In those days, I believed that the sea had a special power. There, far removed from cities, I fancied life must be different, clarified somehow by the constant sight of the water. Once I’d discovered the mystery of art galleries, I would search out depictions of the sea in the Old Masters, who weren’t able to use photos, but instead had to work entirely from nature, and found myself astonished, for instance, by the seascapes of van Goyen with their dusty sheen on the water, and by the artist’s evident skill in blending the sky, the land and the ocean surface together, like they were all made from the same material. I was also completely bowled over by the unfathomable, pagan Romanticism of Claude Lorrain’s landscape paintings, where the valleys are deeper than any in nature and the horizons are sweeping.
Later, as a student, I learned about the phenomenon of dissimilitude, that is of falsification of the truth in nature, and discovered in Claude Lorrain’s Aeneas and Dido in Carthage a kind of bashfulness towards the sea, which hinted at respect and a sense of helplessness, almost as if the painter had been afraid to produce an accurate rendition of the ocean, unable to look it in the eye, so to speak. In this particular work, the sea off the peninsula jutting into the Gulf of Tunis looks like it has been woven, like some ancient artefact, while farther out, it shimmers like a piece of blown glass.
Just as every fire reflects the sun, so in Claude’s works every stream is supposed to recall the sea, and every puddle to allude to the ocean, and wherever waterfalls appear in his paintings, they really do seem to unleash the destructive power of breaking waves. Yet when Claude’s gaze comes to rest on the surface of the actual sea, he’s at a loss, and clearly finds himself incapable of imparting any motion or sparkle to it. Even where the oar blades of the galleys are dipping into the water, there are no splashes visible, and only a little bit of sea foam froths around the ship’s keel. Nor is there any surf breaking on the shore, no reflection of the sky in the water. No, the fact is that there’s more of the high seas in the wine glasses painted by many stilllife painters than in all of Claude’s depictions of the ocean.
So why should the thought of a bank of fog in the Voreifel or an oil painting by Claude Lorrain put me in mind of Burma? This mysterious country was for many years accessible to foreigners only for a week at a time, and even then just to visit four specific places. It was during that period that I was there. You were allowed to go to Rangoon, Pagan, Mandalay and Inle Lake. The rest of the country was the preserve of wild animals, pagodas, Buddhist monks and occasionally some pasty-faced apparatchik from the GDR, tramping through the jungle with his thick Saxon accent, in comradely solidarity with the socialist brother state of Myanmar. Anywhere you set foot was surrounded by forbidden places, lines of demarcation to the unknown and the inaccessible. So, from any given point in the country, you looked out as if from some vantage point at what was terra incognita.
In some places here, there are twice as many pagodas as there are people. You sit yourself up on the back of an ox-cart, sway across the steppe pastureland and stop in the sunset at one of these magnificent buildings, which seems to have blossomed and spread out from a golden bud on the roof. Inside, there’s an incessant ringing, and from far-off the clang of a high-pitched bell lisps through the air. But in his shadowy niche, the selfsame Buddha sits there four times over, so that he can gaze out to all four points of the compass and bestow his blessings on them. Monks sit cross-legged and doze around his knees, holding incense sticks, and the ashes pile up in front their own laps.
Soothsayers also cower in the Buddha’s shadow:
‘Will you live longer than eighty? No, sadly that’s impossible for you,’ one of them tells me.
Sadly. For the first time in my life, I find myself hoping I’ll make it to eighty-one. But while I’m still trying to come to terms with my short life expectancy, the enlightened one dunks a bitter, strawberry-shaped fruit into some salt, and his eyes say ‘Just go ahead and cry!’ I pass him a wafer-thin flag of gold leaf in an envelope as a gift. He bows. The proper decorum has been observed; things have been ‘agreeable to God’.
The artisans worked away for hours in their dark pens, hammering the paper packet with the little gold nugget inside with their mallets until they’d turned it into this glinting scrap of gold leaf. The soothsayer picks up the leaf and, murmuring softly to himself, proceeds to stick it on a statuette of the Buddha that’s only the height of a person, and which has lost all trace of its facial features beneath all the gold that’s been placed there; now all that’s visible through the accretion of gold leaf is the Kajal eyeliner on the lids of his eyes.
‘Sadly,’ the soothsayer repeats, ‘no older than eighty’ and then adds: ‘During your lifetime you’ll get on well with three of the four elements. Water will never be your friend, though. Never.’
Sadly. I’ll burn my lifesaver’s certificate, then, in the friendly fire.
‘Everything that means you harm will come at you from a southeasterly direction.’
‘And what happens if I turn round?’
This kind of hair-splitting won’t do me much good. The seer doesn’t say as much, but I can tell from his eyes. My ox-cart has left by now, but the steppe is steaming, warm and grey. I stuff a splinter of betel nut wrapped in a leaf into my cheek, salivate and proceed on foot. Every time you swallow, a warm sensation fills your stomach and you feel a bit more intoxicated. When you spit, it comes out a fiery-red colour; your saliva forms droplets on the leaves and trickles away into the sand.
After a lifetime of betel nut abuse, old people’s teeth start rotting in their mouths. But chewing the nut does at least keep hunger at bay, and that’s sometimes an important factor, not just because people are poor but also because Burma, as George Orwell found, has the rare gift of turning every appealing dish into an unpalatable one. Meat comes to the table covered in a greenish fur, the unidentifiable mush of vegetables smells of crocuses and stagnant ponds, the little flecks of colour in the rice turn out to be insects, and all the while we’re being given sideways glances by the government functionaries in civilian clothes seated at the next table, who are making sure we don’t get on too friendly terms with the locals.
Anyone who cares to get up at five o’clock can watch people panning for gold in the river, and observe how they put their heads together over the pans, while little girls wash and brush down oxen in the water. But at this hour, the snuffling and calls are muted. The pearly white face of a stone idol, half faun, half gryphon, looms over the bushes covering the cliffs above the river, and behind, in the old wooden monastery building, the barefoot monks are already on the move, like orange and rustred splashes of watercolour. As they begin their bell-ringing and prayer, or simply sit studying holy scriptures in silence, the young woman truck-bus driver on the road below jams a thick, green cheroot in her mouth and flashes a beaming betel nut-red smile at the first passenger of the day. O happy day!
Burma has lived for too long with its back turned to the outside world for its people to have any inkling of quite how neglected and shabby the country has become, and how taken aback we tourists are when we get there. Taking any form of transport is an arduous affair, accommodation is pitiful, and the restaurants are questionable, but, then again, in the capital Rangoon there is The Strand, that magnificent hotel from the colonial period, which is on a par with its two sister establishments, the Oriental in Bangkok and Raffles Hotel in Singapore, with suites of rooms panelled in dark wood and antique fittings, with blood-red upholstery and lounges in which the aroma of a century of espionage and secret diplomacy and the memory of panama hats still linger. These are my favourite kind of hotels, the ones where you get steeped in their history when you stay there. That’s what The Strand is like.
When I arrived, there were no single rooms left, so I agreed to share with a British woman called Belinda, who was travelling on her own. Our room, with its red furnishings and dark furniture – more of a set of rooms, in fact – was so extensive that we could almost have avoided m
eeting one another entirely. She walked in, declared it far too large and oppressive, and immediately closed the curtains, like she needed to protect our domain from the prying eyes of strangers.
‘Shall we go and eat?’
We took a seat in the sprawling dining room of the hotel, with wood panelling all round the room, along with pieces of colonial memorabilia and a set of rituals resurrected from the past. The waiter pushed the chair into the backs of Belinda’s knees as she went to sit down, and she gratefully acknowledged this attempt at politeness.
As a conversational opener, she opted for ‘the poverty out there’, which she found ‘depressing’. I countered with a gambit of my own:
‘On the other hand, it’s very picturesque.’
‘You cynic!’
I explained that feeling sorry for the miserable living conditions of most people in the world was only one side of the coin. The other was that many travellers would surely feel disappointed not to encounter images of poverty at their destination. She shot me an indignant look before replying sharply:
‘I’m sure you’re considering this from some loftier intellectual standpoint than me, but all I can say is that the sight of poverty makes me sad.’
I expounded on my theory that very few things made a country so multifaceted, such a feast for the eye and so baroque as poverty. Before shaping up to reply, she paused for a moment, to give me a chance to feel ashamed at what I’d just said. Then, for safety’s sake, she decided to let it pass and contented herself with giving me that indignant look again.
‘Don’t you think that feeling superior boosts your own sense of well-being, though?’ I asked.
She didn’t deign to grace that with a direct response.
‘These countries are so far away,’ she said, ‘and even further where their inner lives are concerned. We’ve only just opened the door a crack on these people, who are so friendly, and on their culture, their food …’
She says it with a stern look in her eyes, laying stress on every sentence she utters, as each of them has involved labour and great effort on her part. Yet although her words still sound magnanimous, in the next instant her thoughts have turned to the off-putting tendency of the Burmese to try and swindle her at every opportunity, and she duly embarks on some long and involved calculations of what she should have been charged for railway journeys, museums and rickshaws. Though all her figures come from some old travel guides, they can still be measured against the current exchange rate and then recalculated with the aid of a pocket calculator. She’s also got a fund of stories about how she refused to let herself be diddled and managed to get the better of this or that transaction.
No, she finally announces, she’ll never ‘get her head round the price of things’ here. So she’ll only feel really at ease in large hotels with a fixed price list. But when there are gaps in the menu … And when so many waiters are hanging about with nothing to do, like they are here …
‘You’re missing half the menu, though. There you go.’ She scrutinizes the waiter like he is the menu.
‘So what have you got, then? No duck? What, no duck in Burma? But I’ve noticed the odd duck wandering around outside. Just the odd one, mind …’ she gives a hollow laugh.
But the waiter doesn’t give her the satisfaction of bursting into tears. Instead, he clumsily spills ice cubes over half the table.
‘No problem’, Belinda reassures him, and sweeps the ice cubes off her lap, sending them clattering down onto the wooden floor, where they skid away and are gathered up into a tumbler by two girls in traditional dress.
And Belinda? She knows the hospitality profession inside out; after all, she herself has a top position in the service industry sector, a realm where people’s job titles somehow always seem to be comprised of terms like ‘corporate’, ‘assistant’, ‘manager’ and ‘center’. There’s no pulling the wool over her eyes, and she’s not about to change her attitude in Burma either. She’ll always view all the constantly changing landscapes, social structures, and moral situations she encounters in her career through the same eyes, and at the end of the day distill everything she’s seen here down to the standpoint of the initiate, who can say she’s been there and so has the right to speak when others would do best to hold their peace: ‘Burma is … all the people there want to do is … religion makes them … their attitude to poverty is comparatively …’
All that can be said for her self-importance is that it stimulates an aggressive sexuality in me, as I discover when she saunters back into the bedroom from the bathroom in her skimpy pyjama shorts.
We spent that night sitting up in our high beds, drinking bottled beer and chatting, and the mixture of her fussy, imperious nature and her vulnerability in an alien culture somehow made her so attractive that I found myself constantly holding my bottle out to clink with hers. In turn, she confessed to me that up till now she’d simply had ‘no time’ for a man in her life. Later, we talked about what other people would surely do in our position. But we never got round to it.
The following day, I assuaged my guilty conscience for having stayed in such a lavish hotel and enjoyed such bossy company by buying myself a cheap ticket at the railway station for the journey to Mandalay. And so I took my place in cattle class alongside the peasants, workers and assorted vermin.
Burmese State Railway compartments consist of two benches made of light-coloured wood facing one another, each with room for three skinny people – or in the case of those opposite me, a married couple with a turkey. The turkey is an ugly creature, which spends all the time looking disdainfully out of the window and avoiding eye contact. Beneath its head, its red lappet dangles like a tumour. The couple who own it, on the other hand, are very attractive and animated. At first, it’s only the husband, with his large, deep-set eyes, who ventures to give me a beaming smile. His eyes stay glued to mine unwaveringly, like he’s flirting with me.
His wife Mariam is a dormant beauty, who clearly has no inkling of how attractive she is. Her skin is the colour of the earth, she’s heavy limbed, her eyes linger for a long time on things before she looks away, and when she goes to pick up an object, her hand hovers over it before touching it like she’s about to canoodle with it, and she caresses it before she uses it. Also, her smile seems to emerge from deep inside her. But when it finally appears on her face, it spreads out and doesn’t leave until it’s flooded every last corner of her countenance. You can’t stop looking at her.
When she shakes my hand, it remains there in my palm like some item she’s put down, soft and yielding. The growth of her fingernails has carried the last bit of red nail polish she applied to well beyond the middle of the nail. Whenever she nods, or the train rocks, the flesh of her face moves up and down slightly. Only her eyes redden.
‘Where are you headed for?’ I ask.
‘Home,’ says the man, ‘to the war zone.’
‘What war?’ I ask, and call to mind the scene from the film Masculin Féminin, where Jean-Luc Godard asks the beauty queen ‘Miss 19’ where there are wars going on now, and she can’t give him an answer.
‘A war’s been going on for decades on the border between Burma and China,’ he replies. ‘But we’re very self-contained there, so the outside world doesn’t know about what’s happening.’
‘Who are you, then?’
‘We belong to the Kachin people.’
‘What’s the war about?’
He starts counting on his fingers: ‘Well, previously it was against the British, then the Chinese, then we were in alliance with the Chinese against the Burmese government, then against the army, then against the rebel leader Prince Khun Sa, then we fought against the government to gain our independence …’
His finger hovers in the air above the hand he’s counting off from …
‘And that’s the lot,’ Mariam finishes his sentence for him and laughs.
I remember seeing Prince Khun Sa’s photo in a news magazine. This drug baron of northern Burma had been p
ictured posing proudly with his private army. He was half Chinese, had formerly served as an officer in the Chinese Nationalist Army, and for decades controlled the opium trade in the ‘Golden Triangle’ of Burma, Thailand and Laos. In 1994, his HQ was stormed by Burmese forces and the drug trade in the region was reorganized. But the Burmese authorities turned down a request from the USA for his extradition. Khun Sa retired from the drug trade and began dealing in precious stones, and lived for another ten years and more in Rangoon under heavy protection.
Yes, war’s a long established facet of life in Khin Maung and Mariam’s homeland. They are both bookbinders and run a little workshop together. We’ve got a long journey ahead of us, and they use the time to explain their circumstances to me, with Mariam contributing just as much as her husband, and just as proudly, as her husband: even the British never encountered such a big problem colonizing a region as they did in the north of Burma. The name ‘Kachin’ is an umbrella term for various different ethnic groups, such as the Lashi, the Lisu, the Maru and the Rawang. The Kachin, who also lived in China and India, adopted Christianity in order to set themselves apart from the indigenous Burmans, who were Buddhist. Whereas in earlier times in their region, the Communist Party of Burma had fought loyally for closer ties to their Chinese neighbours to the north, up to 1993 the Kachin in Burma, with their Kachin Independent Army, had battled the government, and even nowadays the armed struggle was still going on to secure independence for their province and to combat the opium and diamond smugglers.
Khin Maung and Mariam lived in a village north of Myitkyina, in a district that was closed to foreigners and not far from the border with China. Myitkyina is a centre for the mining of gold, jade, and amber, yet farmers, who practice shifting cultivation, also bring their produce to the market there, and the local Kachins are still organized into tribal groups under chieftains. The railway ends there, but the road continues on into China and India.
Mariam gets control of the unruly turkey by grasping its neck. Khin Maung is gripping a linen sack full of sugar between his knees. Flies have taken up residence on it in their hundreds. Outside the train, expanses of black earth come into view, and the bell-shaped pagoda roofs shine in white or gold, and in so far as anyone has a new acquisition, it’s just a peaked cap. The country here smells of sorghum and rotting vegetables. But everyone’s still wearing a relaxed smile.
The Ends of the Earth Page 22