But no. no, he realized, as his bruised eyes blinked open. He had been dreaming. The whole thing had been a dream. Except there, in the bright empty room adjoining the one in which he was bound, were two of the Japanese who had tortured him. He had the confusing impression that they were dancing, that behind them a peeling gramophone was plaintively giving voice to the old tune he had been hearing again and again in his dreams. He heard the hiss of a record. The jaunty horns. Ozzie Nelson singing. Could it be? He had to strain to see, but yes, sure as day, his tormentors were dancing, alternately serious and smiling, their arms guardedly locking their bodies together as they skittered through the morning light.
It was Khin who answered the door several days later, when he showed up at the house in Tharrawaddy. She drew him inside with trembling hands, and four-year-old Louisa looked at him with elation and then horror, her eyes moving to the slits crisscrossing his now bald head while little Johnny hid behind Khin’s leg. Then Saw Lay’s brother led him to the back room and laid him down, murmuring something about Saw Lay having just left, about Saw Lay going back to the hills to get them, to get them all, to murder every last one of them himself if it came to it. Benny was beyond words by then, beyond the instinct to put suffering into sentences. There was just the relief of no longer being apart from his loved ones, and a new, animal awareness that a cavern of misunderstanding had opened between Khin and him.
It didn’t help that, before Benny’s recent apprehension, Saw Lay had been sweeping through this house, bringing stories from the front lines of wasted survivors, exploding shells, scorched villages, and the agonies and heroics of the fallen. It didn’t help that during these visits Saw Lay’s eyes had seemed most eager to seek out Khin’s, or that, whenever he’d spoken, Khin had paid him the kind of attention she no longer lavished on Benny. How many nights had Benny watched her listen to Saw Lay while she worked over the stove, flushing with horror, with gratitude, with — with something more?
Now, as he lay shivering on the mat in the back room, she unbuttoned the torn shirt he had managed to put on when the Japanese had abruptly released him (with the warning that they would have their eyes on him, that he would die the moment he involved himself in British affairs). She laid her hands on the tender skin of his abdomen, and he felt her heat. Then she lifted his buttocks to draw down his sarong. She did not gasp, but the expression that came over her intent features made him conscious of what she must be seeing: the oozing welts along his penis, the blood caked with the residue of excrement between his inner thighs — images that had appeared to him in flashes throughout the seven days and that had melded with his piercing sense of foreboding about her, about Saw Lay. He felt with his fingertips for a blanket, but Khin stilled his hand, pressing his fingers tightly.
“I won’t rest until you tell me,” she said, struggling for breath. “What happened, Benny? Don’t lie to me.”
Each of them had been made a sharp-eyed creature by the war; what he’d been through had to be roughly evident to her. But why mention lying ?
As though to nurture the seed of her doubt in his ability to be honest (and as though to punish her for the falseness she’d mentioned), he found himself lying to her in response — lying in the most obvious of ways. “Nothing,” he said in a voice small and hoarse from the repeated ramming of the pipe down his throat. An irritated voice. Nothing.
And then he said what had been on his mind since his return here, maybe since he’d had those visions while being tortured: “What happened with Saw Lay?”
Her eyes hardened on him, and he could almost feel that hardness spreading around the soft center of her ache for him. “I will make you soup,” she said, and she called for one of the children to sit by him.
Over the following days, she fed and washed and slept by him, waking at his slightest sound, dressing the wounds he didn’t insist on tending to himself. He couldn’t bear for her to know the extent of his humiliation as a man. For him to be able to make love to her again, for him to find enough fire to take her (here he was, just back from the brink of death by violation and already thinking of the necessity of possessing her), he’d have to heal without being infantilized by her motherly familiarity with the details of his torture. But there was something else: even as he realized he didn’t want to know if she and Saw Lay had assumed he was as good as dead and had found it impossible not to take comfort in each other, he instinctually wanted to punish her for precisely what he didn’t want to know — to punish her by depriving her of the intimacy that she now so desperately needed.
“I can see you want your privacy,” she told him about a week after his return, when he’d begun to prop himself up and manage his bedpan. She put his breakfast on the table beside his bed. But rather than sitting down to feed him, she went on: “Saw Lay’s brother is here if you need anything else.”
Something about her manner, or the quality of her voice, begged him to question her, to ask where she was going. But he said, “That will be fine.”
He’d hurt her — that much was clear. Yet the expression that came over her face also seemed to tell him that she accepted his unwillingness to count on her. “Then you won’t mind,” she said quietly, “if I begin to volunteer a little at the hospital. I was back there for your medicine, and they’re short on help.”
“Of course,” he answered, forcing himself to keep his hard gaze on hers.
A word from you, that gaze of hers now silently pleaded with him, just a word of tenderness, and I’ll be yours again. “Benny,” she stumbled, “when you were gone, I tried—”
“I know,” he cut in. He couldn’t bear it — couldn’t bear the naked need and regret in her eyes, which reflected back to him only his own enfeebled position. He reached for the bowl of rice and egg on the table, as though to dismiss her, to disprove her powerful hold on him. Still, he felt her questioning face hovering above, the light of hope — or whatever it was that had brought her into the room — shining a moment longer over him. “Let’s never speak of it,” he said with a bite of food in his mouth.
That was the extent of his ability to help her bring out everything that had been damaging them from within.
If he had become a sort of nonparticipant in life with the start of the war, now — as Khin began to spend a portion of her days away from the house — he also became a distant observer of his family members, whom he saw with newly objective eyes. Something had been chiseled into Louisa’s winsome face, something that made her seem ferociously determined — as though she were intent on keeping a secret or forgetting something.
“Did Mama tell you to forget what happened while I was gone?” Benny asked the girl one evening, about a month after his apprehension, when she ventured into his room for a cuddle. “Maybe Mama said to forget something about Saw Lay.”
He wasn’t quite sure what he wanted to know more about — the state of his daughter’s soul or his wife’s capacity for deceit.
Louisa looked up into his face, her pretty eyes darkening with recollection, he thought — or with the effort not to recollect. “Saw Lay was sad,” she finally admitted.
“He was?”
“He cried.”
“I see.”
“Mama didn’t tell me to forget.”
She’d made this last declaration almost to shame him, it seemed to Benny. And over the following days, she began to escape the house with toddling Johnny, as though to evade something unpleasant. From the bedroom window, Benny watched her and Johnny disappear into the far thickets of trees on the plain and then reemerge covered in mud, with wildly transported looks in their eyes. They could have just communed with the trees, or been touched in the shade by some higher, redeeming light.
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