Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Though not one of the rifles stockpiled around Benny’s compound was yet fired, Saw Lay knew the violence they would do was already inevitable. Still, he and Benny, in solidarity with the Mons, approached Nu about the question of a separate Karen-Mon state. The government responded by arming Burman irregulars, who proceeded to fire on Karen neighborhoods unprovoked. Then on Christmas Eve, while the congregated inhabitants of two Karen villages were singing carols at midnight, Burman policemen launched hand grenades into their church, fired on the survivors, and torched every last structure.

Hundreds more Karens were murdered during the first weeks of 1949. Had the time come for armed revolt? Together, Saw Lay and Benny insisted that Karen leadership request another meeting with Prime Minister Nu, and a date was set for the thirty-first of January. But on the thirtieth, Nu named Ne Win “Supreme Commander of All Defense Forces and Police Forces,” thereby removing every last military impediment to Burman xenophobia; and that same night shots were fired across Benny’s compound into the Karen village of Thamaing, while now eight-year-old Louisa shook with fever, and Khin — unable to bring down the fever with paste — pleaded with Benny to fetch a healer from the besieged village.

“Let me,” Saw Lay said as Benny threw on his coat in the dark entryway.

“She’s my child—” Benny countered, and a spasm of contrition instantly passed over his face.

“All the more reason to stay with her — with them. Don’t risk it, Benny. I can be down and back with the healer in a quarter hour—”

There was a thundering blast from the bottom of the hill, followed by a clap of light that briefly illuminated the lifelessness of the room behind them. The children and staff were hiding with Khin among the rifles on the floor of Benny’s study. But as if in that clap of light Benny had seen a vision of a world deprived of the family he’d forgotten to cleave to, he became very still, riveted by horror. “I’ll have to take them away,” he told Saw Lay finally, “to Khuli or Tenasserim. ” He didn’t continue: And will you come with us?

“Of course, my place will be on the front lines,” Saw Lay said after a pause. He had the feeling of falling, of the overstretched thread that had drawn their spirits together all at once snapping. So this is the end, he thought.

And how strange that it had come at the very moment the revolution had begun.

In February — while the Karen revolution entered its first tragic weeks, and the Kachins joined in the revolt, and government troops mutinied, and major towns including Mandalay and Prome fell to various “insurgent” armies — Benny hired an airplane to transport the family, along with many Karen civilians, to Thaton, the capital of an old Mon kingdom on the Tenasserim plains in southern Burma, and a cease-fire area.

If Louisa sensed something of her past in the house they rented in Thaton, a house that stood on tree-trunk-like pilings over beaten earth — if the stench of the moldering ground under this house took her back to the murky days of Daddy’s capture in Tharrawaddy — if this escape reminded her vaguely of the earlier one to Khuli — she pretended not to have a care. Beside the house was an ancient city wall overgrown with weeds and vines, and beyond it rose a steep hill topped by a white-and-gold pagoda, and every day she and Johnny — liberated from the constraints of regular baths and piano practice and school hours — played marbles and dug for yellow clay, or else raced after their new Mon friends to the pagoda’s pinnacle, where they kicked off their shoes and imagined they were birds about to catch a breeze. On a breeze, the lumps in their throats could melt away.

Daddy had insisted on bringing along Louisa’s accordion, and at night he roared with laughter as she wrestled with the clunky thing, squeezing out melodies that were alternately jarring and jaunty. She understood in her way that his laughter was as desperate as her need to provoke it, and she longed to keep playing, to keep laughing, to keep outrunning misery and Mama’s reproving eyes.

It was Ducksworth, finally, who caught up with them in April—“Mr. Ducksworth, my dear old friend — excuse me, Lieutenant Ducksworth,” Daddy said after the pale man in Burma Army garb showed up by the foot of the stairs of their rented house, with a strange profusion of apologies and a handwritten letter from Prime Minister Nu.

That letter, Daddy explained to the children while Ducksworth waited outside and Mama packed Daddy’s traveling bag, was a request that Daddy meet Nu for a tête-à-tête in Moulmein—“So we might bring this mayhem to a right end and get on with our lives,” Daddy said. “This is wonderful, wonderful — no?” (Wonderful, but why could Louisa see fright in Daddy’s eyes? And why had Mr. Ducksworth’s breath given off the smell of guilt — why in that man’s eager, aggressive smile had she seen the look of lying?)

Mama shivered as she dropped long bamboo tubes of steamed sticky rice into Daddy’s bag and asked Hta Hta — the only servant they’d brought along — to press a pair of Daddy’s trousers for the journey.

“Khin,” Daddy called to her. “Come.”

When Mama wouldn’t stop fussing with the eggs she was boiling, Daddy went and took her by the hand and pulled her into a circle with the children — all of whom, Louisa noticed, had become very silent, absorbed in listening for signs of imminent menace.

“There’s hope, you know,” Daddy said quietly to them, as Mama began to cry. “There’s more hope than ever before. We’re very fortunate that nothing terrible has happened to us so far — that we’re here together. I’m not afraid, Khin.”

Usually Mama and Daddy clung to their own languages, to their own friends and their own lives. But now Mama fell against Daddy’s neck and clung to him.

“I’ll kill that man when I grow up!” Johnny shouted.

“Don’t say that,” Daddy scolded him. “Mr. Ducksworth is only doing his job.”

Why were they speaking as though Daddy had been captured already? Louisa felt apprehension darken her own smile, a smile she pressed upon her siblings, upon Daddy, because it was possible — wasn’t it? — to keep him safe with her joy. “How will you get to Moulmein, Daddy?” she asked lightly.

“Well, I imagine by airplane.”

“And how long will you fly in it?”

“Not long — a few hours at most.”

“Will it be very big — or small — the plane?” Johnny chimed in. Yes, talk of planes was a means of evading their alarm and even the permanent darkness that waited for them all.

“When I return, I’ll tell you about it,” Daddy said, trying to smile back at them. “Now don’t look as I leave — don’t watch me. I don’t want to glance back and see unhappy faces. I want to go with the vision of these shining eyes in my mind. There, now even Gracie is smiling!”

And little Gracie — the most vulnerable of them in every sense — suddenly broke into soundless sobs and clung to Louisa’s neck.

All that night, as the silence deepened around her — the silence of Daddy’s absence — Louisa lay on the floor of the room she shared with her siblings and concentrated on Daddy’s journey to Moulmein. She saw him sitting beside Ducksworth in the shuddering plane, the descent through a sky shivering with rain, and then sunlight as Daddy disembarked by the turquoise sea. But try as she might, she could not stay the vision of what came next: soldiers rising up out of that sea, surrounding Daddy like a wave, and Ducksworth helplessly standing by.

She was woken the next morning by a fearsome moaning surging through the streets. Mama rushed into the room and roused the others before gathering them together on the floor of the dark room. There was a look of dismay on her face as she told them that the Burmans had broken the Thaton cease-fire. “Betrayed,” she kept saying. “We’ve been betrayed.” Already, the Burmans were invading the city.