Under the Dragon (15 page)

At the end of August, in response to the killings at Maha Bandoola Park, the country went on strike. Hundreds of thousands of demonstrators demanded the government’s resignation. No newspapers were printed for three days, as the journalists too had taken to the streets, and after the break the publications were much changed. At the same time dozens of unofficial, independent news sheets suddenly appeared, spread out on the pavement in front of the town hall like a mosaic of truth, which spurred the established press on to even greater openness.

To a people deprived for twenty-six years of a free press, the factual reporting of news was a wonder. The greater miracle though was that lucid, intelligent voices had remained alive to be heard. Over the decades the tentacles of state repression had silenced those men and women brave enough to speak out. Writers were entwined in the official line, turned with literary prizes and favour, twisted to serve the government. Those who broke free of the cosy web were persecuted. Fear became a habit, a sinister harness that tethered sincerity.

But at the Shwedagon Pagoda, Maugham’s ‘sudden hope in the dark night of the soul’, a young mother broke the habit. Beneath a huge portrait of her father, Aung San Suu Kyi called for ‘democracy through unity and discipline’. She spoke of her love and devotion for the country. ‘The present crisis is the concern of the entire nation,’ she said, speaking from the heart, not looking at her text. ‘I could not, as my father’s daughter, remain indifferent to all that is going on. This national crisis could, in fact, be called the second struggle for national independence.’

Her short, concise sentences appealed to Ma Swe’s sense of clarity. Her bold sincerity won deafening applause. The audience of half a million hopeful, heroic Burmese cheered her demand for free and fair elections.

‘Our strength should be used for the cause of what is right,’ she called out. ‘May the people be free from all harm.’

The day that Ma Swe joined the march was sunny and fine. She walked out of the shadows with Ko Lin, holding hands with strangers, under an upside-down socialist flag. The government appeared to have collapsed under the weight of protest. Its inaction had been misconstrued as weakness and its ribbon of control, the
Tatmadaw
, had been withdrawn from the streets. Local citizens’ committees had emerged to fill the administrative vacuum. That morning the opposition had demanded that the regime concede to their demands or face an indefinite strike. The rapidly unfolding events had encouraged Ko Lin to bring forward his publication date. He and two senior journalists had put their names to a bold article calling for the toppling of the regime. Ma Swe was aware of the risks, both to themselves and to her job, but the defence of truth was at stake. The euphoria of the final editorial meeting committed - and condemned – her. The marchers carried them forward under the multi-coloured banners. Students walked with their faces undisguised by handkerchiefs. Customs officials found the courage to shout out their grievances. There were Palaung pilgrims, dressed in traditional velvet caps and heavy hoods, and a band of ethnic Chinese who had travelled down from the Shan State. Christian clergymen shouted, ‘Jesus loves democracy.’ No one paid much attention to the innocuous clerks taking notes or the uniformed photographers on rooftops. The tide of protest drove the people together. Then, in the thick of the crowd, surrounded by cheering students and a chanting detachment of the People’s Railway Police, Ko Lin asked Ma Swe to marry him.

It was a partnership rather than passion which had brought them together; a meeting of minds, not bodies. Ko Lin liked to speak out, and Ma Swe loved to listen. As a wedding gift he bought her a little shortwave radio, and the batteries to go with it. She gave him a fountain pen. Unfortunately none of her friends could attend the brief ceremony because of the strike. No trains or buses were running. Even her mother was not able to reach Rangoon. The magazine staff and a handful of writers did join them for a celebratory drink, but they were at work in the office anyway. Of her colleagues from the Board only the woman from Meiktila attended the simple reception. She stood alone at the back of the room by the printing press, appalled at how the game had unravelled itself. Ko Lin and Ma Swe spent their nuptial night in his room above the bookshop, surrounded by reams of newsprint and empty stout bottles, listening to the clunk-clunk-slap of the old press and the hopeful cries of the demonstrators on the street outside. In the morning they rose early, he to bind the loose-leaf pages of the first edition, she to go to the Board which was preparing to tear them apart.

* * *

The suppression of the first August uprising had been a wild and ill-disciplined affair. The government had been unprepared and its soldiers had butchered the demonstrators out of fear, and with a brutal arbitrariness. By contrast the second massacre in the following month was calculated and clinical.

On 18 September the military reasserted control over the country. The Council of State was dissolved and the State Law and Order Restoration Council erected in its place. The army’s Chief of Staff, General Saw Maung, became Prime Minister, Foreign Minister and Defence Minister. On the streets gatherings of more than four people were banned and troops fell into orderly ranks to fire at the demonstrators. The soldiers were village boys trucked in from up country ‘to free the capital’, as they had been told, ‘from insurgents’. They were paid in advance. Their officers, fearful of revenge for past excesses, ordered the shooting of ‘communist’ children and housewives. Any change of government would undermine their privileged positions. Hit squads went from door to door, with detailed lists and files of photographs in hand, arresting the student leaders, journalists and monks who had spoken out. They were taken away in trucks. Most were never heard from again. On 21 September the old-style
Working People’s Daily
alone reappeared on the news-stands, its pages as before devoid of real news and objective comment. The operation to silence the Burmese had been executed with steely precision.

Ko Lin’s press was seized. The printed and bound magazines were collected by the PSB, counted and destroyed. Not a single copy was allowed to remain in existence. The toffee-skinned typesetter was arrested. When his wife pleaded that he had not been a spokesman, and merely set the words of others in type, she was shot on the spot, dying among romantic novellas and picture postcards. But Ko Lin himself was not arrested. Every time the hammering came on the door – and it came often in the first days – he stood up expectant and prepared, a small gripsack packed with biscuits and cash for bribes in his hand; but the soldiers always pushed past him, taking instead his records and the student illustrator. Ma Swe too waited for the inevitable, surprised each morning to be woken by the dawn and not by the sound of boots on the stairs, relieved every evening to find Ko Lin still at home, slouched over the desk, drunk.

Ma Swe did not understand why he was not arrested, or why she herself remained at liberty. She, like all employees, had been ordered back to her job. ‘Anyone who prevents, obstructs or interferes with workers returning to work,’ the government warned in radio and television announcements, ‘will be dealt with sternly.’ The general strike collapsed and a fearful normality returned, now heightened by a sense of despair. The feral reek of terror again dominated lives. At each new checkpoint, every time her identity document was inspected, Ma Swe closed her eyes, listening to the rough unfolding of paper, hearing the cold tap of rifle strap against gun metal, waiting for the short intake of breath and urgent shouts of discovery. ‘Move on, little sister,’ the soldiers said instead, shoving the document back into her hand. ‘I don’t have all day. Move along.’

It seemed inconceivable that the PSB, which had destroyed Ko Lin’s magazine, could be protecting them. Yet there was no other explanation. Civil servants were not above suspicion, but some escaped reproach. At the Board it was as if the whole office had slept through the eight-week general strike. There was no mention of the demonstrations or killings. The Eleven Principles were taken down from the wall, every reference to socialism was removed, then they were rehung behind Ma Swe’s head. To create the impression of reform, the SLORC had replaced the Socialist Programme Party and embraced capitalism. But the same soldiers remained in control. The censors, like the generals, fabricated a world of illusion. Nothing changed. The Major telephoned Ma Swe at her desk and said only, ‘So you are there; good.’ Throughout the first afternoon she checked one short article for spelling mistakes, reading the same sentences over and over again, terrified of letting a single error slip through her fingers. She stayed late in the office to complete her work.

Ko Lin on the other hand, believing himself to be shielded by his wife’s position, became reckless. Rather than wait to surrender himself he borrowed a camera and began to photograph the street-corner arrests, the steel-helmeted
Lon Htein
armed with clubs, the civilians press-ganged to serve as human minesweepers in rebel areas. He recorded events, rather than commenting on them. Ma Swe tried to caution him but Ko Lin would not listen. He met foreign journalists and passed his rolls of film to students on the run to Thailand. He wrote letters to the Board demanding the return of his printing press.

Then one evening Ma Swe returned to their room to find him gone. A cup of Chinese tea, still warm to the touch, was on his desk. His toothbrush lay by their washbasin. Her shortwave radio was in its hiding place, wrapped in a coloured cloth and slipped like a plinth beneath the small Buddha shrine. There was no note or sign of struggle. Only his wedding present fountain pen appeared to be missing.

All night Ma Swe slept fitfully, the radio tucked under her pillow, starting herself awake with imaginings of Ko Lin’s drunken footfalls on the stairs, knowing even then that he would never return to her. The next morning she was dismissed from the Board. The guard told her simply that she could no longer enter the building. Her desk had been cleared and its contents discarded. There was no redundancy payment or explanation for her dismissal, as if one were necessary. ‘Reason for Discharge,’ the official rubber stamp might have read, ‘Married to Free-Thinker.’ She wandered the streets for the rest of the day, aimlessly looking for Ko Lin in the tea shops and toddy bars. On the bus she overhead his voice and pushed through the jam of commuters to come face-to-face with a startled monk. Twice more she imagined seeing him, disappearing behind a vegetable stall at the market and drinking at a restaurant where they had once eaten. On both occasions she gave chase, knocking over baskets of cabbages and upsetting self-important waiters, but it was not him. He had gone.

At the end of the week Ma Swe was arrested without fuss or drama. She was not, like countless others, beaten by a squad of soldiers or raped in the back of a lorry. Instead a young officer in a new uniform simply asked her to come with him and she obeyed. He took her to Insein Jail and locked her in a cell where she waited with forty other women. After a week she found the courage to complain to the guards, pointing out that she had not been charged with any offence, and they put her in solitary confinement. Her chamber was too low to stand up in and too narrow for her to lie down. Muffled sobs echoed through the dank walls. She crouched in the corner, afraid, an unknown fate awaiting her.

In the cell Ma Swe remembered her first meeting with Ko Lin. He had told her how imprisonment had taught him to value time. The memory directed her disordered thoughts to their unreleased magazine and she held it in her mind, turned its pages, recollected its articles. It was a good issue, she judged, too good to remain incomplete. She decided to finish it in her imagination. She composed an article about the killings at Rangoon General Hospital and another on Aung San Suu Kyi’s speech at the Shwedagon. She edited them both, and although the magazine was a little short, she was just in time for their Thursday publication date. ‘Whatever happens,’ she told herself, while reviewing each column and story, ‘the magazine must come out without fail on the first Thursday of every month. It must always be published on time.’

Ma Swe set to work on the second issue, deciding that it would be larger than the first. She acted as writer, publisher and editor, composing and cutting, soliciting imaginary advertising and laying out the wished-for pages. She introduced regular pieces on politics, wrote features on the drug trade, about prostitution, on how the wealthiest country in Asia had been impoverished and vandalised by its rulers. To keep her mind occupied she worked as librarian too, training herself to remember the contents of every issue, so that when she wrote a letter to the editor – that is, to herself – she could refer back to earlier editions: ‘Madam: with reference to your editorial on the religious interpretations of love and charity in issue no. 1, I wish to correct etc. etc.’ Alone in her cell she tried to encourage discussion and debate.

In many ways her fanciful work was less difficult than it had been trying to publish the real magazine. She didn’t need paper and ink. There were no writers to chase up, no bills to pay, no PSB to satisfy. As money wasn’t a concern she began to commission articles from famous people: the Dalai Lama wrote about China’s occupation of Tibet, Desmond Tutu penned a piece on economic sanctions. Even General Ne Win agreed to write her an editorial on humility, but in the end he was too busy, missed the publication date and never paid back the advance.

When after two months Ma Swe was moved back into a shared cell, she stayed in her inner world. There were no books to read in Insein, nothing to distract the mind but the mournful cries of its inmates, so she continued with the magazine. She introduced a poetry corner and encouraged readers to send in their work. Her mother submitted three pieces, as did, surprisingly, the supervisor from the Board. Ma Swe had not known that the woman was a poet. She also ran a small ads section – For sale: Festive fans and monk’s utensils; Cassette tapes for hire; Lost: One green Triumph bicycle – and through a personal column a number of friends who had been separated during the September killings were reunited. Tripple Mountain Brand Super Tonic placed an advertisement with her every month: Look Young, Regain Your Youthful Energy, Lack of Appetite, Sleeplessness, Sexual Impotency, For Female Menstrual Troubles and for Skinny Persons (Directions Included). Ma Swe concentrated on the magazine, noting the coming and going of prisoners in her cell only in relation to her publication date.