Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Increasingly, he shut himself into his old study, retreating from Khin’s beseeching looks and the younger children’s noise with the excuse that he was coming up with a business plan. (“For.?” “Pharmaceuticals. An import business. I have a Swiss contact. Perhaps you’ve heard of La Roche?”)

“Have you finished the plan?” Khin would ask after nervously popping in on him.

“Still working the figures,” he’d say. How he pitied her! She still held out hope that the man in front of her could be restored to the man she’d thought significant.

In the widening space between them, he seemed to see shadows of the men she had known during their days apart. ( “Passing in and out like shadows with erections” —wasn’t that what Ne Win had said?) What did Khin need him for? She had survived and supported the family without him.

“I’ll turn in, then,” Khin would say at last, looking weary and defeated.

And in her absence, the silence of the house would become excruciating.

And standing to follow her, he would confront his reflection in the oval mirror by the door. And before he could turn off the kerosene lamp, he would see his face staring back at him, fallen, with puffy drooping eyelids and a twisted glistening mouth — haunted — but still somehow gasping for air.

He had been afraid that, up close, Rita’s soul would be less recognizable to him, or that, on the contrary, their recognition of each other might be so complete that he would have no choice but to call an end to his marriage. But as soon as he was led into the visiting shed, nine months after his release — as soon as he saw Rita sitting in the failing light — he knew he had no reason to fear. There was a kind of silent declaration of being emanating from her skin. It filled him to bursting with compassion. It made him want to shout with regret, with rage over her aloneness and constriction. But not with passion.

For a while they just observed the unexpected awkwardness of sitting together. He sank into the rickety chair across from her and allowed her to take him in: middle-aged (could it be he was really only thirty-two?), wrecked of body, somehow surfacing from a grief as profound as any he’d succumbed to in his life. And he confronted the realness of her face, her extraordinary thinness, which seemed to have something to do with the faint lines over her thickly lashed amber eyes, with the knot of her wiry hair, and with the dryness of her fine fingers resting on the lip of the table. He didn’t want to notice her dissimilarity to what he’d imagined, her slight and innocuous imperfections, but, yes, the animal in him confirmed what it had sensed the moment he’d walked in: that he was safe from chemical interest in her, and just as helpless not to give off cues that would tell her as much. Would she be disappointed?

As if to prove to him that she was beyond either baseness or judgment, she broke into that familiar expression of generous kindness — her smile! — and he had to look back at the door for a moment in order to conceal his sudden rush of emotion.

“I don’t see Zay,” he muttered stupidly.

“Who?”

Her voice! Even with this simple, banal question, it resonated with gentleness, centeredness.

He turned back to the vision of her still smiling searchingly at him. “I tried to come before,” he stumbled. “Several times. But they were intent to have me wait only to turn me away. Once I brought a cake — a pineapple cake Khin made—”

Was he imagining that a subtle change came over her face at the mention of Khin’s name (which he hadn’t meant to mention), a diminishment of her smile’s generousness, a closing of her eyes’ vast reach? Or was it only that he was seeing her through the lens of his own intensified embarrassment — about being sorry for recklessly mentioning his wife, about having lied to that wife by repeatedly claiming to be visiting an old business colleague, about knowing— knowing , now — that he did belong to Khin.

“One of the guards,” he persisted, “had a fine time turning the cake into a pulp with a rod, looking for razors or some such thing. And then today, they waved me in with no trouble at all. Makes no sense.”

Whatever hesitation he thought he’d seen narrowing her features was gone, and it sent him into a faltering silence, through which her smile (of empathy? of remorse?) only deepened.

“Your voice,” she said after a moment. “It’s much lower than I’d expected.”

“I’m surprised you didn’t hear it in your cell. Have a devil of a time keeping it down.”

He’d often seen her laugh, but to hear laughter falling from her lips in such loose, forgiving waves filled him with warmth, with worry for her, with guilty awareness that though he loved her, their romance had ended the moment he’d left prison.

“I wish I’d heard your voice when you were here,” she said. “It would have been something. ” But she couldn’t finish, and he had to glance back at the door again.

“I thought,” she said after a pause, in that gentle, steadying voice of hers, “that maybe you wouldn’t visit.”

The vulnerability of the confession, like a hook under the ribs, drew his gaze back to hers. How nakedly, how honestly, she faced him.

“What I mean is that I miss what we had, Benny. The writing. But I would give up all communication, keeping in touch, if it hurts you. If it keeps you from your life and the world. I wouldn’t want you to hold back on my account.”

Was that what he’d been doing?

He was too moved by her humanity to answer, to do anything but reach across the table and take her thin, cold hand in his. Silenced, she stared with choked relief into his eyes, and he clung painfully to her hand, aware that he was being rescued by her again, though not in the way she would have wished.

Time took on its old sprinting character after that day, when he determined to claim as much time as he could — with his children, in service of emancipating Rita, and for Khin, the woman from whom his time had been stolen.

The truth was they hardly saw each other anymore, he and Khin. Of late she had begun moving some of her personal items into one of the guest rooms, as if to decamp from him, and she often headed to the Karen village across the highway to tend to the sick or deliver a child (or make love to a better, kinder, bolder man, Benny had to wonder). When they did pass each other in the hall or kitchen, he felt her looking at him with respectful, frightened anticipation, as though she were waiting for him to speak the words that would restore them to the closeness they had once almost perfectly shared. But he somehow couldn’t come up with those words, couldn’t manufacture passionate gestures. And anyway, there were other kinds of loving gestures to be made, he assured himself — ones just as expressive of his investment in their marriage and her happiness.

The government was swiftly nationalizing companies, and their family had been limping by on sales of ice, which he no longer had the rights to distribute, and by selling off pieces of their property. At last, he earnestly tried to put together an import deal with La Roche. He had developed ties with some of its executives at the height of his prosperity, and they were intrigued now to learn what Rita had disclosed to him in prison: that Rangoon General Hospital had long been perilously short on medications. (It didn’t hurt that pursuing this particular line put him in regular touch with the hospital chief and officials in the health ministry — any one of whom, Benny was convinced, could maneuver Rita’s release in return for certain favors.)

Under the cover of this La Roche business, in the shadow of the broad black (government?) car always trailing his own decrepit one, he was also putting together a dizzying picture of what time had done to the country. Just as Aung San had, U Nu was beating the unity drum, claiming to want to overcome discord among the ethnic groups (“to convert their clanism into patriotic nationalism so that any insult or threat to the Union becomes as unbearable as an insult or threat to one’s family” were the prime minister’s words); yet the programs Nu had recently put in place promoted what Benny thought of as a Burmanization of the country. There was Nu’s mandate that only Burmese could be used in governmental affairs and in schools, and that history be taught from a perspective of Burman nationalism; then there were his Ministry of Religious Affairs’ loud efforts to spread Buddhism. Lately Benny had heard rumors, from vendors sporadically floating up his drive, of other more hushed-up discriminatory policies — including the government’s stripping of land from “foreigners” (even those whose families had lived in Burma for centuries) and the widespread denial of applications submitted by minorities for licenses, loans, and citizenship. He wouldn’t have been surprised should the prime minister decide to scrap the country’s anglicized name along with the foreigners, and rechristen the place Myanmar in honor of the Burmans’ more erudite word for their own ethnic group. At least then it would be obvious to the rest of the world— wouldn’t it? — that this government had an agenda to monopolize power for the Myanmar people.