Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

True, whenever they returned to Rangoon, where they were stationed in his government-owned cottage, they were greeted with tabloid reports that pegged their marriage as one he’d orchestrated in order to get close to Ne Win, or as one she’d agreed to in order to evade the glare of gossip about her affair with the strongman, or as one through which she’d lured him into Ne Win’s trap. True, these same papers delighted in the tawdry details of their significant age difference and his just as significant (yet evidently untallied) number of “marriages” and illegitimate children. (Though about the subject of his former ties to her mother — which ought to have rendered their union unthinkable by any typical standards of decency — the papers were thankfully ignorant.) But part of the heroism that she was increasingly attracted to was the ability to liberate oneself not just from others’ disparaging opinions, but also from a common and narrow view of such things as decency.

Oh, she still hurt for Mama and mourned their severed tie, blamed herself for the embarrassment she’d caused her; yet that hurt and self-reproach existed separately from her courage to feel the full force of her relief to be with Lynton. They would have been fools not to hold fast to each other. They would have been allowing others’ condemnation to desecrate their attachment. They would have been cowards, and neither of them was, by nature, cowardly.

And what a blessing Lynton’s conviction could be! At the various dinners and official parties they began to attend in Rangoon, Lynton stood by her side not as Kenneth once had — anxiously, innocently — but as he stood up to life. In everything he did, he risked himself to the extent that he worshipped at life’s feet. And he plunged into it all unapologetically and without fuss. The reckless way he danced, spent money, and drank — that was Lynton. No Karen self-effacement. He was a sovereign of his own kind: a man so seemingly beyond the law that he took what he wanted and forced open a zone through which she could peaceably, if dishonorably, pass. What does it matter that there’s more gossip about us than ever before? he tacitly reassured her. We mustn’t disgrace ourselves with consideration of such things . And: Let them think what they like. It only makes clearer our mandate not to bother with pleasing the mob . And: Let them damn us, but let’s not damn ourselves for them. Let them disgrace themselves with their scorn — don’t let’s justify their scorn by retreating back into hiding. Go boldly! Greatly! And, by all means, with much exuberance! What a relief to leave the fakery behind.

Of course, the entertainments and hobnobbing would have been insufferable were she not also reassuring herself that she was preparing to serve some higher purpose alongside Lynton.

“Teach me to shoot,” she blurted out to him one late morning. They were at the lake again, and the previous night, around one or two in the morning, she had woken and turned on her spirit lamp to find Lynton staring up into the folds of their mosquito netting. She hadn’t dared question him — to do so, she sensed, would be to tread on some inviolable private territory whose boundaries he counted on her to respect. And it had been easy, given the intimacies of their quarters on the lake, given their intimacy, to ignore the vast reaches of uncharted terrain between them. But the question of what had been keeping him awake exerted itself on her half-roused mind, even if she hadn’t entirely been conscious of it until this morning, until this moment. And it seemed to her that the answer to that question might be triggered by his response to this demand — that he teach her how to shoot, how to use that pistol on his hip, which he would so soon be relinquishing.

His soldier and sometimes cook, Sunny, a sweet man six or seven years Lynton’s junior and someone she vaguely remembered from their days together in Bilin, had made them a picnic of fried pancakes and milky coffee, which he’d set out on the shore for them. The sky had been swelling up with vapors all night, and had finally burst and drained itself of every last drop earlier this morning, so that now they could sit and drink up the air coming off the refreshed lake while leisurely enjoying Sunny’s meal. But her request made Lynton put down his cup and look with interest into her eyes.

“Teach you to shoot?” he said, his emphasis, interestingly, shifting the focus of her words from her violent impulse to her apparent inability to receive instruction.

His glance darted to the edges of the orchard fronting the lake, where, about a hundred feet off, a furry monkey the size of a small dog sat grooming itself near the top of a banana tree.

“If you hit that,” he said, pointing to the poor creature, “I’ll give you all of my money.”

“You’re already obliged to do that by law,” she said. “And besides, it’ll all be worthless if Ne Win goes ahead with his plan.” In the past week, rumors had started that Ne Win intended to divest their currency of its value in order to combat black marketeering, or more likely to control the distribution of whatever currency he would go on to print.

“Then I’ll give you something else you like,” he said with a gleam in his eyes.

“That’s more of a mutual favor than a gift, I’d say.”

“In other words, you don’t think you can hit it?”

“I’m not going to kill it just to prove a point.”

“I thought so,” he said smugly.

And to prove a point, indeed, she commanded him, “Give me your pistol.”

With a certain swaggering and absorbed delight, he leaned over and took his pistol out of its holster and said, handing it to her, “Be my guest. It’s uncocked as it is. Just don’t shoot me.” And then, in a way that made her want to do nothing but shoot him, he leaned back on his elbows and sighed as if to express his ultimate ease.

“If I hit the bunch of bananas in the tree to the right—” she said, getting to her feet and squinting across the orchard and trying to avoid the trigger on the volatile object between her hands.

“Yes?”

“You owe me your loyalty to the end of your days.”

“I already owe you that by law,” he said with a self-satisfied smile.

“Since when did the law mean anything to you?”

“Exactly my point.”

She grunted in exasperation and, turning to the banana tree in question, focused on the bright green tiers of fruit emanating from a flowering stalk half hidden beneath a fan of feathery leaves. Or rather, she focused her frustration on the innocent bananas, and then on the stalk holding them up. Her frustration about her diminutive position as a woman who was expected to fail at this. Her frustration about being no less in the dark regarding Lynton’s dealings than she had been on the day he’d charged back into her life.

She didn’t even have to take aim twice. As she reeled back from the muzzle blast, she saw she’d hit the stalk, causing the entire bunch of bananas to drop, a flock of birds to spring up for cover, and the poor monkey to jump off into the shadows.

“Goddamn,” she heard Lynton say over the ringing in her ears. And then, using one of the anglicisms he liked to sprinkle his stories with: “I suppose now you think you’re a ‘big shot.’”

She sank back down beside him, trying not to shake. “I think I’m a ‘ crack shot.’”

Gingerly, her heart still banging away in her chest, she passed the pistol back to him. It occurred to her that she would have been justified in marrying him just because he had the strength of spirit to lay down his arms and try peace talks for a time. But for some reason she went on: “Is it really true — that you’re surrendering your arms in order to negotiate? Tell me it’s a formality, that you have stashes of weapons hidden all over the place.”