“Will. Please call me by my name.”
“For God’s sake. Answer me.”
There was a pause, during which Hatchet—Will—seemed to be trying to decide his next course of action. Then he looked at Benny very plainly, and he said, “I have it from a reliable source that Ne Win will be seeking substantial military equipment from the United States any day. I’m not talking about the aid program already in place, what you write about in your diary. I’m talking about substantial amounts of advanced stuff: Trainer, transport, and tactical aircraft—fighter-bombers of the Mach 2 class. Patrol ships, minesweepers, torpedo boats, auxiliaries, amphibious craft. Washington is going to say yes to him because it’ll be seen as an overture. And because, bottom line, yes, our government thinks the ethnics are the problem. As far as Washington is concerned, the United States hasn’t been involved in aiding the opposition since the embarrassment with the Chinese anticommunists.”
For a long moment, Benny was too winded to speak. “What have you been doing here, then,” he finally stammered, “as far as your people are concerned?”
“Doing our part,” the American said softly. “Buffering Thailand from Peking by winning over rebel armies.”
“Winning them over . . . while facilitating their destruction.”
“I imagine so. Yes, that’s right.”
Hatchet picked up his beer and took a forced swallow. And now Benny was the one to laugh—to laugh at him. The little man, the little son of the bigot, who, not knowing he yearned to cleave to his father, to America, had struck out to cleave himself away from them. He’d made his plans with Lynton, striking out in the name of loyalty and courage; but he would follow America’s policies to the last line.
“And is Lynton aware?”
“I’ve tried to warn him.”
“There’s no excuse anymore for keeping your cards to your chest, Hatchet!”
“It’s not a question of that . . . He’s determined to expect the best of us.”
In the light of the man’s admission—in the darkness of Hatchet’s evident shame before it—they sat, lost and speechless. Then the American stood and went to the table where Benny had found him—to the photo of Louisa, as if to a saving grace.
“It’s true I was there,” Hatchet said softly.
A moment passed before Benny understood that he was referring to his presence at Louisa’s first Miss Burma pageant, something to which Benny had referred in the volume.
“I only wanted to see the girls . . . But there’s something about her.” He reddened as he confessed this, yet it was with more pain than embarrassment that he went on. “You’re wrong about me proposing her to Lynton, about me putting into his head the idea of his marrying Ne Win’s mistress . . . I’d never have sacrificed her to a scheme.”
“I realize that. I was out of line.”
“But do you think he married her to get to Ne Win?”
“She was never the man’s lover.”
“Lynton might have believed the rumors . . . I danced with her, you know. A few weeks back at the Orient Club. She’s an awfully good dancer.”
How intolerably isolated William Young was. It took someone equally isolated to recognize that.
“Are you suggesting that he married my daughter the better to execute an assassination plot?”
“The thought occurred to me.”
“Could you blame him?” Benny asked.
Now Hatchet turned back to him with a haunted, hunted gaze.
“Let me tell you something,” Benny pressed on dangerously. “One of the things I’ve been trying to find out all these years in my journals is whether or not we—in defending our rights with this revolution—have the right to kill. I’ll admit to you that I am nowhere near finding my solution. It seems clear enough that violence, murder even of the murderous, is a surrender of a kind, as doomed to end in bitterness as a life of slavery. But have we the right to stand by and watch people be made slaves—to watch them murdered, as through Ne Win’s policies, in the most disgusting and undignified ways?”
Hatchet watched him vigilantly.
“Of course I realize that our fight,” Benny persisted, “our fight which has justice and freedom as its aims, is now at the point of facilitating their opposites. We have Lynton, and then we have his foil, Bo Moo”—Bo Moo who had reignited the Karen revolution in the jungle, while Lynton had been doggedly trying to “talk,” or whatever it was he’d been up to—“and each seems prepared to kill the other for the sake of his particular vision of justice and freedom. Sometimes this contradiction is enough to make one—to make me—want to shrivel up and die. If we can’t trust one another, why should we expect anyone to trust us? Of course, it could be argued that your people’s treachery led us down this path of distrust. I don’t mean to play the continual victim, Hatchet. Part of inhabiting the role of the rebel is to find the courage to tell the truth about unpleasant things. And it can’t be denied that there’s something brilliant about Lynton and Moo. Without them, flawed and frighteningly precipitate as they are, the light of our hope would be extinguished entirely.”
Through all this, Hatchet had continued to watch him steadily, as if in expectation of a final revelation that would put to rest all his remaining questions about Lynton. And now, with Benny’s speech having subsided, he looked washed over by disappointment. Benny was filled with a rush of pity for him.
“I have no idea, no idea at all, what Lynton is up to,” Benny told him. “I can guarantee you that anyone who claims to know is a liar or a fool. He’s too savvy to confide fully in anyone. Even you. Even my daughter, I imagine.”
The reminder of Louisa—of her marriage to the other, unknowable man—seemed to force Hatchet’s eyes back to her picture and then away, to the photograph beside it, one of Khin as a hesitant young bride.
“She’s beautiful, your wife,” he said gently, and not without a trace of envy, so that Benny’s pity gave way to his old frustration with the man, and he was seized by the rebellious desire to disabuse Hatchet of all his juvenile fantasies.
“If my wife stood accused of going to bed with Ne Win, I should be apt to believe it,” he said.
Hatchet turned to him with a start. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”
“Is it?” But of course the fellow was right. “I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve been a philanderer in my time,” Benny continued. “Or to admit I have no right to begrudge my wife her own disloyalty to our matrimony. I have no idea what the extent of that disloyalty has been. For a long time I believed it to be a kind of rebellion against me. Retribution for my philandering. If she were to leave me—now that would be a revolution! But she stays, and she endures a loveless, trapped life, and she hates herself and life all the more.”
Benny had disclosed far more than he’d meant to, far more—it was evident from the fellow’s disapproving stare—than Hatchet had ever wanted him to come out with. And before retreating to a safer subject, he hastened to add, “What I should do is liberate her by leaving the country myself . . . For so long, I’ve been waiting for something—for my prison friend’s release, for my release, for Khin’s release from disappointment in me, for Burma’s release from captivity—when all along I might have tried to free myself . . . You don’t suppose you could help me, Hatchet? Help me secure the necessary immigration papers. Living in America wouldn’t be half bad.”
A moment passed while Hatchet gazed at him in bald bewilderment. “I guess I could look into it,” he said finally.
And to press him a bit by taking a more sympathetic line, Benny said, “To answer your initial question, I doubt very much that Lynton, shrewd as he is, married my daughter to get to Ne Win. I imagine he fell in love with her, plain and simple. I imagine he felt he had the right to love, absent all political aims. And I imagine he felt she did . . . I don’t know, Hatchet.” He couldn’t help it—honest
y compelled him to divulge his secret self again. “I’ve loved rarely in my life, and when I have, love has been mysterious. It’s only sometimes had the quality of soul speak. I find it difficult to explain. We are bewildered most of the time and doomed to be lost to history. And yet we find that there are others who are unlike us in every conceivable way, yet to whom we are bound.”
Whatever condemnation and shock had lit up the man’s eyes before had dwindled again to disappointment. And it came to Benny that they were more alike than dissimilar. “I’ll tell you something,” he went on to the fellow: “since my house arrest, there’s always a question in people’s eyes when they come to visit me. A sort of guilty, dirty, secret question: Why go on living, old chap? Where is the meaning? Just to shovel food into your mouth? To live, to choose to live, Hatchet—it’s no less an act of solidarity for the prisoner than it is for the free. I mean solidarity with the rest of humanity. With the dead, with the living, and with those future beings who will never be able to know precisely what we did or didn’t do for them. I am still, after all, a fighter, though my fight is now limited to the page.” He chuckled in self-mockery. “The pages that will never see the light of day.”
“Don’t say that.”
“You’re a decent fellow.”
It seemed there was nothing more to add.
But Benny, all at once afraid of letting the man go, of reaching the end of something that wasn’t yet complete, uttered, “Say!”
And Hatchet looked up at him in blind desperation.
“I’ve been reading one of your people these past evenings. A fellow called Ralph Waldo Emerson. No idea how I came by his collection of essays. Have you read his writing?”
“In school, I think.”
“Do you mind if I read you one or two lines? Sit. Sit down and finish your beer while I read.”
Tired and obedient, his eyes red-rimmed with feeling, Hatchet went and sat back on the sofa and picked up his bottle and put it to his mouth, while Benny took the lamp from the side table and fumbled toward the cabinet that he’d made into a bookcase.
When he had returned to his seat with the book and put on his spectacles, he cleared his throat and, calling on his old St. James’ education in elocution, read: “‘If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.’”
Hatchet made no sound or sign when Benny closed the book, removed his spectacles, and looked up into his simple and absorbed face, in which it was impossible now to read meaning.
“Don’t give up on Lynton,” Benny said. “You must be very strong, Hatchet. Very strong. You must continue what you have begun. You must never waver from your innermost sense of what is right.”
20
A Retreat and a Return
Eight weeks before the baby was due, Louisa woke around midnight to hear voices through the wall. Since their confrontation with the spies at the Orient Club, she and Lynton had been sleeping in a different location near Rangoon each night. Now they were staying with Sunny’s ailing mother, in the Karen village across the highway from Louisa’s family property, and the first thing she thought—after hearing the voices, after registering that Lynton had left the bed—was that the old woman needed to be protected. But the voices—two of them, one being Lynton’s—were speaking a hushed and innocuous-sounding English, over the rise and fall of which she began to hear the woman’s contented snores drifting down the hall from the recesses of the small house.
Almost unconsciously, she pushed herself up to hear the conversation more distinctly.
“What about the shipment from Taipei?” Lynton was saying.
“Apparently, the Americans are pressuring the Thais to prevent traffic,” the other answered. She recognized the voice, the jaunty, open-throated pressure on the English vowels. “State Department,” the man continued. “I’m afraid the shipment’s stuck in Mae Sot.” It was Tom Erwin, Hannah-Lara’s husband.
“Exactly why Will’s old plan makes sense,” Lynton said. “We need a base in the Tavoy—somewhere arms can be delivered by sea.”
“And Will’s invitation? Have you thought it over?”
For a moment, Lynton seemed to rebuff the question with silence. All was quiet save for the ailing woman’s escalating and agitated snores, which almost begged to be smothered. Then Lynton said, with a measured laugh, “Are you trying to cut me out of the picture, old man? You think I need to go and train under the Americans? Can you imagine me behaving myself at their base in the Philippines?”
That was all—or all she could clearly catch. When Lynton returned to their cell-like room, she was pretending to sleep, her heart banging away in her chest, the baby kicking against her ribs as if to compel her to act—to question Lynton about what it all meant. But she needed a moment to make sense of what she’d heard before determining her own tactics. So Lynton hadn’t surrendered—at least not entirely . . . So he was trying to receive shipments of arms . . . So Will was working with him to assemble a base, and had invited him to train in the Philippines . . . She should have been relieved, but she had the nagging impression that Lynton didn’t entirely trust his British and American friends.
She was half dreaming, her mind untangling a thread in a complicated design, when she woke in the early morning with the nausea that had been worrisomely plaguing her advanced pregnancy and that was now accompanied by intense cramps. By the time they reached Rangoon General, her water had broken. And then they were told that there was nothing to be done: she was going to deliver their child two months early.
The labor was quick but arduous. How tiny the child was, a boy, their son. They knew he couldn’t long survive. It was his undeveloped lungs. Minutes after the delivery, he was sleeping and struggling to breathe in her arms, with Lynton beside her, and then his eyelids fluttered open and he seemed to peer past her, as though at something both haunting and extraordinary beyond her shoulder. His head shifted slightly and he looked directly into her eyes. His own eyes became frighteningly wide—big unblinking orbs, fighting against some unseen force to remain open. He stared at her, into her—to communicate something, or to absorb part of her, or simply to register for as long as possible a human face. Did he know, in his way, that he was dying? That they were fundamentally failing him? Did he feel pain when his heartbeat ceased?
The frantic doctor injected Louisa with something, and when she regained consciousness the next day, Lynton was sitting next to her with bloodshot eyes and empty hands.
“Where is he?” she demanded.
“Returned to where he came from,” he said. She thought he would smile—his eyes gleamed the way they did before he tried to make light of something that pained or concerned him—but instead, while she began to weep, he looked off toward the window, as if at some indescribable inner picture of wherever it was their son had gone.
“Now,” he said, “we have to earn our place by his side.”
Louisa hadn’t known that Lynton’s underground operations had long been headquartered in Kyowaing, where she had once lived in the Forest Governor’s house. A week after the delivery, he informed her that they had to relocate to the village, deep in the heart of the territory he now controlled. “Pressure’s too intense here,” he said. “The time has come to move back in-country.”
How absurd that at the very moment she was ready to give up, to give in, he was ready to trust her more completely—and even to count on her.
Who are we to say the death wasn’t fated? he seemed to want to say as they were secretly preparing to head out, ten nights after the birth. She was still losing blood, her breasts still senselessly knotted with residual milk, and Lynton kept flashing her blazing glances, as if to enflame her old will to fight. Who a
re we to say, he seemed to go on, that the loss wasn’t in some way necessary for you to be born to new strength?
Enraged by her own fleeting thought that their child might never have been meant to be, she inwardly accused him (or, rather, herself) of convenient and weak-minded thinking, and made the point (again, to herself) that many argued there was no more meaning to life than suffering. By that count, she silently contended, Ne Win’s atrocities could also be justified! And Kenneth’s death! No! No! Yet she didn’t really believe that suffering—if causeless—was also utterly meaningless. In her heart, she felt that only those who had suffered could discover grace. So wasn’t it possible that grace made way for suffering in a mysterious way? And she was washed over with tenderness for Lynton, the brave man packing his few belongings before her; surely his past losses and sufferings had been great.
After a hasty and dissatisfying parting from her parents and sisters—whose startled looks and silence, as she said her good-byes, she attributed to her recent loss as much as to her sudden appearance in the house after her long estrangement from it—she and Lynton headed out. En route to Kyowaing, a journey they made largely on foot, Lynton spoke to her more openly of what he was facing. His revelations—muffled by the spurts of rain, and the running of the streams, and the wet steps of the elephants humbly transporting their belongings—did not overwhelm her; rather, they were modulated, moderated by her persistent thoughts of the child they would never know. And even as she was transfixed by painful memories of the boy’s life and death, even as Lynton described to her the most dismaying things, she was aware of being strangely comforted by their surroundings, these familiar hills and ample moist thickets where everything appeared in its place, where they seemed to be plodding past the happenstance of human history into a more lasting order of things. The birds sang, as though in counterpoint, the passing clouds putting the entire human element in its shadowy place in the landscape, yet also recalling to her the shadows of her own past in these hills, in Thaton and Bilin and Kyowaing.
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