Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

But though he left the Jewish quarter, along with the fleeting dream of Mingala Waters, he could not evade the memory of the woman who had once showered him with dignity. And over the following few weeks, as the worst of the hot weather blew in with the southwest monsoon, he felt drowned by an awareness of having abandoned Mama’s God when he’d felt most abandoned during the war. If he was angry with God, if he had lost his faith, he didn’t know it, because somewhere along the line even the thought of faith, of God, had become too much. And what about his faith in man?

That June, Benny was obliged to make an appearance at a British embassy party. The banquet hall was one of those airy, suddenly eerie residuals of colonialism, all gleaming teak and mirrors and candlelit chandeliers. Looking past the rim of a tumbler of pink gin at the blur of chattering, gulping, ogling, richly dressed partygoers, he seemed to see their every anxious bead of sweat. The room and its brightness all at once struck him as a glaring denial of the dark fright brewing within each of them.

Like every one of the guests, he had clawed his way to the top and to what he had imagined was his freedom by insinuating himself into the good graces of the powers that be — principally those in the upper ranks of Aung San’s Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom League, the nationalist party formed during the war and presently involved in exclusive bilateral negotiations with the Brits. Benny had done so with a kind of willful disregard for these men’s machinations — a cold, albeit largely unconscious calculation that if they were getting their lot, he would get his. And now, swallowing down his gin, and watching a pair of flirtatious wives pretending not to try to attract him, he wanted to cover his face in shame.

He was just about to make his escape when Aung San’s right-hand man suddenly approached the bar in his Japanese-inspired military uniform. He leaned into the counter a few feet from where Benny stood and barked out his drink order, his mouth hanging open as if to better display the full prominence of his mismatched buck teeth and disturbingly sensual lips. Benny had never met the man before (and everything about his posture suggested it would take more than the usual pleasantries to get him to pay attention to anyone whom he didn’t care to meet), but he knew that this general had been an underperforming university dropout before joining up with Aung San in the We Burmans Association and then becoming one of the “Thirty Comrades” to receive military training in Japan. Like his comrades, the general called himself Thakin , Burman for “lord” (the thinking being that the ethnic Burmans, and not the British, were the natural lords of their country), and he’d chosen a nom de guerre: in his case, Ne Win, or “Radiant Sun.” The only thing about him that was remotely radiant, however, was his perspiring brow.

Without a glint of graciousness, he accepted a drink from the nervous bartender and turned to survey the crowd. He could have been a schoolyard bully who didn’t want to be caught showing kindness to flatterers or the powerless. “One blood, one voice, one leader”—that was the slogan that he and his bully friends had recently been chanting from their parapets of power (how many times had Benny heard the slogan broadcast over the wireless since the conclusion of the war?) — and there could be no doubt that what they had in mind was a country overrun by their values, their culture, their language, their military. That military had “liberated” the country from its captors, according to their spokesmen, from “aggressors,” whom they sought to repel by rousing Burmans to continue to strike, to create bedlam.

“How have the negotiations been going?” Benny found himself sputtering loudly in his English-inflected Burmese. He meant the negotiations with the British aggressors, of course. The negotiations for independence. But it wasn’t clear at all if Ne Win had heard him.

A moment passed before the general turned to him with an inconvenienced stare. Then a bizarre smile rose to this sensual mouth. “You’re the Jew,” he said, disconcerting Benny to the point that he couldn’t quickly come up with a rejoinder. In all Benny’s days in Burma, no one had ever accused him of that . Being Jewish here simply wasn’t — or hadn’t been — something to slight someone for, unlike, regrettably, being Indian. “The rich Jew,” the general went on. “The Jew who is so good at making mountains of money.”

“Is that what they say?” Benny laughed, trying to match the general’s touch of theatricality.

The man’s eyes cast around the humanity before him again, as though he wanted to be sure of having been observed while making his cutting point. Indeed, the women who had been pretending not to flirt for Benny’s benefit had fallen into the false notes of forced conversation. They were listening, all right — on alert for Benny’s fall from the general’s favor.

“Tell me,” Ne Win said now, with a seriousness that caused Benny to stiffen. “What do you make of what they did to all those Jews in Europe?”

For a while, Benny just stood with his emptied tumbler in his fist, staring into the unhappy eyes of the man who was now breaking into a stupid grin. He felt as if he were looking at the unsightly reflection of his own inability to confront what had happened halfway around the world. And he hated himself. Hated himself as much as he hated this man who had stooped to threatening him with the unspeakable suffering of others. He set his tumbler down and forced out his hand, half expecting the general to touch fists with him, to declare the start of their fight to the end. But Ne Win wouldn’t touch him.

“Saw Bension,” Benny said. “You’ll have to excuse me.” And that was how he came spontaneously to invent the new moniker for himself, one that was still Jewish but unmistakably Karen.

Two days later Aung San’s party held a public rally. So many thousands showed up to hear the Burman leader speak that the entire city shut down — all the Rangoon shops and the roads whose impassability would no doubt cause the ice blocks in Benny’s idling trucks to melt. The rally was relocated from overfull city hall to Fytche Square, where, on the cloisters near the Sule Pagoda, across from Queen’s Park, a platform was erected and the usual banners unfurled (INDEPENDENCE WITHIN ONE YEAR! GO BACK! BURMA IS OUR LAND, BURMESE OUR LANGUAGE!). With a pang, Benny saw his old friend’s flat, still standing at the edge of the gardens in which, a lifetime ago, they had strolled under the fragrant blooming trees, getting to know each other.

At last Aung San took the stage and the tide of humanity surged toward the platform, pulling Benny from the periphery of the square into the crowd. Even if Benny hadn’t been a head or two taller than the others, he would have understood immediately that the leader had the luminosity and magnetism that was utterly deficient in his fellow lord, Ne Win. There was Aung San’s chiseled head, for one, close-shorn and angled slightly toward the tops of the nearby thicket of coco palms. There were his eyes that stared unblinkingly down at the crowd. And then, as soon as he had opened his mouth, there was, if not what one would ordinarily call rhetorical talent, a meticulousness of conviction that at once lifted him toward the gods and insisted on his place among the ordinary populace — a populace that had been victimized by more than just imperialism. “ Capitalism has called forth irreconcilable antagonism between man and man, race and race, nation and nation!” the man broodingly announced. “Even before the war, most people in our country were poor, while only a few — chiefly Europeans and foreigners —were rich. Place this alongside the havoc wreaked by the war. We need to take money out of the keeping of the rich, fix prices of essential commodities, and curb the activities of profiteers and hoarders!”