Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“This isn’t swing!” she cried in the living room, after Saw Lay had cleared away the servants and put on one of Daddy’s records that he said would be “just the thing”—Glenn Miller’s “Fools Rush In.”

The servants had polished and powdered the floor so that it shone like a mirror, and for a few minutes it was just them, laughing and pressing cheek to cheek while Saw Lay bent down in his silly way — all to that song that he kept dashing back to the Victrola to play and that Daddy had once described to Louisa as so sad and so assuring. “We can swing dance to this,” Saw Lay kept saying. “See? We’re swinging.”

But then Johnny and Gracie, woken from their naps, barged into the room wanting to join in — Johnny with his seriousness even in play, and thin Gracie with that constant smile of hers despite the fact that she was always the loser in their games. Louisa could see the way Saw Lay hesitated to swing Gracie around with the same abandon.

“What’s this? The party already started?” came Daddy’s voice. He had entered the room with an enormous wrapped object in his outstretched hands, and now he stood looking muscular and ruddy, beaming at Saw Lay.

“Why not?” Saw Lay said, already retreating to the bar as though Daddy had just offered him something. “Will you have one?”

Daddy looked confused as Saw Lay poured out some brown liquor. These days it was often this way between them, Daddy pressing his too-eager smile on his friend, Saw Lay sinking into the shadows and complaining of headaches. Yet eventually the two of them would disappear into Daddy’s study, where they held meetings with other men, and where the children were forbidden to enter.

“Is no one interested in what I have here?” Daddy said as he lifted the enormous gift up to his ear, giving it a shake, and making Gracie giggle and Johnny look on with interested alarm.

And that was all it took to rescue Louisa from the worried wanderings of her thoughts. Soon they were all pulling at the wrapping paper, revealing pleated layers of cloth — the bellows of something — of an accordion, Louisa realized, exclaiming her pleasure while Johnny instantly asked to have a shot at playing the thing.

Daddy threw off the remains of the paper and gave the accordion a few tugs. “My mother used to play one of these,” he said. “Doesn’t it make you happy? You can’t listen to it and not feel compelled to smile. See? And the marvelous thing — the really marvelous thing is that you can take it with you wherever you go.”

“Where are we going?” Louisa said. There it was again: the sting of spontaneous tears behind her eyes.

“We’re not going anywhere,” Daddy assured her as Saw Lay looked on, and then one of the servants came to whisk the children away to be bathed.

The party was more wonderful than Louisa could have hoped for, with her “very fine” performance at the piano, and the beautiful new dress that flared out whenever she twirled, and heaps of ice cream, and a show by a snake charmer (terrorized by Little Fella), and so much swing dancing — all the lamps in the house aglow, all the doors flung open to let in the cool night air. For hours after Louisa was sent to bed, she sat in her nightgown at the top of the stairs, watching her parents and their guests, the silks and flashing jewels. Daddy danced with Mama, staring into her eyes as though this — as though she — were the thing he needed most.

It was all almost enough to make Louisa forget how unhappy Saw Lay had been throughout the evening. Before going upstairs, she had found him smoking out on the veranda and gazing back through the open double doors at the couples gliding by. “Boo boo!” she had said to startle him out of his thoughts and make him smile, and he had looked at her — not crossly, but without joy. “Boo boo,” he had told her after a pause, quietly. And only after another moment had he smiled and touched her cheek and asked if it wasn’t already time for her to be in bed dreaming.

Now he was by the front door talking sternly with one of the servants, as though to grumble about something. Yet a moment later, he left the servant’s side to charge through the guests toward Daddy, who was still holding Mama on the dance floor. He put a hand on Daddy’s shoulder, and when Daddy nervously stepped aside, he bent toward Daddy’s ear, and then the two of them headed off toward the hall leading to Daddy’s study.

Louisa had never spied on adults before. She had listened, and she had looked, all her senses attuned to the signals they put out, signals she kept recorded somewhere deep inside. Maybe, though, because it was her birthday and she was no longer a very little girl — or maybe because of the way Mama remained out on the dance floor, as if lost — she slipped down the stairs and darted down the hall unseen.

The door to the study was shut, and when she pressed her ear against it, a moment passed before she could hear anything but the thudding of her heart. Then the muffled sounds coming through the wood gave way to voices, to words.

“Could it have been one of the guests?” Saw Lay was saying.

“Goddamn government,” Daddy told him, “poisoning meat to kill off stray dogs.”

“And stray men. What about Louisa?”

“I’ll tell the sentry to bury it. Better for her to think the dog wandered off.”

Before she could quite formulate the thought that she had lost track of Little Fella after going up for bed — that Little Fella had to be buried — the door opened, and Daddy stood breathless and blinking back at her, a curious, startled look on his face.

Behind him, Saw Lay watched her with an expression of regret, and she felt a tug of shame for having put him in the position of discovering her. Then she noticed, in the dim light of Daddy’s lamp, the stacks and stacks of rifles on the dark floor. More rifles than she had ever seen.

The sense of having missed an opportunity to prevent something was one Saw Lay had experienced as far back as the time he had met Khin, before the war, when Benny had invited him over to their flat on Sparks Street, and he had sat across from her at a table laid with her aromatic Karen dishes. On the surface of things, there was nothing special about Khin’s face, but the candle on the table, flickering down to a stub over the course of the night, had emphasized to Saw Lay what seemed to be an unusual introversion and sweetness in the woman’s eyes. Then there was the way that she had strained to speak to Benny through him. Saw Lay had been left that first night with the impression that Khin valued her husband more greatly for the difficulty loving him entailed, yet also that the bravery of her love went unnoticed by the object of its interest. And he knew, with a kind of pain, that Benny was doomed to inadvertently hurt her, to misunderstand and undervalue her difficult devotion to him much as he adored her, and that the only chance that he, Saw Lay, had of protecting her had already passed, because she was already Benny’s.

This feeling of regret soon enough became something more potent, though Saw Lay hadn’t known that until it had already done its damage. What happened was that the moment Benny had been captured by the Japanese secret police in Tharrawaddy, Khin had sent word to him through their network of Karen friends, and Saw Lay had just as reflexively, though stealthily, rushed to her, along with three of his junior men. The problem was how to rescue Benny without compromising the greater Karen underground effort — something Saw Lay and his brother and soldiers had debated for nearly twenty uninterrupted hours. “You have to understand,” he finally confessed to Khin with exhaustion at the kitchen table, “if it were merely a matter of risking getting shot in order to save Benny, there would be no question.” The problem was what the Japanese did to those they captured. Saw Lay didn’t trust himself to endure that without leaking a word about his unit’s covert operations. It was an impossible situation: the willingness to die, the desperation to save, and the cold confrontation with the limits of his own strength.