Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Now and then, Khin would be laughing with a seamstress about something one of the children had said, or taking her evening air and refreshment with Lynton, and the thought of Benny — of what he might be suffering, of the possibility that he was already dead — would strike her so startlingly she would struggle to get her bearings, as though after a vertiginous nightmare. And, gazing around at the pieces of her new life — the holier-than-thou neighbor scowling at them from a window, the children squabbling over a chicken in the yard, the cigarette drooping from Lynton’s lips, Hta Hta’s undeniably swelling belly (what had happened to the poor girl while she’d been in the care of the Forest Governor?) — Khin would seem to see through to the hopeless transience of it all. She would flush with shame, recognizing how far they had fallen, until certain words she’d heard years before would come back to her, words spoken by the rabbi of Rangoon that struck her now like an answer to a long-awaited question, like a pardon: We must find a way to rejoice in our circumstances. We must find a way to do more than endure .

Lynton rejoiced and endured by drinking and joking and making music — if possible with his soldiers — and often after dark, when the air was cooler, the house transformed into a dance hall of sorts. Lynton would play his harmonica or the ukulele he’d found in a trash heap, while his men took turns spinning Hta Hta and the seamstresses and Khin around, until Khin’s limbs were so drowsy with release she almost fell down in joy. If the mood became too earnest, Lynton would break out with one of his absurd stories. (“I tell you what happened to Sunny the other day? Soldier from another brigade says to him, ‘This is a very good herb, a delicious herb — put some in Lynton’s food and he’ll never replace you.’ And Sunny, loyal bodyguard that he is, though a bit daft — I hate to break it to you, Sunny — oh, look how he’s blushing! Well, Sunny has a voracious appetite — goes without saying — and wanting to protect me, he decides to taste the curry he’s made with the herb before giving me any, and it’s so good he has another mouthful, and another, and soon I find him beside an empty pot, dozing in the rain, right there in the mud, with a smile plastered on his face, and the soldier who gave him the herb is laughing his head off over him. I missed out on something good, didn’t I, Sunny?”) And as if unable to stop partaking in the merriment — for fear of stumbling upon its permanent absence — Lynton would sometimes leave the house arm in arm with the soldiers, singing and joking as they staggered out of sight. “You’re not staying?” Khin didn’t dare ask him. Something told her that to lay claim to him in any way would only taint the joy they’d found together, a joy whose essential feature was freedom — from their pasts, from responsibility to anything but the pleasure they took in each other’s company.

Even on the nights when he stayed, only to quit her bed abruptly in the predawn hours — even then, when the lightness of his mood and step could strike her as disrespectful both to her and to the gravity of their times (the stench of fire could be burning in the air, and he would still leave her with a kind of heedless twinkle in his eyes, as if to say, You’ll be all right, old girl ; or: After all, you’re not my wife, my responsibility ; or: And if we die? Well, then we die. To do our part, that should be our wish, and to do so with as much merriment as possible ) — even on those mornings when he left her wanting more and fearing indefinably for her life, she held her tongue. Did he have other women? And was she — if Benny were indeed alive — cashing in on something owed to her with this adulterous affair, or creating a debt that would be impossible to repay?

She couldn’t think of any of it for long, because it all seemed beside the point. The point being that Lynton had restored her — to happiness, to life. And to turn her back on him would have been, in a sense, to choose death over life. She knew, from what she’d heard at the hospital, that he was the most fearless of soldiers and the most brilliant of military tacticians. And there was something about his body , something exceeding breath and blood and flesh, as though he carried in his cells and sweat the life force of all humanity. Watching him disappear down the desolate street on the mornings after he had been hers for a time, she stood stunned in the light of his mortality, and their secret knowledge of each other, and her certainty that she was but part of his passing enjoyment — less wanted than wanting, yet undeniably happy and still alive.

And yet she wasn’t immune to darker feelings around him — feelings not dissimilar to those that had blighted her reunion with Louisa at the Forest Governor’s house. Sometimes, when she was in both Louisa’s and Lynton’s presence, she would see him catching on the vision of the girl, who might be sitting solitarily with a book, or kneeling by the sewing machine while turning the hand crank for a seamstress. Khin would know then, or almost know, that Lynton’s interest in the girl wasn’t anything to be alarmed by. And she would tell herself she couldn’t blame him for noticing what anyone with sensitive eyes might; Khin, too, was often arrested by the girl’s composure and also by Louisa’s unawareness of being noticed: there was nothing desperate about her beauty, which gleamed with serenity, seeming almost to have been ordained. No, Khin couldn’t blame Lynton; but she smarted at the way he began calling the girl “Little Grandmother,” as though the teasing, reverential slight could shake the poise out of her, and at the way he sometimes attempted to make the girl laugh by dancing a jig to the tune of her hand-cranking, or by pretending to pass out from boredom when Khin scolded the children. Then there was the afternoon when he and Sunny returned from some mission with a pair of boxing gloves for Johnny (could the boy have mentioned Benny’s promise to teach him to box when he turned six?) and a rusted bicycle for the girls, which Lynton encouraged Louisa to use in order to escape her chores. The bicycle, along with the implicit suggestion that Louisa challenge Khin’s authority, brought a smile to Louisa’s face, one quickly swallowed up by a pinched look of regret (the girl was apparently bent on resisting anything to do with the man, no doubt out of allegiance to her father). And Khin was left feeling as frustrated by Lynton’s misdirected attentions as she was exasperated by Louisa’s reasonable ingratitude toward him.

But all those feelings came to an end one early morning in October, when she was sleeping beside him and he reached out to take her hand. Something about the tenderness of the gesture — the lingering way he clung to her fingers — frightened her, yet he sprang from the bed as though nothing had changed.

“Shall I make you something?” she said.

“Sunny will have breakfast for me.”

“Then some tea?” There was no coffee to be found anywhere.

“Don’t trouble yourself.”

He pulled on his trousers and a shirt, and hesitated over the washbowl, pouring some water over a rag and then roughly cleaning his neck and face.

“Has something happened?” she said. She realized he could have learned something about Benny — or about Saw Lay, whom they’d lightly spoken of, and under whose command Lynton had apparently fought against the Japanese.

Now he checked the bullets in his pistol. “Let me tell you something. If you hear gossip about the war, me, anyone. don’t be quick to believe it. Trust only your instincts. And remember to be on guard. Assuming we determine to hold to our vision, this war could go on indefinitely.” He put the gun in its holster and turned to face her. “You have to be smart. You can’t just trust any nice person who comes along.”