Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  For a moment, Benny couldn’t respond. “And if that doesn’t happen?”

  Saw Lay crossed to his chair, picked up his bottle of beer, and drank at length. When he set the bottle down, he put his bloodshot eyes on Benny again. “What you’ve done for the Karen people is no secret—what your business smarts, your money smarts, have done. If it should happen that the British concede everything to Aung San—you see, we need to prepare.”

  “You’re talking about—about armament?”

  “How much could you give us to help?”

  All at once, Benny wanted to tell Saw Lay that everything had been forgiven, that he loved him as innocently as on the day they’d last sat together on the Khuli riverbank; but that would have been a lie: if it was too late for a peaceful union of Burma, it was also too late to recover the peace they had once shared. What had been done would go on finding its ways to wound them.

  “I reinvest almost everything into the businesses,” Benny stammered, but already he felt himself weakening—waking to some ancient instinct to resist injustice, to come out swinging . . . “I don’t have much in the way of capital,” he stammered on. “Money’s always going in and out.”

  “We have some men who’ve robbed some banks upcountry—”

  “My God, Saw Lay!”

  “We could mix the money in with yours—”

  “You’re talking about laundering!”

  Now Saw Lay laughed with all the ugliness of the condemned. “Fools rest easy on the ground of easy labels and easy morality, Benny. If you’re going to be a goddamned fool, at least be a fool on our side!”

  7

  Polished

  When, several months later, in September 1946, Louisa woke from a nap on the afternoon of her sixth birthday—that is, when she was woken by her white Scottish terrier, Little Fella, whose nudging paws and licks demanded tea—she had the sensation of having emerged from something frightening. It was a feeling she often had on rousing in the bright, airy room hung with ivory Chinese draperies and strewn with her dollies. Little Fella (who, as Daddy said, “just happened to be female”) pushed the nub of her wet nose into Louisa’s ear so that she laughed, though their pre-teatime ritual mandated that she scowl in complaint. “You remember that Saw Lay is coming?” she scolded the dog. It was possible to believe that Little Fella was enchanted, that she possessed the ability to comprehend Louisa’s every word, and that she bristled with excitement not just because of the forthcoming tea, with its two spoonfuls of sugar, but also out of a love she shared for Saw Lay, who had been visiting them of late.

  The dog followed her out to the landing to peer down at the lower floor of the house, already busy with preparations for tonight’s party in honor of Louisa’s birthday. Several employees were moving the living room furniture in order to make way for an orchestra and dancing, while gardeners were bringing in armloads of Mama’s flowers and two men from Daddy’s brand-new bottling company were unloading crates of fizzy drinks. Little Fella nosed Louisa toward the staircase, but a sound made them turn—the sound of Daddy’s voice—and through her parents’ open bedroom door Louisa saw her father sitting at the window. They lived in a southern suburb of Insein—itself a suburb of Rangoon—and Louisa knew that Daddy had designed the window to look out over their hillside estate and the Karen village of Thamaing, past the highway. It was for the village, he frequently reminded her, that he’d chosen this spot on which to develop this compound that was always humming with Karen employees. “They didn’t forget me, the Karens,” he told Louisa, “and we must never forget them.”

  It could have been any late afternoon now, with Daddy just bathed, his curly hair just washed and wrapped in a handkerchief tied tightly around his head (“nothing flattens the hair like a handkerchief!”), with him dressed in his white suit and beginning to speak aloud to the window. His afternoon sessions in prayer, his “grand exercises in gratitude,” he liked to say—these were the only times Louisa would see him so still. He was such a big, quick man, with such noisy steps, such strong features, such a booming voice. But something about the way his eyes gazed upward reminded her of the darkness of her dreams, and she had the thought that maybe there was no God, that maybe Daddy was like a little lost boy.

  Little Fella prodded her down to the kitchen, and there they found Mama already enjoying her own tea. Mama always preferred to dine with the servants, as if she didn’t like spending time with her family. “Have you practiced?” she asked Louisa, casting her a look of having been disrupted.

  Louisa was supposed to give a short piano recital at the party tonight, but she hated practicing. Maybe to save her, one of the cooks handed her a cup of tea, which Louisa poured into the dog’s bowl before spooning in generous helpings of sugar. Only when boiled milk from the stove was floating in the tea did Little Fella lap up the frothing drink. “Your father will be embarrassed if you play poorly,” Mama persisted.

  The truth was that Mama would be embarrassed. There was so much about Louisa she seemed not to like. “As far back as when she was the tiniest thing, she’d come home crying because another child didn’t have something,” Mama would complain. Or: “She knows too much”—as though what Louisa knew were Mama’s secrets. (And Louisa did remember things meant to be forgotten: the cuts on Daddy’s scalp after he had returned to their house in Tharrawaddy, the way he’d kicked while being dragged off by the Japanese in Khuli. She seemed always to have understood that it was better to pretend to forget, to not mention remembering. It all left her feeling forgotten sometimes.)

  “Here you are, bitch,” the cook said with a grumble, doling rice and curry into the dog bowl. Little Fella licked the gravy, then stared up at the cook, who smiled at her with charmed eyes. A yap and a dismissive wave of the hand followed, and then the cook took her time opening a jar of brined limes, kept next to the pickles on the counter. “Hold your tongue, and show some gratitude for once,” the cook said. “I haven’t forgotten your condiment.” She forked a lime out for the dog, who seized it and immediately began to tear off a pungent piece of rind.

  “You remember it’s my birthday?” Louisa broke in, her voice catching slightly.

  For a moment, the adults stared at her. They seemed to be preparing for one of her “moods.” Then they broke out laughing—at her, Louisa realized, feeling the heat of humiliation on her cheeks.

  “Silly girl,” Mama said, and reached out and hooked her hand around Louisa’s waist.

  Louisa leaned her hot face against Mama’s cool, powdery one, breathing in the earthiness of her scent and sandalwood comb. These moments of Mama’s attention and affection were so rare and bewildering.

  “You think I would forget you?” Mama murmured into her ear. “I’ve made you something special to wear tonight.”

  The last time Mama had sewn Louisa a dress they had still been in Tharrawaddy. Then, Mama had used her own petticoat, and Louisa had loved the dress’s lace zigzag hem and the blue ribbon at the waist—had loved the dress so much she’d suddenly been willing to take a more generous view toward being a big sister to her second younger sibling, whom Mama was then expecting, and who would turn out to be Grace. That memory—of the dress, of baby Gracie—was a happy one, wasn’t it? But why did it make Louisa want to hide her stinging eyes in Mama’s soft neck now? (Why did it bring to mind certain other memories of the war? A Japanese soldier cutting off the top of an old man’s head. Johnny’s sweaty hand in hers as they ran for the trench. Daddy hiding in the back of the house in Tharrawaddy. Learning how to disappear with Johnny into the trees. You put your fingers deep into the moist earth by the roots so that you could hear the trees drinking, and you were very quiet, so quiet you were erased, and the only sound was the tree sucking, and then the tree began to speak—)

  “Boo boo.”

  Louisa lifted her eyes from Mama’s stiffening neck and found Saw Lay in the kitchen doorway, a sheepish grin on his face and t
hat familiar, yet comforting look of sadness in his eyes. He was wearing an oversize polka-dot cravat that Louisa had never seen. It made her want to laugh, to leap into his arms.

  “Boo boo,” she told him. As far back as she could remember, they had welcomed each other that way.

  “I thought I would come early,” he said to Mama. “I did promise to teach Louisa how to swing dance before the party, if it’s all right . . .”

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” Mama said, hiding her eyes in her tea.

  But when Louisa went and took Saw Lay’s hand and tried to pull him away, he turned back to Mama as though to apologize.

  “This isn’t swing!” she cried in the living room, after Saw Lay had cleared away the servants and put on one of Daddy’s records that he said would be “just the thing”—Glenn Miller’s “Fools Rush In.”

  The servants had polished and powdered the floor so that it shone like a mirror, and for a few minutes it was just them, laughing and pressing cheek to cheek while Saw Lay bent down in his silly way—all to that song that he kept dashing back to the Victrola to play and that Daddy had once described to Louisa as so sad and so assuring. “We can swing dance to this,” Saw Lay kept saying. “See? We’re swinging.”

  But then Johnny and Gracie, woken from their naps, barged into the room wanting to join in—Johnny with his seriousness even in play, and thin Gracie with that constant smile of hers despite the fact that she was always the loser in their games. Louisa could see the way Saw Lay hesitated to swing Gracie around with the same abandon.

  “What’s this? The party already started?” came Daddy’s voice. He had entered the room with an enormous wrapped object in his outstretched hands, and now he stood looking muscular and ruddy, beaming at Saw Lay.

  “Why not?” Saw Lay said, already retreating to the bar as though Daddy had just offered him something. “Will you have one?”

  Daddy looked confused as Saw Lay poured out some brown liquor. These days it was often this way between them, Daddy pressing his too-eager smile on his friend, Saw Lay sinking into the shadows and complaining of headaches. Yet eventually the two of them would disappear into Daddy’s study, where they held meetings with other men, and where the children were forbidden to enter.

  “Is no one interested in what I have here?” Daddy said as he lifted the enormous gift up to his ear, giving it a shake, and making Gracie giggle and Johnny look on with interested alarm.

  And that was all it took to rescue Louisa from the worried wanderings of her thoughts. Soon they were all pulling at the wrapping paper, revealing pleated layers of cloth—the bellows of something—of an accordion, Louisa realized, exclaiming her pleasure while Johnny instantly asked to have a shot at playing the thing.

  Daddy threw off the remains of the paper and gave the accordion a few tugs. “My mother used to play one of these,” he said. “Doesn’t it make you happy? You can’t listen to it and not feel compelled to smile . . . See? And the marvelous thing—the really marvelous thing is that you can take it with you wherever you go.”

  “Where are we going?” Louisa said. There it was again: the sting of spontaneous tears behind her eyes.

  “We’re not going anywhere,” Daddy assured her as Saw Lay looked on, and then one of the servants came to whisk the children away to be bathed.

  The party was more wonderful than Louisa could have hoped for, with her “very fine” performance at the piano, and the beautiful new dress that flared out whenever she twirled, and heaps of ice cream, and a show by a snake charmer (terrorized by Little Fella), and so much swing dancing—all the lamps in the house aglow, all the doors flung open to let in the cool night air. For hours after Louisa was sent to bed, she sat in her nightgown at the top of the stairs, watching her parents and their guests, the silks and flashing jewels. Daddy danced with Mama, staring into her eyes as though this—as though she—were the thing he needed most.

  It was all almost enough to make Louisa forget how unhappy Saw Lay had been throughout the evening. Before going upstairs, she had found him smoking out on the veranda and gazing back through the open double doors at the couples gliding by. “Boo boo!” she had said to startle him out of his thoughts and make him smile, and he had looked at her—not crossly, but without joy. “Boo boo,” he had told her after a pause, quietly. And only after another moment had he smiled and touched her cheek and asked if it wasn’t already time for her to be in bed dreaming.

  Now he was by the front door talking sternly with one of the servants, as though to grumble about something. Yet a moment later, he left the servant’s side to charge through the guests toward Daddy, who was still holding Mama on the dance floor. He put a hand on Daddy’s shoulder, and when Daddy nervously stepped aside, he bent toward Daddy’s ear, and then the two of them headed off toward the hall leading to Daddy’s study.

  Louisa had never spied on adults before. She had listened, and she had looked, all her senses attuned to the signals they put out, signals she kept recorded somewhere deep inside. Maybe, though, because it was her birthday and she was no longer a very little girl—or maybe because of the way Mama remained out on the dance floor, as if lost—she slipped down the stairs and darted down the hall unseen.

  The door to the study was shut, and when she pressed her ear against it, a moment passed before she could hear anything but the thudding of her heart. Then the muffled sounds coming through the wood gave way to voices, to words.

  “Could it have been one of the guests?” Saw Lay was saying.

  “Goddamn government,” Daddy told him, “poisoning meat to kill off stray dogs.”

  “And stray men . . . What about Louisa?”

  “I’ll tell the sentry to bury it. Better for her to think the dog wandered off.”

  Before she could quite formulate the thought that she had lost track of Little Fella after going up for bed—that Little Fella had to be buried—the door opened, and Daddy stood breathless and blinking back at her, a curious, startled look on his face.

  Behind him, Saw Lay watched her with an expression of regret, and she felt a tug of shame for having put him in the position of discovering her. Then she noticed, in the dim light of Daddy’s lamp, the stacks and stacks of rifles on the dark floor. More rifles than she had ever seen.

  8

  Saw Lay’s War

  The sense of having missed an opportunity to prevent something was one Saw Lay had experienced as far back as the time he had met Khin, before the war, when Benny had invited him over to their flat on Sparks Street, and he had sat across from her at a table laid with her aromatic Karen dishes. On the surface of things, there was nothing special about Khin’s face, but the candle on the table, flickering down to a stub over the course of the night, had emphasized to Saw Lay what seemed to be an unusual introversion and sweetness in the woman’s eyes. Then there was the way that she had strained to speak to Benny through him. Saw Lay had been left that first night with the impression that Khin valued her husband more greatly for the difficulty loving him entailed, yet also that the bravery of her love went unnoticed by the object of its interest. And he knew, with a kind of pain, that Benny was doomed to inadvertently hurt her, to misunderstand and undervalue her difficult devotion to him much as he adored her, and that the only chance that he, Saw Lay, had of protecting her had already passed, because she was already Benny’s.

  This feeling of regret soon enough became something more potent, though Saw Lay hadn’t known that until it had already done its damage. What happened was that the moment Benny had been captured by the Japanese secret police in Tharrawaddy, Khin had sent word to him through their network of Karen friends, and Saw Lay had just as reflexively, though stealthily, rushed to her, along with three of his junior men. The problem was how to rescue Benny without compromising the greater Karen underground effort—something Saw Lay and his brother and soldiers had debated for nearly twenty uninterrupted hours. “You have to un
derstand,” he finally confessed to Khin with exhaustion at the kitchen table, “if it were merely a matter of risking getting shot in order to save Benny, there would be no question.” The problem was what the Japanese did to those they captured. Saw Lay didn’t trust himself to endure that without leaking a word about his unit’s covert operations. It was an impossible situation: the willingness to die, the desperation to save, and the cold confrontation with the limits of his own strength.

  “I made a mistake calling you here,” Khin finally said to him. There was coolness in her tone, scorn for his unspoken conclusion that one man must not be valued over their shared cause. Yet the pain in her eyes—issuing from a deeper, warmer place—cried out that one man’s wife and children could be a cause all their own, worth sacrificing even a war for.

  Well, Saw Lay was also a man, and as the others crumpled around the kitchen fire and slept, it was the man in him who faced her. “Promise me you’ll never mention a word of this to Benny,” he said. When she didn’t immediately answer, he repeated, “Promise me.” Then he told her, “Khin, it should have been me.” Even as he spoke, he wondered if he meant he should have been the one taken into captivity, or the one whose life was uniquely tied to hers.

  But she didn’t question him. She went to him at the table and cupped his face with one of her hands, and that was all it took to unclench him. Soon he had her supple shape in his own hands, which had a will all their own, and minutes later—just out of view of the kitchen—he had what he’d never allowed himself to want. And the bewildering thing—the first of many bewildering things—was the distinct pitch of ease he detected underlying what they wordlessly, frantically did. Not just then, but again and again through the night, until she drew the blanket up over her full breasts and said, “We must rest,” before adjusting her head on the pillow and thanking him, as though for the comfort she’d found in him. And, just like that, she fell into a sleep so deep it seemed untroubled by anything remotely approaching terror or regret.