The Blue-Eyed Shan

by Becker, Stephen;

  He made a priest’s face at his daughter. “Little golden one, what have you done with your day?” For some weeks after his return from Indochina, during his courtship of Loi-mae, he had been embarrassed by the child’s tawny hair, by a golden glow that seemed to shine forth from her gleaming skin. And then Loi-mae had said, “Her father was a good man and she is a lovely child, and let us have no frowning or perplexities.” Naung had answered, “She is a lovely golden child and all say so.” Loi-mae had said, “Then let there be no fears and no forbidden words. She is a daughter of two worlds, and even her name is a name in both.”

  Lola was not merely nine now but nine and a half, and she spoke up sedately: “I ground millet. I found and fetched eggs. At Lower Stream I pounded garments. And Chung says I must learn soon to tap the poppies.”

  He feigned severity and said, “Well, that is not bad.” Lola was a beautiful name, a beautiful word, musical and sweet. “I hope you found time to play.” He lunged for her and hummed along her neck.

  She squealed and giggled. “Not much time. Cha’s wedding is only three days off and there is much to do.”

  “And what can a girl of nine do?” Naung scoffed. “What does a girl of nine know of weddings?”

  “A girl of nine can polish the silver ornaments. Tui said I did well. And I am to dance.”

  Naung was proud that she had been chosen to dance, so did not mention it. “What do they use for polish in Tui’s house?”

  “Pig’s grease and river sand.”

  “Too harsh,” Naung said. “Pig’s grease and paddy mud do better. That Tui was always a harsh woman.”

  “You lived with her long enough,” Loi-mae said.

  “Well, that was years ago before the war, when I was a boy, and you would not have me, and it was only a month or two. I don’t envy Kin-tan.”

  “I am going to live with Weng-aw,” Lola said.

  “Not yet you aren’t,” Naung said, and nuzzled her again.

  “When the time comes,” Lola said firmly.

  “You will live with more than one man,” Loi-mae promised, “and when you become a wife it will be to a man you know and value.”

  Naung smiled at his wife, who returned the smile. There were moments in Naung’s life so complete, so swollen, that he feared the gods’ wrath, as if one day he might be made to pay a great price.

  The moment dissolved. He sat on a reed mat and leaned back against the oak-and-bamboo wall, content. He felt for his pipe and tobacco, and lit up. “Beer would be good,” he said, but Loi-mae was already scooping a cupful from the keg. Naung sipped and watched his woman work. The beer danced in his belly. Millet cakes she was preparing, surely potatoes, maybe papaya. The venison was long gone. What more could a man ask? All this, and a floor of wide-planked teak-wood too!

  “Lazy man!” Loi-mae said. “Go bring us a fresh fish.”

  Naung groaned. “Why not ask before I light my pipe?”

  “The pipe can be lit again. Or Lola will keep it burning.”

  Naung grumbled but was happy within. Loi-mae’s face was round, her eyes bright, almost black, shiny with life, her lips full, her teeth only slightly stained; she smoked little and chewed betel less. Her body was strong but accommodating, and she loved him within her, or seemed to, and in this Naung was shy and uncertain; and she cried out encouragement and thanks. She was not stringy like Wan’s woman, a scold.

  He took a bamboo pole from its pegs on the rear wall, and a round wicker basket without a bottom, and a wicker creel which he slung on his back. “I’ll go,” he said, “but I’ll be hungry afterward. And later—you know what fish does to a man.”

  “Big talk,” she complained. “Who snored first last night?”

  “Perhaps if my woman were less homely,” he suggested, and she beat him out the door, pounding his back with the flat of her hands and laughing as she cried, “O! O! You rhinoceros!”

  Light lingered over West Slope and the Sawbwa’s house. Naung touched his pistol. The evening sounded normal, a calm voice here and a laugh there, a pye-dog’s yap. Naung hurried. He would need more than starlight, and the moon would be late tonight. The air of dusk was cool and soothing on his face. He trotted toward the upper paddies. They were submerged now, with waterweeds growing that would later be fertilizer. Each spring Pawlu dispatched a body of armed men to follow the valley’s deep stream to the River Lae, a tributary of the great Salween. These men made bundles of reeds and grasses, and strung the bundles on bamboos, and laid them down in shallow water, weighting them with stones. Fat river fish came to the shallows to spawn, and their eggs clung to the reeds and grasses. At the proper time the men gathered these reeds and grasses in great baskets and bore them home, and scattered them in the paddies, and soon the eggs hatched and later the fishing was good.

  At the edge of the paddy Naung removed his cloth shoes and trousers. He waded out a few paces; the water did not reach his knee. He swept the surface with his bamboo pole. Nothing. He went on sweeping. A silver flash broke the surface, but he could not see which way it fled. He went on sweeping. Another flash, and he pounced. Through a small hole in the top of the round wicker basket he felt for his fish. He found it, grasped the tail and hauled it up. Larger than a man’s hand. He dropped it into the creel, dried his legs on his trousers, donned the trousers and shoes, and marched home with his tackle and his catch.

  Lola laughed at the silvery creature and clapped her hands. While Loi-mae cleaned the fish Naung hung up his gear, lit his pipe and swigged his beer. He sang to his daughter, who stole a mischievous sip of the beer. He sang about a little girl who strayed from the valley and was devoured by a leopard. Lola’s eyes were enormous and her teeth gleamed in the firelight, and at the end she cried, “Her father should have rescued her!”

  In the morning Mong fashioned bamboo cages while interested villagers murmured compliments. He drew a crowd always. He was an artist with bamboo, and their compliments were a way to say, “Mong, why should anyone else do this work when you do it so well? Therefore we will all smoke and gossip and be thankful.” Mong cursed them with great good nature. He bound the bamboos with stout hemp twine; he slit, trimmed, lashed again, tested. When the cages were complete he cleaned his knife, and stretched. “I’m hungry,” he said. His wife, Chung, was a famous stout woman, jolly in good times and even-tempered in bad; she was prepared for this announcement and came to him immediately with rice, cold chicken and tea. “Chung has not eaten it all!” a villager cried, and there was free and merry laughter, and Chung called out, “Let who will, sleep with sticks! Mong likes a good substantial woman!” Chung was aggressively round, and in the heavy heat before the monsoon, when the women often wore only the long skirt, her great breasts hung like ripe pumpkins. It was no surprise that she and Mong were raising a large family, seven healthy children, five of them boys, and in summer it was said jokingly that none were yet weaned and there was plenty for all.

  Mong himself was a skinny bunch of dried sticks, short and bandy-legged, so the jokes included him, and some were by now village traditions: “Where is Mong today?” “Fallen in again.” Or, “He slipped and was smothered.” Chung would snort, hearing this, and her little brown eyes would flame in fun and pretended anger, and she would tell them, “Not one of you would last an hour, and Mong is still rutting like a hare after fifteen monsoons!”

  The Sawbwa said that all women were meant to be like Chung. This was the highest of compliments, and it was generally agreed that Chung merited it. She bore herself proudly, even now, serving Mong his meal. While he ate, the villagers admired his work, squinted at the sun, smoked cheroots (small ones, the cheroots of mountain farmers and not the foot-long monstrosities that lazy low-landers had time to burn), poked their children in the ribs and told ancient stories of the miserly and barbarous Chinese. At the edge of the crowd Naung sat against the wall of a house and dozed.

  When Mong had belched, and washed his hands in the dust, and smiled shy thanks at Chung, Naung rose casuall
y and assembled his platoon. Mong would carry the cages, Kin-tan the heads. So many would stand guard, so many would dig, so many would carry posts and so many beams. Naung asked the Sawbwa, “Is it well?”

  The Sawbwa was in good humor this morning. He blinked, and his filmy eye shone pale in the tall sunlight, and he said, “All things have their uses and their seasons, and this morning’s work is well done. It seems to me the hot weather will come a day or two early.”

  The villagers murmured. The Sawbwa was rarely wrong, and now that he had spoken, it seemed to them that, yes, the teak leaves were shriveling a day or two early, and perhaps the goats had begun to shed, and down among the pyinkado trees the monkeys were noisier and more active than customary.

  The Sawbwa tapped his turban as if saluting and said, “Go then.” Naung marched his men off, the whole length of the village, from the Sawbwa’s house on West Slope down the dusty road toward Red Bullock Pass, and when they passed his own house Loi-mae and Lola waved and the woman called, “Hurry home!” Naung’s men then exchanged the customary jokes about those who spoiled women with excessive gallantry, and not merely gallantry but acrobatics, and that was why the Shan never killed monkeys, because the monkeys set high standards of promiscuity, frequency and speed, standards for men to live up to, but this Naung was embarrassing even the monkeys, perhaps because he was over-educated by foreign travel.

  They saw vultures on the upper slope, above East Poppy Field. They crossed the field and entered the grove in open order, a loose rank, some bearing timber, some with weapons at the ready, each man a scout. They only gathered again at the road. From there they could scan the hills thousands of feet above them, where the Wild Wa lived. Naung glassed the hills carefully. They marched north then, the bearers and Mong flanked by their guard, and two men like shadows in the groves to either side. They passed four poles, four beams, four cages, two of them down, the hemp slashed by impious travelers. On the road crows strutted, iridescent blue at the shoulder. Here the road was broad and straight, a true road, suitable for carts. The men kicked up reddish dust.

  After some hundreds of paces Naung called a halt. The band of Shan conferred, and some dug at the earth here and there with their swords. They decided to place the cages one directly opposite the other, a double warning for travelers, who would thus pass between the staring Kachin heads.

  The diggers worked with wooden spades fashioned from one timber and beveled. They would dig crotch-deep. Meantime the balance beams were fitted to the thick posts, and the wooden tholes greased with hog fat and driven. The sun was high now and the men worked slowly.

  Mong took the heads from Kin-tan and sewed the flaps of neck skin to the bamboo slats. He then bound the cages shut. Naung ran hemp line through holes in one end of each balance beam and knotted it securely. These preparations took the time of one meal, or of a good bath in the stream, or of one cheroot.

  When all was in readiness, Mong bound the cages to the inner ends of the balance beams. Two teams raised the posts and planted them deep in their pits; two teams shoveled dirt around them and tamped it firm.

  When the posts were up, Naung hauled on his hemp lines. The balance beams swung up, and the cages hung above the road, and the heads brooded down at them. Naung then tied the hemp lines through notches low on the posts. “No more digging for a while,” he said. “No more construction. For a while we repair only. And replace heads as needed.”

  “Ten is a good number,” Mong approved. “Five to the south and five to the north.”

  “But this is a double,” said Ko-yang, “which makes eleven.”

  Mong scowled.

  “Eleven is not a bad number,” Naung said quickly. “One for each finger and one for the big finger.”

  Mong laughed, though Ko-yang seemed surly, and Naung breathed easier. “Now we make our visits.” The men assembled and marched back along the road, and where the cages were down because fearful or defiant travelers had hacked through the hemp lines, Naung knotted or replaced the hemp. They continued south, beyond the teak grove and East Poppy Field, to repair the other five cages. Naung liked this road. He was a traveled man and knew a small thrill, an eagerness, at the flat dun glare of the road between the green groves, the straight run of it like the airstrip at Muong Sing. He liked it even better now, with his handiwork complete, six to the north and five to the south, eleven former highwaymen and brigands saying to all who approached, “Dawdlers, beware: see what befalls evil men here.”

  They trooped back to the village and lingered over a late noonday meal, each in his own house. In the afternoon Naung made his rounds, inspecting all sentry posts, surprising a sleepy Shwe, taking him unawares by the throat and then delivering, for the twentieth time, a lecture on the functions of a sentry. Shwe was drooping, middle-aged, a smoker of much opium. Naung decided to retire him to farm work, with the Sawbwa’s permission.

  Naung took an hour off then, and played pigs-in-their-pens with Lola so that he could rejoice in her bright brown eyes, her wavy hair, her ivory skin, the warmth of her imp’s grin, the tug of her fingers. She was almost ready now for women’s clothes. Growing up!

  In the evening he reported to the Sawbwa. The Sawbwa’s breath whistled through the hairs of the Sawbwa’s nose; the Sawbwa removed his turban to fluff the white hair and scratch the yellow scalp. “It is well done and still I do not like it,” the Sawbwa said. “We are Shan and not Wild Wa. Our way should be the way of the Lord Buddha, and not the way of savages who worship stones and human heads.”

  “But if we must become like the Wild Wa to survive,” Naung said reasonably, “then we must.”

  “If we become like the Wild Wa,” said the Sawbwa, “then we have not survived.”

  The Sawbwa of Pawlu could distinguish faces at twice a man’s length; at a hundred paces he could see, or at least perceive vaguely, the presence and motion of men and women on a hillside. His kidneys ached always; his urine was greenish yellow, but this did not alarm him because colors were to him muted and dull. He cleared his bowels perhaps once in three days. Sudden pains, sharp pangs in various joints and bones, were his way of life.

  He knew that he was Chinese, and Yunnanese, but not Shan because the language of Pawlu had been gibberish when first he arrived there. Long before that, he remembered gnawing ravenously on acorns. He recalled a snarling, emaciated man admonishing him over and over, “Remember, you are fifteen! You are fifteen!” That was curious. He had celebrated his ninth birthday at the New Year, by burning a strip of red paper. The man was possibly his father and was urging him upon another man and insisting, “Not paper! Not copper cash! The silver piece!” Not paper, not copper cash, the silver piece.

  This first man took the silver piece and plodded off. The second man set him in a wagon and handed him a lump of steamed dough and a bowl of hot water. To the boy it was meat and wine. He could not believe his luck. There were other boys in the wagon. There had been different boys and some girls too in a hut; once he had known their names; perhaps that had been home.

  The wagon creaked and advanced. The spindly boys sat like caged larks, and after a time peered about. There were houses, birds, fields, farmers; the wagon was passing these, but it seemed that the world was passing the wagon. The sky was light and in the distance hazy mountains rose. The season was perhaps spring. The wagon was being pulled by a red mule.

  They were very close to a pink mountain. The boy knew panic; how if they should take him up so high? In his life he had never stood higher than the bed of a wagon. This mountain was carved. There were roads and flat spaces, and queer squat houses. Now they passed red men and red donkeys. Now they were closer still to the mountain and he saw many red men and red monkeys.

  To the other side of the wagon he saw green boys. Pleasure flooded his heart. Red donkeys and green boys! Perhaps this was growing up. Perhaps this was the true world, the world of living people who had houses for shelter and food each day.

  The wagon halted beside one of the low buildi
ngs. “All out! All out!” The boys scrambled down, milled and stared about. “Inside! Inside!” Hastily the boys filed through a narrow doorway. The door was of wood but the house was of stone. Inside were many more boys and a few men. The taller men could not stand erect, but stooped and hunched beneath the low ceiling. The boy felt a strong urge to relieve nature, the small convenience, but suppressed it.

  For some minutes the boys huddled together in the gloom. A man’s voice called, “Sit down, fools!” They sat down immediately. The boy saw then that there were also donkeys in the house. The house, like all the houses he had known, was of one room, more spacious than his family hut. As he grew accustomed to the dim light he imagined that the men and boys who had preceded him were also red and green. Odors here were pungent.

  His neighbor pressed against him; the boy drew away, pressing against another. Bit by bit all made room. It was possible to lie down, but with no more than a hand’s span of free space. The boy’s bladder pressed and he wondered if he dared speak. Others were murmuring. He heard a splash and splatter, and sat up in the gloom: a donkey was staling. Almost immobilized by fear, the boy sought anyone’s eye.

  A shadowy man finally looked at him. The boy crawled two lengths and squatted before the man. This man was surely red. There was a narrow slit of a window, and through the slit came a dusty ray of sunlight and it brightened the red of this man’s skin. “Small convenience,” the boy finally whispered, trembling.