Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

On the fifth morning, the farmer finally wandered out of a tangle of trees in the forest accompanied by one of Bo Moo’s colonels. “I was a friend of your father and Saw Lay,” the colonel told her immediately, surely to put her at ease. But as they sat down together for tea in the farmer’s hut, the embarrassment with which he stole glances at her made her all at once conscious of her shorn head. “There is a long journey ahead of you to headquarters,” he said to her. “I’m afraid you won’t be permitted to bring more than one of your men along.”

With Sunny — of course it was Sunny she chose — they left the farmer’s field that evening, pressing forward into the mountains in a truncated column. The colonel was so soft and almost feminine that she could hardly believe him a warrior. He held his hands folded together as gently as he strode over the steep terrain, as lightly as he seemed to wear his boots and cap. She sensed he was predisposed to taking her into his confidence, yet he kept his silence as the fogs fell over them, and she kept Sunny between them — Sunny who, every hundredth pace, looked back worriedly at her, his eyes gleaming like stars in the deepening night.

As her bones began to throb and she trudged into the shadows that grew increasingly sinister, she felt alternately seized by a desperate desire to survive, to save her men and people, and lured by a call to rest, to surrender, even to die. Was this how Mama had felt, after they had parted in Bilin, when she had walked with her wares on her back, bearing the burden of her children’s survival? Even as Louisa wondered this, her thoughts slipped back to the children she’d left in Kyowaing, to the sick boy. Without the wireless operator accompanying her, she had no way of being reassured that he was still safe; she was submerged in her individual experience, as Mama had been during those months and months of their apartness.

An early blue light broke as they were making a strenuous, desolating climb up a gorge, and through the rising mists she glimpsed a tiny village clinging to the mountainside. The sight took her back to the initial trek she’d made to Kyowaing, after Daddy had disappeared and the Burmans had broken the Thaton cease-fire. Her dawning awareness of the repetitions — the disappearances in Thaton, the broken cease-fires there — filled her with the bewildering sensation that she was reading the future in the past, or reading the future of the past in the present. Again, she seemed to be a girl passing a mystical mountain village, and again Mama seemed to be telling her that its inhabitants had never seen a car, that the rice and vegetables they ate came from their fields or the bounty of the forest. “They know of no artifice.” “What is artifice?” “The way one tricks oneself into forgetting that death is nearby. ” Then she and the colonel and Sunny reached the crest of the gorge, and she was past the village, past her memory of what had been — born to and wrenched from her impressions so swiftly they seemed to have been dreamed.

Only when they drew up to a mountain station overlooking a wide russet-colored valley, whose waking beauty all at once blindsided her, did the colonel break his long silence. “You must be very smart about this,” he said, and he nodded to the valley, as if to humble himself before it. “There are things the general believes you have done.”

“Things?”

She understood he was referring to the rumors and that he was too shy to elaborate.

What he did instead was to complicate the picture she had been forming of Bo Moo, a man whose fanaticism for the Karen cause had apparently been intensified by his conversion to Christianity. Moo had grown up, the colonel said, an animist in the local Papun hills, where he had first confronted the barbarism of Aung San’s Burma Independence Army, whose units had been composed of so many bloodthirsty convicts. One of the early massacres had occurred in Papun, with seventeen elders machine-gunned, and the stray survivor bayonetted into his grave. The incident had been the first of a flurry of increasingly unimaginable atrocities, one of which the colonel himself had survived. “You see,” the colonel told her, dabbing the now lightly falling rain from his eyes, “Aung San’s men liked to say the Japanese sanctioned their extermination of Christians. Whether this was the case, I cannot say. But there is no doubt they had Christian blood on their minds when they arrived at the Roman Catholic mission where I was then boarding, in Myaungmya, as an orphan.”

Sunny retreated to the rear of the open station, as if to hide from the colonel’s description of how one of the priests, in his sickbed at the Roman Catholic mission, had been burned alive, and another shot through the stomach before the soldiers had burst into the orphanage. The children and sisters had fled upstairs while the men shot after them, shot up through the ceiling. And it was only by hiding beneath a mattress that the colonel had escaped the axes and machetes that took the lives of those around him. “Over a hundred and fifty. Even a six-month-old baby. So you see,” he went on quietly, not a note of self-pity or righteousness in his voice, “though the general was an animist then, the targeting of Christians couldn’t fail to make an indelible impression on him. I think it very nearly prepared him for conversion — and when you speak to him you must keep this in mind, his devoutness.”

Before she could form the question taking shape in her mind, he continued, less ambiguously: “He was a teenager at the time, and he did something interesting. Rather than joining the British army, as so many of our people did, rather than fighting against the Burma Independence Army or its allies, the Japanese, in the name of loyalty to the British — or rather than immediately joining British intelligence, as your husband did, pretending to spy for the Japanese and sabotaging their communications”—she made an effort, listening to these revelations, not to betray her ignorance of Lynton’s past, or her interest in it—“rather than doing anything like that, General Bo Moo joined the Japanese police. You know from your father, no doubt, that it was the Japanese, unbelievably, along with Aung San, who eventually put an end to the particular viciousness of the Independence Army’s miscreants. What General Bo Moo did was a very clever way of openly protecting our people at a time when we had no real protector at all. And it seems to me that he must have learned something from the Japanese then.”

The colonel gave her a knowing, ominous look just as the wind picked up at their backs. “Of course, he joined up with the British eventually,” he went on. “And he was not spared that special disillusionment felt by all of us — including your father and Saw Lay — when they left us to our own devices. It explains his reluctance to have confidence in the CIA, in anyone , the way your husband”—he looked worriedly out onto the valley again—“the way General Lynton was intent on doing.”

Night was falling again by the time they arrived on the banks of the Salween River, where Burma came to an end. Bo Moo’s headquarters were on the other side, in the relative refuge of Thailand, and through the gloaming she could see — beyond the far steep sandy bank — a thicket of teak from which several paths emerged, some leading down to the river, others following the shoreline before reentering the forest farther downstream where the trees surged forward to meet the cliff. There was a raft tied to those trees, but no vessel that she could see on the near bank.

The colonel showed them to a simple hut without walls near the water, where he said they could rest and nourish themselves while he conveyed the message of their arrival to headquarters. Then he disappeared into the forest down the shore, and she and Sunny, entering the open structure, seemed to be plunged into an aloneness and an exposure so comprehensive, all they could do for several moments was to stand with their guns pointed out at the expanding evening. Every odd call of a bird, every splash from the river, was a threat, reminding her of their utter vulnerability.