Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

It will pass, she had reassured herself in the joy of Benny’s return from the hands of the Japanese in Tharrawaddy. But then she had seen the extent of his wounds, and the wound that had just been created in her bled all over again. That Benny suspected something had “happened with Saw Lay” and yet wouldn’t reveal what he himself had just been through seemed a confirmation of the fundamental condition of their shared isolation in marriage; that he then proceeded not to touch her, not so much as to raise an eyebrow when she became heavy with child, plunged her into despair. Well, as far as he was concerned, the child was his, she inwardly argued. Hadn’t they lain together in the days before his capture? Then the child was born, and every day the likelihood of its being Saw Lay’s molded itself onto Grace’s pretty little features, and Benny’s silence enslaved her, Khin, to her original sin.

She had felt trapped within her mistake, hurt and increasingly bitter. When Benny’s philandering soon began, she had submitted to his renewed sexual interest in her as she would to a sentence — degradation being the means by which she would pay for her mistake. Oh, she’d profited from the explosion of wealth that his business initiated, but she’d silently judged his foolish faith in what that wealth could buy them and the Karens. And she’d begun to disdain his assumption that he could champion a cause that called for revolution with unbloodied fists. If she had loved Saw Lay — loved him even when he’d reentered their lives and when she’d rebuffed his tentative glances so as to keep her mistake a thing of the past — if she loved Saw Lay still, it was not just for his blood, but for his feeling that he was no better than the cause they rallied around, that he had no more right not to fight than the poorest peasant. And if she’d shut herself in with the servants more and more, it was in stoic revolt against the trappings of a world that her children had come to assume was comfortable and secure.

Now, the thought of those children made her stand up from the bank, and she turned, as though to turn her back on them. She was twenty-eight and had already tolerated so many sorrows, so many terrors. She could not now confront another. She must only find a way for her family to endure. And as she followed the Karens, who had begun to wander down the darkening mountain again (doomed, as all Karens were, to wander and wander), she moved swiftly through the gnarled landscape with a feeling of unburdening herself of her load.

The Bilin River was peaceful and green in the fading light when she arrived at the west bank, where a makeshift camp — with temporary barracks and a mess — had been erected for the soldiers and refugees. Exhausted, she gratefully accepted a bowl of rice and fish paste, then went out to sit alone under the trees bending with the breeze on the bank; she couldn’t yet pretend to be comfortable visiting with others, even when she gleaned the extent of their further suffering. Such visiting still felt like a betrayal of those she’d left behind, and of Benny.

But as she was raising the first mouthful of warm rice to her lips, she glanced up the bank and saw a soldier she’d last seen in Khuli. He was sitting alone beside a campfire, playing a harmonica. Lin Htin — or Lynton — that was his name, she remembered. He’d been passing through Khuli on his way to join the Karen levies in the war effort, and for some reason several men in the village had questioned his allegiances. Even then, she’d found his quick, sure manner and laughing poise to be riveting. He was also troublingly good-looking — and at least a few years younger than she was.

As if sensing her stare, he all at once stopped playing and glanced up at her. It was very straightforward, his stare — it made her blush, though she doubted he could see the evidence of her embarrassment from twenty feet away. She gave him a little reluctant smile and looked back down into her bowl of rice, which she suddenly felt self-conscious about consuming alone. The harmonica started up again — to cry out the first part of a Karen ballad she hadn’t heard since childhood — then stalled.

“Join me,” she heard his relaxed voice call to her.

How ridiculously false her response, of surprise, of bewilderment, of hesitation. Soon, she was plodding toward him with her bowl, through the mud and a swirl of mosquitoes, the echoes of self-recrimination droning in her ear. Why was she coming, like a good puppy, at his first command, when all she really wanted was to be left alone? He continued to stare hard at her (there wasn’t a trace of Karen modesty about him, was there?), smiling broadly when she sat. And his smile only increased her sense that she must untangle herself from the situation as quickly as she’d ensnared herself in it.

“Just who I was hoping to see,” he said, but the comment was directed at someone else — at a soldier, a doughy, thick-lipped, smiling boy who lumbered up to the fire with a bulging sack and a pot of water.

Lynton picked up his harmonica and proceeded to puff out the sad tune again, thoroughly ignoring her and the boy, who went about making his senior’s supper, measuring a finger of rice, putting the pot down to boil, pulling an array of mushrooms, bamboo shoots, and fiddle-leaf fern from his sack, along with two small birds. Well, she had wanted to be left to her thoughts, hadn’t she? And there was something comforting about the respite that this togetherness allowed her. She relaxed into a state of merely eating and listening and observing as Lynton played and the boy plucked and cleaned the birds, and then scattered the charred wood, moved the pot to the embers, salted and skewered his finds, stoked the fire, and — with forked branches that he drove into the ground — constructed a stand on which to set Lynton’s dinner.

Only when the birds began to drip and the mushrooms were sizzling did Lynton speak again. “You’ll have some of Sunny’s delicious cooking, won’t you?” he said, putting his harmonica in his pocket while Sunny, the boy, smiled sweetly at her. Sunny held out his hand for her bowl. When she gave it to him with thanks, he prodded a bird and some vegetables onto her leftovers.

For a while, they ate in silence as Sunny dismantled the stand and headed off to bathe in the river. It was ridiculous, but the juiciness of the meal (more decadent than any she’d had since leaving Thaton), the way its oils coated her fingers, made her self-conscious all over again, and she felt her color rise with Lynton’s eyes, which expectantly met hers.

“Do they know what has happened to your husband?” he said, jolting her. She was suddenly afraid of losing her composure.

“Not as yet.” She put her bowl down, her appetite all at once gone. “Is it known — by everyone — that he was supposed to meet with the prime minister?”

Lynton set his own bowl aside and felt for something in another pocket — his tobacco and paper, she saw. He silently rolled himself a cigarette, which he held out to her with a questioning look, and which she refused — and quickly regretted refusing. Then he put the cigarette to his lips, lit it, and fell into his thoughts, as though forgetting her question. In the flames of the fire, he seemed to see something painful; but his eyes drifted up to the deepening sky, and all the pain behind them instantly vanished.

“Generally speaking,” he said at last, his face cast up to the emerging stars, “the everyone of whom you speak is utterly stupid.” He took a deep suck of his cigarette. “Of course, the higher-ups in our disorganized mess of a military have heard of U Nu’s supposed summons of your husband, and they say it was naive of Saw Bension to assume the meeting would ever happen.”