by Rory Maclean
‘It’s all happened so quickly,’ she said. ‘Maybe too quickly,’ she thought.
‘I remember seeing you that first time.’ He had slipped into the tea factory among the pickers who weighed and emptied the day’s harvest into long mounds near the door. Nan Si Si had noticed him caught in the great white beam of light that slanted down from the upper window. ‘You were standing at the oven, staring at me.’
‘I was not staring.’ She had been trying to brush the dust and steam from her eyes. ‘I was just looking.’
‘Looking like you were staring, then,’ he said. She had been working her way along the hot metal plates, judging the tea’s dryness, turning the moist, shredded leaves with short flicks of her hands. The bright lines of fresh green leaves were the only colour in the dusty shed. Ihla had been beside her, tending the clay oven’s fires. ‘But I was staring at you,’ admitted Saw Htoo.
‘As well as fat old Ihla.’
‘She will keep some man happy and warm through the rains.’
‘And I will not?’ She turned away from him and he held her, wrapping her in the safety of his arms.
‘You will,’ he breathed into her ear. She closed her eyes. ‘The boy who was there on the first day, packing the sacks – what was his name? Sai Wai?’
‘The carpenter’s son?’
‘He seemed to be soft on you.’
‘He is just plain soft, as soft as a pumpkin.’
‘One day I believe he will make a fine husband and give you many healthy children, all born with your gentle eyes…and his flat feet.’
She turned back to beat him then, pounding her fists against his chest until he laughed his whiplash laugh again and pulled her so close that she thought the breath would be squeezed out of her.
That first evening, when Saw Htoo had come to her father’s house to talk of driving the Japanese from the country, she had known that he was the man she would marry. The revelation had come to her with great clarity, as certain as bamboo is strong. The dangers and complications had not occurred to her. She had not considered that his bravery might get him killed, even though she admired him for risking his life, or that he wished to return to his southern village of wooden clapboard churches after the war. She knew simply that she wanted to bear his child, their child, so that his laugh and courage and heart-shaped face would live for ever.
‘I can’t breathe,’ she gasped. ‘Le me breathe, Saw Htoo.’ He let her go and she strained for air.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I like it when you hold me, but not that tight.’
‘I wasn’t thinking.’ It was not true. He had been thinking, only not of her.
‘It’s not fair,’ she complained as she caught her breath. ‘They shouldn’t disturb us tonight.’
‘It must have been some boys from the village.’
‘It was a man’s voice. Maybe the other Karens?’
‘Damn kids,’ he swore, but without anger, and she realised for the first time that he too was frightened.
He lit another cigarette. His matches had been under the mat. He looked at his watch. Its minute-hand seemed to be racing ahead, counting off the last hour. She took his hand into her own and shook his wrist as if to slow down the clockwork march of time. ‘It is running too fast,’ she thought.
‘I never told you about my friend Ko Kyin Pe,’ said Saw Htoo, exhaling. The smoke curled up towards the roof tiles. ‘We grew up in the same village, and did everything together. We played together, hunted together, and when the war started we joined the Burma Rifles together. Last month he was shot’ – Saw Htoo placed her hand on his stomach – ‘here.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘It took him two days to die. We had no morphine. He pissed blood until there was no more blood left in him. The Sergeant too, who was from Loikaw, died the same morning. He stepped on a landmine. I found him leaning against a tree, staring at the ground looking for his legs.’ He took another draw on his cigarette. His words were gentle now, spoken no louder than a whisper. ‘When it happens to me I’d like to die quickly. Here,’ he said, and placed her hand on his heart.
‘It won’t happen to you. I want you to come back to me. Remember that.’ He didn’t answer her. ‘Please remember.’
‘I’ll remember.’ The words were spoken in the same flat tone of voice as if he had said ‘The tea is ready.’
‘It must have been the village boys,’ she insisted, angry now. ‘I’ll tie them to their houses in the morning. They shouldn’t make trouble for new couples.’
‘Damn them. God damn them.’
‘It must have been them fooling around.’
‘It’s too late now to try to sleep.’ He looked again at his watch. ‘Much too late.’ He went to put out his cigarette, even though it was not half-smoked, and the room slipped again into darkness.
Nan Si Si and Saw Htoo had eloped, as was the tradition, though without the customary long engagement. Their courtship had lasted four days. A girl’s parents can object only to a match with a man from another clan or village. Her father did not approve of Saw Htoo despite his strengths, telling her not to set a stone on a slope. He feared that ill would befall the daughter who married a defiant, foreign man. ‘A tree growing in the middle of the bamboo is useless,’ he had told her. The Palaung are a quiet and peaceable people, despising all those who take human life. He would never have approved of her marriage to a Christian guerrilla fighter, no matter how defensible his principles, no matter how her mother had died. But she believed that Saw Htoo was a good man. She knew that he would care for her and protect her. He was a man willing to shout at the silence of the night.
‘I have not built you a house,’ Saw Htoo had apologised. It was the custom, when parents objected to a marriage, for the man to build a home for his lover. But there hadn’t been enough time. So her uncle had loaned them this hut in the jungle instead. An elder had chosen an auspicious hour for the elopement, with due regard for the days of the week on which they had each been born. Ihla had helped her to carry her clothes and her bedding – a mat, a quilt and a small pillow. Her cooking pot had come too. Her uncle had acted as their escort. Saw Htoo had left tobacco for her father but he had refused to accept the gift. They had come to this house only a few hours before, and then had not slept at all. They had talked together, eaten a little curry and rice, and then he had told her that he needed to rest. She had known it but she had kept on talking, and had taken him again and again into her arms.
One day there would be a wedding, and all the village would sit before their lacquered bowls. One day a baby would sleep in her lap. One day Ihla too would have a child, maybe fathered by Sai Wai, the heartbroken carpenter’s son, and the two young women would sit together watching their children play.
‘You will come back, Saw Htoo,’ Nan Si Si said, ‘and we will have a family.’
‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But maybe we should wait.’
‘It’s too late. You have me now.’
‘But don’t you think it’s selfish?’
‘What?’
‘Wanting a family.’
‘You will come back,’ she pleaded. She didn’t want to talk about death again. It was a time for beginnings, not for conclusions. She wanted her man alive. ‘I will find the bone of the socket of a tiger’s eye to make you a ring that will protect you. I will buy a sambur’s sprouting antler to give you courage. You will come back to me.’
‘And I will die, either later this morning or in fifty years’ time. It doesn’t matter when. In making a new life we are only trying to perpetuate our own, defying death. To me, that’s selfish.’
She had never considered love to be selfish, although there was a greed in her need for a baby. ‘Maybe it is at first,’ she admitted, ‘but in it are the seeds of selflessness, of creating and nurturing and teaching and then – when the child becomes an adult – of having the generosity to let go.’ She began to wish for the dawn. She wanted the black, broken night to be driven a
way by the rising sun. ‘And it does matter when you die,’ she added. ‘If it didn’t, if there wasn’t any future, I wouldn’t be here with you. I wouldn’t be yours.’
‘I just don’t want you to be left alone,’ he said.
‘If you’ll light the fire again I’ll make us some tea.’
As the water boiled Saw Htoo dismantled his rifle. He slid the bolt free and counted his cartridges. They flashed with a terrible, evil beauty in the firelight. He cleaned each part and reassembled the weapon.
‘The Palaung believe that we are descended from the sun and a dragon,’ she told him. Their wait for the dawn had lulled them into silence. She tried to fill it with an old legend. ‘A dragon princess – a naga – who lived deep down in the earth decided that she wanted to see the light of day. So she changed form and became a beautiful girl, and when the sun prince saw her, he came down to her and loved her for seven days. But then he tired of her and returned to his home in the sky.’
‘I won’t tire of you.’
‘In time the princess, because she was really a naga, laid three eggs and, in her rage at the prince, threw them away. The first fell into the Gangaw Taung. It broke and turned all the mountains that it touched into jade. The second egg landed at Mogok, which is why the hills there are filled with rubies and sapphires. But the third egg was caught in a tree and did not break. The sun warmed it until it hatched into the first Palaung.’ When Saw Htoo chuckled she told him, ‘We believe it to be the real history of our origin. It is no less fanciful than your loaves and fishes or walking on water.’
‘You believe that the first Palaung was born in an egg?’
‘We wear clothes in stripes to recall the naga’s scales. Our hoods remind us of the dragon’s head. Our dresses are of the early morning sparkling. The daytime green and midnight black honour our parents. I believe this; at least I would if I could find my clothes. Where did you hide them?’
‘You don’t need dragon’s scales when you are with me.’
‘Saw Htoo, I need my clothes. It’s nearly morning.’
He laughed and took her then, at last, by the fire as the tea brewed, and afterwards slept deeply, briefly, like an ox. At dawn a crow cawed away to the north-east of the house. It was a bad omen. While Saw Htoo slept Nan Si Si made a mark on him with a piece of charcoal, as the old woman had taught her, knowing that if he was killed and a baby was born to her with a birthmark in the same position, his spirit had entered into the body of the child.
They ate the last of the rice for breakfast. Taste is the most social of the senses, and the most intimate. Mouths are used to talk and to kiss, as well as to eat. Flavours cannot be savoured from a distance. Taste brings pleasure, from mother’s milk to a last curry, from lovers’ first embrace to their children eating around the family table. Nan Si Si found her clothes under the house, hidden with the pack of explosives. She dressed while Saw Htoo prepared his kit. ‘Come home,’ she told him as the sun rose above the trees, ‘and do not fear.’
‘I am not afraid, Nan Si Si.’
A man’s voice whispered outside the house. It summoned him, and this time did not frighten them. They were prepared for its call. Saw Htoo went out into the morning and met his platoon. He divided the supply of cartridges and charges. She rolled up the bedding.
‘I heard you calling my name in the night,’ he joked in Karen to the youngest soldier. ‘I would have thought you’d have more manners.’
‘It wasn’t me, sir,’ replied the soldier, surprised by the accusation. ‘I didn’t leave the village all night.’
‘I can’t think what kept you awake,’ teased the Lieutenant, noticing Saw Htoo’s tired eyes, and the other men laughed with him.
Saw Htoo came back inside and kissed her goodbye. It was time. ‘It wasn’t the village boys,’ he decided. ‘It was the Lieutenant. I should have known. He’s such a joker.’
‘You will come back, Saw Htoo,’ she whispered. She hadn’t told him about the charcoal mark
Nan Si Si – and the angry dragon child within her – watched him walk away up the path towards the far horizon.
NINE
Stitch and Pair
WE AWOKE to the sound of lapping waves, to the smell of sweet water, to the caress of cool morning breeze. My tongue tingled in anticipation of more papaya and honeydew melon. Katrin slipped out from under the sheet to open the bedroom curtains. Her bare feet padded on the terracotta-tiled floor. I blinked away the sudden brightness. Two dark-haired lovers drifted in the bay, the man held in the woman’s arms like a child at her breast. The water’s calm, mirrored surface reflected the whiteness of the sky. Beyond the lake, high above the floating islands woven from the stems of hyacinths, we watched a single, black bird circle the embrace of misty hills.
The evening before we had arrived at the Gypsy Guest House in the dark, seeing nothing, hearing nothing, not knowing the place where we had chosen to stop and recuperate. The electricity supply had fused and I had tripped on the stairs and dropped our luggage. Katrin had walked into a cupboard while looking for the bathroom. We had eaten our midnight feast of fresh local fruit in silence and by torchlight, until the batteries had run out. We had undressed and found the bed by touch alone, falling into a dead sleep of utter exhaustion.
Less than a week earlier we had been in Namhsan. Our single, fearful night there had passed punctuated by the scamperings of rats and Phahte’s fitful snores. Once in the small hours he had shouted out loud and Katrin had gripped my hand. She hadn’t let go, even when we ourselves had dozed off on the dark edge of dawn, startling each other awake an hour later to find him gone. He had not marched us off to church, so we stole away instead for breakfast with Nancy, that is Nan Si Si. The evening before over supper she had stood up to her son, and even though she had been shouted down, he had listened to her reason in the end. He had put away his pistol and let us alone. We had slunk off to our sleeping mats, hounded only by his tirade against the feebleness of ‘gentle-men’. It could have been far worse. Nancy had acted as our intermediary, intervening on our behalf, and had tempered the worst of his excesses. We had been grateful to her, and for the hour’s peace spent over milky morning tea apart from her son. ‘We need to bite at each other,’ she had repeated to us, hinting at both her distaste for his belligerence and the depth of her devotion to him. ‘It is our way.’
Yet, much as she had wished to help us, she had not been able to find the basket-maker. He had been sent into the fields to help pick tea and would not be returning for a week. We had no option but to leave Namhsan without meeting him. While we waited in Phahte’s Willys, Nancy had wished us a safe journey home. ‘The world is round,’ she had said, then added with a dash of hopelessly hopeful Burmese optimism, ‘Maybe we meet again one day.’
On the drive back not a word had passed between us. The journey took almost ten hours. Phahte had acted with the grace of a spoilt child, stopping and starting every few hundred yards, shooting over twenty-five birds along the way. In Hsipaw, when his driver had dropped us off, he had not even turned around to say goodbye. We never saw if he had a birthmark on the place where Nancy had once marked his father, Saw Htoo.
‘I was fearful for your safety,’ the gardener had said after the jeep had driven away. We had been surprised to find him awaiting our return. ‘My conscience could not let me leave before setting eyes on you again.’
‘That man is dangerous,’ I had flared, turning my anger at myself on him. I had been enraged by my causal acceptance of his assurances of safety. ‘If you ever again help tourists, do not let them travel with Phahte.’
The gardener had nodded in sincere appreciation. ‘Thank you for your advice. But it is not to Phahte that I was referring. It is his enemies who must be feared.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘It is considered bad business to shoot a guest,’ he had explained, ‘even your enemy’s guest. Phahte was not so much protecting you, as you were protecting him.’
It seemed tha
t our host travelled by armed convoy because he was frightened. The gardener had learned that years before Phahte had been an ambitious Tatmadaw sergeant who had seen the chance to advance himself in Namhsan. The army lacked the resources to police the Shan Hills, so, by fighting off the insurgents and brokering a kind of peace, Phahte had been able to carve out a fiefdom for himself in his mother’s land. The government had been pleased to grant authority to one who, if not reliable, was at least consistent in his greed. Phahte would rule until the Tatmadaw had the men and arms to control the area itself. Or until his enemies – who were jealous of his profits – killed him.
The memory of our ordeal had stayed with us on the rocking, retching train ride back to Mandalay, and along the switchback bus trip through Kalaw and Aungban, renowned among Shan truckdrivers for its infamous brothels. We hadn’t had the strength to think of anything else. We had risked so much to reach Namhsan, yet had failed in our objective. Our journey had become an end in itself, but the recollection of my stupidity haunted me. In a display of faith which would have pleased Phahte, I thanked God for our escape from him, and from his enemies.
I ate two mangoes and four sweet, thumb-sized bananas for breakfast. From the guest house balcony we gazed out across picturesque Inle Lake, Burma’s only real holiday destination. Elderly Americans took happy snaps of water buffaloes bathing at the boat landing. A French tour group compared the merits of the Yadana Man Aung Paya with the pagodas of Laos. Nyaungshwe, the waterside tourist town of hotels and souvenir shops, offered fresh food but few smiles. The restaurants had more diners than flies. The bars stocked Carlsberg rather than Steinbräu – ‘brewed by the Sino-German Wuhan Yangtze River Brewery Company Limited’. Shops sold Western goods smuggled over the border from Thailand. An Oral-B toothbrush cost fifty kyat. $50 bought vintage Moët et Chandon champagne. The twice-daily flight from Rangoon was packed with foreigners. Onboard one heard no Burmese spoken. At the Inle Hotel three families of giraffe-necked Padaung women had been put on display like animals in a zoo. They were housed in a compound and tourists paid $3 to photograph them, saving themselves both the time and the trouble of travelling into the hills. Smiles had been unconditional elsewhere in Burma, but in Nyaungshwe faces were harder. No one attempted to pay our bus fare.