Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“You’ve never looked so beautiful,” Lynton told her one sleepy morning when they were still in bed. She knew, from things she’d heard him mutter to his men, that his hours away from her were fraught with tension — nothing was certain — yet he, too, had never looked so unburdened, so free to inhale his fill of air, to rest, to enjoy.

To rest, to enjoy, and to do so while in love. To be understood, and to understand, by means of two frank, flawed bodies. To be touched by, and to touch with, the hands of conviction — conviction that one is enough, more than enough: necessary. To be assured, and to assure, with a kiss, with a look that says one is incapable of disappointing. To be accepted and wanted in spite of one’s imperfections. To be the recipient of the pleasure the other has to give, and the provider of small courtesies (“Let me pull the blanket up over you”). Yes, fiery arguments still sometimes exploded between Lynton and her, and at times they surprised each other with displays of aggression or outrageousness or momentary cruelty, and beneath this, too, shone nothing less than absolute trust, an intimacy that staggered her. No more need to hide, to pose, to feign strength — what was already within either of them, all the greatness and all the humanity, was everything the other saw.

If their hour was at hand, so, too, was the fulfillment of their longing. With Sunny’s gentle assistance, they parented the boys. Lynton bought her two elephants on whose expansive beings the lot of them lavished their affections, and at night they humans would sit up in the house on the haunted hill, sit around the glowing fire, and laugh about the goings-on of the day, or else sing some ancient Karen ballad and enjoy Sunny’s cooking, never speaking directly about where they were headed.

One evening, after Sunny and the boys had cleared out of the house, Lynton came to her and told her to close her eyes, and then he led her out to the stoop under the veranda, where he asked her to sit, and he put something between her hands — something cumbersome and stiff, yet yielding — a small accordion.

“Found it in one of the boy’s huts,” he said, when she couldn’t speak. “Don’t want to know where he got it. Probably pillaged it from some poor Burman’s hut.”

“They’re too young to fight,” she said — one of her refrains when they were speaking of the boys. Not that Lynton’s cease-fire with Ne Win’s army had been broken yet, but they were subtly preparing for that inevitability, and the topic of the boys’ fitness for soldiering had been part of those preparations.

“Go on,” he said. “Play it for me.”

The rain had fallen off a few hours earlier, and now the evening sun shone clearly over the valley. From where she sat, she could see past the gleaming river snaking into the mountains to where she knew Thailand lay.

“I thought you knew how to play,” he chided her, as though to tease away her silence. “You told me your father gave you an accordion that you left in Thaton.”

Had she told him that?

“Go on. Play the song your father hums—‘God Will Take Care of Me.’”

She scoffed, yet there was something chesty in her voice, something about to give. “That’s absurd,” she managed. “You can’t expect me to sing you promises of divine protection when I don’t believe . ” But she trailed off, and he looked at her with anticipation. They had never spoken of the limits of their faith, never even identified themselves to each other as being of any particular faith, or of being of faith particularly.

Don’t you, his quiet gaze asked her, in some unfathomable way?

He closed his eyes, as if trying to see her more clearly, and she shivered at the sight of him so still and undefended. A bird in a nearby bush began to sing of solitude, of yearning.

“The talks aren’t going well,” he said, regarding her again with grave eyes. “It may be soon that you hear I’m dead.” He spoke very tenderly, very sincerely. “Don’t believe it. I’ll come back for you. But in the meantime”—he pointed across the valley, to the dark green slopes of the Dawna Range beyond the pagoda—“go to those mountains if the Burmans come.”

The Karens from whom he’d split off were headquartered in those mountains; she remembered this, and was bewildered by his suggestion that she would be safe with the very people with whom he’d been in conflict — with Bo Moo, whose ruthlessness Lynton’s men referred to only in whispers.

“We’re not alone in this,” Lynton said, putting his arm around her waist. “There are others who want the same things, as I’ve said. If we look past our petty proclivities, past our troubled history; if we see the broader common goal — we Karens, and also the Kachin, the Mon, the Shans, the Muslims, the Burmans —everyone with an eye to democracy. If we find a way to come together, they won’t be able to stand in our way. And our friends will be there to help us.”

“Friends?” Tom’s and Hannah-Lara’s amiable faces flashed before her eyes, and the American’s embarrassed, hesitant one.

“Yes, friends.” There was impatience in his tone now.

“You’re speaking in riddles, Lynton. Be plain with me. Why would Bo Moo protect me if you’re still working with them — with Tom and — and the American? What’s happened?”

But to banish the strain rising in him, to banish talk of every alliance but their own private one, he nudged her lightheartedly with his knee, and said, “You can’t deny me some little ditty on the accordion now — now that you know they may soon be peppering their papers with my obituary.”

He gave her a silly, pleading smile that made her smile in turn, that made her want to cry, and she stared down desperately into the creases of the accordion, saying, “I hate this,” which only provoked his laughter.

But he leaned in toward her and touched his nose to her cheek, so that she smelled his clean river scent, and he said, as though to apologize, “We mustn’t despair. We have so much to do — this is only a stopping ground. To despair is to forget what we owe others. Promise me you won’t despair.”

He was right there beside her, with his beautiful shining face and worried eyes, and soon she might not be able to catch a glimpse of the light that remained of him.

Again, her memory reached back, back to those days in Thaton before Ducksworth had come for Daddy, and she found the fingering, the words of the hymn — yes, one of Daddy’s old standbys.

“Be not dismayed,” the hymn began.

But she was — as dismayed as she’d ever been.

Two months after Benny had left with Molly and Grace for America, Khin stood at the window of her bedroom, staring down at the view he had so prized: the mango trees now lashing against the wind along their darkening drive; the highway outside the gate, with its single passing car throwing beams of light into the evening; and, beyond the highway, the old Karen village of Thamaing. That village breathed, it slept and strived, yet it hadn’t really overcome the beginnings of the civil war, when it had been fired on, torched, and reduced to ashes. No, it had lost its fundamental beauty, its hope, Khin thought, aware of a nearer view: the sharpening image of her face reflected in the window, and the hopelessness in her eyes. And now the feeling came again — the ache that had been increasingly radiating through her bones and pelvis since Louisa had gone underground with Lynton. They’re gone, she said to herself, as though to soothe the pain, or to explain it. They’re gone, and soon I will die.

“Mama, do you know that when a spirit leaves the body, you have to call it back?” Louisa had asked her, so long ago, when they were newly reunited in Bilin — after Khin had walked away from the children in Kyowaing, only to fall into Lynton’s youthful arms for a time. “If a spirit gets frightened, it flies away and you get sick or go crazy. And when a woman has a baby and cries too much, her spirit leaves and she can die. And when a baby thinks it’s falling, its arms fly up and its spirit leaves. And when a child is dying, the spirits guarding the trees can be convinced to save the child’s life. You have to make an offering of rice wrapped in banana leaf and leave it on the riverbank. Or kill a chicken with the right hole in the right part of the spine. You have to invite the spirits back to the bodies. Say, ‘Come back from the fields, come back from the forests, come back, come back, come back, come back.’” Louisa had been standing by one of Khin’s sewing machines, all her tangled curls haloing her mournful open face as she enacted the ancient Karen ritual, and Khin had shuddered, knowing that in some obscure sense the child was asking her to call back their own disembodied spirits, lost to them somewhere along the line.