Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“He is a white Indian?” she found herself asking.

The judge looked displeased by the question, yet turned to the officer and began to query him. At first the officer responded in hardly more than a whisper, though when the judge continued to press him, his answers became more forthright, it seemed to her, more emphatic and even impassioned.

“He knows nothing of our people, Khin,” the judge explained to her at last. “Doesn’t even know the difference between a Burman and a Karen, though he was born here. He is a Jew. I told him you are a Christian, that your mother would very likely require you to be married in a Baptist church, as you no doubt would like to be. Oddly, the prospect doesn’t deter him. He says, rather, that it endears you to him more, that he is, for all intents and purposes, half Christian.” For a moment, the judge appeared to be lost in thought, then he continued: “I imagine many of us Christian Karens are also half spirit-worshippers or half Buddhists when it comes down to it.”

But not me, she wanted to tell him. Oh, she was enough of a spirit-worshipper and a Buddhist, but she had secretly renounced her Christianity years ago — after what had happened to her father. No, the judge had misjudged her, and she must not allow herself to mislead any of them a moment more. Here she was, permitting a conversation about marriage to a man from whom she’d had the impulse to hide, a man whose language she could not even understand!

The boy stood up from his father’s knee and began tentatively crossing toward the officer, who, she saw now, was holding out a silvery object to him — a harmonica. The officer’s eyes lifted briefly to meet hers, and he flashed her the quickest, most natural smile. Then he lifted the shining thing to his mouth and blasted out a tune so absurd, so childishly playful and loud, they all began to laugh again, she with more sorrow than terror this time around.

“Can I play it?” the boy asked, holding his hand out.

The officer wiped the harmonica on his sleeve and presented it to the boy as a gift.

“Leave us, Blessing,” the judge told him.

The boy scampered off with his new treasure. In his absence, the officer’s question — what he had come for, his yearning for her — became almost unbearably conspicuous. She tried to wrest her eyes away from his, but something about his gaze claimed her again. My life is already yours, it seemed to say. When had she ever experienced such simple, undiluted feeling or desire?

“You needn’t feel pressured, Khin,” the judge said now. “This is just a first visit. I can tell him you need time. Perhaps we can send for your mother.”

“Where did he learn to play it?” she said. She supposed she meant the harmonica, though, again, her question surprised her.

The judge, looking vaguely exasperated, relayed her inquiry to the officer, whose eyes closed while he answered, as though he were searching through the recesses of a dark past for some scrap of lightness.

“He says he doesn’t remember,” the judge told her with more feeling now. “But he believes it was his mother who taught him. He says his mother wasn’t a particularly talented singer or musician, but that she made the most of her gifts, something he has tried to do now that he’s on his own. He says her voice was the only one that deeply mattered to him.”

She couldn’t speak for a moment, could hardly breathe or think clearly about what she ought to do.

“Hear me now, Khin,” the judge persisted. “I’ve seen terrible things in my profession. I consider myself a good judge of character. And looking into this man’s eyes, I see someone who is sincere. You owe him a sincere expression of your feelings, even if it’s just to tell him that you sincerely want him to leave you in peace.”

To be sincere would necessitate knowing herself, having a self that wanted to be known, having an instinct for life, rather than for death.

“Shall I tell him I’ll write to your mother then?” the judge said. “Or should I tell him to leave?”

She looked back at the officer, at his proud young features radiating longing. It suddenly seemed to her that she could see through to his marrow. That language was irrelevant. That he had no one else to turn to in the world.

And who was she to argue that the world was any different for her?

The marriage was at first a respite of a kind that neither of them could have anticipated — at least it seemed so to Benny.

To be sure, there had been the awkwardnesses of the wedding, conducted entirely in Karen, in a bamboo-floored Baptist chapel at the heart of the village where her mother lived not far from Rangoon. Khin was, as ever, beautiful in her long white traditional dress, with her hair swept up in a chignon that accentuated the endearing roundness of her face, her milk-white skin and shining dark eyes, and the yellow flowers tucked behind her ears. Yet she had seemed rather aloof here and there, rather distant, as if periodically floating farther and farther from his side at the head of the chapel, before all at once returning to the moment and gazing at him in an upsurge of warmth and reassurance.

True, her mother and sister had never smiled at him. The preacher was an effeminate, bespectacled type, whose fiery sermon seemed to warn against demons, against damnation (twice Benny thought he caught a reference to “Satan”); and the mother and sister absorbed his admonitions with such unblinking gravity that Benny found himself miming his terrified incomprehension of the sermon to lighten their mood. Khin, he thought, was too distracted to notice, whereas the rest of the congregation greeted his gestures with spontaneous laughter. Everyone, that was, but the mother and sister, who appeared concerned, though not necessarily about his fitness to marry Khin. Yes, something in their eyes, something about the recriminating way their gaze flicked over the figure of Khin beside him, told him that the person they stood in judgment of was his bride.

“You belong to her now,” the mother said to him, via the grinning preacher, who interpreted for him at the outdoor feast immediately following the ceremony.

“I’d be damned if I didn’t!” Benny gushed, trying to see beyond the coldness in her eyes, the flat line of her mouth. Even after the subsequent strained bout of translation, that mouth never wavered. Perhaps, he thought, she hadn’t understood him.

Like the ceremony, the festivities that followed were attended by a flurry of tittering village women and stony-eyed men, all of whom seemed continually to mock and admire him, and just as often to remark on his dimensions. (Could it be that they were laughing not only at the extent of his height and muscle mass relative to theirs, but also at his penis, which, in his trousers, was more pronounced than it would have been if he’d worn a sarong as their men did?) There was a certain bawdiness in their mirth, like nothing he’d encountered in life, which both won him over and caught him off guard. All the while, they were mindful of the specter of Khin’s missing father, to whom they often referred, yet with a worried detachment that only increased Benny’s sense of being an outsider and alarmingly ignorant of his new bride’s history and culture. “Very sad, but the way life is,” one man muttered in reference to the father and his presumed end. “He was a drunk and that is what happens,” another said. “Didn’t stand a ghostly chance,” the preacher more charitably offered, as he ate a plate of curry with his fingers. “Out of nowhere, dacoits!”

Dacoits, Benny knew by now, were one of the problems the British had long faced here. Burman bandits who roamed the countryside armed with sharp swords and faith in tattoos and magic, they were notoriously merciless, notoriously without conscience. “It’s a good thing you’re not signing up to be a police officer,” Ducksworth had once told him. “Knew one when I was a kid, a friend of my father’s, and the man was forever tormented by dacoits. I remember hearing him describe what a band of dacoits had done to a baby — pounded it into a jelly with a rice mortar right in front of its mother’s eyes.” “But why ?” Benny had said — meaning, What in God’s name did they have to gain by that? — to which Ducksworth had merely laughed, as though to imply that Benny was ignorant of a seething darkness that would someday come blindingly to light for him. And to a certain extent, all was still a darkness for Benny as far as the dacoits were concerned; their ruthlessness seemed to come indistinctly from the same source as the Burman nationalism now taking the country by storm, claiming anticolonialism as its cause. In the weeks before the wedding, when Benny had returned to Rangoon to set up their new flat on Sparks Street, he had been repeatedly confronted by the news that the former law student Aung San — the one who’d risen to the top ranks of those protesting with the rallying cry “Burma for the Burmans!”—had cofounded a new political party, which opposed backing Britain’s war with Germany, called for Burma’s immediate independence from the yoke of imperialism, and, for all Benny could see, emphasized the supremacy of the ethnic Burmans, thereby aligning itself with the master-race ideals of the Nazis (who, Benny learned from a recent radio program, had monstrously decreed that Jews over the age of twelve must wear an armband with a Star of David). Benny was only beginning to understand that to be Burmese —meaning, to be one of Burma’s natives — but not to be Burman was, in Burman terms, to be distinctly undesirable.