Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Has he said anything to you?” she said finally.

“Benny?”

She peered at him with such apparent feeling that he feared she was on the verge, after all these months together again, of speaking about what had happened between them. Instead, she said, “About where he goes every night.”

“I don’t know what you mean,” he bumbled. He’d never thought to wonder about Benny’s comings and goings, but the question had him feeling suddenly implicated, guilty.

She took another mouthful of smoke between her lips. “About other women,” she said softly.

For a moment, he couldn’t speak — her revelation brought up too many contradictory things inside him — and his lapse in composure was enough to cause her to withdraw, both within herself and to a bank of windows on the far side of the room.

“Some nights, he doesn’t even bother to return. It’s not what he does with them that troubles me anymore. It’s the question of whether or not he lets himself go. Whether or not it’s cost me something, diminished me in his eyes. I keep wondering, is there romance? Talk of love?” Now she hiccupped, or laughed, or choked over a sob, and suddenly became aware of the ash she was scattering over her sarong and the floor. “I’m helpless,” she said. “Hopeless.”

“Let me,” he said, crossing to her, but she hardly seemed to notice when he took the cigarette from between her fingers and went to the table and put it out.

“You think I’m silly.” Without anything to occupy her hands, she had begun to wring her beautiful fingers. “Of course there’s romance. Of course he tells the others what they want to hear. Of course he believes what he tells them. When Benny gives, he gives everything!”

“Khin—”

“Do you know,” she said, her eyes ablaze, “one time I found an address in his pocket? And the next day, while he was away, I took the bus to the capital — I didn’t dare have the driver take me. On foot, I found the flat — not at all a dingy corner of the city. Very posh. But I didn’t hang my head. I didn’t cower. Me, a farmer’s daughter.” Suddenly, she looked proud in all her glowing shame. “Sometimes I wonder what I would have been capable of if I’d had an education. I could have had my independence, if that’s what I wanted—”

“Is it?” he interrupted her, but the question seemed only to annoy her, as though he’d missed her point.

“I rang the bell,” she said. “And when a servant came to the door, I asked to be taken to her mistress. She had a very pretty face, the lady of the house. A fair, thin face. A wide mouth with too much lipstick. She was writing some letter at her desk, and if she hadn’t looked so startled I would have thought I’d made a mistake. She motioned as though to tell the servant to take me away, but I said, ‘Please. Please, just let me talk to you. I don’t blame you.’ And I meant it. She didn’t know me — what I’d been through with Benny, everything I’d given him. ‘I’m not here to insult or blame you,’ I said. ‘I only want to know what happened. I want to understand. Is it — is it romantic?’”

Khin blushed, shamed all over again by her question, it seemed to Saw Lay, or by the vulnerability it betrayed.

“Do you know what she said to me?” Khin stared at Saw Lay almost hostilely. “She put down her pen and straightened herself in her chair — she never stood to greet me — and she said, with a voice so low it might have been borrowed from a monk, ‘That is for him to tell you.’ And she said, ‘You must find the trust to be honest with each other.’ The bitch.”

Khin’s mouth was trembling, and she touched it with her fingers as though to silence it. But she wasn’t done. “I wanted to say, ‘Do you think you can trust him? Do you think he isn’t having his way with some other girl — with me practically every night? He’s the worst kind of liar!’”

With these last words, she threw her hands over her face, and he stood looking in bewilderment at the slope of her curved back and thin shoulders. How alone she was, even as she held another life within the contours of her body — still supple, though aging, and crying out to him to be held.

“Don’t hate him, Khin,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I?” he heard her say from behind her hands.

Because we have done the same to him. Because we began what he has continued. “Because you love him, and that trumps disloyalty,” he said.

Now she raised her eyes to his. “It’s you I love,” she said with a frankness that startled him.

And a moment passed, as he stood catching his breath, before he grasped the meaning of that frankness, which spoke of steadiness, and not of passion’s restless doubt and urgency. She might have said: On the arduous path of life, it is you — you whom I have never wanted — who has not failed me.

From there, their descent into war was steep.

Khin seemed to hide from the glorious final phases of her pregnancy by busying herself with domestic tasks and ceaselessly knitting (though she must have known that the little sweaters and socks and caps she turned out could never shield any of her children from pain). For his part, pugilist that he was, Benny fixated on the injustice that had become his rallying cry, taking the helm when the Karens orchestrated a peaceful and ultimately useless nationwide demonstration that called for an avoidance of civil war, an end to violence, equity among all ethnic groups, and the immediate creation of a separate Karen state. In some sense, too, Saw Lay was guilty of losing himself to the call of history in the making, to the intoxications of being pressed up against the shifting political face of the country. Yet he understood that their cause was also a distraction for him — from Khin, from Grace, from the chances he’d lost at love.

And a distraction from what he was increasingly noticing about Benny — about his unfaithfulness to Khin, which could rear up in the most unsullied corners of their lives (even in the nursery , for God’s sake, where Saw Lay spied Benny eyeing the jiggly rear end of the nanny — a plain, plump Karen girl named Hta Hta, who couldn’t have been more than nineteen, and to whom Gracie was particularly devoted). Saw Lay held his tongue about these lapses. Oh, he held his tongue, much as he knew he couldn’t forever hold off having it out with Benny.

Amid the rising mayhem across the country, Benny’s own capacity for avoidance (of anything to do with what should matter to him personally, thought Saw Lay) seemed to consolidate. After dinner each night, when the children had been excused from the table, Benny would drink tea and ask Khin about her day and watch Saw Lay defiantly quell his agitation with Scotch, and then he would say something cryptic about the dangerous state of affairs for their people. And Saw Lay would think: Better to draw guns and finish one another off! Anything but this painful constriction of friendship, anything but this politeness! He wondered how the man could stand never saying a word about raising a child he must have known wasn’t his. Then it would come to him that Benny’s silence was an expression of his nobility, for by means of it he avoided the trap of laying blame.

In June, Khin gave birth to her fourth child, a girl called Molly, and though Saw Lay was relieved that both the mother and the child came through the ordeal unscathed, he was wounded by the further evidence of Benny’s claim on her. And when rumors swept through the streets of an alleged Burma Army operation — Operation Aung San — calling for “the elimination of the Karens first and then other hill people,” he told himself that it was only a matter of time before it would be too late to redress either the wounds he suffered or those that marred his friendship with Benny.