Burmese Lessons (13 page)

I wake to
a steady pounding. The sound causes my empty stomach to roil. I dread looking out the window, but up I get—how heavy the body is—and pull open the thick green curtains. Sunlight pours in. I squint down into the road.

It’s the ice crusher. I’ve seen him before. Bent over with a crowbar in his hands, he beats a massive block of ice. Soon the block is no longer solid. With the wedge of the bar, he pries open one fault line after another. White and bluish chunks drop onto the pavement. With loose-limbed precision, he smashes each of them with a heavy mallet. As he shovels fragments into rusted barrels, I waken fully to the morning clamor. Bicycle bells ring on the main street, car horns beep and blare.

The ice crusher slides another block of ice off the back of the truck and begins his task anew. Watching him, I think how easily he could smash in a man’s skull. My hands are stiff from gripping the window ledge last night. I gaze up the street. Down the street. The limbs of the trees remind me of guns; the broom propped over an old woman’s shoulder has the
shape of a gun. A si-car driver, riding past with a piece of old cardboard, is carrying a shield.

That man, in the sunglasses and the white shirt, sitting on a motorcycle—who is he? The peaceful world outside is as real as the bass thump of the woman downstairs in the kitchen pounding chilies. But a corrosive power is alive around us. It permeates the buildings, the markets, gnaws through the floors and walls, menacing everyone. I won’t be able to look at a Burmese street again, or a Burmese face, without being aware of it.

I glance around the familiar drabness of my room and feel a jolt of surprise. I’d forgotten about the box of biscuits. There it is, on the night table. Alms, given back. If I eat these buscuits, will my head and my heart remain intact? Will I know how to proceed?

As I tear open the box, the phone rings downstairs. I hear it clearly. And I know that it’s for me.

A
nita was arrested the day before yesterday. And interrogated all night. She was deported yesterday morning, sent out on a plane to Thailand. One of her friends in Bangkok called the journalist colleague who has been trying to find her. That was him on the phone, speaking in a monotone. He said she is all right but badly shaken. He didn’t have any details, and didn’t want to talk for very long. The last thing he said was “I don’t think I need to spell it out for you, do I?”

“No. I’ll buy a ticket this afternoon.”

“I’ve already got mine—4
P.M
. flight. Take care.”

He hung up before I had a chance to say goodbye, but I held the phone for a full thirty seconds more, and pretended the conversation was still going on. Myo Thant eyed me furtively as he swept the lobby. He often sweeps while guests are talking on the phone.

Anita, arrested. Interrogated. I repeat the words, but they do not work. It’s hard to sit her tall, comely Swedish body in a chair and allow Burmese
men to bark questions at her. I have a generic Hollywood interrogation scene in my head that rolls quickly into torture and sexual intimidation. Yet the journalist who called said nothing about such treatment. It is my democratic, guaranteed-human-rights country that readily supplies the images of dehumanization. I try to turn off the screen in my brain, but it’s not as easy as I would like it to be.

I will buy a ticket, leave tomorrow. Though part of me wants to stay. I want to see what happens next. But, more than that, I want my being here to be useful. Oh my God, I have hero delusions! I want my very presence to make some difference. How very white of me.

My visa expired almost a week ago, but I will claim ignorance at customs, a confusion over the dates. I could stay on awhile and make up a story about losing then finding my passport. It would not be prudent to remain here in Rangoon. But what if I went north and lay low in tourist fashion, taking photographs of the monuments? Or I could travel to famous Inle Lake and do a boat tour.

Unfortunately, the thought of partaking in regular travelers’ delights is repugnant. I am too tired, too sad. When I got here, I was a tourist, and I enjoyed being one, reveling in the beauty and strangeness of this new world, confident, too, that I was not merely a tourist because I was aware of the dire political situation. I was prepared to do my bit by writing an article about Ma Thida.

That seems a long time ago now.

I
think about San Aung, but I don’t call his house. It’s possible the line is bugged, and a call would disturb his poor old mother. I think about the monks last night, who led me to the center of the maze, showed me what was there, then led me out again.

I wonder what I’ve been doing with my life. I wonder why I’m not doing more.

Myo Thant
, man of many talents, sits proudly behind the wheel of his boss’s black car. He beams at me in the rearview mirror. Usually the boss gets someone else to escort departing guests to the airport, but today Myo Thant is the lucky chauffeur. While driving, he polishes the steering wheel with a soft cloth.

The polishing becomes flamboyantly aggressive when we roll into an unexpected pod of bicycles. The young clerk meets my eyes in the mirror and apologizes. “Please do not worry. We have much time.”

I do not worry. For different reasons, we both want the drive to take as long as possible. He karate-chops a flat hand at the bicycles and mutters under his breath, but the displeasure is just evidence of how much he enjoys his motorized stature. We roll slowly past the worn cotton longyis and wiry calves of the cyclists, who carry all manner of stuff in baskets and on their handlebars and backs. Through the mill of wheels and laboring bodies, I see a crippled man using his crutch as a broom, knocking white flowers off the step of his cheroot-selling shack. A group of pink-robed young nuns pass under the flower-spilling tree. I feel the same ache
I felt this morning, and ignored. I would like to visit a temple before I leave.

After the bicycles, on the tree-lined boulevard that will take us to Mingaladon Airport, billboards blur by, advertising foreign cigarettes and liquor, and blaring the usual propaganda in English and Burmese, that people must oppose external elements and foreign stooges. No wonder I want to visit a temple.

But there is no time. We have reached the ocher-colored houses on the outskirts of the city. A cow walks down a muddy road, following a little boy.

There is no pagoda in sight. It is a simple balm, to touch one’s head to the earth. Good soil, hard dirt, solid rock: another sort of holy trinity. Several river stones from the wide Irrawaddy weigh down my bag. I rarely buy Buddha icons, or any other religious paraphernalia, but I covet rocks with an odd fervor, and carry them around with me.

Many images of the Buddha show him touching the ground with his right hand. The traditional story has it that, upon achieving Nirvana, he touched the earth so that it could act as a witness to his enlightenment. But why would he need a witness? And why would it be the earth? The Buddha’s hand touching the ground is a gesture to the earth, honoring animist religions that Buddhism displaced.

The earth is already enlightened. It is itself, purely, in this moment, solid and ever-changing. Lower the vulnerable forehead to any stone floor and the third eye sees that even the dust is sacred.

Soon I will be high above the Buddhas and the dust, in a plane passing over green trapezoids and yellow rectangles, crops squared off and parceled out in an orderliness that deceives, suggesting that the wild grass and the weather have no agenda of their own. Flying south to Bangkok, I will look down at the wide rivers and the glimmering tributaries dropped into the mud of the Irrawaddy Delta like a handful of silver chains. The silver thickens and pours blue into the Gulf of Martaban, the Bay of Bengal.

I’ll have no problem getting on that plane. An immature part of me wishes that an MI agent would stop me. I would weasel my way out of difficulty with my voluminous wit and charm. Stupid. I don’t actually want anything bad to happen to me. I just want it almost to happen, so that I’ll have the story.

But my departure is uneventful. Leaving is my consummate and cursed talent.

The sound of birds
.

A raucous argument among birds wakes me. The voices fly through the screens, dive up, down, crash against leaves. The birds—jackdaws? parrots?—roost in two tall trees that grow near this concrete block. New place, new sounds. Rangoon is gone.

I am dislocated, like a bone, and in pain.

In the middle of the night, a lizard woke me. How does it manage to live in the roaring city?
“Too-kay! Too-kay!”
The sound seemed to be inside the room, at the foot of the mattress, but that was just a clever reptilian trick with echoes. The tukae, a big gecko. It must have been outside, clinging to the balcony wall.

The light was so bright I winced and swore aloud at the streetlights. Then squinted and rose clumsily from the mattress on the floor. But it wasn’t lights: it was the full moon gaping through the window.

Afterward, I lay in bed, frowning at the glow on the walls. I kept thinking of the question. On the plane from Burma, a curious man asked, But where do you actually live?

Presently, in a small rented apartment on a
soi
off Phaholyothin Road. A friend of a friend owns the place, empty but for this mattress and a fridge. And a working phone line, thank God.

But I won’t be here for long. I want to go to the Burmese embassy and get a visa to return as soon as possible. And find out the bus schedule to Mae Sot, a border town where many Burmese exiles live. I need to get in touch with Anita, too, though I suspect that she has already left for Sweden.

But first, breathe. Breathe. When I came back to Thailand over a year ago, I went to visit an old Thai monk. His unsolicited advice was identical to that of the monks I met in Mandalay: “You just need to sit. And breathe.”

How do they know?

And why do they give such harsh counsel? Monks are used to tremendous rigor. They probably forget their old lives. Breathing in and out is supposed to be enough to keep the mind from running around like an ax murderer. Some small measure of calmness would be good, though enlightenment is out of the question; I can’t sit still long enough to apply nail polish.

And, right now, I’m hungry. I roll off the mattress and prepare to meet the city.

T
o leave Rangoon and land in Bangkok is to leap from the nineteenth century into the future of the entire planet. Think
Blade Runner
without Harrison Ford.

The rush of the morning hordes flays me awake. Millions of people are on their way to work and school. Those who commute from one side of the city to the other have been traveling for two hours. I walk in the direction of Pratunam with a bathing suit in my bag. If I can stand the smog, I’ll get there an hour before the bus does.

In Thai, Bangkok begins with the syllables
Glung-tape
, but the full name is several lines long. A small part of that extravagance translates into “city of angels.” If angels still reside here, they must be filthy, asthmatic, and covered in mange, like the torn-eared dogs that plod across my path. I’ve been outside for less than forty-five minutes, but a thick layer of grime coats my arms and face.

What are you? I ask the place as I walk through it, dazed by the car and bus exhaust, shaking from too much caffeine in the blood or from the press of bodies in the street, or both. What are you? The angels refuse to answer me. The beggar outside the neighborhood shrine waves away the flies that feed on the raw stump of his amputated leg. The journalists I used to live with told me that the beggars wound themselves, so I shouldn’t give them money. But after standing over his stump for a whole minute I pull out a few baht and drop them into his cup. I feel obliged, because I’ve been watching a squirmy cluster of maggots have their breakfast. I ask him, “Shouldn’t you take those off?,” meaning the maggots, but he just puts his hands together in prayer position against his head, thanking me for the money or wishing for more.