Miss Burma E-Book

Charmaine Craig

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2018 Longlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction After attending school in Calcutta, Benny settles in Rangoon, then part of the British Empire, and falls in love with Khin, a woman who is part of a long-persecuted ethnic minority group, the Karen. World War II comes to Southeast Asia, and Benny and Khin must go into hiding in the eastern part of the country during the Japanese Occupation, beginning a journey that will lead them to change the country's history. After the war, the British authorities make a deal with the Burman nationalists, led by Aung San, whose party gains control of the country. When Aung San is assassinated, his successor ignores the pleas for self-government of the Karen people and other ethnic groups, and in doing so sets off what will become the longest-running civil war in recorded history. Benny and Khin's eldest child, Louisa, has a danger-filled, tempestuous childhood and reaches prominence as Burma's first beauty queen soon before the country falls to dictatorship. As Louisa navigates her newfound fame, she is forced to reckon with her family's past, the West's ongoing covert dealings in her country and her own loyalty to the cause of the Karen people. Based on the story of the author's mother and grandparents, Miss Burma is a captivating portrait of how modern Burma came to be and of the ordinary people swept up in the struggle for self-determination and freedom.

Leseprobe

MISS BURMA

Also by Charmaine Craig

The Good Men

MISS BURMA

CHARMAINE CRAIG

Grove Press UK

First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

Copyright © 2017 by Charmaine Craig

“The Great Pretender” by Buck Ram

Copyright © 1955 by Panther Music Corporation

Copyright Renewed.

Used by Permission.

All Rights Reserved.

A portion of this novel originally appeared in Narrative magazine.

Jacket design by Chin Yee Lai Jacket photograph courtesy of the author

For everything that they have given to me and this book, my deepest thanks go to Ellen Levine, Peter Blackstock, Andrew Winer, and Arthur and Judy Winer.

—C.C.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: May 2017

Hardback ISBN 978 1 61185 624 8

Paperback ISBN 978 1 61185 507 4

Ebook ISBN 978 1 61185 940 9

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Grove Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

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26-27 Boswell Street

London, WC1N 3JZ

groveatlantic.com

In memory of my mother, Louisa;

and her parents, Ben and Khin—all born in Burma

And for Andrew, Ava, and Isabel

Look at the history of Burma. We go and invade the country: the local tribes support us: we are victorious: but like you Americans we weren’t colonialists in those days. Oh no, we made peace with the king and we handed him back his province and left our allies to be crucified and sawn in two. They were innocent. They thought we’d stay. But we were liberals and we didn’t want a bad conscience.

—Graham Greene, The Quiet American

Prologue

There she is, Louisa at fifteen, stepping onto a makeshift stage at the center of Rangoon’s Aung San Stadium in 1956. Give yourself to them, she thinks. And immediately one hand goes to her hip, her head tilts upward, her awareness descends to her exposed thighs, to her too-muscular calves, now in plain view of the forty thousand spectators seated in the darkening stands.

Give them what they need, her mother told her on the way to the stadium. And Louisa understands that her mother meant more than a view of her gold high-heeled sandals (on loan from a friend and pinching her toes), more than the curves accentuated by her white one-piece (copied from a photo of Elizabeth Taylor). Her mother meant something like a vision of hope. Yet what is Louisa’s appearance on this garish stage, during the final round of the Miss Burma contest, but a picture of something dangerous? She is approximately naked, her gleaming suit approximately concealing what should be private. She is approximately innocent, pushing a hip to one side, close to plummeting into indignity.

A tide of applause draws her farther into the light. She pivots, presenting the judges and the spectators beyond them with a view of her behind (ample thanks to her Jewish father, who sits with her mother somewhere in the stands nearby). Before her now are the other finalists, nine of them, grouped in the shadows upstage. Their smiles are fixed, radiant with outrage. “The special contender,” the government paper recently called her. How strange to be dubbed “the image of unity and integration,” when she has wanted only to go unremarked—she, the mixed-breed, who is embarrassed by mentions of beauty and race. “We never win the games we mean to,” her father once told her.

She pivots again, crosses the stage, moving through a cloud of some nearby spectator’s smoke, her eyes landing for a moment on her parents. Daddy is slumped away from Mama, his balding head slightly turned, his docile look catching hers. Though under house arrest, he has contrived special permission to be here. It is even conceivable that he has somehow arranged for the pageant to be fixed. Beside him, Mama, with her demurring aspect, appears anxious, overly engaged in the proceedings. She seems to lift off the edge of her seat, her eyes alight with pride and accusation and something resembling anguish. Move! she mutely cries from her perch, as though to avoid capture by Louisa’s recriminating glances.

And Louisa does move—past her parents, downstage, to face a view of the smiling judges and the rows of eyeglasses glinting up at her, the rifles in the hands of the soldiers manning the stands. It feels nearly benign, the applause that gives way to a flurry of coughs; almost sweet, these whiffs of someone’s perfume, of putrefying garbage and dampness beneath the field; even liberating, this offering of herself, of her near nakedness. Aren’t they all compromised in Burma? They have been through so much.

Several minutes later, before the crown is placed on her head, it occurs to her that the spectators could be worshipful congregants—or penned beasts—and she has the instinct to escape.

But here is a sash being slung across her shoulder.

Red roses shoved into her hands.

A camera flash.

“Miss Burma!” someone cries from the far side of the stadium, as if across the darkness of what has been.

PART ONE

Conversions

1926–1943

1

The Pugilist

When, nearly twenty years earlier, Louisa’s father saw her mother for the first time, toward the end of the jetty at the seaport of Akyab—that is, when he saw her hair, a black shining sheath that reached past the hem of her dress to her muddy white ankles—he reminded himself, God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us.

It was a habit of his, this retreat from cataclysms of feeling (even lust) to the consolations of Saint Augustine’s words. Did he believe them? When had he felt singularly loved, when since he was a very young boy living on Tseekai Maung Tauley Street in Rangoon’s Jewish quarter? Even his memories of that time and place were unsatisfying: Grandfather reciting the Torah in the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue, Daddy behind the register at E. Solomon & Sons, and the wide brown circles under Mama’s eyes as she pleaded with him, her only child, Be careful, Benny. Dead, all of them, of ordinary disease by 1926, when he was seven.

Be careful, Benny. Mama’s terrified love had kept him safe, he’d felt sure of it, until there was nothing between him and death, and he was shipped off to Mango Lane in Calcutta to live with his maternal aunties, daughters of that city’s late rabbi. Their love was nothing like Mama’s. It was meek and bland and threw up little resistance to his agony. So he took to throwing up his fists, especially when the boys at his new Jewish primary school taunted him for his strange way of speaking, the odd Burmese word that decorated his exclamations. His aunties’ solution to “the problem of his fists,” and to the way those fists brought other boys’ blood into their house (“Jewish blood! Jewish blood on his hands!”), was to pack him off again, to the only nearby boarding school with a boxing program, Saint James’ School, on Lower Circular Road. The location was a comfort to his aunties, who mollified their anxiety about the school’s Christian bent by insisting that no institution of serious religious purpose would ensconce itself on a road whose name sounded, when said briskly enough, like Lower Secular. “And no more Jewish blood on his hands,” they reminded each other with satisfaction.

And they were right. Over the next five years on Lower Secular his fists found everything but Jewish blood: Bengali blood, English blood, Punjabi blood, Chinese blood, Tamil blood, Greek blood, Marwari blood, Portuguese blood, and Armenian blood—lots of Armenian blood.

Poor Kerob “the Armenian Tiger” Abdulian, or whatever his name was. In a swollen gymnasium that reeked of feet and stale tea and wood rot, seventeen-year-old Benny fought him for the crown in the Province of Bengal’s Intercollegiate Boxing Championship, and never had one young man’s face been so rearranged physically in the name of another’s metaphysical problems. Before going down in the first round, the Armenian took a left to the chin for the loneliness Benny still suffered because of his parents’ deaths. He took another left to the chin for a world that allowed such things to happen, and another just for the word “orphan,” which Benny hated more than any anti-Semitic slur and which his classmates cruelly, proudly threw at him. The Armenian received a right to his gut for all the mothers and fathers, the aunts and uncles and grandparents and guardians—colonized citizens of the “civilized” British Empire, all of them—who banished their young to boarding schools like St. James in India. But none of these jabs could vanquish the Tiger. No, what sent the Tiger to the mat and all the spectators to their feet was an explosion of blows brought on by something Benny glimpsed in the stands: the entrance of a young, dark St. James’ novice called Sister Adela, to whom Benny had hardly spoken, yet who—until today—had arrived precisely on time for each of his fights.

He took her presence at his matches as some kind of exercise of devotion on her part—to him or to the school (and by extension God?), he wasn’t sure. Now, as the referee began to shout over the collapsed Armenian, Sister Adela positioned herself in her white habit near a group of students whose raucous display of support for Benny only illumined her stillness, the alertness of her black gaze presiding over him. But when the match was abruptly called and Benny struggled to free himself of the spectators flooding the ring, she slipped out of the gymnasium, unnoticed by all but him.

That evening, the proud schoolmaster hosted a feast in Benny’s honor. Leg of lamb, roasted potatoes, trifle for pudding—those were the Western dishes that Benny could hardly taste because he was directing all of his attention to the tip of Sister Adela’s fork, which she repeatedly used to probe her uneaten dinner while stooped over her corner table with the other nuns. Only once did she meet and hold Benny’s gaze, her focus on him so sharp and accusatory that he felt every flaw in his face, especially its swollen upper lip, the result of the one right hook the Armenian Tiger had managed to land. Was she angry at him?

As if to deprive him of an answer to that question, her father came to take her away the next morning. She left in a deep pink sari that clung to her hips and set off the impossibly black strands of hair falling from the knot at the base of her neck, the most elegant neck Benny had ever seen. A queen’s neck, he told himself over the following few weeks, as he tried and failed to assert himself in the ring. Remarkably, his desire to fight had followed Sister Adela right out of the stands.

A month later, a letter from her arrived:

Dearest Benny,

Do you remember when I came across you sitting in the library talking to yourself? I thought you had become one screw loose because of all the pummeling your head receives. But no you were going over the lecture on Saint Augustine and you were saying God loves each of us as if there were only one of us. Well you were saying it with a good amount of mocking but I have seen from the start that you are a very sweet and immensely gentle being. And maybe you were thinking what I have come to. That sometimes it is necessary to go without human love so God’s love can touch us more completely. It is true that no human love can be as untroubled as God’s don’t you agree? Try as I am trying to think of God’s love whenever you are blue. Oh I know you will do the opposite! Well let this be a test and a reminder that true rebels are unpredictable. I told myself I COULD NOT FACE your match when I learned my father would come for me but then I changed my mind. Did you have to be so hard on that boy? You can’t imagine how very very very very happy it made me when you beat him so happy I am crying all over again. Oh Benny. Pray for me. Your very dearest Sister Adela is now a wife.

In faith,

Pandita Kumari (Mrs. Jaidev Kumari)

He sailed for Rangoon later that year, in June 1938, when a cyclone crossed the upper Bay of Bengal and swept his steamer into its violent embrace. With each pitch and lurch, he leaned into the wind over the upper deck rail, purging himself of his choked years of loneliness in India—years that had ended with his rebellious proposal to his aunts that he convert to the faith of Saint Augustine (whose God he truly hoped loved him as uniquely as a parent), followed by their retaliatory proposal to perform his death rites. By the time the cyclone passed and he caught sight of the placid mouth of the Rangoon River, he nearly felt dispossessed of what had been.

At the wharf, he was met by an employee of B. Meyer & Company, Ltd., a lucrative rice-trading house based in Rangoon and run by one of his second cousins. The employee—a young Anglo-Burman called Ducksworth—was chattier than any fellow Benny had encountered. “They didn’t mention you were a heavyweight!” Ducksworth exclaimed when Benny insisted on lifting his own trunk into the carriage drawn by two water buffalo (he’d had the fantasy of being met by an automobile, and stared with some envy at one idling on the road). “Mr. Meyer should have put you to work hefting bags of rice instead of pushing a pen! Not a hopelessly boring job, being a clerk—nor a hopelessly low salary. Enough to live respectably, to take care of your board and lodging at the Lanmadaw YMCA. Well, you wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. A lot of jolly fellows, many of them British officers, half-whites. You’re . . . half Indian?”

Before Benny could answer, they were caught in an afternoon downpour, and Ducksworth busied himself with helping the driver raise the rusted metal roof of the carriage. In any case, Benny thought, better to avoid the subject of his race. He wasn’t worried about ­bigotry—Mr. B. Meyer was a shining example of Jewish ­success—but he was tired of wearing a label that no longer seemed to describe him. His Jewishness was like a feature lost to childhood; it had been part of him, to be sure, but he saw no recognizable evidence of it in who he had become.

Ducksworth was eager to take him under his wing—just as eager as Benny soon became to take flight from anything constraining his newfound freedom in Rangoon. Over the weeks that followed, Benny discovered that if he did his job well, if he worked very hard at pushing his pen, and then was adequately polite to the fellows at the YMCA (where he was the youngest boarder and roundly liked)—if he rewarded Ducksworth with a few generous smiles or minutes of attentive conversation, he could escape into the city on his own. And so every evening after supper he found a way to flee down Lanmadaw Street to the Strand, where, amid the grand official structures and residences built by the British, his pace slowed and he drank in the evening air. He was thirsty, desperately in need of replenishing himself with the kind of sights he’d missed while shut up at St. James’—sights that had become so foreign to him he felt himself taking them in with the embarrassing curiosity of a newly transplanted Brit: the men sitting on the side of the road smoking cheroots, chewing betel, or singing together; the Indians hawking ice cream and the Muslim shopkeepers reading aloud from their holy book; the stalls advertising spices, canned goods, and umbrellas varnished with fragrant oil; the clanking workers in the passageways; and the buses, the trishaws, the bullock carts, the barefoot monks, the Chinese teetering past on their bicycles, and the women in their colorful, tightly wound sarongs, transporting sesame cakes or water on their heads and even meeting his shamed eyes with a grin. How closed in he had been on Lower Circular!

Painfully, it struck him that his aunties had stopped routinely inviting him to Mango Lane long before his talk of conversion, and that the intoxication he felt here was partly due to his burgeoning sense of belonging. In truth, he knew little more about Burma than what he’d learned in history classes: that the region had been settled centuries (or millennia?) ago by a medley of tribes; that one of the tribes, the Burmans, had dominated; and that the problem their domination presented to everyone else had been solved by the British, who’d taken possession of Rangoon nearly a century before and who continued to rule by staffing their civil service and armed forces with natives. The very names of these tribes bewildered his ignorant ears: Shan, Mon, Chin, Rohingya, Kachin, Karen (these last pronounced with the accent on the second syllable, it seemed to him—Ro-HIN-gya, Ka-CHIN, Ka-REN), and so on. He could no longer speak more than a few phrases of Burmese—English had always been his language (though he could make his way with the Bengali and Hindustani coming out of the odd shop). But as he passed the people gossiping in their impenetrable languages and playing their energetic music, he felt seized by a powerful sense of understanding. It was something about their friendliness, their relaxed natures, their open courteousness, their love of life, their easy acceptance of his right to be among them, elephantine as he must have appeared in their eyes (and hopelessly dumb, miming what he wanted to purchase). He had the sense that wherever they had come from (Mongolia? Tibet?), however many centuries or millennia ago, they had long ago accepted others’ infiltration of their homeland so long as it was peaceable. Yet he also had the distinct impression that they’d never forgotten the dust of homelessness on their feet.

“Damnable citizens,” Ducksworth often grumbled at the Lanmadaw YMCA, where every night after dinner the fellows would gather in the close, teak-furnished living room and fill their glasses with cognac (purchased, Benny learned with a pang, from E. Solomon & Sons, where his father had worked). Invariably, they would begin a game of bridge, and as they played and smoked and drank into the early hours, they would talk—about girls, about politics, about the splendor of the British Empire, the great Pax Britannica, which kept this country running with the ease and beautiful regularity of a Swiss clock.

“Unlike China,” Ducksworth cut in on one of these nights, “with Manchuria overrun by Japs. What the devil do you think Hitler’s up to by favoring the Japs, anyhow?”

There was something distasteful about Ducksworth, Benny thought. He was too eager to laugh, to lose himself under the annihilating influence of tobacco and drink. The fellow would never bloody his fists for anything, had he even the mettle to believe in more than a decent pension and a decent meal and a decent-enough game of bridge. No, his lightness appeared to be how he survived, how he sat so easily with not treating anyone but a white or a Burman quite as a man—and how he managed to get away with championing the imperialism that more and more of the Burmans were beginning to revolt against.

Just the other day, Ducksworth had been taking a break for tea at the firm when he’d revealed the shallowness of his convictions to Benny. They’d been alone in the office; Ducksworth had put his feet indecorously up on a chair, raising his teacup to his pursed lips; and Benny had decided to broach the subject of the law student, a Burman fellow at Rangoon University—someone by the name of Aung San—who’d begun raising a ruckus about the British presence. “A solidly anti-empire nationalist sort,” Benny had added rather breathlessly. “They claim he’s starting some sort of movement, saying the Burmans are the true lords and masters—Britons be damned, and everyone else along with them.” By “everyone else,” Benny had meant people like B. Meyer and him, and also the Muslims and Indians and Chinese and, well, the natives who’d been here for centuries, some before the Burmans. “It’s not anyone else’s country,” his new friend had disdainfully replied, reminding Benny that Ducksworth, born to a Burman mother and an English father, had a uniquely dominating perspective.

Yet Ducksworth was habitually unwilling to go so far as to side with the Burmans; it suited him better to sink into the plushness of the Pax Britannica. Indeed, during their conversations, each time Benny came close to the point of pressing him on political matters, Ducksworth would slip away into the haze of his tobacco-drenched musings about the fine pleasures of British tea (which he bought from an Indian) and British cut crystal (which he hadn’t any of) and British manners (which he rarely displayed). And, generally speaking, Benny had to admit that British rule did nurture a spirit of tolerance that appeared more to benefit than to harm many of Burma’s citizens. Certainly there was a kind of caste system, by which the white man was on top and the Anglo-Burmans just beneath them; certainly the British had the deepest pockets; but there was also freedom of religion, an equitable division of labor when it came to British civil and military service, and, for the most part, a general prospering of every sort. From the little Benny had read since landing back in Rangoon, he understood that the Burman rulers whom the British had conquered had shown no such charity (even of the self-interested sort the British practiced) to those they’d overthrown.

“I say, Benny,” Ducksworth said on this particular night, when no one rose to his question about Hitler’s favoring of the Japanese. “Have you put in that application?”

They’d begun to play the cards he’d dealt.

“What application?” said Joseph, one of the others who worked at the firm and lodged at the Lanmadaw.

“Benny doesn’t take our work seriously, Joseph—too ‘stifling,’ too—”

“Well, it is!” Benny said, hiding behind his hand.

“What application?” Joseph repeated.

“To His Majesty’s Customs Service,” Ducksworth answered. “It does have a distinctive ring, doesn’t it? You’re too bloody lazy for that sort of thing, Joseph—but not Benny. And wouldn’t he look dashing in a white uniform?”

Was Ducksworth mocking him? He’d been the one to urge Benny to apply for a junior position, so impatient was he to convert Benny to his chosen faith of imperialism.

“What’s the point?” Benny said. “The English will be out soon enough.”

For a moment, Ducksworth only peered at Benny over his cloud of smoke. Then he said, “Your problem is that you believe in right and wrong. Don’t you know evil will find you no matter what?”

It happened now and then in Benny’s wanderings that he caught a glimpse of a cheek, neck, delicate hand, or sweep of black hair that could have been Sister Adela’s. One evening in November—when the rains had fallen off and he’d wandered beyond the city limits—he noticed a girl walking swiftly along a deserted side street, tripping in her fuchsia sari as though her attention were on something higher than the procession of her feet. Up the steep hill leading to the Schwe’ Dagon Pagoda, he found himself shadowing her, until he was sure she had become as sensitive to his presence as he was to hers: two tuning forks, each dangerously setting off the other’s vibrations. The ground leveled off, and she scurried along a concrete path toward the pagoda, glancing back at him as she fled up a dilapidated set of stairs. Instantly, he saw that her terrified eyes were nothing like Sister Adela’s, and the spell was broken. She disappeared into the golden entrance, set between two enormous griffins covered with horrifying pictures of the damned.

“Are you a fool?” he heard. When he looked back at the entrance, he saw an Indian man facing him. The man’s long lax hands, hanging against his gaunt frame, were not a fighter’s, nor was the fierceness in his amber gaze. Rather, there was something wounded about him, ruined. Benny felt awfully ashamed, awfully sorry. “Are you a fool?” the man said again, in an English thickly accented by Bengali.

“Just foolish,” Benny responded.

“Where does your father work?”

“Forgive me, sir—”

“I insist that you take me to your family!”

Now the man descended the stairs and drew close, so that Benny could smell the tobacco on his breath.

“Are you stupid?” he said more quietly. “Terrorizing a child who only wants to light a candle for her mother? You should be honoring the dead yourself. What do you imagine they think when they look down and see you behaving this way?” His questions seemed to chase one another out of his throbbing heart. “Don’t you know that when no one is present to be strict with a man, he must be strict with himself?”

Benny hadn’t intentionally avoided his parents, or the Musmeah Yeshua Synagogue in whose cemetery they lay. A few nights later, he ventured to the Jewish quarter, where the bazaar was still in full swing. His eyes flicked over the flares of the vendors’ stalls, up to the rickety buildings’ timber balconies, which his father had predicted would be burned down one day. (“You wait and see, Benny. Careless, so careless with their flares, these street peddlers.”)

Farther up the road he soon found E. Solomon, shut up for the night and somehow less commanding than it had long ago seemed. He peered through the dusty window of the dark store at the rows of liqueurs and whiskies. Whenever he’d managed to keep his hands off the merchandise, his father had rewarded him with a bottle of orangeade. How he’d loved the way the marble in the bottle’s little neck gurgled as he swallowed down the sparkling, syrupy drink. Daddy had been head cashier at E. Solomon, which provided the British navy with drinks and ice from its wells on the riverbank. (“The navy keeps us safe, Benny. And how do you imagine their sailors relieve themselves from the press of this heat? Our ice! Our fizzy drinks!”)

At the corner of Tseekai Maung Tauley, he stared up at their old second-story flat, from which Mama had peered down on him while he’d played here with the other boys. She’d never been a doting, fussing type; no, her love was more even-keeled than that: a stroke on the cheek, a brush of warm lips on his brow. But her counsel had lavished him with love, with attention and praise. (“You must not just think of yourself, Benny. Only animals just think of themselves. The worst sin is to forget your responsibility to the less fortunate.”) She had seemed to carry her sacred separateness from man’s lower impulses in the hollows of her frail, perpetually melancholy face; in her slow movements; in the way she watched him, as if already from the remove of eternity. Generosity and charity—those had been her trading posts. How often had she packed a basket of fruit for the less fortunate? How often had she plaintively prayed for the sick before the candles forever being extinguished by fretful Daddy, who had lurked around their flat almost deferentially? Mama had loved to sing—quietly, ­unassumingly—and her voice had drifted from the window down onto the graced street. And then . . . silence.

Benny’s feet fled to narrow Twenty-Sixth Street, where he found the dark outline of the menorah and the words “Musmeah Yeshua” over the archway of the grand white synagogue. Musmeah Yeshua—“brings forth salvation.” The meaning came back to him along with his grandfather’s counsel that he must not hesitate to flee to this refuge in times of darkness. He couldn’t remember where any of his loved ones were buried in the cemetery, but again his feet discovered the way, along a path through the overgrowth, to the tree under which they lay. As he knelt, he touched the cold headstones inscribed with Hebrew he could no longer read, and then he pressed his forehead to the rough stone of his mother’s grave. “I am right here beside you, Benny,” he could almost hear her say.

The world of the dead was something he could reach out and touch; he had only to give it attention, and it reached back out and met him.

For a long time, he sat with his head against the grave, his mind quiet, attentive, sensitive to the wind and the birds and the life in the overgrowth. It must have been a few minutes past dawn when one of the synagogue’s caretakers saw him asleep, and Benny woke with a view of light-suffused clouds before a rock hit him on the cheek. “Indian!” the caretaker shouted at him. “Tramp! Scat! You’ll find no sanctuary in this place!”

2

By Sea

Khin had seen him before, the young officer (an Anglo-Indian?). She had noticed his hands, strong and clenched by his sides, and the restless way he charged from one end of the seaport to the other, as if he were trying to expend something combustible stored within him. One afternoon, she had watched as he’d ridden a launch out toward a ship anchored in the bay; he’d stood at the bow, leaning into the wind, arms crossed over his chest. Was he so sure of his balance? she wondered. Or did some part of him hope to tempt fate, as she sometimes darkly did when she ventured out to the very edge of this jetty, where she stood now, in September 1939, with the boy who was her charge.

She had come to Akyab four months earlier to work as a nanny for a Karen judge, who made a practice of hiring people of their own persecuted race, or so he said. His six-year-old son often drew her out to the port, where from the jetty they could look out over the fitful water and watch the beautiful seaplanes landing and taking off. She loved the planes as much as the boy did, loved their silent sputtering grace—though her love was distressed. Sometimes she saw a plane swerve and imagined it falling like a bird shot out of the sky.

The boy pointed up to the silvery body of a plane ascending toward a cloud, and she shuddered, drew him sharply from the rotting end of the planks giving way to the sea.

“Time to go,” she told him.

“I want to watch until we can’t see it anymore,” he said.

He hadn’t been told that Japan was at war with China, that Germany had invaded Poland, or that France and Britain had declared war on Germany. His innocence made her feel guilty, as though by encouraging his fidelity to the planes she were somehow betraying him. But she was being silly, she knew, imagining that these planes were doomed. “War will never come here,” the sessions judge had told her, after listening to his nightly English radio program. “It’s Malaya the Japs want. There’s no penetrating our territory but by sea, and when it comes to the sea the British are unsinkable.”

“I have a surprise for you at home,” she lied to the boy. She shielded her eyes from the glare and tried to give him her most convincing smile.

The boy studied her for a moment. “What surprise?” he said.

“I’ll tell you when we’re there.”

There was no surprise, of course, and as they stumbled back toward land over the splintered planks (as she stumbled away from the unbidden image of her body slipping into the shivering waves), she kept her eyes on her feet and searched her mind for some small treat the boy might deem acceptably unforeseen. He was already beginning to doubt her reliability. Perhaps the maid had bought a few cream puffs from the Indian who came around on Wednesdays.

She was halfway to the shore again when she looked up and saw the officer watching her intently from the other side of the wooden gate leading to the jetty. His white hat cocked to one side, he leaned against the rickety gate as though to block her path back to land. Even across the distance, she could see he didn’t hesitate to scrutinize her hips, her hair. If any other man had stared at her in such a way, virtually eating her with his eyes, she would have—well, she would have laughed.

The officer suddenly shouted at her, coming out with a confusion of English words of which she clearly caught only “not”—­something he said with great emphasis and at least twice. He was surely instructing her to steer clear of the jetty (the way he further cocked his head and pointed away from the water told her as much), and his loudness and directness should have offended her; yet there was something mellifluous, some kindness, in his baritone voice.

She stopped five feet from the gate, taking the boy’s warm hand in hers, and steadying herself against a fresh assault of wind and sea spray. The officer’s gaze narrowed now on her eyes, and she felt herself blush as she absorbed the full force of his face—the heavy jaw, the mouth too full to be truly masculine, the ears that stuck out beneath the brim of his hat. There was nothing extraordinary about his version of handsomeness, about his large features (though he did have something of the elephant about him!); there was nothing unusual about his authoritative claiming of the port (all the officers seemed to claim Burma, as if they were not also subjects of His Majesty the King of England). But she had to admit that he was more striking than she had imagined him from afar. What was so very unforeseen (what she must have noticed without noticing) was the expression of meekness in his eyes, markedly in contrast to his obvious physical strength. Even the smile that he now leveled at her own lips, and that she unwillingly returned, seemed aggrieved.

“Are we in trouble, nanny?” the boy asked.

“Perhaps,” she said quietly.

Again, the officer began to speak, to express something to her in English, while beside them a seaplane revved its engine.

“Look!” the boy said, pointing to the plane that started to skip over the waves.

For a moment all of them stood in mute wonderment, watching the plane lift off into the vivid blue sky, where it banked and peaceably headed northwest, as though a war were not raging somewhere beyond the horizon.

“Beautiful,” she heard the officer say over the whistling wind.

He had stepped back from the gate. And when their eyes met again, she felt so embarrassed that she yanked the boy forward, yanked open the gate, and hurried past the officer and his spontaneously stricken face.

That the officer had taken an interest in her was something she found both agreeable and unsettling—unsettling just because it reminded her that she had been avoiding taking an interest in herself for fear of discovering something distinctly disagreeable inside.

She could remember moments of tranquillity from her youth, when her father still had his land and life, when her mother still had her smile. There hadn’t been the features of what others might call an easy childhood. She and her younger sister had never attended school, but worked their orchards from the start. Yet there had been ample time to climb and run and play, to bathe on the riverbank, to sit as Mama braided their hair, and to sing.

Singing—that was their ease, their art, their prayer, their lesson. They sang to the Karen god Y’wa, who, she had been taught, was also the Christian Creator. Stretching out under the mosquito net at night, they sang to the spirits of the orchard. And then, as she and her sister fell into sleep’s embrace, they listened to Mama sing their people’s story. Long ago, the story went, we came here along a river of sand. We came upon a fearsome, trackless region, where, like waves before the sea, sands rolled before the wind. We came to this green land, to the sources of the waters and the lakes above. Until we fell among the Siamese and Burmans, who made slaves of us. They took our alphabet and holy books, but our elders promised the coming of our Messiah. White foreigners would bring a holy book, they said. Give thanks exceedingly for the coming of the white men. Give thanks, sons of the forest and children of poverty, for before their coming we were poor and divided and scattered in every direction.

Before the white men, we lived on one stream beyond another, and the Burmans made us drag boats and cut rattans. They made us collect dammer and seek beeswax and gather cardamom; weave mats, strip bark for cordage, pull logs, and clear land for their cities. They demanded presents—yams, bulbo-tubers of arum, ginger, capsicum, flesh, elephant tusks, and rhinoceros horns. If we had no money to give them, they made us borrow and thus become their slaves again. They made us guard their forts, act as guides, and kidnap Siamese while they tied our arms. They beat us with rods, struck us with fists, pounded us for days on end, till many of us dropped down dead. They made us march carrying rice for soldiers, so that our fields fell fallow and great numbers of us starved. They kidnapped us, so that we sickened with yearning for one another, or begged for mercy and met with immediate death. We fled to the streamlets, to the mountain gorges, so they could not take our paddy or our women. But they found us and took from us again and forced us to assemble near the city, where great numbers of us perished.

And in our turmoil we prayed beneath the bushes. “Children and grandchildren,” the ancient sayings of the elders went, “Y’wa will yet save our nation.” We prayed as the rains poured and the mosquitoes and leeches bit us. “If Y’wa will save us, let him save speedily. Alas! Where is Y’wa?” we asked. “Children and grandchildren,” said the elders, “if the thing comes by land, weep; if by sea, laugh. It will not come in our days, but it will in yours. If it comes by sea, you will be able to take breath; but if by land, you will not find a spot to dwell in.”

“And how did the white foreigners come, Mama?” she sometimes sleepily asked from her mat under the mosquito net.

By sea! By sea! Mama’s song replied, yet Mama sang it like a lament.

The following evening, she was in the kitchen of the sessions judge’s mansion with his boy, feeding him his rice and soup at the table, when she looked out the window and saw a black car crawling to a stop before the house. Soon the officer was emerging hesitantly from the rear, while she was taking the boy into her lap and hiding her face in his soft neck.

“What’s the matter, nanny?” the boy asked. “Are you sad?”

“Shall we hide?” she found herself murmuring to him.

There was a knock and the familiar squeak of the sessions judge standing up from his mahogany chair. “Someone’s here!” the boy exclaimed, darting from her lap out of the kitchen. Since his mother’s death two years earlier, such social calls had become rare.

Khin listened with all of her attention to the rise and fall of the muffled conversation in the other room—the judge’s halting questions and pronouncements, the deep force of the officer’s disclosures, muted, she thought, by nervousness and respectfulness. Only a few English words—“girl,” “port,” “sun” (or “son”?)—leaped cooperatively to her ears, and the conversation’s opaqueness increased her sense that she was being temporarily shielded from a confrontation with her fate.

“Khin!” the judge called to her.

She stood with a jolt and then proceeded to the living room, where she found the officer seated calmly in the judge’s chair, his hat in his hands, his dark hair smoothed down in brilliantined waves. He sought out her eyes at once, nodding politely to her as though silently beseeching her for something, and she looked sharply away—to the judge, who assessed her from the settee across the room while the boy rested against his knee.

“Do you know this young man, Khin?” the judge asked in their language. There was nothing insincere about the question, nothing pejorative. The judge’s kind, graying eyes told her that he simply wanted to hear from her.

“I have seen him before,” she confessed.

If the judge heard the tremor in her voice, he made no sign of it. “And do you care to see him again?” he asked. A soft smile passed over his mouth. “He very much would like to see you,” he went on. “You will think it funny, but he has already decided to marry you if you will have him.”

She glanced back at the officer, whose ears—without the cover of his hat—appeared to stick out even farther from his head, and whose long-lashed eyes pitiably batted at her, all of which struck her as funny indeed. And as if she had downed a cup of rice beer, she felt abruptly dizzy, delighted, delirious . . . Her lips began to emit an odd, barely audible twittering laugh, which only redoubled in force when the officer looked at her with an enormous sheepish grin (sheepish because he thought that she and the judge had exchanged a joke at his expense?). She held her fingers over her mouth, commanding herself to stop, thinking she would weep if she didn’t, but for some reason the boy began laughing, too, and then the judge chuckled, and even the officer joined in—and what a resonant, kind, innocent laugh he had!

“The thought pleases you then,” the judge said to her when their laughter had run its course.

She caught her breath, composing herself. “No,” she said quietly to him.

“No?” he asked.

“I mean to say yes.”

“Yes?”

The officer looked between them, clearly as mystified as she was by her responses. Then, after a long moment of silence, he startled her by tumbling into what sounded like a series of half-sung professions of devotion and regret. Again, his eyes lavished her with attention, even as they admitted a suffering that she couldn’t comprehend.

The judge raised a diplomatic hand and interrupted the officer with a few English words of his own. Then he turned to her. “What he has just expressed to you, Khin,” the judge began, “is that he is in Akyab for only the month, after which time he will be transferred back to Rangoon. He says he was so taken by your beauty, he followed you and Blessing from the port, for which he begs your pardon.”

“He is a white Indian?” she found herself asking.

The judge looked displeased by the question, yet turned to the officer and began to query him. At first the officer responded in hardly more than a whisper, though when the judge continued to press him, his answers became more forthright, it seemed to her, more emphatic and even impassioned.

“He knows nothing of our people, Khin,” the judge explained to her at last. “Doesn’t even know the difference between a Burman and a Karen, though he was born here. He is a Jew. I told him you are a Christian, that your mother would very likely require you to be married in a Baptist church, as you no doubt would like to be. Oddly, the prospect doesn’t deter him. He says, rather, that it endears you to him more, that he is, for all intents and purposes, half Christian.” For a moment, the judge appeared to be lost in thought, then he continued: “I imagine many of us Christian Karens are also half spirit-worshippers or half Buddhists when it comes down to it.”

But not me, she wanted to tell him. Oh, she was enough of a spirit-worshipper and a Buddhist, but she had secretly renounced her Christianity years ago—after what had happened to her father. No, the judge had misjudged her, and she must not allow herself to mislead any of them a moment more. Here she was, permitting a conversation about marriage to a man from whom she’d had the impulse to hide, a man whose language she could not even understand!

The boy stood up from his father’s knee and began tentatively crossing toward the officer, who, she saw now, was holding out a silvery object to him—a harmonica. The officer’s eyes lifted briefly to meet hers, and he flashed her the quickest, most natural smile. Then he lifted the shining thing to his mouth and blasted out a tune so absurd, so childishly playful and loud, they all began to laugh again, she with more sorrow than terror this time around.

“Can I play it?” the boy asked, holding his hand out.

The officer wiped the harmonica on his sleeve and presented it to the boy as a gift.

“Leave us, Blessing,” the judge told him.

The boy scampered off with his new treasure. In his absence, the officer’s question—what he had come for, his yearning for her—became almost unbearably conspicuous. She tried to wrest her eyes away from his, but something about his gaze claimed her again. My life is already yours, it seemed to say. When had she ever experienced such simple, undiluted feeling or desire?

“You needn’t feel pressured, Khin,” the judge said now. “This is just a first visit. I can tell him you need time. Perhaps we can send for your mother.”

“Where did he learn to play it?” she said. She supposed she meant the harmonica, though, again, her question surprised her.

The judge, looking vaguely exasperated, relayed her inquiry to the officer, whose eyes closed while he answered, as though he were searching through the recesses of a dark past for some scrap of lightness.

“He says he doesn’t remember,” the judge told her with more feeling now. “But he believes it was his mother who taught him. He says his mother wasn’t a particularly talented singer or musician, but that she made the most of her gifts, something he has tried to do now that he’s on his own. He says her voice was the only one that deeply mattered to him.”

She couldn’t speak for a moment, could hardly breathe or think clearly about what she ought to do.

“Hear me now, Khin,” the judge persisted. “I’ve seen terrible things in my profession. I consider myself a good judge of character. And looking into this man’s eyes, I see someone who is sincere. You owe him a sincere expression of your feelings, even if it’s just to tell him that you sincerely want him to leave you in peace.”

To be sincere would necessitate knowing herself, having a self that wanted to be known, having an instinct for life, rather than for death.

“Shall I tell him I’ll write to your mother then?” the judge said. “Or should I tell him to leave?”

She looked back at the officer, at his proud young features radiating longing. It suddenly seemed to her that she could see through to his marrow. That language was irrelevant. That he had no one else to turn to in the world.

And who was she to argue that the world was any different for her?

3

Something About the Karens

The marriage was at first a respite of a kind that neither of them could have anticipated—at least it seemed so to Benny.

To be sure, there had been the awkwardnesses of the wedding, conducted entirely in Karen, in a bamboo-floored Baptist chapel at the heart of the village where her mother lived not far from Rangoon. Khin was, as ever, beautiful in her long white traditional dress, with her hair swept up in a chignon that accentuated the endearing roundness of her face, her milk-white skin and shining dark eyes, and the yellow flowers tucked behind her ears. Yet she had seemed rather aloof here and there, rather distant, as if periodically floating farther and farther from his side at the head of the chapel, before all at once returning to the moment and gazing at him in an upsurge of warmth and reassurance.

True, her mother and sister had never smiled at him. The preacher was an effeminate, bespectacled type, whose fiery sermon seemed to warn against demons, against damnation (twice Benny thought he caught a reference to “Satan”); and the mother and sister absorbed his admonitions with such unblinking gravity that Benny found himself miming his terrified incomprehension of the sermon to lighten their mood. Khin, he thought, was too distracted to notice, whereas the rest of the congregation greeted his gestures with spontaneous laughter. Everyone, that was, but the mother and sister, who appeared concerned, though not necessarily about his fitness to marry Khin. Yes, something in their eyes, something about the recriminating way their gaze flicked over the figure of Khin beside him, told him that the person they stood in judgment of was his bride.

“You belong to her now,” the mother said to him, via the grinning preacher, who interpreted for him at the outdoor feast immediately following the ceremony.

“I’d be damned if I didn’t!” Benny gushed, trying to see beyond the coldness in her eyes, the flat line of her mouth. Even after the subsequent strained bout of translation, that mouth never wavered. Perhaps, he thought, she hadn’t understood him.

Like the ceremony, the festivities that followed were attended by a flurry of tittering village women and stony-eyed men, all of whom seemed continually to mock and admire him, and just as often to remark on his dimensions. (Could it be that they were laughing not only at the extent of his height and muscle mass relative to theirs, but also at his penis, which, in his trousers, was more pronounced than it would have been if he’d worn a sarong as their men did?) There was a certain bawdiness in their mirth, like nothing he’d encountered in life, which both won him over and caught him off guard. All the while, they were mindful of the specter of Khin’s missing father, to whom they often referred, yet with a worried detachment that only increased Benny’s sense of being an outsider and alarmingly ignorant of his new bride’s history and culture. “Very sad, but the way life is,” one man muttered in reference to the father and his presumed end. “He was a drunk and that is what happens,” another said. “Didn’t stand a ghostly chance,” the preacher more charitably offered, as he ate a plate of curry with his fingers. “Out of nowhere, dacoits!”

Dacoits, Benny knew by now, were one of the problems the British had long faced here. Burman bandits who roamed the countryside armed with sharp swords and faith in tattoos and magic, they were notoriously merciless, notoriously without conscience. “It’s a good thing you’re not signing up to be a police officer,” Ducksworth had once told him. “Knew one when I was a kid, a friend of my father’s, and the man was forever tormented by dacoits. I remember hearing him describe what a band of dacoits had done to a baby—pounded it into a jelly with a rice mortar right in front of its mother’s eyes.” “But why?” Benny had said—meaning, What in God’s name did they have to gain by that?—to which Ducksworth had merely laughed, as though to imply that Benny was ignorant of a seething darkness that would someday come blindingly to light for him. And to a certain extent, all was still a darkness for Benny as far as the dacoits were concerned; their ruthlessness seemed to come indistinctly from the same source as the Burman nationalism now taking the country by storm, claiming anticolonialism as its cause. In the weeks before the wedding, when Benny had returned to Rangoon to set up their new flat on Sparks Street, he had been repeatedly confronted by the news that the former law student Aung San—the one who’d risen to the top ranks of those protesting with the rallying cry “Burma for the Burmans!”—had cofounded a new political party, which opposed backing Britain’s war with Germany, called for Burma’s immediate independence from the yoke of imperialism, and, for all Benny could see, emphasized the supremacy of the ethnic Burmans, thereby aligning itself with the master-race ideals of the Nazis (who, Benny learned from a recent radio program, had monstrously decreed that Jews over the age of twelve must wear an armband with a Star of David). Benny was only beginning to understand that to be Burmese—meaning, to be one of Burma’s natives—but not to be Burman was, in Burman terms, to be distinctly undesirable.

And he couldn’t help thinking of just that word—“undesirable”—toward the end of the festivities, when he and Khin stood side by side before the chapel, she now donning the red-and-black sarong of a married woman, her lips splashed vermilion with betel juice. He hadn’t been permitted a taste of those lips. Karens, he was learning, showed no affection—at least of that kind—publicly. No shortage of attractive girls had taken Khin by the hand or squeezed her soft forearm in solidarity and tenderness; even the men strolled about the muddy square in front of the chapel with their arms around one another. But for Benny? Not so much as a touch from Khin. And now, posed with her before the chapel, he was told that they must ritualistically pay off a string of villagers blocking the boulder-strewn path that led to his Buick and by extension their new home, that private sphere created for the very purpose of satisfying their desire for closeness.

“Part of our culture,” the excitable preacher explained as he gestured toward the line of villagers. “You must give them your rupees.” Benny sought out Khin’s evasive gaze, and then took her hand and pressed into it a clutch of coins that she received with a calmness appearing almost burdened by effort, such that her serenity suddenly struck him as the effect of a tremendous harnessing of will.

Yet laughing lightly, she began to toss the coins in bright arcs to the merry villagers. And Benny chided himself for not being merrier, for feeling so very undesired, so undesirable, even as he made a show of pulling his pockets inside out to indicate his anxious poverty, to the general jollity of the villagers (why was he playing the imbecile again?). God loves each of us, as if there were only one of us, he reminded himself, and then he pushed the phrase out of his mind because it embarrassed him to seek such shelter from his loneliness with his new bride smiling beside him.

Yes, the wedding and its aftermath had presented him with a series of thorny disappointments. But then.

Then.