Under the Dragon (25 page)

‘The church looks beautiful,’ admired Katrin. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many flowers.’

‘You are very kind,’ said the gardener, lowering his voice even though we were alone. He drew his hands together as if in prayer. ‘As you see, we have all retreated into smaller worlds. Please, have another piece of toast.’

I hadn’t eaten my first piece. ‘Smaller worlds?’

‘Here,’ he said, looking around at his ecclesiastical grove, ‘I grow a few blooms. It is the only sensible choice. You must eat more,’ he insisted. ‘You are too thin. Here, have another egg.’

‘I couldn’t,’ I apologised, straining to catch his meaning and unable to swallow a second banana. ‘Has the Reverend Tay-maung retreated too?’

‘The Reverend cares little for self-preservation. He has greater concerns,’ replied the gardener. ‘He is away on business.’

‘Church business?’

‘You might have noticed the building work outside. The Bishops of Mandalay and Rangoon sold our grounds to a Chinese entrepreneur in secret. They also sold Church land in Bhamo under similar conditions.’ He shrugged in polite understanding. ‘We each do what we must to survive.’

‘But wasn’t the congregation consulted?’

He shook his head. ‘The Reverend supported his congregation’s complaint, and so the bishops suspended his salary. Everyone with courage is mistreated. That is why it is better to live in a smaller world. Is it the hill-tribe market you wish to see in Hsipaw?’

Katrin explained about our search for the basket, producing the photograph for him to consider. The gardener nodded. ‘Yes, this is Hsipaw Palaung. We had better get a move on if we’re to arrive in time.’

‘Are you sure?’ I asked, concerned for his safety. ‘We don’t want to cause you difficulties.’

‘It is the Buddhist New Year. Everyone will be too thick-headed to notice us. I hope only for your sake that it is the police, not the army, who stop us at the city gate.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the police charge a hundred kyat for permission to pass. The army charge five hundred.’ He gathered up the leftovers and said, ‘Come, we will take this along for your picnic on the journey.’

In a lean-to behind the church was a large, rounded package. Three layers of tarpaulin were wrapped in braids of jute. The gardener uncoiled the cords one by one and with great care rolled back the covers. A flash of chrome fender caught our eye, then two bug-eyed headlamps. The tyres gleamed with boot-black polish, even though they were worn down to their fibre core.

‘It’s an Austin 30,’ I said, excited.

‘It’s very old,’ worried Katrin.

‘Not so old,’ replied the gardener. ‘1954. My uncle bought it from an Englishman who worked for the Bombay Burma Trade Corporation. Unfortunately he could not take it with him when he returned home.’

‘That was fortunate for your uncle,’ I said, running a hand over the burnished badge and ‘Flying A’ hood ornament. The A30 was the spiritual successor to the original Austin 7, the post-war British family car. Its stubby body brought to mind the sort of shiny beetle that boys like to put in their pockets. It was two-door, two-tone and totally unsuited to the tropics. ‘She’s in perfect condition, apart from the tyres.’

‘There’s a worrying knocking from the front end,’ said the gardener. ‘But I believe it to be a design flaw.’

‘Will it reach Hsipaw?’ asked Katrin, not unreasonably.

‘It was brought from a village near there; I am certain it will make it back.’

‘Maybe we should just take the train,’ she said.

The gardener wouldn’t hear of it. ‘It will be an easy journey,’ he assured us, pulling back the ‘Flying A’ and opening the bonnet. The compact 803cc engine had an endearing quality, like a clockwork toy. ‘See? It’s no more than six months since it last ran.’

The car started first time, after we had changed the oil and borrowed a neighbour’s battery. I would have preferred to replace the spark plugs but spares were only available for Willys Jeeps and Taulagy motorised wheelbarrows. Katrin and I squeezed onto the back seat and, with our knees up around our chins, puttered back to Lashio’s leafy No. 1 Sector. We parked at the back of our hotel, behind the few colonial houses which hadn’t surrendered their teak balconies and fanciful cupolas to woodworm and bulldozers.

‘It will be better if you don’t tell the hotel manager how you are travelling to Hsipaw,’ suggested the gardener, his voice sloshing between his teeth. ‘He’s not a local fellow.’

But the manager took no interest in our departure. He sat on the sofa beside the desk with his young daughter, an inked brush in his hand. As I gathered our bags Katrin watched him help her to draw Chinese characters. ‘Do you teach her alone?’ she asked.

‘Oh no,’ he replied, shaking his head. ‘She learns at school. But I try to share with her the little knowledge that I have.’

We managed to cram our knapsack into the boot of the Austin. The baskets and lacquerware which we had been given filled the front seat. There was barely room for the spare petrol tin. The gardener slipped the car into gear and drove slowly, very slowly, towards the city gate. He hoped there wouldn’t be trouble there.

‘They may say that we are smuggling goods from China,’ he warned. Katrin pointed out that we hadn’t been to China. ‘It is no matter; they like to make money from you.’

The idea of a city gate struck us as medieval. A physical barrier to protect a settlement’s inhabitants from bandits and rebels seemed archaic. Yet there was nothing old-fashioned about the barbed-wire barrier strung across the road. Nor did the immigration, customs, army and police posts on the high grassy bank seem interested in protecting their citizens. In the cool shade I discerned the flash of epaulettes. A white military police helmet rested on a stool. The gardener shifted down in a screech of grinding gears. The sentry must have detected his nervousness.

‘Oh dear,’ the gardener sighed. ‘It is the army.’

Our passports were fingered, and each page inspected, before being taken off to the nearest hut. After a moment the gardener was ordered to follow them. It was hot in the bug-eyed little car, and we started to sweat. Ten, twenty, then thirty minutes ticked away. I worried about him, but we had been told to wait. Chinese lorries lumbered by the checkpoint, swaying around the bamboo barrier like wind-lashed sailing ships. Their vast cargoes were watched over by boys clinging to the top of the khaki tarpaulins. Ox-carts squeaked and squealed along the rutted verge, unmolested by the sleepy guards. An overloaded line-bus thundered down the centre of the road, its exhaust long ago dislodged by a collision. A lizard stole across our bonnet to stalk a fly on the ‘Flying A’ hood ornament. The soldiers only jumped up once, to salute a passing black Mercedes. I wondered if it was the car I had been offered in exchange for Katrin.

‘There is a compulsory transit tax,’ the gardener told us when he returned, ‘of five hundred kyat.’ I passed the notes through the window to him. He moved to hand over the money but the soldier grimaced, stealing a quick look back towards the post. The gardener discreetly placed the bills between the pages of a document which he then surrendered.

The soldier seemed displeased. He fingered his automatic and unleashed a series of short, sharp rapid-fire questions at the gardener. Like the officer in the train, he refused to meet our eyes. Our host backed up against the Austin and whispered over his shoulder, ‘I think he wishes more money.’

‘Please tell the soldier,’ I said in as light a tone as I could muster, ‘that everyone in Lashio has been very kind to us.’

‘Such kind, generous people,’ echoed Katrin, smiling at him.

‘And that we have enjoyed our stay in his town.’

‘Very much.’

The gardener translated, and the soldier looked startled. It seemed that compliments were as uncommon as foreigners at his checkpoint. The exercise of authority was at odds with his natural manner. He stepped back, straightened himself, glanced again at his peers dozing in the shade and nodded.

‘You are very kind,’ Katrin told him as he returned our papers.

‘Bye bye,’ he said under his breath.

The open road beckoned, assuming that we could negotiate a fair price for a few gallons of black-market petrol. We coasted downhill from the checkpoint to the first vendor. Burma has vast oil reserves but the military rations fuel, not only in an attempt to limit car imports. Every petrol shop knows a bureaucrat or soldier willing to sell on his ample official supply for profit.

A glass bottle of fuel was balanced on top of a brick at the side of the road. Scavenged oil filters and distributors filled a display case. Machetes were on sale for carving bypasses when trees blocked the road. Two thousand kyat – about a month’s salary for an office clerk – bought us six gallons of petrol of unknown quality. The gardener watched the attendant measure and pour it through a tea strainer into the Austin. He twice asked him to shake the bottle so as not to waste a drop.

‘Officials only pay twenty-five kyat for a gallon,’ he explained as he slipped back behind the wheel. ‘When they0 resell it we say that their cars are “milking cows”.’ He shook his head in quiet despair. ‘Everyone has to make a living somehow.’

We pulled away from the pump and hit the first pothole. The Austin jumped out of gear. ‘It needs a stronger synchro spring,’ sighed the gardener.

The ragged strip of asphalt, its metalled edges like cliff-edge precipices, wove through banana groves and jungle. The Burma Road, along with the disused Ledo Road which once ran north and west to India, had been built by thirty-five thousand Burmese, Indian, British and Chinese troops under the direction of American engineers during the Second World War. The Bhamo arm had spanned ten major rivers and 155 smaller streams and had cost so many lives that it had been nick-named ‘the man-a-mile road’. Yet despite the horrific human cost of construction, little had been done to improve or maintain it since the Allies withdrew in 1946. The Austin skirted the ruts and hesitated across ‘temporary’ US Army bridges. Along the roadside crippled lorries expired in the dust, bleeding black oil into plastic containers, their drivers lying beneath them in pools of brake fluid. The line-bus which had raced past us at the checkpoint lay wounded by a waterhole. Its patient passengers idled on the bank while one woman, familiar with travel delays, took the opportunity to wash her hair.

‘We Burmese don’t call it the Burma Road any more,’ the gardener said, plunging aside to avoid a Chinese truck, its back groaning under the weight of imported diesel engines, tin teapots and coconut shampoo. ‘It has nothing to do with us, apart from running through our country.’ He reeled off a list of statistics – GNP, import tonnage, the number of local factory closures – then eased the Austin back onto a perforated length of metalled surface. ‘It’s called the Dragon Road now, because the Chinese use it for smuggling.’

‘You’ve got quite a head for figures,’ I said.

‘I was once an economist in the Ministry of Finance,’ he said, trying to find second gear. The revelation took us by surprise. He had given us the impression of being an uneducated man. ‘But no more. No more.’ He concentrated on the road ahead, slowing down to avoid a flock of scrawny chickens. ‘The Chinese sell us their arms and pumps and ploughs. It is bad for Burmese industry, but even worse is the import of technical advisers. These people come with each delivery and they instruct us to follow their way, instead of using our own tools and methods.’ We reduced our speed to such a cautious pace that a cyclist overtook us. ‘Burma is becoming China’s Baltic States. Government employees are leaving the civil service, creating vacancies for even more Chinese advisers.’ A line-bus raced head-on towards us, its horn blaring. The gardener wrenched us off the tarmac to give way and the bus swerved at the last possible moment, just avoiding a collision. Our journey to Hsipaw would take hours. ‘We cover our ears and eyes and, as I said in the church, retreat into smaller worlds.’

‘But isn’t it better to try to resist from within?’ I asked.

‘You must be an American.’

‘Canadian.’

‘It is very refreshing to hear your optimism,’ he smiled, indulging me. ‘But no, it is not possible. My associates have left the civil service and gone into tourism and hotel management. I too am looking after myself, and hiding from the loss of my country.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘When I become disheartened I compare our lot with the people of Cambodia or Stalin’s Russia,’ replied the gardener. ‘Then I do not feel so bad. Would you care for an egg sandwich yet?’

Along the roadside women and children broke stones by hand to make gravel. We circumnavigated cavernous potholes, paused for bullock-carts and stopped when a puff of smoke from a burning field obscured our view. Twice we waited in the shade to let the engine cool. Cicadas buzzed in the trees above our heads. I ground grit between my teeth. The black Mercedes swept past us on its return journey to Lashio.

‘Five years ago that man arrived from nearby with nothing,’ said the gardener, nodding after the swirl of dust.

‘“Nearby” is China?’ asked Katrin.

He nodded. ‘In the first year he opened a small shop, a year later a large store and now, just this past month, a hotel. Only the Chinese are rich.’

‘In five years? How is that possible?’

‘Because he was willing to trade anything, except his nationality. Please understand, the Shan and Burmans and local Chinese all got on well enough before all this…this invasion. Now it is too much. We are no longer at home in our own country.’ We asked him about Burma’s prospects. ‘Do you mean the future? Oh, no hope,’ he smiled.

It was nightfall by the time we crawled into Hsipaw, which means ‘four corners’ in Shan. In 1888 a plague had swept through the state and the Shan Prince, Sao Kya Kaine, had chosen the site for a new settlement, burying a pot of oil at each of its four corners to ward off evil spirits. It was said that the town would prosper as long as the pots remained full of oil. If they dried out the residents were fated to suffer. But it was no longer possible to inspect the pots. In 1988 the government had cemented over them.