Playing Lady Gaga, Being Nan Pau. Steve Tolbert

      Mya nodded and clasped her hands together to keep them from trembling.

      ‘I take your nod to mean yes.’ He pointed to the next photo.

      ‘Me, a construction worker and the policeman who killed my brother.’

      ‘How your brother and the nun died are anybody’s guess. Wrong place at the wrong time in an illegal protest march they should never have taken part in. What is verifiable from this photo is the identity of the person holding a brick over the head of a collapsed policeman. Agreed? … I take your silence to mean yes. Next.’ He tapped.

      ‘Me … and a monk.’

      ‘That monk being the abbot of Thein Tan Gyi Monastery. Next.’ He pointed.

      Mya felt sick. ‘A nun getting off a bus at a market place.’

      ‘The Hpa-an market place to be exact, the same spot you got off. Try again. Get the imposter nun’s identity right and I’ll tell you where she is.’

      She drove her fingernails into her palms. ‘You already know who she is.’

      ‘Your mother, am I right?’

      Mya glared.

      ‘I take your silence to mean yes. Right now she is occupying a room at the back of the Soe Guesthouse, not far from here. Last photo, Mya.’ He pointed. ‘Who is this running towards the market place?’

      ‘You know who.’

      ‘With two policemen chasing after you, am I right?’

      She nodded.

      ‘Good. That was easy, wasn’t it?’ He sat, put his hand in a drawer, clicked a button and brought out a cassette tape and placed it on the desk. ‘Endings can be read in beginnings. Decisions have their consequences. Your future is dependent on your past. In your case, a future as a long-term prisoner for crimes committed against the state: namely, involvement in an illegal march, vicious assault on a policeman, carrying a forged ID card and impersonating a novice nun while heading towards a war zone to join the Karen rebel movement.’ He held up the cassette and photos. ‘All here as passports to your and your mother’s future inside Insein Prison, better known as the Iron Bar Hotel, as I’m sure you know.’ He leaned back in his chair, looking satisfied, like he’d just finished a big meal. ‘Happy with that?’

      She felt numb, like a block of concrete.

      ‘You’re not smiling.’ He continued to watch her, perhaps reading the fear in her face. ‘Feeling overwhelmed and abandoned, are you? And I haven’t even mentioned your father, currently serving a long sentence in a northern labour camp. You’re from a family that refuses to learn the consequences of disobeying the law, of doing your utmost to destroy the country’s peace and harmony.’ He glared. ‘As to your future …’ He started picking his way through her things, letting her stew. ‘Thirty years inside the Iron Bar Hotel sounds right to me. Two rice gruel meals a day, one bucket-wash a week, a rat stick to catch your meat with.’

      Her eyes moistened. She clenched her teeth, held her breath. She would not cry – not one tear.

      ‘Unless.’ Mister MI gestured to the whiskey drinker, who tossed away his cheroot and came up to the desk. ‘Are you a compassionate man, Aung Min?’ he asked.

      Aung Min seemed puzzled at first, then he grinned. ‘I am.’

      ‘Do you try to perform at least one merciful act a day?’

      ‘I do.’

      ‘When you look at me, Aung Min, what sort of a man do you see?’

      ‘A man of great mercy and Buddha-like compassion.’

      ‘Fine words. Thank you. Having established that, maybe we should perform today’s merciful act together.’

      The whiskey drinker nodded, understanding and grinning now. ‘She is fit,’ he said, ‘her legs strong.’

      Mister MI leaned forward and gazed almost tenderly at Mya. ‘I have a proposal, one that will give you an opportunity to redeem yourself. And if you accept it, there will be no need to disturb your mother at the Soe Guesthouse.’

      Seconds passed. ‘What?’

      ‘Perform a noble act, for the good of the country this time.’

      ‘Doing what?’

      He crossed his arms, heaved a sigh. ‘You show no appreciation, no trust. You’ve taken up too much of my time the past few days. Forget the offer. We’ll collect your mother and go back to Yangon together.’ He picked up a mobile phone.

      ‘No, wait. I’ll … I’ll do what you want me to.’

      That smile again. ‘Good,’ he crooned, as though encouraging a child. He put the phone down, turned to the whiskey drinker and said, ‘She’s yours.’

      5

      Echoing cries of birds. The grunts of the old man in front of her, bent nearly flat under a basket of ammunition and supplies. His scratched legs spattered in mud, wearing a too-large singlet and blue longyi, he prodded the ground with a bamboo pole, a spike and two claws on its end.

      Voices in her head: the whiskey drinker’s as he escorted her to the truck where hollow-faced Karen captives – all of them male – waited in the back: ‘Consider yourself lucky. MI peels skin from people who’ve done what you’ve done. But you’ve been spared, for the present anyway.’ The officer’s voice in the darkness hours later, at the end of a rutted road, as captives and soldiers – faces painted in black streaks – prepared to move out, the former acting as porters for the latter: ‘Porters stay ahead of the soldiers. Do not stop and do not slow down unless you are told to. Break this rule and your ears will be shipped back in baskets to your families.’ The old porter’s voice after Mya had asked him why he tapped the ground: ‘We do not talk. We do not look at each other. We do not give each other any thought at all. Then, when one of us is killed, that person remains a stranger.’

      Half the previous night and all morning on this windy, undulating track, past the burnt-out ruins of a village, embers still glowing in the ashes, the supply pack and her sling bag cutting like wire into her shoulders. Her longyi and shirt saturated, feet mud-heavy and blistered, leech-bitten legs trickling blood. She tried to lose herself in memory: getting up in the morning, breakfast waiting for her on the table, parting her hair into braids and tying them off with ribbons, taking the bus with Thant and walking the rest of the way to school. Then came the lessons she was missing, the last time her family was together, what her bed felt like when last she slept on it.

      Mya drew up a vision of herself and her mother leaving the Soe Guesthouse together, walking through the bustling Hpa-an market and out to the bank of that wide brown river. So much space and privacy out there that she could walk for hours and rarely see another person.

      When she lost that vision she diverted to English, describing the things she saw in that language: leaves crunching under her sandals, patches of light and pools of deep shadow, the steepness and exposed roots of the next climb. Mya used the descriptions to write a letter, pretending her mother understood English, until the old porter veered onto a smaller track, avoiding a crater half-filled with water. The purpose of his pole hit Mya like a slap. She hurried to catch up, then drew an imaginary line from his mine detection pole, through him to herself, and did not waver from it.

      Another hour, maybe, descending through bush and a tunnel of trees before a soldier confronted the old porter and pointed. ‘That way,’ he ordered. He grabbed the porter’s pole and hurled it away.

      Bush thinned, sunlight spread and soon they came to a large clearing – airless, hot and bordered by trees and jumbled rock. They were told to stop.

      The officer came and ordered the loads to be dropped. Haggard looks soon turned