Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“Do you imagine it’s true?” she’d said, still in her chair, and looking up at him, fixed before her in the golden glow of the oil lamp. “Do you really think that God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us?”

He seemed taken aback by the question, and for a moment he blinked at her in surprise, or sudden faithlessness. Finally he said, “I couldn’t presume to know.”

“But do you love that way — each of us, as if there were only one of us?”

She was referring also to the other woman, of course. The other woman, with whom, she knew, he had continued to correspond sporadically — during these ten years of his house arrest — by means of their ex-convict friends who alternately visited the prison and this house.

Understanding had dawned on Benny’s face then, but he didn’t — perhaps he couldn’t — speak.

“You’re leaving her, too?” she said.

“For God’s sake, Khin. Don’t make me regret my decision. At least she’s encouraged me to leave. And it’s not — it’s not what you think, my affection for her.”

“You must be filled with regrets. You must regret calling me from the jetty that day.”

This made him look at her in fear, as though he were all at once perched on a splintered series of planks that might at any moment give way to the restless waters beneath them.

“Don’t speak,” she said. “Don’t immediately deny it. Just listen to me, and let me read your eyes.”

But he threw those eyes down, away from her stare.

“Yes, I thought so,” she said.

And as if to rebel against her verdict, he threw those eyes back at her — with defiance, she saw, and also with heartbreak. He looked very fierce, and suddenly she felt like a girl, someone seeing him for the first time: he was strange, and beautiful, and hard-lined. And aging. How tired he looked.

“Who did you think I was?” she said. “A girl on the end of a jetty, holding the hand of a small boy. Why me , of all women? I’m not especially pretty—”

“I won’t stay silent when you’re desecrating the past!” he erupted. “It’s all very well to demystify that — that thunderbolt — to say it was only passing lust . Just hair. Just posture. Just the way your hand seemed to clutch that little boy’s, as though you were holding on to him to stay safe and not the other way around. As though he were keeping you on that jetty. It’s all very well to say that the roundness of your arms, the roundness of your cheeks, their luminescence, the way your lips parted without words — it’s all very well to write it all off as superficial. To write off my burning interest in you as physiological . Just a man wanting to procreate with a member of the species whom he found especially fit. But I saw you on that day, Khin. I don’t know how else to explain it.”

The way he’d uttered her name — it caught her, and she couldn’t speak, couldn’t defend herself against her feeling for him.

“And I felt you seeing me,” he said quietly, and then lapsed into silence for a time. “You asked about my faith,” he went on at last, “if I believe we are so precious after all to God — if God is . I know you loved Saw Lay — don’t deny it. There’s no need. You know, sometimes I hear him talking to me? I hear that modest, moved voice, rending the night. Is it a fantasy? Maybe. But sometimes I believe it’s his immortal voice. I’m not speaking metaphorically. I mean when others enter us — their words, their wisdom, their counsel — all of it lives inside us and will not be extinguished. No, the voice I hear, the words that echo in my ears — they seem to live , in memory, yes, but also in — in what I only know to call eternity.”

When he and the girls were gone — when all that life was sucked out of the house with their quick, irreversible departure — everything had gone mute for a time. Even her mind. And as if to shock that mind awake now, she leaned farther out the window, out into the thrashing rain. Her rosebushes, twenty feet below, flailed in the wind, describing her anguish. But if she wanted to escape her thoughts and her pain, she no longer had the instinct to escape the world. Could it be that, after everything — after all her yearning to vanish, to slip into the waves of oblivion — all she wanted was to persist ? Could it be that, now that she was finally free to die, all she wanted was to inhale the fragrance of the earth, of the rain, and for all of it — for all of them — to come back to her?

“Auntie?” came Hta Hta’s voice.

Khin turned and saw her faithful servant, whose own daughter, Effie — only fifteen — had recently left them to join the revolution. The girl had linked up with a boy — a Burman — who out of disgust with Ne Win had decided to join the Karen cause, and who credited his revulsion also to the rampant racism of even the monks, and the closing down of all but the government’s newspapers, and the restrictions on literature even of a religious kind, and the persistent “Burma for the Burmans” rallying cry of Ne Win’s party. Hta Hta, too, had been a teenager when she’d fled this house with Benny and the family after the outbreak of civil war. And here she was, past thirty: leaning against the door frame, hardly able to support her own weight.

“Would you like to eat rice?” she asked Khin in her mild, fond manner.

And when Khin crossed to her, Hta Hta took her by the hand and led her down toward the kitchen, where they could nourish their bodies and their memories of what had been.

But that night she fell into a fever, and apprehension began seeping from her pores like a premonition of ruin. Hta Hta’s cold compresses soothed the apprehension away; still the fever escalated, and soon Khin was watching herself rave and repel Hta Hta and pull at her bed linens as if they were offensive to her spirit.

“Khin,” a woman said to her, and she realized it was Rita. Rita wrapped in grace, who, as if the butt of a cruel cosmic joke, had been freed only six weeks ago — after the three farewells were complete. Why was it that the dry woman came and pestered her with visits every few days? Pestered her with reminders of Benny and Lynton, the latter of whom had maneuvered Rita’s release as part of his ongoing negotiations, or so the woman said.

“She won’t eat, no longer knows me,” Hta Hta lamented.

“Khin,” said Rita again, “this is only a passing thing, this fever. You will pull through this. Tell yourself you will.”

“Did I fail?” Khin stunned herself by crying.

But Rita seemed anything but astounded. She sat at Khin’s side and took her hand in her own thin cool one.

“Tell me,” Khin pressed on. “Did I fail? Did I fail? ”

In the dim room, illuminated by the lamp and the generous moonlight, Rita’s eyes looked very deep, even bottomless. “Why think in such terms?” she responded finally. “The only question is whether or not you’ve done your best in the face of your circumstances.”

“So it’s the end for me?”

Again, Rita hesitated. “There’s no reason you shouldn’t pull through this.”

“But is this all?” Khin pursued madly.

A new suppleness suffused Rita’s face. She peered down at Khin while seeming also to peer inward, at the limits of her own being. “Does it matter?” she said uncertainly. And then, almost as though to apologize: “We’re here together now. This turn of ours isn’t up.”

“I tried to take turns,” Khin confessed, blinking up into the depths of her eyes. “With you .”

This turn didn’t strike Rita, by appearances, as anything so benign. She made a visible effort to keep her gaze affixed to Khin’s. “It is true,” she said cautiously, “that I have affection for your husband, and that has put you in the position of having to share him. Would you — would you like me to explain my feelings?”