Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

But one afternoon, Gracie appeared at her bedside. Since Myee’s death, Gracie had seemed almost absent from her body. Now her eyes shone with warmth, with life, and she bent over Louisa and kissed her cheek. “The students have called a meeting at the university,” she said, and she went on to explain that a nine o’clock campus curfew had been put in place, along with other university regulations, prompting students to assemble in protest in the student union building. All of Myee’s friends would be there and, yes, probably Kenneth, whom Louisa hadn’t seen in months. “But forget him, Louisa,” she said, pressing Louisa’s hand to her eyes as if to stanch something. “He’s worthless if he doesn’t know who you are.”

Together then, without saying a word to Mama, and never speaking of Louisa’s new dread of mass gatherings, they took Daddy’s unused car and drove into the city. Already at the university, hundreds of protesting students were pouring out of the student union, which was positioned behind the main gate. “They’ve arrested our leaders!” one student called to them, and immediately Grace fell into step with the rally, beckoning to Louisa to join in.

Much as the students were undeniably on the side of freedom, their fist-pumping unanimity and the deafening pitch of their cries frightened Louisa. It was here that Aung San had held his “Burma for the Burmans” campaigns, here that Nu had risen with shouts and fist-pumps by his side. She stumbled, trying to keep up with Grace.

And then she saw him — saw Kenneth — standing near the gate, under a tree in the slanted light. When their eyes met, he smiled spontaneously, as if avowing his honest, abiding, difficult love for her. And just like that, all the difficulty between them seemed to subside. And catching her breath, and feeling a smile brighten her own face, she stood watching him on the edge of the glowing quadrangle.

“The army!” someone cried.

In the blur of what followed — the roaring of trucks, the swarms of soldiers surrounding the campus’s leafy gates, the bursts of smoke, of tear gas obscuring the quadrangle and making everyone instantly retch and burn and go half blind — in the heat of the students’ hurled insults and the soldiers’ frenzied efforts to shut the entrance and Louisa’s impulsive decision to drag Gracie out before it was too late — she lost sight of Kenneth. But out on the street, past the gate, quaking with Gracie like two slim, spared trees standing alone on a plain, she had enough time to take in the view of what was happening up ahead: the soldiers padlocking the entrance to the campus and drawing their guns up to their eyes. She had enough time to find Kenneth, standing in a group a few feet from where he had been.

Then the chaos broke open with an explosion of shots. And, as she grabbed Gracie’s hand and the two of them began to run away, she glanced back and found him one last time — still standing — but covered in the blood of the fallen.

At least a hundred had been killed, said the friends who escaped to their house later that night. Sitting under blankets in the living room, holding teacups with trembling fingers, these friends described to the family how the soldiers had shot into the crowd on and off for minutes at a time before finally opening the main entrance and dragging out bodies, some still squirming, and throwing them in stacks into the lorries to be scorched, dead or alive. The friends had managed to get out then, though many other survivors had fled to the dormitories, to the student union. “What about Kenneth? Did you see him?” “Yes, he was there. I saw him running into the student union.” “Thank God.” “Yes, thank God.”

The shakes and the guilt that had begun when Louisa and Gracie had escaped from the campus only intensified, and soon Mama was pulling them away from the group, drawing them a bath, and stripping them like children. “Your resistance is down,” she kept saying, her voice catching. “You will succumb to fever if you don’t release this from your bodies.” While they crouched in the bath, each half hiding from the visions behind the other’s eyes, Mama sang an ancient song and poured water over their backs.

“He will come,” Louisa said aloud, thinking of Kenneth, but neither Grace nor Mama replied.

Long into the night, after the friends had gone to sleep on mats spread out across the darkness, Louisa sat on the sofa, peering into the night, sure she heard Kenneth’s motorcycle on the highway. Instead the first light came, and she quietly crept from the house and released the car’s clutch and break, so that the car rolled noiselessly down the drive, and not even the soldiers sleeping in the guard hut bothered to wake.

It was a few minutes before six when she parked several blocks up from the campus. There were tanks on the hazy street corners and soldiers ranged along the gate, whose main entrance was opened slightly. Beyond it, she could make out the unassuming student union, its windows darkened, its lights turned off inside (had the soldiers shut down the electricity?). Something about the building’s solidity, its wider-than-tall design, assured her that the students within were likewise hunkered down, prepared to protect their right to outrage, along with their lives. Perhaps they had managed, those students, to catch a few hours of sleep within their bunker. And was he dreaming inside, she wondered, as he had been on the night they’d mistakenly fallen asleep together under the sky?

A month or so after their first encounter on the bus, they had sneaked out to the yard behind his brother’s flat in the city and lain down in the darkness under the trees, pressed up against each other’s heat. “You are so beautiful,” he’d told her. “So much more now that I know you.” Later, holding hands and looking up at the stars that had been watching them all their lives, they had talked jokingly of how many children they would be having. She’d surprised herself by saying she wanted four or five, and he’d laughed and said they had better get going. And then — without ever realizing they had fallen asleep — she was waking at daybreak to discover his sleeping face, still turned expectantly toward the sky. How peaceful he had seemed, how free of suffering and restlessness, his breath coming without a trace of discernible effort, his mouth almost smiling. She’d had the sense that if she touched him, roused him, a piece of his life — contained by sleep — would be released like a bird, and that she wouldn’t be able to catch it. And for a few minutes, in spite of the risk of being discovered by his brother, she had allowed herself to watch him continuing to sleep, at once far from and close to her.

Now, in view of the sturdy building reliably safeguarding his life, she was comforted again by the thought of him being contained, perhaps captured by sleep. And as if she were pressed up against his heat again, in spite of the street and the gate and the walls between them, she felt her longing for him spreading over the surface of her body. And it seemed to her that all her life she had been yearning for the closeness he had given her freely, much as she had imposed upon herself a sort of estrangement from others, born out of some inhuman service to strength. Wasn’t it this very distance — which she had been maintaining from her loved ones, from him, from her own weakness — that was to blame for his incapacity to trust her fully? Her impermeability to his fever — the unsteadying, infectious fever of his feeling — had left him cold, but she wasn’t cold; she was only afraid.

Across the misty distance, she saw several soldiers appear around one side of the building sheltering him. They were making hand motions, scurrying agitatedly toward the path leading to the street. Suddenly, a few dozen more rounded the other side of the building, and in a throng they all began to charge back toward the gate.