Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“It sounds like nonsense,” she persisted, “Lynton wanting in with the tyrant, on the one hand, and in with the powers of democracy, on the other—”

“They’re more linked than you might believe—”

She couldn’t help waving a hand over her face, as if to sweep away so much rubbish. And it hurt him. She instantly saw injury pinch at Daddy’s afflicted face.

“What I mean to say,” he tried more feebly, “is how will you feel if you end up allied to a man responsible for the Karen Union’s undoing?”

The man in question was by now halfway down their property; when she looked, she saw Lynton descending the brushy hillside at a quick clip, as if he meant to burn up his own inner torment.

“If that happens,” she found herself replying when she looked back into Daddy’s troubled eyes, “if Lynton is responsible for the Karen Union dissolving, I will believe it is the best thing.”

She’d never dared pursue such a radical thought — how could she, given Daddy’s part in the Karen Union’s solidification ? But hadn’t the university massacre taught her that if ethnic hatred had fashioned the nation’s history, its new dictator was making the country over with an even broader, blinder, indiscriminate hate? Burman students had also died in the massacre. And if the nation was to heal, if the nation was to do away with both the hater and the hatred, the nation’s peoples must do so together. Undeniably, ethnic minorities had suffered and were still suffering more than any Burmans: rape, beheadings, dismemberments, slavery, not to mention chronic humiliation, chronic displacement, a chronic sense of inferiority — non-Burmans had suffered for ages just because of Burman supremacy. But Burmans were also victims of Ne Win’s military dictatorship; they, too, had grown up — perhaps enough to recognize that they were no more deserving of protection and justice.

“What I mean to say,” she ventured, “is that I trust Lynton to determine if the time has come for us Karens to give up the dream of our own nation — or even the dream of a state within a federal democracy — so that we might pursue something better for a nation that already exists.”

For a long time, Daddy merely considered her, as if in distant suspicion of the person she seemed to have become overnight. Then he said, “You’re more of a revolutionary than I am.” And after a pause: “You really think the Burmans can get past their racism?” And when she didn’t straightaway answer: “You have faith in Lynton. But you still haven’t told me why . Why, when you don’t even know the man?”

She was still desperate not to provide her only justification — that a long time ago she had indeed known Lynton. Yet whom had she really known but a strapping boy-man who’d brought her a rusted old bike and danced a jig in order to make her laugh while she worked at a sewing machine’s hand crank? Who had he been to her but the embodiment of hope and lightness during a desolate time? A fantasy. Just like her fantasy of a cohesive nation untainted by centuries of prejudice. And who was she , anyway, to argue for that nation when it had been the sight of Lynton’s pistol that had detonated her own will to strength?

The most striking feature in Daddy’s face was his eyes: large, bulging, seemingly unblinking — a witness to his decades of enchantment and disputation and suffering. When he studied her now with those eyes, she had the impression that he was reading her thoughts, so that it would have been redundant to answer his question aloud. And after a moment, he appeared to acknowledge this.

“If it’s really trust Lynton’s after,” he said, and she wanted to stop him, to confess that she couldn’t claim to know anything about the man or his intentions, “if he really means to build trust between peoples, then I hope to God he succeeds. The fortitude it takes to trust when they’ve robbed you of your dignities, when they’ve tried to turn you into the vermin they believe you to be. It’s beyond most people — beyond me, I’m afraid. Maybe Lynton can find a way to touch evil without being sullied. Whatever Ne Win is up to, maybe Lynton can escape it alive and morally strengthened. Maybe. ”

But just as she was preparing to divulge all her doubt, he turned directly to her and put his great strong hand on the top of her head and cupped it with his palm and said, “I commend you to God and to the world of his grace.” The press of that hand told her that he was trying to be brave in giving her away, even though he couldn’t summon adequate faith to believe she would come through unscathed.

And she was suddenly afraid that they would never sit this way again, side by side. Reaching to embrace him, she knocked the flask out of his hand, and then they were knocking their heads together as they bent to extricate the thing from the crevice into which it had fallen, the smell of burbling whiskey expanding in the air between them.

“One last drop,” Daddy said with a smile after he’d retrieved the thing and was sitting straight again. He tipped the flask back to his lips, and she sat watching him, until finally he seemed to give up, and he set the flask down on the seat between them. “I just can’t see why. ” he muttered to himself, almost inaudibly.

“Why what?” she asked gently.

From the way he turned to her now, she had the impression that he thought she’d already left him behind.

“Why Lynton should agree to Ne Win’s terms for the peace talks,” he said matter-of-factly. “When I told him I wasn’t sure I wanted a man for a son-in-law who proposed marriage with a gun on his belt, he said if that was all, I shouldn’t worry — that he’d decided to surrender his arms, to surrender his entire brigade’s weaponry.”

How could she expect to be trusted if she couldn’t manage to trust? During the first few weeks of their marriage, as Lynton prepared to enter the peace negotiations that would apparently also be his surrender, she allowed her doubts about him to go unspoken. What he really wanted to achieve by means of those negotiations, what he really wanted to achieve by means of her , what she really wanted to achieve by means of their new alliance — these questions, too, she submerged beneath her pressing desire to draw closer to this man, to whom every day she grew more attached.

There was a flower that she had seen long ago through the window of her room at the Forest Governor’s house: white, broad as a plate, protruding from the end of a long green stalk. It had opened only at midnight, and only two or three times before it had withered. And now she — who had bloomed as a girl in Kyowaing, and then again in an equally difficult incarnation as Miss Burma — felt she was blooming anew in the clandestine, dark light of Lynton’s love.

And as if, before his surrender, he also wanted to flower once more beside her, Lynton ordered some of his men to construct a floating hut on a nearby lake to which they periodically escaped. Fed by a waterfall, the lake was surrounded by an orchard of papaya and banana trees whose branches were reflected on the surface of the clear water. Each morning that they rose in the hut, they would leap out into the cold lake and float on their backs, her stomach facing the sky like some promise of their future together. And in the dimness of the hut, whose small space threw them into greater warmth and closeness, she would look lengthily at him. Revolution, justice. what were those compared with the resolute earnestness of his beautiful face, or with the privilege of residing in this provisional home on this magnificent lake? To be here, to feel this ! They could have been the first humans, momentarily making contact with the shared inheritance of their descendants. He spoke of the clean air, of the taste of the water, of the texture of her skin, and he clasped her face, held her breasts, laughed, shook his head, kissed her. It was impossible for her to doubt the sincerity of his affection.