Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Yet the past did encroach, particularly with news that trickled in — along with the occasional English-speaking Karen soldier — of the destruction of four hundred Karen villages (“not villagers, villages !”) within the span of a few days by Aung San’s army. (“Man, woman, child — no matter. They shot them and pushed them into heaps — eighteen hundred of them just in that one place.”) News of Karen retaliation. Of race wars. Of a total British retreat to Assam. Of emptying prisons, and escalating murder rates, and thousands of released dacoits joining Aung San’s ranks. Now and then one of these reports would break through to a distant part of Benny, and his fists would almost tighten (once he very nearly used those fists to thrash a good-looking soldier, no more than a kid, whose flashing glances kept alighting on Khin’s engorged breasts while she flirtatiously touched her hair). Sometimes Benny even felt prodded to action by Khin’s nearly imperceptible expressions of disappointment in him, expressions that sounded an awful lot like praise (“I’m glad you’re not like Saw Lay — he’d never have it in him to commit himself to a family over a cause”). But then he would glimpse Louisa contentedly making pots out of the muddy clay beside the hut, or Khin’s swelling belly, and his family’s immediate need for him to keep living would lure him into the stupor of idleness, if not indifference, again.

In June, Khin noiselessly gave birth to their second child, a perfect wailing boy named Johnny. Benny leaped around the village, passing out fistfuls of cheroots, and the villagers smiled at him in their pleased, puzzled way, for the birth of a baby was also part of the natural order of things. Their silent absorption of baby Johnny into the body of their community found its counterpart in Khin’s tired, quietly happy, quietly anxious eyes, and in Louisa’s easy claiming of “her” new baby (as if Johnny had been there all along). Even Johnny’s insistent need for milk and burping and caresses seemed to contend that this present was their only reality. Benny almost believed it would never cease.

And then, one day, it did. That July morning had been like any other in the heart of the rainy season, beginning with a light drizzle as the village children scampered across the square to the schoolhouse, and brightening by ten o’clock, when Benny often accompanied his family members on a walk before the worst of the heat set in. He took tremendous pleasure, during these morning sessions, in watching Louisa observe the intricacies of the forest, with whose features he, too, was becoming acquainted: the berrylike cones of the dwarf junipers, the rhododendrons’ eruption of colorful flowers, the clutches of mushrooms that Khin told them were edible, and the sultry way the earth steamed after a shower. Then came the gathering storm clouds and the children scuttling back across the square before the afternoon showers began, when Benny and Louisa would huddle together inside, sipping plain tea and nibbling on the sweet Khin had managed to scrounge up. Today, it was golden-brown jaggery candy, and he was soon following Louisa to the edge of the hut, from where they watched the earth’s soaking, the excess of water running off in rivulets across the angled square. Those rivulets seemed to jostle one another, didn’t they? he remarked to Louisa—“Look how each of the fellows tries to get ahead?”

“Daddy,” Louisa said, holding her wet piece of jaggery candy in her fist. “Which fella is that?”

“Which fella?” Benny said, crouching down, captivated by her tender cheeks, by her impossibly deep, thoughtful eyes. He rested in those eyes — and in the astounding thought that they reflected a soul entirely unique from his own. Only after a time did he follow them back out to the view of the rain and to the sight of a Japanese soldier, standing three feet from their hut and staring right back at him.

For a moment, Benny was so dazed, so disbelieving, he could note only the peculiarity of the soldier’s snug helmet, like a dome, with a startling yellow star sewn into the fabric above his forehead. The soldier was drawing a sword from his waist and then pointing it at Benny’s face. And all at once Benny became very aware of that face, of its fleshy foreignness, of the nozzle of its nose and the thickness of its lips, parting and gasping for breath, even as he feigned calmness. The last thing he should do was run, intuition told him. If he remained composed, if he was honest with the man — if he explained that he was no longer a British officer—

“Kuro,” the man said very coldly, drawing the staccato word out— kkurrro —as he stared with revulsion at Benny.

And suddenly a thought came to Benny, very simple and clear: He is a soldier, trained to kill.

“Go to Mama,” he told Louisa quietly, understanding that if he so much as raised a fist this child and her brother and mother would be slain.

And, almost involuntarily, he stood and stepped down from the hut into the mud, his hands held up in surrender. He registered the soldier’s instant bewilderment, and then — from a distance, it seemed — he watched the man lower his sword and lunge toward him, watched his own body fight off a wave of revolt and allow itself to be carried down by the arm clamped around its neck. Another soldier appeared above him — Benny caught glimpses of the sweat trickling down this other stranger’s cheek, of the lips pursed in concentration, the yellowing teeth, the attentive, disconcerted eyes. “Not a British spy,” Benny heard himself saying in Burmese, before he choked on the arm dragging him by the neck through the mud into the trees. They were shouting to each other, the strangers — and somewhere above the din, Benny heard the village rousing to the crisis, Khin crying out, pleading over Louisa’s cries. What he could see, apart from his legs kicking strangely to be free, even as he forced his fists to be still, was a blur of blue in the clearing sky, over the green branches of the sheltering trees. And then he was out of range of the village, being dragged down an embankment, his back suddenly pushed up against the solid mass of something — a tree trunk, the bark of a pine, its every irregular surface reminding his neck and wrists and cheek that he was still alive. They might have been Karen, these men, the thought came to him. They were so ordinary, so familiar, these faces that contorted with exertion and fury as he was fixed to the pine. But no, the thought flashed through his mind. These were not men any longer. They had passed somewhere beyond the bounds of manhood, had become something other, imbued with a conviction so unfaltering it was dehumanizing. They withdrew their long swords and began to slice them through the air under the darkening sky, screaming insults or questions while behind them a dripping magnolia tree seemed to weep for Benny’s particular life, bidding him good-bye. God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us . Suddenly he wanted to apologize — to Khin, to Louisa, to Mama — who had pleaded with him to take care, to stay safe. Too late to use his fists now — they were tied behind him, halfway around the trunk of the tree. And as his animal self spread out across the pricked surface of his skin, as his heart clamored for life wildly, the tips of the soldiers’ swords whirred over his head, and he closed his eyes, all at once flooded with grief.

“It was very strange, the silence then,” he told Saw Lay, seven months later, in February, when the weather had begun to parch again, and his friend had returned to Khuli for a breath before his deployment to the front lines. Saw Lay had joined up with the Karen levies leading the effort against the Japanese from the eastern hills, and was acting as the makeshift colonel of his irregular unit, which expected to receive more weapons by way of British airdrop any day. “I thought it was the silence of death,” Benny continued, finishing his story about how he had come to be released by the Japanese. “Or — no, that’s not quite it. I thought it was the silence of the anticipation of death, the muting out of everything but that awful expectancy, when one knows the end is very near.”