“We’re not alone in this,” Lynton said, putting his arm around her waist. “There are others who want the same things, as I’ve said . . . If we look past our petty proclivities, past our troubled history; if we see the broader common goal—we Karens, and also the Kachin, the Mon, the Shans, the Muslims, the Burmans—everyone with an eye to democracy . . . If we find a way to come together, they won’t be able to stand in our way. And our friends will be there to help us.”
“Friends?” Tom’s and Hannah-Lara’s amiable faces flashed before her eyes, and the American’s embarrassed, hesitant one.
“Yes, friends.” There was impatience in his tone now.
“You’re speaking in riddles, Lynton. Be plain with me. Why would Bo Moo protect me if you’re still working with them—with Tom and—and the American? What’s happened?”
But to banish the strain rising in him, to banish talk of every alliance but their own private one, he nudged her lightheartedly with his knee, and said, “You can’t deny me some little ditty on the accordion now—now that you know they may soon be peppering their papers with my obituary.”
He gave her a silly, pleading smile that made her smile in turn, that made her want to cry, and she stared down desperately into the creases of the accordion, saying, “I hate this,” which only provoked his laughter.
But he leaned in toward her and touched his nose to her cheek, so that she smelled his clean river scent, and he said, as though to apologize, “We mustn’t despair. We have so much to do—this is only a stopping ground. To despair is to forget what we owe others . . . Promise me you won’t despair.”
He was right there beside her, with his beautiful shining face and worried eyes, and soon she might not be able to catch a glimpse of the light that remained of him.
Again, her memory reached back, back to those days in Thaton before Ducksworth had come for Daddy, and she found the fingering, the words of the hymn—yes, one of Daddy’s old standbys.
“Be not dismayed,” the hymn began.
But she was—as dismayed as she’d ever been.
21
Come Back
Two months after Benny had left with Molly and Grace for America, Khin stood at the window of her bedroom, staring down at the view he had so prized: the mango trees now lashing against the wind along their darkening drive; the highway outside the gate, with its single passing car throwing beams of light into the evening; and, beyond the highway, the old Karen village of Thamaing. That village breathed, it slept and strived, yet it hadn’t really overcome the beginnings of the civil war, when it had been fired on, torched, and reduced to ashes. No, it had lost its fundamental beauty, its hope, Khin thought, aware of a nearer view: the sharpening image of her face reflected in the window, and the hopelessness in her eyes. And now the feeling came again—the ache that had been increasingly radiating through her bones and pelvis since Louisa had gone underground with Lynton. They’re gone, she said to herself, as though to soothe the pain, or to explain it. They’re gone, and soon I will die.
“Mama, do you know that when a spirit leaves the body, you have to call it back?” Louisa had asked her, so long ago, when they were newly reunited in Bilin—after Khin had walked away from the children in Kyowaing, only to fall into Lynton’s youthful arms for a time. “If a spirit gets frightened, it flies away and you get sick or go crazy. And when a woman has a baby and cries too much, her spirit leaves and she can die. And when a baby thinks it’s falling, its arms fly up and its spirit leaves. And when a child is dying, the spirits guarding the trees can be convinced to save the child’s life. You have to make an offering of rice wrapped in banana leaf and leave it on the riverbank. Or kill a chicken with the right hole in the right part of the spine. You have to invite the spirits back to the bodies. Say, ‘Come back from the fields, come back from the forests, come back, come back, come back, come back.’” Louisa had been standing by one of Khin’s sewing machines, all her tangled curls haloing her mournful open face as she enacted the ancient Karen ritual, and Khin had shuddered, knowing that in some obscure sense the child was asking her to call back their own disembodied spirits, lost to them somewhere along the line.
And now even her children’s bodies—still in the realm of breath, she prayed—were far away.
In fact, there had been three farewells. Three farewells that seemed like aftershocks of that earlier rupture at the start of the civil war, when Benny had been led away, and Khin had lost herself and her senses in the haze of Lynton’s body.
Now, she turned from her glassy reflection in the window to the bed that had become only Benny’s at a point. She could almost see it, the impression of his shape on the blanket, how he perched his spectacles on his nose when he read in bed every night, and then the way his plump fingers released their grasp of the book as he fell asleep. Some nights, before he had left for America, before she had moved back into this room, she would ask if she could keep him company, and then she would sit in the chair by the window, pretending to knit and watching him read, watching him peacefully slip away.
She lowered herself onto the bed and took from the nightstand the clutch of photographs he had left for her, or merely decided not to take. The first photograph was of the two of them in the flush of their early intimacy, his arm around her waist, her hands clasped in front of her groin, as if it might give her away. They hadn’t yet been able to imagine the faces their closeness would bear. Almost to explain that mystery, the second photograph, which she held up to her eyes, showed the six of them sitting under the damaged portico after Benny’s prison release. How much they’d recently come through, yet the children’s eyes were lively and forgiving—forgiving first and foremost, it seemed now, of Benny and Khin’s original choice to be man and wife. Yes, the children’s faces cast that choice in the afterglow of inevitability, along with everything that had given rise to it: her own inability to save her father’s life, Benny’s parentlessness and desperation for belonging. If only she could touch them again, her children. If only she could fall before them and draw them to her chest and kiss them and beg for the forgiveness they so easily gave.
The first two farewells had come one on the heels of the other. One afternoon, Hta Hta—her faithful remaining servant—had appeared in the kitchen doorway, where Khin was drinking tea, to say that Benny was napping and that Lynton had arrived.
“Should I wake Saw Bension?” Hta Hta had asked sheepishly. Of course, the servant knew that since Louisa’s elopement, Khin had refused to speak to the same man who’d once spun them around their sewing shop with his men in Bilin.
“No, no,” Khin had told her. “It’s nothing.”
Maybe it was instinct that compelled Khin not to snub Lynton this time. She had known of Louisa’s pregnancy and wasn’t quite surprised to find the general in the living room with a swaddled bundle, held neither clutched to his chest nor out at a distance. Instantly, she understood that something had ended. And she listened, with all her stifled senses, for what blessing or blow he had come to deliver. She listened to his bloodshot eyes, charged with expectancy and ruin, with shock and exhaustion.
“And Louisa?” she found herself saying when those eyes reluctantly met hers.
He didn’t recoil from the question, but simply stood with the bundle, taking her in.
“Alive,” he said finally. “But the child was too young.”
Before she could respond, he escaped from the house, and all her hearing seemed to rush back to life with the slam of the door and then with the startled report of gunfire outside. When she looked out the window, she saw him beneath the mango trees, holding the bundle in one arm as he shot bullets into the sky.
But she hadn’t been spared Louisa after all. One night, about a week later, her eldest appeared at the house, thin and perspiring, her stomach still swollen from pregnancy. It was the first time they had faced each other since Lynton had come back into their lives,
and, as if to give them the space they needed to reckon with their estrangement, Benny and the girls—who had been standing with them in the living room—excused themselves and fled to their rooms.
“You aren’t eating enough,” Khin said to Louisa finally, and immediately regretted her words.
Louisa flinched and knelt a few feet from Khin’s feet. “We have to go . . .” she said softly. She lifted her shining eyes to meet Khin’s. “But I can’t—not without your blessing.” And she leaned forward and pressed her head to the floorboards, prostrating herself as Burmans did before monks and elders. “Do I have your blessing, Mama?” Her voice broke with longing, her need to be embraced becoming a palpable thing. “May I, Mama? May I have your blessing? Do you forgive me?”
Khin hadn’t been able to speak. And when Louisa raised her face to meet hers again, Khin could do no more than mutely signal her assent.
Then Louisa was gone, and the terror that came with her being underground, the knowledge of what would be done to her if she were discovered by the Burma Army . . .
As if possessed now by the need to escape her mind, Khin put down the photographs and pushed herself up from the bed, feeling the pain in her pelvis again. She crossed to the window and, almost hoping to find her missing family through the glass, braced herself on the casement in order to peer out. Seeing nothing but her own translucent, haunted face, she pushed open the window and leaned into the sweaty body and breath of the night, thick with coming rain.
This is what it is to be a ghost, she thought. This is what it is for the world to disappear before your eyes, even as you are doomed to go on existing as a shadow. Hadn’t Benny the right to want to leave this endless imprisonment? Why had she been so afraid of leaving with him, of missing the Burma she had been missing all her life—a Burma that thousands of years ago her ancestors had found in this place they called “Green Land,” and that had vanished to the point of invisibility? For a chilling moment, she thought she truly might be dead. This was not her house, but a sarcophagus from which she would never make her escape.
But the rain began to lash down from the cracked-open sky, and she closed her eyes and seemed to break from the confines of the house, of her body, to a place from which she could perceive the rise and fall of the oceans, and the crumbling of the cities, and the cries and strivings and silencing of all humanity. What a merciful, if brutal, view.
Then she opened her eyes and the view washed away with the rain. What stayed was the feeling of missing something—of missing everything profoundly.
One evening several months earlier, Benny had called her to his room—this room—and asked her to sit, and then he had paced before her and explained that a certain American, whom he would not name, had managed to arrange for the family’s exit to his country. They’d be able to visit Johnny (who, she understood, had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown), and jobs had been secured for Benny and the girls: he would sell sewing machines at a place called Sears Roebuck, Gracie would steward Pan Am flights, and dear Molly would teach Burmese to marines. “I’m going,” he said decisively, yet with a question in his voice. When she didn’t answer—didn’t tell him that there was no question she would join them—he went ahead and asked as a formality: “And will you come with me?”
He didn’t argue when she told him that she would not and then cheaply justified her decision by saying she’d spent enough of her life as a minority (to be Karen in Burma was bad enough, she said; she’d heard what Americans did to those who weren’t white). His willingness to go without her, of course, was as much a confession as her unwillingness to leave: a confession that, if they had once been entwined enough to stay together during the Japanese invasion, they were no longer. There was no need for promises of fidelity. There was nothing left between them to be faithful to. Nothing but memories of what had been and this faltering friendship, this limited understanding.
“Do you imagine it’s true?” she’d said, still in her chair, and looking up at him, fixed before her in the golden glow of the oil lamp. “Do you really think that God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us?”
He seemed taken aback by the question, and for a moment he blinked at her in surprise, or sudden faithlessness. Finally he said, “I couldn’t presume to know.”
“But do you love that way—each of us, as if there were only one of us?”
She was referring also to the other woman, of course. The other woman, with whom, she knew, he had continued to correspond sporadically—during these ten years of his house arrest—by means of their ex-convict friends who alternately visited the prison and this house.
Understanding had dawned on Benny’s face then, but he didn’t—perhaps he couldn’t—speak.
“You’re leaving her, too?” she said.
“For God’s sake, Khin. Don’t make me regret my decision. At least she’s encouraged me to leave. And it’s not—it’s not what you think, my affection for her.”
“You must be filled with regrets. You must regret calling me from the jetty that day.”
This made him look at her in fear, as though he were all at once perched on a splintered series of planks that might at any moment give way to the restless waters beneath them.
“Don’t speak,” she said. “Don’t immediately deny it. Just listen to me, and let me read your eyes.”
But he threw those eyes down, away from her stare.
“Yes, I thought so,” she said.
And as if to rebel against her verdict, he threw those eyes back at her—with defiance, she saw, and also with heartbreak. He looked very fierce, and suddenly she felt like a girl, someone seeing him for the first time: he was strange, and beautiful, and hard-lined. And aging. How tired he looked.
“Who did you think I was?” she said. “A girl on the end of a jetty, holding the hand of a small boy . . . Why me, of all women? I’m not especially pretty—”
“I won’t stay silent when you’re desecrating the past!” he erupted. “It’s all very well to demystify that—that thunderbolt—to say it was only passing lust. Just hair. Just posture. Just the way your hand seemed to clutch that little boy’s, as though you were holding on to him to stay safe and not the other way around. As though he were keeping you on that jetty. It’s all very well to say that the roundness of your arms, the roundness of your cheeks, their luminescence, the way your lips parted without words—it’s all very well to write it all off as superficial. To write off my burning interest in you as physiological. Just a man wanting to procreate with a member of the species whom he found especially fit. But I saw you on that day, Khin. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
The way he’d uttered her name—it caught her, and she couldn’t speak, couldn’t defend herself against her feeling for him.
“And I felt you seeing me,” he said quietly, and then lapsed into silence for a time. “You asked about my faith,” he went on at last, “if I believe we are so precious after all to God—if God is . . . I know you loved Saw Lay—don’t deny it. There’s no need . . . You know, sometimes I hear him talking to me? I hear that modest, moved voice, rending the night . . . Is it a fantasy? Maybe. But sometimes I believe it’s his immortal voice. I’m not speaking metaphorically. I mean when others enter us—their words, their wisdom, their counsel—all of it lives inside us and will not be extinguished. No, the voice I hear, the words that echo in my ears—they seem to live, in memory, yes, but also in—in what I only know to call eternity.”
When he and the girls were gone—when all that life was sucked out of the house with their quick, irreversible departure—everything had gone mute for a time. Even her mind. And as if to shock that mind awake now, she leaned farther out the window, out into the thrashing rain. Her rosebushes, twenty feet below, flailed in the wind, describing her anguish. But if she wanted to escape her thoughts and her pain, she no longer had the instinct to escape the world. Could it be th
at, after everything—after all her yearning to vanish, to slip into the waves of oblivion—all she wanted was to persist? Could it be that, now that she was finally free to die, all she wanted was to inhale the fragrance of the earth, of the rain, and for all of it—for all of them—to come back to her?
“Auntie?” came Hta Hta’s voice.
Khin turned and saw her faithful servant, whose own daughter, Effie—only fifteen—had recently left them to join the revolution. The girl had linked up with a boy—a Burman—who out of disgust with Ne Win had decided to join the Karen cause, and who credited his revulsion also to the rampant racism of even the monks, and the closing down of all but the government’s newspapers, and the restrictions on literature even of a religious kind, and the persistent “Burma for the Burmans” rallying cry of Ne Win’s party. Hta Hta, too, had been a teenager when she’d fled this house with Benny and the family after the outbreak of civil war. And here she was, past thirty: leaning against the door frame, hardly able to support her own weight.
“Would you like to eat rice?” she asked Khin in her mild, fond manner.
And when Khin crossed to her, Hta Hta took her by the hand and led her down toward the kitchen, where they could nourish their bodies and their memories of what had been.
But that night she fell into a fever, and apprehension began seeping from her pores like a premonition of ruin. Hta Hta’s cold compresses soothed the apprehension away; still the fever escalated, and soon Khin was watching herself rave and repel Hta Hta and pull at her bed linens as if they were offensive to her spirit.
“Khin,” a woman said to her, and she realized it was Rita. Rita wrapped in grace, who, as if the butt of a cruel cosmic joke, had been freed only six weeks ago—after the three farewells were complete. Why was it that the dry woman came and pestered her with visits every few days? Pestered her with reminders of Benny and Lynton, the latter of whom had maneuvered Rita’s release as part of his ongoing negotiations, or so the woman said.
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