Under the Dragon (7 page)

‘We’d live in an ice house.’

‘I don’t want to live in an ice house.’ She didn’t want to disagree with him but her father would never find her in the north.

‘Every morning before going hunting, you’d chew my boots to soften them. I’d chase polar bears and whales for our supper. We’d have a herd of caribou, a fleet of kayaks, a pack of huskies.’

Ni Ni raised herself onto her elbow and touched a cool hand to his forehead. ‘It was too hot for you at Shwedagon?’

‘In the summer the sun would never set. Our children would grow up to be strong hunters and trappers and we’d spend all our evenings in our sleeping skins, rubbing noses by the open fire.’ He sighed, ‘We’d be cold. Cold.’

Louis shivered and held Ni Ni. She abandoned herself to his embrace. As sleep rose up to claim them it did not seem right to her that he dreamed himself away to a cold country. If he expected them to share their bodies, she wanted his thoughts too to be there in the strange warm bed.

In the morning when he left for the site he asked her to wait for him. At dusk when he returned she taught him how to walk. He had wanted to make love first, but she resisted. He only agreed to the lesson on the condition that they took off their clothes.

‘When you walk, be where you are,’ she told him.

‘I am here.’ He stood at the head of the villa’s shuttered lounge. Evening sunlight criss-crossed the room’s inky blue shade. ‘But you are too far away, Ni Ni, way over there.’

She moved forward out of the half-light and removed his glasses. He stretched out to touch her and she sprung back. ‘Don’t feel me; feel your feet on the floor.’

Louis felt the smooth teak floorboards and balanced himself upon them. He pictured the room about him: the palmy etchings of colonial Rangoon, the deep wicker armchair, Ni Ni’s tight form tucked into the silver shadow by the old campaign chest. Then he saw himself, prickly skin on a bony frame, short on hair and energy, a gaunt, sun-bleached English architect dislocated in the tropics, wearied by battle with the elements. Ni Ni must have noticed the furrows wrinkle his brow, for she said, ‘If you do not care for yourself, how can you care for others?’ So Louis tried to let her quiet enter him. He pushed aside his worries. ‘Walk,’ he heard her say.

He lifted a foot, felt the pull of calf and bend of knee, sensed his ankle pivot and his weight shift as he began his tread. He took the second step with even more care, swinging his other foot forward, feeling the warm air brush against his body. His toes met the floor, steadied him, made him aware of his poise. He walked the length of the room, a path of twenty paces, then returned. As he paced a thought surfaced to distract him, a flashback to the night before of Ni Ni cowering in a corner to unbutton her tapered blouse. She had released her hair so that it fell over her shoulders. ‘Come back to your footsteps,’ she whispered, recalling him to the present.

He walked on, measuring each step, relaxed yet alert to every movement, each footfall. He discovered the shape of his soles by the way they met the floor, felt the hard bone of his heels and detected the pull of his tendons. The rhythm of his breathing held his attention and then, with each swing of his arms, the minute outward twist of his wrists.

Louis was a stranger to Ni Ni. His white, hairy figure was foreign and unfamiliar. His gestures were abrupt and his movements unrefined. His snarled tangle of pubic curls repelled her. Yet as she watched his progress – the tensing then relaxing muscles, the rise and fall of his chest – she believed that for all his differences Louis shared something with her father. He was weak. He too was a man lost because he was not tied to any woman’s heart. The revelation made him seem less unknown, less the beast who had torn her out of childhood. ‘Open your heart,’ the monks had once taught her, ‘and you will realise that you belong.’ As Louis trod the hardwood pathway she willed herself to believe that there could be a kind of safety in his frantic passion. The thought helped her to accept that she could belong in the shuttered company villa, in the springy bed, with him. He was her escape, if she was willing to pay the price. She watched his half-blind walk and told herself, ‘This is the man I must love properly.’

Ni Ni reached out her arms and from across the room, traced the outline of Louis’s moving figure. She sketched the curve of his spine with her thumb, and the man shivered then missed a step. ‘Don’t stop,’ she hissed from behind the chest. She was frightened, but moved forward to walk behind him, her hands hovering above his waist, feeling him and being felt. He sensed Ni Ni’s hands on his chest, gliding over his ribs, even though her fingers did not touch him.

He turned at the end of the lounge and tried to carry on but his pace faltered, his breathing quickened. ‘Walk,’ she said, and he stepped forward again. She slid backwards before him, stroking his hips without brushing his skin, her distant touch feeling the cool of his buttocks and heat of his loins.

‘Walk,’ she repeated as his legs grew taut and heavy. Her fingers tingled as she wove them around his shaft without touching him. Ni Ni’s alarm and wonder mounted as he began to swell in her detached caress. Louis groaned and rose with his longing. He reached blindly into the void to find her. Instinct made her pull back. She laughed, once again at the wrong time.

‘Ni Ni,’ he begged, ‘where are you?’ She retreated from him, fleeing just beyond his reach. ‘I can’t see you.’ Around and around he turned, grasping at her indistinct shadow, aching to grip her flesh. ‘Come to me,’ he ordered. The anger in his voice stifled her laughter and she obeyed him. He seized her, turned her and took her from behind, lifting her up against the armchair with his fierce thrusts until she bled again and he collapsed, sated, empty, upon her. Then she hurt,
amè
, she hurt, but she felt safe.

The next day Ni Ni moved in with Louis. She had no family who might have warned her. Law San understood that everyone simply did their best to survive. Ko Aye received her sleeping mats. May May Gyi was loaned the rice pot. Louis’s kitchen boasted more saucepans and woks than were on sale in the whole of Bogyoke market. In Wayba-gi she left behind the villa’s address and the betel box, to be kept until her father’s return. All Ni Ni brought with her was the cotton sack of coins and her few worn clothes, which Louis stripped off her that evening. They tumbled on the shreds, ripping the seams of the threadbare cloth, then, while the flush of their copulation was still on her, he dressed her in a new silk blouse and a Chinese silk
longyi
. Its rich salmon-pink complemented her high colour. ‘It costs nothing,’ he said as she gazed at the unfamiliar reflection in the full-length mirror. Then he told her that she was beautiful.

For the next few months Ni Ni’s life hung between innocence and barbarism, caring and abuse, East and West. In Burma physical contact is an intimate matter. Men and women do not touch in public. Her actions further distanced her from her society. She ceased to belong. To compensate for the loss she convinced herself that she was tied to Louis, that his convenient liaison was love. He did nothing to dissuade her. When he arrived home they coupled urgently, on the sofa, in the bed, even once on the hallway floor with the front door still ajar. Afterwards they washed, sometimes dressed again, and ate in the glimmering dusk. Across the low table he took her small hands, kissed each finger in turn and told her that she made him happy. She believed that they would be together for ever, or at least until her father came home. Louis knew that it would end.

There is evil in every man and woman. It courses through our veins, beneath the silk dressing gown or battle fatigues, ready to sweep aside compassion. Our civility determines whether or not we act upon the baseness, whether we restrain or unleash it. Louis tried to contain his by locking it away in the villa. He and Ni Ni never went out together. He isolated her as Burma had been isolated by its military rulers. Their months together melted away as multi-party elections were held across the country. The generals, outraged by their humiliating defeat at the polls, annulled the results. But their refusal to relinquish power went all but unnoticed in the strange bed. Ni Ni surrendered her innocent heart to Louis. She felt herself protected. She once again made the mistake of thinking that she had time.

One Saturday morning in May Ni Ni awoke to the mutterings of rainless thunder. It was the end of the dry season and all Burma was waiting for the western winds that would bring the monsoon. The earth was parched and every breeze stirred in the dust, hanging gritty veils across the dirty streets. The thunder seemed to encircle all of Rangoon. Ni Ni, her head lying on Louis’s chest, heard his voice rise out of its rumble.

‘I’ve been asked to go home,’ he said, his inflexion flat. ‘My work is done here.’ She said nothing, but he felt the tension brace her body. ‘I didn’t tell you sooner because I, well…’ His weakness appalled him, but he gave himself up to it. ‘You’ll be all right.’

‘The building isn’t finished.’ Her woman’s whisper quivered, then broke. She sounded like a child again. ‘Not yet.’

‘My part of it is.’

The hotel’s superstructure had been completed. A Singapore contractor had been appointed to coordinate the fitting out. An English supervisor was not needed to oversee the installation of the wall and ceiling panels. The French interior designer was already on site.

‘Ni Ni, you’re young,’ Louis prattled, turning his unease into platitudes. ‘You’ve learned a lot, and your whole life is in front of you.’ He did not ask her, a fourteen-year-old orphan, to come home to England with him.

Ni Ni slipped out from under the sheet, her lightness leaving no impression on the mattress to show that she had ever laid beside him, and crossed the room to the wardrobe. She opened a lower drawer, burrowed under her fine new clothes and found the bag of coins. She knelt beside the bed, unsure if Louis wished her to return, and emptied out the money onto the pillow. There were silver quarters and Dutch guilders, Deutschmarks and a Canadian two-dollar bill. She arranged her funds with care, sorting them according to colour and size, not by value or nationality, and said, ‘My father saved these for me. Every day for over five years.’

Louis roared with laughter. He sat up in bed, pulled the orderly display toward him and did a quick calculation. ‘About twenty dollars, I’d say. Although I don’t know what the yen is at today.’ He chuckled again. ‘Five years, you say? My poor Ni Ni.’ He shook his head. ‘And where is your father now?’

Ni Ni cried out in a sudden burst of emotion. She threw herself onto the coins and then at Louis, her nails raised like talons. She pinned him down to the bed and tried to scratch his chest, his arms, his face. He could have tossed her aside, but instead he gripped her hands. He locked her feet to his own. She yelled at him, casting off her reserve. Her tears rained down onto his cheeks as she sobbed out the story of the theft of the bicycle.

‘It’s only a bike,’ Louis laughed in his bungled Burmese. ‘What can a bloody bike cost here?’

It was then, as she unravelled her pain, that Ni Ni finally understood how she had been used. She knew that it was the end, that she had never been safe. She tried to pull herself away, to get off him and run out of the villa. But he held her to him. Her outburst had excited him. And despite her cries and pleas, he took her one last, terrible time.

‘One day my father will return,’ she told him later, gathering up the small change that had been scattered across the bed. ‘You need not worry about me.’

Louis was not worried, though he did wonder what had come over him those last months. The girl was so poor, so gauche. He hated himself, but it didn’t really matter; he was leaving. He wanted her out of the house, but hadn’t the nerve to tell her. Instead he took his wallet off the bedside table and pulled out two hundred-dollar bills. ‘Here,’ he said, impatient now. ‘These will help you get by until he comes back.’ He put them into her bag and added, ‘I want you to forget me.’

‘I will never forget,’ she said, straight-backed and serious, no longer a child.

Prostitution does not exist in Burma; at least it cannot be mentioned in the press. The Burmese kings had a history of taking numerous wives, and religious sites always offered the service of ‘pagoda servants’ to pilgrims. Neither custom still exists today, officially. The girls on the steps of pagodas sell flowers and candles, religious requisites, not physical comforts. The royal
zenana
has been replaced by the executive escort agency. But both traditions remain part of the culture and, as a result of the smallest misfortune, a woman can become trapped.

Louis’s dollars, though worth a fortune to Ni Ni, didn’t last until the end of the monsoon. Soon after her return to Wayba-gi she fell ill, and May May Gyi spent the money on medicines which did nothing to improve her condition. No drug seemed capable of restoring her energy, no tonic would lift her spirit. Buddhists are taught that they are responsible today for what they will be tomorrow. Every man and woman is answerable for their own actions. But Ni Ni’s sense of duty had left with Louis’s departing aeroplane. The roar of its engines had shaken the satellite town. Like her father before her she brooded through the airless, vaporous afternoons, not hearing the rain drumming on her roof, ignoring May May Gyi’s encouragement, even turning down Law San’s offer of
Shan hkauk-hswe
noodles. The past was memory, the future might only be fantasy, but she had no love in the here and now. Ni Ni did not feel anger, wished no vengeance, and when the money ran out, when there seemed to be no other choice, she went in search of Way Way.

Way Way’s friend promised to find her work in Thailand as a dishwasher. The wage he promised was double that which she could earn in Rangoon. He paid for her bus ticket to the border, where she was met by a Thai driver. There were five other women in his car: two Burmese, two Shan girls with milky-white complexions and a single, silent Chinese. On the road to Bangkok the driver paid a uniformed man at a checkpoint. In the brothel Ni Ni was given a number and told to sit in a windowed showroom. She toyed with the hem of her blouse when bypassers stopped to stare at her. The first man who took her in the
hong bud boree sut
, ‘the room to unveil virgins’, paid the owner 120 baht – less than five dollars – and tipped her the same amount. During that month she was sold as a virgin to four more clients. She was allowed to keep her tips. They were the largest she was to receive over the next four years.