Burmese Lessons by Karen Connelly Read Free Book Online

are no other tourists. I wanted to go up there to prove I could, though it’s very isolated. It’s hard work, trying to get to places they won’t let you get to, and the locals mob you, and there are no other white people. But I kept calm the whole time, never lost my temper, always just smiled as much as possible.”
    One of the dining-room attendants switches on the television. The news is starting. Out of respect for the diners, he mutes the volume. But the Spanish artist and I are relieved by the interruption. We turn to watchthe images of a fine mango crop, box after box of the small, sweet ovals lined up and glowing. It is impossible to be hungry in the land of a million mangoes. Then come the obligatory scenes of a smiling military leader inspecting a new factory. Followed by a battalion of soldiers marching on a road through the jungle, belts heavy with ammunition.
    The Spanish woman turns away from the television and talks more about the difficulties of being a tourist. White-shirted waiters come, take away our plates. After the table is cleared, we stand up. The artist smiles with her teeth. She shakes my hand and says, “Perhaps we will meet again someday in Madrid.”
    Perhaps. I wish her a safe journey home.

CHAPTER 5
THE EXPERT INSOMNIAC

    I’ve made a list of names, and added to it almost every day since my arrival; these are the ones I want to talk to, the ones who will have something to tell me. These are the ones I met, briefly, the week of my arrival, and wish to meet again. My initial intention to find out about Ma Thida and a few other political prisoners has complicated. Or perhaps it has simplified. I am willing to listen to those who want to talk, who want to describe life under the SLORC, the ruling military regime of Burma. I need to know more about this country, and it seems that learning how people live under a dictatorship is key to catching at least a glimpse of the truth—something beyond the beautiful images that are so readily available to the foreign eye.
    A magazine editor happened to be at the opening of a new art gallery that Sayagyi Tin Moe invited me to attend. This editor gave me his card and asked me to call him upon my return from Pagan. I’m back in Rangoon; I called him today. But the woman who answered the phone said he was unavailable. She hung up while I was still asking when I might callback. An hour later, I called again; she answered, heard my voice, and put down the phone.
    So I called the gallery owner, who quickly explained that the editor has been detained. By the MI, the military intelligence, the SLORC’s extensive spy, interrogation, and torture network. Everyone I’ve spoken to mentions the MI. Its web stretches across the country, through every organization in every city and town. The civil service, universities, colleges, high schools, hospitals, marketplaces, taxi stands, the photocopying shops: they all have their watchers and their informers. The generals who make up the SLORC are the leaders, and people speak of them angrily and scornfully. But when they say “MI” their voices are hushed and fearful. The MI operatives are on the ground, doing the nasty work, knocking at the door in the middle of the night, taking people away to the interrogation centers, picking people up off the street in broad daylight. It happened to the editor just a couple of days after I left Rangoon. He’s been sent to prison for an article that he published in his magazine last month. The gallery owner told me this. Then he also hung up in my ear.
    I cross the editor’s name off my list. One dark line. I move the pen back and forth until his name is indecipherable. As I’m doing this, I become aware of a crying baby, somewhere down the road. A howler. The sound seems so close. Maybe it’s not down the road but in the next house? The black scrawl becomes solid, as impenetrable as the ink the government censors use to blot out offensive passages in periodicals. What is wrong