Saving Fish From Drowning (24 page)

“Well?” Moff said to Bennie.

“Piece o’ cake,” he answered blithely, and snapped his fingers, as if it had never occurred to him that there might be a problem with the border crossing. He handed back passports. In truth, Bennie had worried so much that he had returned to the bus and stood next to Walter as papers were being examined and copied. Through the entire ordeal, his eyes were darting, his ears alert, and his sphincter muscles clenched in preparation for fight or flight.

“What I can’t get over,” Bennie now said, “is how Walter here can switch back and forth between perfect Burmese and excellent English. Have you noticed his English is better than mine? He’s more American than I am.” Bennie meant that Walter had a British accent, which in his mind sounded more high-class than his American mid-western one.

Walter was pleased by the flattery. “Oh, but being American has less to do with one’s proficiency in English and more with the assumptions you hold dear and true—your inalienable rights, your pursuit of happiness. I, sad to say, don’t possess those assumptions. I cannot undertake the pursuit.”

“Well, you understand us,” Bennie said. “So that makes you at least an honorary American.”

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“Why is it such an
honor
?” Wendy said peevishly. “Not everyone
wants
to be an American.”

Although Bennie was annoyed, he laughed. Walter, ever the diplomat, said to Bennie, “Well, I’m flattered that you consider me to be one of your own.”

On their way out, they passed a pile of shiny carp, the mouths of the fish still moving. “I thought this was a Buddhist country,” Heidi said. “I thought they didn’t kill animals.” A few yards to the right was the bloody carnage of a dead pig. Heidi had glimpsed it and now would not look that way.

“The butchers and fishermen are usually not Buddhist,” Walter said. “But even if they are, they approach their fishing with reverence. They scoop up the fish and bring them to shore. They say they are saving fish from drowning. Unfortunately . . .” He looked downward, like a penitent. “. . . the fish do not recover.”

Saving fish from drowning?
Dwight and Harry looked at each other and guffawed. Was he joking?

Heidi was unable to speak. Did these people actually believe they were doing a good deed? Why, they had no intention of saving anything! Look at those fish. They were gasping for oxygen, and the sellers who squatted nearby, smoking their cheroots, hardly possessed the caring demeanor of emergency doctors or hospice workers. “It’s horrible,” she said at last. “It’s worse than if they just killed them outright rather than justifying it as an act of kindness.”

“No worse than what we do in other countries,” Dwight said.

“What are you talking about?” Moff said.

“Saving people for their own good,” he replied. “Invading countries, having them suffer collateral damage, as we call it. Killing them as an unfortunate consequence of helping them. You know, like Vietnam, Bosnia.”

“Those aren’t the same thing,” Bennie said. “And what are you 1 6 2

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suggesting, that we just stand around and do nothing when ethnic cleansing goes on?”

“Just saying we should be aware of the consequences. You can’t have intentions without consequences. The question is, who pays for the consequences? Saving fish from drowning. Same thing. Who’s saved? Who’s not?”

“I’m sorry,” Bennie huffed, “but that is
not
the same thing at all.”

The others were quiet. It wasn’t that they agreed with Dwight, whom they hated to agree with, no matter what he said. But they could not entirely disagree. It was like a brain twister, one of those silhouettes that was a beautiful girl with a hat, then a crone with a crooked nose. It depended on how you viewed it.

“Oh God, what can we do?” Heidi said mournfully, still fixated on the fish. “Can’t we say something? I want to buy all of them and throw them back in the water.”

“Don’t look at it,” Moff told her.

“How can I not look?”

The fish continued to flop. Moff led Heidi away by the arm.

“Can fish drown?” Rupert asked once they had moved away from the fish stalls.

“Of course not,” Bennie said. “They have gills, not lungs.”

“Actually,” Harry said, “they can indeed drown.” All eyes except Heidi’s turned toward him. “In humans who drown, the lungs fill with water, and because our lungs are incapable of filtering out usable oxygen, the person suffocates. That’s the cause of death, lack of oxygen. We call it drowning, because it occurs in water or with some sort of liquid.” He caught Marlena looking at him intently. He continued in his casual, confident manner.

“Fish, on the other hand, have gills that extract oxygen, but most fish have to keep moving about to bring in a lot of water to filter enough oxygen. If they were not able to move, say they were caught 1 6 3

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in a reef pocket at low tide, or stuck on a hook, they would eventually suffer from oxygen deprivation and suffocate. They drown.” He saw that Marlena was staring at him, mesmerized, a look that said to him: You are so incredibly powerful and sexy. If there were a bed right here, I’d jump your bones. Actually, Marlena was wondering why he took so much pleasure in describing how fish die.

Heidi envisioned the panting fish they had just left. “If they can take oxygen from water, why can’t their gills process it from air?”

Marlena gave Harry an expectant look. Harry gladly explained:

“Their gills are like two silky-thin arches. They’re suspended wide open in water, like double sails on a boat. Out of water, the arches collapse like a plastic baggie and press against each other, sealing them off so no air gets in. The fish suffocate.”

Vera gave out a snort. “So there is absolutely no way someone can sincerely say they are saving fish from drowning.”

And Harry replied: “No. They are drowning on land.”

“Well, what about chickens?” Vera mused, gesturing toward a cage of chicks. “What benevolent action will do them in? Will they be receiving yoga lessons when their necks are accidentally broken?”

“It’s no worse than what we do back home,” Esmé said with

sangfroid matter-of-factness. “We’re just better at hiding it. I saw a program on TV. The pigs are all smashed together, then go through a chute, and they’re all screaming, because they know what’s going to happen. They do it to horses, too. That’s what some dog foods are made of. Sometimes they’re not even dead when they get chopped up.”

Marlena stared at her daughter. Esmé seemed to have shed her innocence before her very eyes. How could her baby know these things? Marlena took her daughter’s new strides in knowledge with maternal angst and sadness. She had loved those days when Esmé looked to her for protection and comfort, when it was expected that she, the mother, would shield her daughter from the ugliness of the world. Now she remembered a time, not too long before, when they 1 6 4

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had walked together through Chinatown, and Esmé had cried over the live fish after hearing the shopkeeper say they were “for eating not for petting.” Esmé’s hysterical reaction was not that different from the sentiments of the animal activists on the street who were passing out leaflets, encouraging people to boycott restaurants in Chinatown that killed fish and fowl on their premises to ensure the food was absolutely fresh. “The fish have their heads cut off
while
they are still alive
,” she once heard an animal rights protester complain. Marlena had shouted back, “All animals are alive before they are killed. How else do you propose to kill a fish? Let it die of old age?” She thought it ridiculous that people argued for saving a fish’s life. But now she saw things through Esmé’s eyes. It was awful to witness any creature in a fruitless struggle to stay alive.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” Walter called. “You may return to the bus now, and those of you who still want to do a bit of shopping or sightseeing, please rendezvous back at the bus in fifteen minutes.” My friends dispersed, Wendy to seek the shade of the bus, Moff and Rupert to wander the alleyways, and the others to find a photo opportunity to record that they had been in this town, whatever it was called.

Off in a corner of the marketplace, Bennie spotted an old woman with the sweetest expression. She was wearing a blue turban, which dwarfed her sun-parched face. He gestured to ask if he might do a quick sketch of her and her lovely display of mustard greens and turnips. She grinned shyly. He did the fast line drawing he used for cartoons, just enough sweeps to suggest the forms and features that captured the subject. Knowing what the features were—that was as much the artistry as executing the drawing. The weight of the turban on her small head, and now a big smile that nearly swallowed her chin. A bunch of loops for the turnips and mustard greens, and fainter squiggles for those in the back rows. After a minute or so, he showed the woman his sketch. “Oh my,” she cried in a language he didn’t understand, “you have turned me into someone else, much 1 6 5

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more beautiful. Thank you.” She started to hand it back, and he stopped her.

“For you,” he said.

She gave him another huge smile that engulfed her lower lip. Her small eyes sparkled. As he was about to step away, she grunted at him, then gestured to her vegetables for sale. “You like?” she asked in English. Bennie nodded, to be polite. She gestured that he should choose something. Bennie raised a hand and shook his head politely.

She insisted. He was dismayed that she was now asking him to buy her goods. Finally, still smiling, she snorted and dumped a handful of fermented turnips into a small pink bag, then twirled it and tied off the top, so that, with the air caught inside, it resembled a plump pink bladder. She held this up for him to take.

What the hell. How much could it cost? He offered her a few bills, the equivalent of thirty cents, which was a fantastically huge sum for a bag of fermented turnips, but she looked insulted and firmly pushed his hand away. He finally came to understand:
Oh
, a gift. A gift! She gave a firm nod. He gave her a gift, and she was giving him a gift. Wow! He was overwhelmed. This was the true kindness of strangers.
This
was a
National Geographic
moment: two people, vastly different, separated by language and culture and a whole lot else, yet giving and giving back the best they had to offer, their own humanity, their cartoons, their pickles. He gratefully accepted the pink plastic bag with its soggy lump, this beautiful token of universal friendship. It was incredible, so warming to the heart. He would keep it forever—or until disaster struck, which would be only a few hours later.

T HE BUS ROLLED FORWARD, its wheels now in contact with the Burma Road, a rough-coated two-lane thoroughfare shared by Brahmin cattle of both the wandering variety and the kind manacled to 1 6 6

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carts. My friends looked at the new scenery. The hills were covered with smaller mounds that jutted out like carbuncles. In the fields stood shacks on stilts, the walls made of woven rattan, the roofs of thatched grass. The more prosperous homes had the benefit of blindingly shiny corrugated tin roofs. On this warm winter afternoon, the windows were blocked by shutters, sun-bleached and monsoon-washed such that they evoked a history-rich, distressed style greatly admired by Roxanne. Marlena, for her part, thought the buildings were so surrealistically gorgeous they achieved a reverse trompe l’oeil effect, a deception of the senses that made it seem the shutters were not real but painted on.

“Look at all those Christmas plants,” Esmé said. “There’s like a thousand dollars’ worth right there.” Poinsettias, interlaced with bougainvillea, spread along the base of banyan trees, harmonizing with the ubiquitous bushes of panpuia and their lilac-tinted pom-poms.

“They’re not native,” Moff said. “Poinsettia here is actually an interloper, an ornamental native to Mexico.” Heidi asked if the seeds were blown all this distance. “The early ones probably came by boat,” Moff said. “But as gifts from diplomats of another century.

Nice ecosystem here for any kind of plant.”

When the bus had gone a mile or two, Walter spoke again. “You are to be congratulated,” he told the passengers. “You are probably the first Westerners to travel this section of the road coming in from China. Last year the road was not passable, and it would have taken me three weeks to go from Mandalay to Ruili. This year, the work is completed, and the journey takes only twelve hours.”

Walter did not tell them that the road had been rebuilt by one of Burma’s tribes, which I shall not name here, but whose résumé includes such feats in past years as headhunting, and in more modern times gunrunning and heroin commerce. At one time, they were powerful insurgents against the military regime. The tribe had fought 1 6 7

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hard and well, and the military government finally sought a truce so that they might negotiate like reasonable despots of the world. By and by, the tribe signed off to a cease-fire in exchange for a nod to build a business empire, unobstructed by the government and unfettered by competition. The Burma Road and its tollbooths, the major airlines, and some of the hotels my friends would be staying in were under the control of this entrepreneurial tribe. In the corporate world of Myanmar, hostile takeovers mean something different from what they do in the United States.

Shortly after his announcement, Walter asked the driver to pull into a small dirt road off the highway.

“Bathroom break,” Wyatt said, “just in time.” Others agreed.

“This is not a rest stop,” Walter said diplomatically. “If you can be patient, we will make another stop further up the road. The reason I brought you here is so that you can see one of our traditions followed by nearly all, without regard to religion or tribe.” He got out of the bus and, followed by the others, walked up to what looked like a bamboo birdfeeder, decorated with Christmas tinsel, placed in the cranny of a tree. “This is a small shrine for a Nat. . . .” He went on to explain that Nats were believed to be the spirits of nature—the lake, the trees, the mountains, the snakes and birds. They were numberless. But thirty-seven had been designated official Nats, most of them historical people associated with myths or real tales of heroism. Some were martyrs, people who had been betrayed or had suffered a premature and frightful death. One had died of diarrhea and was reputed to inflict that on those who displeased him. Regardless of their origins, they were easily disturbed, given to making a fuss when they were not treated with respect. My friends made jokes about odious people they knew who would make good Nats.