Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

After a hasty and dissatisfying parting from her parents and sisters — whose startled looks and silence, as she said her good-byes, she attributed to her recent loss as much as to her sudden appearance in the house after her long estrangement from it — she and Lynton headed out. En route to Kyowaing, a journey they made largely on foot, Lynton spoke to her more openly of what he was facing. His revelations — muffled by the spurts of rain, and the running of the streams, and the wet steps of the elephants humbly transporting their belongings — did not overwhelm her; rather, they were modulated, moderated by her persistent thoughts of the child they would never know. And even as she was transfixed by painful memories of the boy’s life and death, even as Lynton described to her the most dismaying things, she was aware of being strangely comforted by their surroundings, these familiar hills and ample moist thickets where everything appeared in its place, where they seemed to be plodding past the happenstance of human history into a more lasting order of things. The birds sang, as though in counterpoint, the passing clouds putting the entire human element in its shadowy place in the landscape, yet also recalling to her the shadows of her own past in these hills, in Thaton and Bilin and Kyowaing.

“Ne Win is only escalating his military program against the people, the ordinary villagers,” Lynton said as they climbed. “Particularly in the delta, the plains. Resist in any way, make contact with one of us, with a rebel soldier, and you risk execution. They’re conscripting everyone at gunpoint — children, women. no one is spared. And they’re making it impossible for our soldiers to move as we once could. A virtual web of human threads spreading from side to side, across the whole delta and beyond.”

Did this — Ne Win’s barbaric stepped-up military program, coupled with Lynton’s mounting fear for their lives — mean that Lynton had given up on the peace negotiations? There had been a time when Louisa would have seized on his openness as an opportunity to probe him; but she still didn’t have the heart for discussions of his conflict, or the will to engage with anything but the richness of mind their loss had bequeathed her.

They stopped, in the space of her silence, to rest under an ancient pine from which they could look down over the river that bent back toward Bilin, and she was overcome still more powerfully by the sensation of evading history — personal and human — in this lush terrain, even as she made contact with the past in it. Hadn’t she once stopped in just this place with her mother and siblings en route to Kyowaing? It seemed she could recall Gracie asking where Daddy was, and Johnny giving Grace a nasty look before a flock of parrots broke through the haze of their grief, allowing them to trek on in pursuit of what their future would bring.

The memory took her back — as everything did now — to that nearer memory of the baby’s passing, that horrifying fact that lay at the new center of her life. And, again, Lynton drew her insistently toward the immediate. “The Burma Army isn’t our only problem,” he said, nudging her toward the crest of a ridge, past which all she could see was the great canyon of the sky, riven with massing thunderclouds. “You remember I worked under Saw Lay when we were fighting the Japanese? Force 136, special operations. Someone named Bo Moo also worked with us. We worshipped Saw Lay. Utterly full of ourselves, the two of us kids. And Saw Lay disciplined our difficult alliance. Our allies and enemies were clearer then. But Moo, he couldn’t forgive the British afterward. Still can’t forgive the betrayal. If it were up to him, the Karens would be pursuing a program of hard-nosed insularity. Trust no one. Not the West. Not the East. Not the Burmans. Not other ‘minorities.’”

He stopped to face the view of the wide, lush valley below. “His territory abuts mine. Just out there, on the Dawna Range,” he said, pointing out across the valley. “And if I fail—”

“In what?” Her question surprised her. Perhaps he was managing to revive her after all.

“In building trust, of course.”

“I thought you wanted to build up arms, build a base in the Tavoy.”

He looked at her in confusion. But a twinkle of relief also danced in his eyes. And it was with a nod that he persisted: “Yes, we need all that for leverage. But there are many on the inside who are just as disgusted as we are by what’s going on. And there are ethnic leaders all over the country ready to work with us. With enough trust, we shouldn’t have to use force — at least not for long. Military action can force a point. But with or without our own states, Louisa, we’re going to have to find a way to get along. That takes compromise, letting go of the past. ”

He passed her his canteen, and she took the cold river water into her mouth instead of giving in to the lump of relief rising in her throat — instead of voicing her questions about what would happen if he were to fail in this, whether Bo Moo wouldn’t attack his territory in order to unify the Karens.

“We are a peaceful, conciliatory people,” he said, taking the canteen back. “It’s true we’ve been betrayed, that we had reason to rise up. But does that mean we should give in to endless war?”

“I don’t believe in peoples or nations,” she found herself abruptly, emotionally answering. He turned to her with surprise, and, in fact, she had surprised herself with the radical thought. Something about the death of their child had led her here, to this feeling that it was wrong for anyone to claim exclusive rights to a corner of the earth — wrong for no other reason than that everyone was passing. And the inner child in her — the mixed-breed, raceless, rootless little girl who had been homeless in just this place — knew what it was to be rebuffed by some who temporarily had more and taken in by others who had long had less. The paradox was that she was suddenly sure that Burma’s most beautiful feature was its multiplicity of peoples.

“We have to find a way to reconcile,” Lynton said gently, in tacit understanding of, if not agreement with, her dangerous assertion. “We must find a way to get over the past.”

The British-built brick-and-wood houses of her childhood had vanished, and with them the teak plantation that had spread out across the valley under the gaze of the far-off pagoda. But upon first reentering Kyowaing she recognized the rocks, the stream that cut the same path through the land. And she knew every detail of the hill on the top of which Lynton’s men had built her a house in the shadow of the Forest Governor’s disappeared one.

“What happened to the old teak plantation?” she asked Lynton on their first evening in the village, when they were sitting in the lone, large house on the hill. They had just finished a surprisingly beautiful meal made by Sunny, and now a slew of boys — who’d run away from their homes to join the revolution, and whom Lynton had taken on as his charges — were cleaning their dishes, singing and bantering while Lynton and Louisa talked over tea at the table.

“Burned by the Burmans in the early years of the revolution,” he told her.

“And the Forest Governor and his family — do you know what became of them?”

“Escaped or captured, no doubt.”

“It’s haunted, you know,” one of the boys said, peering defiantly at her with a dripping plate in his hands.

“What’s haunted? The village ?” she asked him.

“The hill!” the boy said. Sunny whipped the boy’s backside with a towel and told him to keep on task, but the boy pressed on: “Everyone who lives on this hill perishes!”

“Precisely why I choose to live on it,” Lynton said, and then let out one of his dismissive, disquieting cackles. “The past is the past — all over now.”