Under the Dragon (26 page)

The events of our evening suggested that, if not bone dry, the pots were all but empty. The road was not safe to use after dark – there were stories of rebels operating to the north and east – so we invited the gardener to stay with us overnight. He made enquiries on our behalf and discovered, first, that there would not be another market for two weeks and, second, that the basket wasn’t from Hsipaw after all. We had not yet reached our destination.

‘But I am told that these baskets are very common in Pan Chan Pan Cha,’ reported the gardener, returning the photograph. ‘There every Palaung woman wears one on her back.’

‘Is it far away?’

‘About eight miles.’

‘Then we will go there.’

‘It will not be good for you,’ he advised, lowering his voice. We had stopped for supper at a sidestreet restaurant. Its yawning owner sliced slivers of boiled pork by candlelight. Two stocky Chinese skinheads drank and joked with off-duty soldiers. ‘The area is under the control of the SSA – the Shan State Army – and they are cutting down teak to ship to China. They will not let you see.’

‘But we have come so far,’ I said.

The gardener hesitated. ‘Maybe Namhsan is better. I understand that the baskets are common there too, and it is under government control. But it is far away.’

‘How far?’ I asked, opening up my Nelles map.

‘Nine miles as the crow flies, but forty-five miles by road. At least a day’s journey.’

I found Namhsan. It lay high in the hills, in a range of mountains dominated by the Loi Tawngkyaw peak. Few other places appeared to be as isolated. ‘We can drive forty-five miles.’

‘I’m afraid that the road is too poor for the Austin.’

‘Then we’ll go by bus.’

‘A bus will be bad for you.’

‘Why?’

‘Because maybe the buses do not run, and even if they do, it is holiday and you cannot return. That would be bad.’

‘We could rent another car.’

‘The road is too poor for any car.’

My map classified the route as a cart track or path. I took a long, deep breath. The same map had categorised the appalling Burma Road as a National Highway. ‘A four-wheel-drive, then?’

‘Phahte has a jeep.’

‘Paddy?’ I said, encouraged by a familiar name. The skinheads glanced towards our table. ‘There’s a man called Paddy living here?’ In my imagination I pictured a cheeky Irish rogue, fond of a glass, who had stayed on after the departure of the British. The heat must have affected my brain. ‘Let’s meet him,’ I said, wishing I’d brought a couple of cans of duty-free Guinness.

‘I am sorry, but I do not know him. I know only that he is an important man.’

‘He must be if he owns a jeep,’ pointed out Katrin.

‘I understand that he owns eleven vehicles,’ said the gardener. ‘If you wish I can make more enquiries.’

We woke to the dawn chorus of monks calling for alms, but by the time we reached his compound Paddy had gone out. He was due back at noon. We idled away the morning on the banks of the Dokhtawaddy River. Bone-thin fishermen, stripped to the waist and wearing only baggy black Shan trousers, punted canoes as light as leaves across to the far shore. Naked children busied themselves around long poles stuck in the river mud. Cicadas were caught by the hundreds on their gummed, black lengths and little hands plucked them off one by one to be drowned in tin buckets. A mother washed clothes in the brown water, her youngest child dabbling in the shallows behind her.

At two o’clock Paddy was still not home, and in the white heat of the day we retreated to the cool shade under a river house to eat sweet sausages of glutinous rice. The rice had been steamed in lengths of bamboo, which were then shaved away until only a flower-petal skin remained to contain the meal. Paddy’s driver was spotted at six o’clock, but he vanished before the gardener could speak to him. We returned to the sidestreet restaurant, where the skinheads still joked with the soldiers, and waited. Around sunset a message reached us, passed between envoys, that Paddy would meet us at midnight at the pagoda festival. ‘Nice of him to turn up,’ said Katrin. I thought her impatience was misplaced, especially as her grandmother had been Irish.

‘I am told that he is a busy man,’ translated the gardener.

The restaurant owner, who like everyone else in town watched our waiting, said in Shan, ‘He is a generous man.’ The words were spoken with a respect approaching awe. ‘He is paying for the festival even though he is a Christian.’

‘A Christian?’ I repeated. My Paddy fantasy expanded to embrace damp sermons and timid confessions in a rain-soaked church in Donegal. His upbringing must have instilled a sense of charity in him.

‘This man says that the festival has been organised to raise money for the monastery,’ the gardener explained, then hesitated. ‘These events usually occasion much drinking and gambling. I am told, please excuse me, that they are not suitable for ladies.’

Katrin did not object. She was in no hurry to be once again the only woman at an all-male gathering. ‘I’ll just curl up with a mug of hot cocoa and ring a friend for a chat,’ she said, pining for home. As we walked her back to the darkened guest house she added, ‘You know, they make beautiful
graticio
baskets in Tuscany. Next time, let’s just go to Italy.’

The gardener and I carried on along pitch-black lanes, guided by the firefly flashes of torches carried by boys on bicycles. Shadows of people filled the sandy streets, spilling out of the cramped houses to catch a breath of evening breeze. The town’s ration of electricity had been used up and young drunks wheeled through the dark towards the festival, singing American pop songs to the crickets and tree frogs. The night was filled with an outward air of celebration, but behinds its mask I sensed a strained volatility, a ferment to be held in check only by the amnesia of alcohol.

The flickering oil lanterns cast a tarnished halo of light around the temple’s perimeter. Tinny piped music crackled from a dozen loudspeakers. A diesel generator grumbled behind a Buddha. Beneath the canopies of a hundred bamboo stands, wild-eyed gamblers stepped forward crying out ‘Dragon!’ or ‘Tiger!’ They threw crumpled notes onto tilted tables marked with the symbols of animals, watched the dice roll, then slipped back into the crowd as long feather-dusters swept their money into a pot. The rare yelp of triumph brought an eager rush of new punters, a flurry of bets at the lucky table, then disappointment, always disappointment. The Shans’ enthusiasm for drink was surpassed only by their love of gambling. The players, all of whom were men, roamed from game to game, their movements stealthy, their tired eyes charged with futile hope. When their money was lost they stole away, their tempers frayed, carrying with them the expectation of argument and despair. It was a place of extremes: of hope and delinquency, of sobriety and drunkenness, of grand future designs and denial of the present. The winking fairy lamps and pallid lanterns did nothing to alleviate the shadows cast by the darkness of spirit. A man could be murdered in the gloom. At least, I reasoned, Paddy would bring a measure of Catholic tolerance to the community.

We searched up and down the ugly aisles looking for him, looking too for some variation in the game but finding none. The gardener paused to speak to a noodle vendor and was directed towards a knot of gamblers. We pushed through the bodies, drawn towards the whiplash yelp of laughter, and found ourselves standing above a wiry spring of a man in green army fatigues. He squatted on a painted mat, across from a weary boy, snapping hundred–kyat notes onto the dragon symbol. He clicked his tongue and the dice were rolled. His eyes followed them with the quickness of a lizard. They landed on the elephant. He laughed again, a sound at once manic and cruel, then mussed the boy’s hair.

‘Phahte is like an angel to the children,’ rumbled the stranger standing beside me, a whale of a man with minnow-like eyes. ‘You should bet with him.’

The gardener took the hint. ‘Yes, bet,’ he whispered to me, pressing a five-kyat note into my hand, ‘so he will like you.’

‘This is Paddy?’ I asked, too surprised to act.

‘Lucky shrimp!’ called the gardener, beginning to match Phahte’s bets, losing alongside him, indicating that he was acting on my behalf. ‘For my English friend.’

‘“Phahte” means Honoured Uncle,’ translated the stranger as they gambled. ‘He is our guardian angel.’

‘This man?’ I laughed, but the stranger did not laugh with me. My Paddy was neither an Irish rogue nor a Burmese angel. He was very drunk. I looked again at the wiry gambler. My first thought was that it would be inadvisable to be disliked by him.

‘Fish of fortune,’ cried the gardener, casting another bet, emptying his wallet, ‘bring our honoured uncle and welcome guest together.’ He and Phahte lost their stakes again.

Hsipaw’s ‘guardian’ roared, springing to his feet to face me. Phahte was in his early fifties, though his taut, hairless skin made him appear younger. His hooded eyes were yellow and lustreless. His limbs were elastic and supple. He swayed, reached out a sinewy arm to catch his balance, and I saw the rubbery flange of his baby finger sticking out at right angles from his hand. ‘Jesus loves little children,’ he said to me in English, then resettled the pistol in the back of his trousers and swayed away.

An entourage of tall, unsmiling men shadowed his erratic steps from gaming stall to table, swinging left then right, ready to catch their protector if he fell to earth. Phahte slumped onto a stool and demanded beer. While it was being poured the gardener whispered to the minnow-eyed whale who, in turn, rumbled into Phahte’s ear. I was led forward and pushed into the seat beside him. He did not look at me. The gardener indicated that I should talk. I began to explain about our search for the basket and our wish to reach Namhsan.

‘I know, I know,’ said Phahte absently, his vowels larger and longer than his attention span. ‘But Namhsan road dangerous for gentle-man.’ He spread out the word as if dissecting it, then swallowed the glass of lager placed before him. He demanded another and passed it to me. ‘Drink,’ he ordered, and I did. ‘I am mountain man. But you are
gentle
-man.’ He shrugged with disdain then told a joke in Shan which, for some reason, required him to jerk open his shirt and expose a lean, tattooed chest. His bodyguards responded with obsequious hoots.

‘Laugh. Laugh,’ hissed the gardener.

‘I understand that you can help us get to Namhsan,’ I said, as if asking for the time of the last coach to Cambridge.

‘Namhsan my land,’ Phahte insisted, slicing through the laughter by jamming the flange towards me. I had no intention of taking it away from him.

‘Are you Shan?’ I asked. His features seemed too rugged to be Palaung.

‘I am Karen.’ The Karen are a stoic people native to southern Burma and the Tenasserim Peninsula. He was a long way from home. ‘And I am Christian.’

‘I am Christian too,’ I said, then added as an afterthought, ‘And my great-grandfather was a church minister.’

‘Church man?’ Phahte roared with sinister laughter and revealed rotted, betel-stained teeth. ‘My friend!’ he proclaimed.

The nineteenth-century European missionaries had convinced themselves that the Karen’s creation stories echoed the Book of Genesis. They had concluded that the Karen were a lost tribe of Israel and had converted them to Christianity.

‘God loves you,’ Phahte assured me and began to sing ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’. His entourage did not join in. ‘I mountain man. You gentle-man.’ He shrugged, casting away his initial distain. ‘Don’t worry. I Christian. You Christian.’

‘Two Christians together,’ I said, adding up.

Then, in celebration of our bond, Phahte slapped his pistol on the table. He liked to make an impression. ‘One day I die,’ he said with hushed urgency. His voice was low and throaty. ‘Never mind.’

‘We will all die,’ I pointed out, unnecessarily, wondering if death was a price worth paying to find the basket.

‘I not frightened. Jesus in me. Thanks to God.’ He downed another glass of Foster’s and sang to the gathering of vassals, ‘On a far hill is a lonely cross.’

How Phahte came to be in the Shan State was a mystery to me, especially as the Karen National Union was the single major ethnic group still fighting the Burmese government. During the Second World War the Karen had been the Allies’ most effective guerrilla fighters. Their allegiance had been secured by a British promise of support for an independent Karen nation. But after liberation they were betrayed. Their autonomy was denied them, and since 1947 they had been at war with Rangoon. Human-rights groups estimate that half a million Karen have been killed in the five decades of fighting. In the first months of 1997 the SLORC army displaced one
third
of the entire population of the Karen State. Every month thousands of civilians escaped over the border to Thailand. Unlike them, it seemed that Phahte was aligned with the government – somehow.

‘Here Chief of Police,’ he said, concluding the hymn and gesturing towards the whale. The minnow eyes betrayed no emotion. ‘And this inspector taxes.’ The younger man, who wore a
Phantom of the Opera
T-shirt and an American baseball cap, broke off his conversation with Hsipaw’s Chief Judicial Officer. ‘Both go Namhsan.’

‘Phahte speaks seven languages,’ fawned the Chief of Police.

‘Chinese, Burmese, Shan, Karen, Japanese, English and Palaung.’ To confirm his ability he barked out a schoolboy’s marching song, passed down from the days of the Japanese occupation, then crooned a Palaung love poem and followed it with the Taiwanese national anthem.

‘I know it,’ confirmed the judge. ‘Phahte sings it perfect.’

‘Yes, my friend; Chinese women are best cooks, English make finest housekeepers and Japanese are top for seeing to a man’s needs.’ He listed the womanly skills with neither warmth nor eroticism, without respect or ribaldry, as if reporting on breeds of horses or types of cars.

‘Do you really speak Palaung?’ I asked, thinking of the basket.

‘What is Burma?’ he barked at his retinue in Shan, uninterested by my enquiry. He repeated it in Burmese, and then in English to me. ‘It is different people living together. It is a generous people who love our father –
our
father Aung San – but not his daughter Suu Kyi.’ He spat blood-red betel between his legs. A droplet of phlegm caught in the thin wisps of beard that coiled down from his chin. ‘I cannot come to your country.’ I thanked God for His blessings, and prayed for the health and vigilance of all Home Office immigration officers. ‘But you can visit Myanmar and I am happy. I welcome you.’ He shot out his hand and I shook it. ‘Jesus loves you.’