For Us Surrender Is Out of the Question (15 page)

The Blay came from a big, relatively well-to-do family that had pooled serious resources to buy their son the safety of a dead man’s life in Thailand. All Htan Dah had was a KNU card that identified him as a member of the organization, to use as a bargaining tool with Thai cops. It never got him out of paying bribes, but it had so far kept him away from prison or deportation. It did have the downside that if he ever wanted to resettle to the United States through the United Nations, it proved him an actual card-carrying member of a terrorist organization. But Htan Dah wasn’t planning on resettling anyway, because he thought it amounted to abandoning his “duty” to his people. He was born on January 31, 1981, the thirty-second anniversary of the day the Karen rebels declared war, earning him the “Htan,” or “resist, against,” in his name. On his application to become an employee of BA, under the question of how long he thought he’d work for the organization, he’d written, “As long as it takes.” Deciding to get the KNU card was no contest.

The day that our morning class had been canceled for meetings, Htan Dah had driven me to the post office to mail some postcards. Inside, as I got in line, he retreated to a corner, then came over and
whispered to me that he wasn’t legal there, as though I’d forgotten, so maybe I should try another, faster line, then retreated again, came back and whispered that maybe I should just stay in the line I was in so as not to draw attention to us, gave a little nervous laugh, then walked tightly back to his corner. When I finished and turned around to give him the tilted “Let’s go” nod, the smile that broke open exhibited more relief than I’d ever seen on anyone’s face.

A couple of days after Ta Mla’s near arrest at the gas station, Ta Mla drove around town having his picture taken and taking it to the right people to get his KNU card. It was the closest thing to even a modicum of protection he could obtain, but still, it wasn’t enough.

TWO DAYS
before Ta Mla and That Khaing,
²⁵
who’d newly arrived from inside, got arrested, Htan Dah had finally said yes when I asked him if he wanted help cooking breakfast. He’d given me a cutting board and several small heads of garlic, and I’d dutifully begun peeling the fibrous skins.

“I miss you, Htan Dah,” I’d said, my eyes on my sticky fingers. “We haven’t spent so much time together lately.”

His head had been dipped low, his hair hanging in sheets above the heavy marble mortar in which he was pounding chilies with a
matching pestle. He’d looked up and stilled his hand for a moment, the front, shortest layers of his hair landing on his cheekbones. “Yes,” he’d said. “Why not?”

“Because you’re very busy. You have your work, and your wife, and your kid. You just haven’t had so much free time.”

He’d continued looking at me, then gone back to pounding. “Yes,” he’d said. “I miss you, too.”

The morning after the arrest, we were chopping and slicing and smashing at the table when the rest of the house got up and started bustling around. It was agreed that they should all drive the most out-of-the-way back way to wherever they were going. Each incident with the law renewed the fear of the Thai in them for a little bit, though it wasn’t like it was anybody’s first time or anything. It wasn’t even Ta Mla’s first time.

Previously, he’d been arrested along with a friend, a girl, who’d started sobbing when the cops said Ta Mla could go but she couldn’t. He hadn’t been about to pay his way off with a woman, so they’d charged him ten bucks for each of them when he’d refused to leave without her.

“How many times have you been arrested?” I asked Eh Soe when he came into the dining room/garage.

My relationship with Eh Soe had improved somewhat. Every morning, I crawled out from under my mosquito net shortly after dawn and walked past him on my way out the door. Every morning, I went straight downstairs and started helping Htan Dah cook rather than just watching him. And every morning, Eh Soe walked into the dining room/garage an hour or so later and punched me in the arm. When I’d asked Htan Dah what was up with the guys hitting me all the time—Htoo Moo had also taken to slapping me if I was standing near him, or at the very least pulling my arm hair—he’d smiled paternally and said it was because they loved me.

Indeed, Eh Soe and I had started getting along by treating each other like nine-year-old siblings. I had colored and hung an anti-smoking
sign above my reading bench, which had become his bed. He had lain underneath it and continued to smoke. He had repeatedly told me to shut up while I yelled at him to go smoke and talk on the phone somewhere else while I was trying to sleep, but then told me after he hung up that I wasn’t staying long enough, and should stick around for a year. He’d told me I wasn’t his boss, and I’d told him that he could stand to be a better roommate. He thought that was hilarious, and reason to mock me, and had taken to saying “Okay, my roooommaaaate” and “Yes, my roooommaaaate” before completely disregarding whatever courtesy I was asking of him. So even though I kind of wanted to kick Eh Soe in the dick, we were communicative, sometimes chatting from our separate beds at night, like at a sleepover.

“Two times,” he said, answering my question. “In two years with BA.” He smiled. “Once a year. Once, I paid five hundred baht. I show my ID”—Eh Soe had a student ID from Burma, a real one, since his aunt had put him through some school there—“and say, I’m Burmese! I’m Burmese student!” At this point, he started laughing hard, which made Htan Dah and Htoo Moo, who’d sat down as we prepared to fry up breakfast, do the same. “But he knew I was refugee, and so I said, Okay, I will give you two hundred fifty baht. But he said, No, no, it’s not enough. So I had to pay him much more.”

“Why don’t you ask Htoo Moo how many times he has been arrested?” Htan Dah asked me.

“Okay,” I said. “Htoo Moo, how many times have you been arrested?”

“Six times,” he said, which set the other guys giggling again. Htoo Moo got arrested the most and let go the least. Usually, he spent a day or four in jail, then was offered freedom for cash. Once, he was leaving a refugee camp on a bus and the police got on and asked him for ID. I don’t have one, he said. I am a student. He had seen in movies that students were respected. Where do you study, they asked. In a monastery, he said. What’s the name of it? I don’t know.
He was taken off the bus and to a jail, where he spent one day and one night. Then they transferred him to another jail, just this side of the Thai border, with men and women in one room. Girls were crying. The cops punched one of the prisoners in the stomach and back of the neck until he spit up blood, then said they’d let people go for three hundred baht. Htoo Moo had only eighty. But ten people bought their way out and left. In a while, the cops came back and said, Okay, two hundred baht. Five or six more prisoners left. The cops came back and said, Okay, one hundred baht. A few more captives straggled out. When the cops announced that ten people needed to go clean the garden, Htoo Moo volunteered, and even after it was clean, he still swept at the ground like a madman, like the work would never be done, because inside, people were getting beat up. In the end, the cops drove the broke hangers-on, eleven of them, over the border and dropped them off in Burma—though luckily, not directly at an SPDC holding center. So Htoo Moo and the others walked along the river for a while, pooled their cash to hire a boat, and got dropped back off on the Thai side. But they were lost. Htoo Moo asked his companions if they knew the way; nobody did, so they walked until midnight, when they heard monks chanting and followed the sound. The monks fed them rice, told them they got people like them every day, and showed Htoo Moo the way to his brother’s village, nearby. An older gentleman asked the monks if he could stay with them forever. Another guy said that he had twin babies and a wife and no bus fare, so Htoo Moo gave him twenty of his remaining forty baht and set off for his brother’s. But sometimes when he got arrested, he just had to pay five hundred baht or so, and he preferred those times.

“Why do you get arrested so much?” I asked. “Is it because when you’re on your motorbike you’re always looking over your shoulder? Because you always do that, and it makes you look really suspicious.”

“Also,” Htan Dah laughed, “he looks Burmese.” Htoo Moo’s smile lit his dark, oval face. “As for me, maybe I can pass for Thai.”

“Really?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I think my face looks a little bit Chinese.”

Still, Htan Dah had been arrested three times in the last two years. Once, he paid five hundred baht. Once, he and the three guys he was with, two of whom didn’t have KNU cards, paid two thousand baht each. Once, he was just sent back to camp. (That time, he’d been caught by a member of the Thai army—a less crooked organization, according to the refugees, than the Thai police.) Worst, a few months ago, he’d been driving down our street when a neighbor pulled out of her driveway without looking and hit him with her car. She convinced him that it was his fault because he hadn’t gotten out of the way. Regardless of how untrue that was, she gave him the option of being turned in to authorities as an illegal or paying her $250. Lucky for Htan Dah, BA covered the bribe, which was two years’ worth of his earnings.

“Yesterday,” Htan Dah said, “I see the police on our way to Office Two. We didn’t get arrested because I was praying.”

“Oh yeah?” I asked. “You don’t think that could have anything to do with the fact that you were with me?”

Htan Dah laughed and nodded. “Maybe if I go with Ta Mla, I would already be in jail.” That hypothetical made him laugh even harder. “That Khaing is lucky Ta Mla came back with whiskey,” he choked out. “If Ta Mla disappear, That Khaing is screwed by the cops.”