Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Doing our part,” the American said softly. “Buffering Thailand from Peking by winning over rebel armies.”

“Winning them over. while facilitating their destruction.”

“I imagine so. Yes, that’s right.”

Hatchet picked up his beer and took a forced swallow. And now Benny was the one to laugh — to laugh at him. The little man, the little son of the bigot, who, not knowing he yearned to cleave to his father, to America, had struck out to cleave himself away from them. He’d made his plans with Lynton, striking out in the name of loyalty and courage; but he would follow America’s policies to the last line.

“And is Lynton aware?”

“I’ve tried to warn him.”

“There’s no excuse anymore for keeping your cards to your chest, Hatchet!”

“It’s not a question of that. He’s determined to expect the best of us.”

In the light of the man’s admission — in the darkness of Hatchet’s evident shame before it — they sat, lost and speechless. Then the American stood and went to the table where Benny had found him — to the photo of Louisa, as if to a saving grace.

“It’s true I was there,” Hatchet said softly.

A moment passed before Benny understood that he was referring to his presence at Louisa’s first Miss Burma pageant, something to which Benny had referred in the volume.

“I only wanted to see the girls. But there’s something about her.” He reddened as he confessed this, yet it was with more pain than embarrassment that he went on. “You’re wrong about me proposing her to Lynton, about me putting into his head the idea of his marrying Ne Win’s mistress. I’d never have sacrificed her to a scheme.”

“I realize that. I was out of line.”

“But do you think he married her to get to Ne Win?”

“She was never the man’s lover.”

“ Lynton might have believed the rumors. I danced with her, you know. A few weeks back at the Orient Club. She’s an awfully good dancer.”

How intolerably isolated William Young was. It took someone equally isolated to recognize that.

“Are you suggesting that he married my daughter the better to execute an assassination plot?”

“The thought occurred to me.”

“Could you blame him?” Benny asked.

Now Hatchet turned back to him with a haunted, hunted gaze.

“Let me tell you something,” Benny pressed on dangerously. “One of the things I’ve been trying to find out all these years in my journals is whether or not we — in defending our rights with this revolution — have the right to kill. I’ll admit to you that I am nowhere near finding my solution. It seems clear enough that violence, murder even of the murderous, is a surrender of a kind, as doomed to end in bitterness as a life of slavery. But have we the right to stand by and watch people be made slaves — to watch them murdered, as through Ne Win’s policies, in the most disgusting and undignified ways?”

Hatchet watched him vigilantly.

“Of course I realize that our fight,” Benny persisted, “our fight which has justice and freedom as its aims, is now at the point of facilitating their opposites. We have Lynton, and then we have his foil, Bo Moo”—Bo Moo who had reignited the Karen revolution in the jungle, while Lynton had been doggedly trying to “talk,” or whatever it was he’d been up to—“and each seems prepared to kill the other for the sake of his particular vision of justice and freedom. Sometimes this contradiction is enough to make one — to make me — want to shrivel up and die. If we can’t trust one another, why should we expect anyone to trust us ? Of course, it could be argued that your people’s treachery led us down this path of distrust. I don’t mean to play the continual victim, Hatchet. Part of inhabiting the role of the rebel is to find the courage to tell the truth about unpleasant things. And it can’t be denied that there’s something brilliant about Lynton and Moo. Without them, flawed and frighteningly precipitate as they are, the light of our hope would be extinguished entirely.”

Through all this, Hatchet had continued to watch him steadily, as if in expectation of a final revelation that would put to rest all his remaining questions about Lynton. And now, with Benny’s speech having subsided, he looked washed over by disappointment. Benny was filled with a rush of pity for him.

“I have no idea, no idea at all, what Lynton is up to,” Benny told him. “I can guarantee you that anyone who claims to know is a liar or a fool. He’s too savvy to confide fully in anyone. Even you. Even my daughter, I imagine.”

The reminder of Louisa — of her marriage to the other, unknowable man — seemed to force Hatchet’s eyes back to her picture and then away, to the photograph beside it, one of Khin as a hesitant young bride.

“She’s beautiful, your wife,” he said gently, and not without a trace of envy, so that Benny’s pity gave way to his old frustration with the man, and he was seized by the rebellious desire to disabuse Hatchet of all his juvenile fantasies.

“If my wife stood accused of going to bed with Ne Win, I should be apt to believe it,” he said.

Hatchet turned to him with a start. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

“Is it?” But of course the fellow was right. “I’m not too proud to admit that I’ve been a philanderer in my time,” Benny continued. “Or to admit I have no right to begrudge my wife her own disloyalty to our matrimony. I have no idea what the extent of that disloyalty has been. For a long time I believed it to be a kind of rebellion against me. Retribution for my philandering. If she were to leave me — now that would be a revolution! But she stays, and she endures a loveless, trapped life, and she hates herself and life all the more.”

Benny had disclosed far more than he’d meant to, far more — it was evident from the fellow’s disapproving stare — than Hatchet had ever wanted him to come out with. And before retreating to a safer subject, he hastened to add, “What I should do is liberate her by leaving the country myself. For so long, I’ve been waiting for something — for my prison friend’s release, for my release, for Khin’s release from disappointment in me, for Burma’s release from captivity — when all along I might have tried to free myself. You don’t suppose you could help me, Hatchet? Help me secure the necessary immigration papers. Living in America wouldn’t be half bad.”

A moment passed while Hatchet gazed at him in bald bewilderment. “I guess I could look into it,” he said finally.

And to press him a bit by taking a more sympathetic line, Benny said, “To answer your initial question, I doubt very much that Lynton, shrewd as he is, married my daughter to get to Ne Win. I imagine he fell in love with her, plain and simple. I imagine he felt he had the right to love, absent all political aims. And I imagine he felt she did. I don’t know, Hatchet.” He couldn’t help it — honesty compelled him to divulge his secret self again. “I’ve loved rarely in my life, and when I have, love has been mysterious. It’s only sometimes had the quality of soul speak. I find it difficult to explain. We are bewildered most of the time and doomed to be lost to history. And yet we find that there are others who are unlike us in every conceivable way, yet to whom we are bound.”

Whatever condemnation and shock had lit up the man’s eyes before had dwindled again to disappointment. And it came to Benny that they were more alike than dissimilar. “I’ll tell you something,” he went on to the fellow: “since my house arrest, there’s always a question in people’s eyes when they come to visit me. A sort of guilty, dirty, secret question: Why go on living, old chap? Where is the meaning? Just to shovel food into your mouth? To live, to choose to live, Hatchet — it’s no less an act of solidarity for the prisoner than it is for the free. I mean solidarity with the rest of humanity. With the dead, with the living, and with those future beings who will never be able to know precisely what we did or didn’t do for them. I am still, after all, a fighter, though my fight is now limited to the page.” He chuckled in self-mockery. “The pages that will never see the light of day.”