The Last Mandarin (38 page)

“Shan tattoo?” His driver blew smoke; sparks danced back over the jerricans.

Greenwood fingered his collar. The khaki shirt flapped open in the breeze, revealing intricate whorls of red and black among the curly golden hair of his chest. Greenwood was a man of agreeable and honest appearance, stocky, tall, thick in the neck, curly-haired, his eyes direct, expressive and warm, so that the Burmese, a trim and polite people whom in general he loved, often went wide-eyed themselves with pleasure, recovered, and giggled in embarrassment.

“Yes. Shan.”

“You talk Shan talk?” The driver was lithe and carefree, in his early twenties, a great smiler, a steady smoker of beedies. His gentle brown eyes seemed to express all that Greenwood loved about Burma and the Burmese: patience, good cheer, manners, the equanimity of a people who walked hand in hand with the gods. Greenwood had also seen them murder and pillage; government by assassination had for a few years become customary.

“Yes.”

“South Shan, North Shan?”

“South Shan mainly.”

“In war.” The young man, Aung, was certain.

“In war, yes. And before.”

“Lashio Road, plenty good. Railway soon too. Plenty bandit meantime.” Aung wore a lance corporal's shirt, British leavings.

“Quiet lately,” Greenwood said.

Aung agreed. “Plenty quiet.”

Greenwood plucked a beedy—a brown leaf of Burmese tobacco rolled and tucked to make a small tasty cigarette—from his own shirt pocket and set a match to it; he blew out the match and let it cool before he dropped it overboard. They were driving northeast and the sun was friendly.

“You kill plenty Japanese?”

“Nobody likes to kill,” Greenwood lied drowsily.

“Guerrillas like to kill.”

“Well, that's politics.”

“Wa people like to kill. You know Wa people?”

“Well, that's religion.”

“So,” Aung said triumphantly, “plenty people like to kill.”

“You're right,” Greenwood said.

The victory seemed to please Aung. He subsided, savoring his own wisdom. Greenwood seized the moment and offered up a comprehensive thanksgiving, for good health, for the Burmese climate, for this glorious morning, for General Yang's mad odyssey, for the fate that had called him, Greenwood, back here to the one corner of the world he would fight forever to keep free and green and unchanged. He was thirty-five years old and sound. Not a pimple. All humors, winds, inner construction admirably in tune. God, if any, had been good.

A few miles on, Aung asked, “You go Burma side or China side?”

“Nobody's sure,” Greenwood said. “You know how it is up in the hills.”

Aung nodded. “Okay. Salween side or Mekong side?”

“Well, somewhere in between,” Greenwood said.

“You need trail man,” Aung informed him.

“I'll find a guide.”

“I find you good one.”

“I'll do it, thanks,” Greenwood said. “You find yourself some passengers for the drive back.”

After a moment Aung said, “Plenty trouble China side.”

Greenwood said, “Want to know a secret?”

Aung caught his breath. “You tell me. I no tell any man.”

Greenwood said, “Plenty trouble Burma side too.”

Aung considered this nugget, then looked reproachfully at his passenger. “That is humor.”

“That is humor. You watch the road, please.”

Aung was laughing. “Plenty trouble
every
side.”

“That's the first rule,” Greenwood said. “Plenty trouble every side.”

They crossed the river Myitnge over a rusting iron bridge; far behind them, back by Mandalay, the Myitnge would spill into the great Irrawaddy; Greenwood had once stood on the bank and marveled at that rushing confluence. Now they rolled into Hsenwi, a metropolis sprawled over all of forty acres: a rash of huts, a rushchoked river, perhaps a couple of thousand souls, paddy and tobacco fields along the outskirts, and stands of oak and chestnut. Among the town's earthen buildings and wooden stalls, tin sheds and Quonset huts asserted war, the foreigner, intrusion, but even these outlandish structures had settled in like old residents, and the town was placid.

Greenwood warmed to the sight of blue-smocked children with shaven heads, who scampered toward the river waving bamboo fishing rods; he remembered his daughter, and a fish in a reed basket. Far off on the lake he thought he made out storks. Men, women and children of many tribes strolled the town's main street and many alleys. Some wore headbands; these were called gaungbaung, and he remembered what the Americans had made of that. He saw Shan with turbans and tattoos, and many women in mantles of silver tassels and disks. He saw men in longyi—the Burmese wraparound skirt—who were clearly Chinese. Outside the shops fish-shaped kites hung, as if hooked and dying, in the still air. For the moment he saw no Occidental. Usually in these towns there lived a deserter or two, a wandering ex-Nazi, a French adventurer, most often a leftover Briton like Gordon-Cumming, too human now and sensible to swap Maymyo for Windsor.

He did see a holy man, bearded, the eyes fixed on eternity, the beggar's bowl hung from a simple cloth sash cinching a simple cloth skirt. A temple too, and he remembered it, of stone, which was here an accomplishment, a devotion, an offering of sweat.

“You stop zayat?”

“Not yet,” Greenwood said. A zayat, often merely a raised platform, was here a resthouse for weary travelers; its establishment was a good work, another offering, among these Little Wheel Buddhists. “Let's start you back first.”

“Zayat, you leave luggage. Easier walking then.”

“Luggage. Humor.” Greenwood removed his dark glasses and examined this driver. Aung's gaze shifted. “I wondered about your English. It's better than you pretend.”

Aung said, “It is when I want it to be.”

“I won't leave my luggage anywhere,” Greenwood said. “It wouldn't last ten minutes.”

Aung made fierce teeth. “At a zayat? With a priest?”

“A priest isn't a watchman and you know it. He worries about the other world. It's only a field pack and a tommy gun, and if they turned up missing he'd look sorrowful and tell me to shed material illusion. He wouldn't even bother to tell me my driver came back for them. Now head for the market.”

Aung smirked, then laughed aloud. Greenwood allowed a small smile. Aung drove on, by luck and by horn. Greenwood commenced sweating; on the open road their speed had made breeze, but now they were crawling. Pye-dogs loped and grinned, snarled and yapped. Monstrous crows picked at carrion and drew themselves up like martyr priests, indignant but resigned, before taking scornful wing.

Lowland Burman merchants in colorful longyi embellished their own stalls like stands of flowers. Conversation ceased, haggling died, and lambent brown eyes welcomed the foreigner—was he rich? a spy? an official? A former soldier, perhaps, on pilgrimage to a field of victory or defeat.

“Watch the chickens,” Greenwood said. “No hurry.”

Aung protested: “Chickens only one rupee.”

“One rupee alive. Five rupees when a car kills them. Or a four-hour argument. And don't lean on the horn.”

“No horn?” Aung was astonished.

“I dislike unnecessary noise. Exercise the priestly virtues.”

“Chastity?”

“Patience, humility and silence. It's a lovely day; why foul it? Look at those brocades. Silver-work there. River fish. I'm hungry. No fruit at this season?”

“Silver from the mines at Bawdwin,” Aung said. “And look there, plenty fruit, bananas. Also blinded paddy birds in bamboo cages. And there by the table—a Jew-man.”

“A Jew? In Hsenwi?”

“Plenty Jew-man Rangoon side.”

“Where did they come from?”

“India.”

Greenwood was gazing at a swarthy, lugubrious merchant with a small hawkish nose and eyes at once cheerful, alert and ironic. He wore a blue longyi with a black aingyi—a single-breasted jacket—and a black skullcap. Before him, on a broad table covered with white cotton, lay row upon row, heap beside heap, of pliers, small wrenches, machine screws and wood screws, hammers and nails, nuts and bolts, braces and bits; all this Greenwood took in as they crept by, and he thought he recognized a stack of the little paperboard rectangles on which thumbtacks are sold by the hundred.

They chugged on. Greenwood pointed: a corral, donkeys and ponies. Aung pulled up. The horse-master was a Shan, so Aung kept silence and turned expectantly to Greenwood, who said, “Greetings and blessings.”

“Blessings and greetings.” The Shan was sturdy with a scraggly mustache and pointed beard, and unruly sideburns.

“A fine season,” Greenwood said. “Has there been rain in the hills?” Villagers drifted toward them.

“Little, little.” The Shan seemed to realize abruptly that he was speaking his own tongue with a true foreigner; he made rabbit teeth and stared hard at Greenwood's eyes, side arm, khakis. “This is not the stranger's first arrival here.”

“That is true,” Greenwood said amiably. He wondered how far coincidence could stretch, and almost asked this man for news of the village of Pawlu in the valley of the Little River Mon, but decided not to declare himself without need. “I come from Lashio, and not for the first time.”

“Perhaps the stranger fought the Japanese.”

Greenwood answered immediately, “Yes.” Not all Burmese, not all Shan, had fought the Japanese. Their earlier quarrel was with their English masters, and the Japanese, men of Asia, had come to expel the English. Nevertheless, truth was respected here, and Greenwood did not hesitate.

“As did my village,” said the horse-master, and Greenwood breathed easier. A child shouted “See the yellow man!” and the townspeople laughed.

“What village was that?”

“Kawsu, not far from Kengtung.”

“Then you are a long way from home.”

“One travels; one trades.”

“We have nothing to trade,” Greenwood said, and he raised his voice to sow rumor, “but my friend must return to Lashio with this vehicle, and anyone who brings him a paying passenger will share the proceeds.”

The crowd murmured: “Good.” “Aha.” “Reasonably said.”

Aung spoke now, and his Shan was not good. “Best wait here by horse, or go zayat? Travel man come what place?”

“Few travelers here,” said the sturdy Shan. “Better to try the zayat.”

“Good sense,” Greenwood thanked him. “Blessings and greetings, Horse-master.”

“Greetings and blessings, traveler.”

Aung kicked the motor into life. Cautiously they wove among the pye-dogs, children, gossips and flirtatious women, with Greenwood waving little salutes. “I forgot to ask, where is the zayat,” Aung said.

“Close by the temple.”

And the temple was close by the market, and Aung and Greenwood simply sat for a time, allowing curiosity seekers to gather. Greenwood was properly courteous to the aged and properly reserved with the tittering women, and he made a joke or two with the children, who were always more forthright. He also advertised Aung's return journey, and in half an hour Aung had made preliminary contact with one obvious opium runner and one rotund, chirping peanut wholesaler, and after five minutes apiece of enthusiastic haggling they settled in among the jerricans, immediately lighting white cheroots.

Greenwood paid Aung liberally, fifty rupees, and they shook hands in the Western fashion. There was a pause, as between two men who in other times might have become friends. Greenwood wished him a safe journey.

“And you too,” Aung said. “Thank you for not speaking wog English.”

The zayat was a large one, of bamboo and timber, one room about thirty feet by thirty with a thatched roof, a cooking fire on a small hearth against the north wall, and an ancient monk in a saffron robe knotted over one shoulder. The monk was bald, serene, imperturbable. The sudden appearance of a huge fair-haired man bearing arms was only another of nature's accidents, another of the negligible obstacles on the road to Nirvana. Greenwood greeted him politely, and hoped that his weapons would not profane the house.

“A zayat can be profaned by bloodshed or concupiscence,” said the monk, “not by things.” He sat before a small prayer wheel with a bowl of cutch beside him, dipped a bristle brush into the yellow dye and proceeded to paint the wheel in slow strokes, humming on one note as he worked. Greenwood set his pack and weapon against the wall and sat cross-legged watching. After a time he asked, “Is there food? Drink?”

The monk said, “Bah! Only sleep.”

After a time Greenwood asked, “Is there a tavern?”

“There is a wineshop,” the monk conceded.

After a time Greenwood asked, “And where is this wineshop?”

“It is a few houses east.” After a time the monk asked, “You are English?”

“American.”

The monk shrugged at this pagan. “A kind of English.”

After a time Greenwood asked, “Do you never eat?”

“As the gods provide.”

Greenwood hoisted his traps and walked on to the wineshop.

All sound ceased as he entered. Calmly he nodded to the company, and conversation swelled again, murmuring along beneath the clack of tiles. This was a tavern of quality, with tables, benches and mahjongg. Greenwood sat by the wall. He ordered rice, fish and bananas, also rice wine of the lesser fermentation, more like rice beer. The room was gray with cheroot smoke, but the smell was soft, comfortable, like the taste of his food, the fish aromatic, the bananas sweet, even the red pepper not aggressive.

He bought beedies from the stout waiter and said, “I will take a hand at mah-jongg if needed.”

“They play for money,” the waiter said, “and consequently with skill.”

“Nevertheless. The traveler alone must pay for his diversions.”