Miss Burma

by Charmaine Craig

  “She won’t eat, no longer knows me,” Hta Hta lamented.

  “Khin,” said Rita again, “this is only a passing thing, this fever. You will pull through this. Tell yourself you will.”

  “Did I fail?” Khin stunned herself by crying.

  But Rita seemed anything but astounded. She sat at Khin’s side and took her hand in her own thin cool one.

  “Tell me,” Khin pressed on. “Did I fail? Did I fail?”

  In the dim room, illuminated by the lamp and the generous moonlight, Rita’s eyes looked very deep, even bottomless. “Why think in such terms?” she responded finally. “The only question is whether or not you’ve done your best in the face of your circumstances.”

  “So it’s the end for me?”

  Again, Rita hesitated. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t pull through this.”

  “But is this all?” Khin pursued madly.

  A new suppleness suffused Rita’s face. She peered down at Khin while seeming also to peer inward, at the limits of her own being. “Does it matter?” she said uncertainly. And then, almost as though to apologize: “We’re here together now. This turn of ours isn’t up.”

  “I tried to take turns,” Khin confessed, blinking up into the depths of her eyes. “With you.”

  This turn didn’t strike Rita, by appearances, as anything so benign. She made a visible effort to keep her gaze affixed to Khin’s. “It is true,” she said cautiously, “that I have affection for your husband, and that has put you in the position of having to share him . . . Would you—would you like me to explain my feelings?”

  The acknowledgment of what Khin had endured—and of what Rita continued to share exclusively with Benny—sucked the wind right out of Khin’s chest, and she thought that she would gasp, or cry. It occurred to her that Rita had also just lost him to America, to another life. That Rita had lost him without ever having had him, really.

  “I imagine,” Rita said, “that for a long time I have been moved by his brokenness. He can’t help reaching for what he knows will evade his grasp. But the failing doesn’t stop him from continuing to care, from trying again.”

  The way Rita said it—not in grief, but in joy—made the happenstance of her having known and lost Benny seem a blessing. And how fortunate they all had been, Khin realized, to intersect when they might have missed one another entirely.

  And all at once she seemed to see Benny standing with his hands in his coat pockets and gazing down the wrong direction of a foreign boulevard. Time had already transformed him in this image she held now in her mind: he was whiter, puffier, with the bewildered despair of the aged. But his exile was not only from youth. His despair was also that of emigration. The greatest shock was seeing him out in the open air—an open air that in its indifference seemed to obliterate him. For so long, he’d been in prison or under house arrest—his significance continuously underscored, albeit negatively. “Benny!” she called to him, and she seemed to see him reel around toward her with something vacant, something foolish—a touch of stupidity—in his eyes. It took a minute for his gaze to settle on hers and another minute for anything but confusion to register on his features. “Where are the children?” she asked. But he didn’t answer. He leaned toward her, and she knew—from the stiff fragility of his torso enclosed in her arms, from his disorientation—that he wouldn’t long survive the displacement.

  “Khin!” Rita called her to the room again. “I need you to be strong. There is something very tragic I must say.”

  Hta Hta was singing a Karen ballad. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil . . .”

  “Khin!” Rita repeated, and the shadow of Benny rose up between them, annihilating the ache of envy, of apartness. “They say Lynton’s dead. There was a parade in the streets celebrating his capture. Do you hear me?” Rita peered into her eyes, pinning Khin deliberately to this life. “You’re all Louisa has here. You’re all she has.”

  22

  Miss Burma

  On the evening the reports about Lynton began to come in over the wireless, Louisa bolted herself inside their bedroom in the house on the hill. She had the sense that she needed to gather her thoughts, to keep out the confusion of the reports in order to determine how to go on. He’s alive. He’s alive, she kept telling herself, remembering what Lynton had said—to expect the news of his death, which wouldn’t be true. He’ll come back. He’s only hiding out. But even as she thought these things, the collective force of the reports made her crouch down on the bed. And then she put out the lamp, the better not to see—not to confront the horrible likelihood of the reports in aggregate being fact.

  Five hours earlier, Sunny had come for her at the school, where she had been giving a literature lesson to the boys and the village children. Without a word, he had led her to the wireless operator’s hut, and there she learned that the session of talks Lynton had been attending in Thaton—a cease-fire zone—had derailed. What they knew was that Lynton and his senior officers had ventured inside the walled ancient city to meet with the Burmans, and then all entrances had been barricaded. Neither Lynton nor any of the officers had been seen coming out, and nearly half their soldiers who had been waiting for them were already beginning to desert, believing all was lost. What was more, the Burmans had obviously stolen their codebooks, and it was now impossible to tell which of the messages coming in a flurry over the wireless were to be trusted—messages that told crucially different versions of what had befallen Lynton. In all versions, he had been having dinner when the Burmans broke in and began to shoot; but whereas roughly half the accounts reported that he had made an escape and was hiding out wounded, the others reported that he had been killed. And the difference seemed to hinge on the question of culpability: in the versions in which he lived, only the Burmans were at fault for violating the terms of the cease-fire; in the rest, an unnamed member of his inner circle had drugged and set him up.

  He is alive, Louisa told herself again, and in the intensifying darkness she seemed to feel the heat of him in the bed beside her. The heat of his brain. Of his will to go on. Of his relentless interest in her. Had she committed the error of so many of his devoted men and made him some sort of false god? The brilliance of his frequent laughter, his neglect of caution of the usual sorts, his resurrections after the previous reports of his death, his guarantee to her that he wouldn’t die, that he would never really be dead—all of it had seemed capable of rescuing her, rescuing them all, from menace. She’d always intuitively understood that part of the cult of the war hero was necessarily his veneer not only of faultless decisiveness, of immortality, but also of immunity from torment. And like everyone else who believed in him, she had come nearly to worship at the altar of his invulnerability. She, too, needed something to believe in. Life was too oppressive without a measure of faith.

  Shivering on the bed, she seemed to be perched on the precipice of a terrible chasm whose darkness appalled her. Could Lynton have been prepared for betrayal by one of his own friends? To obscure the memory of his face, she sprang up and fumbled with the matches on the table beside the bed, struggling to light the spirit lamp and hold herself on this side of the chasm—the chasm of the unknown. But the frailty of the lamplight only reminded her of how she had eavesdropped from another dark bedroom on Lynton talking with Tom in Sunny’s mother’s kitchen. If not every member of Lynton’s inner circle could be trusted, neither could Tom nor the American, whose “invitation” Tom had seemed to urge upon Lynton. And what had that invitation been? For Lynton to engage with American military personnel, or to be disappeared by them?

  There was a knock at the door, and she yelped, jumping around, but it was only Sunny. His voice came quietly through the door. “I have soup,” he said.

  The sight of his face behind the door—soft and vulnerable and frightened—gave her the strange, almost passionate urge to kiss him, to take his warm
face in her own blood-warmed one and console him.

  Out in the kitchen, he watched while she sat and took the soup into her mouth, submerging her fear spoonful by spoonful. She was an animal, just an animal. It was the mind, not the body, which was alien, the cause of torment. She had only to dwell—and keep dwelling every moment—in this animal self in order to go on.

  “There are more messages,” Sunny said when she was done, speaking in a voice that was at once embarrassed and reverential. “The Burmans say you are forgiven. They invite you back to Rangoon to be with your mother.”

  She did not raise her eyes to meet his.

  He went on: “Another message says that you must never return. That their army has plans for you.”

  The silence he followed this with was immense, and when she finally turned her eyes to him, she saw that he had begun to perspire profusely, as though he could no longer contain the anxiety behind his pores.

  “And that they have already hurt your mother,” he continued.

  “My mother?”

  “Broken into her house and kicked her around. But maybe,” he quietly added, “they want to frighten you into surrender.” His eyes, peering down at her, shone with intention. “We believe our senior officers have all been arrested and transported to Rangoon. Our men will need a leader. You must establish a grid line.”

  She was possessed by a strange, familiar feeling of dissociation, as though she were being called, again, to play a part she didn’t want, for which she was ill prepared. She had been born into war, and war had never let her go, but she hadn’t made war. She had never really wanted to make it. And yet she said, “What is a grid line, Sunny?”

  “A boundary of villages the Burmans can’t cross without us opening fire.”

  “And if the Burmans cross our grid line and we have to open fire . . . will we have enough men and munitions to deter them?”

  “Maybe. Not for long.”

  “And where will we go if we need to retreat?”

  But she remembered that Lynton had already given her the answer: on the night he had spoken of his impending “death,” he had pointed across the dimming valley, toward the lush slopes of the Dawna Range, and he had said, “Go to those mountains if the Burmans come.”

  She had determined nothing, established nothing, seemed only to be caught in a net of continued disbelief, when, several hours later, she learned that one of the boys, the youngest, had developed a high fever and was at risk of death.

  She found him on his bed in a hostile delirium. “I told you the hill is haunted!” he shouted at her when she approached, but he didn’t balk when she soon stripped away the bedding covering him and pressed him to her body to absorb some of his heat.

  He was an orphan, as were most of Lynton’s boys. “Every year, three or four people in every Karen village are shot like his parents,” Lynton had told her, “made to die by the hands of the Burma Army so that the people know to be frightened and to submit.” Now, as she held this child, she had the visceral sense that he was a replacement for her own little lost one, or rather that she could hold this boy so closely because her own boy wasn’t here to fill her hands, her life. And she was overcome by the fervent wish that he not die.

  “Everything is all right,” she found herself murmuring to him, and she laid him back and doused him with the cool water Sunny brought to her. Everything is all right—an absurdity because nothing was as it should be and perhaps nothing ever would be right again for them. Yet she was consoled by her own words, half believed them. If she could just save this one boy’s life—if she could just keep saving it and saving it—disaster would be kept at bay. Hush now. Sleep. I’ll stay with you. Don’t cry. Yes, yes, I’ll stroke your back. You need sleep. Everything will be all right.

  For several hours, they fought to hold on to the boy’s life. He had two frightening seizures before he fell unconscious. And as her hope began to recede, she perceived another meaning in the assurance she’d given him: one way or another, they would all come to an end; but they were meant to come to an end. Everything would be all right—and nothing would be all right—because he would die as they all assuredly would. And, perceiving this almost trivial truth, she told herself that she must go to Mama and surrender herself to the Burmans.

  But around midnight the boy took an inexplicable turn for the better. He awakened, his raging fever broke, and, after changing him and helping him back into the freshly made bed, she sat watching over him in a state of rapture. She hadn’t forgotten Lynton, nor did she discount the possibility that Lynton was dead and the Burma Army was poised to invade Kyowaing. But she seemed to see the entire mysterious panorama of their predicament through the keyhole of this boy’s narrow escape from death. Was it a trick of her present circumstance that, from this perspective, she perceived that her own life, which had never been worth much to her personally, was worth saving because it was meant to serve and save others? She felt filled with an aching, profound love—not for herself, which seemed to have grown thin and dissipated—but for the boy and for her mother, for Lynton’s men and for all of Burma’s persecuted. None of them was worthier than any child born to the planet, but they were worth defending, worth loving especially, for the very reason that their worth was in question. Indeed, the fulfillment she had been anticipating—her fulfillment with Lynton—had finally arrived: now, at last, she was free to give herself utterly.

  And what did that mean, to give herself? The question seemed to bear on nothing less than the Karen problem—a problem of trust, of whom to trust, of the difference between trust and suicide. She saw the scope of their immediate problem: that the Burmans were bound to invade, to cross the grid line which she must right away make known; that the remaining men in Lynton’s brigade would be too few to repel them; that the only place to flee would be hostile Karen territory; that this territory itself would be jeopardized if Kyowaing was overrun; and that Bo Moo would have no choice but to surrender or combine forces with others—with her own soldiers, if she could persuade the man to reconcile with them. But, of course, Bo Moo was the door she must throw open, as Lynton had said. There was no other choice.

  After she arranged for a village woman to watch over the sleeping boy, she ascended the hill in the predawn light, entered her empty house, and went to the bedroom, where she found shears and sat before a mirror. Years before, she had sat down in just this way—that time with a penknife in hand, yet with no understanding of where her instincts were leading her. Now she saw that there was no need to mar herself in order to take possession of her inner strength: she only had to remove the last shred of her pretense, the pretense that would prevent Bo Moo from trusting her and prevent her from becoming the fullest expression of herself.

  She’d never been in the habit of seeing Miss Burma’s beauty, had hardly been able or wished to see it, so it was with some surprise that she now registered her still unblemished skin, her clear, deep gaze. Her hair was up, and as she began to unpin it, and as pieces fell darkly around her pale face, she was strangely taken by the vivid picture the contrast made. For an instant, she thought she hadn’t the courage to cut it away, to deprive herself of this unearned advantage—or disadvantage, for hadn’t she been shackled to pretense by means of this “advantage”? How easy it would be to break the shackles; she had only to want to break them. With a flush of embarrassment, she remembered Lynton’s refrain about the necessity of living free from shame. And, as she stared at her face, she saw in it the presence of Mama’s and Daddy’s longing and valiance and rage. There, beneath the surface of the skin tightening around her eyes, was the same startled stamina she’d witnessed when Mama had tripped after the horse cart carrying her and the other children away from the Bilin plague. “Promise we’ll be all right?” “Never lose faith!” There, behind her searching gaze, was the same bewildered conviction she’d discovered night after night in Daddy’s study, when he would stub out his cigare
tte or throw a glance out the window, as if to throw so many punches at an obscure fate. “If you aren’t prepared to fight against injustice—if you aren’t prepared to risk everything to defend the liberty of all human beings—” She was the completion of each of her parents, as much as she was now the completion of Lynton—dead or alive.

  Lynton. The picture of him riddled with bullets all at once exploded across her consciousness, across her reflected, horrified face. And without wasting another minute she picked up the shears, grabbed a fistful of hair, and began to cut.

  Neither Sunny nor the wireless operator said a thing later that morning down by the operator’s hut, where she appeared shorn and wearing Lynton’s fatigues. Neither of them looked at her when the three of them sat down across the operator’s narrow table to determine the grid line, or when, that grid line having been established and communicated over the wireless, she faced them frankly and said, “I see no choice but to approach Bo Moo about reconciliation.”

  “He will kill us,” Sunny responded, finally staring into her face with agony. He seemed to have ceased breathing.

  “Do you think I am mistaken?” she said to them. “Do you think we can fend off the Burmans on our own?”

  Sunny continued to stare at her in silence while the operator fiddled with his instruments.

  “Tell me,” she said, “is there someone else—some other group—to whom Bo Moo can turn if our territory is overrun?”

  “There are the Communists,” the operator quietly put in, raising his eyes to her at last. He was a small man, timid by nature, and for a few moments, she struggled to reconcile his aspect of hesitancy with the force of his revelation.