Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Some days, the walking consoled her, as did the weariness of her limbs, the heaviness of the physical load strapped on her back. It diminished the burden of her heart, of her memory, of her powerlessness over what would be. More than once or twice, when she met with the eager advances of men whose paths she crossed — traders or soldiers or displaced villagers, just as unhinged from what had been — she was arrested by an old instinct to cease. To give them what they wanted would be to die unto the agony of missing her family, and also to be born anew in relation to others — others untainted by her private past and memory. She was so terribly lonely! But the mandate to move on — to walk and walk and survive as some version of herself for the sake of the children to whom she dispatched supplies — spared her the indignity. There had been Lynton, yes, and before him there had been Saw Lay, and each had made his impression. But there were no others.

Until that night when she was on the threshold of reunion with Benny. Nearly a year had passed since she had closed her sewing shop and sent the children away — away from the ruthlessness of not just the plague, but also the pious, gossiping women of Bilin. But in early November of 1950, she found an abandoned room in a quiet corner of the city, and she wrote to Hta Hta, asking the girl to bring the children back to her. News in Bilin, then still under Karen control, was that a man was standing trial for treachery, a Karen soldier whose own father had accused him of spying across the region for the enemy. Evidence was gathered, the man freely confessed to the crime, and a date was set for his hanging, the morning of which — before the children had yet returned to her — Khin appealed to the court to be allowed to question the prisoner to determine if he knew anything about Benny. The man was brought out to the visiting area with his hands cuffed together, his eyes already making an argument against reverence for his last moments of life. “I know everything,” he boasted to Khin after she had presented him with her case. “The man you speak of is in Insein Prison. Has been for years. A traitor to the state, they say. If you can get to Insein, if you can get through Burman-occupied territory, you’ll find Insein hospitable to Karens at this time.”

Her subsequent reunion with the children was painful and hasty. Within days of greeting them, she was kissing them good-bye. Disguised as a Chinese woman, she set out to cross through Burman territory. Benny was alive! But in what relation to his former being? It seemed to her that all of them — and not just the Karen traitor — were guilty of making an alarming mistake, that they had been meant to disperse, to get along, to live together, and even to lose themselves in one another rather than destroying themselves in the mutual effort to survive. And one evening, in a state of distracted worry, she stopped in the gloom to build a fire under the shelter of a stand of mangroves by a stream when she noticed some shrapnel on the bank and lifted her eyes to find a man under the trees. That he was a Burman soldier was immediately obvious to her: he was armed with a rifle and a sword, and wore the star of the Japanese infantry on his cap. Their eyes locked. Then she was turning to flee, and falling onto the bank, falling under his weight, a beetle skittering past her face as the soldier shouted out words that were a slur on Chinese.

Five evenings later, an old trader found her in a hut where she’d stitched herself up in the middle of a rice field. He recognized her from the road, brought her medicine from a clinic, and promised to look in on her children in Bilin. Shouldn’t she head straight to the comfort of those children? his anxious glances asked her. Yet she couldn’t bear the thought of bending into their embraces only to feel their awareness of something profound in her body and soul having changed, couldn’t bear to see the reflection of her horrified face in their eyes.

So it was that as soon as her swelling began to subside, she proceeded toward Insein, crossing nearly a hundred miles of swampy coastal thickets and clearings under the cover of several nights, understanding viscerally that at any moment she could be stopped, shot, done in. But before she arrived, a rumor reached her that Louisa had been slain during an invasion of Bilin. Wild now with terror, with the desperate wish to prove the rumor false, she reeled around, bursting back along the tracks of tangled land she’d just crossed. The earth itself seemed to have gone mad; though it was the dry season, rain came reproachfully, implacably, in unceasing torrents bent on impeding her progress. The surging tides, too, were a nemesis, as were the daylight, the roar of army trucks on the road, the questioning faces of the cared-for children in each village that she passed. Wanting to evade them, she plunged into forests lining the shore, into regions where bamboos and vines closed over her head, and where she cut tracks through the mud, through the vines, swearing to the fates that if she found the children, if she found them all alive, nothing would have the power to desolate her again.

Would she be able to enter Burman-occupied Bilin without being killed? It was a question that caused her to pause on the final morning, about twenty miles northwest of her destination, in a town called Kyaikto, the home of the old trader who had helped her, she remembered. And it was with the memory of his kindness and promise to her — his promise to look in on her children — that she stumbled along a row of shanties fronting a muddy stream, blindly hoping to catch sight of the elderly man and to receive, if not the miracle of good news from him, some wisdom.

Then, the vision: hundreds of feet down the muddy bank, in the haze of the weak morning, two small figures appeared, ambled to a launched boat, and climbed up onto it. Her profound sense of unreality, coupled with the impossible coincidence of the moment, didn’t allow her to believe that she was looking at Louisa and Johnny. Even when some force of nature compelled the figures to turn their searching faces toward her, she couldn’t trust the feeling rushing in — the feeling that they had all evaded the foreordained, or else intersected with the mysterious providence of grace. Maybe the children also doubted their eyes, because, as though equally unable to bridge the final distance between them, they merely watched her across it for a minute.

That minute was enough to return Khin to her body, to her awareness of its having changed in a way Louisa and Johnny might recognize. And when they soon broke from the boat, broke from their place on the bank, running and shouting, she opened her arms to receive them, yet she couldn’t go on to press them to her chest with complete abandon.

Even after the trader soon made arrangements for all of them, including Hta Hta and her Effie, to be transported to Insein while hidden in the rear of a lorry — even after they were home , confronted by the shock of limbs floating in their well and blood spattered across their walls and bullets falling from their trees when it rained — she couldn’t shake her sense of self-consciousness. Over the following weeks, she inadvertently kept her physical distance from her children, drawing away from their needy touches as if the toll she must pay for the staggering gift of their mutual survival was her isolation in her now-defiled body. A toll, she knew, that they also paid.

And when she finally faced Benny again in the visiting shed of Insein Prison, she couldn’t help exacting a similar toll from him. She took his weak hand, but she could not embrace him.

Now and then, during the several years that had passed since that time, she had the instinct to confess to him what had happened to her during the final days of their separation, how a soldier had fallen on her off the Gulf of Martaban and raped her until she had lost consciousness, and then roused her by slicing off one of her nipples and slamming her ribs with the butt of his gun. But to confess would have been to let Benny in again, to let out the cry that might never stop coming. It was easier, it seemed, to be distant. To be quietly hurt by his inability or unwillingness to notice how much she had changed. It was easier to escape to the Karen village across the highway, where the sick and needy whom she served had nothing to begrudge her and only surprised thanks to provide.