Under the Dragon (12 page)

Around midnight the bus stopped at a roadside restaurant for dinner. Vast bowls of rice had been laid out on refectory tables and the passengers pounced on the food. Michael served himself two portions of chicken curry and broke off a hand of stubby, plump bananas. ‘Everything is included in the price of the ticket,’ he explained, ‘so eat all you can.’ There were endless flasks of tea and platters of palm-sugar cake on offer. The restaurants, which were equipped with toilets and snack stalls like open-air motorway service stations, had sprung up to serve the long-distance coaches. The innovation impressed Michael. ‘It’s ventures like this,’ he pronounced while eating, ‘that will create our new middle class. These are the entrepreneurs who will build up our prosperity.’ I didn’t know who had financed the building of the restaurants, though later we learned that Leo Express was owned by the son of a Kokang drug trafficker. ‘But it will take time,’ Michael warned me. ‘You saw the country ten years ago. Come back ten years from now. You won’t recognise the place. Rip van Winkle will have become an insomniac.’

‘And will there still be child labourers then?’ asked Katrin.

‘It’s churlish to talk about politics. We want to make politics an unfashionable subject.’

‘By concentrating only on making money?’

‘Initially. Then democracy will slip into place and every citizen’s life will be improved. Capitalism first, democracy second; that is the Eastern way.’ As he stood to return to the coach Michael stowed half a dozen pieces of cake in his jacket pocket. ‘It is necessary to work the system if one is to survive, but to succeed one needs opportunities.’

We managed to change seats with two Mandalay traders returning from a shopping trip in Rangoon, and settled into the back row. The Englishman reading the
FT
did not meet our eyes. But the night’s conversation and the seesaw movement of the bus conspired to deny us sleep. ‘I find it hard to comprehend,’ Katrin whispered without removing her goggles, ‘that every foot of this road has been built by hand.’ Rock had been broken into gravel, gravel laid onto the road base, the base pounded and tarmac poured by bare hands. When we stopped later at a level crossing to wait for the northbound ‘Up’ train to pass, I crouched in the headlights and touched the road surface. Meanwhile the women slipped off into the shadows on the right-hand side of the bus. The men relieved themselves in the darkness to the left.

Michael caught my eye as we climbed back on board. ‘Look me up when you reach Mandalay,’ he suggested between mouthfuls of palm-sugar cake, ‘and we’ll do lunch.’

‘Not a chance,’ replied Katrin.

At Meiktila we stumbled through unlit, silent streets from our sleek, express coach to the pre-war bus gate. Drivers dozed in their cabs, and passengers who had arrived long before dawn to find a place waited on the hard bench seats. Apart form the odd colonial rail line and the expensive air service, which was priced to exclude all but foreign tourists and rich entrepreneurs, the only way to travel in the country was by line-bus. Leo Express and Myanmar Arrow ran between Rangoon and Mandalay, but elsewhere there was nothing other than aged pick-up trucks fitted with wooden benches. The roads along which they clattered were often unpaved, always single-track, and to pass vehicles needed to pull over to the shoulder. Transportation, like most systems in modern Burma, had been structured to hinder communication. Rather than linking, it isolated towns, individuals and thought.

Day broke to find us moving but unable to move, packed in with thirty other travellers. Our limbs were jammed between sacks of vegetables and boxes of reconditioned car parts. A child slept across our laps. There wasn’t enough room for me to crane my neck around to catch sight of the arid, scorched plain beyond the pick-up’s metal frame. Not that I was missing much. Once I spotted a spindly, pathetic eucalyptus plantation, but otherwise there was only a barren wilderness of stony ground, laced by the dust-dry gullies of last year’s monsoon.

For two monotonous, grinding hours the scene remained unchanged, until tall, slender toddy palms came into view, the first verticals in a flat landscape. At the morning tea stop we watched farmers guide long bamboo ladders to the trees, then, with charred pots suspended from their waists, climb the elephant-grey trunk to topknots of broad, splayed leaves. There, a hundred feet above the ground, the long tubular nodes were bound together like bundles of oversized genitalia and, in a strange sexuality, the toddy milked into the perfectly round orb of the suspended collecting pot. The toddy juice, either boiled and sweet or fermented into alcohol, was sold in the shaggy, thatched hamlets, alongside rectangular-lidded baskets woven from the palm’s fringed, pointed leaves.

The morning and the miles dragged on, our back and arms ached, until, after seven bone-jarring hours of travel, a serrated line of hills cut the horizon. The landscape became dotted with gleaming bleach-white
stupas
. According to Scott, ‘Jerusalem, Rome, Kiev, Benares, none of these can boast the multitude of temples, and lavishness of design and ornament’ to be found in Pagan. We had arrived in ‘the most remarkable religious city in the world’.

At a scorched crossroad we hobbled off the back of the pick-up, numbed by the journey and dazzled by the noonday sun.

‘Hello my friend where you go?’

‘What country? What your name?’

The rising heat wrung the colour from our vision and we blinked at the shimmering silhouettes of half a dozen horse-drawn carriages.

‘This is my horse-cart. You see pagodas?’ asked a lean young man at the reins.

‘You German?’ enquired another, patting the skeleton of his underfed mare. ‘
Bitte, wir gehen zusammen. Sehr billig
,’ he begged.

There were no trees to offer respite from the sun. The only shade was under the carriages’ canopy. ‘We need a bed first,’ I managed to say, as feeling began to creep back into my legs.

‘Good bed clean hotel fried egg breakfast no problem,’ gabbled a child, taking Katrin’s hand. ‘Please madame,’ she pleaded, ‘come with me.’

‘Come with me, my friend.’

‘
Freund, wir gehen zusammen
.’

We chose to ride with the quietest boy. His horse did not seem to have been maltreated. As we trotted past ancient temples crumbling away into the bare, tinderbox plain I gave him the name of our hotel, recommended by Colonel Than. ‘What is your name?’ I asked him.

‘Soe Htun,’ he replied. It was his first day on the job, but he overcame his shyness to ask, ‘Please sir, later we go to temples?’

Anawrahta, the first great Burmese king, was an Asian Crusader, determined to purify Burmese Buddhism by capturing holy scriptures and relics. In 1047 thirty-two white elephants carried into his capital, Pagan, his sacred booty along with ‘such men as were skilled in carving, turning and painting; masons, moulders of plaster and flower-patterns; blacksmiths, silversmiths, braziers, founders of gongs and cymbals, filigree flower-workers; doctors and trainers of elephants and horses…hairdressers and men cunning in perfumes, odours, flowers and the juices of flowers.’ Anawrahta’s military victories, financed by agriculture and the rich trade with India, China and Malaya, heralded Pagan’s golden age. He and his prospering subjects were inspired to build magnificent monasteries and temples, earning merit for their patrons and assuring them a better life after reincarnation. Thirty thousand prisoners were pressed into the frenzied building of pagodas. They too had ‘given their labour voluntarily and patriotically for the love of Burma’. Over 250 years the officers and rulers built thirteen thousand temples and
kyaungs
on the arid curve of the Irrawaddy. ‘The towers are built of fine stone and then one of them has been covered with gold a good finger in thickness,’ wrote Marco Polo; ‘…really they do form one of the finest sights in the world, so exquisitely finished are they, so splendid and costly’. But this extraordinary undertaking impoverished the kingdom. Asia’s greatest city became vulnerable to Mongol invasion.

The popular view of Pagan’s demise evokes a fanciful vision of Kublai Khan’s hordes ransacking and looting the royal city. In truth its end was the result of complacency and exhaustion. Burmese rulers never developed a bureaucracy capable of maintaining control without a strong army. The centuries of supremacy had made the military indolent. The last king, Narathihapate, was so frightened of invasion that he tore down all of the city’s wooden houses to construct fortifications. On discovering a prophecy under one of the ruined buildings that predicted his downfall, he fled from Pagan. In 1287 the Mongols took over the deserted city, and for half a millennium its ruins were cursed with bandits and evil spirits.

The dusk was filled with the tinkle of temple bells, countless tiny chimes stirred by the evening breeze. Two thousand pagodas remained standing in the Pagan Archaeological Zone, and foreign visitors paid $10 to wander the dusty roads between them, dwarfed by the dark brick ruins, trying to imagine the glory of the lost city on the barren plain. After an afternoon nap, Soe Htun had taken us to the Thatbyinnyu, a monumental square temple laced with a maze of inner passageways and flanked by guardian figures. Katrin and I had climbed its narrow steps to a resplendent Buddha image. From the upper terrace, two hundred feet above the ground, it was possible to conjure up the bustling ancient city eight hundred years below. In our imagination the smell of cooking rose with the murmur of voices. The wind carried the Pali chants of meditating monks. Villagers bathed in the Irrawaddy, boys splashing girls, women crouching in the grey waters, their bare shoulders touched by the rosy light of the evening. Trading barques from Ceylon and Siam swayed in the swells. We watched the sun set beyond the river’s great arc and the lush green trees dissolve into black. A full moon rose above the hills to the west while below, in our fancy, ten thousand lamps were lit and ten thousand meals prepared. But then, as the star of a high-flying aircraft strobed overhead en route to Jakarta or Singapore, my imagination failed me and I became aware of an absence.

Pagan has not remained uninhabited since the days of the Mongols. Earlier in the twentieth century farmers returned to settle among the
kyaung
ruins. A village had developed, and during my first visit to Burma I had eaten in a family restaurant and stayed up until dawn watching a local
pwe
festival. But from our peaceful, idyllic eyrie Katrin and I spotted no sign of the marketplace or tumbledown food stalls. There were no bamboo houses, villagers or school, only new hotels and sightseeing guides. The site had been transformed into a museum for tourists.

On the ride back to our hotel I asked Soe Htun what had happened to the old village. ‘Kublai Khan destroy,’ he replied. ‘Rape and pillage all of old Pagan. Very bad man.’

‘No, more recently than that,’ I said. ‘Maybe last year? Two years ago?’ Soe Htun turned to stare at me and I thought for a moment that he hadn’t understood. ‘There was a town here when I last visited.’

‘No town, no sir,’ he replied, fidgeting with the reins. A furtiveness had crept into his behaviour. ‘A few farmers, maybe, but no town.’

‘Ten years ago I stayed at a place called the Mother Hotel. And I remember a sign at a restaurant which said, “Be kind to animals by not eating them”.’

The cart turned off the track and onto a new tarmac carriageway. A gust of wind from a passing tour bus filled with Taiwanese holidaymakers almost blew us off the road. For a moment the only sound was the clip-clop of hooves on the tarmac. ‘Today is my first day as a horse-cart driver,’ Soe Htun said. ‘My grandfather buy for me. It is our business, you understand.’

‘We wish you success,’ said Katrin.

‘It
must
be success,’ he insisted. ‘You see I hoping many tourists come to Pagan so one day I can buy a cart for myself.’ It seemed unlikely; the horse and cart would have cost So Htun’s grandfather the equivalent of two years’ salary. He would also have had to bribe local officials to secure one of the 160 tourist horse-cart licences. ‘My grandfather take 30 per cent of my daily money so not leave much for saving, but one day I will make prosperous.’ He took a breath. ‘That is why it is important not to talk about some things.’

There was no further mention of the missing village. As the cart passed under an avenue of tamarind trees Soe Htun asked us if we wanted to go swimming at the Thiripyitsaya Hotel. It seemed that the pool was open to non-residents, of the hotel and the country, but the thought did not appeal. We were tired from our travels and I paid him. ‘The first money I earn,’ he said, slapping the notes on the cart and on the horse itself. ‘This bring me luck. It is my good fortune that you have come to Pagan. Please sir, tomorrow we go to buy souvenirs?’

‘No souvenirs,’ I said. ‘No thank you.’

‘I take you to quality lacquerware shop. My cousin working there. He give you good price.’

‘We don’t want to buy any lacquerware. We are trying to find a basket.’

‘In Pagan?’ he asked.

‘Yes.’ Katrin extracted the photograph from the bottom of her bag. ‘We were told that it might have been made here.’

Soe Htun held the picture at an angle, catching it in the amber glow of a street lamp. ‘Not Pagan style,’ he said with finality. Our spirits plummeted. Unwilling to see us disappointed, he added, ‘But I do know a woman who will help you.’

‘Here in Pagan?’ Katrin asked. ‘Can we meet her?’

‘She is an educated woman,’ said Soe Htun with approval, ‘and my friend. But her husband, he is a drunkard and a criminal. They say that he swings from a bamboo pole brushed with cess in England.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘He is a bad man. He fills the sky with lies.’

STATIC. HISS AND WHISTLE. Distant voices strained through the crackle; Chinese martial music, a blast of rapidfire Morse code. A Baptist preacher ranted in the ether, his all-American twang drowning in a scream of heterodynes, then yielded to rock and roll. ‘Maybe I’m tuned to your wavelength.’ In the darkness of her room Ma Swe adjusted the shortwave radio, reached over borders, searched for clarity. Hiss and static, 9725 kilohertz 31-metre band, the bark of Burmese jamming. Another music station drifted across her signal. ‘The world is collapsing round our ears, I turn up the radio.’ Too loud, less volume, the walls were thin. More static. She needed new batteries. There wasn’t the money. It was mad to keep the radio. She had to sell it. Then she heard ‘This is London.’ Diddly-dee. ‘Lillibulero’, absurd and frivolous in the Asian dark. Another growl of interference. She returned to another frequency, quickly, 11850 kHz 25-metre. Would it be him? Please be him. Crackle and static. Turn it down, turn it right down. She leaned her ear against the receiver, listening as if to a dreaming child, and heard his voice. Half a world away he sat alone in a studio, in front of a microphone, speaking to her. To her alone. Ma Swe hadn’t seen her husband or received a letter from him, in over eight years, but she had heard him almost every night. Every night she listened to him, and remembered.