It was not that bad, she assured me. She had had it before and she knew what to expect. When this happened in Rangoon she had a way of dealing with it. She would take a lot of aspirin and quinine, drink a pint of whiskey, and get in bed underneath a lot of blankets. And she would feel much better in the morning.
The only problem lay in the fact that we didn’t have any aspirin or quinine. Or any whiskey. Or any blankets. Or even a bed for her to get into.
“I’ll stop a car,” I said. “We’ll get you to a hospital. There has to be some kind of clinic somewhere. In Taunggyi, or back in Bagan.”
“I do not want to go back to Bagan, Evan. And I do not need to go to a hospital.”
“Are you sure?”
“I am positive. We will find a place for me to sleep, and the fever will break during the night. And I will feel better in the morning.”
And we did, and it did, and she did. We bedded down in an orchard a few dozen yards from the side of the road. The trees were laden with a fruit I couldn’t recognize, the size of a peach but shaped like a pear, with a glossy yellow skin. It would have been nice if they’d turned out to be durian, but when I broke the skin of one, the odor was closer to that of an apple. Whatever they were, they were a long way from ripe, and I let them stay on the trees.
When she was comfortable – or as comfortable as she was likely to get, lying out in the open wracked with malaria – I went out foraging. I found the farmhouse where the keeper of the orchard presumably lived, and I skirted it carefully, hoping my scent wouldn’t set off a canine burglar alarm. But my luck held. Either the family dog wasn’t paying attention or the family had eaten him. Whatever it was, nobody barked at me.
There were several outbuildings, and I slipped in and out of each of them. I found a heavy canvas jacket with a fleece lining, and I found a couple of reasonably clean towels, and that was all I could turn up that looked at all useful. Back in the orchard, I wrapped Katya’s feet in the towels and laid the coat over her for a blanket.
It seemed to me there ought to be something more I could do, but I couldn’t think what. There would be a village within a few miles, but it might be an hour’s walk there and an hour’s walk back, and I didn’t want to leave Katya alone that long. Suppose she woke up in a panic? Suppose the coat’s owner decided to check his fruit trees in the middle of the night? Suppose the last man-eating leopard of Burma ran into her while making his midnight rounds?
I ate some of my leftover food but made sure I saved most of it for the morning. Then I lay down at her side and did my relaxation exercises, and then I sat up and tried meditating. I suppose an accomplished monk could have meditated until the cows came home, or at least until the sun rose, but a half hour was about my limit.
I wished I had a book and a flashlight. I wished I had a Billie Holiday record and something to play it on. I wished I had a bathtub full of gin. I wished I had any sort of bathtub – that bath in the Strand had worked wonders, but the best bath in the world can only deal with the dirt of the moment. Once you dry off and go back out into the world, you get dirty all over again. I had dried off a long time ago, and I’d shared a jail cell with an unrepentant durian eater and a boat with a load of dried fish, and I’d sweated my way down the hot and humid and dusty roads of central Burma. My red robes were pretty filthy, and so was I.
She was a lot better in the morning. Her fever had broken during the night, and her robes were wet with perspiration. I spread them out in the sun to dry while she wore the farmer’s canvas coat. When I brought her the robes – drier, and somewhat aired out – she wrinkled her nose at them. But she got dressed, and we ate our breakfast and got on our way.
“So that’s what it’s like,” I said.
“Malaria? That is what it is like.”
“It can’t be much fun.”
“It is always bad in the evening and not so bad in the morning. It may be different for different people, and with different strains of the disease. The good thing is that I know it will not kill me. When I first came down with it I did not know that, because it does kill some people, you know, so how could I be sure I was not to be one of them? I had never felt so bad in my life, Evan, and I was afraid I was dying, and the fear made it all so much worse.”
“Fear does that.”
“Yes. But I did not die the first time, and I feared it less from then on. And it was not so bad. When you know you will be all right, then it is not so bad.” She smiled. “If it does not kill you early on, then it will probably never kill you. Unless, you know, you develop other problems. If your heart is bad, or you are weakened with age. But I think my heart is good, and I am not so old, am I?”
“Not old at all.”
“But it is still not eating outdoors.” That threw me, until we worked it out – she was saying it was no picnic, and I couldn’t argue the point.
The next village turned out to be a scant half hour from our orchard, and if I’d known that I’d probably have chanced walking there while Katya was sleeping off a malaria attack. It would have been something to do, but I don’t know that it would have been worth the trip. It wasn’t much of a village, really, just the Burmese equivalent of a wide place in the road.
We managed to fill our begging bowls a few times, hit up the local teahouse for a couple of cups each, and snacked on cakes of sticky rice as we resumed our walk. I’d noticed over the past several days that we were doing more uphill than downhill walking, which suggested that we were gradually gaining altitude. This morning was the first time I actually felt the difference, in that I noticed the air was a little cooler and drier, and the vegetation less tropical. We were beginning to reach the hills.
I told Katya, and she was relieved to hear it. “I know it was harder for me to walk. We seemed to be walking uphill all the time.”
“Well, we are.”
“I was afraid it might be the malaria. It makes me weaker. I’m better now, Evan, but I am still not strong. I cannot go too fast.”
“We’ll take it easy,” I said, “and we’ll stop and rest more than usual.”
“I am slowing you down, Evan, I am sorry.”
“You’re not slowing me down.”
“But of course I am! You would not have to go so slow or rest so much. And you could walk at night.”
“I’d fall on my face. I wouldn’t be able to see where I was going.”
“You could walk longer and cover more miles each day. And you would not have to pretend you had taken a vow of silence, because you would not worry that a word from me would disclose that your companion was a woman. It is much more difficult for you to be with me, Evan, and more dangerous. I am sorry I made you take me with you.”
“I’m not.”
“You must be.”
“No,” I said. “Not at all. The dumb act I put on with other people isn’t just because I’ve got you with me. I’d probably do it anyway, to cover up the fact that I can’t speak the language and I don’t know a lot about being a monk. If I opened my mouth, I’d just put my foot in it.
“And I’d go nuts without you to talk to. We can’t talk when we’re around other people, and that’s one reason I’m always in a hurry to get away from the villages and get back on the road. It doesn’t matter whether we’re speaking Russian or English.”
“Because I am not so good in either one of them, Vanya.”
“You’re fine in both. I’m glad I have you with me. And I’m very happy you’re feeling better.”
“Yes, I feel much better. But it is not over, you know. The attack.”
“I was going to ask you about that.”
“The first night is over. And the third night is not so bad, and that is usually the end of it. After that there is some weakness and soreness, but the worst of it is over.”
“The third night’s not so bad,” I echoed. “Today’s the second day, isn’t it? What’s the second night like?”
“The second night is bad,” she said.
It hit her late in the afternoon. I had hoped we’d get to the next village before the fever caught up with her. It was the most substantial way station between Bagan and Taunggyi, and I thought I might be able to find aspirin there, and possibly quinine as well. Maybe I could get her indoors; failing that, I could at least scare up something a little better in the way of blankets than an old coat and a few towels.
“We can keep walking,” she insisted. “It’s not too bad yet, Evan.”
“Promise you’ll tell me when it is.”
“I won’t have to,” she said. “I’ll fall down.”
It was hard to know what pace to set. I wanted to walk faster, in order to beat the fever to our destination, but a faster pace meant a greater strain on Katya. She needed rest breaks, but they cost us precious time. I kept second-guessing myself until I just gave up trying to figure it out, and we found our own pace and just tried to keep moving.
The sun was lower and the air noticeably cooler when she stumbled, and I reached to steady her before she could fall. Her eyes were glassy, her cheeks bright with fever.
“We’ll stop here,” I said.
“No, Evan. I can go on.”
“It’s hopeless,” I said, but then I thought I saw something, and we walked another fifty yards and I could see smoke rising, drifting skyward from the cooking fires of the village that lay ahead of us.
The place was big enough to have outskirts, and I was tempted to stop at the first teahouse we saw. But if we stopped I wasn’t sure we could get started again. We kept going, aiming at the town center, and before we got there a couple of guys with shaved heads and red robes turned up to greet us with big smiles. The smiles faded to looks of concern when they got a look at Katya’s flushed cheeks and glazed stare.
One of them, the taller and older of the two – the alpha monk, I suppose – asked a question in Burmese. I caught a word or two and guessed that he was asking if my companion was all right, but I’d have figured that out even if he’d been speaking Martian. I did my little forefinger-to-the-lips routine, and I guess I wasn’t the only monk who’d sworn vows of silence, because he nodded as if this was quite normal. He nodded his head toward Katya, eyebrows raised, and for reply I took his hand and placed it on her forehead.
If I hadn’t recently touched her forehead myself, I’d have known her fever was high from the alarm that registered on his face. He looked at me and his eyes searched my face, registering my otherness.
He said, “European?”
That was close enough, and I nodded.
“Speak English? Français? Deutsch?”
Since German was his third choice, I nodded enthusiastically when he got to it. If rumors were going to drift back toward SLORC headquarters, let them be a couple of German monks. And let our communication take place in the tongue of which he was least confident.
“Come with us,” he said, in German that was a whole lot better than my Burmese. “We will help you.”
I put an arm around Katya’s waist. The other monk, the one who hadn’t said anything, took her shoulder bag, slung it over his own shoulder, and gripped her arm in his. And off we all walked, with the alpha monk leading the way.
I guess I didn’t want to think about how ill she was, or about our fate if the masquerade fell through. So all I could think about as we paraded through town was that she had just been touched by two men who’d have recoiled in horror if they’d known what she was.
How bad was it? I wondered. The contact was voluntary, at least in the case of the fellow who had taken hold of her arm. But it was done in ignorance.
Suppose a Catholic, in the days before Vatican II, ate meat on a Friday while thinking it was Thursday. Was it still a sin? Suppose he knew it was Friday but thought it was shad roe? Or suppose a Jew ate a ham sandwich under the impression that it was shad roe. Or suppose-
That was different, I decided. Eating meat on Friday was sinful, or used to be. Eating ham was unclean and a betrayal of one’s heritage. Touching a woman was something else, but I wasn’t sure what.
I was still pondering the point when we all kicked off our sandals and entered the monastery.
That’s what it was. It consisted of a walled compound of a couple of acres right smack in the middle of East Jesus, Burma, or whatever the hell they called the town. There were trees, including the sort under one of which Buddha was sitting when he attained enlightenment. (There’s something illuminating, evidently, about sitting under trees. A bodhi tree for Buddha, an apple tree for Sir Isaac Newton. The only thing I ever got sitting under a tree was shat on by starlings.)
There were three wooden buildings. We made our way past the largest one in the center to a smaller structure off to the right. We entered, climbed a flight of stairs, and walked along a floor of smooth polished planks. The room he led us to was small, unfurnished except for a narrow sleeping pallet on the floor.
“You will want to stay here with your friend,” the leader said. “Nicht wahr?”
I nodded, and he turned and said something to his friend, who went out and came back with a second pallet. He rolled it out on the floor next to the first. I eased Katya down on one of these and felt her forehead, and the alarm must have shown in my face.
He said, “It is malaria, ja?”
I opened my mouth, caught myself in time, and nodded.
“We have some medicine. And water. He should drink a good deal of water.”
And they brought medicine. I didn’t know what it was. There were tablets that were probably aspirin and capsules that might have been quinine, and there was a pot of herbal tea with a taste and bouquet that was new to me. I fed it all to Katya. She was in bad shape, shivering violently, heaving, her eyes rolling wildly in her head. I was afraid she might let out a stream of curses in high-pitched Russian. When the others left us at last, closing the door to our little room after them, I became less anxious that she would give the game away with a word.
I crouched beside her, put my lips to her ear. “Try to rest,” I urged her. “We’re alone now, but the walls are thin. You can whisper if you want.”
“Where are we, Vanya?”
“We have our own room,” I said. “In a sort of dormitory, from the looks of it.”
“Monks,” she said.
“Yes.”
“All monks, Vanya?”
“Yes.”
“I need something to drink.”
“More water? Or more of the herbal tea?”
“Is that what it was? It tasted like boiled grass.”
“You may have guessed the recipe. Which do you want?”
“I will take some water,” she said, “because it is good for me, but that is not what I want. Can you get me whiskey?”
“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t see how.”
“Something with alcohol. Ayet piu, they must have it for sale in this town.”
“Are you sure it’s a good idea, Katya?”
“It is the best idea there is,” she said. “I have had this many times, Evan. Nothing helps like alcohol. I don’t care what it says in the books. I know what my experience tells me, and… God, I’m burning up!”
She threw aside the blankets they’d given me to cover her with, then began trembling violently and reached again for the blankets.
“I swear it helps,” she said. “Please, Vanya? Can you get me some?”
The market was small – a couple dozen stalls, each taking up just a few square feet. I looked them over, and their proprietors looked me over, evidently surprised to see a monk shopping, and in the evening, too.
“Ayet piu,” I said to one of them, hoping I was pronouncing it correctly. He gaped at me, and it was hard to tell if he didn’t understand what I wanted or couldn’t believe a monk would want it.
“Ayet piu,” I said again, and mimed guzzling from a bottle, my head thrown back.
He shook his head. “Shwe le maw,” he said.
What on earth did that mean? I said “Ayet piu” again, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Shwe le maw,” he said again, and reached into a crate and produced a pint bottle, the glass a cobalt blue. It didn’t have a label. “Shwe le maw,” he said, and brandished the bottle. I reached for the bottle, and he smiled, drew the cork, and poured an ounce or so into an earthenware teacup. They never give out samples at liquor stores in New York, so the gesture took me by surprise, but I accepted the cup and inhaled the smell of ripe oranges. I took a taste, then tossed off the drink. It had a full-bodied burnt orange taste, and a reasonable kick to it. It was neither as raw nor as potent as ayet piu, but there was definitely alcohol in it.
I asked the price – Beh laut the? – but couldn’t make out the response, so I took out my supply of kyat and let him help himself. He took twenty-five kyat and seemed happy, and I couldn’t believe this stuff was cheaper than beer.
Maybe it wasn’t much stronger than beer. Maybe she’d need a gallon of it to get any benefit from it.
Better safe than sorry, I thought. Especially at these prices.
And so when I shucked my shoes at the gateway to the monastery, I had three flasks of shwe le maw in my shoulder bag.
It was stronger than beer.
She was curled up in a ball when I got back, her hands clutching her shoulders, her knees drawn up to her chest. She was moaning and rocking, and at first she didn’t even know I was there. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me, and I got out a flask and poured her a cup of the stuff.
“I smell oranges,” she said. “Is it orange juice? No. I also smell alcohol.” She drank. “Oh, it is good,” she said. “Not as strong as ayet piu, but better tasting.”
She reached for the bottle. I held on to it for a moment, then let her have it. She tipped her head back and took a long swallow, then looked at me.
I don’t read minds, but just then her thoughts couldn’t have been more evident if they’d been written on her forehead. She knew she should offer me some, but then there would be less for her.
I didn’t wait to see how she’d resolve the dilemma. “There’s another bottle,” I told her, and saw her jaw go slack with relief. She gave me the bottle and I drank deeply and gave it back to her. I wasn’t running a fever myself, and the mosquito bites I’d sustained over the past week hadn’t done anything worse than itch, but you can’t be too careful, can you?
So she took a drink and I took a drink, and she took another and I took another, and lo and behold, the bottle was empty. I capped and traded it for one of the full ones in my shoulder bag, and uncapped that and took a sizable swig without thinking about it. And I passed the bottle to Katya and watched her tip it up and drink deep.
Her Adam’s apple didn’t go up and down when she swallowed, I noticed. That was because she didn’t have one, it not being part of the standard equipment for females. The presence of an Adam’s apple was one of the tip-offs to male-to-female transsexuals, although I’d read that some of them went so far as to have their Adam’s apples shaved surgically. That sounded a little extreme to me – I found it enough of a nuisance to have to shave the outside of my Adam’s apple – but it set me wondering. Had anybody thought about Adam’s-apple implants for female-to-male transsexuals? An interesting new frontier for Medicare, though the HMOs would never cover it.
An even better opportunity, it seemed to me, lay in importing shwe le maw into the States. In taste it ran somewhere between Grand Marnier and Curaçao, although it wouldn’t make the bottles of either turn pale and reach for the Valium. Still, at twenty-five kyat a pint, you were getting a lot of bang for the buck.
No question. It was stronger than beer.
And it was working. As we made our way through the second bottle, I could see that it was the best thing for malaria since bug spray. Katya had stopped shaking and her color was better. She was still running a considerable fever, but the wild stare was gone from her eyes and the desperate agitation had passed. She took a last long drink that left Bottle Number Two as empty as its predecessor, pulled all the blankets over her, buried her face in the crook of her arm, and left the land of the conscious for a better world by far.
I sat beside her, looking down at her. Her breathing, easier and less ragged now, was the only sound I could hear in all the monastery’s severe stillness.
I thought about where we were, and what we had done, and what the future might hold. And I did something that may seem questionable in retrospect, but which made perfect sense at the time. I opened the third bottle of shwe le maw.
I didn’t put that much of a dent in Bottle Number Three. I just nipped at it from time to time, and there was no more than a third of it gone when Katya stirred at my side. I capped the bottle and turned to her.
“I am better, Evan,” she whispered.
And indeed she was. The fever hadn’t merely broken. It had shattered into bits. The blankets were soaked, as were her red robes and the pallet she lay on. She cast the blankets aside and stood up, peeling off her wet red wrapping, and I turned the pallet over so she would have its dry side to lie on.
And she giggled and plopped herself down on it.
“Vanya,” she said. “My little Vanya. My Vanushka.”
And she giggled again.
Well, every medicine has a side effect. What lowers your blood pressure calcifies your liver, and what clears up your acne makes you break out in hives. Shwe le maw had knocked malaria down for the count, and now she wasn’t feverish or delirious or twisted in pain. She had slept and rested, and she felt much better.
But she was stoned out of her mind.
And, see, she wasn’t the only one. We were both of us pretty well oiled. If she’d had a little more than I – the lioness’s share, say – it had been offset by the fact that the booze she drank used up a good part of its fury on the malaria. The stuff I poured into me all went to the end of getting me drunk.
And drunk is what I was. Not falling-down drunk, because you can’t fall down if you haven’t stood up in the first place. Not roaring drunk, either, because a Buddhist monastery in Burma was no place for anything louder than a whisper.
What I was, all the same, was Very Fucking Drunk.
Which may explain what happened next.
“My God,” she said, wide-eyed in wonder. “What happened?”
“Nothing,” I said. “It was a malarial dream.”
“It was better than a dream. It was wonderful.”
“Well,” I said.
“I don’t know how you could bear to touch me,” she said. “I was sweating like a pig before. I must smell foul.”
“You probably do,” I said, “and so do I, in all likelihood. If we bathed in the Irriwaddy we’d leave a ring. But evidently not bathing knocks out the sense of smell, because I didn’t notice.”
“Neither did I.” She yawned, stretched. I reached out a hand and stroked her breast. She purred.
“I hope I didn’t make noise.”
“Just a little,” I said.
“Maybe they’ll think it was the malaria.”
“Let’s hope so.”
“I was drunk, Evan. Were you drunk?”
“Very.”
“But now I think I am sober.”
“It feels that way to me, too.”
“That I am sober? Or that you are sober?”
“Both.”
“We screwed ourselves sober,” she said, and giggled.
“Well, maybe not a hundred percent sober. Not what you might call stone cold sober.”
She sighed. “It has been so long, Evan. I have not been with anyone in a very long time.”
With all the new diseases that had popped up while I chilled out in Union City, this had to come under the heading of Good News. “Neither have I,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Longer for me, I bet.”
“Save your money.”
“Oh? How long?”
She’d never believe me, so why tell her? “So long,” I said, “that I almost forgot how to do it.”
“But you remembered.”
“Well, there are certain things you never forget how to do. Like falling off a bicycle.”
“Or drowning,” she said.
“Exactly. Once mastered, those skills are with you forever.”
“So it has really been a long time, Evan?”
“Ages.”
“Perhaps you are a true monk after all. It sounds as though you have been living like one.”
“Until tonight.”
“Yes, until tonight. But you should not keep him cloistered, Vanya.”
“Him?”
“Your little man,” she said, and reached out and took, uh, him in hand. “He is cute,” she announced. “He is a good little man. A standing-up man. Yes?”
“Upstanding, I think you mean.”
“And also I mean standing up. You see?”
“Oh.”
“So it is not right to keep him under lock and key. You should let him out more.”
“I see what you mean.”
“And I should let him in. Vanya?”
“God,” I said, reaching for her. “We have to be very quiet this time.”
“I know.”
“Extremely quiet.”
“Like mice, Vanya. Oh, yes. Oh, that is nice, my darling. That is so good.”
Perhaps, I thought, perhaps we were not absolutely sober…