Burmese Lessons (38 page)

“Burmese men,” she intones sagaciously. Then can’t help herself and starts to laugh.

I smile miserably and sip my water.

Hot water. How sweet it is, how delicious.

Someone comes to
fetch me in the morning. How kind of Maung not to send the bodyguard. My beloved and I greet each other bashfully and drink our tea on the veranda of the hut where he’s staying. Other men move around inside; we say nothing to each other about our aborted lovemaking. We commiserate about our hangovers and take aspirin together.

After the first pot of tea is finished, I lower my voice. “Maung, I need to talk to you about something.” It pisses me off that I have to confide in him; after last night I want to be cool and independent. But I’m not. I need him.

“What’s wrong?”

“It’s been days since I’ve had a bowel movement.” The change of location, the stress of living among strangers, the low-fiber diet: I know the reasons. But still, constipation is supposed to be temporary.

“Hmm.” He ducks into the hut and consults at length with the other men. I cringe, listening to this manly discussion about my inability to shit.
I am to have no secrets, not one. One of the men reappears, smiles at me, and rushes off.

Ten minutes later, he returns to the hut with a little brown bottle and hands it to Maung, who gives it to me. I twist off the cap. The thick liquid is also brown, and smells like a combination of fermented tree bark, molasses, and lemon. “Tamarind,” Maung explains. “And other herbs. A jungle cure. It will work fast, so be careful.”

I hope it’s not poisonous. I swallow two teaspoons right away, and say goodbye to Maung. He’s off to check out the latest camp improvement: a water pump. Hurrah, I think; a pump will save the women from hauling water up from the stream every day. I return to Khaing Lin’s and play with December, carefully observing my bowels for signs. Will the laxative work in an hour?

No. In two?

Nothing.

Khaing Lin, December, and a few other women eat noodles for lunch. My appetite on the wane, I decline the noodles and opt for three more teaspoons of the laxative. So far, it has had no discernible effect. So much for jungle cures.

L
ater in the afternoon, when the first coolness slips, amphibious, out of the shade, Khaing Lin tells me the women are going down to the stream. “Isn’t it too early to bathe?” I ask.

“It’s not for bathing. We help with the pump. You can come with us. To watch.”

In a clearing at the top of the hill, men are tearing open bags of cement. Maung stands beside the impressive-looking water pump. The men will lay a cement foundation for this new machine and the generator necessary to power it. The leveled-out patch of ground is twelve or fourteen feet square. Maung comes over and chats with the women, slowly working his way closer to me.

He turns to me with a smile and explains in English that they’re going to build a shelter around the pump and generator and possibly add on a new latrine as well. “A new latrine is a good idea,” I say, without complaining about the one they have now: a filthy hole in a rickety shack. Very buggy, too. I don’t mind bugs, generally, but the resident centipede gave me a start the first time I saw it. Longer than my foot and lightning quick, I initially thought it was a snake.

Maung’s hand brushes the back of mine.
Zing!
Amazing how well the electrical connection between us still works, despite moonlit fiascoes, constipation, centipedes. As he turns to say something else to the women, his shoulder grazes mine. He moves past the group, walks back over to the water pump, and looks at me. We stand there staring at each other. I would like to have sex with this man for the rest of my life. (Or, for that matter, even just once or twice more, please God.) Is that a good-enough reason to get married?

What am I thinking?

He looks down at the prepared ground. “It will take us until dinnertime to finish pouring the cement. We didn’t want to start earlier in the day because the work would be too hot for the women.”

“What are the women going to do?” I ask.

Khaing Lin answers, “We’re going to bring the stones for the foundation up the hill.”

“Stones from the stream?” I ask. It’s not easy to mix cement by hand, but carrying stones up that hill is not a simple operation, either. That’s a lot of river rocks.

She holds up the bucket she has in her hand. “In here. On our heads.”

“Really? That’s an interesting division of labor,” I observe. “The women do the heaviest work.”

No one responds. The women are already filing down the hill, each one carrying an aluminum bucket. I pick one up. I have no intention of standing around to watch communal work. Khaing Lin leads the way down the steep path. The women below are a milling rainbow in their
bright longyis and T-shirts. Halfway there, she glances over her shoulder. “Yee Yee Cho, we do not want you to help.”

“That’s too bad,” I mutter under my breath.

“Sa-yeh sehyama
doesn’t need to do this work.”

“But you are also a
sa-yeh sehyama
and you can do this work.” She protests, but I won’t let her get away with it. “It’s true, Khaing Lin. You write poetry. You make notes for a book about your life in the jungle. You’re a writer. But you’re also going to carry stones up this hill in a bucket.”

She cocks her head charmingly and raises her eyebrows. “But you are a guest.”

“I’m also strong.” I hold up my arm, muscleman style, and flex my biceps. She rolls her eyes. “I’ve come to the camp to see how people live here. How will I know if I don’t do the same work?”

“Yee Yee Cho, you are very naughty.”

We join the other women.

There is the huge banyan tree; the wide stony beach stretches beyond it. I arrived here almost two weeks ago in the back of a pickup truck, on the other side of the stream. That moment in time seems distant—months ago, years.

Khaing Lin and I kneel down. The stones in the stream will be easier to collect than the ones packed tight on the beach. Rippling large, they rise up smaller and gleaming as my cupped hands lift from the water. They’re dappled grays and blacks, with an occasional flash of dark red. Unlike the flat chunks of slate downstream, these are mostly round; they roll and rumble against one another, then clatter into the aluminum bucket. A group of women return, ready to carry up more stones. There are at least twelve of us loading up, making a tremendous racket.

Khaing Lin shows me how to wrap a rag around my hand and place the flat coil of it on the top of my head. The first time, she helps me hoist the bucket up onto the small round pad. It’s a shock—I thought I was
stronger. How much does a large bucketful of stones weigh? Twenty pounds? More. Wobbling slightly, I begin to walk.

The ascent of the hill is no laughing matter, though the women filing up and down sometimes laugh and call out encouragement or advice. Water drips through our hair onto our faces and necks. Within four trips of dumping loads into the growing batter of cement, our shirts and longyis are soaked. After I’ve dumped six loads at the worksite, every return trip to the edge of the stream brings with it an irresistible desire: I want to lower my mouth and drink—for the first time in two weeks—cool water.

Within fifteen minutes, we are transformed from women into a carrying factory. A pause in the work breaks the rhythm of the machine. Unless a woman loses her balance and needs help, we work on our own, together, scooping, loading, carrying, dropping the load into the pile up the hill. The cloth coil on the head is a crucial aid, but for me it’s an exercise in good posture and balance to keep it there. Each time I’ve filled up with stones, I have to lower my body far enough to get hold of the bucket’s handle, then heave it straight up to keep the cloth from sliding off my head.

Physical labor relaxes the mind. The laboring body becomes its own purpose, expressing its own rhythm and wisdom as it forges on through aches, pains, exhaustion. And hangovers. The only thing that’s left of the Karen Moonshine Mistake is a ferocious thirst. Half a dozen of us stop at the foot of the hill to rest. A water bottle is passed around. I take a small gulp and pass it on to the next woman, knowing I could have drunk the whole thing. Wishing. Then it’s time to put our buckets on our heads again.

I linger, rubbing my left shoulder, where an old injury howls, “Why are you doing this to me?” I dig my fingers into the muscle under my scapula and watch the women ascend in tandem, their shoulders and hips swaying in opposite directions each time they lift a foot to find purchase on the water-slick path and rise one step higher.

How I love the human body. I love it for precisely this, my torn old muscle and Khaing Lin’s graceful neck and head balancing a freight of rock. Vulnerability and tremendous power. Contradiction is made human by our flesh.

She is almost at the top of the hill. I pick up my bucket, settle it on my headcloth, and begin to walk. My eyes scan from the wet clay to the woman a few steps ahead of me. The passage of so many feet has worn away the kicked-in footholds, so we walk with extra caution. I glance up. A woman carrying a hoe is on her way down. Wherever there’s a break in the work line, she digs new steps out of the clay. Whenever a water carrier reaches her, she steps away onto the sheer incline so we can pass. Each one of us mutters a breathy thank-you when we reach the new footholds.

I dump my rocks onto the pile. A few more women arrive, upend their loads. We can see that the foundation is almost laid now. The man overseeing the work claps his hands and announces, “You’re finished!” We let out a cheer. Khaing Lin hands around a bottle of a neon-pink, warm liquid. We gulp down the flat sweetness and grin at the square of wet cement, at the water pump, at the cluster of camp children who have attended this show all afternoon. Tree shadows fall long across the messy building site and our sweaty faces.

Khaing Lin smooths back her damp hair, drops her bucket with an unapologetic clank, and says, “Let’s go take a bath.” We fetch shampoo, soap, clean clothes, then head back down to the water wearing our bathing longyis pulled chest-high and tucked under our arms. Trees and boulders, bushes and red-clay banks form a cool tunnel around us. We recline in the water, lathering soap over our grimy skin, into our hair, letting all the dirt flow away in the steady current. Most of us stay for a long time in the stream, talking, resting, shedding the day. Our bodies, which have been so loaded down, float up almost weightless to the surface.

Much later, after we’ve eaten dinner in the falling dark and put December to bed, Khaing Lin turns on her little shortwave radio to listen to Voice of America’s Burmese programming. Everyone in the camp listens
to the VOA and the BBC. Those without radios go to their neighbors’ to listen. After news of Burma—the generals’ latest development projects, the newly arrested NLD members—come the English lessons, dictated in a haughty British accent. Listening intently to every word, Khaing Lin sits in front of a mirror the size of her palm and brushes her clean hair by candlelight.

“I’m going to look at the stars,” I tell her, and step outside. I walk toward the center of the camp and turn around slowly, surveying the huts. Each one is lit by candles and dotted here and there with the red embers of cheroots.

The call-and-answer part of the English lesson has begun. The women are the most determined and the least embarrassed to respond to the radio as though it were a living teacher. “Would you like to go to the library tomorrow?”

“Yes,” respond voices high and low, lighthearted and solemn. “I would like to go to the library tomorrow.” Plates clatter on the other side of the camp; a toddler complains loudly and is hushed. I make out the singsong pitch of Khaing Lin’s voice among the others and walk toward it. Crickets fall silent around my feet. My friend’s words grow distinct in the darkness.

The radio asks, “Would you like to go to the university tomorrow?”

“Yes, I would like to go to the university tomorrow,” Khaing Lin answers, the irony that so puzzles my lover complicating her tone. Then, eclipsing the next question, she breaks into the irreverent laughter of a rebellious student.