She had only a few seconds to comprehend her molten, rising instinct to run—to scream—to rescue or warn him and the others inside the building. Then the blast came, so deafeningly she cringed and covered her ears in the jolted car, as another reflex compelled her to look up, to look for him in the pluming yellow cloud of debris, ascending with all the souls, and all the plaster and wood of the student union, into the vast breaking day.
PART FOUR
Suspicions
1963–1965
16
An Unexpected Proposal
On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, in March 1963, General Lynton of the Karen Revolutionary Council directed his driver to take him from the capital to Saw Bension’s compound in Insein.
He had come to Rangoon having recently broken off from the main branch of the Karens. The year before, Ne Win had seized state power in order to protect Burma from “disintegration” (to protect it, in other words, from U Nu, who had become increasingly responsive to the calls, from the Karens and other resistance groups, for a form of government that would have made the domain of the Burmans just one of many constituent ethnic states within the country). Under military rule, even Burmans had no right to dissent—hence the dynamiting of the student union building at Rangoon University by Ne Win’s troops and the subsequent arrest en masse of top politicians. Yet here Lynton was, along with various other resistance leaders, on the verge of peace talks with Ne Win.
Here he was, in the rear of a state-issued car, pulling up to the guarded gate of a political prisoner. Were the guards merely keeping Saw Bension in? Might they not also, because of Saw Bension’s famous daughter, be keeping the likes of Lynton out?
Not that Lynton was anything like one of Louisa Bension’s crazed fans. True, he’d managed to sit still long enough to suffer through the imbecilic plot of her latest film (no more romances or war stories for Ne Win’s public; it was workers’ struggles and the toiling of peasants for those ordered to march the Burmese Way to Socialism). True, he’d been maddened while watching this latest film not only by her beauty (an unsettling beauty, because it seemed to vibrate, to defy categorization or knowability) but also by her almost artless aspect of innocence. That innocence was something she had seemed to wander toward and away from even in her youth, when he’d felt guilty about depriving her of whatever innocence remained to her (she’d never witnessed anything specifically intimate between Khin and him, but he’d been there, in her father’s place). And to see her now on the screen (and in the newspapers, and in the magazines, and on so many billboards) was to see someone he might have unintentionally hurt and someone he couldn’t have—on account of his past with Khin, of course, and also on account of Ne Win, Louisa Bension’s purported lover, whom Lynton really shouldn’t risk offending given their agreement to a temporary cease-fire.
No, he wasn’t here to take Ne Win’s mistress, he reminded himself as his driver muttered curses at the guards, sluggishly fumbling with the gate, nor was he here to save her. His car at last passed into the compound, and he caught a glimpse of Bension’s hillside mansion, whose bombed-out wings gave it the appearance of a giant bird shot out of the sky and breathing its last gasps of air. He was here, he supposed, to purge Louisa Bension from his system. What better way to prove to himself that she was off-limits than to confront her alongside her parents, both of whom he felt he’d also wronged all those years before?
It was Khin, some minutes later, who came to the door of the crumbling house. Before either she or Lynton had said a word, he understood she would do it all again if given a window of opportunity. There was the way her eyes clung to his, in disorientation and then in relief; there was the way her nostrils subtly flared, as if she would laugh, or shed tears. She was still Khin, after all. He saw it in the faint lines around her eyes: all the old grace, all the old vanity and disappointment and vulnerability, and also the traces of selflessness that seemed to explain the streaks of gray now in her hair, the dusting of liver spots on her cheeks—spots that told him she was, or would soon be, past her childbearing years. And there was the residue of sweetness emanating from her like a scent. Strange how the mouth, the lips, hadn’t changed at all. And the irises—they were the same deep red brown, with the same frightened, gathering heat of desire.
“You found us,” she said breathlessly, her voice a notch lower than it had been before. Just as quickly, she seemed to grow embarrassed, and silently, awkwardly, she beckoned him in.
A moment passed before his eyes adjusted to the room’s darkness, but then a moment was all it took for him to comprehensively take in the room’s features. The first shots of the civil war had broken out across this house, he knew—but it wasn’t the damaged floorboards or torn cane sofa or crudely patched walls that spoke principally to him of the effects of war; rather, it was the silence, the stagnant quality of light and air, a sort of stifling absence of oxygen that suggested a lack of full-bodied, hopeful respiration. If this house was a monument to lives lost, it was also a testament to lives being lived in constriction.
He tried to return Khin’s desperate smile. She had closed the door behind him and now stood to his side, smoothing down her wrinkled sarong as her peering eyes echoed with unspoken questions. What had she just said—that he had found them? Suddenly, he sensed another presence enter the room.
“You’ve been impossible,” he said, forcing himself to remain focused for a moment more on Khin’s alert stare, “to avoid.”
“Have I?” Khin said, her voice trembling.
“I’m sure the general is referring to the reports in the papers,” came the other’s voice—unmistakably her voice, yet sparkling with a sarcasm unknown to her film personae.
He turned and found Louisa in the doorway giving onto the dining room. She was less substantial than she seemed on the screen, more haunted looking. Voluptuous, to be sure, but delicate, thinner in the face—more spirit than flesh. Yet her eyes caught his with a physical force. Like her voice, those eyes seemed to mock him, to mock the “reports” to which she referred—reports, Lynton knew, which had in turn mocked her by detailing the minutiae of her alleged affair, including not only a supposed abortion, but also a recent (and nonsensical!) stabbing by the ruler’s jealous wife. Each of the sensational stories had been accompanied by a damaging, though obviously manipulated, photograph of Louisa’s head affixed to another woman’s provocatively posed naked figure. One would have thought the pictures’ evident phoniness would act to exonerate her, but no. No, when the herd wanted to take refuge in an idea, it preferred to be blind to that idea’s opposite. Just the other day, Lynton’s car had idled on the street corner near a boy hawking tabloids whose cover image was matched in vulgarity (and inanity) only by the kid’s slogan, promising that Louisa herself could be purchased for the price of a coin—“Louisa Bension—one kyat!” And Lynton, who’d long propped himself up with the thought that he didn’t care a whit what the herd thought, had nearly emptied his pockets of kyats in order to buy up (and burn) every last paper the boy had to sell.
“What I like about our papers, the high and the low,” he now found himself saying to Louisa with an unintentional gruffness, “is that they don’t even pretend to be truthful or objective. I’ve been reported dead at least a dozen times—or so I hear. And by their count I have something like sixty-nine wives.”
He saw this bring a smile to Louisa’s eyes, if not to her mouth—and the light from that smile seemed to counter the room’s darkness and all the darkness of his memories of her as a girl. During the early days of the revolution, he’d carried a harmonica in his pocket, and though Louisa had always found a reason to dawdle in the room when he was playing it, though her eyes had often lingered on the thing if he left it out on the table, she wouldn’t openly acknowledge the interest she took in it, as her siblings did. “My father’s harmonica is much nicer,” she’d surprised him once by saying. “He bought me an accordion, but I ha
d to leave it in Thaton . . . Will you be going to Thaton?”
“How many wives have you had, General?” Khin now broke in, straining to laugh.
He was unable to check his embarrassed grin—he felt it break hotly from ear to ear. “Lost count,” he muttered.
The response—and his awkwardness—clearly pleased Louisa, whereas Khin, thrown into a panic, began to ramble on about how welcome he was in their home, how lucky they were to have gotten their hands on tea today, how sorry she was that her younger daughters, Grace and Molly, were visiting friends, and how proud she was of Johnny, who was earning an advanced degree in finance in America, and who had prematurely wed. “He was only fifteen when he went abroad,” she said, gesturing for Lynton to sit in the chair across from her. “A mistake letting him go off to college so young, but he’d placed second in the national competition. Actually, he’d placed first, but the prize went to a government official’s son—do you know him?” She smiled nervously at Lynton, as if she’d committed a civil offense. Could it be she thought that he was actually in bed with Ne Win, and that the peace talks were a cover for something more tacit and sinister between them? “First prize would’ve taken him to Cambridge,” she quietly explained. And then: “Cambridge was what my husband wanted for him.”
Somewhere during the beginning of this speech, Louisa had disappeared, and now, with its apparent conclusion, Lynton allowed himself to peer into the dining room after her. “Is he here, Saw Bension?” he asked, trying to divert himself and Khin from the direction of his interest. He had come here to make amends with Bension, after all.
When he looked back, Khin was wearing an inscrutable expression—of her own swollen interest, of dashed expectations. “Always. Indefinitely,” she said. “He sits in his study from dawn to dusk, writing letters to America. Letters he can’t send. He thinks they’ll actually do something, the Americans.”
“About his case—his house arrest?”
She scoffed. “His house arrest? That’s a comfort to him! It gives him permission to lock himself up—with his writing, which he somehow believes will help the Karens.”
“And why shouldn’t it?” came Louisa’s voice. She’d reentered the room carrying a tea tray, which she proceeded to plunk down on the table between her mother and Lynton, as though she wanted to be sure of making it known that she resented everything he took that was rightfully theirs—tea, or her mother, or—
“Allow me,” he said, leaning forward to pick up the pot.
“Don’t be silly,” Louisa shot back, and got down onto her knees, into a position of false supplication, and poured tea for them. “Milk?” she said, dousing his tea with cream. “There’s nothing left in the sugar bowl.”
“I prefer mine unsweetened,” he said.
“You never much liked sweets,” Khin added.
“You’re above such human impulses?” Louisa asked him.
The question prompted his very human impulse to laugh—loudly and with relish—because years had passed since anyone had dared speak to him in this manner, and because the question’s insinuation of rage meant that something in Louisa was already fixed on him. But even as he laughed, he became aware that there was something physically wrong with the young woman. Her brow, lightly perspiring, looked wan in the soft light of the room, the shadows under her eyes more ancient than her (twenty-two? twenty-three?) years.
“Khin,” he found himself venturing, “would you mind if I spoke to your daughter alone?” The question seemed to surprise Khin less than it did him. How many times had he gone over his anticipated and alternative courses of action en route here? This decisive move hadn’t figured in any of them; yet the sudden surrender in Khin’s eyes told him she was well practiced at being passed over by her daughter’s fans. No sense having delayed the decisive blow if it had to come, he counseled himself, though he knew Khin’s suffering would be prolonged because of what they had shared. “There’s something official that I need to communicate to her,” he added.
Khin blinked at him for a moment and then stood, making a visible effort to hold up her head as she said, mouth quivering, “Of course. Of course.” A haze might have cleared, revealing to her with naked clarity her failure to recapture whatever it was he’d glimpsed in her all those years before. And she paled, as if in comprehension of that failure, just at the moment that he felt an unpleasant, uncustomary stab of guilt for having failed her—now and then.
What a reckless, cocky fool he’d been in his younger years, taking and discarding whatever he pleased with little regard for the fallout. But he had left Khin not only because he’d failed to be more devoted to her than to the war. He’d left also because of the child. Because of Louisa. Because of his concern about what the affair was doing to her.
“I’ll see to dinner,” Khin muttered, and crossed out of the room, as if to obey the trajectory of his thoughts.
For a while, neither he nor Louisa made a move. She was still kneeling and wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t follow her mother’s exit with her gaze; she appeared instead to be looking inward, at some invisible record of trouble past and future.
“Sit,” he told her.
It was very difficult for him, in times of stress, to temper his instinct to give orders; the instinct still sometimes flustered him, yet it didn’t obviously unnerve Louisa now. She pushed herself up from the floor and sat across from him, while he fumbled for his cigarettes and held the package out to her. Without a beat, she leaned forward, took one of the cigarettes, and allowed him to light it for her. She was more in her element in her mother’s absence, he thought, and she was finally able to breathe a bit with the cigarette held to her lips.
“Mama doesn’t allow smoking in the house,” she murmured between draws. “And I don’t approve of it, either.”
“Forgive me,” he said, lighting up.
“Impossible,” she said with a smile, but it was a smile full of the sadness of her childhood—a childhood, he told himself again, in which his presence had been understandably resented by her. He had only wanted to help her then, to reanimate whatever spark of innocence and joy remained buried within her. But somehow his present interest in her (of an entirely different sort!) made him ashamed of the interest he’d formerly taken, as though that older interest had prefigured this one.
“I’d almost forgotten you were an unforgiving child.”
She looked squarely at him, curiosity—or was it pain?—settling down around that perfect mouth.
“You disapproved of everyone and everything, especially me,” he continued.
“Did I?”
“I called you ‘Little Grandmother.’”
This seemed to please her. She drew deeply again from the cigarette. “I don’t remember.”
“What happened to you after I left? I heard a plague broke out.”
Now the lights in her features dimmed. She stubbed out her cigarette on a saucer. “What happened,” she echoed, gazing down at the butt, or back at the time when they’d parted. Abruptly, her eyes lifted to his. “What happened,” she said, “was that we were sent away, and for nearly a year none of us much saw my mother. I still don’t understand why, when the plague had run its course, we weren’t swiftly brought back to her.” She paused, as though he might be able to explain what she couldn’t understand. “Do you remember Hta Hta?” she went on. “The servant who was pregnant? She’s still with us.” She gestured vaguely toward the kitchen. “She’d been raped after Mama left us in Kyowaing. And she was the one to accompany us to the village on the plains of the tigers when we left Bilin . . . Every other week, I had malaria. I would shake with chills and want Mama, but . . .” Her eyes darted back to the package of cigarettes on the table in front of him. “May I have another?”
Again, he held out the package to her, and she took a cigarette and put it between her lips as he lit it.
“I loved that little v
illage,” she said, audibly aiming for a lighter note. “A tiger came to prowl around our hut at night, because Hta Hta’s baby had been born in sin—or so the villagers said . . . I was baptized there, in a pool so deep it was said to have no bottom. The minister thought he had convinced me to be baptized to atone for Hta Hta’s and my mother’s sins . . . I felt very old, as though my childhood were far behind me.”
“See? Little Grandmother.”
Now she smiled openly, laughing along with him for a while. But as if to subdue herself, she all at once put out her cigarette.
“You have a right to personal happiness,” he said.
Instantly, he saw that she was affronted by the sheer presumptuousness of his words. And what the hell had he meant? That she could do better than Ne Win? Better than self-imposed house arrest? That he, of all men, could liberate her from the constraints of a sadness that reached back to her earliest childhood?
“Is that some sort of Americanism?” she said. “The right to personal happiness—”
“Americanism?”
“Do you always think in such facile, all-or-nothing terms?”
Up to this point, he had felt fairly sure of himself, if not of his swiftly altering tactics of engagement with this woman. “Yes,” he tried. “Absolutely. I’m all for ‘all or nothing.’” When she didn’t laugh, he gestured toward the reaches of the oppressive room. “Locking yourself up in here, that is submitting to unhappiness—isn’t it?” He smiled—he couldn’t help it. “And it calls for revolution.”
“Interesting, coming from a man presently in peace negotiations.”
“Marry me.”
For a few seconds, she merely studied him, as though gauging the sincerity of his expression, of his request. Then she broke into a laugh that rang with all the fanaticism of hatred—for him, it seemed, for herself, for the ugliness of the world they shared. “So I am to be a seventieth wife, General?” Still, she laughed with frightening condemnation. “Have you forgotten I’m the dictator’s mistress? That I aborted his child and survived a stabbing by his wife? Do you not read the papers?”
Miss Burma Page 27