Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  After Saw Lay’s suicide, he had lost all but the most superficial interest in the revolution and politics. Ne Win and his satraps had promptly seemed to forget him, and Benny had been happy enough to return the favor and disregard them. Of course, his fellow inmates often spoke about the ongoing war, and he’d been generally kept abreast of the state of affairs for the Karens (that much of the delta had been lost, including Insein; that the revolution was slowly being pushed up into the hills, and that U Nu had designated a corner of the already-lost backwater “Karen State”). But these dispatches had only confirmed Benny’s growing sense that to be overly taken in by news of the moment was a grave mistake (the story that the Karens now had a state to lightly administer was just a story, wasn’t it?—only 20 percent of Karens lived in that remote area, where there wasn’t one urban center). And, bit by bit, Benny had recovered in prison, which had become his bulwark against the world. Recovered from the shock of losing Saw Lay, recovered from the tyranny of the moment—in large part through the fragments of writing which he’d continued to exchange with Rita, and by which he’d learned to tend to his inner landscape. Not that he’d been merely acquainting himself with himself. Rather, by means of his correspondence with Rita and the time he took just to think, he’d seemed to be clearing a view from which he could peer out at the broader human predicament. The sense of timelessness he’d experienced then, of expansiveness, of losing his insignificant self to the sweep of humanity, had been undeniable. It had felt akin to looking out at an ancient moonlit valley and then up at the unfathomable stars. He’d thought ceaselessly of his family then; he’d dreamed of them, worried over them so intensely he’d sometimes feared he would go mad. And sometimes, by means of the inner view he was cultivating, he’d felt as though he were mysteriously looking down over Khin and the children. But it was also a view that reminded him to be grateful for what he had in separation from them. Rita’s far-off, infinitely patient, tender smile had been part of that.

  And now the separation was a thing of the past. Now he was apparently a free man, yet he felt strangely sentenced to solitude all over again. For one, all the pleasure he’d taken in socializing was gone. Khin prodded him to arrange dinner parties to reestablish old business contacts. The British Rowing Club had been replaced back in ’48 by the Union Club, which was frequented by government officials. “But there are other clubs,” Khin said. “Go. Go!” It was as though she couldn’t stand the stink of who he had become, the man who grew nauseated at the thought of meaningless talk, at the thought of strained smiles, exchanges that skipped over the shallows of halting drivel, only to alight—for a tense moment—on the possibility of depths beneath, of actual intimate exchange . . . No. No. It wasn’t for him, not anymore. He had become far too sensitive for all that.

  Many mornings after waking beside Khin—who didn’t touch him, and whom he couldn’t muster the confidence (or, he feared, the interest) to touch—he would sit in his old chair before the view of the hillside he’d so loved, the view that looked out over the Karen village of Thamaing, which Khin said was slowly being rebuilt after having been burned to the ground. He couldn’t imagine why he had ever thought he had the right to interfere with Karen affairs. And anyway, the place itself seemed foreign to him—not Insein, per se, not even Burma, but the planet. The feeling of the rain when he reached through the window to touch its wetness, the open expanse of the bunching clouds, and then the lush hillside along which the drive he’d had constructed snaked its way with such . . . certainty. It all seemed to be made for someone far surer of his place—or anyone’s place—here. The sound of his children would drift through the house—the sound of his daughters singing or pretending (“Pretend you’re a princess, Louisa, and your parents died, and an evil witch took over and made you do all the chores”), or of stout Molly galloping down the hill with Johnny tumbling after (“That’s my net, Molly! I get to catch the shrimp! Mama!”)—and he would be overcome by feelings of sorrow for the inevitable pain they would feel, and then for the inevitable loss of that capacity to feel. God only knew what pain they’d already endured while he had been locked up—another source of his feelings of displacement; he had been told only, and in the vaguest terms, that the children had been moved to Kyowaing, where the Forest Governor lived, and then to Bilin, and finally to a remote Karen village, while Khin spent most of her months away from them, trading on the road and vainly seeking news of him.

  Increasingly, he shut himself into his old study, retreating from Khin’s beseeching looks and the younger children’s noise with the excuse that he was coming up with a business plan. (“For . . . ?” “Pharmaceuticals. An import business. I have a Swiss contact. Perhaps you’ve heard of La Roche?”)

  “Have you finished the plan?” Khin would ask after nervously popping in on him.

  “Still working the figures,” he’d say. How he pitied her! She still held out hope that the man in front of her could be restored to the man she’d thought significant.

  In the widening space between them, he seemed to see shadows of the men she had known during their days apart. (“Passing in and out like shadows with erections”—wasn’t that what Ne Win had said?) What did Khin need him for? She had survived and supported the family without him.

  “I’ll turn in, then,” Khin would say at last, looking weary and defeated.

  And in her absence, the silence of the house would become excruciating.

  And standing to follow her, he would confront his reflection in the oval mirror by the door. And before he could turn off the kerosene lamp, he would see his face staring back at him, fallen, with puffy drooping eyelids and a twisted glistening mouth—haunted—but still somehow gasping for air.

  He had been afraid that, up close, Rita’s soul would be less recognizable to him, or that, on the contrary, their recognition of each other might be so complete that he would have no choice but to call an end to his marriage. But as soon as he was led into the visiting shed, nine months after his release—as soon as he saw Rita sitting in the failing light—he knew he had no reason to fear. There was a kind of silent declaration of being emanating from her skin. It filled him to bursting with compassion. It made him want to shout with regret, with rage over her aloneness and constriction. But not with passion.

  For a while they just observed the unexpected awkwardness of sitting together. He sank into the rickety chair across from her and allowed her to take him in: middle-aged (could it be he was really only thirty-two?), wrecked of body, somehow surfacing from a grief as profound as any he’d succumbed to in his life. And he confronted the realness of her face, her extraordinary thinness, which seemed to have something to do with the faint lines over her thickly lashed amber eyes, with the knot of her wiry hair, and with the dryness of her fine fingers resting on the lip of the table. He didn’t want to notice her dissimilarity to what he’d imagined, her slight and innocuous imperfections, but, yes, the animal in him confirmed what it had sensed the moment he’d walked in: that he was safe from chemical interest in her, and just as helpless not to give off cues that would tell her as much. Would she be disappointed?

  As if to prove to him that she was beyond either baseness or judgment, she broke into that familiar expression of generous ­kindness—her smile!—and he had to look back at the door for a moment in order to conceal his sudden rush of emotion.

  “I don’t see Zay,” he muttered stupidly.

  “Who?”

  Her voice! Even with this simple, banal question, it resonated with gentleness, centeredness.

  He turned back to the vision of her still smiling searchingly at him. “I tried to come before,” he stumbled. “Several times. But they were intent to have me wait only to turn me away. Once I brought a cake—a pineapple cake Khin made—”

  Was he imagining that a subtle change came over her face at the mention of Khin’s name (which he hadn’t meant to mention), a diminishment of her smile’s generousne
ss, a closing of her eyes’ vast reach? Or was it only that he was seeing her through the lens of his own intensified embarrassment—about being sorry for recklessly mentioning his wife, about having lied to that wife by repeatedly claiming to be visiting an old business colleague, about knowing—knowing, now—that he did belong to Khin.

  “One of the guards,” he persisted, “had a fine time turning the cake into a pulp with a rod, looking for razors or some such thing. And then today, they waved me in with no trouble at all. Makes no sense.”

  Whatever hesitation he thought he’d seen narrowing her features was gone, and it sent him into a faltering silence, through which her smile (of empathy? of remorse?) only deepened.

  “Your voice,” she said after a moment. “It’s much lower than I’d expected.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t hear it in your cell. Have a devil of a time keeping it down.”

  He’d often seen her laugh, but to hear laughter falling from her lips in such loose, forgiving waves filled him with warmth, with worry for her, with guilty awareness that though he loved her, their romance had ended the moment he’d left prison.

  “I wish I’d heard your voice when you were here,” she said. “It would have been something . . .” But she couldn’t finish, and he had to glance back at the door again.

  “I thought,” she said after a pause, in that gentle, steadying voice of hers, “that maybe you wouldn’t visit.”

  The vulnerability of the confession, like a hook under the ribs, drew his gaze back to hers. How nakedly, how honestly, she faced him.

  “What I mean is that I miss what we had, Benny . . . The writing . . . But I would give up all communication, keeping in touch, if it hurts you. If it keeps you from your life and the world. I wouldn’t want you to hold back on my account.”

  Was that what he’d been doing?

  He was too moved by her humanity to answer, to do anything but reach across the table and take her thin, cold hand in his. Silenced, she stared with choked relief into his eyes, and he clung painfully to her hand, aware that he was being rescued by her again, though not in the way she would have wished.

  Time took on its old sprinting character after that day, when he determined to claim as much time as he could—with his children, in service of emancipating Rita, and for Khin, the woman from whom his time had been stolen.

  The truth was they hardly saw each other anymore, he and Khin. Of late she had begun moving some of her personal items into one of the guest rooms, as if to decamp from him, and she often headed to the Karen village across the highway to tend to the sick or deliver a child (or make love to a better, kinder, bolder man, Benny had to wonder). When they did pass each other in the hall or kitchen, he felt her looking at him with respectful, frightened anticipation, as though she were waiting for him to speak the words that would restore them to the closeness they had once almost perfectly shared. But he somehow couldn’t come up with those words, couldn’t manufacture passionate gestures. And anyway, there were other kinds of loving gestures to be made, he assured himself—ones just as expressive of his investment in their marriage and her happiness.

  The government was swiftly nationalizing companies, and their family had been limping by on sales of ice, which he no longer had the rights to distribute, and by selling off pieces of their property. At last, he earnestly tried to put together an import deal with La Roche. He had developed ties with some of its executives at the height of his prosperity, and they were intrigued now to learn what Rita had disclosed to him in prison: that Rangoon General Hospital had long been perilously short on medications. (It didn’t hurt that pursuing this particular line put him in regular touch with the hospital chief and officials in the health ministry—any one of whom, Benny was convinced, could maneuver Rita’s release in return for certain favors.)

  Under the cover of this La Roche business, in the shadow of the broad black (government?) car always trailing his own decrepit one, he was also putting together a dizzying picture of what time had done to the country. Just as Aung San had, U Nu was beating the unity drum, claiming to want to overcome discord among the ethnic groups (“to convert their clanism into patriotic nationalism so that any insult or threat to the Union becomes as unbearable as an insult or threat to one’s family” were the prime minister’s words); yet the programs Nu had recently put in place promoted what Benny thought of as a Burmanization of the country. There was Nu’s mandate that only Burmese could be used in governmental affairs and in schools, and that history be taught from a perspective of Burman nationalism; then there were his Ministry of Religious Affairs’ loud efforts to spread Buddhism. Lately Benny had heard rumors, from vendors sporadically floating up his drive, of other more hushed-up discriminatory policies—including the government’s stripping of land from “foreigners” (even those whose families had lived in Burma for centuries) and the widespread denial of applications submitted by minorities for licenses, loans, and citizenship. He wouldn’t have been surprised should the prime minister decide to scrap the country’s anglicized name along with the foreigners, and rechristen the place Myanmar in honor of the Burmans’ more erudite word for their own ethnic group. At least then it would be obvious to the rest of the world—wouldn’t it?—that this government had an agenda to monopolize power for the Myanmar people.

  The rest of the world. More and more, as his days of freedom sped by—as he played with the children, and plotted Rita’s release, and worked to restore for Khin a semblance of their old life—it became clear to Benny that there was something else he must do with his time, something directly pertaining to his wife and her people’s freedom. And that something had to do with beaming a message out from Burma to the other side of the world. But how? And precisely what message would he send?

  One sweltering night he paced his study in nothing more than his underpants, mumbling to himself. “The problem . . .” he said. “The problem . . .” The clock on his desk ticked with extra force, as though to comment on the slowness with which he was trying to arrive at his inchoate point. He put out a cigarette and passed by the faltering light of the floor lamp. The problem was that there would always be problems among men, and neither Nu’s “unity” nor communism accounted for that, or allowed men to negotiate their problems through government. Only democracy did that. “But even if I believe that we are all brothers and sisters—in spite of our differences—deserving of the same respect . . .” he said to himself. “Even if I believe it with all my heart, if you don’t believe it—if you abuse my brothers because you feel they are not yours, that they are inferior—then I am forced to protect the brotherhood you abuse.”

  He lit another cigarette and smoked it broodingly for a minute, peering out his small open window at the moon. A breeze drifted in carrying the heavy scent of Khin’s flowering trees and of the rain dripping warmly from the rooftop. He might have still been in prison.

  “Yes . . . yes,” he went on. He seemed to be picking up the trail of some truism. A man who lived in a state that, through Burmanization or the like, had vanished that man’s culture no longer had the right—the freedom—to choose to live as a member of that culture. He was in a kind of prison . . . So . . . He took another languorous puff. “What if we divide the country into ethnic states within a larger federal democracy? Each of those states could enjoy a degree of self-determination.”

  Even as he said this, though, he felt defeated by hopelessness, by the humidity of the night, and by a host of problems that his solution would give rise to. “Bah!” he spat, putting out the cigarette with disdain. “In any case, the Burmans will never give up territory!”

  “Daddy?”

  When he turned with a start, his heart leaping, he saw Louisa standing in the doorway, her long braids stretching mournfully halfway down her nightdress. They seemed, those braids, to be a strange gesture to a childhood the girl had already left behind. She was tall for her age and undeniably begi
nning to develop, taking on the lines of a woman with all the attendant complications and sensitivities. Yet in her eyes he saw a young child’s need for reassurance. Lately, she’d been popping in on Benny when he least expected it, peering at him as if trying to ascertain how much of him had survived—how much of the father she’d once known remained in this house, indeed in this life that they were all trying to remake.

  “Can’t you sleep, darling?”

  “What are you doing?”

  There was nothing insincere about the question, nothing snide or accusatory. Yet something about her eyes, about their impenetrable stare, made him feel cornered, small, utterly effete. They seemed to shine with worry, with her latent fear that he was now impotent. That what he was doing was nothing, merely a waste of time.

  Through the window another saving breeze drifted in, and he had the sudden instinct to escape. But he found himself turning to her, as if she were the solution he had all along been seeking, and he stammered, “If you aren’t prepared to fight against injustice—if you aren’t prepared to risk everything to defend the liberty of all human beings—”

  “Yes?” she said quietly, and he saw how pale and alertly frightened she’d become, fixed in the doorway.

  “Go to sleep,” he said, more shortly than he’d meant to. And then, to soften her stricken face: “It’s very late.”

  He met the two Americans at the Orient Club in April 1954.

  He’d first seen them loitering at the bar, thumbing their drinks as they watched the couples on the dance floor floating by. Soon he was buying them another round and describing, as quietly as possible under the shrieking music, the editorials he’d recently submitted to American and British venues without response—“all in English, of course, and meant for a Western audience, but about Burma. You don’t have any contacts or know how a chap could go about getting something like that published? I thought perhaps the Times, or Newsweek—”