Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  And in our turmoil we prayed beneath the bushes. “Children and grandchildren,” the ancient sayings of the elders went, “Y’wa will yet save our nation.” We prayed as the rains poured and the mosquitoes and leeches bit us. “If Y’wa will save us, let him save speedily. Alas! Where is Y’wa?” we asked. “Children and grandchildren,” said the elders, “if the thing comes by land, weep; if by sea, laugh. It will not come in our days, but it will in yours. If it comes by sea, you will be able to take breath; but if by land, you will not find a spot to dwell in.”

  “And how did the white foreigners come, Mama?” she sometimes sleepily asked from her mat under the mosquito net.

  By sea! By sea! Mama’s song replied, yet Mama sang it like a lament.

  The following evening, she was in the kitchen of the sessions judge’s mansion with his boy, feeding him his rice and soup at the table, when she looked out the window and saw a black car crawling to a stop before the house. Soon the officer was emerging hesitantly from the rear, while she was taking the boy into her lap and hiding her face in his soft neck.

  “What’s the matter, nanny?” the boy asked. “Are you sad?”

  “Shall we hide?” she found herself murmuring to him.

  There was a knock and the familiar squeak of the sessions judge standing up from his mahogany chair. “Someone’s here!” the boy exclaimed, darting from her lap out of the kitchen. Since his mother’s death two years earlier, such social calls had become rare.

  Khin listened with all of her attention to the rise and fall of the muffled conversation in the other room—the judge’s halting questions and pronouncements, the deep force of the officer’s disclosures, muted, she thought, by nervousness and respectfulness. Only a few English words—“girl,” “port,” “sun” (or “son”?)—leaped cooperatively to her ears, and the conversation’s opaqueness increased her sense that she was being temporarily shielded from a confrontation with her fate.

  “Khin!” the judge called to her.

  She stood with a jolt and then proceeded to the living room, where she found the officer seated calmly in the judge’s chair, his hat in his hands, his dark hair smoothed down in brilliantined waves. He sought out her eyes at once, nodding politely to her as though silently beseeching her for something, and she looked sharply away—to the judge, who assessed her from the settee across the room while the boy rested against his knee.

  “Do you know this young man, Khin?” the judge asked in their language. There was nothing insincere about the question, nothing pejorative. The judge’s kind, graying eyes told her that he simply wanted to hear from her.

  “I have seen him before,” she confessed.

  If the judge heard the tremor in her voice, he made no sign of it. “And do you care to see him again?” he asked. A soft smile passed over his mouth. “He very much would like to see you,” he went on. “You will think it funny, but he has already decided to marry you if you will have him.”

  She glanced back at the officer, whose ears—without the cover of his hat—appeared to stick out even farther from his head, and whose long-lashed eyes pitiably batted at her, all of which struck her as funny indeed. And as if she had downed a cup of rice beer, she felt abruptly dizzy, delighted, delirious . . . Her lips began to emit an odd, barely audible twittering laugh, which only redoubled in force when the officer looked at her with an enormous sheepish grin (sheepish because he thought that she and the judge had exchanged a joke at his expense?). She held her fingers over her mouth, commanding herself to stop, thinking she would weep if she didn’t, but for some reason the boy began laughing, too, and then the judge chuckled, and even the officer joined in—and what a resonant, kind, innocent laugh he had!

  “The thought pleases you then,” the judge said to her when their laughter had run its course.

  She caught her breath, composing herself. “No,” she said quietly to him.

  “No?” he asked.

  “I mean to say yes.”

  “Yes?”

  The officer looked between them, clearly as mystified as she was by her responses. Then, after a long moment of silence, he startled her by tumbling into what sounded like a series of half-sung professions of devotion and regret. Again, his eyes lavished her with attention, even as they admitted a suffering that she couldn’t comprehend.

  The judge raised a diplomatic hand and interrupted the officer with a few English words of his own. Then he turned to her. “What he has just expressed to you, Khin,” the judge began, “is that he is in Akyab for only the month, after which time he will be transferred back to Rangoon. He says he was so taken by your beauty, he followed you and Blessing from the port, for which he begs your pardon.”

  “He is a white Indian?” she found herself asking.

  The judge looked displeased by the question, yet turned to the officer and began to query him. At first the officer responded in hardly more than a whisper, though when the judge continued to press him, his answers became more forthright, it seemed to her, more emphatic and even impassioned.

  “He knows nothing of our people, Khin,” the judge explained to her at last. “Doesn’t even know the difference between a Burman and a Karen, though he was born here. He is a Jew. I told him you are a Christian, that your mother would very likely require you to be married in a Baptist church, as you no doubt would like to be. Oddly, the prospect doesn’t deter him. He says, rather, that it endears you to him more, that he is, for all intents and purposes, half Christian.” For a moment, the judge appeared to be lost in thought, then he continued: “I imagine many of us Christian Karens are also half spirit-worshippers or half Buddhists when it comes down to it.”

  But not me, she wanted to tell him. Oh, she was enough of a spirit-worshipper and a Buddhist, but she had secretly renounced her Christianity years ago—after what had happened to her father. No, the judge had misjudged her, and she must not allow herself to mislead any of them a moment more. Here she was, permitting a conversation about marriage to a man from whom she’d had the impulse to hide, a man whose language she could not even understand!

  The boy stood up from his father’s knee and began tentatively crossing toward the officer, who, she saw now, was holding out a silvery object to him—a harmonica. The officer’s eyes lifted briefly to meet hers, and he flashed her the quickest, most natural smile. Then he lifted the shining thing to his mouth and blasted out a tune so absurd, so childishly playful and loud, they all began to laugh again, she with more sorrow than terror this time around.

  “Can I play it?” the boy asked, holding his hand out.

  The officer wiped the harmonica on his sleeve and presented it to the boy as a gift.

  “Leave us, Blessing,” the judge told him.

  The boy scampered off with his new treasure. In his absence, the officer’s question—what he had come for, his yearning for her—became almost unbearably conspicuous. She tried to wrest her eyes away from his, but something about his gaze claimed her again. My life is already yours, it seemed to say. When had she ever experienced such simple, undiluted feeling or desire?

  “You needn’t feel pressured, Khin,” the judge said now. “This is just a first visit. I can tell him you need time. Perhaps we can send for your mother.”

  “Where did he learn to play it?” she said. She supposed she meant the harmonica, though, again, her question surprised her.

  The judge, looking vaguely exasperated, relayed her inquiry to the officer, whose eyes closed while he answered, as though he were searching through the recesses of a dark past for some scrap of lightness.

  “He says he doesn’t remember,” the judge told her with more feeling now. “But he believes it was his mother who taught him. He says his mother wasn’t a particularly talented singer or musician, but that she made the most of her gifts, something he has tried to do now that he’s on his own. He says her voice was the only one that deeply ma
ttered to him.”

  She couldn’t speak for a moment, could hardly breathe or think clearly about what she ought to do.

  “Hear me now, Khin,” the judge persisted. “I’ve seen terrible things in my profession. I consider myself a good judge of character. And looking into this man’s eyes, I see someone who is sincere. You owe him a sincere expression of your feelings, even if it’s just to tell him that you sincerely want him to leave you in peace.”

  To be sincere would necessitate knowing herself, having a self that wanted to be known, having an instinct for life, rather than for death.

  “Shall I tell him I’ll write to your mother then?” the judge said. “Or should I tell him to leave?”

  She looked back at the officer, at his proud young features radiating longing. It suddenly seemed to her that she could see through to his marrow. That language was irrelevant. That he had no one else to turn to in the world.

  And who was she to argue that the world was any different for her?

  3

  Something About

  the Karens

  The marriage was at first a respite of a kind that neither of them could have anticipated—at least it seemed so to Benny.

  To be sure, there had been the awkwardnesses of the wedding, conducted entirely in Karen, in a bamboo-floored Baptist chapel at the heart of the village where her mother lived not far from Rangoon. Khin was, as ever, beautiful in her long white traditional dress, with her hair swept up in a chignon that accentuated the endearing roundness of her face, her milk-white skin and shining dark eyes, and the yellow flowers tucked behind her ears. Yet she had seemed rather aloof here and there, rather distant, as if periodically floating farther and farther from his side at the head of the chapel, before all at once returning to the moment and gazing at him in an upsurge of warmth and reassurance.

  True, her mother and sister had never smiled at him. The preacher was an effeminate, bespectacled type, whose fiery sermon seemed to warn against demons, against damnation (twice Benny thought he caught a reference to “Satan”); and the mother and sister absorbed his admonitions with such unblinking gravity that Benny found himself miming his terrified incomprehension of the sermon to lighten their mood. Khin, he thought, was too distracted to notice, whereas the rest of the congregation greeted his gestures with spontaneous laughter. Everyone, that was, but the mother and sister, who appeared concerned, though not necessarily about his fitness to marry Khin. Yes, something in their eyes, something about the recriminating way their gaze flicked over the figure of Khin beside him, told him that the person they stood in judgment of was his bride.

  “You belong to her now,” the mother said to him, via the grinning preacher, who interpreted for him at the outdoor feast immediately following the ceremony.

  “I’d be damned if I didn’t!” Benny gushed, trying to see beyond the coldness in her eyes, the flat line of her mouth. Even after the subsequent strained bout of translation, that mouth never wavered. Perhaps, he thought, she hadn’t understood him.

  Like the ceremony, the festivities that followed were attended by a flurry of tittering village women and stony-eyed men, all of whom seemed continually to mock and admire him, and just as often to remark on his dimensions. (Could it be that they were laughing not only at the extent of his height and muscle mass relative to theirs, but also at his penis, which, in his trousers, was more pronounced than it would have been if he’d worn a sarong as their men did?) There was a certain bawdiness in their mirth, like nothing he’d encountered in life, which both won him over and caught him off guard. All the while, they were mindful of the specter of Khin’s missing father, to whom they often referred, yet with a worried detachment that only increased Benny’s sense of being an outsider and alarmingly ignorant of his new bride’s history and culture. “Very sad, but the way life is,” one man muttered in reference to the father and his presumed end. “He was a drunk and that is what happens,” another said. “Didn’t stand a ghostly chance,” the preacher more charitably offered, as he ate a plate of curry with his fingers. “Out of nowhere, dacoits!”

  Dacoits, Benny knew by now, were one of the problems the British had long faced here. Burman bandits who roamed the countryside armed with sharp swords and faith in tattoos and magic, they were notoriously merciless, notoriously without conscience. “It’s a good thing you’re not signing up to be a police officer,” Ducksworth had once told him. “Knew one when I was a kid, a friend of my father’s, and the man was forever tormented by dacoits. I remember hearing him describe what a band of dacoits had done to a baby—pounded it into a jelly with a rice mortar right in front of its mother’s eyes.” “But why?” Benny had said—meaning, What in God’s name did they have to gain by that?—to which Ducksworth had merely laughed, as though to imply that Benny was ignorant of a seething darkness that would someday come blindingly to light for him. And to a certain extent, all was still a darkness for Benny as far as the dacoits were concerned; their ruthlessness seemed to come indistinctly from the same source as the Burman nationalism now taking the country by storm, claiming anticolonialism as its cause. In the weeks before the wedding, when Benny had returned to Rangoon to set up their new flat on Sparks Street, he had been repeatedly confronted by the news that the former law student Aung San—the one who’d risen to the top ranks of those protesting with the rallying cry “Burma for the Burmans!”—had cofounded a new political party, which opposed backing Britain’s war with Germany, called for Burma’s immediate independence from the yoke of imperialism, and, for all Benny could see, emphasized the supremacy of the ethnic Burmans, thereby aligning itself with the master-race ideals of the Nazis (who, Benny learned from a recent radio program, had monstrously decreed that Jews over the age of twelve must wear an armband with a Star of David). Benny was only beginning to understand that to be Burmese—meaning, to be one of Burma’s natives—but not to be Burman was, in Burman terms, to be distinctly undesirable.

  And he couldn’t help thinking of just that word—“undesirable”—toward the end of the festivities, when he and Khin stood side by side before the chapel, she now donning the red-and-black sarong of a married woman, her lips splashed vermilion with betel juice. He hadn’t been permitted a taste of those lips. Karens, he was learning, showed no affection—at least of that kind—publicly. No shortage of attractive girls had taken Khin by the hand or squeezed her soft forearm in solidarity and tenderness; even the men strolled about the muddy square in front of the chapel with their arms around one another. But for Benny? Not so much as a touch from Khin. And now, posed with her before the chapel, he was told that they must ritualistically pay off a string of villagers blocking the boulder-strewn path that led to his Buick and by extension their new home, that private sphere created for the very purpose of satisfying their desire for closeness.

  “Part of our culture,” the excitable preacher explained as he gestured toward the line of villagers. “You must give them your rupees.” Benny sought out Khin’s evasive gaze, and then took her hand and pressed into it a clutch of coins that she received with a calmness appearing almost burdened by effort, such that her serenity suddenly struck him as the effect of a tremendous harnessing of will.

  Yet laughing lightly, she began to toss the coins in bright arcs to the merry villagers. And Benny chided himself for not being merrier, for feeling so very undesired, so undesirable, even as he made a show of pulling his pockets inside out to indicate his anxious poverty, to the general jollity of the villagers (why was he playing the imbecile again?). God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us, he reminded himself, and then he pushed the phrase out of his mind because it embarrassed him to seek such shelter from his loneliness with his new bride smiling beside him.

  Yes, the wedding and its aftermath had presented him with a series of thorny disappointments. But then.

  Then.

  He had made all the arrangements for the flat on his own, selectin
g a few mahogany and teak pieces including a glass-fronted cupboard and a dressing table, on which he’d placed an artfully shaped, fragrant sandalwood comb. It was to this comb that Khin was initially drawn on that first night together, after he led her through the small living room to the bedroom, where he set down her bags. Immediately, her eyes searched the dim room—not in a panic, not for an escape route, it seemed to him, but to take in the proportions of what life had offered up to her. She lingered over the sight of the comb, then crossed to the dressing table and picked the comb up.

  “For you,” he said, and she seemed to understand. She ran her finger over the comb’s scalloped edge, and he watched her in the act of perceiving it. Here he was, with a generous and utterly exclusive view of her engaged in this private moment of perception. He now had permission to watch; the last time he had been permitted that closeness was in the presence of Mama and Daddy, who’d expected him to study them as living examples of how to be human.

  She didn’t smile, but the comb clearly touched her, and he saw her relax. The change was slight, starting somewhere in her shoulders. Not a forced loosening, but one he thought arose from her finally being apart from everyone else’s eyes but his own.

  Without sitting, she turned to the dressing table’s mirror, set down the comb, and looked at his reflection behind hers. He watched her in the yellow lamplight, watched her watching him watching, watched his own astonished eyes, taking in the new and ancient pleasure of feeding another’s desire to be watched. He could see now, for the first time, what they looked like side by side: as physically different as human creatures could be from each other—he at least a foot taller than she and nearly twice her width, with features that appeared the inverse of hers (he’d never noticed how elongated, how tapered his face was, a perfect contrast to her flat, square-jawed one). The difference excited him, daunted him; he felt blood flow to certain places even as it drained from others, and he wanted to go to her, to watch her doing just this and just for him.