Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Someone outside his cell went on providing him — or whatever he was — with just enough to exist on, and for those few precious seconds twice a day when that someone shoved his tray through the trap, Benny seized on the sight of a nervous, spotted, obviously masculine, immediately withdrawing human hand. And then, when the trap grated shut again, he clutched at the hope that this someone, this male human beyond his door, would linger long enough to hear, to comprehend, everything he spontaneously shouted at him — his most constant plea being for water, and then for relief from the rats, and then for an indication of how long this torment, this hell, would go on.

The answers, all the answers, came on what he thought might be his ninetieth day, when, for the first time since he’d been shunted into the cell, the door creaked open, and Benny, blinking in the blinding light of the corridor, saw the shape of a soldier. Or rather, of a general. Of the commander in chief of the Burma Army. Of Ne Win himself.

Was it a hallucination? The features of the man stepping into the shadows of the cell seemed to blur into one another as he stared down at Benny and began to speak, almost to soliloquize. “You are repulsive,” the man said quietly. “Strange, that you managed to produce such beautiful children. Your eldest— Louisa , is it? She’s quite the temptation to the spies we have in Bilin. Does that upset you? It shouldn’t. Because we can keep her safe if we choose. We can keep your wife safe. Not that she thinks of you as her husband anymore. I’ve caused you pain. I am very sorry. But you can understand her position, no?. Is she a widow? Is she still married? She has no idea. And her appetite for men who aren’t Jews is quite extraordinary. Don’t be angry! It’s amusing! Men of all ages passing in and out of the house she squats in, passing in and out like shadows with erections. Imagine her squatting over all those ! Why aren’t you laughing?”

Now, at last, the man, Ne Win — there was no mistaking his foaming voice — moved, reached into his pocket, and threw something at Benny, who instantly, almost ferociously snatched it out of the air. But it was only a cigar.

“You are repulsive,” said the man, laughing. “And your repulsive wife thinks she’s very clever trading in sweaters and cigars. Look at the one in your hand. Strange how much a man’s hand resembles a claw when he is starved. See how she’s put a band of her own design around the thing? Clever, your wife, isn’t she? Started up a little factory modeled on the ones built by her husband — excuse me, by the man to whom she is false. Doesn’t realize she’s being allowed to live, to feed her little beasts, her hungry vagina.”

“What do you want?” Benny growled. He could snap; he could allow himself to snap, to snap this man’s neck in a few seconds.

Ne Win put his hand on the pistol at his hip and stepped back a foot, into the corridor, so that the light fell harshly across his own feral features. “Only to tell you a story,” he simpered, “a story of something that just happened. You see, some of your Karen leaders thought they were going to be very smart and meet with an American in Thailand — a CIA man, no doubt. Can you imagine? Here it is, almost August, with the rains so heavy — but they were adamant about getting over the Salween River. And when they reached the village on the edge of the river, the headman put them up in a tiny bamboo hut in the middle of an isolated field. Only stupid Karens would have agreed, don’t you think? Only stupid Karens would have waited for the rains and the swollen river to subside. But you already know what happened, don’t you? Go on. tell me.”

It was of Louisa that Benny thought then, and Khin. And only after, of Saw Lay. “Murdered.”

“You aren’t stupid at all like them. You remind me of a particular lieutenant of mine. We like to call him the Butcher. And he was the one, very early in the morning, before dawn, to lead the ambush. Those poor, stupid men. Every one of them done for. except your friend. Yes, him. You know exactly to whom I’m referring. Don’t look at me like that. Enough to make me nervous, that look. He lived, your friend! Just as your dirty children will live, and your dirty wife, if . ” He paused to stare down at Benny with a smile so fixed it seemed panicked. “We’re going to catch your friend. And when we do, you’ll be the one to talk to him. To get intelligence from him. About your insurgent operations, of course. And also about the Americans. About what exactly their spies are doing on our turf.”

Benny couldn’t process Ne Win’s words; the physical presence and threat of the man were too insistent. But he kept his eyes watchfully on the general, who in the gleam of the corridor returned Benny’s animal stare, and then breathlessly, almost disconcertedly, murmured, “Have you understood a word I’ve said?”

The next evening, Benny was transferred to Insein Prison, where he was made the only class A prisoner among at least two hundred mostly Karen class B and class C political prisoners. Assigned a servant to cook his meals and to maintain his clothes, and, just as uniquely, allowed to roam the men’s barrack nearly at his leisure, he ought to have experienced the change as an enormous leap toward liberation. But if he found comfort in the plentiful food, and in the freedom of space, and in the inexhaustible supply of water — the gallons and gallons that he daily gulped and doused himself clean with in the drab communal shower — he could not escape the feeling that he was even more constricted here, in the company of other men. More constricted because he’d come to believe, inescapably, that the extraordinary thing — the truly extraordinary thing — was when others treated you well, not badly. He expected every other man to betray him; and he expected disloyalty of himself.

He was put up in a room with two narrow beds, the other ominously empty — waiting, he knew, for his “friend,” on the loose somewhere beyond the prison walls. In the hours after Ne Win’s visit, he had vaguely pieced together what the general had suggested with his mention of the Americans — that not all the Allies had left Burma to its own devices, that the Americans were somehow still involved in the country’s, and perhaps even in the Karens’, affairs. But this, all of this, was overshadowed by the more surprising realization that he, Benny, would be willing to betray Saw Lay in order to keep himself and his family alive. And to hide his diminished face from the specter of Saw Lay in these new, almost lavish quarters, he turned his back on the empty bed, turned his back on the other prisoners, who were hungry to hear his counsel about the revolution, about their cause, about the state of a Karen future that Benny felt he’d also already betrayed. Sometimes, stretched out on his hard mattress, he felt so annihilated by infidelity to his past that he imagined his body crumbling into dust that floated up in the stagnant air, all the way to the window through which, if he lifted his eyes, he could see over the top of the facing women’s prison to the bruised sky. What a negligent husband he’d been; what a sense of entitlement he’d had to the gifts of Khin’s body, to the gifts of her grace. And how pathetic he’d turned out to be as a man, ready to betray his highest ideals, to bow before the power of the ignoble for survival’s sake. He drank the cup of humiliation to the dregs, praying to God not to be spared.

But perhaps a month or two after his transfer, he happened to be standing on his bed, looking for a hook or a nail embedded in the beam above, when he was startled by the face of a woman in the window opposite his. She stood eight or ten feet away, separated from him by two walls and two sets of bars (his window’s and hers), yet her eyes seemed to speak directly to his. ( Are you on your bed? those eyes said. Yes, I am on a bed, too, and, like you, seeking to understand my options. You won’t kill yourself yet — that would be rash; but it’s important to know what your escape route will be if one becomes required. ) She could have been twenty, thirty, this woman, with a delicate-featured face enlivened by excitable dark eyebrows that rose up a half inch before falling toward the gracious smile she flashed him. And then she was gone.