Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Where is Daddy?” Grace asked one morning, as they prepared to descend the mountain. Grace gazed down at the thin river, which wound its way back toward Bilin, with the longing of someone who could see, not precisely what she was looking for, but only that it was something she had left behind.

Johnny shot her a punishing look, and the poor girl nearly broke out in sobs again, but then a flock of parrots rose up before them and flew east, transporting Louisa’s thoughts to the vaporous distance beyond grief.

As long as they were walking, moving toward the distance, their bodies stayed strong. But when they arrived in Kyowaing, with its British-built brick-and-wood houses and its teak plantation that spread out under the shadow of a far-off pagoda, they immediately fell down and became sick.

The Karen overseer of the plantation, called the “Forest Governor,” lived with his wife and their two teenage sons on top of a hill overlooking the teak fields, and while the man himself showered them with fondness — turning a room over to them and bringing them soup that first night — his wife seemed wary and distracted by the silk of Mama’s torn, muddied sarong. “Where did you find such fabric?” the woman asked.

The embarrassed Forest Governor gently reprimanded her: “Don’t you know this is Saw Bension’s wife? He is very rich! The richest man in all of Burma!”

“Not so rich,” Mama murmured, and Louisa felt suddenly ashamed of their wealth.

For many days, the children were ill with dysentery, and Louisa also with malaria, and as they languished in their room, Louisa had the sense that they were hiding from the wife, who, unlike her husband and smiling sons, never came to check on or help them (though Mama and Hta Hta hardly slept, and at one point expressed genuine worry for Gracie’s life). Hta Hta grew weepy, wondering aloud if her soldier brothers had survived the battles surrounding Insein, and Mama became strained and short-tempered. “Remember what I told you about not making a noise!” she snapped when Louisa and Johnny bickered.

“I can’t breathe!” Johnny protested — the close air in the room did reek of illness.

“Nevertheless!” Mama scolded him. She was trying to determine their next step, Louisa knew, and in the meantime nearly drowning in stagnation.

One night, they woke to the wife shouting, accusing her husband of being a sinner. Satan was trying to wedge her out of the house! she cried. The children stayed quiet, listening to the woman’s evil words. But baby Molly — as if understanding every one of them — screamed in fright, and would not be consoled by Mama’s breast.

“Don’t worry, children,” Mama whispered in the darkness. “Sometimes it is like this between a husband and a wife.”

The next morning Mama woke them early. She looked very proud, Louisa noticed, almost as though she were pretending at pride, and had drawn in her eyebrows with ash, powdered her face with rice flour, and washed and mended her sarong. Even her blouse had its pink color back. She led them out of the sleeping house into the fresh open air, and for a time they simply stood on the hilltop, waking up with the day and the view of the houses scattered below. A sleepy stream wound around the enchanted village, which seemed to have settled itself placidly in the mist, tucked into the folds of the slim, still mostly barren teak trees.

“With the first monsoon rains,” Mama said, “the new foliage is emerging. Soon the trees will flower and bear fruit.”

“Can we eat it, Mama?” Johnny asked.

“Better not,” she told them. Then, with a strange sadness on her face: “Better do only what they tell you to until I come back.”

Now there were new questions for Louisa to hold in her mouth. Where was Mama going? And why without them? And would she be safe? And would they ?

“You are almost strong again,” Mama said. “What is more, Bilin is now in Karen control.” She lapsed into silence, and when she spoke again it was in a voice broken by sorrow. “There is not enough room for me in this house,” she said. And then she explained that she had brought along several pieces of her jewelry, including her star sapphire earrings, which she would sell in Bilin in order to establish their new life. She would come for them in short time — and they wouldn’t have to walk back to Bilin, she would see to that. And in the meantime, Hta Hta was here to care for them, to ensure that they were treated with kindness.

“Why can’t you ask them for help a little longer?” Johnny asked. “Isn’t it better to be in the position of having to ask?”

“Not when one can help oneself,” Mama said. “We can’t depend on others forever — we mustn’t.”

“How will Daddy find us if you are there and we are here?” Louisa found herself asking, and straightaway the question put hurt in Mama’s eyes.

“He will know we have gone to friends,” Mama said after a pause. “Don’t be afraid.”

A few minutes later, a group of Karens going down to Bilin came for her. Louisa, whose legs were all at once weak again, stood in a huddle with her siblings on the front steps of the Forest Governor’s house to watch her leave.

How elegant and vulnerable Mama seemed, in her petal-pink blouse, her head held high as she walked away from them into the trees.

Saw Lay had been a mistake, though as Khin picked her way down the muddy path leading away from Kyowaing — away from the children about whom she couldn’t, even for an instant, bear to think — she wondered if she would ever feel the way she had with him again.

“Khin,” he’d said on that appalling night, when he’d failed to rescue Benny from the Japanese in Tharrawaddy, “it should have been me.” His sureness about what should have been, in a world in which nothing seemed as it should be, had touched something deep within her. Suddenly, she had become sensitive to the grief in his lamplit eyes — grief that sought a relinquishment that she could provide, if only temporarily. She had gone to him and taken his face in her hand, still nearly innocently. And she had seen for the first time that he had such a fine, well-made face, with such a distinguished jaw — a Karen jaw — and such a vulnerable mouth that parted in the shadows as he looked up at her, and then moaned as she pressed his eyes to her breast. She had still been half expecting a simple consoling caress between them, yet nothing surprised her about the press of his wide hands grasping her buttocks, about his urgent unleashing need to be touched by her and to touch her.

Would she ever be touched that way again? she wondered now, stumbling toward the stream where the group of Karens whom she was following had stopped to rest. In this escape from the Forest Governor’s house, it would be easy to believe that she was also essentially innocent, this time merely the victim of another woman’s jealousy. But the Forest Governor’s quiet interest in her could not be denied, and she had found herself vulnerable not to him (in fact, she had gone out of her way to avoid the man) but to his recognition of her as a woman worth being recognized, worth being wanted even in her deprivation. His stifled yearning for her had pushed her back to the memory of what had happened five years before, when she had melted, during a moment of desperate need, into what had felt like perfect understanding. With Saw Lay she had escaped not just her fear for Benny’s life, but also all the agitation that came with loving a man with whom she had never easily been able to speak in her first language, and to whom her Karen tendencies too often had to be explained. She had not known how very Karen she was until there was Benny — boisterous, belligerent Benny, who bigheartedly trampled all over her preferences for gentleness and humility and silent attunement to others. And she had not known how isolated she had felt with him until there was Saw Lay.