Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Must we be divided?” Benny threw out. There it was again, the tremor of guilt in his voice — but also a loosening knot of anguish. His question, he knew, was wrong, even immoral, given what he would soon do to betray Saw Lay and their joint cause. But he felt like a child about to cry over a petty crime he’d perpetrated because a bully had made him do it.

“You cannot make me reveal what they want revealed,” Saw Lay said. He spoke very calmly, very firmly, and also with a punishing parent’s depths of love. “And they cannot prevent me from revealing to you what they don’t want you to know.”

Benny was so stunned by the reversal in the conversation — from an obscurity in which all was mere suggestion to utter forthrightness — that his heart began to race. He felt caught, found out, and also frightened of what would soon be disclosed. And, like a child, he wanted to hide from it all and to deny the truth that was suddenly exerting its pressure on him. “I don’t know,” he stammered, “what you are referring to—”

“The British have been funding the Burma Army’s liquidation of our revolution,” his friend quickly returned. “I don’t mean the British aid program to Nu’s government that has been in place since independence. This is an arms program specifically designed to stamp out our uprising.”

When Benny didn’t respond — he couldn’t, so much did his system refuse to believe in the extent of the British betrayal — Saw Lay went on: “It was one of them, wasn’t it, a British lord who said that ‘absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Nu and his satraps — Ne Win— those are London’s allies now, and London will stop at nothing to keep them in power, so that the West keeps a foothold in the increasingly communist East. Apparently, they’ve convinced themselves of the legitimacy of Nu’s parliamentary democracy. So you cannot blame us for beginning to splinter over the question of trust itself, some of us even looking to the Communists in Burma, who as you know have been waging their own revolution against the government, and who are eager for us to join their cause, which none of us really believes in—”

“The Communists ?”

“I don’t want such an alliance — but tell that to others as we’re being betrayed by the arbiters of democracy themselves. You see what I mean when I speak of hope now. Where is the hope in the face of duplicitousness, in the face of such colossal betrayal, in the face of our likely internal schism over the question of whom to trust?”

And the Americans? Benny wanted to ask. Where did they fit into this broader, terrible global picture? But then he realized that to ask such a question would only betray the faithfulness Saw Lay was showing him — his refusal to betray Benny by divulging anything with which Benny might betray the cause and their friendship.

For a while, they each retreated into the remote corners of their unspoken questions and doubts. Then Saw Lay looked back at Benny, as though to push past the mental argument that had just been occupying his silence. “Should someone from the outside make an overture to you. ” he said very carefully.

Benny’s first thought was of someone outside this cell, outside the men’s prison — of Rita, who, indeed, had made an overture to him all those months ago. And then of Ne Win, the someone responsible for his continuing to be imprisoned. But on the heels of this came his awareness that Saw Lay — who was staring at him persistently and darkly — was referring to someone outside Burma . And all at once he recalled, with excruciating clearness, Ne Win’s words about the ambush on the banks of the Salween, about the Karen leaders who had “thought they were going to be very smart and meet with an American in Thailand.”

Saw Lay continued, very quietly now: “Should someone who goes by the name of Hatchet reach out to you—”

“Hatchet?”

“If he does make contact, remember to consider the question of trust, Benny.”

The question of trust was just what seemed to throw them into a renewed silence that only rang with still more questions. questions about everything that Saw Lay’s disclosure yet kept concealed. And when the wind beyond the window began to whistle plaintively, Benny watched with relief as it carried Saw Lay’s attention away from him, away from the cell, to the night and the revolution spreading out under the stars.

“I remember, during the war,” Saw Lay said at last—“I mean the Second World War, when we were fighting the Japs and the Burma Independence Army — I remember coming upon a village that had just been scorched. There was a young woman who was picking through the remains of what must have been her hut. I still can’t bear to imagine what exactly she was looking for. But what struck me was her calm, the way she seemed almost practiced at this, as if it had been written into her fate, a fate that she already knew — and, even more astonishingly, a fate she had accepted.”

Saw Lay inhaled sharply, as if to keep hold of nothing less than his life, in spite of his own doomed fate. “You know, I have never had a need to be seen, to be recognized for doing anything. In fact, I prefer to be invisible. Nothing seems more appropriate than to pass out of this world as invisibly as I passed into it, remarked by only one or two who truly cared for me. Perhaps that is a Karen trait, that inclination toward self-effacement, toward standing in the shadows. Our modesty that runs so deep it is almost self-annihilating. But now. now, suddenly, my invisibility — our relative invisibility — strikes me as very sad. Very sad, indeed. If you stand for a moment behind their eyes — behind the eyes of anyone for whom modesty is not an ultimate virtue — we appear to value our lives less than they do. It is a kind of permission, in their eyes, to ignore us. Or, even more ominously, to stamp us out like a weak strain of bacteria. I never thought of the British as being racist, but they must know Nu has declared he wants all Karens wiped out. How can they, then, with this arms program targeting us, not also be accomplices to genocide?”

Past the window, the wind beckoned to them again, and Saw Lay seemed to ponder the possibility of following it. “Sometimes it seems to me that I am nothing but a thirty-five-year-old boy,” he finally went on, “brokenhearted because his daddy, who he thought saw him as precious, as unique, as loyal, as good and worthy, never really loved him at all — because his daddy loved him only as a convenience. Suddenly everything is altered — one’s sense of right and wrong, one’s old affection for the smell of the streets. No one to lean on anymore, nothing to believe in. You must know I’ll never get out of here, Benny. Not alive.”

“But there’s hope,” Benny said again, without any kind of belief.

Saw Lay seemed to hear the defeat in his voice. With a half-smile that was almost comforting, he said, “Ne Win and his men — the soldiers who’ve been hunting me — they certainly don’t have any hope that I’ll come around to their side. You know where they finally found me? Back in my brother’s house in Tharrawaddy. I couldn’t even bring myself to hide.”

For a time neither of them spoke, and in the silence and the darkness there was nowhere to take shelter from their powerlessness over what would be. It seemed to Benny that there was nothing he could do to catch hold of his friend, to keep him there. That Saw Lay’s disenchantment was too profound.

Saw Lay suddenly pushed himself off his bed and crossed to the window, where he stood looking up over the women’s prison at the far-off moon. Benny didn’t get up to stand with him, but he had the distinct inward impression of following his friend, carried by the whimsy of the wind, over sleeping Rita, past the tainted prison grounds, to a sparkling river, where they stood before the open branches of the forest, with the fields unfolding behind them. So this was the place where their paths would diverge.