Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Lynton. The picture of him riddled with bullets all at once exploded across her consciousness, across her reflected, horrified face. And without wasting another minute she picked up the shears, grabbed a fistful of hair, and began to cut.

Neither Sunny nor the wireless operator said a thing later that morning down by the operator’s hut, where she appeared shorn and wearing Lynton’s fatigues. Neither of them looked at her when the three of them sat down across the operator’s narrow table to determine the grid line, or when, that grid line having been established and communicated over the wireless, she faced them frankly and said, “I see no choice but to approach Bo Moo about reconciliation.”

“He will kill us,” Sunny responded, finally staring into her face with agony. He seemed to have ceased breathing.

“Do you think I am mistaken?” she said to them. “Do you think we can fend off the Burmans on our own?”

Sunny continued to stare at her in silence while the operator fiddled with his instruments.

“Tell me,” she said, “is there someone else — some other group — to whom Bo Moo can turn if our territory is overrun?”

“There are the Communists,” the operator quietly put in, raising his eyes to her at last. He was a small man, timid by nature, and for a few moments, she struggled to reconcile his aspect of hesitancy with the force of his revelation.

“Which communists?” she said. “Isn’t Bo Moo opposed to communism?”

“I mean the Karen Communists,” he said. “The ones based in the Tavoy. They are few, but well funded by Peking. I’ve been listening in, and they are trying to pay Bo Moo a visit.”

It was hours past dawn and the sun shone strongly in the window like a grace, yet she had the sense again of standing over a chasm whose depths she could hardly fathom. Again she remembered the overheard conversation between Lynton and Tom. “ Exactly why Will’s old plan makes sense. We need a base in the Tavoy — somewhere arms can be delivered by sea.” Had the American wanted to position Lynton in the Tavoy as a defense against communism and further communist incursions? And had Lynton knowingly gone along with being used to such an end? She was seized by the impulse to back away from the depths of her incomprehension, to run toward Bo Moo, who had doggedly trusted no one: not the Burmans, not the West, not Lynton himself, and not Peking — as yet.

“We will go to him regardless,” she said.

“His men will ambush us if we enter his territory without permission,” Sunny cried. She saw him shiver, as though he were caught in a wind from which there was no escape.

“With the corrupted airwaves,” the operator added, “communication is impossible.”

“We’ll communicate by hand and runners, if necessary,” she said.

And then she forced herself to look past their frightened faces to the window, to the sunshine, still pacifying the day.

That night, under the cover of the mist and the darkness, with a gun that still felt unnatural on her hip and a rifle in her hands, she left the village with Sunny, the operator, a medic, and a platoon of eight other men. They had sent a runner ahead to make contact with a farmer whose property straddled the opposing brigades’ territories — and whose soldier sons were no less divided — with the hope that the farmer would be willing to approach Bo Moo as a neutral party and communicate their desire for safe passage to his headquarters. Sometime in the next few hours, they trusted, they would intersect with the runner and learn their next step.

She had not slept in over a day, but as she proceeded into the forest she was drawn deeper into her acutely alert state of mind. She followed her ruined body over paths that plunged, that slipped, that climbed, that vanished into streams whose currents came up to her knees, that propelled her and the others all at once onto brief clearings from which she could see, through the parting mists, the moonlit ridges of the Dawna Range. Then back, back they burrowed, freezing, into the forest’s comprehensive darkness, leaving time, or rather entering another kind of time — the time of the dead. The mire into which they sank was that of the decomposed. The nocturnal beings peering at them from the trees were the dead’s descendants. And the rustle of a snake in the underbrush was the angel of death calling them home. A cemetery, old as the earth, with traps laid to bury them. And yet she seemed to sense an invisible hand drawing her forth with every pace. Sunny’s tense shape ahead of her, the silhouette of his rifle and grenade launcher in the shadows beyond the shadows — those might have been Lynton’s.

Dawn was breaking when the mists gave way to white fields of paddy, and the men recognized the farmer’s hut on the edge of the far forest. The rest hid in the brush while she and Sunny proceeded through the sodden field as far as the hut, where they gently called out to make themselves known, and soon discovered the tousled head of the runner emerging from the doorway. He had made contact, he told them, and the willing farmer had left sometime in the middle of the night. There was rice and tea for them inside. They must eat, and then hide in a hut farther on in the forest until the man’s return. No cooking during the day, no smoke the Burmans might see, no movement at all until the farmer returned with Bo Moo’s answer, and that could take four or five days.

An enforced pause. A maddening pause, during which they could only listen in over the wireless, mutely watching the terrible action from afar. They knew the Burmans were on the move, knew — from the escalating warnings that their own men in Kyowaing were sending out — that Taung Kwin, on the grid line, was under threat. Any moment gunfire would erupt, while they were left to reckon with the paltriness of their plans.

Or rather, her plans, because there was no question anymore that she had become the leader of Lynton’s men, that she alone was responsible for arranging and conducting this entire, if halted, movement toward Bo Moo’s camp, which would either save or destroy them. And yet she knew so little of the menacing figure on whom her aspirations were now pinned.

“Tell me more about him,” she said to the men each night, when they felt freer to breathe, to speak. And slowly a picture began to crystallize in her mind — a picture of revolution made manifest. Bristling hair, eyes shocked with contempt, furious and thick-fingered fists. Bo Moo had staged an attack on Lynton’s camp before the peace talks had begun, the men told her, and he was known to impose the harshest sentences on soldiers who committed crimes, sentences he himself executed with his bayonet. From a peace-seeking perspective, he would appear to be a demon. And will I become like that? she wondered in this sanctuary of the indefinite.

Because not only could she not comprehend Bo Moo, but she hardly knew what she meant to do with the man should he not kill her on the spot. She would endeavor to convince him that he should accept reunification — but beyond that? Her first thought was to persuade him to trust in Lynton’s plan of building trust, of looking West while working toward democracy; but of course she no more knew if she trusted Lynton’s allies — his senior officers, Tom, the American, those Burman government insiders who had been willing to lend Lynton an ear — than she knew if she trusted in the possibility of democracy and trust itself. Consider, on the one hand, survival by means of a rejection of the ideals one used to hold dear; consider, on the other, victory by means of the risk of holding fast to them. One instant she had the evil fantasy of surprising the Burmans who had shot at Lynton, surprising them in their beds with a volley of shots from her own rifle; another appalled instant she thought she would prefer to call her men to her and pray for divine inspiration. Who will we be from now on? she seemed to be asking herself. Shall we be described as the crystallization of revolution, too? Shall we be defined by hatred and suspicion and contempt, absolved by righteousness and a bloody thirst for revenge?