“He looks like a TV star,” said another woman, and giggled.
“Is that book the Lost Important Writings?” a man called out.
This time, Black Spot explained, the Younger White Brother chose to bring a black book and not a white one. It was similar to the one the Older Brother lost, but this was called Misery, titled like the old Lamentations. Black Spot could read only a little, but from what he saw, he believed it concerned their sufferings over the last hundred years. That would make these the New Important Writings.
“But what did you see him do?” a one-legged man asked. “What did the sign look like?”
“They were at the dock in Nyaung Shwe Town,” Black Spot reported, “and the Younger Brother easily drew a crowd to him, as only leaders can. He spoke with great authority and called upon people to believe in his magic.” Just then Rupert walked by, and Black Spot said to him in English, “Please, sir.” He made the fanning motion of a deck of cards. “You can showing us the disappearing of things?”
Rupert shrugged. “I guess.” He slipped the deck out of his pocket and began to shuffle in midair, sending the cards leaping.
The tribe broke into grateful cries. At last, they would grow strong again. No more eating rotted fruit from the Tree of Trial. To the Karen, it did seem fate had led Rupert here. He had the deck of cards, the Important Writings, the slanted eyebrows. For years this splinter tribe had been seeking signs. They had studied every foreigner who arrived at the dock in Nyaung Shwe, where a young man had arrived more than a hundred years earlier, the Younger White Brother. Just as likely, the tribe could have seen other signs—a young man with sandy hair wearing a white coat and a straw hat. Or these: a gilded cane, a carefully clipped moustache, a small wormlike scar below the left eye. Equally convincing: any sleight-of-hand, particularly the ability to change a person’s hat without his realizing it, or to open a book and make it seem as if God were blowing the pages. These people, now so desperate for any kind of hope, saw what they wished to see, the signs, the promise. Don’t we all see them? We wait for signs that we will be saved, or protected from future harm, or endowed with unusual good luck. And often, we find them.
The people of No Name Place created a receiving line and beckoned the visitors to go through. “Use your right hand,” Bennie advised. “In some countries the left is considered untouchable.” My friends did as Bennie suggested, but their hosts used both their hands to clasp each visitor’s right. They shook hands up and down, gently. “Dah ler ah gay, dah ler ah gay,” the people of the jungle murmured, and followed this with a slight bow. Marlena was surprised to feel the roughness of their skin, even on the young children. Their hands had been toughened by calluses and cuts. One man, she was shocked to learn, had only two bony fingers on one hand, and he gripped her hard, as if to take away three of hers as replacements.
Rupert was standing next to Marlena, and as they made their way through the receiving line, she noted something peculiar: With Rupert, the Karen looked down, covered their mouths, and bowed extra low. Perhaps it was a custom accorded to men alone. But she saw that Moff and Dwight received only the slight bows shown to her, and the Karen had no problem looking at them straight in the eye. Who knew what the customs and taboos were here?
A few girls spotted the little dog Esmé held tightly to her chest. They pointed and sang out: “Woo-woo! Woo-woo!” Everyone laughed, except Esmé. A few kids reached to pet the dog, their eyes seeking permission. “Just the head,” Esmé instructed firmly and with a watchful eye. “Right here. Gentle.” And the little dog licked each child’s hand like a benediction.
Roxanne motioned to Black Spot to come over. She held up her camcorder. “Do they mind? It’s okay?”
“Please,” he said, and swept his hand back to suggest an invitation that she take it all in.
She did a panorama, rotating to include three hundred sixty degrees, narrating where they were and how welcoming the Karen tribe was. She saw Dwight. “Honey, stand over by those women behind you,” she directed. He knew the ploy. Instead of capturing him, she would film the natives in natural poses. But as soon as she pressed the record button, the old ladies looked up at the camcorder and waved. “What hams,” Roxanne said. She waved back. “We’ve come to this beautiful place . . .” she now narrated for the video.
Wyatt and Wendy were talking to two young women. Wendy pointed to herself.
“America,” she said, and then pointed to Wyatt: “America.” The women repeated, “Merraga, Merraga.” Black Spot uttered in their dialect: “They come from the United States.” One of the young women shot back, “We knew that. They’re telling us their name. Both are called the same.”
“They’re so friendly,” Wyatt said, and let two boys look at the photo captured on his digital camera. The rest of my friends were similarly engaged in meeting the inhabitants, making the most of this cultural activity. Bennie tried to buy a few items that looked interesting—a bamboo cup, a wooden bowl—but when he inquired about the price, intending to double whatever was asked, the owners insisted he take them for free. “They’re so generous, which counts twice as much because they’re poor,” he told Vera.
The greatest attention, of course, was heaped on Rupert. The crowd surrounded him and moved him toward a long carved plank that was laden with a banquet—a banquet, that is, by the standards of a tribal people bedeviled by years of hardship. Black Spot gave out the invitation: “Please, we inviting you—eat, sir.”
To my friends, the jungle repast looked ill conceived, one dish after another, what Moff called “mystery meats,” grayish-greenish substances, some shiny, some slimy, none of it looking palatable. But as they would soon discern, the food was actually quite delicious. There were seasonal weeds, sticky rice, and the leaves of woodland trees and shrubs. There were also, in beautiful small bowls carved out of tree knots, tubers and seeds, buds and stems, small growths that were as delicious as pistachios and almonds, fungi of all kinds, gathered from the base of trees, left to dry, and then stored for occasions like these. The main platters held nascent reeds. And at the other end of the long narrow table were bowls with roots, sliced fermented eggs, roasted larvae, and a prized chicken. The dishes had been colored and flavored with whatever dry goods were stocked in the primordial kitchen: colorful ingredients of shrimp powder and turmeric, coarse chili and curry, garlic chips in place of fresh, preserved vegetables, as well as paprika, salt, and sugar. Next to the chicken, the most prized dish was the talapaw, a vegetable soup prepared by the twins’ grandmother, who knew just the right amount of spices and peppers to pinch with her fingers and mix into the crushed rice, fish sauce, and green beans, ingredients that Black Spot had brought her after his last foray into town. To bind all these many flavors, a big pot of rice was set in the middle of the table.
The twins’ grandmother signaled Rupert to be the first to fill his bowl. “Yum,” he said in flat voice. “I’ll just dig right in.” After his first bite, his eyebrows rose. After his second, he announced, “Not bad.” The young women around him kept their faces down, but beamed and giggled as he nodded, and gave a thumbs-up. Two young boys mimicked the gesture.
Marlena leaned over and said to Moff: “I think Rupert has found some female admirers.”
When lunch was over, Roxanne held up her camcorder and captured the happy occasion. Bennie stood next to the pecked-at banquet table. He waved and called: “Hi, Mom! We love it here! Good food, too. Yummy-yum.” Marlena tried to think of something to say about the strangler figs. “Our new home ...” she quipped, and gestured toward the tangle of vines. “The rent is supercheap. Comes with expansive backyard and lots of trees. We’re moving in.” Rupert was caught showing the tribe yet another card trick. He looked up at the camera and grinned. “The way things are going I may never leave this place. . . .”
All at once, a child’s high voice cried out, and everyone fell silent. All heads turned toward the coppery-haired boy with a smoky cheroot hanging from his mouth. He was standing
on an upturned stump and looked wild. He was rocking forward and back. His twin sister mounted the stump next to his, and she, too, began to sway. Staring blankly, the boy seemed to be in a trance, moving his upper body in cadence to his keening. The people of the jungle fell to their knees, shut their eyes and clasped their hands, and began to pray. The twins’ grandmother stood and began to speak.
“Christmas entertainment’s starting,” Moff announced. “Must be the manger scene.”
My friends glanced about. Who were these people? They could not fathom what the twins were doing, yet they certainly looked odd. But as I had found more and more often, with the proper attitude, the Mind of Others—and a bit of eavesdropping on private conversations—many truths are knowable.
11
THEY ALL STUCK TOGETHER
The boy was praying, not to a Buddhist deity, as one might expect, but to the Christian God, the Great God, and his emissary, the Younger White Brother, Lord of Nats. This was a renegade ethnic tribe who had no orthodox religion but had accommodated a pantheon over the past century. And so they believed in Nats and witches and green ghosts as both mischief makers and deliverers of disasters. They worshipped the Lord of Land and Water: O Lord, we’re sorry we had to chop down the saplings, but please don’t let our soil and crops wash away to the bottom. They had given thanks to the Crop Grandmother in the days when they had fields: We pray to you to give us good rain, good rice, no chewing insects, and not too many sticky weeds.
And they believed in the Younger White Brother, who had been part of their mythology for hundreds of years. They had once had an elegantly written language, and not the chicken scratch that some now used. Their stories were contained in three books of Important Writings. Those writings held their strength, their protection from ill forces. The books were supposed to be safeguarded by two divine but absentminded brothers, who lost them by placing them where they were eaten by wild animals or burned by a cooking fire. As prophesied, one day the Younger White Brother would bring back another copy of the Important Writings and restore their tribe’s power.
As you can imagine, missionaries over the years found a willing flock, who readily accepted Jesus and were keen to learn the Bible. The tribe mistook each of the pastors who arrived over the years as the Younger White Brother. As with the Buddha, the tribe gave offerings to the Great God to receive merit, and this gave the missionaries merit and made them happy. The tribe loved consensus and mutual respect. When a pastor died—as many did, from malaria, typhoid, or dysentery—the tribe waited patiently for him to return as a Reincarnated One. In 1892, the one who would be the most influential of the Younger White Brothers arrived among the Karen.
He was born in England, an ordinary boy, named Edgar Seraphineas Andrews, his odd middle name chosen by his mother, who thought she had passed from life while giving birth to him but was then miraculously returned to vital shores by a large-winged angel, who pried her neck from Death’s cold grip. That was the Seraph. The rest of his name came from his father, Edgar Phineas Andrews. They were not a titled family but a rich one. In former years, the elder Andrews had been noted for his charm, his prodigious conversational skills, and his generosity. Aided by his wife, Matilda, he used to invite battalions of guests to join him for weeks of witty parties, in which the visitors were required to dress in the funny costumes native to whichever of the colonies had been chosen for the evening’s theme. But in later years, his perceived charm dwindled along with his bank account. Duped in a speculation scheme, he suffered a devastating reversal. There were no more costume balls filled with laughter, no laughter, for that matter, for there were no servants to attend to the preparation, upkeep, and disposal of laughter. No manservant or valet, no cook or scullery maid, no gardener or groomsman. Matilda Andrews fell into a perpetual state of mortification and remained in her rooms talking to the wives of dignitaries in her mirrors. Young Seraphineas kept to himself and read books—books on magic, which he perceived to be the fine art of conjuring money out of rich fools. He practiced many of his illusions on his father, a willing subject, as he had already proven all too well.
In 1882, Phineas Andrews was invited to Rangoon by an old and loyal friend, a captain with the Raj, who beckoned him to witness the courage of the soldiers who served Her Majesty in the wild jungles of Burma. At first glance, Phineas became enamored of Burma and her verandahs and lazy days, her palanquins and polite deference to the British. In Burma, he started a small export business in feather fans, the feathers plucked from the marvelous array of birds found in this tropical land. In short order, his business included other exotic luxuries: elephant-leg stools, stuffed-monkey lamps, tiger-skin rugs, and drums fashioned out of the bowls of two human skulls, which produced a sound like no other. Many items remained unsold, but the profit margins were high enough to make Phineas a wealthy man again. In that small society, the Andrews family was soon elevated to the equivalent of high pooh-bahs. They had twenty servants—they could have had a hundred, if they liked—and lived in a house with so many rooms and gardens that most of them had no particular purpose.
Phineas was not a bad sort, merely dissipated and ineffectual. But the youngest of his three sons was “a friend of evil,” as some he tricked would later describe him. Whatever charm his father had possessed for entertaining, Seraphineas used without hesitation for ill gain. Whereas the father could convince his costumed guests that he was the Sheik of Araby, the son could convince a tribe of thousands that he was the Lord Almighty of Nats.
Having spent a good part of his boyhood in Burma, Seraphineas Andrews was adept at debauchery in two cultures. He took to bedding loose ladies and seducing laced-up ones, smoking opium and drinking absinthe. In Mandalay, he learned from watching illusionists of all nations and stripes, and soon began to defraud even the savviest gamblers. He found opportunity in the thousandth of a second between movements, and he knew the power of psychological diversion and verbal smokescreen. What his father had lost through speculation he could more than make up through manipulation. The supply of gullible people in the world was delightfully endless.
Seraphineas Andrews made it his habit to discern quickly what religious, mystical, or superstitious beliefs people held. Their illusions, he found, made for interesting twists in his illusions. He might thump a Bible to ask God to deliver the right card into the victim’s hand. He might cause watches to disappear from men’s pockets, and reappear in the palm of the Buddha. The more people believed, the more they could be fooled.
One day, he was performing his usual repertory of tricks, a deck of cards in one hand, the Bible in another. He set the Bible down, opened to Psalms, and as he shuffled and exhorted God to manifest Himself to the unbelievers, an exhalation of his breath caused a few pages to rise and turn. He had not intended to do this, but instantly, a dozen new believers felt the hand of God seizing their necks.
From then on, Seraphineas Andrews practiced and perfected a trick he called the Breath of God. At first he could turn a single thin page of the Bible from a distance of one foot. He increased this to two feet, then learned to shoot his breath from the side of his mouth without any sign that he was puffing his cheeks or rotating his lips. In time, he could converse and between words aim his breath backward five feet and ripple the pages from Old Testament to New.
He had discovered that changing a person’s beliefs was intoxicating, far more satisfying than performing tricks that only induced a temporary bewilderment. For a while, he was able to convince a number of young ladies that God had commanded them to grant him intimate favors, which they could give freely, for God, they would see, restored their purity as soon as the gift was given. He progressed to cheating grieving widows out of their bank holdings in exchange for a reunion with their deceased husbands. The husbands bade greetings and adieu with the rippling pages. He later had a retinue of young men to carry out his orders, from robbing banks to stabbing to death a man who threatened to expose him as an impostor. When friends of the dead man began
to investigate, the crooked finger of fate pointed at Seraphineas Andrews and he ran into the Burmese jungle.
Seraphineas Andrews knew of the myth of the Younger White Brother. How convenient that he was supposed to be white. Andrews set up an impromptu church on a busy market day. He opened a traveling table and placed a short stack of twelve cards on one side and the open Bible on the other. “Within your villages,” he intoned, “you have many Nats, who want to do you mischief and harm.” He fanned out the cards with a single tap of his finger. “I have captured their likenesses here.” The crowd peered at the faces: the Lord of Spades, the Lady of Spades, the Son of the Lord of Spades . . . He then called upon the Heavenly Father and Lord Jesus to recognize him as the Younger White Brother who had come to deliver these souls from evil. “Show me a sign that I am the one chosen to lead the Lord’s Army.” He looked upward. The pages stirred and stood upright for a moment, then rapidly flapped forward.
There was another sign that Seraphineas Andrews often used. He would select the most blustery man from the crowd and ask him to pick a card from a full deck of fifty-two, which was always the king of clubs, one of the colorful cards that represented a Nat. Next he was told to pick another card, and invariably it was the two of diamonds. He was then told to hide that card—behind his back, in his turban, under his shoe, wherever he liked. Seraphineas would then slip the two of diamonds into the cards and shuffle the deck, tap the top card, and ask the man to turn it over. Without fail, the Nat card that the man had hidden would be there, and the one he retrieved from its hiding place would be the two of diamonds. Seraphineas Andrews would ask the crowd: “Do you now believe that I am the Lord of Nats, ruler over all Nats?” And the open pages of the Bible would fly forward, calling forth the answer.
The Lord of Nats soon had a fast-growing flock. His followers were called the Lord’s Army, and this subgroup of Karen constituted both his cherished children and his soldiers in battle. His doctrines contained the precise combination of elements that would keep an oppressed people under absolute control: fear of oblivion, strict laws of obedience, harsh punishment for doubt, rituals with feasting, the manifestation of miracles, and the promise of immortality in a Kingdom of Everlasting Rice Fields. In a few years, Seraphineas Andrews’s flock grew to thousands, bolstered by the numerous “children of the Lord of Nats,” the hundred or so conceived by Seraphineas Andrews and his two dozen perpetually virgin wives.