“Well, you speak it beautifully.”
“You’re too kind. And thank you for answering my questions about Miss Bibi. I appreciate your frank answers on this difficult subject. And now I won’t interrupt your rest any longer.”
“No problem. If you have any other questions, fire away.” Bennie settled back and closed his eyes.
Walter stared out the window. He mused: In the last five generations of his family, all had had reasons to use English as part of their work. And at least one person in each generation before his had died as a consequence. English was their inheritance, the purveyor of opportunities. But it was also their curse.
WALTER’S GREAT-GREAT-GRANDFATHER had learned English as a lad when he did chores for a British teacher who ran a one-room school for colonial boys in Mandalay. As he went about sweeping in the courtyard, he listened to the voices of the teacher and his pupils floating out the windows. Later, he would trace the words written on the chalkboard before washing it clean. He was adept at learning, and the teacher recognized this, and eventually allowed him to sit at the back of the classroom. His English grew to be as beautiful as that of his employer’s children, with the right amount of crispness at the ends of words and roundness within. When he was twenty-seven, he was recruited as an interpreter for the British Raj. His command of the languages did not win him alliances with other tribes, however. In one remote outpost, neither the British nor the Burman presence was tolerated, and one day a hail of wild gunfire spattered trees and bushes, birds and monkeys, and Walter’s great-great-grandfather. It was amazing that no one else was killed.
As compensation for the interpreter’s death, his son was sent to study at a secular school for native boys, run by British educators. Thirty years later, this same boy, now grown, returned to that school as its first Burmese headmaster. While the academics were first-rate, the headmaster was just as proud that the school’s cricket team was undefeated among other native schools. One day, the team was invited to play against its British counterpart. The foreigners sat on the shaded side, in seats under awnings. The Burmese were seated in the sun. It was an especially hot day, and when the Burmese team won, the headmaster cried out, “Huzzah! Huzzah!” and then collapsed and died. Likely it was heatstroke, but that is not how the story of Walter’s great-grandfather was told. By the evidence of his last words, he died of English joy.
The son of the headmaster also found work in education. He taught in schools established by the missionaries who had flocked to Burma once the Japanese were run out. Through the mission school, he met a Burmese nurse with bright shining eyes who worked at the surgery. She, too, spoke impeccable English, having been raised since toddlerhood under the guardianship of a British couple, whose automobile accelerated for no apparent reason, then struck and killed her parents, who had been their devoted servants. One day, the nurse and three missionaries rode out to a village where there was a malaria outbreak among the new American teachers. On the way, their car ran off the road and overturned in a ravine. The nurse, Walter’s grandmother, was the only one killed—taken, some said, by the Nats of her parents. How else would one explain this third death by automobile in the family?
The nurse left behind her husband, three sons, and a daughter. Walter’s father was the oldest. He went on to become a journalist and a university professor. Walter remembered that his father, who was a stickler for grammar, had a favorite saying, which clarified the proper use of “good” and “well”: “While it is good to speak well, it is better to speak the truth.” Walter’s father had valued the truth more than his own life. In 1989, he was arrested after he joined students and other teachers in protesting the military. The fact that he spoke English was enough to convict him as a spy. Walter’s father was arrested and taken away, and a year later, a man who had been released from prison told Walter’s family that their father had died after a beating that collapsed his lungs.
Sixteen-year-old Walter, his sisters, and their widowed mother went to live with the children’s grandfather. It became a divided household. The grandfather now believed that English had been the cause of these tragic deaths in the family—his own dear wife’s, for one. Why hadn’t he recognized the pattern sooner? He forbade his daughter-in-law and grandchildren to speak English. The novels by Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen and all the other works by trouble-mongers were cast out, and Nat shrines replaced them on the bookshelves.
Walter’s mother, however, refused to give up English. She had not received it effortlessly as an inheritance. As a girl, she had struggled to learn the difficult twists of the tongue, and had passed one examination after another in the European code. By listening to her husband speak, she had improved her pronunciation, so that it was no longer like that of those students with the pidgin diction of their native teachers. Her mastery of the language was a blissful expression of the spirit to her, like playing a musical instrument. And her most intimate and private memories of her husband were in that language. What books and periodicals her husband’s father had not hacked to pieces, she locked away for safekeeping. On special occasions she took them out and read the stale news of magazines many years old, savoring them sparingly, as she did the waxy bonbons given to her one Christmas by a visiting professor from an American university, before it was illegal to let foreigners in one’s house.
For the past ten years, Walter’s grandfather and mother had refused to talk to each other, except through Walter. He spoke Burmese to his grandfather and English to his mother. There had been no better preparation for him in his career as tour guide, a career that required him to be adept at managing the misunderstandings of two people who spoke separate languages, while circumnavigating the same place at the same time.
But now and then, Walter wondered about his family’s curse by the English language. Was he next? How would it happen? And when?
THE BUS HAD STOPPED. Slowly, my friends roused themselves and straightened their cramped necks. Walter stood up: “This is not a photo opportunity, I’m afraid. We are at another checkpoint. We will be here for half an hour or so. For your safety and security, please remain on the bus.”
Safety? Security? The mention of those words caused my friends to feel unsafe and insecure.
Walter gathered his packet of passports, then stepped off the bus and headed for a booth. Outside, rifle-toting solders in camouflage were opening car trunks, removing boxes and suitcases tied to the roofs. Clothes lay strewn about, picked through by the soldiers. Boxes containing foodstuffs were opened. Some soldiers poked at a foam sofa that had been compressed and covered in plastic tarp, then wound in string, and strapped atop a station wagon. A flick of a knife, and the strings were cut, the tarp sliced through. The sofa was excised like a tumor, and freed from its confines, it expanded until it seemed impossible that it had ever been in such a small package. The passengers—three men and a woman—looked nervous and unhappy. An old woman approached the station wagon, offering eggs as snacks for sale. The occupants did not look at her. The sofa cushions were unzipped, and hands shot in and brushed back and forth. The soldiers ordered the people out of the car. As they scrambled to obey, one soldier barked that they were to stay with the car, not move away. The soldiers leaned into the car and patted the seats, the floor pads. They lifted out the backseats and ran their hands up the back cushion. They violently pried open the side panels on the doors. The passengers looked as though they were on the verge of either breaking down or running for their lives.
And then, all at once, they were told to get back in. One of the soldiers grunted, and the driver hurried to start the engine. In a few seconds, the car was gone, heading toward China. Now my friends could see a sign posted on the side of the checkpoint, written in Chinese, Burmese, Thai, and English: “The penalty for smuggling drugs is death.”
This made some of my friends wonder whether they had inadvertently brought in any illegal substances. The polar fleece vest, Wyatt remembered, and sat up. Had he searched all the pockets, the secret
ones as well? Was there a forgotten marijuana joint in one of them?
Bennie thought of a bottle into which he had thrown prescription pills of all kinds, in case of emergencies; some of the pills were Darvocet. Was that related to heroin? Did that count as drug smuggling, a reason to line him up against a dusty wall and fill him with bullets?
Heidi had a similar fear. She was tallying up the items that might be considered drug-related: the syringes, the multiple bottles of pills, and the tubing, the kind used by heroin addicts to pump up their veins. What else did she have? She wondered how she would be able to survive in a prison, let alone face imminent death alone.
It crossed Vera’s mind that some of her compatriots might have been less circumspect about the safety of others. Moff, for example, that so-called bamboo grower, had been a bit too keen to see the open markets where drug dealing was done. She stared hard at him. He was reading a book. She pictured him still reading, as they stood shackled in the dock in a closed courtroom, listening to unknown charges read aloud in Burmese.
Moff pretended to read, but kept an eye out for what was happening. Best not see too much. He had heard that the soldiers could be easily corrupted. Perhaps they were not searching for contraband at all, but stuffing their own blocks of heroin into tight spaces. Their contact on the China side of the border, another corrupt worker, would find it and send payment back in another car that had been duly “searched.”
Esmé threw her mother’s scarf over Pup-pup. Marlena squeezed her daughter’s hand, and reflexively, she also squeezed her left hand, which held Harry’s. Harry squeezed back. He was not overly worried. Tonight was the night, he was thinking. Esmé would have healthy little Pup-pup to sleep with, and he would have Marlena to play with. He reached into his pocket with his free hand, extracted a mint, and popped it into his mouth.
Walter returned to the bus. “Ladies and gentlemen, we have been given permission to proceed.” By then, several members of the group had developed upset stomach, which they thought was the result of high stress from waiting at the checkpoint. But in fact, unbeknownst to them, Shigella bacillus had finally multiplied in sufficient numbers to besiege and scour the linings of their bowels. This was the souvenir of the now forgotten meal served at a restaurant on the way to Stone Bell Temple.
Our travelers went ever deeper into Burma. The fields now resembled crazy quilts, with irregularly shaped plots and borders that never managed to run a straight line. The fields had been passed down in families, and their original boundaries had been marked by the natural growth of bushes. In those colorful fields stood haystacks shaped like stupas. Along streambeds, graceful ladies leaned over huge buckets and splashed themselves as part of their twice-a-day bathing ritual. Tiny children perched on water buffaloes, having already mastered perfect balance on a furry hump.
Dusk was approaching, as marked by the smell of smoke. Fires for the evening meal were being lit. A haze rose from each household and hovered over the land like a blanket of benediction. My friends turned and saw that the banks of the hills were the color of chilies, sharp tastes that brought tears to the eyes. Soon this deepened to blood red, and then the sun dipped past the end of the fields, the land and sky turned black, save for a slice of moon, a colander of stars, and the golden smoke of cooking fires.
7
THE JACARANDAS
The overhead lights of the bus came on, a feeble green, casting a pickled pallor upon the faces of my fellow travelers.
On the last leg, during the climb up the Burma Road into Lashio, the exhaust system on the bus had malfunctioned, and toxic fumes were sucked through the air-conditioning; my friends were made stupid with headache and nausea. Walter noted that even the noisiest ones—Wendy, Moff, Bennie, and Vera—had quieted into a daze. Then Mr. Joe, the usually morose driver, cried out that he had seen a Nat riding toward him on a white horse. Walter ordered that they pull over for fresh air. All the men tumbled off the bus, searching for privacy in the pitch-dark night and unknown vegetation. The women preferred to wait until they arrived at the hotel, which Walter promised was only a half-hour away. It was actually forty-five minutes, but he knew that would have sounded unbearably long.
For once, Harry did not need to use a loo. But he, too, left the bus, to clear his head. He and Marlena were suddenly at odds with each other, and he could not fathom why. In his mind, he had simply tried to show a bit of affection—this was in the way of rubbing her rump—and she had recoiled, as if he had been trying to sodomize her in front of her dozing daughter. She shot him a look, a castrating look. His ex-wife used to aim such a look at him frequently toward the end of their marriage, and he was an expert at interpreting it. It meant: “Not if you were the last sperm bank on earth.” Yet the night before, Marlena had been as passionate as he had been, he was certain of it. There was absolutely no reluctance there. She had reciprocated on the sidewalk of Ruili, providing fully fifty percent of their physics of frottage. Why this sudden turnabout?
The look Marlena gave him was actually one of mortifying distress. She, along with several others on the bus, was starting to feel the cramping effects of dysentery as it prepared to make its inexorable descent. How could she tell him, especially in front of Esmé, the reason that their ardor needed to be put on hold? Even if Esmé were not there, of all things to put a damper on romance, not this. Dear God, the agony, the inconvenience.
Rupert, Moff, and Bennie hurried off with feeble flashlights in search of a spot where they might have solid footing. Here, I averted my eyes. I would like to point out, however, the highly unfortunate coincidence that what an American takes to be an ideal outdoor toilet is what some Nats—perhaps the one who died of intestinal malaise—consider to be home sweet holy home, in this case, a small grove of jacaranda trees, still leafy in winter but missing their magnificent mane of lilac-colored blossoms. Cross-culturally, mistakes were made, unintentional to be sure, and nothing would have come of it had Rupert not yelled out: “Daa-ad! Dad! Do you have toilet paper?” He cursed, pulled out the paperback from his jacket pocket, and reluctantly ripped out pages he had already read. “Never mind!” he yelled again.
Thus shaken from a drinking game, two Nats in the form of military police jumped to their feet. Earlier they had left their guard posts and sneaked into the field, so that they might smoke cheroots and get drunk on palm toddy. The soused men shouted in Burmese with the prerogative of those on guard. “What the fuck’s going on out there?”
Walter, hearing their curses, had no desire to discern whether they were farmers or spirits. He summoned the rest-stop takers to re-board quickly. Trousers were yanked up, dark figures hobbled toward the vehicle while tugging on their zippers. But Harry, happy wanderer and slow pisser, was oblivious of all of it. He was farther down the road, gazing at brilliant pinpricks of stars, when he heard the commotion. He glanced back and saw the others mounting the bus. Time to walk back. He assumed the same leisurely pace that had taken him there. A second later, the bus engine started, and the rear brake lights glowed red. What’s their big hurry? Harry began to walk a bit faster. A sharp pain shot through his right knee. He bent down and clutched where it throbbed. Old ski injury, the onset of arthritis. Drat, he was getting old. Well, no use aggravating it further. He slowed to a walk again, deciding he would simply have to apologize for the delay once he reached his companions. But instead, when he was some twenty feet away, much to his astonishment, the bus pulled off.
“Hey there!” he shouted while hobbling forward. The bus belched black fumes, and in reeling from this noxious assault, Harry leapt to the right and fell into a shallow ditch, landing on his left shoulder and in a manner not conducive to proper arm rotation. A few moments later, he climbed out, coughing and swearing. Was this a joke? Surely, it had to be, and a wretched one at that. He rubbed his shoulder. He’d be lucky if he had not torn his rotator cuff. All right, ha, ha, ha. Any moment now, they would stop and turn back. They had better do it quick. He waited a bit more. Come on. He imagined
hearing the hiss of the bus door opening. “Get your bum in here,” he expected Moff to say. And Harry would launch himself at his chum’s torso in a fury of mock punches. But his expectations of reprising the jokes of their youth dwindled, as the red brake lights of the bus grew smaller and dimmer, then disappeared completely, as did the blackened road before him.
“Damn!” Harry said. “Now what?” And as if in answer, two drunken policemen in green fatigues rushed from the fields with torchlights and rifles trained at his face.
WALTER HAD NEVER MADE a mistake like that. He was usually fastidious about ensuring that all passengers were accounted for. Before Mr. Joe drove off, Walter had turned on the garish overhead light to perform the count. The eyes of the nauseated throbbed, and they groaned and covered their faces with their hands. “One, two . . .” He counted off Bennie and Vera, then Dwight and his grumpy wife, Roxanne. Five was the pretty lady, Heidi, who had a cautious manner, much like his girlfriend in Yangon. “Six, seven,” would be Moff and his son, then came the mother and daughter with the small puppy. . . Walter paused. Did he just count seven? He was also suffering a bit. He had a frontal headache brought on from inhaling carbon monoxide from the bus exhaust, and this impaired him. Thus, as he made his way back up the right side of the bus, he included in the count a rattan conical hat balanced atop a backpack, the same hat Wendy had purchased for a hundred kyats in the alley. In bad light, the hat and backpack looked like the head and shoulders of a passenger who had nodded off. “. . . Eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve,” Walter counted. “All here, off we go.”
Actually, before I tell you what happened to Harry, there is also the matter of Marlena to report. She should have been the first to note that Harry was missing. But as you now know, she was concentrating on her stomach cramps, counting the seconds each lasted, as if she were doing Lamaze birthing exercises. In any case, she did not feel like explaining her troubles to Harry, who had left with a cold frown.