Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“We thought you’d gone on, my friend,” Benny said, taking Saw Lay into his embrace. They hadn’t seen him since late December, and he seemed to have lost a third of his weight, and just as much of his life expectancy, so worn was the skin clinging to the bones of his face, so haunted were his eyes, so racked was his body by tremors of the kind one sees in only the very aged or sick. They warmed him with blankets and the last of their brandy, and, as Louisa slept, pulled their chairs very close to his in the living room. Every unforeseen intimacy threw into relief for Benny the possibility of its loss; they seemed to be holding on to the final moments of their time in the history of humankind.

Slowly, very slowly, in a thin voice occasionally overtaken by fits of silence, Saw Lay began to speak of having volunteered to assist the refugees walking over the mountain passes between Burma and India. He had heard that the British were organizing stations to feed and hydrate the refugees, but when he got there (“merely to man a tank of chlorine with a rifle”), he found many tens of thousands already succumbing to malaria and cholera and dysentery. “One almost becomes accustomed to stepping over fallen bodies, human remains,” he said softly. “Amazing how butterflies descend on the dead — have you ever seen such a thing? Thousands of colorful wings, flitting about over the bloat and the stink. I still can’t shake the sight of it from my eyes.”

The territory, he said, was largely unmapped; all each man had was the man (or the woman or child) in front of him to lead the way, forming an interminable progression of the dying. And those who made it across the border were divided into camps by race. “You have the Anglo camp, of course. And then the Anglo-Indian camp. The Anglo-Burman camp. The Indian camp — that’s fouler than any of the other three. Even in their own country, they’re third-class citizens, the Indians.” He seemed to be describing one of Khin’s arguments for avoiding India; if Benny would be protected there by the British, far less certain was her and their children’s fate.

“Meanwhile, Aung San’s army is marching northward, westward, swelling with Burmans, with dacoits,” Saw Lay went on. “You can be sure they’ve already started targeting Karens.” His eyes lifted and met Khin’s forcefully, Benny noticed, then fell to her protruding belly. “It won’t be safe anywhere here for our kind.”

For three days, as Saw Lay recuperated on a mat laid out on their living room floor, Benny and Khin were plunged back into the darkness of indecision. Breaking reports over the wireless had more than half of the five hundred thousand refugees dead, many succumbing to the Japanese troops now blocking the southern Taungup Pass leading to India. It seemed like madness to flee to their likely demise — particularly for Khin, in her state, and for Louisa, so vulnerable in her youth. But they were also plagued with indecision about things increasingly too dangerous to face: the value each of them accorded to their togetherness, to their race, to their place in this country. She, who had evidently been momentarily eager to sink into Benny’s Jewish identity, could not now conceive of herself as anything but a Karen in Burma; and he was unwilling to conceive of himself as a young man again alone and homeless in the world. And yet they each now argued emotionally on the other’s behalf: she, that they must find another escape route into India; he, that they must hide in a Burmese village that wouldn’t become a target of Aung San’s army — one whose inhabitants weren’t staffing the British armed forces.

Then came word that the Japanese were fifteen miles from Rangoon, that everything would be set fire to or demolished in the retreating British army’s wake — the docks, the government buildings, the post and telephone offices, the refineries. Within an hour, still not knowing if they meant to land somewhere in Assam or the Shan division, they were crammed on an airless train bound north for Katha, their terror momentarily muted by the thunder of the carriage clanging down the tracks. Khin perched on a stranger’s trunk, Louisa jostling on her lap, while Benny — the only “white” aboard — crouched by Saw Lay, to be repeatedly stepped on and kicked by others’ feet. “Is he a British spy?” one man hissed, scowling down at Benny. “He’s jeopardizing all of our lives!”

“Dearest Father,” Saw Lay said, leading them in prayer that first night as Louisa slept on Khin’s knees, “we ask not to be favored over any of your other children, but that you might show us the wisdom of your grace. That we might make the right decisions, and trust and forgive according to your higher judgment.” At this, he paused, and his silence seemed to tremble with doubt. “We remember tonight,” he went on quietly, “all that our British Father has saved us from, and we ask for faith that in his present retreat from our capital he has not forgotten us, as fathers sometimes forget even their most devoted children.”

How to reconcile the ordinary discomforts of the body — a pinching in the lower back, a stiffening neck, the thickness of a parched tongue, the unpleasant constriction of clothing — with the extraordinary discomforts of remaining crouched in one place all day and all night, bathed in sweat and the reek of others’ unseemly shapes, in temperatures sometimes exceeding 115 degrees? How to reconcile the ordinary comforting sights of the breaking day — the milky-green meadows, the villages rising on stilts from the mist, the flash of a gilded stupa, or the smoke from someone’s fire — with the ominous black clouds now billowing on the horizon?

“It’s the oil fields,” Benny told Khin. “We’re burning them so the Japs can’t use our oil.”

“You mean our Father is burning them,” Saw Lay said. “Scorching our earth as he leaves.”

The early monsoon had started by the time the train pulled into Katha the next evening, and they learned that the roads to the Tamu Pass leading to Assam, to the northwest, were now swarming with Japanese. They dared not pause, but, taking turns holding Louisa, they walked east for hours through sodden paddies and along undulating muddy paths toward the mountains of the Shan. Only when they reached the cover of a forest did they stop to build a fire and take out the cans of nectar and sardines that Benny had stuffed into his pockets.

“I want you to look at this,” Saw Lay told them as Khin rocked Louisa. He smoothed the map that he’d been carrying in his pocket over a log by the fire. “You’ve been talking only about the Shan State. But if we go just north, beyond Bhamo, in Kachin State”—he pointed to the hills bordering China—“my sister’s husband was from a village here — a little Karen village, called Khuli.”

“You don’t understand,” Benny told him with impatience. “We can’t hide with the Karens. They’ll be the targets, as you said. Aung San’s army—”

“No one else will hide you,” Saw Lay said sharply, and he folded up his map before suggesting that he take the first shift keeping watch while the others slept.

The next dew-drenched morning, about fifty feet from where they had camped in the cold, they discovered a family of slaughtered Chinese. They had just packed up their few things and begun to walk off, Louisa strapped across Khin’s back, when they saw the family through the mist: the naked husband and wife, bound to facing trees, his penis amputated, his abdomen sliced open and disemboweled, one of her breasts sliced off, sticks impaling her vagina and anus, their heads dangling at odd angles, and, between them, in the undergrowth of the trees, three decapitated children lying side by side amid a pile of their parents’ traditional clothing.