Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Khin reached out and touched the side of her plump, soft cheek. “I’ll help you raise it.”

Never had she spoken so openly and affectionately to Hta Hta, in whose eyes there was now a gleam of hurt and also of relief, as though the source of the terrible ache festering in her had finally been identified. With time she would accustom herself to that ache, Khin told herself.

“Is it a troupe of dancers, Mama?” Johnny called from the gate. He was pointing to a line of bullock carts trundling down the road. “Can we go see? Can we, Mama?”

“Yes, Mama!” Gracie joined in. “Please!”

Khin stood and drifted to the gate to stand by Louisa, while Johnny and Grace galloped up the muddy road.

“Is it a funeral, Mama?” Louisa asked, so calmly it put a chill on Khin’s spine.

Only then did Khin glimpse what the girl had seen: piled onto the bed of every approaching cart were three or four coffins.

Bubonic plague had broken out, the infected carried away swiftly and with excruciating pain. By twilight, it was agreed that Hta Hta would take the children to live with the family of one of the seamstresses, who came from a remote village on the plains of the tigers, about eight hours away, while Khin would stock the family with supplies by selling whatever goods she could on the road.

And just like that, they were saying their good-byes again, the children collected in the rear of a horse cart that Khin had hired with her ten rupees, and Khin kissing each of them — not as Benny might have, with a chaste peck on the brow, but as a Karen, by placing the side of her nose against each of their cheeks and inhaling deeply.

“Who will deliver my baby?” Hta Hta asked, as if the parting had finally awakened her to the child who would soon be wrenched from her body.

“You’ll find that if you look there will be people to help you,” Khin told her.

A violent wind picked up, the driver hit the horse with his switch, and the cart began to roll away.

Khin stared at the departing children, trying to sear the picture of them into her memory: Johnny looking back at her with eyes reflecting the deepening night; Gracie avoiding her gaze by nestling into Hta Hta’s swollen side; Molly, fed up with the seamstress’s feeble attempts to console her, whining and reaching her chubby arms back toward Khin; and Louisa, now taking the baby into her own small lap. But a wild, frightened expression suddenly broke over Louisa’s face.

“Promise we’ll be all right?” she called to Khin over the wind.

And, following after the cart, Khin cried, “Never lose faith!”

It had been Ducksworth’s smile, false and scared, that had spoken of disgrace to Benny seven months earlier, in April 1949, when his old friend had come for him in Thaton. And it had been the way the man’s fingers had instantly recoiled from the envelope he’d dropped in Benny’s hand, the one containing the letter from Nu. And then it had been — as Ducksworth and Benny had sat on the plane bound for Moulmein, confined to a physical proximity they hadn’t shared since their days around the same desk at B. Meyer — the way the man’s skin had given off the damp odor of anxiousness and avoidance. No, Ducksworth wasn’t settled, Benny saw; he wasn’t settled at all. But whether his disgrace was merely that of having joined the Burma Army’s ranks after his long habit of colonial apologism, Benny couldn’t be sure.

“You going to tell me how you ended up a lieutenant in their army?” Benny attempted on the plane, putting on his own (unintentionally) false smile. He could feel the heat of that falseness burning his pinched, trembling cheeks.

“ Their army?” Ducksworth said stiffly.

“You know what I mean.” If Benny could just turn his old friend’s disgrace into something to laugh about (however mordantly), if he could just reel back eleven years and remind Ducksworth of their once easy, rancorous banter, he might stand a chance. “What happened?”

“What happened is that you’ve lost your manners.” The rebuff ought to have reassured Benny, but it was delivered coldly, as if confirming something suspected.

Ducksworth stared, tight-lipped, toward the cockpit, almost at ease — until the plane rapidly descended, causing him to grip the armrest between them. He nearly bolted out of his seat when the plane touched ground; then, on the dusty, desolate tarmac, he cast his eyes around like a bewildered child waiting for some adult to claim him after an arduous excursion. “Now there should be — there should be — someone here to meet us,” he sputtered.

That someone was a swarm of armed guards, who surrounded them in the modest airport and demanded — amid curses and insults and jabs with their guns — that Benny get back out to the darkening runway. Benny’s last look at Ducksworth was of him covering his head with his hands — in shame, or self-defense. And then Benny was herded out, bracing himself for the fatal shot, and having the odd instinct to look back and cry out to his old friend. As though in Ducksworth’s face he might find one last vision of faithfulness, one last glimpse of affection or regret.

But he was not killed. Not yet. In Rangoon’s notorious Barr Street lockup, a temporary holding place for the most hardened criminals, Benny was thrust into a cell without explanation and without an opportunity to speak to anyone in charge. Yet he was not left entirely alone in the eight-by-twelve-foot cell, whose clanging steel door closed his world off completely from the prison, and whose only amenity — save for a thin, sordid blanket — was a bucket hanging from a rope in a narrow hole in the floor. It was out of this hole that his company crawled. The moment the trap in the bottom of the steel door grated open twice a day, an army of rats invaded, watching with rapacious red eyes and twitching whiskers as Benny’s food — thin rice soup for breakfast, or a gelatinous mixture of rice and bits of meat for dinner — was pushed on a tray into the cell. But to call these creatures rats was to do them an injustice. Big as cats, with sinuous, almost hairless bodies and scaly pink tails, they hurled themselves at the dish with piercing shrieks, and Benny had to beat them back with kicks while they snarled and snapped, trying to sink their long teeth into his ankles. They begrudged him every mouthful, and he was forced to defend himself each second that he stuffed the food into his mouth. Cheated of their meal, his cellmates wrestled with one another, snarling and biting, or slavering and uttering hoarse cries at Benny, their fierce eyes greedily watching his every move.

That would have been enough; but as night fell, and the sickly light emitted by a small aperture near the ceiling died away, the creatures were hideously emboldened and scampered freely about the cell, scuttling into corners, chasing each other around the walls, squeaking and chattering until Benny passed out and they scurried over his inert form, tearing at his face and throat and testicles before he beat them off and, in the blackness, murdered as many of them as he could with his bare hands.

Because he was given only a mug of water every third or fourth day, his tongue grew swollen and his mouth and skin, already covered with scabs from his fights with the rats, cracked. He was so chronically exhausted and in pain that he might have been lured by the solution of the rope from which his toilet hung. But the ravaging hunger of his companions fed his own animal instinct to keep fighting, to survive.

Though he wasn’t the one who survived precisely. No, the creature who survived as the rats’ contender and companion was more villain than prizefighter, more vermin than man. Bloody sons of bitches, he taunted the rats, and he scratched a strike into the wall for every one of them that he killed, beside his tally of the days that passed. Bastards. Devil fucks. Earth scum. He counted the rats and recounted them, and their numbers only seemed to multiply, and he often lost track and had to count and recount them again. You belong here. Dirty Jews. Born in the dark. The sewer. Go to hell — no one wants you. Think they care what happens — the humans? Your mama knew what would become of you. Better off dying.