Burmese Lessons (46 page)

Please! Soon you’re going to quote some old inquisitor on the inherent wickedness of women. Get a grip. You’re going back to Greece for a while. Big fucking deal. You’ve been planning to leave for months, and soon you will leave. You need a break
.

But I’m afraid that Greece will make me fat and happy again and I won’t want to come back here.

You’re afraid of that, are you? Better to be afraid of another parasite. Or getting pregnant. But aren’t they the same thing? Remember the high-school teacher who always used to say that pregnancy was parasitism made good?

I’ve brought condoms.

I know this may be hard for you to believe, but they won’t work in your toiletries bag
.

This contrary voice goes on and on, bossily, with crass humor. It’s no longer whispering.

Manng comes to
see me in the little apartment I’ve rented near Chiang Mai University. This is the neighborhood where I first met him at the drunken Christmas party. I look down from the window of the apartment and see not only trees but the confounding maze of streets and houses that complicates the hillside. At the top of the hill is an old monastery and, outside its grounds, a mostly unused pagoda. Optimistically, I plan to meditate there every morning.

When I come down from my rooms, Maung is waiting for me in the atrium of the apartment building. We stand looking at each other; we don’t touch. The sight of him moves and unsettles me. I take deep, slow breaths, willing myself to produce no tears. Why cry? Here he is, in the flesh, wearing his blue shirt, smiling with a mixture of hesitation (not showing his teeth) and expectancy (his eyebrows lifted slightly). This is the face in the photograph that I carry around, but it is the real face, older, more closed. More handsome, too, though he looks tired.

We don’t embrace in the plant-filled foyer. We approach each other
slowly. Hello. How are you. We link hands and walk up the stairs. There is a space between us. Or is it the missing flesh? Between the two of us we’ve lost twenty pounds or more. We need to be in each other’s company for a few hours. The closeness will return, settle back into and between us.

Upstairs, in an apartment twice the size of my room in Bangkok, with tall windows filling one wall, we leap from conversation into hungry lovemaking. We do everything gluttonously, too quickly, until the food of delight is devoured in record time and we lie spent on the bed, panting, covered in a sheen of sweat. Maung hops up and goes to the bathroom, runs the shower. After a few seconds, he calls out, “There’s hot water!”

“Only the best for you, my dear,” I respond lightly, though I’m listening to the shower spray on tile as if it’s some kind of warning. I don’t know why. Fucking like animals made the separation between us wider than before. I’m angry at the sex itself. It didn’t work. It cinched us together but didn’t release us into each other. Vexed, confused, I yank the anonymous sheet over my naked body and tuck it under my arms. Back against the wall, I stare out at the splendid, rounded treetops that float beyond the fourth floor.

Maung emerges from the bathroom with a threadbare white towel wrapped around his waist. I can tell by the careful way he walks toward the bed that he has something unpleasant to tell me.

But I’m wrong. He has two unpleasant things to tell me.

The first is, “I have to leave soon. I have a meeting to go to.” He watches the disappointment freeze my face. I look out the window. Why don’t I know the names of those trees? “Please don’t be upset, Karen. I can’t help it. I’ll have dinner with you tomorrow. And the next day.”

My voice is toneless, unfamiliar to both of us. “I don’t know what I was thinking, to expect to have dinner with the man who’s just fucked me. Honestly. What was I thinking? How long has it been since I’ve seen you alone?” He’s confused for a moment, unsure whether or not he’s supposed
to answer my rhetorical questions. I clarify by adding, “It’s all right, Maung. I understand. Go. Just get dressed and go.” This makes it sound as if I’m ordering him to do something that he will do regardless.

But he doesn’t move. I stare out the window, my mind reeling. I’m so angry that I don’t know what to do. My jawbone could crack because my mouth is shut so hard; my throat is closing up.

What is this? A fantasy, fed on absence. A fleeting world created by two lonely bodies
.

But it is also love. I love him. We do love each other.

What kind of love is it? A starving love stretched thin by political exigency. And bad manners. Whatever it is, it is not enough. It will never be enough
.

Don’t be so melodramatic. What does “never” mean? The political situation will be different next year; Maung might not have to travel so much.

Don’t refer to the future. What about this moment?

I am frozen. My mind hisses away, back and forth, like a whip. I’m grinding my teeth. Will I be able to grate a few words out of my mouth? He hasn’t left yet. In fact, he has sat down on the bed. Scent rushes into my nose: tangy green soap on warm skin, clean-cotton-towel smell. His hair is slicked back like the pelt of an otter, thick and gleaming. I want him to embrace me, comfort me. I hate him.

He has used me for sex. I cannot speak. What is there to say? If he’d told me that he was going to leave after making love, I never would have undressed. He knew this. I want him to go. Then I will take my own goddamn hot shower.

He sits on the edge of the bed, his hands in his lap, his gaze soft, a fake penitent. But gradually I realize that’s not it. He isn’t asking forgiveness. He’s sitting there blocking my view of the trees because he has something else to say. I force myself to look at him. The obvious regret on his face makes me think that he’ll tell me something hopeful. Make it better. Or change his mind and stay with me.

“I am sorry. Truly sorry.”

Well, that’s something, an apology. Then I learn what else he is apologizing for.

“But I have to leave Chiang Mai in a few days. I’m going to meet with a military group in China. An important meeting. I wanted to tell you before, but you were so sick, and I knew the news would upset you. When you got out of the hospital and said you would come here, I thought it would be best to wait and tell you in person.”

I laugh—a violent spasm in the throat—and shake my head. Again he doesn’t know what to say. Am I really laughing, or barking out a dry sob? I’m not sure, but I will not shed a single tear in front of him. “It’s fine, Maung. I’ll see you later. You need to go, don’t you?”

“Yes,” he says, relieved to be able to answer a simple question.

I don’t watch him dress. I take a long shower. To my surprise, I don’t cry. Fuck crying, it just gives you wrinkles. I get ready to go out by myself. Fury has wakened something unexpected in me: an appetite. For the first time in more than a month, I’m ravenously hungry.

O
ver the next few days, Maung and I return to each other. We make love with concentrated tenderness, as though we’re holding our breath. I don’t bring up his speedy postcoital departure.
Why bother
, says the voice,
it’s part of your job description, and his
. We eat together. We are close again because we have to be; he will leave soon. Lying in bed, I ask the inevitable question: “How long will you be on the border?” The Chinese border, not the Thai or Indian one. I know the answer, but I want to hear him say it with that familiar tone of regret that has become, for me, an expression of affection.

“Almost a month.”

As I thought. He will be in China when I leave for Greece. These are the last days we’ll spend together until I return from Europe. By silent
agreement, we will not discuss the date of my return. Also by silent agreement, we decide we mustn’t waste our last week together. We must love each other now. I make him use the condoms. A barrier method, yes. Little border. I regret it every time. While I crave and relish the lovemaking, I deny its greater purpose. I deny our deeper longing, which feels like a betrayal of us both. But I don’t want to leave Thailand attached to Maung by an unborn baby.

One evening, after making love, we lie in bed listening to the warring street dogs. After a particularly vicious brawl I ask, “Does it ever feel like you’re failing?”

I don’t need to explain the question. He looks at me with endearing condescension, and smiles. “You are so new to this. Failure has nothing to do with it. When you are on the losing side, the struggle is not about winning or losing. It’s about … continuing. The one who keeps going will triumph.”

“Perseverance. Endurance.”

“Yes.”

I don’t necessarily believe this, but I hold my tongue.

He pulls out of our embrace to look me in the eye. “It is not about my life. The struggle may be longer than my life. I hope not. But I don’t know when I will die. I might not see Burma become democratic. But it will happen. Maybe for the next generation. I do what I can. Of course, I have my ego, my selfish desires. But I understand they aren’t important, they are the normal imperfections. I am just a man. You cannot be a good leader if you don’t understand your weaknesses.”

I wait for him to say, “What about you, what are your weaknesses?” because I want to unburden myself, I want to confide in him, tell him that I love him but am not his match, not his equal. He has some steel alloy in him where I have none. I am made of nothing but flesh, and words.

But he doesn’t ask me, and I don’t offer. Never mind giving my heart—I can’t even bear to reveal its workings, because I don’t want to
hurt him. I’m afraid of making my reservations irrevocable by giving voice to them.

In the middle of the night, he wakes me up, shouting incoherently, striking the air with his hands. “Maung, wake up!” Still half asleep, he pulls me close and nestles his head against my chest like a child. “What’s wrong?” I whisper.

“I dreamed I’d been stabbed five times. I was dying.”

I kiss the top of his head. “Go back to sleep. I love you.” I love you. Despite the failings of love, it is such a balm to say and to hear those words. He falls asleep again almost immediately, and in the morning barely remembers his nightmare.

How will I leave for Europe without promising the date of my return? He reads the
Bangkok Post
out loud and we laugh about some ridiculous news items. He walks into the apartment and guesses what I am thinking in five seconds. After we drink a good bottle of wine, he announces that he has an important question. I raise one eyebrow, half curious, half cringing. He asks, “Why does every bottle of wine have such a complicated name?” We go swimming at a swank hotel pool and we are like young lovers—we
are
young lovers—playing in the water just as we did those first days at the lake. I must try to be patient. To see what happens.

By a daily act of will, I calm my anger. More accurately, I dismantle it and put it away, as a soldier might take apart his gun and place it in a case, each chunk snug in its separate compartment. The tool I use to accomplish this tidy sorting-out is meditation, for I am true to my aim and walk up the hill almost every morning to the dusty, ant-tracked pagoda, where I sit and breathe out fury like a dragon. Meditation proves instructive, in that it allows me to realize just how furious I am, about how many things.

Being inveigled into sex by a revolutionary has made me think about all the ways in which women are used. The revolution uses men, certainly, but it uses women in ways that rarely allow them to be celebrated as heroines.
What have I been doing here? Why have I spoken to so many men? Why are my notebooks full of the words of men?

I think of the stoic faces of the women from the jungle and the refugee camps. Some of them I spoke to, through men. Why didn’t I have a woman translator? I remember how many of their husbands were away, busy fighting battles in a war they will not win. The women raise children alone, without proper health care, without resources. When the men return on leave from their fruitless war, they impregnate their wives again.

Why is Khaing Lin in a jungle camp carrying stones uphill on her head? Why has it taken so much longer for a few of the women to get out of the camps? This is the good revolution. These are the good men. But many of them scoffed openly when they found out that a large sum of NGO money from abroad was earmarked for women’s projects: sewing and weaving workshops, ventures in education, family planning—the most basic networks of communication for women to share their common concerns and to help one another. From women I have learned that domestic abuse is a serious problem in the refugee camps, but not one in more than a hundred men I’ve interviewed ever brought this subject up—even when we talked specifically about camp life. Maung says it’s all a matter of education, but he always says that.

At Dr. Cynthia’s clinic in the town of Mae Sot, I saw a strange exhibit of small twigs and bits of metal. Some were straight, some jagged or fashioned into hooks. They formed a display that might have come from an ancient culture, a collection of mysterious tools whose uses were lost in time. Except that the young assistant who showed me around the clinic explained that they were all objects found embedded in the cervixes and uteruses of poor Burmese women desperate to have abortions. Performed by “herb women,” the abortions are sometimes successful, sometimes not. It depends on one’s definition of success. The abortion usually works. But many women suffer from life-threatening bacterial infections and too many of them die.