Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Another gust of fresh wind seemed to impel him to approach. Yet his eyes were tainted with worry when he came and took her firmly by the elbows and said, “Wouldn’t have been right not to ask for his blessing. Just to steal you away — not when he doesn’t have the freedom to steal you back.” There was a note of laughter in his voice, the laughter that came from their need to make light of the harm they were doing.

“If it makes you more comfortable to believe you’re stealing me,” she tried, “I’ll go along with the story.”

“Go to him,” he said very tenderly. “He wants to speak with you.” And he strode out to the edge of the flower beds and took out his package of cigarettes.

It was strange, sliding onto the backseat beside Daddy, sliding into the strange car — which belonged to a stranger to whom she would soon belong — in order to talk to a person who all at once appeared strange. They seemed somehow to be very far away from each other, she and Daddy, as far as they’d ever been, and yet also physically closer than in such a long time.

He didn’t immediately turn to face her, so she had a moment to take in the disorientation everywhere on his pale and bloated face. He appeared to have just woken, all of his alertness sopped up by sleep. In one of his hands, he held a flask — it must have been Lynton’s flask — and something about the way he grasped the delicate silver thing, almost as though he didn’t quite know how it had landed between his oversize fingers, deeply affected her. She’d always loved his strong hands; while the rest of him had shriveled and withdrawn, those hands seemed still to be waiting to be made full use of. How had they landed with the rest of him here, in this position?

For another moment, she and Daddy sat in silence, and she seemed to hear the ticking of the car, but maybe it was only Daddy’s old watch.

“I’m sorry,” she said finally.

He turned to her and said, with an indistinct smile, “One of these days it was bound to happen.” And he raised the little flask, as if to toast her. But his face fell flat. “Your mother will take it personally, of course. You’ve told her, I imagine?” He didn’t wait for her to respond. Instead he turned his large, knowing gaze to the window — to Lynton, who had strolled out under the mango trees beyond the rose garden. “I’ve never been able to keep you safe,” he said very quietly. “And now you’re walking right into the storm.”

“That’s where I’ve been for a long time,” she found herself replying. When he turned his eyes back to hers, she went on. “Years now.”

In Daddy’s look she saw curiosity, comprehension — and, finally, empathy. But that look narrowed suddenly, and with a rawness that chilled her he said, “Have you considered the possibility that you are being used by him?”

Unwittingly, she turned her glance back to the man who was to be her husband. He was standing stiffly away from them with a cigarette held to his lips. How perfectly groomed he looked out there in the blustery evening, the branches of the mango trees whipping over him.

“Anyone who thinks the rumors happen to be valid. ” Daddy was continuing. “Anyone who happens to think that you have special inroads in the capital. ”

Could it be more than mutual and visceral attraction that had compelled Lynton to command her to be his wife? And what if he were using her to — to get to Ne Win? Wasn’t she also using him, if only to begin to draw on her own untapped reserves of strength?

“Lynton must have his own inroads,” she insisted blindly. “He wouldn’t engage in this so-called peace process without them.”

“I wouldn’t say that’s quite the same thing.”

Daddy’s words could have been an insult, but she heard the countervailing assurance in the way he’d spoken them — assurance that at least he believed her innocent.

“There are forces bigger than any you might have imagined,” he said now, gesturing past Lynton and the mango trees. “Forces at work on all of us.”

Whenever he spoke that way — suspiciously, obscurely — she was plagued by pity for him. He appeared something of the raving fool, discontent with his small place in the world, and determined to enlarge it by imagining swelling powers that pressed down on his own diminishing ones. He’d never permitted her to read his editorials and essays (his “writings”), but she’d long ago formed the impression that the tottering, circular, effete nature of his verbal rants formed the character of whatever arguments he happened to be making on the page — that he never got anywhere past supposition, accusation. And yet, glancing back at the man waiting for her in the windy twilight — a man presently peering out over the hillside and the distant village of Thamaing as if to glean the scope of forces that not even he could fathom — she wondered if she hadn’t been the fool to reject Daddy’s rants so entirely.

“You’re correct that a man like Lynton isn’t naive,” Daddy went on. “He has his plan. His strategic plan. His broader connections. His allies and enemies.” He glanced, as if suspicious, around the car. But it was only embarrassment, she realized, that kept his eyes averted from hers now. “A man like that doesn’t just allow himself to be conquered by impulse and infatuation. It would be different if you two had previously been acquainted.”

Or have you been? his nervous glance seemed to imply. Am I the one who’s been kept in the dark about certain alliances?

“Are you asking me not to marry him?” Louisa interjected, partly to evade the subject of those alliances, of her own past with Lynton, of Mama’s past, of which she urgently wanted to keep Daddy ignorant. But she had the sense that she was also trying to keep herself in the dark about Daddy’s latent suspicions.

“I’m asking you to understand that if you go ahead with this, you become his ally,” he said. “You ally yourself with a man who has been rumored not just to have died repeatedly on the battlefield and to have been repeatedly resurrected, but to have led a raid on a Thai police station because he thought he’d been cheated on an arms deal. A man who supposedly derailed a train en route to Moulmein. A man who, according to your mother’s acquaintances, has never had a taste for monogamy. A man who, according to my own friends, may be pursuing this ‘so-called peace process,’ as you put it, only in order to secure an elevated place within Ne Win’s regime.”

So repelled was she by this last bit of speculation that a surge of fury rose up within her now-battering chest, and she said, trying to contain the fright in her voice, “No doubt in order to undermine that regime — that is, if your ‘friends’ have it right. Aren’t we beyond rumors, Daddy? Don’t we know better than to give them credence? I’m past caring what others think.”

“Past caring what other Karens think?”

“What are you saying? He has our people’s support.”

“And rumor would have it that he’s tended to go his own way in order to achieve it.”

“There you go again with rumors!”

“Not all Karens are thrilled about what he’s doing, Louisa. One of his rivals in the Karen army, a man who goes by the name of Bo Moo — a hotheaded, trigger-quick son of a bitch, they say, and also the only one who can scare Lynton half out of his wits. Apparently, he is adamantly against trusting the regime, against talks of any kind — even talks with the West, by whom we’ve also been burned repeatedly — while Lynton seems to be courting conversation with the CIA.”

“Is this just conjecture, Daddy?”

She might have said: How can what you are saying be anything but conjecture when you’re locked in your study, with your only source of information being the ex-convicts who visit you out of pity?