How bad was it? I wondered. The contact was voluntary, at least in the case of the fellow who had taken hold of her arm. But it was done in ignorance.
Suppose a Catholic, in the days before Vatican II, ate meat on a Friday while thinking it was Thursday. Was it still a sin? Suppose he knew it was Friday but thought it was shad roe? Or suppose a Jew ate a ham sandwich under the impression that it was shad roe. Or suppose-
That was different, I decided. Eating meat on Friday was sinful, or used to be. Eating ham was unclean and a betrayal of one’s heritage. Touching a woman was something else, but I wasn’t sure what.
I was still pondering the point when we all kicked off our sandals and entered the monastery.
That’s what it was. It consisted of a walled compound of a couple of acres right smack in the middle of East Jesus, Burma, or whatever the hell they called the town. There were trees, including the sort under one of which Buddha was sitting when he attained enlightenment. (There’s something illuminating, evidently, about sitting under trees. A bodhi tree for Buddha, an apple tree for Sir Isaac Newton. The only thing I ever got sitting under a tree was shat on by starlings.)
There were three wooden buildings. We made our way past the largest one in the center to a smaller structure off to the right. We entered, climbed a flight of stairs, and walked along a floor of smooth polished planks. The room he led us to was small, unfurnished except for a narrow sleeping pallet on the floor.
“You will want to stay here with your friend,” the leader said. “Nicht wahr?”
I nodded, and he turned and said something to his friend, who went out and came back with a second pallet. He rolled it out on the floor next to the first. I eased Katya down on one of these and felt her forehead, and the alarm must have shown in my face.
He said, “It is malaria, ja?”
I opened my mouth, caught myself in time, and nodded.
“We have some medicine. And water. He should drink a good deal of water.”
And they brought medicine. I didn’t know what it was. There were tablets that were probably aspirin and capsules that might have been quinine, and there was a pot of herbal tea with a taste and bouquet that was new to me. I fed it all to Katya. She was in bad shape, shivering violently, heaving, her eyes rolling wildly in her head. I was afraid she might let out a stream of curses in high-pitched Russian. When the others left us at last, closing the door to our little room after them, I became less anxious that she would give the game away with a word.
I crouched beside her, put my lips to her ear. “Try to rest,” I urged her. “We’re alone now, but the walls are thin. You can whisper if you want.”
“Where are we, Vanya?”
“We have our own room,” I said. “In a sort of dormitory, from the looks of it.”
“Monks,” she said.
“Yes.”
“All monks, Vanya?”
“Yes.”
“I need something to drink.”
“More water? Or more of the herbal tea?”
“Is that what it was? It tasted like boiled grass.”
“You may have guessed the recipe. Which do you want?”
“I will take some water,” she said, “because it is good for me, but that is not what I want. Can you get me whiskey?”
“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t see how.”
“Something with alcohol. Ayet piu, they must have it for sale in this town.”
“Are you sure it’s a good idea, Katya?”
“It is the best idea there is,” she said. “I have had this many times, Evan. Nothing helps like alcohol. I don’t care what it says in the books. I know what my experience tells me, and… God, I’m burning up!”
She threw aside the blankets they’d given me to cover her with, then began trembling violently and reached again for the blankets.
“I swear it helps,” she said. “Please, Vanya? Can you get me some?”
The market was small – a couple dozen stalls, each taking up just a few square feet. I looked them over, and their proprietors looked me over, evidently surprised to see a monk shopping, and in the evening, too.
“Ayet piu,” I said to one of them, hoping I was pronouncing it correctly. He gaped at me, and it was hard to tell if he didn’t understand what I wanted or couldn’t believe a monk would want it.
“Ayet piu,” I said again, and mimed guzzling from a bottle, my head thrown back.
He shook his head. “Shwe le maw,” he said.
What on earth did that mean? I said “Ayet piu” again, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“Shwe le maw,” he said again, and reached into a crate and produced a pint bottle, the glass a cobalt blue. It didn’t have a label. “Shwe le maw,” he said, and brandished the bottle. I reached for the bottle, and he smiled, drew the cork, and poured an ounce or so into an earthenware teacup. They never give out samples at liquor stores in New York, so the gesture took me by surprise, but I accepted the cup and inhaled the smell of ripe oranges. I took a taste, then tossed off the drink. It had a full-bodied burnt orange taste, and a reasonable kick to it. It was neither as raw nor as potent as ayet piu, but there was definitely alcohol in it.
I asked the price – Beh laut the? – but couldn’t make out the response, so I took out my supply of kyat and let him help himself. He took twenty-five kyat and seemed happy, and I couldn’t believe this stuff was cheaper than beer.
Maybe it wasn’t much stronger than beer. Maybe she’d need a gallon of it to get any benefit from it.
Better safe than sorry, I thought. Especially at these prices.
And so when I shucked my shoes at the gateway to the monastery, I had three flasks of shwe le maw in my shoulder bag.
It was stronger than beer.
She was curled up in a ball when I got back, her hands clutching her shoulders, her knees drawn up to her chest. She was moaning and rocking, and at first she didn’t even know I was there. Then she opened her eyes and looked at me, and I got out a flask and poured her a cup of the stuff.
“I smell oranges,” she said. “Is it orange juice? No. I also smell alcohol.” She drank. “Oh, it is good,” she said. “Not as strong as ayet piu, but better tasting.”
She reached for the bottle. I held on to it for a moment, then let her have it. She tipped her head back and took a long swallow, then looked at me.
I don’t read minds, but just then her thoughts couldn’t have been more evident if they’d been written on her forehead. She knew she should offer me some, but then there would be less for her.
I didn’t wait to see how she’d resolve the dilemma. “There’s another bottle,” I told her, and saw her jaw go slack with relief. She gave me the bottle and I drank deeply and gave it back to her. I wasn’t running a fever myself, and the mosquito bites I’d sustained over the past week hadn’t done anything worse than itch, but you can’t be too careful, can you?
So she took a drink and I took a drink, and she took another and I took another, and lo and behold, the bottle was empty. I capped and traded it for one of the full ones in my shoulder bag, and uncapped that and took a sizable swig without thinking about it. And I passed the bottle to Katya and watched her tip it up and drink deep.
Her Adam’s apple didn’t go up and down when she swallowed, I noticed. That was because she didn’t have one, it not being part of the standard equipment for females. The presence of an Adam’s apple was one of the tip-offs to male-to-female transsexuals, although I’d read that some of them went so far as to have their Adam’s apples shaved surgically. That sounded a little extreme to me – I found it enough of a nuisance to have to shave the outside of my Adam’s apple – but it set me wondering. Had anybody thought about Adam’s-apple implants for female-to-male transsexuals? An interesting new frontier for Medicare, though the HMOs would never cover it.
An even better opportunity, it seemed to me, lay in importing shwe le maw into the States. In taste it ran somewhere between Grand Marnier and Curaçao, although it wouldn’t make the bottles of either turn pale and reach for the Valium. Still, at twenty-five kyat a pint, you were getting a lot of bang for the buck.