by Rory Maclean
‘I’m sorry,’ Louis said. Ni Ni stared down at the ground. She didn’t know what to say. She worried that conversations with foreigners had to be reported to the police. ‘I’m full of good intentions,’ he continued. His poor Burmese made her want to smile but she resisted the temptation. ‘I never meant to get you fired.’
Ni Ni shuffled her feet then rubbed her nose, even though it didn’t itch. Law San’s cousin had gone back into the office. The new girl from Dagon Myothit had been called in to see him. The other labourers were gathered at the end of the street, pausing at the cigarette stall or waiting for buses. She saw no sign of Way Way. No one seemed to be watching them.
‘You were trying to help me,’ said Ni Ni. Louis had to lean closer to hear her voice above the dying gasp of Tin Oo’s cement mixer. ‘I must be grateful.’
‘Can you get work somewhere else?’
Ni Ni looked up into his eyes, as blue as the hot season sky. He seemed to be concerned for her. He seemed to want to help her. He understood nothing of her country. ‘I have a plan,’ she answered, looking away.
‘Good. Plans are good. Mine never came to much, so I admire someone who has confidence in their own. Look, I am sorry,’ he repeated, then added, ‘Here,’ and slipped an envelope into her hand. ‘I enjoyed our dance last night.’ Inside the smooth, clean white envelope Ni Ni found two hundred kyat.
The next day she planned to return to the site to find Way Way. She put on her favourite longyi and a borrowed muslin blouse, and took the time to gather her fine black hair into a knot around a comb at the back of her head. She pressed a thin coat of thanakha on her cheeks, then paused to consider her clear almond eyes in Ko Aye’s mirror. She turned this way and that, moving her slender figure with refinement and economy. She took a small piece of red crêpe paper, wet it with her tongue and rubbed it on her lips.
On the walk from the bus stop a car stopped beside her. She hurried on, fearing that it was Law San’s cousin. Then she heard its electric window slip open, and recognised the voice that said, ‘Ma Ni Ni?’ She hesitated. ‘What are you doing back here?’
‘I’ve come to look for my friend,’ she answered. ‘She promised to help me to find work.’
‘It’s too hot to even think about work,’ said Louis. ‘I’m taking the day off. I’ve been here for six months, and all I’ve seen is this damn building site.’ He stared at Ni Ni and she turned away, suddenly self-conscious. ‘Is your friend expecting you?’ he asked.
‘No.’
‘Then come with me to the Shwedagon. You can see her tomorrow.’
Ni Ni shook her head. ‘I can’t do that.’
‘No one need know,’ insisted Louis. ‘Please come. I’d enjoy your company.’
The world looked picturesque from inside the air-conditioned car: Rangoon’s decaying colonial buildings appeared charming, the passengers riding on the roofs of overcrowded buses seemed quaint. Her seat was so soft, and the ride so smooth, that Ni Ni felt as if the wheels had left the road the car was gliding up toward Shwedagon’s great gilded pagoda. She could not bring herself to speak. A guitar concerto played on the stereo. A traffic policeman saluted as they drove past the Deaf and Dumb School.
They didn’t climb up the slowly rising steps with the Burmese pilgrims. Instead Louis guided Ni Ni into the lift which was reserved for military officers and foreigners. She paused at the gate, expecting to be turned back by an indignant armed cadet, but no one asked her to explain herself. Being with Louis made her feel safe. At the top he tipped the operator ten kyat, less than twenty-five American cents.
Temple bells tinkled on the golden hti. The diamond orb at its tip flashed in the sunlight. The faithful strolled and murmured around the worn stone walkway, stopping to meditate, to offer flowers at the smaller shrines and to recite the Buddha’s teachings. Monks walked arm in arm and youngsters squatted on the cool marble slabs. Like St Peter’s in Rome and the Kaaba at Mecca, Shwedagon was a centre of pilgrimage. Yet for all its sanctity it ordained no severity. The atmosphere that prevailed was both intimate and communal, exhilarating and serene. Buddhism remained a constant solace, in spite of the recent turmoil.
They circled the platform twice in silence before Ni Ni stepped forward to pour water over a chalky Buddha image – one glassful for each of her years, plus an extra one to ensure long life – then lowered herself onto the stones to pray. As she tucked her legs beneath her Louis saw for an instant the pale soles of her tiny feet. Their nakedness stirred him, as might the touch of a stranger in a darkened room.
Six months earlier he had left England in search of the unfamiliar. He was young – twenty-six – and not long out of university. He had not taken a year out, so as to complete his degree sooner. His discipline had earned him a First. Nothing disrupted his rigid ambition. Every morning he laid his pens out on the desk in a neat row. When his practice offered him a promotion overseas he had leapt at the opportunity. He could advance his career, and unwind.
‘Burma is an economic tiger cub,’ the firm’s senior partner had told him. The Asian economic crisis was still far in the future. ‘Business there is going to take off like a skyrocket.’ Then he had added with a wink, ‘You’ll have fun, too.’
Louis had bought a mosquito net and a year’s supply of Paludrine. He had enrolled himself in an immersion language course and read Collis, Orwell and Maugham. He wanted to be part of that boom, to help to modernise the country brick by brick, but he hadn’t counted on the heat. From the moment of his arrival in Rangoon it had exhausted him. The dazzling white light had blinded him and the poor hygiene had made him ill. He had contracted bacillary dysentery and spent his second month in bed. His girlfriend had cancelled her visit. His methodical organisation had uncoiled.
Having reached this most extraordinary country, Louis began to pine for the familiar, to look for signposts which would help him to orient himself. He rarely strayed from the building site and his company villa. He ate Welsh rarebit in the British Club rather than ginger soup on Anawrahta Street. His weekends were spent in shady rooms reading other travellers’ tales. He lived apart from the city, until his urgent hunger, stoked by the scalding climate, drove him in search of company. The few women at the British Club were all attached or unavailable to a transient, so his eyes turned to the Burmese. It was all so easy, he told himself. His relative wealth, and their lack of liberty, gave him power. In them he found the reassurance of the familiar, yet grasped their gentle difference: taut breasts, slim hips, supple hands and a lightness of movement that reminded him of birds fluttering in a cage. No one, not his accommodating hosts or their irresponsible government, cared to stop him.
On her knees, her back towards him, Ni Ni bent forward in supplication, and touched her copper-brown forehead to the cool white marble. Louis was gripped by the desire to possess her.
The child returned to his side. ‘The Buddhist comes to the pagoda to rejoice in the good deeds of others,’ she ventured, trying in her way to thank him. ‘And in one’s own fortune to be able to do good deeds.’
‘Do you know Somerset Maugham?’ he asked. It did not occur to him that she might never have been able to afford a book. ‘He once wrote that Shwedagon was “a sudden hope in the dark night of the soul.” I just remembered that now.’
He took her out to dinner. Ni Ni had never before been to a restaurant, apart from Law San’s noodle stall, and she ate with caution. Louis explained each dish and ingredient to her, guessing at the translation of words that he didn’t know: prawn, mayonnaise, lemon meringue pie. She listened but was hesitant with her own words, speaking only once, and then about Buddhism. She didn’t mention her father. Louis filled the quiet with talk of university, London, central heating and his job. When she reminded him of her need to find work he interrupted her. ‘Please don’t go to Bangkok,’ he said. She leaned forward, willing him to talk, hiding her desperation. ‘Stay here. I will look after you.’ Her manner made her seem eager not to disappoint him.
Af
ter the meal, sitting in the dark in his car, he asked her where she lived. Ni Ni was unsure whether to tell him, so he took her home. It was that simple. They were both alone.
His eyesight was so poor that without his glasses he could not see the hand in front of his face. In bed he removed them and caressed her by memory, recalling the bodies of past lovers from Basingstoke and Bassein, hardly knowing the tender presence in his arms. Ni Ni too loved by touch alone, but her fingers trembled with new sensations: a rough graze of stubble, the tension in his thigh, his weight so heavy upon her. All her other senses were numbed. She was the unformed strand of desire, pliable and easy to mould, and Louis shaped her in his great white paws. He wove her slim legs around him, lifted her petite hips towards him and lashed her feather-light sex to his own. At first he took her with gentleness, handling her as another caged bird, whispering soft vows, until the heat and frustration swelled up inside him and he tore deeply into her flesh, making her bite her tongue so as not to cry out. She hid her face in the pillow, muffling her tears, afraid.
Louis knew that Ni Ni was young, very young, and wondered at himself for a moment. He was hard-working, loved by his parents from Berkshire. At home he bought flowers for his grandmother and made donations to Children in Need. His designs favoured open-plan architecture, not the hierarchical structures which set in stone the tentacles of power. He was not at home, but he reasoned that he could still do good. I can help this one, he told himself. I can give her a home, a bed and a start in life. It’s almost an act of charity, he lied, gripping at her pliant flesh. He slipped the pillow aside to kiss the damp eyes.
In all her life Ni Ni had never been praised, never been told that she had done well, yet now his lips were on her nipples, on her stomach, caressing her with charmed words. Louis’s loving overwhelmed her. Its ferment had brought pain, but now he was promising to look after her, to protect her. And though her voice remained stifled by the months of fear, she sensed that her hands should express her gratitude.
‘I think we will move to a cold county,’ he whispered later, his voice pulling her back from the edge of sleep. ‘In the far north, where it never does anything but snow.’
‘Snow?’ she breathed, soft, aching, uncertain.
‘We’d live in an ice house.’
‘I don’t want to live in an ice house.’ She didn’t want to disagree with him but her father would never find her in the north.
‘Every morning before going hunting, you’d chew my boots to soften them. I’d chase polar bears and whales for our supper. We’d have a herd of caribou, a fleet of kayaks, a pack of huskies.’
Ni Ni raised herself onto her elbow and touched a cool hand to his forehead. ‘It was too hot for you at Shwedagon?’
‘In the summer the sun would never set. Our children would grow up to be strong hunters and trappers and we’d spend all our evenings in our sleeping skins, rubbing noses by the open fire.’ He sighed, ‘We’d be cold. Cold.’
Louis shivered and held Ni Ni. She abandoned herself to his embrace. As sleep rose up to claim them it did not seem right to her that he dreamed himself away to a cold country. If he expected them to share their bodies, she wanted his thoughts too to be there in the strange warm bed.
In the morning when he left for the site he asked her to wait for him. At dusk when he returned she taught him how to walk. He had wanted to make love first, but she resisted. He only agreed to the lesson on the condition that they took off their clothes.
‘When you walk, be where you are,’ she told him.
‘I am here.’ He stood at the head of the villa’s shuttered lounge. Evening sunlight criss-crossed the room’s inky blue shade. ‘But you are too far away, Ni Ni, way over there.’
She moved forward out of the half-light and removed his glasses. He stretched out to touch her and she sprung back. ‘Don’t feel me; feel your feet on the floor.’
Louis felt the smooth teak floorboards and balanced himself upon them. He pictured the room about him: the palmy etchings of colonial Rangoon, the deep wicker armchair, Ni Ni’s tight form tucked into the silver shadow by the old campaign chest. Then he saw himself, prickly skin on a bony frame, short on hair and energy, a gaunt, sun-bleached English architect dislocated in the tropics, wearied by battle with the elements. Ni Ni must have noticed the furrows wrinkle his brow, for she said, ‘If you do not care for yourself, how can you care for others?’ So Louis tried to let her quiet enter him. He pushed aside his worries. ‘Walk,’ he heard her say.
He lifted a foot, felt the pull of calf and bend of knee, sensed his ankle pivot and his weight shift as he began his tread. He took the second step with even more care, swinging his other foot forward, feeling the warm air brush against his body. His toes met the floor, steadied him, made him aware of his poise. He walked the length of the room, a path of twenty paces, then returned. As he paced a thought surfaced to distract him, a flashback to the night before of Ni Ni cowering in a corner to unbutton her tapered blouse. She had released her hair so that it fell over her shoulders. ‘Come back to your footsteps,’ she whispered, recalling him to the present.
He walked on, measuring each step, relaxed yet alert to every movement, each footfall. He discovered the shape of his soles by the way they met the floor, felt the hard bone of his heels and detected the pull of his tendons. The rhythm of his breathing held his attention and then, with each swing of his arms, the minute outward twist of his wrists.
Louis was a stranger to Ni Ni. His white, hairy figure was foreign and unfamiliar. His gestures were abrupt and his movements unrefined. His snarled tangle of pubic curls repelled her. Yet as she watched his progress – the tensing then relaxing muscles, the rise and fall of his chest – she believed that for all his differences Louis shared something with her father. He was weak. He too was a man lost because he was not tied to any woman’s heart. The revelation made him seem less unknown, less the beast who had torn her out of childhood. ‘Open your heart,’ the monks had once taught her, ‘and you will realise that you belong.’ As Louis trod the hardwood pathway she willed herself to believe that there could be a kind of safety in his frantic passion. The thought helped her to accept that she could belong in the shuttered company villa, in the springy bed, with him. He was her escape, if she was willing to pay the price. She watched his half-blind walk and told herself, ‘This is the man I must love properly.’
Ni Ni reached out her arms and from across the room, traced the outline of Louis’s moving figure. She sketched the curve of his spine with her thumb, and the man shivered then missed a step. ‘Don’t stop,’ she hissed from behind the chest. She was frightened, but moved forward to walk behind him, her hands hovering above his waist, feeling him and being felt. He sensed Ni Ni’s hands on his chest, gliding over his ribs, even though her fingers did not touch him.
He turned at the end of the lounge and tried to carry on but his pace faltered, his breathing quickened. ‘Walk,’ she said, and he stepped forward again. She slid backwards before him, stroking his hips without brushing his skin, her distant touch feeling the cool of his buttocks and heat of his loins.
‘Walk,’ she repeated as his legs grew taut and heavy. Her fingers tingled as she wove them around his shaft without touching him. Ni Ni’s alarm and wonder mounted as he began to swell in her detached caress. Louis groaned and rose with his longing. He reached blindly into the void to find her. Instinct made her pull back. She laughed, once again at the wrong time.
‘Ni Ni,’ he begged, ‘where are you?’ She retreated from him, fleeing just beyond his reach. ‘I can’t see you.’ Around and around he turned, grasping at her indistinct shadow, aching to grip her flesh. ‘Come to me,’ he ordered. The anger in his voice stifled her laughter and she obeyed him. He seized her, turned her and took her from behind, lifting her up against the armchair with his fierce thrusts until she bled again and he collapsed, sated, empty, upon her. Then she hurt, amè, she hurt, but she felt safe.
The next day Ni Ni moved in wi
th Louis. She had no family who might have warned her. Law San understood that everyone simply did their best to survive. Ko Aye received her sleeping mats. May May Gyi was loaned the rice pot. Louis’s kitchen boasted more saucepans and woks than were on sale in the whole of Bogyoke market. In Wayba-gi she left behind the villa’s address and the betel box, to be kept until her father’s return. All Ni Ni brought with her was the cotton sack of coins and her few worn clothes, which Louis stripped off her that evening. They tumbled on the shreds, ripping the seams of the threadbare cloth, then, while the flush of their copulation was still on her, he dressed her in a new silk blouse and a Chinese silk longyi. Its rich salmon-pink complemented her high colour. ‘It costs nothing,’ he said as she gazed at the unfamiliar reflection in the full-length mirror. Then he told her that she was beautiful.
For the next few months Ni Ni’s life hung between innocence and barbarism, caring and abuse, East and West. In Burma physical contact is an intimate matter. Men and women do not touch in public. Her actions further distanced her from her society. She ceased to belong. To compensate for the loss she convinced herself that she was tied to Louis, that his convenient liaison was love. He did nothing to dissuade her. When he arrived home they coupled urgently, on the sofa, in the bed, even once on the hallway floor with the front door still ajar. Afterwards they washed, sometimes dressed again, and ate in the glimmering dusk. Across the low table he took her small hands, kissed each finger in turn and told her that she made him happy. She believed that they would be together for ever, or at least until her father came home. Louis knew that it would end.
There is evil in every man and woman. It courses through our veins, beneath the silk dressing gown or battle fatigues, ready to sweep aside compassion. Our civility determines whether or not we act upon the baseness, whether we restrain or unleash it. Louis tried to contain his by locking it away in the villa. He and Ni Ni never went out together. He isolated her as Burma had been isolated by its military rulers. Their months together melted away as multi-party elections were held across the country. The generals, outraged by their humiliating defeat at the polls, annulled the results. But their refusal to relinquish power went all but unnoticed in the strange bed. Ni Ni surrendered her innocent heart to Louis. She felt herself protected. She once again made the mistake of thinking that she had time.