"It wasn't easy," he said. "We had to get up at four in the morning to clean the dining room and set the tables. Empty the ashtrays. Sweep. Uncle Bernard insisted that we get there at that time. 'Be very quiet, the guests are sleeping.' He was so strict. He checked each table. 'Don't hurry,' he said. 'Do it all correctly.' And he could get really angry."
"What made him angry?"
"If we left the spoon out of the sugar bowl."
***
I WENT BACK TO MANDALAY. It was then that I searched for and found Oo Nawng and gave him the money. He said, "I'm happy."
Before I left, I made a visit to the Irrawaddy, just to see the river and the boats and the landing stage. It was too far for Oo Nawng to go in his bicycle rickshaw, so I took a taxi. On the way, we passed a big bold sign:
"What's the Tatmadaw?"
"Damadaw," the driver said, giving it the correct pronunciation. "Is the army."
"Yes?"
"Stupid army."
NIGHT TRAIN TO NONG KHAI
THE GREAT CHALLENGE in travel is not arriving at the glamorous foreign city, but solving the departure problem, finding a way out of it, without flying. Buses are usually nasty, and bus stations the world over are dens of thieves, cutpurses, intimidators, mountebanks, and muggers. Hired cars are convenient but nearly always a ripoff, and who wants narration from the driver? The train is still the ideal—show up and hop on.
The express trains out of Bangkok were brand-new and comfortable, yet Bangkok was hard to leave. I had thought I would breeze through, but found myself seated in a cool shadowy room with muted gong music playing and a Thai woman washing my feet. She called herself Sky, because her name (she said) was too hard for me to say. I was so moved by the foot-washing I wanted to weep. Then she had me on the table and was kneeling on the backs of my thighs and tugging the kinks out of my arms. They were sore from rocking up and down Myanmar on the ghost trains. She poked her elbows into the small of my back and did a sort of samba along my spine, digging her toes into my vertebrae, and I thought of my trip from Colombo to Galle. She punched my upper back, giving me noogies in the recesses of my muscles, and I thought of the two drunks on the train from Bokhara, their hands in the remains of a tornapart chicken, their eyes glazed with vodka, as I stayed in the corridor trying to remain upright. She worked on my arms, flexed one then the other, twisted them, and I saw the rigid posture of the Muslim sitting stiff-backed on the train from Ashgabat to Mary.
She straddled me, as though playing horsy. This was heaven, having her seated on my back like a child on a pony ride, her knees forward, using them to massage my kidneys as she hammered the kinks out of my back. I had seen horsemen sitting like this in the desolate fields of Romania, but I was the pony now, and she the rider.
She slipped back, gripped my legs with hers and pressed, a wrestling move, kneading my calves with her heels, and then she took hold of my feet, finding each joint, each muscle, rolling each toe—whose feet are ever venerated and squeezed and chafed in this way, even by a lover? I had a vision of all the people, in India and Sri Lanka and Myanmar, whom I had seen walking—their cracked and tortured feet in broken shoes and shattered sandals.
"Over, please."
Then I was face-up, with a cloth mask over my eyes, as Sky knuckled and punched my legs and made a circular syncopation, open-handed against my inner thighs, playing a percussive tune. All this for almost two hours, a kind of bliss, some of it hurting badly, but when she stopped I wanted more. What lover ever spent that much time appeasing the tension in her lover's body?
Near the end she took my right hand. I write with this hand. It is cramped like a claw most of the time from holding a pen. She used her fingers to pry my hand bones apart, massaging my palm, bending my whole hand backwards, flexing my fingers, and then, finger by finger, cracking my joints, pulling each digit, until my hand stopped being a blunt instrument and acquired an elasticity, opening like a blossom.
"The children's hands bleed, sir!" a carpet seller had told me in Jaipur, unrolling a rug. "Look at the tiny knots!"
And then fruit juice under the stars, and my thinking, I'll stay a little while longer.
