by David Shafer
But Aung-Hla was not at the taxi queue, and Leila rode back to Mandalay with a driver she did not know, in silence. An accident on the so-called highway from the airport clogged what little traffic there was, and Leila averted her eyes when they finally passed the wailing and mangled mopedist whose day and probably whole life was going a lot worse than hers.
She tried to will herself into a better attitude. This was a setback, no more. She’d overcome worse. Part of her wanted to be all You have no idea who you’re fucking with. But she couldn’t summon enough of that moxie; they apparently knew exactly with whom they were fucking: a lone white girl whose organization lacked the pull, the will, or the cash to get fourteen short tons of medical equipment out of lockup. In fact, it was Leila who didn’t know who was fucking with her.
I think they do not want you here no way. The guy had looked scared when he’d said it. A pronoun without a referent. Always troubling. And if bird people were involved, things were way more complicated than she had figured. What could the man have meant?
She went back to her office—two rooms above a grocery store beside an important traffic circle on a wide, dirty avenue downtown. She changed out of her stupid shirt and shoes. She made motions at her desk like she was doing work. But it was an act, and soon she remembered that she was without an audience. So she left her office with her laptop in a plastic shopping bag and started walking toward her favorite tea shop. She would order mint tea and those digestive biscuits they had there called Number Nines. She liked the bustle of the street. If she was moving quickly, not speaking, and wearing something reasonable, Leila could blend in here. She could blend in in lots of places; one advantage to being Persian.
But blending in was a kind of hiding, right? She was too alone here, she thought. The aloneness had been the point when she accepted the job. A year in the hot far-away. After the Rich breakup, she wanted out of New York; she wanted to go back in the field. Leila had no social deficits; she existed in the happy and crowded range of the spectrum. The rules did not escape her, nor did ways to bend them. But she thought that maybe she didn’t like all that many people. How many people are you supposed to like? she wondered. Below what number are you attachment-disordered? She liked colleagues in a drinks-after-work kind of way. But in general, they were net-unhelpful during the workday, and often annoying, with their egg salad sandwiches and their bike helmets perched on their monitors.
But in this situation, Leila could have used some help. Besides Aung-Hla, her only friend here was Dah Alice, a precise-English-speaking, crane-like woman, the director of a local orphanage and charity. Dah Alice had been kind to Leila since her arrival and had seriously helped Leila with the find-nursing-students part of her assignment, by introducing her to faculty at the nursing school. But Leila was reluctant to admit to the older woman how much trouble she was having in her work; she didn’t want to be the clueless complainer.
Especially since Leila had discovered this about Dah Alice: Though the orphanage was her main thing, her charity had a wider social-services role—some public-health outreach, some adult-literacy programs. The more capable and effective she was, the more threatening the generals found her, so they kept their shifty eyes on her; she had to do her work and keep her head down. Asking Dah Alice for help with the denied shipment—that would be a bridge too far; it would put her on the spot. People living under tyranny ask fewer favors of one another.
Leila’s favorite tea shop was down a street that had no outlet and no Anglicization of its name on the metal enamel street sign affixed to the pocked pink two-story building on the corner. The Burmese script looked to Leila like a loopy cuneiform or like the schoolgirl doodles that once crowded the margins of her notebooks: it was a series of horseshoes and bubbly Es that apparently contained, for the twenty million readers of the language, useful information. If Leila couldn’t decipher a particular written Burmese word, she tried to notice and remember what the symbols looked like to her. A moon over three tennis balls, smiley face, backward E, fucked-up @ sign: that was the name of the street of her tea shop.
Even ten yards down this narrow street, the heat was cut by shade and leavened with streams of cooler air that trickled from low doorways. People wandered in and out of the buildings down the length of the street. A nonsense-named dead-end street in a second city in a kleptocratic East Asian punch line, thought Leila. But it’s busy!
A man in shades and a crisp white shirt had followed Leila a few steps down the street from the avenue—a too-eager money changer hoping she’d been inviting his trade, she thought. He saw that she was intent on something else, so he stopped at a T-shirt-and-teapot stall and heartily greeted the vendor.
Leaning on the wall or squatting on the sidewalk, men sold soap and batteries and barrettes that were spread on rugs more valuable than any of those things. An old woman folded lace on a stoop. An older woman was making and selling whisk brooms. A decidedly antique little man was polishing shoes, his hands black and nimble. Two monks mumbled at each other. Leila remembered not to smile too keenly, to just keep her face open and make soft eye contact with anyone who wished to do the same. A few did. She had been coming down this street twice a day for a couple of months now. The lace-folding lady gave her a little chin-raise, and a child in a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt beamed and waved.
In the tea shop, Leila sat with her back to the wall. It annoyed her when aid workers acted like Army Rangers, but one eight-month stint in Afghanistan had drilled a few cautious habits into her. The waiter, who may have had a little crush on Leila, raced over to take her order, though by now he probably could have guessed: mint tea and a plate of Number Nines.
What was that smell? Was it cumin? Burlap? Chinese dish soap? Whatever, it was delicious, and it soothed her. That’s what she’d miss when she left this place: the smells. Leila smelled whatever came near her; not just food, but book pages and faces and phones. Her sniffing technique was discreet but effective. Certainly she never had to pass anything under her nose, sommelier-like, as her little brother, Dylan, had to do to match her skills. That’s what the Majnoun kids did on slow Saturdays back in the day: they played smelling games. Roxana might hide a Starburst candy behind her toes and wave her foot in the air in front of her siblings, who then had to guess the flavor. Leila could tell you who had been sitting in the red corduroy chair an hour ago. Dylan did not dare steal Leila’s stuff because once she had claimed she could smell his hands on her library books. Bluffing or no, she’d been right.
Leila’s particular sensitivities seemed to cycle between the wafty, closer smells—mainly food and human—that draped over a moment, and the dusty, distant smells that could be carried by coat sleeve or breeze. In the former category was the knapsack that still smelled of curry, the hairbrush left too near the stove, and the human hangover behind the counter at Kinko’s. In the latter category was the subway-tunnel vent mixed with newspaper that had snaked around her corner in Bushwick, and the tang of handrails, and the seep of wet gravel, but it also included the thinner smells that came from paper and paint and industrially produced hard surfaces. This cycling was in some way related to her mood. Only very rarely did her nose prove too powerful. She was usually able to shut it down or tune out the worst, as when a pair of dirty underpants sat down next to her on a bus. So it annoyed her when pregnant women went on and on about their powers of smell, about how they just had to leave the room because someone was eating a banana or whatever.
Her tea arrived, the little cup and pot and plate of biscuits arranged just so on the dinged aluminum tray. Her waiter practically bowed as he retreated.
No, she couldn’t ask Dah Alice for help. And she doubted Aung-Hla could help in this situation. He knew how to bribe traffic cops but this was probably out of his league. Though maybe he would know what bird people were. Then there was one American in Mandalay she’d spoken with a few times. Fred. Was it Fred? He was some sort of visiting fellow at the university, fluent in Burmese and Kachin and Shan. Maybe
he knew something about how to get around crooked customs officials; he said he’d been in Mandalay for a few years. But despite his exotic multilingualism, he didn’t strike Leila as all that bright. Besides, she thought with a cringe, when they last spoke, she may have been a little snooty to him. He had asked would she like a tour of Mandalay Palace. But she’d just arrived and thought she had a lot to do, and she’d seen about a thousand palaces anyway and Fred didn’t look like someone she wanted to hear talk about fenestration or crenellation or whatever.
Leila stayed in that tea shop until three in the afternoon—more or less the end of the Burmese workday. For most of that time, she drafted an e-mail to Dylan. He had a correspondence-return rate of about one in three, but you really have to stay on kid brothers and she wanted to know about this girlfriend and was Mom drinking too much and who was Roxana’s fancy new employer.
Then she called Aung-Hla on her disposable Burmese phone. Comms were kind of a hot mess on this job. Though in fairness, that wasn’t due to Helping Hand; that was more due to working in a failed socialist-military autarky. Leila had a smartphone that could receive some but not all calls from abroad, plus the office landline she was legally required to keep, plus the satellite phone that Helping Hand was very proud of, plus her local cell. Foreigners were’t allowed to sign contracts, though, even for a cell phone, so Leila’s local cell was always a prepaid burner bought on the street. Eighty minutes for ten bucks. But she got a different number each time she bought a new phone. (Which was actually a used phone. Take that, first-world recyclers!) The constantly changing number meant that it was pretty much just an outgoing-calls device, as though she were carrying a little phone booth with her at all times.
She needed to reconfirm tomorrow’s trip with Aung-Hla. When she’d told him the destination—a town in Kachin State called Myo Thit, five hundred kilometers north—he had looked apprehensive. Leila knew that things got a bit extra-repressive up there, because of the separatists, but Myo Thit wasn’t the deep north, she thought, and it was right on the main highway. If they started early and turned around quick, maybe they could do it in one day.
When she got Aung-Hla on his phone—he shared it with another taximan—he said yes, he would meet her in the morning, but he said no way they could make it there and back in one day. He actually said, “No way this can be done.”
“We will find a hotel, then,” said Leila, “a place to stay in Myo Thit.” She could hear his hesitation over the line. Was he embarrassed? Should she not have said we? Or was it a question of his time, his fee? “I will pay you more. Double the usual rate.” She immediately regretted that. It probably seemed to Aung-Hla that money was a lever she could pull whenever she wanted to. She would like to explain to him about her student loans.
“The same rate,” he said, and she winced. “But the hotel. I think it will not be salubrious.”
She and Aung-Hla would find somewhere to stay, she told herself later that night. It was an important trip. There was a woman in Myo Thit she needed to meet.
The nursing students that Leila had so far identified as strong scholarship candidates were all from relatively prosperous Burmese households. These were women able to put themselves forward, and they were fine applicants. But Leila also wanted to find the women who usually missed these opportunities. Probably because of her sister, Roxana, because there had been someone who’d intervened in Roxana’s case when she was young, someone who had said to the Majnouns, Your daughter is disabled, but she is also a genius.
The woman in Myo Thit was called Ma Thiri. She was a twenty-eight-year-old nurse with a below-the-knee prosthetic who had single-handedly opened a medical clinic in a small village in a poor and dangerous region in a destitute and benighted country. The prenatal care that the clinic provided had demonstrably reduced infant mortality in the population. To Leila, this sounded like a woman who might seriously benefit from three years at an American nursing school.
Jeez, it was hot. Implausibly hot for midnight, Leila thought. Her upper arms stuck sweatily to the skin of her rib cage, except where her T-shirt blotted their meeting. There was a ceiling fan in her two-room flat; it was on now. But it whorled and kerchonked around at such an unstable and idiotic rate that what it gave in breeze it took back in worry. When she’d first arrived, the bed had been centered beneath the fan, but she couldn’t sleep a single night with that seizing squid above her, so she’d moved the bed, a steel beast, to the window, ten feet away. Even so, Leila found the clatter of the fan anathema to sleep, so she had developed a bedtime routine that involved shutting off all the lights, taking a cold, drippy shower, and then, last, killing the fan.
The water from the plastic showerhead spit and dribbled, pooled in Leila’s clavicles, then ran down between her breasts, sluicing before it the film of sweat and yellow dust that coated her daily. For a moment, in the dark shower, she was a completely solved problem, happy as a beetle on a leaf. She thought of California, her motherland, or mother-in-law-land, really. She was on a Huffy bike, pedaling hard, her little brother standing tall on the pegs of her back axle. She was walking the Redondo Beach boardwalk in a beloved yellow windbreaker, her whittled big sister roller-skating beside her.
Then, leaving the shower and ghosting naked across the dark room, Leila killed the fan and sparrowed into her sagging netted bed. The sheet reached her ribs and lay on her like moonlight. Worries began to circle her. But she listened to the breath that she borrowed from the air and she lay still. She let the worries circle. You can’t move a muscle if you’re trying to fall asleep in Mandalay in April.
Aung-Hla was outside her place at six in the morning, and they made good time until they came to a lineup of cars waiting at an unexplained roadblock. There was no traffic coming the other way. Leila watched Aung-Hla. Was he concerned? No. So she tried to sit patiently. After half an hour, two big SUVs came roaring down from the other direction, and when the SUVs had passed, the checkpointists reopened the road. Leila and Aung-Hla didn’t make Myo Thit until one o’clock, and, from the moment of their arrival, the town struck Leila as a menacing place. The dogs flinched at unthrown rocks. Doors shut ahead of her as she walked down the street. The man who sold her a Coke wouldn’t meet her eyes. And at the teahouse in the dismal main square, she saw Aung-Hla being given grief, presumably for driving a foreign girl.
When Leila found the small clinic, she had to wait an hour before Ma Thiri had time to sit down with her. This annoyed her, but she tried to get over it; the woman was clearly busy with patients. Surely, that was more important than talking to some rich foreign girl who would be gone tomorrow. Isn’t that how Leila would have seen it if they’d swapped places? Because Leila knew well that that’s what she was here, that was how she presented: as rich. This question, in all its forms, vexed and pestered her: How much did money matter? Clearly, a lot. Being so poor hurt. This clinic was pretty dirty. Obligingly, a patchy cat skittered through the little waiting room. Yeah, rich/poor still meant everything. Did that make her a Marxist?
But then sometimes Leila saw that there was something about living closer to the ground and nearer to need, something that bestowed grace on a soul. Or was she just romanticizing poverty? That was super-annoying, when people did that. This ineffable thing she was admiring in the downtrodden Burmese—she didn’t want it enough to give away any of what she had.
They spoke in Ma Thiri’s small examination room. The walls were covered with exhortations to wash your hands and some junta-required agitprop about working together to overcome adversity and negative elements. But also some medical-anatomical and pictographic self-diagnostic posters that would probably get a school nurse in Kansas run out of town.
Leila’s Burmese was about as good as Ma Thiri’s English, so when they spoke, that rare thing happened: they shared languages; they shared all that work and risk. In all her previous interviews, Leila had found it difficult to avoid the women’s desperation, the plain truth that they would do anything to get what she
was dangling before them. So it took her ten minutes to even understand that maybe Ma Thiri didn’t want her scholarship. Once Leila understood that ambivalence, she heard herself become incredulous.
“Why not seize this?” she asked. “You can return here with more knowledge and more skills.”
“But and what because if I do not return here?”
It was a jumble of words, but there was Ma Thiri’s sad smile at the end of it, and its meaning was clear to Leila. Just as Leila had been doing moments before, Ma Thiri was wondering at the puzzle of rich and poor, and she was saying that she was afraid that the West would ruin her for the tougher life that was hers to live.
“You must resolve to return, then” was what Leila said to her (or, actually, You must extra-decide to return, then, as she didn’t know the Burmese for resolve).
But there was this amazing thing that Ma Thiri had already accomplished—the clinic—and that was mostly what they talked about. She said she’d done it for her mother, who had died from—a word that Leila didn’t understand but didn’t want to ask her to repeat because she got the important part: that it was preventable, and that Ma Thiri was still mad about that.
There was some money from a Christian charity, and perhaps more coming; there was another nurse who might begin work soon. Ma Thiri sighed. Then she smiled. “You will give me a man, also, at this hospital school?” She mentioned the dreamy doctor from a years-old TV show, and Leila laughed.
