Burmese Lessons (36 page)

“Khaing Lin says this is the single women’s hut.”

“Yes. Though you are not a single woman.”

Teeth clenched, I nod. It’s so hard to speak sometimes. I feel needy, and feeling needy makes me mad at him. “Maung, I promise I will ask you this just once. Then I won’t ask again. Do you think we might have a chance to spend any time together? Alone?”

“Difficult. It’s communal life here. You and I are not married, so we cannot stay together like we are married.” I don’t bother pointing out the obvious hypocrisy of this behavior, considering our usual conjugal relations.

“Why didn’t you tell me that before? I know it’s stupid, but I thought … I just …”

“You thought we would stay together?”

“Why didn’t you explain that we wouldn’t? At least I could have prepared myself.”

“I’m sorry. I was busy in Chiang Mai and I did not think about it. For me it’s obvious.”

“For me it wasn’t.”

“Do you want to declare?”

“What do you mean?”

“We publicly announce our engagement so we can act like a married couple.”

I roll my eyes. “That’s almost as bad as … Christianity! We should declare our marriage plans so we can sleep together!”

“I am a Buddhist, not a Christian. I told you it was not so easy in the jungle.”

“I didn’t realize you were talking about us.”

We have arrived at Khaing Lin’s hut. I hear her inside, murmuring to December in a mellifluent voice, half spoken, half sung.

I sidle closer to Maung. “Will you kiss me good night?”

“It is better to be private.”

“Maung, who can see us? Most people know that I’m here because we’re a couple. We’ve been out a lot together in Bangkok. It’s no longer a big secret.”

“But it doesn’t have to be a big public.”

“All right. Fine. I’ll see you tomorrow. Maybe. If I’m lucky, I guess.” I duck into the little house before he can say another word.

Do I care that I am being childish? Not at all. Like a child, I enjoy my petulance for the illusion of power it gives me.

During the next
week, I visit briefly with Maung and his colleagues over lunch or dinner; we spend one long afternoon in the radio-operations hut. With a copy of
My Universities
in my hand, I learn about how far the signals reach, how often the operators are able to listen in on SLORC radio communications, how the SLORC sometimes decodes their signal and listens in on them. Sometimes the two sides find themselves on the same wavelength and talk and swear at each other.

Throughout these visits, I inwardly congratulate myself on my maturity. At meals, Maung and I occasionally slip off a flip-flop and touch our feet together under the table. What a thrill. It seems we are engaged in a chaste, public courtship for the benefit of his comrades. It is natural, in this world, that my behavior will determine their approval of me. They are a family, after all, formed and bonded through experiences I can only imagine, no matter how much I may know of the details. Part of me strongly rejects the notion that I need to be approved of, that I need to satisfy an entire group’s requirements in order to show my love for their leader.

I remind myself that if I were a Burmese woman I would probably be more accepting, more patient—qualities that are valued in every Theravadan Buddhist culture. Women are expected not just to exhibit those traits but to embody them. I pride myself on my ability to adapt, but in fact this pride is false: I don’t like adapting when it means acting out some kind of charade. I don’t like adapting to celibacy when my lover and I have been apart for two months already. On several of these hot afternoons, I daydream longingly of Greece. I wish I could teleport myself out of this bamboo camp to the edge of the Aegean, blue water spread out, waiting to be entered by men and women who live more easily in a conjoined realm of body and heart.

What a load of romantic crap! But I indulge in it as I sip my warm water and wonder when constipation becomes a serious problem. (It’s been two days since I’ve had a meaningful visit to the stinky latrine.) Romantic crap or not, the extrovert’s tendency to intertwine emotion and body works well in Greece, land of loud talkers, big huggers, passionate hand-wavers.

I shake my drowsy head back and forth. Snap out of it. I’m not on the edge of the Aegean, I’m on the edge of Burma, with cheroot smoke in my nose, in my mouth. Why not? An information officer offers me one and I tamp down the tobacco and snap off the end as if I’ve been doing it all my life. We light up and smoke as he shows me a few snapshots of his battalion’s first few months in the jungle. He explains how people move from one camp to another, from camp to town or city, from city back to camp, bringing books, mail, supplies, job assignments, and news.

Though he never states it directly, I understand that there is a slow drain of people out of the jungle. As the SLORC buys more weapons, swells its ranks continuously with young, destitute soldiers, keeps troops near the border into the rainy season—which traditionally has been a period of détente—the ABSDF armed battalions grow smaller, worn out. Without more new recruits, it’s hard to keep a guerrilla force alive.

Besides the soldiers fighting in the jungle and the undercover agents
sent back into Burma, the ABSDF’s other powerful battalion consists of people whose weapons are made of words. They are public-relations people and record keepers, clipping and sorting and keeping notes for Burma’s unofficial history. It is a curious thing, to enter a small house in a dusty Thai town and discover dozens of metal bookshelves sagging with carefully labeled files. Political events. Business deals. Overt and subtle shifts in the regime’s chain of command. The names of the dead, the missing, the presumed dead. The names of the imprisoned. Records that no one inside the country can keep. The men and women who build the files and fill the metal shelves believe that someday there will be a place in Burma for the truth they have so carefully preserved.

I am conscious, too, that there will be a time when a few of the men and women I’ve met here will write about their experiences. Khaing Lin still composes poetry sometimes, in the evening, and occasionally jots down her thoughts on her life, as it is now, as it was before she left her country. “But I am often tired,” she tells me. “There is … how do you call it, when something is missing?”

“An absence?”

“Yes, but another word. A lock. A lock on inspiration?”

“A lack! You mean a lack of. A lock is on a door, to keep it closed.”

“Hmm. The lack of, yes. Also the lock on. I would like to write, but it is hard. When I was in Rangoon before the strikes and nothing ever happened to me, I wrote pages and pages. Now so much happens, but it is painful to write, and tiring. Sometimes too hard.” She physically shakes herself—her head, her shoulders, even her arms, which loosen and lift off her lap as she attempts to rid herself of an encumbrance.

I spend long hours with Khaing Lin, December, the other women and children in the camp. Each bird-filled green morning burns into a silent, hazy afternoon, the heat so thick that it’s hard to breathe, especially when the water-boiling fires are going. During these hours, of sweat and thirst and physical discomfort, I repeat to myself: almost ten years in the jungle.
I consider living this way for one. Could I do it for one year? Doubtful. I think of the rainy season. This far north, the cold season would be bone-chillingly damp. Every morning, I stretch my aching back and hips, wondering how long it takes to get used to sleeping on bamboo. A decade?

One of the hardest things is the smallest, the most trifling. We have to haul the water up from the stream. All right. I do this task on the sly, otherwise Khaing Lin refuses to let me have the buckets, saying a guest shouldn’t have to haul water. Frankly, no one should have to haul water up that fucking hill. The first time I attempted to ascend the kicked-in steps with the full buckets, I fell on my ass—twice. I lost so much water that I had to go back down to the stream and refill. But it’s not the hauling, or even the falling, that bothers me so much.

It’s the drinking. The stream water has to be boiled long and hard. In this heat, forty to forty-five degrees Celsius, the water never cools. I don’t like freezing-cold water; I don’t need ice. But it’s dispiriting to drink bath-temperature water when you are sweating and thirsty at midday.

As our cauldron comes to the boil, I offhandedly mention this to Khaing Lin, trying to frame it as an observation. She laughs at me. “You are suffering with the hot water. Oh, me too. We are used to it, but it is still bad. I went to Chiang Mai a couple months ago. With December. She was scared of ice cream! She didn’t know anything could be so cold. It is a strange life in the jungle.”

“Do you ever wonder what might have happened if you had stayed in Burma? Do you think it might be better?”

“You mean more easy?”

Is that what I’m asking? I nod.

“Inside Burma the people are less free. If you want to do political work, even if you don’t go to prison, you are a prisoner. The country is still closed, though tourists can visit. I might have been sent back to prison if I had stayed.”

“You were in prison?”

“Not for so long. Just two years.”

Just two. Only two. “I didn’t know.” A bolt of shame drills through me. I am such a suck!

“Decembaa!” Khaing Lin jumps up and grabs the little girl, who is too close to the fire. She reprimands her sternly, then sends her off to play. “I worry she will fall into the fire. Aie! What a disaster, so far from a hospital.”

D
anger aside, cooking on the open fires is a time-consuming, physically draining task, like washing clothes by hand. Those clothes, I discover, also include the rags women use during menstruation.

“That’s the way it is in the jungle.” Khaing Lin shrugs. “Simple living.”

We’re washing clothes in the stream, which runs shallow at the edges, as streams will, and deep in the center, where we bathe in the evenings. Midmorning, it’s already too hot; we sprinkle our faces and heads with water. Thump-thump, thump-thump-thump: bunched cloth beaten against flat stone, fistful after fistful. When Khaing Lin sees my ocher-and-black sarong, with its design of peacock-like birds, she takes the material in her hands and examines the unprinted side. “It’s from Burma, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. I bought it in Rangoon.”

“At a big market?”

“No. Just a little shop on the street near my guesthouse. A tailor. But he had some nice material. His wife sewed the waist for me.”

She looks carefully at the broad tube of black fabric at the top of the sarong. “It’s well done. Two stitches, everything sewn inside.”

“Hemmed.”

“Yes. I forgot the word.” She hands the cloth back to me. “We all need new clothes. We get clothes from the charities. From Europe, from the United States. Sometimes very nice. Sometimes …” Her voice trails off.

“Sometimes,” I venture, “unbelievably ugly! So ugly no one wants to wear them, I bet.”

Her eyes flash mischievously. “You are naughty.”

“I’m just honest!”

“Naughty.” For good measure, she says it in Burmese, too.

For a while we wash in silence. Even though we’ve wet our hair, our heads are baking under the sun. But it’s lovely down here, by the water. Light refracts shreds of rainbow through the spray. “It’s hard work,” I say, and stretch my back.

“Yes. I like it, though. I love to have the clean clothes.” She dunks a lime-green shirt into the water, pushes it up and down, wrings it out. “That was my most difficult thing, with living in the prison. So dirty. We never had enough water for washing. There are more bugs in prison than in the jungle.”

“Where were you?”

“Insein. When I got out, I knew I couldn’t stay in Burma. I was too angry. I was a strike organizer at the university. When the MI picked me up, they wanted to know all the student-union names I knew. Four different groups of men interrogated me, tortured me over two weeks.”

The most common form of torture in Burma’s prisons is beating. I have had so many different kinds of beatings described to me, in such careful detail, that I sometimes dream of them. I am in the cell, watching, unable to say anything, unable to stop what happens. But such a dream is not really a dream. It is the hidden truth made visible by the imagination.

Beatings with the fists, with boots, with sticks, with leather belts. Beatings standing up, beatings squatting down naked with hands clasped behind the head. Beatings tied or handcuffed to a chair. Beatings until the individual’s face and body are bruised and swollen beyond recognition. Beatings until the kidney or the liver or the spleen or the intestine is irreparably damaged; beatings that cause permanent paralysis. Beatings with a black hood over the head. As though the victim in the interrogation cell, through her actions and her voice, has become her own executioner.

Khaing Lin wore such a hood through several days of torture. It made everything worse, which was the point.

The water flows past us. I look at the long-limbed trees; their green leaves point to the red mud. Her words are sometimes inaudible, drawn away by the murmuring current. “Eventually, I told them. The names of the other students.” She is still ashamed. “But they had those names already. So they kept torturing me.”