Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“I can’t,” Saw Lay said gently. “You mustn’t be hard on me, Benny. I know my faith requires forgiveness and steadfastness. But I can’t. Try to remember that in the face of duplicitousness betrayal is forgivable.”

Astonishing, how one could go from absolute intimacy to utter estrangement, Benny thought over a year later, as he sat for the first time across from Khin in the visiting area of Insein Prison. It was January 1951, midafternoon, an hour when he would normally have been napping; but a few minutes earlier his favorite guard, Zay, had popped his head into the cell, a strange half-hysterical smile suppressed on his lips, and said, “You have a visitor, old man”; and then Benny — still groggy and feeling he was in a dream — was led out into the glare of the yard, past some commotion between two class C prisoners, to a large shed in which he immediately recognized, sitting alone among a shadowy cluster of otherwise desolate card tables and chairs, his wife blinking back at him.

For a few moments, after he had seated himself across from her as Zay hung back by the door, all Benny could do was mutely take her in while he palpated the peculiar texture of their apartness. A clamped hardness had taken hold of Khin. She held her now-ringless fingers tightly together on the table, so that her knuckles appeared blanched, and her mouth — once so supple, so tentative with words and yielding to his advances — was fixed in a line that seemed merely to express her staunch refusal to betray anything but her determination not to break into an outpouring of joy or relief or despair at seeing him again. Even her blouse — plain, opaque, in an unobtrusive black that might have been designed to deflect the eye’s attention (whereas Khin had preferred to dress in light colors before, and to feature her voluptuousness with delicate fabrics and formfitting cuts) — spoke to him of hiding, of ethnic concealment and feminine woundedness. What had life done to her?

“Are they alive?” he heard his strangled voice come out with.

Her eyes had been distantly but steadily watching him (taking in, no doubt, the dimensions of his own altered body and being), but now her gaze fell to the table, to a fly resting on one of his fingers, poised inertly between them. He saw her flick something away from her cheek, and then she brushed the fly from his hand, which she took and pressed as she finally began to nod with unmistakable suffering, so that he understood that, yes, the children yet lived, but that they — and she — had barely come through with their lives.

“Saw Lay?” she said finally, in a small voice, as she lifted her gaze to meet his. “Have you heard anything?”

Now he was unable to hold her gaze, instead grasping her hands with his, as though to restore the flow of warm blood in them. “They caught him,” he said, the partial confession catching in his throat. “He was brought here. We were together. But. he was disenchanted.”

He felt her peering watchfully at him.

“He—?” she said when he finally glanced up to meet her assessing gaze.

He nodded. “I found him.”

Her eyes narrowed, but only slightly. And he seemed to see in them the distant look not quite of suffering or incomprehension, but of resignation — or was it envy?

Another moment passed and, as if from a distance, he looked back at their hands, still clasped uncomfortably. Those hands appeared to be trying to hold on to the difficulty that he and Khin had encountered while apart, and trying to loosen themselves of culpability for having clawed their way through everything.

“Where are the children now?” he managed.

After a pause, she said, “Home with me. In Insein.” The continued smallness of her voice, its constricted quality, told him that in fact she had been shaken by the news of Saw Lay’s suicide and that she was struggling to contain her sorrow. “I wanted to come back — to Insein — alone when I heard you were here,” she continued. “I didn’t know if it would be safe. But. we’ll talk about that later. I found the children — that’s what matters.”

“They weren’t with you?”

Emotion flared in her gaze, pleading with him, he thought, to rush with her past wherever they had been. But it was only a moment. “I almost brought them today,” she said, “but I thought. too much of a shock for them, and you. They’re very eager to see you, Benny. When they learned you were alive. ”

She pulled her hands from his, regaining her composure, her flinty coolness, and she took something from her lap — an envelope, from which she removed a clutch of photographs that she spread before him on the table.

“That is Molly.” She pointed to a dark, sturdy little girl with a dimple in her chin and a gleam so fierce she seemed to be considering pouncing on the camera as though to capture and eat it.

“She’s two?” Only now did he realize he’d begun to laugh through tears.

“Almost three. She never takes no for an answer, never stops fighting. Knows just what she wants and how to say just about everything.” The pictures had given her a way into familiarity; he heard, in the far reaches of her voice now, the distant lilt of anguish and release. “And this. ”

She pointed to a second portrait of two children lengthening toward the imperfections of adolescence. Johnny and Grace. “We had these taken in Rangoon last week. They spent all morning telling Hta Hta how to groom their hair.”

“Tell me about them.”

He heard the tightening of her breath as she stared down at the pictures of their children between them.

“Johnny is grateful to be back, to have clean pressed clothes, to be studying ‘seriously’ again, as he says.” The tentativeness, the precision of her phrasing, made him acutely aware of the Burmese they were speaking, of its formality. They had always mostly spoken Burmese together by necessity, but he’d become much more proficient in the relaxed, unadorned grammar of Karen these past years, quartered as he’d been with so many political prisoners; more than ever, the convolutions of her Burmese struck his ears as a wall between them. “And Johnny takes himself very seriously. He’s nearly nine, with such a mind. Gracie worships him, and he wants nothing to do with her. She daydreams, climbing trees with a book and then forgetting the book and napping on the branches. And here’s Hta Hta and her little girl, Effie.”

“Hta Hta’s a mother now?”

“Another product of the war. We were at the Forest Governor of Kyowaing’s house. One of his sons, I think. Poor Hta Hta — she’ll hardly speak of it.” She touched the image of Effie, as though to caress Hta Hta’s child. “Feisty little girl,” she said with a laugh. “Gives Molly a ‘run for her money,’ as you used to say.” She blushed, having used the anglicism, perhaps because she was trying on English for the first time in years. Then, as though to move his attention away from her again, she pushed forward a portrait of a child who had been made to look like a doll.

“What is this?” he sputtered, more repelled than intrigued by the image, and yet, somehow, spellbound by it.

She began to tell him of how she’d recently made inroads with the wife of the local district commissioner, under whose jurisdiction this prison lay. The wife organized child beauty pageants, one of which had been held in Insein a few days after their return. “She’s very ‘keen on’ Louisa,” she said, using his English again, as though to somehow implicate him in what had been made of Louisa.

And it was Louisa, the creature in the photograph, dressed in Burmese court clothes, her curls coiled perfectly, her lips and eyes and skin exaggerated with lipstick and charcoal and powder, her gaze fixed, and her smile guilelessly directed over a shoulder. Yes, it was Louisa (could it be that she was ten ?), but he could see at once that under the surface of her cosmetic transformation, something different had come to the front of her beauty. On the one hand, she seemed to have aged significantly, to have come past her innocence. But there was also in her face a marked absence of discontent and gravity, which had pulled at the corners of even her happiest expressions. She seemed instead now to be too composed, to have been conquered by acceptance — of the condition of her life, of its being an endless battle with loss, never to be won.