Burmese Lessons (34 page)

Bear it.

If I love him, I will bear it, whatever it is.

“Don’t, come inside me,”
I whisper. He pulls his head up and finds my eyes, questioning. But I don’t want to interrupt with more words. I thrust my hips against his, holding on to the rhythm. I have waited for this and I want this, now, I don’t want him to stop.

We’ve been shy with each other, maladroit. Though he slept comfortably in the plane for hours, the vastness of the ocean remains between us. After two months apart, sex is hunger, an appetite to satiate urgently, forcefully. But it doesn’t deliver us over to each other.

That comes only after sex. To let my eyes rest on his body is to return to him. What is more lovely than the beloved, come back? His arms gleam in the half-light; I would like to lick them. I peer at the thick black line of eyelashes. He didn’t get his hair cut in America, so it’s too long in the front and back. The thick black sheen falls like a helmet over his head.

The darkness that is not dark spreads into the room, along with the noise of people below, laughing at the noodle stand in the parking lot.

“My period came. A few days before you got back.” More than six
weeks late. I was convinced I was pregnant. A quarter exultant and three-quarters terrified.

“I understood.” His voice is soft, ever so slightly resigned.

“It’s better. We’re not ready for a baby.”

“I know.” He turns on his side toward me and opens his eyes, fixes me with a steady stare. “But I want one.”

“Yes. I feel that, too.”

For the first time in my life, the appearance of the blood made me sad, and the sadness confounded me. When did I begin to feel this intensely physical desire to have a child? A few days after that poor Karen woman in Maw Ker lost her boy to malaria. The body cried out, “Make another child, make sure we have a child; we must have children to replace the ones who slip through our fingers, out of time.” No wonder the refugee camps are teeming with babies and toddlers. Maung has been here since 1989. He is soon to be thirty-seven. I’m not surprised that he wants to stand in the light of a new baby.

I’m about to voice some of these thoughts when he startles me with an observation of his own. “You are like a man.”

“How so?”

“You are so sexual. You want so much.”

I pull away from him, hurt. “Maung, we’ve been separated for two months.”

“It is not a criticism. I don’t complain. The Burmese woman is not usually like that. She is more quiet. She does not know what the orgasm is. If she has the orgasm, it frightens her.”

“I’m sure she would enjoy the orgasm once she got used to it. It’s natural to be frightened if you don’t understand what’s happening to your body. Even if it feels good.” I wonder who “she” is. An early girlfriend? The gem dealer’s daughter?

“But you like it.”

“Yeah, I’m definitely into the orgasm.”

“Every time?”

“Why not? It’s not the be-all and end-all of sex, but I’d rather have one than not.”

“I see.” He sounds perplexed.

“Don’t you like having an orgasm every time?”

“But I’m a man.”

“Meaning what? That men should have them and women don’t really need them?”

“We have the sperm. The orgasm is …” The doctor appears in his face, searching for the right word. “Functional.”

I whip the pillow out from under my head and hit him with it. “And women have the womb! We grow the babies and make the milk. How functional is that? The least we should get in exchange is a lot of orgasms. Trust me, after not having sex for a long time the orgasm I just had was extremely functional.”

He takes the pillow hits with equanimity and replies, “I see only that you are very aggressive. The orgasm makes you aggressive.”

I crawl on top of him, growling. “Here, let me show you aggressive.” Take that, and that.

And I’ll take some, too.

M
y lover has been back in Thailand for almost a week. It’s already hard to remember what it was like without him here. That may be because the two states—with, without—are not so different. My longing for him is greater now because he is closer, but we haven’t spent much time together. Still, I am happy. The promise of him provides a flesh-and-blood center to my days.

Maung leaves in the morning like any working husband, kissing me quickly, whisking himself out the door. I may not see him tonight if he is too busy, or works too late, or cannot face the trip back across the sprawl
of Bangkok traffic. I can’t stay in the communal ABSDF house, so there’s no question of my going to him. I try to look on the bright side: wanting but not receiving enough is an aphrodisiac.

The yearning suits me. Our relationship is only one of Maung’s obligations; perhaps the least of them. The anxiety this provokes is familiar. I’ve had other relationships with unavailable men. Does this have to do with my past—the emotionally stunted father and the little girl I was who craved his love? I’m sure it does. But knowing that doesn’t help me.

This world is more real and more pressing than my past. Political exigencies make my personal concerns seem indulgent. I grasp that outwardly, but I whine about it inwardly. I want to rest. I want my lover to rest. I want us to go to a movie
(The English Patient
is playing) or spend the day in bed, making love, eating, and reading the newspapers. No, I want us to spend two whole days doing that. But such desire is unseemly; I would not admit it to anyone. Why should he and I have such bliss when ABSDF battalions are engaged in active combat on the border?

This is a serious question, but if I asked it at every moment joy would become a sin. One needs balance, but I don’t know how to find it in a climate of emergencies. In the past six weeks, several thousand more Karen refugees have poured across the border into Thailand, their SLORC-attacked homes and fields charred and smoking behind them. An ABSDF safe house was ransacked by Thai military intelligence and every computer was confiscated. Several members of a battalion at the front line sustained serious injuries; one of the men’s wives had just had a baby. The two-year-old child of a dissident was diagnosed with cerebral palsy, a condition likely caused or at least worsened by the malaria she suffered as a baby.

Tragedy is a climate; I have acclimatized. My eyes are open and they ache. One day I went to help out with some paperwork for the Burmese Women’s Union. After doing some editing and typing, correcting English text, I guiltily confided to one of the activists that writing a book wasn’t enough. She sighed. “But we all feel that way. No one can do enough. Just write your book.”

I do. I continue to collect stories, talk to people. While I try to control my personal longings and berate myself for being too soft, they remind me that my yearnings are as basic as cooked rice. Though the Burmese dissidents have exiled themselves in the name of political activism, they usually talk about their families and their friends. The former prisoners often describe more about the relationships they forged with the small animals in their cells than they do about their political convictions. That is partly because the political convictions are common knowledge between us, almost taken for granted. But it’s also because they’ve sacrificed the personal world in order to do political work. It is the personal world they crave; they recognize that it sustains them. They reconstruct it as best they can out of a few photographs, music tapes, memories told and retold, grafting the past onto the present to keep it alive. The politics is the road and the method. It is the fraught journey. But the personal is the only shelter.

Forced to live in a prison, under a piece of tarpaulin, in one place then another, and another, the mind struggles to build an interior freedom, or even the possibility of freedom, a new life relegated to the future. And the mind succeeds. People can build their lives on a fracture.

A shelter within broken shelter is another version of home. I can live there, if I want to. In some ways, I already do. And the company is fine.

“Karen, I need
to spend some time in Chiang Mai. Then I have to go to Mae Sarieng and the jungle for the rest of the month.”

I respond to this news with measured nods, hypnotized. We’re in a noodle shop with steaming bowls of gwiteo and a TV in front of us. A Hong Kong melodrama lays bare the political machinations and the lusts of an old, well-powdered dynasty. Unaccustomed to televisions, Maung and I sit on the same side of the table and stare at the topknots of the men and the long embroidered robes.

He raises his voice above the Thai dubbing. “I am a leader. I have to go see everyone.”

“I know.” I push chopsticks laden with noodles into my mouth. A woman in an elaborate wig screams at her lover—he seems to have failed to garner the favor of some important lord. I think. I don’t get all the words. I fill in the gaps by guessing. At least I’m not like that woman. Teeth bared, eyes bugging out. So un-Buddhist.

I’m calm because I was expecting Maung to announce his departure.
I take another load of noodles. Chew. Swallow. “You’ll be going to the camp from Mae Sarieng, right?”

“Yes, Camp One and Two. I’ll divide my time between each of them.”

“When are you going?”

He swivels his head away from me, mumbles.

“What?”

“In two days.”

I nod again. If I were pregnant, would it be different? If a child were to arrive in a year, would we have a house by then? Where? I don’t think I could live full-time in the noise and pollution of Bangkok, though I know that’s where Maung needs to have a base now. I also don’t know if I have enough money to rent a proper house in Chiang Mai. If I did that, would five or six comrades live with us, because they had no other place to go?

We watch the Chinese lovers fighting. The long sleeves of the robes fly; the braided black hair flies, too; there’s a lot of whirling around. I suppose I should ask Maung if he’s going to stay with Angie in Chiang Mai. But I prefer not to know.

Other women manage, year after year. The Burmese women, the white women who live with Burmese men on the border, in the various towns, here in Bangkok. Their revolutionary husbands go off to clandestine meetings, they make dangerous border crossings, they leave for weeks, months at a time, and the children stay with the mothers. Nola says she wants to have a baby, too. Soon. Sometimes other women help take care of the children. There’s that—cheap child care. I could hire a poor Burmese woman to be a nanny. That is, if I had enough money. How long will it take me to finish my novel and get the rest of the advance? Maybe it would all work out.

I push my stool back, then turn to Maung, who still stares at the television. “You know what?”

“Ungg.” Male Asian grunt: willing to listen.

“I’m going to come with you.”

He turns to me. “Oh! I would like that. I’m glad you want to come.”

For a moment I think I’ve misunderstood. Maybe he invited me and I missed it because I was watching Chinese actors fighting in shrill Thai.

“But in Chiang Mai I’ll be in meetings a lot.”

“I don’t want to come to Chiang Mai.” I need to keep writing, uninterrupted. And I don’t want to pay for my own accommodation there. No matter where he stays, I wouldn’t be able to stay with him. “I need to keep working on the book. But I’ll meet you in Mae Sarieng, and come with you to the camps. I’d like to see them.”

“It’s not very comfortable.”

“That’s fine. I’ve done a lot of camping. We’re not staying for three months, are we?”

He raises his hands in a “Who knows?” gesture. “Maybe we will. It’s nice in the jungle. We’ll be able to spend some time together.”

T
wo weeks later, on a sweltering April morning, we leave Mae Sarieng in the back of a pickup truck with ten other ABSDF members, both men and women, and a load of supplies. It reminds me of a school trip: we’re giddy with excitement when we start out, talking to one another loudly over the laboring engine. It’s a hired vehicle driven by a burly Thai man with one eye. We don’t drive on a paved road but on a trail used by water buffalo and motorcycles, through vegetable fields and fallow rice paddies. Bumping along, the morning air already hot, we begin to rise into hills without houses. We pass village hunters who walk barefoot on the dust track, smoking wooden pipes, old thin-barreled rifles slung across their backs.