Burmese Lessons (31 page)

Tennyson is sitting
at the gleaming teak table when I come out for my morning coffee. “How long have you been here?”

“Ten minutes.” He looks back up at the TV. An action movie.
Rambo?
Mercifully, the sound is muted.

I nod and stir my Nescafé, admiring Tennyson’s profile. He really does look like Rock Hudson. He feels my eyes and shakes his head as if to rid himself of a wayward insect. Still staring at the TV, he asks, “Did you sleep okay?”

“I slept like shit. I had bad dreams.”

“Ugh.” Male Asian grunt of vague acknowledgment. He drags his chair closer to the TV.

“Tennyson?”

“Ugh?” Male Asian grunt, more responsive.

“Do you know the name of the child who died yesterday?”

He turns his big head toward me slowly. Gazes into my eyes. Incredulous? Disgusted? Monumentally annoyed? I can’t read the unhappy look
on his face. As slowly as he turned his head, he asks, “Do you think I remember the names of all the dead children?”

Resisting the urge to crawl under the big table, I squint into my coffee and take a sip. So. He also feels guilty about not knowing the child’s name. “No,” I eventually say. “I guess only God can do that.” I say this to make him feel better. It seems to work.

In a mild voice, he asks, “What do you have planned for today?”

“I’m going to go back to the Muslim part of town and take some photographs. Visit the tea shops. And the mosque.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. Why?”

“Maybe you want to go to Umphang, a town about three hours from here. Some ABSDF guys are there, but also a lot of Karen. Because there is a meeting. You take a songtow truck to Umphang, with other passengers, mostly Thai. Sometimes the journey is more than three hours. Depends. Four sometimes. Someone will fetch you when you arrive. Don’t be afraid.”

I make a face. “I’m not afraid of riding in a songtow, Tennyson,” I say, as though fear is ridiculous. Which is obviously not the case. But, like many other vulnerabilities—sadness, exhaustion, confusion, longing—fear is beginning to seem like a luxury. I am allowed to be afraid if my house is about to be burned down. Particularly if I am still in it, with my children. Or if I am about to be raped or murdered or sold to a brothel. Otherwise, normal human fear is an indulgence. I’ve always secretly suspected this. Now I know that’s true.

“I have to go somewhere for a few days. So I will not be here to take you places and make introductions. In Umphang, you can meet Moe Thee Zun. Do you know who he is?”

I nod just once, immediately more interested in faraway Umphang. Moe Thee Zun was the famous student leader who organized and led some of the most significant antigovernment protests in 1988. He came to
the border before the MI could find him and is now a leader of the other ABSDF section.

Maung has told me almost nothing about this rift. Early on, I innocently asked him what it meant when people talked about the two “sections” of the ABSDF. I didn’t yet understand that there had been a literal break, and that both factions insisted on keeping the same name. He told me there were personality conflicts between various people, so the two groups separated, each taking supporters with them. “The revolutionaries got divorced?” I said, eyebrows raised. But trying to bring levity to the subject was a mistake. Maung shrugged himself out of bed and went to smoke on the balcony.

“Does a songtow go to Umphang every day?” I ask.

Tennyson replies, “I will find one for you. For tomorrow. They usually leave in the morning.”

I
’m heat-dazed, riding shoulder to shoulder with fifteen people crammed into the back of the small covered truck. Like the Thai women, I hold my scarf over my nose as dusty wind gusts through the long side apertures. We hurtle through the thick stands of trees, almost jungle; labor up and careen down parched hills, almost mountains, through sun-stunned fields burned black by farmers. The passengers sit facing each other on two benches. Several bags of vegetables, a big sack of chilies, and two long, misshapen boxes shift and slide on the floor between us, sometimes bumping us in the shins. We sway together, silently, helplessly pleading: Despite the driver’s unwise choices, his lack of sleep, his probable amphetamine use, let us survive this journey. With amendments when he pulls out to pass other laboring vehicles on the steep hills: But if we are to die in a head-on collision, please let death or painless unconsciousness come as quickly as possible.

•    •    •

T
he truck lurches to a halt at a small roadside hut. Two dark-skinned men approach and wave their hands at the driver, trying to negotiate payment for the trip. They don’t speak Thai very well.

The tension rises as my fellow passengers glance at them, then survey the cramped songtow. The woman across from me pulls the scarf from her head and whispers sharply to her neighbor,
“Kohn baa-maa.”
Burmese people. The other woman yells at the driver, “There’s no room!” Interested only in the extra fares, he shouts back, “They will ride on top, they don’t care.” The women grumble to each other.

One of the men easily swings up to the roof; the other man throws him their bundles, then walks to the back of the truck and peers in at us. There is a third passenger with him, unseen until now, a small girl, maybe ten or eleven, with a full-lipped red mouth and kohl-drawn owl eyes and long curling lashes. She blinks and the world wobbles. What a face. A gold-and-crimson glimmer pierces her nose. I wiggle, shift my knees to the side; there’s always room for a child in these trucks. The Thai woman opposite me snaps, “She can’t sit with us.”

I glare at the nicely dressed woman. She’s not a peasant. A peasant would make room. Sometimes, in tense situations, I lose my vocabulary. Or just don’t know the right words. How do you say “callous racist bitch” in Thai? Darn, I don’t know. But other words jump to my mouth. “What are you talking about? She’s a child. Of course she will ride with us.”

The woman is taken aback; her face softens in confusion. Then hardens again. “She can ride with her father. Or in the front with the driver. Not with us.” But we all know there’s no space in the cab, either. He already has two passengers up there.

I throw my only punch immediately, because the father and daughter are getting nervous, the songtow driver impatient. The other passengers won’t meet my eye. They’re just waiting to see who wins; this is good entertainment on a long trip. “We respect the Buddha’s ideas, don’t we? Compassion and kindness. Even for foreigners.” Being the one who is most
obviously a foreigner here, it’s as though I’m making an appeal for myself. Which I suppose I am.

Not even the racist will argue with the Buddhist card.

“The little girl will ride beside me.” I smile at her father first, then at her. “Come sit here.” The moment she hears Burmese, she looks up at her father and grins. I twist my knees away and move one of the vegetable bags to make space for her. Other passengers signal their agreement—or acquiescence—by helping her into the truck.

Thin gleaming girl child! I ask the man beside me to shift the bag of chilies. If she sits against them for a long time, they will burn her skin, even through the cotton sack. I once saw that happen on another long songtow journey. Her father thanks me and clambers up onto the roof of the truck. She folds herself down onto the floor as the truck pulls onto the highway. I pat my leg, showing her that she can lean on me; she is obviously tired. The hair that frames her face is black, but the long braid is gray with dust. Her three layers of clothes are filthy, especially at the edges, where the material touches her skin. When I ask her name, words pour from her mouth.

I explain, “I can’t understand, I only speak a little.”

“Oh, that’s not a problem, I just want to talk.” She talks and talks, self-possessed, laughing at her own jokes, asking me questions. I stumble along behind her, picking up phrases I recognize. She is to be married soon, unbelievably enough; her mother is dead; she and her father and uncle are going to the refugee camp near Umphang to see a sick aunt. I think. She lives in Maw Ker. “I have been to Maw Ker,” I tell her. “Then you must come again,” she says. “To visit us.”

When she is all talked out, she molds her skinny body to my legs, worried about sliding toward the open end of the vehicle; everyone holds on tighter when the truck goes up the steep hills. Soon she begins to nod off. “Here, take this.” I pull my scarf from my neck and ball it up into a pillow.

But she doesn’t want to touch it.
“Ayun hla-deh,”
she murmurs, and shakes her head.

She’s right: the silky black material woven through with bright threads is beautiful. For an old traveling companion, it’s still in good shape. “Don’t worry,” I tell her, patting my thigh. “You’re tired.” After a few more refusals, she puts her head down on the pillow-scarf and drops into sleep, one arm over my lap, the other curved around my shins. The Thai woman’s upper lip lifts in disgust. I gently stroke the girl’s hair away from her face.

After two more hours of numb bum and aching knees, the truck grinds to a stop. Below us, and stretching toward the hazy horizon, are thousands of thatched roofs, brown dominoes fallen in a complex pattern up and down the hillside. A refugee camp. We are close to Umphang. The girl’s father and uncle jump down onto the dusty road; they look sandblasted. The father calls out. Calls again. I touch her back, the scapula like a blade under my palm. She wakes and rubs her face. Blinks. Lifts her head to me and smiles.

Goodbye, dark eyes of the world.

“You will come and visit us?”

“I will try.” As she climbs out of the truck, an inordinate sense of loss, or regret, rises in my chest. I lean over the chilies and push my scarf into her hands. “A present for little sister.”

I’m relieved that she doesn’t refuse. When the truck pulls away, she is still oohing and aahing, showing her father. She waves with one hand and holds the colorful fabric to her cheek with the other. I wave too, smiling, wondering what will happen to her.

Do the light touches leave a clean trace, a thread of kindness to weave into suffering, that endlessly unraveling bolt of cloth? This notion is a Buddhist tenet—in essence, to be kind for the sake of kindness, to step gently through the world. But what I do is small. Even what I think is small; my mind is not big enough to understand what I meet here, to absorb and to know it. The little girl needs much more—a guarantee of protein and rice, a peaceful country, an education—so many things that are impossible for me to give. What is a scarf?

A shirtless man
waters the bougainvillea in front of the wooden house, which is built on stilts in the old Thai style. I lean out the window and watch a piebald dog pee against the outer beam. A flip-flop flies in the dog’s direction; someone under the house shouts in Burmese. The bougainvillea waterer laughs and sprays the farther plants. Muscle flares over shoulder bones and extends into excellent arms. He turns and grins at me. “I’m the gardener!”

“I see that.”

“Did you do your interviews?”

“Some of them.” In fact, the man who spent the most time in prison didn’t want to talk about prisons. He wanted to take me for a walk through the verdant fields here, on the outskirts of Umphang.

“It was like an Indian film,” says the shirtless man.

“What?”

“When you went for a walk with Thet Mu. I thought he was going to burst into song and you would run across the field to each other, like Bollywood.
So romantic.” He drops the water hose, spreads his arms, throws back his mop of curly hair, and runs toward an invisible woman at the other end of the fence. The man under the house giggles and makes a comment I don’t understand.

I laugh, too. “I didn’t know you were watching, or I would have danced.”

“Oh! More fun!”

“What’s your name?”

He opens his mouth in mock amazement, then puts his hand to his heart. “I’m not insulted. But I’m well known in my circle. A Burmese circle.”

I realize that this is the famous Moe Thee Zun.

A
few hours later, a few of us sit on the large porch at the front of the house, a bare lightbulb over our heads, lizards running around on the insect-crowded roof beams. Moe Thee Zun’s voice is sharp, commanding. “We were trying to think of ways to get more regular people to join the protests. Students are good, but a whole country is not just students. The demonstrations had to include everybody, working regular people, the ones we knew were also sick of the government, just like we were. We knew they were our comrades also, but they were afraid.” He shakes his head. “So I went to the monastery. I wanted to ask the monks if they would help us. If the people saw the monks join the protest, then they would become more brave—they would join us, too.”

He lowers his voice to an urgent whisper. “I was respectful. I asked to see the abbot and explained to him what we were going to do. I said that the students wanted to invite the monks to join us, to show that we had their support. Most Burmese people love the monks, they know they are wise, they listen to them. And, to my amazement, the abbot agreed to join the protest.