Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  His heart was racing wildly, and he had the instinct both to defend himself and to attack. She, too, was panting, staring at him in what looked like open, defensive preparation for combat. Yet beneath this, or within it, he recognized the alarm of a warrior who had glimpsed a respite from long battle, but was ill prepared to trust, to rest. Could it be that she wanted him—that she, too, had divined the relief they might discover in each other?

  All at once he lunged forward and seized her wrist—not as gently as he would have liked, but with palpable affection, with palpable respect.

  “Even if the papers are telling the truth,” he told her, “it doesn’t matter.”

  17

  A Revolutionary Decision

  When Louisa had seen Lynton standing with his pistol on his hip in the darkened entrance to the house, she had been afraid that she might leave with him.

  But after he asked her to marry him, after he lurched forward to take her wrist, she noticed the lump (a buried bullet?) lodged in the bone by his ear, and all her resistance gave way to raw relief.

  “Take me away with you,” she found herself instructing him.

  She had done her time as the submissive daughter, as the symbol of integration, assimilation, subjugation: as “Miss Burma,” as “Ne Win’s whore.” She had done her time as the victim of ethnic woundedness, of slander, of the regime’s ruthlessness. Oh, she loved her parents. And she would be very sorry to leave her sisters. But her time in exile was over, and she was ready to stand up actively for those who were oppressed. One could achieve nothing of greatness without risk. What she wanted now was to be linked to the rebel par excellence, to the warrior-womanizer who couldn’t care less about dishonor. Could it be that he thought she might have really slept in Ne Win’s bed—the same bed she had recently imagined murdering the monster in? What she wanted was Lynton’s capacities of heart, a heart that was even willing to wager that there were circumstances in which a woman could be towed into a liaison that was morally repellant to her. What she wanted was a man so enamored with justice, he hadn’t the time to worry about morality or his own death. What she wanted was the pistol on his hip and the blood on his hands and the bullet in his skull and a life stripped of pretense.

  “Now?” he stammered, his face pale and expectant. “Take you away now? But your mother—your parents—”

  “Now,” she said. “Now. Yes.”

  That Lynton was ostensibly in Rangoon in order to pursue peace negotiations with the monster would have been a problem had she believed Ne Win capable of negotiating anything: no doubt, their new dictator would make various promises that might suit both his own and the ethnic leaders’ ends; but if Ne Win’s predecessor, U Nu—a man far less nefarious and far more open to considering the ethnic question—had invited leaders like Daddy to talks in order to throw them into prison, then surely Ne Win was capable of shooting his peace-pursuing guests across the diplomatic table. Surely Lynton was savvy about this. And surely these talks were a pretext for him, too . . .

  No, the problem, she confessed to herself after instructing Lynton to wait for her in his car (she needed to break the news to her parents in her own voice and on her own terms)—the problem, she comprehended with a twist of nausea, as she heaved clothing into the suitcase thrown open across her bed, was that in escaping with Lynton she might be permanently rupturing her already tenuous peace with Mama. The problem was Mama’s claim to Lynton in light of what had been.

  Downstairs, she left her suitcase by the front door and set out with trepidation toward the kitchen. These days, Gracie and Molly spent most of their time with friends or at their respective schools (Gracie was finishing her first degree at the now government-controlled Rangoon University, where instruction in English had been abolished, while Molly continued on as a scholarship student at Methodist English, where Ne Win had incongruously kept the younger members of his brood enrolled). With Hta Hta’s daughter, Effie, having entered what looked to be an unmanageable tract of teenage years, Mama and the nanny had drawn more tightly into their private sphere, and could nearly always be found in quiet company together in the kitchen.

  They were there when Louisa entered, Mama sitting silently over her tea and Hta Hta moving stoically around her, singing a hymn and preparing their dinner.

  “Hta Hta,” Louisa broke in, as Mama took a long sip of tea, resolved, it seemed, not to acknowledge her daughter, “would you mind telling my father that I need to speak to him? If he’ll come to the living room, I’ll be there in a minute.”

  Hta Hta glanced uneasily at Mama, then wiped her hands on a dish towel and set it on the counter, as if in begrudging surrender.

  Only when the woman was gone did Mama look up from her cup and set her fierce eyes on Louisa, still standing opposite the table from her. And for a few moments, across their persistent silence, it seemed to Louisa that anything could happen between them: that they had never been closer to perfect understanding, now that they were poised to part.

  What she wanted was to fall down on her knees and tell Mama that she loved her.

  But a question rose in Mama’s eyes, and then those eyes all at once went dim, and she said, “He acts quickly, doesn’t he? No time to think. ‘You in or you out?’ That’s Lynton . . . What was it—a proposal of marriage? Or just an invitation to be his mistress?”

  “Please don’t—”

  “You don’t—don’t pull out your acting tricks! Pretending to be contrite when it’s obvious you’ve been wanting to get away from us for a long time.”

  The accusation that she was acting—that the worry and remorse Louisa had come into the room with were contrived—was there any crueler form of depriving another of her right to be? It occurred to Louisa dimly that her years of pretense had been encouraged by a mother who was frightened of her daughter’s feelings. And for a moment, all she could do was stand there, fighting off the tremors of old hurt and rage, as Mama threw her hands over her own face, as though to hide what it had to say, or as though to hide from what its eyes might perceive.

  “Sixty-nine wives,” she heard Mama mutter from behind her hands. “Aren’t you ashamed?”

  “Of course I am.”

  This brought Mama’s peering eyes out from behind her fingertips. It seemed she was uncertain whose victory Louisa had just declared.

  But it wasn’t a victory.

  “For a long time,” Louisa confessed, “that’s all I’ve been—ashamed. Disgraced.” She was referring not only to the rumors, she realized, but to her whole run on the catwalks and at the parties and before the cameras. “I’ve gone along with it,” she pushed on, remembering how she’d felt at her first Miss Burma pageant, “because we’re all degraded here.”

  The truth was never in her life had she felt more naked than now, baring herself to this woman, whom she loved beyond any other, and to whom her nakedness and truthfulness were so obviously threatening. But something in Mama’s questioning eyes told her to keep trying to explain.

  “But I can’t go on indefinitely enduring. I want to serve, Mama. And service is Lynton’s life.”

  “Is it? Maybe service to whatever he happens to want.”

  The explicit reminder of the service that Lynton had rendered Mama, and that she had rendered him, appeared to raise the cup to the woman’s repelled lips. She pretended to drink and then set the cup down in feigned indifference.

  “You’ve been overly influenced by your father,” Mama finally continued with lowering eyes. “Two of a kind. Sentenced to your own self-importance.”

  “I hope that’s not true.”

  “You have a low opinion of me. You see nothing but an ordinary woman content to sit here at her kitchen table, day after day.”

  What Louisa saw was a woman who couldn’t help suddenly throwing a beseeching glance up at her.

  “I’ve never met anyone stronger,” Louisa said, and she found tha
t she wasn’t lying. And there was only quavering honesty in her voice when she went on: “The way you help people—the way you’ve always helped people, everywhere we’ve gone. You’ve never thought twice about it. The sick. The children who needed to be delivered. The dying. All of us. You never stopped serving. I’m also your daughter. And you need to give me the freedom to do the same.”

  She hadn’t meant to refer to what Mama had done with Lynton, but she saw—by the dark blush that consumed Mama’s face—that her final words had thrown that dimension of their past straight back into her mother’s sight line. And too shamed or bewildered to reply, the woman simply sat in the echoing implications of all that had been said.

  Then finally she announced, with defeat, “Go then. Make every mistake I made.” You might as well hold me accountable while you’re at it, she could have added. Instead, she said, “A mistaken marriage is also a life sentence.”

  This last assault took Louisa’s breath away.

  “Is it so impossible with Daddy?” she managed.

  “Your father is my burden to bear. You think, so long as he’s locked up here, I can just do as I please? Your father gave up everything for us. His freedom. He could’ve escaped to India when the Japanese came. That’s what all the other Anglos were doing. But he stayed. He became a Karen. He gave his life to my people. He belongs to me . . . And whenever I see him, ugly as he’s grown, with his foul breath in the morning and his disgusting belly and his bad manners, the way he wears his torn underwear in his study and talks with a full mouth . . . Whenever I see him, with his other woman on the side in that hallowed prison—”

  “Other woman?”

  “Yes, I know—who am I to talk?” Now she peered back into the recesses of her cup. “Whenever I see him, I see a man who nearly sacrificed himself to the Japanese so that we wouldn’t be slaughtered—you and Johnny, my children . . . my children, who are my life . . .”

  She seemed to have lost her way. With tremendous sadness, she lifted the cup to her lips again, and this time she drank. She drank deeply. And Louisa wanted to say something, to say everything, to convey the depth of gratitude and pain that was her inheritance.

  But the fear of seeming false held her silent.

  And then Mama said, “Go. Have your freedom with him. He’ll assert his freedom from you soon enough.”

  She didn’t find Daddy in the living room. Instead, she discovered Hta Hta standing by the suitcase she’d placed by the front door—open to a view of Lynton’s imposing black car and the general seated beside her father in the rear.

  “He must have seen them driving up,” Hta Hta whispered guiltily. “I couldn’t stop him from going out there.”

  “It’s better this way,” Louisa said, though dismay kept her pinned in the doorway a moment more.

  Alongside the car, a man in uniform—no doubt Lynton’s driver—paced through Mama’s beds of roses. He raised his glance bashfully to meet hers when she emerged and then watched as she proceeded out from under the portico, finally stopping a few feet from the car. Evening was coming along with a breeze that drew her anxious gaze down the hillside. Was Mama right? Was her desperation to leave this prison so intense she had to flee with the first man foolhardy enough to offer her a means of escape? She hardly knew him!

  A noise drew her attention back to the car—one of the doors was opening. Soon Lynton emerged, and everything about him confirmed the soundness of her rash choice: his straight stance as he faced her, his aura of respectful calm, the reassuring smile he cast her (a smile that was, well—yes, dashing). And the pistol. That ultimate form of resistance that partly expressed his ultimate strength and that she sensed he would resort to using only in the direst of circumstances. Don’t you see? his searching glance seemed to tell her. All of that—that suffering you put yourself through—it came out of a need not to offend. And as long as you concern yourself with upsetting others, you’re in prison. And: As I see it, you are your father’s daughter. He was a warrior, too, in his way. Trust him to endure this.

  Another gust of fresh wind seemed to impel him to approach. Yet his eyes were tainted with worry when he came and took her firmly by the elbows and said, “Wouldn’t have been right not to ask for his blessing. Just to steal you away—not when he doesn’t have the freedom to steal you back.” There was a note of laughter in his voice, the laughter that came from their need to make light of the harm they were doing.

  “If it makes you more comfortable to believe you’re stealing me,” she tried, “I’ll go along with the story.”

  “Go to him,” he said very tenderly. “He wants to speak with you.” And he strode out to the edge of the flower beds and took out his package of cigarettes.

  It was strange, sliding onto the backseat beside Daddy, sliding into the strange car—which belonged to a stranger to whom she would soon belong—in order to talk to a person who all at once appeared strange. They seemed somehow to be very far away from each other, she and Daddy, as far as they’d ever been, and yet also physically closer than in such a long time.

  He didn’t immediately turn to face her, so she had a moment to take in the disorientation everywhere on his pale and bloated face. He appeared to have just woken, all of his alertness sopped up by sleep. In one of his hands, he held a flask—it must have been Lynton’s flask—and something about the way he grasped the delicate silver thing, almost as though he didn’t quite know how it had landed between his oversize fingers, deeply affected her. She’d always loved his strong hands; while the rest of him had shriveled and withdrawn, those hands seemed still to be waiting to be made full use of. How had they landed with the rest of him here, in this position?

  For another moment, she and Daddy sat in silence, and she seemed to hear the ticking of the car, but maybe it was only Daddy’s old watch.

  “I’m sorry,” she said finally.

  He turned to her and said, with an indistinct smile, “One of these days it was bound to happen.” And he raised the little flask, as if to toast her. But his face fell flat. “Your mother will take it personally, of course. You’ve told her, I imagine?” He didn’t wait for her to respond. Instead he turned his large, knowing gaze to the window—to Lynton, who had strolled out under the mango trees beyond the rose garden. “I’ve never been able to keep you safe,” he said very quietly. “And now you’re walking right into the storm.”

  “That’s where I’ve been for a long time,” she found herself replying. When he turned his eyes back to hers, she went on. “Years now.”

  In Daddy’s look she saw curiosity, comprehension—and, finally, empathy. But that look narrowed suddenly, and with a rawness that chilled her he said, “Have you considered the possibility that you are being used by him?”

  Unwittingly, she turned her glance back to the man who was to be her husband. He was standing stiffly away from them with a cigarette held to his lips. How perfectly groomed he looked out there in the blustery evening, the branches of the mango trees whipping over him.

  “Anyone who thinks the rumors happen to be valid . . .” Daddy was continuing. “Anyone who happens to think that you have special inroads in the capital . . .”

  Could it be more than mutual and visceral attraction that had compelled Lynton to command her to be his wife? And what if he were using her to—to get to Ne Win? Wasn’t she also using him, if only to begin to draw on her own untapped reserves of strength?

  “Lynton must have his own inroads,” she insisted blindly. “He wouldn’t engage in this so-called peace process without them.”

  “I wouldn’t say that’s quite the same thing.”

  Daddy’s words could have been an insult, but she heard the countervailing assurance in the way he’d spoken them—assurance that at least he believed her innocent.

  “There are forces bigger than any you might have imagined,” he said now, gesturing past Lynton and the mango trees. “Forces
at work on all of us.”

  Whenever he spoke that way—suspiciously, obscurely—she was plagued by pity for him. He appeared something of the raving fool, discontent with his small place in the world, and determined to enlarge it by imagining swelling powers that pressed down on his own diminishing ones. He’d never permitted her to read his editorials and essays (his “writings”), but she’d long ago formed the impression that the tottering, circular, effete nature of his verbal rants formed the character of whatever arguments he happened to be making on the page—that he never got anywhere past supposition, accusation. And yet, glancing back at the man waiting for her in the windy twilight—a man presently peering out over the hillside and the distant village of Thamaing as if to glean the scope of forces that not even he could fathom—she wondered if she hadn’t been the fool to reject Daddy’s rants so entirely.

  “You’re correct that a man like Lynton isn’t naive,” Daddy went on. “He has his plan. His strategic plan. His broader connections. His allies and enemies.” He glanced, as if suspicious, around the car. But it was only embarrassment, she realized, that kept his eyes averted from hers now. “A man like that doesn’t just allow himself to be conquered by impulse and infatuation. It would be different if you two had previously been acquainted.”

  Or have you been? his nervous glance seemed to imply. Am I the one who’s been kept in the dark about certain alliances?

  “Are you asking me not to marry him?” Louisa interjected, partly to evade the subject of those alliances, of her own past with Lynton, of Mama’s past, of which she urgently wanted to keep Daddy ignorant. But she had the sense that she was also trying to keep herself in the dark about Daddy’s latent suspicions.