Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“You’re giving Daddy the wrong idea,” Johnny interrupted, sinking into a chair near Louisa. “You belonged to the audience. You were Miss Karen State.”

Louisa’s laughter had dropped off, and now she looked at her brother with a sort of distressed solemnity. “That’s sweet,” she said.

“It’s not sweet,” Johnny told her. “It’s undeniable.”

She seemed to be waiting — and hoping — for the compliment to take the usual turn, to veer into a brotherly bout of teasing, but Johnny just allowed his statement to breathe in the air. And Benny was left to contemplate the silence within his other child, his son, who suddenly looked older and sadder to him, and so unlike the little boy who had scrambled around this room before the revolution. They had never really recovered from their separation, he and Johnny. Somehow, the chasm that had been opened between them was already, even at the time of their reunion, too wide to be bridged. Benny hadn’t been there to protect him from other men’s influence during the important years. And that, too, must have been part of what was inexorably separating them, that influence of other fatherly figures — or of one in particular — something the boy himself seemed forever to be arguing against. He was thirteen now, Johnny, and so smart with figures — determined, or so he said, to become a “businessman” like Benny, though the fact of Benny’s present business failure obviously troubled the boy. He often complained about the injustice of their poverty, and had recently taken to reading books on economics and finance, as though in them he might find his own solution to the problem of their oppression. But the books, or what he discovered in them, seemed only to oppress him further; sometimes he sauntered around the house with the look of someone reckoning with the terrible limitedness of his own future prospects, the terrible narrowing of his view, a view that gave way only to obscurity. And Benny wanted to urge him to shake off his hopelessness, to remember the greatness that no amount of money could buy: the greatness that could be achieved only through a more forgiving reckoning — with life, with its painful truths, and with its beauty. But how could you force someone to see beauty before which injustice finally paled in significance? How, when Benny himself so often was blind to it?

Now, sitting in the darkening room with his children, in the presence of their unsounded thoughts, Benny was possessed by awareness of the moment’s perfection. In another moment, this one would be gone — he couldn’t hold on to it. And he seemed to see that this moment— exactly this — was what he’d been endeavoring to reach all along. This moment of sitting with his children, on furniture that was so familiar it seemed to be extensions of them, pieces of their existence. This shared, comfortable silence, while outside the night encroached, with its secret sounds, a siren on the highway, the threats they didn’t have to mention to comprehend.

In the darkness, he heard Louisa sigh, and then she sat up with a reluctant smile, and turned on the lamp by her side, and said, “Time for bed.” And she stood and crossed to him and caught his hands in her delicate ones and kissed him on the head — something her mother would have hated because even to touch an elder on the head was to show him disrespect. “Good night, Daddy.”

Then it was just Johnny facing him — Johnny, with those sad, large eyes, with that simmering intelligence and intensity that put him at risk. Looking at him in the glow of the lamp, watching how he began to nervously fidget — pulling at the knees of his trousers, and then drumming his fingers on the arm of his chair — Benny had the terrible thought that the boy was beyond saving.

But he said, “How have you been doing, Johnny?”

The boy’s glance flitted up to meet his. It was clear from that glance that Johnny had come into the room with something to say. Benny could feel it now, the pressure of whatever it was on Johnny’s mind exerting itself on the air between them.

“All right,” he said. “School is hard sometimes. Not the work — that’s too easy. I mean other people.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Just the usual meanness.”

“That’s disappointing.”

“I guess so.”

“Is there something on your mind?”

He sighed, as though to leak out some of that pressure building up in him. “Not especially,” he said. But he turned his eyes more fully to meet Benny’s, so that Benny was taken by their dignity, by their handsomeness and gravity. “I was talking to a kid at school,” he said. “A government official’s son. He was bragging about how they got money out of the Americans. I guess the Americans have too much wheat. Hundreds of millions of bushels more than they need. Their government wants to keep their wheat prices high, so they have to subsidize it, offload the wheat, sell it abroad, or even dump it at a ‘special’ price. And I guess that’s what they did here. Sell it at a loss — of something like five million dollars. But they got something else for it, for the five million. They made our government put all of it in a bank here on deposit.”

Listening to his son’s story, Benny felt an old tug — their want of money, and his instinct to meet that want, to fight. Recently, one of his prison mates had spent the evening with him, prodding Benny to gamble, and Benny had been so thrown by the losses that he’d felt driven to raise the game’s stakes, until finally Khin had burst in on them with a wad of cash with which she’d all but chased the friend away.

“Why would the Americans do a thing like that?” he said to Johnny now, trying to keep the curiosity out of his voice.

“I’m getting to that,” the boy said with impatience. “See, the money’s supposed to be used for Americans —to lend to them if they start doing business here. And the point is the money’s just sitting there. It’s been a year at least, and no one’s touched it, no one’s come forward, because no one knows about it. Our government’s not going to say anything. And I thought. ”

No doubt the boy was onto something, but pursuing that something could lead him only deeper into the void. America, the Burmese government: he was no match for them. Johnny’s sights were fixed on the darkness, and Benny wanted to tell him to turn to the light.

“I thought,” Johnny continued, “with your American—”

“ My American?”

Johnny blushed, a kind of fury rising to his dark eyes.

“Have you been reading my journals, Johnny?” Lately in those journals, Benny had begun to address Hatchet directly — to address the American with the outrage of a person abandoned by someone trusted, by someone almost cherished — and the thought of the boy seeing that was deeply upsetting.

“The money’s just sitting there,” Johnny said again. “If he knew about it — if he knew how much there was—”

“What?”

“You could go into business with him. Show him how it works here—”

“And you think the Burmese government would dutifully hand the money over to him — that he’d dutifully hand me my cut? Listen to me, son — listen to me clearly — you’re going about this all wrong. You can’t work with them and expect any personal gain. They’ll listen, they’ll suck up your intelligence, but then they’ll leave you to rot with your recriminations.”

He wanted to go on — to speak of the beauty that had mostly evaded his own notice, the beauty that Rita had helped him to see. But the thought of all that made him feel foolish suddenly.

And Johnny said, with a contempt that further shamed him, “The money’s just sitting there. You’re just sitting there. I’m not going to sit here with you and suffocate!”