Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  They’ll come soon enough, following the pattern of the earlier rallies. News of the recent arrests and beatings has spread through Rangoon, which makes this group of young men and women doubly admirable. Undaunted, they keep shouting, “Do-ayey, do-ayey!” Our business, our concern! Our cause!

  Sure enough, not ten minutes later, big army trucks turn the corner and stop a short distance down the street. The student protesters fall silent. Everyone hears the metallic clamor of armed men jumping onto the pavement. It’s the most formidable international language: automated rifles rattling and clattering against buttons and cartridge belts. Heavy boots batter the pavement. How strange that I recognize these noises.

  Then I pick out another familiar sound, closer, more immediate: the thwack of flip-flops slapping the road. The feet above the rubber soles are so bare. Shins and calves and knees appear as men hoist up their longyis in order to run faster. I turn my head again. Across the street, beyond the stream of frightened people, the soldiers stand in a line, holding their weapons across their chests.

  The juxtaposition is riveting. This is the finale of a small street protest in a half-forgotten country, but it’s also the face of war in the late twentieth century: the heavily armed, overdressed enforcer preparing to run after shoeless people wrapped in cotton. I can sense the attraction, the hunger to fulfill the machine’s purpose. Raise the gun and fire. The release like orgasm, but against life. How difficult it must be for the commanders not to give the order to open fire, how challenging for the soldiers not to shoot. Because that is the heart of the gun, the only reason it was made: to shoot and kill human beings.

  A few brave souls cry out, “Don’t run, don’t run away!” It sounds both absurd and heartbreaking. I, too, am startled into movement, but I let people pass me at a fast clip. I keep turning around to watch what happens. I slow to a stop. What is wrong with me? Is it the stupidity of youth, or the arrogance of the white brain, believing it is safe inside its still-colonial skull?

  The soldiers form two rows.

  Carrying a wooden truncheon, their commanding officer marches down the pavement, offering a sort of pre-charge introduction. I watch him come on. Here he is, there is his face, a man in his late forties or early fifties, trim, close-lipped. Like most of the commanders, like the one who took my film the other day, he wears a wide-brimmed, turned-up-on-one-side safari hat, Crocodile Dundee style.

  As he walks past, he brandishes the truncheon at my head, motioning a swift whack with the stick, but he is four or five paces away and there is no real danger, no reason to flinch, and I do not. I just keep looking at him, knowing that he, too, has a history, and a family, probably children, and tenderness coiled inside him. Farther down the road, a few demonstrators stand poised on the pavement, waiting for the soldiers to charge. The commander stops about twenty feet away from them and begins to yell, furiously, taunting them. His voice is full of hatred. The sound of it bounces from building to building in the narrow street.

  My stomach churns. The jeering voice makes me afraid. Yet I remain at the side of the road. What will happen if I stay on the street when the soldiers start running? Will they crack my head open? Will I be beaten up or arrested or killed? Or will the soldiers just pound past me?

  I want to find out.

  A voice whispers out of the side street to my left. The language is the old-fashioned British English of a young Burmese man: “Miss, perhaps you might not remain in the road. We fear they will hurt you.” There is concern, but no command: the voice proffers a useful suggestion. I look from the faintly glinting shields down the road to the speaking darkness.

  No one is there. The speaker must be hidden. In the other direction, the commander stops yelling, pivots, and starts to walk back toward his soldiers. He will pass by me again in a few seconds.

  I step toward the voice.

  It’s the group of monks whose bare arms and burgundy robes I struggled not to touch. The six young men are squeezed into the doorway of a building. Just inside the vestibule, I stop. To move backward is to leave the hiding place, to move forward is to press against a member of the holy Sangha.

  How stupid I’ve been, exposing their secret nook to the commander. He must have watched me step into the path and disappear. The monks murmur amongst themselves. Then the one who called out, their spokesperson, asks me, “Would you like to watch the SLORC?”

  Would you like to watch a movie?

  Would you like to watch the sunset?

  Would you like to watch the soldiers beating people up?

  It’s a reasonable question, assuming, in the discreetly polite Burmese manner, that perhaps I do not want to see such a thing. The question also assumes that if I say, “Yes,” I am willing to be a witness. Implicit in the act is some kind of responsibility—though who knows what kind, how much.

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Then let’s go,” responds the tallest monk. We quickly step out of the doorway. Three monks walk in front, three walk behind. We glide through the dark. The houses and shops are closed, without lights, not even candles. We pass a line of huts, a healthy cluster of trees, then move through a walled compound of small buildings. I am disoriented, and getting nervous. Far from the street where the soldiers and the remaining protesters were, how will we “watch the SLORC”?

  We enter a two-story wooden building, take off and pick up our flip-flops, then ascend a narrow, steep staircase. At the top, we step into a large, empty room. Streetlight shines in the row of glassless windows along one wall, our destination. I crouch down beside the kneeling monks and look out.

  What I see baffles me. The street of the protest is below us. The soldiers are far down in one direction, at the intersection with another street.

  The commander’s voice gives a one-word cry. The soldiers begin to run. At first I can hear only the clatter and pounding, then they surge into our field of vision. The rare streetlight gives the scene the hyperrealness of theater, as does the first line of riot police, holding up their shields like warriors. The second line are soldiers. The men gallop over the place where I stood and disappear from view. The military commander strides behind his men. As he passes by beneath us, he adjusts his safari hat.

  At that moment, someone—a protester who broke away early from the knot of students? a sympathetic observer? a pedestrian?—runs across the path of the commander. The two of them are about fifty feet apart. The commander shouts; the man slows to a hesitant jog. He looks ahead, glances back. He must be measuring the distance to the safety of the side streets against the relative proximity of the man in the safari hat. The commander strides on, speaking all the while. I hold my breath, willing the man to run. Runrunrun! As though to push him into action, I grip the windowsill harder, forcing energy through the wood and the air, down into the legs of the man below us.

  When he steps toward his escape—a path into the darkness similar to the one that led me here—the commander shouts at him not to go. And the man stops. The tension goes out of him. He begins to shrink, to cover himself.

  I know what’s going to happen. The monks also know. We sit transfixed at the window, unable to look away and unable to act.

  We hear the thwack of wood on his head.

  From farther along the street, where the soldiers have charged the students, we hear the shatter of glass. Below me, the armed man clubs the unarmed man on the head. Some of the monks look away. The intimacy of the violence is shocking. The two men are so close to us.

  When frantic hands with widespread fingers shield the skull, the back of the neck, the commander clubs the narrow back. The sound of the wood hitting the man’s back is like that of an ax when the blade misses the chopping block and sinks—thunk——into hard earth. When the man pivots to save his back, the commander shoves the truncheon under the elbows to bash in his face. The officer changes tactics suddenly and aims for the man’s belly.

  We watch the man sink heavily onto his knees and sway. The commander hits his head again, and
once more the man raises his hands to shield himself. When he twists his body away, I see a ragged diamond between his shoulder blades. At first I don’t understand what it is. Then I do. The blood must be coming from a split on the back of his head.

  I am afraid for the thin bone of his skull.

  San Aung told me about the 1988 protests, how soldiers cracked people’s heads right open. “They did not hit to hurt, you see. That was the problem. They hit to kill you.”

  When the commander shouts, I jump six inches off the floor. His bellowing reverberates against the buildings. He abruptly stops the beating and begins screaming. Then he stops screaming and kicks the man once in the upper thigh. He pivots on his heel and stalks off toward the battalion farther down the road.

  The man pulls himself off the ground and slowly stands. His longyi has unknotted. As he rises, it drops down his hips and thighs. He grabs at the material of the longyi and, missing it, almost falls down. A second time, more slowly, he pulls the longyi up, reknots it, and begins to walk.

  The monks whisper among themselves. One of them rises and leaves, thumping back down the wooden staircase. “Has he gone to see if the man is all right?” I ask.

  The spokesman-translator doesn’t answer my question. Instead, he observes in a doubtful voice, “That man is very lucky.”

  I can’t reply. My fingers won’t release the windowsill. I say to my hands, “Let go of the sill.” It hurts when they uncurl. I grit my teeth to stop them from chattering.

  The monk turns to me like a teacher whose lesson is finished. He says, “When you return to your hotel, be careful. Take a different road. My friend will show you how to go. Please come and visit us sometime.” Then he tells me where his monastery is. He tells me his abbot’s name. We crouch out of the room. I hear the soldiers returning now, boots thumping steadily on the asphalt.

  At the bottom of the stairs, in a darkness so complete that I have to squint, the monk produces—from where I will never know—a box of crackers. “Please take these crackers with you, for the journey back to your hotel.” As though that trip were several hours by train rather than half an hour by foot.

  “But it’s really not that far, thank you. Please, I am very grateful, but you need this food.” They are monks; their food comes to them as daily alms. “You are a guest,” he insists. “Please, you also need this food.”

  Need is not the point. They are offering the antidote to what I’ve seen in the street, a gift of civilization that I can understand and ingest without fear: English water biscuits. This is a talisman against harm. I must not refuse.

  Holding my right elbow with my left hand in the traditional way, I lower and open my right palm to accept food from a monk. I thought monks were forbidden to give objects directly to a woman, but perhaps because of what we’ve seen this rule has been set aside. I thank the monk in Burmese. The other monks smile and nod; we whisper thank you to each other repeatedly.

  The youngest monk leads me through the same walled compound, that maze of buildings. We walk quickly through the narrow streets and into another compound, where he opens a gate and points to a passageway of shops. At the end of it is a thoroughfare that I recognize. I’m surprised again. We’re at the edge of Chinatown.

  I thank the monk and walk alone into the street, which is empty save for a few sleeping si-car drivers and, farther on, two young men sitting on the curb. One of them is strumming a guitar, which seems bizarre to me, discordant, though late-night lazy playing is common in Rangoon. My teeth have begun to chatter again. A large rat scampers slowly along the gutter toward me. It pauses to inspect some refuse, and begins to eat. I stop, too, and stare at the rat for a long time, seeing it, not seeing it at all, clutching the box of crackers to my chest.

  CHAPTER 12

  THE ICE CRUSHER

  I wake to a steady pounding. The sound causes my empty stomach to roil. I dread looking out the window, but up I get—how heavy the body is—and pull open the thick green curtains. Sunlight pours in. I squint down into the road.

  It’s the ice crusher. I’ve seen him before. Bent over with a crowbar in his hands, he beats a massive block of ice. Soon the block is no longer solid. With the wedge of the bar, he pries open one fault line after another. White and bluish chunks drop onto the pavement. With loose-limbed precision, he smashes each of them with a heavy mallet. As he shovels fragments into rusted barrels, I waken fully to the morning clamor. Bicycle bells ring on the main street, car horns beep and blare.

  The ice crusher slides another block of ice off the back of the truck and begins his task anew. Watching him, I think how easily he could smash in a man’s skull. My hands are stiff from gripping the window ledge last night. I gaze up the street. Down the street. The limbs of the trees remind me of guns; the broom propped over an old woman’s shoulder has the shape of a gun. A si-car driver, riding past with a piece of old cardboard, is carrying a shield.

  That man, in the sunglasses and the white shirt, sitting on a motorcycle—who is he? The peaceful world outside is as real as the bass thump of the woman downstairs in the kitchen pounding chilies. But a corrosive power is alive around us. It permeates the buildings, the markets, gnaws through the floors and walls, menacing everyone. I won’t be able to look at a Burmese street again, or a Burmese face, without being aware of it.

  I glance around the familiar drabness of my room and feel a jolt of surprise. I’d forgotten about the box of biscuits. There it is, on the night table. Alms, given back. If I eat these buscuits, will my head and my heart remain intact? Will I know how to proceed?

  As I tear open the box, the phone rings downstairs. I hear it clearly. And I know that it’s for me.

  Anita was arrested the day before yesterday. And interrogated all night. She was deported yesterday morning, sent out on a plane to Thailand. One of her friends in Bangkok called the journalist colleague who has been trying to find her. That was him on the phone, speaking in a monotone. He said she is all right but badly shaken. He didn’t have any details, and didn’t want to talk for very long. The last thing he said was “I don’t think I need to spell it out for you, do I?”

  “No. I’ll buy a ticket this afternoon.”

  “I’ve already got mine—4 P.M. flight. Take care.”

  He hung up before I had a chance to say goodbye, but I held the phone for a full thirty seconds more, and pretended the conversation was still going on. Myo Thant eyed me furtively as he swept the lobby. He often sweeps while guests are talking on the phone.

  Anita, arrested. Interrogated. I repeat the words, but they do not work. It’s hard to sit her tall, comely Swedish body in a chair and allow Burmese men to bark questions at her. I have a generic Hollywood interrogation scene in my head that rolls quickly into torture and sexual intimidation. Yet the journalist who called said nothing about such treatment. It is my democratic, guaranteed-human-rights country that readily supplies the images of dehumanization. I try to turn off the screen in my brain, but it’s not as easy as I would like it to be.

  I will buy a ticket, leave tomorrow. Though part of me wants to stay. I want to see what happens next. But, more than that, I want my being here to be useful. Oh my God, I have hero delusions! I want my very presence to make some difference. How very white of me.

  My visa expired almost a week ago, but I will claim ignorance at customs, a confusion over the dates. I could stay on awhile and make up a story about losing then finding my passport. It would not be prudent to remain here in Rangoon. But what if I went north and lay low in tourist fashion, taking photographs of the monuments? Or I could travel to famous Inle Lake and do a boat tour.

  Unfortunately, the thought of partaking in regular travelers’ delights is repugnant. I am too tired, too sad. When I got here, I was a tourist, and I enjoyed being one, reveling in the beauty and strangeness of this new world, confident, too, that I was not merely a tourist because I was aware of the dire political situation. I was prepared to do my bit by writing an article about Ma Thida.<
br />
  That seems a long time ago now.

  I think about San Aung, but I don’t call his house. It’s possible the line is bugged, and a call would disturb his poor old mother. I think about the monks last night, who led me to the center of the maze, showed me what was there, then led me out again.

  I wonder what I’ve been doing with my life. I wonder why I’m not doing more.

  CHAPTER 13

  TOUCH STONE

  Myo Thant, man of many talents, sits proudly behind the wheel of his boss’s black car. He beams at me in the rearview mirror. Usually the boss gets someone else to escort departing guests to the airport, but today Myo Thant is the lucky chauffeur. While driving, he polishes the steering wheel with a soft cloth.

  The polishing becomes flamboyantly aggressive when we roll into an unexpected pod of bicycles. The young clerk meets my eyes in the mirror and apologizes. “Please do not worry. We have much time.”

  I do not worry. For different reasons, we both want the drive to take as long as possible. He karate-chops a flat hand at the bicycles and mutters under his breath, but the displeasure is just evidence of how much he enjoys his motorized stature. We roll slowly past the worn cotton longyis and wiry calves of the cyclists, who carry all manner of stuff in baskets and on their handlebars and backs. Through the mill of wheels and laboring bodies, I see a crippled man using his crutch as a broom, knocking white flowers off the step of his cheroot-selling shack. A group of pink-robed young nuns pass under the flower-spilling tree. I feel the same ache I felt this morning, and ignored. I would like to visit a temple before I leave.