Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

At two months, Louisa began, pathetically, trying to speak, emitting a series of plaintive, songlike, rounded sounds meant evidently to communicate deep layers of hurt. What past atrocities had she suffered? Khin wondered. What lives had her death destroyed? Khin had expected the child to be a salve to her own death-tainted spirit — but this baby! She might have been a general who had failed his men, a grandmother who had survived the slaughter of every last grandchild. And the only salve to her inherent anguish appeared to be Benny. Certainly, Khin’s breast quieted the girl (at least, until the agonies of digestion set in); Khin’s arms soothed her for a time, as did Khin’s songs of their people’s centuries of suffering. But only Benny could unburden her of the weight she’d come hobbling into the world under. He would stride up in his half-interested, half-distracted way, cooing and babbling English terms of endearment— “turtle dove!” “precious angel!” “Daddy’s little darling!”—and, astonishingly, Louisa would gurgle; she would smile, like the most ordinary of babies. “Da!” she said to him at three months. “Want Da-da!” she said at twenty weeks. (“Is it normal for a baby to speak so early?” Benny proudly asked Khin. “Strange,” Khin’s mother reprovingly commented about the girl’s blabbering during her only visit to them in the city.)

To escape the heat that seemed to be rising in parallel with Louisa’s powers of articulation, Khin often strolled with her down noisy Sparks Street all the way to the Strand, where they could catch a breath of river breeze. Something about the river cast the child into a contemplative frame of mind. “Want another boat,” she was soon saying, with her chubby little index finger pointing at the ships docked in the harbor. Want another boat, in Karen to Khin and in English to her daddy when he and Saw Lay had a moment to greet them on the wharf. Benny would tip his hat to Louisa, telling her that he would do what he could to gratify her desire.

“You think she’s the smartest baby in all of Burma?” he repeatedly asked Saw Lay, who stood shyly aglow beside him, peering down into Louisa’s wide-set eyes.

“She is remarkable,” Saw Lay never failed to say — his admission a cocktail, Khin thought, of one part compliment to two parts worry. Oh, yes, it was clear as day that Louisa was remarkable — but remarkable in a sense that doomed her to the glories or the miseries of greatness? “Don’t think I’ve ever seen such eyes” was another of Saw Lay’s refrains. And it was true: Louisa’s eyes were astonishing. Not just for their unusual shape — a hybrid of the doe’s and the snake’s. Not just for the way they were spaced, floating almost luridly over her porcelain cheeks. What made them astonishing was the way they seemed, disarmingly, to confront one, to penetrate one, to demand something of one in a nearly menacing way. Yes, they were eyes that made you want to run and hide.

And was that just what they ought to do — run and hide? — Khin wondered toward the end of 1941, when Aung San reportedly went underground to receive support from the Japanese, and Benny’s fellow officers started to stream through the flat as though to find an outlet for the troubled eddies of their conversation. It was possible, some of these officers said, that in the Japanese the Burmans had found their potential liberators — not that the Anglo officers would admit to fearing for their own security in the East. Not even when Pearl Harbor was soon bombed and the Japanese went on to do the impossible — landing in northeast Malaya — did these Anglos find reason to mitigate their professions of optimism: Singapore was safe, and war would never reach Burmese shores. “Why trouble with banalities like air-raid warning systems and shelters and adequate air defense and ground troops?” Benny privately mocked them. “Why forgo supper and dancing and the pleasures of club life when the hostilities are so far away?” True, the British were now at war with Japan, the Anglos said, but Churchill was said to have dispatched four unsinkable destroyers to the Indian Ocean. Did the fact that two of those destroyers swiftly sank along with nearly a thousand men not constitute a threat to the great Pax Britannica? Khin reasoned.

By then, she was pregnant for the second time; Louisa was confident in her mobility and willingness to be charmed by strangers; and Benny. Khin couldn’t help thinking that the new fatigue spreading like a mask across his features was the manifestation of a terror seizing him more with every passing day. It was as though the external pressures of the war had possessed him and were exerting their force on him from the inside out. And as long as he kept those pressures contained, their little family would be safe — from external strife and also from trouble within.

That trouble began one night when a man called Ducksworth was visiting. Benny had run into him on the street and invited the sallow, too-talkative fellow to come home with him for a drink. As they chatted over cognac (their “old favorite,” according to Benny), Louisa ran between them, and Ducksworth looked at the child crookedly, plainly displeased by her repeated claims on Benny’s attention.

“They say Aung San’s reemerged in Bangkok,” Ducksworth broke out, as though to break through to Benny, who bounced Louisa on his lap while tickling her under her chin and redoubling her glee. Ducksworth had spoken in English, but Khin knew too much of the language to be excluded from the conversation (at least, from understanding it; she rarely found the courage to speak). In fact she was seized by Ducksworth’s disclosure before Benny appeared to be; a moment passed before his knee went still and Louisa began to complain.

Khin rose from her chair to scoop up the child as Benny, still immobilized by mistrust or disbelief, watched his friend. “Aung San, you say?” he said slowly.

“Sure as day,” Ducksworth went on — too cheerfully, a sly smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “Been in Japan all this time, training with the Japs, his would-be liberators, the little runts. They say he’s become a genuine samurai. And now he’s enlisting anyone he can get into his pro-Jap Independence Army. You can bet dacoits and all the other political vermin are lining up.”

“And when will you go?” Benny said now.

At first, she thought he’d meant to slight his friend, meant to suggest that Ducksworth would be lining up alongside the vermin. Ducksworth, too, looked momentarily blindsided. He fixed his stunned eyes on Benny before relaxing into an overfriendly smile, followed by a bout of forced chuckling.

“No need to flee,” he murmured, and tossed back the remains of his cognac. “I’ve never been the one to doubt in the British.”

The only sign that Benny was offended or distressed was the slight wrinkle on his brow. By the next morning, though, on Christmas Eve, he was racked with emotion, storming from one end of the living room to the other, cursing Ducksworth—“the Britons and Burmans be damned”—and arguing that they should listen to common sense and flee the country. “If the Japs make it here — or if Aung San’s army invades — we’re sunk,” he called to Khin, who was preparing Louisa’s morning meal in the kitchen. “Not only everyone who worked for the British — not only the whites. Everyone the British favored. Everyone the Burmans hate.”

Khin worked away steaming and mashing yams, and then sat Louisa down at the table off the living room to spoon the concoction between the baby’s lips — all as a way to slake her own urgent need for Benny to stop speaking. She had the sense that he was forcing her closer to a precipice beyond which lay perpetual homelessness, perpetual misery. “What a mess!” she teased Louisa, whose happy, smeared cheeks seemed to support her cause: that if they could just persist in the everyday, the clouds of danger might pass uneventfully.