by Lydia Netzer
There was a knock on the door. She saw soldiers on the doorstep. Emma picked up her child and held her aside, out of the way. Nu came and took her then, sheltered her. The father was flustered and pink. Boots came in on the floor. Flies were on the curry. The fan went back and forth. Sunny was afraid. Her mother was still chewing a bite of dinner, swallowing, trying to get it down.
The father had been exposed as a Christian missionary and was immediately taken captive by the military junta. He understood them perfectly when they explained themselves. General Ne Win himself had approved his execution, the soldiers told him. General Ne Win just wanted to do things right. He did not deny that Bob Butcher was a fine scientist. Any who knew him might have volunteered to say that he exhibited nothing but the most excruciating charisma and honor. He never offered any woman his left hand, or touched any man on the top of the head. But the general had to, as he put it, crush all who sought to weaken the union.
But how did it happen these men in gray from over the mountain came again to their door, and penetrated the laboratory, and opened the secret cabinet full of Bibles and hymnals? Who told the tale that led the flat-faced soldiers to take Bob Butcher down to the post office, along with a dusty box of smuggled whiskey which he had attempted to use as a bribe? No one wanted money in Burma. You could bathe yourself in emeralds that you dug from your backyard, but you couldn’t eat them, smoke them, or use them to kill your neighbors. Look at the stupas, covered in gold. But no one can get a bus across town. So who cares about the clinking offering of one sweating missionary?
*
AFTER HER HUSBAND WAS taken away and the door had been slammed in their faces, Emma Butcher’s heart raced in her body. She went into their bedroom with her small daughter, holding her by the hand. She took a golden nat, an image of one of the ancient Burmese gods, out of her dresser from underneath her nightgowns. While her daughter watched, she put this nat, The Young Lord of the Swing, into the living room of Sunny’s dollhouse in the corner. From a pocket of her robe came a stick of incense, which she lit, hand shaking, and placed in front of the little house. Sunny came to kneel beside her, with Nu. Nu was stern and smiling; she sang a song. They watched the godlet sitting on the little rag mat before his bamboo chairs and table. Sunny ran to the kitchen and came back with a grape. This animism the women of the house had hid from Bob Butcher the way he had hid the Bibles from the Communists. Over her dozen years of service, Nu had taught it to Emma, and Sunny had learned it from the both of them. Everyone sneaking around having their religious ceremonies. Baptism and fruit sacrifice. Communion and incense. Smells and bells.
Emma prayed for blessings and protection. Life went on without her husband. A letter came to them after a week. Bob Butcher was imprisoned in Rangoon and his execution was set to happen in four days. She called Sunny in out of the tea garden and began to pack up the house. She gave Sunny a small linen bag and told her to choose whatever treasures she could fit inside, not too heavy to carry herself. Sunny chose the golden nat and some of her braided hats. A flowering branch from one of the garden trees. The family teapot. Emma packed a few of their clothes and then meticulously gathered all the notes from her husband’s research. She filed them all into a leather case with a collection of bottles and vials, and everything that was left she gave to Nu along with a packet of money. Sunny cried when she left her nurse, saying “Nu-nu” over and over. Emma cried, too, and said, “Nu, as soon as I can, I will send for you. Don’t worry. We will see each other again.” They left the cottage at the bottom of the mountain forever.
They traveled to Mandalay on one seat of a terrible bus, Sunny on her mother’s lap, holding her nose and sometimes crying. Emma sat erect, her face without tears. She kept her eyes forward and her mouth quiet, even her tongue. She used a little money to buy them some sour food that they did not like, that Sunny would not eat. She wished she could nurse her daughter again, but Sunny had weaned. It would make her feel better.
They came to Mandalay this way. From the dusty place they stood, on the shore of the Irrawaddy River, it was not beautiful. Kipling notwithstanding, they could see neither the Moulmein Pagoda nor the dawn coming up like thunder. They could hear wind in the palm trees, though, carrying dust along with it, a dry wind that made them thirsty and twirled Emma’s hair and the ends of Sunny’s head wrap. In the end, they found a way to get down the river, in a ferry piloted by a fat man who traded their journey for Emma’s personal Bible. It took ten hours to get to Rangoon.
The triangle sails of the round-bottomed fishing boats made sharp peaks against the horizon. The pointed horns of water buffalo marked where the animals were dragging plows along or wading in the shallow water. Nothing else rose up. Small farming villages hugged the shores of the warm flat river and long teak canoes slipped along, driven by poles or paddles. Emma clutched Sunny to her chest and gripped their bags between her feet. Nearby, an old person sitting in a large basket was lamenting being born a woman. A young monk crouched on his heels under the railing. His head and even his eyebrows had been shaved in an initiation ritual. Emma shuddered. No one could sleep on a boat like this, even on the Irrawaddy River. You couldn’t tell a regular monk from a government spy wrapped in an orange blanket.
*
ANOTHER MEMORY. THEY STOOD, linen bag and leather case in hand, in the square before the elaborate Sula Pagoda in Rangoon. Sunny could remember the shape of her mother’s face, it was so serene. The gold point of the shining pagoda rose up in the center of the building, layer on layer of gold getting smaller up to the very top. Around the central peak was a golden fence and there behind that fence, some people were congregating. The day was hot and Sunny was not well rested. She hung on her mother’s hand. She let her head fall back against the top of her shoulders, her neck going slack. At the very peak of the pagoda’s spire, there was an extra little hat shape and a beautiful star.
Her mother shifted her weight but did not lean on the white wall behind them. She stood straight. In the square, Sunny saw a woman with gold rings around her neck. The rings were stretching the neck to double its natural length, and on top of this great neck the woman’s head was wrinkled and flat. She saw the great white chinthes, sacred lion statues, with enormous teeth and their beards green. She saw brown babies carried on their mothers’ backs. She saw a man with one arm and half a leg where his whole leg should be. He was sitting on the ground. She saw hungry children gathered around a bag of trash outside a restaurant. Sunny was only three years old. Her mother had to help her remember, later, what things she saw, and what she knew. Some people were in rags, and some were draped in orange robes. Her mother held her hand. Then some people dressed in brown were hurled off the roof of the golden pagoda, over the golden fence. They dangled under the edge of the roof and swung back and forth, like they were dancing.
Sunny’s mother pulled her away and they began to walk toward the harbor. She asked her mother if they would see her father soon. Her mother said that they would never see her father again. Years later, in front of the Sula Pagoda, there would be a violent antigovernment uprising. Thousands of protesters would be silenced by bayonets in the face. When they had been killed, they would lie down in the street with broken skulls. The protest continued for months, until people began to wonder whether Burma had ever been a beautiful place. Pain was all around. In Burma, things never seemed to get any better. For Sunny and her mother, it was over. They were done with Burma and the Irrawaddy River. They were done with Buddhism and nats and monsoons. They boarded a boat with some other people going to America. They left the entire country of Burma behind.
In the end, the fate of Bob Butcher is murky. But his wife, at last, returned to America, where Sunny began her life as an American child.
12
In her mind, Sunny did not really accept that her father was dead. She did not learn that lesson of the dangling bodies. She believed in her heart that he had survived, and lived. Maybe he had never been put up there, swinging high from the p
agoda. After all, no one had seen his face. Maybe he had stayed in the prison, escaping years later. He had wandered off into the jungle, confused, or more likely sad. To imagine him as a fugitive in this world was more pleasant than the alternative. There wasn’t really a great visual memory of him left, even right away after he died. Her memory at that time did not include details. But she knew of him, his broad outlines, the roaring energy around him. She liked to think of him as free, as a panther.
If her father was out there hunting the woods of Burma, looking for home, then she was not ever really alone on this earth. He might eventually work things out, and be coming for her. He might be ready to reach out to her at any time. In city traffic, in any passing car, he could be there turning his certain shape of face to the glass, seeking her out. Of course, he would also have his reasons for staying in the shadows. He would need to be cautious. After all, what had happened to him once might happen to him again. There could be consequences to human contact.
She was never able to identify his face in a passing vehicle. But this did not stop her from wondering if her face had captivated other people she saw, men of a fatherly age. She thought she might catch someone’s eye, someone who had never seen a face like hers before. The person might say, “Follow that girl, because I have to know where she lives.” Someone solid and distinguished might show up at the doorstep, fall in love with her mother, and become her new father. Maybe he would turn out to be the same old one after all, wearing a clever disguise. There were men, throughout her life, that were fatherlike. A man with gray hair. A professor who told her, The subject is not worth doing, if it’s not fucking full of memorizing right at the beginning. Everything worthy starts out that way.
The tragedy of her father’s absence had never actually been an acutely tragic event for her. As she grew up and came to understand the world, he was a part of it. An already dead part. His absence was the landscape of her family. Increasingly, as the years went on, she didn’t really know what she was missing, but that didn’t stop her from missing it. She fixated on him. She prayed to him. She attempted to research him, found obscure publications of his in scientific journals. The language was so formal, she could barely understand it. But she told herself, This is familiar. This is mine, bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. She thought, There was a feeling he had, when he wrote this, when he was alive. He communicated it to me, even though everyone else who reads the article only gets a lot of information about this scientific test subject, and his reactions to all these oils. She dreamed her father was still out there, publishing under a pseudonym, more chemical properties of Burmese flora, the exquisite blooms of a jungle orchid coming to grips with his mortar and pestle.
Her belief that her father was still living did not stop her from telling stories about his death. She learned quickly when she started school that having a father who was killed by Communists immediately magnified her fame. Of course in her school she had already gained a certain notoriety from the mere fact of being bald.
In school, she would reference Bob Butcher in passing, and call him “My father who died” or “My father who was killed by Communists” or “My dead father.” There were other children in her middle school whose fathers were gone. There was one other child whose father was dead, of a heart attack, at age forty-five. That poor kid, having stood over his father’s grave, and cried with real tears and snot, was not able to translate this experience into any sort of social status, because he was always coming in with a little dairy farm on his brown shoes, and it didn’t matter to the other kids, whatever thing was festering in him. He could visit his father’s grave, and no one put their arm around him. But there was a lot of curiosity, about Sunny’s family in general, coming from the community. So eventually Sunny was asked, by one of the girls from Foxburg whose families still had money, to tell everyone exactly how her father died, anyway. “What’s the deal with your dad,” said this girl to Sunny. “How did he die anyway?”
Sunny, her social instinct strong even at the age of eleven, was able to deflect. Rather than giving up her mystery in the moment, she was wise enough to say, “Yes, I will tell you, but not today.” She chewed her gum cryptically, rolled her eyes, slammed her locker shut. Then she delivered a brilliant smile, and pushed off down the hall.
“I will tell you,” said Sunny when pressed again by this other local rich girl with a very severe ponytail and curls. “Next week at some point, probably, down by the track. During track practice. Meet me.”
Sunny never did any sports in middle school or high school, but she did watch the track team practice, dutifully, most every day. She had a crush on one of the boys. There were kids coming over, like they always did, waiting for their mothers to pick them up, or skipping out on play practice, or pep band or whatever. But now they would sit there near to Sunny, where she was perched up on the bleachers, watching the distance runners loping around. They looked expectantly at her, but she didn’t have much to say on the matter. Around the middle of the week, someone said, “Well, are you going to tell us pretty soon?” And Sunny said, abruptly, that this would be the day she would tell. She slammed her math notebook shut and put it aside, chewed her pencil absently, then threw it over her shoulder.
“My father died,” she said, “on a plateau. He was high up in Tibet.” The warm breeze blew across the green valley, up from the river. The track was nestled in a little dell, down behind the school. In this land of rolling hills, there was hardly an acre of level ground in the entire county, making swimming pools almost an impossibility. The children around her turned their faces toward her, their skeletons obscured by the shape of their hair. A couple were wearing hats, too. Their butts made the wooden bleachers creak, the chipped green paint getting into the seams of their jeans. “That’s near China,” she added. “Outside.” One of the kids nodded. One of the kids looked at another kid and quietly muttered, “No, it’s not.” The track kids pounded past, another lap of the asphalt counted. Sunny cleared her throat.
“It was winter in Tibet,” she went on, “and the Communists had guns.” Now the kids sat up a bit more and paid attention. Sunny clasped her hands together and turned them inside out, stretching out her elbows. She yawned.
“How many Communists were there?” asked one girl.
“Three,” said Sunny. “There were three Communists, in brown military uniforms. The uniforms of the Chinese Liberation Army of the People’s Democracy. They were supposed to be exterminating all the missionaries, even the ones who had families to support. My father had left us to escape the Communists. He had been hiding in a Buddhist monastery, but when the Communists came to the monastery, they found him there. He was in a dark room, between two clay jars of water. Probably praying or something. They came into the room, and tipped the jars over one by one onto the floor. The clay lids were breaking, water spilling everywhere, all over the place. My father stood up, in the middle of all this breaking pottery and monastery stuff, and said, ‘I’m here.’ And they dragged him out, up the mountain and onto a high flat rock. There were monks, um, dying all around. Getting bayoneted.”
“But what did he do?” asked a boy in red shorts. “Why was he in trouble?”
“For not being a Communist, obviously,” said Sunny kindly, and the other kids looked at this red-shorts kid like he was a complete idiot.
“So they dragged him up there on this high rock, one on each side and one marching behind. That was uncomfortable. And they threw him down on a flat place on the ground. ‘Do you believe in communism?’ they said to him. ‘No,’ said my father. ‘I will never believe in communism!’”
Sunny’s voice echoed across the track. She put up a bony fist and shook it. “They kicked him in the stomach, and began to walk around him in a circle, kicking him. ‘Do you believe in communism?’ they kept saying, but he would always say ‘No!’ and then they would kick him again. Their boots were dry and hard, and they had short legs. But there was no dust around, there’s no dust in Tibet becaus
e there is no dirt, only rock. These soldiers, their faces were flat and Chinesey, but really tough and mean. Finally they turned toward him, pointing all their guns right at his head, and they pulled him up so he was kneeling on the rock, and then they shot him. Dead.”
“Holy crap,” said one boy, impressed. A horn honked in the parking lot, as somebody’s mother had arrived. The track team had separated out now, a long trail dripping back from the lead group. At the front of the pack, Sunny watched a long, lean boy with a shaved head run mechanically past. Others followed, breathing hard, marking out another mile.
“In Tibet you can’t bury people,” Sunny went on. “You can’t dig; the rock is too hard. So they chopped him up into pieces with these big steel machetes, and left him there, for the vultures. They didn’t talk while they were doing it, they just kind of chop, chop, chopped. The rock turned all bloody with his blood, making red pools here and there on the rock. And then they went off down the mountain. After the vultures had eaten him, his bones dried, and eventually they blew off that rock, and became just part of the gravel. White bones.”
“How could you even know that,” said the cynic in red shorts.
“Shut up, man!” said the kid next to him, and pushed him off the bleachers.
“Sunny, that’s horrible,” said the girl with the curly ponytail. “You must feel so bad.”
Sunny nodded and watched the runners. She laced her fingers over the scarf behind her neck. Her eyes were wet.
*
SUNNY TOLD THE STORY again in college. She wrote a poem about it for an elective poetry workshop she was taking. In this version of the story, her father hung from his heels from a bar on a wall in a Burmese prison.