Chapter 18
Day by day, we settled into a routine. Up at daybreak, beg for food, eat breakfast, beg for tea, and hit the street. Stop at a village around midday, get something to drink, wait in the shade until the sun had dropped a few degrees from its zenith, then walk to the next village, or as close to it as we could get. Then eat the final meal of the day where no one could see us, polishing off whatever was still stowed in our shoulder bags. (An evening meal might violate a monastic precept, but cross-country trekkers have precepts of their own, and “Don’t go to bed hungry” is one of them.)
By the time the sun went down, we would find a place for Katya to sleep. Within a few days, she had noticed that I never seemed to be sleeping myself, and I wound up telling her about the sleep center, and how I didn’t have one anymore. (I didn’t tell her I’d been like this since before she was born, or that I’d spent the past quarter-century in cold storage. That, I felt, was more information than she needed to contend with.)
We’d usually make our camp at the edge of a village, though one night we dossed down in the middle of nowhere rather than try to walk with only starshine to guide us. It would have been great to use those evening hours, when the sun was down and the air cooled off and the roads were empty, but not when the trade-off was an inability to see where we were going. I lamented my little flashlight, along with my Swiss Army knife and so many other indispensable articles I was now forced to dispense with, and I wished all kinds of ill fortune upon the head of the little SLORCist martinet who’d taken them away from me.
As far as that goes, I’d have liked my sneakers back. The Formerly Firestone sandals, staple footwear throughout the Third World, were not so bad once you got used to them, but Michael Jordan was never going to want to swap his Nikes for them.
Of course I couldn’t have worn my sneakers even if I had them. They would have looked out of place peeping out from under a red robe. The sandals slowed us down, and gave us sore calf muscles the first few days, and God knows they never provided much in the way of cushioning. But they were a better fit than those wing tips I had filched, and one did tend to get used to them.
“This isn’t so bad,” I told Katya one morning. “Plenty to eat, loads of fresh air, and not a lot of decisions to make about what clothes to put on in the morning. I can see why a good percentage of the men who try it decide to make it their life work.”
“Of course,” she said, “that means a lifetime of the ten precepts. Never to sleep in a high bed might not be so bad, but always to sleep alone?”
“There’s a downside to everything,” I admitted. “And it’s not just ten precepts when you’re a lifer. On that level you’ve got two hundred and twenty-seven precepts to contend with.”
“So many! How could a person even learn what they all are, let alone follow them?”
“That’s why the short-timers make do with ten.”
“Two hundred and twenty-seven of them! Evan, there are not that many things that I do to begin with. How could I give them all up?”
“Think of the poor nuns,” I said. “They’ve got three hundred and eleven precepts.”
“Nuns?”
“Right.”
“You mean Carmelites and Poor Clares? Catholic nuns?”
“Buddhist nuns.”
“There is such a thing?”
“I saw some in Rangoon,” I said. “Their robes are pink. You’ve lived here for years. Didn’t you ever see any?”
“I thought they were monks,” she said. “With robes of a different color, to signify that they were novices, perhaps. Or monks of a different order.”
“Well, they’re monks of a different gender,” I said. “In other words, nuns.”
“Evan!”
“What’s the matter?”
“I could have been a nun!”
“This is an odd time to discover a vocation,” I said. “I thought you were hellbent on getting out of this country, but if you really want to spend your life in a convent in Rangoon-”
“I mean I could have pretended to be a nun,” she said, “the way I am pretending to be a monk. Ku Min could have brought me pink robes instead of red, and I would not have had to shave off all my hair-”
“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.”