Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Give it to me,” Louisa said, reaching for the bottle.

With a look of almost comical remorse, Gracie relinquished the innocuous thing, which Louisa quickly uncapped, and whose bitter contents she downed in several choked gulps. “There,” she said, wiping her lips. “Now you’ve done your job. And I hope you’ll be glad to know that so far it hasn’t taken effect.”

“Of course I’m glad,” Gracie said after a moment, but with such doubt and sorrow Louisa was instantly seized with regret.

There was very little she didn’t regret after that:

The party at the Government House to which she brought Kenneth (almost in defiance of Katie, Mama, and Gracie) and at which Kenneth noticed Ne Win’s generals leering at her behind. Their subsequent fight, instigated because she was unable to ignore Kenneth’s sullen irritation (“Just tell me what’s wrong.” “You really want to know? I can’t accept the foolish way you’re living. These ridiculous parties—” “Then you don’t accept me —don’t understand me. If you understood me, you’d know a person can be many things, some truer than others—” “And if you understood yourself , you’d see what you’re doing to arouse men’s lust—” “That’s not fair!”). Then the way she’d been unable to accept his copious expressions of contrition (he’d kicked the helmet of his motorcycle, swung around, fallen on his knees, and buried his head in her lap, saying, “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m senselessly jealous. Forgive me. Forgive me,” and she’d stroked his beautiful hair, but with fingers that had felt suddenly deadened).

If she’d been better at assuring him that night and in the aftermath of the fights that followed, if she hadn’t begun to build a wall around her innermost, secret self, would he have believed in her innocence when the tabloids — as if tired of the established newspapers’ championing of her as a symbol of harmony — issued reports all but naming her as Ne Win’s mistress (“Naw Louisa Bension Seen Leaving Ne Win’s Private Apartment at the Capitol,” “Naw Louisa Bension Accompanies Ne Win in State Vehicle”)? Of course it was ludicrous; she’d never in her life been alone with the man, let alone introduced to him. But instead of simply defending herself to Kenneth, she hid behind a wall of offended outrage and cool reason. (“Katie says Aung Gyi started the rumors — that he wants to hurt Ne Win.” “I thought you said Aung Gyi was devoted to Ne Win like a lover. It makes no sense.” “You’ve been with me every minute .” “Not every minute.”) She didn’t want to conceal her hurt from Kenneth, couldn’t help blaming him for the hurt she felt, yet unhappily found herself retaliating with hurtful aloofness, which only further provoked his suspicion — particularly when Katie stopped inviting her around and rumors began to swell that she, Louisa, was pregnant with Ne Win’s baby.

Of course she comprehended that it was possible to know that one’s beloved was innocent and simultaneously be lured by the temptation to believe her faithless — just as she comprehended that beneath the storm of Kenneth’s suspicion lay a wellspring of conviction about her strength of character and devotion to him. But she was so disappointed by his vulnerability to the rumors that she refused to admit the extent to which they were also tormenting her (“We hear you have very powerful friends,” her dentist said when she was in his chair; “Ne Win, Ne Win, Ne Win,” a group of boys at the university taunted her in the hall). If only she could have confessed that her family members’ cool refusal to address the subject of those rumors left her wondering if they, too, doubted her. If only she could have been patient with Kenneth instead of extinguishing every chance of tenderness with frosty rebukes. (“Can’t you see it’s better to clear the air and confess?” “If you think I’m guilty, leave. ”)

A kind of wickedness had thwarted his love of honesty and turned her honest protestations into something as wounding as gunfire. And one morning, on the second of March, after they had fought until nearly midnight beyond the sentry’s hut in front of her compound, and he had sped off on his bike, and a passing car had slowed and delivered her a volley of slurs, and she had walked up and down the highway in search of him only to return alone to the house to find Mama anxiously waiting up and peering at her with such frightened, accusatory eyes that she’d erupted into an unprecedented tantrum of returned accusation, shouting, “Why do you hate me?”—after all that, she woke with a headache to discover that they had all crossed beyond the portents of disaster. For the past week, U Nu had been quietly meeting with ethnic leaders to discuss the question of a federalist Burma, and in the middle of the night tanks had spread out around the capital and Ne Win’s troops had seized control of the government. U Nu, many of his chief ministers, and their minority counterparts had been taken into custody, and now the Burma Army was guarding the city.

“I have to inform you, citizens of the Union,” Ne Win announced in a radio broadcast at 8:50 that morning, “owing to the greatly deteriorating conditions of the Union, the armed forces have taken over the responsibility and task of maintaining the country’s safety.”

“Bloodless,” a subsequent report called the coup — but it wasn’t bloodless. The father of Gracie’s friend Myee had been one of the minority leaders meeting with Nu, and at two in the morning, when Ne Win’s soldiers had stormed into the father’s compound, Myee — darling, blameless sixteen-year-old Myee — had been shot and killed.

“I’m so sorry,” Louisa told Kenneth on the phone that evening. She had stretched the cord from the table in the hallway to her closet, where she crouched in hiding without understanding why.

For a long time, Kenneth was silent — so silent she could hardly hear him breathe.

Then he said, “I’m sorry, too, Louisa. Sorry that the life we all almost had is gone.”

The real end came four months later, in July 1962, after Ne Win had abolished the supreme court, the constitution, the legality of all but his ruling party — after he had staffed his Union Revolutionary Council with Aung Gyi and other army commanders and veterans of Aung San’s Burma Independence Army — after he had established his platform, the “Burmese Way to Socialism,” by which every sector of the society was nationalized or ruled by the regime.

Right away, government officials descended on the family property, measuring it; counting rooms, beds, vehicles; tapping phones. Right away everything was rationed, everyone made to line up for scanty provisions at army-run stores. No one knew quite what was going on. Was it true the soldiers were allowing up to eight potatoes per family, while guarding mountains of them that were going to rot? Was it true the soldiers were mixing bad oil in with the good, making thousands of people sick?

Don’t complain! The soldiers are quick to shoot.

Quiet! Remember the phone goes click click click.

No one knew what to expect, what to believe.

Was it true, what they were saying about Louisa — that she had gone to Hong Kong with Ne Win and married him in secret there? As confused as the Karen villagers who came inquiring about all of this, Mama alternately defended Louisa, snapped at her, and hid upstairs. And Louisa — overwhelmed by the truth and lies, by the justifications and the doubts, by the evident and the incomprehensible — choked on her food, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t go out in crowds, became pale and anemic, hyperventilated. The doctor came and administered tranquilizers, and she crawled into bed, sure she was dying.