Burmese Lessons

by Karen Connelly

  Men and women sit around him, their faces sullen with concern but accepting, too, acquiescent. No, that can’t be. They’re just not showing their emotions as I am, fear in my voice as I ask questions to which no one responds. I catch some of the Burmese back-and-forth, but most of it is beyond me.

  “We will take him out. Back to Mae Sarieng.”

  “It’s hard to know what is wrong.”

  I ask, “If you think we should leave, shouldn’t we go right away?”

  Several people look at me blankly. Another fifteen minutes pass, filled with murmuring around the feverish man. The women who’ve come want to nurse him, too; they ask me to move so they can hold cold cloths on his face. We compete, briefly, at hovering. They win.

  I step into the sunlight. The valley, which I have thought beautiful, has been transformed into a burning, hazy trap, far from civilization, too far from doctors and hospitals. Someone hands me a cheroot and I take a deep drag, steadying myself against the side of the hut.

  Maung’s bodyguard calls me into the dim room. Maung’s eyes are open, but he’s on his side, moaning, clenching his stomach with both hands. He looks at me, speaks English. “I think, dysentery. But I don’t know why—” The words are sucked into a gasp. “I don’t know why it’s so bad. The pain.” We hold each other’s gaze for two, three, four seconds. That’s it. Five seconds, the moan that comes erupts into a hoarse roar. Then a cry. Like a woman in labor, I think, never having heard a woman in labor. My shoulders involuntarily rise toward my ears against the sound.

  Then we all have to leave the hut, because he can’t hold his bowels. Two of the men have to get him up again; they will hold him over the waiting bucket. Once most of us are outside, we stare at the dark rectangle of the doorway and listen to the violent sound of Maung vomiting.

  His bodyguard comes out and says, “We’re going soon. You should get your bag.” When I turn, he follows me down through the camp, past the gardens, the rabbit hutches, the little houses. The people must be there, leaning on their small verandas, working, chatting, but I see no one. I feel only the bodyguard walking behind me as he has so often shadowed Maung. In the empty hut where I have lived this past week, I quickly gather up my things, erase my traces, making the place as unpeopled as it was before I arrived. It’s always a shock, isn’t it, how quickly a person can disappear.

  The journey out is a dream, hyperreal as well as illogical. Time speeds up, hours pass more quickly, yet it often seems as though we ourselves are traveling faster. How is that possible when we have to hike more slowly? Our shirts become damp and then heavy with sweat. For an hour, two hours, I rarely take my eyes off Maung’s hand and wrist hanging over the side of the stretcher. I think of another hand loosened like that, attached to a child’s arm dangling from a bed in Rangoon.

  One of the men loses his sweaty grip on one of the stretcher poles and it drops precipitously, throwing the other man off balance, upsetting the sick one who lies there. I listen to him moan. Sometimes I listen to him not moan, which is worse.

  The sounds we make—his moaning, the men’s murmuring, my swears when I stumble—are absorbed into the foliage, a detail that I found intriguing when we walked in but which is only threatening now. The jungle, too, is parasitic, predatory, it will swallow us alive. The colors of the trees and the red earth and the vines and one bush with small yellow flowers are too vivid, poisonous with brilliance. I walk too closely behind the men, annoying them, especially when we go through streams and they need to slow down.

  What’s wrong with Maung? How many parasites are there in the camp? How many cysts and spores and microscopic creatures pass over our dirty hands, or survive in a pot of insufficiently boiled water, or lie in wait on contaminated vegetables, in meat? Every living thing needs to eat other living things, either by consuming them whole or by living in guts or tissue or burrowing into skin. Is Maung sleeping or is he unconscious? What is the medical difference between the two states?

  The stretcher-bearers get tired. They switch with the other men who are walking behind me. Then I watch those two get tired, too, and turn their wills as well as their strength to carrying the sick man. The body is so heavy in sleep, in sickness, and its fabulous appendages useless.

  But awake and able it is a persistent wonder. The men’s toes spread and grip at rocks through the flip-flop rubber. I take my eyes away from Maung’s hand and watch their ankles, their ropy calf muscles, their flanks like those of spooked horses, bunched and straining. I feel grateful for their strength, their sweat. I encourage them in my mind, yet I say nothing. I ask nothing. I don’t want to waste my energy speaking, trying to be understood.

  The blisters re-form on the tops of my feet, between my toes. How could I have complained of blisters! The word hisses out of my mouth like a curse.

  When we reach the ABSDF camp, I’m so happy I want to cry. The little village at the top of the hill, which we don’t ascend, is blessed, blessed. Why? Because of what exists at the bottom of the hill: the track that will metamorphose into a road that will become asphalt that will take us into Mae Sarieng, Mae Sarieng, Mae Sarieng, Mae Sarieng. A hospital, doctors.

  We walk faster along the stream. When we come around the last bend before those always-slippery steps kicked into the clay earth, we don’t even notice the steps, because the red Toyota is there on the bank, a bizarre anachronism, an impossible machine from the future, and from the past, too, the same truck that brought us here. The one-eyed Thai man sits against the front bumper, smoking, watching our approach. A few people have come down from the camp at the top of the hill; they will return with us to the town. We load the bags up first, then the men count one two three and carefully lift Maung and slide him in. The women maneuver him off the stretcher onto a blanket.

  We climb in, the driver gets into the cab, guns the engine. The truck crashes over the rocks as it crosses the stream. Maung’s head is thrown around, his body jostled. Several of us move at the same time to steady him, to hold him. How far is it, again, to Mae Sarieng?

  I’ve forgotten the interminable length of three hours. The hike out seemed fast because our bodies worked hard, crossing distance. But the truck, racing along the parched track, forces us to sit here and makes everything slow. We stare at a man who gets sicker under our eyes. I hold a blanket over Maung’s dehydrated, drawn face. We move a bag under his head to make sure it’s up when we try to give him water; we hold his jaw closed after he drinks. But he barely takes in anything, and he is heavy, his head like a big stone, rolling between us as the truck dives into and leaps out of potholes, over tree roots and rocks. I crouch beside him, trying to brace his body with my own. Sometimes he gasps or his body jerks and stiffens, but there is nothing we can do but stay close to him, as if we could absorb his pain through touch.

  I start appealing to gods, God, the old Karen and Karenni gods of the river, the mountain, the trees—the god of that tall banyan tree on the edge of the stream. I suggest deals that would not interest them because they would have nothing to gain. Let him live, I think, and I will marry him. Marriage, children, work all my life for Burma, for the Burmese people. But gods don’t care about countries, they’re not interested in borders, which tribe gets what territory, puny human sacrifices. They roam the whole world at will, and smile at us when we are desperate enough to try to barter with them.

  All this talk of gods, as if I’m in a myth or a fairy tale, when I’m just terrified of death. More precisely, I am terrified of losing this one, this one I love, to the chasm in time that shatters the past and swallows the future. As I hold the blanket over him and stare into his slack face, a weight presses against my throat. This, too, is love. I reach out to touch his beautiful warm body, flesh of my flesh, but it’s cold, he’s cold, in this heat, he’s no longer there.

  CHAPTER 45

  MAI PEN LAI

  Death is close in the poor towns of Southeast Asia. It crowds the hallways of this country hospital, which is not antiseptic, not even clean,
definitely not white. The walls are filthy. Maung is sleeping the sleep of the profoundly ill, his body invaded and conquered by some parasite that has not, so far, appeared under the microscope. He lies sweating on a gurney in the hallway, an IV dripping saline into his arm. By the time we reached Mae Sarieng, even the men were mute with fear that he might actually, unbelievably, die. After hours of vomiting and diarrhea, he was unable to keep down any water.

  A sick woman ahead of him groans on her gray sheet and stares out of eyes thick with a yellow, suppurating infection. Ten minutes ago the doctor said to me, “We don’t know exactly”—his raised eyebrows pushed one deep wrinkle into his otherwise smooth forehead—“what the problem is. But his vital signs are stable now. Mai pen lai.”

  Never mind, he said. Mai pen lai. Just another sick Burmese refugee. When the doctor first spoke with us—an anxious knot of six people—he turned to me and asked if I had money to pay for Maung’s care, insulting the men, who drew themselves up taller, proud, and answered him, “Yes, yes, we have money.”

  I glance around the cramped waiting room, up and down the hallways, trying to find a place to rest my eyes. So much for “the land of smiles,” that long-standing slogan bandied about by the Tourist Authority of Thailand. There is no hint of a smile here; you can smell the cloying brine of sick people. Death’s messengers hang out, death’s siblings and cousins and old friends fraternize with the dozens of people on benches, on the floor, slumped against the walls. Little Asian tiger, Thailand, here is the underside of your economic miracle.

  The clinic doors are open wide, but the waiting room is airless. The people are sanguine about the oozing skin conditions, the swollen necks, the infected wounds, the eyes glued shut with pus, the parasites, the bronchial coughs. I doubt they were ever horrified by their bad luck—“horrified” is too histrionic, and implies surprise, that such bad things could happen to them—and they are not horrified now. They are listless, sapped of energy, their hands fallen open on their laps. They stare perplexed at my white skin. What is she doing here?

  When I stand beside Maung, it is obvious what I’m doing here. Too obvious. I forget that I’m not supposed to touch him. I lay my hand on his shoulder, his bare hot arm; though he was cold on the drive in, he has a fever now. I cannot help standing over him, staying near him. But this annoys the women who have come from the camp and from the ABSDF Mae Sarieng house. They glower at me. They call me away from him for a moment, to ask about this or that. When I return to him, a line of his women comrades have closed around him. They wipe his face with wet towels, they hover and whisper with one another. Stretched as though on a hammock between illness and sleep, he belongs to them. I see this, and I understand it in the simplest way: his life is their life.

  After the deposit is paid, a slovenly attendant pushes the gurney into a small private room. Half an hour later, when Maung wakes up, I elbow my way between the women with a cup of water. It is my petty triumph that I react to his thirst before they do. I hold the plastic to his lips, I lift his heavy head off the pillow, he drinks. I would like to kiss the top of his head, but I refrain. He smiles at me like a drunken man, noticeably disoriented, still untangling himself from an underworld. But, as he slowly drinks, his eyes change. They focus in a discernible way. He has seen the three women and two men standing beyond me, also at the bedside, watching him, watching us. He takes the cup in his own hand, finishes drinking, and addresses them.

  I don’t understand what he says. It’s a joke. Of course, he would make a joke. They smile, the men laugh, I laugh, but there is no hiding it, from myself or from them: I do not understand. More words, discussion, and I step away; he needs to talk with everyone, acknowledge each person. We have all been sick with worry.

  I know what a quick study he is, what a precise reader of inflection, inference, pointed glance. Part of me wishes he were still sleeping—vital signs stabilized—so that I could have him to myself. Within minutes he apprehends the tension: how the women want to care for him, how my presence here is problematic.

  What am I but an intruder? What do I know of his life with them, the struggle they have lived through together? Nothing. Or only words. I can see and feel the edges, the hardness of this, another life, a more rigorous life than I have ever imagined living, an existence that requires sacrifice and love and stopping, too, a diminishment of the self. A silencing of the self. It has not been thrust upon me as it has been thrust upon them. I have to choose it.

  I sit on the single chair in the room. The people crowd around their leader—I find it so difficult to use that word—and I observe their expressions of concern, the women’s hands busy folding towels, giving water, lifting to check the saline drip. The low tones of Burmese resonate in the small space.

  If I back away emotionally, get myself out of it, I am able to appreciate their love for him. It makes me ask, What do I know of his love for them? I can only think of our love. I want love to be all of a piece—good big love, one size fits all—but it isn’t like that. There are many kinds of love, and sometimes it divides people, makes us jealously face each other down.

  In Buddhism, jealousy and envy are called defilements. They do defile the more noble emotions, the more generous heart. It’s all right. I don’t have to hold his hand or touch him. I’ll get a room at the guesthouse and visit him early, or late. There is no such thing as visiting hours in a hospital like this. When I’m not here, I’ll go to the local temple and meditate. I will use this; I will work with my defilements in meditation practice. Oh, I am so good!

  A few minutes later, everyone leaves. I am confused, then touched—he has asked them to give us a moment. We look at each other. I am flooded with happiness and a pure gratitude to see him awake, fully conscious, though he looks like hell. I go to his bed, lean down, and kiss his cheek.

  “I am so glad to see you. We were afraid for you.”

  “Me, too. I was wishing that I could die because the pain was so bad.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t get your wish.”

  He nods. “I know it’s been hard. I’m sorry. But I think you should go back to Bangkok.”

  “Maung! You’re sick. They still don’t even know exactly what’s wrong. I want to stay here.”

  “There are lots of people to take care of me now.”

  I am burned right to the core. It would be a strategic error to cry, but that’s what I want to do. Cry until my nose runs. Then blow my nose noisily. He doesn’t want me close to him.

  I do not cry. My sensitivity is the problem. To be Burmese, one has to absorb the sadness into the already sadness-saturated body. The Thais are this way, too; I’ve seen it in my Thai friends. What is the first truth of Buddhism? The first truth is that life is full of suffering. Certainly one sees that plain fact right here, and in the waiting room fifty steps away. The ability to endure, then, is a necessity. You must absorb disaster, loss, death, a host of other minor disappointments. There is no need to wave any of these around like gaudy flags; you furl them up tightly, inside. If you are a Burmese dissident, a fighter, a revolutionary, you can also plant them in the cause. A profound political cause can absorb human suffering for decades.

  That is another part of my problem. I do not have a cause. Not really. I am not like Nola and Charlie, or the other women who are married to Burmese dissidents. I observe, I listen and gather stories. But I am suspicious, still, of joining. I am joined to Maung, to the people in the waiting room, even to the women with whom I compete. I am joined to people. And a few valuable ideas, ideals, fiercely held, upheld. But not to causes. Not to the cause. This is my shortcoming. He must feel it.

  I blink, absorbing the tears back into my eyes. “You want me to go away?”

  “I think it is better for now.”

  I stare at him. The brown skin has regained much of its vitality, its brightness, but his face is noticeably thinner. We can change in the space of hours. I look at his broad cheeks, his lips. There. I’ll have to be satisfied with that, look
ing at but not kissing them.

  I don’t know what else to say.

  Goodbye, I suppose.

  They are sending me home on the bus, like a child who has misbehaved at camp.

  Does the whisper begin as I walk away from the hospital? No, it began before, quietly. It’s louder now. I don’t know if I can do this.

  But you love him.

  Yes. But I don’t know if I can be what he needs. I am too spoiled and childish. I want him and I will never have him.

  Well. You will grow up. You will get tougher, like the other women, you’ll become less selfish.

  What about my work? Didn’t you just say, Writer, that to be with Maung and to live this life I have to silence myself? Where the fuck have I heard that before?

  I’m sure you’re going to tell me.

  In a hard chair at church, that’s where, as a twelve-year-old who had figured out the censorial nature of a maniac god.

  I think you should calm down and get yourself some dinner. It’s been hours since you’ve eaten. A whole day.

  I have no desire to eat. There is no room in my stuck guts for food.

  CHAPTER 46

  THE NEED FOR PROPAGANDA AND PARASITES

  At least in Bangkok I am able to shit.

  The system starts to work again the morning I get back to my dusty apartment, after spending a cramped night on the bus. Maybe it was the congee that cured me. All-nighter buses in Thailand invariably stop halfway through their nocturnal journeys and eject their passengers into the lurid fluorescent half-dream of the cow-tom experience. Stumbling, purblind with exhaustion, familiar with but always mesmerized by this travel ritual, I, too, took my seat at the table (one of dozens) and ate my bowl of cow-tom, the Thai equivalent of Chinese congee, or boiled rice soup. I was invited to this meal by the lecherous old Thai man seated behind me on the bus, who slid his hand under my ass—ostensibly to wake me up—and offered to buy my soup.