Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

That betrayal seemed only to redouble the tenuous bond being forged between Benny and Saw Lay again (just as Louisa coming upon the rifles in Benny’s study soon drew them together in their guilt). Together they smarted from the sting, in January 1947, of Aung San being invited to Buckingham Palace (“Even Churchill is in disbelief,” Benny noted, reading a dispatch from one of his London contacts, “saying — listen—‘I certainly did not expect to see U Aung San, whose hands were dyed with British blood and loyal Burmese blood’”—meaning Karen and Kachin and Chin blood—“‘marching up the steps of Buckingham Palace as the plenipotentiary of the Burmese Government’”). Together they chafed at Aung San’s victorious return to Burma and his hubristic assertion that he alone had determined the country’s fate (“And was it not I ,” the ruler proclaimed, “who pulled Burma out of the stage in which she was held in regard by neither men nor dogs, to a stage in which her affairs have attracted the attention of the world?”). Together they argued against a naive faith in Aung San’s “principle” of Frontier rights, prompting the Karens to walk out of the conference that the Burman leader soon staged at Panglong, at which Shans, Kachins, and Chins agreed to terms that some argued paved the way for a future Burma of semiautonomous ethnic states (“But read the fine print,” Benny made the case to anyone who would listen; “what he wants to give us is minority rights”). And when, in April, Aung San publicly and repeatedly threatened to “smash” anyone opposing his national objectives (“We will allow freedom of speech, freedom of press, and freedom to agitate,” the leader asserted, “but if the opposition abuses these freedoms they will be smashed. . Try whatever tactics you wish to take over the power that is now in our hands, but we will smash anyone resorting to tactics that hurt the people and the State. Go on and agitate, but agitate unfairly and you will be smashed ”), they felt jointly sickened and justified.

Still, Saw Lay had the sense that, for all their political unity, he and Benny were avoiding the treacherous terrain of something that still lay between them: not the subject of Khin, precisely; not even the truth about what had happened between Saw Lay and her one night; but something more proximate — Saw Lay’s singular devotion to the mother and child. It was very possible, Saw Lay knew deep down, that the only thing keeping him fighting for the Karen cause, with which he felt himself becoming more disenchanted every day, was the chance it gave him to be near Khin and the baby.

For her part, Khin seemed to retreat with each passing week further into a world made up exclusively of the children and the servants, and further into a silence, whenever she was around Saw Lay, that anyone else would have taken for aloofness. There were whole days when the only glimpse he had of her was when he ambled into the kitchen ostensibly in search of something to eat or drink; even if he found her alone at the table, she seemed to struggle to speak a word to him. And he understood that her reluctance to address him was an expression of her desire to keep the peace between them, even as it admitted to some war still going on within her. Not that she gave any sign of wanting him. But his presence clearly aroused her anxiety.

And the more time he spent in the house, the more sure he was that this anxiety extended to the other family members in a mysterious way. Sometimes, when he happened to be sitting with Benny and Khin together after dinner — listening to the same rain outside, drinking the last drops of the same sherry, being moved by the same plaintive or jubilant music drifting off the gramophone, watching the older children stage a play or read aloud from a book of English poetry — he would catch a glimpse of Khin looking up from her knitting needles at Benny, or gazing mournfully out the window at the mists rolling down the hillside while Grace napped in her arms, and it would come to him that nothing had been resolved between them. That they were merely holding their breath, like everyone else in the country. And that even the children, with their fierce love of play and ever-watchful eyes, and Benny, with his reassuring glances and swaggering ways, were uncertain, and that their uncertainty was the measure of hers with Saw Lay.

Then it came: the break in the peace, theirs and the country’s.

On the nineteenth of July, in that year of 1947, sirens began to wail over the radio, and a shaken and tearful broadcaster announced, “At ten thirty-seven this morning, our leader and liberator, General Aung San, was tragically martyred during a cabinet meeting at the secretariat, along with eight others. He leaves behind a nation in mourning, a wife, two boys, and a daughter.”

Immediately, rumors spread that the assassins — figures in fatigues who had burst out of an army jeep into the secretariat before opening fire and escaping through an exit on Sparks Street — were agents of some Western party wanting to shut down what progress Aung San had made with the minorities. But that made no sense, Saw Lay and Benny agreed. Indeed, evidence was soon unearthed linking one of Aung San’s Burman political rivals to the murders. And in short order, the rival was tried and convicted of conspiracy to murder, making way for another Thakin to lead Aung San’s party, one who had professed great resistance to the idea of semiautonomous ethnic states, and who, unlike his predecessor, hadn’t switched sides to join the Allied camp during the war, but had retreated with the Japanese. It was thus doubly heartbreaking when, some months later, around the time that Burman veterans descended on Rangoon incanting the refrain “We want to eat Karen flesh,” Attlee signed Burma over to this successor Thakin, U Nu, and the country was granted its cruel independence.

Or triply heartbreaking, because this was when Khin revealed something about Benny that shattered Saw Lay’s faith in his friend’s nobility. Many evenings around this time, Saw Lay would show up at the house expecting to find Benny, only to be told that his friend was still out at his office or one of the factories, and that Khin, pregnant again, was resting upstairs, and he would find himself playing with Louisa and Johnny, or, reluctantly, with little Gracie (he somehow felt it was a betrayal of both Khin and Benny to do so out of their sight). But on this night, Saw Lay was finishing up the paper and a drink alone in the living room, steeling himself before his return home and another lonely stretch of fitful sleep, when he heard Khin’s step on the stair.

He stood, dusting the ash from his lap, and saw her enter the room. She didn’t seem at all surprised to find him there, but rather relieved and expectant, though for several moments she just stood by the door, looking at him and clutching her thin fingers over her small, swollen abdomen. Her black hair — always worn tautly back in a chignon — was slightly mussed so that several pieces fell down around her face, giving her a softened look, as though she had just woken, or were coming undone.

“Is there something you need?” he found himself saying uneasily.

The question clearly surprised her, and she glanced around and shut the door, sealing them into the room alone. “Need?” she said. “No. No.” She could have been speaking to herself, so lost in thought did she appear. “Only”—she made a little motion toward his package of cigarettes on the table, also sprinkled with ash—“may I?”

He’d never seen her smoke, but he took up the package immediately and held it out to her. The awkwardness with which she approached and then accepted a cigarette and a light touched him, and for a moment he stood bashfully watching her fumble with the thing and take a few meager puffs.