Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  Through bursts of rain then, they continued up a mountain and crossed some of the most breathtaking terrain Louisa had ever seen. Villages shrouded in mist in the early-morning sun, and always a clear stream running by. Hill plantations where rice stalks grew side by side with marigold flowers. The people inhabiting these places had never encountered a car, Mama informed them. The rice they ate came from their fields, vegetables either grown or gathered from the bounty of the forest, fish from the stream, meat from their traps. Their clothes were made with their own looms, dyes from nature. Unmarried girls wore woven white dresses adorned with red strands that fell down to their ankles. Marrying, they donned long tubelike sarongs and short tops woven in black and decorated in the traditional patterns of their village. Their lives were serene, harmonious, and brief. “They know of no artifice,” Mama said.

  “What is artifice?” Louisa asked her.

  “The way one tricks oneself into forgetting that death is nearby.”

  Sometimes the six of them would sleep in a monastery. Once they sank into sleep on a pile of stinky fruit in someone’s storage shed. When their teeth became unpleasantly dirty, Hta Hta searched for a special twig that, when broken, foamed with natural toothpaste. And when the day was hot, they cleaned their bodies in the cold, clear streams, washing away their old life.

  “Where is Daddy?” Grace asked one morning, as they prepared to descend the mountain. Grace gazed down at the thin river, which wound its way back toward Bilin, with the longing of someone who could see, not precisely what she was looking for, but only that it was something she had left behind.

  Johnny shot her a punishing look, and the poor girl nearly broke out in sobs again, but then a flock of parrots rose up before them and flew east, transporting Louisa’s thoughts to the vaporous distance beyond grief.

  As long as they were walking, moving toward the distance, their bodies stayed strong. But when they arrived in Kyowaing, with its British-built brick-and-wood houses and its teak plantation that spread out under the shadow of a far-off pagoda, they immediately fell down and became sick.

  The Karen overseer of the plantation, called the “Forest Governor,” lived with his wife and their two teenage sons on top of a hill overlooking the teak fields, and while the man himself showered them with fondness—turning a room over to them and bringing them soup that first night—his wife seemed wary and distracted by the silk of Mama’s torn, muddied sarong. “Where did you find such fabric?” the woman asked.

  The embarrassed Forest Governor gently reprimanded her: “Don’t you know this is Saw Bension’s wife? He is very rich! The richest man in all of Burma!”

  “Not so rich,” Mama murmured, and Louisa felt suddenly ashamed of their wealth.

  For many days, the children were ill with dysentery, and Louisa also with malaria, and as they languished in their room, Louisa had the sense that they were hiding from the wife, who, unlike her husband and smiling sons, never came to check on or help them (though Mama and Hta Hta hardly slept, and at one point expressed genuine worry for Gracie’s life). Hta Hta grew weepy, wondering aloud if her soldier brothers had survived the battles surrounding Insein, and Mama became strained and short-tempered. “Remember what I told you about not making a noise!” she snapped when Louisa and Johnny bickered.

  “I can’t breathe!” Johnny protested—the close air in the room did reek of illness.

  “Nevertheless!” Mama scolded him. She was trying to determine their next step, Louisa knew, and in the meantime nearly drowning in stagnation.

  One night, they woke to the wife shouting, accusing her husband of being a sinner. Satan was trying to wedge her out of the house! she cried. The children stayed quiet, listening to the woman’s evil words. But baby Molly—as if understanding every one of them—screamed in fright, and would not be consoled by Mama’s breast.

  “Don’t worry, children,” Mama whispered in the darkness. “Sometimes it is like this between a husband and a wife.”

  The next morning Mama woke them early. She looked very proud, Louisa noticed, almost as though she were pretending at pride, and had drawn in her eyebrows with ash, powdered her face with rice flour, and washed and mended her sarong. Even her blouse had its pink color back. She led them out of the sleeping house into the fresh open air, and for a time they simply stood on the hilltop, waking up with the day and the view of the houses scattered below. A sleepy stream wound around the enchanted village, which seemed to have settled itself placidly in the mist, tucked into the folds of the slim, still mostly barren teak trees.

  “With the first monsoon rains,” Mama said, “the new foliage is emerging. Soon the trees will flower and bear fruit.”

  “Can we eat it, Mama?” Johnny asked.

  “Better not,” she told them. Then, with a strange sadness on her face: “Better do only what they tell you to until I come back.”

  Now there were new questions for Louisa to hold in her mouth. Where was Mama going? And why without them? And would she be safe? And would they?

  “You are almost strong again,” Mama said. “What is more, Bilin is now in Karen control.” She lapsed into silence, and when she spoke again it was in a voice broken by sorrow. “There is not enough room for me in this house,” she said. And then she explained that she had brought along several pieces of her jewelry, including her star sapphire earrings, which she would sell in Bilin in order to establish their new life. She would come for them in short time—and they wouldn’t have to walk back to Bilin, she would see to that. And in the meantime, Hta Hta was here to care for them, to ensure that they were treated with kindness.

  “Why can’t you ask them for help a little longer?” Johnny asked. “Isn’t it better to be in the position of having to ask?”

  “Not when one can help oneself,” Mama said. “We can’t depend on others forever—we mustn’t.”

  “How will Daddy find us if you are there and we are here?” Louisa found herself asking, and straightaway the question put hurt in Mama’s eyes.

  “He will know we have gone to friends,” Mama said after a pause. “Don’t be afraid.”

  A few minutes later, a group of Karens going down to Bilin came for her. Louisa, whose legs were all at once weak again, stood in a huddle with her siblings on the front steps of the Forest Governor’s house to watch her leave.

  How elegant and vulnerable Mama seemed, in her petal-pink blouse, her head held high as she walked away from them into the trees.

  10

  The Cause of Her Need

  Saw Lay had been a mistake, though as Khin picked her way down the muddy path leading away from Kyowaing—away from the children about whom she couldn’t, even for an instant, bear to think—she wondered if she would ever feel the way she had with him again.

  “Khin,” he’d said on that appalling night, when he’d failed to rescue Benny from the Japanese in Tharrawaddy, “it should have been me.” His sureness about what should have been, in a world in which nothing seemed as it should be, had touched something deep within her. Suddenly, she had become sensitive to the grief in his lamplit eyes—grief that sought a relinquishment that she could provide, if only temporarily. She had gone to him and taken his face in her hand, still nearly innocently. And she had seen for the first time that he had such a fine, well-made face, with such a distinguished jaw—a Karen jaw—and such a vulnerable mouth that parted in the shadows as he looked up at her, and then moaned as she pressed his eyes to her breast. She had still been half expecting a simple consoling caress between them, yet nothing surprised her about the press of his wide hands grasping her buttocks, about his urgent unleashing need to be touched by her and to touch her.

  Would she ever be touched that way again? she wondered now, stumbling toward the stream where the group of Karens whom she was following had stopped to rest. In this escape from the Forest Governor’s house, it would be easy to believe that she was also ess
entially innocent, this time merely the victim of another woman’s jealousy. But the Forest Governor’s quiet interest in her could not be denied, and she had found herself vulnerable not to him (in fact, she had gone out of her way to avoid the man) but to his recognition of her as a woman worth being recognized, worth being wanted even in her deprivation. His stifled yearning for her had pushed her back to the memory of what had happened five years before, when she had melted, during a moment of desperate need, into what had felt like perfect understanding. With Saw Lay she had escaped not just her fear for Benny’s life, but also all the agitation that came with loving a man with whom she had never easily been able to speak in her first language, and to whom her Karen tendencies too often had to be explained. She had not known how very Karen she was until there was Benny—boisterous, belligerent Benny, who bigheartedly trampled all over her preferences for gentleness and humility and silent attunement to others. And she had not known how isolated she had felt with him until there was Saw Lay.

  It will pass, she had reassured herself in the joy of Benny’s return from the hands of the Japanese in Tharrawaddy. But then she had seen the extent of his wounds, and the wound that had just been created in her bled all over again. That Benny suspected something had “happened with Saw Lay” and yet wouldn’t reveal what he himself had just been through seemed a confirmation of the fundamental condition of their shared isolation in marriage; that he then proceeded not to touch her, not so much as to raise an eyebrow when she became heavy with child, plunged her into despair. Well, as far as he was concerned, the child was his, she inwardly argued. Hadn’t they lain together in the days before his capture? Then the child was born, and every day the likelihood of its being Saw Lay’s molded itself onto Grace’s pretty little features, and Benny’s silence enslaved her, Khin, to her original sin.

  She had felt trapped within her mistake, hurt and increasingly bitter. When Benny’s philandering soon began, she had submitted to his renewed sexual interest in her as she would to a sentence—degradation being the means by which she would pay for her mistake. Oh, she’d profited from the explosion of wealth that his business initiated, but she’d silently judged his foolish faith in what that wealth could buy them and the Karens. And she’d begun to disdain his assumption that he could champion a cause that called for revolution with unbloodied fists. If she had loved Saw Lay—loved him even when he’d reentered their lives and when she’d rebuffed his tentative glances so as to keep her mistake a thing of the past—if she loved Saw Lay still, it was not just for his blood, but for his feeling that he was no better than the cause they rallied around, that he had no more right not to fight than the poorest peasant. And if she’d shut herself in with the servants more and more, it was in stoic revolt against the trappings of a world that her children had come to assume was comfortable and secure.

  Now, the thought of those children made her stand up from the bank, and she turned, as though to turn her back on them. She was twenty-eight and had already tolerated so many sorrows, so many terrors. She could not now confront another. She must only find a way for her family to endure. And as she followed the Karens, who had begun to wander down the darkening mountain again (doomed, as all Karens were, to wander and wander), she moved swiftly through the gnarled landscape with a feeling of unburdening herself of her load.

  The Bilin River was peaceful and green in the fading light when she arrived at the west bank, where a makeshift camp—with temporary barracks and a mess—had been erected for the soldiers and refugees. Exhausted, she gratefully accepted a bowl of rice and fish paste, then went out to sit alone under the trees bending with the breeze on the bank; she couldn’t yet pretend to be comfortable visiting with others, even when she gleaned the extent of their further suffering. Such visiting still felt like a betrayal of those she’d left behind, and of Benny.

  But as she was raising the first mouthful of warm rice to her lips, she glanced up the bank and saw a soldier she’d last seen in Khuli. He was sitting alone beside a campfire, playing a harmonica. Lin Htin—or Lynton—that was his name, she remembered. He’d been passing through Khuli on his way to join the Karen levies in the war effort, and for some reason several men in the village had questioned his allegiances. Even then, she’d found his quick, sure manner and laughing poise to be riveting. He was also troublingly good-looking—and at least a few years younger than she was.

  As if sensing her stare, he all at once stopped playing and glanced up at her. It was very straightforward, his stare—it made her blush, though she doubted he could see the evidence of her embarrassment from twenty feet away. She gave him a little reluctant smile and looked back down into her bowl of rice, which she suddenly felt self-conscious about consuming alone. The harmonica started up again—to cry out the first part of a Karen ballad she hadn’t heard since childhood—then stalled.

  “Join me,” she heard his relaxed voice call to her.

  How ridiculously false her response, of surprise, of bewilderment, of hesitation. Soon, she was plodding toward him with her bowl, through the mud and a swirl of mosquitoes, the echoes of self-recrimination droning in her ear. Why was she coming, like a good puppy, at his first command, when all she really wanted was to be left alone? He continued to stare hard at her (there wasn’t a trace of Karen modesty about him, was there?), smiling broadly when she sat. And his smile only increased her sense that she must untangle herself from the situation as quickly as she’d ensnared herself in it.

  “Just who I was hoping to see,” he said, but the comment was directed at someone else—at a soldier, a doughy, thick-lipped, smiling boy who lumbered up to the fire with a bulging sack and a pot of water.

  Lynton picked up his harmonica and proceeded to puff out the sad tune again, thoroughly ignoring her and the boy, who went about making his senior’s supper, measuring a finger of rice, putting the pot down to boil, pulling an array of mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and fiddle-leaf fern from his sack, along with two small birds. Well, she had wanted to be left to her thoughts, hadn’t she? And there was something comforting about the respite that this togetherness allowed her. She relaxed into a state of merely eating and listening and observing as Lynton played and the boy plucked and cleaned the birds, and then scattered the charred wood, moved the pot to the embers, salted and skewered his finds, stoked the fire, and—with forked branches that he drove into the ground—constructed a stand on which to set Lynton’s dinner.

  Only when the birds began to drip and the mushrooms were sizzling did Lynton speak again. “You’ll have some of Sunny’s delicious cooking, won’t you?” he said, putting his harmonica in his pocket while Sunny, the boy, smiled sweetly at her. Sunny held out his hand for her bowl. When she gave it to him with thanks, he prodded a bird and some vegetables onto her leftovers.

  For a while, they ate in silence as Sunny dismantled the stand and headed off to bathe in the river. It was ridiculous, but the juiciness of the meal (more decadent than any she’d had since leaving Thaton), the way its oils coated her fingers, made her self-conscious all over again, and she felt her color rise with Lynton’s eyes, which expectantly met hers.

  “Do they know what has happened to your husband?” he said, jolting her. She was suddenly afraid of losing her composure.

  “Not as yet.” She put her bowl down, her appetite all at once gone. “Is it known—by everyone—that he was supposed to meet with the prime minister?”

  Lynton set his own bowl aside and felt for something in another pocket—his tobacco and paper, she saw. He silently rolled himself a cigarette, which he held out to her with a questioning look, and which she refused—and quickly regretted refusing. Then he put the cigarette to his lips, lit it, and fell into his thoughts, as though forgetting her question. In the flames of the fire, he seemed to see something painful; but his eyes drifted up to the deepening sky, and all the pain behind them instantly vanished.

  “Generally speaking,” he said at last, his fa
ce cast up to the emerging stars, “the everyone of whom you speak is utterly stupid.” He took a deep suck of his cigarette. “Of course, the higher-ups in our disorganized mess of a military have heard of U Nu’s supposed summons of your husband, and they say it was naive of Saw Bension to assume the meeting would ever happen.”

  “Why do they assume my husband assumed that?” she said quickly. The truth was she had struggled with her own private judgment of Benny’s unquestioning trust in Ducksworth’s—and Nu’s—word. Yet it had seemed possible to her that Benny knew Ducksworth could be leading him to his end, and that his reluctance to resist was a willful one, meant to spare her and the children, just as his reluctance to defend himself with the Japanese had been.

  Now Lynton took measure of her with the cigarette between his lips. “A drink?” he said. When she nodded, he pulled a bottle of whiskey and a metal mug from behind a nearby log, and poured out some of the whiskey for her. “There is something courageous,” he said, removing the cigarette from his lips, “about Saw Bension’s trust, no? Maybe it takes an outsider to trust the Burmans. Someone whose ancients haven’t been bitten by them again and again.”

  A cold wind blew in from over the river, carrying with it the memory of the mountain that she had traversed with the children. She shuddered, and Lynton’s eyes narrowed on her again.

  “Drink,” he commanded her.

  She did as he said, gulping the heat down, but the alcohol only further agitated her. “Is it true what they say,” she spat out, “that you spied for the Japanese?”

  Now he seemed to have been stung. He laughed—a brief, defensive chortle—and bowed his head, inhaling from his cigarette and then stubbing it out on a rock. “Who told you that?” he said finally.