The Blue-Eyed Shan (15 page)

“If a Bghai Karen marries out of his rank in life, he is strangled in a pit.” The cheroot glowed.

“I never knew that,” Greenwood said, truly pleased. “You see: for the moment I am your student, and you are my master. But the Kachin too can be cruel to their own. They used to eat their old ones, and some still do.”

“Yes, yes,” Jum-aw said with excitement. “They set them on high wooden platforms and poked them with long poles unti they fell off and were killed.”

“But again without malice. Only relatives and intimate friends were invited to this convivial ceremony, and afterward they made many sacrifices.”

“Some did not eat their elders,” Jum-aw said with assurance. “Some buried their elders beneath the floor of the longhouse.”

“That is true, and the spirits of the elders, now at rest, brought luck and prosperity to the village.”

“So it is not simple,” Jum-aw said.

“It is life, and life is not simple. A Kachin woman must be faithful to her husband; but before marriage she may try any number of men, to be sure she selects one she can be faithful to. The Shan may take three wives, but a wife may divorce her husband and keep her property.”

“You had a wife?”

“Not quite. Because I am not a full Shan, but a foreigner and adopted, I had a concubine to whom I was faithful. The Shan call them ‘little woman.'”

“And now?”

“And now I am returning to Pawlu and I do not know what I may find; as I no longer know the way to Pawlu for sure, and have asked your help.”

“You have it,” Jum-aw said firmly. “I have known round-eyed men before and never have I liked one. I like you.”

“My heart fills,” Greenwood said. “I like you.”

“Then ask me another riddle. Your riddle gave me great pleasure.”

Greenwood considered. Again they listened, again they sensed no danger. Again the tree frogs' chorus drifted up from the valley. “Well, then,” Greenwood said, “you know about malaria.”

“I have seen men shiver and burn.”

“It is borne by mosquitoes.”

“I have been told that. It is not easy to believe.”

“They take the bad blood from one, and their bite passes it to another. And you know that many Shan, most of the lowland Shan, suffer from malaria, and that it disappears sometimes for years and then returns.”

“I know.”

“But the monks—you are a Buddhist?”

“My people worship trees, thunder, tigers and certain hills.”

“Once more I am your student.” Again the cheroot reddened.

“About the monks,” Jum-aw said.

“Yes. Among the monks there is very little malaria. Now, why is that?”

“Because they are men of the Lord,” Jum-aw said promptly.

“But even virtuous men who are not monks fall sick, as do some very godly monks. Think and try again.”

After a moment Jum-aw said, “Because they live in monasteries and do not mingle with the sick.”

“And how if the mosquitoes mingle, what then?”

Jum-aw was now silent for some time. They sat motionless and hooded, ancient travelers in an eternal landscape. Jum-aw said, “I am your student. You must tell me.”

“Well, you came close,” Greenwood said. “I think, I am not sure but I think, that the mosquitoes are sickened by incense, and so avoid it, and here the monks burn incense day and night in praise of the Lord.”

“Then it
is
because they are men of the Lord!”

“By all the gods, you are right!” Greenwood laughed with him. “And who is now the student? But it is not as simple as you first thought, is it?”

“No, it is not. Here, my friend. There is one good cloud left in this cheroot. And that is plenty of riddling for one night.”

“It is.” Greenwood drew in a lungful of sweet smoke, then snubbed the butt in the dry, crumbly earth. “We must listen awhile, and then sleep.”

They listened awhile, and heard an owl. They observed the heavens, and saw the Hunter stride high. They lay quietly in their blankets, and the stars dimmed. They slept, and when they opened their eyes in the opal dawn, they saw six men in turbans seated upon the ground, calm, curious and lavishly armed.

6

The Burma Road Out

General Yang's column straggled on. Communists were variously reported to the north, south and east, but always hot on the trail. When the tail of the column fell behind because Colonel Prince Nikolai Andreevich Olevskoy fell into a drunken stupor compounded by sexual exhaustion, General Yang was obliged to administer a polite but public rebuke.

Olevskoy was sufficiently bitter without that. He had spent much of his youth fleeing eastward, and much of his middle age fleeing westward, and now the trucks were backfiring false alarms, brake drums wearing through, spark plugs fouling, air filters clogging and mechanics deserting. He had no desire to walk to the Burmese border—indeed no desire to visit Burma at all—and his nostalgia for the cavalry was passionate: if he must flee west, how he would enjoy leading a squadron across Asia!

Furthermore, the skies were a shiny pewter-gray, with never the relief of a good rain.

Furthermore, the road was in terminal disrepair and road crews had vanished in the prevailing chaos.

Furthermore, Hsiao-chi—in time he had asked her name—was physically grimy.

And a bridge was out, its sheet-metal tracks torn up for shacks or pots or crude plows; for two days the battalion bivouacked and bickered and reluctantly learned construction.

And bandits were reported to the west.

In five days the column had managed ninety miles; Olevskoy could have doubled that with horses. His headache was chronic; he announced himself unfit for active duty and retired to his vehicle.

He was at any rate traveling first-class, as became a prince. He and his paramour were the only passengers in a light canvas-covered truck; they reclined on mattresses, were warm between quilts and messed from the same cauldrons and pans as the general staff, Yang, Wei and Ho.

Even this relative luxury he found insufficient. True luxury, he decided, was a hot bath. In his truck were Scotch whisky and American cigarettes, the practiced endearments of a mistress, and the privacy due his rank and lineage; all he desired was a hot bath. Perhaps this Pawlu was a famous hot spring. He would bathe twice a day. Perhaps Pawlu was the capital of a utopian Asiatic hot-bath culture, its secret jealously guarded these many centuries, its borders patrolled and approaches barred by a corps of barbered and perfumed tribesmen in immaculate silk robes, the sensual refinements of its spas administered by bevies of adolescent girls in gauze trousers.

They would be infinitely preferable to his present rancid companion, who was, he conceded, considerably better than no body at all. He simply refrained from mouthing her, while allowing her to relieve him a variety of childish ways. He spent his days and nights lolling, drinking, smoking and remembering. He gave himself over to an orgy of recollection. The present was impossible. The future was opaque. In the distant past lay all that he loved.

His first memory was of his father weeping. Even now his heart and mind could almost relive the shock of that enormity, and of the sudden jabber that broke through the tears: his father, Prince Andrei Alexeevich Olevskoy, tall as a tree, broad as a barn, straight fair hair like a tumbled sheaf of wheat, weeping silently, tears gushing from Arctic eyes down ruddy cheeks like twin glaciers thawing over sandstone, and then, “Port Arthur! Mukden! Tsushima!” The god had crushed the boy in a wracking, clumsy embrace. Olevskoy was confused about the spate of words that followed but could recall, “Ce sont des animaux, mon fils, des animaux, ces Japonais!” And then a babble of warnings, admonitions, instructions, the gist of which was that these Japanese must—if not now, then in the boy's lifetime—be exterminated, or at least reduced to serfdom and slavery before they destroyed the Christian world.

The boy was appalled. He was four years old and his world was Sobolyevo, the Olevskoy estate, and beyond Sobolyevo were places like Berezhov and St. Petersburg and ultimately a vast and glorious land called Russia; and that vast and glorious land had been invaded, overcome, perhaps overrun, by treacherous, dwarfish creatures from some other world. “Remember! Remember!” the god had cried, and the boy had stammered, “Oui, Papa! Oui!” All his life “Tsushima!” had rung in his memory like a curse.

Well, Olevskoy had not done badly. He had exterminated a few Japanese in his time. He had also killed Russians, at least one Czech in a brawl over a Siberian woman, innumerable Chinese for unremembered reasons, and a variety of less defined people in a variety of places and uniforms—Muslim Communists from the northwest, Mongolians, assorted tribesmen, uncomprehending women and children trapped and annihilated like insects by the fumigatory techniques of modern war.

It was not precisely what his father had expected, but neither had his father expected to lose Sobolyevo, and his peasants, and finally his life. Olevskoy remembered Sobolyevo with a fierce ache that thirty-three years had not assuaged. There was a bridge crossing the brook that fed the pond: “No carp,” his father said, “they're trash fish and eat the trout. Good only for French kings, formal gardens and enclosed fountains.” Olevskoy fils, the little prince, dashed across the bridge with old nurse Marya screeching after him and her son Prohor, a year older than Olevskoy, stocky and powerful, pig-eyed already, light brown hair cropped to a centimeter, panting, “Go easy, boy. If you tumble and bleed she catches hell,” and a bit later it was not “boy” but “Nikolai Andreevich.” It was Prohor he would always remember staggering into the great hall under towering armfuls of quartered logs, Prohor with whom, each spring, he had spurred a pony on that glorious day, the real hinge of the year, when it was permitted to ride after dinner; when the sun lingered; when mangy brown earth swelled through the falling snow; when roads became bogs; when flocks of kids and lambs, already weeks old, appeared as if by magic on greening hillsides.

Little Olevskoy also loved the barns on summer evenings. Once at dusk, when half the cattle in the west meadow were down for the night and the other half hesitantly ending their graze on the cool swatches of lush summer grass, Prohor had called him out to the horse barn. The two of them raced, nine years old, ten, and in the dreamy yellow lantern light of the high barn that smelled of sweet hay and rich manure his father and old Uncle Pyotr, Prohor's father—“uncle” the affectionate title—were standing vigil over a straining mare, down and sweaty. “It's the off forefoot,” Uncle Pyotr said. Enormous shadows swayed on the walls, the stalls, the high beams.

Olevskoy pere asked, “Will you go in?”

“I must,” said Uncle Pyotr. “Should the boy see?”

“He is old enough.” And to the boy Andrei Alexeevich said, “The foal is badly presented. Come closer.

Olevskoy saw the mare's vulva, distended, a tiny muzzle and a tiny hoof peeping out. He saw blood and was momentarily queasy; slime. “At birth,” his father was saying, “the forehoofs should be together, directly beneath the lower jaw. You've seen the lambs come. But one foreleg has gone awry. Do you understand?”

Olevskoy understood. He nodded over and over, unaware that he was nodding, eyes wide, one hand tight on Prohor's arm. His father gestured; Uncle Pyotr dipped both hands into a bucket, washed them and his forearms, and knelt. He inserted his right hand, groped, and entered further, to the elbow. The mare stirred, tried to heave, whickered once. Uncle Pyotr probed. Olevskoy was breathless. The foal's muzzle oozed, sticky, glistening. It will die, the boy told himself. It cannot breathe. It is already dead. Oh Lord God let it live.

Uncle Pyotr grunted and tugged. Bracing his left hand on the mare's rump, he tugged; “Ah,” he said. Slowly his arm emerged, slick, dribbling. “Ah.” A last quick tug, and beside the first hoof the boy saw a second, and suddenly the foal's head surged out, and two forelegs, and in another moment—Olevskoy could never be sure that he had not heard a sucking
pop
!—a tiny wet horse slithered to the straw. The mare's flanks heaved.

Olevskoy père knelt quickly. “A colt. Another son for Rurik.”

Uncle Pyotr sloshed water between the mare's hind legs. “Now, if she doesn't take infection.”

“Yes,” murmured Olevskoy père. “Always that.”

Uncle Pyotr glanced quickly at the prince and away. A few years later, when the boy understood that his mother had died of puerperal fever, he recalled that glance.

The men and boys stepped back. The mare struggled, half rose, collapsed beside the colt; wearily, patiently, she licked at her foal.

“We'll see how she cleans out,” Olevskoy père said.

“The quicker the better,” Uncle Pyotr said. “I'll plaster her then with comfrey.”

Prohor too was entranced. Young Olevskoy was fascinated by this colt; he marveled at the blaze, like Rurik's. The colt wrinkled his muzzle; his ears quivered. Olevskoy fell in love. “Papa,” he whispered.

“Yes, boy?”

“Will he be mine?”

The prince laid a tender hand on the boy's head. “Do you want him?”

“I love him,” Olevskoy whispered.

“Then he shall be yours.”

And he was; and that was a better night than winter nights with his tutor, Monsieur Grandin, who had a tic; when he corrected the boy a corner of his mouth quirked, as if in apology or fear. “A moins qu'il
nnn
'y ait une guerre! N'oubliez jamais ce
ne
! Avant qu'il
ne
pleuve!”

So Olevskoy never forgot that
ne
, and only ten years old read stories in both French and Russian, learning each language from the other, stories of war and of peace, one of them about Cossack country and raids and skirmishes, by a count and not merely a scribbler, and he remembered that count's death too. Olevskoy père, reading a letter in the shiny old leather-covered wooden chair, a throne beside the fire, reared back snorting and said, “So! Lev Nikolayevich is dead in Astapovo! Count Tolstoy! Some count! Mikhail Kirilovich says here the old man used to sit in the gardens at Yasnaya Polyana with flies wandering his face, and tell people, ‘They are God's creatures as well as I and have the same right to a free and unfettered existence as I.' Mischa goes on. ‘Free, yes, but not on my face. What would it have cost him to give a small, kindly wave and simply make them fly somewhere else? It would have cost him being Tolstoy.' Well, God rest him. He was a fine buck in his youth, but I tell you, these last years he was not only a fool but a pain in the backside.” (Five years later Olevskoy, fourteen and infatuated with Prince Bolkonsky, with Count Vronsky, with Anna and above all with Natasha, blushed to recall his father's words. And four years after that, wading an icy river with Semenov after a disastrous skirmish against a mob of Reds near Irkutsk, he had in midstream recalled that judgment, and thanked his father for it, and wished Tolstoy and all such sanctimonious populists in hell.)