“Ne Win is only escalating his military program against the people, the ordinary villagers,” Lynton said as they climbed. “Particularly in the delta, the plains. Resist in any way, make contact with one of us, with a rebel soldier, and you risk execution. They’re conscripting everyone at gunpoint—children, women . . . no one is spared. And they’re making it impossible for our soldiers to move as we once could. A virtual web of human threads spreading from side to side, across the whole delta and beyond.”
Did this—Ne Win’s barbaric stepped-up military program, coupled with Lynton’s mounting fear for their lives—mean that Lynton had given up on the peace negotiations? There had been a time when Louisa would have seized on his openness as an opportunity to probe him; but she still didn’t have the heart for discussions of his conflict, or the will to engage with anything but the richness of mind their loss had bequeathed her.
They stopped, in the space of her silence, to rest under an ancient pine from which they could look down over the river that bent back toward Bilin, and she was overcome still more powerfully by the sensation of evading history—personal and human—in this lush terrain, even as she made contact with the past in it. Hadn’t she once stopped in just this place with her mother and siblings en route to Kyowaing? It seemed she could recall Gracie asking where Daddy was, and Johnny giving Grace a nasty look before a flock of parrots broke through the haze of their grief, allowing them to trek on in pursuit of what their future would bring.
The memory took her back—as everything did now—to that nearer memory of the baby’s passing, that horrifying fact that lay at the new center of her life. And, again, Lynton drew her insistently toward the immediate. “The Burma Army isn’t our only problem,” he said, nudging her toward the crest of a ridge, past which all she could see was the great canyon of the sky, riven with massing thunderclouds. “You remember I worked under Saw Lay when we were fighting the Japanese? Force 136, special operations. Someone named Bo Moo also worked with us. We worshipped Saw Lay. Utterly full of ourselves, the two of us kids. And Saw Lay disciplined our difficult alliance. Our allies and enemies were clearer then . . . But Moo, he couldn’t forgive the British afterward. Still can’t forgive the betrayal. If it were up to him, the Karens would be pursuing a program of hard-nosed insularity. Trust no one. Not the West. Not the East. Not the Burmans. Not other ‘minorities.’”
He stopped to face the view of the wide, lush valley below. “His territory abuts mine. Just out there, on the Dawna Range,” he said, pointing out across the valley. “And if I fail—”
“In what?” Her question surprised her. Perhaps he was managing to revive her after all.
“In building trust, of course.”
“I thought you wanted to build up arms, build a base in the Tavoy.”
He looked at her in confusion. But a twinkle of relief also danced in his eyes. And it was with a nod that he persisted: “Yes, we need all that for leverage. But there are many on the inside who are just as disgusted as we are by what’s going on. And there are ethnic leaders all over the country ready to work with us. With enough trust, we shouldn’t have to use force—at least not for long . . . Military action can force a point. But with or without our own states, Louisa, we’re going to have to find a way to get along. That takes compromise, letting go of the past . . .”
He passed her his canteen, and she took the cold river water into her mouth instead of giving in to the lump of relief rising in her throat—instead of voicing her questions about what would happen if he were to fail in this, whether Bo Moo wouldn’t attack his territory in order to unify the Karens.
“We are a peaceful, conciliatory people,” he said, taking the canteen back. “It’s true we’ve been betrayed, that we had reason to rise up. But does that mean we should give in to endless war?”
“I don’t believe in peoples or nations,” she found herself abruptly, emotionally answering. He turned to her with surprise, and, in fact, she had surprised herself with the radical thought. Something about the death of their child had led her here, to this feeling that it was wrong for anyone to claim exclusive rights to a corner of the earth—wrong for no other reason than that everyone was passing. And the inner child in her—the mixed-breed, raceless, rootless little girl who had been homeless in just this place—knew what it was to be rebuffed by some who temporarily had more and taken in by others who had long had less. The paradox was that she was suddenly sure that Burma’s most beautiful feature was its multiplicity of peoples.
“We have to find a way to reconcile,” Lynton said gently, in tacit understanding of, if not agreement with, her dangerous assertion. “We must find a way to get over the past.”
The British-built brick-and-wood houses of her childhood had vanished, and with them the teak plantation that had spread out across the valley under the gaze of the far-off pagoda. But upon first reentering Kyowaing she recognized the rocks, the stream that cut the same path through the land. And she knew every detail of the hill on the top of which Lynton’s men had built her a house in the shadow of the Forest Governor’s disappeared one.
“What happened to the old teak plantation?” she asked Lynton on their first evening in the village, when they were sitting in the lone, large house on the hill. They had just finished a surprisingly beautiful meal made by Sunny, and now a slew of boys—who’d run away from their homes to join the revolution, and whom Lynton had taken on as his charges—were cleaning their dishes, singing and bantering while Lynton and Louisa talked over tea at the table.
“Burned by the Burmans in the early years of the revolution,” he told her.
“And the Forest Governor and his family—do you know what became of them?”
“Escaped or captured, no doubt.”
“It’s haunted, you know,” one of the boys said, peering defiantly at her with a dripping plate in his hands.
“What’s haunted? The village?” she asked him.
“The hill!” the boy said. Sunny whipped the boy’s backside with a towel and told him to keep on task, but the boy pressed on: “Everyone who lives on this hill perishes!”
“Precisely why I choose to live on it,” Lynton said, and then let out one of his dismissive, disquieting cackles. “The past is the past—all over now.”
But it was and it wasn’t over.
During the following weeks, Lynton came and went on missions she didn’t press him to explain—she was too desperately afraid for his life. And her memories of what had been in the old house on this haunted hill mingled with her memories of her boy, and she experienced the shock of his death with a clarity made sharper by the village’s lost luminance. She looked out from the open veranda of the house, looked out over the vaporous valley where the old teak plantation had been, and she seemed to see Mama walking away from her, disappearing into the vanished trees. And superimposed over this, she saw their boy’s eyes staring into hers before he drew his last breath. And even as she saw this, she also saw the long-ago lumbering elephants that the Forest Governor had kept to haul his felled logs of teak. Beautiful creatures, those intensely private beings, whose lives had seemed a lesson to her in the value of modesty—gone! Gone with all the rest!
Had the universe—or God, if the universe had a soul—been indifferent to those elephants’ suffering? To the decimation of the teak fields? To the decimation of Kyowaing? To her boy? Here, now, with her perspective on the past, she seemed to see that, from the perspective of eternity, our tragedies might not look so very bleak. And she remembered how every afternoon she and Johnny and Grace had been released from this house onto the hillside to catch fish and collect vegetables and firewood. Their appetite for freedom had intensified with the breaking cataclysms of afternoon rain, rain that cleansed them of their heartache and tried to wash the earth of its sins. How the parched earth had revived in that rain, bodying forth waves of leafy mossy fragrance. How they, too, had revived, earthe
n creatures that they were. They had leaned against aromatic tree trunks, listening to what those protective silent beings had to say—that the tallest among them were preparing to die, that death itself was part of the way of things, that the Forest Governor’s wife and sons were also passing by, that the shades of Mama and Daddy were carried in the same light that struck the trees’ generous leaves. I am right here with you, those leaves had told Louisa. See as we do.
And what a mercy it had been to see that way:
When a mother bird lays eggs, she sits in her nest for a long time. The eggs hatch, and she feeds her babies and remains near the nest. Then she backs away, until one day she abandons the nest, and the babies cry. If she were to keep feeding them, they would never learn to fly; eventually, they would fall out of the nest and perish. Sometimes a baby bird falls from the nest. Then the mother is sad and leaves the other babies to die. Or a baby bird starts to fly and is eaten by a snake. Then the sibling still in the nest is too frightened to fly, to cry. Ignored by its mother, it freezes into fear’s hard shape.
Deep in the forest, you can pick fiddle-leaf fern and sweet oranges. After the rain starts to fall and the river water is muddy, the fish can’t see your line. In the morning, the monks who live in a monastery at the base of the pagoda beyond the forest receive food in their bowls as alms, but they abstain from eating after noontime. If you visit them in the afternoon, you might be offered leftover rice and curry; as you eat, you will also receive the blessing of the monks’ approving gaze.
To make shampoo: find a pod that looks like tamarind; boil the pod in water; then peel the bark off a certain tree, rub the bark between your palms, and mix the slippery sap with the pod liquid. To bathe: descend to the stream, but don’t copy the little children who go naked; instead, emulate the big girls, the women, who wrap their sarong under their arms and wash their torso through the sarong. To feel relief: clamber up the rocks, and stand without moving under the waterfall until something throbbing is pounded out of your shoulders. To soften the eyes of the Forest Governor’s wife: collect the red seeds of a certain tree with which she can make strands of beads.
“What will you do with your time here?” Lynton asked Louisa one evening—not with accusation, but with a certain disquiet in his eyes.
He had recently returned from a clandestine mission, and was already preparing to head out again. But all evening he’d been playing a noisy card game with Sunny and the boys in the kitchen, and he’d come into the bedroom to find her lying awake on their bed.
“I should send you out with Sunny to shoot some birds for my dinner,” he said, sitting on the bed beside her and taking her hand. “I’m sick of vegetables. Or I should charge you with the task of teaching the boys how to shoot. We need more sharpshooters.”
She looked at him, half wanting to laugh, half wanting to defend herself against his insinuation that her reflections and grieving did not constitute a meaningful life.
“I’ll teach your boys,” she found herself replying. “But it’s literature and math they need.”
And, in fact, there was no nearby school for the boys or the village children to attend. “Don’t refine all the ruffian out of them,” he said gratefully.
She soon organized the construction of a simple schoolhouse, into which she went on to pour all of her longing and energies. Lynton’s boys couldn’t easily be taught much of anything, but they and the other children adored her, basked in her tenderness and reprimands and high expectations, much as she complainingly reveled in being the butt of their pranks.
And, by means of this unexpected mutual fondness, her grief diminished, and the past, which had been so initially present for her in the village, began to recede. To give to these children—who were exiled from the country that was supposedly their birthright, who were of a provisional people in a provisional place—to be the object of their secret yearnings and ceaseless teasing, to be the witness to their minuscule achievements: it was a very small and almost invisible kind of service. She found that while she sometimes missed acting in films (the sheer escape of self that came with that), she never longed for the imposed sense of significance she’d felt in her older life (when she had so glaringly stood for something, if only the nation’s ideal of beauty). And she understood that it was up to her to give her new humbler vocation and existence all of her largeness, without restraint.
The boys and Lynton were her nation now. Kyowaing was her nation. And she began to live in it as never before. Not just to live as if she were at home in her body—to savor the contact her skin made with the dense air as she trudged down the perspiring hill on her way to the schoolhouse, or to relish Sunny’s delicious curries, his succulent, perfectly pickled eggs—but to live as if she were finally at home here among the boys and all the officers and soldiers and villagers, here among the unchanging rocks and the stream and the haunted hill that, along with her, remained.
How cherished she felt, even when Lynton was away! How cocooned in safety—not the false safety a child yearns for when she seeks reassurance that evil will never touch her, that no one she loves will ever die—but the safety of acceptance, a safety that accompanies the feeling of being free to laugh with an open mouth, and to nap and snore loudly, and even to shed tears of grief. A safety that came, for her, now, with a relinquishment of the place she’d held in Burma’s consciousness and of the greater place she’d held in her own experience of the world. These people clearly knew of her fame and silly titles; but they were all too happy to oblige her wish that all of that be left behind. They loved her in the most ordinary of ways, for being the most ordinary, inconspicuous of women; and, out of the public eye, she was free to love them—to love life—indiscriminately.
“You’ve never looked so beautiful,” Lynton told her one sleepy morning when they were still in bed. She knew, from things she’d heard him mutter to his men, that his hours away from her were fraught with tension—nothing was certain—yet he, too, had never looked so unburdened, so free to inhale his fill of air, to rest, to enjoy.
To rest, to enjoy, and to do so while in love . . . To be understood, and to understand, by means of two frank, flawed bodies. To be touched by, and to touch with, the hands of conviction—conviction that one is enough, more than enough: necessary. To be assured, and to assure, with a kiss, with a look that says one is incapable of disappointing. To be accepted and wanted in spite of one’s imperfections. To be the recipient of the pleasure the other has to give, and the provider of small courtesies (“Let me pull the blanket up over you”). Yes, fiery arguments still sometimes exploded between Lynton and her, and at times they surprised each other with displays of aggression or outrageousness or momentary cruelty, and beneath this, too, shone nothing less than absolute trust, an intimacy that staggered her. No more need to hide, to pose, to feign strength—what was already within either of them, all the greatness and all the humanity, was everything the other saw.
If their hour was at hand, so, too, was the fulfillment of their longing. With Sunny’s gentle assistance, they parented the boys. Lynton bought her two elephants on whose expansive beings the lot of them lavished their affections, and at night they humans would sit up in the house on the haunted hill, sit around the glowing fire, and laugh about the goings-on of the day, or else sing some ancient Karen ballad and enjoy Sunny’s cooking, never speaking directly about where they were headed.
One evening, after Sunny and the boys had cleared out of the house, Lynton came to her and told her to close her eyes, and then he led her out to the stoop under the veranda, where he asked her to sit, and he put something between her hands—something cumbersome and stiff, yet yielding—a small accordion.
“Found it in one of the boy’s huts,” he said, when she couldn’t speak. “Don’t want to know where he got it. Probably pillaged it from some poor Burman’s hut.”
“They’re too young to fight,” she said—one of her refrains when they were
speaking of the boys. Not that Lynton’s cease-fire with Ne Win’s army had been broken yet, but they were subtly preparing for that inevitability, and the topic of the boys’ fitness for soldiering had been part of those preparations.
“Go on,” he said. “Play it for me.”
The rain had fallen off a few hours earlier, and now the evening sun shone clearly over the valley. From where she sat, she could see past the gleaming river snaking into the mountains to where she knew Thailand lay.
“I thought you knew how to play,” he chided her, as though to tease away her silence. “You told me your father gave you an accordion that you left in Thaton.”
Had she told him that?
“Go on. Play the song your father hums—‘God Will Take Care of Me.’”
She scoffed, yet there was something chesty in her voice, something about to give. “That’s absurd,” she managed. “You can’t expect me to sing you promises of divine protection when I don’t believe . . .” But she trailed off, and he looked at her with anticipation. They had never spoken of the limits of their faith, never even identified themselves to each other as being of any particular faith, or of being of faith particularly.
Don’t you, his quiet gaze asked her, in some unfathomable way?
He closed his eyes, as if trying to see her more clearly, and she shivered at the sight of him so still and undefended. A bird in a nearby bush began to sing of solitude, of yearning.
“The talks aren’t going well,” he said, regarding her again with grave eyes. “It may be soon that you hear I’m dead.” He spoke very tenderly, very sincerely. “Don’t believe it. I’ll come back for you. But in the meantime”—he pointed across the valley, to the dark green slopes of the Dawna Range beyond the pagoda—“go to those mountains if the Burmans come.”
The Karens from whom he’d split off were headquartered in those mountains; she remembered this, and was bewildered by his suggestion that she would be safe with the very people with whom he’d been in conflict—with Bo Moo, whose ruthlessness Lynton’s men referred to only in whispers.
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