Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Don’t say that.”

“You’re a decent fellow.”

It seemed there was nothing more to add.

But Benny, all at once afraid of letting the man go, of reaching the end of something that wasn’t yet complete, uttered, “Say!”

And Hatchet looked up at him in blind desperation.

“I’ve been reading one of your people these past evenings. A fellow called Ralph Waldo Emerson. No idea how I came by his collection of essays. Have you read his writing?”

“In school, I think.”

“Do you mind if I read you one or two lines? Sit. Sit down and finish your beer while I read.”

Tired and obedient, his eyes red-rimmed with feeling, Hatchet went and sat back on the sofa and picked up his bottle and put it to his mouth, while Benny took the lamp from the side table and fumbled toward the cabinet that he’d made into a bookcase.

When he had returned to his seat with the book and put on his spectacles, he cleared his throat and, calling on his old St. James’ education in elocution, read: “‘If you would serve your brother, because it is fit for you to serve him, do not take back your words when you find that prudent people do not commend you. Be true to your own act, and congratulate yourself if you have done something strange and extravagant, and broken the monotony of a decorous age.’”

Hatchet made no sound or sign when Benny closed the book, removed his spectacles, and looked up into his simple and absorbed face, in which it was impossible now to read meaning.

“Don’t give up on Lynton,” Benny said. “You must be very strong, Hatchet. Very strong. You must continue what you have begun. You must never waver from your innermost sense of what is right.”

Eight weeks before the baby was due, Louisa woke around midnight to hear voices through the wall. Since their confrontation with the spies at the Orient Club, she and Lynton had been sleeping in a different location near Rangoon each night. Now they were staying with Sunny’s ailing mother, in the Karen village across the highway from Louisa’s family property, and the first thing she thought — after hearing the voices, after registering that Lynton had left the bed — was that the old woman needed to be protected. But the voices — two of them, one being Lynton’s — were speaking a hushed and innocuous-sounding English, over the rise and fall of which she began to hear the woman’s contented snores drifting down the hall from the recesses of the small house.

Almost unconsciously, she pushed herself up to hear the conversation more distinctly.

“What about the shipment from Taipei?” Lynton was saying.

“Apparently, the Americans are pressuring the Thais to prevent traffic,” the other answered. She recognized the voice, the jaunty, open-throated pressure on the English vowels. “State Department,” the man continued. “I’m afraid the shipment’s stuck in Mae Sot.” It was Tom Erwin, Hannah-Lara’s husband.

“Exactly why Will’s old plan makes sense,” Lynton said. “We need a base in the Tavoy — somewhere arms can be delivered by sea.”

“And Will’s invitation? Have you thought it over?”

For a moment, Lynton seemed to rebuff the question with silence. All was quiet save for the ailing woman’s escalating and agitated snores, which almost begged to be smothered. Then Lynton said, with a measured laugh, “Are you trying to cut me out of the picture, old man? You think I need to go and train under the Americans? Can you imagine me behaving myself at their base in the Philippines?”

That was all — or all she could clearly catch. When Lynton returned to their cell-like room, she was pretending to sleep, her heart banging away in her chest, the baby kicking against her ribs as if to compel her to act — to question Lynton about what it all meant. But she needed a moment to make sense of what she’d heard before determining her own tactics. So Lynton hadn’t surrendered — at least not entirely. So he was trying to receive shipments of arms. So Will was working with him to assemble a base, and had invited him to train in the Philippines. She should have been relieved, but she had the nagging impression that Lynton didn’t entirelytrust his British and American friends.

She was half dreaming, her mind untangling a thread in a complicated design, when she woke in the early morning with the nausea that had been worrisomely plaguing her advanced pregnancy and that was now accompanied by intense cramps. By the time they reached Rangoon General, her water had broken. And then they were told that there was nothing to be done: she was going to deliver their child two months early.

The labor was quick but arduous. How tiny the child was, a boy, their son. They knew he couldn’t long survive. It was his undeveloped lungs. Minutes after the delivery, he was sleeping and struggling to breathe in her arms, with Lynton beside her, and then his eyelids fluttered open and he seemed to peer past her, as though at something both haunting and extraordinary beyond her shoulder. His head shifted slightly and he looked directly into her eyes. His own eyes became frighteningly wide — big unblinking orbs, fighting against some unseen force to remain open. He stared at her, into her — to communicate something, or to absorb part of her, or simply to register for as long as possible a human face. Did he know, in his way, that he was dying? That they were fundamentally failing him? Did he feel pain when his heartbeat ceased?

The frantic doctor injected Louisa with something, and when she regained consciousness the next day, Lynton was sitting next to her with bloodshot eyes and empty hands.

“Where is he?” she demanded.

“Returned to where he came from,” he said. She thought he would smile — his eyes gleamed the way they did before he tried to make light of something that pained or concerned him — but instead, while she began to weep, he looked off toward the window, as if at some indescribable inner picture of wherever it was their son had gone.

“Now,” he said, “we have to earn our place by his side.”

Louisa hadn’t known that Lynton’s underground operations had long been headquartered in Kyowaing, where she had once lived in the Forest Governor’s house. A week after the delivery, he informed her that they had to relocate to the village, deep in the heart of the territory he now controlled. “Pressure’s too intense here,” he said. “The time has come to move back in-country.”

How absurd that at the very moment she was ready to give up, to give in, he was ready to trust her more completely — and even to count on her.

Who are we to say the death wasn’t fated? he seemed to want to say as they were secretly preparing to head out, ten nights after the birth. She was still losing blood, her breasts still senselessly knotted with residual milk, and Lynton kept flashing her blazing glances, as if to enflame her old will to fight. Who are we to say, he seemed to go on, that the loss wasn’t in some way necessary for you to be born to new strength?

Enraged by her own fleeting thought that their child might never have been meant to be, she inwardly accused him (or, rather, herself) of convenient and weak-minded thinking, and made the point (again, to herself) that many argued there was no more meaning to life than suffering. By that count, she silently contended, Ne Win’s atrocities could also be justified! And Kenneth’s death! No! No! Yet she didn’t really believe that suffering — if causeless — was also utterly meaningless. In her heart, she felt that only those who had suffered could discover grace. So wasn’t it possible that grace made way for suffering in a mysterious way? And she was washed over with tenderness for Lynton, the brave man packing his few belongings before her; surely his past losses and sufferings had been great.