Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

He saw this bring a smile to Louisa’s eyes, if not to her mouth — and the light from that smile seemed to counter the room’s darkness and all the darkness of his memories of her as a girl. During the early days of the revolution, he’d carried a harmonica in his pocket, and though Louisa had always found a reason to dawdle in the room when he was playing it, though her eyes had often lingered on the thing if he left it out on the table, she wouldn’t openly acknowledge the interest she took in it, as her siblings did. “My father’s harmonica is much nicer,” she’d surprised him once by saying. “He bought me an accordion, but I had to leave it in Thaton. Will you be going to Thaton?”

“How many wives have you had, General?” Khin now broke in, straining to laugh.

He was unable to check his embarrassed grin — he felt it break hotly from ear to ear. “Lost count,” he muttered.

The response — and his awkwardness — clearly pleased Louisa, whereas Khin, thrown into a panic, began to ramble on about how welcome he was in their home, how lucky they were to have gotten their hands on tea today, how sorry she was that her younger daughters, Grace and Molly, were visiting friends, and how proud she was of Johnny, who was earning an advanced degree in finance in America, and who had prematurely wed. “He was only fifteen when he went abroad,” she said, gesturing for Lynton to sit in the chair across from her. “A mistake letting him go off to college so young, but he’d placed second in the national competition. Actually, he’d placed first, but the prize went to a government official’s son — do you know him?” She smiled nervously at Lynton, as if she’d committed a civil offense. Could it be she thought that he was actually in bed with Ne Win, and that the peace talks were a cover for something more tacit and sinister between them? “First prize would’ve taken him to Cambridge,” she quietly explained. And then: “Cambridge was what my husband wanted for him.”

Somewhere during the beginning of this speech, Louisa had disappeared, and now, with its apparent conclusion, Lynton allowed himself to peer into the dining room after her. “Is he here, Saw Bension?” he asked, trying to divert himself and Khin from the direction of his interest. He had come here to make amends with Bension, after all.

When he looked back, Khin was wearing an inscrutable expression — of her own swollen interest, of dashed expectations. “Always. Indefinitely,” she said. “He sits in his study from dawn to dusk, writing letters to America. Letters he can’t send. He thinks they’ll actually do something, the Americans.”

“About his case — his house arrest?”

She scoffed. “His house arrest? That’s a comfort to him! It gives him permission to lock himself up — with his writing, which he somehow believes will help the Karens.”

“And why shouldn’t it?” came Louisa’s voice. She’d reentered the room carrying a tea tray, which she proceeded to plunk down on the table between her mother and Lynton, as though she wanted to be sure of making it known that she resented everything he took that was rightfully theirs — tea, or her mother, or—

“Allow me,” he said, leaning forward to pick up the pot.

“Don’t be silly,” Louisa shot back, and got down onto her knees, into a position of false supplication, and poured tea for them. “Milk?” she said, dousing his tea with cream. “There’s nothing left in the sugar bowl.”

“I prefer mine unsweetened,” he said.

“You never much liked sweets,” Khin added.

“You’re above such human impulses?” Louisa asked him.

The question prompted his very human impulse to laugh — loudly and with relish — because years had passed since anyone had dared speak to him in this manner, and because the question’s insinuation of rage meant that something in Louisa was already fixed on him. But even as he laughed, he became aware that there was something physically wrong with the young woman. Her brow, lightly perspiring, looked wan in the soft light of the room, the shadows under her eyes more ancient than her (twenty-two? twenty-three?) years.

“Khin,” he found himself venturing, “would you mind if I spoke to your daughter alone?” The question seemed to surprise Khin less than it did him. How many times had he gone over his anticipated and alternative courses of action en route here? This decisive move hadn’t figured in any of them; yet the sudden surrender in Khin’s eyes told him she was well practiced at being passed over by her daughter’s fans. No sense having delayed the decisive blow if it had to come, he counseled himself, though he knew Khin’s suffering would be prolonged because of what they had shared. “There’s something official that I need to communicate to her,” he added.

Khin blinked at him for a moment and then stood, making a visible effort to hold up her head as she said, mouth quivering, “Of course. Of course.” A haze might have cleared, revealing to her with naked clarity her failure to recapture whatever it was he’d glimpsed in her all those years before. And she paled, as if in comprehension of that failure, just at the moment that he felt an unpleasant, uncustomary stab of guilt for having failed her — now and then.

What a reckless, cocky fool he’d been in his younger years, taking and discarding whatever he pleased with little regard for the fallout. But he had left Khin not only because he’d failed to be more devoted to her than to the war. He’d left also because of the child. Because of Louisa. Because of his concern about what the affair was doing to her.

“I’ll see to dinner,” Khin muttered, and crossed out of the room, as if to obey the trajectory of his thoughts.

For a while, neither he nor Louisa made a move. She was still kneeling and wouldn’t look at him, wouldn’t follow her mother’s exit with her gaze; she appeared instead to be looking inward, at some invisible record of trouble past and future.

“Sit,” he told her.

It was very difficult for him, in times of stress, to temper his instinct to give orders; the instinct still sometimes flustered him, yet it didn’t obviously unnerve Louisa now. She pushed herself up from the floor and sat across from him, while he fumbled for his cigarettes and held the package out to her. Without a beat, she leaned forward, took one of the cigarettes, and allowed him to light it for her. She was more in her element in her mother’s absence, he thought, and she was finally able to breathe a bit with the cigarette held to her lips.

“Mama doesn’t allow smoking in the house,” she murmured between draws. “And I don’t approve of it, either.”

“Forgive me,” he said, lighting up.

“Impossible,” she said with a smile, but it was a smile full of the sadness of her childhood — a childhood, he told himself again, in which his presence had been understandably resented by her. He had only wanted to help her then, to reanimate whatever spark of innocence and joy remained buried within her. But somehow his present interest in her (of an entirely different sort!) made him ashamed of the interest he’d formerly taken, as though that older interest had prefigured this one.

“I’d almost forgotten you were an unforgiving child.”

She looked squarely at him, curiosity — or was it pain? — settling down around that perfect mouth.

“You disapproved of everyone and everything, especially me,” he continued.

“Did I?”

“I called you ‘Little Grandmother.’”

This seemed to please her. She drew deeply again from the cigarette. “I don’t remember.”

“What happened to you after I left? I heard a plague broke out.”