Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

“My mother?”

“Broken into her house and kicked her around. But maybe,” he quietly added, “they want to frighten you into surrender.” His eyes, peering down at her, shone with intention. “We believe our senior officers have all been arrested and transported to Rangoon. Our men will need a leader. You must establish a grid line.”

She was possessed by a strange, familiar feeling of dissociation, as though she were being called, again, to play a part she didn’t want, for which she was ill prepared. She had been born into war, and war had never let her go, but she hadn’t made war. She had never really wanted to make it. And yet she said, “What is a grid line, Sunny?”

“A boundary of villages the Burmans can’t cross without us opening fire.”

“And if the Burmans cross our grid line and we have to open fire. will we have enough men and munitions to deter them?”

“Maybe. Not for long.”

“And where will we go if we need to retreat?”

But she remembered that Lynton had already given her the answer: on the night he had spoken of his impending “death,” he had pointed across the dimming valley, toward the lush slopes of the Dawna Range, and he had said, “Go to those mountains if the Burmans come.”

She had determined nothing, established nothing, seemed only to be caught in a net of continued disbelief, when, several hours later, she learned that one of the boys, the youngest, had developed a high fever and was at risk of death.

She found him on his bed in a hostile delirium. “I told you the hill is haunted!” he shouted at her when she approached, but he didn’t balk when she soon stripped away the bedding covering him and pressed him to her body to absorb some of his heat.

He was an orphan, as were most of Lynton’s boys. “Every year, three or four people in every Karen village are shot like his parents,” Lynton had told her, “made to die by the hands of the Burma Army so that the people know to be frightened and to submit.” Now, as she held this child, she had the visceral sense that he was a replacement for her own little lost one, or rather that she could hold this boy so closely because her own boy wasn’t here to fill her hands, her life. And she was overcome by the fervent wish that he not die.

“Everything is all right,” she found herself murmuring to him, and she laid him back and doused him with the cool water Sunny brought to her. Everything is all right —an absurdity because nothing was as it should be and perhaps nothing ever would be right again for them. Yet she was consoled by her own words, half believed them. If she could just save this one boy’s life — if she could just keep saving it and saving it — disaster would be kept at bay. Hush now. Sleep. I’ll stay with you. Don’t cry. Yes, yes, I’ll stroke your back. You need sleep. Everything will be all right.

For several hours, they fought to hold on to the boy’s life. He had two frightening seizures before he fell unconscious. And as her hope began to recede, she perceived another meaning in the assurance she’d given him: one way or another, they would all come to an end; but they were meant to come to an end. Everything would be all right — and nothing would be all right — because he would die as they all assuredly would. And, perceiving this almost trivial truth, she told herself that she must go to Mama and surrender herself to the Burmans.

But around midnight the boy took an inexplicable turn for the better. He awakened, his raging fever broke, and, after changing him and helping him back into the freshly made bed, she sat watching over him in a state of rapture. She hadn’t forgotten Lynton, nor did she discount the possibility that Lynton was dead and the Burma Army was poised to invade Kyowaing. But she seemed to see the entire mysterious panorama of their predicament through the keyhole of this boy’s narrow escape from death. Was it a trick of her present circumstance that, from this perspective, she perceived that her own life, which had never been worth much to her personally, was worth saving because it was meant to serve and save others? She felt filled with an aching, profound love — not for herself, which seemed to have grown thin and dissipated — but for the boy and for her mother, for Lynton’s men and for all of Burma’s persecuted. None of them was worthier than any child born to the planet, but they were worth defending, worth loving especially, for the very reason that their worth was in question. Indeed, the fulfillment she had been anticipating — her fulfillment with Lynton — had finally arrived: now, at last, she was free to give herself utterly.

And what did that mean, to give herself? The question seemed to bear on nothing less than the Karen problem — a problem of trust, of whom to trust, of the difference between trust and suicide. She saw the scope of their immediate problem: that the Burmans were bound to invade, to cross the grid line which she must right away make known; that the remaining men in Lynton’s brigade would be too few to repel them; that the only place to flee would be hostile Karen territory; that this territory itself would be jeopardized if Kyowaing was overrun; and that Bo Moo would have no choice but to surrender or combine forces with others — with her own soldiers, if she could persuade the man to reconcile with them. But, of course, Bo Moo was the door she must throw open, as Lynton had said. There was no other choice.

After she arranged for a village woman to watch over the sleeping boy, she ascended the hill in the predawn light, entered her empty house, and went to the bedroom, where she found shears and sat before a mirror. Years before, she had sat down in just this way — that time with a penknife in hand, yet with no understanding of where her instincts were leading her. Now she saw that there was no need to mar herself in order to take possession of her inner strength: she only had to remove the last shred of her pretense, the pretense that would prevent Bo Moo from trusting her and prevent her from becoming the fullest expression of herself.

She’d never been in the habit of seeing Miss Burma’s beauty, had hardly been able or wished to see it, so it was with some surprise that she now registered her still unblemished skin, her clear, deep gaze. Her hair was up, and as she began to unpin it, and as pieces fell darkly around her pale face, she was strangely taken by the vivid picture the contrast made. For an instant, she thought she hadn’t the courage to cut it away, to deprive herself of this unearned advantage — or disadvantage, for hadn’t she been shackled to pretense by means of this “advantage”? How easy it would be to break the shackles; she had only to want to break them. With a flush of embarrassment, she remembered Lynton’s refrain about the necessity of living free from shame. And, as she stared at her face, she saw in it the presence of Mama’s and Daddy’s longing and valiance and rage. There, beneath the surface of the skin tightening around her eyes, was the same startled stamina she’d witnessed when Mama had tripped after the horse cart carrying her and the other children away from the Bilin plague. “ Promise we’ll be all right?” “Never lose faith!” There, behind her searching gaze, was the same bewildered conviction she’d discovered night after night in Daddy’s study, when he would stub out his cigarette or throw a glance out the window, as if to throw so many punches at an obscure fate. “If you aren’t prepared to fight against injustice — if you aren’t prepared to risk everything to defend the liberty of all human beings —” She was the completion of each of her parents, as much as she was now the completion of Lynton — dead or alive.