Soon after, Harry watched Marlena leave with her daughter. She was too distraught to speak, and waved away his questions, his apologies. The tattered netting had been hauled away, the ruined bedding stripped, and now he was alone. The damp bare mattress before him reminded Harry of a shameful time in his childhood. “What were you possibly thinking?” both his mother and Marlena had shrieked. A headache began to pound in his temples.
He could not sleep, so he sat on the edge of the undamaged twin bed, punching the pillow and cursing, “Sod’s law, bloody sod’s law!” If anything could go wrong, it would. He pictured Marlena’s face, how ashamed she looked with an inadequate towel wrapped around her hunched-over body, pleading with her daughter to go back to their bungalow and wait. Esmé had remained in the doorway, wordless and inscrutable.
An hour later, Harry finished the last of a bottle of champagne he had bought at Heinrich’s exorbitant price; it had been intended to toast the start of his and Marlena’s love affair. He put down the empty bottle and rummaged in his carry-on case for the liter of duty-free liquor he had bought on the airplane. There it was, Johnnie Walker Black, his fine Scottish friend for the lonely night. Outside, an Intha fisherman, obviously soused to the bones, began bellowing with operatic strength, and in the arena created by the lake and the semicircle of floating cottages, his serenade boomed and reverberated for a captive audience. To Harry, the tune sounded like a wail to the universe. It was awful, he mused, well suited to the occasion.
THE NIGHT BEFORE, Walter had assured them that the early wake-up call would be worth it. “A sunrise on Christmas Day,” he had said, “is the best present you can give yourselves. We’ll go in two of the longboats to a beautiful spot on the lake. Dress warmly and do wear sturdy shoes, no flip-flops. We’ll be doing a bit of walking. After the sunrise, we’ll visit various factories making paper, woven cloth, and cheroots. Bring a camera and a mid-morning snack. If you’re not on the boats by six-fifteen, I will assume you preferred to sleep in, in which case we’ll meet you in the Great Hall for lunch.”
At five-thirty in the morning, everyone but Harry rose for an early breakfast. As for Harry, after listening to the drunken fisherman most of the night, he had finally drifted off to sleep at four. With so much alcohol in his bloodstream, his sedated brain kept him somnolent until nearly noon, at which time he awoke with a terrific hangover.
In another corner of the resort, Heinrich was also awakening. He often kept late hours. He took a brisk shower, dressed in his woven silk trousers and shirt, and padded over in slapping sandals to the dining hall to greet his guests for lunch. What a surprise to see the hall was empty except for the Famous TV Star. “Aren’t they back yet?” he asked.
“Apparently not,” Harry said, and sipped his coffee.
“And you stayed behind?”
“Apparently so.”
Heinrich went into his office to meet with three of his staff and organize for the day. He glanced at the schedule Walter had given him. The sunrise viewing and morning shopping was supposed to last only a few hours, with a return by ten or ten-thirty and lunch at noon. Perhaps they had opted to do more Christmas shopping.
The staff told him of the previous night’s fire. They spoke to him in Burmese. No, no one was hurt, they said.
“Anyone jump in the lake?”
The men laughed. Not this time, but the man sure was hopping scared. They said it was the cottage of the moping TV star in the dining room. The damage wasn’t bad. Workmen were just now replacing the ruined sections of rattan on the ceiling. The bed would dry out on its own. Should they put up another netting?
Heinrich scratched his head. He had meant to buy the fireproofed netting, but the son of one of the head honchos had insisted that Heinrich take a brand of his tribe’s own making, an older style that was illegal in other countries. This was the third fire at the resort. “Put up a net but remove the candles,” Heinrich said.
There was also a lady in the TV star’s room, the staff told Heinrich, a naked woman. They chuckled to themselves. “Which one?” Heinrich asked in Burmese. The Chinese lady, they said. He nodded, affirming Harry’s good taste.
“Also sorry to report, boss, we’ve had another theft.”
Heinrich sighed. “What now?”
“The bicycle generator.” This was what they used to power up twelve-volt car batteries during the frequent electrical failures. “They left behind the bicycle this time.”
“Wasn’t the shed locked as I instructed?”
“The lock was beheaded. Cut clean.”
“What about the guard dogs?”
“Still in the pen, but chewing on fresh bones.”
Heinrich counted the items already stolen over the last six months: a small television, the satellite dish for illegally receiving international channels, a bicycle, a hand-crank flashlight, some large Toyo twelve-volt batteries, a box of ginger-flavored sunflower seeds, and now the bicycle generator.
“Go into town and see if the generator is for sale on the black market. If so, notify the police and report back to me.” But Heinrich knew it was unlikely that the generator would ever be found. Still, it was best to follow proper procedures. He would simply charge the Famous TV Star two hundred U.S. dollars for fire damage that could be repaired for less than ten. With the remaining cash, he would buy a new generator, perhaps a fuel generator this time, now that he had a good black-market source for buying petrol without government rationing coupons.
As with any problem, you simply had to be more creative.
THERE IS A FAMOUS Chinese sentiment about finding the outer edges of beauty. My father once recited it to me: “Go to the edge of the lake and watch the mist rise.” At six-thirty, my friends had been at that edge. At dawn, the mist rose like the lake’s breath, and the vaporous mountains behind faded in layers of lighter and lighter gray, mauve, and blue until the farthest reaches merged with the milky sky.
The motors of the longboats had been cut. All was quiet. The mountains reflected in the lake waters caused my friends to reflect upon their busy lives. What serenity had eluded them until now?
“I feel like the noise of the world has stopped,” whispered Marlena. But then secretly she wondered what had happened to Harry. Had he lain awake most of the night, as she had? She glanced at Esmé, who still refused to look at her, despite the fact that Marlena had offered to let her have forbidden things for breakfast, coffee cake, doughnuts, a Coke. Throughout, Esmé had remained silent.
She was embarrassed by her mother and Harry. They looked so stupid. They wrecked the little house. They nearly got themselves killed. Everybody saw and was talking about it. She had done things far less stupid than that, and her mother had been mad and wouldn’t talk to her. “I just can’t deal with this,” she would tell Esmé, and then not look at her for hours. It had made her stomach ache. Well, now her mother could see what that felt like.
“Man, this is so worth it,” Wyatt said. Wendy nodded, silent for once.
Heidi had not felt stillness like this since the murder. The water buoyed her, and the mist took her worries away. She realized, after a while, that she had not thought about bad things, like the boat tipping . . . No, she put it out of her mind, and turned her face toward the mountains.
Here the lessons of Buddhism seemed true, Vera thought. Life was merely an illusion you must release. As she grew older, she was aware of her changing position on mortality. In her youth, the topic of death was philosophical, in her thirties it was unbearable, and in her forties unavoidable. In her fifties, she had dealt with it in more rational terms, arranging her last testament, itemizing assets and heirlooms, spelling out the organ donation, detailing the exact words for her living will. Now, in her sixties, she was back to being philosophical. Death was not a loss of life, but the culmination of a series of releases. It was devolving into less and less. You had to release yourself from vanity, desire, ambition, suffering, and frustration—all the accoutrements of the I, the ego. And if you did, you
would disappear, leave no trace, like the mist at dawn over the lake, evaporating into nothingness, into nibbana.
I was appalled at the idea. Evaporate? Would that happen to me? I wanted to expand, to fill the void, to reclaim all that I had wasted. I wanted to fill the silence with all the words I had not yet spoken.
THE PAPERMAKER WAS the first to report to the military police that he had seen the missing tourists. “You saw them before or after they disappeared?” the police asked.
“Must have been before,” answered the papermaker. “Otherwise, how could I be telling you I saw them?” Go on, they said. They were standing in the papermaker’s yard, in front of his house, a six-poled, one-room affair. The tourists had been his customers, he explained. He went over to a bucket and picked it up. They had watched him as he lifted it and poured a batter of mulberry leaf mash onto a wood-framed silk screen. And then he had taken this wooden trowel—see how it’s the same width as the frame, and see how it spreads the slime thinly and evenly over the screen? Then, he said, he took bits of flower petals and ferns. The police watched him sprinkle them onto the silk screen in captive flourishes. The pretty little girl with the dog liked that very much, the papermaker said. He went to another frame, which had already dried, and peeled off a sheet of rough-hewn paper, the kind that sold for ten dollars in American stationery stores. Can you believe it? Ten dollars! That’s what they told him anyway, though he charged these customers only a hundred kyats.
The little girl picked up a sheet of paper, and as soon as she did, the Chinese lady, who must have been her mother, offered to buy it for her. The little girl said nothing, would not even look at her, as if her mother were invisible. Then the girl spotted the sun umbrellas, made of the same flowery paper, popular items with tourists. The Chinese lady again wanted to buy one for her daughter, simply because the girl had looked at it! And after the mother paid, the daughter smiled—although not at her—and this filled the woman with joy. I tell you, American children are so easy to please, the papermaker said to the police, because they have so many desires to choose from.
The cheroot maker also said the Americans had come by. He knew they were Americans because none of them smoked, and they admired the lacquered containers more than the dozen cheroots they held. They had politely watched his girls making the cheroots. The police now paused to admire a particularly lovely girl with a sweet face and large cat eyes. She took a flat, disc-shaped cheroot leaf and expertly rolled the blend of tobacco and woody root together with a filter made of layers of cornhusks. The cheroot maker appeared to think hard as he went on: A tall man with long hair bought a dozen, to qualify for the free container. And when he lit one to smoke, the black lady was very upset, as was a pretty young woman who turned on a small whirring machine around her neck. Something seemed very peculiar about those foreigners, the cheroot maker concluded.
Several women at the silk-weaving factory confirmed that they, too, had seen the foreigners. All the women who worked on the first floor of the rickety wooden building were old, and their job was to spin thread out of silk. The black lady and a woman with pinkish hair, they said, were very curious and asked odd questions. They asked about their work hours. “Whenever there was daylight,” the thread spinners had answered, “dawn to dusk, every day.” And their wages? “Two or three hundred kyats a day”—less than an American dollar. And what happened to them if they were sick or injured? How much were they paid? “Of course there’s no pay for days not worked,” they had told her. Wasn’t that a strange question to ask! The policemen nodded.
The second floor was much noisier, and the women here were young, some just girls, for they were the weavers and had to be energetic to operate the looms. The weaving women reported that the black lady was astounded by their skill, more so than most tourists, who seemed to think their bodies were merely extensions of machines. The police now watched a young woman move her feet rapidly over the outer then the inner pedals of the loom, her arched soles flexed and dancing. Meanwhile her hands operated at another rhythm to jerk a string with the exact degree of force needed to send a wooden threader flying from left to right, right to left. This required enormous concentration and coordination, the old weaving woman said, and as everyone knew, no man possessed the ability to stay eye-sharp for such a long time. It was a patient woman’s work, the ability for hands and feet to think independently, for the mind to remain focused through the same movements, thread after thread. Between daybreak and light’s end, each woman created a full yard of intricately patterned silk that would sell for the fixed price of ten U.S. dollars. That was how they helped their company make a very good profit, they said. Yes, they enjoyed their work, they told the American black lady. Very, very much. Constancy is its own satisfaction, said one of the older ladies, the predictability of days, the serenity of seeing the same loom and spools, the same co-workers beside me, the same wooden walls and high roof, with only occasional rain tapping the roof, like the thrumming fingers of a god, which was a small but welcome intrusion.
We saw the tourists the whole time, up to the moment they were leaving, one of the weaving women told the police. But in the next moment, they were gone, with just the strong smell of them left behind. Snatched by Nats, that’s what I think.
HERE IS how it actually happened.
At nine-thirty in the morning, my friends had finished visiting the weaving mill. They were standing on the jetty, ready to climb into the longboats. “Our next stop,” Walter said, “is my Christmas surprise to you. We may have to walk in just a little ways, but I think you will enjoy it enormously.”
Everyone liked the sound of those words: Christmas surprise. What a delightful combination of syllables. Black Spot and Salt also heard how easily they agreed to such a simple invitation. A surprise could be anything, could it not?
What Walter had in mind, in fact, was a visit to a local school where young children had practiced singing a Burmese rendition of “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” He and the teacher had agreed months before that it would be a joyous event for the schoolchildren and foreigners alike. He would bring whatever groups came in December, and he would also suggest that they make a small donation to the school’s book fund. Even though the schools did not officially celebrate Christmas, it was their duty to help win over more tourists as part of the “Visit Myanmar” campaign to change foreign perception of their country. The past two groups Walter had led said it was a highlight of their trip, one that had touched their hearts. Walter hoped this group would like it as well.
As my friends waited on the jetty, they had no idea that this humble pageantry was the Christmas surprise, and thus they were impatient to be on their way and see what source of awe or amusement awaited them. But as usual, they were delayed, waiting this time for Rupert.
“You should buy him a watch,” Vera said sharply to Moff.
“He’s got a watch,” Moff replied.
“Then one with a timer and an alarm.”
“It’s got two timers.”
Stepping off his boat, Black Spot offered to help Walter find the boy. Walter could go in one direction, he in the other, and both would return in fifteen minutes. A good plan. Off they went.
Happily, next to every dock and jetty there are vendors with trinkets to see, lacquerware to buy, and folk art to admire. The goods were laid out on cardboard tables, and the vendors urged the tourists to examine the excellent quality—see, touch, buy! Bennie and the women bargained in earnest, while Moff, Wyatt, and Dwight stood at the end of the dock and lit up cheroots, commenting that they tasted like a cross between a cigarette and a joint. Esmé dipped into the treats her mother had brought and found a bag of teriyaki turkey jerky she could share with Pup-pup.
Within ten minutes, they saw that the boatman in the brown longyi had returned with Rupert. The miscreant confessed he had been demonstrating a card trick to some local men.
“What did I tell you about everyone sticking together?” Moff said. “You can’t just go of
f and do what you want.”
“They begged me to show them,” Rupert explained. “Honest.” Moff gave the usual lecture about one’s responsibility to the universe, how it was rude to keep anyone waiting, let alone eleven people.
“Ten,” Rupert said. “Harry’s not here.”
“What about Walter?” Moff said.
Yes, what about Walter? Fifteen minutes went by, then a half-hour, and still he had not returned. Salt, the round-faced friend of Black Spot, gesticulated to the tourists that he would go in the direction Walter had taken, to see what the delay was. After five minutes, he returned with a big smile. He and Black Spot had a quick exchange in their dialect. “Okay, okay, no worries,” Black Spot told the tourists. He gestured to his boat and motioned them to step in. And then, pointing to some vague place on the other side of the lake, he said, “We are going there.”
“Hey,” Esmé said. “He speaks English. Did anyone notice? He speaks English!” No one paid much attention to Esmé. They assumed that everyone spoke some amount of English.
“What the hell is Walter doing there?” Dwight said aloud.
Black Spot smiled enigmatically. “Christmas surprise,” he said, recalling Walter’s words. The words were like magic. Their secret helper had told them that the boy would never come willingly. And Black Spot had worried over how he would persuade the Younger White Brother that this was his calling. But then their helper gave him a useful tip: The boy would not go unless everyone else went with him. And see how easy it was. They did not even know what the surprise was, yet they were willing to go find it.