Now Saw Lay looked straight at Benny, his intelligent, perspiring face suddenly frightening for its startling openness. “If our Father abandons us, Benny, everything—everything will come undone. Don’t you see?”
4
Burdened by Choice
His hands swept over her body whenever he made love to her, as though he couldn’t quite believe that this—her body, this closeness—were real. And sometimes Khin felt unreal. Sometimes, even in this, she felt herself drifting away . . . Benny’s pants had to be taken in at the waist, she might remind herself. Obviously, the food she was preparing for him wasn’t rich enough. Or: Why had he yelled at her after dinner and then denied it? Was he so tone-deaf he couldn’t hear the difference between a frustrated and a loving pitch? Her sense of drifting might all at once vanish: she would catch a glimpse of Benny’s arms—how strongly beautiful they were, and how lucky she was to be held by them. Then she would be drawn back to her body, to the moment, to the fortunate reality she shared with this man, who like her had been so lonely before their union.
But the happenstance of that good fortune could strike her then with unbearable force. How arbitrarily they had landed in this bed together! How arbitrarily their child, expanding right now in her womb, had come into existence! Had she and Benny not each been sent to Akyab—had the neighbor in her village not been a cousin of the sessions judge—had her mother not wanted to tear her away from the only Karen boy whom she’d managed to care for—had Mama not found her and that boy talking by the riverbank, only talking, only sharing some rice candy . . . Even while Benny seemed to strive to restore her presence of body in their bed, her mind would leap to the original chain of arbitrary events from which she had never really recovered: had Daddy not become a drunkard—had he not lost their orchard—had they not moved into a borrowed hut—had the dacoits not broken into that hut—had her sister not been raped—had Mama’s hands not been smashed—had Daddy’s abdomen not been sliced open so that his intestines spilled out over the floor . . . If Daddy hadn’t been drunk, would he have been able to fight the dacoits off? If she had managed to save him, rather than stuffing his intestines back inside and holding him together while he choked, would Mama still despise her? If she had been raped like her sister? If she had been murdered like Daddy? “Unscathed,” Mama said of her. “The only one to walk away unscathed.”
Benny was correct to remind himself of her reality while they made love. As if from a distance, she would watch the way that he, like their unborn child, determinedly knocked against her; and she would find herself grabbing his flesh in panicked desire, longing alternately to lose herself and to protect this passion that they’d accidently discovered from some unimaginable menace beyond their door.
She was seven months pregnant when Benny brought Saw Lay home to meet her. All through the dinnertime visit, she listened in astonishment as, with Saw Lay translating, Benny revealed his past to them—describing the death of his parents, his years in Calcutta, his near conversion, the pain of having been hounded from the Rangoon synagogue’s graveyard where he’d come to mourn the dead. “Imagine if I’d been recognized, embraced,” he said at the table with alcohol-induced vigor. “Imagine if it’d gone another way—the return of the prodigal son. Might have married a pretty Jewess. Might have never accepted the temporary post in Akyab. Might have never spotted my girl, the girl with the beautiful hair.”
How lightly he spoke of their accidental love, as though he had no reason to justify it—whereas all evening this Saw Lay had been stealing strange glances at them, perhaps because he didn’t approve of the union that had led her to abandon her village and their people.
“Do you miss your Judaism?” she asked Benny through Saw Lay now. She was standing at the table, pouring coffee into the guest’s cup, and in the candlelight she could feel Saw Lay retract from her outsize belly (because he was repelled by the reminder of her procreation with Benny? Or merely afraid that she would pour hot coffee all over his lap?).
“I suppose I miss the sensation of being in a community,” Benny said, some kind of pain flooding up to his lips. “But I’m sure that describes many happy childhoods. And I’m sure that we have something like that together, my darling.”
He reached across the table for her free hand, as though to reassure her, yet his fingers were weak with loneliness.
Two weeks later, she brought Benny’s lunch to the wharf at an hour when she knew he was likely to be absorbed with work. She found him with Saw Lay in the offices and told the latter casually in Karen that she would be waiting to speak privately with him at the coffee stall up the Strand. Now Saw Lay looked at her in outright fear, but after forty minutes he appeared nervously at the counter and ordered a strong coffee with condensed milk.
When she explained what she wanted from him, he blinked at her in confusion, then began to laugh—a result of his relief or the outrageousness of her request, she wasn’t sure.
“I mean to honor my husband,” she said quietly.
“Then why not go through him?” he countered, his amusement already dissipated. “Benny is my friend, and much as you think you’d be serving him by—by reintroducing him to his own, I can’t help thinking he’d take all this as a gross violation of our confidence!”
Nevertheless, he did as she asked, setting up an appointment for the two of them to meet with the rabbi of the Rangoon synagogue, covertly informing her of the time and date of their engagement, and then showing up at the appointed hour on Twenty-Sixth Street.
Inside the bright pillared building, in an office strewn with papers and books, they sat across the desk from the hunched rabbi, whose countenance spoke to her primarily of skepticism. Saw Lay wouldn’t look at her, even as, with perfect elegance and straightness, he began to translate into English the case she shyly presented to the learned man: how she felt her husband would benefit from a reintroduction to his people—community being the thing they were so lacking in now, orphaned as Benny was, and alone as they were in Rangoon.
“You don’t mean Joseph Elias Koder’s grandson?” the rabbi blurted out. At her first mention of Benny’s full name, the rabbi’s eyes had clouded over with sullen confusion, but now his bushy eyebrows lifted and he went very pale.
“Yes—he—him,” she said, in an English the rabbi clearly had to strain to understand. She recognized the grandfather’s name, which Benny had repeatedly thrown out when listing relatives on the night of Saw Lay’s visit to the flat—thrown out as though he were throwing lines back into the sea of his past, trying to catch pieces of himself that had been swept irretrievably away from him.
All at once, the rabbi began rummaging through the piles on his desk, launching into a speech. “He says,” Saw Lay translated for her, “that he assumed—they all assumed—that Benny was lost to them . . . He says he has a letter here somewhere . . . from Benny’s auntie. A letter for Benny.” Having clearly not found what he was looking for, the rabbi started flinging open the drawers of his desk. “He says that she also wrote directly to him asking—” Saw Lay continued, “charging him with the responsibility of finding her nephew, who was lost to the Jews.”
The rabbi emitted a sound like a bark and held up a thin envelope with a flourish, a gleam in his pale eyes. But his smile faded when he fixed his face on hers, as if, one problem having been solved, a new, greater problem had surfaced—and she was that problem: she, the living manifestation of Benny’s having been forever lost to the Jews. Was it not a problem she could fix?
The now wilted-looking rabbi seemed all at once reluctant to part with the letter he’d just found. He set it squarely in front of him and tapped it heavily with a forefinger as he began to speak again—this time in melancholy complaint, she thought, with moans and shakes of the head.
“He says it’s not so simple as being welcomed into the community,” Saw Lay said, turning to her worriedly, a new pity washing over his face. “To begin with, yo
ur condition and Benny’s marriage to you, presumably in a church, present obstacles . . . Theirs is a traditional community, and they abide by many ancient laws . . . They all must live in this neighborhood, for example.” The rabbi gestured to and fro, the letter now clutched in one of his fists. “And they must exclusively obey Jewish elders. They must study a good deal, study their holy book, keep kosher . . . Surely Benny no longer keeps kosher, with separate dishes and pots for dairy and meat . . . And their women—he says they must wear less revealing clothing than our Karen sarongs or fitted Burmese tops.”
The rabbi’s eyes narrowed on hers as Saw Lay went on. “But the bigger problem—the insurmountable problem—is that you are not a Jew, Khin. And he says that you can’t simply become a Jew. Apparently, you must be born Jewish, which means being born to a Jewish mother. And so you see, Benny’s child will not be Jewish, not unless you and the child convert—something that he is required by his holy book to try to dissuade you from doing. Not that you would ever consider conversion.”
Of course she knew what the word “conversion” meant; it immediately conjured the image of members of her village surrendering to their icy river in baptism, and reminded her chillingly of the falseness of her own faith. That falseness wasn’t as simple as her having begun to doubt the existence of a higher power after the dacoits incident; such would have been a cheap form of doubt, because faith, she had come to feel, derived its meaning from difficulty. Rather it seemed to her that baptism was a desperation to submerge doubt in the rescuing waters of belief, a desperation to wash away aeons of suffering with the promise of salvation. To her mother’s and sister’s satisfied dismay, she had many times refused the village minister’s attempts to lure her down to the riverbank to be reborn—but now, in the face of this rabbi, who peered with such grave concern at her (and at the problem of Benny’s having gone astray), she longed all at once to be saved.
“Is it so hard to convert to Judaism?” she asked him.
As the rabbi turned expectantly to Saw Lay, no doubt awaiting his interpretation, the latter gazed at her in reproachful panic. “It isn’t a matter of walking into a river and accepting the faith of Jewish elders,” he whispered to her, as though all along he’d been reading her mind. “I can’t believe you know what it means to be a Jew.”
“It means not believing that Christ is the Messiah,” she found herself replying. The words had come from a deep, as yet untapped well within her, and she suddenly had to swallow to prevent herself from sobbing. Strictly, it wasn’t that she doubted Christ was the Messiah, but that she didn’t believe in anyone’s capacity to know that he had been—that, ultimately, she didn’t believe in sure-footed belief. Faith without belief—that’s what she wanted, something that seemed suddenly, irrationally possible in this realm of her husband’s ancestors.
Idiocy! Saw Lay’s eyes seemed to reflect back to her, before he turned his gaze away and stared out the small window facing the barren cemetery. “To be a part of this—this—” he said, gesturing to the expanse of the surprised rabbi’s office and beyond, “you would have to shed your very skin, shed your past and every last thing you were taught to believe in—all your customs, the teachings of our elders, the realms of the spirits, the Christian parables!”
For a moment, no one said anything. Then the rabbi’s head fell into his hands. He seemed to be praying, or summoning some higher wisdom. When at last he raised his eyes to them and began speaking, it was with newfound grief and calm. And as if steadied by his words, or as if steadying himself to translate them, Saw Lay breathed deeply. “In the Jewish faith,” he said to her finally, “one needn’t become a Jew to find one’s place in the coming world.”
It wasn’t that this rabbi had spoken to her as a Burman might; anytime a Burman engaged with a Karen, it was with the posture of superiority—intellectual, spiritual, racial. No, this rabbi hadn’t condescended to her, but he had treated her as something alien. He was fighting to preserve his people in a country, it so happened, that was ceaselessly obliterating hers. And she saw that much as she wanted to find someplace to take root with Benny, she would never not be a lost Karen. She would never not be wandering in the desert, homeless, unwanted—except by some of her own. Except by equally rootless Benny.
Abruptly she burned for her husband, and she pushed back her chair and stood. “Please thank the rabbi for his time,” she told Saw Lay. “Thank you,” she said to the rabbi in English.
Neither man immediately responded. Then the rabbi smiled at her, the light of defeat shining in his eyes. He slid the letter across the desk, saying something to her that, despite the roughness of his voice, struck her ears as almost loving. “One of man’s injunctions is to strive to live joyously,” Saw Lay translated. “In the face of these terrible wars abroad, when our very peace is threatened, we must find a way to rejoice in our circumstances. We must find a way to do more than endure.”
She summoned the courage to tell Benny about the clandestine meeting a few weeks later, in September 1940. Rather than being enraged, Benny was touched and took her in his arms, ignoring the letter from his aunt that she held out to him. They must invite Saw Lay to the flat to discuss the matter openly, he told her in his increasingly fluent Burmese. And they must wait to open the letter until Saw Lay could join them.
She would never forget the night when they did open the letter, just days before their child was born. They had sated themselves on a variety of dense Burmese dishes, which she had been preparing recently to fatten Benny up—pork and coconut milk noodle soup, deep-fried squash, and curried meat stewed in sesame oil—followed by cake and cigarettes and generous tumblers of Scotch for the men; and when they moved into the living room, Benny belched and, in an English she could just understand, said, “Looks like it’s about that time, don’t it?”
He sat heavily on their cane sofa, taking his spectacles from the coffee table while she brought him the letter and the small opener he preferred. She and Saw Lay sat across from him, and she noticed how much older Benny had become, the new spectacles poised on the tip of his nose as he worried the envelope open with the knife. Only in his twenties, and already his hair lightly graying, his upper body—in spite of her efforts to put weight on him—losing a measure of its massiveness. He set the opener on the coffee table and extracted a single sheet of folded paper from the envelope. “Let’s see. Let’s see,” he said, as he unfolded the thing and leaned back into the sofa. He began to read, his eyes squinting with the faintest frown.
“Well then?” Saw Lay said.
“Benny?” she said, frightened for him.
He looked up at her then, letting the letter fall with his hand before he removed his spectacles. “Do me favor, darling?” he said to her in Burmese. “Burn it in stove for me.”
He held the letter up, shaking it slightly, gesturing for her to take it, to be rid of it. And when she did, sadly, he caught her by the hand and smiled into her eyes and said something that Saw Lay later rendered for her in Karen: “One mustn’t make the mistake of judging one’s relationship to a person by how that relationship ends. No, one must look at the entire canvas. When I think of the woman who wrote this letter, my auntie Louisa, I think mostly of my childhood. I think of the kindnesses she showed me after Mama and Daddy died . . . She was a warrior in her way, Auntie Louisa—did you know that’s what her name means? ‘Renowned warrior.’ And was she ever a fighter! I think if it had been acceptable, she would have pummeled me for every schoolyard fight . . . If we have a girl, we shall name her after her. Louisa. Renowned warrior.”
And what a warrior little Louisa turned out to be. Khin gave birth to her—with the aid of a midwife at home—in total silence, and Louisa’s immediate and unrelieved cries seemed like an argument against Khin’s practice of stoic submission to pain. She had Benny’s thick hair and Benny’s angry fists and Benny’s unremitting need for Khin’s body, for Khin’s breasts. Yet how furious Louisa was whe
n digestion caused her discomfort! How piercingly she screamed! And how thorough were Khin’s tears for her baby, whose slightest suffering seemed to her as weighty as all the agony the world had ever seen. Louisa screamed when she woke and Khin was not immediately in sight. She shook if Khin was more than a minute rushing to her side. She stuck out her bottom lip—even at two weeks!—when anyone but her mother or father approached, as though she were keenly aware of her unjust vulnerability and mustering any line of defense in her personal command.
At two months, Louisa began, pathetically, trying to speak, emitting a series of plaintive, songlike, rounded sounds meant evidently to communicate deep layers of hurt. What past atrocities had she suffered? Khin wondered. What lives had her death destroyed? Khin had expected the child to be a salve to her own death-tainted spirit—but this baby! She might have been a general who had failed his men, a grandmother who had survived the slaughter of every last grandchild. And the only salve to her inherent anguish appeared to be Benny. Certainly, Khin’s breast quieted the girl (at least, until the agonies of digestion set in); Khin’s arms soothed her for a time, as did Khin’s songs of their people’s centuries of suffering. But only Benny could unburden her of the weight she’d come hobbling into the world under. He would stride up in his half-interested, half-distracted way, cooing and babbling English terms of endearment— “turtle dove!” “precious angel!” “Daddy’s little darling!”—and, astonishingly, Louisa would gurgle; she would smile, like the most ordinary of babies. “Da!” she said to him at three months. “Want Da-da!” she said at twenty weeks. (“Is it normal for a baby to speak so early?” Benny proudly asked Khin. “Strange,” Khin’s mother reprovingly commented about the girl’s blabbering during her only visit to them in the city.)
Miss Burma Page 5