Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  She smiled at Louisa again, yet her eyes shone with mortal fear. And Louisa, frightened for the woman—for them—stepped forward, reaching out to touch her arm.

  Katie thrust the smoldering cigarette at her. “Take it,” she said. “It makes me sick.”

  And as though to sweep her revelations further out of sight, she called abruptly to the servants, and then broke into a series of complaints about all she had to do to direct them in preparation for the afternoon’s party.

  Louisa moved to take the cigarette, still extended toward her, though the falseness that had reclaimed her hostess and this room seemed suddenly unbearable, suffocating. And as she took the damp cigarette between her fingers, grasping for something else—for some speck of goodness and truth—she sputtered, “There’s a woman being held in Insein Prison—a Burman medical student by the name of Rita Mya. We’ve never spoken of my father, but he—”

  “What nonsense are you saying?”

  The servants had appeared, and before Louisa could answer Katie rushed at them, throwing her gold shawl over her shoulder.

  “I expect you to play doubles with me in lawn tennis this afternoon,” she said to Louisa in passing. “We must prevail!”

  But at the door she stopped, adding without looking back, “I will see about the medical student, Louisa. I know it’s hard, but chin up.”

  Several nights later, Gracie appeared in Louisa’s bedroom, looking pallid and afraid and filled with tender affection. She was carrying something, a little amber-colored medicine bottle, which she half concealed in her slight hand.

  “Is something wrong?” Louisa said to her.

  Gracie seated herself on the edge of the bed, where Louisa was studying for her midyear examinations. Earlier that evening, the two of them had gone to see a Burmese movie with Kenneth and Myee, and on the bus ride home Louisa had been mildly diverted by Gracie’s own preoccupied state, so at odds with her usual smiling lightness.

  “Tell me to stop talking,” Gracie said now, still hiding the medicine bottle in her hand.

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Because—because I don’t know if I have the right to say what I’m about to.”

  Louisa felt a chill of apprehension as she smiled and grasped Gracie’s free hand. “You have every right to say anything you want to me, little sister.”

  Gracie gave her hand a quick squeeze, then instantly dropped it. “I can tell how happy Kenneth makes you,” she said. “And how obviously happy you make him. But are you sure about what you’re doing?”

  “What is it that you think I’m doing?”

  Louisa had tried to speak without accusation, yet a look of defensive anger coursed through Gracie’s usually placid face, and she jumped up from the bed and covered her eyes even as she continued to clasp the bottle. “It’s Mama!” she moaned. “She put me up to it! She doesn’t want you to marry him. And she gave me one of her stupid potions to make you fall out of love.”

  Mama. Yes, the woman had been unusually cold with Louisa of late, never forbidding her to entertain Kenneth or his friends at the house or to go along with a group to the city, but distantly on the lookout for a sign of—what was it? Misbehavior? Disloyalty to the family? A joy so complete it might lift Louisa forever up out of her mother’s longstanding misery?

  “Give it to me,” Louisa said, reaching for the bottle.

  With a look of almost comical remorse, Gracie relinquished the innocuous thing, which Louisa quickly uncapped, and whose bitter contents she downed in several choked gulps. “There,” she said, wiping her lips. “Now you’ve done your job. And I hope you’ll be glad to know that so far it hasn’t taken effect.”

  “Of course I’m glad,” Gracie said after a moment, but with such doubt and sorrow Louisa was instantly seized with regret.

  There was very little she didn’t regret after that:

  The party at the Government House to which she brought Kenneth (almost in defiance of Katie, Mama, and Gracie) and at which Kenneth noticed Ne Win’s generals leering at her behind. Their subsequent fight, instigated because she was unable to ignore Kenneth’s sullen irritation (“Just tell me what’s wrong.” “You really want to know? I can’t accept the foolish way you’re living. These ridiculous parties—” “Then you don’t accept me—don’t understand me. If you understood me, you’d know a person can be many things, some truer than others—” “And if you understood yourself, you’d see what you’re doing to arouse men’s lust—” “That’s not fair!”). Then the way she’d been unable to accept his copious expressions of contrition (he’d kicked the helmet of his motorcycle, swung around, fallen on his knees, and buried his head in her lap, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m senselessly jealous. Forgive me. Forgive me,” and she’d stroked his beautiful hair, but with fingers that had felt suddenly deadened).

  If she’d been better at assuring him that night and in the aftermath of the fights that followed, if she hadn’t begun to build a wall around her innermost, secret self, would he have believed in her innocence when the tabloids—as if tired of the established newspapers’ championing of her as a symbol of harmony—issued reports all but naming her as Ne Win’s mistress (“Naw Louisa Bension Seen Leaving Ne Win’s Private Apartment at the Capitol,” “Naw Louisa Bension Accompanies Ne Win in State Vehicle”)? Of course it was ludicrous; she’d never in her life been alone with the man, let alone introduced to him. But instead of simply defending herself to Kenneth, she hid behind a wall of offended outrage and cool reason. (“Katie says Aung Gyi started the rumors—that he wants to hurt Ne Win.” “I thought you said Aung Gyi was devoted to Ne Win like a lover. It makes no sense.” “You’ve been with me every minute.” “Not every minute.”) She didn’t want to conceal her hurt from Kenneth, couldn’t help blaming him for the hurt she felt, yet unhappily found herself retaliating with hurtful aloofness, which only further provoked his suspicion—­particularly when Katie stopped inviting her around and rumors began to swell that she, Louisa, was pregnant with Ne Win’s baby.

  Of course she comprehended that it was possible to know that one’s beloved was innocent and simultaneously be lured by the temptation to believe her faithless—just as she comprehended that beneath the storm of Kenneth’s suspicion lay a wellspring of conviction about her strength of character and devotion to him. But she was so disappointed by his vulnerability to the rumors that she refused to admit the extent to which they were also tormenting her (“We hear you have very powerful friends,” her dentist said when she was in his chair; “Ne Win, Ne Win, Ne Win,” a group of boys at the university taunted her in the hall). If only she could have confessed that her family members’ cool refusal to address the subject of those rumors left her wondering if they, too, doubted her. If only she could have been patient with Kenneth instead of extinguishing every chance of tenderness with frosty rebukes. (“Can’t you see it’s better to clear the air and confess?” “If you think I’m guilty, leave.”)

  A kind of wickedness had thwarted his love of honesty and turned her honest protestations into something as wounding as gunfire. And one morning, on the second of March, after they had fought until nearly midnight beyond the sentry’s hut in front of her compound, and he had sped off on his bike, and a passing car had slowed and delivered her a volley of slurs, and she had walked up and down the highway in search of him only to return alone to the house to find Mama anxiously waiting up and peering at her with such frightened, accusatory eyes that she’d erupted into an unprecedented tantrum of returned accusation, shouting, “Why do you hate me?”—after all that, she woke with a headache to discover that they had all crossed beyond the portents of disaster. For the past week, U Nu had been quietly meeting with ethnic leaders to discuss the question of a federalist Burma, and in the middle of the night tanks had spread out around the capital and Ne Win’s troops had seized control of the government. U Nu, many of his chief min
isters, and their minority counterparts had been taken into custody, and now the Burma Army was guarding the city.

  “I have to inform you, citizens of the Union,” Ne Win announced in a radio broadcast at 8:50 that morning, “owing to the greatly deteriorating conditions of the Union, the armed forces have taken over the responsibility and task of maintaining the country’s safety.”

  “Bloodless,” a subsequent report called the coup—but it wasn’t bloodless. The father of Gracie’s friend Myee had been one of the minority leaders meeting with Nu, and at two in the morning, when Ne Win’s soldiers had stormed into the father’s compound, Myee—darling, blameless sixteen-year-old Myee—had been shot and killed.

  “I’m so sorry,” Louisa told Kenneth on the phone that evening. She had stretched the cord from the table in the hallway to her closet, where she crouched in hiding without understanding why.

  For a long time, Kenneth was silent—so silent she could hardly hear him breathe.

  Then he said, “I’m sorry, too, Louisa. Sorry that the life we all almost had is gone.”

  The real end came four months later, in July 1962, after Ne Win had abolished the supreme court, the constitution, the legality of all but his ruling party—after he had staffed his Union Revolutionary Council with Aung Gyi and other army commanders and veterans of Aung San’s Burma Independence Army—after he had established his platform, the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” by which every sector of the society was nationalized or ruled by the regime.

  Right away, government officials descended on the family property, measuring it; counting rooms, beds, vehicles; tapping phones. Right away everything was rationed, everyone made to line up for scanty provisions at army-run stores. No one knew quite what was going on. Was it true the soldiers were allowing up to eight potatoes per family, while guarding mountains of them that were going to rot? Was it true the soldiers were mixing bad oil in with the good, making thousands of people sick?

  Don’t complain! The soldiers are quick to shoot.

  Quiet! Remember the phone goes click click click.

  No one knew what to expect, what to believe.

  Was it true, what they were saying about Louisa—that she had gone to Hong Kong with Ne Win and married him in secret there? As confused as the Karen villagers who came inquiring about all of this, Mama alternately defended Louisa, snapped at her, and hid upstairs. And Louisa—overwhelmed by the truth and lies, by the justifications and the doubts, by the evident and the incomprehensible—choked on her food, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t go out in crowds, became pale and anemic, hyperventilated. The doctor came and administered tranquilizers, and she crawled into bed, sure she was dying.

  But one afternoon, Gracie appeared at her bedside. Since Myee’s death, Gracie had seemed almost absent from her body. Now her eyes shone with warmth, with life, and she bent over Louisa and kissed her cheek. “The students have called a meeting at the university,” she said, and she went on to explain that a nine o’clock campus curfew had been put in place, along with other university regulations, prompting students to assemble in protest in the student union building. All of Myee’s friends would be there and, yes, probably Kenneth, whom Louisa hadn’t seen in months. “But forget him, Louisa,” she said, pressing Louisa’s hand to her eyes as if to stanch something. “He’s worthless if he doesn’t know who you are.”

  Together then, without saying a word to Mama, and never speaking of Louisa’s new dread of mass gatherings, they took Daddy’s unused car and drove into the city. Already at the university, hundreds of protesting students were pouring out of the student union, which was positioned behind the main gate. “They’ve arrested our leaders!” one student called to them, and immediately Grace fell into step with the rally, beckoning to Louisa to join in.

  Much as the students were undeniably on the side of freedom, their fist-pumping unanimity and the deafening pitch of their cries frightened Louisa. It was here that Aung San had held his “Burma for the Burmans” campaigns, here that Nu had risen with shouts and fist-pumps by his side. She stumbled, trying to keep up with Grace.

  And then she saw him—saw Kenneth—standing near the gate, under a tree in the slanted light. When their eyes met, he smiled spontaneously, as if avowing his honest, abiding, difficult love for her. And just like that, all the difficulty between them seemed to subside. And catching her breath, and feeling a smile brighten her own face, she stood watching him on the edge of the glowing quadrangle.

  “The army!” someone cried.

  In the blur of what followed—the roaring of trucks, the swarms of soldiers surrounding the campus’s leafy gates, the bursts of smoke, of tear gas obscuring the quadrangle and making everyone instantly retch and burn and go half blind—in the heat of the students’ hurled insults and the soldiers’ frenzied efforts to shut the entrance and Louisa’s impulsive decision to drag Gracie out before it was too late—she lost sight of Kenneth. But out on the street, past the gate, quaking with Gracie like two slim, spared trees standing alone on a plain, she had enough time to take in the view of what was happening up ahead: the soldiers padlocking the entrance to the campus and drawing their guns up to their eyes. She had enough time to find Kenneth, standing in a group a few feet from where he had been.

  Then the chaos broke open with an explosion of shots. And, as she grabbed Gracie’s hand and the two of them began to run away, she glanced back and found him one last time—still standing—but covered in the blood of the fallen.

  At least a hundred had been killed, said the friends who escaped to their house later that night. Sitting under blankets in the living room, holding teacups with trembling fingers, these friends described to the family how the soldiers had shot into the crowd on and off for minutes at a time before finally opening the main entrance and dragging out bodies, some still squirming, and throwing them in stacks into the lorries to be scorched, dead or alive. The friends had managed to get out then, though many other survivors had fled to the dormitories, to the student union. “What about Kenneth? Did you see him?” “Yes, he was there. I saw him running into the student union.” “Thank God.” “Yes, thank God.”

  The shakes and the guilt that had begun when Louisa and Gracie had escaped from the campus only intensified, and soon Mama was pulling them away from the group, drawing them a bath, and stripping them like children. “Your resistance is down,” she kept saying, her voice catching. “You will succumb to fever if you don’t release this from your bodies.” While they crouched in the bath, each half hiding from the visions behind the other’s eyes, Mama sang an ancient song and poured water over their backs.

  “He will come,” Louisa said aloud, thinking of Kenneth, but neither Grace nor Mama replied.

  Long into the night, after the friends had gone to sleep on mats spread out across the darkness, Louisa sat on the sofa, peering into the night, sure she heard Kenneth’s motorcycle on the highway. Instead the first light came, and she quietly crept from the house and released the car’s clutch and break, so that the car rolled noiselessly down the drive, and not even the soldiers sleeping in the guard hut bothered to wake.

  It was a few minutes before six when she parked several blocks up from the campus. There were tanks on the hazy street corners and soldiers ranged along the gate, whose main entrance was opened slightly. Beyond it, she could make out the unassuming student union, its windows darkened, its lights turned off inside (had the soldiers shut down the electricity?). Something about the building’s solidity, its wider-than-tall design, assured her that the students within were likewise hunkered down, prepared to protect their right to outrage, along with their lives. Perhaps they had managed, those students, to catch a few hours of sleep within their bunker. And was he dreaming inside, she wondered, as he had been on the night they’d mistakenly fallen asleep together under the sky?

  A month or so after their first encounter on the bus, they had sneaked out to the yard behin
d his brother’s flat in the city and lain down in the darkness under the trees, pressed up against each other’s heat. “You are so beautiful,” he’d told her. “So much more now that I know you.” Later, holding hands and looking up at the stars that had been watching them all their lives, they had talked jokingly of how many children they would be having. She’d surprised herself by saying she wanted four or five, and he’d laughed and said they had better get going. And then—without ever realizing they had fallen asleep—she was waking at daybreak to discover his sleeping face, still turned expectantly toward the sky. How peaceful he had seemed, how free of suffering and restlessness, his breath coming without a trace of discernible effort, his mouth almost smiling. She’d had the sense that if she touched him, roused him, a piece of his life—contained by sleep—would be released like a bird, and that she wouldn’t be able to catch it. And for a few minutes, in spite of the risk of being discovered by his brother, she had allowed herself to watch him continuing to sleep, at once far from and close to her.

  Now, in view of the sturdy building reliably safeguarding his life, she was comforted again by the thought of him being contained, perhaps captured by sleep. And as if she were pressed up against his heat again, in spite of the street and the gate and the walls between them, she felt her longing for him spreading over the surface of her body. And it seemed to her that all her life she had been yearning for the closeness he had given her freely, much as she had imposed upon herself a sort of estrangement from others, born out of some inhuman service to strength. Wasn’t it this very distance—which she had been maintaining from her loved ones, from him, from her own weakness—that was to blame for his incapacity to trust her fully? Her impermeability to his fever—the unsteadying, infectious fever of his feeling—had left him cold, but she wasn’t cold; she was only afraid.

  Across the misty distance, she saw several soldiers appear around one side of the building sheltering him. They were making hand motions, scurrying agitatedly toward the path leading to the street. Suddenly, a few dozen more rounded the other side of the building, and in a throng they all began to charge back toward the gate.