Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Why do they assume my husband assumed that?” she said quickly. The truth was she had struggled with her own private judgment of Benny’s unquestioning trust in Ducksworth’s — and Nu’s — word. Yet it had seemed possible to her that Benny knew Ducksworth could be leading him to his end, and that his reluctance to resist was a willful one, meant to spare her and the children, just as his reluctance to defend himself with the Japanese had been.

Now Lynton took measure of her with the cigarette between his lips. “A drink?” he said. When she nodded, he pulled a bottle of whiskey and a metal mug from behind a nearby log, and poured out some of the whiskey for her. “There is something courageous,” he said, removing the cigarette from his lips, “about Saw Bension’s trust, no? Maybe it takes an outsider to trust the Burmans. Someone whose ancients haven’t been bitten by them again and again.”

A cold wind blew in from over the river, carrying with it the memory of the mountain that she had traversed with the children. She shuddered, and Lynton’s eyes narrowed on her again.

“Drink,” he commanded her.

She did as he said, gulping the heat down, but the alcohol only further agitated her. “Is it true what they say,” she spat out, “that you spied for the Japanese?”

Now he seemed to have been stung. He laughed — a brief, defensive chortle — and bowed his head, inhaling from his cigarette and then stubbing it out on a rock. “Who told you that?” he said finally.

When she didn’t respond — she’d forgotten who exactly had spread the rumor to her — he went on: “Our people are too simple. Their trusting nature can make them untrustworthy.”

Without another word, he reached for some of his things behind the log, put on a brimmed hat, and threw down a jacket like a makeshift blanket. Then he took a rifle in one hand and stretched out his long body, tilting the brim of the hat over his eyes.

“You might want to watch for the python,” he said sleepily, hat still over his eyes. “At least fifteen feet long. Before dinner, I saw it slither out of the water and swallow a rat Sunny had his eye on.”

Something in the reeds rustled, and she gave a little yelp, causing him to chuckle.

“Why don’t you sleep in the barracks?” she asked angrily.

“I don’t like the reek of the group.”

“And you’re not fighting for the group?”

“Good night, Khin.”

That he knew her name — had known it all along — set her heart beating hard.

And for a moment more, all she could do was glare down at this undeniably beautiful young man, bound for battle, with only the dying fire by his side to warm him.

Bilin’s Burman residents had fled along with their soldiers, and in a vast brick split-level, amid the ghosts of a family with at least three or four children, Khin quickly — if temporarily — established herself. She used the proceeds from the sale of her jewelry to purchase a hand-crank sewing machine and to hire three Karen women to help her run a tailoring shop (now the only one in town). The women were unskilled in the sewing arts but quick learners; soon she had trained them to operate the sewing machine and to embroider, crochet, and knit with the needles that she crafted by burning the point of bamboo sticks in ash. In exchange for vegetables or rice or peanuts to be ground into oil, she and the women began to turn out not just hemmed sarongs and men’s shirts, but also dainty dresses for girls and even festive sweaters — turquoise with orange designs, scarlet with violent streaks of purple.

I will get the children, Khin said to herself with every passing day; but then another day passed, at the end of which she plunged hollowly into sleep by the embers of the kitchen fire (she couldn’t bear to sleep in any of the family members’ beds). The children are safer beyond the river, she thought. Or, I might hear of Benny’s whereabouts and need to go to him. If the children are here, I will have to leave them again. Her instincts told her that, much as the children might be suffering with the Forest Governor and his wife, they were better off without her — because her circumstances were unreliable, and because something inside her had become equally unreliable, even as, with every hour, she reliably put together a semblance of another life.

And she was always searching for Benny — writing letters to Karens near and far, never failing to ask passing soldiers if they’d heard of his whereabouts or seen Saw Lay, who was supposed to be somewhere close to the delta leading a brigade. About two months after she’d set up the shop, one of her customers came rushing to tell her that a white Indian had been admitted to the Bilin hospital and that people were saying it was Saw Bension. She fled to the hospital, nearly more frightened of finding Benny than of continuing to live in the unknown. That unknown had allowed her to keep on soldiering through, hadn’t it? Yes, she realized, when she saw — instantly, and with enormous relief — that the balding, blood-drained, mortally wounded man who lay unconscious with a gaping mouth was not Benny. A sudden vision of her husband’s or children’s suffering would have been the end of the hope that allowed her to work on their behalf. She had the sense that, separated from one another, and unaware of one another’s fates, they were all in a kind of indeterminate state, a kind of limbo, where they were just managing to escape outright disaster.

And as though to widen the limits of that limbo, and to avoid her confrontation with fate itself, she added to her daily burden in Bilin by starting to spend half of nearly every night in the hospital, ministering to the wounds that reeked of rotten meat and that fouled her mind with fear for Benny and the children. A teaspoon of Dettol in a gallon of water: that was the antiseptic mixture she used to clean the wounds and sterilize her thoughts. But not every man whom she treated survived, and not every man was purified by his suffering; many seemed to have been poisoned by suffering itself, reduced to nothing more than a shattered limb, blinded eyes. And, absorbed in the small task of aiding them, she became tainted, too — almost fatalistically resigned to her separation from Benny and the children.

Then one night a stretcher with a dead child was brought in and another with the gravely injured mother, who wouldn’t allow Khin to nurse her and wouldn’t trouble anyone with her loss. She must have been around forty, the mother. One of her legs had been blown apart by a mortar, and when the question of amputation came up, she merely held up a hand and waved it across her face, as though to wave away the question and her life along with it. Khin crouched down beside her, while the woman took her in with a strange recognition, as if to acknowledge the torment Khin must be enduring having to go on in this world. Yet in her final, fitful hours the woman was racked by terror of further suffering, and the difficult death drove such fear into Khin that she determined to go for the children right away.

But as she was preparing for the journey the following night, tidying the shop after her hires had gone — her body seething, close to dropping along with the heat and the last light— he showed up. Lynton. Eleven weeks had passed since she had last stood in his presence, and he was more beautiful than she had wanted to remember him being, so unblemished, so relaxed, she had to wonder if he had simply been loitering and avoiding life all this time. He stood in the front doorway of the house, his hands in his pockets, his eyes radiant and refreshed in the lamplight, giving her the impression that war was serving him, rather than the other way around.