For the next two hours, as day dawned, he lay watching her, amazed by the miracle of their sudden familiarity, by the illuminating vision of her closed eyes and bare arms, by the rise and fall of her breath, more sweet than acidic. He felt graced by that breath, which emanated from a soul whose beauty he was only beginning to fathom. But the depths of his own soul were also revealed to him: he had been devoted to her all along, and more steadfastly for her steadfast devotion to her husband. If he loved her, it was paradoxically for the very nobility and loyalty that he had just sabotaged. And he knew that, the better to love her, the better to serve her, he must spare her his newly revealed self. He must run.
For most of the following year, then, after he’d heard word that Benny had survived the capture, he’d run from one mission to the next, hiding his wounded heart among the remains of his fellow men—all of them stinking and soaked to the bone, and many rotting alive as they slashed through the jungle, gasped in the mud, evaded the bullets and mortars that ceaselessly fell around them. And when the Brits at last celebrated their successful recapturing of the capital, he threw himself into what they called Operation Character, by which the loyal native troops were to ambush the retreating Japanese as they fled. Often during these final weeks of war, he had to engage in hand-to-hand combat, and once at the bend of a river found himself being grabbed by the throat before he was able to get the upper hand. He held his assailant under the limpid current, squeezing the stranger’s neck as though to intensify his pain or more quickly extinguish it, staring into the man’s startled eyes while it came to him, like a wave of grace, that he had nothing anymore but compassion for him, and nothing left for himself but cold hatred. And weeping blindly, wondering what he was putting out exactly—a life or his own right to life—he released the man, half prepared for him to jump up and do him in. But the man’s glassy eyes were unchanging beneath the water, and Saw Lay tramped back to shore amid the shots and shouts of the surrounding battle, knowing only that it was too late, that too much had happened, that in some sense he, too, was finished.
And nothing revived him—not even his effete efforts to organize the Karens politically at the conclusion of the war. Nothing, that was, until the early evening in 1946, when, after the Aung San rally in Fytche Square, he spotted Benny from his stoop and was immediately seized by a painful, begrudging, remorseful love that seemed physically to shake him back into life. It was a sensation—of being sharply resuscitated—that only intensified the next day, when Benny sent a car for him, and he was driven in a downpour from the capital to the nearby suburb of Insein, where the rain fell off and the sun reappeared and the car all at once ascended a glittering, lush hillside toward a sprawling house in which she—in which they—still existed.
The entire family met him at the door, a baby in Khin’s arms, and tough little Johnny half hidden behind Benny’s wide stance. Only Louisa stood a step apart from the group, and he was immediately taken by the ethereal prettiness of her face, by her wild black ringlets and deep, mysterious eyes, which she raised to meet his with an open defiance crossed with expectancy. How could he have left them? she asked silently but unmistakably. And how could he have taken so long to return? She must have been five already. Saw Lay stooped before her and held out one of the flowers he’d brought.
“Boo boo,” he said. He held the bright pink bloom farther out toward her knowing glance.
“Boo boo,” she said after a pause. At last, the impression of the old child emerged in her face, and she smiled.
“Are you unwell?” he heard Khin ask.
“Khin!” Benny corrected her. “For God’s sake! What a greeting! Here our poor friend is still recovering from the harrowing things he’s seen . . .”
Only now, as Saw Lay stood and took in the husband and wife, did he recognize the overlay of shame in Benny’s rebuke, as though he were embarrassed not just by what Khin had said, but also by the person she’d become, by her diminished youth and beauty. True, she was altered, but not all for the worse. Her new status had hardened her, glossed her up, and the sheen of her silk garments along with the tightness of her hairstyle matched the new angles in her cheeks. Yet something burning in her eyes suggested hardness’s counterpart: the liquid heat of restlessness, of longing—of worry for him? In spite of a note of caution now sounding in his chest, he lowered his eyes to the child on her hip.
If Louisa’s fierceness had been drawn straight from Benny’s pugilism, this baby—happy and hapless, poor girl—had a dullness, an easily pleased, conciliatory disposition that was as much a denial of Benny’s paternity as was her slight Karen nose, her fine black hair and Asiatic eyes. He held a finger out to her curious, outstretched hand, whose clasp set his heart beating, so that he found himself flashing the baby girl an oafish, quivering grin. There was no question. No question. No need for speculation.
“I am changed,” he said, in response to Khin’s question, he supposed.
“As we all are,” she said, drawing the baby closer to her breast. Yet the desperation with which she quickly glanced at Benny told him that nothing had changed about her loyalties.
Over the next months, they almost fell back into their easy prewar camaraderie.
At great risk to himself, Benny started up a bottling plant called Mingala Waters and another business called the Karen Trading Corporation—the first to generate cash and the second to launder it (the idea being to purchase and stockpile arms in case the Karen National Union had reason to revolt). But Benny couldn’t yet give up on the British, and Saw Lay soon went along with his plan to send a delegation of Karens to London in order to plead the Karen case (“A ‘goodwill mission’—that’s what we’ll call it. A goodwill mission to London, during which you’ll sit shoulder to shoulder with Atlee’s men”). In London, Saw Lay did what he could to play into British sympathies, even loosening up to the extent that he was able to share a few inebriated hours in entertaining talk about his favorite British authors and actresses with the likes of the Labour Party’s Lord Pethick-Lawrence at the luminous Claridge’s Hotel. But Atlee’s buttoned-up ministers—who listened politely enough to his (pained) words of thanks for how the British had delivered them from the Japanese, and to his (too emotional) reminder of how the long-loyal Karens needed an autonomous state that he hoped might exist within the British Commonwealth even if Burma itself gained independence from it—ultimately distanced themselves from their predecessors’ protectorship of the Karens. (“We’re terribly grateful for what you have done,” one particularly sympathetic minister said as he escorted Saw Lay to the door. “Without you, Aung San might never have come around. But I can’t imagine how our officers thought they had the right to promise you statehood in exchange for your service. They overstepped. Yes, they overstepped. Very unfortunate.”) In the end, they were advised to throw in their lot with the Burmans.
That betrayal seemed only to redouble the tenuous bond being forged between Benny and Saw Lay again (just as Louisa coming upon the rifles in Benny’s study soon drew them together in their guilt). Together they smarted from the sting, in January 1947, of Aung San being invited to Buckingham Palace (“Even Churchill is in disbelief,” Benny noted, reading a dispatch from one of his London contacts, “saying—listen—‘I certainly did not expect to see U Aung San, whose hands were dyed with British blood and loyal Burmese blood’”—meaning Karen and Kachin and Chin blood—“‘marching up the steps of Buckingham Palace as the plenipotentiary of the Burmese Government’”). Together they chafed at Aung San’s victorious return to Burma and his hubristic assertion that he alone had determined the country’s fate (“And was it not I,” the ruler proclaimed, “who pulled Burma out of the stage in which she was held in regard by neither men nor dogs, to a stage in which her affairs have attracted the attention of the world?”). Together they argued against a naive faith in Aung San’s “principle” of Frontier rights, prompting the Karens to walk out of the conference that the Bur
man leader soon staged at Panglong, at which Shans, Kachins, and Chins agreed to terms that some argued paved the way for a future Burma of semiautonomous ethnic states (“But read the fine print,” Benny made the case to anyone who would listen; “what he wants to give us is minority rights”). And when, in April, Aung San publicly and repeatedly threatened to “smash” anyone opposing his national objectives (“We will allow freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom to agitate,” the leader asserted, “but if the opposition abuses these freedoms they will be smashed . . . Try whatever tactics you wish to take over the power that is now in our hands, but we will smash anyone resorting to tactics that hurt the people and the State . . . Go on and agitate, but agitate unfairly and you will be smashed”), they felt jointly sickened and justified.
Still, Saw Lay had the sense that, for all their political unity, he and Benny were avoiding the treacherous terrain of something that still lay between them: not the subject of Khin, precisely; not even the truth about what had happened between Saw Lay and her one night; but something more proximate—Saw Lay’s singular devotion to the mother and child. It was very possible, Saw Lay knew deep down, that the only thing keeping him fighting for the Karen cause, with which he felt himself becoming more disenchanted every day, was the chance it gave him to be near Khin and the baby.
For her part, Khin seemed to retreat with each passing week further into a world made up exclusively of the children and the servants, and further into a silence, whenever she was around Saw Lay, that anyone else would have taken for aloofness. There were whole days when the only glimpse he had of her was when he ambled into the kitchen ostensibly in search of something to eat or drink; even if he found her alone at the table, she seemed to struggle to speak a word to him. And he understood that her reluctance to address him was an expression of her desire to keep the peace between them, even as it admitted to some war still going on within her. Not that she gave any sign of wanting him. But his presence clearly aroused her anxiety.
And the more time he spent in the house, the more sure he was that this anxiety extended to the other family members in a mysterious way. Sometimes, when he happened to be sitting with Benny and Khin together after dinner—listening to the same rain outside, drinking the last drops of the same sherry, being moved by the same plaintive or jubilant music drifting off the gramophone, watching the older children stage a play or read aloud from a book of English poetry—he would catch a glimpse of Khin looking up from her knitting needles at Benny, or gazing mournfully out the window at the mists rolling down the hillside while Grace napped in her arms, and it would come to him that nothing had been resolved between them. That they were merely holding their breath, like everyone else in the country. And that even the children, with their fierce love of play and ever-watchful eyes, and Benny, with his reassuring glances and swaggering ways, were uncertain, and that their uncertainty was the measure of hers with Saw Lay.
Then it came: the break in the peace, theirs and the country’s.
On the nineteenth of July, in that year of 1947, sirens began to wail over the radio, and a shaken and tearful broadcaster announced, “At ten thirty-seven this morning, our leader and liberator, General Aung San, was tragically martyred during a cabinet meeting at the secretariat, along with eight others. He leaves behind a nation in mourning, a wife, two boys, and a daughter.”
Immediately, rumors spread that the assassins—figures in fatigues who had burst out of an army jeep into the secretariat before opening fire and escaping through an exit on Sparks Street—were agents of some Western party wanting to shut down what progress Aung San had made with the minorities. But that made no sense, Saw Lay and Benny agreed. Indeed, evidence was soon unearthed linking one of Aung San’s Burman political rivals to the murders. And in short order, the rival was tried and convicted of conspiracy to murder, making way for another Thakin to lead Aung San’s party, one who had professed great resistance to the idea of semiautonomous ethnic states, and who, unlike his predecessor, hadn’t switched sides to join the Allied camp during the war, but had retreated with the Japanese. It was thus doubly heartbreaking when, some months later, around the time that Burman veterans descended on Rangoon incanting the refrain “We want to eat Karen flesh,” Attlee signed Burma over to this successor Thakin, U Nu, and the country was granted its cruel independence.
Or triply heartbreaking, because this was when Khin revealed something about Benny that shattered Saw Lay’s faith in his friend’s nobility. Many evenings around this time, Saw Lay would show up at the house expecting to find Benny, only to be told that his friend was still out at his office or one of the factories, and that Khin, pregnant again, was resting upstairs, and he would find himself playing with Louisa and Johnny, or, reluctantly, with little Gracie (he somehow felt it was a betrayal of both Khin and Benny to do so out of their sight). But on this night, Saw Lay was finishing up the paper and a drink alone in the living room, steeling himself before his return home and another lonely stretch of fitful sleep, when he heard Khin’s step on the stair.
He stood, dusting the ash from his lap, and saw her enter the room. She didn’t seem at all surprised to find him there, but rather relieved and expectant, though for several moments she just stood by the door, looking at him and clutching her thin fingers over her small, swollen abdomen. Her black hair—always worn tautly back in a chignon—was slightly mussed so that several pieces fell down around her face, giving her a softened look, as though she had just woken, or were coming undone.
“Is there something you need?” he found himself saying uneasily.
The question clearly surprised her, and she glanced around and shut the door, sealing them into the room alone. “Need?” she said. “No. No.” She could have been speaking to herself, so lost in thought did she appear. “Only”—she made a little motion toward his package of cigarettes on the table, also sprinkled with ash—“may I?”
He’d never seen her smoke, but he took up the package immediately and held it out to her. The awkwardness with which she approached and then accepted a cigarette and a light touched him, and for a moment he stood bashfully watching her fumble with the thing and take a few meager puffs.
“Has he said anything to you?” she said finally.
“Benny?”
She peered at him with such apparent feeling that he feared she was on the verge, after all these months together again, of speaking about what had happened between them. Instead, she said, “About where he goes every night.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” he bumbled. He’d never thought to wonder about Benny’s comings and goings, but the question had him feeling suddenly implicated, guilty.
She took another mouthful of smoke between her lips. “About other women,” she said softly.
For a moment, he couldn’t speak—her revelation brought up too many contradictory things inside him—and his lapse in composure was enough to cause her to withdraw, both within herself and to a bank of windows on the far side of the room.
“Some nights, he doesn’t even bother to return . . . It’s not what he does with them that troubles me anymore. It’s the question of whether or not he lets himself go. Whether or not it’s cost me something, diminished me in his eyes. I keep wondering, is there romance? Talk of love?” Now she hiccupped, or laughed, or choked over a sob, and suddenly became aware of the ash she was scattering over her sarong and the floor. “I’m helpless,” she said. “Hopeless.”
“Let me,” he said, crossing to her, but she hardly seemed to notice when he took the cigarette from between her fingers and went to the table and put it out.
“You think I’m silly.” Without anything to occupy her hands, she had begun to wring her beautiful fingers. “Of course there’s romance. Of course he tells the others what they want to hear. Of course he believes what he tells them. When Benny gives, he gives everything!”
“Khin—”
“Do
you know,” she said, her eyes ablaze, “one time I found an address in his pocket? And the next day, while he was away, I took the bus to the capital—I didn’t dare have the driver take me. On foot, I found the flat—not at all a dingy corner of the city. Very posh. But I didn’t hang my head. I didn’t cower. Me, a farmer’s daughter.” Suddenly, she looked proud in all her glowing shame. “Sometimes I wonder what I would have been capable of if I’d had an education. I could have had my independence, if that’s what I wanted—”
“Is it?” he interrupted her, but the question seemed only to annoy her, as though he’d missed her point.
“I rang the bell,” she said. “And when a servant came to the door, I asked to be taken to her mistress. She had a very pretty face, the lady of the house. A fair, thin face. A wide mouth with too much lipstick. She was writing some letter at her desk, and if she hadn’t looked so startled I would have thought I’d made a mistake. She motioned as though to tell the servant to take me away, but I said, ‘Please. Please, just let me talk to you. I don’t blame you.’ And I meant it. She didn’t know me—what I’d been through with Benny, everything I’d given him. ‘I’m not here to insult or blame you,’ I said. ‘I only want to know what happened. I want to understand. Is it—is it romantic?’”
Khin blushed, shamed all over again by her question, it seemed to Saw Lay, or by the vulnerability it betrayed.
“Do you know what she said to me?” Khin stared at Saw Lay almost hostilely. “She put down her pen and straightened herself in her chair—she never stood to greet me—and she said, with a voice so low it might have been borrowed from a monk, ‘That is for him to tell you.’ And she said, ‘You must find the trust to be honest with each other.’ The bitch.”
Miss Burma Page 12