Burmese Lessons (39 page)

We’re walking through
the jungle. When I ask the word for
jungle
, the bodyguard tosses his hand toward the leaves and shadows. “This is not really jungle. Just many trees with a path.” Six of us travel the incline single file. Breathing hard, Maung, too, asserts that these trees and vines are “close,” whereas the real jungle is still “far away.”

“Close to what?”

“Roads. Thai villages. On this trip, you will not see the deep jungle.” This feels like a failing on my part. I glance from my feet to the extensive-layered, thick, variously green, complexly viny foliage. Then I glance back down at the path. Hot season usually means dry, but here the red earth is wet and raw.

Like my feet. My expensive sports sandals are useless because we repeatedly trudge through streams. It’s too time-consuming to peel the Velcro straps apart and stick them together again for the water crossings, so I leave them on, not wanting to hold the group up; the wet straps rub and rub. Wherever the one-inch bands of high-tech material touch my feet—the loop just below my ankles, the edge of my toes, the band around the
heel—the skin burns. Within an hour or two, I will have strap lines of blisters on both feet.

Ostensibly, I chat with the bodyguard to practice my Burmese, relearning the words for spider, tree, snake. In actuality, I am preparing to make a deal. I ask the word for blister. A minute later, he’s thrilled to give me his orange flip-flops in exchange for my sandals. Good riddance—he can have them. He steps into the cushioned rubber soles, adjusts the Velcro, waves off my (insincere) concern that they’re slightly too small. “Let’s go,” he says, and we do.

An hour later, we pause to rest. I ask how he’s doing. Loves the sandals, they’re very good! He bends to admire the stupid North American things. I stare at his sweat-rimmed baseball cap, conscious of the large blisters between my toes—new blisters, from his loose flip-flops, which match the hot little geysers rising elsewhere on my feet.

We will get there soon enough. I will not complain. It’s just a few hours’ walk. I remind myself of how many dissidents used to live middleclass lives in Burma, until violence and politics brought them here. I think of good-looking blond Charlie, who sometimes wears high heels, slogging for miles through the monsoon jungle with a battalion of Karen soldiers, puking up her malaria pill only to dig through vomit to find it again.

I will not complain.

How mortifying, to want to complain so badly, especially about small patches of irritated skin. It’s not like I’ve been shot, is it? If I lived here as long as Khaing Lin and Aye Aye and the other women, I would toughen up like them. I would learn to fold my longyi so that it wouldn’t loosen and slide down all the time. (Why am I wearing a long skirt on a hiking trip? Because everyone else is. I am walking with five men; they wear longyis. Carrying stones uphill for three hours, the women wore longyis; they laughed whenever mine started to drop down my waist.) If I stayed here for a year or two, I would learn to endure more stoically.

I consider this claim as we trudge across another stream. It’s bullshit. Not because I would be physically incapable of living here but because I
would not want to stay. To be held here by history, by fate, even by passionate conviction, would suffocate me. I would rather sell deep-fried grasshoppers in the Mae Sot market than live in a jungle camp for a year, never mind a decade.

After another stream-crossing, I furtively carry the flip-flops pressed against my leg. The path has narrowed again. We return to walking single file, Maung ahead of me. He can’t see my bare feet. Painless bliss!

I’m impressed that he moves so quickly. His shining head angles down, his arms barely swing. He doesn’t lead a physical life in the cities and towns of his exile, but the rapid pace returns to him with ease. Barefoot, I can match his speed. Just when I’m starting to enjoy the feel of my toes digging into the earth, the bodyguard loudly asks, “Where are your shoes?”

I flick them, twinned flippers, at my side. He grunts (consternation), then adds, “It’s dangerous to walk without shoes.” A pair of overlarge flip-flops is not going to protect me from anything, but I say nothing, knowing it’s the lack of civility that rankles. Without breaking stride, Maung shoots a look over his shoulder. “We may be in the jungle, but we do wear shoes.”

Yes, my love. It’s not deep jungle, though, is it?

“If you go barefoot and step on a …” He searches for the word, the antennae of his mind waving around like those of the ants on the tree we just passed. “… a thorn … no one will carry you.” The man in front of him asks him what he said. He translates. The man glances at me.

I keep walking barefoot. Just a few more minutes. I’m too embarrassed to tell Maung how much my feet hurt.

The oval of sweat on his back lengthens. I listen to the musical voices of the guides ahead of me, talking. Around us is more intricate music, layers of birdsong rising as the heat lessens. A few steps along, when a brown shadow with a streak of red plumage torpedoes across the path, I find myself wishing I could walk after it. I ask the men what the bird is called, but they don’t know.

Other animals are here, too, hiding in the hollow trunks of old trees and the rotting stumps, in the dense undergrowth. Some watch as we walk, their eyes on our strange bare arms. Macaques. Snakes. A cobra or two. Gibbons. There are panthers in this jungle, but not very many. Not as many as before. War takes up land, and land is the animals’ single need.

The Karen people eschew the human-destroying trade of opium smuggling, but they’ve financed their side of the war by cutting down the last old-growth Dahat Teak forests on earth. They sell this precious contraband to the Thais, who sell it to Japan, Europe, North America. The Burmese military government also auctions off timber, gems, oil, and fish to various multinationals, polluting the country’s rivers and seas in the process. The Canadian government does exactly the same thing. What government doesn’t pimp its territory to the highest bidder?

Humans have always waged war against the wilderness. And animals have always been civilians, ignorant of bombs. A young man in Chiang Mai who does environmental work told me that sometimes wild elephants step on land mines, then wander, bleeding and disoriented, or furious with pain, into villages. He believes that wild elephants, and Asian tapirs, and the capped langur monkey, and a little deer called Fea’s muntjac will become extinct in our lifetime. “We’re killing them. Forever,” he told me. “But no one cares. No one even notices.”

I stop to rest, and notice. Even the trees ask for that. Since I was a child, I’ve liked to stand among trees. Being upright like me but taller, they often had some wisdom to impart. They still do.

Say nothing. Breathe. Bend.

The men have passed me. I stand alone on the path, listening to their fading footsteps. Bend. I will have to change. Beyond putting on my flip-flops. Maung and I will have a child—an alteration I can’t fathom at the moment, with my muddy feet and bounding mind. Really, I should say I will have a baby, because who knows where Maung will be when I give birth?

Not long after I arrived in Burma, I thought the place would alter me
somehow. And it did—in the sense that we are always altered by powerful experience. Only now, though, with this difficult love, do I sense my self changing. Breaking open. This is what I am—these are my elements, scattered. After breakage comes … what?

Less self. And less certainty. But the spirit augmented.

“Yee Yee Cho!” Maung yells. “Where are you?”

“I’m in the jungle. But not far away,” I yell back, and keep walking. Barefoot.

I
wake up with the gun pressing against my anklebone. Like a finger. At first I think it is a finger, attached to the tattooed hand of the soldier who sat here beside me, reading a Burmese paperback while I dozed. But he’s gone now. The paperback lies facedown on the stool where he sat. He left the gun on the sleeping platform beside me.

I presume that the safety catch is on. Nothing untoward would have happened if I accidentally knocked the gun to the dirt floor. When I was still awake, I asked him what kind of gun it was. “M16.” I made a mental note of the relatively short barrel.

“Where does it come from?”

“Cambodia.” But I thought M16s were American-made.

I rise up on one arm, nudging the M16 with my foot. Like the other guns I’ve seen on the border, it looks well used. Old. Could it have killed people during Pol Pot’s reign of terror? Though the Khmer Rouge did not favor bullets. Too expensive. Maybe it killed people in Vietnam.

My face, where it pressed against my elbow as I slept, is marked with lines from my cotton sleeve. I can feel them like thin scars, from the top of my cheek to the place where my ear begins. How long was I out? I don’t usually fall asleep in the presence of strangers with guns on their laps. I sit up and rub my eyes.

This is where I am to bunk for a week or two. Maung and his bodyguard will stay in a similar hut slightly farther down the slope. Despite
the thatch and the dirt floor, the room feels clinical. Usually these places are stuffed with personal belongings—Burmese calendars of popular singers, Thai posters of fruit and waterfalls, photos, little mirrors. Talismans that ward off no-one-ness.

In contrast, this hut is full of anonymity. The view through the doorway is straight down the narrow valley we switchbacked up—when? Two hours ago? Three? Above the mass of trees, the sky glows magenta. The trees are already black. Voices filter down the hillside. From below, I hear a guitar. It’s not a tape deck because the player misses the same chord twice and picks up the phrase again, repeats, repeats, faintly and patiently melodic, like a child practicing piano scales. The sound brings tears to my eyes.

This place is
a lively village, with many Karen families living and working alongside the ABSDF members. Small clusters of huts spread over the thickly forested hillside. I take a walk on my own through the heart of the camp—Maung doesn’t want me to go too far away without a guide—and marvel at the elegant system of irrigation. Long pieces of bamboo channel water to a dozen gardens at different levels. In the morning and the evening, the bell-like music of fast-falling water fills the clearings.

In one of those clearings, people keep rabbits. A Karen woman explains that they’ve had mixed success with rabbit breeding. Too many other animals besides humans are interested in the easy pickings, and disease occasionally wipes out entire litters and breeder pairs. Nevertheless, the rabbits continue to be amorous, and the men keep getting better at building snakeproof hutches.

Glancing over my shoulder, I quickly slip away on a path that leads to a less inhabited area at the edge of the camp. A brand-new meetinghouse stands there, with a view across the river into Burma. I lean out the big
window, wondering how far the range of a rocket launcher is. The river is wide, but not that wide.

My eyes are in Burma, my feet in Thailand. How strange borders are. Even the obvious demarcation of the river seems an arbitrary line to distinguish one stretch of land from another. It wouldn’t be that hard to swim across it. The trees, the animals, the mud, the nature of pain and of suffering, the way people die: it’s all the same across the water. But for everyone in this industrious, well-run camp full of children and guns and military fatigues the far bank is dangerous, enemy territory as well as homeland.

Considering the work that has gone into this structure—the fresh yellow weave of the walls, the carved beams, the bamboo-strip floor—I wonder how long it and the rest of the outpost will last. Three years? Five? Maybe six months, if the Burmese military infiltrates that porous emerald wall across the water. The KNU base of Manerplaw was like a small city, a bastion for both the Karen people and the democratic movement. But the Burmese military overran it in January 1995, looting and burning everything.

I know only the basic facts about Manerplaw, but when people discuss the loss of that stronghold their eyes tear up, their voices tremble. Even Maung, who is so matter-of-fact about everything, including losses, doesn’t like to talk about it. “After Manerplaw, we have to do revolution differently. That is what we learned. The Burmese army is more powerful than our forces. We accept that. But there are other ways to be powerful. That is what we learn now, slowly.”

When he talks this way, measured, sure of himself, I feel sure of him also. English is a recent second language; in Burmese, his voice and his words are more incisive and weighted. For a politician—isn’t a dissident a politician without an expense account?—he has the rare diamond quality: he inspires trust. At least among some. It surprises me how much I trust him, not just with my safety here but with my safety in general. My heart.

Yet he has been dishonest with me, and he is often far away, inaccessible.
That is my future with him. I say it to myself over and over, attempting to muster … anger? rejection? acceptance?

I’m testing them all out. I dig through my emotions, trying to find what I am, unbury my private nature. But, more and more often, the big primordial Nature takes me by the shoulders, gives me a good shake, and says, “Child. Baby. Dig that, honey.”