Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  But Lynton only peered remotely at him, as though transfixed by his own inexorable confusion.

  “She was pointing to something,” Benny continued. “She mouthed a few words to the child, and they looked out to the sea. At what? I wondered. I knew every vessel and man that came within five hundred feet of that shore.”

  “I’m going to have to take your daughter underground,” Lynton said.

  Benny was conscious of the blow having come, of what Lynton meant: that Louisa was in jeopardy. He was conscious that Lynton was speaking of nothing less than their lives being imminently threatened; yet everything about the man’s presence defied this easy interpretation: the steadiness of Lynton’s voice, the clarity of his gaze, the frank way he faced Benny, his perfectly groomed head, how he filled out his uniform, even his hands, which had set down his glass and were composed on his knees yet enlivened with something—a readiness to fight, to win. Yes, everything about Lynton insisted on his being absolutely resplendent with life, absolutely inextinguishable.

  “Should we have another round?” Benny finally said.

  With genuine respectfulness and a gleam of remorse in his eyes, Lynton stood and filled their tumblers to the top again.

  “I always thought the most unbearable thing, the very most unbearable,” Benny said when Lynton had sat back down, “would be to have to leave Rangoon. I was born here, you know. My grandfather was this city’s rabbi once. I’ll never forget the day the Japs started bombing. My fellow officers, most of them, had left. I could have sought refuge in India. Khin wanted me to go. But she wouldn’t leave Burma with me. Louisa was—she must have been one, or two. We still thought of her as a baby.”

  But he couldn’t speak another word. All at once, he burst out in convulsive sobs.

  “Her mother will be devastated,” he found himself blubbering. And then, over Lynton’s silence: “She pretends to be outraged, but she loves Louisa, painfully!”

  He felt Lynton watching him as he collected himself and blew his nose, until, finally raising his sheepish glance to him, he took in Lynton’s firm, frank face again.

  “The talks aren’t over,” Lynton said. “But the Burmans are cornering us. It may not be possible to stay in Rangoon until the birth.”

  “And William Young?”

  Benny was as startled by the turn he’d taken as Lynton appeared to be. There was a moment of hesitation, almost of interest in the man’s disoriented gaze, which soon narrowed, telling Benny that he’d violated something—if not Lynton’s privacy, then his personal code of conduct, in which he alone held the power to determine what he would and wouldn’t disclose.

  But Benny, powerless to stop himself anymore from pursuing the course of his rushing boldness, leaped up from his seat and dashed out of the room—all the way down the hall to his study, where, from his peeling old desk, he snatched up the latest volume of his writings.

  “Read it!” he said, when he’d returned with the inflammatory thing, which he immediately began to wave wildly at Lynton. “Prove all of my suppositions wrong! And, by all means, pass it along to him if he’s someone you’re working with! It’s all I have to give!”

  Lynton gave no sign of being staggered by Benny’s outburst. Rather, he watched him with renewed fortitude and even reverence. Yet suddenly he stood and formally seized the volume from Benny’s hand—to claim or confiscate it—and, just as abruptly, he bowed and said, “She will be protected.”

  And because a single act of courage can incite similar acts, Benny shouted to the retreating man, “Do what you can before it’s too late for Rita Mya! She’s been held by the monsters for fifteen years in Insein Prison!”

  A few days later, by some universal principle by which misfortunes strike more often in aggregate than in isolation, they received a letter from Johnny’s young American wife. It had been tampered with, the letter—its seal broken, its carefully inked script pooling in fingerprint-sized spots, as if the government meddler had just washed his hands before sifting through the thin pages, or as if that meddler had wiped away his own spontaneously elicited tears. It was enough, these heartaches in aggregate, to make one wonder what it was all for. You strive, you strive to do right, to make something of your life, to find a way to make peace with others, with yourself, and then you drop dead. Or else the ones you are trying to make peace with vanish or are felled.

  After reading the letter through several times, Benny took it upstairs and knocked on Khin’s door. She called for him to enter—or, rather, she called to the person who she must have thought would be Hta Hta to come in. When he hesitantly opened the door and leaned his head inside the yellowing room, its curtains only partially drawn, she appeared to be as surprised to see him as he was shocked by the state in which he found her—laid out stiffly on the bed, her hands positioned over her startlingly narrow chest, her color off in the afternoon light filtering through the window.

  “Has something happened?” she said, spotting the letter in his hand.

  She seemed to struggle to sit up and flinched with some pain—in her abdomen, he observed.

  “Are you sick?” he ventured.

  “Tell me what it says.”

  She set herself against the headboard with worried expectancy, and he sat in the chair opposite the bed, guilt passing over his heart. Since the first Miss Burma pageant—when from his seat in those stands he’d glimpsed what Louisa might radiantly have stood for—his anger toward Khin had raged as never before. Raged because of Khin’s part in what had been made of their daughter. At some level, he’d even blamed her for the disappearing act that Louisa had felt compelled to stage with Lynton, though he took no satisfaction in the particular suffering that act must have caused Khin. And he’d come—perhaps solipsistically, he realized—to view what Khin had done to launch Louisa into celebrity, and what she’d done much earlier with Saw Lay and Lynton, as part of her personal (if ultimately unsuccessful) revolution against him, against her unhappiness with him. But seeing her now, seemingly trapped in the bed, trapped in her body, he glimpsed how terribly partial that view of her had been. The truth was she’d never been trapped. He was the prisoner. All along, she could have moved on with her life, walked out on him. Yet she had chosen to stay. And he was so suddenly moved by her loyalty that for a moment he couldn’t speak. What was astonishing, he thought, wasn’t that their union had been meant to be; very possibly they could have built equally meaningful lives with others. What was astonishing, rather, was that this loyalty existed in spite of their not having been meant to be together. What was astonishing was that leap, unique to every less-than-perfect marriage.

  “Whatever it says, Benny, please tell me,” she urged him, and he saw that she was bracing herself against the headboard.

  He coughed into his fist and opened the letter. “It’s from Nancy”—Nancy being Johnny’s plain, bespectacled twenty-year-old wife, whose blurry photograph they had received soon after the young couple’s precipitate marriage nearly two years earlier. “She is very reassuring,” he added—a lie. “She promises that nothing has changed as far as her devotion to Johnny goes.” Another lie—this one told by Nancy, who no doubt had been struggling to believe the lie herself. Again his eyes took in the smudged contours of the girl’s careful handwriting, pressed into the thin pages between his fingers. “It seems our boy has suffered a nervous episode. He was studying for oral examinations, and at the same time managing the money of friends and several faculty members. How his instructors could have allowed themselves to put a student in such a position is unimaginable—”

  “But he is alive?”

  When he glanced up, Khin was staring at him with desperation. He couldn’t do it: he couldn’t subject her to one more heartache. What he wanted was to shelter her from heartbreak for the rest of her life.

  “Yes, my darling,” he assured her, rather than telling her of Johnny’s rise and fall while playing the
stock market, rather than describing how one night Johnny hadn’t come home, and Nancy had driven around the cold Michigan campus, finally locating him near midnight, crouched in the snow, without clothes, and defecating. “He is alive.” Alive in a mental institution, he did not elaborate.

  Now she exhaled, her body seeming to release itself of something more than breath, so that suddenly he felt frightened of losing that breath’s ongoingness. And he was filled with tender pity for her. It must have been very difficult for her, he admitted to himself, that their daughter had found freedom with a man who had once freed Khin ­herself—from heartache, from aloneness, from captivity by loyalty to him.

  Not a week passed before Hta Hta woke him at midnight, a lamp in her hand, saying a white man was waiting for him downstairs. In the bafflement of his half-wakefulness, Benny fumbled with his trousers and pressed down his hair. Yet he was somehow unsurprised to find Hatchet in the semidarkness of the living room, peering at a photograph of Louisa pretending at serenity under the weight of her Miss Burma crown.

  “I imagine you bribed the thugs at the bottom of my driveway,” Benny said to him.

  Hatchet turned—not in surprise, exactly, but with obvious anxiousness. And with dismay. Yes, from the way he took Benny in, it was evident that time—ten years of time since they’d last met!—hadn’t been any kinder to Benny than it had been to the poor chap. The slope of Hatchet’s enlarged belly, the cant of his neck (even with his head thrown back just so)—each feature of his appearance spoke of his having been defeated by gravity, by the work Burma had made of him, or the work he’d made of Burma. Only the absence of his old pustules now dignified him. So he was finally past his adolescence. Finally past it, and already an old man.

  “One of them,” the American said now, though Benny had forgotten his own question by then. “The rest were sleeping on the job.”

  “Will you have something?” Benny said, heading for the bar, where one of the bottles from a stash Lynton had previously brought stood nearly emptied. Benny had gone to bed having had too much, and he had told himself he would be more moderate come morning, and here it was, around midnight, and he could hardly steady his hands enough to divide the dregs of the bottle into the tumblers he hadn’t bothered to wash.

  Hatchet gripped the glass that Benny thrust at him, staring at its amber contents with a hangdog look. He seemed to be gathering up his courage finally to reveal his own human dependency on something—on liquor, on intimacy.

  He touched the glass to his lips, but a moment later drew the glass back down.

  “For God’s sake,” Benny said, “what is it?”

  “I guess I don’t drink,” the man said, blushing to the jawline. “I’ve never really developed the taste.” The way he confessed it: it was as if the deficiency of that taste betrayed some greater deficiency of spirit.

  “So why accept the glass?” Benny hadn’t meant to be cruel, but even as he regretted his tone he snatched the glass from Hatchet and defended himself with a few swift gulps of its contents.

  “It seems to make others more comfortable,” Hatchet said, looking rather shocked.

  “You’re wrong. It makes people far more uncomfortable when a man isn’t easy in his skin. So you don’t like liquor. So what? Say you don’t drink. That’s a respectable position. For heaven’s sake, don’t take a glass and fondle it and dab its rim around your lips.”

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” Benny told him.

  “You haven’t hurt them.”

  “For God’s sake,” Benny said.

  Another bloom of embarrassment rose to Hatchet’s cheeks, and Benny had the sudden, unreasonable instinct to protect the devil—and then, just as swiftly, to punish him for needing protection. What he wanted was to take him by the collar and give him a good shake.

  “Why did you name yourself ‘Hatchet’ of all things?” he demanded instead. “Leaves a terrible tingle on the back of a man’s neck.”

  “I don’t know. Just came to me.”

  “That’s a cop-out if I ever heard one. It must’ve come to you for a reason.”

  “Maybe it’s related to a story my father used to tell me.”

  “Your father?” Why was Benny astounded by the entirely ordinary revelation that Hatchet was someone’s son?

  “I grew up in New England, Boston—that’s—”

  “I know where it is.”

  “My mother was raised there. But Dad was Southern, the son of a Presbyterian minister from a place called Prattville, Alabama. That probably doesn’t mean anything to you. Back home, the difference between the South and the North—it meant even more when Mother and Dad married in the early twenties. He came to Boston to go to MIT, a university—”

  “Of course.”

  There he was, Benny, wanting to pummel the fellow again.

  “I guess he converted to Mother’s perspectives—Republican, Congregationalist. And she apologized for his old ones. She liked to say his ancestors had been ‘nice to their slaves.’” Hatchet laughed as he said this, with a spite Benny had never seen even in the shadows of his most stifled expressions of interest or pain. “Whenever I used to get dreamy, or sleepy, or talk about some scheme I had when I was a kid, my father would tell me the story of what he did to the Negro working under him when he was a boy. I guess they were ten or eleven, and one day my father was left in charge, and the other boy—a sweeper—fell asleep on a cracker barrel, and my father told the boy to wake up, to get back to work, but the boy kept sleeping. So my father picked up a hatchet and threw it at the cracker barrel, where it stuck, while he shouted, ‘When I say wake up, I mean wake up!’” The American was laughing more fiercely now, laughing with that awful spite in his eyes.

  But all at once the laughter stopped, and he said, “Maybe I will have something to drink, if it’s not too much trouble,” and he sank onto the sofa, beside his balled-up overcoat.

  When Benny returned with a couple of bottles of beer from one of Lynton’s stashes, Hatchet took his warm bottle by the neck and drank absently. And it was suddenly pleasant, drinking in the shadows with him. They seemed to have found a way to be together.

  But when Benny’s bottle was empty, it occurred to him that a man’s personal vulnerability could blind one to his cold cruelties.

  “Did Lynton send you?” he said, startling Hatchet out of his daze. Benny hadn’t spoken sharply, yet the accusation in his tone must have been audible.

  A sort of sourness pinched at the man’s mouth now, and he put down his own half-drained bottle, as if unable to manage the taste after all.

  “I was a little hurt by what you wrote,” he said. “But I guess I deserved some of it.”

  Almost sadly, he sifted through the mess of his overcoat and brought out Benny’s volume. “You should have it,” he said, holding it out.

  Benny took the thing between his fingers, wanting to protect it from extinguishment. “Has Lynton had the chance to read it?” he said, his heart thumping in his throat.

  Hatchet didn’t seem to catch on to the significance of his question. “I imagine so,” he said quietly. “He’s very well-read.”

  “You haven’t told me what you think. I have thick skin. Tell me where I’ve erred.”

  Hatchet seemed to consider this a moment. “I can’t speak to everything about the past. And I guess I don’t understand the value of all the time you spend on it. But your conjectures about recent events and what’s going on now—”

  “Hold on a minute,” Benny interrupted him. “Don’t you see—don’t you see that one of the values of examining the past is that it allows you to escape the tyranny of the present? I mean the tyranny of the self in the present. A self that is terrified of diminishment in the face of the past, in which it played no part.”

  The fellow looked at him in pity and confusion. He couldn’t f
ollow where Benny’s thoughts had taken him—beyond history, beyond circumstance, to the realm of the spirit. He couldn’t follow it, and he mistook his confusion for Benny’s.

  “I’m sorry for not finding a way to make contact before,” he said. “The pressure has been intense. I mean the pressure not to interact with insurgents or anyone involved in insurrectionary activities.”

  “Yet you’ve kept in touch with Lynton.”

  Now the man couldn’t hold his gaze.

  “Am I correct, Hatchet? Correct in what I describe about America playing a role—if not in overthrowing U Nu and installing Ne Win on the throne, then in keeping Ne Win on that throne . . . U Nu came too close to bowing to the demands of the ‘ethnics,’ didn’t he? Too close to giving in to federalism. And your government doesn’t want that kind of fragmentation, as you told me. That might open the region to communist influence. Whereas the Union is safe in the dictatorial fist of Ne Win—provided, of course, he maintains his so-called posture of neutrality regarding China. Never mind his Marxist rhetoric, that he’s staffed his ranks with old communist sympathizers, that his party controls everything . . . And his army’s program to ‘liquidate’ minorities, as you people like to call it—the executions, the way he’s relocating villagers en masse to camps, forcing them to serve in the Burma Army . . . Am I right that America wants Ne Win to succeed—to kill off the minority problem? . . . And Lynton—are you behind his ‘surrender’? Have you promised him support as long as he works with Ne Win? Hatchet?”