Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  Khin’s mouth was trembling, and she touched it with her fingers as though to silence it. But she wasn’t done. “I wanted to say, ‘Do you think you can trust him? Do you think he isn’t having his way with some other girl—with me practically every night? He’s the worst kind of liar!’”

  With these last words, she threw her hands over her face, and he stood looking in bewilderment at the slope of her curved back and thin shoulders. How alone she was, even as she held another life within the contours of her body—still supple, though aging, and crying out to him to be held.

  “Don’t hate him, Khin,” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t I?” he heard her say from behind her hands.

  Because we have done the same to him. Because we began what he has continued. “Because you love him, and that trumps disloyalty,” he said.

  Now she raised her eyes to his. “It’s you I love,” she said with a frankness that startled him.

  And a moment passed, as he stood catching his breath, before he grasped the meaning of that frankness, which spoke of steadiness, and not of passion’s restless doubt and urgency. She might have said: On the arduous path of life, it is you—you whom I have never wanted—who has not failed me.

  From there, their descent into war was steep.

  Khin seemed to hide from the glorious final phases of her pregnancy by busying herself with domestic tasks and ceaselessly knitting (though she must have known that the little sweaters and socks and caps she turned out could never shield any of her children from pain). For his part, pugilist that he was, Benny fixated on the injustice that had become his rallying cry, taking the helm when the Karens orchestrated a peaceful and ultimately useless nationwide demonstration that called for an avoidance of civil war, an end to violence, equity among all ethnic groups, and the immediate creation of a separate Karen state. In some sense, too, Saw Lay was guilty of losing himself to the call of history in the making, to the intoxications of being pressed up against the shifting political face of the country. Yet he understood that their cause was also a distraction for him—from Khin, from Grace, from the chances he’d lost at love.

  And a distraction from what he was increasingly noticing about Benny—about his unfaithfulness to Khin, which could rear up in the most unsullied corners of their lives (even in the nursery, for God’s sake, where Saw Lay spied Benny eyeing the jiggly rear end of the nanny—a plain, plump Karen girl named Hta Hta, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and to whom Gracie was particularly devoted). Saw Lay held his tongue about these lapses. Oh, he held his tongue, much as he knew he couldn’t forever hold off having it out with Benny.

  Amid the rising mayhem across the country, Benny’s own capacity for avoidance (of anything to do with what should matter to him personally, thought Saw Lay) seemed to consolidate. After dinner each night, when the children had been excused from the table, Benny would drink tea and ask Khin about her day and watch Saw Lay defiantly quell his agitation with Scotch, and then he would say something cryptic about the dangerous state of affairs for their people. And Saw Lay would think: Better to draw guns and finish one another off! Anything but this painful constriction of friendship, anything but this politeness! He wondered how the man could stand never saying a word about raising a child he must have known wasn’t his. Then it would come to him that Benny’s silence was an expression of his nobility, for by means of it he avoided the trap of laying blame.

  In June, Khin gave birth to her fourth child, a girl called Molly, and though Saw Lay was relieved that both the mother and the child came through the ordeal unscathed, he was wounded by the further evidence of Benny’s claim on her. And when rumors swept through the streets of an alleged Burma Army operation—Operation Aung San—calling for “the elimination of the Karens first and then other hill people,” he told himself that it was only a matter of time before it would be too late to redress either the wounds he suffered or those that marred his friendship with Benny.

  Though not one of the rifles stockpiled around Benny’s compound was yet fired, Saw Lay knew the violence they would do was already inevitable. Still, he and Benny, in solidarity with the Mons, approached Nu about the question of a separate Karen-Mon state. The government responded by arming Burman irregulars, who proceeded to fire on Karen neighborhoods unprovoked. Then on Christmas Eve, while the congregated inhabitants of two Karen villages were singing carols at midnight, Burman policemen launched hand grenades into their church, fired on the survivors, and torched every last structure.

  Hundreds more Karens were murdered during the first weeks of 1949. Had the time come for armed revolt? Together, Saw Lay and Benny insisted that Karen leadership request another meeting with Prime Minister Nu, and a date was set for the thirty-first of January. But on the thirtieth, Nu named Ne Win “Supreme Commander of All Defense Forces and Police Forces,” thereby removing every last military impediment to Burman xenophobia; and that same night shots were fired across Benny’s compound into the Karen village of Thamaing, while now eight-year-old Louisa shook with fever, and Khin—unable to bring down the fever with paste—pleaded with Benny to fetch a healer from the besieged village.

  “Let me,” Saw Lay said as Benny threw on his coat in the dark entryway.

  “She’s my child—” Benny countered, and a spasm of contrition instantly passed over his face.

  “All the more reason to stay with her—with them. Don’t risk it, Benny. I can be down and back with the healer in a quarter hour—”

  There was a thundering blast from the bottom of the hill, followed by a clap of light that briefly illuminated the lifelessness of the room behind them. The children and staff were hiding with Khin among the rifles on the floor of Benny’s study. But as if in that clap of light Benny had seen a vision of a world deprived of the family he’d forgotten to cleave to, he became very still, riveted by horror. “I’ll have to take them away,” he told Saw Lay finally, “to Khuli or Tenasserim . . .” He didn’t continue: And will you come with us?

  “Of course, my place will be on the front lines,” Saw Lay said after a pause. He had the feeling of falling, of the overstretched thread that had drawn their spirits together all at once snapping. So this is the end, he thought.

  And how strange that it had come at the very moment the revolution had begun.

  9

  Into the Trees

  In February—while the Karen revolution entered its first tragic weeks, and the Kachins joined in the revolt, and government troops mutinied, and major towns including Mandalay and Prome fell to various “insurgent” armies—Benny hired an airplane to transport the family, along with many Karen civilians, to Thaton, the capital of an old Mon kingdom on the Tenasserim plains in southern Burma, and a cease-fire area.

  If Louisa sensed something of her past in the house they rented in Thaton, a house that stood on tree-trunk-like pilings over beaten earth—if the stench of the moldering ground under this house took her back to the murky days of Daddy’s capture in Tharrawaddy—if this escape reminded her vaguely of the earlier one to Khuli—she pretended not to have a care. Beside the house was an ancient city wall overgrown with weeds and vines, and beyond it rose a steep hill topped by a white-and-gold pagoda, and every day she and Johnny—liberated from the constraints of regular baths and piano practice and school hours—played marbles and dug for yellow clay, or else raced after their new Mon friends to the pagoda’s pinnacle, where they kicked off their shoes and imagined they were birds about to catch a breeze. On a breeze, the lumps in their throats could melt away.

  Daddy had insisted on bringing along Louisa’s accordion, and at night he roared with laughter as she wrestled with the clunky thing, squeezing out melodies that were alternately jarring and jaunty. She understood in her way that his laughter was as desperate as her need to provoke it, and she longed to keep playing, to keep laughing, to keep outrunning misery and Mama’s reproving eyes.

  It
was Ducksworth, finally, who caught up with them in April—“Mr. Ducksworth, my dear old friend—excuse me, Lieutenant Ducks­worth,” Daddy said after the pale man in Burma Army garb showed up by the foot of the stairs of their rented house, with a strange profusion of apologies and a handwritten letter from Prime Minister Nu.

  That letter, Daddy explained to the children while Ducksworth waited outside and Mama packed Daddy’s traveling bag, was a request that Daddy meet Nu for a tête-à-tête in Moulmein—“So we might bring this mayhem to a right end and get on with our lives,” Daddy said. “This is wonderful, wonderful—no?” (Wonderful, but why could Louisa see fright in Daddy’s eyes? And why had Mr. Ducksworth’s breath given off the smell of guilt—why in that man’s eager, aggressive smile had she seen the look of lying?)

  Mama shivered as she dropped long bamboo tubes of steamed sticky rice into Daddy’s bag and asked Hta Hta—the only servant they’d brought along—to press a pair of Daddy’s trousers for the journey.

  “Khin,” Daddy called to her. “Come.”

  When Mama wouldn’t stop fussing with the eggs she was boiling, Daddy went and took her by the hand and pulled her into a circle with the children—all of whom, Louisa noticed, had become very silent, absorbed in listening for signs of imminent menace.

  “There’s hope, you know,” Daddy said quietly to them, as Mama began to cry. “There’s more hope than ever before. We’re very fortunate that nothing terrible has happened to us so far—that we’re here together. I’m not afraid, Khin.”

  Usually Mama and Daddy clung to their own languages, to their own friends and their own lives. But now Mama fell against Daddy’s neck and clung to him.

  “I’ll kill that man when I grow up!” Johnny shouted.

  “Don’t say that,” Daddy scolded him. “Mr. Ducksworth is only doing his job.”

  Why were they speaking as though Daddy had been captured already? Louisa felt apprehension darken her own smile, a smile she pressed upon her siblings, upon Daddy, because it was ­possible—wasn’t it?—to keep him safe with her joy. “How will you get to Moulmein, Daddy?” she asked lightly.

  “Well, I imagine by airplane.”

  “And how long will you fly in it?”

  “Not long—a few hours at most.”

  “Will it be very big—or small—the plane?” Johnny chimed in. Yes, talk of planes was a means of evading their alarm and even the permanent darkness that waited for them all.

  “When I return, I’ll tell you about it,” Daddy said, trying to smile back at them. “Now don’t look as I leave—don’t watch me. I don’t want to glance back and see unhappy faces. I want to go with the vision of these shining eyes in my mind . . . There, now even Gracie is smiling!”

  And little Gracie—the most vulnerable of them in every sense—suddenly broke into soundless sobs and clung to Louisa’s neck.

  All that night, as the silence deepened around her—the silence of Daddy’s absence—Louisa lay on the floor of the room she shared with her siblings and concentrated on Daddy’s journey to Moulmein. She saw him sitting beside Ducksworth in the shuddering plane, the descent through a sky shivering with rain, and then sunlight as Daddy disembarked by the turquoise sea. But try as she might, she could not stay the vision of what came next: soldiers rising up out of that sea, surrounding Daddy like a wave, and Ducksworth helplessly standing by.

  She was woken the next morning by a fearsome moaning surging through the streets. Mama rushed into the room and roused the others before gathering them together on the floor of the dark room. There was a look of dismay on her face as she told them that the Burmans had broken the Thaton cease-fire. “Betrayed,” she kept saying. “We’ve been betrayed.” Already, the Burmans were invading the city.

  What did it mean for Daddy? Louisa wanted to ask.

  But Mama said, “You will die if you make a noise. From now on, you must not cry out, you must not complain. If you are hungry, find a way to feed yourself. If you are thirsty, find a stream. If your body is tired, ignore the tiredness. If you are hurt, let your tears fall only inside.” And then, with tears in her own eyes: “God bless you, children.”

  Right away, they crept out to the bushes behind the house, where they stayed for hours, and when baby Molly complained, Mama suckled her, and when a scream penetrated the woods at their backs, the servant Hta Hta covered the children’s ears with the edge of her sarong. Toward dusk, Mama left them, but then she returned with a small sack and some oranges, which she peeled and fed to the older children, and even to Hta Hta, slice by slice. Only at night, when she motioned for them to crawl out behind her and they drew themselves out of the bushes, emerging like shadows under the black dome of the sky, did Mama speak again: “I will try not to lose you, and you must try not to lose me.”

  How would Daddy find them? Louisa kept the question tucked inside her mouth as she trailed Mama in the moonlight.

  “I’m thirsty, Mama,” Johnny dared to utter.

  Immediately Mama stopped and picked up a stick and whipped his backside. Johnny’s lip trembled, but he didn’t cry.

  “We will find something as we go,” she said in an uneven voice.

  A man with a horse carriage was waiting for them down the empty road. He took all of them, including Hta Hta, as far as the Thaton train station, which they found heaving with Karens wanting to flee. “Three Karen families were beheaded while trying to escape,” one woman on the platform said, and Louisa watched how Johnny and Grace encircled Mama, turning their mute faces up toward hers, as if seeking reassurance that those faces were still attached to their beings.

  Near dawn, as blue light washed the sky, they caught a current onto the only train to appear. Wedged as they were among hundreds of other evacuees, Mama’s body gave off a warm wave of relief, telling Louisa that now at last, in the shelter of the train’s thunder, she might feel free to speak a few words.

  “Will Daddy come find us?” she asked.

  Light seemed to pass over Mama’s features, but then she closed her eyes and sank into her thoughts for a time. “The minute he can,” she said in a voice that was not hers.

  The train refused to roll past Bilin—a town, Mama explained anxiously, less than thirty miles north of Thaton, and also overrun the previous night by Burman troops. Soon they found themselves carried by tides of refugees along muddy streets littered with bodies and broken glass and burned bricks, to the banks of the Bilin River, the other side of which hadn’t yet been breached.

  Louisa had assumed until now that Karens were unvaryingly charitable, that whatever a Karen had was what he had to share. But the rafts crossing the Bilin were being controlled by Karens with rifles, and the family had no choice but to wait for the teeming bank to be cleansed of the armed. That first evening, Mama took a small pot from her sack and told Hta Hta to boil water for them to drink—there hadn’t been time for her to pack more than a few biscuits and pieces of fruit, which they had already eaten. She asked a family, also waiting on the west bank, if it would be possible for her children to have the crust on the bottom of their pot of rice and chicken curry, and the father bitterly peered into Mama’s eyes, pried out the crust, and tossed it into the river.

  Louisa knew better than to speak of her hunger that night. But Johnny—when they were huddled in a heap by the fire, trying to sleep alongside the moonlight glittering across the river—broke out all at once, “You shouldn’t have asked for their crust, Mama!”

  Usually Mama suffered no complaint, though tonight she allowed the gurgle of the river to speak for her awhile. Then she said, “It is better to be in a position of having to ask for charity than to be in the position of never having to ask, children.” Her voice was filled with sorrow and deep reserves of tenderness for them. “Most people think it is the other way around—that one is at an advantage having everything.” She didn’t need to remind them, Louisa knew, that they had recently liv
ed in a world built on such false advantages.

  “I would rather have chicken curry!” Johnny cut in.

  Mama laughed, along with Hta Hta, and drew Johnny very close to her body, causing Louisa to feel a stab of envy.

  “No,” Mama said, still laughing. “Ordinary people think of things that way. Don’t look down on them for it—they’ve never been taught differently. They can’t imagine that it would be to their benefit spiritually to have to ask for something, to have to become acquainted with their meekness, and to find tremendous strength in it. Why do you think monks beg for alms?”

  It was the first time Louisa could remember sleeping under the exposed sky, and as the sounds of war—of shots and snarls and ­wailing—drifted toward her from the city, she blinked back at the staring stars, and comforted herself with the rustle of the river and the cool water-scented breeze tipping her closer to sleep.

  “I know of a root we can search for when dawn breaks,” she heard Mama say as she drifted off finally. “It is soft and sweet, and we can mash it with a stone into a delicious cake to be baked over the fire . . . No, don’t be jealous, children . . . And don’t feel small, even when you have to ask for rice.”

  The next day, when the west bank was nearly empty, they boarded a raft and crossed the river—on the other side of which, Mama explained, they would make their way over the mountains to a place called Kyowaing, a teak reserve whose governor was a Karen leader and one of Daddy’s trusted friends. “We will ask him for shelter,” she said. “And until then we will try not to linger.”

  For three days they hiked upriver, stopping only to forage for edible greens or to gnaw on roots or to collapse into the mud at night. And for three days they were hungry. But the farther they trekked from the fighting frontiers, Louisa noticed, the farther they seemed to stray from cruelty and greed. On the fourth evening, they came to a bamboo hut owned by poor mountain Karens whose table was a carved wooden pan and whose evening meal was salted watery rice. The juices from the rice flowed to the edge of the pan, and Louisa ate with relish, shyly saying it was the best meal of her life.