“Damnable citizens,” Ducksworth often grumbled at the Lanmadaw YMCA, where every night after dinner the fellows would gather in the close, teak-furnished living room and fill their glasses with cognac (purchased, Benny learned with a pang, from E. Solomon & Sons, where his father had worked). Invariably, they would begin a game of bridge, and as they played and smoked and drank into the early hours, they would talk—about girls, about politics, about the splendor of the British Empire, the great Pax Britannica, which kept this country running with the ease and beautiful regularity of a Swiss clock.
“Unlike China,” Ducksworth cut in on one of these nights, “with Manchuria overrun by Japs. What the devil do you think Hitler’s up to by favoring the Japs, anyhow?”
There was something distasteful about Ducksworth, Benny thought. He was too eager to laugh, to lose himself under the annihilating influence of tobacco and drink. The fellow would never bloody his fists for anything, had he even the mettle to believe in more than a decent pension and a decent meal and a decent-enough game of bridge. No, his lightness appeared to be how he survived, how he sat so easily with not treating anyone but a white or a Burman quite as a man—and how he managed to get away with championing the imperialism that more and more of the Burmans were beginning to revolt against.
Just the other day, Ducksworth had been taking a break for tea at the firm when he’d revealed the shallowness of his convictions to Benny. They’d been alone in the office; Ducksworth had put his feet indecorously up on a chair, raising his teacup to his pursed lips; and Benny had decided to broach the subject of the law student, a Burman fellow at Rangoon University—someone by the name of Aung San—who’d begun raising a ruckus about the British presence. “A solidly anti-empire nationalist sort,” Benny had added rather breathlessly. “They claim he’s starting some sort of movement, saying the Burmans are the true lords and masters—Britons be damned, and everyone else along with them.” By “everyone else,” Benny had meant people like B. Meyer and him, and also the Muslims and Indians and Chinese and, well, the natives who’d been here for centuries, some before the Burmans. “It’s not anyone else’s country,” his new friend had disdainfully replied, reminding Benny that Ducksworth, born to a Burman mother and an English father, had a uniquely dominating perspective.
Yet Ducksworth was habitually unwilling to go so far as to side with the Burmans; it suited him better to sink into the plushness of the Pax Britannica. Indeed, during their conversations, each time Benny came close to the point of pressing him on political matters, Ducksworth would slip away into the haze of his tobacco-drenched musings about the fine pleasures of British tea (which he bought from an Indian) and British cut crystal (which he hadn’t any of) and British manners (which he rarely displayed). And, generally speaking, Benny had to admit that British rule did nurture a spirit of tolerance that appeared more to benefit than to harm many of Burma’s citizens. Certainly there was a kind of caste system, by which the white man was on top and the Anglo-Burmans just beneath them; certainly the British had the deepest pockets; but there was also freedom of religion, an equitable division of labor when it came to British civil and military service, and, for the most part, a general prospering of every sort. From the little Benny had read since landing back in Rangoon, he understood that the Burman rulers whom the British had conquered had shown no such charity (even of the self-interested sort the British practiced) to those they’d overthrown.
“I say, Benny,” Ducksworth said on this particular night, when no one rose to his question about Hitler’s favoring of the Japanese. “Have you put in that application?”
They’d begun to play the cards he’d dealt.
“What application?” said Joseph, one of the others who worked at the firm and lodged at the Lanmadaw.
“Benny doesn’t take our work seriously, Joseph—too ‘stifling,’ too—”
“Well, it is!” Benny said, hiding behind his hand.
“What application?” Joseph repeated.
“To His Majesty’s Customs Service,” Ducksworth answered. “It does have a distinctive ring, doesn’t it? You’re too bloody lazy for that sort of thing, Joseph—but not Benny. And wouldn’t he look dashing in a white uniform?”
Was Ducksworth mocking him? He’d been the one to urge Benny to apply for a junior position, so impatient was he to convert Benny to his chosen faith of imperialism.
“What’s the point?” Benny said. “The English will be out soon enough.”
For a moment, Ducksworth only peered at Benny over his cloud of smoke. Then he said, “Your problem is that you believe in right and wrong. Don’t you know evil will find you no matter what?”
It happened now and then in Benny’s wanderings that he caught a glimpse of a cheek, neck, delicate hand, or sweep of black hair that could have been Sister Adela’s. One evening in November—when the rains had fallen off and he’d wandered beyond the city limits—he noticed a girl walking swiftly along a deserted side street, tripping in her fuchsia sari as though her attention were on something higher than the procession of her feet. Up the steep hill leading to the Schwe’ Dagon Pagoda, he found himself shadowing her, until he was sure she had become as sensitive to his presence as he was to hers: two tuning forks, each dangerously setting off the other’s vibrations. The ground leveled off, and she scurried along a concrete path toward the pagoda, glancing back at him as she fled up a dilapidated set of stairs. Instantly, he saw that her terrified eyes were nothing like Sister Adela’s, and the spell was broken. She disappeared into the golden entrance, set between two enormous griffins covered with horrifying pictures of the damned.
“Are you a fool?” he heard. When he looked back at the entrance, he saw an Indian man facing him. The man’s long lax hands, hanging against his gaunt frame, were not a fighter’s, nor was the fierceness in his amber gaze. Rather, there was something wounded about him, ruined. Benny felt awfully ashamed, awfully sorry. “Are you a fool?” the man said again, in an English thickly accented by Bengali.
“Just foolish,” Benny responded.
“Where does your father work?”
“Forgive me, sir—”
“I insist that you take me to your family!”
Now the man descended the stairs and drew close, so that Benny could smell the tobacco on his breath.
“Are you stupid?” he said more quietly. “Terrorizing a child who only wants to light a candle for her mother? You should be honoring the dead yourself. What do you imagine they think when they look down and see you behaving this way?” His questions seemed to chase one another out of his throbbing heart. “Don’t you know that when no one is present to be strict with a man, he must be strict with himself?”
Benny hadn’t intentionally avoided his parents, or the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in whose cemetery they lay. A few nights later, he ventured to the Jewish quarter, where the bazaar was still in full swing. His eyes flicked over the flares of the vendors’ stalls, up to the rickety buildings’ timber balconies, which his father had predicted would be burned down one day. (“You wait and see, Benny. Careless, so careless with their flares, these street peddlers.”)
Farther up the road he soon found E. Solomon, shut up for the night and somehow less commanding than it had long ago seemed. He peered through the dusty window of the dark store at the rows of liqueurs and whiskies. Whenever he’d managed to keep his hands off the merchandise, his father had rewarded him with a bottle of orangeade. How he’d loved the way the marble in the bottle’s little neck gurgled as he swallowed down the sparkling, syrupy drink. Daddy had been head cashier at E. Solomon, which provided the British navy with drinks and ice from its wells on the riverbank. (“The navy keeps us safe, Benny. And how do you imagine their sailors relieve themselves from the press of this heat? Our ice! Our fizzy drinks!”)
At the corner of Tseekai Maung Tauley, he stared up at their old second-story flat, from which Mama had pee
red down on him while he’d played here with the other boys. She’d never been a doting, fussing type; no, her love was more even-keeled than that: a stroke on the cheek, a brush of warm lips on his brow. But her counsel had lavished him with love, with attention and praise. (“You must not just think of yourself, Benny. Only animals just think of themselves. The worst sin is to forget your responsibility to the less fortunate.”) She had seemed to carry her sacred separateness from man’s lower impulses in the hollows of her frail, perpetually melancholy face; in her slow movements; in the way she watched him, as if already from the remove of eternity. Generosity and charity—those had been her trading posts. How often had she packed a basket of fruit for the less fortunate? How often had she plaintively prayed for the sick before the candles forever being extinguished by fretful Daddy, who had lurked around their flat almost deferentially? Mama had loved to sing—quietly, unassumingly—and her voice had drifted from the window down onto the graced street. And then . . . silence.
Benny’s feet fled to narrow Twenty-Sixth Street, where he found the dark outline of the menorah and the words “Musmeah Yeshua” over the archway of the grand white synagogue. Musmeah Yeshua—“brings forth salvation.” The meaning came back to him along with his grandfather’s counsel that he must not hesitate to flee to this refuge in times of darkness. He couldn’t remember where any of his loved ones were buried in the cemetery, but again his feet discovered the way, along a path through the overgrowth, to the tree under which they lay. As he knelt, he touched the cold headstones inscribed with Hebrew he could no longer read, and then he pressed his forehead to the rough stone of his mother’s grave. “I am right here beside you, Benny,” he could almost hear her say.
The world of the dead was something he could reach out and touch; he had only to give it attention, and it reached back out and met him.
For a long time, he sat with his head against the grave, his mind quiet, attentive, sensitive to the wind and the birds and the life in the overgrowth. It must have been a few minutes past dawn when one of the synagogue’s caretakers saw him asleep, and Benny woke with a view of light-suffused clouds before a rock hit him on the cheek. “Indian!” the caretaker shouted at him. “Tramp! Scat! You’ll find no sanctuary in this place!”
2
By Sea
Khin had seen him before, the young officer (an Anglo-Indian?). She had noticed his hands, strong and clenched by his sides, and the restless way he charged from one end of the seaport to the other, as if he were trying to expend something combustible stored within him. One afternoon, she had watched as he’d ridden a launch out toward a ship anchored in the bay; he’d stood at the bow, leaning into the wind, arms crossed over his chest. Was he so sure of his balance? she wondered. Or did some part of him hope to tempt fate, as she sometimes darkly did when she ventured out to the very edge of this jetty, where she stood now, in September 1939, with the boy who was her charge.
She had come to Akyab four months earlier to work as a nanny for a Karen judge, who made a practice of hiring people of their own persecuted race, or so he said. His six-year-old son often drew her out to the port, where from the jetty they could look out over the fitful water and watch the beautiful seaplanes landing and taking off. She loved the planes as much as the boy did, loved their silent sputtering grace—though her love was distressed. Sometimes she saw a plane swerve and imagined it falling like a bird shot out of the sky.
The boy pointed up to the silvery body of a plane ascending toward a cloud, and she shuddered, drew him sharply from the rotting end of the planks giving way to the sea.
“Time to go,” she told him.
“I want to watch until we can’t see it anymore,” he said.
He hadn’t been told that Japan was at war with China, that Germany had invaded Poland, or that France and Britain had declared war on Germany. His innocence made her feel guilty, as though by encouraging his fidelity to the planes she were somehow betraying him. But she was being silly, she knew, imagining that these planes were doomed. “War will never come here,” the sessions judge had told her, after listening to his nightly English radio program. “It’s Malaya the Japs want. There’s no penetrating our territory but by sea, and when it comes to the sea the British are unsinkable.”
“I have a surprise for you at home,” she lied to the boy. She shielded her eyes from the glare and tried to give him her most convincing smile.
The boy studied her for a moment. “What surprise?” he said.
“I’ll tell you when we’re there.”
There was no surprise, of course, and as they stumbled back toward land over the splintered planks (as she stumbled away from the unbidden image of her body slipping into the shivering waves), she kept her eyes on her feet and searched her mind for some small treat the boy might deem acceptably unforeseen. He was already beginning to doubt her reliability. Perhaps the maid had bought a few cream puffs from the Indian who came around on Wednesdays.
She was halfway to the shore again when she looked up and saw the officer watching her intently from the other side of the wooden gate leading to the jetty. His white hat cocked to one side, he leaned against the rickety gate as though to block her path back to land. Even across the distance, she could see he didn’t hesitate to scrutinize her hips, her hair. If any other man had stared at her in such a way, virtually eating her with his eyes, she would have—well, she would have laughed.
The officer suddenly shouted at her, coming out with a confusion of English words of which she clearly caught only “not”—something he said with great emphasis and at least twice. He was surely instructing her to steer clear of the jetty (the way he further cocked his head and pointed away from the water told her as much), and his loudness and directness should have offended her; yet there was something mellifluous, some kindness, in his baritone voice.
She stopped five feet from the gate, taking the boy’s warm hand in hers, and steadying herself against a fresh assault of wind and sea spray. The officer’s gaze narrowed now on her eyes, and she felt herself blush as she absorbed the full force of his face—the heavy jaw, the mouth too full to be truly masculine, the ears that stuck out beneath the brim of his hat. There was nothing extraordinary about his version of handsomeness, about his large features (though he did have something of the elephant about him!); there was nothing unusual about his authoritative claiming of the port (all the officers seemed to claim Burma, as if they were not also subjects of His Majesty the King of England). But she had to admit that he was more striking than she had imagined him from afar. What was so very unforeseen (what she must have noticed without noticing) was the expression of meekness in his eyes, markedly in contrast to his obvious physical strength. Even the smile that he now leveled at her own lips, and that she unwillingly returned, seemed aggrieved.
“Are we in trouble, nanny?” the boy asked.
“Perhaps,” she said quietly.
Again, the officer began to speak, to express something to her in English, while beside them a seaplane revved its engine.
“Look!” the boy said, pointing to the plane that started to skip over the waves.
For a moment all of them stood in mute wonderment, watching the plane lift off into the vivid blue sky, where it banked and peaceably headed northwest, as though a war were not raging somewhere beyond the horizon.
“Beautiful,” she heard the officer say over the whistling wind.
He had stepped back from the gate. And when their eyes met again, she felt so embarrassed that she yanked the boy forward, yanked open the gate, and hurried past the officer and his spontaneously stricken face.
That the officer had taken an interest in her was something she found both agreeable and unsettling—unsettling just because it reminded her that she had been avoiding taking an interest in herself for fear of discovering something distinctly disagreeable inside.
She could remember moments of tranquill
ity from her youth, when her father still had his land and life, when her mother still had her smile. There hadn’t been the features of what others might call an easy childhood. She and her younger sister had never attended school, but worked their orchards from the start. Yet there had been ample time to climb and run and play, to bathe on the riverbank, to sit as Mama braided their hair, and to sing.
Singing—that was their ease, their art, their prayer, their lesson. They sang to the Karen god Y’wa, who, she had been taught, was also the Christian Creator. Stretching out under the mosquito net at night, they sang to the spirits of the orchard. And then, as she and her sister fell into sleep’s embrace, they listened to Mama sing their people’s story. Long ago, the story went, we came here along a river of sand. We came upon a fearsome, trackless region, where, like waves before the sea, sands rolled before the wind. We came to this green land, to the sources of the waters and the lakes above. Until we fell among the Siamese and Burmans, who made slaves of us. They took our alphabet and holy books, but our elders promised the coming of our Messiah. White foreigners would bring a holy book, they said. Give thanks exceedingly for the coming of the white men. Give thanks, sons of the forest and children of poverty, for before their coming we were poor and divided and scattered in every direction.
Before the white men, we lived on one stream beyond another, and the Burmans made us drag boats and cut rattans. They made us collect dammer and seek beeswax and gather cardamom; weave mats, strip bark for cordage, pull logs, and clear land for their cities. They demanded presents—yams, bulbo-tubers of arum, ginger, capsicum, flesh, elephant tusks, and rhinoceros horns. If we had no money to give them, they made us borrow and thus become their slaves again. They made us guard their forts, act as guides, and kidnap Siamese while they tied our arms. They beat us with rods, struck us with fists, pounded us for days on end, till many of us dropped down dead. They made us march carrying rice for soldiers, so that our fields fell fallow and great numbers of us starved. They kidnapped us, so that we sickened with yearning for one another, or begged for mercy and met with immediate death. We fled to the streamlets, to the mountain gorges, so they could not take our paddy or our women. But they found us and took from us again and forced us to assemble near the city, where great numbers of us perished.
Miss Burma Page 2