“Which communists?” she said. “Isn’t Bo Moo opposed to communism?”
“I mean the Karen Communists,” he said. “The ones based in the Tavoy. They are few, but well funded by Peking. I’ve been listening in, and they are trying to pay Bo Moo a visit.”
It was hours past dawn and the sun shone strongly in the window like a grace, yet she had the sense again of standing over a chasm whose depths she could hardly fathom. Again she remembered the overheard conversation between Lynton and Tom. “Exactly why Will’s old plan makes sense. We need a base in the Tavoy—somewhere arms can be delivered by sea.” Had the American wanted to position Lynton in the Tavoy as a defense against communism and further communist incursions? And had Lynton knowingly gone along with being used to such an end? She was seized by the impulse to back away from the depths of her incomprehension, to run toward Bo Moo, who had doggedly trusted no one: not the Burmans, not the West, not Lynton himself, and not Peking—as yet.
“We will go to him regardless,” she said.
“His men will ambush us if we enter his territory without permission,” Sunny cried. She saw him shiver, as though he were caught in a wind from which there was no escape.
“With the corrupted airwaves,” the operator added, “communication is impossible.”
“We’ll communicate by hand and runners, if necessary,” she said.
And then she forced herself to look past their frightened faces to the window, to the sunshine, still pacifying the day.
That night, under the cover of the mist and the darkness, with a gun that still felt unnatural on her hip and a rifle in her hands, she left the village with Sunny, the operator, a medic, and a platoon of eight other men. They had sent a runner ahead to make contact with a farmer whose property straddled the opposing brigades’ territories—and whose soldier sons were no less divided—with the hope that the farmer would be willing to approach Bo Moo as a neutral party and communicate their desire for safe passage to his headquarters. Sometime in the next few hours, they trusted, they would intersect with the runner and learn their next step.
She had not slept in over a day, but as she proceeded into the forest she was drawn deeper into her acutely alert state of mind. She followed her ruined body over paths that plunged, that slipped, that climbed, that vanished into streams whose currents came up to her knees, that propelled her and the others all at once onto brief clearings from which she could see, through the parting mists, the moonlit ridges of the Dawna Range. Then back, back they burrowed, freezing, into the forest’s comprehensive darkness, leaving time, or rather entering another kind of time—the time of the dead. The mire into which they sank was that of the decomposed. The nocturnal beings peering at them from the trees were the dead’s descendants. And the rustle of a snake in the underbrush was the angel of death calling them home. A cemetery, old as the earth, with traps laid to bury them. And yet she seemed to sense an invisible hand drawing her forth with every pace. Sunny’s tense shape ahead of her, the silhouette of his rifle and grenade launcher in the shadows beyond the shadows—those might have been Lynton’s.
Dawn was breaking when the mists gave way to white fields of paddy, and the men recognized the farmer’s hut on the edge of the far forest. The rest hid in the brush while she and Sunny proceeded through the sodden field as far as the hut, where they gently called out to make themselves known, and soon discovered the tousled head of the runner emerging from the doorway. He had made contact, he told them, and the willing farmer had left sometime in the middle of the night. There was rice and tea for them inside. They must eat, and then hide in a hut farther on in the forest until the man’s return. No cooking during the day, no smoke the Burmans might see, no movement at all until the farmer returned with Bo Moo’s answer, and that could take four or five days.
An enforced pause. A maddening pause, during which they could only listen in over the wireless, mutely watching the terrible action from afar. They knew the Burmans were on the move, knew—from the escalating warnings that their own men in Kyowaing were sending out—that Taung Kwin, on the grid line, was under threat. Any moment gunfire would erupt, while they were left to reckon with the paltriness of their plans.
Or rather, her plans, because there was no question anymore that she had become the leader of Lynton’s men, that she alone was responsible for arranging and conducting this entire, if halted, movement toward Bo Moo’s camp, which would either save or destroy them. And yet she knew so little of the menacing figure on whom her aspirations were now pinned.
“Tell me more about him,” she said to the men each night, when they felt freer to breathe, to speak. And slowly a picture began to crystallize in her mind—a picture of revolution made manifest. Bristling hair, eyes shocked with contempt, furious and thick-fingered fists . . . Bo Moo had staged an attack on Lynton’s camp before the peace talks had begun, the men told her, and he was known to impose the harshest sentences on soldiers who committed crimes, sentences he himself executed with his bayonet . . . From a peace-seeking perspective, he would appear to be a demon. And will I become like that? she wondered in this sanctuary of the indefinite.
Because not only could she not comprehend Bo Moo, but she hardly knew what she meant to do with the man should he not kill her on the spot. She would endeavor to convince him that he should accept reunification—but beyond that? Her first thought was to persuade him to trust in Lynton’s plan of building trust, of looking West while working toward democracy; but of course she no more knew if she trusted Lynton’s allies—his senior officers, Tom, the American, those Burman government insiders who had been willing to lend Lynton an ear—than she knew if she trusted in the possibility of democracy and trust itself. Consider, on the one hand, survival by means of a rejection of the ideals one used to hold dear; consider, on the other, victory by means of the risk of holding fast to them. One instant she had the evil fantasy of surprising the Burmans who had shot at Lynton, surprising them in their beds with a volley of shots from her own rifle; another appalled instant she thought she would prefer to call her men to her and pray for divine inspiration. Who will we be from now on? she seemed to be asking herself. Shall we be described as the crystallization of revolution, too? Shall we be defined by hatred and suspicion and contempt, absolved by righteousness and a bloody thirst for revenge?
On the fifth morning, the farmer finally wandered out of a tangle of trees in the forest accompanied by one of Bo Moo’s colonels. “I was a friend of your father and Saw Lay,” the colonel told her immediately, surely to put her at ease. But as they sat down together for tea in the farmer’s hut, the embarrassment with which he stole glances at her made her all at once conscious of her shorn head. “There is a long journey ahead of you to headquarters,” he said to her. “I’m afraid you won’t be permitted to bring more than one of your men along.”
With Sunny—of course it was Sunny she chose—they left the farmer’s field that evening, pressing forward into the mountains in a truncated column. The colonel was so soft and almost feminine that she could hardly believe him a warrior. He held his hands folded together as gently as he strode over the steep terrain, as lightly as he seemed to wear his boots and cap. She sensed he was predisposed to taking her into his confidence, yet he kept his silence as the fogs fell over them, and she kept Sunny between them—Sunny who, every hundredth pace, looked back worriedly at her, his eyes gleaming like stars in the deepening night.
As her bones began to throb and she trudged into the shadows that grew increasingly sinister, she felt alternately seized by a desperate desire to survive, to save her men and people, and lured by a call to rest, to surrender, even to die. Was this how Mama had felt, after they had parted in Bilin, when she had walked with her wares on her back, bearing the burden of her children’s survival? Even as Louisa wondered this, her thoughts slipped back to the children she’d left in Kyowaing, to the sick boy. Without the wireless operator accompanying he
r, she had no way of being reassured that he was still safe; she was submerged in her individual experience, as Mama had been during those months and months of their apartness.
An early blue light broke as they were making a strenuous, desolating climb up a gorge, and through the rising mists she glimpsed a tiny village clinging to the mountainside. The sight took her back to the initial trek she’d made to Kyowaing, after Daddy had disappeared and the Burmans had broken the Thaton cease-fire. Her dawning awareness of the repetitions—the disappearances in Thaton, the broken cease-fires there—filled her with the bewildering sensation that she was reading the future in the past, or reading the future of the past in the present. Again, she seemed to be a girl passing a mystical mountain village, and again Mama seemed to be telling her that its inhabitants had never seen a car, that the rice and vegetables they ate came from their fields or the bounty of the forest. “They know of no artifice.” “What is artifice?” “The way one tricks oneself into forgetting that death is nearby.” Then she and the colonel and Sunny reached the crest of the gorge, and she was past the village, past her memory of what had been—born to and wrenched from her impressions so swiftly they seemed to have been dreamed.
Only when they drew up to a mountain station overlooking a wide russet-colored valley, whose waking beauty all at once blindsided her, did the colonel break his long silence. “You must be very smart about this,” he said, and he nodded to the valley, as if to humble himself before it. “There are things the general believes you have done.”
“Things?”
She understood he was referring to the rumors and that he was too shy to elaborate.
What he did instead was to complicate the picture she had been forming of Bo Moo, a man whose fanaticism for the Karen cause had apparently been intensified by his conversion to Christianity. Moo had grown up, the colonel said, an animist in the local Papun hills, where he had first confronted the barbarism of Aung San’s Burma Independence Army, whose units had been composed of so many bloodthirsty convicts. One of the early massacres had occurred in Papun, with seventeen elders machine-gunned, and the stray survivor bayonetted into his grave. The incident had been the first of a flurry of increasingly unimaginable atrocities, one of which the colonel himself had survived. “You see,” the colonel told her, dabbing the now lightly falling rain from his eyes, “Aung San’s men liked to say the Japanese sanctioned their extermination of Christians. Whether this was the case, I cannot say. But there is no doubt they had Christian blood on their minds when they arrived at the Roman Catholic mission where I was then boarding, in Myaungmya, as an orphan.”
Sunny retreated to the rear of the open station, as if to hide from the colonel’s description of how one of the priests, in his sickbed at the Roman Catholic mission, had been burned alive, and another shot through the stomach before the soldiers had burst into the orphanage. The children and sisters had fled upstairs while the men shot after them, shot up through the ceiling. And it was only by hiding beneath a mattress that the colonel had escaped the axes and machetes that took the lives of those around him. “Over a hundred and fifty. Even a six-month-old baby . . . So you see,” he went on quietly, not a note of self-pity or righteousness in his voice, “though the general was an animist then, the targeting of Christians couldn’t fail to make an indelible impression on him. I think it very nearly prepared him for conversion—and when you speak to him you must keep this in mind, his devoutness.”
Before she could form the question taking shape in her mind, he continued, less ambiguously: “He was a teenager at the time, and he did something interesting. Rather than joining the British army, as so many of our people did, rather than fighting against the Burma Independence Army or its allies, the Japanese, in the name of loyalty to the British—or rather than immediately joining British intelligence, as your husband did, pretending to spy for the Japanese and sabotaging their communications”—she made an effort, listening to these revelations, not to betray her ignorance of Lynton’s past, or her interest in it—“rather than doing anything like that, General Bo Moo joined the Japanese police. You know from your father, no doubt, that it was the Japanese, unbelievably, along with Aung San, who eventually put an end to the particular viciousness of the Independence Army’s miscreants. What General Bo Moo did was a very clever way of openly protecting our people at a time when we had no real protector at all. And it seems to me that he must have learned something from the Japanese then.”
The colonel gave her a knowing, ominous look just as the wind picked up at their backs. “Of course, he joined up with the British eventually,” he went on. “And he was not spared that special disillusionment felt by all of us—including your father and Saw Lay—when they left us to our own devices. It explains his reluctance to have confidence in the CIA, in anyone, the way your husband”—he looked worriedly out onto the valley again—“the way General Lynton was intent on doing.”
Night was falling again by the time they arrived on the banks of the Salween River, where Burma came to an end. Bo Moo’s headquarters were on the other side, in the relative refuge of Thailand, and through the gloaming she could see—beyond the far steep sandy bank—a thicket of teak from which several paths emerged, some leading down to the river, others following the shoreline before reentering the forest farther downstream where the trees surged forward to meet the cliff. There was a raft tied to those trees, but no vessel that she could see on the near bank.
The colonel showed them to a simple hut without walls near the water, where he said they could rest and nourish themselves while he conveyed the message of their arrival to headquarters. Then he disappeared into the forest down the shore, and she and Sunny, entering the open structure, seemed to be plunged into an aloneness and an exposure so comprehensive, all they could do for several moments was to stand with their guns pointed out at the expanding evening. Every odd call of a bird, every splash from the river, was a threat, reminding her of their utter vulnerability.
Sunny seemed to force himself to set down his rifle and reckon with the provisions left for them, and she turned her eyes to the calmly glistening river. How narrow it was, and how easy it would be for the Burmans to traverse it and overrun the last remnants of the Karen stronghold. She understood—at last, and viscerally—why Lynton had been so intent on seeking outside allies: in this isolation they could defend themselves for only so long. She felt a pang of sympathy for the man across the river, whom fate had also made her enemy; there he was, somewhere beyond the dark water, somewhere behind the slim forest of teak trees, full of pride, no longer able to cope alone with the evil he faced.
She glanced back at Sunny, who was pouring grains of rice into an empty pot. His movements were mechanical, his fingers almost imperceptibly trembling, as if he were trying to fulfill an obligation to persist. With an alert glance at her, he stood with the pot and left the hut, bound for the river—for the water, she saw. She watched him walk out to the very edge and stoop down and wash the rice. Then he stood erect, a kind of defeat in his shoulders, before he crossed to a nearby thicket of trees. A few moments later, he was back, beside the hut with the waterlogged pot and a few forked branches that he had plucked and presently used to construct a stand for cooking. Normally, he would have darted back out to the forest for vegetables or birds—he’d done as much every night when they had been waiting at the farmer’s field—but this meal was not about their nourishment, she knew; these preparations were about his terror of discontinuing. And, watching him struggle to light a fire under the stand, she tried to halt the stream of her own sunken thoughts, rushing dangerously toward a mental picture of Lynton’s last supper and the stunned expression that had snatched the smile away from his face.
But he’s alive! she argued with herself inwardly, forcing her mind away from the images that were such a disgrace to the living man she loved.
She turned back to the river, trying to conjure Lynton’s voice, as she had do
ne with those of her parents when she had been separated from them in childhood—and instantly he was speaking to her, repeating what he’d said on the stoop of their Kyowaing house: “If we look past our petty proclivities, past our troubled history; if we see the broader common goal, everyone with an eye to democracy . . . If we find a way to come together, they won’t be able to stand in our way. And our friends will be there to help us . . .”
How easily she had let herself think him the dupe of those friends, of the unnamed member of his inner circle who had supposedly betrayed him in Thaton, of Tom and the American. Lynton couldn’t force an ally to be loyal, but he could determine to believe in another’s capacity for loyalty. And she could keep her faith: in his judgment, even if he’d fallen; in his allies. Perhaps the thing she could most convincingly offer Bo Moo was precisely the thing the Communists couldn’t—the thing most impossible to convince another of, because it was defined by uncertainty: faith. True, Bo Moo and Lynton had broken faith with each other, but neither had—at least until now—lost faith in their people’s original dream of democracy. Wasn’t it true that she had reason to believe that America—that the West, that Will and Tom—would support them only if they refused to tangle with the Communists? She must tell Bo Moo of the American’s proposed base, which Lynton had believed would facilitate their aid.
A distant splash drew her attention to the far side of the river. In the early moonlight, she glimpsed the silhouette of a man standing as if on the water: a soldier was paddling the raft this way.
Sunny quickly took the pot off the stand and kicked dirt into the fire, and they picked up their rifles and went out to the bank. When she looked down the shore, she saw that the colonel had emerged from the trees and was walking toward them at a slow pace, as if trying to put off reaching them.
By the time the colonel drew abreast of them, his breath coming fast, his eyes glimmering with uncertainty, the soldier on the raft had nearly arrived.
Miss Burma Page 36