Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

And now even her children’s bodies — still in the realm of breath, she prayed — were far away.

In fact, there had been three farewells. Three farewells that seemed like aftershocks of that earlier rupture at the start of the civil war, when Benny had been led away, and Khin had lost herself and her senses in the haze of Lynton’s body.

Now, she turned from her glassy reflection in the window to the bed that had become only Benny’s at a point. She could almost see it, the impression of his shape on the blanket, how he perched his spectacles on his nose when he read in bed every night, and then the way his plump fingers released their grasp of the book as he fell asleep. Some nights, before he had left for America, before she had moved back into this room, she would ask if she could keep him company, and then she would sit in the chair by the window, pretending to knit and watching him read, watching him peacefully slip away.

She lowered herself onto the bed and took from the nightstand the clutch of photographs he had left for her, or merely decided not to take. The first photograph was of the two of them in the flush of their early intimacy, his arm around her waist, her hands clasped in front of her groin, as if it might give her away. They hadn’t yet been able to imagine the faces their closeness would bear. Almost to explain that mystery, the second photograph, which she held up to her eyes, showed the six of them sitting under the damaged portico after Benny’s prison release. How much they’d recently come through, yet the children’s eyes were lively and forgiving — forgiving first and foremost, it seemed now, of Benny and Khin’s original choice to be man and wife. Yes, the children’s faces cast that choice in the afterglow of inevitability, along with everything that had given rise to it: her own inability to save her father’s life, Benny’s parentlessness and desperation for belonging. If only she could touch them again, her children. If only she could fall before them and draw them to her chest and kiss them and beg for the forgiveness they so easily gave.

The first two farewells had come one on the heels of the other. One afternoon, Hta Hta — her faithful remaining servant — had appeared in the kitchen doorway, where Khin was drinking tea, to say that Benny was napping and that Lynton had arrived.

“Should I wake Saw Bension?” Hta Hta had asked sheepishly. Of course, the servant knew that since Louisa’s elopement, Khin had refused to speak to the same man who’d once spun them around their sewing shop with his men in Bilin.

“No, no,” Khin had told her. “It’s nothing.”

Maybe it was instinct that compelled Khin not to snub Lynton this time. She had known of Louisa’s pregnancy and wasn’t quite surprised to find the general in the living room with a swaddled bundle, held neither clutched to his chest nor out at a distance. Instantly, she understood that something had ended. And she listened, with all her stifled senses, for what blessing or blow he had come to deliver. She listened to his bloodshot eyes, charged with expectancy and ruin, with shock and exhaustion.

“And Louisa?” she found herself saying when those eyes reluctantly met hers.

He didn’t recoil from the question, but simply stood with the bundle, taking her in.

“Alive,” he said finally. “But the child was too young.”

Before she could respond, he escaped from the house, and all her hearing seemed to rush back to life with the slam of the door and then with the startled report of gunfire outside. When she looked out the window, she saw him beneath the mango trees, holding the bundle in one arm as he shot bullets into the sky.

But she hadn’t been spared Louisa after all. One night, about a week later, her eldest appeared at the house, thin and perspiring, her stomach still swollen from pregnancy. It was the first time they had faced each other since Lynton had come back into their lives, and, as if to give them the space they needed to reckon with their estrangement, Benny and the girls — who had been standing with them in the living room — excused themselves and fled to their rooms.

“You aren’t eating enough,” Khin said to Louisa finally, and immediately regretted her words.

Louisa flinched and knelt a few feet from Khin’s feet. “We have to go. ” she said softly. She lifted her shining eyes to meet Khin’s. “But I can’t — not without your blessing.” And she leaned forward and pressed her head to the floorboards, prostrating herself as Burmans did before monks and elders. “Do I have your blessing, Mama?” Her voice broke with longing, her need to be embraced becoming a palpable thing. “May I, Mama? May I have your blessing? Do you forgive me?”

Khin hadn’t been able to speak. And when Louisa raised her face to meet hers again, Khin could do no more than mutely signal her assent.

Then Louisa was gone, and the terror that came with her being underground, the knowledge of what would be done to her if she were discovered by the Burma Army.

As if possessed now by the need to escape her mind, Khin put down the photographs and pushed herself up from the bed, feeling the pain in her pelvis again. She crossed to the window and, almost hoping to find her missing family through the glass, braced herself on the casement in order to peer out. Seeing nothing but her own translucent, haunted face, she pushed open the window and leaned into the sweaty body and breath of the night, thick with coming rain.

This is what it is to be a ghost, she thought. This is what it is for the world to disappear before your eyes, even as you are doomed to go on existing as a shadow. Hadn’t Benny the right to want to leave this endless imprisonment? Why had she been so afraid of leaving with him, of missing the Burma she had been missing all her life — a Burma that thousands of years ago her ancestors had found in this place they called “Green Land,” and that had vanished to the point of invisibility? For a chilling moment, she thought she truly might be dead. This was not her house, but a sarcophagus from which she would never make her escape.

But the rain began to lash down from the cracked-open sky, and she closed her eyes and seemed to break from the confines of the house, of her body, to a place from which she could perceive the rise and fall of the oceans, and the crumbling of the cities, and the cries and strivings and silencing of all humanity. What a merciful, if brutal, view.

Then she opened her eyes and the view washed away with the rain. What stayed was the feeling of missing something — of missing everything profoundly.

One evening several months earlier, Benny had called her to his room — this room — and asked her to sit, and then he had paced before her and explained that a certain American, whom he would not name, had managed to arrange for the family’s exit to his country. They’d be able to visit Johnny (who, she understood, had suffered some sort of nervous breakdown), and jobs had been secured for Benny and the girls: he would sell sewing machines at a place called Sears Roebuck, Gracie would steward Pan Am flights, and dear Molly would teach Burmese to marines. “I’m going,” he said decisively, yet with a question in his voice. When she didn’t answer — didn’t tell him that there was no question she would join them — he went ahead and asked as a formality: “And will you come with me?”

He didn’t argue when she told him that she would not and then cheaply justified her decision by saying she’d spent enough of her life as a minority (to be Karen in Burma was bad enough, she said; she’d heard what Americans did to those who weren’t white). His willingness to go without her, of course, was as much a confession as her unwillingness to leave: a confession that, if they had once been entwined enough to stay together during the Japanese invasion, they were no longer. There was no need for promises of fidelity. There was nothing left between them to be faithful to. Nothing but memories of what had been and this faltering friendship, this limited understanding.