by Rory Maclean
‘Are there still insurgents in the hills?’ asked Katrin. Our repulsive host had disgusted her, but it had not occurred to us before that there might be men in the area more dangerous than him. ‘I thought the government had signed ceasefire agreements in the north.’
Phahte slammed his pistol on the table. ‘My friends, don’t worry. I will die but I protect you. You are like family.’
Nancy looked at him from under her eyebrows, frowning at his unruly behaviour. ‘His father never used to drink so much,’ she whispered. ‘I lost him too.’
As Phahte sang ‘Jesus loves God’s little children,’ the gun boy refilled his glass. ‘You are Christian?’ he demanded again, pointing a twisted finger at me.
‘Yes, Phahte,’ I confirmed. I had had enough. ‘But I am a frustrated and annoyed Christian.’
As a rule I disapprove of weapons at the dinner table. Now I was anxious for our safety and wanted out, yet in Namhsan there was no handy telephone, no secure hotel and no authority greater than the unstable, over-armed drunkard who leered at us from across the table. It seemed to me that our only hope of salvation would be in manipulating his sense of honour as he had manipulated my naïve trust.
‘We are tired now, tired and disappointed,’ I said, and he seemed to listen. I tried to be bold. ‘We have been looking for a long time to find the basket which is probably a few hundred yards from here, but you won’t let us go to see it. You promised to help. But now I do not think that you are being fair to us.’
Phahte hit the table so hard that the lid jumped off the soup and small pieces of bird slopped onto the cloth. ‘Yes!’ he barked, ‘Yes!’ In the shadows the gun boy snapped to attention. ‘So I not pick you up sharp 8 a.m. tomorrow.’ His eyes gleamed with drunken purpose. For a moment there seemed to be the possibility that he would give us the time to meet the basket-maker. We might finally find Scott’s basket. ‘No, my friend. I pick you up at 6 a.m. and we go to church to pray. I mountain man. You gentle-man. No matter. We Christians together.’ The drunken chief of the Palaung militia waved his pistol in the air and fired. ‘God follows me,’ he shouted as shards of roof tile clattered down around us.
EIGHT
Bound to Love
THE CRY CAME long after midnight, soon after he had fallen both into her arms and to sleep, and almost scared the life out of her.
‘Who’s there?’ Nan Si Si whispered, now frightened again. ‘Who is it?’ The moon did not shine and the room was black, black as burial, and Saw Htoo was suddenly awake. ‘It’s not time yet.’
Saw Htoo sprung up and crossed the room. His feet were silent on the boards and Nan Si Si felt rather than saw him move. Only at the door, where he froze to listen, did she hear him release the rifle’s safety catch. The breath of night air stirred the leaves of the calendar on the far wall. He stepped down onto the path and circled the house. ‘Be careful,’ she thought. ‘Please take care.’ There wasn’t another sound. She wished that it was not so late. She told herself it was her fault that he had not taken more rest.
‘There’s no one there,’ he said when he returned.
‘I heard a voice,’ she insisted. It had been a man’s voice. He had spoken softly, as if reciting an incantation in the monastery. She had heard him whisper a single word.
‘It was probably a bird,’ Saw Htoo said casually, and lay back down beside her. He pulled her close but she knew he was listening. She felt him listening. She shivered, even though the night was warm. ‘It was nothing, Nan Si Si. Go back to sleep.’
He needed his sleep. She knew that he needed his sleep. In two hours it would be dawn and he would be gone. He and the other Karens would march south, moving behind the Japanese lines and down from the hills towards the railway. He had hidden the English soldier’s pack under the floorboards. She told herself that Saw Htoo had to rest, not to pander to the selfish fancies of a woman. The Karen think that the Palaung are a parsimonious people. Nan Si Si had never in her life considered herself to be mean, but when she met him it became true. She turned selfish. She didn’t want to share him. She couldn’t let go of him.
‘It’s so late,’ she said into the dark. ‘Who would disturb you at this time?’
‘Don’t worry about it.’
‘I couldn’t make out what he was saying.’
‘Go back to sleep.’
‘Maybe it was a bird,’ she conceded, hoping that her agreement would draw his thoughts back into the house. If he relaxed, if she could put him at ease, he might doze for an hour. She felt his senses still roaming outside, detached and prowling away from his body, making sure that they were safe. The fire had burned out but she was wide awake. Her heart pounded in her chest as loudly as a child beating a tin-can drum. Its rattle had to be keeping him awake. He needed to sleep. She wanted to taste him on her lips. She wanted him to wrap his senses around her like a living, pleasing cloak.
‘It must have been a bird,’ he said, but he had not believed her.
She shouldn’t have said it was a voice. ‘A bird or a bat.’
‘I wish they would leave us alone, the birds and bats, tonight of all nights,’ she moaned, then added, ‘Sleep, Saw Htoo. Try to get some more sleep.’
He sighed and felt for a cigarette. ‘He’s weary of war,’ she thought, ‘and maybe even of me.’ The flare of the match made the shadows dance around the room. Saw Htoo must have decided that there was no one outside, even though she knew that the prowler had not been a bird. He inhaled and in the glow of the cigarette his skin took on the smooth, burnished colour of a newborn baby. It made him look younger than his nineteen years, almost like a little child, and she wanted to cradle him in her arms. ‘Don’t go,’ she longed to tell him, but instead she asked, ‘Don’t you want to sleep more?’
‘With you awake beside me?’
‘Maybe you would prefer to have another girl beside you?’ she said, lifting herself up onto an elbow. She loved his heart-shaped face, his wide forehead and tapered cheeks. It gave him a look of meditative serenity. ‘Maybe you’d like Nan Ihla? You once said that Ihla was like a little bird. Or did you say a bat?’ Saw Htoo laughed out loud, so she continued, ‘She is fat like a paddy-mortar. And she snores, you know. Did you know that?’
‘Maybe it was her sneaking around outside the house.’
‘No, it was a man,’ she said, and then regretted it. ‘If only I would think before opening my mouth,’ she told herself. He drew deeply on the cigarette, and she felt his senses reach out again beyond the walls. The jungle was still and made no sound. She pulled at his waist to draw him back to her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m just a little scared. There’s no one there.’
‘No one at all,’ Saw Htoo said with certainty.
He smoked his cigarette, every measured breath one less for them to spend together. She counted their passing in the silence between their words. ‘You know Ihla?’ she said after a moment. She felt bad about her lie. Ihla was her friend. It was true that she was plump, but she had made up the story about her snoring. ‘And her father?’
‘The mat-maker?’
‘He used to have a terrible temper,’ she said.
‘He seemed nice enough to me.’
‘It used to be so bad that his wife encouraged him to travel away from Namhsan for months on end. Until one day, when he was away and Ihla was little, Ihla came into our house weeping. “Come quickly,” she said. “My mother is lying on the floor crying. You have to help her.” My mother and I ran to their house and found that she was in labour. The mat-maker didn’t even know she was pregnant.
‘“Please don’t tell my husband,” Ihla’s mother pleaded with us. “He will beat me. We cannot afford another child.”
‘She planned to give it away to some cousin in Panglong. My mother said nothing, and helped her with the delivery. Saw Htoo, I had never seen anything like it. But after the baby was born my mother told the woman, “Mind that you keep and love this child. If you don’t I’ll come and take him from yo
u, for I’ve lost two girls of my own.”
‘I didn’t know your mother had lost two children,’ said Saw Htoo, gentler now. Nan Si Si hadn’t told him. Many women lose babies. Often couples who have been robbed of their children dedicate the newest born to the monastery in the hope of saving its life. The evil spirits might then not have the power to take that baby away. ‘What did the mat-maker say when he came back?’ he asked.
‘He held the child in his arms, not looking at it, but with tears in his eyes. I went home and cried the rains.’
They both fell quiet again, only now Saw Htoo was with her. He no longer listened to the outside or even reached ahead to the morning’s march. She placed her hand across his waist. She realised that in the excitement of her storytelling she had woven the quilt around herself alone. Saw Htoo lay uncovered and naked, so she wrapped his body in her own.
Since that first birth Nan Si Si had often tried to picture herself as a mother. She had tried to imagine a life growing within her. She needed to feel the pain of delivery and the deep bond of shared flesh. She didn’t care if she had a baby boy or a girl, even though boys are born with more merit. But she did wish for the good fortune of a birth at the full moon, and not for a Saturday-born child who would bring her unhappiness or poverty. She imagined that she would wash her baby in clean, cold water before its first sunrise and, when it was a few days old, give it its first taste of rice. She would chew the steamed – not boiled – rice into a smooth pap and then, as her mother had done for her, feed it to her child like a kiss. By its sixth month he or she would eat as much as three teacupfuls of rice a day and so grow strong like a stone and live long like water.
Her child would be the embodiment of love. It would sleep between her and her husband on its own little mat. She would carry it to the harvest and, as it grew older, they would teach it to herd cattle and to clear weeds from around the tea plants. Her husband would make it a clay whistle. It would learn the old rhyming tales which her mother had taught her. Its skin would be smooth all over like a mouse.
Every mother wishes for healthy, happy children. But if her baby remained weak she would make offerings so that its spirit might acquire merit and, when it died, live longer in the body next inhabited. She held onto Saw Htoo and kissed him, knowing that in less than two hours her arms would be empty. She wanted a child so deeply that she could taste it.
‘But I am not going away to sell sleeping mats, Nan Si Si,’ said Saw Htoo. ‘I might not come back.’
‘We could hide,’ she hurried, rising onto her knees before him. His cigarette had been snuffed out and it was again pitch black in the room. ‘I know places in the hills. We could go there. No one would find us.’
‘I cannot hide. I am fighting for a Karen state. Isn’t that a beautiful sound? The Karen State.’ He rolled the words around his mouth to savour them. ‘It is what we’ve been promised.’ And again his thoughts fled away from her.
She lay back down into her own solitude. When she was young, before her fourteenth year, the young men of Namhsan had come calling. As was the custom, each man wrapped himself in a large grey blanket which enveloped both body and head, a disguise designed to hide his identity from all but her. By the fireside they whispered their names, which all those assembled knew in any case, and in turn she gave them betel-nut and cheroots. Once five men sat together with her and they gossiped all evening, in between their formal rhymes of courtship. Ihla never had more than three suitors serenade her. The next day on the hills the men, who picked tea on different terraces, sang love songs to her and the other girls. She told them all to take a long drink of water to stop the flow of words. A Palaung girl is free to marry whomever she pleases, provided that the man shares her wish, but no neighbour took Nan Si Si’s heart, and so the courtship soon lost its interest for her. She was not afraid to look to the left and to the right, that is to flirt with men, but she became lazy in her responses to their questions. Once she even yawned, when the carpenter’s son Sai Wai was telling her what he had eaten that day. He later stole a thread from her coat and took it to the wise man to cast a love charm. It was then that she began to lock the entrance-door so none of them could come into her house, until her mother found out and scolded her.
It was not that she disliked the compliments, rather that she could not determine their true value. The whispered promises made her emotions sway like bamboo in the monsoon, yet the shower of kind words did not begin to satisfy her thirst. Excitement inevitably led to disappointment, laughter was always followed by tears and any real meaning remained changeable and unclear. She chose to wait for fate to bring her the man who would hold her heart.
When the war began it was not only the old traditions that died. There was no longer time for courtship ceremonies, or even for the morning sharing of night-time’s dreams. The English tea-planters and bureaucrats escaped up into the hills, losing thousands of their people on the high jungle trails that led to India. Nan Si Si’s mother, who had before abused with blasphemy the British Empire, gave the poor women and men food as they passed by the house. It was not that she cared particularly for the English. She had always condemned the three ‘M’s of their colonial ways: their missionaries, merchants and military. Rather, there was simply no vengeance in her character. She would have done the same for the Japanese if their refugees had been retreating, had they not cut short her forbearance by bombing Namhsan. She had died in the fire which swept through the marketplace. It was Nan Si Si who found it difficult to forgive them now.
‘There, Saw Htoo!’ she hissed in terror, startled back to her senses. ‘Listen.’
‘Quiet,’ he whispered, already on his feet, the gun in his hand. ‘I heard it.’
‘That wasn’t a bird.’
Saw Htoo crossed the inner room in two strides, then reached the door in a single step. He shouted a challenge at the darkness, first in Karen and then in Palaung, but no answer came back. He sprinted around behind the house, from where the voice seemed to have come. His bare feet drummed on the hardened earth. He, like all the other Karen soldiers, rose at the prospect of a fight. He seemed anxious to defend both his faith and his nation with his life. She prayed that the unknown intruder wasn’t stronger than him. Saw Htoo pushed deeper into the night and she heard the thrash and snap of branches. ‘Saw Htoo?’ she called, suddenly alone. ‘Saw Htoo?’
She stood up from the mat and tried to find her clothes. It was foolish to have undressed, she scolded herself. The Palaung usually sleep fully-clothed, women removing only the scarlet hood, but the Karen throw off their garments and sleep naked, like animals, in the skin. She wished now that he had spared her that habit. It was so foolish, if pleasing. She found her cap but nothing else. Her clothes were not where she had left them. At the start of the night, after she had laid out their bedding, she had asked Saw Htoo to look away and had undressed quickly, folding her smock and dress and setting them beside the hearth. Now she could not find them. He might have hidden them as a joke. She should have stayed dressed and let him sleep, stayed dressed so he might stay alive.
‘Saw Htoo?’ she whispered. There were no sounds outside the house, not even the breath of the wind. She felt for his matches but they too had vanished. He must have knocked the box aside. She could see nothing. She held up her hand in front of her face, close enough to touch her nose, but it was too dark even to make out her fingers. She bit them for the reassurance that it really was her here in this room in this house in the jungle. She licked them and tasted him.
She remembered an old woman who had appeared at the head of the cradle on the evening after Ihla’s mother had given birth. Nan Si Si had not recognised her, as she was too young, and assumed that she was the cousin from Panglong. At first only the swiftness of her arrival had seemed unusual. Panglong was more than a day’s travel from Namhsan. But the woman had sat among them, sharing in the examination of the child. There was always the time to talk in those days. Before the war it was still thought that a deep hollow
at the nape of the baby’s neck indicated a selfish and miserly character. Large ears, on the other hand, were considered a sure sign that the child would be good and wise. The visitor had explained that the position of birthmarks, with which Palaung and Shan children are often born, indicated something of the previous existence of the reincarnated spirit. The signs were discussed and their meanings interpreted, and towards the end of the examination the old woman stood up and left. It was only then that the other women fell silent. Later Nan Si Si learned that the visitor had been Ihla’s mother’s own grandmother, who had been dead for almost thirty years. The old woman’s ghost had appeared to the family before, sharing in the birth of both Ihla’s mother and Ihla herself. Now she had come to welcome their newest-born. Ihla’s mother had then rubbed a finger of soot off the bottom of the rice-pot and made a black mark between her baby’s eyebrows.
‘Saw Htoo?’ Nan Si Si heard his steps follow the path, climb the verandah and cross the room. She reached out in the dark to seize him.
‘I could find no one.’
‘He called your name, Saw Htoo. Your name.’ The stranger’s voice had shocked her. It had spoken as if from half-sleep, intimate yet distant, murmuring Saw Htoo’s name again and again.
He was shaking. She could feel him shaking. But he answered her alarm in a controlled tone, ‘You must not worry. We are tired. We should try to rest a little.’
They lay together, skin to skin, and now she felt thankful for Karen ways. She did not want to hear again the calling of his name. She buried her head in his chest and listened to his heart, traced its pulse, felt his body damp from the jungle dew. The intimacy reassured her, pushing the voice out of her mind and away from them. Saw Htoo’s concentration drifted too, dulled by his tiredness, and they may have slipped off into the refuge of sleep.
‘I can’t believe it’s less than a week since we met,’ he said. She did not know if a minute had passed, or a whole precious hour. She gripped him, startled awake. His calm, confident manner comforted her.