Huts stalk across the surface of marshy lakes on rotten pilings. You can almost see epidemics developing, and because the windows remain open all the while, every time the train stops, insects swarm into the carriage, drunk on the miasma of decay. Mariam holds an empty bottle of Western perfume, a gift from a tourist, to her nostrils. Little horses pelt, panting, down an alleyway. Tattooed boys in traditional longyi puff clouds of smoke from their green cheroots, while men in checked sarongs squat idly outside blue-painted huts, with their dogs and kids before them, ox-carts trail behind horse-drawn buggies, and far-off in the distance a loudspeaker van blares out music seemingly composed of knocking and whining sounds.
Schoolboys come down the road, arm in arm. There’s a smell of dried fish in the air, and standing back on the platform, as if in respect for the train, is a group of farmers, cattle herders and monks. A clanking of horse harnesses can be heard, before it’s drowned out by the thundering of ancient heavy lorries. Then as the train moves off silence asserts itself once more, broken only now and then by the cry of a gold prospector on a riverbank. Immediately, fellow prospectors crowd in on him from left and right, pressing to look into his pan and pointing meaningfully with their index fingers at the little pool of silt gathered there.
‘We should be in Freetown,’ says Khin Maung. He’s read in a newspaper that in Freetown, Sierra Leone, recent heavy rainfall has washed away topsoil and exposed diamonds. People have been rushing there from every corner of the country, armed with primitive tools like spades and shovels, nets, sieves and pans, without a clue what to do. They’re also bringing weapons with them. There have already been some serious clashes, and the government has had to deploy troops. Khin Maung has read that report like it relates to him. But isn’t he living in the middle of a war himself?
A Burman mother on the other side of the corridor is jiggling her little girl on her lap. Every time the child screams in delight, she apologizes to everyone around her for the noise.
‘Oh, don’t worry, that’s the sweetest noise.’
Hearing this, she places her hand flat on her chest with relief.
‘Is it, indeed?’ she asks incredulously, like she’s never heard such a thing before, and looks at her daughter with fresh eyes.
The only other foreigner in cattle class is a Canadian, who went to a monastery in northern Thailand to try and get over his dependence on heroin, but ended up fleeing after enduring tadpoles in the bath water, lice in his bed, awful food and accommodation like a prison cell.
‘They chain you up. If you try and get away, they beat you with a rubber hose. There’s nothing meek or mild about that place. Just filth, violence and tyranny. But there is a fish pond in the courtyard and mango trees where you can sit in the shade and play your music.’
He’s on his second trip to Burma to try and prevent his relapse into drugs. Running down his arm, he’s had the word ‘hellian’ tattooed – a dweller in hell.
When I ask Khin Maung what the purpose of his journey is, he opens his large, soulful eyes wide and says nothing.
‘The purpose,’ I repeat, ‘the purpose of your travel.’
The look he gives me is one of amiable dull-wittedness, and Mariam assumes an expression of serious introspection behind her frozen smile. And that doesn’t change even as he begins listing what he bought in Rangoon: paper, glue, various knives … He’ll bind a book for me, he says, with gold embossed letters on the cover. And months later, it really is delivered to me – it’s blue, with our names on it, and every line looks like it’s been meticulously set by hand.
Now that he’s got plenty of work lined up for the foreseeable future, he tells me, he …
… still won’t tell me why you’ve made this journey, then?
It takes quite some time, plus lots of exchanged glances between them and satisfying themselves that they’re in agreement with one another, before the charming couple finally divulge what they’ve been up to. It turns out they’ve taken their excursion in order to do something scarcely permitted, basically because it’s so senseless: for once in their life they wanted to see the sea, wanted to take the short journey of a few kilometres from Rangoon to the ocean and revel in the sight of the water. That was all.
‘But there are shorter routes from where you live to the coast.’
‘Ah, but it’s easier to get permission to take a trip to Rangoon.’ In the capital, though, they’d run into a police roadblock and had been stopped from going any further.
‘Why was that?’
Khin Maung laughs again. Only a foreigner could ask that.
He has some quite different questions: What happens to things that were once reflected in the surface of the ocean? He’d once read that their presence still remains there – the sunken ships, the silhouettes of freighters, even bottles that had been bobbing on the waves. Can you still see them, feel them, he asks me?
His questions are positively poetic. My answers aren’t. But that doesn’t dim his enthusiasm in the slightest. Why, he even wants to know, should the sea, of all things, be a simile for love? I explain:
‘It appears boundless, its colour is that of devotion, and it looks static but it’s constantly in motion …’
‘But it can rage sometimes.’
The married couple sit there, their knees wrapped in their palms, sit there like mirror images of one another between their ugly turkey and their sack of sugar and refuse to accept the sea as a simile. Maybe their love is a seascape in the style of Claude Lorrain? Is that what I should see?
I tell them how, towards the end of the nineteenth century, the writer Franz Grillparzer travelled to the Adriatic to see the sea for the first time, which he couldn’t appreciate properly in photos or early moving film. I recount how we readers waited with bated breath for the outcome; after all, this was a poet, a man of words, encountering the ocean in its original form for the first time in his life. And what does he write in his diary?: ‘It’s not how I imagined it.’
Khin Maung gazes contentedly out of the window. My Grillparzer story makes no impression on him, but we journey on, chatting and sharing.
‘What’s the sea like where you live?’ he wants to know.
‘We’ve got two small ones,’ I tell him. ‘They mean well.’
‘And what do they look like?’
‘Sometimes just like fog in a valley.’
The friendly expression never leaves his face, and the reason for this – however strange it may sound – is that I, the foreigner, am the one who can accredit everything I say, and so he all he does is sit there like a moderator and nod in assent to his wife. She needs to share in our mutual understanding. This she does indeed do, and when we spot a group of monks walking along the embankment, she calls out: ‘Monks’, and when it’s water buffaloes, ‘Buffaloes’. And that’s all it takes to establish complete and cordial communication between us.
‘What’s your final destination?’ I ask. ‘What kind of village do you live in?’
‘It’s not worth mentioning,’ says Khin Maung. ‘It’s so small.’
We can see from the train that poor people in Burma live in bamboo huts which get swept away by the monsoons, whereas the rich live in houses made of teak. Only very few villages have electricity, and Khin Maung tells me that in many cases people’s only means of getting provisions is to walk for hours to the nearest markets.
‘But do the Burmese live in houses, or huts?’
‘We live in war,’ Khin Maung repeats.
From our compartment window, we see villages whose poverty has even taken on an idyllic appearance. I fall to wondering whether the couple’s home village is like this: a cluster of huts on pilings grouped around a pond, with wooden troughs for the cattle feed, surrounded by groundnut fields and palm groves, blessed with the black, fertile soil, graced with pagodas strewn liberally across the plains? It’s clear people can make a living from farming here, and what they don’t possess they cobble together out of scrap.
We see
two workers taking turns to hammer a red-hot horseshoe on an anvil, alternating with lightning speed; we spot a lone peasant under a Palmyra Palm, praying to the tree spirits and hoping to appease them before he climbs up into its branches to harvest the fruit with his machete. We notice a potter bending over his wheel and shaving off clay so as to get the right shape of water jug; we see bamboo-mat weavers soaking the strips; gold beaters using mallets to flatten little packets of paper containing grains of the precious metal and transform it into gold leaf; women stirring and applying the protective cosmetic paste called Thanaka – made from water, bark and sandalwood – to their face; and women with their heads smothered in sweet treebark shampoo conducting their hair-washing ritual. And when the train stops, we catch the sound of handbells and flutes drifting over from the nearby monastery complex, as if this is the sound favoured by the gods, the aural equivalent of candlelight.
One can also hear prayers being chanted in unison, by voices that sound like they’re arguing. They always intone the same thing; they always do the same things in the same sequence. This is the sound, then, of the prayer mantra, which never varies and which always follows the same cycle, like the mantra of work. Indeed, the mantras of prayer and work somehow belong together, given that they both concern eternally mythical realms of human activity.
Meanwhile Khin Maung has uncorked a bulbous bottle covered in smooth leather, and pours me and himself a small measure of rice wine into two tiny glasses that he unwraps from newspaper.
‘Twelve hundred years ago, the Kachin left Tibet and emigrated to the north of Burma,’ he announces. ‘When the Great Spirit distributed the scripture among the Kachin, it was given to them on a piece of leather. So the Kachin carried the scripture under his arm, but in his excitement he sweated so profusely that the leather had to be dried out over a fire. But while it was hanging there, the rats snatched it, chewed on it and dragged it off into a rice basket. The Kachin retrieved it and tried to save the content of the scripture by soaking the rice and drinking the water.’ Having successfully reached this stage of his story, Khin Maung gives me a beaming smile before continuing. ‘And that’s why the wise priests still drink rice wine today before they begin their prophesies, and in so doing gain access to the truth. Your good health!’
Mandalay, that rebellious settlement oriented toward the modern, announced its presence outside the window with the first outlying suburbs of a growing million-inhabitant metropolis, yet one which cannot yet shake off its village past. These little hovels gradually give way to the urban sprawl on the banks of the Irrawaddy, a river some people call ‘The Refresher’. The city has been flooded with Western products, like the purple bobble hats worn by old men, comics, kid’s bikes with stabilizers and oral irrigators. And yet its streets are still full of rumbling oxcarts, along with ancient tractors, wagons and rickshaws, and unstreamlined cars from China.
We exchange our final questions and answers. I’m not permitted to travel beyond the limits of this city, and Khin Maung and Mariam sit here in their red traditional garb, with their turkey and sack between their knees, and their amazing food, which they unwrap from sheets of newspaper – and with their inflamed eyes, which keep a lookout for everything, they’ll await whatever comes.
‘Why are you dressed in red?’
Khin Maung grows serious, for despite being a Christian like most of the Kachin, he’s still keen not to miss out on Buddha and the animistic spirits, and this polytheism hasn’t in any way diminished his faith. Christ and Buddha are jointly responsible for the Hereafter, he reckons, whereas the spirits mainly operate in the Here and Now. That’s why he and Mariam also pay an occasional visit to the spirit sisters, the half-beings, who act as mediums.
‘The red stands for the blood of the earth and for the migration of souls that awaits us.’
‘And for water?’
‘For us, water represents rebirth, the most important factor in the cycle of life.’
And Mariam adds: ‘We’ve long prayed to heaven for Indra, the god of war and thunder, to split the monsoon clouds asunder with his diamond thunderbolt and draw rain from them.’
So, their trip to the sea was more of a pilgrimage than an excursion. They’d wanted to start by praying in the Shwedagon Pagoda, then journey to the shore and approach the ocean. But then a power had blocked their way that was neither God nor Nature, and yet which was as potent as both: the power of the state. The only liberty it granted us was to sit together in cattle class on a train and try and get over all our failures and frustrations. They won’t get to see the sea, and I won’t get to see their village.
Mandalay is the place where we’ll part in a clumsy embrace. They’ll try to re-enact the kind of embrace they’ve seen in films, and I won’t know how much body I’m meant to hug when embracing the wife of a Burmese Kachin bookbinder or rather when I’m taking hold of her rounded shoulders and just drawing her a couple of centimetres closer to me. So we embrace one another here, at this intersection of two impermeable borders. Each of us disappears behind a wall that is impenetrable for those left behind.
I wished we’d been able to do the obvious, natural thing and stand by the sea, travel to their village and stay there, but this time our parting isn’t culturally determined but politically. I haven’t been able to give them a vicarious experience of the sea that they never got to see. My sea is a different one, and likewise I’m left to search for their village in their eyes, in the texture of their hands, in the glances they give one another, their fabrics and utensils, but I search in vain.
And so we remain gazing intently at one another, because the only thing we have left is to try and decipher the reality of the other’s existence, and our eyes just will not disengage, as I stand by the carriage window on the platform at Mandalay station and the train carrying the couple starts to move off; they’ve only raised their hands slightly to wave goodbye. Khin Maung’s passion is still palpable, and Mariam’s beaming face still lingers in the air, and when they’ve finally both disappeared from view something intangible still remains on this platform, something I can only see as art. It is the aura of a border, which has just revealed itself to be impassable and yet permeable all the same.
Lake Fucino
Wasting Away
Around the mid-1980s, a young woman with a dark pageboy haircut was labouring long and hard on her research in the Austrian National Library in Vienna. Every morning she’d heave a weighty pile of books onto the same desk, and every evening, she’d lug them back to the same returns counter. She didn’t let anything distract her. The only people who heard her voice were the library staff who handed out the books to her and collected them again in the evening. No one invited her for coffee, nobody chatted with her, and because I sat two rows behind her, I can say with certainty that she made no moves herself to invite anyone over to her desk, or to go and fetch anyone from theirs. Her skin was pale, but even so she still wore white face powder, never appeared without her Campari-red lipstick on and, even in her late twenties, must already have been dyeing her hair. Jet black.
But it wasn’t her rather eccentric appearance or her forbidding, almost sneering, manner, nor indeed her fixation on her work – which was less zealous diligence than it was a burning fury, a self-immolation – that kept any of her fellow brainworkers from pestering her. Rather, it was that she couldn’t help but give off an air of awkwardness and hysteria, a sense that she might well be fanatical or ecstatic, or, at the very least, unreasonably and desperately at odds with life. I didn’t use her real name very often, since she couldn’t stand it, and so we settled on ‘Clarisse’ as being the one that suited her better than any other. Curiously, I can recall her smell better than I can her appearance – a disembodied, mildewy odour that was somehow the carrier medium for the smell of churchy types who have remained unredeemed.
I’d been working in this library for some months, during which time we’d taken note of each other’s presence, nothing more; months in which I studied h
er neck for the most part, her white-powdered, naked neck, which supported the black helmet of hair like the stalk of a mushroom supports its cap. And so the months went by, until one day I came back from my lunch break to find a note on top of my papers. On it, scribbled hastily in thin, violet-coloured ink, were the words: ‘Our man from Cairo has arrived at the station’.
The next time I got up from my desk, I stole a glance as I passed hers just to check that she wrote in violet ink. So, that evening, I came and leant on her desk and asked:
‘So, what now?’
She was writing about Kafka, but you couldn’t call it research. Rather, Kafka was imposing his will upon her, casting a spell on her. Nothing and no one could resist it. It was a case of taking something too seriously beyond all measure, a classic case in fact, given that she was taking Kafka more seriously than he ever took himself in all likelihood. It was a hostage-taking, with herself as the hostage.
Kafka was hollowing out her life and moving around in it, and when she referred to him as her ‘spiritual father’, she did it deliberately in order to do down her birth father, a man who’d come to Austria as a guest worker from the Abruzzi – in her words, a contemptible little man who’d never felt at home here, and who’d had a questionable relationship with her when she was a child. Yet there was also something questionable about the way she spoke about it; it sometimes seemed as though she really wanted it to have been the case, so she’d have grounds, after the early death of her mother, for severing all contact with her father too, so she could make room for Kafka.
The Ends of the Earth Page 23