Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

But the happenstance of that good fortune could strike her then with unbearable force. How arbitrarily they had landed in this bed together! How arbitrarily their child, expanding right now in her womb, had come into existence! Had she and Benny not each been sent to Akyab — had the neighbor in her village not been a cousin of the sessions judge — had her mother not wanted to tear her away from the only Karen boy whom she’d managed to care for — had Mama not found her and that boy talking by the riverbank, only talking, only sharing some rice candy. Even while Benny seemed to strive to restore her presence of body in their bed, her mind would leap to the original chain of arbitrary events from which she had never really recovered: had Daddy not become a drunkard — had he not lost their orchard — had they not moved into a borrowed hut — had the dacoits not broken into that hut — had her sister not been raped — had Mama’s hands not been smashed — had Daddy’s abdomen not been sliced open so that his intestines spilled out over the floor. If Daddy hadn’t been drunk, would he have been able to fight the dacoits off? If she had managed to save him, rather than stuffing his intestines back inside and holding him together while he choked, would Mama still despise her? If she had been raped like her sister? If she had been murdered like Daddy? “Unscathed,” Mama said of her. “The only one to walk away unscathed.”

Benny was correct to remind himself of her reality while they made love. As if from a distance, she would watch the way that he, like their unborn child, determinedly knocked against her; and she would find herself grabbing his flesh in panicked desire, longing alternately to lose herself and to protect this passion that they’d accidently discovered from some unimaginable menace beyond their door.

She was seven months pregnant when Benny brought Saw Lay home to meet her. All through the dinnertime visit, she listened in astonishment as, with Saw Lay translating, Benny revealed his past to them — describing the death of his parents, his years in Calcutta, his near conversion, the pain of having been hounded from the Rangoon synagogue’s graveyard where he’d come to mourn the dead. “Imagine if I’d been recognized, embraced,” he said at the table with alcohol-induced vigor. “Imagine if it’d gone another way — the return of the prodigal son. Might have married a pretty Jewess. Might have never accepted the temporary post in Akyab. Might have never spotted my girl, the girl with the beautiful hair.”

How lightly he spoke of their accidental love, as though he had no reason to justify it — whereas all evening this Saw Lay had been stealing strange glances at them, perhaps because he didn’t approve of the union that had led her to abandon her village and their people.

“Do you miss your Judaism?” she asked Benny through Saw Lay now. She was standing at the table, pouring coffee into the guest’s cup, and in the candlelight she could feel Saw Lay retract from her outsize belly (because he was repelled by the reminder of her procreation with Benny? Or merely afraid that she would pour hot coffee all over his lap?).

“I suppose I miss the sensation of being in a community,” Benny said, some kind of pain flooding up to his lips. “But I’m sure that describes many happy childhoods. And I’m sure that we have something like that together, my darling.”

He reached across the table for her free hand, as though to reassure her, yet his fingers were weak with loneliness.

Two weeks later, she brought Benny’s lunch to the wharf at an hour when she knew he was likely to be absorbed with work. She found him with Saw Lay in the offices and told the latter casually in Karen that she would be waiting to speak privately with him at the coffee stall up the Strand. Now Saw Lay looked at her in outright fear, but after forty minutes he appeared nervously at the counter and ordered a strong coffee with condensed milk.

When she explained what she wanted from him, he blinked at her in confusion, then began to laugh — a result of his relief or the outrageousness of her request, she wasn’t sure.

“I mean to honor my husband,” she said quietly.

“Then why not go through him?” he countered, his amusement already dissipated. “Benny is my friend, and much as you think you’d be serving him by — by reintroducing him to his own, I can’t help thinking he’d take all this as a gross violation of our confidence!”

Nevertheless, he did as she asked, setting up an appointment for the two of them to meet with the rabbi of the Rangoon synagogue, covertly informing her of the time and date of their engagement, and then showing up at the appointed hour on Twenty-Sixth Street.

Inside the bright pillared building, in an office strewn with papers and books, they sat across the desk from the hunched rabbi, whose countenance spoke to her primarily of skepticism. Saw Lay wouldn’t look at her, even as, with perfect elegance and straightness, he began to translate into English the case she shyly presented to the learned man: how she felt her husband would benefit from a reintroduction to his people — community being the thing they were so lacking in now, orphaned as Benny was, and alone as they were in Rangoon.

“You don’t mean Joseph Elias Koder’s grandson?” the rabbi blurted out. At her first mention of Benny’s full name, the rabbi’s eyes had clouded over with sullen confusion, but now his bushy eyebrows lifted and he went very pale.

“Yes — he — him,” she said, in an English the rabbi clearly had to strain to understand. She recognized the grandfather’s name, which Benny had repeatedly thrown out when listing relatives on the night of Saw Lay’s visit to the flat — thrown out as though he were throwing lines back into the sea of his past, trying to catch pieces of himself that had been swept irretrievably away from him.

All at once, the rabbi began rummaging through the piles on his desk, launching into a speech. “He says,” Saw Lay translated for her, “that he assumed — they all assumed — that Benny was lost to them. He says he has a letter here somewhere. from Benny’s auntie. A letter for Benny.” Having clearly not found what he was looking for, the rabbi started flinging open the drawers of his desk. “He says that she also wrote directly to him asking—” Saw Lay continued, “ charging him with the responsibility of finding her nephew, who was lost to the Jews.”

The rabbi emitted a sound like a bark and held up a thin envelope with a flourish, a gleam in his pale eyes. But his smile faded when he fixed his face on hers, as if, one problem having been solved, a new, greater problem had surfaced — and she was that problem: she, the living manifestation of Benny’s having been forever lost to the Jews. Was it not a problem she could fix?

The now wilted-looking rabbi seemed all at once reluctant to part with the letter he’d just found. He set it squarely in front of him and tapped it heavily with a forefinger as he began to speak again — this time in melancholy complaint, she thought, with moans and shakes of the head.

“He says it’s not so simple as being welcomed into the community,” Saw Lay said, turning to her worriedly, a new pity washing over his face. “To begin with, your condition and Benny’s marriage to you, presumably in a church, present obstacles. Theirs is a traditional community, and they abide by many ancient laws. They all must live in this neighborhood, for example.” The rabbi gestured to and fro, the letter now clutched in one of his fists. “And they must exclusively obey Jewish elders. They must study a good deal, study their holy book, keep kosher. Surely Benny no longer keeps kosher, with separate dishes and pots for dairy and meat. And their women — he says they must wear less revealing clothing than our Karen sarongs or fitted Burmese tops.”