny’s husband—teases me about the tragedy of the broken A string. “You need to hear Maung sing. The sooner, the better,” he says knowingly. My face burns as hot as a stove.

  A few minutes later, Maung stands up to help himself to more tea, but before he goes inside he lays his cotton jacket over the back of my chair. It takes monumental strength not to lean my body against this material that has touched his skin. Hilarious. Infuriating. He’s done it on purpose, too; he’s tempting me. But I will be strong.

  After some more conversation, I stand up and say goodbye to everyone, thanking Angie for the party last night and for the tea this morning. She grunts an unintelligible reply and throws a look like a machete between my eyes.

  Maung once again walks me to the gate of her house. Before I turn out into the street, he asks me, “Are you busy tonight?”

  “Why, is there going to be another party?”

  “No. We’re just having a dinner.” He tells me the name and location of the restaurant while I back away from him.

  Dinner will involve at least a dozen people, so I’ll be safe. I don’t want to be safe, of course. I want to be my impetuous, passionate Greek self and act on my lustful impulses. But this is hardly the place for that kind of thing. I’m in Thailand, with Burmese political exiles, people whose lives are defined by dictatorship and revolution. The past twenty-four hours have been a respite for all those I met last night—and for me, too. I know nothing about these people, but I felt in the music, and in that magical dance and the mostly happy drunkenness, that I had entered a rare oasis of pleasure. It continued into the morning, the teacups and the chime of spoons, people talking on the terrace in the dappled shadow of a tamarind tree, a man flirting amusingly with a woman: all lovely, lovelier because unexpected, fleeting. Not unreal, but not reflective of the daily life of struggling Burmese dissidents, to say nothing of the hundreds of thousands of refugees in camps up and down the border.

  I have so often chosen pleasure, taken it as the right of my body and my mind. I love Greece because the world I experience on the island feeds the passionate animal I have been. The easy dry heat, the reasonable winters, the Mediterranean, the physical body cherished through swimming in that brilliant salty blue, enlivened through eating, dancing, gardening. The Greek landscape calls forth a sensual response partly because it’s covered in human fingerprints: the earth is both body and living memory.

  But I am here now. How do I know what my real self is, when I owe so much of what I am to the places that have made me? Thailand was my first foreign home, the country my chameleon heart cleaved to a decade ago; I will always be comfortable here. But I’ve further complicated myself with Burma.

  I know that I lived too much there, leaped into events that I didn’t fully understand. I feel frayed at the edges. When I close my eyes, I see image after image from those last days in Rangoon—the monks who led me up the stairs, the man being beaten, the child’s arm hanging out of the bed I was supposed to hide under if the soldiers came.

  Could I have contained the trip? Could I have turned away from unexpected events and departed unscathed? I didn’t think I had a choice, but I did have a choice.

  Why must I love?

  I’ve been served an unreasonably large portion of love for an insane world, yet the world does not serve the same portion back to me. Why would it? I don’t mean romantic love, not even human love. I love the feral dogs as I love the thick dust and the filthy mess of broken streets in Mandalay, as I love walking into the market at the bottom of this hill and seeing the human faces over the pyramids of fruit and, farther back, the stalls bloody with chunks of meat and the guts of animals laid out like augury that always comes to pass: cooking, dinners, people eating together, taking in the life of the animal to feed their own lives.

  I love, I love, I love. The language of the world calls me, wills me to know it. To become it, in a way. That is why I’m obsessed with new words. To speak another language is to think anew, to be born again—eyes, mouth, sky, blue, hand, heart, open, open. I still carry around my Burmese notebook, full of phonetic spellings, scribbled notes, the many words that San Aung wanted me to learn. Where is he? Lying low with friends in Mandalay? Or having tea on Mahabandoola Street?

  Burmese will be my sixth language if I ever learn to speak it properly. Isn’t that just another form of gluttony—wanting to take it all in, have it, know it? In one of his notebooks, van Gogh scribbled the words I live by: “The best way to know life is to love many things.”

  But should I live this way? To love widely is not to love deeply. I love, yes, but I am also lonely. I remember talking to an NLD member in Burma. Early in the interview, he inquired if I was married. I said no. He responded, “Always alone! You modern women. Alone, alone, alone against Rome.” We laughed. Then he became thoughtful and said, “Daw Suu Kyi is also alone. Alone against the SLORC!” We did not laugh.

  Sometimes my loneliness is like a well
I cannot get out of, though I see the human light up there, the people coming and going. It’s partly why I am interested in these amazing women who have married Burmese men and settled here. How I admire them!

  There are precedents—that’s the point.

  Though I still think it unwise to become involved with a man who belongs to a guerrilla army, even a small one.

  CHAPTER 18

  THE DATE

  Should I blame my naïveté on youth? But I will be twenty-eight years old in two months. That’s not so young. By my age, my mother had three children and a house to run. I need to smarten up.

  I arrive at the lovely garden restaurant expecting a group of Burmese men and women dissidents, foreigners who do Burma work, maybe a smattering of journalists. But there are no large tables. I check out the diners seated among potted palms and hanging orchids—several couples, a group of four, Thai businessmen drinking a bottle of Johnnie Walker. I wonder if I’m at the right place, or if the dinner was called off; I didn’t give Maung my number, so he wouldn’t have been able to contact me at the hotel.

  Then I realize that the one solo diner in the restaurant—in the far, candlelit corner—is him. Maung. My date. This is a date, not a motley gathering into which I can slip, one more motley among many. Self-consciously, I walk through the restaurant and sit down across from him. “I thought some other people would be here, too.” I don’t know whether to be amused or irritated.

  That smile again. The earliest form of foreplay. How does he do that? “You look beautiful,” he says.