Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Her name was Rita, and she had been a medical student at the University of Rangoon until her arrest five months before, when she’d dared to question why, at the hospital, Karen doctors were allowed to work while Karen patients were barred from treatment. Benny learned these details the following day, when, around noontime, she held up a pillowcase on which she’d written the compressed story of her recent past in bold English letters. So that he could read every one of these letters between the bars, she moved the pillowcase slowly from side to side, before replacing it with her worried face. ( Have I embarrassed myself by reaching out to you? she might have been asking. Please write something back! ) But then she ducked down once again, holding up the backside of the pillowcase, on which she’d written: “SAW BENSION?”

Of course, it was possible — entirely possible — that this woman was a trap laid to ensnare him. Yet her eyes. the gracious smile. He felt powerless not to throw caution to the wind. When he asked for something to write with, he was granted a pen and a journal of fifty-odd sheets. Given how huge he would have to make his letters in order for Rita to read them, he would be able to write little more than a sprinkling of words on each page. For hours, he was paralyzed by the necessary economies of phrasing: each time he went to write something to her, it seemed stale, clichéd, lacking the agitated understanding Rita’s eyes had instantly made him feel. “Do you need anything?” he thought to write. But that was foolish, because he would never be able to provide her with what she wanted. Or: “Is there someone looking for you?” But again, what could he do to ease her loved ones’ worry?

“Soon I will betray my friend to keep my children alive,” he finally wrote — not on the journal’s impossibly small pages, but on his own pillowcase.

As soon as he held the case up to his window, though, he regretted the self-revelation. If she were there to entice him into making disclosures, could he have more expediently assisted her in that task? But it was a different sort of regret that afflicted him when she replied, on a section of her bedsheet: “Lack of courage keeps us from understanding others’ perspectives.” Was she chastising him? Calling him cowardly for giving in to betrayal? Or, on the contrary, was she telling him in her abbreviated terms that it was cowardly not to empathize with men like him? Before he’d come up with a reply, she went on, as if in explanation: “And what makes us great can limit our greatness.”

The immediacy of her depth. The absolute absence of stock introductory phrases. Never before had he encountered anything like it, and his every last defense was broken down. Her words reminded him of his children: how he’d come to feel that they were nearly the only meaning he’d achieved in life, yet meaning that had the power to cause him to commit betrayal, to snuff out the meaningful. He wanted to explain as much to her, but to narrow his thoughts to such an extent that they could be clearly communicated in just a sprinkling of words — nothing had prepared him for that particular difficulty.

“We shouldn’t blame anyone for lacking courage or greatness,” she wrote a few hours later on her sheet in response to his continued silence and, he thought, his utter cowardice.

“But you don’t lack it,” he wrote, finally, on his own bedsheet.

“How do you know?” she responded.

What he knew now — just about the only thing he knew now — was that here in prison he’d suddenly discovered the freedom to face himself.

“How does man forgive himself for the lives he’s taken even in the name of saving lives?” he wrote on a piece of paper that he tore from the journal and persuaded the crooked-backed servant who cooked his meals to pass to Rita.

“He doesn’t,” she responded on the paper the servant tersely returned. “Only those who have reduced their humanity to almost nothing put their virtue and ethics and faith in an unbreakable safe.”

Him: “Is the man who seeks the limelight the one we should be suspicious of?”

Her: “Perhaps he is the one we should pity.”

Him: “I wish you didn’t know who I am, or that you hadn’t seen my face.”

Him again: “Then you wouldn’t know my race. I don’t want to know yours.”

Her: “Nor do I want you to know it.”

Her again: “Because I don’t believe in it.”

Him: “The most perilous symptom of suffering is self-pity.”

Her: “When we think we hold exclusive rights to suffering.”

Her again: “And we have the instinct to deprive others of theirs.”

Him: “Tell me of your suffering.”

They never spoke directly of their growing love, but that love was the subject of their every exchange. And he was unspeakably grateful for it. Unspeakably.

And then there was Saw Lay, suddenly sitting on the bed opposite his. “It’s nice here,” his dear friend said coolly. It was evening, sometime toward the end of 1949, and they leaned against their respective walls in the semi-shadows, too disconcerted by their contrived coming together to face each other in the remaining light. “We can almost pretend the war doesn’t exist,” he went on. “That it never existed in the first place.”

Was Benny being sensitive, hearing a measure of reproach in Saw Lay’s tone? Surely his friend suspected that they had been quartered together for a reason, that there would be a price to be paid for their mutual survival, perhaps even that Benny had been put up to informing on him. Yet Saw Lay also seemed to resent the change that had come over Benny, his new freedom in the safe harbor of this cell.

“Tell me about it — the war — the suffering,” Benny said to him. “Tell me what has happened. I know nothing, my friend.”

Hearing Benny utter this term of endearment with such old familiarity and tenderness seemed to surprise Saw Lay, and he lifted his eyes so that the light hit them, and he looked at Benny with an expression of amazed pain. But then he turned and cast his glance around the shadows of the room, as though to seek out a wiretap in them. And he said derisively, as though also addressing the enemy, “The Burma Army would be heartened to know that we’ve been reduced to digging up whatever ammunition — whatever buried Japanese or British three-pounders and artillery shells — we can find. And, of course, making arms that misfire—.303s whose brass shells have to be repeatedly used — that is, after they’ve been filed down to the scale of our rifles’ chambers, filed so thin they sometimes blow up in our fingers.”

“But there’s hope,” Benny hazarded, hearing the premonitory quiver of guilt in his voice.

“Hope,” Saw Lay returned ruminatively, sarcastically. “We have more fighters than ever before — twenty-four thousand at minimum. And still we’re slowly being pushed east, into the hills. It’s not just a matter of our lack of arms. Not any continuing disorganization of our forces. In fact, we’ve become much more disciplined, skilled. ”

Down the corridor, someone — another prisoner — cried out in physical or spiritual agony, and Saw Lay became very alert, his ear turning toward the door as the corridor filled with the shouts of guards. But it was only the commotion of a group of men being escorted to the showers. Soon the pipes in the wall began to clang, and then came the sound of running water and the sudden rise in pitch of a few prisoners’ voices, the temporary escalation of mood that so often accompanied the prisoners’ escapes into the shower room.

The moonlight beginning to filter in through the bars of the window had washed Saw Lay clean of some of his scorn, and when he directed his eyes at Benny again, it was with a question in them. “It all comes down to trust,” he said quietly. “If we could trust them, we could actually talk.” His melancholic voice seemed to stretch compassionately toward Benny, suggesting subjects of which they would never speak. “But without trust, we become divided, we who were so unified in our desire for a dignified life.”