“Buddhist nuns shave their heads,” I reminded her. “That’s why you didn’t know they were women. Remember?”
“So I would have shaved my head. That is the least of it. It is every moment pretending to be what I am not that is such a strain on me.”
“You’d still be pretending,” I said. “You’d be pretending to be a nun instead of a monk, that’s all.”
She’d goofed earlier that day, automatically heading for the women’s lavatory at a village teahouse. A man had caught her arm in time and pointed her toward the men’s instead, and he and his companions had all had a good laugh at the unworldly monk who’d almost dishonored himself by squatting over the wrong hole in the ground.
“I don’t know why they laughed,” she said now. “What was so funny about it?”
“The irony of it,” I said. “As a monk, you’re not even supposed to look at women, and here you came that close to using a woman’s toilet.”
“And what would that do? Shrink my precious penis? Cause my balls to fall off?”
“It’s a violation of a precept, that’s all.”
“If I had a pink robe,” she said, “I would not have to concern myself with such nonsense.”
“If you had a pink robe,” I said, “I wouldn’t be able to have anything to do with you. Nuns are women, even if they don’t look like it. I’m not supposed to look at you, and I’m definitely not allowed to touch you or speak to you, so it would raise a few eyebrows if the two of us set out to walk across Burma together.”
“Of course,” she said. “I forgot.”
“But if you wanted to spend your life wearing a pink robe in Rangoon-”
“Evan.”
“Or in some rural convent, where there are no men for miles around.”
“Evan, please.” She was silent for a few minutes, and then she said, “Why do they hate women so much? Didn’t Buddha have a mother?”
“Sure he did, and so did Jesus. A lot of people can simultaneously revere the Virgin Mary and insist that women can’t be priests. It may look contradictory to you, but it makes sense to the pope.”
“But to think it defiles a monk to be touched by a woman-”
“Not defiled exactly,” I said. “I don’t think that’s quite it. I think it all grew out of the chastity precept. Maybe it’s a way of playing it safe. If a man never lays eyes on a woman, let alone touches her, he’s not in much danger of losing control and jumping her bones.”
“Perhaps that is the justification for it, Evan. But that is not what it says to me. To me it says women are dirty, women are immoral, women exist to lure men into sinful behavior. It is cloaked in religion, but it is not religion because it is to be found in one form or another in all religions.”
“You’re right about that part,” I said.
“It is men,” she said. “They despise women, so they make a religion out of it. But it is not religious. It is just men being disgusting.”
“Men are swine,” I agreed. “Are you sure you don’t want to look for a nunnery along the way? It would shake them up a little when you walked in the door, but as soon as you got rid of your robes and stood naked before them they’d recognize you as a soul sister.”
“Oh, shut up,” she said.
A while later, she said, “I am sorry, Evan.”
“For what?”
“For telling you to shut up. For saying nasty things about men.”
“I’m the one who said men are swine,” I said, “and we probably are, all things considered.”
“Nevertheless, I apologize. It is the sun, I think. It is so strong.”
“Why don’t we take a break? There’s a shady spot coming up.”
“If I sit down I won’t want to get up again.”
“Are you feeling all right, Katya?”
“Yes, I think so,” she said. “I think it is just the sun.”
A couple of hours later the sun was lower in the sky, and we had eaten and rested a little, and shared a large bottle of orange soda from a roadside stand. This didn’t go in the begging bowl; the vendor expected to be paid for it. But it was only twenty kyat. That was hardly any money, but we had started out with hardly any money, so I was doing what I could do to make our remaining kyat last.
The orange soda tasted of sugar and chemicals, but I found I didn’t mind. The sugar was welcome after all the exercise we’d had, and the chemicals were reassuring; I knew the stuff was safe to drink, because no known pathogens could possibly survive in it.
We got back on the road, and I was wondering where we would spend the night. There was another village down the road ahead of us – there always is, sooner or later – but it was hard for me to gauge just how far it was, or if we could expect to reach it before it was too dark to walk.
We were walking more slowly today, it seemed to me. I kept having to ease my pace to accommodate Katya. And we were making more frequent stops.
I looked at her now, and she caught me looking and asked me what was the matter.
“You look a little tired,” I said.
“I am a little tired.”
“Yes, but you look different. Stressed out.”
“There is nothing wrong with me, Evan.”
“I didn’t say there was. I just-”
“I am perfectly fine.”
“Whatever you say,” I said.
Traffic was generally pretty light. A couple of times a day a bus would pass, each time reminding me that a bus would have conveyed us from Bagan to Taunggyi in a day instead of the week or more it was taking us. But I had not seen how we could have spent that much time in such close quarters without having our deception exposed by the other passengers. We’d be in Taunggyi in a matter of hours, all right, and as soon as we got there we’d be placed under arrest.
There were other public conveyances, too, for those citizens who couldn’t afford the luxury of a broken-down bus. For even fewer kyat one could ride in a van, with everybody’s luggage tied to the roof and everybody’s children hanging out the windows. The van passengers stood up throughout the journey, pressed together like upright sardines. I didn’t imagine monks ever rode those things. A monk could be deaf and blind, and he’d still break the chastity precept before the van had gone ten miles.
There was some military traffic, too, and the first time a truck full of soldiers passed us I got a little nervous. But we got used to it.
This afternoon a whole convoy passed us, every driver sounding his horn, young men in fatigues leaning out of the troop carriers to wave to us as they went by.
“So many soldiers,” she said. “Where do you think they are going, Evan?”
“To the Shan state,” I said.
“The same as us.”
“Yes.”
“But why?”
“Probably to kill the very people who are supposed to help us get out of the country.”
“There is fighting there? I thought there was peace.”
“There was,” I said, “the last I heard. But they’ve been waging this war off and on for close to forty years. All a peace treaty does is give both sides a chance to catch their breath.”
“I wish I could,” she said.
“You wish you could what?”
“Catch my breath. We have to stop for a minute, Evan.”
“There’s some good shade just up ahead on the left.”
“I don’t think I can wait that long,” she said, and dropped her shoulder bag to the ground, and dropped down next to it herself.
I squatted beside her. “Katya,” I said, “you don’t look well.”
“I don’t feel well.”
“It must be something we ate this morning. It hasn’t hit me yet, but-”
“It is not something we ate, Evan.” She took my hand, put it to her forehead.
“My God, you’re burning up!”
“Yes,” she said. “And I feel dizzy and light-headed. And I have been seeing things out of the corners of my eyes. Flashing lights, bolts of lightning. And my muscles are sore, but not from walking so much. A different kind of soreness. And there is a pain deep in my bones.”