Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  When she didn’t respond—she’d forgotten who exactly had spread the rumor to her—he went on: “Our people are too simple. Their trusting nature can make them untrustworthy.”

  Without another word, he reached for some of his things behind the log, put on a brimmed hat, and threw down a jacket like a makeshift blanket. Then he took a rifle in one hand and stretched out his long body, tilting the brim of the hat over his eyes.

  “You might want to watch for the python,” he said sleepily, hat still over his eyes. “At least fifteen feet long. Before dinner, I saw it slither out of the water and swallow a rat Sunny had his eye on.”

  Something in the reeds rustled, and she gave a little yelp, causing him to chuckle.

  “Why don’t you sleep in the barracks?” she asked angrily.

  “I don’t like the reek of the group.”

  “And you’re not fighting for the group?”

  “Good night, Khin.”

  That he knew her name—had known it all along—set her heart beating hard.

  And for a moment more, all she could do was glare down at this undeniably beautiful young man, bound for battle, with only the dying fire by his side to warm him.

  Bilin’s Burman residents had fled along with their soldiers, and in a vast brick split-level, amid the ghosts of a family with at least three or four children, Khin quickly—if temporarily—established herself. She used the proceeds from the sale of her jewelry to purchase a hand-crank sewing machine and to hire three Karen women to help her run a tailoring shop (now the only one in town). The women were unskilled in the sewing arts but quick learners; soon she had trained them to operate the sewing machine and to embroider, crochet, and knit with the needles that she crafted by burning the point of bamboo sticks in ash. In exchange for vegetables or rice or peanuts to be ground into oil, she and the women began to turn out not just hemmed sarongs and men’s shirts, but also dainty dresses for girls and even festive sweaters—turquoise with orange designs, scarlet with violent streaks of purple.

  I will get the children, Khin said to herself with every passing day; but then another day passed, at the end of which she plunged hollowly into sleep by the embers of the kitchen fire (she couldn’t bear to sleep in any of the family members’ beds). The children are safer beyond the river, she thought. Or, I might hear of Benny’s whereabouts and need to go to him. If the children are here, I will have to leave them again. Her instincts told her that, much as the children might be suffering with the Forest Governor and his wife, they were better off without her—because her circumstances were unreliable, and because something inside her had become equally unreliable, even as, with every hour, she reliably put together a semblance of another life.

  And she was always searching for Benny—writing letters to Karens near and far, never failing to ask passing soldiers if they’d heard of his whereabouts or seen Saw Lay, who was supposed to be somewhere close to the delta leading a brigade. About two months after she’d set up the shop, one of her customers came rushing to tell her that a white Indian had been admitted to the Bilin hospital and that people were saying it was Saw Bension. She fled to the hospital, nearly more frightened of finding Benny than of continuing to live in the unknown. That unknown had allowed her to keep on soldiering through, hadn’t it? Yes, she realized, when she saw—instantly, and with enormous relief—that the balding, blood-drained, mortally wounded man who lay unconscious with a gaping mouth was not Benny. A sudden vision of her husband’s or children’s suffering would have been the end of the hope that allowed her to work on their behalf. She had the sense that, separated from one another, and unaware of one another’s fates, they were all in a kind of indeterminate state, a kind of limbo, where they were just managing to escape outright disaster.

  And as though to widen the limits of that limbo, and to avoid her confrontation with fate itself, she added to her daily burden in Bilin by starting to spend half of nearly every night in the hospital, ministering to the wounds that reeked of rotten meat and that fouled her mind with fear for Benny and the children. A teaspoon of Dettol in a gallon of water: that was the antiseptic mixture she used to clean the wounds and sterilize her thoughts. But not every man whom she treated survived, and not every man was purified by his suffering; many seemed to have been poisoned by suffering itself, reduced to nothing more than a shattered limb, blinded eyes. And, absorbed in the small task of aiding them, she became tainted, too—almost fatalistically resigned to her separation from Benny and the children.

  Then one night a stretcher with a dead child was brought in and another with the gravely injured mother, who wouldn’t allow Khin to nurse her and wouldn’t trouble anyone with her loss. She must have been around forty, the mother. One of her legs had been blown apart by a mortar, and when the question of amputation came up, she merely held up a hand and waved it across her face, as though to wave away the question and her life along with it. Khin crouched down beside her, while the woman took her in with a strange recognition, as if to acknowledge the torment Khin must be enduring having to go on in this world. Yet in her final, fitful hours the woman was racked by terror of further suffering, and the difficult death drove such fear into Khin that she determined to go for the children right away.

  But as she was preparing for the journey the following night, tidying the shop after her hires had gone—her body seething, close to dropping along with the heat and the last light—he showed up. Lynton. Eleven weeks had passed since she had last stood in his presence, and he was more beautiful than she had wanted to remember him being, so unblemished, so relaxed, she had to wonder if he had simply been loitering and avoiding life all this time. He stood in the front doorway of the house, his hands in his pockets, his eyes radiant and refreshed in the lamplight, giving her the impression that war was serving him, rather than the other way around.

  “You don’t remember me?” he asked.

  She heard the rumble of an army truck down the road, and then silence, and then her heart banging in her chest. “I am going for my children.”

  “Alone?”

  “You don’t think I can manage?” She was suddenly sure that she couldn’t go another day without someone—without him—to lean on.

  “You’ll be fine,” he said softly.

  Something about the way he’d said it made all the heat of her hurt—hurt she hadn’t known she was feeling—gather in her throat, behind her eyes. She turned, not wanting him to see it, and busied herself folding two sweaters while he silently looked on.

  He had to be sent away, she told herself; she was a married woman alone, and his showing up at nightfall was a form of degradation. What was more, the hurt he was causing her by presenting himself here was more unbearable than the hurt of her having no one, because it reminded her how impossibly and inevitably alone she was.

  “Khin,” she heard him say, just as softly, and she set the sweaters down, turned out the lamp, and crossed to the hallway that led to the kitchen, where her sleeping mat lay under the mosquito net.

  There, the only thing to waver was the firelight. He came to her, and she submitted to the thing inside her—the force—that knew exactly what she wanted, that waged a revolution against her strength.

  And he was a force to be reckoned with, she discovered. In the firelight, without a word, he possessed her comprehensively, almost dutifully, as though her need was his cause, and he was there to serve it, to very thoroughly serve it. And that service was like a trapdoor through which, all at once, she fell, blessedly ceasing to exist.

  Or blessedly coming into a new existence—one where she was unleashed from her chronic will to cease, to escape the deadening strength that had been her burden since she’d held her choking father’s intestines in her hands and survived. This new version of herself was anything but unscathed. And it hurt, it hurt terribly, when Lynton—his service suddenly completed—threw on his fatigues and left her alone under th
e mosquito net.

  She found him smoking on the stoop under the stars. “I have soup inside,” she said, embarrassed, clutching her already bound sarong to her waist.

  “Sunny will be waiting,” he told her, not coldly. “We’re heading off early.”

  “To the front?”

  “When we’re back, I’ll look in on you and the children.”

  He put out his cigarette and stood, turning to her so frankly, she felt more naked than she’d just been. “Is there anything you need?”

  The tender way he’d asked the question told her she hadn’t been a disappointment—at least not entirely. “When will you be back?” she ventured.

  He didn’t reel from her, but something about the way his jaw tensed, the way his head slightly shifted even as his eyes still burned with something like desire, conveyed everything she needed to know about his need for freedom. And suddenly—because of his stiffness, because of what she’d just been through at the hospital—she pictured him dead, lying stiffly in the reeds with no one but Sunny to acknowledge his passing.

  A few days later, she arrived in Kyowaing to find the children dressed in tatters and hesitant to meet her eye, hesitant even to acknowledge the gifts she’d brought on the back of an elephant—tins of condensed milk and meat and biscuits, silk sarongs and sweaters and embroidered dresses. As though to seek out the Forest Governor’s wife’s permission to enjoy, the children peered guiltily at the woman rather than face Khin—until Louisa snatched up a dress, vanished with it into the back room, and emerged minutes later resplendent yet somehow as though in costume, or armor.

  The dress—pale blue and dainty—had been made for a little girl; but this girl was clearly no longer the child who in Tharrawaddy had delighted in the frock cut from Khin’s eyelet petticoat—not even the child who’d pranced around her sixth birthday party showing off her flaring skirt while trying to swing dance with Saw Lay. No, this person, this eight-year-old, stood poised in the Forest Governor’s kitchen, staring back at Khin with wounded pride, as if to prove something—that she was still Khin’s daughter? Still intact? And she was intact, wasn’t she? She was more beautiful, even, though the dress was all wrong on her—too childish, and hanging from her lengthened frame in a way that made her seem overdeveloped. And she was more beautiful as only a full-grown woman usually could be; it wasn’t just that she’d shed much of her appearance of innocence (and Khin hoped that shedding had nothing to do with the weight Hta Hta was worrisomely gaining around her waist); it was that a self-possession more radiant than any innocence now shone from her, and this self-possession had been steeled by experience, Khin saw—by disappointment, heartache, and something that appeared to be a sense of her own power of body and mind.

  “Take it off,” Khin found herself instructing Louisa. “Now’s not the time for that kind of thing.” Khin gave the wife an embarrassed, commiserating shrug, as though she were more in league with the woman than with her own daughter.

  Could it be, she wondered later, as she led the children away from the place, that she’d been responding not only to the other woman’s envy, but also to something like envy rumbling in her own unruly center?

  Back in Bilin, they were all soon safely installed in the house that was almost their own, where Khin’s seamstresses were skillful and kind, and where Lynton shortly reappeared to press his smiling eyes on them as though he were an old family friend.

  Lynton—mysterious, ardent, given to flashes of hilarity and somber distraction . . . Over the following months, he was no stranger to Khin’s bed. True, he could sometimes disappear to the front lines for weeks; but he seemed to exist apart from the war when he was with them. And, with him, Khin seemed to discover a life as true as the one that had come before.

  Every morning, Louisa, Johnny, and Grace would scamper off to school in shoes made from bits of blown tires, while Hta Hta watched Molly, and Khin put in her hours at her tailoring shop or the cheroot factory that she soon started (located in a rented house, where her hires seasoned dried palm sheets rolled into the mild cigars). The afternoons were for the hospital, where she continued to volunteer, just as she continued to write letters of inquiry about Benny during breaks. Then, around five, Lynton would show up at the house if they were lucky, a cigarette between his lips, a bottle of something in his fist, a pocketful of candy or marbles or bottle caps for the children, who, save for Louisa, would race out into the dusty yard to greet him, as he pretended not to know what they were after.

  They rarely spoke Benny’s name—out of respect for him, it seemed to Khin, but also to shelter this new life from his memory—just as they chose to talk around what Lynton had become to her. They were so desperate for laughter, for the respite of carefree hours, and it was easier to find their own smiles by sequestering unpleasant subjects to the realm of private thought. The topic of the war at large—and the truth that this provisional happiness was at that war’s mercy—was also kept to a minimum. Certainly, they saw soldiers sauntering through the streets, heard references to fighting in conversations between Lynton and his friends, witnessed war’s horrors in every wound that Khin nursed at the hospital, where the children were sometimes brought along because, Khin told them, “We must not pretend suffering doesn’t exist.” But those reminders of trouble also instructed them to enjoy what and while they could.

  Now and then, Khin would be laughing with a seamstress about something one of the children had said, or taking her evening air and refreshment with Lynton, and the thought of Benny—of what he might be suffering, of the possibility that he was already dead—would strike her so startlingly she would struggle to get her bearings, as though after a vertiginous nightmare. And, gazing around at the pieces of her new life—the holier-than-thou neighbor scowling at them from a window, the children squabbling over a chicken in the yard, the cigarette drooping from Lynton’s lips, Hta Hta’s undeniably swelling belly (what had happened to the poor girl while she’d been in the care of the Forest Governor?)—Khin would seem to see through to the hopeless transience of it all. She would flush with shame, recognizing how far they had fallen, until certain words she’d heard years before would come back to her, words spoken by the rabbi of Rangoon that struck her now like an answer to a long-awaited question, like a pardon: We must find a way to rejoice in our circumstances. We must find a way to do more than endure.

  Lynton rejoiced and endured by drinking and joking and making music—if possible with his soldiers—and often after dark, when the air was cooler, the house transformed into a dance hall of sorts. Lynton would play his harmonica or the ukulele he’d found in a trash heap, while his men took turns spinning Hta Hta and the seamstresses and Khin around, until Khin’s limbs were so drowsy with release she almost fell down in joy. If the mood became too earnest, Lynton would break out with one of his absurd stories. (“I tell you what happened to Sunny the other day? Soldier from another brigade says to him, ‘This is a very good herb, a delicious herb—put some in Lynton’s food and he’ll never replace you.’ And Sunny, loyal bodyguard that he is, though a bit daft—I hate to break it to you, Sunny—oh, look how he’s blushing! Well, Sunny has a voracious appetite—goes without saying—and wanting to protect me, he decides to taste the curry he’s made with the herb before giving me any, and it’s so good he has another mouthful, and another, and soon I find him beside an empty pot, dozing in the rain, right there in the mud, with a smile plastered on his face, and the soldier who gave him the herb is laughing his head off over him. I missed out on something good, didn’t I, Sunny?”) And as if unable to stop partaking in the merriment—for fear of stumbling upon its permanent absence—Lynton would sometimes leave the house arm in arm with the soldiers, singing and joking as they staggered out of sight. “You’re not staying?” Khin didn’t dare ask him. Something told her that to lay claim to him in any way would only taint the joy they’d found together, a joy whose essential feature was freedom—from their pasts
, from responsibility to anything but the pleasure they took in each other’s company.

  Even on the nights when he stayed, only to quit her bed abruptly in the predawn hours—even then, when the lightness of his mood and step could strike her as disrespectful both to her and to the gravity of their times (the stench of fire could be burning in the air, and he would still leave her with a kind of heedless twinkle in his eyes, as if to say, You’ll be all right, old girl; or: After all, you’re not my wife, my responsibility; or: And if we die? Well, then we die. To do our part, that should be our wish, and to do so with as much merriment as ­possible)—even on those mornings when he left her wanting more and fearing indefinably for her life, she held her tongue. Did he have other women? And was she—if Benny were indeed alive—cashing in on something owed to her with this adulterous affair, or creating a debt that would be impossible to repay?

  She couldn’t think of any of it for long, because it all seemed beside the point. The point being that Lynton had restored her—to happiness, to life. And to turn her back on him would have been, in a sense, to choose death over life. She knew, from what she’d heard at the hospital, that he was the most fearless of soldiers and the most brilliant of military tacticians. And there was something about his body, something exceeding breath and blood and flesh, as though he carried in his cells and sweat the life force of all humanity. Watching him disappear down the desolate street on the mornings after he had been hers for a time, she stood stunned in the light of his mortality, and their secret knowledge of each other, and her certainty that she was but part of his passing enjoyment—less wanted than wanting, yet undeniably happy and still alive.

  And yet she wasn’t immune to darker feelings around him—feelings not dissimilar to those that had blighted her reunion with Louisa at the Forest Governor’s house. Sometimes, when she was in both Louisa’s and Lynton’s presence, she would see him catching on the vision of the girl, who might be sitting solitarily with a book, or kneeling by the sewing machine while turning the hand crank for a seamstress. Khin would know then, or almost know, that Lynton’s interest in the girl wasn’t anything to be alarmed by. And she would tell herself she couldn’t blame him for noticing what anyone with sensitive eyes might; Khin, too, was often arrested by the girl’s composure and also by Louisa’s unawareness of being noticed: there was nothing desperate about her beauty, which gleamed with serenity, seeming almost to have been ordained. No, Khin couldn’t blame Lynton; but she smarted at the way he began calling the girl “Little Grandmother,” as though the teasing, reverential slight could shake the poise out of her, and at the way he sometimes attempted to make the girl laugh by dancing a jig to the tune of her hand-cranking, or by pretending to pass out from boredom when Khin scolded the children. Then there was the afternoon when he and Sunny returned from some mission with a pair of boxing gloves for Johnny (could the boy have mentioned Benny’s promise to teach him to box when he turned six?) and a rusted bicycle for the girls, which Lynton encouraged Louisa to use in order to escape her chores. The bicycle, along with the implicit suggestion that Louisa challenge Khin’s authority, brought a smile to Louisa’s face, one quickly swallowed up by a pinched look of regret (the girl was apparently bent on resisting anything to do with the man, no doubt out of allegiance to her father). And Khin was left feeling as frustrated by Lynton’s misdirected attentions as she was exasperated by Louisa’s reasonable ingratitude toward him.