Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“You don’t remember me?” he asked.

She heard the rumble of an army truck down the road, and then silence, and then her heart banging in her chest. “I am going for my children.”

“Alone?”

“You don’t think I can manage?” She was suddenly sure that she couldn’t go another day without someone — without him — to lean on.

“You’ll be fine,” he said softly.

Something about the way he’d said it made all the heat of her hurt — hurt she hadn’t known she was feeling — gather in her throat, behind her eyes. She turned, not wanting him to see it, and busied herself folding two sweaters while he silently looked on.

He had to be sent away, she told herself; she was a married woman alone, and his showing up at nightfall was a form of degradation. What was more, the hurt he was causing her by presenting himself here was more unbearable than the hurt of her having no one, because it reminded her how impossibly and inevitably alone she was.

“Khin,” she heard him say, just as softly, and she set the sweaters down, turned out the lamp, and crossed to the hallway that led to the kitchen, where her sleeping mat lay under the mosquito net.

There, the only thing to waver was the firelight. He came to her, and she submitted to the thing inside her — the force — that knew exactly what she wanted, that waged a revolution against her strength.

And he was a force to be reckoned with, she discovered. In the firelight, without a word, he possessed her comprehensively, almost dutifully, as though her need was his cause, and he was there to serve it, to very thoroughly serve it. And that service was like a trapdoor through which, all at once, she fell, blessedly ceasing to exist.

Or blessedly coming into a new existence — one where she was unleashed from her chronic will to cease, to escape the deadening strength that had been her burden since she’d held her choking father’s intestines in her hands and survived. This new version of herself was anything but unscathed. And it hurt, it hurt terribly, when Lynton — his service suddenly completed — threw on his fatigues and left her alone under the mosquito net.

She found him smoking on the stoop under the stars. “I have soup inside,” she said, embarrassed, clutching her already bound sarong to her waist.

“Sunny will be waiting,” he told her, not coldly. “We’re heading off early.”

“To the front?”

“When we’re back, I’ll look in on you and the children.”

He put out his cigarette and stood, turning to her so frankly, she felt more naked than she’d just been. “Is there anything you need?”

The tender way he’d asked the question told her she hadn’t been a disappointment — at least not entirely. “When will you be back?” she ventured.

He didn’t reel from her, but something about the way his jaw tensed, the way his head slightly shifted even as his eyes still burned with something like desire, conveyed everything she needed to know about his need for freedom. And suddenly — because of his stiffness, because of what she’d just been through at the hospital — she pictured him dead, lying stiffly in the reeds with no one but Sunny to acknowledge his passing.

A few days later, she arrived in Kyowaing to find the children dressed in tatters and hesitant to meet her eye, hesitant even to acknowledge the gifts she’d brought on the back of an elephant — tins of condensed milk and meat and biscuits, silk sarongs and sweaters and embroidered dresses. As though to seek out the Forest Governor’s wife’s permission to enjoy, the children peered guiltily at the woman rather than face Khin — until Louisa snatched up a dress, vanished with it into the back room, and emerged minutes later resplendent yet somehow as though in costume, or armor.

The dress — pale blue and dainty — had been made for a little girl; but this girl was clearly no longer the child who in Tharrawaddy had delighted in the frock cut from Khin’s eyelet petticoat — not even the child who’d pranced around her sixth birthday party showing off her flaring skirt while trying to swing dance with Saw Lay. No, this person, this eight-year-old, stood poised in the Forest Governor’s kitchen, staring back at Khin with wounded pride, as if to prove something — that she was still Khin’s daughter? Still intact? And she was intact, wasn’t she? She was more beautiful, even, though the dress was all wrong on her — too childish, and hanging from her lengthened frame in a way that made her seem overdeveloped. And she was more beautiful as only a full-grown woman usually could be; it wasn’t just that she’d shed much of her appearance of innocence (and Khin hoped that shedding had nothing to do with the weight Hta Hta was worrisomely gaining around her waist); it was that a self-possession more radiant than any innocence now shone from her, and this self-possession had been steeled by experience, Khin saw — by disappointment, heartache, and something that appeared to be a sense of her own power of body and mind.

“Take it off,” Khin found herself instructing Louisa. “Now’s not the time for that kind of thing.” Khin gave the wife an embarrassed, commiserating shrug, as though she were more in league with the woman than with her own daughter.

Could it be, she wondered later, as she led the children away from the place, that she’d been responding not only to the other woman’s envy, but also to something like envy rumbling in her own unruly center?

Back in Bilin, they were all soon safely installed in the house that was almost their own, where Khin’s seamstresses were skillful and kind, and where Lynton shortly reappeared to press his smiling eyes on them as though he were an old family friend.

Lynton — mysterious, ardent, given to flashes of hilarity and somber distraction. Over the following months, he was no stranger to Khin’s bed. True, he could sometimes disappear to the front lines for weeks; but he seemed to exist apart from the war when he was with them. And, with him, Khin seemed to discover a life as true as the one that had come before.

Every morning, Louisa, Johnny, and Grace would scamper off to school in shoes made from bits of blown tires, while Hta Hta watched Molly, and Khin put in her hours at her tailoring shop or the cheroot factory that she soon started (located in a rented house, where her hires seasoned dried palm sheets rolled into the mild cigars). The afternoons were for the hospital, where she continued to volunteer, just as she continued to write letters of inquiry about Benny during breaks. Then, around five, Lynton would show up at the house if they were lucky, a cigarette between his lips, a bottle of something in his fist, a pocketful of candy or marbles or bottle caps for the children, who, save for Louisa, would race out into the dusty yard to greet him, as he pretended not to know what they were after.

They rarely spoke Benny’s name — out of respect for him, it seemed to Khin, but also to shelter this new life from his memory — just as they chose to talk around what Lynton had become to her. They were so desperate for laughter, for the respite of carefree hours, and it was easier to find their own smiles by sequestering unpleasant subjects to the realm of private thought. The topic of the war at large — and the truth that this provisional happiness was at that war’s mercy — was also kept to a minimum. Certainly, they saw soldiers sauntering through the streets, heard references to fighting in conversations between Lynton and his friends, witnessed war’s horrors in every wound that Khin nursed at the hospital, where the children were sometimes brought along because, Khin told them, “We must not pretend suffering doesn’t exist.” But those reminders of trouble also instructed them to enjoy what and while they could.