Burmese Lessons (16 page)

Song rises up like sparks from a fire. People come carrying candles, shoulders shrugging off the cold. Many of them are not as young as I thought but well into their thirties, early forties—a group of men and women growing older near the border, as the guitarist said. What an exile they’ve had, these onetime university students who walked into the jungle to become revolutionaries. In the early years, dozens of them died of malaria, snakebite, battle wounds. But these ones survived.

I don’t know what the words of the song mean, but I know the people sing them to go home. Music is a vehicle that traverses every terrain, carries over oceans, through air, across time. This is a song they have sung for years. The guitar is not that bad; the new A string holds. The player’s fingers spider easily from one chord to another, accomplishing the slow rise and sudden drop of the melody, then the bridge when the chorus becomes something new, the place where most voices would drift off, unsure of the key change. But these singers know every word and how it rests in the music.

When the first song is finished, the guitarist noodles around until he works his way into another tune, and the voices move again. The next song
is familiar, though I can’t remember the American band that sings it. Sounds like the Eagles, but not quite.

The flirtatious man beside me has been singing, bass voice thick with alcohol but serious. Now he cants his head close to mine and whispers, “Do you know the song?”

“‘Dust in the Wind.’”

“This is a different song using the same music. A revolutionary song.” People sing it with growing intensity. He translates the song haltingly:

I watch the faces. Everyone is either singing or listening quietly.

I wonder if this means the party’s over, literally on a sad note, but I underestimate the partygoers and their appetites. The guitar player lets a moment of silence settle between his last song and his next, which is, my translator explains, “a touching love song.” People sing their hearts out again, but with ease and some mock crooning. After another song, someone makes an announcement in Burmese and everyone begins to walk toward the house. My translator stands directly behind me, and walks close to me as I follow the group up the terrace steps into the living room, where perhaps fifty people are crammed together on the parquet floor. When I sit down, he sits next to me. We’re both cross-legged; our knees touch. When he lets his hand rest on his knee, his knuckle brushes my leg.

Candles flicker on the staircase, lighting the room. Someone turns on traditional Burmese music and a man descends the stairs. He wears a stunning Burmese dancing dress, with a tight bodice and flowing bits of material and sequins sewn along the seams and hem. After he gives a graceful
bow, a young woman approaches him and lights the candles he holds in his palms. He begins with elegant, highly stylized movements.

The man sitting close to me whispers into my ear, “In the traditional dance, the woman holds small oil lamps.”

“Why is a man dancing?”

“Because there are not so many women here, and they are shy. This man dances because he loves the music. As you see, he knows the steps.”

Burmese mandolin sweeps beneath xylophone and drums, finger cymbals open and close. The dancer cups the candles in his hands while weaving his arms around his torso. He goes down on one knee, the other. Then, birdlike, he lifts his arms and rises again. His upper arms extend straight from the shoulder and the elbows bend downward like a marionette’s. Wrists swivel toward his body then away, toward the audience. The lights flare out toward us. His body plummets again, but never once do the candles gutter, proving his expertise. He ignores the spill and splash of hot wax. The flames light his face and glow through the skin of his fingertips.

The xylophone and the drumbeats become increasingly feverish; the dancing gets faster. Everyone in the room wears a smile or a look of astonishment. The guerrilla soldiers on three days’ leave and the dissidents in from Bangkok and the people in from the jungle camps: they watch this man dance himself into a woman, his body lithe and beautiful, his face beaded with sweat.

I don’t know if he dances for thirteen minutes or for thirty-five. I’m lost in the close room, the faces around me, the man at my side watching the dancer and sometimes watching me. Keenly aware of his eyes, I ignore him and feel the full measure of my delight. I am happy in his presence.

After the dancer falls into a motionless pose, he raises his hands to his mouth and blows out the candles. The people laugh and clap hard, clap harder, like a herd of horses stampeding into the room. We all cheer for
him. As everyone smiles at the dancer, my translator smiles at me. People begin to stand up, then flood out of the room, but we remain sitting.

The long, serious drink we’re taking of each other’s face is interrupted by one of his friends—I have noticed them, too, these hoverers—who bends down and whispers something into his ear. My companion turns to me and says briskly, “Excuse me,” then springs up off the parquet floor and leaves the house. I get up tipsily, laughing, wondering where he’s going.

He has disappeared. I stand on the raised terrace, picking through the faces. I don’t know his name. Now that he’s gone, my high quickly metamorphoses into morose-drunk-and-rattled.

I scan the crowd again. Among the Burmese people are white faces, too, mostly belonging to women: Angie, the activist who rents this house; Marla; Charlie the filmmaker, very fetching in a formfitting blouse and jeans, spiky heels at the bottom and a cascade of blond hair at the top. There’s another woman who works with Burmese migrant workers, a feminist academic from Britain, and an activist, married to a Burmese revolutionary, who started a Burma-focused NGO years ago and continues to run it. Her name is Anna; she invited me to her office to browse through her library of Burma books. She and Charlie are the most welcoming and relaxed of the foreign women I’ve met in Chiang Mai and Bangkok. A few of the others here tonight, upon meeting me, radiated such grim antipathy that I shrank away, removing myself from their company. I am at the bottom of the pecking order here.

How did these women fall through the world and land on the border? How did they decide to stay? Technically, “the border” refers to military encampments in the jungle—sometimes on the Thai side, sometimes on the Burmese side—and to refugee camps and Thai frontier towns: Mae Sai, Mae Sot, Mae Sarieng, Mae Hong Son and, farther south, Ranong, Sangkhla Buri, all the places for crossing over. But the border is also a mental and emotional state.

Even when people spend most of their time in Chiang Mai or
Bangkok, they still talk about living on the border, or going there, or what was happening when they were last “on the border.” Though contemporary Burma may be the yearned-for home and the heart of memory, it’s not the first point of reference. The border is the invisible, shifting country they inhabit now. Most of the Burmese exiles move around a lot, partly because of work but also to avoid the Thai immigration police. None of them are here legally. Even my mystery companion talked about traveling from elsewhere to come to this party, and about going to a different place on the border after a few days of respite.

There he is. With the guitar. He takes a swallow from a plastic cup, hands it to one of his friends, then starts toward me with a purposeful though weaving stride. I quickly descend the steps of the terrace, not wanting to be Juliet. He stares at me with burning eyes. Oh, no. No!

He stops walking. He has to break his gaze in order to carefully put his fingers around the frets. He begins to play, poorly, and sing, better—he has a rich, resonant voice—but I do not want to be serenaded. At least not in front of a crowd of people who know that I am a writer: a serious person.

But he does not care about my reputation. Or his own, apparently. The two men he left ten steps behind him are grinning indulgently, as are a few other revelers nearby, who watch the scene unfold. Loudly and goofily, he sings the chorus of a pop song about a brown-eyed girl.

I am mortified. I laugh, trying to make a joke of the whole thing.

His fingers jump off the frets. He takes an unsure step backward and squints at the neck of the guitar. “Oh! Too bad. The A string has broken again!”

“How unfortunate.” I laugh some more. Thank God.

“Very sad,” he agrees mournfully, but tries a few more bars before giving up. He walks past me and up the steps to the terrace, where he collapses into a low-slung wicker chair. I follow and sit in the chair beside him. He puts down the guitar and pats his shirt pocket. “Too many of us smoke cheroots. It’s not good.”

Again he smiles that sexy smile. In response, a current of lust snaps through my belly, makes me sit up straighter, more sober than I’ve felt for hours.

He says, “I do not smoke cheroots.” He taps his jacket pocket. “I surrender to Thai consumer society and smoke Marlboros instead.” He pulls out his pack of cigarettes and proffers it.

“No, thanks. I don’t smoke.”

“Better.” He lights up. “Come tomorrow. I will see you tomorrow, yes?”

“Well, I don’t know. Where will you be?”

“Here. Just come here in the morning. For tea. Or coffee.”

“You’re staying here, in this house?”

“I stay here when I come to Chiang Mai. Me and some of the other men.”

I wonder about Angie, the activist who rents this place. What is it like to let a group of revolutionaries regularly stay in one’s home? Marla does the same thing; she has a spare room at her house in Bangkok, and Burmese dissidents and refugees often occupy it, coming or going from one place to another. I doubt that I could ever be so generous. I’d never be able to get any writing done.

I’m such a hypocrite. How often am I a part of that vagabond stream? I cannot count the times I’ve taken succor in other people’s homes, depended on their comfortable domestic worlds. When will I pay back the debt of hospitality that I owe to the universe?

My translator asks, “Why are you smiling?”

“Because I wish I could stay in this house, too.”

“Maybe you should ask Angie.”

“No, I don’t think that would be a good idea. I just mean her house is lovely.”

“Yes, it is.”

“By the way, what is your name?”

He flinches. “I told you my name already!”

“No, you didn’t.”

“I did. When we were listening to the music.”

“Really? I don’t think I heard you. I’m sorry.”

He stares at me, as though reconsidering his first impression. “My name is Maung.”

“And you already know my name.”

“Yes, I do. Karen.” He puts the accent on the second syllable. I don’t correct his pronunciation.

“Will you come tomorrow for tea? Or we could have dinner.”

“Maybe tea. I’ll see how I feel in the morning. I am going home—to my hotel—now.” When I stand up, I have to make a conscious effort not to sway.

“I will walk you to your hotel.”

“No, no. That’s all right. It’s not far.” A lie. “I’ll just catch a songtow at the bottom of the hill. Not to worry.”

He walks me through the dregs of the party, toward the gate. I say goodbye to people as I pass them, feeling conspicuous and awfully drunk. I’m thinking about the dogs, and rocks to throw at them, and finding a bamboo cane before I leave the compound. But it’s too awkward. If I tell Maung that I want a stick for the dogs, he’ll insist on coming with me—to protect me, of course—and that could lead to all sorts of inebriated lustful foolishness. Bad enough to have been serenaded; how much worse to take a revolutionary to bed on the first meeting!

I wave goodbye to Maung gaily, as if I were going for a picnic in the dark. I’m barely past the property line of the house when I hear the dogs barking down the road.

In the morning
. I find Angie’s house with irritating ease. The garden compound has been cleaned up already, and a small group of people are gathered on the terrace. I am curious to see Maung again. Will the attraction prove as strong in the warm, revealing light of day? Maybe last night was pure drunken revelry and the only real thing about it now is a pounding headache and dehydration.

People are chatting, eating Thai coconut sweets, and drinking tea. One of the Burmese men makes a spot for me on a bench—beside Maung. Everyone laughs about being hungover and agrees that our hostess gave a wonderful party. Maung stands and asks me what I take in my tea—all the fixings are on the table just inside the house—and brings me the warm cup. We touch fingers as he hands it to me. When his phone rings, he walks down into the garden to talk, but I can feel him watching me as I talk to Jenny, an Englishwoman who works for the Burma Border Consortium, an organization that brings food and aid to Burmese refugees and dissidents.

It’s hard to be present for the conversation when I feel an invisible umbilical cord stretching between myself and a man I don’t know. But I nod and try to listen to this intelligent woman talk about her work. She tells me she is married to a Burmese man who is a member of the ABSDF. Her husband is here; he’s the one who pointedly made a spot for me on the bench beside Maung.