Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  But all those feelings came to an end one early morning in October, when she was sleeping beside him and he reached out to take her hand. Something about the tenderness of the gesture—the lingering way he clung to her fingers—frightened her, yet he sprang from the bed as though nothing had changed.

  “Shall I make you something?” she said.

  “Sunny will have breakfast for me.”

  “Then some tea?” There was no coffee to be found anywhere.

  “Don’t trouble yourself.”

  He pulled on his trousers and a shirt, and hesitated over the washbowl, pouring some water over a rag and then roughly cleaning his neck and face.

  “Has something happened?” she said. She realized he could have learned something about Benny—or about Saw Lay, whom they’d lightly spoken of, and under whose command Lynton had apparently fought against the Japanese.

  Now he checked the bullets in his pistol. “Let me tell you something. If you hear gossip about the war, me, anyone . . . don’t be quick to believe it. Trust only your instincts . . . And remember to be on guard. Assuming we determine to hold to our vision, this war could go on indefinitely.” He put the gun in its holster and turned to face her. “You have to be smart. You can’t just trust any nice person who comes along.”

  She had no idea what he was getting at, only a sense from his tone that disaster was imminent and that she must soldier on without him. And to keep him here in the room with her a moment longer, she rose from bed, all at once ashamed of her naked and well-used breasts, which never failed to remind her that Lynton, at twenty-four, was four years her junior. She wrapped a sarong under her arms to hide from his unflinching gaze.

  “I’ve received a message,” he went on. “Nothing you should worry yourself about, but we’re being moved to a place where we’re more necessary.”

  And there it was. The end. And how absurd—after all that she’d survived, much of it without a man to bear her up—that she should feel utterly incapable of enduring any of this without him. Allowing a young man such as Lynton into her life, a man who lived for freedom . . . It had only ever thrown into relief how burdened she was, how hopelessly weak and dependent.

  “Don’t be angry,” he said, giving her one of his quiet, attentive smiles.

  “Why should I be angry?”

  That was enough to make him break out into one of his merciless laughs. He took her into his arms, and she—bathed again in his vibrancy, in the heat and light that emanated from his skin—allowed herself to pretend that she had been wrong, that everything would continue between them in a way she hadn’t yet guessed.

  “You’ll take care, won’t you?” he said, the smile in his voice slackening. “You’ll take care of the children?”

  “What a question!” She’d meant to scold him, but her words caught in her throat, and she felt as though she were scolding herself instead.

  She had never felt at home in Bilin, occupying another family’s abandoned house. The air was stagnant, the Christian school was pickling the children’s brains, and the neighbors were a pack of pious gossips. But now, in the aftermath of her happiness with Lynton, she saw how savagely those neighbors and even her customers peered at Hta Hta’s expanding belly and hissed about Khin’s affair with Lynton, suggesting that—according to her seamstresses and cheroot rollers—he had been one of her many adulterous lovers, and that his absence now opened the way for her to more freely pursue their husbands.

  And she was startled to find that she had become rather careless with her businesses during her recent carefree days, not always registering which wages she had distributed or which debts she had paid in her logbook, but scribbling notes she’d massed in piles around the house if she’d kept them at all. (Could it be she owed such an exorbitant sum to the shepherd, whose wool was so fine, and whom she’d thought she’d long since remunerated? She was sure she’d recently paid him, but in which pile in which part of the house lay his dashed-off receipt?) Part of her success as a business owner had arisen from her willingness to defer payment for her own goods for sale; and now she found that she had been just as careless, during her liaison with Lynton, with records of debts owed to her. Had the holier-than-thou neighbor always avoiding her eye ever paid for that case of cheroots? The thought of confronting the woman, with her reproving looks, was just as stomach-turning as the thought of facing the disorder of the piles—a disorder reflecting, more than anything else, how undone Khin had been by Lynton, by the miserable joy she’d taken in him.

  One particularly oppressive night, after the children and Hta Hta were in bed, she scoured the house for piles of her papers and receipts, and then, her head pounding, spread everything out over the kitchen table. For hours, she struggled to cross-check her ­memories—some vague, some quite clear—with the numbers that had been recorded, and in the end all she was certain of was that she owed hundreds more rupees than she could reasonably claim to be owed, and that soon she would have no way to pay her employees’ wages or the cheroot factory’s rent, and no way to purchase basic staples to feed her children.

  Near her face powder and the mirror reflecting her sobered, candle-haunted features, she kept a secret lockbox, and when she opened it now she found—instead of a roll of bills—only a single, rumpled ten-rupee note. Of course she had borrowed from her store of bills from time to time to pay this person or that, but she had reminded herself to replenish the box whenever she could, hadn’t she? What had been important was to keep going, from day to day . . .

  In the kitchen, Lynton had left a half-drained bottle of whiskey, which she grasped by the neck before stumbling out of the house into the light of the full moon. The air outside was still and drenched in the heavy scent of something sickly. For a moment, she stood taking swigs of whiskey, feeling disconcerted by the cloying smell and the immense quiet of the sleeping street, which seemed to mute the roaring in her mind. The bitches, she thought, remembering the evil words the neighbors were said to have spoken against her. The haughty bitches who obediently sat in church all Sunday, listening to lessons about tolerance and the golden rule, only to be quick to cast stones. They couldn’t wait to prove their superiority, and only showed their own smallness of heart and mind instead.

  “You think I’m having affairs?” she screamed into the silence. “Can’t you see I’m full of juices? I’m so fertile, if a man touches me, babies pop out! You could go to bed with an elephant and nothing would happen!”

  For the next three days, storms blew in unremittingly from across the mountains, like a cosmic injunction that Khin should shut herself in with her thoughts. But she shrank from those thoughts, as though unworthy of them. Never again, they commanded her. Never ever again should she allow herself to lose her way in the inebriation of a man’s company. Never again should she so recklessly put herself in a position of inviting others’ censure.

  The sky cleared on the fourth day, and, with the new sunshine filtering in through the trees, her mood began to lift. She asked Hta Hta and the children to follow her outside to a damp tangle of grass under the tree in the yard, where she set up a lunch made from breakfast leftovers. And as she glanced up at the shimmering road and the opening doors of her neighbors, it occurred to her that if she were to move the cheroot factory into this house and sell off the sewing equipment, the money saved and made would be enough to gradually pay off her debts. And couldn’t she, with very little labor, make something that these neighbors would enjoy far more than sweaters or tailored sarongs? Take a leaf, steam it, throw in some chopped betel nut and a dash of lime, a little anisette, maybe some tobacco if there was any leftover from the cheroots . . . Her mother had long ago taught her how to make betel so pungent and intoxicating, no one would be able to get enough of it. Which of her neighbors didn’t have a mouth reddened and teeth blackened from betel?

  Now she watched Johnny run out to the gate to escape the mosquitoes hovering over th
eir meal, and she had the sense of having nearly evaded disaster. With her first separation from the children, she had allowed herself to forget that they alone were the true center of her world. Yet here they were, by some gift of grace, within her line of sight: Gracie dashing out to meet her brother, Louisa calmly following after, while Molly grabbed at a handful of wet grass. Here they were, all four of them, resilient and curious, alive.

  And soon they would be joined by another.

  “You’re pregnant, Hta Hta,” Khin dared say to the nanny, who had started pulling blades of grass from Molly’s wet mouth. “Was it the Forest Governor? One of his sons? Did he injure you? You can tell me.”

  For a moment, the poor girl only looked at her in a kind of dazed grief. Then she said, obviously ashamed, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  Khin reached out and touched the side of her plump, soft cheek. “I’ll help you raise it.”

  Never had she spoken so openly and affectionately to Hta Hta, in whose eyes there was now a gleam of hurt and also of relief, as though the source of the terrible ache festering in her had finally been identified. With time she would accustom herself to that ache, Khin told herself.

  “Is it a troupe of dancers, Mama?” Johnny called from the gate. He was pointing to a line of bullock carts trundling down the road. “Can we go see? Can we, Mama?”

  “Yes, Mama!” Gracie joined in. “Please!”

  Khin stood and drifted to the gate to stand by Louisa, while Johnny and Grace galloped up the muddy road.

  “Is it a funeral, Mama?” Louisa asked, so calmly it put a chill on Khin’s spine.

  Only then did Khin glimpse what the girl had seen: piled onto the bed of every approaching cart were three or four coffins.

  Bubonic plague had broken out, the infected carried away swiftly and with excruciating pain. By twilight, it was agreed that Hta Hta would take the children to live with the family of one of the seamstresses, who came from a remote village on the plains of the tigers, about eight hours away, while Khin would stock the family with supplies by selling whatever goods she could on the road.

  And just like that, they were saying their good-byes again, the children collected in the rear of a horse cart that Khin had hired with her ten rupees, and Khin kissing each of them—not as Benny might have, with a chaste peck on the brow, but as a Karen, by placing the side of her nose against each of their cheeks and inhaling deeply.

  “Who will deliver my baby?” Hta Hta asked, as if the parting had finally awakened her to the child who would soon be wrenched from her body.

  “You’ll find that if you look there will be people to help you,” Khin told her.

  A violent wind picked up, the driver hit the horse with his switch, and the cart began to roll away.

  Khin stared at the departing children, trying to sear the picture of them into her memory: Johnny looking back at her with eyes reflecting the deepening night; Gracie avoiding her gaze by nestling into Hta Hta’s swollen side; Molly, fed up with the seamstress’s feeble attempts to console her, whining and reaching her chubby arms back toward Khin; and Louisa, now taking the baby into her own small lap. But a wild, frightened expression suddenly broke over Louisa’s face.

  “Promise we’ll be all right?” she called to Khin over the wind.

  And, following after the cart, Khin cried, “Never lose faith!”

  11

  The Faithful

  It had been Ducksworth’s smile, false and scared, that had spoken of disgrace to Benny seven months earlier, in April 1949, when his old friend had come for him in Thaton. And it had been the way the man’s fingers had instantly recoiled from the envelope he’d dropped in Benny’s hand, the one containing the letter from Nu. And then it had been—as Ducksworth and Benny had sat on the plane bound for Moulmein, confined to a physical proximity they hadn’t shared since their days around the same desk at B. Meyer—the way the man’s skin had given off the damp odor of anxiousness and avoidance. No, Ducks­worth wasn’t settled, Benny saw; he wasn’t settled at all. But whether his disgrace was merely that of having joined the Burma Army’s ranks after his long habit of colonial apologism, Benny couldn’t be sure.

  “You going to tell me how you ended up a lieutenant in their army?” Benny attempted on the plane, putting on his own (unintentionally) false smile. He could feel the heat of that falseness burning his pinched, trembling cheeks.

  “Their army?” Ducksworth said stiffly.

  “You know what I mean.” If Benny could just turn his old friend’s disgrace into something to laugh about (however mordantly), if he could just reel back eleven years and remind Ducksworth of their once easy, rancorous banter, he might stand a chance. “What happened?”

  “What happened is that you’ve lost your manners.” The rebuff ought to have reassured Benny, but it was delivered coldly, as if confirming something suspected.

  Ducksworth stared, tight-lipped, toward the cockpit, almost at ease—until the plane rapidly descended, causing him to grip the armrest between them. He nearly bolted out of his seat when the plane touched ground; then, on the dusty, desolate tarmac, he cast his eyes around like a bewildered child waiting for some adult to claim him after an arduous excursion. “Now there should be—there should be—someone here to meet us,” he sputtered.

  That someone was a swarm of armed guards, who surrounded them in the modest airport and demanded—amid curses and insults and jabs with their guns—that Benny get back out to the darkening runway. Benny’s last look at Ducksworth was of him covering his head with his hands—in shame, or self-defense. And then Benny was herded out, bracing himself for the fatal shot, and having the odd instinct to look back and cry out to his old friend. As though in Ducksworth’s face he might find one last vision of faithfulness, one last glimpse of affection or regret.

  But he was not killed. Not yet. In Rangoon’s notorious Barr Street lockup, a temporary holding place for the most hardened criminals, Benny was thrust into a cell without explanation and without an opportunity to speak to anyone in charge. Yet he was not left entirely alone in the eight-by-twelve-foot cell, whose clanging steel door closed his world off completely from the prison, and whose only amenity—save for a thin, sordid blanket—was a bucket hanging from a rope in a narrow hole in the floor. It was out of this hole that his company crawled. The moment the trap in the bottom of the steel door grated open twice a day, an army of rats invaded, watching with rapacious red eyes and twitching whiskers as Benny’s food—thin rice soup for breakfast, or a gelatinous mixture of rice and bits of meat for ­dinner—was pushed on a tray into the cell. But to call these creatures rats was to do them an injustice. Big as cats, with sinuous, almost hairless bodies and scaly pink tails, they hurled themselves at the dish with piercing shrieks, and Benny had to beat them back with kicks while they snarled and snapped, trying to sink their long teeth into his ankles. They begrudged him every mouthful, and he was forced to defend himself each second that he stuffed the food into his mouth. Cheated of their meal, his cellmates wrestled with one another, snarling and biting, or slavering and uttering hoarse cries at Benny, their fierce eyes greedily watching his every move.

  That would have been enough; but as night fell, and the sickly light emitted by a small aperture near the ceiling died away, the creatures were hideously emboldened and scampered freely about the cell, scuttling into corners, chasing each other around the walls, squeaking and chattering until Benny passed out and they scurried over his inert form, tearing at his face and throat and testicles before he beat them off and, in the blackness, murdered as many of them as he could with his bare hands.

  Because he was given only a mug of water every third or fourth day, his tongue grew swollen and his mouth and skin, already covered with scabs from his fights with the rats, cracked. He was so chronically exhausted and in pain that he might have been lured by the solution of the rope from which his toilet hung. But the rava
ging hunger of his companions fed his own animal instinct to keep fighting, to survive.

  Though he wasn’t the one who survived precisely. No, the creature who survived as the rats’ contender and companion was more villain than prizefighter, more vermin than man. Bloody sons of bitches, he taunted the rats, and he scratched a strike into the wall for every one of them that he killed, beside his tally of the days that passed. Bastards. Devil fucks. Earth scum. He counted the rats and recounted them, and their numbers only seemed to multiply, and he often lost track and had to count and recount them again. You belong here. Dirty Jews. Born in the dark. The sewer. Go to hell—no one wants you. Think they care what happens—the humans? Your mama knew what would become of you. Better off dying.