Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“I made a mistake calling you here,” Khin finally said to him. There was coolness in her tone, scorn for his unspoken conclusion that one man must not be valued over their shared cause. Yet the pain in her eyes — issuing from a deeper, warmer place — cried out that one man’s wife and children could be a cause all their own, worth sacrificing even a war for.

Well, Saw Lay was also a man, and as the others crumpled around the kitchen fire and slept, it was the man in him who faced her. “Promise me you’ll never mention a word of this to Benny,” he said. When she didn’t immediately answer, he repeated, “Promise me.” Then he told her, “Khin, it should have been me.” Even as he spoke, he wondered if he meant he should have been the one taken into captivity, or the one whose life was uniquely tied to hers.

But she didn’t question him. She went to him at the table and cupped his face with one of her hands, and that was all it took to unclench him. Soon he had her supple shape in his own hands, which had a will all their own, and minutes later — just out of view of the kitchen — he had what he’d never allowed himself to want. And the bewildering thing — the first of many bewildering things — was the distinct pitch of ease he detected underlying what they wordlessly, frantically did. Not just then, but again and again through the night, until she drew the blanket up over her full breasts and said, “We must rest,” before adjusting her head on the pillow and thanking him, as though for the comfort she’d found in him. And, just like that, she fell into a sleep so deep it seemed untroubled by anything remotely approaching terror or regret.

For the next two hours, as day dawned, he lay watching her, amazed by the miracle of their sudden familiarity, by the illuminating vision of her closed eyes and bare arms, by the rise and fall of her breath, more sweet than acidic. He felt graced by that breath, which emanated from a soul whose beauty he was only beginning to fathom. But the depths of his own soul were also revealed to him: he had been devoted to her all along, and more steadfastly for her steadfast devotion to her husband. If he loved her, it was paradoxically for the very nobility and loyalty that he had just sabotaged. And he knew that, the better to love her, the better to serve her, he must spare her his newly revealed self. He must run.

For most of the following year, then, after he’d heard word that Benny had survived the capture, he’d run from one mission to the next, hiding his wounded heart among the remains of his fellow men — all of them stinking and soaked to the bone, and many rotting alive as they slashed through the jungle, gasped in the mud, evaded the bullets and mortars that ceaselessly fell around them. And when the Brits at last celebrated their successful recapturing of the capital, he threw himself into what they called Operation Character, by which the loyal native troops were to ambush the retreating Japanese as they fled. Often during these final weeks of war, he had to engage in hand-to-hand combat, and once at the bend of a river found himself being grabbed by the throat before he was able to get the upper hand. He held his assailant under the limpid current, squeezing the stranger’s neck as though to intensify his pain or more quickly extinguish it, staring into the man’s startled eyes while it came to him, like a wave of grace, that he had nothing anymore but compassion for him, and nothing left for himself but cold hatred. And weeping blindly, wondering what he was putting out exactly — a life or his own right to life — he released the man, half prepared for him to jump up and do him in. But the man’s glassy eyes were unchanging beneath the water, and Saw Lay tramped back to shore amid the shots and shouts of the surrounding battle, knowing only that it was too late, that too much had happened, that in some sense he, too, was finished.

And nothing revived him — not even his effete efforts to organize the Karens politically at the conclusion of the war. Nothing, that was, until the early evening in 1946, when, after the Aung San rally in Fytche Square, he spotted Benny from his stoop and was immediately seized by a painful, begrudging, remorseful love that seemed physically to shake him back into life. It was a sensation — of being sharply resuscitated — that only intensified the next day, when Benny sent a car for him, and he was driven in a downpour from the capital to the nearby suburb of Insein, where the rain fell off and the sun reappeared and the car all at once ascended a glittering, lush hillside toward a sprawling house in which she — in which they —still existed.

The entire family met him at the door, a baby in Khin’s arms, and tough little Johnny half hidden behind Benny’s wide stance. Only Louisa stood a step apart from the group, and he was immediately taken by the ethereal prettiness of her face, by her wild black ringlets and deep, mysterious eyes, which she raised to meet his with an open defiance crossed with expectancy. How could he have left them? she asked silently but unmistakably. And how could he have taken so long to return? She must have been five already. Saw Lay stooped before her and held out one of the flowers he’d brought.

“Boo boo,” he said. He held the bright pink bloom farther out toward her knowing glance.

“Boo boo,” she said after a pause. At last, the impression of the old child emerged in her face, and she smiled.

“Are you unwell?” he heard Khin ask.

“Khin!” Benny corrected her. “For God’s sake! What a greeting! Here our poor friend is still recovering from the harrowing things he’s seen. ”

Only now, as Saw Lay stood and took in the husband and wife, did he recognize the overlay of shame in Benny’s rebuke, as though he were embarrassed not just by what Khin had said, but also by the person she’d become, by her diminished youth and beauty. True, she was altered, but not all for the worse. Her new status had hardened her, glossed her up, and the sheen of her silk garments along with the tightness of her hairstyle matched the new angles in her cheeks. Yet something burning in her eyes suggested hardness’s counterpart: the liquid heat of restlessness, of longing — of worry for him? In spite of a note of caution now sounding in his chest, he lowered his eyes to the child on her hip.

If Louisa’s fierceness had been drawn straight from Benny’s pugilism, this baby — happy and hapless, poor girl — had a dullness, an easily pleased, conciliatory disposition that was as much a denial of Benny’s paternity as was her slight Karen nose, her fine black hair and Asiatic eyes. He held a finger out to her curious, outstretched hand, whose clasp set his heart beating, so that he found himself flashing the baby girl an oafish, quivering grin. There was no question. No question. No need for speculation.

“I am changed,” he said, in response to Khin’s question, he supposed.

“As we all are,” she said, drawing the baby closer to her breast. Yet the desperation with which she quickly glanced at Benny told him that nothing had changed about her loyalties.

Over the next months, they almost fell back into their easy prewar camaraderie.

At great risk to himself, Benny started up a bottling plant called Mingala Waters and another business called the Karen Trading Corporation — the first to generate cash and the second to launder it (the idea being to purchase and stockpile arms in case the Karen National Union had reason to revolt). But Benny couldn’t yet give up on the British, and Saw Lay soon went along with his plan to send a delegation of Karens to London in order to plead the Karen case (“A ‘goodwill mission’—that’s what we’ll call it. A goodwill mission to London, during which you’ll sit shoulder to shoulder with Atlee’s men”). In London, Saw Lay did what he could to play into British sympathies, even loosening up to the extent that he was able to share a few inebriated hours in entertaining talk about his favorite British authors and actresses with the likes of the Labour Party’s Lord Pethick-Lawrence at the luminous Claridge’s Hotel. But Atlee’s buttoned-up ministers — who listened politely enough to his (pained) words of thanks for how the British had delivered them from the Japanese, and to his (too emotional) reminder of how the long-loyal Karens needed an autonomous state that he hoped might exist within the British Commonwealth even if Burma itself gained independence from it — ultimately distanced themselves from their predecessors’ protectorship of the Karens. (“We’re terribly grateful for what you have done,” one particularly sympathetic minister said as he escorted Saw Lay to the door. “Without you, Aung San might never have come around. But I can’t imagine how our officers thought they had the right to promise you statehood in exchange for your service. They overstepped. Yes, they overstepped. Very unfortunate.”) In the end, they were advised to throw in their lot with the Burmans.