Saving Fish From Drowning (40 page)

The screams never stopped for those two days. The soldiers called them pigs, they pierced them like pigs, told them they screamed like pigs and bled like pigs. With those who tried to fight them off, they cut off their breasts. Some of the girls died from bleeding. As for the 2 8 2

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ones who lived, when they were all used up, the soldiers shot them.

All but one girl. She prayed and prayed for a way to live, even while the soldiers were using her. And the Great God answered her prayers.

While the soldiers were using her she fainted, and they threw her off into a corner. When she revived, she saw they were busy with another girl, so she crawled away and ran into the jungle. Many days later, she found another village and told what had happened. When she finished, she started again. She could not stop talking. She could not stop crying or shaking. The tears kept pouring, like a monsoon cloud, until she used up all the water in her body and died.

I wasn’t there to see any of this, but I am supposed to tell these things. And if there isn’t time to say all my testimony, then the important part to know is that we three are alive, Loot and Bootie and myself, and one hundred and five people from my village are dead.

That’s the only reason the Great God didn’t let me stick together with them, so I can be here today, so I can tell you these things, so you can remember it, so we can write it down, now that the Younger White Brother has brought back the Important Writings.

AS SOON AS the old grandmother finished her testimony, the twin boy Loot sang out in his native tongue: “Dear Great God and Older Brother Jesus, today Ye deliver us from evil. Ye deliverest Your messenger, the Younger White Brother, Lord of Nats. Ye deliver a warrior for victory. Ye bring Your troops, strong men and women! Count them! Ye deliver food, excellent food for nourishing our bodies, food so we can face Your enemies and fight with bodies that cannot be pierced by bullets or knives or arrows. Make us invisible. Give us victory against the SLORC army. We also pray for the Nats, keep them peaceful. We pray for our brothers and sisters who died a green death after they were baptized in the stream. For Yours is the kingdom and the power . . .”

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To my friends, it sounded like rap music.

Bootie broke in, and her prayer was in a liturgical English of sorts:

“Dear Heavy Fazzer, Great God and Bo-Cheesus, we pray Dine Lord of Nats safe us fum gheen dess. Not let us die in bud and bosom of life like our fazzer and muzzer before us, our bruzzers and sissers before us, our aunties and unkies before us, our cuzzins and fends before us. Potect us so we not falling into hands of enenies or new Nats dat die gheen dess. When our fends and enenies be dead, keep dem in Dine grafess. Keep us safe.”

The two children closed their eyes and appeared to drift off to sleep while standing.

“What the hell was that about?” Dwight whispered to Roxanne.

“It almost sounded like English. Did you understand any of it?” Roxanne shook her head, then added, “Nothing beyond Great God and Cheez Whiz.”

The residents of No Name Place then passed around a wooden

plate with seeds, first to the twins, then to the rest, and each partook of one seed, downing it like a communion wafer. My friends politely ate one each as well.

When the ritual was done, the twins’ grandmother approached

Rupert with a long sacklike tunic made of a royal-blue cloth woven with a zigzag pattern. She bowed and mumbled to him in Karen to accept this humble gift symbolizing his faithfulness in returning. The girls nearby giggled with hands cupped over their mouths. “You teks,” she told Rupert.

Rupert held up empty hands and shrugged. “I don’t have any

money,” he said. He was
not
about to bargain for a dress. When the grandmother insisted once again that he take the gift, Rupert pulled his pockets inside out. “See? No money. I swear.” He had only the deck of cards he had been given on the flight to China. He held them up as proof that he had nothing valuable.

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All at once, the people in front of him fell to the ground and prostrated themselves.

“For God’s sake,” Moff said to his son. “They’re begging you. It’s a Christmas present. Just be polite and take it.”

“
You
take it,” said Rupert, and as Moff started to reach for the cloth, Bootie cried out, “No, no, he teks.” She walked up to Rupert.

Moff whispered fiercely through clenched teeth that Rupert should simply accept the damn dress and be done with it. And once Rupert took the unwanted gift, the people rose to their feet, and the twins sidled up to him.

Loot tapped the hand holding the cards and pantomimed a fanned deck.

Rupert grinned. “Man, everyone in Burma likes to see card

tricks.” He happily shuffled the deck, drawing the cards up with one hand and letting them slide into place. He held the deck in front of Loot. “All right, pick a card, any card.” And the twin divinities were delighted to hear this start of the ritual, the identical words that had been uttered more than a hundred years before by their founding father, the con artist Seraphineas Andrews. In short order, the twins shrieked joyfully as their sign appeared, the Lord of Clubs, the avenger of all evil.

Three other children aligned themselves near the center of the camp and began to sing a cappella. The tune sounded almost like a church hymn, but much sadder, Vera thought, and it had that Asian tonality, as if the harmonic thirds had shifted to fifths. She and the other Americans stood quietly, appreciating the heartfelt performance. With the second refrain, two men joined in, one beating a bronze drum decorated with detailed frogs, the other blowing a buffalo horn. My friends gave Black Spot the thumbs-up. “What tribe are you again?” Bennie asked him. “I want to tell my people in America that we visited you.”

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Black Spot responded in his accented English, “We are ethnic Karen people, but we are also calling the Lord’s Army.”

“I’m sorry. What was the last thing you said?” Bennie leaned in to hear above the chanting songs.

“The Lord’s Army,” Black Spot repeated.

“What did he say?” Vera asked.

Bennie shrugged. “It sounded like ‘the Lajamee.’”

“There is a subtribe that begins with
l
,” Heidi said. “Bibi wrote about it. It’s in the folder back at the hotel. The La-something. Must be the Lajamee.”

Wendy added, “You can tell they’re a tribe because of the black and red colors on the older people—and that thing wrapped around their heads, the terry-cloth turban. That’s a dead giveaway of something.”

It was now three o’clock, my friends noticed. Dwight cursed:

“Damn you, Walter, wherever you are, we’re going back down and you better have a good reason why you weren’t here.” Black Spot heard their plans to leave and turned to Grease and Salt. They needed to quickly remind the Reincarnated One who he was. The three men went to the small huts beyond the clearing to ask those residents to come out.

Roxanne had taken out her camcorder and was now instructing

the group to mill about so she could get some last shots of the twins, the strangler fig huts, as well as the more colorful members of the

“Lajamee” tribe. As she panned the camp, she suddenly stopped.

What was
that
? A skinned animal? She zoomed in closer. It was the stump of a leg! And its owner had a face that was even more disfigured. My other friends turned, and they, too, murmured disbelief.

What in God’s name had happened to these people? There were two men, two women, and a pretty girl no older than ten. Each was missing a foot, or an arm, or the lower part of a leg, the limb ending 2 8 6

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abruptly in a coral cluster of blasted flesh. Why were they so horribly mutilated? Had they been in a bus accident?

Roxanne faced Black Spot. “What happened to them?” she said

quietly, and aimed the camcorder at him.

“Three of them are once working for SLORC army,” Black Spot

said, “walking to find land mines. They are going in front of soldiers, go right, go left. When the mine is exploding, no more danger, and then soldiers they very happy. Now path is safe for walking.” He glanced quickly at Rupert.

Rupert was stunned. “They had a job stepping on land mines?”

“Karen people not having choice.” Black Spot gestured toward the wounded. “That man, he both lucky and no. He now living, yes, but wife, sister, brother, they not living. The soldiers are shooting him in the head and body. But he not dying. That girl, she not dying.” Roxanne directed the camera toward the unlucky man. He bore a quarter-sized dark indentation in his cheek, and his shoulders were laced with pale scars. The pretty girl had an arm that bent at an odd angle, and on her shoulder was a keloid that looked like a meaty-red tumor.

Despite their mutilation, these five people smiled at the camera and waved.
“Dah blu, dah blu,”
they sang. Roxanne was in tears by the time she turned off the camcorder. Several others were as well, and Black Spot felt great hope rising that they would help the tribe.

When my friends were out of earshot of Black Spot, Wendy said,

“A friend told me the Burmese military does stuff like this.” She was referring to Gutman. “He’s with a human rights group, so he knows all about these atrocities, horrible, horrible things. That’s why he said tourists should boycott coming here unless they’re coming as witnesses.”

“I feel awful,” Bennie said, instantly filled with guilt.

“We all do.” Vera placed her hand on Bennie’s shoulder. “We

wouldn’t be human if we didn’t.”

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Marlena muttered: “I was the one who said we shouldn’t come to Burma.”

“Well, we’re here,” Dwight replied grimly. “So there’s nothing we can do about that now, is there?”

“But we
should
do something,” Heidi said. My friends nodded, thinking in silence. What could they do? What can anyone do in view of such cruelty? They felt uselessly sympathetic.

“It’s kind of weird that Bibi had us come here as one of our activities,” Wyatt said.

I was a sputtering ball of indignation until I heard Vera: “Bibi didn’t put this on the original itinerary. Inle Lake got patched in—

remember?—because some people voted to leave China early.”

Heidi sighed. “I just wish Bibi had told us more about the military here, the bad stuff. I mean, I sort of knew about it, but I thought it was a long time ago.”

They went on talking softly among themselves, thinking how to deal with their moral discomfort. If only they had known more. If only someone had warned them. If only they knew that lives were at stake. If, if, if. You see how it was, In their minds
I
should have provided the information, the arguments, the reasons why it was all right to visit or not. But how could I have been responsible for their morals?

They should have taken the initiative to learn more on their own.

And yet, I admit I was shocked as well to see the people of No Name Place. I had not encountered anything like this when I was alive, never in all my previous trips to Burma. But when I was alive, I was not looking for tragedy. I was looking for bargains, the best places to eat, for pagodas that were not overrun with tourists, for the loveliest scenes to photograph.

“Maybe tourism is the only way that they can make money,” Heidi reasoned.

“We should definitely support their economy,” Bennie said. He promised to buy a lot of souvenirs.

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“I’ve done guiding on a number of ecotourism trips,” Wyatt said,

“where the clients pay a lot of extra money to plant trees or to do research on endangered species. Maybe they can do something like that here. Get people to come and help them set up ways to become self-sufficient.”

“We could each give them some money when we leave,” Esmé said.

“We can tell them it’s for the children.” My friends accepted this idea as the obvious way to be of immediate help and lessen their discomfort.

“A hundred each?” Roxanne said. “I have enough to cover all of us.

You can pay me back later.” Everyone nodded. This was the same solution they used for many situations. I am not criticizing. Most likely I would have done the same. Give money. What more can a person do?

Roxanne picked up her camcorder and did one final pan, resting longer on the maimed, the young children, the old ladies with their smiling faces. Wyatt put his arm around a man missing the lower part of his leg.

The two men grinned at each other as if they were great friends.

“We’ve come to this beautiful place,” Roxanne narrated, “and we’ve learned that within beauty, there is tragedy. The people here have suffered terribly under the military regime . . . it’s heartbreaking. . . .” She spoke of the forced labor, the explosions of land mines.

She concluded with a promise to help. “We can’t just give them sympathy or a token bit of help. We want to help in a bigger way, a substantial way that can make a difference.” She was speaking, of course, about their generous contribution.

They decided to give the money to the twins’ grandmother. She seemed to be the one who bossed people around the most. They had a little ceremony to thank her for the tribe’s hospitality. They spoke slowly in English, bowed to express gratitude, made a thumbs-up sign for the food, gestured around at the wonders of this dark, dank settlement. They put on sad faces, as if reluctant to leave such wonderful people.

Then Roxanne stepped forward and took the grandmother’s tiny, 2 8 9

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rough, clawlike hands and pressed the money into them. The old woman looked at the wad, appeared shocked and insulted, pushed it back into Roxanne’s hands, and kept a palm upraised as if fending off a demon. They had expected she would. Marlena had already advised that the Chinese had to dramatically refuse three times, and maybe they had a similar custom here. On the fourth offer, after Black Spot muttered to the grandmother to take the money, she snapped at him, saying the money was useless out here, and if anyone was caught with it by SLORC soldiers, it would buy nothing but a grave. Black Spot told her to take it and hand it to Grease, who would put it in Roxanne’s satchel when the Americans were not looking. So the old woman smiled at my friends, bowed and bowed, kissed the money and held it toward heaven for the Great God to see.