Burmese Lessons (33 page)

I used to find the word
homemaking
vaguely embarrassing. As an occupation, it was an uninspiring potential fate. But being among Burmese refugees and exiles in Thailand has taught me that it’s no small act to make a home. Making a home safe enough for a child is the ordinary miracle. How many refugees on this earth can only dream of it? The tendency—perhaps from television images, news clips—is to envision the displaced as herds, flocks, haunted masses carrying children and possessions on their backs, walking away, arriving in makeshift camps only to leave again. And they are that. But they are also individual men and women and children
with the old human longing: to be held safely in their world. Each one of them has a name.

Some of them even have the same name as a certain beloved English poet. Tennyson is wearing his bulky army jacket that smells of ash. Does he sleep in it? I wonder. Last night, he must have. I’m so happy to see him that I want to hug him. But I only smile.

The reason I
keep thinking about home is that my period is two weeks late. Or three. I don’t know exactly. I thought I wrote down when my last cycle started, but I’m back in Bangkok and my wall calendar and notebooks yield no information. Has it been a month?

Time is deceptively elastic. A week stretches into long days filled with intense experiences and conversations, so that seven days can be as replete as twenty. It feels as though I’ve lived here for years. Where? Around. Bangkok, Mae Sot, Chiang Mai. After Mae Sot, I spent a week in another border town, Mae Sarieng. Next week I will return to Mae Sarieng to interview more people from the DPNS and the ABSDF.

Marriage, children. Home. The other ordinary miracle, of course, is pregnancy.

One thing I know: if I am pregnant, I will not have an abortion.

I could not bear an abortion in this place, at this time. I don’t regret the abortion I had when I was seventeen. I mourned it as a loss but also recognized that it was the only way to keep my own life intact. Now something
else is at work, something more powerful than my need for self-definition. Evolution, I think. To become fatly, healthily pregnant is the female body’s most positive response to the near-scent of death, illness, and loss. Life is here! sings the belly. The future is suspended in these upside-down flower pods full of eggs.

Maung and I haven’t been overzealous with the condoms. Each time we made love without one, part of my brain scolded, What are you doing? while my body opened wide and swallowed.

“W
hat are you doing?” I ask.

“Traveling too much. And sleeping only a little. There are many people to see, a lot of meetings. Talking. I talk a lot. That’s part of the work.”

“So how’s it going?” He has not told me exactly what he is doing in America—“Meetings, meetings,” he always says, explaining nothing. I think he might be working on the sanction lobby. Many Burma activists in the U.S. have been trying for years to massage the American administration toward economic sanctions against the junta. I ran into one of Maung’s colleagues in Mae Sot, and that’s all we talked about—what the U.S. can or cannot do for Burma and the movement.

“It’s going slowly. The cigarettes are very expensive. And it’s freezing. My feet are always cold.”

I don’t know what to say.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

My darling, I recently heard allegations that you were responsible for executions in the jungle, the deaths of people who may have been innocent of real crimes. Is this true, my heart? But I know that we can’t talk about it on the phone.

“I’m fine. Also tired.”

“Is something wrong?”

“I just miss you. I’d like to see your face again. It’s been a long time.”

“It’s only a month!”

No. It’s been six weeks.

His voice takes on enough buoyancy to keep us both afloat. “We’re almost halfway. I know it’s not easy over the phone.”

“No.” Why do upwelling tears affect the voice? I don’t want him to hear me crying. I can’t tell him what I’m crying about, because I don’t know. Sure, I miss him. I feel such skin-hunger these days, lust and more-than-lust, an animal desire to be in a dark place, burrowing down in the present of our bodies, that shimmering privacy surrounded by the large, complicated mess of Burma.

“Something has happened. Something is wrong.”

“Maung, I love you. That’s why I’m upset.” An accurate if incomplete statement.

He laughs. I laugh back.

“Are you going to be okay?”

I inhale a lungful of air and speak while holding it. “If I were pregnant, what would you want me to do?”

As I hear the verge of tears in my words, I hear the pleasure in his.

“Bear it. Bear it! Are you pregnant?”

I exhale, “I don’t know.”

“How late are you?”

“Two or three weeks.”

“But you’ve been traveling a lot, Karen. Mae Sot, Mae Sarieng, Umphang. So maybe your body is confused.” I keep forgetting that Maung is also a doctor. “How did you like Mae Sarieng in the end? Did you warm up?” At the beginning of my stay there, I, too, was cold all the time.

The town was more northerly than I thought, and I didn’t have warm clothes. “I bought a sweater and a blanket and everything was fine. And I interviewed Ko Lwanni, the poet.”

“And ex–political prisoner. Was he nice to you?”

“A true gentleman. I also spent a lot of time with the DPNS guys. One
of their members was injured by a land mine and needed money for the operation.”

“You paid?”

“That’s what the book advance is for, my dear. Expenses in the field.”

His voice drops into its familiar seriousness. “Do you feel like you are pregnant?”

I close my eyes and stir a spoon around my gut. “I have no idea. I just know that my cycles are usually like clockwork. When I’m really stressed out, I might be a week late, but never more. So …”

“Maybe you are!” The elation in his voice sets my teeth on edge. “We could announce our engagement.”

Announce. Make the engagement public. Follow it with a marriage celebration. Am I old enough to get married? I recently turned twenty-eight. I’m old enough to have a young family and baby food in my hair.

“You have to get enough rest. Eat properly. I’m sorry, Karen, but I have to go, the card is running out. I’ll call you again in a few days. I’m sorry I can’t give you a number; I keep changing places. Do you want to talk some more?”

“No, I’m fine. Call me in the evening or the morning, Thai time, to make sure you get me. I’ll be in Bangkok for at least a week. Then I think I’m going up to Mae Hong Son.”

“I love you,” he says in his deep, steady voice.

Vexed, I deliver my fond, echoing reply and hang up the phone.

B
ear it. He said that twice. To me the phrase suggests not the beginning of a family but some kind of punishment I’ll have to endure alone. I chide myself: it’s the English thing. If I could speak Burmese, his response would have felt different. I cannot get angry about words spoken from thousands of miles away. He was happy. Thousands of miles away. Bear it.

•    •    •

I
catch a motorcycle taxi and careen through Bangkok wearing a backpack loaded with precious liquid cargo.

Nola’s dog is happy to see me. He picks his way around the students’ shoes on the floor and sticks his wet nose into my hand. Nola stands behind him, eyeing me shrewdly. “What’s wrong with you?”

Is she one of those people who can magically tell when a woman is with child? I hope not, because that means she might suggest that I have a cup of water instead of five glasses of wine.

“Everything’s different. I met Moe Thee Zun in Umphang. He told me about the executions.”

Nola raises her eyebrows. “Someone was going to tell you sooner or later.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Why didn’t Maung tell you?”

“Fuck, I don’t know. I don’t want to think about it.”

“Most people don’t want to think about it. It’s a big wound. A shameful thing for the whole movement. None of us like to talk about it.” She leads me into the house. I hear some of the younger students upstairs chanting lines of English back to their teacher.

“Moe Thee Zun told me about it the first evening I was in Umphang. Only because I asked. It was like he opened a box, let me look inside, then shut it again.” I take off my backpack. “Can we have a glass of wine and discuss, oh, I don’t know, the joys of Mae Sot? Or whether Clinton will invoke sanctions? Or how about books? Have you read any good novels lately? Novels about anything other than Burma.”

She lets out a low whistle. “Wow. You’re really stressed out, aren’t you?”

“I brought two bottles of not-bad Italian red. I didn’t want to start drinking alone.”

She nods. “You’re so wise. The alcohol will be safe with me. The students’ll be leaving in about half an hour.”

•    •    •

D
ays pass. Maung will be back soon. I think and I do not think about the executions, the ones who died. One woman. Rumors of torture. I distance myself from the gooseflesh that rose on my skin in Umphang, and the feeling that came after I left. Not that I didn’t know and couldn’t trust Moe Thee Zun, Win Min, the men from the other side. But that I didn’t know Maung. That I don’t know him.

At the same time, I’m anxious to see him again. In the welter of days, I place my confusions aside, though I cannot put them outside myself. I know. I know. Unknowing is impossible.

But I can be busy. Writing. Meeting more people. Reading. I interview several more former political prisoners and meet people from the Burmese Lawyers’ Association and the NLD-LA. I ask questions, listen and make notes. I don’t inquire further about the split in the ABSDF, reluctant to touch that raw nerve.

But it lifts up of its own accord and touches me. Every secret is at odds with itself. It seeks entrance into the open field of human discourse. One of the men I interview tells me a story.

Soon after he arrived at a Karen military camp for training, he watched a weathered Karen guerrilla herd a man and a woman out of the safe area. The soldier wielded an AK-47; the couple wore manacles and had signs around their necks that the Rangoon student couldn’t read—the words were in Karen. When the young man left his hut and followed a few steps behind the captives, the soldier turned to him in anger. “Go back, go back. You don’t want to be near these two.” The woman began to cry, to sob, holding her hands together as though in prayer, supplicating the armed man. The student saw that she was pleading for her life.

The soldier pushed the people away, onto a path through the trees. The young man watched until he couldn’t see or hear them anymore, then he went around the camp asking people about what he’d just seen. Some shook their heads and turned away; some told him the couple had done bad things and were to be punished. Finally, an older woman explained that the two had been caught having an adulterous affair. The guerrilla
took them to a cliff a couple of kilometers away from the camp and shot them.

Did the signs say Sinner? Adulterer?

The Karen guerrillas, remember, are fighting the good fight against a superior military force that persecutes and kills the most vulnerable and innocent of their civilian population. The war against the Karen has been called protracted genocide. The Karen are the good guys. They are also a predominantly Christian people. The KNLA reserves the right to execute its people for drug trafficking, for violent crimes—and for adultery, as proscribed in those authoritarian, law-bound Old Testament books Deuteronomy and Leviticus, where all adulterers and adulteresses are put to death, no questions asked. Such a punishment was a barbarity two thousand years ago and it is a barbarity now, but the good people continue to do it.

I’m afraid of the good people. Goodness makes us smug. From smug to dangerous, the distance is minuscule, the step small, a stumble. I like to believe that I’d never take such a step, and that is precisely where the danger lies.

All the revolutionaries, young and old, carrying guns or redefining themselves as dissidents, each one of them grew up under a political system predicated on violence that could and sometimes did result in imprisonment and untimely death. Murder, torture, lies, threats, betrayal, isolation, distrust—these have been the working tools of political and social life in Burma for half a century. Thought control and intimidation are built into neighborhoods, village councils, schools, universities. It would be naïve to think that fighting a war in the jungle would make young men wise and peaceable.

I’m not making excuses for Maung—if the allegations against him are true. I’m not making excuses for the person or people who pulled the trigger. Nor do I suggest that goodness itself is an illusion. I’m trying to understand what might have happened. In that jungle camp, wherever it was. I will ask him about it. He will tell me. But I will never know.

I imagine my way to some kind of answer because I love him. Because my body may be irrevocably involved with his. Suddenly his admonition to me doesn’t seem so ill phrased at all.