To escape the heat that seemed to be rising in parallel with Louisa’s powers of articulation, Khin often strolled with her down noisy Sparks Street all the way to the Strand, where they could catch a breath of river breeze. Something about the river cast the child into a contemplative frame of mind. “Want another boat,” she was soon saying, with her chubby little index finger pointing at the ships docked in the harbor. Want another boat, in Karen to Khin and in English to her daddy when he and Saw Lay had a moment to greet them on the wharf. Benny would tip his hat to Louisa, telling her that he would do what he could to gratify her desire.
“You think she’s the smartest baby in all of Burma?” he repeatedly asked Saw Lay, who stood shyly aglow beside him, peering down into Louisa’s wide-set eyes.
“She is remarkable,” Saw Lay never failed to say—his admission a cocktail, Khin thought, of one part compliment to two parts worry. Oh, yes, it was clear as day that Louisa was remarkable—but remarkable in a sense that doomed her to the glories or the miseries of greatness? “Don’t think I’ve ever seen such eyes” was another of Saw Lay’s refrains. And it was true: Louisa’s eyes were astonishing. Not just for their unusual shape—a hybrid of the doe’s and the snake’s. Not just for the way they were spaced, floating almost luridly over her porcelain cheeks. What made them astonishing was the way they seemed, disarmingly, to confront one, to penetrate one, to demand something of one in a nearly menacing way. Yes, they were eyes that made you want to run and hide.
And was that just what they ought to do—run and hide?—Khin wondered toward the end of 1941, when Aung San reportedly went underground to receive support from the Japanese, and Benny’s fellow officers started to stream through the flat as though to find an outlet for the troubled eddies of their conversation. It was possible, some of these officers said, that in the Japanese the Burmans had found their potential liberators—not that the Anglo officers would admit to fearing for their own security in the East. Not even when Pearl Harbor was soon bombed and the Japanese went on to do the impossible—landing in northeast Malaya—did these Anglos find reason to mitigate their professions of optimism: Singapore was safe, and war would never reach Burmese shores. “Why trouble with banalities like air-raid warning systems and shelters and adequate air defense and ground troops?” Benny privately mocked them. “Why forgo supper and dancing and the pleasures of club life when the hostilities are so far away?” True, the British were now at war with Japan, the Anglos said, but Churchill was said to have dispatched four unsinkable destroyers to the Indian Ocean. Did the fact that two of those destroyers swiftly sank along with nearly a thousand men not constitute a threat to the great Pax Britannica? Khin reasoned.
By then, she was pregnant for the second time; Louisa was confident in her mobility and willingness to be charmed by strangers; and Benny . . . Khin couldn’t help thinking that the new fatigue spreading like a mask across his features was the manifestation of a terror seizing him more with every passing day. It was as though the external pressures of the war had possessed him and were exerting their force on him from the inside out. And as long as he kept those pressures contained, their little family would be safe—from external strife and also from trouble within.
That trouble began one night when a man called Ducksworth was visiting. Benny had run into him on the street and invited the sallow, too-talkative fellow to come home with him for a drink. As they chatted over cognac (their “old favorite,” according to Benny), Louisa ran between them, and Ducksworth looked at the child crookedly, plainly displeased by her repeated claims on Benny’s attention.
“They say Aung San’s reemerged in Bangkok,” Ducksworth broke out, as though to break through to Benny, who bounced Louisa on his lap while tickling her under her chin and redoubling her glee. Ducksworth had spoken in English, but Khin knew too much of the language to be excluded from the conversation (at least, from understanding it; she rarely found the courage to speak). In fact she was seized by Ducksworth’s disclosure before Benny appeared to be; a moment passed before his knee went still and Louisa began to complain.
Khin rose from her chair to scoop up the child as Benny, still immobilized by mistrust or disbelief, watched his friend. “Aung San, you say?” he said slowly.
“Sure as day,” Ducksworth went on—too cheerfully, a sly smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Been in Japan all this time, training with the Japs, his would-be liberators, the little runts. They say he’s become a genuine samurai. And now he’s enlisting anyone he can get into his pro-Jap Independence Army. You can bet dacoits and all the other political vermin are lining up.”
“And when will you go?” Benny said now.
At first, she thought he’d meant to slight his friend, meant to suggest that Ducksworth would be lining up alongside the vermin. Ducksworth, too, looked momentarily blindsided. He fixed his stunned eyes on Benny before relaxing into an overfriendly smile, followed by a bout of forced chuckling.
“No need to flee,” he murmured, and tossed back the remains of his cognac. “I’ve never been the one to doubt in the British.”
The only sign that Benny was offended or distressed was the slight wrinkle on his brow. By the next morning, though, on Christmas Eve, he was racked with emotion, storming from one end of the living room to the other, cursing Ducksworth—“the Britons and Burmans be damned”—and arguing that they should listen to common sense and flee the country. “If the Japs make it here—or if Aung San’s army invades—we’re sunk,” he called to Khin, who was preparing Louisa’s morning meal in the kitchen. “Not only everyone who worked for the British—not only the whites. Everyone the British favored. Everyone the Burmans hate.”
Khin worked away steaming and mashing yams, and then sat Louisa down at the table off the living room to spoon the concoction between the baby’s lips—all as a way to slake her own urgent need for Benny to stop speaking. She had the sense that he was forcing her closer to a precipice beyond which lay perpetual homelessness, perpetual misery. “What a mess!” she teased Louisa, whose happy, smeared cheeks seemed to support her cause: that if they could just persist in the everyday, the clouds of danger might pass uneventfully.
“Are you listening to me?” Benny said, all at once appearing before her. “Because I have the sense that you’re not taking any of this seriously.”
She had the sense—or her Karen ears did—that this last profession reverberated with unvoiced shouts of frustration. There was certainly accusation in his tone, as if the threat they faced could somehow be attributed to her unwillingness to acknowledge it.
What she wanted all at once was to throw down the baby’s spoon and run away. Instead, she grabbed a napkin and began roughly wiping Louisa’s yam-coated mouth.
“Listen to me,” Benny said—no less firmly, but with less indictment of her, she heard with relief. “My mother was from Calcutta. If we go there, my aunts can’t turn us away.”
“The same aunts who wanted you dead if you became a Christian?”
“I’ll be dead if the Japs make it here.”
“Then you should leave.” She didn’t know quite what she was saying as she turned from the now-fussing baby to his startled eyes; she knew only that something about his effort to save himself, to save them—reasonable and wise as it may be—felt like a betrayal of . . . of what she wasn’t sure exactly. But it was a betrayal she longed to make him feel the sting of.
“You don’t mean without the two of you?” he said.
“Yes, of course,” she replied, ignoring Louisa’s rising complaints. Those complaints gave voice to what she was feeling inside. “Don’t you trust me to be faithful until your return?”
His astonished features drew together. Until this moment, he’d had no reason to distrust her faithfulness. But in hesitating to flee with him, in raising the subject of trust, she had injected distrust into his heart—maybe so that he could suffer doubt, as she
did. He now had reason to doubt in their marriage, just as she had reason to doubt in his sureness about it.
“This is foolishness,” he said. “You must go because you will be a target, too—don’t you listen?”
“You think I’m a cheap woman,” she pressed on, lured by the seductive waves of self-destruction. If an end to this period of accidental love must come, she would hasten them toward it; he wanted to save them, but she would sink them first. Hadn’t she struggled to save her family as well as she could in the presence of the laughing dacoits, only so that they could spit on her as she’d held Daddy together while he died? All her subsequent years, she had paid for that effort. It would have been better to submit, to die. “A cheap Karen. A woman of weak race—”
“Stop,” he said.
“Why didn’t you marry a white?”
“I said stop—”
“Don’t you know that Karens are so stupid their loyalty can be bought for the price of two cows?”
As if to stop her forcibly—or as if to stop himself from doing something he would regret—he lunged for Louisa, who somewhere along the line had fallen silent in her chair and begun to watch them with her frightening, assessing eyes.
“Come on, my precious darling,” he murmured as he pulled the child into his arms.
Louisa clung to his neck, smearing the remains of the yam across the shoulder of his white jacket while he headed for the door. “Where we going, Daddy?” she asked him.
“Where are you going?” Khin cried.
He flung open the door, then slammed it shut after his retreat. A few minutes later, she heard him crossing the flat roof overhead, where they kept a few toys and a tricycle that Louisa still could not ride.
In shame, Khin sank down to the floor and stared into the geometry of her sarong, as though it might yield up a reason for the wretched way she had just behaved. Was it really as simple as her wanting to lie down and die? Shouldn’t she be desperate to live—if only for the child’s sake? Perhaps part of her wanted to stay put in order to end the same arbitrariness that had landed her here with this man and this child. Again, her mind played its tricks, its guessing games: If Benny stayed with her and were killed . . . If he left and she stayed and died . . . If the child were orphaned . . . If they all fled together to India, a place where she was sure to be even more of an alien than she already was here . . . The more she thought, the more she understood that if Benny were the only one to leave, she would be exonerated of the burden of choice—whereas if she left with him, she would be his burden; and if he remained, he would be hers. She had pushed him away, told him to go without her, because she wanted fate alone to hold the burden of their deaths, and their lives.
As she was thinking of this, and remembering all the sorrows that fate and choice had delivered to her door—as she was grasping the extent of all she had already lived through and suffered and received in her twenty years—she heard something strange. A wail, but not human in origin. A cry so piercing, it sent a shudder down her body.
“Benny?” she said quietly, knowing he wouldn’t hear her, knowing it was already too late to protect him and Louisa from whatever menace the noise was bringing. It was a menace coming from the air outside.
Across the living room, a single window faced Sparks Street. She couldn’t see the street from her vantage point on the floor, but she stood now and crossed to the window, dimly aware of confronting the fate that she had been so eager to entrust with her life a moment before.
As the undulating moan took hold of her again, she reached the window and was blissfully relieved to see the usual pandemonium below—not a panic, but the cheerful disorder of a barber clamoring for a customer, of children playing a game with a ball and sticks amid a flock of strolling monks. No one seemed to hear what she could. Then a woman pushing a cart pointed in the direction of Sule Pagoda’s pinnacle, and Khin lifted her eyes to see, flashing through the still-unknowing sky, at least fifty planes flying in formation toward her—toward them all.
How oddly beautiful the vision was, set against the cry of what her ears now clearly heard as an air-raid signal—like nothing she had ever seen, and yet precisely like what she had been preparing to witness all her life.
5
Grace
From that moment, until the war was finished, Benny noticed beauty only in the unexpected. In the waters off the wharf, roiling with iridescent oil slicks and debris. In the winged statues on the arched roof of a corner municipal building, all at once ascending over the rubble on the street. In a doll’s head that Louisa found in the stairwell (“Poor baby,” she cooed, clutching the head whose ice-blue eyes rolled open crookedly). In the startled voices of British wireless announcers, who promised that Rangoon would be held at all costs, even as news came that the Japanese had begun a land invasion along with Aung San’s Burma Independence Army (“The enemy is currently occupying all three major southern airfields, and now the city of Moulmein”). In the broken glass glinting up and down Sparks Street, which suddenly seemed worthy of its name, and which lit the way for families optimistically fleeing with all of their trunks and laden coolies (and, conveniently for Benny and Khin, leaving their stores of tinned food behind). In Louisa’s serenity amid the blasts, and the way she covered her ears during moments of peace (as though to assure herself of her capacity to drown out noise should she please). And in the too-crimson, smoke-choked evening skies that gave way to tremulous nights, to ardent acts that Benny committed on increasingly pregnant Khin (“Leave—save yourself,” she pleaded with him. Not without you, his fervent silence replied).
Rangoon was a virtual ghost town by the time Singapore fell in mid-February, and then the British lost the Battle of Sittang Bridge in southern Burma, all but relinquishing Rangoon to the advancing Japanese army. Nearly all the “foreigners”—the Jews and Indians and Chinese and Anglos—were already en route to India; and nearly all the “natives” had already taken shelter in the countryside. But now, at last, came the official evacuation signal—a signal that at first seemed to relieve Benny of the burden of choice: he was given nine months’ severance pay and permission to leave the country; yes, he and Khin agreed immediately, they would follow the hundreds of thousands over the Arakan Yomas to India—their path was virtually mandated. But as they were preparing to vacate the flat in the middle of the night, Saw Lay appeared like a specter in their doorway, throwing choice back at them.
“We thought you’d gone on, my friend,” Benny said, taking Saw Lay into his embrace. They hadn’t seen him since late December, and he seemed to have lost a third of his weight, and just as much of his life expectancy, so worn was the skin clinging to the bones of his face, so haunted were his eyes, so racked was his body by tremors of the kind one sees in only the very aged or sick. They warmed him with blankets and the last of their brandy, and, as Louisa slept, pulled their chairs very close to his in the living room. Every unforeseen intimacy threw into relief for Benny the possibility of its loss; they seemed to be holding on to the final moments of their time in the history of humankind.
Slowly, very slowly, in a thin voice occasionally overtaken by fits of silence, Saw Lay began to speak of having volunteered to assist the refugees walking over the mountain passes between Burma and India. He had heard that the British were organizing stations to feed and hydrate the refugees, but when he got there (“merely to man a tank of chlorine with a rifle”), he found many tens of thousands already succumbing to malaria and cholera and dysentery. “One almost becomes accustomed to stepping over fallen bodies, human remains,” he said softly. “Amazing how butterflies descend on the dead—have you ever seen such a thing? Thousands of colorful wings, flitting about over the bloat and the stink. I still can’t shake the sight of it from my eyes.”
The territory, he said, was largely unmapped; all each man had was the man (or the woman or child) in front of him to lead the way, forming an interminable progressio
n of the dying. And those who made it across the border were divided into camps by race. “You have the Anglo camp, of course. And then the Anglo-Indian camp. The Anglo-Burman camp. The Indian camp—that’s fouler than any of the other three. Even in their own country, they’re third-class citizens, the Indians.” He seemed to be describing one of Khin’s arguments for avoiding India; if Benny would be protected there by the British, far less certain was her and their children’s fate.
“Meanwhile, Aung San’s army is marching northward, westward, swelling with Burmans, with dacoits,” Saw Lay went on. “You can be sure they’ve already started targeting Karens.” His eyes lifted and met Khin’s forcefully, Benny noticed, then fell to her protruding belly. “It won’t be safe anywhere here for our kind.”
For three days, as Saw Lay recuperated on a mat laid out on their living room floor, Benny and Khin were plunged back into the darkness of indecision. Breaking reports over the wireless had more than half of the five hundred thousand refugees dead, many succumbing to the Japanese troops now blocking the southern Taungup Pass leading to India. It seemed like madness to flee to their likely demise—particularly for Khin, in her state, and for Louisa, so vulnerable in her youth. But they were also plagued with indecision about things increasingly too dangerous to face: the value each of them accorded to their togetherness, to their race, to their place in this country. She, who had evidently been momentarily eager to sink into Benny’s Jewish identity, could not now conceive of herself as anything but a Karen in Burma; and he was unwilling to conceive of himself as a young man again alone and homeless in the world. And yet they each now argued emotionally on the other’s behalf: she, that they must find another escape route into India; he, that they must hide in a Burmese village that wouldn’t become a target of Aung San’s army—one whose inhabitants weren’t staffing the British armed forces.
Miss Burma Page 6