Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Are you listening to me?” Benny said, all at once appearing before her. “Because I have the sense that you’re not taking any of this seriously.”

She had the sense — or her Karen ears did — that this last profession reverberated with unvoiced shouts of frustration. There was certainly accusation in his tone, as if the threat they faced could somehow be attributed to her unwillingness to acknowledge it.

What she wanted all at once was to throw down the baby’s spoon and run away. Instead, she grabbed a napkin and began roughly wiping Louisa’s yam-coated mouth.

“Listen to me,” Benny said — no less firmly, but with less indictment of her, she heard with relief. “My mother was from Calcutta. If we go there, my aunts can’t turn us away.”

“The same aunts who wanted you dead if you became a Christian?”

“I’ll be dead if the Japs make it here.”

“Then you should leave.” She didn’t know quite what she was saying as she turned from the now-fussing baby to his startled eyes; she knew only that something about his effort to save himself, to save them — reasonable and wise as it may be — felt like a betrayal of. of what she wasn’t sure exactly. But it was a betrayal she longed to make him feel the sting of.

“You don’t mean without the two of you?” he said.

“Yes, of course,” she replied, ignoring Louisa’s rising complaints. Those complaints gave voice to what she was feeling inside. “Don’t you trust me to be faithful until your return?”

His astonished features drew together. Until this moment, he’d had no reason to distrust her faithfulness. But in hesitating to flee with him, in raising the subject of trust, she had injected distrust into his heart — maybe so that he could suffer doubt, as she did. He now had reason to doubt in their marriage, just as she had reason to doubt in his sureness about it.

“This is foolishness,” he said. “You must go because you will be a target, too — don’t you listen?”

“You think I’m a cheap woman,” she pressed on, lured by the seductive waves of self-destruction. If an end to this period of accidental love must come, she would hasten them toward it; he wanted to save them, but she would sink them first. Hadn’t she struggled to save her family as well as she could in the presence of the laughing dacoits, only so that they could spit on her as she’d held Daddy together while he died? All her subsequent years, she had paid for that effort. It would have been better to submit, to die. “A cheap Karen. A woman of weak race—”

“Stop,” he said.

“Why didn’t you marry a white?”

“I said stop—”

“Don’t you know that Karens are so stupid their loyalty can be bought for the price of two cows?”

As if to stop her forcibly — or as if to stop himself from doing something he would regret — he lunged for Louisa, who somewhere along the line had fallen silent in her chair and begun to watch them with her frightening, assessing eyes.

“Come on, my precious darling,” he murmured as he pulled the child into his arms.

Louisa clung to his neck, smearing the remains of the yam across the shoulder of his white jacket while he headed for the door. “Where we going, Daddy?” she asked him.

“Where are you going?” Khin cried.

He flung open the door, then slammed it shut after his retreat. A few minutes later, she heard him crossing the flat roof overhead, where they kept a few toys and a tricycle that Louisa still could not ride.

In shame, Khin sank down to the floor and stared into the geometry of her sarong, as though it might yield up a reason for the wretched way she had just behaved. Was it really as simple as her wanting to lie down and die? Shouldn’t she be desperate to live — if only for the child’s sake? Perhaps part of her wanted to stay put in order to end the same arbitrariness that had landed her here with this man and this child. Again, her mind played its tricks, its guessing games: If Benny stayed with her and were killed. If he left and she stayed and died. If the child were orphaned. If they all fled together to India, a place where she was sure to be even more of an alien than she already was here. The more she thought, the more she understood that if Benny were the only one to leave, she would be exonerated of the burden of choice — whereas if she left with him, she would be his burden; and if he remained, he would be hers. She had pushed him away, told him to go without her, because she wanted fate alone to hold the burden of their deaths, and their lives.

As she was thinking of this, and remembering all the sorrows that fate and choice had delivered to her door — as she was grasping the extent of all she had already lived through and suffered and received in her twenty years — she heard something strange. A wail, but not human in origin. A cry so piercing, it sent a shudder down her body.

“Benny?” she said quietly, knowing he wouldn’t hear her, knowing it was already too late to protect him and Louisa from whatever menace the noise was bringing. It was a menace coming from the air outside.

Across the living room, a single window faced Sparks Street. She couldn’t see the street from her vantage point on the floor, but she stood now and crossed to the window, dimly aware of confronting the fate that she had been so eager to entrust with her life a moment before.

As the undulating moan took hold of her again, she reached the window and was blissfully relieved to see the usual pandemonium below — not a panic, but the cheerful disorder of a barber clamoring for a customer, of children playing a game with a ball and sticks amid a flock of strolling monks. No one seemed to hear what she could. Then a woman pushing a cart pointed in the direction of Sule Pagoda’s pinnacle, and Khin lifted her eyes to see, flashing through the still-unknowing sky, at least fifty planes flying in formation toward her — toward them all.

How oddly beautiful the vision was, set against the cry of what her ears now clearly heard as an air-raid signal — like nothing she had ever seen, and yet precisely like what she had been preparing to witness all her life.

From that moment, until the war was finished, Benny noticed beauty only in the unexpected. In the waters off the wharf, roiling with iridescent oil slicks and debris. In the winged statues on the arched roof of a corner municipal building, all at once ascending over the rubble on the street. In a doll’s head that Louisa found in the stairwell (“Poor baby,” she cooed, clutching the head whose ice-blue eyes rolled open crookedly). In the startled voices of British wireless announcers, who promised that Rangoon would be held at all costs, even as news came that the Japanese had begun a land invasion along with Aung San’s Burma Independence Army (“The enemy is currently occupying all three major southern airfields, and now the city of Moulmein”). In the broken glass glinting up and down Sparks Street, which suddenly seemed worthy of its name, and which lit the way for families optimistically fleeing with all of their trunks and laden coolies (and, conveniently for Benny and Khin, leaving their stores of tinned food behind). In Louisa’s serenity amid the blasts, and the way she covered her ears during moments of peace (as though to assure herself of her capacity to drown out noise should she please). And in the too-crimson, smoke-choked evening skies that gave way to tremulous nights, to ardent acts that Benny committed on increasingly pregnant Khin (“ Leave —save yourself,” she pleaded with him. Not without you, his fervent silence replied).

Rangoon was a virtual ghost town by the time Singapore fell in mid-February, and then the British lost the Battle of Sittang Bridge in southern Burma, all but relinquishing Rangoon to the advancing Japanese army. Nearly all the “foreigners”—the Jews and Indians and Chinese and Anglos — were already en route to India; and nearly all the “natives” had already taken shelter in the countryside. But now, at last, came the official evacuation signal — a signal that at first seemed to relieve Benny of the burden of choice: he was given nine months’ severance pay and permission to leave the country; yes, he and Khin agreed immediately, they would follow the hundreds of thousands over the Arakan Yomas to India — their path was virtually mandated. But as they were preparing to vacate the flat in the middle of the night, Saw Lay appeared like a specter in their doorway, throwing choice back at them.