Museum of the Steel Souls  

Ma Thida

(1)

Exhibition Room 1

A smoke bomb must have exploded in here. Its strong smell and thick smoke almost choked me. I couldn’t see anything inside the room clearly. The dark columns of smoke curled up to the ceiling, and then back down to the floor. I could only make out objects up to three feet away.

My goodness! As I peered through the dark clouds of smoke, squinting my eyes so I could see what lay ahead, I tripped over something on the floor. I fell, but the object didn’t move. I looked down quickly. My eyes stung.

Oh, there you are! A woman’s white slipper soaked in blood. Quite a light slipper, but sticky blood had dried under its sole. So, though I tripped over it, the slipper was as firm as a hammered nail. The Myanmar basic education women teachers I know usually wear this type of slipper. It symbolized, therefore, a teacher joining the Spring Revolution till she breathed her last breath. I turned around, looking down at the bloody slipper, stood upright, and bowed to the owner, who I imagined was a school teacher in a green and white school uniform. My eyes no longer stung, but the smell of smoke had not dissipated. Maybe my nostrils had gotten used to the smell.

On the white wall I could clearly see a pair of inexpensive glasses. They belonged to a man, a school teacher, who had devoted many years of his life to education. His soul was not able to take his glasses to the after-life, but, on his behalf, the museum had accepted his blood-stained glasses as an exhibit for posterity. For the exhibit caption there was a map showing the birthplace of the deceased owner of the glasses, in honor of his noble service. This map was different from the one displayed beside the school teacher’s white slipper. My eyes no longer stung, but I felt tears welling up. The smell of smoke! Does it come from outside? Or does it come from inside my body - from an organ which might have been burned? The cloud of smoke almost blocked my throat.

On the wall next to me appeared one blurred image after another. My eyes strained through the cloud of smoke to see them, as though they were farther than their actual distance: tattooed letters on a poetess’s forearm spelling out her blood type; a poet in the vanguard holding a fluttering banner; the lifeless body of a poet whose organs had been mutilated and who wrote the lines, ‘I will live with a clear conscience until my last minute’; a worried lad pushing a wagon carrying a wounded body; a little girl behind a thin, makeshift shield to protect her from the cloud of smoke; a young man, who, taking the cover of a fiber shield, tried to carry the body of his wounded brother ... 10 or 20 images, one after another. The dam of my eyelids broke, and tears flowed down uninterrupted. I could now tolerate the smell of smoke.

Bang! Something dropped from the ceiling right on my head! Sticky liquid flowing from my forehead down over my glasses. Nothing but red in my vision. The thing that dropped down on my head didn’t roll off. I turned my head to the right. A mirror was waiting. ‘My goodness! A motorbike helmet on my head!’

Now the wind from nowhere began to blow very strongly. Strange! The wind was blowing, not on the lower part of my body, only the upper part. I could hear the strong gust of wind blowing. The smell of smoke was blown away. Now a smell reminiscent of clinics and hospitals invaded my nostrils. The strong wind hit the helmet on my head like the brutal butt of a rifle so many times that I almost lost my balance. My glasses were smeared with red liquid so everywhere I looked was red. The wind was blowing on the upper part of my body. Should I sit down so that I feel better? Yet I stood still on my feet, fossilized. Now, the stringent smoke of gunpowder filled the air.

‘Everything is gonna be alright. Come here, and wash your face with Coke.’ I heard a young woman’s voice. Her voice was sweet, clear and very decisive. I headed in the direction of the voice. To my astonishment, I discovered it came from the map of Myanmar next to a caption on the wall, displaying the thoughts of a mass of people of different ages, races, religions, birthplaces, sexual tendencies and orientations, and everything else. ‘Everything is gonna be alright!’ Then, the backwash from the deepest core of my heart must have blown away the helmet from my heart right up to the ceiling. The smell of gunpowder was getting stronger. But I neither sat down nor stood still, as if anchored firmly. I must move, I must move forward. A new exhibition room was waiting for me.

(2)

Exhibition Room 2

The strong smell of tears! Who would argue that you can’t smell tears? I became accustomed to all sorts of smells in the exhibition room I just visited. I could now distinguish one smell from another. This room is choked with the pungent smell of tears. Filled with the smell of tears, it was so suffocating you couldn’t breathe properly. Yes, before you enter this room, you must sign an agreement that your life is at stake, and you are required to cover your face with an oxygen mask, hooked up to an oxygen tank, so that you can see everything in this exhibition room, and are blessed with the chance to take a good breath. This oxygen mask, if you are lucky, will serve you well until you leave this room. Yet the flow of oxygen could stop at any time. This you must know, and you must accept the terms of agreement before you enter: when the oxygen stops flowing, the air through the tube may cause breathing problems, doing harm to your life. So, you must be convinced that it is a great blessing if you do not lose your sense of the smell of tears. The smell of tears would be the meal you nibble at; and if you do not make any mistakes taking steps, with the oxygen mask over your face, you would not miss your Spring goal.

The challenge was there, ahead of me. The moment I took one step, four or five guns, trigger-ready, were aimed at my heart. Their bodies were made of cold gray stone, their heads and hands from human flesh. When a human figure came into sight, they mechanically aimed their guns. Their masked heads and ballistic helmets could only see three fingers raised upright. They were deprived of the sense of knowing, ‘this is an ambulance. This is the smell of tears’. Their hands looked stone dead, ready to pull the trigger and shoot at anything, animate or inanimate, the moment they heard a puff of the wanton wind. The hospital behind these stone-sculptured soldiers was only thirty or forty steps away, but I turned around, never to go there. The hospital seemed miles away.

I came to a long corridor. There I saw a long line of shadowy figures, seated and standing, with hundreds of oxygen cylinders, large and small, in a long line. Once again, the intolerable smell of tears rose up in the gloomy air. The sounds of hard breathing and groans, high and low, rose, then exploded, then paused and thinned, and then got louder. The hard, confused breathing blasted my eardrums.

Dark gray clouds floated down from the ceiling, introducing a new scene. In the wink of an eye, an invisible hand pushed those people, and their bodies fell to the ground. At that very moment, the long line of oxygen cylinders also fell and, alas, were transformed into stretchers for carrying corpses. Right before my eyes, those thousands of sorrowful eyes, looking almost hopeless, turned into motionless, stony eyes.

I lost the heart to skim the captions. I wanted to leave right away. Why the smell of tears? Why the hard breathing? Why such a moving scene? I didn’t want to know why. These baffling questions had numbed my desire to find out why. Is there anything more to find out? What would more messages bring to me? Just gruesome scenes of misery. Would there be anything else on earth to bring but a huge shame, a terrible disgrace to humanity?

(3)

Exhibition Room 3

The clean fresh air emanated a sweet fragrance. The beaming light was bright and calm. At the entrance were rows of many slippers of different sizes and shapes, neatly laid out on the floor. A three-cornered card on the floor read: when dispersed by gunshots during the Spring Revolution, many who fled were barefooted, so people in the neighborhoods collected and arranged the ownerless slippers in such an efficient manner that, if fortune should favor them, the owners could come back to claim their slippers and put them right back on. I was gazing at the slippers, pleased with the efforts, when I saw glittering silver and gold wings flying down from the ceiling. The wings gently alighted on the respective footwear. What was going to fly up to the sky was not the winged slippers, of course, but the butterflies of the noble souls of those people, who had hearts of gold to show empathy to their fellow human beings.

I stood before the rows of slippers and bowed. When I looked up, I saw a smiling, young woman holding a basket of boiled peas around her waist. An inviting smell wafted from the steaming, boiled peas! My mouth watered. She smiled, but her eyes revealed a bit of pride. A caption on her bamboo basket read: ‘During the Covid-19 pandemic, the prices of commodities have skyrocketed. This young hawker of boiled peas, sensing what could happen to food prices, sold her gold ring, invested in bags of peas, and sold boiled peas to her customers at normal prices. Thanks to her lack of greed, the price wasn’t raised.’ Impressed by her noble mindset and laudable motives, I embraced the statue of the young hawker by the shoulder. ‘During the Spring Revolution,’ said her clear recorded voice, ‘those who have sacrificed their lives outnumber the audience capacity of this museum. We have simply done what we could for our people.’

All the walls, ceiling and floor of the next section were crammed with certificates of honor for CDM heroes and Spring Revolution donors. Among them, a homeless, mentally ill man who made a donation of 30,000 kyats to a charity fund to purchase oxygen! On the wall filled with certificates, a transparent embossed screen of teardrops floated, much like animation slides. Hours passed, but the images went on and on: 22222 strike, thanaka strike, drivers’ strike, flower strike, Tumbling Kelly strike, inanimate objects strike, and many, many more. Images of the Ministry of Railway Service workers, who, adopting the lives of CDMs, took their belongings and left their barracks; striking people lying on railway lines to stop the railway service; religious leaders who begged soldiers to shoot them instead of the demonstrators; people preparing food and oxygen inside religious buildings for the Spring Revolution demonstrators; vehicles and staff of nonprofit organizations bravely sacrificing their lives for the people, doing their part to the best of their abilities; a Buddhist monk who offered banana bunches to a Muslim during the pandemic when food supply was a problem for all; a young Muslim staff member, covering her head with a shawl, vaccinating a Buddhist monk; the staff of the People’s Police Force and the army. The bursts of images continued.

On the floor, in the corner of the hall, by my right hand, there were dented pots and pans, iron rods, tin sheets, and tin boxes, large and small, with captions listing the owner’s house number, name of street or road, town, township and division. A red spotlight was hovering over these iron and tin wares, and as the spotlight fell on a particular object, an aggressive cacophony rang out - strikes of hate and resentment. More red spotlights! Then a tumultuous roar of hard strikes against the iron pots and pans, as though the hall was hit by lightning and thunder. 

(4)

The compound of the museum was a cool, shady glade. Each tree growing there bore the name of an honored hero. The stories of the heroes were displayed on the tree trunks. The letters of each name were an embossed piece of art. Not only the names of individual people, but also towns and villages that had bravely resisted and taken up arms during the Spring Revolution. The trees also bore the names of people living abroad who had contributed to the revolution, along with the names of their respective cities and countries. These little steel butterflies, bearing names, performed their duties on behalf of the heroes, throughout the glade in the compound of the museum. At an exit with no re-entry, a small lottery house welcomed visitors. Unlike all the other lottery houses in the world, this one offered two choices to ticket buyers: If you win the lottery prize, are you going to take away the prize or are you going to donate it? Surprisingly, the majority of ticket buyers ticked the box: ‘Donate’. They chose the destiny of the revolution, not their own destiny.

Now I am leaving the museum. After I read the sign at the exit of The Museum of Steel Butterflies, I make a solemn promise with strong determination. The sign at the exit said: ‘Make a promise that you and your next generations will ensure a museum like this will never exist in the future.’