Under the Dragon (27 page)

‘And you too,’ I guessed.

But Jesus was not a favourite of the two Shan-Chinese traders who had been waiting in the crowd to speak to Phahte. It seemed that I had jumped the queue, and the traders, denied their audience, had begun to criticise me and our speaking of English.

‘What you say?’ snapped Phahte, a reptilian instinct alerting him to dissent. They complained in loud stage whispers, emboldened by their smart Thai suits. Phahte shouted in Shan, demanding an apology. When it didn’t come, he seized the pistol and sprang to his feet, aiming it at the traders. Never in my life had I seen a man point a gun at another in anger. The judge, the inspector of taxes and the henchman tried to restrain Phahte, to wrestle down his arm. But he was strong enough to resist them. The Chief of Police turned and looked the other way.

‘You have been insulted,’ bellowed Phahte, his dark anger inflamed by drink.

‘Oh, don’t worry about me,’ I mumbled.

‘My friend, I protect you like family.’

‘No harm done,’ I assured him, then added, ‘Forgive them that trespass against us.’

Phahte let his men subdue him. He collapsed back down on the stool, smoothed his ruffled feathers and, while the Chief Judicial Officer poured him another glass of beer, tucked his pistol back in his belt. The incident seemed to strike no one as unusual, just as I imagined the shooting of one of the traders wouldn’t have been considered extraordinary. ‘God follows me,’ Phahte announced. There seemed little sense in my correcting him. He then quoted from the scriptures and pulled from his breast pocket a cheap, tarnished crucifix. ‘I will die,’ he said. ‘Don’t worry. But when they find me dead they will know that I am not Buddhist. Oh yes. I not frightened.’ Phahte laughed, spat at the ground again, and shook my hand. ‘We go Namhsan together tomorrow. Never mind.’

‘Thank you, Phahte,’ I said.

‘Don’t thank me. Thank God.’

The gardener guided me back to the guest house. I woke Katrin and told her of the early start. She groaned and rolled back into the embrace of sleep. I lay in the dark pondering the last leg of our journey. With luck we would find Scott’s Palaung basket by the next evening. Our trip would be complete. The momentum of our search and its likely success, meant that I did not stop to consider the wisdom of my arrangements. In truth, I did not want to consider them. I had been assured that Phahte was a good man, and despite the drink and the gun, I chose to believe what I had been told.

Travel has always involved risk, but I had never thought of my journeys as endangering life. I had gone to the pagoda festival looking for a ride. I had found it. In the still Burmese night Katrin slept on beside me. A sliver of cool moonlight curled around a tendril of hair on the nape of her neck. I was willing to take risks. I was also capable of being very, very stupid.

The next morning we waited in the dust outside our guest house. Katrin brushed a mark off my shirt sleeve. The gardener brought us each a glass of sweet lime juice, and when I thanked him he gently laid his hand on my shoulder. It was the first time I had been touched by a Burman.

The two four-wheel-drive vehicles pulled into the lane, slicing through a saffron line of monks and causing a novice to drop his alms bowl. Phahte sat in the front of the leading Land Rover, sober and silent, a German G3 automatic resting on his knees. Behind him the tax inspector clutched the butt of a Colt assault rifle dating from the Vietnam War. ‘Property of US Government’ was engraved on its stock. Katrin and I were marshalled into the second Chinese-made Willys with the Chief of Police. We sat behind him next to a khaki-clad gun boy. Two Kalashnikovs were slung over his shoulder. On the floor pouches of ammunition were lodged in the hub of the spare tyre. The bristling display of weapons alarmed us; as far as we knew, there was no need for armed protection. Military ceasefires had been secured with all the northern rebel groups. The ruling junta posed no threat, judging from the previous evening’s camaraderie. Yet Phahte’s arsenal could not be carried for the sake of bravado alone. The drivers slipped the vehicles into gear, and I asked the gardener if we were safe.

‘It is safe,’ he whispered, smiling as if we were off for a jolly picnic by the river. And because of the quest, because of the impetus of our travels, because of my blind curiosity, I chose to believe him.

The tour by gunpoint headed north. Beyond the edge of town the broken highway climbed around lush plantations of wild banana trees, their broad leaves turning like windmills in the morning breeze. Gangs of farmers dug weeds from the steep fields of tobacco. Narrow tracks, trodden clay-hard by generations of feet, snaked up through the bush to hidden villages in the hills above us. Our Willys always kept fifty feet behind Phahte’s Land Rover, slowing when it slowed, stopping when it stopped. We did not pause at any of the many standing earthenware pots which were always full of clean water, replenished by passers-by who wished to earn merit.

In the first hamlet, which nestled beneath plantations of dry hill rice, a woman pressed an offering of fresh betel
kunya
into our driver’s hand, saying in Shan, ‘For Phahte. For dear Phahte.’ A girl gave him grilled cicadas from her roadside stall. In another one-street village our convoy paused and, without a word being spoken, a shopkeeper stowed a crate of beer under our feet. Every man we passed smiled or waved at the Land Rover in a mark of respect, though I could not make out the expression in their eyes. Phahte seemed not to notice his well-wishers. He ignored their greetings and stared ahead, hanging onto the automatic and the windscreen, his bent little fingers sticking out to catch the wind.

Beyond the last telephone pole we crossed wasted acres of blackened fields, once a teak forest, and replanted here and there with sickly rubber plants. Blood-red scars were gouged into the hillsides where the topsoil had been carried away. We passed a bloated cow, its eyes sticky and weeping, being coaxed downhill to Hsipaw for treatment. In places our vehicles needed to wheel up onto the bank, the roadbed having been eroded by the rains too.

At a bamboo roadblock a round-faced teenager in Palaung State Liberation Army uniform and flip-flops joined us. He sat on the spare tyre and held his long-handled knife in pudgy hands. Phahte said nothing to us all morning, and the Chief of Police never met our eyes. I concluded that both of them were horribly hungover.

Our driver too stared ahead, though with rapt concentration. His aquiline features seemed to be shaped by the act of looking, his eagle’s beak sensing a way around the massive craters and potholes. He drove quickly between the broken stretches of road, braking hard to leave us teetering above each chasm, easing into first gear to skirt around it and then accelerating away in an attempt to reach top gear as quickly as possible. The speeding-stopping cycle was relentless, straining our arms and rubbing our hands raw from clinging onto metal handles and seat backs. Every moment in motion was punished by wrenching dips. Branches and fronds whipped against our faces. It became impossible to appreciate our surroundings. Our mangled discomfort and the intense heat distracted us from the passing scene, from the waterfalls and plateaux and mile after mile of verdant jungle.

At noon we lurched up to a sun-baked long house, too numbed to be excited by the bowls of festering noodles and garlic-fried insects on offer. Phahte sat in the shade and drank his first Foster’s of the day. A butterfly spring had snapped on the Land Rover, filling the air with the stench of burning brakes. While the drivers attempted to repair it, their greasy tools spilling out of a plastic Yum Yum Noodles carrier bag, we retreated to the shade at the back of the open building. A cockerel scratched in the dust. There couldn’t be much for it to eat along the dry verge. Then we heard the sharp crack of gunshot. The chicken jerked off the ground and crumpled onto its side, bleeding from a shattered leg.

‘Morning cock crows three times,’ said Phahte, lowering his automatic. ‘First time to say get up, second time to say light fire, third time to say cook breakfast.’ The drivers had stopped their repairs. The cook had stopped stirring his pot. The only sound was the manic beating of wings. ‘But no more. Now I say eat lunch.’ Phahte raised the gun again, took his time, letting the bird suffer, then killed it. ‘Never mind,’ he told us, and took off his shirt. He crunched a garlicky cicada between his teeth. The drivers turned back to the brake shoes.

We had no appetite, so sipped at our bottle of ‘Ultraviolet Safety’ water and watched our host down two more beers. The Chief of Police joined him, and as they talked Phahte became boisterous. He ordered the PSLA boy soldier to stand the empty beer cans on an embankment, then picked each one off with a single, precise shot. Katrin, disgusted, looked away, but I whistled to assure him of our continued camaraderie. There was a sense that Phahte’s mood could change on the slightest whim. His displeasure would have been, at the least, an inconvenience.

‘My friend, we ride together,’ he decreed.

‘Thank you,’ I said, trying to sidestep the dubious honour. ‘But my wife and I are fine in the second car.’

‘Second car now first car.’ He waved away the damaged Land Rover, and we watched the Chief of Police lumber away towards it. ‘Don’t worry. We Christians ride together.’

Phahte fell into the front seat, bringing with him his automatic and the stink of beer. Our driver collected the discarded shirt, folded it, smoothed it and pressed it upon his lap. The Willys started first try but the Land Rover’s engine would not turn over. It needed to be hand-cranked to life. ‘God follows me,’ concluded Phahte, his arrogance explaining away random nature. The cook waved us off with a broad smile. No money changed hands. The dead chicken lay in the dust.

As we climbed through the sweltering afternoon heat the condition of the road deteriorated. Each time we felt we could not imagine a poorer trail, it became still worse again. The hardened surface gave way first to an eroded lane, and then a pitted track. It began to resemble a boulder-strewn riverbed more than a highway. Hairpin bends snaked around the hills’ contours, their edges unguarded by barriers or stones. Bridges were rough planks laid over gullies. In the places where streams crossed the road our wheels kicked up great fists of mud. Elsewhere a burning yellow dust caked our arms and legs, coloured our clothes and hair. I found myself thinking of the medieval torture which sealed the condemned into a nail-pierced barrel and rolled them downhill. It would have been a horrible way to die, but at least one would have reached the end sooner.

The drink had put Phahte in good if volatile humour. On the riverbed road peasants, walking between unknown and unknowable destinations, applauded his passing. In a three-hut village he bounced a newborn baby on his knee, its young mother wary of his wild laughter. He stopped every overburdened lorry to interrogate its operator. While he inspected the load our drivers retuned our vehicles’ engines. One lorry took Phahte’s fancy and he ordered it – along with its dozen hushed passengers – to turn around and follow us to Namhsan.

At the head of his wobbling, seesaw convoy, Phahte rode on the edge of his seat, his gun pointing out the window, his hand and crooked finger bent around the windscreen. ‘My friend,’ he announced, drunk now that the case of Foster’s was finished, ‘in Namhsan I will buy you a basket.’

I thanked him and explained, ‘We just want to see if they are still made, Phahte.’

‘Never mind. I will have one to be made.’ He began to sing, slurring his words into a meaningless mash of tones. ‘Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war…’ The shrill sawing of countless cicadas scorched our ears. In our heated imaginations it seemed as if the road would never end. We began to fantasise that there was no place called Namhsan. The town took on the aura of an unreal destination. ‘…with the cross of Jesus, going on before.’

Phahte soon bored both of hymns and his royal progress, and at a bend he instructed the driver to reduce speed. As the next stretch of road came into view, he raised his automatic and took a shot at a pigeon. He hit it, and the PSLA boy soldier, anxious to please, scampered ahead to retrieve it. The men joked in Shan as they inspected the rust-brown corpse, and the driver risked teasing Phahte that it was a rather small specimen. At the next turn the convoy slowed again, and Phahte spotted a crow. He settled the gun against the windscreen and fired. The bird dropped off its bamboo perch and into the bush. The gun boys and drivers hopped down from the vehicles, beating through the undergrowth in their flip-flops to find the prize. Phahte walked swiftly forward on his short legs, the gun slung across his shoulders. He hooked his arms around barrel and butt, leaving his fists dangling, looking like one crucified. His skin rubbed against the gun metal. Our driver found the crow, which was as big as a large hawk, and the kill again lifted Phahte’s spirits.

For the next two hours we crawled forward, stopping and starting every few minutes, while at our feet there gathered the corpses of pigeons, doves and an emerald-green parrot. Our driver offered Phahte encouragement, pointing out new prey, abetting the game. Phahte grunted the rare times he failed to hit his target. ‘I am sorry,’ he said to us after one unsuccessful shot. I did not understand his apology. Was it because he had missed? Because of the callousness of the killings? Or because he recognised that we – like the birds – were trapped by him? The sweet, aromatic scent of betel was sickly in his beery mouth. ‘God loves you,’ he added.

Phahte was a thug. Like the Rangoon generals, he bullied to mould behaviour and to dominate. But it was not brutality alone that had given him power. Vulgarity had not provided his arms or his eleven vehicles. At one checkpoint, a palm-thatch hut atop a barren hill as bare as a monk’s head, Phahte peeled off banknotes for the ragged
Tatmadaw
guards. The gun boy handed over the Kalashnikov and a dozen rounds of ammunition. The soldiers dipped and bowed with obsequious, fearful loyalty. The shuck-shuck of hoes and shovels tumbled down the slope behind them. One square metre of teak sold for $200 in Burma; less if it was cut illegally. Over the border in China or Thailand it fetched $600. A complete, mature tree could be worth over $30,000 on the open market. In place of the ancient forests eucalyptus was planted, for firewood and oil, but the fast-growing trees drained the soil, and in a handful of years the land became exhausted.