Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

She had only a few seconds to comprehend her molten, rising instinct to run — to scream — to rescue or warn him and the others inside the building. Then the blast came, so deafeningly she cringed and covered her ears in the jolted car, as another reflex compelled her to look up, to look for him in the pluming yellow cloud of debris, ascending with all the souls, and all the plaster and wood of the student union, into the vast breaking day.

On the eve of his thirty-eighth birthday, in March 1963, General Lynton of the Karen Revolutionary Council directed his driver to take him from the capital to Saw Bension’s compound in Insein.

He had come to Rangoon having recently broken off from the main branch of the Karens. The year before, Ne Win had seized state power in order to protect Burma from “disintegration” (to protect it, in other words, from U Nu, who had become increasingly responsive to the calls, from the Karens and other resistance groups, for a form of government that would have made the domain of the Burmans just one of many constituent ethnic states within the country). Under military rule, even Burmans had no right to dissent — hence the dynamiting of the student union building at Rangoon University by Ne Win’s troops and the subsequent arrest en masse of top politicians. Yet here Lynton was, along with various other resistance leaders, on the verge of peace talks with Ne Win.

Here he was, in the rear of a state-issued car, pulling up to the guarded gate of a political prisoner. Were the guards merely keeping Saw Bension in? Might they not also, because of Saw Bension’s famous daughter, be keeping the likes of Lynton out?

Not that Lynton was anything like one of Louisa Bension’s crazed fans. True, he’d managed to sit still long enough to suffer through the imbecilic plot of her latest film (no more romances or war stories for Ne Win’s public; it was workers’ struggles and the toiling of peasants for those ordered to march the Burmese Way to Socialism). True, he’d been maddened while watching this latest film not only by her beauty (an unsettling beauty, because it seemed to vibrate, to defy categorization or knowability) but also by her almost artless aspect of innocence. That innocence was something she had seemed to wander toward and away from even in her youth, when he’d felt guilty about depriving her of whatever innocence remained to her (she’d never witnessed anything specifically intimate between Khin and him, but he’d been there, in her father’s place). And to see her now on the screen (and in the newspapers, and in the magazines, and on so many billboards) was to see someone he might have unintentionally hurt and someone he couldn’t have —on account of his past with Khin, of course, and also on account of Ne Win, Louisa Bension’s purported lover, whom Lynton really shouldn’t risk offending given their agreement to a temporary cease-fire.

No, he wasn’t here to take Ne Win’s mistress, he reminded himself as his driver muttered curses at the guards, sluggishly fumbling with the gate, nor was he here to save her. His car at last passed into the compound, and he caught a glimpse of Bension’s hillside mansion, whose bombed-out wings gave it the appearance of a giant bird shot out of the sky and breathing its last gasps of air. He was here, he supposed, to purge Louisa Bension from his system. What better way to prove to himself that she was off-limits than to confront her alongside her parents, both of whom he felt he’d also wronged all those years before?

It was Khin, some minutes later, who came to the door of the crumbling house. Before either she or Lynton had said a word, he understood she would do it all again if given a window of opportunity. There was the way her eyes clung to his, in disorientation and then in relief; there was the way her nostrils subtly flared, as if she would laugh, or shed tears. She was still Khin, after all. He saw it in the faint lines around her eyes: all the old grace, all the old vanity and disappointment and vulnerability, and also the traces of selflessness that seemed to explain the streaks of gray now in her hair, the dusting of liver spots on her cheeks — spots that told him she was, or would soon be, past her childbearing years. And there was the residue of sweetness emanating from her like a scent. Strange how the mouth, the lips, hadn’t changed at all. And the irises — they were the same deep red brown, with the same frightened, gathering heat of desire.

“You found us,” she said breathlessly, her voice a notch lower than it had been before. Just as quickly, she seemed to grow embarrassed, and silently, awkwardly, she beckoned him in.

A moment passed before his eyes adjusted to the room’s darkness, but then a moment was all it took for him to comprehensively take in the room’s features. The first shots of the civil war had broken out across this house, he knew — but it wasn’t the damaged floorboards or torn cane sofa or crudely patched walls that spoke principally to him of the effects of war; rather, it was the silence, the stagnant quality of light and air, a sort of stifling absence of oxygen that suggested a lack of full-bodied, hopeful respiration. If this house was a monument to lives lost, it was also a testament to lives being lived in constriction.

He tried to return Khin’s desperate smile. She had closed the door behind him and now stood to his side, smoothing down her wrinkled sarong as her peering eyes echoed with unspoken questions. What had she just said — that he had found them? Suddenly, he sensed another presence enter the room.

“You’ve been impossible,” he said, forcing himself to remain focused for a moment more on Khin’s alert stare, “to avoid.”

“Have I?” Khin said, her voice trembling.

“I’m sure the general is referring to the reports in the papers,” came the other’s voice — unmistakably her voice, yet sparkling with a sarcasm unknown to her film personae.

He turned and found Louisa in the doorway giving onto the dining room. She was less substantial than she seemed on the screen, more haunted looking. Voluptuous, to be sure, but delicate, thinner in the face — more spirit than flesh. Yet her eyes caught his with a physical force. Like her voice, those eyes seemed to mock him, to mock the “reports” to which she referred — reports, Lynton knew, which had in turn mocked her by detailing the minutiae of her alleged affair, including not only a supposed abortion, but also a recent (and nonsensical!) stabbing by the ruler’s jealous wife. Each of the sensational stories had been accompanied by a damaging, though obviously manipulated, photograph of Louisa’s head affixed to another woman’s provocatively posed naked figure. One would have thought the pictures’ evident phoniness would act to exonerate her, but no. No, when the herd wanted to take refuge in an idea, it preferred to be blind to that idea’s opposite. Just the other day, Lynton’s car had idled on the street corner near a boy hawking tabloids whose cover image was matched in vulgarity (and inanity) only by the kid’s slogan, promising that Louisa herself could be purchased for the price of a coin— “Louisa Bension — one kyat!” And Lynton, who’d long propped himself up with the thought that he didn’t care a whit what the herd thought, had nearly emptied his pockets of kyats in order to buy up (and burn) every last paper the boy had to sell.

“What I like about our papers, the high and the low,” he now found himself saying to Louisa with an unintentional gruffness, “is that they don’t even pretend to be truthful or objective. I’ve been reported dead at least a dozen times — or so I hear. And by their count I have something like sixty-nine wives.”