The younger, more amiable one of the pair seemed to appreciate his deference to their perspective, and put on a thoughtful face even as he continued to leer at the ladies, while the older one scrutinized Benny over the rim of his perpetually raised, seemingly untapped drink (or at least he looked older, with his uniformly graying thicket of well-combed hair, the paunch ill concealed by his wilted button-down, and the cumbersomely oversize glasses behind which he hid his assessing eyes).
“It’s got to be topical,” the younger one said. “I dabbled in journalism for a while, and I can tell you that you have to find a way to frame your story—link it to something people are talking about. Nuclear power. Or something friendly. Take Miss America—they’re putting the pageant on television later this year. Now, that’s a feel-good story. Also links into people’s dreams. Maybe you frame your story with the Miss Burma pageant—is there a Miss Burma pageant?”
“Communism,” the older one put in carefully. All along, he’d been observing the conversation, and now, pushing his glasses up over the slick bridge of his nose, he continued, just as cautiously. “Vietnam. The Domino Theory.”
“The Domino Theory?” asked Benny. He hadn’t heard of it.
“Yeah, well, those are obvious,” the first spat. “I’m giving him an angle that’ll be unique.”
The older one didn’t cringe exactly, but his gaze seemed to retreat, to move inward, as though in shame, or in buried anger. What an awkward chap, Benny thought. He had the sense that the fellow’s unbecoming appearance—the wide rings of perspiration under his arms, the way the few pink pustules on his skin glistened—was caused less by the room’s stifling air than by a chronic hesitation and uneasiness within him. It was terribly clear he had little respect for the younger chap. So what was he doing with him here?
“I’m sorry,” the awkward one said now, setting down his drink and mopping his brow with his sleeve. “I have—I have a train to catch.” And without offering his hand to either of them, he lumbered away into the crowd, like an outcast.
For a while, Benny and the guy’s friend just stood remarking his clumsy retreat.
“What did you say brings you here?” Benny said finally.
The other, appearing even more relaxed, leaned back into the bar and began to eye the girls again. “Oh, we’re Bangkok based,” he said lightly. “Work for a corporation you wouldn’t know—building airstrips, that kind of thing.”
“May I ask the name?”
“Sure you can.” He flashed Benny a twitchy smile. And then he said, too brightly, “It’s called Sea Supply.”
The “falling domino” principle, Benny learned, was a term used by Eisenhower in a speech made earlier that month. “You have a row of dominoes set up,” Eisenhower had said, speaking of communism in Indochina, “you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” In other words: if one country in Southeast Asia aligned itself with the Communist Bloc, all of Southeast Asia would soon do the same—followed by the Middle East, if not Japan and Europe.
There was no reason to assume that Eisenhower’s theory justified the strange American duo’s presence in the country. Yet something unsettled about each of the fellows had left Benny to wonder if their feats of engineering with Sea Supply were really as modest as “building airstrips” and “that kind of thing.”
It turned out Benny didn’t have long to wait for his answer. In July, the broad black car that had been increasingly tracking his excursions from the compound through the rain followed him as far as the American embassy, to which he’d been invited for a casual reception as the guest of one of his La Roche contacts. Soon enough, he found himself standing shoulder to shoulder at the buffet with the American ambassador himself—a scrubbed-pink, arrogant sort called Sebald, who looked like just the type to live in terror of catching some vile disease, and to whom Benny wasted no time emphasizing the country’s need of more access to good medicine.
Yet Sebald couldn’t be bothered to dignify Benny’s attempts at conversation with even the briefest look of interest. Instead, the ambassador scooped himself dollop after dollop of gelatin salad, and then stared unhappily at the glistening green mound on his plate.
“I’ll tell you what I find interesting,” the man suddenly announced, straightening himself up and smiling with satisfaction into Benny’s face, which appeared to look keenly foreign to the foreigner’s eyes. “The natural resources in this country. Can you imagine the benefits through trade? It all depends on reinforcing internal security . . .”
But Benny, having drawn back from the liquored haze of the man’s breath, was already noticing something else—someone else—scrutinizing him from across the crowded banquet hall. It was one of the Americans from the Orient Club, the older, awkward one, with the oversize glasses and the cautious gaze. He was standing, clutching his drink, and staring at Benny with a kind of focused alarm, as though to say that he’d seen everything, and knew all about Ambassador Sebald and all about Benny.
As though to say that in this nest of vipers, he alone was an ally.
That same day, after Benny contrived to cross the banquet hall to the American, who offered him a drooping hand and a covertly extended damp card that read “William Young, South East Asia Supplies Corporation”—that very night, as planned during a brisk telephone conversation, Benny showed up at a dingy guesthouse with no evidence of having been followed, and there he was, William Young, opening the door, with his paunch and his rumpled shirt and his carefully combed nest of hair and his glasses, which he pushed up his nose before uneasily beckoning Benny inside.
“You want to sit there?” he said to Benny, gesturing to two chairs at the foot of a hastily made bed, beside a window whose sealed shutters seemed intent on closing in the room’s heat, its sourness. But there was no odor of insidiousness that Benny could detect as he sat and took in the meager quarters: a table with a clock and a typewriter and an untidy pile of papers, a lamp without a shade, a door open to a view of a primitive lavatory. No personal effects, no suitcase or book or evidence of liquid drunk or food eaten. Save for the decrepit toilet and the bed with its bunched mosquito net, the room was stripped of every sign of human need and weakness. A temporary holding place, without question; but also a sort of description of the American’s provisional character. What did he do to satiate himself? Benny wondered. And for love? Perhaps he consumed what he required as expeditiously as possible, taking care of his human urges shyly out of view of the rest of his life.
“I’m afraid I don’t have anything to offer you,” the American said, so redundantly it almost caused Benny to laugh, until he saw the nervous, disheveled way the fellow seated himself across from him.
“Mind if I smoke?” Benny said. “I’ve become enslaved to the habit in recent months.”
The American raised himself from his seat and lumbered to the lavatory, returning moments later with an unwieldy glass ashtray that he must have kept alongside his toothbrush. “I guess you’ll have to hold it in your lap,” he said, thrusting the ashtray at Benny.
“That’s fine,” Benny offered with forced joviality. He was trying to dispel the tension in the room, and indeed it was almost agreeable, lighting up and filling the sour air with the bittersweet scent of his tobacco. Rather than face each other, they sat listening to Young’s loudly ticking clock and to the sounds of the night—the spattering of rain and a volley of honks outside the shut window. They seemed to be observing their shared atmosphere of smoke, as though it might unveil some possibilities between them.
“You do have me wondering why I’m here,” Benny said finally, noticing that the American’s face was now beaded with sweat. “Perhaps you could tell me what exactly you do at Sea Supply—or South East Asia Supplies Corporation. Do I have that right?”
Young appeared to retreat further behind his glasses, even as his eyes darted to
the cigarette at Benny’s lips (in disapproval?). With a certain rebellious impetuousness, Benny found himself leaning forward and offering him the cigarette, which the man considered with astonishment before accepting. He put it awkwardly to his distressed lips. “Maybe you’ve heard,” he said, shoving the cigarette back at Benny, “about a group of Chinese who’ve based themselves inside Burma’s borders. For the past few years, they’ve been trying to stage attacks on the Chinese Communists from Burma. It’s sort of a secret war that’s mostly come to an end and that we were secretly assisting.”
“We . . .” Benny ventured.
“My job was to coordinate the transfer of American arms—arms and ammunition—from Okinawa to these people’s airstrip in Shan State. Under the radar of the Burmese government, of course. U Nu doesn’t want to give China the impression that he’s in any way supportive—he has to toe the neutralist line between the West and the Communist Bloc . . . And also under the radar of most of our own people. Ambassador Sebald. The State Department.”
“But why under the radar of your people?”
The American turned his head slightly, so that the lenses of his glasses caught the lamplight.
Benny took a different line. “I can only assume that Sea Supply is some sort of Central Intelligence Agency front. And that if this secret war is mostly over, it has mostly ended unsuccessfully . . . What are you and your Sea Supply associates still doing here, Mr. Young?”
The American turned to Benny now with a kind of sorrowful frankness. But just as quickly, he bent over and pulled the ashtray away, silently urging Benny to put out his cigarette; and then he stood and made for the lavatory, no doubt to dispose of the evidence of the intimacy and transgressions they had just shared. Watching him, Benny seemed to see a picture of the man’s entire life—the waking each morning in a sweat, the standing under a cold shower, the nights of stifled sleep, and, beneath it all, that private sorrow, that aloneness. Perilous, the instinct Benny had to identify with the stranger.
When Young returned to his chair, he took refuge in his habit of adjusting his glasses, yet there was something defended, something determined, presently animating his gaze. “You need to watch what you say around Sebald,” he told Benny. “Ambassador Sebald has a certain perspective. It makes him suspicious of people like you.”
“Like me?”
“What you described to me that night when we met—your editorials, your vision of a Burma with different ethnic states, one of them being Burman, a federal system—that’s the last thing someone like Sebald wants to see happening to this country.”
“You do realize that my interest has always been in what Burma’s peoples want to see happening to this country—”
“Don’t be naive.”
“Excuse me?” Benny was surprised by the emotion in his own voice—by the high, hollow inflection of hurt.
“Sebald’s perspective,” the American went on, “the State Department’s perspective, is that the Burmese government is inherently anticommunist. That it enjoys broad popular support among its citizens and therefore deserves our support and understanding.”
“I see.” What had Benny expected of the United States? What, really, had he expected? After all the hopeful, stupid editorials he’d dispatched to their papers with no response . . . His opinion didn’t matter, because Burma’s peoples didn’t matter. Burma mattered only so far as it posed a problem for the countries that did matter: America, China, Russia.
But Young wasn’t finished. “And because Sebald equates the local opposition groups with a threat of communism—”
“That’s insanity—”
“Because he believes groups like the Karens are uniformly left-leaning, he argues strongly that the United States should be working to strengthen the Burmese central government and its army in order to assist in the opposition’s liquidation.”
“That’s the term he uses—‘liquidation’?”
“It’s a common term to use in these kinds of cases.”
“And does Sebald have Eisenhower’s ear?”
“Certainly. To an extent.”
“And yet here you are.”
“We’re not all State Department.”
The rain had fallen off. When Benny, all at once desperate for air, stood and went to the window and cracked open one of the shutters, he could smell oil coming off the clean-washed tar road.
“It’s important to keep that window closed,” the American said quietly.
A distant figure walked briskly along the road, and something about the sight of that solitary human seemed an outward expression of the incredible sense of abandonment that Benny had been carrying around for nearly all his life. Yet at this very moment he was just as keenly aware of the proximity of, if not a possible friendship with Young, a balm to his isolation. He drew the shutter closed and turned back around.
“You still haven’t told me what you want with me, Mr. Young.”
“It’s Hatchet.”
“Say again?”
“My code name. If I contact you going forward, that’s how you’ll know me.”
It was as if Benny had finally fallen off the ledge on which he’d been trembling—not of his freedom, precisely, but of time. He could have been back in his old cell. He could have been back with Saw Lay, hearing afresh his old friend’s admissions and forewarnings. “Should someone who goes by the name of Hatchet reach out to you . . . remember to consider the question of trust, Benny.”
“Hatchet?” he heard himself utter breathlessly to the man, who seemed to be nothing less than an intruder on what had been. “Doesn’t exactly ring of trust. One could easily imagine it implies an agenda on your part to cleave the unwelcome elements from the body of Burma . . . And is that what you’re trying to do with me, ‘Hatchet’? Acquaint yourself with another Karen all the better to eradicate the opposition? Saw Lay warned me about you.”
The American pulled his glasses away from his face, as though to hide from Benny’s recognition of him.
“It was you, wasn’t it?” Benny said to him, remembering “the American” whom Ne Win had described to him in the Barr Street lockup, the “CIA man, no doubt,” whom Karen leaders had been trying to meet in Thailand before they’d been butchered on the banks of the Salween. “The American our leaders trusted,” Benny sputtered now, “the one they were attempting to get to when they were ambushed and Saw Lay escaped. And were you the one who gave Ne Win’s ‘Butcher’ the tip about their location?”
For a minute, the man’s unfocused eyes seemed to cringe from some terrible vision beyond Benny. Then he put his glasses on. “I can’t say if you should trust me, Mr. Bension,” he said, a quaver of emotion in his voice. “I can’t say I trust myself with any of this. But I was trying to assist Saw Lay and the Karens. Not all of us forget what you people did for us. And I’m as upset as any of you about Ne Win’s brutality . . . I can’t do this alone.”
“Do what? What is it that you are trying to do exactly?”
The man swallowed deeply, as though to keep down some unpleasantness destined to come out between them. “After the revolution broke out,” he tentatively began, “Saw Lay introduced me to someone. A battalion commander in the Karen army—someone named Lynton.”
Lynton. Benny had a vaguely disconcerting memory of having met a fellow by that name back in Khuli, when so many strong Karen soldiers had trudged through the village on their way to the front lines.
“He and Saw Lay served together in special operations under the British. I only met the guy once—but it was enough.”
“Enough?”
Something like exuberance crept to the edges of the American’s eyes—and of his voice. “You see, I’m just like you, Mr. Bension. I’m trying to find a solution to the Burma problem. And I believe Lynton can play a key role in that. In a pan-ethnic, anticommunist opposition coalition—one that could ev
entually influence the center. The problem has been making contact. Lynton’s notoriously quick, impossible to catch, to intercept. Last time I talked to Saw Lay, a couple of weeks before they got him, I asked about the guy, what he was up to, and Saw Lay said . . .” A blush rose to the fellow’s cheek, so that Benny felt almost sorry for him. “He said if I wanted to know about Lynton, I should ask your wife.”
13
An Indistinct Figure
Sometimes when Khin thought of the period after Lynton had quit her bed—when she thought of how in desperation to provide for the children she’d started trading in peanut oil and cheroots and betel leaf, becoming part of an imprecise network of traders hawking their wares at open markets across the hot, wet, forested hills of eastern Mon State—what she remembered was the hours and hours, the weeks and months of walking. Walking without the burden of anyone or anything but what she had to trade.
What she remembered was the fog, the damp, the rain that came slanting across the sky like relief, the watchful trees, the hungry mothers at the markets, the muddy paths that ruined her feet, the vastness of the peaceful sky, and the fields and fields of rice. Certain days, she would head out into the depth of those fields—unsure of whether she was crossing into enemy territory—and the lush green stalks seemed to regard her, in turn, an indistinct figure walking in an indistinct place.
What she remembered was the burned-down villages and gouged, fallen bodies crawling with mosquitoes. And the sweat. Her sweat. Her smell. And the coldness of the Salween River’s tributaries. Sometimes she would be squatting by a river, building a fire for the night or cooking herself a bit of rice, and she would have the instinct to tell one of the children to take care not to fall into the current. Or she would be caught in a heaving crowd at a market, and someone would all at once see her, and she would be seized by the desire to divulge her suffering—to speak of her four children, of the husband who might be dead or alive. It seemed to her then that the roof of the sky had been ripped off, and that they all had been left to wander aimlessly in an unending night.
Miss Burma Page 20