Burmese Lessons (20 page)

Appropriately, he rented
his own little cabin. After dinner, and drinks, and tea, he walked me through the lit gardens, talking. At regular intervals we listened to a night bird make a low-pitched trill—like an owl on a harmonica. We were both tired but didn’t want to part. Eventually Maung declared that he had to go to sleep, so he walked me along the orchid-lined paths back to my little house. At the door, he gave me a depressingly chaste kiss—on the lips, yes, but dry and restrained nevertheless—and walked away.

The sound of my own voice surprised me, a hoarse whisper unrolling over the grass and flower beds. I called him back. The woman says yes. She begins it. Yes. Come back. Come in.

I
write by candlelight. And try not to look at him too much—I don’t want my hungry eyes to wake him. But I could look at him for hours—the slopes and roundnesses of the face, the body, half curled, the slack hands. The white blanket is pulled halfway up the smooth expanse of brown back.
I would like to keep touching him, but he’s sleeping. He looks seventeen, eighteen—a boy, for all his thirty-six years.

I
try to hear the sound of his body inside me. I hold on to the details, the shock of ease—the ease of us undressing, shy and serious, his face close to me. We kept our eyes open.

Two strangers meet in the dark and share hunger. It won’t be sated. There is nothing better than that kind of lust, except for more of it. We eat and eat and still the flesh wants to consume more, and can, and does. Shh. Shh. The walls are made of rough wood; cries of lust travel through them. Once, in our hurry to change positions, we bumped our heads together—which reminded me of stumbling on the path—but Maung did not laugh. I was smiling already, with the gratification of my hands on his skin. I could not stop smiling.

“Do you think I am funny?”

“No. I’m just smiling because I’m glad you’re here.” He looked doubtful, but kissed me.

Is he less of a stranger now, or more of one? We lit the candle afterward, and talked for a long time, released from our bodies, claimed by them. Already sleepy but questioning what we’re up to. In the early stages, I actually asked him, “What am I doing?”

He answered, “You are having your clothes removed. By me. Is it all right?”

“It’s not all right. You’re going much too slowly.”

He laughed. And continued doing what he was doing, more slowly still.

L
ying in bed, talking and talking, I fell asleep between sentences. My response to the last question he asked me was lost, drawn down into a cave of dream images. Zoë’s six-year-old daughter was splashing in the lake. I
sat on the bank, glancing from her to the ants as they pulled a butterfly’s wing over a tree root. But the wing was actually part of a scarf my cousin gave me, threads of blue, green, yellow woven through black cloth, a scarf I use all the time here, as a sarong, a wrap, a soft talisman of home. I was worried that the ants were taking her gift.

Maung whispered, “Karen. Karen?” But I couldn’t pull myself out of the dream.

Was that fifteen minutes or an hour ago? Now I’ve woken, and he’s asleep. What did he ask me, as I fell asleep? I can’t remember.

I follow the bones in his wrist rising into his forearm, the naked shoulder, the neck. Sadness sits tightly in my throat. I already want to use the word
love
. That must be the result of long solitude and months of celibacy. Is it reasonable to fall in love after just a few meetings? Since when have I been reasonable?

I think of the half-dozen white women in Chiang Mai and Bangkok in love with Burmese men. Passionate love takes root easily in a place full of exiles and extremes, even if the extraordinary circumstances have become habit. Maung seems the least desperate of men; he is even-tempered, calm, blessed with a good sense of humor. How else could he manage his life? Over dinner, he explained that he moves around almost constantly. The ABSDF offices in Bangkok, Chiang Mai, and Mae Sarieng are under threat of raids by the Thai police, whose tolerance of Burmese dissidents changes constantly. When that tolerance plummets, policemen descend on the makeshift offices and confiscate computers, printers, paper files. Sometimes they send people to immigration detention centers. Maung told me about the five-thousand-baht rule: most of the dissidents try to carry around that much money at all times, in case they are stopped by Thai police and have to pay a bribe to avoid detention.

People live as well as work at the ABSDF offices, Maung said, their few belongings tucked into market bags, bedrolls on the floor beside their computer tables. The offices themselves shift location regularly. “Most of us live between arriving and leaving.”

“That’s the definition of a refugee,” I said.

He shook his head. “The real refugees are in the worst situation. Their lives have been stolen from them. It’s bad for refugees from Burma because Thailand isn’t a signatory nation to the U.N. convention on the status of refugees. So, officially, they don’t exist. The Thai government doesn’t have to care about what happens to them. If they work, they can be exploited, beaten, killed. Have you ever been to a refugee camp?”

“No, never.”

“You will have to go, if you want to learn about Burma.” He turned his head to light a cigarette and added, “Soon they will be burned down.”

“What do you mean, burned down?”

“It happens every dry season, to the camps that are close to the border. Burmese soldiers come across in the night and set fire to the camp. Thai soldiers guard the camps, but they are useless. They run away.” He paused. “So you see, our situation is not so bad.”

In this place and time, facing the world and my ignorance of it, everything has become sharper. When I look at Maung, I see someone who has given himself over, completely, to a cause bigger than his one life. The shadow of his eyelashes on the sheet rises, flutters, falls again. The eyes slide, pearl-like, under the closed lids. What is he dreaming?

For years he slept in a hammock, in the jungle—they all did—to keep off the insects and the damp. He says he can sleep through mortar explosions, if they’re not too close. Here there is only the sound of crickets.

T
he next morning, on the restaurant deck that overlooks the pond, Maung and I have hard-boiled eggs and fruit and steaming cups of Nescafé with condensed milk. We watch fish jump in the water. Fog hangs in the gardens, shrouding the trees and the bird-of-paradise flowers. Zoë is already up and about, chatting with other guests as she makes tea and changes the tape in the machine to some hypnotic Indian tabla music. I catch only one of her curious looks. When she approaches with a coffee mug in hand, I
ask her to join us. She sits next to me, comments on the cool morning weather, and takes surreptitious glances at Maung. Eventually she asks us about our plans for the day.

Maung and I look at each other bashfully. I say nothing, but I’m all for spending the day between the lake and bed.

Receiving no response, Zoë continues, “We’re going into town later. Didn’t you say you needed to go to the bank, Karen?”

I blink. The bank?

Then I remember: “the bank” is a euphemism for the pharmacy. I’d told Zoë that I had a single condom in my overnight bag. Gone now. Maung brought some—in battered-looking packages. Also gone now. “I forgot all about that. What time are you leaving?”

“Around noon. I have some errands to do, but you could go to the bank then have lunch. We’d be back by two. Plenty of time after for a swim.”

“You are so thoughtful, Zoë.”

“Just trying to help. And Maung can have a little tour of the village.”

T
he best noodle shop in town is situated beside a big machinery and mechanics shop. It smells not only of garlic and chicken but of diesel and grease. There’s oil on the floorboards. Spiderwebs hang thick in the corners of the ceiling. I love the place. Young grease monkeys and old men and betel-nut-chewing ladies from the market are in and out all day long, eating, talking, gossiping. On the weekend the tables are packed with teenagers, who come for the good cheap food and for the fancy Sony TV that sits at the back of the concrete room, beside the Buddha altar.

Maung pauses at the threshold. “This is your favorite noodle shop?”

“At least in northern Thailand.”

“Hmm,” he responds doubtfully. “If you like this, you will like Mae Sot. Everywhere in Mae Sot is like this place. But with more dust.”

When he leaves here in two days, Maung will stop in Bangkok en
route to Mae Sot, a border town farther south, where many Burmese migrant workers make their entrance into Thailand to work in factories and on building sites. A good number of dissidents live there, too; some of the men and women I met at the Christmas party talked about the “Mae Sot office.” Refugee camps of Karen and Karenni people are also situated close to the town. I don’t know why Maung is going there, and I don’t ask. I’ve understood that he doesn’t want to talk too much about his work.

So we talk about mine instead—the series of interviews I’m conducting with former political prisoners, the people I met in Burma, the people I would like to meet here, in Thailand.

Maung says, “I will help you to make contacts.”

I thank him for the offer, thinking that I’ll have to be careful about accepting it. I’ve already figured out that there are a lot of rivalries between different groups of dissidents and revolutionary organizations on the border. I don’t want to alienate other contacts by seeming to be too connected to the ABSDF, or to him. Nevertheless, we talk about various well-known dissidents and activists. Maung tells me which ones are living in Bangkok. One man, a well-known musician I’d heard of in Rangoon, emigrated to Norway a few months ago.

“It’s too bad I missed him.”

“You should have come sooner. More people leave every year. They go to one of the U.N. holding camps and they wait to become official U.N. refugees. They get tired of the instability, the poverty. If they have children, it is more difficult. They have to choose: Thailand illegal or somewhere else legal. There is not so much here, for some people.” He looks at me searchingly.

I stare into my noodles and reply, “I’m beginning to see the Thailand that so many Burmese people live in—safer than Burma but still a brutal place.”

“Not compared to Burma, though. And we get used to it.”

“I don’t know if I could. I would probably leave. Though leaving Asia can’t be easy, either. In Canada, it’s really tough for new immigrants.”

“And so cold.”

“That’s why I’ve spent a lot of time in Greece.”

“Is that really the reason?”

“It’s not just the physical weather, it’s the mental weather. I’m more comfortable in Greece. My character fits the Greek character. I’m happier. Canada feels too stiff for me. When I’m there, I’m always thinking of somewhere else. I would like to settle down at some point—just not where I was born.”

“You are lucky! You don’t have to choose a country. You can belong everywhere. I think that is the sort of person you are, naturally. I had to learn to be that way. Most of the Burmese people had to learn to be that way. We always miss Burma. But you don’t miss your country.”

“That’s because I left freely. And I can go back if I want to. Besides, I’m not sure that belonging everywhere is a lucky trait. I’m sick of moving all the time.”

“Then you will stay somewhere. You have a choice.” His eyes contain the obvious question. “All you have to do is make it.”

O
n our drive home from town, Zoë’s kids are in the back of the truck with us, giggling and bickering in Thai and English. Earlier in the day, they refused to believe that Maung was not Thai, and kept saying all sorts of silly things to him in that language, trying to make him laugh. But to every one of their jokes and jabs he replied to the extent that his Thai would allow him: “Hello” and “Fried noodles” and “Grilled chicken” and “Omelet with pork.” The kids laughed until they couldn’t breathe.

The older boy and girl are ten and twelve. They’re talking with him a little in English. As we get closer to home, they lapse into long silences, and sit with their heads turned toward the green fields and hills rushing by. Five-year-old Lennie, though, continues to be chatty. Cuddled up next to me, she addresses Maung in Thai. It’s the easier language for her, and
she still can’t grasp that someone who looks Thai can’t speak it. She turns her beautiful face up to mine and asks, “Is he your boyfriend?”

Maung smiles. Interesting, that he understands that particular phrase. He regards Lennie tenderly.

I take a deep breath and exhale, “He is.”

Lennie takes my hand, snuggles closer. “Do you love him?”

I hesitate. And think, Why not? Why not say it? “Yes.”

“Are you going to get married?”

Maung laughs. He understands more Thai than I thought. He leans out the back of the truck, unable to contain a whoop of joy. The other two kids look over. The boy yawns.

I say, “Out of the mouths of babes.”

Lennie touches the back of my hand. She is a naturally gentle child, almost too softhearted. “Will you marry him?”