She takes this question and holds it for a while, her eyes full of trouble. I’ve touched an open sore, which makes me regret asking the question so forthrightly. “It is hard, in Thailand, with no papers. Or illegal papers. So better for to go to the Norway, and get citizenship. It is not easy, to be no country.” She quickly corrects herself. “To have no country.”
CHAPTER 24
TREASURE
Manny is coming to see me, so I walk up to Soi Dang to buy food. Crammed with treats of every description, Soi Dang leads to the best dead end in the world, a market and a temple. I say hello to the people I know as I pass them, and promise the Esaan woman that I’m coming back within the hour for her chicken. Hungry young couples sit at tables devouring rice and curry or thick noodles; children in their pyjamas are running around with skewers of meat and pieces of fruit in their hands. The withered pharmacist has emerged like an iguana from his dark, narrow shop. He gives me a quick reptilian nod and lights up a cigarette. I walk along the market’s edge, buying orchids and the other bits for the temple, the whole ritual package. I could do this every day for the rest of my life.
Inside, I light the joss sticks and the candles, place the flowers, sit there breathing in front of the old gold man for half an hour. Other women are sitting here, too, and two men. One of the women near me has her small boy beside her. I try not to think, thinking: There is no reason to feel so choked up. I want to cry, which is unreasonable, Maung is coming home. So much for meditation. Through most of my sitting I can’t help but notice that the six-year-old boy sits stiller than I do. I comfort myself with the pathetic notion that perhaps he’s handicapped—he actually cannot move. But then, as if infected by my mind, he gets fidgety and begins to pester his mother.
Outside, shoes slipped on, I realize it’s the word that gets me. Home. It’s not right—the bed on the floor, the cardboard-box altar. I do the dishes in the bathroom sink. Will I ever, in my life, buy curtains?
An hour and a half later, eight o’clock, I’m here, in the big room where I live, and the darkness has arrived in this city that is never dark. I spread the tablecloth on the floor, put down the grilled chicken and noodles and curried eggplant—it’s all in plastic bags. Home? Not home—me. He is coming to me.
I’m hungry, but I won’t eat without him. I take off all my clothes and lie on the mattress. He will arrive soon, I will touch him. Now I have to put my clothes back on, because it would be anticlimactic to masturbate before Maung arrives. Besides, I can’t answer the door naked; that would embarrass him.
I lie here and will him toward me. The gecko sings—“Too-kay! Too-kay!”—as I draw him out of meetings, tasks, away from other people, through traffic lights (they turn green as he approaches), past stray dogs, beggars, dripping air conditioners. Before I see his face, I will hear his feet on the echoey concrete landing, walking past the scuffed walls. He will have to decide if he should take the left hallway or the right. He chooses correctly, and now he coughs outside my door and I have to restrain myself from leaping up before he even knocks.
Knock knock. Who’s there?
I expect the stilted words after absence, but when I open up he steps toward me so quickly that I’m taken aback. I think of the lake that first hot afternoon, the boyish grin as he dove into the water. He wears the same smile as our bodies press close. The door slams behind us.
“It’s nice to see you, too,” I say. More quickly than I undressed myself, he undresses me again, the wraparound skirt a rectangle of ocher cotton on the floor, the black shirt up and over my head, and my hands on his belt as we turn around in a graceless polka, the small clank of the buckle and then his trousers and shorts, now the bare skin of his chest. “Are you in a rush?” I ask, walking backward toward the mattress.
“Not too much,” he whispers, and stops, and kisses me. That mouth! Vive la révolution! His wetness turns into my own—his tongue in my mouth pulls liquid silk between my legs, I slide as he maneuvers me around again, throws me off balance. I push him backward onto the mattress and fall down on top of him, messing the carefully straightened sheets. With me weighing him down, he must feel the lousy coils under the foam pushing into his back. He lifts me deftly, a rapid reversal, and he’s on top, right there, at the drenched edge of me, ready to dive in.
Then, a pause. He whispers, barely audible.
“What?” I’m listening too hard to our genitals to hear words. I don’t even notice the mattress coils.
“I am not wearing. A condom.”
“I don’t fucking care.” Slightly sobered, I amend, “Just this once.”
Then he’s in, in, in.
We drown in skin. No surprise, to think of him diving into the lake, my cunt. The human body is an inland sea, all our salts and minerals churning in perfect order. There is no turning away from these depths, only longing to make them deeper. To pull him into me is to have him push through me, find something else below, beyond me. Fucking as deep-sea diving. The divers acknowledge that it will be impossible to make it back to the surface, they must keep going in, to the treasure.
Where is it? Here, love. You are the treasure, and me: these bodies, alive, peeled open in nakedness. Oh, happy, serious, wild frenzy!
Later, we’re almost sleeping as the world floats back to the surface. The sound of the gecko returns. “Too-kay! Too-kay!” And traffic growl. Sweat on the skin, the smells. I love you, we murmur. The old promise is as delicate as a sea horse.
More treasure drifts up on the tide. An uncomfortable, attractive, worrisome understanding. I realize what he was searching for, inside me. For the first time in my life, I feel it hovering around us like a little fish. Gold seed, brown eyes. The bright minnow of a child.
CHAPTER 25
THE STORY
In the middle of the night, I wake up to him sitting on the mattress with his back against the wall, smoking. Watching me. Our positions reversed. A different glow shines in the balcony doors.
Maung says, “The light is so bright.”
“It’s the moon.”
He sounds offended. “It is not the moon. It is neon—someone turned on a sign. Strange light. But it makes your face look beautiful.”
“It’s the moon. Go on. Look at it.”
He goes out on the balcony with his Marlboros and I fall asleep again.
A week later, at dinnertime, we walk along Soi Dang, not holding hands. But my knuckles graze his as we swing our arms. Our elbows touch, our shoulders. A week of this, touching, and talking, seeing each other every day. Except for Wednesday. He couldn’t come. He was on the other side of the city and it would have taken two hours to get here on the bus. But today he came early and there is time for a walk and street food before sex and falling exhausted into sleep. It’s lovely to be out with him, in the life of the city, to see the same things—a child walking across the overpass with a birdcage, the piles of fruit on the stands in Soi Dang.
His knuckles, my knuckles, his hand on my waist as I sidestep a motorcycle that passes too closely. The street is so full of people that only local traffic comes through, usually at a snail’s pace, though sometimes the boys on their bikes can’t resist zipping through a gap in the crowd.
A brown man with a white woman incites a certain amount of curious staring in this neighborhood, especially when the white woman had been shopping and eating alone. The pharmacist looks up from the counter in his grotto. The big Esaan lady who sells grilled chicken and som-tam is all eyes and lascivious smiles. The curry woman is reserved as usual, but after we pass by I feel her eyes boring into the backs of our heads. I know they want to know if he is Thai. Later, when I return on my own, that will be their first question. I will answer honestly, and they will express their negative opinions.
Over dinner, Maung tells me about the latest round of talks the ABSDF has had with other armed groups on the border. “When we are together, we are revolutionaries, fighting the Burmese military, discussing strategy—where to put the troops, thinking abo
ut where the SLORC troops are. Strategy and maneuvers. Then I am a different person for the other talks, with NGOs, and sometimes not exactly NGOs, but like NGOs—European, American groups that might give us funding. I can never say ‘revolutionary.’ Some of the NGO people were French. They especially don’t like the word ‘revolution.’ Why not? They had their big revolution!”
“Maybe that’s why they’re not so keen. Their own turned out to be very bloody.”
“I cannot help that the French killed each other so much. It doesn’t mean Burmese revolution would be like that. We are Buddhists. We don’t want to cut off the generals’ heads. We just want to build a democratic government. The generals work so hard, they need a long vacation. In prison. How can we do that without revolution? All right, I find out more about diplomatic means—I have to, because the Burmese military is so big. We cannot win at armed conflict.
“Everyone, all the ethnic leaders—Karen, Karenni, Shan, Pa-O, Wa, Kachin—for all, it is just time. More time passes, everything will change. There will be more cease-fires. The SLORC will make deals with the ethnic leaders. It’s already happening. The generals have so much money. And they have China, Russia, Israel. The world is happy to sell them guns and tanks and airplanes. But if I say ‘grenade’ to a Western NGO they have a heart attack.”
I can’t help laughing at this, though the joke is too true to be genuinely funny.
He responds to my laughter with a rare physical gesture: a big flourish of his arm, hand aloft. “You think I am kidding with you! I am not kidding. We are supposed to be good dissidents. Be polite to the land mines. Work with the white people.” He pushes his untouched plate of food away from him.
This is the first time he has expressed frustration with … anything. Even so, he holds it easily. And lights a cigarette for his second course—not that he has eaten much of his curry.
“Maung, five minutes ago you said you were starving.”
“My stomach is bothering me.” He has an ulcer. That’s why he was awake the other night.
“We shouldn’t talk about NGOs over dinner. They make you feel sick.”
He takes another drag. “You know, we need them. Revolutionary or dissident, we need them. This makes me crazy sometimes.” He takes my hand and looks deeply into my eyes, as if about to make a declaration. Which he does. “I am so glad you don’t belong to an NGO.”
“Oh, you’re so romantic! I’m glad, too. It’s my fate to belong to nothing. That’s a writer’s job.”
“To preserve your objectivity?”
“No, not at all. That’s what journalists say they do, though I don’t believe them. I’m glad I’m not a journalist. My job is to preserve my subjectivity. I have to keep my biases safe. I celebrate them.”
“But you do belong to something.” He frowns. And squeezes my hand.
“You,” I say, raising my bottle of beer. “And the revolution!” I turn his warm hand over in my cooler one and kiss his palm. I trace the lifeline, the work line, the love line.
“What do you see?”
“In the future, you will live in Burma. And you will be a politician. You will never be rich.”
“I know,” he says. “I would like to give up politics, but I cannot. I will be an opposition politician, too. That is my job. To oppose the ruling party.” He sighs. “Do you see children?” He looks at me so seriously that I literally squirm.
“Maung, I don’t really know how to read palms.”
“But whatever you say, I believe you.”
“Then I will say that you need to eat more. You’ve had five cigarettes and half a beer for dinner.”
“You are like my mother.”
“That is not a sexy thing to say to your girlfriend!” I toss his hand away from me, happy to change the subject. “You must never again say I’m like your mother. It’s forbidden!”
“But it’s a compliment.”
“Eat some food!”
“See? Just like Meh Meh.”
I push his plate in front of him. He puts out his cigarette, sheepishly picks up his spoon. “I will try.”
“Try.” My pleasure, as I watch him eat his food, is smug, even carnal. And deeply motherly.
• • •
He goes back to the office tonight—the Bangkok office, that is, where he sleeps on a mat on the floor—to prepare for an early meeting with some NCGUB guys: the National Coalition Government of the Union of Burma. And the NLD-LA: the National League for Democracy—Liberated Area. Meetings, meetings, meetings. They are endless. Maung doesn’t tell me what they talk about. There are more than a dozen different groups to interact with, at least, and a few hundred egos to negotiate in order to proceed as some kind of united front. Though I’m not sure how united that front really is.
Within its own ranks, the ABSDF has had serious problems. The two sections of the organization represent a serious split in the leadership, with Maung on one side and Moe Thee Zun, the prominent student leader, on the other. I’ve also discovered that an execution took place in the jungle a few years ago, of an alleged spy, which outraged those who believed the man was innocent. An ABSDF member told me about that incident reluctantly, in confidence, and I didn’t press him for details: an execution was not the proposed subject of our interview. I would like to ask Maung about it, but I’m not sure how to, or when.
Maung wants to know what I’m faithful to, what defines me, the way revolution and being Burmese define him. What do I belong to? Why on earth did I say I belonged to him?
Because that’s what he wanted to hear. But it was a romantic feint. I don’t believe that lovers belong to each other. He doesn’t belong to me. His work owns him; it’s the center of his life. I respect him for that, as I respect all those who are involved in Burma’s democracy movement, both the armed and the unarmed fighters. But I also understand those French NGO people who don’t like the word revolution. Recent history is drenched in the blood of revolutions. They have always been such a good excuse for mass murder. Even the word makes me suspicious. Doesn’t the revolution simply revolve, coming back to what was there before in a disguised form?
And yet. I believe that some wars need to be fought. But most of them should never begin, and too many of them—in Africa, Central America, the Middle East, not to mention the jungles of Burma—lead to the slaughter of innocent civilians.
But to return to the first question, which should be easier to answer than ones about revolution and war: what do I belong to?
A code of behavior—morals. I believe in acting when I see injustice. I believe in speaking out against violence of all kinds, especially if it means risking my own comfort. But that’s too noble: my big mouth never thinks of comfort; it has its own designs. It’s hard to know when speaking out makes a difference, or if the course of action chosen is the right one. But it is wrong to do nothing. It is criminal to be silent in the face of an outrage. The pathology of the bystander pretends to be a minor, forgivable pathology, but it is the mildest, most common face of evil.
Daily I meet people who have lost everything because they acted and spoke out against injustice. They insisted on their right to protest, to demand better from their abusive leaders, and they paid dearly for it. All the former political prisoners I’ve interviewed have had staring contests with death. A man I spent a few hours with last week, Win Naing Oo, was interrogated, tortured, and, once he had healed from the torture, beaten unconscious in prison. After the beating, he watched as his whole body turned blue and swelled with septicemia. It is a miracle that he did not die, or that he was not crippled by the beating. He has made it his mission to document the various prisons and work camps he lived in. My writing about the Burmese prison experience will depend on his book Cries from Insein. My work will come, in part, from his memory. This tall, slender man with shaking hands sat across from me (there was no table between us) in a dirty room with a broken tap dripping behind him, and he said that it was worth it, his suffering, his exile, his loss of health, the
nightmares, the pain—so many different kinds of pain. It was all worth it. Not because he had survived but because he had acted, and his action took the form of resistance.
And I have fallen in love with a man who does not question the sacrifices he makes for the cause he believes in. Do we match? Maybe I should join an NGO and do real humanitarian work in the field—build wells in the refugee camps or help in the Burmese clinic in Mae Sot, an extraordinary place run by a Karen Burmese woman named Dr. Cynthia Maung. Maybe I should just teach English. The most useful thing I do around here is interview people about their experiences in Burma and on the border. Even that is beginning to feel more useful than actually writing a book.
The people I interview want to talk, even if they don’t want to talk about everything. By listening carefully, by asking questions, I become a mirror that reflects their lives back to them. They are here illegally, set apart from the dominant culture, existing in a long, difficult limbo. To tell his or her own history is one way for a human being to reclaim legitimacy. The power of story gives both ways, to the teller and to the listener. It is literally life-affirming.
Brutality makes no sense. It ravages the senses; it takes apart meaning. To be survived, it needs to be integrated into the larger context that is the story of a life, the story of community. If something else came before the cruelty, something else can come after the trauma it leaves behind.
When I have finished an interview with a former political prisoner, I feel a mixture of emotions: a closeness to someone who, an hour or two before, was a stranger; a deep weariness, from taking so much in and holding it; and a sorrow that is not always sad. Maybe a better word is tenderness—an anxious tenderness for this person who has entrusted me with his story. Tenderness for his family, from whom he’s been separated, usually, for years; tenderness for my own family, from whom I’ve separated myself willfully. Tenderness for the human condition—how we struggle, how cruel we are to each other, how deeply we want to love and to be loved. I think I feel metta, to use the Buddhist term, which carries with it an appropriate formality: loving-kindness. It is a specific feeling, but also a kind of atmosphere that I move around in for a few hours or days after talking with the person.
Burmese Lessons Page 17