Assignment Burma Girl

by Edward S. Aarons

  He reached for his water bowl, but it was empty. His movements made the cage swing back and forth, and he felt sick. He vomited, but there was nothing in his shriveled stomach, and the motion-sickness quickly passed when he was careful not to make any more violent movements that caused the bamboo cage to sway.

  Like a captive bird, he thought dimly. Oh, my God, when will they set me free?

  It was getting difficult to remember how long he had been here. He sat cross-legged in the center of the bamboo cage, aware of the smell of his body and the filth that littered around him. He could see very little through the bamboo green forest. The sky was something long forgotten beyond the interlaced branches forming a canopy overhead. Monkeys moved out there, and the water buffalo lumbered toward rice paddies on the terraced hillsides around Nambum Ga. And yesterday—or was it the day before?—or last week?—an elephant had moved ponderously through the jungle, down the trail toward the town, and the giant beast’s head had been at Paul’s eye level. For a moment the tiny, piggish eyes in the wrinkled, leathery armor of hairy hide had locked directly with his.

  Paul shivered. How long had it really been? And what was Eva doing now? Did she think he was dead, or that he had forgotten her, or that he was too wrapped up in memories, like a small boy, as she had said patronizingly, back in the sanity and safety of Rangoon when he’d told her what he wanted to do.

  At first he was sure it was all a hideous mistake. They must have thought he was someone else to put him in this cage that swung from the banyan tree in the bamboo jungle, as if he were some great prized bird or beast. But nobody came to gawk at him or make fun of him—which was just as well. They might prod him with sharp sticks or throw stones or giggle and point at him, and he could not bear anything more torturous than the empty hours he had to live through up here. But at the same time, a man grew lonely, with nothing but the monkeys around and water buffalo moving down the trail below and no sky to see and damned little water and rice to keep himself alive.

  Paul stood up, careful to keep the cage from swaying. The cage was high in the center, where the bamboo was bent and lashed together, and here he could stand upright. It was still cool at this hour of dawn. He drew a deep breath and expanded his chest and yelled.

  “H-e-l-p!”

  His voice rang out like the wild screams of the monkeys, no more coherent than the beasts.

  He yelled again.

  “Can—anybody—hear—me?”

  He paused to listen. The monkeys jibed at him. A cockatoo screamed. He fell to his knees and covered his face with his hands and began to weep.

  He wondered dimly when they would feed him. He was so hungry.

  Yugi Tagashi listened to the ululating animal cry that echoed over the hills and said to his wife, “I will bring rice to him.”

  She looked sad and resigned. “It will turn out badly.”

  “It is something I must do. Can you listen to him for another morning?”

  “It is not permitted to help him.”

  “I must,” Yugi said.

  “They will kill you.”

  “I am a man, and so is he.”

  “And your children?” she asked.

  “Nothing will happen,” Tagashi said. “Get the rice.” He was Japanese, in a land where, twenty years before, he had marched as a conqueror and known the death of many friends and the hatred and hostility of a strange and alien people. He was Japanese in a place where his people were not permitted, where he should have been put to death many long years ago.

  But they had not killed him then, and for all these years he had lived like an outcast hermit with the woman, and with the children as they came. He had no friends. He was afraid of men. He never went into Nambum Ga. The woman did the marketing and sold the rice crop and bargained for what was needed. Primitive life had been difficult and challenging, but at the end of the first year he became bored, thinking of how life had been in all its refinement and cultivated delicacy at Ito, on the island of Kyushu, a product of civilization a thousand years old. Now he lived like a savage and had begun to think like a savage. One day he had decided to end it and took his gun and tried to shoot himself, in as honorable a way as possible.

  The woman had stopped him.

  For a long time they had sat facing each other, listening to the monsoon rains outside the cave where she had come to live with him, and they had said nothing to each other, each sitting with a hand on the gun.

  And gradually her presence, and the knowledge of her soft and docile body under the printed sarong, the sense of continuity and forgiveness that she gave him, made him yield his grip and he gave up the idea of suicide as something dishonorable, after all, just as he had given up that other code of honor to the God-Emperor many years ago, when he deserted from the Imperial Japanese Army and hid in the Buddhist monastery above Nambum Ga until the war was over.

  Yugi Tagashi was now a man in his late forties. He had been a colonel in the Eighteenth Regiment stationed on the Kamaing Road when he ran away to live like a hermit in the hills of North Burma. The thing that had happened then destroyed him as a man, tearing his life into shreds with a past and present and future; and he thought about it a little, every day, ever since. The yellow-robed Buddhist priest, Kusawa, who took the name of Yan Gon, meaning End of Strife, had saved his life when the Karens found him in his primitive rice paddy after the was was over and the Japanese Imperial Army had been driven from the land.

  The woman now said, “It will be like it was once, Yugi.”

  She spoke softly, imploring him with her manner more than her words. She looked old, old, as he had grown old. It takes culture and civilization to keep a man and woman from aging too quickly, he thought. He had not seen himself in a mirror for many years, but he knew what he must look like. She was perhaps no more than thirty, now. She had only been twelve when she saved his life by taking him to the Buddhist priest, Yan Gon. A child and a woman, all at once. A woman-child who had chosen a cave and a hillside in this remote land and lived with him. And now she was old.

  “The world repeats itself,” he told her. “It is as Kusavva once said. All is in cycles and orbits, and all is foreordained and in the past, moving in great circles around the center of Truth.”

  “But this time—” she faltered.

  “Listen to the man in the eagle’s cage,” Tagashi said. “How he screams.”

  They listened.

  “Yes,” she said. “I will get the rice.”

  Yugi Tagashi followed a footpath on the high ridge overlooking the Inkagaung River valley. The river flowed to the south, through twisting and devious routes in the green, mist-shrouded hills of this border area of Yunnan Province in China. Eventually, the Inkagaung joined the Mogaung and that, in turn, flowed southwest into the Irrawaddy and then down to Rangoon’s delta and the wide, complicated, civilized world of East and West. He had renounced that world long ago, and here in Burma, because of the woman who was only a girl-child in the years of war, he had changed and grown as a lily blossoms after the bulb is a long time dormant. That other American, so long ago, had cried for help, too, and had been rejected. He, that other American, had changed the lives of everyone in Nambum Ga, and although everyone there pretended to have forgotten—the woman told him this, when she went alone to the market—it was not really forgotten, and the shame of the village would last until the generation that had lived through it had died out and was forgotten, too.

  Yugi was tall for a Japanese, bent at the shoulders from the years of primitive toil in the rice paddies he cultivated. There was very little left of the proud Imperial Army colonel who had commanded the unit here at Nambum Ga so long ago. His clothing was simple, the skirt-like longyi of the Burmese. He’d had his tea and a little rice before dawn. He carried the rice for the American in a teak bowl, more than he himself had eaten, because Americans were accustomed to eating more than other men, and this American in particular was sick and perhaps dying.

  He could not hear the wil
d yelling now. The American was quiet again.

  Long ago, Pra Ingkok, the headman of Nambum Ga, which was then only a village of two dozen bashas, and not an important town on the arms-smuggling road as it was now, had found two eagles in the forest, near a small stream that fed the Inkagaung River. One of the eagles had a broken wing, perhaps suffered in a precipitous dive after prey. Its mate had stood by, uncertain and proud, yellow-eyed and ferocious, to protect it. The chief had called for other men and they had fashioned strong nets and climbed into the trees above the two creatures, who were dangerous and strong enough to kill a man, if they chose to do so. The nets were dropped and the eagles captured. Then the cage of bamboo was built, a most unusual thing, and hoisted up in the limbs of the banyan tree where the two birds were kept and fed in the hope that the injured one would mend itself.

  But after two weeks the eagle that was not injured turned on its mate and killed it; and then it, too, died, since neither bird would eat or drink while kept from the blue sky that was their home.

  The cage was all that remained of the incident.

  And now the American sat in it, high overhead, cross-legged, a look of madness in his eyes as he watched Yugi approach with the rice.

  Yugi paused under the banyan tree.

  The American and the Japanese looked at each other.

  The dawn mist was lifting from the jungle, and the birds and the monkeys were silent. To the north, if one could look through the bamboo that grew so thickly a man had to hack his way laboriously, step by step, and fashion a tunnel for himself through the interlocked branches, one could see the rough, folded, uninhabited hills of the vague border region between Yunnan Province of Communist China and the North Burma districts. To the south and east was the autonomous Red provinces of Phonsaly and Samneua of Laos. On the maps of the Karen state, where the Red uprising took place in 1949, and in the descriptions of news that came faintly crackling every morning over the battery radio that Yugi Tagashi treasured, all was neatly defined, under one government or ruling army, or another. But here in the reality of jungle and misty mountains and shrouded gorges, nothing was clear, and every man lived under the immediacy of today’s force and terror. It was a bad time, worse than any that Tagashi could remember, because there was movement and change, and no man knew what tomorrow might bring, or what new master would come with each new day.

  “You, there!” Yugi looked up at the American, who called with surprising quietness from his cage in the tree.

  “Hey, you! You understand English?”

  “I understand,” Yugi said, equally quiet.

  “Listen,” the American said. “Listen, you’re a friend. I can tell. Let me out, will you? Listen, can’t you let me out?”

  “I am sorry. I have only brought you rice.”

  “Listen,” the American said, crazily sly. “Let me out or I’ll tell them you’ve been coming here secretly to feed me, hear? You know what will happen then to you?”

  “They will kill me,” Yugi said quietly.

  “Okay, then.” It was settled. “Let me out.”

  “I am sorry,” Yugi said. “Why should you threaten me? Will it do any good to you, if I am killed?”

  “You want to help me, don’t you?” Paul called down. “Don’t you?”

  “In my small way, yes.”

  “Please,” Paul said. “I’m sorry I said I’d tell. You know I won’t. I’m grateful to you. Please. I don’t know why I’m here or what’s going to happen to me. Please, please let me out.”

  “I cannot,” Yugi said. “I have only brought you rice.” There was a ladder against the tree, and he climbed carefully, holding the rice bowl clear, until he was on a level with the bamboo cage. Paul watched him, not moving, sitting cross-legged in the filth on the bottom of the cage. Already he was sweating as the day grew hotter. His clothes were in rags. His beard itched. The grime and dirt on his skin was like a smothering blanket. When he thought of water, or of bathing in a cool shower with soapy lather, or of a martini, and of Eva’s soft, sensuous laughter, he thought it was all a bad dream and all the horror of his days with the Marauders of the 5307th was still going on, and the twenty years between had never been.

  He greedily watched the rice bowl in the Japanese man’s hands, and felt his hunger rise until it was an insanity. “Please—” he whispered.

  “Take it,” Yugi said. He thrust the bowl quickly through the bamboo slats of the cage and retreated. “Eat.”

  “When will they kill me?” Paul asked.

  “I do not know.”

  “Why do they do this to me?”

  “I cannot say.”

  Paul looked at him with cunning. “You’re Japanese, right? What are you doing here? I thought they all hated the Japanese.”

  “They do.”

  “Then how did you get here?”

  “I never left,” Yugi said. “Are you and I still enemies?”

  “No, no,” Paul said. “Please. You’re a human being. You understand how it is with me, I think.”

  “I am sorry for you,” Yugi said. “But I cannot do more to help you than to bring you this rice.”

  “Where did you learn English?”

  “In the Imperial Army School.”

  “In Tokyo?”

  “Yes.”

  Paul looked at him incredulously. “Have you been here since the war, really?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t understand it,” Paul said. “I don’t understand any of it.”

  Yugi Tagashi was silent. There was too much to explain, and his life was his own, in any case. He watched Paxil eat, scooping the rice from the bowl with dirty, shaking fingers. When a few grains fell into the filth on the bottom of the cage, Paul carefully searched for them and picked them up and popped them into his mouth, so as not to waste a single kernel of the grain. Yugi felt great compassion for him. But pity was a mistake he could not afford to pay for twice in his lifetime. Once was enough. He sat on the wide branch of the tree and contemplated the prisoner in the big bird cage. The monkeys were chittering again, and this was good, because it meant that no one had followed him up the trail from Nambum Ga.

  He did not know what would happen if bis visit here was discovered.

  “I must have the bowl back,” he said, when Paid was finished eating.

  “Have you any water?” Paul asked.

  “They will bring you some at midday.”

  “I’ll go crazy by then.”

  Yugi said nothing.

  “Look,” Paul said. He breathed hard and inched toward the bamboo slats of the cage, gripping them hard, staring at the Japanese in the tree. “Look, I’m rich, I can get a lot of money to you. Can’t you bring me something— a knife, or a gun? Can’t you get me out?”

  “I am afraid,” Yugi said. “They would kill me, too.”

  “Why did they take me like this? I only came here as an old friend. I was here long ago. I was here when you first came. You and I—we fought in this country long ago, right? We were enemies then, but we’re not enemies now, right? It’s you and me against them, now.”

  “No. I live Here. I will die here. I can never go home.” “Sure, you can,” Paul said eagerly. “I could help you.” Yugi Tagashi smiled. “The choice was made many years ago. This is my home now.”

  “Do these people like you? Are they your friends?”

  “They let me live,” Yugi said. “It is enough.”

  “Well, what are they going to do with me?” Paul shouted. He shook the bamboo bars of the cage with mad violence. The cage swayed back and forth in huge arcs, and he paused presently, sickened by the motion. He hung his head down, and when he spoke, his voice held a hopeless note of puzzled complaint. “Look, I only came here as an American tourist to look over the old battlegrounds. You know—”

  “You are an American spy,” Yugi said flatly.

  Paul’s head snapped up. “Spy?”

  “So they think.”

  “But that’s not true? I’m n
ot! I’m on a world tour with my wife. I only took a couple of weeks from Rangoon to come up here and find my brother-in-law’s grave, so to speak—”

  “A spy,” Yugi repeated.

  Paul stared at him. “Do you believe that?”

  Yugi shrugged. “It does not matter what I think or believe. I must leave you now.”

  “Wait,” Paul said quickly.

  Yugi paused. “Yes?”

  “I was treated as an old friend in Nambum Ga, wined and dined there. Some of the people there even remembered me. And yet—and yet it was funny, now that I think of it—”

  “Funny?”

  “Strange, I mean. I felt something—it was different from the old days.”

  “Much has changed here. China is no longer an ally.” “Yes, but—”

  “And China is very near to this place.”

  “I know, but—”

  Yugi held up a gnarled, callused hand. "A moment. There is trouble coming to Nambum Ga. It will be here soon. The headman, Pra Ingkok, you know him?”

  “Yes, yes, he—” “How do you say it in America? In poker? You are Pra Ingkok’s hole card.”

  Paul swallowed astonishment. “But he’s my friend! He took me into his basha and we talked for two days’ running, about old times, when we were both younger, in the guerilla war against the Japs—I mean—”

  Yugi smiled. “It was long ago. You killed many of us.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “It is nothing to regret. It was war.”

  “Look, I want you to understand—”

  “Do you remember how you came to be in the cage?” Paul frowned. “I was asleep. Some men came and jumped me. I was knocked out; and when I awoke, I was here. Look, it’s driving me crazy. Can’t you go into Nambum Ga and let Ingkok know what’s happened to me?”

  “He knows,” Yugi said sadly.

  “What?”

  “He is the one who did this to you. You are his hole card.”

  “Oh, God,” Paul said.

  The Japanese was silent. Paul contemplated the enormity of his danger. He began to shake, and when the Japanese climbed down from the banyan tree and he was alone again, he covered his face with his hands and rocked back and forth on his haunches in the bamboo cage.