Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  “The Communists?”

  “I don’t want such an alliance—but tell that to others as we’re being betrayed by the arbiters of democracy themselves . . . You see what I mean when I speak of hope now. Where is the hope in the face of duplicitousness, in the face of such colossal betrayal, in the face of our likely internal schism over the question of whom to trust?”

  And the Americans? Benny wanted to ask. Where did they fit into this broader, terrible global picture? But then he realized that to ask such a question would only betray the faithfulness Saw Lay was showing him—his refusal to betray Benny by divulging anything with which Benny might betray the cause and their friendship.

  For a while, they each retreated into the remote corners of their unspoken questions and doubts. Then Saw Lay looked back at Benny, as though to push past the mental argument that had just been occupying his silence. “Should someone from the outside make an overture to you . . .” he said very carefully.

  Benny’s first thought was of someone outside this cell, outside the men’s prison—of Rita, who, indeed, had made an overture to him all those months ago. And then of Ne Win, the someone responsible for his continuing to be imprisoned. But on the heels of this came his awareness that Saw Lay—who was staring at him persistently and darkly—was referring to someone outside Burma. And all at once he recalled, with excruciating clearness, Ne Win’s words about the ambush on the banks of the Salween, about the Karen leaders who had “thought they were going to be very smart and meet with an American in Thailand.”

  Saw Lay continued, very quietly now: “Should someone who goes by the name of Hatchet reach out to you—”

  “Hatchet?”

  “If he does make contact, remember to consider the question of trust, Benny.”

  The question of trust was just what seemed to throw them into a renewed silence that only rang with still more questions . . . questions about everything that Saw Lay’s disclosure yet kept concealed. And when the wind beyond the window began to whistle plaintively, Benny watched with relief as it carried Saw Lay’s attention away from him, away from the cell, to the night and the revolution spreading out under the stars.

  “I remember, during the war,” Saw Lay said at last—“I mean the Second World War, when we were fighting the Japs and the Burma Independence Army—I remember coming upon a village that had just been scorched. There was a young woman who was picking through the remains of what must have been her hut. I still can’t bear to imagine what exactly she was looking for. But what struck me was her calm, the way she seemed almost practiced at this, as if it had been written into her fate, a fate that she already knew—and, even more astonishingly, a fate she had accepted.”

  Saw Lay inhaled sharply, as if to keep hold of nothing less than his life, in spite of his own doomed fate. “You know, I have never had a need to be seen, to be recognized for doing anything. In fact, I prefer to be invisible. Nothing seems more appropriate than to pass out of this world as invisibly as I passed into it, remarked by only one or two who truly cared for me. Perhaps that is a Karen trait, that inclination toward self-effacement, toward standing in the shadows. Our modesty that runs so deep it is almost self-annihilating. But now . . . now, suddenly, my invisibility—our relative invisibility—strikes me as very sad. Very sad, indeed . . . If you stand for a moment behind their eyes—behind the eyes of anyone for whom modesty is not an ultimate virtue—we appear to value our lives less than they do. It is a kind of permission, in their eyes, to ignore us. Or, even more ominously, to stamp us out like a weak strain of bacteria . . . I never thought of the British as being racist, but they must know Nu has declared he wants all Karens wiped out. How can they, then, with this arms program targeting us, not also be accomplices to genocide?”

  Past the window, the wind beckoned to them again, and Saw Lay seemed to ponder the possibility of following it. “Sometimes it seems to me that I am nothing but a thirty-five-year-old boy,” he finally went on, “brokenhearted because his daddy, who he thought saw him as precious, as unique, as loyal, as good and worthy, never really loved him at all—because his daddy loved him only as a convenience. Suddenly everything is altered—one’s sense of right and wrong, one’s old affection for the smell of the streets. No one to lean on anymore, nothing to believe in . . . You must know I’ll never get out of here, Benny. Not alive.”

  “But there’s hope,” Benny said again, without any kind of belief.

  Saw Lay seemed to hear the defeat in his voice. With a half-smile that was almost comforting, he said, “Ne Win and his men—the soldiers who’ve been hunting me—they certainly don’t have any hope that I’ll come around to their side. You know where they finally found me? Back in my brother’s house in Tharrawaddy. I couldn’t even bring myself to hide.”

  For a time neither of them spoke, and in the silence and the darkness there was nowhere to take shelter from their powerlessness over what would be. It seemed to Benny that there was nothing he could do to catch hold of his friend, to keep him there. That Saw Lay’s disenchantment was too profound.

  Saw Lay suddenly pushed himself off his bed and crossed to the window, where he stood looking up over the women’s prison at the far-off moon. Benny didn’t get up to stand with him, but he had the distinct inward impression of following his friend, carried by the whimsy of the wind, over sleeping Rita, past the tainted prison grounds, to a sparkling river, where they stood before the open branches of the forest, with the fields unfolding behind them. So this was the place where their paths would diverge.

  “I can’t,” Saw Lay said gently. “You mustn’t be hard on me, Benny. I know my faith requires forgiveness and steadfastness. But I can’t. Try to remember that in the face of duplicitousness betrayal is forgivable.”

  PART THREE

  Ascensions

  1951–1962

  12

  The Burma Problem

  Astonishing, how one could go from absolute intimacy to utter estrangement, Benny thought over a year later, as he sat for the first time across from Khin in the visiting area of Insein Prison. It was January 1951, midafternoon, an hour when he would normally have been napping; but a few minutes earlier his favorite guard, Zay, had popped his head into the cell, a strange half-hysterical smile suppressed on his lips, and said, “You have a visitor, old man”; and then Benny—still groggy and feeling he was in a dream—was led out into the glare of the yard, past some commotion between two class C prisoners, to a large shed in which he immediately recognized, sitting alone among a shadowy cluster of otherwise desolate card tables and chairs, his wife blinking back at him.

  For a few moments, after he had seated himself across from her as Zay hung back by the door, all Benny could do was mutely take her in while he palpated the peculiar texture of their apartness. A clamped hardness had taken hold of Khin. She held her now-ringless fingers tightly together on the table, so that her knuckles appeared blanched, and her mouth—once so supple, so tentative with words and yielding to his advances—was fixed in a line that seemed merely to express her staunch refusal to betray anything but her determination not to break into an outpouring of joy or relief or despair at seeing him again. Even her blouse—plain, opaque, in an unobtrusive black that might have been designed to deflect the eye’s attention (whereas Khin had preferred to dress in light colors before, and to feature her voluptuousness with delicate fabrics and formfitting cuts)—spoke to him of hiding, of ethnic concealment and feminine woundedness. What had life done to her?

  “Are they alive?” he heard his strangled voice come out with.

  Her eyes had been distantly but steadily watching him (taking in, no doubt, the dimensions of his own altered body and being), but now her gaze fell to the table, to a fly resting on one of his fingers, poised inertly between them. He saw her flick something away from her cheek, and then she brushed the fly from his hand, which she took and pressed as she finally began to nod with unmistaka
ble suffering, so that he understood that, yes, the children yet lived, but that they—and she—had barely come through with their lives.

  “Saw Lay?” she said finally, in a small voice, as she lifted her gaze to meet his. “Have you heard anything?”

  Now he was unable to hold her gaze, instead grasping her hands with his, as though to restore the flow of warm blood in them. “They caught him,” he said, the partial confession catching in his throat. “He was brought here. We were together. But . . . he was disenchanted.”

  He felt her peering watchfully at him.

  “He—?” she said when he finally glanced up to meet her assessing gaze.

  He nodded. “I found him.”

  Her eyes narrowed, but only slightly. And he seemed to see in them the distant look not quite of suffering or incomprehension, but of resignation—or was it envy?

  Another moment passed and, as if from a distance, he looked back at their hands, still clasped uncomfortably. Those hands appeared to be trying to hold on to the difficulty that he and Khin had encountered while apart, and trying to loosen themselves of culpability for having clawed their way through everything.

  “Where are the children now?” he managed.

  After a pause, she said, “Home with me. In Insein.” The continued smallness of her voice, its constricted quality, told him that in fact she had been shaken by the news of Saw Lay’s suicide and that she was struggling to contain her sorrow. “I wanted to come back—to Insein—alone when I heard you were here,” she continued. “I didn’t know if it would be safe. But . . . we’ll talk about that later. I found the children—that’s what matters.”

  “They weren’t with you?”

  Emotion flared in her gaze, pleading with him, he thought, to rush with her past wherever they had been. But it was only a moment. “I almost brought them today,” she said, “but I thought . . . too much of a shock for them, and you. They’re very eager to see you, Benny. When they learned you were alive . . .”

  She pulled her hands from his, regaining her composure, her flinty coolness, and she took something from her lap—an envelope, from which she removed a clutch of photographs that she spread before him on the table.

  “That is Molly.” She pointed to a dark, sturdy little girl with a dimple in her chin and a gleam so fierce she seemed to be considering pouncing on the camera as though to capture and eat it.

  “She’s two?” Only now did he realize he’d begun to laugh through tears.

  “Almost three. She never takes no for an answer, never stops fighting. Knows just what she wants and how to say just about everything.” The pictures had given her a way into familiarity; he heard, in the far reaches of her voice now, the distant lilt of anguish and release. “And this . . .”

  She pointed to a second portrait of two children lengthening toward the imperfections of adolescence. Johnny and Grace. “We had these taken in Rangoon last week. They spent all morning telling Hta Hta how to groom their hair.”

  “Tell me about them.”

  He heard the tightening of her breath as she stared down at the pictures of their children between them.

  “Johnny is grateful to be back, to have clean pressed clothes, to be studying ‘seriously’ again, as he says.” The tentativeness, the precision of her phrasing, made him acutely aware of the Burmese they were speaking, of its formality. They had always mostly spoken Burmese together by necessity, but he’d become much more proficient in the relaxed, unadorned grammar of Karen these past years, quartered as he’d been with so many political prisoners; more than ever, the convolutions of her Burmese struck his ears as a wall between them. “And Johnny takes himself very seriously. He’s nearly nine, with such a mind. Gracie worships him, and he wants nothing to do with her. She daydreams, climbing trees with a book and then forgetting the book and napping on the branches . . . And here’s Hta Hta and her little girl, Effie.”

  “Hta Hta’s a mother now?”

  “Another product of the war . . . We were at the Forest Governor of Kyowaing’s house. One of his sons, I think. Poor Hta Hta—she’ll hardly speak of it.” She touched the image of Effie, as though to caress Hta Hta’s child. “Feisty little girl,” she said with a laugh. “Gives Molly a ‘run for her money,’ as you used to say.” She blushed, having used the anglicism, perhaps because she was trying on English for the first time in years. Then, as though to move his attention away from her again, she pushed forward a portrait of a child who had been made to look like a doll.

  “What is this?” he sputtered, more repelled than intrigued by the image, and yet, somehow, spellbound by it.

  She began to tell him of how she’d recently made inroads with the wife of the local district commissioner, under whose jurisdiction this prison lay. The wife organized child beauty pageants, one of which had been held in Insein a few days after their return. “She’s very ‘keen on’ Louisa,” she said, using his English again, as though to somehow implicate him in what had been made of Louisa.

  And it was Louisa, the creature in the photograph, dressed in Burmese court clothes, her curls coiled perfectly, her lips and eyes and skin exaggerated with lipstick and charcoal and powder, her gaze fixed, and her smile guilelessly directed over a shoulder. Yes, it was Louisa (could it be that she was ten?), but he could see at once that under the surface of her cosmetic transformation, something different had come to the front of her beauty. On the one hand, she seemed to have aged significantly, to have come past her innocence. But there was also in her face a marked absence of discontent and gravity, which had pulled at the corners of even her happiest expressions. She seemed instead now to be too composed, to have been conquered by acceptance—of the condition of her life, of its being an endless battle with loss, never to be won.

  “You see, she doesn’t wear a sash,” Khin was saying. “She didn’t win. But it was a success, her participation in the pageant. Yesterday, she visited the woman and her husband at their home. She was invited in for tea, and she told the district commissioner of your innocence—”

  “Innocence?” He could hear the irritation in his voice, though in fact he was deeply affected by what his daughter had done for him. By her courage.

  “How hard life has been without you.”

  “Any day I could be hanged for treachery, Khin. It won’t be so easy maneuvering my release, convincing the district commissioner.” He wasn’t sure just what he was defending himself against, but it seemed he was being held accountable for something and he wanted nothing to do with it. “To call any attention to me could—”

  “He said he would see what he could do about your case.”

  She stared at him from behind a mask of—of censure? Or was it only anxiety? Then all at once that mask gave way, and he saw a deep welling of fear in her eyes, as she said, with such defenselessness he felt utterly ashamed, “Don’t you want to come back to us, Benny?”

  Three weeks later, he found himself standing in the cavity of his old living room, a tinny trio playing some welcoming tune in the flat light of the opposite window, while his children—looking more delightful in person, but more heartbreakingly unfamiliar—strained to sing along to the tune and simultaneously to smile at him. On the other side of the room an assortment of old friends stood arrayed beside a table laid with dressed-up provisions—rice and curries no less thin, from the looks of it, than what he’d received every day in prison. And there was Hta Hta, smiling shyly at him behind the guests, her peering little girl on her hip.

  “We still have a lot to do,” Khin said at his side, drawing him by the elbow into the room. “Put your things down.”

  His “things” were little more than his journals, and he was loath to part with them, but he did as she said, stooping to put his sack by the crumbling doorway.

  “The property’s not what it was,” Khin went on. “I’m still trying to get the gas station out of a neighbor’s hand
s. But your old employees have helped me to fix things up. They’re working on credit now, so you have to get going as soon as possible. I’ve already visited the ice factories—one’s been stolen from under us, but your manager handled the other as he could. The trucks are gone. The government’s taken over the trucking company. And the bottling plant—a lost cause . . .”

  He took in the splashes of darkness (old blood?) under a coat of paint on the walls; the bullet holes—they were everywhere and shabbily patched; the boards of plywood in the otherwise teak floor; the empty display case shoved up against one wall; the ebony piano with a missing leg, propped up by a table stacked with books; and the complication of odors—the overtone of spoiled curry, the undertone of wood rot, of death. The first shots of the civil war had broken out across this house, he well knew, but he hadn’t guessed that the house itself had sheltered battles. My God, how many men had been slaughtered in this very room?

  “Come greet your father!” Khin called to the children.

  They had been watchfully taking their father in, their faces trembling between looks of excitement and despair. But now Louisa began to pull her reluctant younger sisters across the room toward him, while Johnny hung back, fists tightening at his sides.

  “That’s not my father!” Molly hollered. “Don’t let that Indian touch me!”

  “What a terrible thing to say!” Khin scolded her, as the guests broke into peals of laughter.

  Now poor Johnny began to bawl noiselessly behind his sisters.

  “Of course he’s your father!” Louisa cried, her serious, gleaming eyes on Benny’s—but there was doubt in them. And when she ran to Benny and fiercely embraced him, she called out as though to the heavens, “He is our father! He is! He is! He is!”