Burmese Lessons (19 page)

She doesn’t say that, exactly. Yet I know that she wants me to preserve in my own life what she doesn’t have enough of in her own. But I’m envious of her, too. She is fully steeped in the rich, complicated muck of marriage, attached body and soul to this land and to her husband and their lovely kids. It’s no surprise that such attachment sometimes feels confining.

My own life is so open-ended. I’ve been vanquished by one country after another, as though I have no center, as though I belong everywhere, nowhere, touching the world but not bound to it, like wind. How many realities can a person contain, how many languages? Not as many, apparently, as I would like. That is why I need to escape to various bodies of water and pretend to be a fish.

I feel guilty for being in this peaceful place, though. Guilty for this ease and luxury. I think of the students back in Burma, dozens of them in prison, thousands of them, disillusioned by their own brave efforts at protesting the regime. I doubt that Maung—like most of those who work on the border—is able to run away from his responsibilities and wallow in questions of selfhood beside a green lake.

I’ve come here
to write, but I wake up in the mornings full of reluctance. The usual ache in my back and right shoulder radiates down into my hands. I turn away from my notebook and turn off my computer. I just want to swim or sit in the sun or walk around the town. How I love that sane, friendly world of temples, markets, and noodle shops, the easy banter I have with shopkeepers and children buying rice sweets outside their walled schoolyard. Doing these things, I am able to hide from my recent experiences and growing interest in Burma.

Though I hide, he finds me. In the middle of the night, when I wake up for my bout of insomnia, a man’s voice whispers in my head. No, not Maung. This Burmese man has been with me since the interviews I did with ex–political prisoners in Rangoon. He is not one of those ex-politicals, not exactly. He is himself. I would have expected a woman, some familiar of Ma Thida, the young woman writer whose tragic case got me interested in Burma. But that is not what—not whom—I have received.

This man does not talk to me. I have no personal connection with him. He addresses two worlds, his own and a much larger one beyond
him, countries and people he has never met. Not in a didactic way, not grandstanding—just talking. He wants to communicate with the world outside the prison. That is where he is, in a solitary-confinement cell. But the greater world ignores him.

It’s horrible. And captivating, because I hear him so clearly. He talks about his own life. The history of his country is recorded in his body. That is always the first record, written as it unfolds for those who live it: flesh as memory. The official accounts, mythic or laden with propaganda or detached, come later, and do not smell of human skin or taste of tears. This man who speaks is not detached. One of the most painful things about these visitations is that I already know some of what he has suffered. I know that he will suffer more. Yet, disconcertingly, I’ve also heard his laughter. I’ve heard him sing.

I’ve always been suspicious of those interviews in which novelists describe how they are “taken over” by their characters, as though the writer is privy to some kind of mystical experience that eludes the rest of us. In fact, I am not at all “taken over” by this as-yet-nameless personage; he is not me. When I hear him speaking, I feel unbalanced somehow, unsure, but full of curiosity: it’s the ideal mental climate for good writing. At the same time, I feel I’ve entered a world that I probably shouldn’t have entered, in which I have no rights.

Yet here I am. A man in a prison in Burma. He is not the only one. There is a boy, too; the boy I saw once early in my stay in Rangoon, in the railway yard, at night. I stumbled down a hill, toward a fire that was, in fact, the center of a tea shop, and he was there, a worker, presumably, taking his break. A miniature man with tough hands, stained fingers on the white tea cup. A boy. But a man, knees spread wide, an unlit cheroot stub in his mouth. I could not stop looking at him. The human self was sharply present, almost commanding. Sometimes the child laborers are so tired that vacancy fills them; they look benumbed. He looked fierce. He relit his cheroot, the flame of the lighter flaring briefly in front of his face, darkening the smudges of dirt, the small scars on his cheek, his forehead. After
a deep inhalation, smoke rushed straight out of his nostrils. Little dragon, sharp-faced and wire-limbed, the wildness held in but there, as fire was there inside the cheroot, capable of burning down a house, or a train station. So small, so vulnerable, yet such a power.

In my imagination, in the story, this boy does not talk. At least, I cannot yet hear his voice. He watches; mostly he is looking for something to eat. An old, crafty monk will help him, but I don’t know how they are related to the prisoner yet.

Who are these people? To find out, I have to write about them. But I can’t. Not yet. I’m too indignant. I spend many notebook pages ranting at the cruel generals of Burma and praising the bravery of those who fight against them. Fair enough—the generals are brutal tyrants, their opponents are courageous—but it’s still a girl’s journal writing, simplistic and embarrassing.

I fear I’ll have to wade through a lot of that crap before I’m able to transcribe the stories of my nightly visitors. Equally daunting is that their voices and the images of deprivation that accompany them threaten me in a visceral way. They are imaginary—as illusory as the ghost in the lake—but they are literally haunting. They call to me from a dark place, a world I have glimpsed vividly but in small degree, from the safety of my white skin and my Canadian passport. I don’t know if I can write my way out of that safety—beyond my noisy self—into the truth about a wounded country whose language I cannot speak.

“A
re you writing?”

“I’m doing what comes before writing. This is a quiet place. I’m able to think.”

“What are you thinking about?”

“My life. Burma.” I pause, wondering. “You.”

He pauses back. Then says, “Do not think about the first two too much. The last is more important.”

“Really? What makes you so sure of that?”

“I am older than you. Wiser. You must listen to me.”

“Comrade, you are dispensing propaganda.”

“The revolutionary forces will do what is necessary to achieve their goals.”

I laugh. “What are you actually doing? Right now?”

“Having meetings with some people from the Karen army.”

“Are you still in Chiang Mai?”

“No. But we’re not too far away. So tell me, the place where you are, is it beautiful?”

“It is. There is a green lake, where I swim every day, usually twice, and there are some lovely gardens.” Mimicking the postcard line, I add, “I wish you were here.”

To which Maung quickly replies, “I will come. Can I come to see you? Tell me how to get there.”

T
he next two days consist of waiting. Waiting is an odious task, which I’ve disdained for almost as long as I’ve been doing it. I believe it is a function of female biology. Women wait. From the age of ten or eleven, we wait to get our periods for the first time. Then, for decades after, we wait for them every month, often holding our breath. We wait for pregnancies to take root. We wait, weeping, for the date at the abortion clinic. We wait for nine months to give birth. We wait, fretting, for our children to get home safely. Once the periods start getting unpredictable, we wait for menopause. And along with all of this waiting, from early adolescence on—if we are straight—we wait and wait, and wait some more, for our men.

Historically, we wait while they go to war and kill one another. In the absence of war, we wait for them while they are busy making other conquests. Last year, at a writers’ festival in Australia, I sat on a travel-writing
panel with three men. I presumed that all four of us were single and childless because we each spent long periods of time traveling or living abroad, alone. How wrong I was! All three of them, in their recent books, thanked loving wives and children—I quote, their “greatest inspirations,” their “deepest reasons,” “the ones who remind me of my most important role”—wives and children who waited for them faithfully while they took off and had their grand, often dangerous adventures in the world. The youngest one was a few years older than me and had an obvious addiction to war zones. I was fascinated by him, and annoyed. If I have a child, I will not be leaving the kid behind with Dada while I dodge bullets in the Congo. I won’t be able to do that. But men can. That is because they know the woman will wait, and will perform waiting’s corresponding duty: she will take care.

It is no coincidence that I think about this as I wait for a man who comes to me from no fixed address and who will depart from me, in all likelihood, for an equally unspecified location.

I
walk out to the entrance of the property so that our initial greeting won’t be witnessed by anyone who is working or staying at the resort, especially Zoë. In the roadside shelter, I sit watching a troop of large ants detach the wing from a yellow-and-iridescent-blue butterfly. Now they are dragging the wing away—to eat? to decorate their apartments? I try not to look up too often at the two-lane highway.

Some dry, angry voice in me repeatedly whispers, “He’s not going to show up.” And then adds sarcastically, “And if he does he’ll have the bodyguard with him.” Several songtows pass. He will be a passenger in a similar vehicle, eventually, come from the bus station in the nearby town.

Provided that he was on the bus from Chiang Mai.

After the ants start dragging away the long, plain body of the butterfly, a songtow signals and slows down, then pulls onto the shoulder just
past the shelter. There he is, sitting on the end of the songtow bench and grinning enthusiastically. Maung. He hops down from the back of the truck and pays the driver, who zooms off.

Maung lifts his small pack up over his shoulder and takes a long look at me. There is no rush to touch. We begin as we ended in Chiang Mai, regarding each other from a distance. I step out of the shelter. He observes, “You’re wearing a dress.”

“To remind you that I’m a woman.”

“Ah, thanks. I forgot about that.”

I give him a saucy grin. Yet my pleasure at seeing him is accompanied by an unsettled stomach. I honestly thought that he might not come. I look from the glinting eyes to the heavy black hair hanging just above them to the full mouth, which I seem to know too well, considering that I’ve met the man only three times. It is a praiseworthy and memorable mouth. I clumsily open my own. “I thought you might be too busy. To visit. How are you?”

“Happy.” He finally steps toward me. “I am so happy to see you.” Then his arms take me in, enfold me. He hugs me hard, almost lifts me up with the strength of his embrace. He smells wonderful: clean cotton and cigarettes and the spice of male sweat. We remain in the embrace for a long while, stunned. His heart hammers against mine.

I
show him the lake before dinner. Walking back, we hold hands. Our swinging arms propel sexual electricity—
zing zing zing
—through us both and out into the dark: dozens of fireflies wink on and off among the trees.

“There are so many of them,” Maung says, delighted. “We don’t even need a flashlight!” A few steps later, he stumbles on a tree root and I bump into him. “Maybe we do need a flashlight,” he amends. “A broken ankle would be hard to explain to my men.”

“Do they know where you are?”

“Not exactly. But I think one or two have an idea.”

•    •    •

W
hen we get back to the resort’s bar and restaurant, Zoë is a model of discretion. She shakes Maung’s hand in welcome, asks about his trip. Then she leaves us alone. We drink wine and eat dinner, talk some more, with openness and humor, about our lives.

How to compress a courtship of months into the space of a few days? We don’t have much time—he can stay only four nights. In a week I will return to Bangkok to get a visa for Burma. He’s not sure if he can see me again before I leave for Rangoon.

“Let’s not think about it too much, when we will say goodbye,” he tells me. “I arrived today. I will see you tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. Before, I did not know you at all, but now we’re here, together. Compared to before, we have many hours. I’ve learned something important in my strange job, doing revolution.”

“What’s that?”

“Patience. There is no substitute for it.”

“I’ve never been very good at patience.”

“That doesn’t surprise me. You have little training.”

I consider this. I want to defend myself, say that I have had training. (What, waiting in airports?) But there’s nothing to defend. I cannot comprehend his patience, nor that of the other men and women working on the border, through rainy seasons and dry seasons, through malaria, through jungles, through deaths.

“It’s true. I’m quick to act, quick to feel. That’s part of my nature.”

“Yes, I know.” His eyes meet mine. “That’s why I am here.”