The Burma Legacy

by Geoffrey Archer

  The finality of it shocked her. It was as if all trace of his existence had been purged from the place. The action of a man who knew he would never return.

  She switched off the computer and looked round the room, memories flooding back. She’d been nervous the first time she’d come here, but all they’d done was talk. She, mostly. He was a good listener. A few little prompts from him and before long she’d spilled out the story of her life, including the extraordinarily personal fact that she was still a virgin and didn’t much want to be.

  Instead of taking advantage of her obvious readiness for sex, he’d talked fondly about her predecessors. Handmaidens, he’d called them. Spoken of them in a way that deconstructed them, never using their real names. The ‘Jenny wren’, ‘The vole’. Always animals and birds. What did he call her behind her back, she’d wondered?

  In the ensuing weeks and months she’d come here nearly every day, whenever he requested it. And every evening she’d expected him to make his move. Sometimes they’d lain on the bed together watching TV or reading books. But he’d never touched her. Not in the way she’d wanted.

  The bedroom.

  She’d remembered a place where Perry kept things. An odd, schoolboyish hiding place. A hollowed-out book on the shelf next to the TV. She had a feeling – although where she’d got the idea from she didn’t know – that he used to keep contraceptives in it. Imagined that a part of his usual ritual with new ingenues had been to take the Kama Sutra off the shelf, excite the girl with some exotic illustrations, then open the book’s secret cavity and pluck out a little foil pack.

  Melissa entered the bedroom, flushed with vicarious excitement and a touch of resentment. She took the book off the shelf and opened it up. There was something in the hiding place, but it wasn’t a prophylactic. Gingerly she extracted a little scrap of paper, half expecting some tawdry item of pornography. She sat on the bed.

  It was a cutting from a magazine. A colour picture of a smallish stone obelisk. Some memorial or other with oriental writing on it. And standing in front of it was a tall, straight-backed but elderly man.

  She read the caption, saying where it was.

  And it identified the person.

  A Japanese name. One which had recently taken on a terrible new significance for her.

  ‘Oh Perry,’ she gasped.

  Suddenly there was a noise.

  Melissa’s heart missed several beats as she realised it was the clicking of the combination lock. She struggled to stuff the cutting down the front of her pullover, but Ingrid appeared in the doorway to the bedroom and saw her doing it.

  ‘What have you found?’ she snapped.

  ‘Don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  The Danish woman’s face went a vile shade of puce. ‘You fat bitch!’ She hurled herself at Melissa, snatching at the hand that was still buried in the pullover. ‘Give it to me. You have no rights in here.’

  Melissa tried to roll clear, but Ingrid crashed down on top of her. She reeked of wine. Melissa dug at the hated woman, her elbow making contact with soft flesh.

  ‘Give it to me!’ Ingrid screamed, tearing at Melissa’s jumper.

  ‘Get off!’

  She managed to slide off the bed and away from her attacker, making a dart for the door, but Ingrid was too quick for her. She was taller than Melissa and blocked her path.

  ‘You think you’re so special,’ Ingrid hissed. ‘But you’re so stupid. You believe Perry cared for you.’

  ‘He did! He did!’

  ‘So why did he never make love to you?’ She smiled as she saw Melissa’s embarrassed reaction.

  ‘Who says he didn’t?’ The words how does she know shrieked inside her head.

  ‘He says,’ Ingrid smirked, trying to mimic her voice. ‘Perry. He told me. Me, Melissa. There.’ She pointed at the bed. ‘Between those sheets. Told me you were the only one of his handmaidens he couldn’t bring himself to fuck.’ She flung the word at Melissa, like a slap across the face. ‘Now, silly little girl, whatever you’ve found, give it to me.’

  A scream burst from Melissa’s chest. She charged forward, punching Ingrid’s breasts like a prize fighter. The woman retreated under her blows, clawing at Melissa’s eyes. But Melissa ducked. Head down, she charged again, ramming Ingrid against the door frame. The woman’s shoe caught against it and she went down, cracking her head on the polished wood floor.

  Melissa stood over her. Panting for breath, she waited for her to get up again. When she didn’t, when she saw Ingrid wasn’t moving at all, she panicked, hurling herself through the open door and down the grand staircase to the ground floor.

  Back in her room in Mandalay Lodge she fought to calm herself. To gather her thoughts. Lies. It had to have been lies what Ingrid had said.

  Her rucksack lay on the bed. She’d already packed most of the things for her flight tomorrow night. She couldn’t stay here, that was clear, even if Ingrid was merely unconscious rather than dead. The bitch would come after her. She stuffed the last items of clothing into the bag, swung it onto her shoulders and ran down the stairs into the cold night air.

  Listening to check there were no noises from the manor, she began to walk. Towards the drive. Then the village. And a phone box so she could get a taxi to the station and a late train to London.

  Sixteen

  Yangon, Myanmar

  Monday, 10 January 2000, 11.40 a.m.

  One day earlier and five and a half thousand miles away from where Melissa had made her shocking discovery, Peregrine Harrison was collected from Yangon’s Mingaladon airport by a driver sent from the hotel in a taxi.

  It was an uncomfortable journey into the city where he’d lived thirty-eight years ago. The doctors had warned him the pain and exhaustion would increase towards the end, but he had never imagined it would worsen so fast.

  He sat wedged in the back of the car trying to minimise the effects of the bumps and jolts, trying at the same time to recognise places – faces even. But although the town felt familiar, like an old jacket discovered in a loft, there was a strangeness about it too. Trees had grown in places where there’d been none before. Old landmarks were half obscured by new buildings. Only the people seemed not to have changed – men and women still wearing longyis and sandals, their placid faces which had accepted rule by colonialists now tolerating the strong arm of their own military.

  Harrison had picked the Inya Lodge Hotel from the pages of the Lonely Planet Guide because it was in the northern suburbs, away from the noisy centre of the city he still thought of as Rangoon. Also because it was close to where he’d lived last time he’d been here.

  The taxi turned off a broad, tree-lined avenue into an area of large colonial mansions, many in a state of disrepair. The hotel was of bungalow style, set in its own leafy compound. A young man in white shirt and black trousers erupted from the entrance to open the car door. Inside the small, dark lobby, the eager faces of the three reception staff made Harrison suspect he was the first foreign visitor they’d seen for weeks.

  A boy carried the small suitcase to the bedroom, its white walls speckled here and there with the red and brown of squashed insects. High up near the ceiling an air-conditioner hummed and rattled. The boy pulled back the curtain to show off the garden, revealing windows covered with a rusting wire screen.

  When he was alone, Harrison lay on the bed and let out an exhausted sigh. The strain of the long flight to Bangkok and the seven-hour time difference were not things a terminal cancer patient could be expected to tolerate well. During the first part of the journey, the pain from the spinal tumour had become excruciating. He’d hobbled to the aircraft’s toilet to stick the first of his Fentanyl patches to the side of his chest. As effective as morphine, the doctors had said, when they’d prescribed them a few days ago.

  Rather than continuing immediately from Bangkok to Yangon, he’d scheduled a night in the Thai capital, partly to recover from the journey and partly to keep the appointment he’d made b
efore leaving England. When Rip failed to make contact at the hotel, it had been a bitter blow.

  He stared up at the ceiling. A plastic lampshade hung from it. He knew he’d left far too much to chance coming here. In the interests of preserving secrecy he’d made no checks that Tin Su was still alive, even. Nor that Tetsuo Kamata had booked his annual pilgrimage to Burma this year, for fear that by doing so he might alert the authorities to his plans. All that work was still to be done.

  And the pain and exhaustion he was now suffering made that prospect a daunting one. Particularly the thought that he might need to confront Kamata on his own. It had been stupid to forget to tell Rip the name he was travelling under.

  He smacked his forehead – he was about to forget something else. He raised himself into a sitting position, picked up the phone and pressed the button for the reception desk.

  ‘I need to send an email,’ he announced when the man answered.

  ‘Yes sir.’

  ‘Can I do that from here?’

  ‘Oh no sir.’

  ‘Then where?’

  ‘We do not have Internet in Myanmar, sir.’

  The news stunned him. He’d naïvely assumed the technology was universal. It was the only means he had of telling Rip where he was.

  ‘But surely somebody …’ he protested. ‘I’m happy to pay.’

  ‘Sir, I think some people telephone to Thailand to make Internet connection. But for us it is not permitted.’

  It was a disaster. Madness not to have checked before leaving Bangkok.

  ‘Thank you,’ he whispered and put the phone back on its cradle. The thought of trying to find a sympathetic person with a computer who would connect him up through Thailand defeated him utterly.

  He lay back again, feeling foolish and wrecked. The journey had been too much for him. He had an overpowering need to sleep. Maybe in a couple of hours he would feel fresher. Ready to begin the process of confronting his past.

  North-east of Yangon

  12.10 p.m.

  A Hilux pickup truck crammed with bags and bodies hummed southwards towards the Myanmar capital. The road was good by Burmese standards. A dual-carriageway. Every so often the driver stopped to pay a toll of a few kyat. Road tax – except the money went towards brighter uniforms for the military, the passengers believed. As the vehicle lurched on again from one such stop, Daw Tin Su clutched for support at the rail which surrounded the open back. Hardly necessary, for the press of bodies held her firmly in her seat. Above the roof of the driver’s cab, a crate of ducklings was wedged between sacks of rice.

  Tin Su wore a longyi of rust-coloured cotton. Her greying hair had been drawn back behind her neck and curled into a bun. A rush bag holding some fruit for her son lay on her lap. She was tired already and the day was only beginning. She’d slept little last night or the night before. The days preceding a visit to the prison were always anxious ones.

  They passed rice paddies, squares of glinting water and a few of yellow-green where the new crop was taking root. Here and there little figures crouched, their heads shaded by coolie hats. A different climate, a different landscape from the hills and orchards of her former home a long way north in the cool Shan hills. She longed for it often, when the humidity of the plains wore her down.

  The name ‘Tin’ meant ‘gentle’ and as a girl it had suited her. The apple of her father’s eye, she’d been much loved for her sweet nature. She was aged sixty-eight now, and during the long, hard years of her life, her once-smooth, pale-brown skin had become taut and lined.

  Burma had been British when she was born in the small hill town of Mong Lai. Her father, a strong, forceful man, had taught her to treat their masters with respect but not affection. He’d been employed by an English trader exporting rubies and jade for women on the other side of the world. Responsible work that had paid well, enabling her and her older brother to have a better education than many of their peers.

  In 1942 when the Japanese invaded, the English trader had fled, leaving behind his stock of precious stones. Her grateful and startled father had hoarded it, then sold the gems to Japanese officers so he could minimise the family’s hardships during the lean years of the war.

  After it was over, and the country was rushing towards independence, Tin Su had continued to study the departing colonialists’ language and literature. A lending library established in the town decades earlier by the British had somehow survived the war and she planned to work there.

  Then her mother died of malaria. Tin Su had just turned eighteen. Her older brother had gone abroad to seek his fortune, so she’d had to care for her heartbroken father alone. Three years later, he too had died.

  The shock of being without immediate family at such a young age had turned her thoughts inwards. For months she’d hidden away, hardly speaking to anyone, before finally deciding to make a life for herself. She’d persuaded the old scholar at the English library to take her on as his assistant. The work was far from arduous and she’d loved being surrounded by books.

  Then, in 1953, a foreigner had visited Mong Lai, changing her life forever.

  A particularly deep pothole sent a bone-jarring jolt through the chassis of the pick-up. Tin Su was shaken awake. She’d been dozing and her head had flopped onto the shoulder of the tall young man beside her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered, hiding her mouth behind her hands, embarrassed at such intimate contact with a stranger.

  The young man said nothing, staring across the paddies as if he hadn’t noticed. Tin Su looked around. All the passengers were younger than her. She wanted to know their stories, yet dreaded them asking for hers. Had they guessed where she was going? They would know soon enough when the line bus stopped outside the bleak walls of the prison.

  Her stomach clenched at the thought of those twin layers of wire-mesh inside, reaching out to her son with her soul because he was beyond the reach of her touch. He’d looked thinner last time she’d seen him two weeks ago, his not-quite-Burmese face pale and drawn, his spectacles with a crack in one lens. He’d told her he was all right. What else could he say when every word was listened to.

  The brakes squealed. She glanced up, sick with nervousness.

  They’d arrived.

  The Inya Lodge Hotel

  2.20 p.m.

  Perry Harrison had slept for nearly two hours and felt a little better. He asked reception for a taxi, then tidied himself and made his way to the lobby, sinking into a chair to wait. The man behind the desk smiled unwaveringly, watching his every move.

  ‘Not many tourists coming?’ Harrison remarked.

  ‘France, German some. England – not many. You are most welcome thakin.’

  Thakin. The servants had called him that in the family home near Mandalay a lifetime ago. It meant master.

  ‘This first time in Myanmar?’

  Harrison wondered whether to lie.

  ‘First time for a very long time,’ he answered eventually.

  He picked up an English-language newspaper from the table called The New Light of Myanmar, whose content was summed up by its banal headlines.

  Secretary-1 attends skill demonstration by outstanding students.

  Secretary-2 visits traditional apparel show.

  The job titles the junta had invented for themselves sounded like something out of George Orwell.

  The taxi came and drove him towards the centre of the city, where he hoped to find the man who could lead him to Tin Su. As they passed the gilded hilltop splendour of the huge Shwe Dagon Pagoda he remembered taking his new wife there on their first evening in Rangoon more than forty-six years ago. She’d never been to the capital before.

  The centre of Yangon looked little changed from its time as colonial Rangoon. The warmth and smells of the place slipped round his shoulders like an old cardigan. The car dropped him at the smaller Sule Pagoda and he looked about to get his bearings. Two young children ran up, one with a basket covered with fine lace through which the beaks of
wild birds poked. Smiling at their expectant faces, Harrison pulled out a 50-kyat note and gave it to them in payment for the creatures’ freedom. Buddhist tradition said such an act improved a man’s chances of a good reincarnation. As he watched them flutter away he knew that securing freedom for his son was going to be infinitely harder.

  He began to walk, stiffly conscious of the pain in his pelvis and back. The analgesic patch appeared to be losing its efficacy, despite the doctors saying they lasted three days.

  At the junction with Merchant Road he stopped to catch his breath outside a grey ministerial building, guarded by watchful soldiers. When the military junta took power in 1988 it had called itself the SLORC, he remembered. State Law and Order Restoration Council. Today it was SPDC – State Protection and Development Council, a softening of the acronym but not of the regime. It irked him that within a few short days, fate willing, he’d be doing business with these strutting demagogues.

  The pavements were crowded, men as well as women dressed in the skirt-like longyis. He passed shops selling electric fans and aluminium pots, and side-stepped tea shop customers crouching on low stools by the kerb. An ancient bus clattered past, gushing blue fumes, its rusting bodywork disguised by bright green paint.

  Central Yangon was laid out as a grid, the numbered north–south roads crossing named streets at right angles. The house Harrison was looking for was on a junction, but he couldn’t remember which, though he recollected a wrought-iron balcony overlooking the main road. The address had been on the faded yellow letter his friend had written twelve years ago, but he’d destroyed it because it reminded him so chillingly of all he’d turned his back on.

  Than Swe. Still living in that corner house in 1988, but today? Harrison hoped he wasn’t dead. Because however shamefully he’d neglected their friendship, he was the key to the past. The one key he had.

  When they were children Than Swe was the only Burmese friend he’d had. They’d played in rivers and streams and frightened one another with tales of wild beasts from the jungle. At the age of thirteen Perry had been sent to boarding school in England, but the friendship had continued in the summer holidays. After the war they’d met again in Rangoon when he returned in 1953 to work for a timber exporter. Their conversation then was of politics, books and women.