Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

The meticulousness with which these people had been made to suffer. The particular attentiveness to their genitals. The passion behind that. The personal ferocity. So incomprehensible was the scene that Benny found himself clinging to his only respite from it — the thought that at least this family’s worst nightmare was past them, that in death they had arrived at the completion of suffering toward which we continuously strive.

“I didn’t want to tell you,” Saw Lay whispered. “Always like this, the Japanese.”

It was very difficult for any of them to leave, with no one else to witness that family’s untold suffering. Khin hid with Louisa under the shelter of a nearby tree, and Saw Lay began to pray: “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters. Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me. Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. ”

The mandate to survive forced them to keep moving. And for a time, God — or circumstance — did provide, even in the face of the mutilated bodies they continued to confront along the way. The war’s unfathomable brutality could not vanquish the startling reality of their ongoing lives: The steep gorges through which they trekked along the placid Irrawaddy River. The warm soup and wool blankets unassumingly provided by the strong Kachin villagers who took them in. The wind whipping through those villagers’ mat walls. The dizzying sunlight of Bhamo’s scorching alluvial basin, its swaying rice fields edged by limestone and distant snowy Himalayan peaks. Then the simplicity of the Karen village called Khuli, a thicket of stilted huts under the clouds. And its inhabitants’ swift construction of a hut in which they were invited to live, to stay. Even Louisa’s diarrhea, Benny’s first bout of malaria, Khin’s pre-labor pains — each a bodily battle to purge a foreign element more pressingly present than the Japanese or the complicit Burma Independence Army.

Within a week of their arrival in Khuli, Saw Lay announced that he would be leaving for Mandalay to help with some of the refugees. “They say the entire city is burning,” he told Benny.

It was evening, the worst of the parching heat already spent on the day, and Benny had left the hut for the first time since his bout of malaria. He and Saw Lay sat by the thin stream that wound from the village down to the Irrawaddy, a bit of fresh breeze coming through the forest, bringing with it the scent of something floral.

“I should be strong enough to come along in a day or two,” Benny said.

It was a lie, or a partial lie. Not that Benny couldn’t have summoned the strength to join his friend or even to join the British army. God knew their side needed reinforcement; rumor had it that an all-out British retreat from Burma was inevitable. But a strange malaise had taken hold of Benny. For all his life in the tropics, he’d never lived outside the city; and now, with tigers and pythons in close range, with the threat of the enemy looming in the silent caverns of the forest — here, in hiding, when he ought to have been tenser and angrier than ever before — he felt oddly at peace. He could hardly feel his fists, let alone summon the energy to want to wield them against his opponent.

“The first bout of malaria is always the most vicious,” Saw Lay said, and took a stone in hand and cast it slanting across the stream. “Like the first soldiers coming through enemy territory. You’ll need more time.” He fell silent and looked up at the strange clouds assembling in the darkening sky. “It will be easier for me to pass through without you, in any case. Hard for a Jap to distinguish a Karen from a Burman. You’d be marked as a target immediately.”

“And if the Japs come here?” Benny said. “What will happen to these villagers who’ve sheltered me?”

Now, at last, Saw Lay looked at him again, a kind, impatient frown pinching his eyebrows together. “Let me tell you something about the Karens,” he said. “Part of our culture is to take strangers into our home and care for them. This is odd, when you think about it, because part of our culture is also to be slow to trust, slow to take a person into our heart.” He paused, looking down at the stream. “Once we’ve put a person in our heart, though. ”

He fell silent again, and for a while Benny watched the reflection of light on the water play against his eyes. It is enough that you should stay and take care of yourself and your wife and your child, you who are so dear to me, Benny felt him silently go on, with his absolute surrendering of anything approaching envy.

“You must allow them to do what comes naturally,” Saw Lay said. And two days later, he was gone.

What soon came naturally to Benny was a life in which he and his family members slept on mats rather than beds. A life in which they took shelter in a home without walls, a home entirely open to the damp and the night and the sound of others chattering and washing and singing over the riot of creatures in the trees. A life in which men to whom Benny could hardly speak worried about him being lonely, and came visiting and were content to sit with him and smoke moh htoo or share a cup of strong homemade htaw htee . A life in which privacy held no quarter, because — because it was a life in which there seemed to be nothing to hide. Each villager was so accepting of others (Benny had never witnessed such routine and unabashed public spitting and belching, and yet everyone was exceptionally clean, bathing twice daily down by the stream) that there was little reason for anyone to retreat from view. Astonishing, Benny thought, how linked the value of privacy was to that of personal (rather than collective) betterment or gain.

He began to wear a sarong, which more than once fell to his ankles, to the village women’s hilarity, and which he rather enjoyed plodding in down to the stream, along with naked Louisa, to dump buckets of icy water over their heads each evening. He began to rely on the soothing babble of women visiting with Khin as he drifted into sleep each night. He even began to laugh at others teasing him about his routine mee ga thah thaw (his snoring, which apparently projected across the village, waking even the roosters in the morning). Their teasing struck him as a kind of spiritual practice — an insistence that none was above being teased. As did the stunning specificity of their frequent obscenities—“ Aw pwa lee!” (“Eat vagina!”), or “Na kee poo thoo!” (“Your asshole is black!”). Even the marital bond between these Karen villagers (literally, as he had it, “the strings that tie a marriage together”), though utterly strong, seemed to leave space for responsibility for others in it.

“Come to me,” Benny still whispered to Khin in the darkness, and she did come to him, and yet wasn’t entirely his, as she had once been. Her ears were pricked for others in need, her face turned to the night.

And as the knot of their intimacy vaguely loosened, she seemed to thrive in this highly democratic community, establishing herself near the top of its particular system of hierarchy. Here, the elders were revered, the young expected to serve anyone older or perceived to be a leader — a teacher, say, or a minister, or a military adviser. Because Khin’s months in Akyab and Rangoon had taught her about sanitation, about the importance of sterilization, she — in addition to never hesitating to instruct teenage girls on how more vigilantly to tidy their hut or cook their supper — was soon being referred to as tha ra mu (teacher) and asked to heal others’ sick children, even to assist with others’ difficult deliveries. Sometimes she would wake in the middle of the night and murmur the names of herbs of which she’d dreamed, and in the morning she would leave him with sleeping Louisa in order to hunt for the plants, muttering about how she was sure the cooling properties of such-and-such would bring down so-and-so’s fever. When he asked if this was something she’d done before — healing the sick, having premonitions about medicinal herbs — she blinked at him as if to ask, Is any of this something you’ve done before? Their easy adaptation to the present made him almost question if they had ever had a past to leave (something emphasized uncannily by the absence in Karen language, he now realized, of a past or future tense; “In the era of yesterday,” someone would say, “heart disease takes my wife away from me”).