by Rory Maclean
The dusk was filled with the tinkle of temple bells, countless tiny chimes stirred by the evening breeze. Two thousand pagodas remained standing in the Pagan Archaeological Zone, and foreign visitors paid $10 to wander the dusty roads between them, dwarfed by the dark brick ruins, trying to imagine the glory of the lost city on the barren plain. After an afternoon nap, Soe Htun had taken us to the Thatbyinnyu, a monumental square temple laced with a maze of inner passageways and flanked by guardian figures. Katrin and I had climbed its narrow steps to a resplendent Buddha image. From the upper terrace, two hundred feet above the ground, it was possible to conjure up the bustling ancient city eight hundred years below. In our imagination the smell of cooking rose with the murmur of voices. The wind carried the Pali chants of meditating monks. Villagers bathed in the Irrawaddy, boys splashing girls, women crouching in the grey waters, their bare shoulders touched by the rosy light of the evening. Trading barques from Ceylon and Siam swayed in the swells. We watched the sun set beyond the river’s great arc and the lush green trees dissolve into black. A full moon rose above the hills to the west while below, in our fancy, ten thousand lamps were lit and ten thousand meals prepared. But then, as the star of a high-flying aircraft strobed overhead en route to Jakarta or Singapore, my imagination failed me and I became aware of an absence.
Pagan has not remained uninhabited since the days of the Mongols. Earlier in the twentieth century farmers returned to settle among the kyaung ruins. A village had developed, and during my first visit to Burma I had eaten in a family restaurant and stayed up until dawn watching a local pwe festival. But from our peaceful, idyllic eyrie Katrin and I spotted no sign of the marketplace or tumbledown food stalls. There were no bamboo houses, villagers or school, only new hotels and sightseeing guides. The site had been transformed into a museum for tourists.
On the ride back to our hotel I asked Soe Htun what had happened to the old village. ‘Kublai Khan destroy,’ he replied. ‘Rape and pillage all of old Pagan. Very bad man.’
‘No, more recently than that,’ I said. ‘Maybe last year? Two years ago?’ Soe Htun turned to stare at me and I thought for a moment that he hadn’t understood. ‘There was a town here when I last visited.’
‘No town, no sir,’ he replied, fidgeting with the reins. A furtiveness had crept into his behaviour. ‘A few farmers, maybe, but no town.’
‘Ten years ago I stayed at a place called the Mother Hotel. And I remember a sign at a restaurant which said, “Be kind to animals by not eating them”.’
The cart turned off the track and onto a new tarmac carriageway. A gust of wind from a passing tour bus filled with Taiwanese holidaymakers almost blew us off the road. For a moment the only sound was the clip-clop of hooves on the tarmac. ‘Today is my first day as a horse-cart driver,’ Soe Htun said. ‘My grandfather buy for me. It is our business, you understand.’
‘We wish you success,’ said Katrin.
‘It must be success,’ he insisted. ‘You see I hoping many tourists come to Pagan so one day I can buy a cart for myself.’ It seemed unlikely; the horse and cart would have cost So Htun’s grandfather the equivalent of two years’ salary. He would also have had to bribe local officials to secure one of the 160 tourist horse-cart licences. ‘My grandfather take 30 per cent of my daily money so not leave much for saving, but one day I will make prosperous.’ He took a breath. ‘That is why it is important not to talk about some things.’
There was no further mention of the missing village. As the cart passed under an avenue of tamarind trees Soe Htun asked us if we wanted to go swimming at the Thiripyitsaya Hotel. It seemed that the pool was open to non-residents, of the hotel and the country, but the thought did not appeal. We were tired from our travels and I paid him. ‘The first money I earn,’ he said, slapping the notes on the cart and on the horse itself. ‘This bring me luck. It is my good fortune that you have come to Pagan. Please sir, tomorrow we go to buy souvenirs?’
‘No souvenirs,’ I said. ‘No thank you.’
‘I take you to quality lacquerware shop. My cousin working there. He give you good price.’
‘We don’t want to buy any lacquerware. We are trying to find a basket.’
‘In Pagan?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’ Katrin extracted the photograph from the bottom of her bag. ‘We were told that it might have been made here.’
Soe Htun held the picture at an angle, catching it in the amber glow of a street lamp. ‘Not Pagan style,’ he said with finality. Our spirits plummeted. Unwilling to see us disappointed, he added, ‘But I do know a woman who will help you.’
‘Here in Pagan?’ Katrin asked. ‘Can we meet her?’
‘She is an educated woman,’ said Soe Htun with approval, ‘and my friend. But her husband, he is a drunkard and a criminal. They say that he swings from a bamboo pole brushed with cess in England.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘He is a bad man. He fills the sky with lies.’
FOUR
Unpicking the Weave
STATIC. HISS AND WHISTLE. Distant voices strained through the crackle; Chinese martial music, a blast of rapidfire Morse code. A Baptist preacher ranted in the ether, his all-American twang drowning in a scream of heterodynes, then yielded to rock and roll. ‘Maybe I’m tuned to your wavelength.’ In the darkness of her room Ma Swe adjusted the shortwave radio, reached over borders, searched for clarity. Hiss and static, 9725 kilohertz 31-metre band, the bark of Burmese jamming. Another music station drifted across her signal. ‘The world is collapsing round our ears, I turn up the radio.’ Too loud, less volume, the walls were thin. More static. She needed new batteries. There wasn’t the money. It was mad to keep the radio. She had to sell it. Then she heard ‘This is London.’ Diddly-dee. ‘Lillibulero’, absurd and frivolous in the Asian dark. Another growl of interference. She returned to another frequency, quickly, 11850 kHz 25-metre. Would it be him? Please be him. Crackle and static. Turn it down, turn it right down. She leaned her ear against the receiver, listening as if to a dreaming child, and heard his voice. Half a world away he sat alone in a studio, in front of a microphone, speaking to her. To her alone. Ma Swe hadn’t seen her husband or received a letter from him, in over eight years, but she had heard him almost every night. Every night she listened to him, and remembered.
* * *
It had been through her ears, and not as other women through her hands and eyes, that Ma Swe had come to know the four loves. She had been born a frail child, at once fearful and curious, obedient yet independent, with an intense aversion to the sun. As a baby she had wailed through the hot season, crying to her mother to be taken into the leafy tamarind shade, cooing at her through the cool monsoon rains. Warm weather did not agree with her. So almost as soon as her legs would carry her she had retreated out of the smothering heat and into her own world. In the unlit recesses of the Ananda Pahto she had chased cold-blooded lizards and mythical tales, spinning herself into the jatakas, or Buddha birth stories, singing old love epics about the kinnayas, lovers half-bird and half-human who wept for seven hundred years after being separated for one night. Ma Swe loved the legends because her mother had been a poet. In the cool of evening she had been meshed into the passages of poems. ‘Listen, my lovely,’ her mother had said as they sat beneath the rhyming tree which grew in the temple precinct. Ma Swe had obeyed, hearing the song in her words, gaining a kernel of truth from each story. ‘Into every poem goes my only life,’ her mother had told her, and after each recital they had wound around and around the tree, repeating a line from here or a stanza from there, before collapsing in a heap to drink sweetened lime juice to the music of language. The gentle, loving childhood had set the pattern of Ma Swe’s life; to attend to others, to cherish the finite, to accept her insignificance. It also taught her the art of listening.
It was as a child that Ma Swe had been drawn to the first love. There were caves near the temple, and she had often played alone in their dim shadows. She was not afraid of the dar
k but rather of that which she could not hear, and one day she overheard the soft sound of whispers. She squeezed herself into a dim alcove and, above the beating of her heart, overheard the rustle of clothing. Beyond a stone lattice a man sighed, murmuring eternal promises in a moment’s passion, and a woman laughed in the blackness. Ma Swe lay as still as a reclining Buddha, almost near enough to the lovers to have been taken into their entwining arms, and listened. The thrill of their intimacy stirred her and she trembled beside them for hours, hidden in the alcove until nightfall. She hung onto the silence long after the unseen couple had regathered both their clothes and their modesty, and departed.
The wonder of the second and third loves had come to her five years later with the wails, pain and push of labour. She had been an adolescent lying on her sleeping mat in the family house, listening through a moonless night and thin bamboo walls. Late in life her mother had borne a last child and first son, but within twelve months the family’s whirl of joy had tangled into taut sorrow. The boy died from cerebral malaria. As they washed the little corpse from head to toe, then closely swathed it in new white cotton cloth, Ma Swe wept alongside the women. She shared the aching emptiness of her mother’s arms, but grieved alone for the loss of a brother.
Another decade later, as a wife herself, Ma Swe had understood the fourth love. Every night in her dark solitude she had reached out to grasp it. She tuned the radio to hear the voice of the man who had been gone for too long ever again to be her lover, whose child she would never bear, who would always remain her companion. The carnal and the maternal, platonic and filial love; all her life Ma Swe had learned by listening. At school, at the side of her mother’s cooking pot, even when walking alone in the arid, brick-littered fields between the payas of Pagan, she had always been quiet and intent, observant yet somehow distanced from experience. It had seemed such an obvious concept to her, to listen and to learn. But as she grew older the people around her had seemed to lack both the patience and the inclination to pay attention to anyone other than themselves.
The family that had embraced her could not alone contain her, and she had to reach beyond its confines. In time it was in the unpicking of the poems that she had come to understand her need to leave Pagan. Her mother’s words helped her to decide to train as an editor. There was so much noise and static in the world. Both deafness and verbosity muddled the search for clarity, and Ma Swe had learned the importance of succinct expression. She had an ear for the leanness of good writing, as well as the good fortune to have a teacher who was a member of the Burma Socialist Programme party. Ability had always played a large part in a child’s education, but with the military controlling the country a parent’s connections were more important. Ma Swe’s teacher was her uncle and he arranged for her a scholarship from the Ministry of Home and Religious Affairs. The condition attached to it would not become apparent until later.
In her three years at college Ma Swe never missed a lecture. She also never lingered outside. Her pale, translucent skin gave the impression of fragility, as if a bout of fever might be fatal. Her tutors, who were cowed newsmen and imported East German advisors adept at ideological journalism, worried for her health. They singled her out for special treatment, though not only because of her delicate constitution. They saw that Ma Swe observed and absorbed, but kept her opinions to herself. She was a good listener and therefore a suitable journalist. In early 1988 she graduated near the top of her class. But she had no ambition to write editorials for the Working People’s Daily. Instead she hoped only to return to Pagan, or at least to nearby Meiktila, and to find herself a quiet position as a regional correspondent, or better still a district editor. The ministry which had supported her education had other plans. They offered her a junior position at the Press Scrutiny Board, the government censor, in Rangoon. Ma Swe was free to refuse the post, of course, but if she turned it down she would be required to repay the full cost of her scholarship – plus interest.
The pages rustled in the fan’s languid breeze. Piles of manuscripts waited on a dozen dark wooden desks, beside Bakelite telephones which only received incoming calls, and carousels of rubber stamps: ‘Approved’, ‘Rejected’, ‘Refer to MI’. The reams of paper were stacked like sheaves of yellowed tobacco leaves around the old plaster walls. A single typed sheet was caught by the breeze and blown free from its binding, sailing across the office, over the bowed Monday morning heads before crumpling to the floor below a barred window. Beneath the slowly turning fans the censors read and yawned and sauntered out for coffee, idling past anxious authors and publishers who waited on the hard bench by the door. Ma Swe found her way to her seat, a ministry crest on its shoulder. She had been issued with a grey civil service uniform and a red pencil. She sat down at her desk and vanished behind the mountain of paper. The telephone rang and she picked up the receiver. The Board’s chairman, a major on secondment from Military Intelligence, barked a curt welcome then counted off the Eleven Principles.
‘In scrutinising literature and the media no publication may contain:
1. anything detrimental to the Burmese Socialist Program;
2. anything detrimental to the ideology of the state;
3. anything detrimental to the socialist economy…’
As he spoke Ma Swe scrabbled in the empty drawer to find a pen. She tried to note the guidelines with her red pencil on the back of a collection of short stories. In her confusion she missed Principles Number Four and Five, but lacked the courage to interrupt the Major.
‘6. any incorrect ideas and opinions which do not accord with the times;
7. any descriptions which, though factually correct, are unsuitable because of the time or circumstances of their writing;
8. any obscene or pornographic…’
Ma Swe broke her pencil lead in the midst of Principle Number Nine.
‘10. any criticism of a non-constructive type of the work of government departments;
11. any libel or slander of any individual.
Is this quite clear?’
‘Yes, saya,’ she answered.
‘The Principles are listed on the wall behind your head. Refer to them at each opportunity,’ he instructed and hung up.
Every newspaper and novel, comic and calendar, magazine and religious manual intended for publication in Burma had to pass through the PSB office. Works were submitted either in triplicate at manuscript stage or after printing, when five copies were required. The Board then read and approved – or forbade – distribution. Because of the costs involved in editing text after a book had been printed and bound, most writers tended to censor themselves. They wrote either bland pyei-thu akyo-pyu, that is ‘works beneficial to the people’, or allegories, veiled enough to pass the inspection yet not so disguised that readers overlooked their true meaning. A misjudgement meant non-publication; honesty guaranteed imprisonment. The restrictions did little to encourage clarity of thought.
Burma’s press had once been the most dynamic and free in Asia. The country’s first newspaper had been published in 1836. The colonial Rangoon Gazette, founded in 1861, had survived until the Second World War. For decades the nationalist cause had been served by Aung San’s Oway, the Dagon magazine and the Myanma Alin, or ‘New Light of Burma’. By the 1950s the country boasted more than thirty daily papers, including six in Chinese and three in English. But in 1962 the situation changed. The country was in chaos, rebel armies threatened to tear apart the union, and the military saw free thought as a threat to national stability. Irresponsible journalists – that is writers who expressed independent views – were perceived as troublemakers, capable of lobbying opinion against the Tatmadaw. So, for the sake of national unity editors and publishers were arrested, their newspapers closed or nationalised. To silence the voices of dissent the government banned all private dailies, and the press was placed under the direct control of the Ministry of Information.
At college Ma Swe and her classmates had learned of their responsibility to promote th
e ideology of the state. They were taught that the media needed to explain official policies, to inform the people of relevant facts and to exhort the virtues of hard work and sacrifice. Their role as editors and journalists was to help to strengthen the unity of the country, not to undermine it with criticism. The Burmese constitution granted every citizen freedom of speech, expression and publication ‘to the extent that such freedom is not contrary to the interests of the working people and socialism’. There was little room for interpretation and imagination.
But at the PSB Ma Swe was not yet responsible for imposing the Eleven Principles. She was a clerk, and too junior to be in charge of the dissemination of information. Her job was simply to look for spelling mistakes. On her carousel there hung a simple rubber stamp: ‘Fee Payable due to Errors of Spelling’. For every mistake that she found an author was required to pay ten pyas to the Board. There were one hundred pyas to the kyat. This charge was in addition to the reading fee, paid in advance, of fifty pyas per page.
Ma Swe had hoped that she might be able to learn from the work, but when the Major left his office and went out a few minutes later, she didn’t have time to read. The other clerks and the deputy supervisor gathered around her desk, bringing with them cups of tea and conversation. One clerk was from Meiktila and knew her uncle. Many of the others had, like her, studied journalism. The supervisor outlined for Ma Swe the daily routine of trimming words and unweaving thought. It was her work that had led to the recent banning of a series of articles recounting the legends and myths of famous pagodas. The articles, she recalled with pride, were censored because ‘there was no proof that any of the legends were true’.
‘Did they tell the story of the days when it rained gold and silver?’ Ma Swe asked her. ‘That is why there are so many pagodas in Pagan; after the rains even widows became rich enough to build them.’