The Burma Legacy (22 page)

It was good she could still remember those tender moments, because they softened her anger and made it easier to bear. There was something else about him she would never forget – his body twisting and shuddering beside her every night, in the grip of the evil dreams he would never explain.

For some time, Tin Su lay there, unable to sleep. Her body was exhausted but her mind wouldn’t let her rest.

Suddenly she heard a noise. Footsteps outside. But instead of passing on to one of the other homes further up the alley, they’d stopped outside her door.

She pulled up the sheet, holding her breath. The footsteps moved on, but hesitantly. She breathed again.

Moonlight filtered through the sackcloth curtains covering the one small window at the front of her room. The footsteps returned. More determined this time. Soft padding on the earthy ground right in front of her door. A shadow moved in the window. Someone trying to see inside.

Tin Su was afraid all of a sudden. She imagined dacoits – armed bandits. The knob rattled. She heard the creak of latch springs as it turned.

The door slowly opened, letting in a faint quadrant of light, just bright enough to show that her visitor was large. Shan people were tall. Someone from her
past? The brother she hadn’t seen for fifty years? Her younger son?

A thin beam of light shone from the visitor’s hand, swinging round the room until it found the white veil of the mosquito net.

‘Tin Su?’

Her heart quivered as if it were about to stop. This couldn’t be. Not
that
voice.

Then the visitor turned the torch on himself. The face was deeply lined. Haggard even. The hair that had once flowed like a mane was cropped short, its colour like snow.

‘Per-grin,’ she croaked. ‘You have come to kill me?’

Harrison hardly recognised her. She’d become skin and bone. Seeing her there in the flesh, cowering on the sleeping mat, stirred up emotions he’d spent most of his life suppressing.

He closed his eyes, feeling he was about to unravel.

‘You have come to kill me?’ she repeated, her voice thin and tremulous. She clutched the sheet to her chest.

‘How can you say such a thing?’ he croaked.

‘Because you must hate me,’ she told him.

‘How can you think that?’

He swung the torch beam until he found a chair, then sat on it, hunching forward in the vain hope it would ease the pain in his back. He’d put on a new patch before leaving Yangon but it had not yet reached its full effect.

‘Why you have come here? How do you find me?’

‘Than Swe.’ He indicated the young man standing in the doorway. ‘This is his grandson Saw Lwin.’

She was still clutching the sheet to her chest. ‘Please … you turn away so I put clothes on.’

The youth went outside and Harrison swung the
chair round, happy not to see how emaciated her once fine body had become.

‘You want I find place to stay for tonight?’ Than’s grandson called out.

‘Yes please.’

There was no room in Tin Su’s tiny abode and he was in no physical condition to sleep on the ground. He heard the boy scuttle off down the alley.

Harrison took measured breaths, switching on his defence mechanisms to choke off his feelings of guilt and shame. He made himself visualise the vile men who’d paid Tin Su to have sex with them, so he could feel disgusted by her.

Tin Su’s shaking hands made it hard for her to tie the knot in her
longyi
. Once dressed, she lit a small oil stove to heat some water for tea. Then she just stared at him, her arms limp at her sides.

‘I did something wrong?’ she asked. The question had tormented her for nearly forty years. ‘Why you don’t write to me and don’t want to see me again.’

‘No, Tin Su. It was I who did something wrong. I’ve come to say sorry.’

Her face creased in a frown. She didn’t understand.

‘Please,’ said Perry, beckoning her towards the table. ‘Let us sit together.’

Still not certain this wasn’t a bad dream, Tin Su complied, sitting upright on the rush-seated chair with her hands clasped tightly on her lap.

‘How are you, Tin Su?’ It was a stupid question but the only way he could think of beginning.

She didn’t answer. He didn’t expect her to. She wouldn’t know where to start.

‘Tell me about our sons. I … I never really knew them.’

For a while she didn’t reply, fearing her voice would betray her feelings.

‘They were beautiful children,’ she whispered eventually. ‘Not often fighting. Khin Thein put up with very much from Mo Win who was like you, Per-grin. Always worries in his head. Could never say what. Very like you …’

She talked of the hardships of bringing them up alone. The difficulty of earning money. Then she looked away, wondering how much Than Swe had told him.

‘I know what you had to do,’ Perry said. ‘The shame is mine, Tin Su, not yours.’

She got up from the chair to make the tea.

‘Tell me about 8.8.88. The last time you saw Mo Win.’ It was the first time he’d called him by his Burmese name. ‘Michael,’ he murmured.

As she poured water into the pot, she began to tell him about the people’s anger at their incompetent military rulers in the sweltering summer of 1988. The eighth day of the eighth month of that year had been chosen as an auspicious date for the masses to take to the streets in protest.

‘Khin Thein suspecting the military only sleeping. He stay at back of crowd,’ she whispered, carrying a tray back to the table. ‘But Mo Win won’t listen. Always in front, close to people who speaking. And
when the tanks come, when the soldiers start shooting, he can’t get away. We don’t know what happen to him. Ask at hospitals. Then I ask the army. Where is he? Have they taken him? They question me. All day. Wanting to know name of his friends.’ She sniffed back tears. ‘Our son want to change Myanmar, Per-grin. To make it better after long sickness. Like doctor – that’s what he say last time I see him.’

She searched her former husband’s face for some sign that he felt what she felt, but all she saw in his eyes was the confusion and mania of an old man.

‘And Khin Thein?’ Harrison asked. It was his surviving son he had to be concerned about. The only one he could help.

‘I see him in the prison. Insein. Today. He very thin. Food no good. I take fruit for him.’

‘Tin Su, I want to go and see him.’

His bald statement knocked the breath from her.

‘Not possible,’ she whispered, full of fear.

‘We must
make
it possible, Tin Su.’

The intensity of his insistence took her back to the first time they’d met. His refusal to take no for an answer.

Reluctantly she told him of the mechanics of visiting the prison. Two visits per month for members of the family. Next visit not due for another couple of weeks.

‘I can’t wait two weeks.’ There was another way. There always was. And in Myanmar the bribe wouldn’t need to be large. ‘To whom do I give a present?’

Tin Su told him that 100 kyat slipped quietly to the
officer in charge of the prison guards might be sufficient for a Burmese to secure an extra visit. The equivalent of twenty pence, he calculated.

‘You’ve done that?’

‘No. But I hear people talk.’

Harrison saw her lips flicker. Some little story had occurred to her. She liked stories, he remembered. Used to garner them from her friends to amuse him when he returned from work.

‘This officer – the bell to his house is at the back door, not the front. And down low. Close to ground. Because visitors always come on their knees. And they carrying heavy presents.’

He smiled condescendingly. ‘We will go there tomorrow, you and me.’

The protest in her eyes died quickly, as he knew it would.

Than’s grandson returned. He’d found two rooms in a small guest house. Ten dollars a night for Harrison because he was a foreigner and one dollar for himself. The rooms were simple but clean, he said.

Harrison stayed on with Tin Su long enough to make arrangements for the morning, then, feeling utterly drained, he hobbled down the alley to where they’d left the car.

Five minutes later he lay in a narrow bed with a lumpy mattress, longing for sleep to deaden the pain. In his mind as well as his body.

Myanmar

The next day, Tuesday, 11 January

It was dawn when they began the drive back to Yangon. Against her will, Tin Su guided them to the township on the outskirts of the capital where the prison officer lived. Then, quivering with embarrassment at being seen with a European, she led her one-time husband to the door – it
was
at the rear of the house – and explained on his behalf what they wanted.

The prison officer was in his uniform and appeared to be about to go to work. He spoke no English, but the alarm their request created was evident on his thin, light brown face. An Englishman arriving at the jail would stand out like a sore thumb. There’d be questions from above. Reports would be filed to Military Intelligence. No. It would be very hard to arrange – Harrison understood his drift even before Tin Su translated.

Then he produced a fifty-dollar note. Tin Su had told him not go above twenty but the situation was desperate. The man’s eyes doubled in size at the sight of the money. He pocketed it quickly and told them to come back the same time the following day.

Harrison twitched with frustration. There was a clock ticking inside him whose spring was about to run down. He suggested Tin Su remain in Rangoon until tomorrow, fearing that if he let her go she wouldn’t come back. He offered her a room at his hotel, but she begged to be allowed to return to her home alone.

In fact he was relieved. Conversation in the car on the journey to Yangon had been a strain. Than Swe had been right. Forgiveness was not in Tin Su’s gift. After the initial confused emotions of seeing him again, she resented his presence here, telling him there was nothing he could do to make amends for having abandoned her. And she wanted nothing from him. Not even the belated benefit of his money.

He got Saw Lwin to arrange for another student friend to drive her home, with instructions to collect her again early the following morning. Then Than’s grandson took him back to the Inya Lodge Hotel. Inside the lobby there were still three people behind the desk and still no sign of other guests.

He retired to his room and lay on the bed, telling Saw Lwin to wait for him. It wasn’t the pain that was troubling him this morning but a feeling of impending failure. In his bones he knew he would not be allowed to see his son, and even if he were, Khin Thein would probably be embarrassed to see him rather than glad. And as to the other purpose of his journey, without the physical assistance of Rip it seemed impossible that he’d be able to complete it.

He rested for thirty minutes then forced himself to get up again. There
were
things still to do, because
however deep his despair he had to press on. And hope for a miracle.

Back in the car again, Saw Lwin drove him beyond the northern outskirts of Yangon. Nondescript industrial sprawl gave way to agricultural land, orchards and water buffalo. Then, coming up on the right, Harrison saw a denser, darker patch of ground. Trees had been planted in an orderly way, surrounding a compound bounded by a perimeter wall. Emotions welled up. He began the measured breathing tactics he’d learned years ago, to keep them under control.

Saw Lwin pulled up outside a wrought-iron gateway. There was one other car there, its driver waiting patiently for his passengers to return.

‘Not quite sure how long I’ll be,’ Harrison mumbled as he eased his legs out of the car.

‘I wait here. No problem.’

Straightening his painful back and placing a soft bush hat on his head as protection from the sun, he stepped across the threshold, then stopped to catch his breath. He’d forgotten how large the cemetery was, line upon line of stone tablets set out in the grass, the morning light glinting off their polished granite. Twenty-seven thousand Allied soldiers who’d died in Burma and Assam were commemorated here, including several Harrison had counted as friends.

Fighting for self-control, he began moving between the rows. The orderliness of the place struck him as a terrible deceit when he thought of the vile circumstances in which the men had met their ends.

He faltered as he read the names, ranks, regiments. He’d been twenty-one years old. Picked because he
knew Burma. A lieutenant in charge of men much older than himself. And a couple of them lay here in front of him. He could smell the jungle again. The damp earthiness, and the pungent mix of stale rice, sweat and human waste that he’d come to know as the whiff of Jap.

The date on the stones, 29 March 1943, was etched in his memory as deeply as into these pieces of polished granite. That day their infantry column had been picking through dense thorn to avoid a swamp not marked on maps. They’d been exhausted when the ambush happened, their spirits frayed by eight weeks of short rations and long marches. Two men cut down beside him.

These two, in front of him now. Corporal Dent.

A smiling face, a heart of gold
,

No dearer one this world could hold
.

And Private Billings.

Beloved Tom. Forever in our memory
.

Harrison’s chest quivered. He clamped a hand to his mouth. He’d shut out these feelings for so long, but he needed to experience the pain of them again, if he was to have the steel to achieve his goal.

He walked on, reading more inscriptions. Then he stepped up to the colonnade in the centre of the cemetery and stared at the huge stone tablets. Indians, Australians, New Zealanders were listed there, their remains lost forever. Also reading them
was an elderly Sikh. For a moment the two men’s eyes met in mutual acknowledgement. Then they bowed to one another and continued with their sad and solitary business.

At the end of the colonnade Harrison stepped onto the lawn again. The air was heavy with scent. Beneath the trees that edged the cemetery, two young girls in white shirts and dark
longyis
were making garlands from fallen blossoms. They were laughing. This solemn place had becometheir playground. Harrison felt a rush of anger. He wanted to tell them of the awful things he’d experienced in their country in a bygone age, but knew they wouldn’t want to hear. He turned away, shutting them from his sight.