Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

But it was and it wasn’t over.

During the following weeks, Lynton came and went on missions she didn’t press him to explain — she was too desperately afraid for his life. And her memories of what had been in the old house on this haunted hill mingled with her memories of her boy, and she experienced the shock of his death with a clarity made sharper by the village’s lost luminance. She looked out from the open veranda of the house, looked out over the vaporous valley where the old teak plantation had been, and she seemed to see Mama walking away from her, disappearing into the vanished trees. And superimposed over this, she saw their boy’s eyes staring into hers before he drew his last breath. And even as she saw this, she also saw the long-ago lumbering elephants that the Forest Governor had kept to haul his felled logs of teak. Beautiful creatures, those intensely private beings, whose lives had seemed a lesson to her in the value of modesty — gone! Gone with all the rest!

Had the universe — or God, if the universe had a soul — been indifferent to those elephants’ suffering? To the decimation of the teak fields? To the decimation of Kyowaing? To her boy? Here, now, with her perspective on the past, she seemed to see that, from the perspective of eternity, our tragedies might not look so very bleak. And she remembered how every afternoon she and Johnny and Grace had been released from this house onto the hillside to catch fish and collect vegetables and firewood. Their appetite for freedom had intensified with the breaking cataclysms of afternoon rain, rain that cleansed them of their heartache and tried to wash the earth of its sins. How the parched earth had revived in that rain, bodying forth waves of leafy mossy fragrance. How they, too, had revived, earthen creatures that they were. They had leaned against aromatic tree trunks, listening to what those protective silent beings had to say — that the tallest among them were preparing to die, that death itself was part of the way of things, that the Forest Governor’s wife and sons were also passing by, that the shades of Mama and Daddy were carried in the same light that struck the trees’ generous leaves. I am right here with you, those leaves had told Louisa. See as we do .

And what a mercy it had been to see that way:

When a mother bird lays eggs, she sits in her nest for a long time. The eggs hatch, and she feeds her babies and remains near the nest. Then she backs away, until one day she abandons the nest, and the babies cry. If she were to keep feeding them, they would never learn to fly; eventually, they would fall out of the nest and perish. Sometimes a baby bird falls from the nest. Then the mother is sad and leaves the other babies to die. Or a baby bird starts to fly and is eaten by a snake. Then the sibling still in the nest is too frightened to fly, to cry. Ignored by its mother, it freezes into fear’s hard shape.

Deep in the forest, you can pick fiddle-leaf fern and sweet oranges. After the rain starts to fall and the river water is muddy, the fish can’t see your line. In the morning, the monks who live in a monastery at the base of the pagoda beyond the forest receive food in their bowls as alms, but they abstain from eating after noontime. If you visit them in the afternoon, you might be offered leftover rice and curry; as you eat, you will also receive the blessing of the monks’ approving gaze.

To make shampoo: find a pod that looks like tamarind; boil the pod in water; then peel the bark off a certain tree, rub the bark between your palms, and mix the slippery sap with the pod liquid. To bathe: descend to the stream, but don’t copy the little children who go naked; instead, emulate the big girls, the women, who wrap their sarong under their arms and wash their torso through the sarong. To feel relief: clamber up the rocks, and stand without moving under the waterfall until something throbbing is pounded out of your shoulders. To soften the eyes of the Forest Governor’s wife: collect the red seeds of a certain tree with which she can make strands of beads.

“What will you do with your time here?” Lynton asked Louisa one evening — not with accusation, but with a certain disquiet in his eyes.

He had recently returned from a clandestine mission, and was already preparing to head out again. But all evening he’d been playing a noisy card game with Sunny and the boys in the kitchen, and he’d come into the bedroom to find her lying awake on their bed.

“I should send you out with Sunny to shoot some birds for my dinner,” he said, sitting on the bed beside her and taking her hand. “I’m sick of vegetables. Or I should charge you with the task of teaching the boys how to shoot. We need more sharpshooters.”

She looked at him, half wanting to laugh, half wanting to defend herself against his insinuation that her reflections and grieving did not constitute a meaningful life.

“I’ll teach your boys,” she found herself replying. “But it’s literature and math they need.”

And, in fact, there was no nearby school for the boys or the village children to attend. “Don’t refine all the ruffian out of them,” he said gratefully.

She soon organized the construction of a simple schoolhouse, into which she went on to pour all of her longing and energies. Lynton’s boys couldn’t easily be taught much of anything, but they and the other children adored her, basked in her tenderness and reprimands and high expectations, much as she complainingly reveled in being the butt of their pranks.

And, by means of this unexpected mutual fondness, her grief diminished, and the past, which had been so initially present for her in the village, began to recede. To give to these children — who were exiled from the country that was supposedly their birthright, who were of a provisional people in a provisional place — to be the object of their secret yearnings and ceaseless teasing, to be the witness to their minuscule achievements: it was a very small and almost invisible kind of service. She found that while she sometimes missed acting in films (the sheer escape of self that came with that), she never longed for the imposed sense of significance she’d felt in her older life (when she had so glaringly stood for something, if only the nation’s ideal of beauty). And she understood that it was up to her to give her new humbler vocation and existence all of her largeness, without restraint.

The boys and Lynton were her nation now. Kyowaing was her nation. And she began to live in it as never before. Not just to live as if she were at home in her body — to savor the contact her skin made with the dense air as she trudged down the perspiring hill on her way to the schoolhouse, or to relish Sunny’s delicious curries, his succulent, perfectly pickled eggs — but to live as if she were finally at home here among the boys and all the officers and soldiers and villagers, here among the unchanging rocks and the stream and the haunted hill that, along with her, remained.

How cherished she felt, even when Lynton was away! How cocooned in safety — not the false safety a child yearns for when she seeks reassurance that evil will never touch her, that no one she loves will ever die — but the safety of acceptance, a safety that accompanies the feeling of being free to laugh with an open mouth, and to nap and snore loudly, and even to shed tears of grief. A safety that came, for her, now, with a relinquishment of the place she’d held in Burma’s consciousness and of the greater place she’d held in her own experience of the world. These people clearly knew of her fame and silly titles; but they were all too happy to oblige her wish that all of that be left behind. They loved her in the most ordinary of ways, for being the most ordinary, inconspicuous of women; and, out of the public eye, she was free to love them — to love life — indiscriminately.