The Blue-Eyed Shan

by Becker, Stephen;

  The girl’s gaze darted from man to man. She nodded hesitantly and then astonished them: she giggled.

  “To victory,” Olevskoy said.

  “Not funny.”

  “No.” Olevskoy drank off the small cupful. “To defeat, then.”

  “To defeat.”

  “Funeral baked meats and Scotch whisky.”

  “‘Did coldly furnish forth the marriage table.’ You remind me of Hamlet, you know. You look as I always imagined him.”

  “And why not? Am I not a prince? And my ancestors were Scandinavian.” Olevskoy accepted a cigarette.

  Yang’s brow rose. “You never told me that last.”

  “The original Russians were a Swedish tribe. My line goes back to Ivan Kalita Moneybag—”

  “You cannot be serious.”

  “I never joke about my family. You can look it up. And from Ivan back to Nevsky, Vsevolod, Igor and Rurik.”

  Yang said, “Mon Dieu.”

  “Good idea. We ought to stick to French now. March into Tonkin chattering away like Parisians.”

  The men replenished their cups. The girl sat like a child at a puppet show, only sipping from time to time. Olevskoy raised his cup and said, “Tonkin!”

  General Yang raised his and said, “Pawlu!”

  Olevskoy checked. “What the devil is that?”

  “Not ‘what,’” Yang said. “‘Where.’ Pawlu is a place. It is a small, happy village either in China or in Burma, and it is where we are going, and for once in our lives we shall visit decent people and do no harm.”

  The argument lasted half an hour; the quarrel for the rest of their lives. Olevskoy stormed off with his juvenile concubine and appeased anger, lust and ennui at once by taking her in cold fury; she seemed to respond, which eased him, and when she breathed finally, “Ah! Foreign devil!” he chose to take the hackneyed compliment for truth. Calmer, he joined his fellow officers at the evening meal and made small talk correctly. A prisoner, he learned, had been taken, a sniper, and was under guard in the former laundry.

  General Yang’s kidney had commenced to twinge again.

  The Red Bandits seemed to be regrouping; at any rate there were no reports of lightning dashes or encirclements.

  Olevskoy rose when the general rose; the formal nod, replacing bows and salutes among this motley command, was offered; Olevskoy retired to nurse his grudges, helpless now short of outright mutiny, doomed to a mysterious and primitive village called Pawlu instead of the cosmopolitan Hanoi he longed for, the vin rouge and the poules de luxe and perhaps a commission in the Legion.

  At the third dawn of this fleeting conquest the occupying troops assembled in the grand plaza before the governor’s yamen. Rolls were called. One hundred and two men remained. Also thirteen vehicles of which seven were rachitic or tubercular. Arms and ammunition galore, another irony: they might never again fire a shot in anger. Olevskoy carried the carbine and the American .45, being fond of the latter. The Luger, he felt, was grossly overestimated. An American .45 stopped anything. This he proved before the caravan moved out.

  General Yang received reports with satisfaction, saw personally to the safe stowage of fuel, and delivered a pithy lecture on smoking in the vicinity of same: he would personally execute any man found smoking within ten meters of the fuel carriers. “Discipline,” he said to the ragged, wounded young sniper whom Major Wei had just delivered to him. “That much we have in common. You claim to be the fish, and the people are the sea; fish swim in schools. Have you watched fish in great shoals? Mysteriously hundreds of them will veer or leap at once.”

  “They survive,” the wounded man said lightly.

  Yang surveyed his line, his order of march. “Major Ho. Major Wei.”

  “Sir!”

  “Your sections are ready to move out?”

  “Sir!”

  The general told the sniper, “Your famous Governor Lu Han is in there,” and waved a swagger stick toward the compound. “Tell him for me he is a fool, but a lucky fool. Any other Nationalist general would have razed his little palace and hung him by the plums. Tell him that, and good luck to you.”

  “Well, good luck to you too,” the sniper said, but General Yang, stately and erect—command presence a habit now, a necessity—was already taking his place in a presentable jeep, which promptly chugged across the plaza to the head of the line. Orders eddied in the morning light. Metal clattered and clanked. A motor hawked and spat.

  “Who is this man?” Olevskoy asked.

  “The enemy,” said Major Ho. “A sniper.”

  “A genuine Red? The one who killed my driver?”

  “The same, sir.”

  “The war is over, Colonel,” said Major Wei.

  “And my driver meant less to me than a Soochow whore. All the same, to kill him was an insult.” Olevskoy and the young man performed a mutual inspection. Olevskoy saw a blunt but intelligent face, disheveled hair, tattered clothes and utter, ultimate defiance. He knew what the sniper saw: officer, breeches, boots, round eyes, big nose.

  “You Americans are betting on the old stag,” the sniper said. “You should have backed the young tiger.”

  “Not American,” Olevskoy said. A cry echoed across the square, a tailgate slammed shut, another engine turned. “Russian. An old stag.”

  “Not Red.”

  “Not Red,” said Olevskoy. “I am afraid you have made a mistake.”

  After a moment the sniper blew his nose through the fingers of his good left hand, and wiped the hand on his torn and stained trousers. “I have never seen a Russian, and I have been a Red for fifteen years.”

  The head of the column was moving out. A barrage of racing motors and clashing gears assaulted them, a drift of exhaust fumes washed over them.

  “Long enough,” Olevskoy said. “Out of my sight. Go to the bastard Lu Han and deliver your message.” His voice was barely audible in the clamor.

  The sniper frowned, as if this world were proving more complicated than he had been led to believe, and turned away, padding toward the compound, the knot of his sling bright white against the black of his jacket.

  Olevskoy’s hand went to his holster. Major Wei said, “Colonel!” but too late: swiftly Olevskoy drew the pistol and extended his arm, loudly he cried “Red Bandit!” The sniper halted, hesitated, finally looked back, scarcely stirring then, only his eyes widening a fraction, perhaps in fear, perhaps in a last impossible effort to glimpse the future, perhaps even in disgust. Olevskoy relished this second or two of shock, of finality, of a perplexity so deep and paralyzing that no one could speak, not even Wei, who had already spoken; and Olevskoy hoped, as he often had before, that when his own time came he would have notice, and could look death in the eye. He fired. The young man toppled. Olevskoy tucked away his pistol and turned to the majors.

  “Just another Chinese,” Wei said quietly.

  “I’ve killed more Russians than I have Chinese,” Olevskoy said, “and more Japanese than either.”

  “And the general’s message to Lu Han?”

  “On your way, gentlemen,” Olevskoy said. “Keep your sections moving and remember we’re just one long flank on both sides. Keep those flanks covered.”

  Major Ho said, “Sir!”

  Deliberately, Major Wei turned his back.

  4

  Pawlu

  The two mounted Kachin sat arguing beneath the suspended cage. They were half a kilometer from Naung, who lay on his belly in a pine grove uphill shading his binoculars and noting what he could: turbans, white blouses, black Kachin trousers, Yunnan ponies. One Kachin gestured fiercely at the cage, and for a moment the two appeared undecided. At this distance Naung could not identify their weapons. Rifles, surely, and the Kachin swords slung across their backs. He saw no pistols. A mercenary in the Japanese war, he had journeyed to Laos and Tonkin and had returned with his own weapons, the French M1935 pistol and M1938 submachine gun—mitraillette, as the French had taught him to call it—because they used the sam
e cartridge. Well and good, but his mitraillette was not accurate beyond fifty meters.

  He would take them close and take them sure.

  The Kachin came to agreement. With a last glance at the cage they turned off the road and onto the mountain trail. The last Naung saw of them, before teak and pyinkado swallowed them, they were peering about cautiously rifles at the ready. Fools! Beginners! They rode bareback and they rode well, with the knees.

  Naung squawked twice, a parakeet.

  A parakeet answered.

  Naung took up his weapon and loped soundlessly through the forest. There was not time to ask travelers’ intentions. Traders came with oxen or mules, and not bearing arms. Kachin were not bad people but this was Naung’s valley. It was the Sawbwa’s valley really, but Naung thought of the Sawbwa as king, or fool-king, and himself as commander in chief.

  He skirted East Poppy Field, his blood running hot and strong, the breath in his lungs like wine. His valley and his people. Killing was commonplace and not difficult. But not all men had such good reasons.

  Unless they climbed to the ridge, the Kachin would cross or round East Poppy Field, which was precautionary terrain, for show and maneuver; Pawlu proper began half a mile to the west, through Red Bullock Pass. The pass was the first line of Shan defense and the people of Pawlu had never, so far, needed another. Organization. Method. Naung was proud of himself. He was a born fighter.

  Wan was waiting at the pass. Naung raced to him. “Kin-tan?”

  “North Slope. Mong, South Slope. Don’t fret. No one will outflank us. What is it this time?” Wan was a bull of a man, powerful, over forty monsoons and could lift a grown goat in the crook of one elbow. He would surely have been First Rifle if Naung had not acquired foreign experience and then become a legend for his Long-Haul-with-Koko. Beside him Naung, who was thirty and wiry, felt a stripling.

  “Two Kachin.”

  “A brave people. No help for it. Weapons?”

  “Rifles.” Above them a cat seemed to miaow. Naung scanned the sky. “There. A kite.”

  “Waiting for carrion. And there it is: your Kachin.”

  The two horsemen were bordering the field by the north path. Naung and Wan lay among sheep-stagger-bush on the south slope of the pass; the Kachin would ride directly toward them for half a minute or more.

  “How shall we do it this time?”

  “We just take them,” Naung said. “No pranks and no haste. We can kill them a ten of times.”

  “Once is usually enough,” Wan said. “I think we should stop talking.”

  Naung examined his weapon again and unfolded the trigger. This trigger simply folded forward out of the way—that was the ingenious safety; and for firing it had to be deliberately plucked down. Naung had thirty-two rounds in his magazine and hoped to use no more than two. Perhaps the pistol this time? Wan was sighting an old British rifle. Traders brought ammunition, two and three cartridges at a time, once a full box of fifty, and the pompous Indian wanted an ounce of silver for it. Wan had taken twenty for ten catties of rice. Wan now had half a magazine, but his was a bolt-action rifle and if he missed, or if his round of unknown origin misfired … No. Naung would use the mitraillette, to be certain. He trusted his own ammunition. It was four years old and more, but the gods had blessed his Long-Haul-with-Koko and this ammunition was sacred.

  They saw the Kachin at the same moment and there was no need to speak or signal. The two horsemen approached at a leisurely walk, squinting here and there, rifles still at the ready. They seemed to believe that because they were not singing and dancing no one would notice them. Now Naung could see bandoliers, a silver ornament in the turban; one of these Kachin was missing an eye and wore a bit of colored ribbon on his blouse, probably a British or American medal. The sun washed them in clear golden mountain light.

  Naung and Wan fired simultaneously. No refinements: they aimed for the heart and fired. The Kachin were dead before they fell. The ponies bucked and shied, the Kachin slid to earth. Half a ten of Shan emerged from the bushes and trees and caught the ponies while Naung covered the Kachin and Wan confirmed their release from this life. One rifle was an M-1, the other an Arisaka 99. The bandoliers were almost full. A blessing. In small leather bags they found silver pieces. One carried opium and a pipe of inferior jade. In the cloth boots they found articles of carved superior jade, doubtless for trading. These two men carried no food, no spare clothing, no religious objects. They were far from their own shrines, and would cross to the long night without ritual.

  Naung freed his magazine and counted cartridges. Good! Only two gone! The lightest touch of the finger! For the hundredth time he wondered why this mitraillette had been conceived without single-shot fire as well. But only two gone! He was pleased. “Take the heads,” he called out. “Leave the bodies on the upper slope. Sentries, back to your posts. Kin-tan, take charge. I’m going home. Cages tomorrow.”

  The men groaned and cursed. Naung laughed. “You call yourselves Shan! Bandits, more like. Scared to death of honest labor.”

  “All we ask is honest labor,” they protested. “Is paddy-work not work? And the tea harvest? And the poppies?”

  “We are farmers, and not roadside carpenters,” one said.

  “Nor killers either,” Naung said, “but when there is work to be done, we must do it.”

  “And we will,” Wan said, “but complaining is half the pleasure.”

  They all chuckled, and the strapping Kin-tan deployed some of the men, and the rest filed through the pass, two on Yunnan ponies, all of them cheerful, homeward bound, their women and children waiting for them, and the Sawbwa. It was the Sawbwa’s work to see that no harm came to his people, that they dealt justly with one another, that they committed no blasphemy and comported themselves with honor, that no bandit or guerrilla ever set foot in their valley, that the Wild Wa never took a Shan head.

  “They never learn,” said the Sawbwa, his cloudy eye rolling. “How many heads are up?”

  “Nine,” Naung said, “along both sides of the road, and some are naked skulls, now.”

  “Barbarous. It makes me feel no more civilized than the Wild Wa.”

  “It is the only way,” Naung insisted. “We count a hundred bandits each moon who see them, think twice and pass on by.” Before the Sawbwa he made a tiny row of Kachin boots, pipes, jade. “The meager leavings of two lives.”

  “It is the end of order. The earth’s underpinnings tremble and shift. The last lakh of years is passing.” The Sawbwa’s pale, greenish skin gleamed; his thinned hair was white, his good eye was a doe’s eye, his nostrils were broad and noisy, his teeth jagged and brown. He had been known to speak with the dead. “Before the war we killed only Wild Wa, and only when they came headhunting. Now the hills crawl with bandits and every man is his own state with his own law.”

  The two were squatting before the Sawbwa’s house, chatting across an aromatic fire in the clay-and-stone hearth. A small vat of potato soup bubbled promisingly. If you stood one hundred rows of one hundred men in a field, that would make a lakh of fingers. So many years were the Sawbwa’s concern; Naung’s concern was tomorrow.

  “You did well.” The Sawbwa sighed. “But these cages! We never used to do that. Over in Yunnan they did it.” From his shirt he drew a bamboo pipe two spans long: he plucked a brand from the fire and blew tobacco smoke. “It is well. Go to your woman and child.”

  Naung sniffed at the soup. Always that inner twinge when they said, “Your child.” He rose, bowed briefly, slung the mitraillette and padded down the road. The Sawbwa’s house overlooked most of the valley, and the evening report was to Naung an excursion, a bracing stroll to West Slope and then, at sunset, a grand view east over poppy fields and potato patches, plum orchards and terraced paddy; the poppies were plump now. The wood-and-bamboo houses, forty-two of them, were hospitable in the late light, contours soft and shadowed, fires flickering, knots of farmers gossiping and smoking. And according to the season there were pleasant odors,
in the autumn drying fish, in early spring the heavy wet aroma of muddy furrow (Naung had learned during the war that when the rest of Burma was dry as a bone the Shan States enjoyed mountain rains, and he took this as evidence of the Lord Buddha’s favor), in summer from the slopes rich billows of sheep-stagger-bush blossom and in the valley harvest odors, potato and barley and peanut, and the smell of paddy. In fall Naung shot gyi and pheasant, and once he had hacked to death a somnolent python, which was tasty boiled.

  He entered his own leafy lane. His house sat well back among bamboo, looking south; at this time of year sunshine was a blessing early and late. High on the ridges above the valley Naung saw rime now and then, in December or January, like a Kachin mantle of silver; it vanished in an hour.

  Loi-mae was pounding millet. Naung stood outside in the dusk sniffing at a warm, moist northerly breeze. He heard a toktay croak, and counted: six times. Here where he was born he had meat, drink, warmth, shelter, an amiable woman of beauty to share his life, and a stepdaughter of nine who brightened his house like a flock of rainbow swallows. True, the daughter was not his; true, the woman had been another’s; never mind. Pawlu was all this and more: cool dry season, warm dry season, monsoon. The occasional wildcat, a flight of bats, good opium for relaxation. Pawlu was some two hundred souls who asked little of life yet had much.

  Naung entered his house, feeling, as always when he crossed his own doorsill, a man of worth. “Blessings.” Loi-mae came to embrace him. Lola skipped to them and tugged at his jacket. He let his cheek rest warmly against his wife’s, and then he rubbed his daughter’s head and drew her too into the embrace. His wife, Loi-mae, was a goodly woman and comely. He had wondered, for a time, whether Green Wood had found her beautiful as Western women were beautiful. To Naung she was the most beautiful of all, but not for size, or shape, or feature: for the soft voice, the hearth, the soup, the gentle hands, the constancy.

  His daughter’s beauty was unquestioned, and was still a source of wonder to the whole village, as was her bubbly disposition. She was a busybody, welcome everywhere, an imp born of the sun and fated to laugh, skip, dance and make merry in the bright mountain light. When she passed by, plowmen paused to wave; when she transplanted, she cheered the whole paddy full of Shan. Even the other children liked her. Loi-mae had been more wary of the other children than of the grown men and women; these last, after all, knew hunger and death and were inclined to kindness. Loi-mae had not burdened Naung with her worries, but he sensed the narrow way this child had walked, and sensed too Loi-mae’s relief, like a burden set down, that the child was a child of the village and not of a stranger.