The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (11 page)

I close my eyes and hear my animals and think: my father’s right. They can. They hum me quietly to sleep.

My mother didn’t like this story because it didn’t have a happy ending. My father thought that it did so have a happy ending. So vast was the gulf between them.

I myself was never sure.

 

THE NIGHTTIME QUIET
was torture. I lay in my hotel bed, craving familiar noises. Car horns. Fire sirens. Rap music or voices from a television in the next apartment. The elevator bell. Nothing. Not even a creak on the stairs or the footsteps of other guests in the hallway.

Some time later, I heard U Ba’s voice. Like an invisible intruder it wandered through the room speaking to me from the desk and the cupboard, then sounding as if it came from the bed next to mine. I couldn’t get his story out of my mind. I thought about Tin Win. Even with a few hours’ distance I couldn’t see my father in him. But how much did that matter? What do we know about our parents, and what do they know about us? And if we don’t even know the individuals who have accompanied us since birth—we not them and they not us—then what do we know about anyone at all? Don’t I have to imagine, from that perspective,
that anyone is capable of anything, even the most heinous crime? On what or whom, on which truths, can one ultimately depend? Are there individuals I can trust unconditionally? Can there ever be such a person?

Not even sleep released me. I dreamt of this Tin Win. He had fallen down, stricken blind, and lay crying on the ground before me. I wanted to pick him up, so I bent over him, but—despite his small size—he was impossibly heavy. I took his hands and pulled. I wrapped my arms around his child’s body, but I might as well have tried to lift an iron bull. I knelt beside him as if beside the wounded victim of a car wreck, bleeding on the side of the road. I spoke words of comfort to him, assuring him that help was on the way. He begged me not to go, not to leave him alone. Suddenly my father was standing next to us. He picked the boy up and whispered something in his ear. Finally in my father’s arms Tin Win was consoled. He put his head on my father’s shoulder, sobbing, and fell asleep. The two of them turned from me and walked away.

The air was warm when I woke and smelled vaguely sweet, like fresh cotton candy. Outside I could hear insects buzzing and two men talking under my window. My calves ached when I stood, but I felt much better than the day before. The long sleep had done me good. The hot morning made the cold shower bearable. Even the coffee tasted better and was hotter than it had been the day before. I felt my purpose returned and for a moment even felt ready to begin
my search for Mi Mi, but something held me back. U Ba’s story. It had cast a spell over me.

I sat unmoving before the hotel and watched an old man trim the lawn with long shears. Corn poppies ran riot in their beds amid freesias, gladioli, bright yellow orchids. Over these, arched branches laden with hundreds of red, white, and pink hibiscus blossoms. In the middle of the lawn stood a pear tree; white blossoms lay strewn about the grass beneath its branches. A bit farther off stood two palms and an avocado tree heavy with fruit. There were beans and peas, radishes, carrots, strawberries, raspberries.

U Ba came for me just after ten. I watched him approach from a long way off. He walked along the street, greeted a cyclist, and turned into the hotel entrance. To ease his movement he lifted his longyi a bit with both hands, like a woman in a long dress stepping over a puddle. He met me with a smile and a conspiratorial wink, as if we had known each other for many years and had not parted on a bad note the day before.

“Good morning, Julia. You enjoyed your nightly repose?” he asked.

I smiled at his archaic way of putting things.

“Ah, how beautifully radiant your eyes. Exactly like your father’s! The full lips and the white teeth you also get from him. Forgive me for repeating myself. It’s not my simple-mindedness but your beauty that causes me to repeat myself.”

His compliment embarrassed me. We walked into the street and turned onto a trail that led down to the river. The plants on the edge of the path flourished and blossomed as obscenely as in the hotel garden. Our way was lined with date palms, mango trees, and tall green plants laden with small yellow bananas. The warm air smelled of fresh jasmine and ripe fruit.

By the river several women were standing up to their knees in the water, washing clothes, singing at their work. They laid the wrung-out shirts and longyis on the rocks in the sun to dry. A few of them greeted U Ba and watched me inquisitively. We crossed over a little wooden bridge, climbed an embankment on the other side of the river, and hiked along a steep footpath. The women’s singing followed us up to the summit.

The view of the valley and the peaks in the distance set me on edge somehow. Something about the postcard scenery wasn’t right. The slopes were sprinkled only sparsely with young pines. Between the trees was brown, burnt grass.

“There was a time you would have seen nothing but dense pine forests from this spot,” said U Ba, as if reading my mind. “In the seventies the Japanese came and cleared the trees.”

I wanted to ask why they had allowed it and whether no one had resisted, but decided instead to hold my tongue.

We plodded on past old, dilapidated English manor houses and dingy, windowless shacks whose lopsided walls
were woven of dried leaves and grass. When finally we stopped it was in front of one of the few wooden houses. It was of nearly black teak and stood on stilts almost five feet off the ground, with a corrugated tin roof and a narrow porch. A pig was rooting around beneath it. Chickens ran loose in the yard.

U Ba led me up the porch steps and into a large room with four unglazed windows. The furniture looked like hand-me-downs from an earlier, colonial time. Coil springs rose through the seat of a brown leather armchair set beside two threadbare couches, a coffee table, and a dark cupboard. An oil painting of the Tower of London hung on the wall above the chair.

“Make yourself at home. I’ll fix some tea,” said U Ba, disappearing.

I was about to sit down when I heard a strange droning. A small swarm of bees flew right across the room from one of the windows to the open cupboard and back. Only then did I see their nest hanging on the top shelf, larger than a football. I retreated cautiously into the other corner of the room, took a seat, and held still.

“I hope you’re not afraid of bees,” asked U Ba when he returned with a pot of tea and two cups.

“Only wasps,” I lied.

“My bees cannot sting.”

“You mean they haven’t stung anyone yet.”

“Is there a difference?”

“What do you do with the honey?”

“What honey?”

“From the bees.”

U Ba looked at me. “I wouldn’t touch it. It belongs to the bees.”

I followed the flight of the bees with a wary glance. Was he serious? “Then why not have the nest removed?”

He laughed. “Why should I drive them off? They do me no harm. On the contrary, I feel honored they have chosen my home. We have lived together peacefully for five years. We Burmese believe they bring good fortune.”

“Is it true?”

“One year after the bees moved in, your father returned.

Now you are sitting across from me.”

He smiled again and poured the tea.

“Where were we obliged to interrupt our story? Tin Win had become blind, and Su Kyi was trying to find help, correct?”

And so he resumed his tale.

RAIN CLATTERED ON
the corrugated tin roof as if the house were collapsing under a hail of stones. Tin Win had retreated into the rearmost corner of the kitchen. He did not like these downpours. The drumming of the water on the roof was too loud, and the vehemence with which it tore from the sky made him nervous. He heard Su Kyi’s voice, but the rain swallowed even her words.

“Where on earth are you?” she called yet again, poking her head through the kitchen door. “Come on now, let’s get going. It’ll stop soon enough.”

Su Kyi was right, as she almost always was when it came to the weather. She claimed to feel the storms and tropical showers in her gut and above all in her ears, which would first warm, then tickle, and finally itch terribly just before the first drops fell. Tin Win had long ago ceased to doubt her forecasts. Not two minutes later they were standing in
front of the house, the rain having stopped, the only sound water dripping from the roof and from the leaves and racing in a wild torrent through the ditch across the yard.

Su Kyi took his hand. The ground was slick; muck oozed between his toes at every step. It was still early, not much after seven. The sun broke through the clouds and shined pleasantly on his face, though it would soon burn his skin and raise white clouds of vapor from the ground, sweating the earth itself. They trudged through the mud past huts ringing with the sounds of the morning: children crying, dogs barking, the clatter of tin pots.

She wanted to take him to the monastery in town where a monk named U May was abbot. She had known him for a long time and believed he would be able to help. U May was perhaps the only person whom Su Kyi trusted, whom she sensed was a kindred spirit. If not for him, she would not have survived the deaths of her daughter and husband. U May himself was already old, probably over eighty. She didn’t know for sure. Since going blind a few years earlier, he had been teaching a small class of local children every morning. Su Kyi was hoping he would be able to take Tin Win under his wing, too, to coax him out of the darkness that beleaguered him, to teach him what he had taught her: that life is interwoven with suffering. That in every life, without exception, illnesses are unavoidable. That we will age, and that we cannot elude death. These are the laws and conditions of human existence, U May had explained to her. Laws that apply to everyone, everywhere in the world,
regardless of how dramatically times might change. There is no power that can release a person from pain or from the sadness one might feel as a result of that insight—unless it be that person himself. And in spite of it all, U May had told her again and again, life is a gift that none might disdain. Life, U May told her, is a gift full of riddles in which suffering and happiness are inextricably intertwined. Any attempt to have one without the other was simply bound to fail.

The monastery itself was surrounded by a high stone wall just off the main street, behind which half a dozen little white pagodas were festooned with colored streamers and tiny golden bells. As a safeguard against flooding, the monastery stood on pilings a good ten feet off the ground. Over the years a number of outbuildings had grown up around the main building. In the middle of it all a four-cornered tower jutted upward, narrowing in seven tiers to a single golden pinnacle visible far and wide. The walls were pine, browned by the sun, and each roof was shingled with blackish wooden shake. Across from the entrance, a massive wooden Buddha nearly as high as the ceiling sat cloaked in semidarkness and overlaid with gold leaf. At its feet stood tables crowded with offerings: tea, flowers, bananas, mangos, and oranges. On the wall behind the Buddha hung shelves with dozens of smaller Buddhas, shimmering gold, many draped in yellow robes, others holding parasols of red, white, or gold paper. Of course, Tin Win saw none of this.