Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“You do realize that my interest has always been in what Burma’s peoples want to see happening to this country—”

“Don’t be naive.”

“Excuse me?” Benny was surprised by the emotion in his own voice — by the high, hollow inflection of hurt.

“Sebald’s perspective,” the American went on, “the State Department’s perspective, is that the Burmese government is inherently anticommunist. That it enjoys broad popular support among its citizens and therefore deserves our support and understanding.”

“I see.” What had Benny expected of the United States? What, really, had he expected? After all the hopeful, stupid editorials he’d dispatched to their papers with no response. His opinion didn’t matter, because Burma’s peoples didn’t matter. Burma mattered only so far as it posed a problem for the countries that did matter: America, China, Russia.

But Young wasn’t finished. “And because Sebald equates the local opposition groups with a threat of communism—”

“That’s insanity—”

“Because he believes groups like the Karens are uniformly left-leaning, he argues strongly that the United States should be working to strengthen the Burmese central government and its army in order to assist in the opposition’s liquidation.”

“That’s the term he uses—‘liquidation’?”

“It’s a common term to use in these kinds of cases.”

“And does Sebald have Eisenhower’s ear?”

“Certainly. To an extent.”

“And yet here you are.”

“We’re not all State Department.”

The rain had fallen off. When Benny, all at once desperate for air, stood and went to the window and cracked open one of the shutters, he could smell oil coming off the clean-washed tar road.

“It’s important to keep that window closed,” the American said quietly.

A distant figure walked briskly along the road, and something about the sight of that solitary human seemed an outward expression of the incredible sense of abandonment that Benny had been carrying around for nearly all his life. Yet at this very moment he was just as keenly aware of the proximity of, if not a possible friendship with Young, a balm to his isolation. He drew the shutter closed and turned back around.

“You still haven’t told me what you want with me, Mr. Young.”

“It’s Hatchet.”

“Say again?”

“My code name. If I contact you going forward, that’s how you’ll know me.”

It was as if Benny had finally fallen off the ledge on which he’d been trembling — not of his freedom, precisely, but of time. He could have been back in his old cell. He could have been back with Saw Lay, hearing afresh his old friend’s admissions and forewarnings. “Should someone who goes by the name of Hatchet reach out to you. remember to consider the question of trust, Benny.”

“Hatchet?” he heard himself utter breathlessly to the man, who seemed to be nothing less than an intruder on what had been. “Doesn’t exactly ring of trust . One could easily imagine it implies an agenda on your part to cleave the unwelcome elements from the body of Burma. And is that what you’re trying to do with me, ‘Hatchet’? Acquaint yourself with another Karen all the better to eradicate the opposition? Saw Lay warned me about you.”

The American pulled his glasses away from his face, as though to hide from Benny’s recognition of him.

“It was you , wasn’t it?” Benny said to him, remembering “the American” whom Ne Win had described to him in the Barr Street lockup, the “CIA man, no doubt,” whom Karen leaders had been trying to meet in Thailand before they’d been butchered on the banks of the Salween. “The American our leaders trusted,” Benny sputtered now, “the one they were attempting to get to when they were ambushed and Saw Lay escaped. And were you the one who gave Ne Win’s ‘Butcher’ the tip about their location?”

For a minute, the man’s unfocused eyes seemed to cringe from some terrible vision beyond Benny. Then he put his glasses on. “I can’t say if you should trust me, Mr. Bension,” he said, a quaver of emotion in his voice. “I can’t say I trust myself with any of this. But I was trying to assist Saw Lay and the Karens. Not all of us forget what you people did for us. And I’m as upset as any of you about Ne Win’s brutality. I can’t do this alone.”

“Do what ? What is it that you are trying to do exactly?”

The man swallowed deeply, as though to keep down some unpleasantness destined to come out between them. “After the revolution broke out,” he tentatively began, “Saw Lay introduced me to someone. A battalion commander in the Karen army — someone named Lynton.”

Lynton. Benny had a vaguely disconcerting memory of having met a fellow by that name back in Khuli, when so many strong Karen soldiers had trudged through the village on their way to the front lines.

“He and Saw Lay served together in special operations under the British. I only met the guy once — but it was enough.”

“Enough?”

Something like exuberance crept to the edges of the American’s eyes — and of his voice. “You see, I’m just like you, Mr. Bension. I’m trying to find a solution to the Burma problem. And I believe Lynton can play a key role in that. In a pan-ethnic, anticommunist opposition coalition — one that could eventually influence the center. The problem has been making contact . Lynton’s notoriously quick, impossible to catch, to intercept. Last time I talked to Saw Lay, a couple of weeks before they got him, I asked about the guy, what he was up to, and Saw Lay said. ” A blush rose to the fellow’s cheek, so that Benny felt almost sorry for him. “He said if I wanted to know about Lynton, I should ask your wife.”

Sometimes when Khin thought of the period after Lynton had quit her bed — when she thought of how in desperation to provide for the children she’d started trading in peanut oil and cheroots and betel leaf, becoming part of an imprecise network of traders hawking their wares at open markets across the hot, wet, forested hills of eastern Mon State — what she remembered was the hours and hours, the weeks and months of walking. Walking without the burden of anyone or anything but what she had to trade.

What she remembered was the fog, the damp, the rain that came slanting across the sky like relief, the watchful trees, the hungry mothers at the markets, the muddy paths that ruined her feet, the vastness of the peaceful sky, and the fields and fields of rice. Certain days, she would head out into the depth of those fields — unsure of whether she was crossing into enemy territory — and the lush green stalks seemed to regard her, in turn, an indistinct figure walking in an indistinct place.

What she remembered was the burned-down villages and gouged, fallen bodies crawling with mosquitoes. And the sweat. Her sweat. Her smell. And the coldness of the Salween River’s tributaries. Sometimes she would be squatting by a river, building a fire for the night or cooking herself a bit of rice, and she would have the instinct to tell one of the children to take care not to fall into the current. Or she would be caught in a heaving crowd at a market, and someone would all at once see her, and she would be seized by the desire to divulge her suffering — to speak of her four children, of the husband who might be dead or alive. It seemed to her then that the roof of the sky had been ripped off, and that they all had been left to wander aimlessly in an unending night.

Sometimes during that period, to banish the lightness of her solitude, she spoke to Benny, heard his voice in the wind’s sighs. This unknown is unendurable, she told him. And once she heard him reply, Someday, after we are gone, the unknown will come to light. She had no idea what he meant, didn’t care to muddle this moment of communion with misunderstandings. How will I find you in the meantime? she asked. Keep looking, she heard him say. And she shivered with the thought that he’d been referring to the afterlife, and she saw herself shrouded and bent over, doomed to wander and wander in search of him and safe territory, like all the Karens, for all eternity.