Benny reached for Khin’s hand, and, by the grace of the moment, she took his fingers in hers.
Then Louisa was drawn into the shadows upstage, to be replaced by another contestant whose strained smile and panicked glances cried, Look at me! Like me! Admire me!
And Benny, casting around for some sort of respite from the agony of his feeling for the poor girl, turned from the stage and saw him. Saw Hatchet. One row up and across the narrow aisle—but could it be? There was the same nest of hair, the same perspiring pink skin, the same glasses, hiding the same intent, guardedly embarrassed gaze—a gaze now directed, it seemed in profile, past the poor girl in question, toward the shadows in which Louisa stood futilely trying to hide her light.
15
The Great Pretender
From the moment Louisa first posed as Miss Burma, with the crown on her head and the sash around her shoulder and the red roses in her fists—already, even then, as the cameras began to flash, it had begun: her long engagement with pretense.
Pretending not to be hurt by Mama’s pinched look of defeat in the stands. Not to be troubled by Daddy’s haunted smile of reassurance. Not to be desperate to apologize in the face of the losing contestants’ shamed, strained felicitations. Not to be appalled by the clichés soon spewing from her own lips (“I’m so surprised! So honored!”).
Pretending to want this.
And then pretending, as she took her victory walk, not to wonder who or what (other than her own compliance) was really to blame for her participation in the pageant (she had been told by her mother only that it, like the preceding Miss Karen State, was “important to the Karens”). And also pretending not to wonder who or what was really to blame for her “success.” (“Image of unity” aside, how could a Karen prevail in a contest presided over by a panel of mostly Burman judges? How, really, could a Jewish Karen win, whose “foreign” father was an enemy of the state and under house arrest? How during this time of continued civil war, in a country bent on weakening “the influence of outsiders” and denying anyone’s difference? How, unless Daddy had managed to fix the results, or unless her success had actually been part of some official plan to prove that if the minorities played by the rules, they, too, could be championed?)
And then, after the pageant, pretending not to notice how her change in status seemed to change everything else—how the fights that sometimes exploded between Mama and Daddy became more frequent, more violent, with plates (and even knives!) clattering against walls that harbored an even more stifling silence; how Johnny wouldn’t meet her eye and cowered in his room studying for the Cambridge exams because he had to place first in order to secure the scholarship that would get him “the bloody hell out”; how Molly cried with more abandon and Gracie hid in the trees for longer stretches and Hta Hta and Effie made themselves scarce and even Louisa’s best school friends had a need now to tease her, batting their eyes and flashing her coy smiles (“You went just like this!”) and clipping her pictures from the papers and pinning them to the bulletin board (in playful support or jeering indignation?).
Pretending to smile through it all, and pretending to herself that she accepted her new life, her new lot. And then making light of that lot, of the press soon penetrating the most private corners of her existence—a press that seemed to collude with her pretense: not one of the reporters interviewing her acknowledged the hurtfulness of the labels they slung around her (“minority,” “product of assimilation”), labels that narrowed her personhood; not one of them raised the subject of her father’s former incarceration, or of his involvement in the ongoing revolution, or of the indefinite term of his current house arrest. And, in response to their avoidance, she smiled and posed for the photographers (in Burman dress, of course), and she calmly spoke about everything other than what most concerned her: the reality that at any moment Daddy could be taken away, thrown back into Insein Prison or hanged, and for no better reason than that she, Louisa, had not succeeded in pretending convincingly enough that all was harmonious, that Burma was harmonious, free of injustice and ethnic discord.
And when the falsely bright reports about her began to appear (about her “picture-perfect life,” and her “dreams of stardom,” and her position as a “top student at Methodist English, the same elite school that Ne Win’s children attend”), she hid her embarrassment, which was almost as intense as if the reports had abased her. And she became accustomed to the garish colors with which her likeness was painted on billboards and reproduced in advertisements. Wasn’t she to blame, in part, for their tasteless lack of shadow or depth, a lack that her own pretense had mirrored? But what choice did she have? she argued with herself in rare moments of self-confession.
She could feel it, at those moments, the small flame of her older self, the self she had become acquainted with in the absence of her parents during the early years of the revolution, after Mama had left her and the other children in Kyowaing, and the Forest Governor’s wife had begun to beat them. Their crime was their existence, Louisa had obliquely understood, and she had heeded Mama’s plea that they must not make a noise, taking each blow soundlessly, keeping her tears on the inside, until the lake of her grief had become so wide it had seemed almost inviting, a thing into which she could escape. Johnny and Gracie, too, had kept their anguish stopped up behind their features, which had grown composed and vacant as the beatings persisted. Only Hta Hta had wept unabashedly with baby Molly, saying privately to Louisa that the elder son was a scoundrel and that she couldn’t endure another day. But gradually Louisa had begun to find strength in the nature that surrounded them. Sometimes she would catch a glimpse of a far-off mountain between the mists, and it would speak to her of forces beyond their control. Then, just as suddenly, something about the mountain’s power and permanence would strike her like a bolt of insight, and she would know—in a flash—that the physical world was a kind of curtain before another world in which none of them were separated. The Forest Governor kept a herd of elephants to haul felled logs, and often after the completion of her morning chores, Louisa would crouch behind the house and watch the great lumbering beings traverse the fields along the valley floor, towing their burdens with their expressive trunks. Now and again, one of the elephant riders would prod a creature with a glinting metal hook driven into its head or the secret folds behind its ears. What sadness the elephants’ heavy, assuaging steps spoke of; what modest willingness to submit, as though they had forgotten the fact of their great physical power. Louisa had hurt over the elephants’ suffering, over what she knew was their silent yearning, and in her thoughts she had addressed them, just as she addressed Mama and Daddy. Those conversations had transported her from her private corner of anguish, giving her the feeling of being part of a great process of conferring silent and invisible love.
Until one night she had comprehended, suddenly, that there was no more need to keep silent, to cringe. A storm had been coming, wind thrashing against the Forest Governor’s house as though to attack or possess it, and Gracie had been so frightened she’d dropped a soup bowl, prompting the wife to lock her outside. Soon Gracie’s small cries had begun to flay against the front door. “My sister is scared,” Louisa had found herself saying to the wife, who was disciplining the startled fire in the hearth with a poker. “Get back to work,” the woman had told her, yet something like worry blighted her voice. That worry was enough to allow Louisa to start for the door, and soon her hand was on the latch, and another blast of wind was knocking against the door, which opened almost of its own accord. Then she had Gracie in her arms, and she was leading her back inside, all but daring the woman to try to strike them with the poker.
She shuddered now, remembering what had become her routine boldness there in Kyowaing and then later, on the plains of the tigers, after the plague had blown through Bilin and they’d been separated from Mama for most of a year. The agonizing waiting. The wondering if they would ever see Mama or Daddy again. The loo
king to nature day after day for lessons and comfort. The sheer, animal, honest grace of finding a dignified way to endure and to protect themselves and even to grow while parentless. Then the invasion of Bilin, only a few weeks after Mama had left them there and gone in search of Daddy. They had been sitting in a circle around Gracie, who was shaking with fever, when two soldiers with bloody knives had burst in on the house they were squatting in. “What’s this?” one said. “Saw Bension’s children?” “My sister is sick,” Louisa told them. “She needs medicine.” The men seemed almost surprised by themselves as they led her down the road to their medic.
Would Gracie have lived—would any of them have lived—if Louisa had stayed silent? Would they be here, tucked into the same ruined house as Daddy, if Mama hadn’t gone on to enter Louisa into that child pageant in Insein, and if Louisa hadn’t subsequently had the gall to head to the pageant organizer’s house and very sincerely describe to the woman and her district commissioner husband how much they missed Daddy, how they loved him, how they needed him, how they yearned to kiss and hug him and talk to him. How they missed his face, his voice, his eyes, his afflicted smile, his funny ears, and his breath. Daddy. Daddy. She wanted her daddy. Could she have her daddy again? The tears she spilled had been an offering of truth; the tears elicited a cup of trembling from which she drank.
It taunted her now—that older, braver self—telling her that Miss Burma was an empty coward.
“A father knows things,” Daddy said to her one evening, when they were alone in the dining room together. His eyes took her in, as though not wanting to see the change that had come over her, and yet compelling him to confront the hell she was in. “Are you—” he tried. “Should I be doing something to help?”
But to stop herself from dropping the pretense—a pretense she was suddenly desperate to confess—she broke into a mocking laugh, kissed him apologetically on the cheek, and left.
And to stop her own inner voice from tormenting her further, she began to take a little sip of her mother’s palm wine, her “tonic,” every so often before bed. And then occasionally before public appearances. It was easier that way to laugh with her friends, and to bend over in her bathing suit and touch her toes when she was asked to demonstrate exercises at bodybuilding conventions. It was easier to relax when she was told to sing on the radio. And she really did love the Penguins and the Platters and Johnny Mathis, though sometimes, as she sang one of their tunes (“Oh, yes, I’m the great pretender . . . pretending that I’m doing well . . . My need is such I pretend too much . . . I’m lonely but no one can tell . . .”), it occurred to her that perhaps those American singers were famous, not in spite of their minority status in their country, but because there was something acceptable and even reassuring about a minority playing the part of a happy clown (“Yes, I’m the great pretender . . . just laughin’ and gay like a clown . . . I seem to be what I’m not, you see . . .”).
And to suppress this thought, she began to look at the articles about her that she’d thought she was above reading (and to convince herself that their occasional depictions of her bearing as “dignified” and “artless” proved her greatest concerns wrong). And when that didn’t help, she took a bit more tonic, just enough to smile more loosely at the ribbon cuttings, to speak more unself-consciously at galas. Just enough not to fret whenever Ne Win’s wife, Katie, stopped her in the schoolyard (“I’m having a little party this Sunday at the old Government House—there’ll be tennis and swimming and cards . . . Come!”). It became almost easy to pretend to be unflustered—to pretend that this woman’s husband, who led the army that some said had become “a state within the state,” wasn’t her father’s jailor. Almost easy to find the words and lightness to graciously, gaily (clowningly) turn down Katie Ne Win again and again.
But in 1957, Johnny placed second in the nationwide exams and practically fell apart (“Tell me it’s really true that a state official’s son won first!”), and the movie offers coming in became impossible for her to refuse (“Think of how just one of these films would help—Johnny so desperately wants to attend university abroad”). And soon she was pretending not to hear the hissing protestations of her most religious friends, who wouldn’t even attend a movie, or any other kind of “entertainment” (“When you do God’s work you do it with your whole heart, and when you do the devil’s work you do it with your whole heart, too”). And she was conceding to her brightest friends that, yes, in the past, “nice girls,” “educated girls,” didn’t make movies, but now?
And, to her surprise, she found that acting—the pretense of it—relieved her of the pretense of not pretending. Or more simply: it allowed her deeper hidden self to seep out through the cracks between her pretend self and whatever part that pretend self was playing in a film (a governess who fell in love with a member of parliament and died before that love could be discovered; a Burman soldier’s wife who searched for him only to discover him dead). Mama came with her to every shoot (“to be sure there is no funny business”), and even in the face of Mama’s quiet, startled scrutiny, she felt freer to let go—to weep and laugh openly under the cover of the roles she assumed.
But there were consequences. As the movies began to play around the country, her fame swelled, as did the crowds increasingly surging in her path when she left the house. She pretended at normalcy, graduating from Methodist English and enrolling in an English honors program at Rangoon University (“Pursuing English wouldn’t be a bad idea, Louisa,” Daddy told her. “I’m gratified to have learned it so well in India, and you already speak beautifully”). But as though to sabotage that attempt, she agreed, in 1958, to make a bid at Miss Burma all over again. Now, though everyone from her fans to the pageant’s coordinators had pressed her to run, she couldn’t pretend to blame her participation on anyone or anything but her own weakness and self-deception. Oh, yes, the thought of going through it all sickened her, but it seemed easier to submit—especially given her family’s chronic need of more money—and she convinced herself that she couldn’t possibly win again. Oddly, the relief she felt upon winning was as acute as her sense of doom. Somewhere along the line, she had become more afraid of public failure than of false success.
With her attainment of still greater fame, Katie Ne Win’s invitations came by telephone with cheerful menace (“So you don’t want to associate with us?”), and were met by Mama’s panicky admonitions (“You’re giving her a reason to turn against us!”) and by Daddy’s remorseful opportunism (“Tell Mrs. Ne Win there’s a Burman medical student named Rita Mya, a dear family friend, who’s been held for over a decade in Insein Prison for no other reason . . .”). Then U Nu—who was being blamed for the ongoing insurgent problem and for running the economy into the ground—stepped aside so that Ne Win could helm a “caretaker government.” To refuse Katie now was to refuse the interim prime minister’s wife, and though something in Louisa understood that to accept Katie was to agree to a sentence whose terms she couldn’t fathom, she focused on how flattered (rather than frightened) she was by the woman’s invitations, and allowed Katie to send a car to pick her up.
Of course, it wasn’t sustainable. Every story of ascent has its reversal. But at that first party on Katie’s rooftop—where tables were laid with such lavishness that they suggested a poverty of refinement, and where no one seemed to know when to laugh or when to fall serious—she discovered a refuge from her mounting dread. For all of Katie’s pushiness (and bad-girl, fame-entranced, youth-worshipping, quick-talking, thick layer of pretense), she was kind. And she had a trace of the startled foal about her. The excitements that spread out over her expanding world were not atrocities, her flashing glance seemed to say; they were flirtations. And if the man who kept her was of a threatening sort, what had she to do with it?
Soon a car was coming for Louisa every other Sunday, whisking her to Katie’s garden on Ady Road, where college lecturers and wives from the British embassy assembled; or to the old G
overnment House, where brashly made-up stars strained to act like children, splashing one another in the pool, gorging themselves on waffles, and pretending at helplessness on the tennis court; or to the Ne Wins’ rooftop, where ambassadors and international types hobnobbed with Katie’s teenage “friends.” And sometimes Katie would tell her, “Go dance with the English fellow!” or “Keep the party going!”
That Louisa was still a child with respect to certain adult matters (that she had only an abstract knowledge of how two bodies managed to become one), that she was actually still largely innocent didn’t seem to matter. It didn’t matter because, in fact, Katie’s parties were only ever about pretense. No one tried to go to bed with anyone within Louisa’s line of sight. She was never even introduced to the ruler himself (who, as “caretaker” of Burma, had moved his troops into government posts, arrested politicians, and deported refugees from the capital to establish “law and order,” while his Defence Services Institute assumed control of banks and transportation and various business interests). No, if Ne Win was present at the parties, it was aloofly, only to putt on the Government House golf course; and if he sometimes ascended to his rooftop on Ady Road, or descended to his living room when guests were there, it was only to coldly converse with one of his generals.
Miss Burma Page 24