Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Listening to this chastising yet effervescent young man, Benny felt himself shrink into the crowd, as if Aung San were targeting him in particular. After all, Benny had been amassing a good amount of money of late (a disconcerting amount that just might be plain unfair, much as he had also pulled some eight hundred employees out of the postwar economic wasteland along with him, not to mention the dockworkers, the export outfits that relied on his trucks, the citizens near and far whose perishables lasted a few days longer on his ice), and for several seconds he nearly convinced himself that, in Aung San, this beleaguered country had indeed found its solution to people like him .

He was all but ready to slip out of the crowd in shame when the leader suddenly called for a nationalism that, to Benny’s ears, sounded like nothing less than a denial of difference. “What is nationalism , anyway?” Aung San asked, almost as though to dispense with the question by raising it. “It’s having to lead one common life. Sharing racial or linguistic communities, traditions that make us conscious of oneness and the necessity of oneness. It’s the unity of the entire people. What’s important isn’t that parties other than ours exist or not, but that they refrain from partisan activities detrimental to national interests.”

There wasn’t evil anywhere in the man’s face that Benny could spot. There was anger, ancient anger, to be sure, and the focused ferocity of someone who would stop at nothing to free Burma’s people. But as Aung San suddenly absented himself from the platform, leaving the crowd too momentarily stunned to respond, Benny couldn’t help wondering exactly what menace Aung San was seeking to free his own people of.

At last, a delayed applause thunderously rolled over the park, followed by an eruption of cheers for the same old “One blood, one voice, one leader!” And Benny, feeling dazed, turned and spotted a familiar face twenty feet off, a face so unabashedly swept up — so transported, so expressive of something appearing like amorous love — that a moment passed before he realized it belonged to Ducksworth, the Anglo-Burman Pax Britannica apologist, who had been so besotted by his British inheritance. Now, riding the trajectories of history, Ducksworth appeared to have recast himself as another chosen one — as a Burman, maybe even a Thakin. There he stood, slightly apart from the throng of his countrymen: clapping exultantly, red-cheeked, aglow with righteousness, ready to claim his rightful place in a Burma reborn.

While the crowd dispersed, Benny dejectedly angled for the street that would lead him to his office, and took one last lingering look at his old friend’s flat. That was when, by what initially seemed like an implausible second coincidence, he saw another ghost from his past — Saw Lay, standing on his stoop, smoking a cigarette. Benny was still so disoriented by having spotted Ducksworth, and so accustomed to imagining that he had glimpsed Saw Lay here or there — at the wharves where they’d met, or in this neighborhood where Benny often was brought on business — that at first he didn’t believe his eyes. As the departing rally-goers jostled him, he stopped about fifty feet from the flat, luxuriating in this specter of his old friend. Only when the man on the stoop dropped his cigarette and stiffly stubbed it out with the toe of his boot did Benny begin to trust that he was looking at Saw Lay in the flesh.

Saw Lay caught sight of him while Benny was closing the distance between them. He seemed about to step back, to disappear behind his door, but then he braced himself on the rail by the stoop and stared at Benny with a kind of painful tenderness, as though he were steeling himself to face an affection that was almost more than he could bear.

“I didn’t know. ” Benny said, when he was at the foot of the stoop.

“Will you come in?” Saw Lay answered.

Inside, Benny waited in a chair while Saw Lay put on the kettle and rolled himself another cigarette. Saw Lay hadn’t smoked before the war, and as Benny watched him put the burning thing to his lips, he was moved, and saddened, by how much had changed about his friend. Saw Lay’s hair was almost all white now, and there was a kind of secret on his face — some evidence of struggle beneath the quietness of his aspect, which itself had lost much of its polished elegance. He’d suffered, no doubt. But he would never speak of it; no, Benny knew from the way his friend sank into a chair across from him and closed his eyes when he inhaled, only sporadically looking at Benny without apology or shame or resentment, that whatever had happened in Saw Lay’s personal past would remain there.

“You’ve been back. ” Benny started.

“Oh, a few months now,” Saw Lay cagily confessed. “And how. how are the children?” he asked with a sincere smile. “Louisa must be very aware of her own superiority to the rest of us by now.”

Benny chuckled as tears came to his eyes. If he was sad, it was because he identified with Saw Lay’s despair. And he was reminded for some reason of his mother, and how protected he’d felt by her against the inevitability of loss and pain. He had meant always to protect this friend from pain, but instead they had brought pain on each other. This is my wife’s former lover, he thought. This is the progenitor of my own little daughter.

The kettle began to scream, and Saw Lay stubbed out his cigarette and limped to the kitchen — he’d been wounded, Benny observed. When he returned, it was with a single cup of milky tea, which he foisted on Benny, and an open bottle of beer for himself; perhaps he needed Benny to stay sober as much as he personally needed to be loosened.

“I want to ask you something,” Saw Lay said, sinking back into his seat as he took a long swallow of beer. “Do you suppose that the British — that any of the Allies — would think it would be reasonable for the Jews to trust the Germans again? I mean to live peaceably under the Germans, under their government?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Benny said. If he’d been short, it was because Saw Lay’s question had struck his ears — and his heart — as a latent insult, because it presupposed that Benny was so much an outsider that a comparison with the Jewish condition had to be drawn in order for him to understand that of the Karen people. But there was also something painful about how easily Saw Lay had started down the path of political discussion, as if picking right up from where they’d left off years before — painful because it had been so absent from Benny’s life.

Saw Lay sipped his beer without meeting Benny’s eyes. “You probably haven’t heard,” he said quietly, “that we wrote a memorial of sorts, a letter, to the British secretary of state before the war was even over.”

“We?” There it was, the excluding “we.”

“The Karens leading the effort against the Japs,” Saw Lay said, putting his beer down. “We wanted to remind the British of the slaves the Burmans made of us before they came here, of the huge role we played in the British army and police forces all along.”

“And did you ask for something in return?”

Now it was Saw Lay who became very sober, staring at Benny as he might at a fool. “The creation of our own state, of course,” he said, but there was no conviction in his words, and his eyes seemed to follow the dispirited train of his thoughts as he looked to the window that faced the park and the place where Aung San had stood. “No response,” he said quietly. “And with every one of Aung San’s rallies, with every one of his mass strikes, the Brits come closer to all-out capitulation. How can they expect us to trust the Burmans after what’s been done to us?”