Under the Dragon (30 page)

It was not that she disliked the compliments, rather that she could not determine their true value. The whispered promises made her emotions sway like bamboo in the monsoon, yet the shower of kind words did not begin to satisfy her thirst. Excitement inevitably led to disappointment, laughter was always followed by tears and any real meaning remained changeable and unclear. She chose to wait for fate to bring her the man who would hold her heart.

When the war began it was not only the old traditions that died. There was no longer time for courtship ceremonies, or even for the morning sharing of night-time’s dreams. The English tea-planters and bureaucrats escaped up into the hills, losing thousands of their people on the high jungle trails that led to India. Nan Si Si’s mother, who had before abused with blasphemy the British Empire, gave the poor women and men food as they passed by the house. It was not that she cared particularly for the English. She had always condemned the three ‘M’s of their colonial ways: their missionaries, merchants and military. Rather, there was simply no vengeance in her character. She would have done the same for the Japanese if their refugees had been retreating, had they not cut short her forbearance by bombing Namhsan. She had died in the fire which swept through the marketplace. It was Nan Si Si who found it difficult to forgive them now.

‘There, Saw Htoo!’ she hissed in terror, startled back to her senses. ‘Listen.’

‘Quiet,’ he whispered, already on his feet, the gun in his hand. ‘I heard it.’

‘That wasn’t a bird.’

Saw Htoo crossed the inner room in two strides, then reached the door in a single step. He shouted a challenge at the darkness, first in Karen and then in Palaung, but no answer came back. He sprinted around behind the house, from where the voice seemed to have come. His bare feet drummed on the hardened earth. He, like all the other Karen soldiers, rose at the prospect of a fight. He seemed anxious to defend both his faith and his nation with his life. She prayed that the unknown intruder wasn’t stronger than him. Saw Htoo pushed deeper into the night and she heard the thrash and snap of branches. ‘Saw Htoo?’ she called, suddenly alone. ‘Saw Htoo?’

She stood up from the mat and tried to find her clothes. It was foolish to have undressed, she scolded herself. The Palaung usually sleep fully-clothed, women removing only the scarlet hood, but the Karen throw off their garments and sleep naked, like animals, in the skin. She wished now that he had spared her that habit. It was so foolish, if pleasing. She found her cap but nothing else. Her clothes were not where she had left them. At the start of the night, after she had laid out their bedding, she had asked Saw Htoo to look away and had undressed quickly, folding her smock and dress and setting them beside the hearth. Now she could not find them. He might have hidden them as a joke. She should have stayed dressed and let him sleep, stayed dressed so he might stay alive.

‘Saw Htoo?’ she whispered. There were no sounds outside the house, not even the breath of the wind. She felt for his matches but they too had vanished. He must have knocked the box aside. She could see nothing. She held up her hand in front of her face, close enough to touch her nose, but it was too dark even to make out her fingers. She bit them for the reassurance that it really was her here in this room in this house in the jungle. She licked them and tasted him.

She remembered an old woman who had appeared at the head of the cradle on the evening after Ihla’s mother had given birth. Nan Si Si had not recognised her, as she was too young, and assumed that she was the cousin from Panglong. At first only the swiftness of her arrival had seemed unusual. Panglong was more than a day’s travel from Namhsan. But the woman had sat among them, sharing in the examination of the child. There was always the time to talk in those days. Before the war it was still thought that a deep hollow at the nape of the baby’s neck indicated a selfish and miserly character. Large ears, on the other hand, were considered a sure sign that the child would be good and wise. The visitor had explained that the position of birthmarks, with which Palaung and Shan children are often born, indicated something of the previous existence of the reincarnated spirit. The signs were discussed and their meanings interpreted, and towards the end of the examination the old woman stood up and left. It was only then that the other women fell silent. Later Nan Si Si learned that the visitor had been Ihla’s mother’s own grandmother, who had been dead for almost thirty years. The old woman’s ghost had appeared to the family before, sharing in the birth of both Ihla’s mother and Ihla herself. Now she had come to welcome their newest-born. Ihla’s mother had then rubbed a finger of soot off the bottom of the rice-pot and made a black mark between her baby’s eyebrows.

‘Saw Htoo?’ Nan Si Si heard his steps follow the path, climb the verandah and cross the room. She reached out in the dark to seize him.

‘I could find no one.’

‘He called your name, Saw Htoo. Your name.’ The stranger’s voice had shocked her. It had spoken as if from half-sleep, intimate yet distant, murmuring Saw Htoo’s name again and again.

He was shaking. She could feel him shaking. But he answered her alarm in a controlled tone, ‘You must not worry. We are tired. We should try to rest a little.’

They lay together, skin to skin, and now she felt thankful for Karen ways. She did not want to hear again the calling of his name. She buried her head in his chest and listened to his heart, traced its pulse, felt his body damp from the jungle dew. The intimacy reassured her, pushing the voice out of her mind and away from them. Saw Htoo’s concentration drifted too, dulled by his tiredness, and they may have slipped off into the refuge of sleep.

‘I can’t believe it’s less than a week since we met,’ he said. She did not know if a minute had passed, or a whole precious hour. She gripped him, startled awake. His calm, confident manner comforted her.

‘It’s all happened so quickly,’ she said. ‘Maybe too quickly,’ she thought.

‘I remember seeing you that first time.’ He had slipped into the tea factory among the pickers who weighed and emptied the day’s harvest into long mounds near the door. Nan Si Si had noticed him caught in the great white beam of light that slanted down from the upper window. ‘You were standing at the oven, staring at me.’

‘I was
not
staring.’ She had been trying to brush the dust and steam from her eyes. ‘I was just looking.’

‘Looking like you were staring, then,’ he said. She had been working her way along the hot metal plates, judging the tea’s dryness, turning the moist, shredded leaves with short flicks of her hands. The bright lines of fresh green leaves were the only colour in the dusty shed. Ihla had been beside her, tending the clay oven’s fires. ‘But I was staring at you,’ admitted Saw Htoo.

‘As well as fat old Ihla.’

‘She will keep some man happy and warm through the rains.’

‘And I will not?’ She turned away from him and he held her, wrapping her in the safety of his arms.

‘You will,’ he breathed into her ear. She closed her eyes. ‘The boy who was there on the first day, packing the sacks – what was his name? Sai Wai?’

‘The carpenter’s son?’

‘He seemed to be soft on you.’

‘He is just plain soft, as soft as a pumpkin.’

‘One day I believe he will make a fine husband and give you many healthy children, all born with your gentle eyes…and his flat feet.’

She turned back to beat him then, pounding her fists against his chest until he laughed his whiplash laugh again and pulled her so close that she thought the breath would be squeezed out of her.

That first evening, when Saw Htoo had come to her father’s house to talk of driving the Japanese from the country, she had known that he was the man she would marry. The revelation had come to her with great clarity, as certain as bamboo is strong. The dangers and complications had not occurred to her. She had not considered that his bravery might get him killed, even though she admired him for risking his life, or that he wished to return to his southern village of wooden clapboard churches after the war. She knew simply that she wanted to bear his child, their child, so that his laugh and courage and heart-shaped face would live for ever.

‘I can’t breathe,’ she gasped. ‘Le me breathe, Saw Htoo.’ He let her go and she strained for air.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I like it when you hold me, but not that tight.’

‘I wasn’t thinking.’ It was not true. He had been thinking, only not of her.

‘It’s not fair,’ she complained as she caught her breath. ‘They shouldn’t disturb us tonight.’

‘It must have been some boys from the village.’

‘It was a man’s voice. Maybe the other Karens?’

‘Damn kids,’ he swore, but without anger, and she realised for the first time that he too was frightened.

He lit another cigarette. His matches had been under the mat. He looked at his watch. Its minute-hand seemed to be racing ahead, counting off the last hour. She took his hand into her own and shook his wrist as if to slow down the clockwork march of time. ‘It is running too fast,’ she thought.

‘I never told you about my friend Ko Kyin Pe,’ said Saw Htoo, exhaling. The smoke curled up towards the roof tiles. ‘We grew up in the same village, and did everything together. We played together, hunted together, and when the war started we joined the Burma Rifles together. Last month he was shot’ – Saw Htoo placed her hand on his stomach – ‘here.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It took him two days to die. We had no morphine. He pissed blood until there was no more blood left in him. The Sergeant too, who was from Loikaw, died the same morning. He stepped on a landmine. I found him leaning against a tree, staring at the ground looking for his legs.’ He took another draw on his cigarette. His words were gentle now, spoken no louder than a whisper. ‘When it happens to me I’d like to die quickly. Here,’ he said, and placed her hand on his heart.

‘It won’t happen to you. I want you to come back to me. Remember that.’ He didn’t answer her. ‘Please remember.’

‘I’ll remember.’ The words were spoken in the same flat tone of voice as if he had said ‘The tea is ready.’

‘It must have been the village boys,’ she insisted, angry now. ‘I’ll tie them to their houses in the morning. They shouldn’t make trouble for new couples.’

‘Damn them. God damn them.’

‘It must have been them fooling around.’

‘It’s too late now to try to sleep.’ He looked again at his watch. ‘Much too late.’ He went to put out his cigarette, even though it was not half-smoked, and the room slipped again into darkness.

Nan Si Si and Saw Htoo had eloped, as was the tradition, though without the customary long engagement. Their courtship had lasted four days. A girl’s parents can object only to a match with a man from another clan or village. Her father did not approve of Saw Htoo despite his strengths, telling her not to set a stone on a slope. He feared that ill would befall the daughter who married a defiant, foreign man. ‘A tree growing in the middle of the bamboo is useless,’ he had told her. The Palaung are a quiet and peaceable people, despising all those who take human life. He would never have approved of her marriage to a Christian guerrilla fighter, no matter how defensible his principles, no matter how her mother had died. But she believed that Saw Htoo was a good man. She knew that he would care for her and protect her. He was a man willing to shout at the silence of the night.

‘I have not built you a house,’ Saw Htoo had apologised. It was the custom, when parents objected to a marriage, for the man to build a home for his lover. But there hadn’t been enough time. So her uncle had loaned them this hut in the jungle instead. An elder had chosen an auspicious hour for the elopement, with due regard for the days of the week on which they had each been born. Ihla had helped her to carry her clothes and her bedding – a mat, a quilt and a small pillow. Her cooking pot had come too. Her uncle had acted as their escort. Saw Htoo had left tobacco for her father but he had refused to accept the gift. They had come to this house only a few hours before, and then had not slept at all. They had talked together, eaten a little curry and rice, and then he had told her that he needed to rest. She had known it but she had kept on talking, and had taken him again and again into her arms.

One day there would be a wedding, and all the village would sit before their lacquered bowls. One day a baby would sleep in her lap. One day Ihla too would have a child, maybe fathered by Sai Wai, the heartbroken carpenter’s son, and the two young women would sit together watching their children play.

‘You will come back, Saw Htoo,’ Nan Si Si said, ‘and we will have a family.’

‘Maybe,’ he replied. ‘But maybe we should wait.’

‘It’s too late. You have me now.’

‘But don’t you think it’s selfish?’

‘What?’

‘Wanting a family.’

‘You
will
come back,’ she pleaded. She didn’t want to talk about death again. It was a time for beginnings, not for conclusions. She wanted her man alive. ‘I will find the bone of the socket of a tiger’s eye to make you a ring that will protect you. I will buy a sambur’s sprouting antler to give you courage. You will come back to me.’

‘And I
will
die, either later this morning or in fifty years’ time. It doesn’t matter when. In making a new life we are only trying to perpetuate our own, defying death. To me, that’s selfish.’

She had never considered love to be selfish, although there was a greed in her need for a baby. ‘Maybe it is at first,’ she admitted, ‘but in it are the seeds of selflessness, of creating and nurturing and teaching and then – when the child becomes an adult – of having the generosity to let go.’ She began to wish for the dawn. She wanted the black, broken night to be driven away by the rising sun. ‘And it does matter when you die,’ she added. ‘If it didn’t, if there wasn’t any future, I wouldn’t be here with you. I wouldn’t be yours.’

‘I just don’t want you to be left alone,’ he said.

‘If you’ll light the fire again I’ll make us some tea.’

As the water boiled Saw Htoo dismantled his rifle. He slid the bolt free and counted his cartridges. They flashed with a terrible, evil beauty in the firelight. He cleaned each part and reassembled the weapon.