Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Now the lights in her features dimmed. She stubbed out her cigarette on a saucer. “What happened,” she echoed, gazing down at the butt, or back at the time when they’d parted. Abruptly, her eyes lifted to his. “What happened,” she said, “was that we were sent away, and for nearly a year none of us much saw my mother. I still don’t understand why, when the plague had run its course, we weren’t swiftly brought back to her.” She paused, as though he might be able to explain what she couldn’t understand. “Do you remember Hta Hta?” she went on. “The servant who was pregnant? She’s still with us.” She gestured vaguely toward the kitchen. “She’d been raped after Mama left us in Kyowaing. And she was the one to accompany us to the village on the plains of the tigers when we left Bilin. Every other week, I had malaria. I would shake with chills and want Mama, but. ” Her eyes darted back to the package of cigarettes on the table in front of him. “May I have another?”

Again, he held out the package to her, and she took a cigarette and put it between her lips as he lit it.

“I loved that little village,” she said, audibly aiming for a lighter note. “A tiger came to prowl around our hut at night, because Hta Hta’s baby had been born in sin — or so the villagers said. I was baptized there, in a pool so deep it was said to have no bottom. The minister thought he had convinced me to be baptized to atone for Hta Hta’s and my mother’s sins. I felt very old, as though my childhood were far behind me.”

“See? Little Grandmother.”

Now she smiled openly, laughing along with him for a while. But as if to subdue herself, she all at once put out her cigarette.

“You have a right to personal happiness,” he said.

Instantly, he saw that she was affronted by the sheer presumptuousness of his words. And what the hell had he meant? That she could do better than Ne Win? Better than self-imposed house arrest? That he, of all men, could liberate her from the constraints of a sadness that reached back to her earliest childhood?

“Is that some sort of Americanism?” she said. “The right to personal happiness—”

“Americanism?”

“Do you always think in such facile, all-or-nothing terms?”

Up to this point, he had felt fairly sure of himself, if not of his swiftly altering tactics of engagement with this woman. “Yes,” he tried. “Absolutely. I’m all for ‘all or nothing.’” When she didn’t laugh, he gestured toward the reaches of the oppressive room. “Locking yourself up in here, that is submitting to unhappiness — isn’t it?” He smiled — he couldn’t help it. “And it calls for revolution.”

“Interesting, coming from a man presently in peace negotiations.”

“Marry me.”

For a few seconds, she merely studied him, as though gauging the sincerity of his expression, of his request. Then she broke into a laugh that rang with all the fanaticism of hatred — for him, it seemed, for herself, for the ugliness of the world they shared. “So I am to be a seventieth wife, General?” Still, she laughed with frightening condemnation. “Have you forgotten I’m the dictator’s mistress? That I aborted his child and survived a stabbing by his wife? Do you not read the papers?”

His heart was racing wildly, and he had the instinct both to defend himself and to attack. She, too, was panting, staring at him in what looked like open, defensive preparation for combat. Yet beneath this, or within it, he recognized the alarm of a warrior who had glimpsed a respite from long battle, but was ill prepared to trust, to rest. Could it be that she wanted him — that she, too, had divined the relief they might discover in each other?

All at once he lunged forward and seized her wrist — not as gently as he would have liked, but with palpable affection, with palpable respect.

“Even if the papers are telling the truth,” he told her, “it doesn’t matter.”

When Louisa had seen Lynton standing with his pistol on his hip in the darkened entrance to the house, she had been afraid that she might leave with him.

But after he asked her to marry him, after he lurched forward to take her wrist, she noticed the lump (a buried bullet?) lodged in the bone by his ear, and all her resistance gave way to raw relief.

“Take me away with you,” she found herself instructing him.

She had done her time as the submissive daughter, as the symbol of integration, assimilation, subjugation: as “Miss Burma,” as “Ne Win’s whore.” She had done her time as the victim of ethnic woundedness, of slander, of the regime’s ruthlessness. Oh, she loved her parents. And she would be very sorry to leave her sisters. But her time in exile was over, and she was ready to stand up actively for those who were oppressed. One could achieve nothing of greatness without risk. What she wanted now was to be linked to the rebel par excellence, to the warrior-womanizer who couldn’t care less about dishonor. Could it be that he thought she might have really slept in Ne Win’s bed — the same bed she had recently imagined murdering the monster in? What she wanted was Lynton’s capacities of heart, a heart that was even willing to wager that there were circumstances in which a woman could be towed into a liaison that was morally repellant to her. What she wanted was a man so enamored with justice, he hadn’t the time to worry about morality or his own death. What she wanted was the pistol on his hip and the blood on his hands and the bullet in his skull and a life stripped of pretense.

“Now?” he stammered, his face pale and expectant. “Take you away now ? But your mother — your parents—”

“Now,” she said. “Now. Yes.”

That Lynton was ostensibly in Rangoon in order to pursue peace negotiations with the monster would have been a problem had she believed Ne Win capable of negotiating anything: no doubt, their new dictator would make various promises that might suit both his own and the ethnic leaders’ ends; but if Ne Win’s predecessor, U Nu — a man far less nefarious and far more open to considering the ethnic question — had invited leaders like Daddy to talks in order to throw them into prison, then surely Ne Win was capable of shooting his peace-pursuing guests across the diplomatic table. Surely Lynton was savvy about this. And surely these talks were a pretext for him, too.

No, the problem, she confessed to herself after instructing Lynton to wait for her in his car (she needed to break the news to her parents in her own voice and on her own terms) — the problem, she comprehended with a twist of nausea, as she heaved clothing into the suitcase thrown open across her bed, was that in escaping with Lynton she might be permanently rupturing her already tenuous peace with Mama. The problem was Mama’s claim to Lynton in light of what had been.

Downstairs, she left her suitcase by the front door and set out with trepidation toward the kitchen. These days, Gracie and Molly spent most of their time with friends or at their respective schools (Gracie was finishing her first degree at the now government-controlled Rangoon University, where instruction in English had been abolished, while Molly continued on as a scholarship student at Methodist English, where Ne Win had incongruously kept the younger members of his brood enrolled). With Hta Hta’s daughter, Effie, having entered what looked to be an unmanageable tract of teenage years, Mama and the nanny had drawn more tightly into their private sphere, and could nearly always be found in quiet company together in the kitchen.

They were there when Louisa entered, Mama sitting silently over her tea and Hta Hta moving stoically around her, singing a hymn and preparing their dinner.