The Blue-Eyed Shan (11 page)

Soon the interruptions came in Shan; the boy heard no other language, and was instructing his tongue. This, then, was the language of the gods. He listened and listened, and from time to time he interrupted. One would be saying again, “If there is not rain soon—” and the child would interrupt. “A locomotive is a one-eyed dragon,” and this would necessitate conferences, first to translate “locomotive” from the Chinese, then to make sense of the whole phrase.

That was a dry year, and East Poppy Field showed rusty from the hillside. The sky was blue and clear, and when the boy, writhing, clenching, his good eyeball rolling, cried out, “The gods send rain! Tomorrow comes rain!” and fell unconscious, the old Sawbwa and the men about him were merely embarrassed. Two of the women carried the little fellow to the shelter of a wall, away from the blazing sun, and washed him down and tended him.

Next day a memorable downpour swelled the Little River Mon, and consequently Upper Stream in Pawlu, and consequently Lower Stream in Pawlu; it lasted all one day and half another, drowned the paddies, revived the vegetation, restored Pawlu's spirits and occasioned serious discussion of the boy. Most scoffed. But the old Sawbwa hated foreigners and had sensed in this boy a rare sweat of the same hate. It was decided to take the boy seriously for the time being. Perhaps he was inhabited, or visited, by a nat. Nats were forest spirits, some benign and helpful, others malign and baleful.

The boy confirmed his importance almost immediately. He fell into a foam-flecked trance one morning and spoke of the house that flies and roars like thunder. Two of Pawlu's men had seen aircraft, and knew what the boy was speaking of. But no such machine had ever droned through Pawlu's sky or racketed through Pawlu's peace—until three days later, when to the amazement of the entire village and the terror of half its people, a silver bird appeared from the west, crossed the valley buzzing like a bee and veered off to the south. It possessed, they swore, four wings, two on each side, and it emitted a modest but steady stream of smoke. (When he heard the tale years later, Greenwood surmised that a French or British bomber, honorably surviving World War I, had been achieving one of the first primitive aerial reconnaissances Out East, probably making a zigzag run from Mandalay to Hanoi and perhaps even taking photographs.)

After the third spectacular and successful prediction of rain, the old Sawbwa adopted this stunted, sickly, half-blind, discolored, demented youth. Over the years the boy announced many irrelevant visions, but he was never wrong about rain.

So when the old Sawbwa died a few years later, the village voted this grotesque the Sawbwa's turban, wardrobe and bangles, being careful at the same time to confirm Hu-chot (a polite rendition of whose name would have been “Tiger Tamer”) as First Rifle with independent powers. The Shan of Pawlu were religious, orderly, traditional folk, but not to the risk of their land and freedom.

And so this Sawbwa of Pawlu, spawned in the hell of the Celestial Kingdom and banished by its inhumanities, reigned for many years in his mountain fastness, celibate, visionary, crippled, shrewd and simple at once. White-haired where he was not bald, wrinkled and squinting, venerable and slow of speech, he was almost precisely Greenwood's age.

5

The Bandits in the Hills

Eight years before Greenwood's return to Pawlu, Yang's flight from China, and the death of the two Kachin, the Japanese had invaded Burma. In January of 1942 they struck by land from Siam and advanced with strategic caution and tactical brio. Hastily the Allies—stodgy Britain, stunned America (it was only a month after Pearl Harbor) and feudal China—improvised a defense. This was necessarily a limited defense. British generals believed in war but not in combat. Americans were thin on the ground and inexperienced. The Chinese (whom the British, with perhaps justifiable reluctance, finally deigned to admit to the “defense” of the Shan States) believed that when you had trained and equipped a good division you should not erode it in battle. (“The Fifth Army,” said a Chinese general to a British general, “is our best army because it is the only one which has any field guns, and I cannot afford to risk those guns. If I lose them the Fifth Army will no longer be our best.”)

At first the Allied line ran north-south, and the Japanese thrust westward across Burma's southern panhandle. The Japanese then consolidated, struck for Rangoon and fanned northward; the Allied line pivoted to run east-west. By mid-April the Japanese had slashed their way to within two hundred fifty miles of Lashio, the western terminus of the Burma Road, strategically vital (every town, island, fort that fell in those first months were “strategically vital”), and the Lashio Road was defended by the famed Chinese 55th Division.

Famed ever after, that is. The battle lasted only a few hours. The 55th's General Chen (whom the theater commander, the most crusty, aggressive and frustrated of American generals, had proposed court-martialing a week before) deployed his troops in echelon along the road, unit after unit staggered back from an insanely narrow front. In effect this forced each company to deal with the whole Japanese advance in turn; and when Chen ordered his rear battalions forward, the Japanese swung wide, flanked, enveloped, isolated and annihilated. The 55th simply disappeared. It was never again listed on Chinese army rolls. The most crusty, aggressive and frustrated of American generals said next day to the most romantic, idealistic and melancholy of American correspondents, “There's not a trace of it. It's the god-damnedest thing I ever saw. Last night I had a division, and today there isn't any.”

Two of the survivors were in apprentice American anthropologist named Greenwood and a Chinese major general named Yang. They survived because they never reached the battle.

Greenwood was then twenty-seven years old. He had spent his early adolescence hoping above all that his freckles would fade; also dismantling and reconstituting motor vehicles; and yearning after pudgy girls. He had spent his late adolescence at Harvard College, where motor vehicles were a means to an end—namely, women's colleges and their baffling inmates; and the two and a half years since his Master of Arts in 1939 absolutely without motor vehicles, fulfilling an anthropologist's dream: he had found an exotic people that no one had yet elucidated, and was living as one of them, in Shan trousers, Shan jacket, Shan turban, with a Shan beard (though golden), Shan tattoos, a Shan woman and by the grace of the nats a half-Shan daughter.

When he contrasted that life—Pawlu, Loi-mae, Lola, amethyst sunsets, blushing opal dawns—with his past (St. Louis, cars, proms, Cambridge, waistcoats, ritual sherry, sanctimonious and resentful women armored in layers of moral theory and underclothes), he wondered seriously if he should bother with a ticket home. But Shan life was family life, and he missed his own: each month he wrote a letter to his parents—pharmacy and notary public, soda fountain; Gray Lady and garden club—with a postscript to his younger sister, and after inscribing the magical foreign characters “Air Mail” and affixing a one-rupee stamp (he had purchased a hundred of those in Mandalay), he scouted the Nan-san road for a caravan. His postman was most often a ruffian, turbanned or skullcapped, ostentatiously armed. Greenwood informed these couriers that this was a message to his father, a great sawbwa across the water, and mother, a princess; he then proffered small silver and hoped for the best.

He had never been so happy and was intelligent enough to fear that he would never again be so happy. He heard in February of 1942 that the Japanese were invading Burma. Pawlu considered this irrelevant, at most insulting. Now and then bizarre tales prowled the mountains: the Dalai Lama was dead, Lung Yun had executed a Yunnan sawbwa, there was a road all the way from Lashio to Kunming littered with the corpses of foreign vehicles, opium was once more legal in China. (This last was exaggerated by Pawlu's natural desire for a favorable balance of trade. Opium was legal only in Japanese-occupied territory.)

Greenwood lit a cheroot and agreed that this was a degenerate age. He did not change his way of life. He made cooing sounds to his daughter and inexhaustible love to his little woman. In early April he parleyed with a Kachin amber merchant who mentioned the influx of Americans. Greenwood chuckled: a few diplomats and businessmen must indeed seem like a mob if they were American. Americans spoke loudly.

No, no. Soldiers.

The Kachin was only gossiping and had nothing to gain by lies. He was uncertain what a fleet consisted of, but reported that even before invading Burma the Japanese had, somewhere east of Shanghai, destroyed the entire American fleet—ferries, was it? gunboats? yes, yes—sending a ten, or perhaps ten tens, of aircraft to accomplish this with large bombs. The Kachin himself had spoken to Americans recently, down by Maymyo. All this was true, by the gods, and the great places of Asia were now Japanese. Singapore, which had once been English even as Burma was. Indochina. Siam. The Philippines. He believed the Siamese government had declared war on America; that was serious.

A rush of patriotism stunned Greenwood. Anger shook him, and he asked, “Have the Japanese set foot in America?”

The Kachin shrugged. “How can one know? Far places, far places.”

Greenwood then forfeited all standing as an anthropologist by blurting, “Those buck-toothed bowlegged sons of bitches!”

The Kachin smiled. “They will free Burma. You watch.”

Loi-mae knew immediately that the axis of Greenwood's world had tilted. He loomed in the doorway and explained. Loi-mae stepped to the cradle and took up their daughter. Greenwood said miserably, “We agreed I could not stay forever.”

“All the same I am heartsick,” she said.

Greenwood saw her fresh, not the native mistress but the wife and mother. He saw himself fresh, and he knew what treason was. “I too am heartsick,” he said, and he had not seen much betrayal or death, rapine or destruction, so he wept openly before her.

And then Greenwood the father, Greenwood the Shan, no longer the gangling student but well fleshed and muscled, Greenwood who had toiled in the fields, stood sentry, tapped poppies, sat on the men's side at weddings, attended village meetings, shot game, been honored with tattoos, been mocked for pride when his little woman swelled and his firstborn was delivered, stood humbly before Pawlu and its Sawbwa and tried to say why he must leave. The men sat to one side and the women to another, and the sun westered low, the sky rosy. Yes, his woman was here. Yes, his daughter was here. Yes, the people of Pawlu were his people. Yes, his heart was a cracked bell.

But the land of his ancestors had been attacked. The graves of his ancestors had been desecrated. His father and mother had no other son. To fail them would be to insult the gods.

The Sawbwa understood these arguments.

How would Phe-win feel, or Wan or Mong or Kin-tan, if the Japanese came to Pawlu? If they took the women, the crops, the silver, if they quartered themselves upon the people?

The Sawbwa understood these arguments too.

Greenwood would leave his silver and his amber, and wanted only a pony, to take him to Kunlong and then Hsenwi.

The Japanese were attacking the English?

They were.

The Sawbwa himself detested the English.

Greenwood sat silent.

But it was not given to man to know the gods' intent. The Sawbwa would not oppose his departure.

Pawlu would weep for its loss but would send him on his way with blessings.

Loi-mae too understood but her anguish could not be contained; it spilled over in silent tears. Greenwood was unable to explain the ferocity of his reaction, the depth of his need to go; it was as if he were some primitive warrior who had never been blooded and could not bear the shame of it.

Next morning—ashamed, angry, sure that he was defying the gods, fate, luck, but unable to hang back—he bound his bedroll, strapped on the 1917 Smith & Wesson .45 revolver he had never fired in anger, touched every hand in Pawlu, embraced Loi-mae and hugged Lola tight, and started down the trail to Kunlong with Kin-tan for guide and escort the first day.

He pushed hard. In Kunlong he saw Chinese soldiers, on their caps white suns against blue, and this seemed incorrect; but he reminded himself that the Japanese would seem even less appropriate. He rode on to Hsenwi and was dazzled: Chinese troops and trucks jammed the roads. Rather, Chinese troops and American trucks. The noise deafened him. The trucks seemed to be headed for China. Why Chinese troops in Burma? Where were the Americans? The British? Somebody must be going south to Lashio!

He was hungry, he was tired, he was disoriented. Here in Hsenwi he was also hot, and the trucks raised dust. He wore cotton dungarees and a blue cotton work shirt and sweated himself muddy. “Where's the horse market?” he bawled. A scuttling Burman started in alarm and waved uncertainly. Greenwood waited for a break in traffic and urged his pony across the road, into an alley, toward the river. Vehicles rumbled, horns blared, the pony shied.

He sold the pony cheap, an ounce of silver, and felt worse, more treacherous and cowardly, betraying the beast than leaving Pawlu; it was as if he had sold the pony for the cook-pot. He shouldered his bedroll, checked his pistol and headed for the Lashio Road. Trucks rumbled by, all on their way to China. He crossed a bridge. On the west bank of the river he sat on his bedroll and waited.

An hour later, under hot cloudless skies, a dusty automobile halted at his wave. “Lashio!” he cried. The driver, a Burman, waved him aboard impatiently. Greenwood never knew what the man's errand was. They bucked and twisted their way to Lashio, arriving at sunset. “No more,” said the driver. “English car. Stop here.”

“South,” Greenwood said. “I want to find the Americans.”

“Lorry.” The Burman pointed down a road. “Much lorry.”

Greenwood hopped out and trotted down the road in the gray-green twilight. Lashio swarmed with trucks; its very air was exhaust. He found a truck depot (shortly he would learn to call it motor pool) full of Chinese troops, and made himself heard over the roar of engines: “Americans! The American army! Where is the war?” No one listened, no one understood. He spotted what seemed to be a dispatcher's shed and pushed through the doorway.