Charmaine Craig - Miss Burma

Sunny seemed to force himself to set down his rifle and reckon with the provisions left for them, and she turned her eyes to the calmly glistening river. How narrow it was, and how easy it would be for the Burmans to traverse it and overrun the last remnants of the Karen stronghold. She understood — at last, and viscerally — why Lynton had been so intent on seeking outside allies: in this isolation they could defend themselves for only so long. She felt a pang of sympathy for the man across the river, whom fate had also made her enemy; there he was, somewhere beyond the dark water, somewhere behind the slim forest of teak trees, full of pride, no longer able to cope alone with the evil he faced.

She glanced back at Sunny, who was pouring grains of rice into an empty pot. His movements were mechanical, his fingers almost imperceptibly trembling, as if he were trying to fulfill an obligation to persist. With an alert glance at her, he stood with the pot and left the hut, bound for the river — for the water, she saw. She watched him walk out to the very edge and stoop down and wash the rice. Then he stood erect, a kind of defeat in his shoulders, before he crossed to a nearby thicket of trees. A few moments later, he was back, beside the hut with the waterlogged pot and a few forked branches that he had plucked and presently used to construct a stand for cooking. Normally, he would have darted back out to the forest for vegetables or birds — he’d done as much every night when they had been waiting at the farmer’s field — but this meal was not about their nourishment, she knew; these preparations were about his terror of discontinuing. And, watching him struggle to light a fire under the stand, she tried to halt the stream of her own sunken thoughts, rushing dangerously toward a mental picture of Lynton’s last supper and the stunned expression that had snatched the smile away from his face.

But he’s alive! she argued with herself inwardly, forcing her mind away from the images that were such a disgrace to the living man she loved.

She turned back to the river, trying to conjure Lynton’s voice, as she had done with those of her parents when she had been separated from them in childhood — and instantly he was speaking to her, repeating what he’d said on the stoop of their Kyowaing house: “If we look past our petty proclivities, past our troubled history; if we see the broader common goal, everyone with an eye to democracy. If we find a way to come together, they won’t be able to stand in our way. And our friends will be there to help us. ”

How easily she had let herself think him the dupe of those friends, of the unnamed member of his inner circle who had supposedly betrayed him in Thaton, of Tom and the American. Lynton couldn’t force an ally to be loyal, but he could determine to believe in another’s capacity for loyalty. And she could keep her faith: in his judgment, even if he’d fallen; in his allies. Perhaps the thing she could most convincingly offer Bo Moo was precisely the thing the Communists couldn’t — the thing most impossible to convince another of, because it was defined by uncertainty: faith. True, Bo Moo and Lynton had broken faith with each other, but neither had — at least until now — lost faith in their people’s original dream of democracy. Wasn’t it true that she had reason to believe that America — that the West, that Will and Tom — would support them only if they refused to tangle with the Communists? She must tell Bo Moo of the American’s proposed base, which Lynton had believed would facilitate their aid.

A distant splash drew her attention to the far side of the river. In the early moonlight, she glimpsed the silhouette of a man standing as if on the water: a soldier was paddling the raft this way.

Sunny quickly took the pot off the stand and kicked dirt into the fire, and they picked up their rifles and went out to the bank. When she looked down the shore, she saw that the colonel had emerged from the trees and was walking toward them at a slow pace, as if trying to put off reaching them.

By the time the colonel drew abreast of them, his breath coming fast, his eyes glimmering with uncertainty, the soldier on the raft had nearly arrived.

“He is ready to meet you,” the colonel told her, seeming to apologize.

He and Sunny trudged into the water, each taking hold of the rope the soldier had cast out to them.

“I will hold it — I will hold it—” the colonel told Sunny, drawing the raft toward her with all of his might.

Sunny backed away and extended his hand to her in unspoken reassurance.

She moved, yet didn’t take it. She had the sense that she might never stand again in this place. And she was keenly aware of the people whom she seemed to be leaving behind.

She couldn’t know that her mother, ailing and bruised from the attack at her home, was at that moment walking toward her along the Gulf of Martaban, retracing the steps she had taken when she’d heard the rumor that ten-year-old Louisa had been slain. She didn’t know that the boys, earlier that day, had scattered in the burning forest after Kyowaing’s invasion. She would never know that Lynton’s corpse, weighted with chains, had three days earlier been flown out over the gulf and dumped, so that, like a downed plane, it fell through the sky, plunged into the waters, and finally came to rest on the sea bottom. She couldn’t fathom the atrocity she would witness four days hence, when, after she succeeded in convincing Bo Moo to reunify and called her men to her, Bo Moo would decide to punish ten of those men for having trusted Lynton. Nor could she imagine the harrowing way that nearly every one of those men would lose his poise, crying and swearing and beseeching someone — beseeching God — for mercy, while in the chaos, before the crack of the gunfire, Sunny, also seized, would find her with his eyes and motion for her to run, to spare herself the sight.

She couldn’t know. She couldn’t. Yet, as if for the last time, she held in mind those who had held her in turn.

“Take my hand,” Sunny said.

“He’s a Christian,” the colonel added. She wasn’t sure if he meant to remind or reassure her.

“I have faith,” she told them.

She had the chilling notion that they were but souls in the abyss, without a god or a country or a man to defend them. And to banish the notion, she put her rifle in Sunny’s outstretched hand.

“You can step onto the raft,” he said gently. “It is safe.”

But she waited, uncertain and trying to be brave, for one more moment on Burma’s shore.

The Good Men