Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

The acknowledgment of what Khin had endured — and of what Rita continued to share exclusively with Benny — sucked the wind right out of Khin’s chest, and she thought that she would gasp, or cry. It occurred to her that Rita had also just lost him to America, to another life. That Rita had lost him without ever having had him, really.

“I imagine,” Rita said, “that for a long time I have been moved by his brokenness. He can’t help reaching for what he knows will evade his grasp. But the failing doesn’t stop him from continuing to care, from trying again.”

The way Rita said it — not in grief, but in joy — made the happenstance of her having known and lost Benny seem a blessing. And how fortunate they all had been, Khin realized, to intersect when they might have missed one another entirely.

And all at once she seemed to see Benny standing with his hands in his coat pockets and gazing down the wrong direction of a foreign boulevard. Time had already transformed him in this image she held now in her mind: he was whiter, puffier, with the bewildered despair of the aged. But his exile was not only from youth. His despair was also that of emigration. The greatest shock was seeing him out in the open air — an open air that in its indifference seemed to obliterate him. For so long, he’d been in prison or under house arrest — his significance continuously underscored, albeit negatively. “Benny!” she called to him, and she seemed to see him reel around toward her with something vacant, something foolish — a touch of stupidity — in his eyes. It took a minute for his gaze to settle on hers and another minute for anything but confusion to register on his features. “Where are the children?” she asked. But he didn’t answer. He leaned toward her, and she knew — from the stiff fragility of his torso enclosed in her arms, from his disorientation — that he wouldn’t long survive the displacement.

“Khin!” Rita called her to the room again. “I need you to be strong. There is something very tragic I must say.”

Hta Hta was singing a Karen ballad. “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil. ”

“Khin!” Rita repeated, and the shadow of Benny rose up between them, annihilating the ache of envy, of apartness. “They say Lynton’s dead. There was a parade in the streets celebrating his capture. Do you hear me?” Rita peered into her eyes, pinning Khin deliberately to this life. “You’re all Louisa has here. You’re all she has.”

On the evening the reports about Lynton began to come in over the wireless, Louisa bolted herself inside their bedroom in the house on the hill. She had the sense that she needed to gather her thoughts, to keep out the confusion of the reports in order to determine how to go on. He’s alive. He’s alive, she kept telling herself, remembering what Lynton had said — to expect the news of his death, which wouldn’t be true. He’ll come back. He’s only hiding out. But even as she thought these things, the collective force of the reports made her crouch down on the bed. And then she put out the lamp, the better not to see — not to confront the horrible likelihood of the reports in aggregate being fact.

Five hours earlier, Sunny had come for her at the school, where she had been giving a literature lesson to the boys and the village children. Without a word, he had led her to the wireless operator’s hut, and there she learned that the session of talks Lynton had been attending in Thaton — a cease-fire zone — had derailed. What they knew was that Lynton and his senior officers had ventured inside the walled ancient city to meet with the Burmans, and then all entrances had been barricaded. Neither Lynton nor any of the officers had been seen coming out, and nearly half their soldiers who had been waiting for them were already beginning to desert, believing all was lost. What was more, the Burmans had obviously stolen their codebooks, and it was now impossible to tell which of the messages coming in a flurry over the wireless were to be trusted — messages that told crucially different versions of what had befallen Lynton. In all versions, he had been having dinner when the Burmans broke in and began to shoot; but whereas roughly half the accounts reported that he had made an escape and was hiding out wounded, the others reported that he had been killed. And the difference seemed to hinge on the question of culpability: in the versions in which he lived, only the Burmans were at fault for violating the terms of the cease-fire; in the rest, an unnamed member of his inner circle had drugged and set him up.

He is alive, Louisa told herself again, and in the intensifying darkness she seemed to feel the heat of him in the bed beside her. The heat of his brain. Of his will to go on. Of his relentless interest in her. Had she committed the error of so many of his devoted men and made him some sort of false god? The brilliance of his frequent laughter, his neglect of caution of the usual sorts, his resurrections after the previous reports of his death, his guarantee to her that he wouldn’t die, that he would never really be dead — all of it had seemed capable of rescuing her, rescuing them all, from menace. She’d always intuitively understood that part of the cult of the war hero was necessarily his veneer not only of faultless decisiveness, of immortality, but also of immunity from torment. And like everyone else who believed in him, she had come nearly to worship at the altar of his invulnerability. She, too, needed something to believe in. Life was too oppressive without a measure of faith.

Shivering on the bed, she seemed to be perched on the precipice of a terrible chasm whose darkness appalled her. Could Lynton have been prepared for betrayal by one of his own friends? To obscure the memory of his face, she sprang up and fumbled with the matches on the table beside the bed, struggling to light the spirit lamp and hold herself on this side of the chasm — the chasm of the unknown. But the frailty of the lamplight only reminded her of how she had eavesdropped from another dark bedroom on Lynton talking with Tom in Sunny’s mother’s kitchen. If not every member of Lynton’s inner circle could be trusted, neither could Tom nor the American, whose “invitation” Tom had seemed to urge upon Lynton. And what had that invitation been? For Lynton to engage with American military personnel, or to be disappeared by them?

There was a knock at the door, and she yelped, jumping around, but it was only Sunny. His voice came quietly through the door. “I have soup,” he said.

The sight of his face behind the door — soft and vulnerable and frightened — gave her the strange, almost passionate urge to kiss him, to take his warm face in her own blood-warmed one and console him.

Out in the kitchen, he watched while she sat and took the soup into her mouth, submerging her fear spoonful by spoonful. She was an animal, just an animal. It was the mind, not the body, which was alien, the cause of torment. She had only to dwell — and keep dwelling every moment — in this animal self in order to go on.

“There are more messages,” Sunny said when she was done, speaking in a voice that was at once embarrassed and reverential. “The Burmans say you are forgiven. They invite you back to Rangoon to be with your mother.”

She did not raise her eyes to meet his.

He went on: “Another message says that you must never return. That their army has plans for you.”

The silence he followed this with was immense, and when she finally turned her eyes to him, she saw that he had begun to perspire profusely, as though he could no longer contain the anxiety behind his pores.

“And that they have already hurt your mother,” he continued.