Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

There was no reason to assume that Eisenhower’s theory justified the strange American duo’s presence in the country. Yet something unsettled about each of the fellows had left Benny to wonder if their feats of engineering with Sea Supply were really as modest as “building airstrips” and “that kind of thing.”

It turned out Benny didn’t have long to wait for his answer. In July, the broad black car that had been increasingly tracking his excursions from the compound through the rain followed him as far as the American embassy, to which he’d been invited for a casual reception as the guest of one of his La Roche contacts. Soon enough, he found himself standing shoulder to shoulder at the buffet with the American ambassador himself — a scrubbed-pink, arrogant sort called Sebald, who looked like just the type to live in terror of catching some vile disease, and to whom Benny wasted no time emphasizing the country’s need of more access to good medicine.

Yet Sebald couldn’t be bothered to dignify Benny’s attempts at conversation with even the briefest look of interest. Instead, the ambassador scooped himself dollop after dollop of gelatin salad, and then stared unhappily at the glistening green mound on his plate.

“I’ll tell you what I find interesting,” the man suddenly announced, straightening himself up and smiling with satisfaction into Benny’s face, which appeared to look keenly foreign to the foreigner’s eyes. “The natural resources in this country. Can you imagine the benefits through trade? It all depends on reinforcing internal security. ”

But Benny, having drawn back from the liquored haze of the man’s breath, was already noticing something else— someone else — scrutinizing him from across the crowded banquet hall. It was one of the Americans from the Orient Club, the older, awkward one, with the oversize glasses and the cautious gaze. He was standing, clutching his drink, and staring at Benny with a kind of focused alarm, as though to say that he’d seen everything, and knew all about Ambassador Sebald and all about Benny.

As though to say that in this nest of vipers, he alone was an ally.

That same day, after Benny contrived to cross the banquet hall to the American, who offered him a drooping hand and a covertly extended damp card that read “William Young, South East Asia Supplies Corporation”—that very night, as planned during a brisk telephone conversation, Benny showed up at a dingy guesthouse with no evidence of having been followed, and there he was, William Young, opening the door, with his paunch and his rumpled shirt and his carefully combed nest of hair and his glasses, which he pushed up his nose before uneasily beckoning Benny inside.

“You want to sit there?” he said to Benny, gesturing to two chairs at the foot of a hastily made bed, beside a window whose sealed shutters seemed intent on closing in the room’s heat, its sourness. But there was no odor of insidiousness that Benny could detect as he sat and took in the meager quarters: a table with a clock and a typewriter and an untidy pile of papers, a lamp without a shade, a door open to a view of a primitive lavatory. No personal effects, no suitcase or book or evidence of liquid drunk or food eaten. Save for the decrepit toilet and the bed with its bunched mosquito net, the room was stripped of every sign of human need and weakness. A temporary holding place, without question; but also a sort of description of the American’s provisional character. What did he do to satiate himself? Benny wondered. And for love? Perhaps he consumed what he required as expeditiously as possible, taking care of his human urges shyly out of view of the rest of his life.

“I’m afraid I don’t have anything to offer you,” the American said, so redundantly it almost caused Benny to laugh, until he saw the nervous, disheveled way the fellow seated himself across from him.

“Mind if I smoke?” Benny said. “I’ve become enslaved to the habit in recent months.”

The American raised himself from his seat and lumbered to the lavatory, returning moments later with an unwieldy glass ashtray that he must have kept alongside his toothbrush. “I guess you’ll have to hold it in your lap,” he said, thrusting the ashtray at Benny.

“That’s fine,” Benny offered with forced joviality. He was trying to dispel the tension in the room, and indeed it was almost agreeable, lighting up and filling the sour air with the bittersweet scent of his tobacco. Rather than face each other, they sat listening to Young’s loudly ticking clock and to the sounds of the night — the spattering of rain and a volley of honks outside the shut window. They seemed to be observing their shared atmosphere of smoke, as though it might unveil some possibilities between them.

“You do have me wondering why I’m here,” Benny said finally, noticing that the American’s face was now beaded with sweat. “Perhaps you could tell me what exactly you do at Sea Supply — or South East Asia Supplies Corporation. Do I have that right?”

Young appeared to retreat further behind his glasses, even as his eyes darted to the cigarette at Benny’s lips (in disapproval?). With a certain rebellious impetuousness, Benny found himself leaning forward and offering him the cigarette, which the man considered with astonishment before accepting. He put it awkwardly to his distressed lips. “Maybe you’ve heard,” he said, shoving the cigarette back at Benny, “about a group of Chinese who’ve based themselves inside Burma’s borders. For the past few years, they’ve been trying to stage attacks on the Chinese Communists from Burma. It’s sort of a secret war that’s mostly come to an end and that we were secretly assisting.”

“We. ” Benny ventured.

“My job was to coordinate the transfer of American arms — arms and ammunition — from Okinawa to these people’s airstrip in Shan State. Under the radar of the Burmese government, of course. U Nu doesn’t want to give China the impression that he’s in any way supportive — he has to toe the neutralist line between the West and the Communist Bloc. And also under the radar of most of our own people. Ambassador Sebald. The State Department.”

“But why under the radar of your people?”

The American turned his head slightly, so that the lenses of his glasses caught the lamplight.

Benny took a different line. “I can only assume that Sea Supply is some sort of Central Intelligence Agency front. And that if this secret war is mostly over, it has mostly ended unsuccessfully. What are you and your Sea Supply associates still doing here, Mr. Young?”

The American turned to Benny now with a kind of sorrowful frankness. But just as quickly, he bent over and pulled the ashtray away, silently urging Benny to put out his cigarette; and then he stood and made for the lavatory, no doubt to dispose of the evidence of the intimacy and transgressions they had just shared. Watching him, Benny seemed to see a picture of the man’s entire life — the waking each morning in a sweat, the standing under a cold shower, the nights of stifled sleep, and, beneath it all, that private sorrow, that aloneness. Perilous, the instinct Benny had to identify with the stranger.

When Young returned to his chair, he took refuge in his habit of adjusting his glasses, yet there was something defended, something determined, presently animating his gaze. “You need to watch what you say around Sebald,” he told Benny. “Ambassador Sebald has a certain perspective. It makes him suspicious of people like you.”

“Like me ?”

“What you described to me that night when we met — your editorials, your vision of a Burma with different ethnic states, one of them being Burman, a federal system — that’s the last thing someone like Sebald wants to see happening to this country.”