Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“You see, she doesn’t wear a sash,” Khin was saying. “She didn’t win. But it was a success, her participation in the pageant. Yesterday, she visited the woman and her husband at their home. She was invited in for tea, and she told the district commissioner of your innocence—”

“Innocence?” He could hear the irritation in his voice, though in fact he was deeply affected by what his daughter had done for him. By her courage.

“How hard life has been without you.”

“Any day I could be hanged for treachery, Khin. It won’t be so easy maneuvering my release, convincing the district commissioner.” He wasn’t sure just what he was defending himself against, but it seemed he was being held accountable for something and he wanted nothing to do with it. “To call any attention to me could—”

“He said he would see what he could do about your case.”

She stared at him from behind a mask of — of censure? Or was it only anxiety? Then all at once that mask gave way, and he saw a deep welling of fear in her eyes, as she said, with such defenselessness he felt utterly ashamed, “Don’t you want to come back to us, Benny?”

Three weeks later, he found himself standing in the cavity of his old living room, a tinny trio playing some welcoming tune in the flat light of the opposite window, while his children — looking more delightful in person, but more heartbreakingly unfamiliar — strained to sing along to the tune and simultaneously to smile at him. On the other side of the room an assortment of old friends stood arrayed beside a table laid with dressed-up provisions — rice and curries no less thin, from the looks of it, than what he’d received every day in prison. And there was Hta Hta, smiling shyly at him behind the guests, her peering little girl on her hip.

“We still have a lot to do,” Khin said at his side, drawing him by the elbow into the room. “Put your things down.”

His “things” were little more than his journals, and he was loath to part with them, but he did as she said, stooping to put his sack by the crumbling doorway.

“The property’s not what it was,” Khin went on. “I’m still trying to get the gas station out of a neighbor’s hands. But your old employees have helped me to fix things up. They’re working on credit now, so you have to get going as soon as possible. I’ve already visited the ice factories — one’s been stolen from under us, but your manager handled the other as he could. The trucks are gone. The government’s taken over the trucking company. And the bottling plant — a lost cause. ”

He took in the splashes of darkness (old blood?) under a coat of paint on the walls; the bullet holes — they were everywhere and shabbily patched; the boards of plywood in the otherwise teak floor; the empty display case shoved up against one wall; the ebony piano with a missing leg, propped up by a table stacked with books; and the complication of odors — the overtone of spoiled curry, the undertone of wood rot, of death. The first shots of the civil war had broken out across this house, he well knew, but he hadn’t guessed that the house itself had sheltered battles. My God, how many men had been slaughtered in this very room?

“Come greet your father!” Khin called to the children.

They had been watchfully taking their father in, their faces trembling between looks of excitement and despair. But now Louisa began to pull her reluctant younger sisters across the room toward him, while Johnny hung back, fists tightening at his sides.

“That’s not my father!” Molly hollered. “Don’t let that Indian touch me!”

“What a terrible thing to say!” Khin scolded her, as the guests broke into peals of laughter.

Now poor Johnny began to bawl noiselessly behind his sisters.

“Of course he’s your father!” Louisa cried, her serious, gleaming eyes on Benny’s — but there was doubt in them. And when she ran to Benny and fiercely embraced him, she called out as though to the heavens, “He is our father! He is! He is! He is !”

After Saw Lay’s suicide, he had lost all but the most superficial interest in the revolution and politics. Ne Win and his satraps had promptly seemed to forget him, and Benny had been happy enough to return the favor and disregard them. Of course, his fellow inmates often spoke about the ongoing war, and he’d been generally kept abreast of the state of affairs for the Karens (that much of the delta had been lost, including Insein; that the revolution was slowly being pushed up into the hills, and that U Nu had designated a corner of the already-lost backwater “Karen State”). But these dispatches had only confirmed Benny’s growing sense that to be overly taken in by news of the moment was a grave mistake (the story that the Karens now had a state to lightly administer was just a story, wasn’t it? — only 20 percent of Karens lived in that remote area, where there wasn’t one urban center). And, bit by bit, Benny had recovered in prison, which had become his bulwark against the world. Recovered from the shock of losing Saw Lay, recovered from the tyranny of the moment — in large part through the fragments of writing which he’d continued to exchange with Rita, and by which he’d learned to tend to his inner landscape. Not that he’d been merely acquainting himself with himself . Rather, by means of his correspondence with Rita and the time he took just to think, he’d seemed to be clearing a view from which he could peer out at the broader human predicament. The sense of timelessness he’d experienced then, of expansiveness, of losing his insignificant self to the sweep of humanity, had been undeniable. It had felt akin to looking out at an ancient moonlit valley and then up at the unfathomable stars. He’d thought ceaselessly of his family then; he’d dreamed of them, worried over them so intensely he’d sometimes feared he would go mad. And sometimes, by means of the inner view he was cultivating, he’d felt as though he were mysteriously looking down over Khin and the children. But it was also a view that reminded him to be grateful for what he had in separation from them. Rita’s far-off, infinitely patient, tender smile had been part of that.

And now the separation was a thing of the past. Now he was apparently a free man, yet he felt strangely sentenced to solitude all over again. For one, all the pleasure he’d taken in socializing was gone. Khin prodded him to arrange dinner parties to reestablish old business contacts. The British Rowing Club had been replaced back in ’48 by the Union Club, which was frequented by government officials. “But there are other clubs,” Khin said. “Go. Go!” It was as though she couldn’t stand the stink of who he had become, the man who grew nauseated at the thought of meaningless talk, at the thought of strained smiles, exchanges that skipped over the shallows of halting drivel, only to alight — for a tense moment — on the possibility of depths beneath, of actual intimate exchange. No. No. It wasn’t for him, not anymore. He had become far too sensitive for all that.

Many mornings after waking beside Khin — who didn’t touch him, and whom he couldn’t muster the confidence (or, he feared, the interest) to touch — he would sit in his old chair before the view of the hillside he’d so loved, the view that looked out over the Karen village of Thamaing, which Khin said was slowly being rebuilt after having been burned to the ground. He couldn’t imagine why he had ever thought he had the right to interfere with Karen affairs. And anyway, the place itself seemed foreign to him — not Insein, per se, not even Burma, but the planet. The feeling of the rain when he reached through the window to touch its wetness, the open expanse of the bunching clouds, and then the lush hillside along which the drive he’d had constructed snaked its way with such. certainty . It all seemed to be made for someone far surer of his place — or anyone’s place — here. The sound of his children would drift through the house — the sound of his daughters singing or pretending (“Pretend you’re a princess, Louisa, and your parents died, and an evil witch took over and made you do all the chores”), or of stout Molly galloping down the hill with Johnny tumbling after (“That’s my net, Molly! I get to catch the shrimp! Mama! ”) — and he would be overcome by feelings of sorrow for the inevitable pain they would feel, and then for the inevitable loss of that capacity to feel. God only knew what pain they’d already endured while he had been locked up — another source of his feelings of displacement; he had been told only, and in the vaguest terms, that the children had been moved to Kyowaing, where the Forest Governor lived, and then to Bilin, and finally to a remote Karen village, while Khin spent most of her months away from them, trading on the road and vainly seeking news of him.