Then came word that the Japanese were fifteen miles from Rangoon, that everything would be set fire to or demolished in the retreating British army’s wake—the docks, the government buildings, the post and telephone offices, the refineries. Within an hour, still not knowing if they meant to land somewhere in Assam or the Shan division, they were crammed on an airless train bound north for Katha, their terror momentarily muted by the thunder of the carriage clanging down the tracks. Khin perched on a stranger’s trunk, Louisa jostling on her lap, while Benny—the only “white” aboard—crouched by Saw Lay, to be repeatedly stepped on and kicked by others’ feet. “Is he a British spy?” one man hissed, scowling down at Benny. “He’s jeopardizing all of our lives!”
“Dearest Father,” Saw Lay said, leading them in prayer that first night as Louisa slept on Khin’s knees, “we ask not to be favored over any of your other children, but that you might show us the wisdom of your grace. That we might make the right decisions, and trust and forgive according to your higher judgment.” At this, he paused, and his silence seemed to tremble with doubt. “We remember tonight,” he went on quietly, “all that our British Father has saved us from, and we ask for faith that in his present retreat from our capital he has not forgotten us, as fathers sometimes forget even their most devoted children.”
How to reconcile the ordinary discomforts of the body—a pinching in the lower back, a stiffening neck, the thickness of a parched tongue, the unpleasant constriction of clothing—with the extraordinary discomforts of remaining crouched in one place all day and all night, bathed in sweat and the reek of others’ unseemly shapes, in temperatures sometimes exceeding 115 degrees? How to reconcile the ordinary comforting sights of the breaking day—the milky-green meadows, the villages rising on stilts from the mist, the flash of a gilded stupa, or the smoke from someone’s fire—with the ominous black clouds now billowing on the horizon?
“It’s the oil fields,” Benny told Khin. “We’re burning them so the Japs can’t use our oil.”
“You mean our Father is burning them,” Saw Lay said. “Scorching our earth as he leaves.”
The early monsoon had started by the time the train pulled into Katha the next evening, and they learned that the roads to the Tamu Pass leading to Assam, to the northwest, were now swarming with Japanese. They dared not pause, but, taking turns holding Louisa, they walked east for hours through sodden paddies and along undulating muddy paths toward the mountains of the Shan. Only when they reached the cover of a forest did they stop to build a fire and take out the cans of nectar and sardines that Benny had stuffed into his pockets.
“I want you to look at this,” Saw Lay told them as Khin rocked Louisa. He smoothed the map that he’d been carrying in his pocket over a log by the fire. “You’ve been talking only about the Shan State. But if we go just north, beyond Bhamo, in Kachin State”—he pointed to the hills bordering China—“my sister’s husband was from a village here—a little Karen village, called Khuli.”
“You don’t understand,” Benny told him with impatience. “We can’t hide with the Karens. They’ll be the targets, as you said. Aung San’s army—”
“No one else will hide you,” Saw Lay said sharply, and he folded up his map before suggesting that he take the first shift keeping watch while the others slept.
The next dew-drenched morning, about fifty feet from where they had camped in the cold, they discovered a family of slaughtered Chinese. They had just packed up their few things and begun to walk off, Louisa strapped across Khin’s back, when they saw the family through the mist: the naked husband and wife, bound to facing trees, his penis amputated, his abdomen sliced open and disemboweled, one of her breasts sliced off, sticks impaling her vagina and anus, their heads dangling at odd angles, and, between them, in the undergrowth of the trees, three decapitated children lying side by side amid a pile of their parents’ traditional clothing.
The meticulousness with which these people had been made to suffer. The particular attentiveness to their genitals. The passion behind that. The personal ferocity. So incomprehensible was the scene that Benny found himself clinging to his only respite from it—the thought that at least this family’s worst nightmare was past them, that in death they had arrived at the completion of suffering toward which we continuously strive.
“I didn’t want to tell you,” Saw Lay whispered. “Always like this, the Japanese.”
It was very difficult for any of them to leave, with no one else to witness that family’s untold suffering. Khin hid with Louisa under the shelter of a nearby tree, and Saw Lay began to pray: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters . . . Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me . . . Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies . . .”
The mandate to survive forced them to keep moving. And for a time, God—or circumstance—did provide, even in the face of the mutilated bodies they continued to confront along the way. The war’s unfathomable brutality could not vanquish the startling reality of their ongoing lives: The steep gorges through which they trekked along the placid Irrawaddy River. The warm soup and wool blankets unassumingly provided by the strong Kachin villagers who took them in. The wind whipping through those villagers’ mat walls. The dizzying sunlight of Bhamo’s scorching alluvial basin, its swaying rice fields edged by limestone and distant snowy Himalayan peaks. Then the simplicity of the Karen village called Khuli, a thicket of stilted huts under the clouds. And its inhabitants’ swift construction of a hut in which they were invited to live, to stay. Even Louisa’s diarrhea, Benny’s first bout of malaria, Khin’s pre-labor pains—each a bodily battle to purge a foreign element more pressingly present than the Japanese or the complicit Burma Independence Army.
Within a week of their arrival in Khuli, Saw Lay announced that he would be leaving for Mandalay to help with some of the refugees. “They say the entire city is burning,” he told Benny.
It was evening, the worst of the parching heat already spent on the day, and Benny had left the hut for the first time since his bout of malaria. He and Saw Lay sat by the thin stream that wound from the village down to the Irrawaddy, a bit of fresh breeze coming through the forest, bringing with it the scent of something floral.
“I should be strong enough to come along in a day or two,” Benny said.
It was a lie, or a partial lie. Not that Benny couldn’t have summoned the strength to join his friend or even to join the British army. God knew their side needed reinforcement; rumor had it that an all-out British retreat from Burma was inevitable. But a strange malaise had taken hold of Benny. For all his life in the tropics, he’d never lived outside the city; and now, with tigers and pythons in close range, with the threat of the enemy looming in the silent caverns of the forest—here, in hiding, when he ought to have been tenser and angrier than ever before—he felt oddly at peace. He could hardly feel his fists, let alone summon the energy to want to wield them against his opponent.
“The first bout of malaria is always the most vicious,” Saw Lay said, and took a stone in hand and cast it slanting across the stream. “Like the first soldiers coming through enemy territory. You’ll need more time.” He fell silent and looked up at the strange clouds assembling in the darkening sky. “It will be easier for me to pass through without you, in any case. Hard for a Jap to distinguish a Karen from a Burman. You’d be marked as a target immediately.”
“And if the Japs come here?” Benny said. “What will happen to these villagers who’ve sheltered me?”
Now, at last, Saw Lay looked at him again, a kind, impatient frown pinching his eyebrows together. “Let me tell you something about the Karens,” he said. “Part of our culture is to take strangers into our home and care for them. This is odd, when you think about it, because part of our culture is also to be slow to
trust, slow to take a person into our heart.” He paused, looking down at the stream. “Once we’ve put a person in our heart, though . . .”
He fell silent again, and for a while Benny watched the reflection of light on the water play against his eyes. It is enough that you should stay and take care of yourself and your wife and your child, you who are so dear to me, Benny felt him silently go on, with his absolute surrendering of anything approaching envy.
“You must allow them to do what comes naturally,” Saw Lay said. And two days later, he was gone.
What soon came naturally to Benny was a life in which he and his family members slept on mats rather than beds. A life in which they took shelter in a home without walls, a home entirely open to the damp and the night and the sound of others chattering and washing and singing over the riot of creatures in the trees. A life in which men to whom Benny could hardly speak worried about him being lonely, and came visiting and were content to sit with him and smoke moh htoo or share a cup of strong homemade htaw htee. A life in which privacy held no quarter, because—because it was a life in which there seemed to be nothing to hide. Each villager was so accepting of others (Benny had never witnessed such routine and unabashed public spitting and belching, and yet everyone was exceptionally clean, bathing twice daily down by the stream) that there was little reason for anyone to retreat from view. Astonishing, Benny thought, how linked the value of privacy was to that of personal (rather than collective) betterment or gain.
He began to wear a sarong, which more than once fell to his ankles, to the village women’s hilarity, and which he rather enjoyed plodding in down to the stream, along with naked Louisa, to dump buckets of icy water over their heads each evening. He began to rely on the soothing babble of women visiting with Khin as he drifted into sleep each night. He even began to laugh at others teasing him about his routine mee ga thah thaw (his snoring, which apparently projected across the village, waking even the roosters in the morning). Their teasing struck him as a kind of spiritual practice—an insistence that none was above being teased. As did the stunning specificity of their frequent obscenities—“Aw pwa lee!” (“Eat vagina!”), or “Na kee poo thoo!” (“Your asshole is black!”). Even the marital bond between these Karen villagers (literally, as he had it, “the strings that tie a marriage together”), though utterly strong, seemed to leave space for responsibility for others in it.
“Come to me,” Benny still whispered to Khin in the darkness, and she did come to him, and yet wasn’t entirely his, as she had once been. Her ears were pricked for others in need, her face turned to the night.
And as the knot of their intimacy vaguely loosened, she seemed to thrive in this highly democratic community, establishing herself near the top of its particular system of hierarchy. Here, the elders were revered, the young expected to serve anyone older or perceived to be a leader—a teacher, say, or a minister, or a military adviser. Because Khin’s months in Akyab and Rangoon had taught her about sanitation, about the importance of sterilization, she—in addition to never hesitating to instruct teenage girls on how more vigilantly to tidy their hut or cook their supper—was soon being referred to as tha ra mu (teacher) and asked to heal others’ sick children, even to assist with others’ difficult deliveries. Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night and murmur the names of herbs of which she’d dreamed, and in the morning she would leave him with sleeping Louisa in order to hunt for the plants, muttering about how she was sure the cooling properties of such-and-such would bring down so-and-so’s fever. When he asked if this was something she’d done before—healing the sick, having premonitions about medicinal herbs—she blinked at him as if to ask, Is any of this something you’ve done before? Their easy adaptation to the present made him almost question if they had ever had a past to leave (something emphasized uncannily by the absence in Karen language, he now realized, of a past or future tense; “In the era of yesterday,” someone would say, “heart disease takes my wife away from me”).
Yet the past did encroach, particularly with news that trickled in—along with the occasional English-speaking Karen soldier—of the destruction of four hundred Karen villages (“not villagers, villages!”) within the span of a few days by Aung San’s army. (“Man, woman, child—no matter. They shot them and pushed them into heaps—eighteen hundred of them just in that one place.”) News of Karen retaliation. Of race wars. Of a total British retreat to Assam. Of emptying prisons, and escalating murder rates, and thousands of released dacoits joining Aung San’s ranks. Now and then one of these reports would break through to a distant part of Benny, and his fists would almost tighten (once he very nearly used those fists to thrash a good-looking soldier, no more than a kid, whose flashing glances kept alighting on Khin’s engorged breasts while she flirtatiously touched her hair). Sometimes Benny even felt prodded to action by Khin’s nearly imperceptible expressions of disappointment in him, expressions that sounded an awful lot like praise (“I’m glad you’re not like Saw Lay—he’d never have it in him to commit himself to a family over a cause”). But then he would glimpse Louisa contentedly making pots out of the muddy clay beside the hut, or Khin’s swelling belly, and his family’s immediate need for him to keep living would lure him into the stupor of idleness, if not indifference, again.
In June, Khin noiselessly gave birth to their second child, a perfect wailing boy named Johnny. Benny leaped around the village, passing out fistfuls of cheroots, and the villagers smiled at him in their pleased, puzzled way, for the birth of a baby was also part of the natural order of things. Their silent absorption of baby Johnny into the body of their community found its counterpart in Khin’s tired, quietly happy, quietly anxious eyes, and in Louisa’s easy claiming of “her” new baby (as if Johnny had been there all along). Even Johnny’s insistent need for milk and burping and caresses seemed to contend that this present was their only reality. Benny almost believed it would never cease.
And then, one day, it did. That July morning had been like any other in the heart of the rainy season, beginning with a light drizzle as the village children scampered across the square to the schoolhouse, and brightening by ten o’clock, when Benny often accompanied his family members on a walk before the worst of the heat set in. He took tremendous pleasure, during these morning sessions, in watching Louisa observe the intricacies of the forest, with whose features he, too, was becoming acquainted: the berrylike cones of the dwarf junipers, the rhododendrons’ eruption of colorful flowers, the clutches of mushrooms that Khin told them were edible, and the sultry way the earth steamed after a shower. Then came the gathering storm clouds and the children scuttling back across the square before the afternoon showers began, when Benny and Louisa would huddle together inside, sipping plain tea and nibbling on the sweet Khin had managed to scrounge up. Today, it was golden-brown jaggery candy, and he was soon following Louisa to the edge of the hut, from where they watched the earth’s soaking, the excess of water running off in rivulets across the angled square. Those rivulets seemed to jostle one another, didn’t they? he remarked to Louisa—“Look how each of the fellows tries to get ahead?”
“Daddy,” Louisa said, holding her wet piece of jaggery candy in her fist. “Which fella is that?”
“Which fella?” Benny said, crouching down, captivated by her tender cheeks, by her impossibly deep, thoughtful eyes. He rested in those eyes—and in the astounding thought that they reflected a soul entirely unique from his own. Only after a time did he follow them back out to the view of the rain and to the sight of a Japanese soldier, standing three feet from their hut and staring right back at him.
For a moment, Benny was so dazed, so disbelieving, he could note only the peculiarity of the soldier’s snug helmet, like a dome, with a startling yellow star sewn into the fabric above his forehead. The soldier was drawing a sword from his waist and then pointing it at Benny’s face. And all at once Benny became very aware of that face, of its fleshy foreignness, of
the nozzle of its nose and the thickness of its lips, parting and gasping for breath, even as he feigned calmness. The last thing he should do was run, intuition told him. If he remained composed, if he was honest with the man—if he explained that he was no longer a British officer—
“Kuro,” the man said very coldly, drawing the staccato word out—kkurrro—as he stared with revulsion at Benny.
And suddenly a thought came to Benny, very simple and clear: He is a soldier, trained to kill.
“Go to Mama,” he told Louisa quietly, understanding that if he so much as raised a fist this child and her brother and mother would be slain.
And, almost involuntarily, he stood and stepped down from the hut into the mud, his hands held up in surrender. He registered the soldier’s instant bewilderment, and then—from a distance, it seemed—he watched the man lower his sword and lunge toward him, watched his own body fight off a wave of revolt and allow itself to be carried down by the arm clamped around its neck. Another soldier appeared above him—Benny caught glimpses of the sweat trickling down this other stranger’s cheek, of the lips pursed in concentration, the yellowing teeth, the attentive, disconcerted eyes. “Not a British spy,” Benny heard himself saying in Burmese, before he choked on the arm dragging him by the neck through the mud into the trees. They were shouting to each other, the strangers—and somewhere above the din, Benny heard the village rousing to the crisis, Khin crying out, pleading over Louisa’s cries. What he could see, apart from his legs kicking strangely to be free, even as he forced his fists to be still, was a blur of blue in the clearing sky, over the green branches of the sheltering trees. And then he was out of range of the village, being dragged down an embankment, his back suddenly pushed up against the solid mass of something—a tree trunk, the bark of a pine, its every irregular surface reminding his neck and wrists and cheek that he was still alive. They might have been Karen, these men, the thought came to him. They were so ordinary, so familiar, these faces that contorted with exertion and fury as he was fixed to the pine. But no, the thought flashed through his mind. These were not men any longer. They had passed somewhere beyond the bounds of manhood, had become something other, imbued with a conviction so unfaltering it was dehumanizing. They withdrew their long swords and began to slice them through the air under the darkening sky, screaming insults or questions while behind them a dripping magnolia tree seemed to weep for Benny’s particular life, bidding him good-bye. God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us. Suddenly he wanted to apologize—to Khin, to Louisa, to Mama—who had pleaded with him to take care, to stay safe. Too late to use his fists now—they were tied behind him, halfway around the trunk of the tree. And as his animal self spread out across the pricked surface of his skin, as his heart clamored for life wildly, the tips of the soldiers’ swords whirred over his head, and he closed his eyes, all at once flooded with grief.
Miss Burma Page 7