Burmese Lessons (37 page)

They didn’t care about the names. I’ve learned that through my other interviews. This is a fact I wish I did not know. I would like to believe that people are tortured to some purpose. A purpose would not make the torture less criminal, but it would make it nominally less senseless. I would like it to be more like a Hollywood film, where the hero, through his brave silence, keeps safe the secret formula or the secret name or the secret whereabouts of the treasure.

But in the real world of interrogation there is rarely a secret. The acquisition of information is almost never the point. In the drama of torture, confession resembles the climax, but it is not the climax. The drama affirms only one resolution, the same one it begins with: that the regime will use absolute violence to wield absolute power. The individual represents her whole society. What can be done to that sentient representation, the human being? She can be beaten, cut, electrocuted, prodded, forced, forced against herself so that, finally, there is no language left, only moaning, weeping, crying out. Then silence.

Forged through brutality, through destruction of flesh and spirit, the climax is silence.

Khaing Lin stares at her hands under the water.

We sit beside the stones black with wetness, electric-blue and ocher and lime-green whorls of fabric piled beside us. We’re so far away from that time. Yet it is here, in her voice, in her lit eyes. “What they do is unbelievable. But you have to believe it, don’t you?

“They hit me on the very top of the head. Over and over, until they got tired. Then someone else would come. They did it softly at first, like water
torture, then harder and harder, until I was about to fall down. But I was not allowed to fall down. Eventually, I lost my consciousness. After, I can’t remember what happened. There is a hole. In my memory. There is a hole right here.” She taps her head and laughs.

Someone calls out to us. We look downstream toward the sound of the voice. But no one is there. It’s just the water, talking. Khaing Lin does that distinctive body wave again—head, arms, long slender torso—as though she were shaking herself out like a carpet. Then she pulls another piece of longyi through the funnel of her fist and begins to pound the cloth against stone.

The bodyguard comes
to get me from Khaing Lin’s hut. We walk across the center of the camp and down the little hillock, along the path. I’m relieved to feel the first cool breath of evening on my arms.

There are visitors at the cook shelter, some Karen officers from the post upriver. Maung, sitting among them, grins at me with uncharacteristic goofy pride. Small yellow candles light the table, which is scattered with bundles of cheroots and little bowls, mostly empty of peanuts. I smell roasting meat. We’ve eaten soy and rice since we got here; the decadence of cooked flesh makes me lift my head and peer at the charcoal grill on the other side of the table. “Is it chicken?”

Maung rubs his hands together. “It’s monkey.” He’s been telling me since we got here that monkey meat is sweet and delicious. I don’t think I want to eat a monkey. It would be too much like eating a second cousin I’ve never met.

I turn to the radio operator, who blinks at me with owl eyes. “Is it really monkey?”

“Ma di boo.”
I don’t know. He adds, also in Burmese, that the Karen officers brought the meat. Odd: he’s always keen to practice his English with me.

As soon as I sit down beside one of the gregarious visitors, he picks up the bottle on the table and asks, “Are you thirsty? This will defeat your thirst!”

Why didn’t I see it immediately? They’re all drunk. The clear stuff in the plastic bottle isn’t water, it’s hooch, presumably the famous Karen moonshine I’ve heard stories about. So strong it could knock over a bull elephant. So strong it’ll make you see triple. Stronger than the strongest vodka. Paint thinner, essentially, but without the utility of that worthy poison.

I smile back at Maung, handsomely rakish in the candlelight, and glance around at the rest of the men. Then I laugh out loud and smack my little glass on the bamboo tabletop.

T
hree hours later, the camp is asleep and we’ve just managed to send the Karens stumbling away to bed, giggling and burping, with Gorky’s champion. Now there is just me and my lover left, touching each other under the table and breathing in the drug of sweaty flesh.

Praise the Lord for Karen moonshine! It’s the aphrodisiac the world has been searching for. Or, at least, the only love potion Maung needs to forget his duty, his example, his important moral codes. We’re horny as hell and alone for the first time in two weeks. He wriggles his hand under my longyi, between my legs, and—

Wait—

What’s that, the shadow falling across the path near the shelter’s entrance?

Oh. Of course. It’s just me and my beloved and his bodyguard.

Fine. Who cares, really? He’s just doing his job. Ubiquitous yet unobtrusive, like a butler in an old English manor. I want you to fuck me. I
think I just said that out loud. To Maung, not the bodyguard, who is a stone’s throw away.

Just to make sure Maung knows—maybe I only thought it last time—I slur, “I want you to fuck me.”

He murmurs something back in Burmese. Then, still in Burmese, “Let’s go down.”

At first I don’t know what he means. For a few gleeful seconds, I think he’s going to go down on me! Oh, I love Karen moonshine, I love it. Why haven’t we been drinking it since we got here?

But the translation is wrong, because he’s not going down at all, he’s getting up, up; he’s so much taller when he’s standing. Does he want me to give him a blow job? In the cook shelter?

“Come on,” he whispers, pulling on my hand. “Stand up!”

I didn’t think so.

My body floats off the hard bench like a helium-filled inflatable doll. My genitals rise (oh, the swell and the burn, oh-oh-oh) and my arms reach out for him, all the pieces ascending of their own accord, because it can’t be my legs doing the work. I can’t feel my legs. Fascinating, really. I thought it was hyperbole when scandalously drunk people said, “I can’t feel my legs.”

I can’t feel my legs, but my pussy pulsates wonderfully between them. I’ve never wanted someone to fuck me so badly. Let’s do it here, on the communal table.
Vive la révolution!
Impregnate me tonight. I grab onto his shoulders (because I’ve lost my balance and am about to fall down), and he props me up. “Are you all right? Can you walk?”

Walk? Are you kidding? Look at me, I can fly! I lean into him again and whisper a series of loving obscenities in his ear. He kisses me quickly, refusing to get too involved, then places his hands on my hips and spins me around. “Go.” He nudges my butt. Forward, march!

We stumble out of the kitchen shelter. Oh, how beautiful. It must be very late, because the no-longer-full moon is up again, whitewashing the
bamboo and the rocks and Maung’s hair with mercury. Glimmer, glimmer everywhere. I think I said that out loud. I make sure I did by repeating it. “Glimmer, glimmer. Where are we going?”

“Let’s go down to take a bath.”

“A bath?”

“In the stream. We’ll go swimming.”

When viewed late at night from the top rather than the bottom, the hill is actually a cliff. I notice this as I fall from one kicked-in step to the next on my heels, my flip-flops splayed away from the bottom of my feet so that I step into the mud. How slippery it is. There are
nats
in the forest, those benign Burmese spirits in the trees—no, really, there are. They keep me from tumbling down and breaking a significant bone, or a couple of vertebrae in my neck.

Suddenly, here are the stones, there, steps away, the stream, cricket song in the water rush, water full of silverware, a thousand polished forks and spoons. … No, that’s just the moonlight. Maung drops his bag—what’s in there? a towel? his gun?—on the bank and takes my hand. We walk right into the water and sit down, roll like otters. I can’t believe how cold the water is, and I don’t care. We fumble with our longyis, the cloth suddenly heavy in the cold water. I lift mine up, he unknots and lowers his. We press against each other’s warm flesh.

Trying to get a better purchase on the stones, I shift position, lift my head, and see a red light glowing in the bushes on the bank, maybe twenty feet away. “What’s that?” I ask, knowing exactly what it is: the bodyguard’s cheroot. Now, on the brink of the Act, as ass-bruising as it may be, I no longer feel inclusive of the bodyguard. A wave of sober clarity hits me. Such a shame, that wave, when I’m still so lustfully drunk.

“Maung, tell him to go away. He should just go back up the hill. It’s not like anyone is going to try to assassinate you right now.” I hope.

“You tell him. He will listen to you right now better than he will listen to me.”

“Fuck off!”

“No, he will, I promise. A woman is more powerful than a man in a moment like this.”

So I shout at the bushes, in Burmese, “Go away now.” The bushes respond with a deep murmur that I cannot understand. “What did he say?”

“He says he doesn’t want to leave me alone here.”

“You’re not alone!” I shout again, “Go away!” rising clumsily to a squatting position.

The cheroot burns redder: he’s taking a drag. Then I gasp and squint. There are two cheroots in those bushes!

“Maung, look. There are two men down here, watching us! Two of them! It’s not just your guy.”

“Karen, never mind. Let’s just take a bath. We’ll enjoy the water. Come.”

He pulls me from the shallows into the deeper current. We half float, our feet pulled downstream. Thirty seconds later, we are entwined like sea creatures and newly inspired, inside the protective shadow of a tree, our wet clothes more or less out of the way.

Maung pushes me down, crushing my cold naked ass against a pointy chunk of rock. I shift, but the new spot is too slick with algae, so I wriggle back to the chunk, doing my best to remain open to his thrusts. It works, ahh! It doesn’t work, shit. It works, ahh! It doesn’t work, damn. What’s wrong? He keeps missing the mark. We kiss, we splash, we groan. An image flashes into my mind: the flayed red backs of desperate salmon, spawning themselves to death. I want to cry. Maung starts laughing.

“What’s so funny?”

He laughs again, and kisses my cheek. “Sorry.”

He’s lost his erection. The wave of clarity crests again and knocks me in the face. If it weren’t for the stupid bodyguard, we wouldn’t be here in the deeper water, struggling to fuck. We’re in the jungle, for Christ’s sake! Couldn’t we just have had sex in the trees?

“Do you have a gun in that bag you left on the shore?”

“Why?” Maung asks.

“Because I want to shoot your bodyguard!”

He laughs harder, rolls off me, and splashes into the water on his back. “You can’t shoot him,” he says, giggling. “He loves me!”

I stand up, slapping my hands on the water. Then I start to shiver. It’s unnerving, in the hot season, to feel so cold. The second we emerge from the stream, clothes dragging with water, our hair plastered to our faces, the bodyguard and his fellow voyeur beat it through the brush. We hear them tramping all the way up the hill, their hysterical laughter hushed but audible. As Maung and I ascend, my teeth begin to chatter. I start crying, primarily out of sexual frustration. It’s a new kind of crying for me, I must admit—tearless, jaw-clenched, hiccuping.

Maung and I are alone, finally, when we reach Khaing Lin’s hut.

“Are you all right?” he asks.

“I’m great,” I say, wiping my nose on my arm.

He embraces me tenderly. Our bodies touch, which makes me aware of something clinging to my leg. I wonder vaguely if it’s a leech. Maung wipes the hair away from my eyes. He has a sweet, serious expression on his face. “Sometime, maybe tomorrow, I have to ask you about irony.”

“What? Irony?”

“Yes. Because I know you are not feeling ‘great,’ but you said you were. Is this irony?”

I let out a dry sob, which sounds like the bark of a large dog.

“Oh, Karen, I’m sorry. This was not a romantic evening.” When I say nothing in response, he whispers, “Yee Yee Cho, I’ll see you in the morning, okay?”

“Okay. Good night.”

I watch him walk away until the darkness swallows him up. The moon is long gone now, dropped behind the trees. Shivering, dripping, I consider the cacophony of crickets and other night insects. They are so loud, yet no one even hears them anymore. But if I have a well-deserved crying jag I’ll wake up fifty people and have the whole camp gossiping. I
can’t cry inside the hut; that would be too disruptive. I can’t cry here, right outside; the walls are too thin. Wandering off into the black trees does not appeal.

A match strikes inside the little house, then the glow of flame shines through the woven wall. Khaing Lin comes out blinking, sleep-addled, curly hair sprung off her head. She holds up the candle and appraises the situation. “Oh, Yee Yee Cho! Wait a minute.” She slips back inside, returns with a towel and a longyi. “There is some water in the pot, on the fire.” She takes my hand and leads me to the cooking area behind the hut. I dry myself and step into the clean longyi without falling down. She restarts the fire and we sit on our usual perches. A moment later, she hands me a steaming enamel cup.