Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

What did it mean for Daddy? Louisa wanted to ask.

But Mama said, “You will die if you make a noise. From now on, you must not cry out, you must not complain. If you are hungry, find a way to feed yourself. If you are thirsty, find a stream. If your body is tired, ignore the tiredness. If you are hurt, let your tears fall only inside.” And then, with tears in her own eyes: “God bless you, children.”

Right away, they crept out to the bushes behind the house, where they stayed for hours, and when baby Molly complained, Mama suckled her, and when a scream penetrated the woods at their backs, the servant Hta Hta covered the children’s ears with the edge of her sarong. Toward dusk, Mama left them, but then she returned with a small sack and some oranges, which she peeled and fed to the older children, and even to Hta Hta, slice by slice. Only at night, when she motioned for them to crawl out behind her and they drew themselves out of the bushes, emerging like shadows under the black dome of the sky, did Mama speak again: “I will try not to lose you, and you must try not to lose me.”

How would Daddy find them? Louisa kept the question tucked inside her mouth as she trailed Mama in the moonlight.

“I’m thirsty, Mama,” Johnny dared to utter.

Immediately Mama stopped and picked up a stick and whipped his backside. Johnny’s lip trembled, but he didn’t cry.

“We will find something as we go,” she said in an uneven voice.

A man with a horse carriage was waiting for them down the empty road. He took all of them, including Hta Hta, as far as the Thaton train station, which they found heaving with Karens wanting to flee. “Three Karen families were beheaded while trying to escape,” one woman on the platform said, and Louisa watched how Johnny and Grace encircled Mama, turning their mute faces up toward hers, as if seeking reassurance that those faces were still attached to their beings.

Near dawn, as blue light washed the sky, they caught a current onto the only train to appear. Wedged as they were among hundreds of other evacuees, Mama’s body gave off a warm wave of relief, telling Louisa that now at last, in the shelter of the train’s thunder, she might feel free to speak a few words.

“Will Daddy come find us?” she asked.

Light seemed to pass over Mama’s features, but then she closed her eyes and sank into her thoughts for a time. “The minute he can,” she said in a voice that was not hers.

The train refused to roll past Bilin — a town, Mama explained anxiously, less than thirty miles north of Thaton, and also overrun the previous night by Burman troops. Soon they found themselves carried by tides of refugees along muddy streets littered with bodies and broken glass and burned bricks, to the banks of the Bilin River, the other side of which hadn’t yet been breached.

Louisa had assumed until now that Karens were unvaryingly charitable, that whatever a Karen had was what he had to share. But the rafts crossing the Bilin were being controlled by Karens with rifles, and the family had no choice but to wait for the teeming bank to be cleansed of the armed. That first evening, Mama took a small pot from her sack and told Hta Hta to boil water for them to drink — there hadn’t been time for her to pack more than a few biscuits and pieces of fruit, which they had already eaten. She asked a family, also waiting on the west bank, if it would be possible for her children to have the crust on the bottom of their pot of rice and chicken curry, and the father bitterly peered into Mama’s eyes, pried out the crust, and tossed it into the river.

Louisa knew better than to speak of her hunger that night. But Johnny — when they were huddled in a heap by the fire, trying to sleep alongside the moonlight glittering across the river — broke out all at once, “You shouldn’t have asked for their crust, Mama!”

Usually Mama suffered no complaint, though tonight she allowed the gurgle of the river to speak for her awhile. Then she said, “It is better to be in a position of having to ask for charity than to be in the position of never having to ask, children.” Her voice was filled with sorrow and deep reserves of tenderness for them. “Most people think it is the other way around — that one is at an advantage having everything.” She didn’t need to remind them, Louisa knew, that they had recently lived in a world built on such false advantages.

“I would rather have chicken curry!” Johnny cut in.

Mama laughed, along with Hta Hta, and drew Johnny very close to her body, causing Louisa to feel a stab of envy.

“No,” Mama said, still laughing. “Ordinary people think of things that way. Don’t look down on them for it — they’ve never been taught differently. They can’t imagine that it would be to their benefit spiritually to have to ask for something, to have to become acquainted with their meekness, and to find tremendous strength in it. Why do you think monks beg for alms?”

It was the first time Louisa could remember sleeping under the exposed sky, and as the sounds of war — of shots and snarls and wailing — drifted toward her from the city, she blinked back at the staring stars, and comforted herself with the rustle of the river and the cool water-scented breeze tipping her closer to sleep.

“I know of a root we can search for when dawn breaks,” she heard Mama say as she drifted off finally. “It is soft and sweet, and we can mash it with a stone into a delicious cake to be baked over the fire. No, don’t be jealous, children. And don’t feel small, even when you have to ask for rice.”

The next day, when the west bank was nearly empty, they boarded a raft and crossed the river — on the other side of which, Mama explained, they would make their way over the mountains to a place called Kyowaing, a teak reserve whose governor was a Karen leader and one of Daddy’s trusted friends. “We will ask him for shelter,” she said. “And until then we will try not to linger.”

For three days they hiked upriver, stopping only to forage for edible greens or to gnaw on roots or to collapse into the mud at night. And for three days they were hungry. But the farther they trekked from the fighting frontiers, Louisa noticed, the farther they seemed to stray from cruelty and greed. On the fourth evening, they came to a bamboo hut owned by poor mountain Karens whose table was a carved wooden pan and whose evening meal was salted watery rice. The juices from the rice flowed to the edge of the pan, and Louisa ate with relish, shyly saying it was the best meal of her life.

Through bursts of rain then, they continued up a mountain and crossed some of the most breathtaking terrain Louisa had ever seen. Villages shrouded in mist in the early-morning sun, and always a clear stream running by. Hill plantations where rice stalks grew side by side with marigold flowers. The people inhabiting these places had never encountered a car, Mama informed them. The rice they ate came from their fields, vegetables either grown or gathered from the bounty of the forest, fish from the stream, meat from their traps. Their clothes were made with their own looms, dyes from nature. Unmarried girls wore woven white dresses adorned with red strands that fell down to their ankles. Marrying, they donned long tubelike sarongs and short tops woven in black and decorated in the traditional patterns of their village. Their lives were serene, harmonious, and brief. “They know of no artifice,” Mama said.

“What is artifice?” Louisa asked her.

“The way one tricks oneself into forgetting that death is nearby.”

Sometimes the six of them would sleep in a monastery. Once they sank into sleep on a pile of stinky fruit in someone’s storage shed. When their teeth became unpleasantly dirty, Hta Hta searched for a special twig that, when broken, foamed with natural toothpaste. And when the day was hot, they cleaned their bodies in the cold, clear streams, washing away their old life.