Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

The rest of the world. More and more, as his days of freedom sped by — as he played with the children, and plotted Rita’s release, and worked to restore for Khin a semblance of their old life — it became clear to Benny that there was something else he must do with his time, something directly pertaining to his wife and her people’s freedom. And that something had to do with beaming a message out from Burma to the other side of the world. But how? And precisely what message would he send?

One sweltering night he paced his study in nothing more than his underpants, mumbling to himself. “The problem. ” he said. “The problem. ” The clock on his desk ticked with extra force, as though to comment on the slowness with which he was trying to arrive at his inchoate point. He put out a cigarette and passed by the faltering light of the floor lamp. The problem was that there would always be problems among men, and neither Nu’s “unity” nor communism accounted for that, or allowed men to negotiate their problems through government. Only democracy did that. “But even if I believe that we are all brothers and sisters — in spite of our differences — deserving of the same respect. ” he said to himself. “Even if I believe it with all my heart, if you don’t believe it — if you abuse my brothers because you feel they are not yours, that they are inferior — then I am forced to protect the brotherhood you abuse.”

He lit another cigarette and smoked it broodingly for a minute, peering out his small open window at the moon. A breeze drifted in carrying the heavy scent of Khin’s flowering trees and of the rain dripping warmly from the rooftop. He might have still been in prison.

“Yes. yes,” he went on. He seemed to be picking up the trail of some truism. A man who lived in a state that, through Burmanization or the like, had vanished that man’s culture no longer had the right — the freedom — to choose to live as a member of that culture. He was in a kind of prison. So. He took another languorous puff. “What if we divide the country into ethnic states within a larger federal democracy? Each of those states could enjoy a degree of self-determination.”

Even as he said this, though, he felt defeated by hopelessness, by the humidity of the night, and by a host of problems that his solution would give rise to. “Bah!” he spat, putting out the cigarette with disdain. “In any case, the Burmans will never give up territory!”

“Daddy?”

When he turned with a start, his heart leaping, he saw Louisa standing in the doorway, her long braids stretching mournfully halfway down her nightdress. They seemed, those braids, to be a strange gesture to a childhood the girl had already left behind. She was tall for her age and undeniably beginning to develop, taking on the lines of a woman with all the attendant complications and sensitivities. Yet in her eyes he saw a young child’s need for reassurance. Lately, she’d been popping in on Benny when he least expected it, peering at him as if trying to ascertain how much of him had survived — how much of the father she’d once known remained in this house, indeed in this life that they were all trying to remake.

“Can’t you sleep, darling?”

“What are you doing?”

There was nothing insincere about the question, nothing snide or accusatory. Yet something about her eyes, about their impenetrable stare, made him feel cornered, small, utterly effete. They seemed to shine with worry, with her latent fear that he was now impotent. That what he was doing was nothing , merely a waste of time.

Through the window another saving breeze drifted in, and he had the sudden instinct to escape. But he found himself turning to her, as if she were the solution he had all along been seeking, and he stammered, “If you aren’t prepared to fight against injustice — if you aren’t prepared to risk everything to defend the liberty of all human beings—”

“Yes?” she said quietly, and he saw how pale and alertly frightened she’d become, fixed in the doorway.

“Go to sleep,” he said, more shortly than he’d meant to. And then, to soften her stricken face: “It’s very late.”

He met the two Americans at the Orient Club in April 1954.

He’d first seen them loitering at the bar, thumbing their drinks as they watched the couples on the dance floor floating by. Soon he was buying them another round and describing, as quietly as possible under the shrieking music, the editorials he’d recently submitted to American and British venues without response—“all in English, of course, and meant for a Western audience, but about Burma. You don’t have any contacts or know how a chap could go about getting something like that published? I thought perhaps the Times , or Newsweek —”

The younger, more amiable one of the pair seemed to appreciate his deference to their perspective, and put on a thoughtful face even as he continued to leer at the ladies, while the older one scrutinized Benny over the rim of his perpetually raised, seemingly untapped drink (or at least he looked older, with his uniformly graying thicket of well-combed hair, the paunch ill concealed by his wilted button-down, and the cumbersomely oversize glasses behind which he hid his assessing eyes).

“It’s got to be topical,” the younger one said. “I dabbled in journalism for a while, and I can tell you that you have to find a way to frame your story — link it to something people are talking about. Nuclear power. Or something friendly. Take Miss America — they’re putting the pageant on television later this year. Now, that’s a feel-good story. Also links into people’s dreams. Maybe you frame your story with the Miss Burma pageant— is there a Miss Burma pageant?”

“Communism,” the older one put in carefully. All along, he’d been observing the conversation, and now, pushing his glasses up over the slick bridge of his nose, he continued, just as cautiously. “Vietnam. The Domino Theory.”

“The Domino Theory ?” asked Benny. He hadn’t heard of it.

“Yeah, well, those are obvious,” the first spat. “I’m giving him an angle that’ll be unique .”

The older one didn’t cringe exactly, but his gaze seemed to retreat, to move inward, as though in shame, or in buried anger. What an awkward chap, Benny thought. He had the sense that the fellow’s unbecoming appearance — the wide rings of perspiration under his arms, the way the few pink pustules on his skin glistened — was caused less by the room’s stifling air than by a chronic hesitation and uneasiness within him. It was terribly clear he had little respect for the younger chap. So what was he doing with him here?

“I’m sorry,” the awkward one said now, setting down his drink and mopping his brow with his sleeve. “I have — I have a train to catch.” And without offering his hand to either of them, he lumbered away into the crowd, like an outcast.

For a while, Benny and the guy’s friend just stood remarking his clumsy retreat.

“What did you say brings you here?” Benny said finally.

The other, appearing even more relaxed, leaned back into the bar and began to eye the girls again. “Oh, we’re Bangkok based,” he said lightly. “Work for a corporation you wouldn’t know — building airstrips, that kind of thing.”

“May I ask the name?”

“Sure you can.” He flashed Benny a twitchy smile. And then he said, too brightly, “It’s called Sea Supply.”

The “falling domino” principle, Benny learned, was a term used by Eisenhower in a speech made earlier that month. “You have a row of dominoes set up,” Eisenhower had said, speaking of communism in Indochina, “you knock over the first one, and what will happen to the last one is the certainty that it will go over very quickly.” In other words: if one country in Southeast Asia aligned itself with the Communist Bloc, all of Southeast Asia would soon do the same — followed by the Middle East, if not Japan and Europe.