Sometimes during that period, to banish the lightness of her solitude, she spoke to Benny, heard his voice in the wind’s sighs. This unknown is unendurable, she told him. And once she heard him reply, Someday, after we are gone, the unknown will come to light. She had no idea what he meant, didn’t care to muddle this moment of communion with misunderstandings. How will I find you in the meantime? she asked. Keep looking, she heard him say. And she shivered with the thought that he’d been referring to the afterlife, and she saw herself shrouded and bent over, doomed to wander and wander in search of him and safe territory, like all the Karens, for all eternity.
Some days, the walking consoled her, as did the weariness of her limbs, the heaviness of the physical load strapped on her back. It diminished the burden of her heart, of her memory, of her powerlessness over what would be. More than once or twice, when she met with the eager advances of men whose paths she crossed—traders or soldiers or displaced villagers, just as unhinged from what had been—she was arrested by an old instinct to cease. To give them what they wanted would be to die unto the agony of missing her family, and also to be born anew in relation to others—others untainted by her private past and memory. She was so terribly lonely! But the mandate to move on—to walk and walk and survive as some version of herself for the sake of the children to whom she dispatched supplies—spared her the indignity. There had been Lynton, yes, and before him there had been Saw Lay, and each had made his impression. But there were no others.
Until that night when she was on the threshold of reunion with Benny. Nearly a year had passed since she had closed her sewing shop and sent the children away—away from the ruthlessness of not just the plague, but also the pious, gossiping women of Bilin. But in early November of 1950, she found an abandoned room in a quiet corner of the city, and she wrote to Hta Hta, asking the girl to bring the children back to her. News in Bilin, then still under Karen control, was that a man was standing trial for treachery, a Karen soldier whose own father had accused him of spying across the region for the enemy. Evidence was gathered, the man freely confessed to the crime, and a date was set for his hanging, the morning of which—before the children had yet returned to her—Khin appealed to the court to be allowed to question the prisoner to determine if he knew anything about Benny. The man was brought out to the visiting area with his hands cuffed together, his eyes already making an argument against reverence for his last moments of life. “I know everything,” he boasted to Khin after she had presented him with her case. “The man you speak of is in Insein Prison. Has been for years. A traitor to the state, they say. If you can get to Insein, if you can get through Burman-occupied territory, you’ll find Insein hospitable to Karens at this time.”
Her subsequent reunion with the children was painful and hasty. Within days of greeting them, she was kissing them good-bye. Disguised as a Chinese woman, she set out to cross through Burman territory. Benny was alive! But in what relation to his former being? It seemed to her that all of them—and not just the Karen traitor—were guilty of making an alarming mistake, that they had been meant to disperse, to get along, to live together, and even to lose themselves in one another rather than destroying themselves in the mutual effort to survive. And one evening, in a state of distracted worry, she stopped in the gloom to build a fire under the shelter of a stand of mangroves by a stream when she noticed some shrapnel on the bank and lifted her eyes to find a man under the trees. That he was a Burman soldier was immediately obvious to her: he was armed with a rifle and a sword, and wore the star of the Japanese infantry on his cap. Their eyes locked. Then she was turning to flee, and falling onto the bank, falling under his weight, a beetle skittering past her face as the soldier shouted out words that were a slur on Chinese.
Five evenings later, an old trader found her in a hut where she’d stitched herself up in the middle of a rice field. He recognized her from the road, brought her medicine from a clinic, and promised to look in on her children in Bilin. Shouldn’t she head straight to the comfort of those children? his anxious glances asked her. Yet she couldn’t bear the thought of bending into their embraces only to feel their awareness of something profound in her body and soul having changed, couldn’t bear to see the reflection of her horrified face in their eyes.
So it was that as soon as her swelling began to subside, she proceeded toward Insein, crossing nearly a hundred miles of swampy coastal thickets and clearings under the cover of several nights, understanding viscerally that at any moment she could be stopped, shot, done in. But before she arrived, a rumor reached her that Louisa had been slain during an invasion of Bilin. Wild now with terror, with the desperate wish to prove the rumor false, she reeled around, bursting back along the tracks of tangled land she’d just crossed. The earth itself seemed to have gone mad; though it was the dry season, rain came reproachfully, implacably, in unceasing torrents bent on impeding her progress. The surging tides, too, were a nemesis, as were the daylight, the roar of army trucks on the road, the questioning faces of the cared-for children in each village that she passed. Wanting to evade them, she plunged into forests lining the shore, into regions where bamboos and vines closed over her head, and where she cut tracks through the mud, through the vines, swearing to the fates that if she found the children, if she found them all alive, nothing would have the power to desolate her again.
Would she be able to enter Burman-occupied Bilin without being killed? It was a question that caused her to pause on the final morning, about twenty miles northwest of her destination, in a town called Kyaikto, the home of the old trader who had helped her, she remembered. And it was with the memory of his kindness and promise to her—his promise to look in on her children—that she stumbled along a row of shanties fronting a muddy stream, blindly hoping to catch sight of the elderly man and to receive, if not the miracle of good news from him, some wisdom.
Then, the vision: hundreds of feet down the muddy bank, in the haze of the weak morning, two small figures appeared, ambled to a launched boat, and climbed up onto it. Her profound sense of unreality, coupled with the impossible coincidence of the moment, didn’t allow her to believe that she was looking at Louisa and Johnny. Even when some force of nature compelled the figures to turn their searching faces toward her, she couldn’t trust the feeling rushing in—the feeling that they had all evaded the foreordained, or else intersected with the mysterious providence of grace. Maybe the children also doubted their eyes, because, as though equally unable to bridge the final distance between them, they merely watched her across it for a minute.
That minute was enough to return Khin to her body, to her awareness of its having changed in a way Louisa and Johnny might recognize. And when they soon broke from the boat, broke from their place on the bank, running and shouting, she opened her arms to receive them, yet she couldn’t go on to press them to her chest with complete abandon.
Even after the trader soon made arrangements for all of them, including Hta Hta and her Effie, to be transported to Insein while hidden in the rear of a lorry—even after they were home, confronted by the shock of limbs floating in their well and blood spattered across their walls and bullets falling from their trees when it rained—she couldn’t shake her sense of self-consciousness. Over the following weeks, she inadvertently kept her physical distance from her children, drawing away from their needy touches as if the toll she must pay for the staggering gift of their mutual survival was her isolation in her now-defiled body. A toll, she knew, that they also paid.
And when she finally faced Benny again in the visiting shed of Insein Prison, she couldn’t help exacting a similar toll from him. She took his weak hand, but she could not embrace him.
Now and then, during the several years that had passed since that time, she had the instinct to confess to him what had happened to her during the final days of their separation, how a soldier had fallen on her off the Gulf of Martaban and raped her until she had lost consciousness, and the
n roused her by slicing off one of her nipples and slamming her ribs with the butt of his gun. But to confess would have been to let Benny in again, to let out the cry that might never stop coming. It was easier, it seemed, to be distant. To be quietly hurt by his inability or unwillingness to notice how much she had changed. It was easier to escape to the Karen village across the highway, where the sick and needy whom she served had nothing to begrudge her and only surprised thanks to provide.
Easier, that was, until 1954, when everything about Benny changed.
By now, Louisa was going on fourteen, too composed and concerned about others—about her father—to dare remark on the frenzied interest Benny had begun to take in the world again, the way he would often rise from his chair in the middle of supper and mumble something about needing to meet so-and-so for a drink. Johnny, at nearly twelve, was openly defensive on Benny’s behalf (“It’s too boring here—with too many girls!”). And Molly, not yet six, still treated her father with little more than wary curiosity. Only Gracie, at nine, seemed to be extinguished by Benny’s increasing absences. When he happened to be out late, the girl refused to be put to bed, begging Khin to be allowed to light a lamp and wait up by the window for him. If Gracie was still awake when the lights of his car flashed up the drive, her eyes shone with a renewed happiness that Khin tried not to be unsettled by (why did the girl love Benny so much more than anyone else—only because he’d been missing for so much of her life?), just as she tried not to concern herself with the thought of what Benny was actually doing during these excursions: whatever that was, she told herself, it must be keeping him going.
But one July night, as she sat on the sofa with Gracie sleeping beside her, she heard the car stop out by the portico, and then there was a long pause before the creak and slam of its door. The delay told her that Benny was reluctant to return, and she had the sudden, old impulse to hide, to evade a collision with the future that would cause them pain. The sight of Gracie’s precious and defenseless sleeping face on the worn seat of the sofa—the face of Saw Lay in softened form—held her there. Then the front door was opening and Benny was standing in the entryway. He must have expected to find her there—the lamp was lit, as whenever she and Gracie waited for him. With his hat in his hand, he looked at them across the glowing living room, and she saw something powerful and aroused in his eyes. He could have just emerged from a bracing mountain lake, or from a bed in which he’d plunged into an unexpected passion. And there was something ferocious in his stare, something never before directed at her: the scorn of a man seeing his wife, whom he’d thought noble and beautiful, with fresh disappointment.
“Are you in love with her?” she found herself saying, not with spite, but with genuine hurt and a need to understand.
He seemed confused, then irritated. Then that awful, killing disappointment washed over his face. “It’s not what you think,” he said.
She thought that he was finished—he turned and proceeded to the staircase.
But he stopped and looked around, almost with resignation. “Someday,” he said, “not now—I really couldn’t stand to hear anything else now . . . you’ll have to tell me about Lynton. If you know where he is. If that’s why you leave the house so often.”
Someday. The closest they came to it—to coming right out and addressing the subject of Khin’s former affair and present blamelessness—was about a week later, on an early morning just past dawn, when she was sitting in the kitchen with Hta Hta, drinking coffee before the commotion of the school day.
Unexpectedly Benny appeared in the kitchen doorway, fresh from the shower and dressed with care, and bringing with him the scent of cleanness and something like estrangement. He stood surveying the women at the table and the contours of the small room, where so much life happened in his absence. Then he turned his defended eyes to Khin and said, very matter-of-factly, “It strikes me that it was unfair not to tell you how I learned of Lynton.” He’d swallowed down Lynton’s name, and maybe to recover his nerve he went on very swiftly: “The point is I’m not at liberty to say. Though I can tell you that my source had his information from Saw Lay, who must have had it from one of his men. And I shudder to think what the news did to our old friend.”
She couldn’t react for a moment. Something twisted in her chest, and she was so immediately breathless that she heard herself beginning to pant. That Saw Lay had suffered because of her—that the embarrassment she’d suffered in Bilin should have reached him, should have caused him hurt—that Benny should want to inflict this on her—that he should be so hurt . . . As though to prove that her own sudden suffering didn’t exist, she said, with a calmness and viciousness that astonished her, “I wish I did know where Lynton was, because I’d run to him.”
The expression that this put on Benny’s face was pinched with injury, with dismay. But gradually a smile of satisfaction spread across his face. It seemed to tell her, that smile, that he suspected as much of her. He closed his eyes, though, and then he said, with genuine feeling, “One’s treachery is such a difficult thing to admit.”
What she wanted was to come clean about it all, to tell Benny everything, to say something about their time being short: now all of that was over—what had happened with Lynton, the various breaches that had hurt their marriage over the years—now they were together and there was no excuse for them not giving each other all of their forgiveness and all of their affection. Lynton had been a means of survival, she wanted to say, whereas Benny was her sense of significance—and wasn’t she his?
Fifteen years had passed since they’d met on the Akyab jetty, nearly half their lives, and she still vividly recalled the surprise of Benny’s hungry eyes, the smell of the dense salt air, the sound of the waves smacking against the floats of a seaplane, the way he’d smiled tenderly at her and the boy who was her charge. Now when she saw Benny across a room and noticed how rigid he’d become—as though his back were hurting, or as though he hadn’t been softened by a loving touch in years (whereas, until recently, she’d supposed he’d resumed his love affairs)—now when she remembered her first startling impressions of him in Akyab, she thought he’d grown more dignified because he carried more evidence of having lived and suffered. And she was flooded with remorse for having kept her physical distance from him since his release from prison. Shame had held her apart, fear of how he would look at her once he saw what had become of her body, of her breast. It struck her that to care about him, to continue to ask for his care, would be to accept the damage that the future would bring them. And she understood that she loved his damaged body, loved it with her own damaged one. She wanted to take off her clothes and lie in bed with him, to press herself close to his skin, to give him everything she had to offer.
But other times, when he shouldered past her up the stairs, or returned to the house without bothering to greet her, she found his coldness to be desolating. It was as though he’d forgotten she was the same person who had shown him so many years of warmth. She tried very hard to proceed without expectations, to remind herself that what she thought of as the normal attentions owed to a wife by her husband were meaningless, that as long as she fixated on her disappointment she was doomed to live an unhappy life. She tried very hard to take the gifts as they came—when Benny gave her a strained smile, say, or took a few minutes to laugh with the children. But as many times as she set out on any given day to shower him with gifts of her own—to make a loving remark, or even, perhaps, to take his hand—that terrible twist of resentment and humiliation would stop her, and in spite of herself she would remain aloof with him, and in her thoughts she would cough up recriminating words. How dare you hold Lynton against me after all of your cheating years? You’re the one who took those women to bed right under my nose, whereas I didn’t know if you were alive or dead when I was with Lynton. You can’t imagine what that man made me feel—the pleasure he took in the wife you spurn!
Lynton. Increasingly, she w
as overpowered by a physical desire to be overcome by that beautiful man again, to be overcome by the sheer, strong certainty of him. The thought of never again being vanquished by such satisfactions staggered her. And she started shouting at the children because she couldn’t take her frustration out on anyone else. “He’s gotten fat and lazy, your father,” she told the younger girls as she tugged at their unruly hair. “He sits around, expecting to be served, as if it were the old days when he was making money. His lordly ways. Doesn’t even see what the rest of us do for him. How I have to sew the shirts he sweats in. Hta Hta doing the work of ten servants while he refuses to pitch in. It must be wonderful to pretend that chores and bills don’t exist.”
Under the influence of her roughness, the younger girls grew peevish. “You’re hurting me!” Molly cried, while Gracie dashed out of the house to climb the trees.
“Stop it!” Khin screamed when Johnny slugged Molly, who swung wildly back at him with her fat little fists. “You’re twelve, for God’s sake, Johnny! What’s wrong with you?”
“How do you expect any of them to behave when you’re so mean to Daddy?” Louisa challenged Khin one evening.
Khin had been trying to get the younger children ready for bed, having told Hta Hta to take a break with her own little Effie, and having just bathed Molly with extraordinary difficulty. Louisa, it seemed, had come to the nursery to tell them good night—she was heading out to a party—and Khin was stunned to see how serene and striking the fourteen-year-old appeared, standing at a sort of regal remove from the rest of them and wearing her best sarong, with her hair done up and a scarf draped elegantly around her shoulders. Khin was reminded of that moment during their reunion at the Forest Governor’s house, when Louisa had emerged in the dress that Khin had brought her, looking transformed by newly discovered self-possession. And hadn’t Khin, too, been transformed then? Transformed by a subtle envy toward Louisa that would later blight her days with Lynton.
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