“It was very strange, the silence then,” he told Saw Lay, seven months later, in February, when the weather had begun to parch again, and his friend had returned to Khuli for a breath before his deployment to the front lines. Saw Lay had joined up with the Karen levies leading the effort against the Japanese from the eastern hills, and was acting as the makeshift colonel of his irregular unit, which expected to receive more weapons by way of British airdrop any day. “I thought it was the silence of death,” Benny continued, finishing his story about how he had come to be released by the Japanese. “Or—no, that’s not quite it. I thought it was the silence of the anticipation of death, the muting out of everything but that awful expectancy, when one knows the end is very near.”
Saw Lay looked at him out of the corner of his eye. They were sitting down by the stream in the evening, just as they had been before Saw Lay had left for Mandalay, and, again, Benny watched his friend take refuge in finding stones with his fingers. There was a certain shyness about him, Benny thought. A reservedness about speaking directly, about meeting another’s exposed eyes. Could it be this was why his friend had never found it in himself to take a wife?
“When did you first become aware of them?” Saw Lay asked now. He sent a flat speckled stone over the surface of the stream.
“I’m not sure,” he answered. “I remember thinking the silence had gone on too long. Being afraid to open my eyes. And then the shock of seeing them, in a kind of ring around the Japanese and the tree where I was bound. All of the Karens—the entire village. And Khin with the children at the front—Johnny over her shoulder, Louisa pressed to her leg, with her gorgeous curls and deep eyes. And that terrifying expression on Khin’s face.”
“Describe it to me.”
The nakedness of Saw Lay’s request made Benny look at him with a start. Had he imagined something personal, a long-dormant urgency, in his friend’s tone? “It’s that way she sometimes looks,” Benny began tentatively, but also almost frantically, as though, now that he had picked up a thread, he must rush to discover where it would lead, for fear of losing it again, or for fear of losing his courage to pursue it. “That look where she seems to be acknowledging that you are about to do something to break her heart. But there’s a defiance about it. As if she’s daring you to go ahead and break it. Or as if she’s telling you it’s already beyond breaking—so shattered is it already. Anyone else would have thought that she felt nothing at the moment, because her features were very relaxed. But her eyes . . . rage and longing were behind them. I couldn’t tell if she was bidding me good-bye or pleading with me to stay brave.”
Saw Lay smiled softly, looking out at the glistening stream. Then the light in his eyes seemed to fade, as though he had become impossibly sad.
“I’d have died if it weren’t for her courage,” Benny said, staking his claim on Khin—on the claim she’d made on his life by rescuing it. Only in the days after the Japanese incident had he pieced together, from the villagers, that she had summoned them to follow her through the forest to the tree where he was bound, and where the soldiers were slicing their swords over Benny’s head, in preparation to scalp him. When Benny’s eyes had opened and he’d looked at her beseechingly, she had stepped forward and explained to the soldiers that they were making a mistake. She had spoken in Burmese, and it wasn’t clear if the Japanese—who were said, generally, to have learned a smattering of the language from Aung San and his comrades—understood a word of what she meant to convey. But they became very still, the Japanese, listening to her as she went on to explain that the man whom they had captured was not a British spy. That he belonged to her, that she was his wife.
“Why do you think they listened to her?” Saw Lay asked. He was still focused on the stream, strangely purple in the dying light.
It was a question Benny had often asked himself. Was it the fact that she was holding a baby? Was it Louisa’s obvious relation to him, with her curly hair and Eurasian eyes? Or was it Khin’s startling combination of meekness and strength—a combination that dared the soldiers to defy her. If they had defied her—if they had strung her up beside Benny and mutilated her in the villagers’ plain sight—they would have proved the point that they were above showing and being shown mercy.
“She is unexpected,” Saw Lay said quietly, before Benny had the chance to answer his question, and then a flock of parrots suddenly screeched overhead. For a moment they sat back, watching the beating blur of blue and red passing by.
Benny wanted to say something then, to ask a question that he couldn’t quite bring to the forefront of his mind. But something about his friend’s eyes, about their persistent sadness, told him to hold his tongue, to still his brain. Saw Lay was five or six years older than Benny, nearing thirty, and whatever he’d been going through recently had aged him significantly. Watching him—the way he sat with one knee bent, his serious eyes, the sheen of perspiration on his forehead—Benny thought, He’s passed out of his youth at the very moment that his dignity is deepening. And he realized, with a warm wave of feeling flooding his chest, that he’d never loved a man as he did Saw Lay. It seemed to him that his friend was largely above human concerns, above even the primary concern to fight first for one’s own life.
“Let me ask you a question,” Benny said, surprising himself. “If a person should want to become a Jew, the process is really very circumscribed—certain guidelines must be followed, certain steps.”
Saw Lay turned to him now with a certain flat caution, a hint of something like defensiveness in his eyes.
“If one wanted to become a Christian,” Benny went on, bumbling, “well, there is baptism.”
“And?” Saw Lay said.
“And—” Benny rushed on, afraid his friend might be misunderstanding him—the question of faith wasn’t actually on his mind. “If one wanted to become Karen—say, if one wanted to take on a Karen identity, how would one go about it?”
Now Saw Lay looked at him in plain astonishment.
“Would that even be possible?” Benny asked.
“To become Karen?”
“Yes.”
The question seemed to hang suspended over Saw Lay’s widening features. Then all at once those features contracted, and he broke out in a fit of full-bellied laughter that sent him falling back onto the dusty bank. Benny had never seen him so stripped of the armor of his poise.
“As if anyone would want to become a Karen!” Saw Lay heaved, barely getting out the words. “As if anyone would willingly . . .”
He looked so foolish, Benny couldn’t help laughing along with him, first in reluctant spurts, and then fully, relievingly, half sobbing as he fell back beside his friend and they laughed together, laughed until all their laughter was spent, and they lay smiling side by side.
“It’s the simplest thing in the world, my friend,” Saw Lay said finally. Benny heard him inhale the night, then release himself back into it. “All you have to do is want to be one.”
PART TWO
Revolutions
1944–1950
6
Buy That Dream!
In April 1944—more than a year after he had laughed with Saw Lay on the riverbank—the Japanese secret police came for Benny. He and the family had recently moved in with Saw Lay’s brother in Tharrawaddy, a town on the plains where many Karens were seeking sanctuary, not far from Rangoon. First the secret police took him to their headquarters at the local American Baptist Mission High School and strung him up to a pillar in a classroom. Using their swords to nick his scalp again and again so that blood streamed down his face into his eyes, they threatened him with death and charged him in English-crossed Burmese with espionage—“espionage activities” was the exact phrase they kept repeating. They stripped him of his clothes, thrust a pipe down his throat, and poured water down the pipe until—with him retching and choking—his stomach ballooned and water burst from his nose. Then t
hey pulled out the pipe, thrust it up his rectum, pumped water into his bowels, and smacked his penis when he tried to urinate. And the strange thing was that when they replaced the pipe with a sharp stick, increasing his agony so much that he truly wanted to die, he began to hear the voice of Ozzie Nelson, whose orchestra had made such a hit with “Dream a Little Dream of Me” in the 1930s. Was he dreaming? That voice, the brass, the strings—it all seemed to come to him from a great distance. From an even greater distance, Sister Adela appeared before him in her white habit, clutching at her wimple as if to pull it off, or as if to hold it down, and staring at him with those anguished eyes. It occurred to him that Saw Lay’s eyes had something similar about them. And he seemed to see Saw Lay stealing glances at Khin from across the kitchen, and then Saw Lay taking Khin in his arms and beginning to dance with her . . .
But no . . . no, he realized, as his bruised eyes blinked open. He had been dreaming. The whole thing had been a dream. Except there, in the bright empty room adjoining the one in which he was bound, were two of the Japanese who had tortured him. He had the confusing impression that they were dancing, that behind them a peeling gramophone was plaintively giving voice to the old tune he had been hearing again and again in his dreams. He heard the hiss of a record. The jaunty horns. Ozzie Nelson singing. Could it be? He had to strain to see, but yes, sure as day, his tormentors were dancing, alternately serious and smiling, their arms guardedly locking their bodies together as they skittered through the morning light.
It was Khin who answered the door several days later, when he showed up at the house in Tharrawaddy. She drew him inside with trembling hands, and four-year-old Louisa looked at him with elation and then horror, her eyes moving to the slits crisscrossing his now bald head while little Johnny hid behind Khin’s leg. Then Saw Lay’s brother led him to the back room and laid him down, murmuring something about Saw Lay having just left, about Saw Lay going back to the hills to get them, to get them all, to murder every last one of them himself if it came to it. Benny was beyond words by then, beyond the instinct to put suffering into sentences. There was just the relief of no longer being apart from his loved ones, and a new, animal awareness that a cavern of misunderstanding had opened between Khin and him.
It didn’t help that, before Benny’s recent apprehension, Saw Lay had been sweeping through this house, bringing stories from the front lines of wasted survivors, exploding shells, scorched villages, and the agonies and heroics of the fallen. It didn’t help that during these visits Saw Lay’s eyes had seemed most eager to seek out Khin’s, or that, whenever he’d spoken, Khin had paid him the kind of attention she no longer lavished on Benny. How many nights had Benny watched her listen to Saw Lay while she worked over the stove, flushing with horror, with gratitude, with—with something more?
Now, as he lay shivering on the mat in the back room, she unbuttoned the torn shirt he had managed to put on when the Japanese had abruptly released him (with the warning that they would have their eyes on him, that he would die the moment he involved himself in British affairs). She laid her hands on the tender skin of his abdomen, and he felt her heat. Then she lifted his buttocks to draw down his sarong. She did not gasp, but the expression that came over her intent features made him conscious of what she must be seeing: the oozing welts along his penis, the blood caked with the residue of excrement between his inner thighs—images that had appeared to him in flashes throughout the seven days and that had melded with his piercing sense of foreboding about her, about Saw Lay. He felt with his fingertips for a blanket, but Khin stilled his hand, pressing his fingers tightly.
“I won’t rest until you tell me,” she said, struggling for breath. “What happened, Benny? Don’t lie to me.”
Each of them had been made a sharp-eyed creature by the war; what he’d been through had to be roughly evident to her. But why mention lying?
As though to nurture the seed of her doubt in his ability to be honest (and as though to punish her for the falseness she’d mentioned), he found himself lying to her in response—lying in the most obvious of ways. “Nothing,” he said in a voice small and hoarse from the repeated ramming of the pipe down his throat. An irritated voice. Nothing.
And then he said what had been on his mind since his return here, maybe since he’d had those visions while being tortured: “What happened with Saw Lay?”
Her eyes hardened on him, and he could almost feel that hardness spreading around the soft center of her ache for him. “I will make you soup,” she said, and she called for one of the children to sit by him.
Over the following days, she fed and washed and slept by him, waking at his slightest sound, dressing the wounds he didn’t insist on tending to himself. He couldn’t bear for her to know the extent of his humiliation as a man. For him to be able to make love to her again, for him to find enough fire to take her (here he was, just back from the brink of death by violation and already thinking of the necessity of possessing her), he’d have to heal without being infantilized by her motherly familiarity with the details of his torture. But there was something else: even as he realized he didn’t want to know if she and Saw Lay had assumed he was as good as dead and had found it impossible not to take comfort in each other, he instinctually wanted to punish her for precisely what he didn’t want to know—to punish her by depriving her of the intimacy that she now so desperately needed.
“I can see you want your privacy,” she told him about a week after his return, when he’d begun to prop himself up and manage his bedpan. She put his breakfast on the table beside his bed. But rather than sitting down to feed him, she went on: “Saw Lay’s brother is here if you need anything else.”
Something about her manner, or the quality of her voice, begged him to question her, to ask where she was going. But he said, “That will be fine.”
He’d hurt her—that much was clear. Yet the expression that came over her face also seemed to tell him that she accepted his unwillingness to count on her. “Then you won’t mind,” she said quietly, “if I begin to volunteer a little at the hospital. I was back there for your medicine, and they’re short on help.”
“Of course,” he answered, forcing himself to keep his hard gaze on hers.
A word from you, that gaze of hers now silently pleaded with him, just a word of tenderness, and I’ll be yours again. “Benny,” she stumbled, “when you were gone, I tried—”
“I know,” he cut in. He couldn’t bear it—couldn’t bear the naked need and regret in her eyes, which reflected back to him only his own enfeebled position. He reached for the bowl of rice and egg on the table, as though to dismiss her, to disprove her powerful hold on him. Still, he felt her questioning face hovering above, the light of hope—or whatever it was that had brought her into the room—shining a moment longer over him. “Let’s never speak of it,” he said with a bite of food in his mouth.
That was the extent of his ability to help her bring out everything that had been damaging them from within.
If he had become a sort of nonparticipant in life with the start of the war, now—as Khin began to spend a portion of her days away from the house—he also became a distant observer of his family members, whom he saw with newly objective eyes. Something had been chiseled into Louisa’s winsome face, something that made her seem ferociously determined—as though she were intent on keeping a secret or forgetting something.
“Did Mama tell you to forget what happened while I was gone?” Benny asked the girl one evening, about a month after his apprehension, when she ventured into his room for a cuddle. “Maybe Mama said to forget something about Saw Lay.”
He wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to know more about—the state of his daughter’s soul or his wife’s capacity for deceit.
Louisa looked up into his face, her pretty eyes darkening with recollection, he thought—or with the effort not to recollect. “Saw Lay was sad,” she finally admitted.
&nbs
p; “He was?”
“He cried.”
“I see.”
“Mama didn’t tell me to forget.”
She’d made this last declaration almost to shame him, it seemed to Benny. And over the following days, she began to escape the house with toddling Johnny, as though to evade something unpleasant. From the bedroom window, Benny watched her and Johnny disappear into the far thickets of trees on the plain and then reemerge covered in mud, with wildly transported looks in their eyes. They could have just communed with the trees, or been touched in the shade by some higher, redeeming light.
Miss Burma Page 8