Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  “I’m asking you to understand that if you go ahead with this, you become his ally,” he said. “You ally yourself with a man who has been rumored not just to have died repeatedly on the battlefield and to have been repeatedly resurrected, but to have led a raid on a Thai police station because he thought he’d been cheated on an arms deal. A man who supposedly derailed a train en route to Moulmein. A man who, according to your mother’s acquaintances, has never had a taste for monogamy. A man who, according to my own friends, may be pursuing this ‘so-called peace process,’ as you put it, only in order to secure an elevated place within Ne Win’s regime.”

  So repelled was she by this last bit of speculation that a surge of fury rose up within her now-battering chest, and she said, trying to contain the fright in her voice, “No doubt in order to undermine that regime—that is, if your ‘friends’ have it right . . . Aren’t we beyond rumors, Daddy? Don’t we know better than to give them credence? I’m past caring what others think.”

  “Past caring what other Karens think?”

  “What are you saying? He has our people’s support.”

  “And rumor would have it that he’s tended to go his own way in order to achieve it.”

  “There you go again with rumors!”

  “Not all Karens are thrilled about what he’s doing, Louisa. One of his rivals in the Karen army, a man who goes by the name of Bo Moo—a hotheaded, trigger-quick son of a bitch, they say, and also the only one who can scare Lynton half out of his wits. Apparently, he is adamantly against trusting the regime, against talks of any kind—even talks with the West, by whom we’ve also been burned repeatedly—while Lynton seems to be courting conversation with the CIA.”

  “Is this just conjecture, Daddy?”

  She might have said: How can what you are saying be anything but conjecture when you’re locked in your study, with your only source of information being the ex-convicts who visit you out of pity?

  “It sounds like nonsense,” she persisted, “Lynton wanting in with the tyrant, on the one hand, and in with the powers of democracy, on the other—”

  “They’re more linked than you might believe—”

  She couldn’t help waving a hand over her face, as if to sweep away so much rubbish. And it hurt him. She instantly saw injury pinch at Daddy’s afflicted face.

  “What I mean to say,” he tried more feebly, “is how will you feel if you end up allied to a man responsible for the Karen Union’s undoing?”

  The man in question was by now halfway down their property; when she looked, she saw Lynton descending the brushy hillside at a quick clip, as if he meant to burn up his own inner torment.

  “If that happens,” she found herself replying when she looked back into Daddy’s troubled eyes, “if Lynton is responsible for the Karen Union dissolving, I will believe it is the best thing.”

  She’d never dared pursue such a radical thought—how could she, given Daddy’s part in the Karen Union’s solidification? But hadn’t the university massacre taught her that if ethnic hatred had fashioned the nation’s history, its new dictator was making the country over with an even broader, blinder, indiscriminate hate? Burman students had also died in the massacre. And if the nation was to heal, if the nation was to do away with both the hater and the hatred, the nation’s peoples must do so together. Undeniably, ethnic minorities had suffered and were still suffering more than any Burmans: rape, beheadings, dismemberments, slavery, not to mention chronic humiliation, chronic displacement, a chronic sense of inferiority—non-Burmans had suffered for ages just because of Burman supremacy. But Burmans were also victims of Ne Win’s military dictatorship; they, too, had grown up—perhaps enough to recognize that they were no more deserving of protection and justice.

  “What I mean to say,” she ventured, “is that I trust Lynton to determine if the time has come for us Karens to give up the dream of our own nation—or even the dream of a state within a federal democracy—so that we might pursue something better for a nation that already exists.”

  For a long time, Daddy merely considered her, as if in distant suspicion of the person she seemed to have become overnight. Then he said, “You’re more of a revolutionary than I am.” And after a pause: “You really think the Burmans can get past their racism?” And when she didn’t straightaway answer: “You have faith in Lynton . . . But you still haven’t told me why. Why, when you don’t even know the man?”

  She was still desperate not to provide her only justification—that a long time ago she had indeed known Lynton. Yet whom had she really known but a strapping boy-man who’d brought her a rusted old bike and danced a jig in order to make her laugh while she worked at a sewing machine’s hand crank? Who had he been to her but the embodiment of hope and lightness during a desolate time? A fantasy. Just like her fantasy of a cohesive nation untainted by centuries of prejudice. And who was she, anyway, to argue for that nation when it had been the sight of Lynton’s pistol that had detonated her own will to strength?

  The most striking feature in Daddy’s face was his eyes: large, bulging, seemingly unblinking—a witness to his decades of enchantment and disputation and suffering. When he studied her now with those eyes, she had the impression that he was reading her thoughts, so that it would have been redundant to answer his question aloud. And after a moment, he appeared to acknowledge this.

  “If it’s really trust Lynton’s after,” he said, and she wanted to stop him, to confess that she couldn’t claim to know anything about the man or his intentions, “if he really means to build trust between peoples, then I hope to God he succeeds. The fortitude it takes to trust when they’ve robbed you of your dignities, when they’ve tried to turn you into the vermin they believe you to be . . . It’s beyond most people—beyond me, I’m afraid. Maybe Lynton can find a way to touch evil without being sullied. Whatever Ne Win is up to, maybe Lynton can escape it alive and morally strengthened. Maybe . . .”

  But just as she was preparing to divulge all her doubt, he turned directly to her and put his great strong hand on the top of her head and cupped it with his palm and said, “I commend you to God and to the world of his grace.” The press of that hand told her that he was trying to be brave in giving her away, even though he couldn’t summon adequate faith to believe she would come through unscathed.

  And she was suddenly afraid that they would never sit this way again, side by side. Reaching to embrace him, she knocked the flask out of his hand, and then they were knocking their heads together as they bent to extricate the thing from the crevice into which it had fallen, the smell of burbling whiskey expanding in the air between them.

  “One last drop,” Daddy said with a smile after he’d retrieved the thing and was sitting straight again. He tipped the flask back to his lips, and she sat watching him, until finally he seemed to give up, and he set the flask down on the seat between them. “I just can’t see why . . .” he muttered to himself, almost inaudibly.

  “Why what?” she asked gently.

  From the way he turned to her now, she had the impression that he thought she’d already left him behind.

  “Why Lynton should agree to Ne Win’s terms for the peace talks,” he said matter-of-factly. “When I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted a man for a son-in-law who proposed marriage with a gun on his belt, he said if that was all, I shouldn’t worry—that he’d decided to surrender his arms, to surrender his entire brigade’s weaponry.”

  18

  Allies

  How could she expect to be trusted if she couldn’t manage to trust? During the first few weeks of their marriage, as Lynton prepared to enter the peace negotiations that would apparently also be his surrender, she allowed her doubts about him to go unspoken. What he really wanted to achieve by means of those negotiations, what he really wanted to achieve by means of her, what she really wanted to achieve by means of their new alliance—these questions, too, she submer
ged beneath her pressing desire to draw closer to this man, to whom every day she grew more attached.

  There was a flower that she had seen long ago through the window of her room at the Forest Governor’s house: white, broad as a plate, protruding from the end of a long green stalk. It had opened only at midnight, and only two or three times before it had withered. And now she—who had bloomed as a girl in Kyowaing, and then again in an equally difficult incarnation as Miss Burma—felt she was blooming anew in the clandestine, dark light of Lynton’s love.

  And as if, before his surrender, he also wanted to flower once more beside her, Lynton ordered some of his men to construct a floating hut on a nearby lake to which they periodically escaped. Fed by a waterfall, the lake was surrounded by an orchard of papaya and banana trees whose branches were reflected on the surface of the clear water. Each morning that they rose in the hut, they would leap out into the cold lake and float on their backs, her stomach facing the sky like some promise of their future together. And in the dimness of the hut, whose small space threw them into greater warmth and closeness, she would look lengthily at him. Revolution, justice . . . what were those compared with the resolute earnestness of his beautiful face, or with the privilege of residing in this provisional home on this magnificent lake? To be here, to feel this! They could have been the first humans, momentarily making contact with the shared inheritance of their descendants. He spoke of the clean air, of the taste of the water, of the texture of her skin, and he clasped her face, held her breasts, laughed, shook his head, kissed her. It was impossible for her to doubt the sincerity of his affection.

  True, whenever they returned to Rangoon, where they were stationed in his government-owned cottage, they were greeted with tabloid reports that pegged their marriage as one he’d orchestrated in order to get close to Ne Win, or as one she’d agreed to in order to evade the glare of gossip about her affair with the strongman, or as one through which she’d lured him into Ne Win’s trap. True, these same papers delighted in the tawdry details of their significant age difference and his just as significant (yet evidently untallied) number of “marriages” and illegitimate children. (Though about the subject of his former ties to her mother—which ought to have rendered their union unthinkable by any typical standards of decency—the papers were thankfully ignorant.) But part of the heroism that she was increasingly attracted to was the ability to liberate oneself not just from others’ disparaging opinions, but also from a common and narrow view of such things as decency.

  Oh, she still hurt for Mama and mourned their severed tie, blamed herself for the embarrassment she’d caused her; yet that hurt and self-reproach existed separately from her courage to feel the full force of her relief to be with Lynton. They would have been fools not to hold fast to each other. They would have been allowing others’ condemnation to desecrate their attachment. They would have been cowards, and neither of them was, by nature, cowardly.

  And what a blessing Lynton’s conviction could be! At the various dinners and official parties they began to attend in Rangoon, Lynton stood by her side not as Kenneth once had—anxiously, innocently—but as he stood up to life. In everything he did, he risked himself to the extent that he worshipped at life’s feet. And he plunged into it all unapologetically and without fuss. The reckless way he danced, spent money, and drank—that was Lynton. No Karen self-effacement. He was a sovereign of his own kind: a man so seemingly beyond the law that he took what he wanted and forced open a zone through which she could peaceably, if dishonorably, pass. What does it matter that there’s more gossip about us than ever before? he tacitly reassured her. We mustn’t disgrace ourselves with consideration of such things. And: Let them think what they like. It only makes clearer our mandate not to bother with pleasing the mob. And: Let them damn us, but let’s not damn ourselves for them. Let them disgrace themselves with their scorn—don’t let’s justify their scorn by retreating back into hiding. Go boldly! Greatly! And, by all means, with much exuberance! What a relief to leave the fakery behind.

  Of course, the entertainments and hobnobbing would have been insufferable were she not also reassuring herself that she was preparing to serve some higher purpose alongside Lynton.

  “Teach me to shoot,” she blurted out to him one late morning. They were at the lake again, and the previous night, around one or two in the morning, she had woken and turned on her spirit lamp to find Lynton staring up into the folds of their mosquito netting. She hadn’t dared question him—to do so, she sensed, would be to tread on some inviolable private territory whose boundaries he counted on her to respect. And it had been easy, given the intimacies of their quarters on the lake, given their intimacy, to ignore the vast reaches of uncharted terrain between them. But the question of what had been keeping him awake exerted itself on her half-roused mind, even if she hadn’t entirely been conscious of it until this morning, until this moment. And it seemed to her that the answer to that question might be triggered by his response to this demand—that he teach her how to shoot, how to use that pistol on his hip, which he would so soon be relinquishing.

  His soldier and sometimes cook, Sunny, a sweet man six or seven years Lynton’s junior and someone she vaguely remembered from their days together in Bilin, had made them a picnic of fried pancakes and milky coffee, which he’d set out on the shore for them. The sky had been swelling up with vapors all night, and had finally burst and drained itself of every last drop earlier this morning, so that now they could sit and drink up the air coming off the refreshed lake while leisurely enjoying Sunny’s meal. But her request made Lynton put down his cup and look with interest into her eyes.

  “Teach you to shoot?” he said, his emphasis, interestingly, shifting the focus of her words from her violent impulse to her apparent inability to receive instruction.

  His glance darted to the edges of the orchard fronting the lake, where, about a hundred feet off, a furry monkey the size of a small dog sat grooming itself near the top of a banana tree.

  “If you hit that,” he said, pointing to the poor creature, “I’ll give you all of my money.”

  “You’re already obliged to do that by law,” she said. “And besides, it’ll all be worthless if Ne Win goes ahead with his plan.” In the past week, rumors had started that Ne Win intended to divest their currency of its value in order to combat black marketeering, or more likely to control the distribution of whatever currency he would go on to print.

  “Then I’ll give you something else you like,” he said with a gleam in his eyes.

  “That’s more of a mutual favor than a gift, I’d say.”

  “In other words, you don’t think you can hit it?”

  “I’m not going to kill it just to prove a point.”

  “I thought so,” he said smugly.

  And to prove a point, indeed, she commanded him, “Give me your pistol.”

  With a certain swaggering and absorbed delight, he leaned over and took his pistol out of its holster and said, handing it to her, “Be my guest. It’s uncocked as it is. Just don’t shoot me.” And then, in a way that made her want to do nothing but shoot him, he leaned back on his elbows and sighed as if to express his ultimate ease.

  “If I hit the bunch of bananas in the tree to the right—” she said, getting to her feet and squinting across the orchard and trying to avoid the trigger on the volatile object between her hands.

  “Yes?”

  “You owe me your loyalty to the end of your days.”

  “I already owe you that by law,” he said with a self-satisfied smile.

  “Since when did the law mean anything to you?”

  “Exactly my point.”

  She grunted in exasperation and, turning to the banana tree in question, focused on the bright green tiers of fruit emanating from a flowering stalk half hidden beneath a fan of feathery leaves. Or rather, she focused her frustration on the innocent bananas, and then on the s
talk holding them up. Her frustration about her diminutive position as a woman who was expected to fail at this. Her frustration about being no less in the dark regarding Lynton’s dealings than she had been on the day he’d charged back into her life.

  She didn’t even have to take aim twice. As she reeled back from the muzzle blast, she saw she’d hit the stalk, causing the entire bunch of bananas to drop, a flock of birds to spring up for cover, and the poor monkey to jump off into the shadows.

  “Goddamn,” she heard Lynton say over the ringing in her ears. And then, using one of the anglicisms he liked to sprinkle his stories with: “I suppose now you think you’re a ‘big shot.’”

  She sank back down beside him, trying not to shake. “I think I’m a ‘crack shot.’”

  Gingerly, her heart still banging away in her chest, she passed the pistol back to him. It occurred to her that she would have been justified in marrying him just because he had the strength of spirit to lay down his arms and try peace talks for a time. But for some reason she went on: “Is it really true—that you’re surrendering your arms in order to negotiate? Tell me it’s a formality, that you have stashes of weapons hidden all over the place.”

  He couldn’t have guessed how exposed she felt, divulging what she knew he’d kept concealed from her. He couldn’t have guessed that she was asking for a place by his side politically. Nor could he have imagined that she would take any refusal to grant her entry into that covert world as a declaration of, if not war between them, a stalemate of a kind.

  Or perhaps, by some ineffable sense of the soul that had already begun to pass into him long before, he glimpsed all that lay behind her question. But a darkness spread over his usually shining face. And he said, “Trust me,” and put the pistol back in its holster, and looked off toward the banana tree. Did he see something there, too, or was she just imagining that, in blasting its one stalk full of fruit, she’d wrecked something precarious in the universe, tipped an invisible scale the balance of which she and he, and maybe all the Karens, were dependent on?