The Blue-Eyed Shan (13 page)

Yang maintained the courtesies and observed the Sawbwa, and after the banquet he asked if he might chat comfortably with him, through an interpreter. The Sawbwa condescended. Greenwood eavesdropped. Conversation lurched, stalled, flowed, ceased. The Sawbwa pressed a hand to his back and grimaced. “Ah, you too,” Yang said with profound sympathy. The Sawbwa showed interest. Yang spoke mournfully. “Gravel. Had it for years. Kidney pains in the morning, kidney pains at night.”

“By the gods, yes!” frothed the Sawbwa. “In the morning and at night.”

“In the morning and at night,” Yang affirmed, nodding lugubriously, and thus was born an alliance. Pawlu smothered Yang with affection when he overcome his back pains and sat a pony, charging with the rest to scatter the Wild Wa east of the village, using a bamboo stick for pointer and mapping tactics, smoking up cheroots and slugging down good mountain rum. Wan suggested a tattoo. Greenwood felt a pang of jealousy, which was allayed when Phewin, venerable now, declared the suggestion premature. Among the women there was a brief contention, as many strove to drag the general home; he remained aloof. Not two moons had passed before he was escorted to Nan-san bearing letters, messages, addresses, and united with Chinese irregulars who would see him safely to the interior; but they were two unforgettable months. Yang in a turban, pinching silver into its conical crown, Yang firing at Wild Wa from ponyback, Yang telling of his parachute jump, Yang drawing China in the dust and bringing the infinitely distant war home to Pawlu. His departure left Pawlu bereft, as if a whole vivacious family had rolled up its blankets and marched forever away.

The day came when Greenwood too departed. For six years he had not seen his native land, parents, jalopies, girdled women. When the war ended, homesickness, overpowered him. The cozy leathery smoky shelter of a paneled library; the shrewd infighting at conclaves of learned societies; tweed jackets and sherry; the advance of the human mind: his obligation now to pass along what life had taught him—all that tugged him back.

His farewells were melancholy but not too sad to be borne. Among the Shan too there was a sense of completion, time now to return to the old ways, to put war and foreigners out of mind and into legend. Greenwood, Loi-mae and Lola shed tears, but they were not the tears of despair; acceptance, rather, sorrowful resolution, the will of the gods.

He rode to Hsenwi by pony with Kin-tan for escort, to Lashio by jeep and to Mandalay by plane. He marched into headquarters—somebody's headquarters; who were these pale men in pressed shirts and shined shoes?—wearing his beard, cotton mountain clothes and well-silvered turban, carrying a submachine gun, feeling at once heartsore and immensely curious about the modern world. He discovered that he was a captain. He was given large amounts of money. He was placed aboard an aircraft and wafted to Hanoi, Manila, Guam, Wake, Hawaii and points east, emerging finally, huge and hairy, to horrify his tiny old parents and enrapture his little sister, now more than nubile. His mother shrieked, uncertain whether to enfold him or flee. His father quailed, but proudly, and slapped him tentatively on one shoulder. Merciless, Greenwood roared greetings, hugged and kissed, raised his little mother high, announced that she and his father were grandparents, wore his turban through the airport and all the way home, ate three sirloins for dinner and informed his adoring sister that incest was normal where he came from. “I had a letter from a
Chinese general
,” his gray-haired mother boasted. “He said you were a
hero
.”

“Yang will say anything,” Greenwood told her, enormously pleased. “He's the best they have. I love that man,” and he launched a few hero's tales. His parents' pride, his sister's admiration, tickled him; but in a matter of days deep depression gripped him. Greenwood was thirty-one years old and a hero in his own eyes and he was scared half to death of this clattering, frenzied new world.

In a month he had shaved his Wotan's beard and begun serving his life sentence. In a year he had typed his thesis on the Shan, sat for orals before a board of solemn owls who knew not one damn thing about the Shan, and become Dr. Greenwood. He celebrated his doctordom besieging, after a sumptuous dinner, a graduate student of noble proportions who, it transpired, was wearing a corset fabricated apparently of reinforced concrete and extending some four inches below the keep. The siege failed, the battering ram was withdrawn, Dr. Greenwood pitied American women and wept for Loi-mae. He encouraged a new beard. He taught. He drank rum. At a fusty tobacco shop he found beedies; he smoked them and became a character. Once each year he heard from Yang. He found a Thai restaurant redolent of familiar aromas. He knew that he would never be happy again, and actually considered returning to the armed forces.

He perked up when he received two copies of a strange letter, one forwarded by his proud mother, from Yang Yu-lin.

I can only say that I believe I know where they are, that they are the genuine article, and that I have a Japanese colonel who would prefer not to be hanged. If I send for you, come. Trust me. Say nothing. There is more at stake here than universities, armies, even countries.
Do as I ask
. There is none other I can trust.

No need to answer this; indeed, no way. I have spent eighteen interesting months in Peking but shall be on the move now. Manchuria, I suppose, to hold out for a bit longer. Can't imagine why; if you're a gambling man … but I must not say that. Ici tout est foutu comme l'as de pique. Victrix causa diis placuit, sed victa Yango.

Greenwood rummaged in dictionaries: “Everything here is fucked up in spades,” and something like “The gods favored the winners, but Yang backed the losers.” “If I send for you, come!” The old romantic Greenwood rejoiced and reminisced. That was the way to live: “If ever I send for you, one mile or ten thousand, never mind why,
do it
. Meet me at the Raffles in Singapore a week from Friday at noon:
do it
.” As for the bones, old Sinanthropus pekinensis, that was at best dubious; someone had stumbled upon plaster casts or clever fakes or “dragon's bones” in some rural pharmacy.

But when in October of 1949 Greenwood received the first of three identical letters (this one postmarked Hong Kong, the later two Macao and Tokyo), he never hesitated. It took him a month, and the influence of the president of the university (in the 1920s a secretary had informed a caller, “The president is in Washington visiting Mr. Coolidge”), to acquire a visa for Burma, and another week to reach Rangoon; and he stepped to the tarmac at Mingaladon blinded by his own tears; but he was shortly in Maymyo discussing air fares with Gordon-Cumming.

And now, a fortnight later, he was in Kunlong on the road to Pawlu. He and the boy Jum-aw washed at dawn and shared a breakfast of rice, crushed sugarcane and tea. It was fu-erh tea, real Shan tea, and the taste of it hummed in the American's head like a hymn of welcome. The two then saddled up—good heavy horse blankets with a stout stitched loop for a sometime stirrup.

The ponies were Kachin ponies, longer in the barrel and shaggier than Yunnan ponies, sandy brown in color and vile of disposition, though disciplined: a Kachin pony was unsalable until its owner could put it through its paces—four gaits—holding a full tumbler in one hand without spilling a drop.

Well, perhaps a drop. What was a drop or two among mountain men? Greenwood was an honorary Shan but continually crossed Kachin trails, rubbed elbows with Kachin wanderers, and could blurt his way through a campfire negotiation, or lying session, in rude Jinghpaw. He spoke it now to his pony, and Jum-aw trilled a short laugh: “‘Every time we say good-bye to a Shan, we say hello to a Kachin.'”

“Crazy country,” Greenwood agreed. “And on the ridges—”

“—the Wild Wa. And up north here—”

“some Lahu, and over by Bawdwin—”

“—some Palaung, and everywhere else—”

“—Karen and Burman.”

“Is it so in your land?”

They were lashing bedrolls along the ponies' necks, Kachin fashion, and not back on the crupper. “No, truly not,” Greenwood said. “My own land is a hundred days' ride from east to west—”

“Ah, ah,” the boy warned him.

“That is no lie,” Greenwood said firmly. “By all the nats I swear this.”

“One hundred days!”

“And fifty days from north to south,” Greenwood said, “and in all that land one language will suffice, though the manner of it varies, as with southern Shan and northern Shan.”

The boy was silent, absorbing this. Was it the silence of appreciation, or a gentle reluctance to express disbelief? Finally he said, “And are there birds?”

“There are birds, and bears, and goats, but not leopards or tigers or monkeys or elephants. I believe there are birds everywhere in the world, even on the mountaintops in Tibet, the deserts in Mongolia and the flat fetches of ice at the southern pole.” Greenwood knew he had gone too far.

“Ice in the south?” Jum-aw smiled sympathetically.

Greenwood retrieved the moment: “Did I say south? Curse this poor tongue of mine. Naturally I meant north.”

“Ah. Are we ready?”

“Food. Weapons. Ammunition. Fire. The rupee's worth of worldly goods. And you?”

“The same.” Jum-aw cocked his head and allowed himself a diffident admonition: “Your turban is ill-wound.”

“The habit is fallen away,” Greenwood said with regret. “It will improve each day.”

“Well then, let us begin. A safe journey.”

“A safe journey.”

They mounted, and took their ponies at a walk through Kunlong, the town coming to life in the early light, which was now golden and blue and green and no longer gray. For Greenwood it was like traversing, and then leaving, a metropolis. First the shops, temples, inns, the women at the wells or toiling up from the riverbank, men in vivid turbans and silver necklaces even now lighting cheroots and meeting in clumps to gossip and face east like sunflowers, the children squatting beside the road to pull apart the split seats of their knee-length pants. Then a thinning of the huts and houses, and a wider sweep of garden and farm, here and there even now a shell hole or bomb crater. Greenwood and Jum-aw rode side by side up the slope, out of town, out of the world, and then single file up the trail, bee-eaters and woodpeckers falling silent above them, toktays almost swarming on the broad-leaved shrubs at either hand, twice the crash and rustle of a wild pig or a startled hog deer invisible in the forest.

Too soon Jum-aw led them downhill to the main road again. Greenwood said, “Thank you. The forest was beautiful.”

“Even Tame Wa dislike roads,” Jum-aw said, slim and graceful astride his pony; his teeth flashed in a quick, self-deprecating smile. “Also the machines that travel them. But a rifle beats a bow for hunting, and the skill that braids rope is also the skill that hangs a man. No having the one without the other.”

“And the same skill built this bridge,” Greenwood agreed, as they paused by the abutment to contemplate this marvel of steel. “How did men cross the Salween before?”

“It was a day's march down to the water. Then at a double bend in the river—”

“Oxbow,” Greenwood said in English.

Jum-aw was puzzled.

“That is my people's word for the rounded yoke that collars an ox.”

“So.” Jum-aw nodded emphatically. “Just so. There the waters run slower, and eddies may help. At the downstream curve the raft was poled and sailed across. It was then hauled all the way up to the top of the upstream curve, and from there it made the return crossing. And then there was a day's march up the far side of the gorge.”

“The gorges are wonderous,” Greenwood said. “Either from the lip or from the bowl a great river gorge is a sight to speed the blood.”

“True. Then there are great rivers in your land also.”

“In all lands.”

“In the beginning God favored no one, or all alike.”

Greenwood shut up for a moment, to savor this remark. He recalled other visions of it. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal. Man is born free and he is everywhere in chains. History is something that never happened, written by a man who wasn't there. Had life once truly been a siesta in the Garden of Eden? “Do the Wa believe that all was once peaceful and beautiful and bountiful?” They were on the bridge now, and the unshod hoofs clopped softly.

“The Wild Wa believe that all is still peaceful and beautiful and bountiful, as long as they take a few heads each spring.”

Much of the time they rode in silence, the trail mainly rising but dipping at intervals to cross a valley or round a ridge low down. For some hours there was no intrusion of mankind. Greenwood saw cedars, pines and oaks, and in them squirrels. He saw a hawk gliding, a white harrier with black wing tips. His heart was at rest and he seemed to feel his tattoos glowing lightly, as if they too were a living part of this fertile landscape; but he kept his mind quick, and kept his eyes roving. The Wild Wa would not prowl here but others roamed, and these days no roamer roamed in peace and innocence.

At noon they tethered the ponies well off the trail, a quarter-mile into the forest, and cut slices off the cold quarters of broiled saing, rolling them around wild watercress, with bananas for dessert and water from the canteens. They debated a cheroot, and decided against it; a Kachin or a Shan could, as the proverb had it, sniff drifting smoke and tell you whether the cheroot was white or brown.

On the trail again they proceeded in silence. Jum-aw suggested a halt every half-hour or so for serious listening. And yet when they saw their first traveler it came as a surprise. Greenwood's knees dug in; as his left hand snubbed the rein his right grasped the tommy gun. Jum-aw's rifle was unslung in the same moment. They were side by side on a gentle downhill slope.

The man climbing toward them was old and ragged. He bore a bulging round sack slung crossways, and as he drew nearer they saw that his face was northern, a web of fine wrinkles and a parrot's nose. He wore no turban but a mangy fur hat, and on his feet were leather slippers with pointed toes.