All of this, Khin, too, must have seen. And it unsettled Benny. It unsettled him all that morning and afternoon, as he sat waiting, stupidly, for his family to return to him.
“I made the mistake of suggesting this stupid business to your mother,” he said to Louisa later that day, after she and her entourage had returned from the pageant, and Khin and Hta Hta with the little ones had disappeared upstairs. Louisa lay stretched out on the sofa across from him, smiling vaguely up at the ceiling, as though she were actually glad to have been named Miss Karen State.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said, the blush of exertion—or excitement—on her cheek.
“How did you get through it?”
Now she turned her amused eyes to him, as if to say that there was nothing about the subject she had to avoid. “I pretended to be somebody else,” she said simply. “As somebody else, I could actually sort of enjoy it . . . Of course, the real me saw how funny it was—to be standing in a bathing suit with a bunch of other girls, in front of an auditorium of people who were fully dressed. Funny and embarrassing. To act the way the other girls seemed to want to act, silly and flirty, like you’ve never read a serious book, and you’re desperate to be looked at—like you think your body’s so interesting. ‘Just look at me! Don’t you love my big behind?’”
She laughed, and without a false note, he observed. And how reassuring that she’d found a way to cope, to lessen the pageant’s seriousness and power to demean her by casting herself as a player in a parody.
“Not so big,” he said with a chuckle.
“Yes, it is!”
It was marvelous, the way she could laugh at herself, laugh the whole thing off, not to shield an inherent vanity, but because too much vanity was repellent to her. He loved to watch her laugh, something she did more freely, he’d noticed, when they were alone together, and when she seemed to leave her body and her beauty—to leave it on a shelf—in order to more fully become herself.
“You can picture Mama,” she said, as Johnny ambled into the darkening room, a tormented look on his brow. “‘Tighten your buttocks! It jiggles too much when you walk! Tighten it!’ I was so worried about what she would think as I jiggled across the stage, I could hardly think.”
“You’re giving Daddy the wrong idea,” Johnny interrupted, sinking into a chair near Louisa. “You belonged to the audience. You were Miss Karen State.”
Louisa’s laughter had dropped off, and now she looked at her brother with a sort of distressed solemnity. “That’s sweet,” she said.
“It’s not sweet,” Johnny told her. “It’s undeniable.”
She seemed to be waiting—and hoping—for the compliment to take the usual turn, to veer into a brotherly bout of teasing, but Johnny just allowed his statement to breathe in the air. And Benny was left to contemplate the silence within his other child, his son, who suddenly looked older and sadder to him, and so unlike the little boy who had scrambled around this room before the revolution. They had never really recovered from their separation, he and Johnny. Somehow, the chasm that had been opened between them was already, even at the time of their reunion, too wide to be bridged. Benny hadn’t been there to protect him from other men’s influence during the important years. And that, too, must have been part of what was inexorably separating them, that influence of other fatherly figures—or of one in particular—something the boy himself seemed forever to be arguing against. He was thirteen now, Johnny, and so smart with figures—determined, or so he said, to become a “businessman” like Benny, though the fact of Benny’s present business failure obviously troubled the boy. He often complained about the injustice of their poverty, and had recently taken to reading books on economics and finance, as though in them he might find his own solution to the problem of their oppression. But the books, or what he discovered in them, seemed only to oppress him further; sometimes he sauntered around the house with the look of someone reckoning with the terrible limitedness of his own future prospects, the terrible narrowing of his view, a view that gave way only to obscurity. And Benny wanted to urge him to shake off his hopelessness, to remember the greatness that no amount of money could buy: the greatness that could be achieved only through a more forgiving reckoning—with life, with its painful truths, and with its beauty. But how could you force someone to see beauty before which injustice finally paled in significance? How, when Benny himself so often was blind to it?
Now, sitting in the darkening room with his children, in the presence of their unsounded thoughts, Benny was possessed by awareness of the moment’s perfection. In another moment, this one would be gone—he couldn’t hold on to it. And he seemed to see that this moment—exactly this—was what he’d been endeavoring to reach all along. This moment of sitting with his children, on furniture that was so familiar it seemed to be extensions of them, pieces of their existence. This shared, comfortable silence, while outside the night encroached, with its secret sounds, a siren on the highway, the threats they didn’t have to mention to comprehend . . .
In the darkness, he heard Louisa sigh, and then she sat up with a reluctant smile, and turned on the lamp by her side, and said, “Time for bed.” And she stood and crossed to him and caught his hands in her delicate ones and kissed him on the head—something her mother would have hated because even to touch an elder on the head was to show him disrespect. “Good night, Daddy.”
Then it was just Johnny facing him—Johnny, with those sad, large eyes, with that simmering intelligence and intensity that put him at risk. Looking at him in the glow of the lamp, watching how he began to nervously fidget—pulling at the knees of his trousers, and then drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair—Benny had the terrible thought that the boy was beyond saving.
But he said, “How have you been doing, Johnny?”
The boy’s glance flitted up to meet his. It was clear from that glance that Johnny had come into the room with something to say. Benny could feel it now, the pressure of whatever it was on Johnny’s mind exerting itself on the air between them.
“All right,” he said. “School is hard sometimes. Not the work—that’s too easy. I mean other people.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Just the usual meanness.”
“That’s disappointing.”
“I guess so.”
“Is there something on your mind?”
He sighed, as though to leak out some of that pressure building up in him. “Not especially,” he said. But he turned his eyes more fully to meet Benny’s, so that Benny was taken by their dignity, by their handsomeness and gravity. “I was talking to a kid at school,” he said. “A government official’s son. He was bragging about how they got money out of the Americans. I guess the Americans have too much wheat. Hundreds of millions of bushels more than they need. Their government wants to keep their wheat prices high, so they have to subsidize it, offload the wheat, sell it abroad, or even dump it at a ‘special’ price. And I guess that’s what they did here. Sell it at a loss—of something like five million dollars. But they got something else for it, for the five million. They made our government put all of it in a bank here on deposit.”
Listening to his son’s story, Benny felt an old tug—their want of money, and his instinct to meet that want, to fight. Recently, one of his prison mates had spent the evening with him, prodding Benny to gamble, and Benny had been so thrown by the losses that he’d felt driven to raise the game’s stakes, until finally Khin had burst in on them with a wad of cash with which she’d all but chased the friend away.
“Why would the Americans do a thing like that?” he said to Johnny now, trying to keep the curiosity out of his voice.
“I’m getting to that,” the boy said with impatience. “See, the money’s supposed to be used for Americans—to lend to them if they start doing business here. And the point is the money’s just sitting there. It’s been a year at lea
st, and no one’s touched it, no one’s come forward, because no one knows about it. Our government’s not going to say anything. And I thought . . .”
No doubt the boy was onto something, but pursuing that something could lead him only deeper into the void. America, the Burmese government: he was no match for them. Johnny’s sights were fixed on the darkness, and Benny wanted to tell him to turn to the light.
“I thought,” Johnny continued, “with your American—”
“My American?”
Johnny blushed, a kind of fury rising to his dark eyes.
“Have you been reading my journals, Johnny?” Lately in those journals, Benny had begun to address Hatchet directly—to address the American with the outrage of a person abandoned by someone trusted, by someone almost cherished—and the thought of the boy seeing that was deeply upsetting.
“The money’s just sitting there,” Johnny said again. “If he knew about it—if he knew how much there was—”
“What?”
“You could go into business with him. Show him how it works here—”
“And you think the Burmese government would dutifully hand the money over to him—that he’d dutifully hand me my cut? Listen to me, son—listen to me clearly—you’re going about this all wrong. You can’t work with them and expect any personal gain. They’ll listen, they’ll suck up your intelligence, but then they’ll leave you to rot with your recriminations.”
He wanted to go on—to speak of the beauty that had mostly evaded his own notice, the beauty that Rita had helped him to see. But the thought of all that made him feel foolish suddenly.
And Johnny said, with a contempt that further shamed him, “The money’s just sitting there. You’re just sitting there. I’m not going to sit here with you and suffocate!”
It began before it had begun, Louisa’s reign as the nation’s beauty queen. With still two months before the big pageant, the papers began to feature her “special” status as the “image of unity and integration,” vaguely referring to her mixed heritage, all but denying her affiliation with the Karens (or the Jews) particularly.
“They’ve got us,” Benny several times found himself muttering guiltily to himself during these days. He’d wanted, with this Miss Burma business, to have something to write about—or so he’d claimed; but it turned out he’d only given the Burmans an angle. Or, no, a weapon. A weapon of Burmanization. A weapon against revolution. For if Louisa, as the racially indistinct product of assimilation, was already a symbol of a “higher form of unity,” as Aung San had once put it (one that might serve “national tasks and objectives”), then her winning the pageant would be an argument that racism in the country didn’t exist, that there was no discrimination to fight against.
Just as appalling was Khin’s seemingly willful blindness to the discrimination behind the media’s fixation on Louisa. By all appearances, Khin was hoping that the media would soon similarly fixate on her! In the weeks running up to the pageant, she began to take tremendous care with her dress (adorning herself in some of the flashier shawls and sarongs she’d professed to be assembling for Louisa), and emerged from her bedroom every morning with increasingly youthful styles of hair and makeup. She was basking in a reflected light, experiencing the thrill of being an object of interest by proxy—all while the actual object (at least at home in Benny’s sight) appeared determined to pretend that she herself was not being thrust perilously into celebrity.
It’s nothing, Louisa’s easygoing manner and laughter seemed intended to reassure him, as he hid from mental pictures of her posing on some garish stage, in some garish bathing costume, hands on her hips. Only once during this period did he see a twinge of similar horror pass over the girl’s face—when Khin found the two of them at the dining table and thrust forth a magazine featuring the upcoming pageant’s “front-runners,” including a giddy-looking Louisa being crowned Miss Karen State.
Their family had been granted two special tickets to the Miss Burma pageant, and Khin had somehow contrived for him to have permission to attend (though she’d insisted on telling everyone—including Louisa—that he’d made the arrangements, so shamed was she, he thought, by his ineffectualness). So it was that on the day of the event, hours after Louisa and Khin had left, he found himself abruptly free. Or at least rather free, his “escort” being one of the Burma Army soldiers who manned the guard hut at the bottom of his drive. How very strange it was—strange and somehow ominously touching—when, at the bottom of that drive, the escort slowed his truck so that his fellow guards could sincerely applaud for the father of their nation’s prospective beauty queen.
Evening was falling by the time they approached the Central Railway Station. Already a crowd was coming over the road leading to the stadium that had been named for Burma’s liberator and protector of the populace, Aung San. Looking out his window at the commotion, Benny had the strange impression of taking in alternately a collection of individuals—a mother tugging at the hand of a young child, a delicate man hawking snacks, a police officer sectioning off a side street, a legless girl being wheeled along by a dog—and a collective force. The urgency and excitement in the air were undeniable, and in spite of his own cynicism (and in spite of the armed soldiers patrolling the road up ahead), Benny felt the tug of elation. It was breathtaking, the vision of this panoply of peoples, young and old, able-bodied and destitute, blameless and criminal—all taking possession of the streets. It was also irrational and oddly undemocratic, this impulse of thousands to catch a glimpse of whoever was crowned; the poorest among them wouldn’t possibly be able to pay for even the cheapest tickets. But there was nothing rational or democratic about beauty itself, Benny told himself. And still, beauty was not classist or racist. From the looks of it, these people were prepared to adore whichever girl, of whichever origins, became their queen. Perhaps beauty alone had the power to transfigure people so. And yet, Benny reminded himself with a shudder, there was something insidious about beautifying the country’s image by means of a girl, whatever her background, for somewhere in the darkness beyond the delta, innocent people continued to be shot and killed.
Half a block from the stadium, the truck came to a stop beside a jeep where two soldiers were waiting to escort Benny through the overspill of would-be spectators surging from the station. The narrowing evening was giving way to a deeper darkness, heightening the assault of sights and sounds and smells on Benny’s desensitized soul. Soon, he was marshaled past a throng of beggars being rebuffed by a guard, through a stadium gate, into a tunnel, and out into an arena, where—in the shadows of an enormous stage that had been erected—he discovered Khin seated in a lower section of the packed stands. She claimed him with a look of relief as he stumbled toward her along the narrow aisle, and he was overcome by a feeling of belonging, of being bound to her by years of experience. How easily he’d forgotten the powerful pleasure she’d so willingly given him, the sensual offering of loyalty and children. Intoxicating, not just their early years, but all the years until his imprisonment—years when they had given themselves over to the lives they’d remade in order to be together. Now, approaching her, he seemed to see every one of their children’s faces in her own still-lovely one. And when he sat on the hard bench between her and a heavyset man, and she leaned in to say something in his ear (“Did you see Katie Ne Win? She’s sitting with him”), he was immediately comforted by the familiar sound of her voice and by the clean scent she was wearing, undercut by her own, almost undetectable deeper fragrance.
That feeling—of renewed appreciation for his wife, of closeness with her—only grew when at last the stadium lights went dim, and a hush came over the assembled thousands, and sweet music began to sound over the loudspeaker. It wasn’t long before yellow floodlights shot up from the stage, and then a procession of bathing-costumed girls appeared before them. Many of these girls, he saw with a pang of sympathy, were too heavily made up; most wore smiles that w
ere too theatrical; some tottered and swung their hips, as though to impersonate feminine confidence and magnetism; others cast defeated glances at the audience or blinked out at the darkness as if to find reassurance there. Then Louisa emerged in a simple white suit, and it was as if a switch were thrown . . . And was some amplification of lighting responsible for her skin appearing so luminous? Her smile seemed to reach out past him and across the stadium, to reach out as if to fling the gates open and let everyone in.
Who was this creature? he was still asking himself a quarter hour later, when Louisa was invited to present herself uniquely to the judges. Who had taught her to move on those gold heels—not cheaply or brashly; not frantically—no, there wasn’t a tense or unnatural note in the way she fell into a smile, cast her eyes over the stands, turned, looked with another unabashed glance back at the audience. Here, rather, was a young woman radiant with self-possession. Yes, this was precisely what distinguished her from the rest. Not the mechanics of her beauty (the way her eyes were set above the sculpture of her cheekbones, or the voluptuousness that Benny preferred not to notice)—all of these girls were knockouts, mechanically speaking. Rather, what distinguished her was what she did with her looks: disregarded them, so that the outer luminosity gave way to a more resplendent inner one. Wasn’t it a truism that a virtue was a virtue only by dint of its keeper’s unconsciousness of it? And didn’t she seem to be unself-consciousness made manifest, a sort of heavenly body obediently prepared to shine on for the others spinning and circling around her composure, until the light of that composure must finally perish? I give you my light, she seemed to communicate, that you might have a measure of grace. I give you my naturalness, that you might see a simpler, more natural life, one unspotted by the shadows of divisiveness. Yes, I have the blood of various peoples coursing through my veins, but what of it? We are all various. Don’t despair. Stop these arguments. Content yourself with enchantment.
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