That Savage Water (14 page)

Then along the ditch, blurred human shapes begin to flash by the periphery of my sleep-starved eyes. A line of them, spaced evenly like telephone poles but couldn't be: Men and women – their hands bound with chains, heads bowed, feet apart and ankles shackled. Their skin is dusted with the blow of the passing cargo trucks, longyis dirt-stained and torn. Dozens of them line the roadside like totems, a forest of deliberately planted trees.


Prisoners
– a voice whispers from the seat behind me, a man chewing segments of an orange –
Them prisoners by the army. You know…politics
– A fleck of orange catches his lip.

The lights suddenly flicker on. Across the street, cheers and applause from men smoking at the tea shop, their seats already saved for the game. The television screen, no bigger than a book, hums to life and the flames of lighters ignite fresh cigarettes.

The owner goes out onto the street and switches off the generator. Then the restaurant is just the quiet silt of night air, quiet except for oil in the pan.

Every evening now – I say – since I've been here.

They deal with it well, though – says Jake.

The army drains it all to Naypyidaw. They keep every road lit, even in the middle of the night.

We heard there would be military on the way to the look-out. Is that true?

On the far side of the valley there's a barracks. You can see it.

We heard it was a college.

You mean the one in Pagan.

That's a horrible story… – Jake continues.

Yes, but go on. You should tell him – Seth says.

You know you can take a boat from Mandalay to Pagan…

That's right.

On our boat there were soldiers who were escorting a prisoner of some sort. They kept him in a cage on the deck.

A prisoner of what?

I don't know, but there were soldiers guarding him.

There were two. And they had their rifles. He must have been political. They said they were transferring him to a prison in Pakokku. But it's a tourist boat, so there's all these backpackers around him. And an Austrian woman asked one of the soldiers why they were taking him, what had he done.

She had guts.

Yes, and listen to this. We're sitting there, you know, wondering what this was all about. And then Seth here noticed the man was mumbling to himself.

Mumbling what?

He was saying something under his breath. We couldn't understand it at first. But then we started recognizing English words and then realized he was talking to us, but quietly so he wouldn't get caught. He was being forced to kneel so he couldn't look at us, but he was saying something about foreigners in Burma…

That's right – Seth said –
Foreigners must know what's happening in Burma.
That's what he said…

He was a professor.

Right. From the University of Yangon.

And there was an older French lady who took his picture and passed him food through the bars. She wanted to do something.

Food?

She only had some bananas.

Some Germans tried to give him dollars when the guards weren't looking, but the prisoner said he couldn't take the dollars. Said dollars were useless to him in prison.

He needed kyat.

But then the guard spotted us and said we shouldn't give him money. We could give him food, but no money. He had a few thousand kyat tucked under his feet from the French couple but then the soldiers searched the cage and found it.

They took it from him and told us we could only give him food.

They spoke English?

The guards didn't but we knew what they meant.

The prisoner actually spoke very well, Seth thought so.

The guards weren't happy his English was better than theirs.

The man could talk to us and the guards couldn't understand, you see.

They got angry and put a tarp over the cage.

It was this big plastic sheet.

The French couple was really moved. The woman was, wasn't she, Jake?

She started crying when they covered the cage with the tarp. She couldn't help it.

You couldn't say anything?

The Germans tried. But the soldiers said it was their job.

And the French woman was crying because she couldn't believe it. She said it wasn't fair and she couldn't bear it. We were stuck on the boat, you see…

Yes – I say – I think so.

Then the angular guy's face locks at the doorway. All of us turn as a green-uniformed soldier steps into the restaurant, a slender woman in a longyi traipsing behind him. The patrons are quiet as the officer speaks to the owner then is seated near the far wall, the gazes of the other diners lowering to the plastic tablecloths printed with soccer balls. The officer has the darkened skin of someone who spends his time outdoors, probably in charge of a battalion or two. His forehead appears devoid of creases until it furrows when he looks our direction. The woman's face is a smug doll with tiny, bitten lips.

The flashlight is completely dead now. I'd laid it somewhere on the bedding so when I rolled over it dropped to the floor with a cold, cylindrical thud. Hope the bulb didn't break. I'll buy new batteries tomorrow if the shops have them. Seth and Jake, both pleasant guys, hiking to Inle in the morning and starting early. My trek to the lookout was stunning. My guide Harry knew everything about the landscape, the bark of the trees, how the water buffalo follow precisely in each other's footsteps so they won't break their legs. He knew about the poppy farms near the Chinese border you could only get to by truck – four days into the mountains by road. Knew about how the traders smuggled opium in the rectums of cattle and how the army oversaw it all. We stayed the night at a farm on the lookout and could gaze down into the dusk-filled valley and hear the tea harvesters talking by their distant echoes, their tiny shapes shifting on the far surfaces of the slopes as they picked. The farm grew every kind of food – a sky-forest Eden in perpetual harvest: Squash vines, papayas, citrus, beanstalks, fields of snap peas, marigolds and roses. Goats and squadrons of chickens patrolled the yard. I took a shower using a bucket and cold water from a trough, naked and looking out over the valley as the sun set. Harry said that on a clear day you could see all the way to Mount Popa near Pagan. That's a hundred kilometres away, I said, and he said yes, but you can see it. A warm wool blanket and dinner waited for me inside the smoky hut and at night the stars pierced through the black canopy – a billion of them, like there were more of them than sky. And they had a depth too; not just a flat surface but a space you could actually see into, like you could tell which of the light had travelled from farthest away. Across the canopy of stars, a satellite drifted like a beacon, white and blinking, tracing the curve of space.

The officer looks over at us, his thick lips cushioning a toothpick. He leans over and says –
You are American, no? Three Americans in Burma…

We're British – Jake says.

Canadian – I say.


Americans…come to Burma…for trekking
– his ruddy face drops, drunk, as if searching the racks of his brain for some lost vocabulary. He calls over to the owner in Burmese and repeats his demand to him. The officer gestures to us.

Then the owner translates – He say, it very dangerous for everyone in Burma when the foreigner talk about politics…

No – I say – We didn't talk about politics. We don't even care about it really.

We came for the trekking – Jake says.

The owner translates back and then from the soldier to us again. His hand trembles beside the pocket of his Levi's.

He wants to know where you stay. What guesthouse.

Don't tell him that, Jake. He doesn't need to know.

The officer pushes his chair back from the table, keeping his eyes somehow on all three of us at once. The owner has that look on his face like he was going to be in for it if we didn't leave. Across the road, a ball is kicked into a net and the men at the tea shop jump up to applaud the TV.

Again he ask – the owner mediates – You stay what guesthouse?

Don't tell him – Seth says – It's none of his business…

I won't. We'll leave, it's okay.

Seth and Jake stand from the table and reach for their wallets to pay. The wife in the corner lays the baby on the table and tallies the bill on the pad. But the officer puts his hand out, mutters to the woman with the tiny lips and they both stand ready to leave. The officer stares at the owner, a long dark glare the colour of a lie. He drags his index finger across his throat. The restaurant is a rectangle of silence as they turn and leave.

We weren't even talking about politics – I say – Don't know what his problem was.

He was listening to us, from outside…about the boat ride.

I don't know.

That must have been it.

Then the restaurant plunges back into darkness. Across the road, the men watching football cry out as the television snaps off. Moments of pitch black at the plastic-covered table, silent except for the shouts from the tea shop, then the sudden pull-start of the generator and the feeling that everything in the country had been kicked in the gut but was determined to get up again like it had a thousand times before.

I say goodnight to the British guys and wish them luck on their trek. I close the door to my room and feel around for the flashlight in the dark, my room where my backpack lay open on the second bed looking in the shadows like the mound of a sleeping body I was finally coming home to. It was a shame the men across the street couldn't finish the game. Their dejected footsteps picked across the shattered sidewalks ahead of me, the beams of the oncoming headlights blinding us.

The Spanish couple is silent now. I curl beneath the blankets thinking about what Seth had told about the prisoner. That was tough to hear, especially after the officer left the restaurant having done what he did. I hope the owner is alright. But that's how these places are, I think, as I pull the blankets over my head. Beautiful but dangerous. The owner had to translate to us and I could see on his face he didn't want to but had no choice. All of us understood and were on his side. And then the frustrated shouts from the men across the street where the TV had gone out.

Maybe I should have stayed in Thailand, stayed swinging in hammocks next to beach bars, not venturing out into the wilds of Asia just to suffer this loneliness. Like at the lookout, when I stared across the valley feeling fresh after my shower and the water buffalo were called home by the bells of their owners as the sun set. The huts down in the valley beginning to smoke from their evening fires and the children chasing their dogs and the hills glowing purple in the dusk and beyond them, just the trees.

Gravel ricocheted off the undercarriage as the steel-coloured Volvo sped up. The steady percussion of stones masked the noise of the camping gear shifting in the trunk as the vehicle pitched and swayed over potholes. The road getting worse meant he was nearly there. All his favorite places in the province were like that, at the distant ends of deteriorating gravel roads. He loved the kind that led to where you could drive no further, where you would slow to a crawl, become blocked by a body of white-capped water or an impassable forest of spruce, the kind that lead to the cabin.

The blue glow of the dashboard matched the headlights' intensity. A shower of insects blazed white on the windshield. As a boy he'd seen deer along this road – a doe had once darted out with her fawn. Their coal-black marmoreal stares froze in the high beams and for the only time he could remember he'd heard his father swear out loud.

Goddamn deer
. Just in time.

This far north the lakes fanned outward like amoebas. Wild eskers of forested shoreline separated each inlet and cove, wending around each other in a geographical labyrinth. The radio still crackled with reception. He'd expected that much at least, but surprisingly his cellphone still showed three bars. Progress, sure.

A kilometre more
, he thought.

He would assemble the tent using a fire for light. To gather wood he would have to be cautious and use the headlights. Running out of battery this deep in the backwoods could land him in all sorts of trouble he'd rather not think about. He'd get the flames going by nesting birch bark with clumps of old needles and dead leaves. Later he would add kindling, a few heavier branches. Larger blow-down would be easy to find and there was never much wind that would make it past the treeline at the shore. One dead pine or cedar would be fuel enough. It was good there wasn't any wind, he thought. There was also moisture on the grass and in the soil – just a few centimetres of peat over a bedrock of limestone, only enough for a thin set of roots to grow. Dry, peat soil could spread a fire, even keeping it alive underground if given a steady supply of oxygen.

When he pulled into the clearing and stopped, the grass came as high as the driver-side window. Through the rolled-down opening he smelled the damp stalks and the wet tannin of mud. He switched off the headlights and sat in silence as the familiar shape of the cabin began to edge itself out from the blackness. He breathed in full lungs of air in the audible quiet: crickets, a frog croaking its coordinates somewhere in the dark like a two-toned ratchet, the sound of waves muted in the distance.

Slowly the posts of the weathered grey porch appeared, then the tilted eaves of the roof stopping where the blackberry bushes had wildly overgrown. Next, he saw the worn log siding, the Indian chair crafted from bent saplings and bark. The faded colour in the corner was a forgotten beach towel, crumpled and solidified beneath ten winters of snow. The cabin looked smaller than he remembered. The roof had caved at the back, maybe that was why. He was always surprised at the difference the passing of years made to the memory of objects. Rooms shrank. Ceilings drifted downward. How much smaller everything was that had been magnificent and indestructible as a kid. So fallible what had once seemed faultless. Nothing ever stayed the same as you remembered it.