Someone outside his cell went on providing him—or whatever he was—with just enough to exist on, and for those few precious seconds twice a day when that someone shoved his tray through the trap, Benny seized on the sight of a nervous, spotted, obviously masculine, immediately withdrawing human hand. And then, when the trap grated shut again, he clutched at the hope that this someone, this male human beyond his door, would linger long enough to hear, to comprehend, everything he spontaneously shouted at him—his most constant plea being for water, and then for relief from the rats, and then for an indication of how long this torment, this hell, would go on.
The answers, all the answers, came on what he thought might be his ninetieth day, when, for the first time since he’d been shunted into the cell, the door creaked open, and Benny, blinking in the blinding light of the corridor, saw the shape of a soldier. Or rather, of a general. Of the commander in chief of the Burma Army. Of Ne Win himself.
Was it a hallucination? The features of the man stepping into the shadows of the cell seemed to blur into one another as he stared down at Benny and began to speak, almost to soliloquize. “You are repulsive,” the man said quietly. “Strange, that you managed to produce such beautiful children. Your eldest—Louisa, is it? She’s quite the temptation to the spies we have in Bilin . . . Does that upset you? It shouldn’t. Because we can keep her safe if we choose. We can keep your wife safe. Not that she thinks of you as her husband anymore . . . I’ve caused you pain. I am very sorry. But you can understand her position, no? . . . Is she a widow? Is she still married? She has no idea. And her appetite for men who aren’t Jews is quite extraordinary . . . Don’t be angry! It’s amusing! Men of all ages passing in and out of the house she squats in, passing in and out like shadows with erections. Imagine her squatting over all those! Why aren’t you laughing?”
Now, at last, the man, Ne Win—there was no mistaking his foaming voice—moved, reached into his pocket, and threw something at Benny, who instantly, almost ferociously snatched it out of the air. But it was only a cigar.
“You are repulsive,” said the man, laughing. “And your repulsive wife thinks she’s very clever trading in sweaters and cigars. Look at the one in your hand . . . Strange how much a man’s hand resembles a claw when he is starved . . . See how she’s put a band of her own design around the thing? Clever, your wife, isn’t she? Started up a little factory modeled on the ones built by her husband—excuse me, by the man to whom she is false . . . Doesn’t realize she’s being allowed to live, to feed her little beasts, her hungry vagina.”
“What do you want?” Benny growled. He could snap; he could allow himself to snap, to snap this man’s neck in a few seconds.
Ne Win put his hand on the pistol at his hip and stepped back a foot, into the corridor, so that the light fell harshly across his own feral features. “Only to tell you a story,” he simpered, “a story of something that just happened. You see, some of your Karen leaders thought they were going to be very smart and meet with an American in Thailand—a CIA man, no doubt. Can you imagine? Here it is, almost August, with the rains so heavy—but they were adamant about getting over the Salween River. And when they reached the village on the edge of the river, the headman put them up in a tiny bamboo hut in the middle of an isolated field. Only stupid Karens would have agreed, don’t you think? Only stupid Karens would have waited for the rains and the swollen river to subside. But you already know what happened, don’t you? Go on . . . tell me.”
It was of Louisa that Benny thought then, and Khin. And only after, of Saw Lay. “Murdered.”
“You aren’t stupid at all like them. You remind me of a particular lieutenant of mine. We like to call him the Butcher. And he was the one, very early in the morning, before dawn, to lead the ambush. Those poor, stupid men. Every one of them done for . . . except your friend. Yes, him. You know exactly to whom I’m referring. Don’t look at me like that. Enough to make me nervous, that look. He lived, your friend! Just as your dirty children will live, and your dirty wife, if . . .” He paused to stare down at Benny with a smile so fixed it seemed panicked. “We’re going to catch your friend. And when we do, you’ll be the one to talk to him. To get intelligence from him. About your insurgent operations, of course. And also about the Americans. About what exactly their spies are doing on our turf.”
Benny couldn’t process Ne Win’s words; the physical presence and threat of the man were too insistent. But he kept his eyes watchfully on the general, who in the gleam of the corridor returned Benny’s animal stare, and then breathlessly, almost disconcertedly, murmured, “Have you understood a word I’ve said?”
The next evening, Benny was transferred to Insein Prison, where he was made the only class A prisoner among at least two hundred mostly Karen class B and class C political prisoners. Assigned a servant to cook his meals and to maintain his clothes, and, just as uniquely, allowed to roam the men’s barrack nearly at his leisure, he ought to have experienced the change as an enormous leap toward liberation. But if he found comfort in the plentiful food, and in the freedom of space, and in the inexhaustible supply of water—the gallons and gallons that he daily gulped and doused himself clean with in the drab communal shower—he could not escape the feeling that he was even more constricted here, in the company of other men. More constricted because he’d come to believe, inescapably, that the extraordinary thing—the truly extraordinary thing—was when others treated you well, not badly. He expected every other man to betray him; and he expected disloyalty of himself.
He was put up in a room with two narrow beds, the other ominously empty—waiting, he knew, for his “friend,” on the loose somewhere beyond the prison walls. In the hours after Ne Win’s visit, he had vaguely pieced together what the general had suggested with his mention of the Americans—that not all the Allies had left Burma to its own devices, that the Americans were somehow still involved in the country’s, and perhaps even in the Karens’, affairs. But this, all of this, was overshadowed by the more surprising realization that he, Benny, would be willing to betray Saw Lay in order to keep himself and his family alive. And to hide his diminished face from the specter of Saw Lay in these new, almost lavish quarters, he turned his back on the empty bed, turned his back on the other prisoners, who were hungry to hear his counsel about the revolution, about their cause, about the state of a Karen future that Benny felt he’d also already betrayed. Sometimes, stretched out on his hard mattress, he felt so annihilated by infidelity to his past that he imagined his body crumbling into dust that floated up in the stagnant air, all the way to the window through which, if he lifted his eyes, he could see over the top of the facing women’s prison to the bruised sky. What a negligent husband he’d been; what a sense of entitlement he’d had to the gifts of Khin’s body, to the gifts of her grace. And how pathetic he’d turned out to be as a man, ready to betray his highest ideals, to bow before the power of the ignoble for survival’s sake. He drank the cup of humiliation to the dregs, praying to God not to be spared.
But perhaps a month or two after his transfer, he happened to be standing on his bed, looking for a hook or a nail embedded in the beam above, when he was startled by the face of a woman in the window opposite his. She stood eight or ten feet away, separated from him by two walls and two sets of bars (his window’s and hers), yet her eyes seemed to speak directly to his. (Are you on your bed? those eyes said. Yes, I am on a bed, too, and, like you, seeking to understand my options. You won’t kill yourself yet—that would be rash; but it’s important to know what your escape route will be if one becomes required.) She could have been twenty, thirty, this woman, with a delicate-featured face enlivened by excitable dark eyebrows that rose up a half inch before falling toward the gracious smile she flashed him. And then she was gone.
Her name was Rita, and she had been a medical student at the University of Rangoon until her arrest five months before, when she’d dared to question why, at the hospital, Karen doc
tors were allowed to work while Karen patients were barred from treatment. Benny learned these details the following day, when, around noontime, she held up a pillowcase on which she’d written the compressed story of her recent past in bold English letters. So that he could read every one of these letters between the bars, she moved the pillowcase slowly from side to side, before replacing it with her worried face. (Have I embarrassed myself by reaching out to you? she might have been asking. Please write something back!) But then she ducked down once again, holding up the backside of the pillowcase, on which she’d written: “SAW BENSION?”
Of course, it was possible—entirely possible—that this woman was a trap laid to ensnare him. Yet her eyes . . . the gracious smile . . . He felt powerless not to throw caution to the wind. When he asked for something to write with, he was granted a pen and a journal of fifty-odd sheets. Given how huge he would have to make his letters in order for Rita to read them, he would be able to write little more than a sprinkling of words on each page. For hours, he was paralyzed by the necessary economies of phrasing: each time he went to write something to her, it seemed stale, clichéd, lacking the agitated understanding Rita’s eyes had instantly made him feel. “Do you need anything?” he thought to write. But that was foolish, because he would never be able to provide her with what she wanted. Or: “Is there someone looking for you?” But again, what could he do to ease her loved ones’ worry?
“Soon I will betray my friend to keep my children alive,” he finally wrote—not on the journal’s impossibly small pages, but on his own pillowcase.
As soon as he held the case up to his window, though, he regretted the self-revelation. If she were there to entice him into making disclosures, could he have more expediently assisted her in that task? But it was a different sort of regret that afflicted him when she replied, on a section of her bedsheet: “Lack of courage keeps us from understanding others’ perspectives.” Was she chastising him? Calling him cowardly for giving in to betrayal? Or, on the contrary, was she telling him in her abbreviated terms that it was cowardly not to empathize with men like him? Before he’d come up with a reply, she went on, as if in explanation: “And what makes us great can limit our greatness.”
The immediacy of her depth. The absolute absence of stock introductory phrases. Never before had he encountered anything like it, and his every last defense was broken down. Her words reminded him of his children: how he’d come to feel that they were nearly the only meaning he’d achieved in life, yet meaning that had the power to cause him to commit betrayal, to snuff out the meaningful. He wanted to explain as much to her, but to narrow his thoughts to such an extent that they could be clearly communicated in just a sprinkling of words—nothing had prepared him for that particular difficulty.
“We shouldn’t blame anyone for lacking courage or greatness,” she wrote a few hours later on her sheet in response to his continued silence and, he thought, his utter cowardice.
“But you don’t lack it,” he wrote, finally, on his own bedsheet.
“How do you know?” she responded.
What he knew now—just about the only thing he knew now—was that here in prison he’d suddenly discovered the freedom to face himself.
“How does man forgive himself for the lives he’s taken even in the name of saving lives?” he wrote on a piece of paper that he tore from the journal and persuaded the crooked-backed servant who cooked his meals to pass to Rita.
“He doesn’t,” she responded on the paper the servant tersely returned. “Only those who have reduced their humanity to almost nothing put their virtue and ethics and faith in an unbreakable safe.”
Him: “Is the man who seeks the limelight the one we should be suspicious of?”
Her: “Perhaps he is the one we should pity.”
Him: “I wish you didn’t know who I am, or that you hadn’t seen my face.”
Him again: “Then you wouldn’t know my race. I don’t want to know yours.”
Her: “Nor do I want you to know it.”
Her again: “Because I don’t believe in it.”
Him: “The most perilous symptom of suffering is self-pity.”
Her: “When we think we hold exclusive rights to suffering.”
Her again: “And we have the instinct to deprive others of theirs.”
Him: “Tell me of your suffering.”
They never spoke directly of their growing love, but that love was the subject of their every exchange. And he was unspeakably grateful for it. Unspeakably.
And then there was Saw Lay, suddenly sitting on the bed opposite his. “It’s nice here,” his dear friend said coolly. It was evening, sometime toward the end of 1949, and they leaned against their respective walls in the semi-shadows, too disconcerted by their contrived coming together to face each other in the remaining light. “We can almost pretend the war doesn’t exist,” he went on. “That it never existed in the first place.”
Was Benny being sensitive, hearing a measure of reproach in Saw Lay’s tone? Surely his friend suspected that they had been quartered together for a reason, that there would be a price to be paid for their mutual survival, perhaps even that Benny had been put up to informing on him. Yet Saw Lay also seemed to resent the change that had come over Benny, his new freedom in the safe harbor of this cell.
“Tell me about it—the war—the suffering,” Benny said to him. “Tell me what has happened. I know nothing, my friend.”
Hearing Benny utter this term of endearment with such old familiarity and tenderness seemed to surprise Saw Lay, and he lifted his eyes so that the light hit them, and he looked at Benny with an expression of amazed pain. But then he turned and cast his glance around the shadows of the room, as though to seek out a wiretap in them. And he said derisively, as though also addressing the enemy, “The Burma Army would be heartened to know that we’ve been reduced to digging up whatever ammunition—whatever buried Japanese or British three-pounders and artillery shells—we can find. And, of course, making arms that misfire—.303s whose brass shells have to be repeatedly used—that is, after they’ve been filed down to the scale of our rifles’ chambers, filed so thin they sometimes blow up in our fingers.”
“But there’s hope,” Benny hazarded, hearing the premonitory quiver of guilt in his voice.
“Hope,” Saw Lay returned ruminatively, sarcastically. “We have more fighters than ever before—twenty-four thousand at minimum. And still we’re slowly being pushed east, into the hills . . . It’s not just a matter of our lack of arms. Not any continuing disorganization of our forces. In fact, we’ve become much more disciplined, skilled . . .”
Down the corridor, someone—another prisoner—cried out in physical or spiritual agony, and Saw Lay became very alert, his ear turning toward the door as the corridor filled with the shouts of guards. But it was only the commotion of a group of men being escorted to the showers. Soon the pipes in the wall began to clang, and then came the sound of running water and the sudden rise in pitch of a few prisoners’ voices, the temporary escalation of mood that so often accompanied the prisoners’ escapes into the shower room.
The moonlight beginning to filter in through the bars of the window had washed Saw Lay clean of some of his scorn, and when he directed his eyes at Benny again, it was with a question in them. “It all comes down to trust,” he said quietly. “If we could trust them, we could actually talk.” His melancholic voice seemed to stretch compassionately toward Benny, suggesting subjects of which they would never speak. “But without trust, we become divided, we who were so unified in our desire for a dignified life.”
“Must we be divided?” Benny threw out. There it was again, the tremor of guilt in his voice—but also a loosening knot of anguish. His question, he knew, was wrong, even immoral, given what he would soon do to betray Saw Lay and their joint cause. But he felt like a child about to cry over a petty crime he’d perpetrated because a bu
lly had made him do it.
“You cannot make me reveal what they want revealed,” Saw Lay said. He spoke very calmly, very firmly, and also with a punishing parent’s depths of love. “And they cannot prevent me from revealing to you what they don’t want you to know.”
Benny was so stunned by the reversal in the conversation—from an obscurity in which all was mere suggestion to utter forthrightness—that his heart began to race. He felt caught, found out, and also frightened of what would soon be disclosed. And, like a child, he wanted to hide from it all and to deny the truth that was suddenly exerting its pressure on him. “I don’t know,” he stammered, “what you are referring to—”
“The British have been funding the Burma Army’s liquidation of our revolution,” his friend quickly returned. “I don’t mean the British aid program to Nu’s government that has been in place since independence. This is an arms program specifically designed to stamp out our uprising.”
When Benny didn’t respond—he couldn’t, so much did his system refuse to believe in the extent of the British betrayal—Saw Lay went on: “It was one of them, wasn’t it, a British lord who said that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Nu and his satraps—Ne Win—those are London’s allies now, and London will stop at nothing to keep them in power, so that the West keeps a foothold in the increasingly communist East. Apparently, they’ve convinced themselves of the legitimacy of Nu’s parliamentary democracy . . . So you cannot blame us for beginning to splinter over the question of trust itself, some of us even looking to the Communists in Burma, who as you know have been waging their own revolution against the government, and who are eager for us to join their cause, which none of us really believes in—”
Miss Burma Page 17