Under the Dragon (29 page)

‘Good?’ he asked, irritated that we had not volunteered our praise. The dish was, in fact, delicious, though we had little appetite. I could only think of the basket-maker sitting down to his own meal a few minutes’ walk away. ‘Do you like Burma?’ Phahte asked Katrin suddenly.

‘I like the Burmese people,’ she replied.

‘We are a welcoming people,’ he declared, overlooking for a moment the pistol holstered on his hip. ‘And Burmese papayas,’ he continued with intemperate sincerity, ‘are they not better than Thai papayas?’

‘They both taste pretty similar,’ said Katrin.

‘In Thailand they use chemicals, but not in Burma.’

‘Maybe the farmers can’t afford chemicals here.’

‘No chemicals is good.’

‘Yes, it is good.’

‘So they are better,’ Phahte concluded with childish simplicity, translating for the cook, driver and gun boy. ‘She prefers Burmese papayas,’ he crowed, then raised his glass towards us. ‘My friends!’ The others applauded.

For the next hour Phahte talked, and we listened. Conversation was not a social skill that he had developed. Our occasional questions failed to engage him, and it became apparent that he had not brought us to Namhsan out of kindness, but rather as means of elevating his own status. In Rangoon we had been told that the Burmese considered tourists to be ‘like the stars in the night sky’. Phahte also hoped a little of that light would shine on him, so his subjects might see him as reflecting the promise of liberty. To serve this end, our obedient, obsequious presence alone was required. He would have preferred it if we did not talk at all. We were stuffed mascots of hope, and he ignored us for the most part.

‘Phahte,’ I managed to interrupt when he paused in his praise of Burmese tomatoes, ‘isn’t it possible for us to delay our return to Hsipaw? Just for a few hours.’

‘Maybe you go back by “cha-la-la-la”?’ he roared, imagining us rattling south on a sixteen-horsepower motorised wheelbarrow. Even at full throttle it would take a week to cover the distance.

‘Is there no other way back?’

‘Or maybe by feet?’ he suggested, finishing his glass. He pushed his heart-shaped face towards us. ‘But then you get shot dead.’

‘You have come to a country that is very isolated,’ explained Nancy.

‘There are bad men living here. It is better that you go together tomorrow.’ It would also be an insult to Phahte if we travelled by any other manner.

‘Are there still insurgents in the hills?’ asked Katrin. Our repulsive host had disgusted her, but it had not occurred to us before that there might be men in the area more dangerous than him. ‘I thought the government had signed ceasefire agreements in the north.’

Phahte slammed his pistol on the table. ‘My friends, don’t worry. I will die but I protect you. You are like family.’

Nancy looked at him from under her eyebrows, frowning at his unruly behaviour. ‘His father never used to drink so much,’ she whispered. ‘I lost him too.’

As Phahte sang ‘Jesus loves God’s little children,’ the gun boy refilled his glass. ‘You are Christian?’ he demanded again, pointing a twisted finger at me.

‘Yes, Phahte,’ I confirmed. I had had enough. ‘But I am a frustrated and annoyed Christian.’

As a rule I disapprove of weapons at the dinner table. Now I was anxious for our safety and wanted out, yet in Namhsan there was no handy telephone, no secure hotel and no authority greater than the unstable, over-armed drunkard who leered at us from across the table. It seemed to me that our only hope of salvation would be in manipulating his sense of honour as he had manipulated my naïve trust.

‘We are tired now, tired and disappointed,’ I said, and he seemed to listen. I tried to be bold. ‘We have been looking for a long time to find the basket which is probably a few hundred yards from here, but you won’t let us go to see it. You promised to help. But now I do not think that you are being fair to us.’

Phahte hit the table so hard that the lid jumped off the soup and small pieces of bird slopped onto the cloth. ‘Yes!’ he barked, ‘Yes!’ In the shadows the gun boy snapped to attention. ‘So I not pick you up sharp 8 a.m. tomorrow.’ His eyes gleamed with drunken purpose. For a moment there seemed to be the possibility that he would give us the time to meet the basket-maker. We might finally find Scott’s basket. ‘No, my friend. I pick you up at 6 a.m. and we go to church to pray. I mountain man. You gentle-man. No matter. We Christians together.’ The drunken chief of the Palaung militia waved his pistol in the air and fired. ‘God follows me,’ he shouted as shards of roof tile clattered down around us.

THE CRY CAME long after midnight, soon after he had fallen both into her arms and to sleep, and almost scared the life out of her.

‘Who’s there?’ Nan Si Si whispered, now frightened again. ‘Who is it?’ The moon did not shine and the room was black, black as burial, and Saw Htoo was suddenly awake. ‘It’s not time yet.’

Saw Htoo sprung up and crossed the room. His feet were silent on the boards and Nan Si Si felt rather than saw him move. Only at the door, where he froze to listen, did she hear him release the rifle’s safety catch. The breath of night air stirred the leaves of the calendar on the far wall. He stepped down onto the path and circled the house. ‘Be careful,’ she thought. ‘Please take care.’ There wasn’t another sound. She wished that it was not so late. She told herself it was her fault that he had not taken more rest.

‘There’s no one there,’ he said when he returned.

‘I heard a voice,’ she insisted. It had been a man’s voice. He had spoken softly, as if reciting an incantation in the monastery. She had heard him whisper a single word.

‘It was probably a bird,’ Saw Htoo said casually, and lay back down beside her. He pulled her close but she knew he was listening. She felt him listening. She shivered, even though the night was warm. ‘It was nothing, Nan Si Si. Go back to sleep.’

He needed his sleep. She knew that he needed his sleep. In two hours it would be dawn and he would be gone. He and the other Karens would march south, moving behind the Japanese lines and down from the hills towards the railway. He had hidden the English soldier’s pack under the floorboards. She told herself that Saw Htoo had to rest, not to pander to the selfish fancies of a woman. The Karen think that the Palaung are a parsimonious people. Nan Si Si had never in her life considered herself to be mean, but when she met him it became true. She turned selfish. She didn’t want to share him. She couldn’t let go of him.

‘It’s so late,’ she said into the dark. ‘Who would disturb you at this time?’

‘Don’t worry about it.’

‘I couldn’t make out what he was saying.’

‘Go back to sleep.’

‘Maybe it
was
a bird,’ she conceded, hoping that her agreement would draw his thoughts back into the house. If he relaxed, if she could put him at ease, he might doze for an hour. She felt his senses still roaming outside, detached and prowling away from his body, making sure that they were safe. The fire had burned out but she was wide awake. Her heart pounded in her chest as loudly as a child beating a tin-can drum. Its rattle had to be keeping him awake. He needed to sleep. She wanted to taste him on her lips. She wanted him to wrap his senses around her like a living, pleasing cloak.

‘It must have been a bird,’ he said, but he had not believed her.

She shouldn’t have said it was a voice. ‘A bird or a bat.’

‘I wish they would leave us alone, the birds and bats, tonight of all nights,’ she moaned, then added, ‘Sleep, Saw Htoo. Try to get some more sleep.’

He sighed and felt for a cigarette. ‘He’s weary of war,’ she thought, ‘and maybe even of me.’ The flare of the match made the shadows dance around the room. Saw Htoo must have decided that there was no one outside, even though she knew that the prowler had not been a bird. He inhaled and in the glow of the cigarette his skin took on the smooth, burnished colour of a newborn baby. It made him look younger than his nineteen years, almost like a little child, and she wanted to cradle him in her arms. ‘Don’t go,’ she longed to tell him, but instead she asked, ‘Don’t you want to sleep more?’

‘With you awake beside me?’

‘Maybe you would prefer to have another girl beside you?’ she said, lifting herself up onto an elbow. She loved his heart-shaped face, his wide forehead and tapered cheeks. It gave him a look of meditative serenity. ‘Maybe you’d like Nan Ihla? You once said that Ihla was like a little bird. Or did you say a bat?’ Saw Htoo laughed out loud, so she continued, ‘She is fat like a paddy-mortar. And she snores, you know. Did you know that?’

‘Maybe it was her sneaking around outside the house.’

‘No, it was a man,’ she said, and then regretted it. ‘If only I would think before opening my mouth,’ she told herself. He drew deeply on the cigarette, and she felt his senses reach out again beyond the walls. The jungle was still and made no sound. She pulled at his waist to draw him back to her. ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I’m just a little scared. There’s no one there.’

‘No one at all,’ Saw Htoo said with certainty.

He smoked his cigarette, every measured breath one less for them to spend together. She counted their passing in the silence between their words. ‘You know Ihla?’ she said after a moment. She felt bad about her lie. Ihla was her friend. It was true that she was plump, but she had made up the story about her snoring. ‘And her father?’

‘The mat-maker?’

‘He used to have a terrible temper,’ she said.

‘He seemed nice enough to me.’

‘It used to be so bad that his wife encouraged him to travel away from Namhsan for months on end. Until one day, when he was away and Ihla was little, Ihla came into our house weeping. “Come quickly,” she said. “My mother is lying on the floor crying. You have to help her.” My mother and I ran to their house and found that she was in labour. The mat-maker didn’t even know she was pregnant.

‘“Please don’t tell my husband,” Ihla’s mother pleaded with us. “He will beat me. We cannot afford another child.”

‘She planned to give it away to some cousin in Panglong. My mother said nothing, and helped her with the delivery. Saw Htoo, I had never seen anything like it. But after the baby was born my mother told the woman, “Mind that you keep and love this child. If you don’t I’ll come and take him from you, for I’ve lost two girls of my own.”

‘I didn’t know your mother had lost two children,’ said Saw Htoo, gentler now. Nan Si Si hadn’t told him. Many women lose babies. Often couples who have been robbed of their children dedicate the newest born to the monastery in the hope of saving its life. The evil spirits might then not have the power to take that baby away. ‘What did the mat-maker say when he came back?’ he asked.

‘He held the child in his arms, not looking at it, but with tears in his eyes. I went home and cried the rains.’

They both fell quiet again, only now Saw Htoo was with her. He no longer listened to the outside or even reached ahead to the morning’s march. She placed her hand across his waist. She realised that in the excitement of her storytelling she had woven the quilt around herself alone. Saw Htoo lay uncovered and naked, so she wrapped his body in her own.

Since that first birth Nan Si Si had often tried to picture herself as a mother. She had tried to imagine a life growing within her. She needed to feel the pain of delivery and the deep bond of shared flesh. She didn’t care if she had a baby boy or a girl, even though boys are born with more merit. But she did wish for the good fortune of a birth at the full moon, and not for a Saturday-born child who would bring her unhappiness or poverty. She imagined that she would wash her baby in clean, cold water before its first sunrise and, when it was a few days old, give it its first taste of rice. She would chew the steamed – not boiled – rice into a smooth pap and then, as her mother had done for her, feed it to her child like a kiss. By its sixth month he or she would eat as much as three teacupfuls of rice a day and so grow strong like a stone and live long like water.

Her child would be the embodiment of love. It would sleep between her and her husband on its own little mat. She would carry it to the harvest and, as it grew older, they would teach it to herd cattle and to clear weeds from around the tea plants. Her husband would make it a clay whistle. It would learn the old rhyming tales which her mother had taught her. Its skin would be smooth all over like a mouse.

Every mother wishes for healthy, happy children. But if her baby remained weak she would make offerings so that its spirit might acquire merit and, when it died, live longer in the body next inhabited. She held onto Saw Htoo and kissed him, knowing that in less than two hours her arms would be empty. She wanted a child so deeply that she could taste it.

‘But I am not going away to sell sleeping mats, Nan Si Si,’ said Saw Htoo. ‘I might not come back.’

‘We could hide,’ she hurried, rising onto her knees before him. His cigarette had been snuffed out and it was again pitch black in the room. ‘I know places in the hills. We could go there. No one would find us.’

‘I cannot hide. I am fighting for a Karen state. Isn’t that a beautiful sound? The Karen State.’ He rolled the words around his mouth to savour them. ‘It is what we’ve been promised.’ And again his thoughts fled away from her.

She lay back down into her own solitude. When she was young, before her fourteenth year, the young men of Namhsan had come calling. As was the custom, each man wrapped himself in a large grey blanket which enveloped both body and head, a disguise designed to hide his identity from all but her. By the fireside they whispered their names, which all those assembled knew in any case, and in turn she gave them betel-nut and cheroots. Once five men sat together with her and they gossiped all evening, in between their formal rhymes of courtship. Ihla never had more than three suitors serenade her. The next day on the hills the men, who picked tea on different terraces, sang love songs to her and the other girls. She told them all to take a long drink of water to stop the flow of words. A Palaung girl is free to marry whomever she pleases, provided that the man shares her wish, but no neighbour took Nan Si Si’s heart, and so the courtship soon lost its interest for her. She was not afraid to look to the left and to the right, that is to flirt with men, but she became lazy in her responses to their questions. Once she even yawned, when the carpenter’s son Sai Wai was telling her what he had eaten that day. He later stole a thread from her coat and took it to the wise man to cast a love charm. It was then that she began to lock the entrance-door so none of them could come into her house, until her mother found out and scolded her.