Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Saw Lay looked at him out of the corner of his eye. They were sitting down by the stream in the evening, just as they had been before Saw Lay had left for Mandalay, and, again, Benny watched his friend take refuge in finding stones with his fingers. There was a certain shyness about him, Benny thought. A reservedness about speaking directly, about meeting another’s exposed eyes. Could it be this was why his friend had never found it in himself to take a wife?

“When did you first become aware of them?” Saw Lay asked now. He sent a flat speckled stone over the surface of the stream.

“I’m not sure,” he answered. “I remember thinking the silence had gone on too long. Being afraid to open my eyes. And then the shock of seeing them, in a kind of ring around the Japanese and the tree where I was bound. All of the Karens — the entire village. And Khin with the children at the front — Johnny over her shoulder, Louisa pressed to her leg, with her gorgeous curls and deep eyes. And that terrifying expression on Khin’s face.”

“Describe it to me.”

The nakedness of Saw Lay’s request made Benny look at him with a start. Had he imagined something personal, a long-dormant urgency, in his friend’s tone? “It’s that way she sometimes looks,” Benny began tentatively, but also almost frantically, as though, now that he had picked up a thread, he must rush to discover where it would lead, for fear of losing it again, or for fear of losing his courage to pursue it. “That look where she seems to be acknowledging that you are about to do something to break her heart. But there’s a defiance about it. As if she’s daring you to go ahead and break it. Or as if she’s telling you it’s already beyond breaking — so shattered is it already. Anyone else would have thought that she felt nothing at the moment, because her features were very relaxed. But her eyes. rage and longing were behind them. I couldn’t tell if she was bidding me good-bye or pleading with me to stay brave.”

Saw Lay smiled softly, looking out at the glistening stream. Then the light in his eyes seemed to fade, as though he had become impossibly sad.

“I’d have died if it weren’t for her courage,” Benny said, staking his claim on Khin — on the claim she’d made on his life by rescuing it. Only in the days after the Japanese incident had he pieced together, from the villagers, that she had summoned them to follow her through the forest to the tree where he was bound, and where the soldiers were slicing their swords over Benny’s head, in preparation to scalp him. When Benny’s eyes had opened and he’d looked at her beseechingly, she had stepped forward and explained to the soldiers that they were making a mistake. She had spoken in Burmese, and it wasn’t clear if the Japanese — who were said, generally, to have learned a smattering of the language from Aung San and his comrades — understood a word of what she meant to convey. But they became very still, the Japanese, listening to her as she went on to explain that the man whom they had captured was not a British spy. That he belonged to her, that she was his wife.

“Why do you think they listened to her?” Saw Lay asked. He was still focused on the stream, strangely purple in the dying light.

It was a question Benny had often asked himself. Was it the fact that she was holding a baby? Was it Louisa’s obvious relation to him, with her curly hair and Eurasian eyes? Or was it Khin’s startling combination of meekness and strength — a combination that dared the soldiers to defy her. If they had defied her — if they had strung her up beside Benny and mutilated her in the villagers’ plain sight — they would have proved the point that they were above showing and being shown mercy.

“She is unexpected,” Saw Lay said quietly, before Benny had the chance to answer his question, and then a flock of parrots suddenly screeched overhead. For a moment they sat back, watching the beating blur of blue and red passing by.

Benny wanted to say something then, to ask a question that he couldn’t quite bring to the forefront of his mind. But something about his friend’s eyes, about their persistent sadness, told him to hold his tongue, to still his brain. Saw Lay was five or six years older than Benny, nearing thirty, and whatever he’d been going through recently had aged him significantly. Watching him — the way he sat with one knee bent, his serious eyes, the sheen of perspiration on his forehead — Benny thought, He’s passed out of his youth at the very moment that his dignity is deepening . And he realized, with a warm wave of feeling flooding his chest, that he’d never loved a man as he did Saw Lay. It seemed to him that his friend was largely above human concerns, above even the primary concern to fight first for one’s own life.

“Let me ask you a question,” Benny said, surprising himself. “If a person should want to become a Jew, the process is really very circumscribed — certain guidelines must be followed, certain steps.”

Saw Lay turned to him now with a certain flat caution, a hint of something like defensiveness in his eyes.

“If one wanted to become a Christian,” Benny went on, bumbling, “well, there is baptism.”

“And?” Saw Lay said.

“And—” Benny rushed on, afraid his friend might be misunderstanding him — the question of faith wasn’t actually on his mind. “If one wanted to become Karen — say, if one wanted to take on a Karen identity, how would one go about it?”

Now Saw Lay looked at him in plain astonishment.

“Would that even be possible?” Benny asked.

“To become Karen?”

“Yes.”

The question seemed to hang suspended over Saw Lay’s widening features. Then all at once those features contracted, and he broke out in a fit of full-bellied laughter that sent him falling back onto the dusty bank. Benny had never seen him so stripped of the armor of his poise.

“As if anyone would want to become a Karen!” Saw Lay heaved, barely getting out the words. “As if anyone would willingly. ”

He looked so foolish, Benny couldn’t help laughing along with him, first in reluctant spurts, and then fully, relievingly, half sobbing as he fell back beside his friend and they laughed together, laughed until all their laughter was spent, and they lay smiling side by side.

“It’s the simplest thing in the world, my friend,” Saw Lay said finally. Benny heard him inhale the night, then release himself back into it. “All you have to do is want to be one.”

In April 1944—more than a year after he had laughed with Saw Lay on the riverbank — the Japanese secret police came for Benny. He and the family had recently moved in with Saw Lay’s brother in Tharrawaddy, a town on the plains where many Karens were seeking sanctuary, not far from Rangoon. First the secret police took him to their headquarters at the local American Baptist Mission High School and strung him up to a pillar in a classroom. Using their swords to nick his scalp again and again so that blood streamed down his face into his eyes, they threatened him with death and charged him in English-crossed Burmese with espionage—“espionage activities” was the exact phrase they kept repeating. They stripped him of his clothes, thrust a pipe down his throat, and poured water down the pipe until — with him retching and choking — his stomach ballooned and water burst from his nose. Then they pulled out the pipe, thrust it up his rectum, pumped water into his bowels, and smacked his penis when he tried to urinate. And the strange thing was that when they replaced the pipe with a sharp stick, increasing his agony so much that he truly wanted to die, he began to hear the voice of Ozzie Nelson, whose orchestra had made such a hit with “Dream a Little Dream of Me” in the 1930s. Was he dreaming? That voice, the brass, the strings — it all seemed to come to him from a great distance. From an even greater distance, Sister Adela appeared before him in her white habit, clutching at her wimple as if to pull it off, or as if to hold it down, and staring at him with those anguished eyes. It occurred to him that Saw Lay’s eyes had something similar about them. And he seemed to see Saw Lay stealing glances at Khin from across the kitchen, and then Saw Lay taking Khin in his arms and beginning to dance with her.