I nodded uneasily.
He scurried down the steps and across the yard.
Through the open windows the first light of day was spilling into the house. Roosters were crowing, and the pigs below the house were awake now. I wanted to get up, light a fire, boil water, and make a little breakfast, but I felt too exhausted. Instead I just crawled deeper under the covers. I couldn’t get Thar Thar out of my head. He must have been an extraordinary individual. About my age. I wished I could have met him.
I was reminded suddenly of my brother and my mother. We had spent a lot of time together just the three of us, because my father frequently traveled or worked late. I remembered the events of a particular summer’s day. My mother, my brother, and I were at the beach on Long Island. I must have been six or seven years old. I saw them before me sitting on their towels and applying sunscreen on each other. Backs. Arms. Legs. Faces. Then they stood up and ran to the water, forgetting all about me. I ran after them and floundered in the waves, and while they swam farther out, I dug holes in the sand. That evening my thighs, arms, and nose were so red that my father took me to the doctor.
First- and second-degree burns.
More than skin-deep.
We weren’t close. Never had been. My brother and I, definitely not. But not my mother and I, either. Why, I never knew. I suspect that she didn’t, either. Maybe I, like Thar Thar, had crashed a party for two. I wondered whether they had planned to have me or whether I had been an “accident.” I didn’t know. It was not something anyone in the family ever talked about.
A full-grown New Yorker? With a small heart? Without much room to spare? But it was the only one she had.
I still lay wrapped up on the sofa when I heard U Ba coming back. He was out of breath and more excited than I had ever seen him. I detected a shadow of disappointment in his eyes when he saw that I was still in bed.
“She thinks the rumor is true.” He took a deep breath.
“One of the boys managed to get away?”
“Yes.”
His eyes turned to my big backpack.
“Can you pack just a few things for a short trip in your small bag?”
“Sure. Why?”
“We need to be on our way.”
“On our way? When?”
“Now. At once.”
“For how long?”
“A couple of days.”
“Where to?”
He considered it for a moment. “To the island.”
“Which island?”
“Thay hsone thu mya, a hti kyan thu mya a thet shin nay thu mya san sar yar kywn go thwa mai,” he said in Burmese.
“I don’t understand a word of it.”
Chapter 21
WE DIDN’T HAVE much to go on. The man we were looking for had apparently lived for years in Thazi, a city on the rail line between Rangoon and Mandalay, five hours by bus from Kalaw. He was married, had two or three kids. His father-in-law owned a garage on the main drag, where he supposedly worked as a mechanic. He was one of the young men hauled off by the military that morning in the village. After a few years he had managed to escape. Would he be able to tell us anything about Thar Thar?
We hitched a ride in the next pickup truck to Thazi. U Ba clambered onto the roof, where half a dozen young men were crammed among shopping bags and sacks. Someone lifted me onto the bed, where there seemed at first to be no space at all. The other passengers pushed closer together; a child sat on his mother’s lap, and I squeezed in between them and an old woman on a wooden pallet. We were so cramped that I began to sweat immediately and felt short of breath.
The road wound steeply in tight serpentines into the valley below. My anxiety increased with every turn. I felt sick and was on the verge of throwing up. Out. I had to get out. At the first stop I pushed my way into the open and climbed onto the roof with my brother. We sat in the very front above the driver, clenching the grill that we were sitting on. The vehicle was desperately overloaded. It leaned threateningly on every curve.
The road was full of potholes broadened by the rainy season. The shoulders dropped off precipitously. There were no guardrails or any other kind of safety structures. In the brush below us we could see the occasional wreck. My increasing panic was threatening to overpower me any moment. My brother sensed my fear.
“Look up at the sky. Breathe deeply and think of something else,” he said.
I tried it. Looked up, concentrated on my breath, and thought of New York, of Amy, my apartment. It didn’t make me any calmer. I thought of the sea. Of a long beach, the monotonous roll of the gentle waves, of U Ba’s voice coming to me in an endless stream of talk. I heard the singing of the novices at a monastery in the early morning and gradually felt calmer.
THE FIRST WE saw of Maung Tun were his long, thin legs. He was lying under a van, hammering away at something. The other mechanics with their longyis tied high and their sweat-soaked T-shirts regarded us with curiosity.
“Hey, Maung Tun,” one of them eventually called.
The hammering stopped. An oil-smeared man crawled out from under the vehicle.
He was as tall as I was, and he stared at us in surprise. A haggard man with close-set eyes, bushy brows, a narrow face, strong cheekbones, and a deep scar on his forehead. Lips and teeth stained red from the juice of betel nuts. He was missing two fingers on his left hand.
Maung Tun’s eyes flitted back and forth between my brother and me. U Ba asked him something. He nodded, irritated, grabbed a rag, and tried without much success to clean his hands.
U Ba spoke again, and though I did not understand a word, I knew approximately what he was saying. We wanted to invite him to a teahouse or, if he was hungry, to a nearby Chinese restaurant.
Maung Tun nodded and said something to the other men, who returned to work.
“He’s not hungry,” my brother whispered to me, “but he’ll gladly join us at a teahouse.”
IT WAS MUCH hotter in Thazi than in Kalaw. The glaring light was blinding. I put on my sunglasses and then took them right off again. It made me uncomfortable being the only one with protection against the sun.
U Ba and Maung Tun walked a couple of yards ahead of me, deep in conversation. We crossed the main street bustling with traffic. Vans, tractors, trucks, and buses rolled past amid oxcarts, a horse-drawn carriage, pedestrians, and bicycles. The surface of the road was dry and sandy. Every passing car kicked up a cloud of dust. In the middle of the street U Ba suddenly stopped, held firmly on to me, and started to cough. Maung Tun gripped him under one arm and led us both safely to the other side.
In the teahouse Maung Tun lit a cigarette, took two deep drags, turned and said something to me.
I looked at my brother for help.
“He would like to know why you are interested in Thar Thar,” he translated.
I had been expecting that question, and in order not to make a fool of myself by admitting that I heard voices, I had concocted an elaborate story about distant relatives of Thar Thar who now lived in America and were coincidentally my neighbors and who had asked me to … but before I could make any reply U Ba was answering for me.
“What are you telling him?” I interrupted.
“That you hear the voice of his dead mother and that you need to know what happened to Thar Thar if the voice is ever going to leave you in peace.”
Maung Tun nodded to me, full of understanding, as if my circumstance was the most natural thing in the world. He paused for a long while before saying a few words and gesturing to my brother that he should translate.
“He says that he does not like to talk about his time as a porter. Not even his wife knows anything about it. But for Nu Nu he will make an exception. She deserves to know what happened to Thar Thar. She deserves to know what a hero her son was.”
I thanked him. Also on Nu Nu’s behalf.
Maung Tun put out his cigarette, leaned forward, and started to tell.
Chapter 22
THE SOLDIERS HAD rolled o
ut barbed wire in a field just outside the village, and they used that to pen us up. It was a cold night. We sat in a tight circle to keep warm. Thar Thar and Ko Gyi were sitting right next to me. I knew them both well. We were the same age, and we used to play together as kids. Thar Thar took his brother, who was shivering from head to toe, in his arms. The soldiers had forbidden us to speak. No one said a word. I heard nothing but the loud wheezing of fear. Suddenly a soldier shouted into the night that Ko Gyi and Thar Thar should come to the gate. They both stood up, and I recognized their mother waiting for them in the moonlight. They stood whispering not far away. Ko Gyi shook his head again and again. Nu Nu was crying. At some point she took him by the hand and tried to lead him away. He wouldn’t go. Then the two brothers stood face-to-face one more time. Ko Gyi put something around Thar Thar’s neck. Two soldiers came and ordered Nu Nu to clear out and drove mother and son away into the darkness.
Thar Thar watched them go. He stood at the barbed wire, motionless. For minutes. The guards kept calling out for him to go back to the others and sit down—immediately!—but Thar Thar did not react. Only when a soldier shoved the butt of his rifle with full force into his side did he shudder, turn around, and come back to us. I was horrified when I saw his face. His eyes looked bigger, his cheeks were sunken, he was pale, and now he was the one shivering.
He stood there in the middle of us all and kept looking toward where his mother and brother had disappeared. The soldiers were making vile threats and some of us tried to pull him down by his hands, but he shook us off. Eventually things quieted down, and I fell asleep. Thar Thar was still standing there when I woke up at daybreak.
Thar Thar and I huddled side by side in the truck that brought us to the barracks. He sat slumped on the boards, not holding on. The truck was jolting severely and his head kept smacking into the wall until the blood ran into his face. It stank something awful in the truck because some of us had vomited. Thar Thar seemed not to care about the blood or the stench.
At the camp an officer divided us into two units. Some of us went straight onto another army transporter and then drove on. I wound up with Thar Thar in a smaller group that stayed at the barracks. I found out only later that that had saved our lives, at least for a start. The others went straight to the front, and as far as I know, not one of them got through the next few months alive.
The officer split us again into smaller groups. If you had any experience as a metal worker or a mechanic they would put you in the workshop. Others went to the laundry. They asked Thar Thar if he could cook. When he nodded they shipped him off to the kitchen and me with him.
We spent nearly two years in the barracks. Compared with what followed, that was the good life. They rarely hit us without cause; there was almost always enough to eat; we slept on pallets in one of the barracks. In winter we even got a few blankets that we shared.
Thar Thar quickly earned a measure of respect, because he was an extraordinarily good cook. His specialty was a sweet rice cake. I’m pretty sure his cooking was about the only thing between us and the front; the officers didn’t want to miss out on his food.
My survival depended on his. I made every effort to make myself an irreplaceable assistant: cleaned, peeled, and cut vegetables, cooked rice, slaughtered hens when the higher officers had a hankering for meat.
I think that some of them found Thar Thar creepy after a while. He hardly spoke more than a handful of sentences during the whole two years. He did his work in silence, no matter what they assigned him, answering with a nod or a shake of his head, avoiding all conversation. He never laughed at jokes. If they were at his expense he just ignored them. Threats got no reaction at all out of him. A commandant smacked him in the face and threatened to send him to the front the next day because a meal was not ready on time. Thar Thar stared at him in silence until the commandant turned away uneasily.
There were some who took his lack of fear as a sign that he was simpleminded. Others thought he was mute. I knew he was neither, and I was already in awe of his courage even before I had any idea of what was to come. Thar Thar was the bravest person I’ve ever met.
Even when he got injured he never said a word. One time he tipped over a pot of boiling water. It ran down his legs, but he winced only briefly. He looked at the scalded flesh as if it belonged to someone else.
IN OUR QUARTERS the pallets were packed so close together that you could hear your neighbor’s stomach growl. During the first year I heard him crying at night now and again. Sometimes he would reach out for my hand in the dark and squeeze it so tight that it hurt. He always held on for a long while.
Whenever I asked him whether I could do anything for him he would always answer “No, thank you.”
Thank you.
I had practically forgotten that those words even existed.
Only sleep would loosen his tongue. In the night he would call out to his mother or father. Or mutter sentences where I could make out only fragments.
I always wanted to ask him what happened that night when his mother came to get Ko Gyi, but I never dared to.
When the military started to prepare for a big offensive against the rebels, Thar Thar and I ended up getting shipped off to the jungle, too.
By that time we’d heard enough stories from the soldiers to know that our chances of coming back alive were next to none. Fear gnawed at me. As our departure approached I was unable to help him in the kitchen because I had diarrhea and vomiting. You wouldn’t have known from Thar Thar, though, that anything was different. I started to suspect what turned out in the jungle to be true: it just didn’t matter to him. He feared neither death nor dying. By the time I figured out what he was actually afraid of it was too late.
WHEN THE FATEFUL moment arrived, the soldiers crammed us onto two open trucks. We drove the whole day without a break until we reached a base camp late in the evening where a regiment was stationed. From there we would set off in smaller units on days-long—sometimes weeks-long—marches into the jungle.
The atmosphere in the encampment was completely different from the atmosphere in the barracks. The soldiers were nervous and aggressive, kicking and punching us without cause. If we had been beasts of burden they would have treated us better. At night we would wake up to shots fired into the darkness by guards who feared a rebel attack.
We slept on the ground in bamboo huts. There were no toilets for the likes of us. We had to do our business in a corner behind the huts where the shit was piled high. At dusk and dawn the mosquitoes would come after us. Whoever did not yet have malaria would be infected soon.
There wasn’t much to eat, almost always rice, some vegetables, and occasionally a bit of dried fish. The thirst was worse than the hunger. They rationed out the drinking water. We got whatever was left. Not much. Medication was only for soldiers. Festering wounds, bouts of malaria, pneumonia, snake bites. Any time one of us was seriously ill they would bring us to a hut at the far end of the camp. Precious few ever came back. We called it the Death House.
The daily routine was monotonous. We did the soldiers’ laundry and cooked, worked on the camp fortifications, repaired watchtowers, or deepened ditches. The rest of the time we sat around and waited. Only half the porters would return from any given deployment. At most.
A week after our arrival we got orders for our first mission. With twenty other porters we were to accompany two dozen soldiers who were supposed to be delivering food and ammunition to an outpost two days’ march away.
We set out at dawn. I was carrying a fifty-pound bag of rice; Thar Thar had an even heavier crate of hand grenades. He was the biggest and most muscular of us all, towering a couple of inches over even the captain, who was not what you would call short.
After the first couple of hundred yards our road plunged directly into the forest. Despite the early hour it was warm and moist. After a short time shirts and longyis clung drenched with sweat to our bodies. The hungry mosquitoes swarming all around us would not be driven off.
We followed a dirt track that led deeper and deeper into the jungle. Maybe two hours had passed when I started to feel that I couldn’t go on. My shoulders and legs ached miserably. We walked barefoot, and my feet were bloody because I had stepped on a branch full of thorns. I had no idea at that point just how much I was capable of.
Thar Thar was walking right behind me, and he saw that I was exhausted. He offered encouraging words, told me I would make it, it wouldn’t be far now, we’d be taking a break soon. When no one was looking he carried my sack of rice for a while.
The soldiers ordered us to take turns going in front. They would follow the first three or four porters at some distance, machine guns always at the ready. They were at least as scared as we were. If we walked into an ambush their chances of survival here in the jungle were not much greater than our own.
When my turn came my legs were quivering. Every step I took might trigger a mine. I felt paralyzed, incapable of setting one foot in front of the other. A soldier brandished his weapon threateningly, barking at me to pick up the pace. I cast Thar Thar a terrified look. He stepped forward and said that he would take my place in the lead. The soldiers looked at him suspiciously. A nutcase? A trap? An attempt to flee? Who was crazy enough to volunteer? In the end they didn’t really care who was risking his life for them, and Thar Thar took the lead. He stepped thoughtfully, but not slowly, his gaze intently scanning the ground and underbrush for anything suspicious. All at once he paused. A few yards in front of him the ground had been disturbed. Had someone buried something, or was it just some animal looking for food? We backed away, a soldier fired a couple of rounds at the spot, nothing happened. Thar Thar went forward and we followed a few yards behind.
EARLY IN THE afternoon we reached the edge of the wood. In front of us were fields where the rice stood knee-high in water. We had to get across. I could see by the soldiers’ reactions that they feared this stretch more even than the jungle. The captain shouted some orders. Each of the soldiers took a porter as a shield and walked close behind him. We walked along a causeway and were about halfway across when the shots rang out. At first I didn’t know what was happening, then I saw a bunch of the porters fall; the soldiers screamed in confusion, we jumped into the field and sought cover in the rice. I lay flat on the ground and dug my fingers hard into the mud. Thar Thar lay not far off.