It’s not easy to separate after these interviews. Too much has been said, too much has been given, for a hasty departure. The desire to remain in the same room is almost physical, a magnetism between myself and the people I’ve spoken to. We want to return together to this other world of the present, in Thailand. Usually I end up staying at the house or apartment for an hour or two afterward, talking with the larger group of people, drinking tea, chatting. And laughing. We return to the present and usually find a way to laugh. Often the group ends up eating together. The ubiquitous food vendors of Bangkok make it easy for me to contribute to a communal meal. And I talk about my other work, or show the photos that I often carry around with me, of Greece and Canada.
What do I belong to?
The story.
Such a small word. And not an answer Maung would understand.
CHAPTER 26
ENGLISH LESSONS
On the weekend, I took Aye Aye Lwin shopping for clothes to keep her warm in Norway. She doesn’t know when she’s leaving—the paperwork is still moving through the labyrinth of United Nations and Norwegian bureaucracy—but I’ll miss her when she’s gone. I’ve returned to the house where she lives perhaps half a dozen times; Aye Aye, Ma Tu, and Chit Hlaing have taken the place of a small family in my life. They help me with my Burmese and tell me stories about Burma.
On our shopping trip, I got to be the expert on cold weather, searching for skirts that were thick enough, socks with real wool in them, a good-quality winter jacket. Late in the afternoon, near the end of our spree, she said, “I am older than you, but you are just like my mother!” A few minutes later she said, “And Maung, he is like my father.”
“Is he?” She always refers to him as Ako, which means “older brother.” They seem to be very close. They were in the same jungle camp together for a long time, and I think he protected her. Early on, in the military camps, the ratio of women to men was something like three to two hundred. She’s told me that she has a boyfriend, but he’s still in the jungle.
I don’t know if she knows that I am involved with Maung. More than once, we’ve arrived at her house together, as we did this evening. Maung came in to say hello to everyone, then went to the ABSDF office, which is not too far away. I’m not sure when or how romantic relationships are made public. People must figure things out on their own, but surely, at some point, we will be more open about being together. At present, I have the feeling that we’re sneaking around. Maung is a private man, discreet, though that was not my first impression of him. Chiang Mai was more of an exception than I realized. I’ve gone with him to another party, in Bangkok, but I attended as “the writer who is writing about political prisoners.” Maung didn’t stick to me as he did in Chiang Mai, which was a relief. Of course, he doesn’t have to woo me now that we’re sleeping together. But I don’t think he would have wooed me anyway—too many older political figures were there. Maung was serious throughout the evening, drinking little, murmuring a lot on his cell phone. Once, he disappeared for half an hour. I eventually found him outside, deep in conversation with one of the other men.
We see each other sporadically, and spend our time together in a room without a kitchen. To share a home you must be able to cook food together, not pour curry and som-tam out of plastic bags. I love the street food, but I miss cooking. For that matter, I miss sitting at a dining table. I contemplate buying one but always have better things to do. I bought a work desk for one of the communal dissident houses, but a table for myself seems an extravagance. One of the reasons I love visiting Aye Aye is that the little townhouse provides a domestic haven. It’s comforting. It’s comprehensible, though much of the conversation goes on in Burmese.
Tonight, after we eat together and have a discussion about the mysteries of skiing—Why would anyone want to ski, really, in the cold, covered with padded clothing? Why?—Aye Aye asks me in Burmese if I want to go to “[Burmese word I don’t understand]” with her. I’m so pleased to understand half the question that I say, “Yes, let’s go,” without knowing our destination. Typical. Somehow I think it has to do with Maung—his house, which I take to mean the ABSDF office. But I’m not sure.
She picks up her knapsack, which suggests that she’s going to a computer training or something, but they’re usually on the weekends. We say goodbye to Ma Tu and Chit Hlaing, but we don’t leave the little street in the usual way, by walking out onto the big road; we walk back down the lane for two minutes, then turn into a narrow passageway between buildings, the kind of path you would miss altogether unless you know it’s there. Obviously the locals use it often, to get from one soi to another without having to go to the main street. Aye Aye glances at her watch and picks up the pace. “We have to hurry. I’m going to be late for English.”
“English?”
“English class. I’m going to school.”
That was the word I didn’t get. School.
We leave a vacant lot and pass into the next soi, walking up the street past good-sized houses with small compounds. “That building. Classrooms are upstairs.”
A big dog begins to bark. Louder and probably tougher than the dog, a woman yells in English, “That’s enough! Stop! You know everybody. Stop that barking!” She sounds Irish. Or Scottish.
Aye Aye says proudly, “Is Miss Nola.”
“Your teacher?”
“Headmaster.”
“Oh.” Through the chain-link fence I see the woman turn sharply into the doorway, her dark red hair swinging. The screen door slams behind her.
“Her house is our school.” Aye Aye opens the gate. The dog—a German shepherd—resumes his barking, which is pure canine welcome, accompanied by tail wagging and stolen licks of hand or leg.
“But, Aye Aye, why did you bring me to your school? My English is pretty good.”
“Your English is perfect! I bring you because Miss Nola wants to meet you.”
I suddenly feel nervous. Marla must know Nola; Marla seems to know everyone. And I know that she has probably told some of her friends how untrustworthy I am, problematic, inexperienced. It can be worse than high school around here.
“Hello, Miss Nola! I brought my friend, the sa-yeh sehyama.”
I smile, touched. Aye Aye has used the respectful Burmese term for “woman writer.”
“Oh, it’s great to meet you. I’m Nola.” A woman with big blue eyes comes toward me, her hand out. The eyes are enlarged by the roundness of her face, a freckled, smiling moon. “Aye Aye—and a few other people—have told me so much about you.”
“Yes, it’s a small world, isn’t it?”
Nola turns to a few more students, young men, who have just sauntered through the gate. The dog starts again. “All right, hurry up. It’s seven, your class has probably already started!” Aye Aye and the others step out of their shoes and disappear into the house. “And you shut the hell up right now, you bloody rogue!” Scottish, definitely. The dog puts his head down but looks up at us, maudlin, full of longing. The heavy tail begins a cautious wag.
“He’s a real love, but he just can’t stop barking. It drives us mad.” The accent is soft around the edges; she hasn’t lived in Scotland for a while. She holds the door open for me. “Can you stay a bit? A friend of yours is here. You could have a drink with us when the classes are over.”
“A friend of mine?” My voice comes out high and reedy.
“Yes, a friend of yours. From the party. I’m sorry I wasn’t there; I heard it was quite a good one. And you were very popular, weren’t you?”
I laugh awkwardly. I can’t think of anything to say but, “Yeah, we all had a really great time.” And I call myself a writer.
We’re inside now, passing through a short hallway and into a large sitting room—sofa, TV, all the regular stuff except for the piles of English workbooks piled tidily along one wall. Happy to shift focus, I ask, “So you run a school out of your house?” I sneak a peak through the partially open kitchen door—someone in there, banging cupboard
doors. I grit my teeth and smile as Nola talks.
“I guess I do run a school, though I still keep thinking that there are just a few classes going on upstairs. But we’re always full, all levels. You see how many shoes are at the door? We have to find a bigger site, because there are so many people who need to learn English.
“It’s not political work,” she says ruefully, “except that Burmese people need the English if they’re going to keep doing the politics. Or just about anything else, for that matter. It’s like computer training—necessary for communications. It’s great to have these people come out of the jungle and start sending emails. Some of them have already taught themselves Web design.”
I refrain from mentioning that I’ve never sent an email myself.
“I don’t teach the classes, unless one of my teachers can’t come in. But I organize the whole thing, work on funding. It’s crazy to be doing all this from a kitchen table, but I’m not quite ready for an office yet. I’m still getting used to being so sedentary. I used to move around all the time. I worked on the border, delivering rice for the BBC.”
The BBC. Rice?
She sees my puzzled look. “No, not that BBC. The Burma Border Consortium.”
Of course.
A drawer slams hard in the kitchen. We both turn around just as a woman cries out, “I found the fucking corkscrew!”
The voice does not belong to Marla. I feel physical relief, and happiness, for who emerges from the kitchen but Charlie the Kiwi filmmaker, bottle of wine in one hand and elusive corkscrew in the other. Her China-red lipstick complements an ear-splitting grin. She walks straight into the conversation. “Yes, Nola’s given up all her wild frontier ways and is practically a married woman now. To the most handsome man on the border, too.” She raises the wine bottle, which is not yet opened, and gives Nola a mock toast. “I think I should crack this bottle right now. Why wait?”
“Charlie, behave yourself. Don’t touch that corkscrew until all the kids go home.” With this admonishment, the Scottish accent becomes sharper.
“I’m already touching it, and besides, they’re not exactly kids.” She gives me a wink and starts twisting through the cork. “Come on, Nola, I’m a guest in your home and I desperately need a drink.” She looks at me. “I just got in from Phnom Penh, where I was visiting my lovely brother. But he had a sick roommate in his house, and we both had a ton of work to do, and I caught this weird stomach bug. You can’t even brush your teeth with Cambodian water, it’s so lethal. Ah, Thailand! Civilization!” The cork comes out with a jovial pop.
Nola responds, “Well, I need a drink, too, so it’s cruel to start without me. At least give me a cigarette, would you?”
Charlie puts the bottle on an end table. She sprawls on the sofa. “We’ll let the wine breathe while we have a smoke.”
Almost three hours later, long after the students have left, we’ve finished the second bottle of wine and have made it halfway through the third. The fourth is looking like liquid wisdom. Charlie and Nola are engaged in a detailed, intense discussion about vomiting.
I started it, by quizzing them about malaria. Nola is telling a grim tale about being on a visa run in Malaysia and coming down with an attack while she was on a train. Now that she’s been drinking, she sounds like a Scottish miner. “When I got outta the station, I was so ill I could barely walk. I was delirious. But I didn’t want to get stuck in some Malaysian hospital in quarantine. I just hadta keep going, to catch the next train and make it back. Then, of course, I started puking up me guts. And there’s nothing you can do to stop it. I hadta change trains, too, so I walked from one flower planter to another on the platform, puking into every one of them. I’m sure people thought I was a heroin addict on a bad trip. ’Twas bloody awful. But I made the damn train.”
“What if you’d passed out or something?” I ask. “There was no one to help you. You could have died.”
“Well. I wasn’t pleased. When you first get malaria, it’s uncomfortable, but by this point in time I was used to it. You kind of develop a sense about just how sick you are. If I’d really thought I was dying, I probably would have gone to the hospital.” It’s the “probably” that sticks in my mind. Nola lifts up her hands, shrugs. “Here I am, I survived.”
“How does it feel?”
Charlie guffaws. “What do you think, Kaz? It feels like shit!” Kaz. That’s what my favorite cousin calls me. “And sometimes you know you’re so sick that you have to take the damn pills. I was on a march on the Burmese side once, with some ABSDF guys and the KNU. It was the monsoon; we had leeches all over us. I’ve never been so fucking sick in my life. But Nola’s right—you understand when it’s critical to have drugs. And I knew, so I took my last pill. But the timing was wrong. Five minutes after I took the damn thing, I threw up. I had to have that pill in order to make it out, so I dropped down on my knees and scooped through the puke until I found the damn tablet and swallowed it again. Thank God I managed to keep it down.”
“Malaria’s not all bad, though,” Nola says in a philosophical voice.
“Really?”
“It’s the best diet going. I always lose ten pounds at least.”
As Nola drinks, she gets funnier and sharper and sweeter at the same time. She sees the doubtful look on my face and laughs. “I’m perfectly serious! Just think how much money the Burmese resistance movement could generate by organizing fat farms for Western tourists. Overweight white people could go out to the military camps in the jungle, get malaria, and lose ten or twenty or even forty pounds. Medics would have to be there, of course, dispensing Fansidar and quinine, and making sure no one died or went cerebral.” Her nostalgia-soft eyes quickly focus on my face. “The falciparum strain of malaria can get into the brain if it’s not treated properly. And then, well”—she wipes her hands one against the other—“the brain swells and the person usually dies.”
“But falciparum seems to be rarer these days,” observes Charlie as she pulls the elastic from her hair and scratches her scalp. Her gold hair rises and shakes under her fingers. I can’t help thinking that underneath it all is the miracle of her unswollen, non-malarial brain. She flips her hair over her head. “I love the fat-farm idea. We’ve got serious potential there. The tourists would get skinny, experience true adventure, and further a noble cause at the same time. If the rates were competitive, imagine the AK-47s and grenades the guys could buy. A Southeast Asian guerrilla war won with American fat—that’s got a nice ring to it, don’t you think?”
“There are more and more fat English people, you know,” Nola interjects. “I think we could market it in Britain, too. Why not Britain? At least they have a vague idea of where Burma is.”
After pouring me the first glass from the new bottle, Charlie yanks her thick hair up high on the back of her head and forcibly restrains it again with the elastic band. “You’ll have a chance, Kaz, at some point, to go out to the camps. If you want to.”
I snap back, “Are you calling me fat?”
We all convulse with laughter. I’m happy to make them laugh so hard.
In a surprisingly lucid voice—almost her no-nonsense, smart “headmaster” voice—Nola says, “We’ll have to find the right person to take you to one of the military camps. And the right camp.” She rattles off the names and numbers of battalions ranging from the south to the far north. Presumably, she has visited them all, even as they’ve shifted through hills and valleys, because of the work she used to do for the BBC.
I sit up and try to shake some of the fuzz out of my head.
Charlie says, “Well, it always depends on what’s going on, who’s doing what.”
I insist, “I’ll find my way to a military camp on my own.”
Charlie yawns. “Well, make sure you watch out for land mines.”
“I don’t mean I’ll go by myself! I will be accompanied.”
Nola is quick on the uptake. “What d’ya mean? Who’s going to take you out?”
Why be c
autious? I’m at home with these two, everything’s fine. A secretive smile unfolds on my face.
Nola sits up on the edge of the sofa and howls. The dog lifts its head. “One of them has already got to you! I can’t believe how fast those guys work! It was the Christmas party, wasn’t it?”
This conversation will cause me some anxiety later, but in the moment it’s as good as flirting. My mouth remains closed. Except to take a huge swallow of wine.
Charlie lights another cigarette and happily sucks on it. I’ve never seen such a keen smoker. She raises her finely plucked eyebrows. “Of course! It was at the Christmas party. It’s all coming back to me now.”
Nola looks at Charlie. Then at me. She sits on the actual edge of her seat, close enough to me to grab my hand. Though she doesn’t do that. “You have to tell me. Who is it?”
I smile.
“Tell me!”
There is a long and, for me, confused pause. I’m drunk. This is not how I should tell anyone about my new relationship. But it’s too late to change the subject. At least I can lower my voice and vacuum it clean of drama. It comes out like a verbal shrug. “Maung.”
Nola lurches backward. She is astonished, and clearly not by joy. Her big blue eyes gleam; the generous whites are full of tiny red veins.
Suddenly I feel depressingly sober.
“Karen, that’s … I’m sorry to say this, but I—well, I like you a lot, so I want to be honest with you. I think it’s awful. He’s not a good man.”
In a markedly noncommittal voice, Charlie says, “I thought Angie was his girlfriend.”
The hostess of the Christmas party: machete eyes. “He said that they’re only friends.”
Burmese Lessons Page 18