Burmese Lessons (30 page)

I don’t mention anything about my Burmese dictionary. “Unfortunately, I don’t have a Karen dictionary! I’ve never touched a Karen dictionary. Though I agree that they’re very handsome.” The young women clap, thrilled that I run with the joke. Eyebrows raised, I look around at them. “You are all so beautiful,” I tell them, honestly. They loudly protest the compliment. Which makes them more beautiful still. I lean toward the inquisitive nurse and slyly ask, “Is Tennyson your Karen dictionary?”

The other young women shriek with delight. The nurse leaps up off the bench, her cheeks as red as apples, and exclaims, “I already know how to speak Karen! I don’t need a dictionary!” We laugh.

In the middle of our laughter, a woman screams.

She’s only a
few feet away and her cry is loud, but guttural and deep, not shrill. A two- or three-year-old child hangs limp in her arms.

The two medics slide off the bamboo benches and go to her. They want to take her little one to examine him, but she doesn’t want to let him go. She holds him tight, safe against her body. The medics talk with her for a few seconds, explaining, cajoling. Then one of them yanks the child away; the mother clutches at his legs for a moment, then gives in and begins to cry soundlessly.

I can’t process the speed with which the scene a few feet away has changed while remaining unaltered here, in the waiting room, where the two nurses beside me are still chatting. “It’s so hot, isn’t it?” one of them says.

The other responds, “Because of the rain. The heat is too wet.” Accustomed to the sickness, the births, the deaths, neither of them glances over at the crying mother and the medics, who are now preparing a needle.

I ask, “What’s wrong with the woman’s baby?”

In chorus, they reply, “Malaria.”

“Go and see,” one of them says, pointing with her chin.

I step into the women’s side of the clinic, where I sit on the floor opposite the medics, out of their way. When the boy’s shaved head lolls back, his eyes fall open, exposing the whites and the edges of his brown pupils. I wonder if this ghoulish sign of unconsciousness is what made his mother scream.

Victoria is in charge. She holds the needle while the other medic holds the child. Then, quickly and violently, she pokes it into his upper thigh. The mother gasps down a sob, and I flinch. The two young women lay the child out flat on the straw mat. Victoria tries to slide a plastic tube down his throat, but it’s too big. She keeps pushing, but it won’t go down. The plastic scratches the inside of the child’s esophagus like a small shovel, digging, digging. She jumps up to get a smaller tube.

The clinic is so unlike a hospital. Patient and mother and medics sit on the bamboo-strip floor, their bare feet folded under them. The dull eyes of other patients watch everything but betray no emotion. They’ve seen this struggle with malaria happen before; they have experienced it themselves. I know that most of the world’s people seek medical attention in facilities like these, but that does not help me digest what I’m seeing. It does not help the mother who sits here.

She wipes her face again. She has stopped crying. The child is still.

I look expectantly at the little boy. A clear fluid was in the needle. What was it? A drug. A good drug. It will take effect now. He will wake up. Where is Victoria with the smaller tube?

One of the nurses goes to get the head medic. He comes in rubbing his eyes, his countenance wrapped in the hot skin of sleep, which sloughs off him in seconds. As he kneels beside the child, he wakens fully, gives a series of orders in Karen, and pulls out his stethoscope, shines a light into the clouded eyes. Now he speaks sharply to the nurses. After preparing another needle, he administers it as quickly as Victoria administered the first one.

Victoria returns with another tube from the dispensary counter. Again it’s too big and won’t fit down the child’s throat. She jumps up again and almost runs into one of the nurses, who hands her a smaller tube. The head medic holds open the small mouth and pushes and pokes until the length of plastic disappears into the child’s gut.

Victoria attaches an accordion suction to the tube, and one of the nurses pumps the apparatus with her foot. Gray, half-digested rice from the boy’s stomach slowly appears in the clear container. After his stomach is empty, the head medic performs cardiac massage, pushing down with his large, splayed hands on the boy’s narrow chest. The rhythmic pumping sends new blood, new oxygen, into the little body, making it writhe and contort before falling still again.

Now. The little boy will wake up and cry out. The limbs shudder. And go still. Shudder again; the legs kick the air and fall.

The head medic swats a fly away from the child’s face then sits back on his heels, his hands spread on his thighs. He sits there for a while, looking down at his hands. Then he swats another fly away from his own tired face. The child’s expression is also one of weariness, the deep sadness of sick children. But he is no longer sad. I don’t understand until Victoria begins to unravel the gauze from the IV bandage, which is big and thick. When the mother sees the gauze being unwrapped, she, too, understands.

She makes a sound I’ve never heard before and hope never to hear again. Her voice rises from the core of her body and fills the long room, and pours out, into the rest of the camp, into the hills. She howls; her head tilts up. I close my eyes, incapable of looking anywhere. The insult is that life is already taking over her child’s death. I hear the medics and nurses go about the business of cleaning up, rattling stethoscopes, pulling the suction apparatus apart.

I open my eyes. The woman gathers her son, limbs akimbo, off the mat and into her embrace. One of the nurses pulls the tube up from the child’s stomach, through his throat, out of his slack mouth. Victoria is still unraveling the gauze from the small, bruised arm. It comes away easily,
layer after layer. Low sobs wrench out of the mother. She clasps her child close to her body again and rocks back and forth in rhythm with her cries.

Refugee children appear at the front and back entrances of the clinic to see what’s going on. They come inquisitively up the steps, two almost smiling, others with apprehension in their eyes. Victoria clenches her teeth against the woman’s crying and reaches past her, carefully pulling the thick IV needle out of the boy’s arm.

I look down. Beneath the bamboo slats, the scrawny chickens of the Maw Ker refugee camp scrounge for any edible thing. The nurses giggle at some private amusement known only to them. How strange their laughter is to me, how awful their ease with the child’s death. Yet death is normal, especially here. Every day they live with it on the bamboo doorstep, waiting to barge in, barging in often enough, and departing with the lives of innocents. The nurses and medics cannot allow every tragedy to devastate them.

I realize that I am crying. I’ve been crying since the woman howled. But it’s out of place. No one but the mother shows her emotions. I rub my eyes and stand up just as Tennyson appears. The medics explain to him what has happened, but he seems to know already. He nods away the explanations and turns to me. “Did you take photographs?”

“No.”

“Why didn’t you? Why didn’t you take pictures so people can see?”

“I couldn’t, Tennyson.”

“But we need pictures of this. This is the truth, this is how our children die. This is murder. This is the way the Burmese regime kills our children. Why didn’t you take pictures?”

“I’m not a good enough photogra—”

“Yes, you are, you are. You have a good camera, you take good pictures.”

I’m surprised by how angry he is. “Tennyson, I couldn’t take pictures. I’ll write it down instead.”

But the promise of the written word makes little impression on him.
In the propaganda fields of the world, the image is all-powerful. He speaks briefly with the head medic and looks with concern at the child and the mother.

I, too, look at the little boy, and think, numbly, Now he is a body. A corpse. I’m trying to convince myself. I’ve never seen the life go out of a human being before. I’m unprepared for how small death seems, how its inevitability has stripped it of importance. Not for his mother, of course, nor for the medics who struggled to save him, nor for me. I am shaken.

Tennyson still looks furious. “They have no oxygen. No oxygen tanks. And not enough drugs. So the babies die of malaria. For nothing. Stupid malaria.” He spits out the last word. Then he opens his wallet and places two hundred baht—about ten Canadian dollars—in front of the mother.

This gesture seems callous only to me, because I have no need of ten dollars. To the others, two hundred baht signifies generosity in a moment of need. The grief, common to them all, cannot be paid off. If only it could be.

Tennyson growls, “Let’s go.” I say goodbye to the medics and the nurses at the dispensary. The head medic returns to the consulting room to go back to sleep. Another medic, a young man with a ponytail, comes into the clinic without asking why the woman is crying. She rocks the boy in her arms. The nurses move around her, taking care of what has to be taken care of.

Tennyson points down the stairs and says in a tone of reprobation, “Your shoes are all mud.” As I put them on, the last of the camp children scatter. They know the boy is dead.

I
walk behind Tennyson, who walks beside his friend, my guide from earlier in the day. Tennyson speaks rapidly in Karen. His friend grunts or murmurs short responses. Past the first row of thatched huts, the woman’s crying remains distinct, clear in its rhythm. It would be hard to live near the clinic.

Her crying mixes with the sound of a child crying somewhere near the main road. It weaves through the rising voices of early evening and blends with Tennyson’s greeting to a woman washing dishes. A few huts later, he stops to talk to a man layering dried leaves into a roof. I can still hear the woman.

When we arrive at the guide’s house, I sit outside in the falling light of dusk. Children nearby play a game with stones. Years ago, I played a similar game with my Thai schoolmates. But these are such different children, tossing the little stones. The darkness slowly eats away at their features; in every child I make out the small boy’s face. I still hear his mother’s voice, faintly, through the voices of the children, though that seems impossible.

A while later, Tennyson calls me in to eat. The family have killed one of their chickens in my honor. I sit to eat with them, and they tell me their stories. Their hospitality demands politeness and genuine engagement; I have to put the events of the day aside. We talk, we laugh, sometimes until tears come to our eyes. In the midst of an anecdote, I think about what happened this afternoon. The woman and her child occupy a place beyond the glow of candlelight that illuminates the bowls and plates, the pot of curried chicken.

For me—and for Tennyson, too, I think—the evening becomes a secret echo of her and her boy. Our journey back to Mae Sot through the unexpectedly chill air is part of that echo. Tennyson does not yell a single time into the blasting wind.

When he drops me off at the guesthouse, he offers some curt advice. “Sleep now. Don’t think. I’ll come to check on you tomorrow. Try not to think.” Then he tramps away under the lurid blue lights on the guesthouse fence.

Before leaving the courtyard, he stops abruptly, turns around, and takes a few steps back toward me. I can’t see the expression on his face, but I hear the strain in the whispered words: “It doesn’t matter. About the photographs. We have too many photographs already.”

I stand beside the big teak table until he starts up the motorbike and drives away. I wonder where he’s going. Where does he take his grief and anger? Where does he store year after year of grief and anger?

I’m too tired to bathe, so the sweat and dust of the day lie down with me. I am so tired and so awake. “I want to help you,” he said a week ago. “I’ll show you whatever you want to see,” he said. But, Tennyson, I didn’t want to see that. I’m stretched out under my torn mosquito net, but the thin woman is close, still crying, her child dead in her arms.

Outside the nearby temple, the street dogs of Mae Sot are fighting. It’s a savage, wild sound. Repeatedly attacked, one of the weaker creatures yelps in the lane that Tennyson has just left. “Shh,” I whisper, and turn on my side, inhaling dirty skin and mildewy mattress. Finally alone, my throat constricts.

I don’t know the child’s name.

I forgot to ask his name.

Tennyson will come in the morning. To see how I am. Ha! I am fine, fine. I’ve never been anything but fine. Tennyson will come, he won’t want coffee, he never wants coffee or a soft drink, he never wants anything to eat. Tennyson will know the boy’s name. Won’t he?

The dog in the street whines. The other dogs attack again, and the yelping crescendoes. “Shh,” I whisper, a beggar for silence. But the sound doesn’t go away.