The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (17 page)

That evening he was talkative as never before. He regaled her with full details of U May and how excited he, Tin Win, was as he stepped all alone from the monastery gate into the street, how in his distraction he fell and grew
angry, but how from now on he intended to manage the trip entirely without her help. He told of noises, of bird feathers and bamboo leaves he had heard floating to the ground, of beating hearts that sounded like voices in song. Su Kyi delighted in his imagination.

Concerning Mi Mi he said nothing, and so poor Su Kyi was also at a loss to explain what was happening to Tin Win. He, who regularly hunched silently in a corner for hours at a time, was hardly able to sit still. He marched restlessly through the house and yard. He took a sudden interest in the market, wanting to know why it convened only every fifth day and inquiring repeatedly when it would be time again. His appetite waned from meal to meal until on the third day he would drink only tea. Su Kyi didn’t know what to do. Tin Win was ill, that much was certain, but he complained of no ailment. Gradually, the tales of the noises he was hearing began to trouble her. Clearly he was losing his mind.

Tin Win counted the days—and the hours and the minutes—until the next market. How long a day could be. Why did it take an eternity for the earth to turn once about its axis? Time crept by as slowly as a snail across the forest floor. Could he do nothing to hasten its passage? He asked U May, who merely laughed.

“Be patient,” he said. “Sit down and meditate. Then time will lose its meaning.”

Meditation had served Tin Win well in the preceding few years, but little good it did him now. He tried sitting amid the monks in the monastery, in a meadow, and on the
stump in front of his house. Whatever he tried, wherever he was, he heard her heart knocking. He heard her voice. He felt her skin. He felt her weight against his back.

The scent of her filled his nose. That soft, sweet, unmistakable fragrance. On the eve of the next market day he could get no rest. He heard Su Kyi lowering herself onto the mat next to him, turning onto her side, and pulling the covers up to her ears. Shortly thereafter her heart, too, settled down for its nightly repose. It beat slowly and evenly, as if it would never cease. His own heart raced. A wild and fierce beating. He did not even know what was exciting him so; it was a world in which eyes played no part in seeing, where motion did not depend on feet.

How best to locate Mi Mi that morning among all the booths and people? From Su Kyi’s descriptions Tin Win imagined the market like a flock of birds descending on a field. A tumult of voices, sounds, and smells. It’ll be crowded, he thought, and they’ll push and shove, and no one will be watching out for me. Curiously, the thought did not frighten him, he who was otherwise so wary of people. He felt certain he would find Mi Mi quickly. He would recognize the sound of her heartbeat. He would follow her scent. He would hear her voice, even if she merely whispered something into her brother’s ear.

For a few minutes Tin Win stood motionless by the side of the road. He retied his longyi. Sweat stood in little
beads on his brow and nose. Voices of the market were both louder and more intimidating than he had anticipated, like a rushing brook swollen into a threatening and impassable torrent. How to get his bearings? He did not know the paths between the booths. He did not know the quirks of the ground. Not one voice was familiar to him.

He set one foot in front of the other, slowly but without hesitating. He would let himself be swept along by the stream of people. Someone shoved him from behind. He felt an elbow in his ribs. “Watch where you’re stepping,” a man barked at him. The betel nut chewers smacked their lips and spit juice onto the street. An infant whimpered. So many voices and hearts snorted, groaned, coughed, and rattled around him. Their guts rumbled. It was so loud, that he was unable to distinguish one from the other. But he would find her. He knew this. Nothing was troubling him but the heat. He’d had too little water at the monastery and was sweating more than usual. His shirt was wet, his mouth dry. Suddenly he noticed that the throng was splitting off into two directions, and he tried to stand his ground, but the pressure from behind was too great. He followed those turning to the right.

“Watch out,” yelled a woman. He heard a cracking sound and felt something soft and moist on his feet and between his toes. Eggs.

“Are you blind?”

He turned toward her. She saw the milky white in his eyes and mumbled a shocked apology. Tin Win was swept
along. These must be the fish stands. He caught the salty tang of dried fish. Next he had the bitter scent of coriander in his nose, then the spicy-sour goldenseal, an aroma that went right to his head and burned on his mucous membranes when he inhaled. He caught the fragrances of cinnamon, of curry, and of chili pepper. Of lemongrass and ginger. Interspersed again and again with the luscious, heavy, cloying fragrance of overripe fruit.

As soon as he honed in on it, people stopped jostling him. Those coming from behind parted around him as if sensing that pushing and shoving were of no further use. Tin Win listened hard. There it was. So tender and fragile, so steady. It would catch his ear amid all the noise in the world. From a distance he felt her skin in his hands. Her arms about his neck. He followed the beating that came to him from a remote corner of the market.

MI MI SAT
out of the way, beside a heap of potatoes. In her left hand she held a small round parasol to protect her from the sun. It was the dark red, nearly brown shade of monks’ robes. She was wearing her most beautiful longyi, red with a green pattern. She had finished weaving it only the previous evening. She wore her black hair in a braid. That morning she had asked her mother to paint two round yellow circles on her cheeks. All the older girls and women made themselves up this way, but Mi Mi had always put it off until now. Her mother smiled and asked no questions. Once Mi Mi was settled on her brother’s back, Yadana sent her daughter off with a kiss on the forehead. True, she did the same thing every time they parted, but this kiss had been different. Mi Mi sensed it, though she would have been hard pressed to articulate the distinction.

Now she was sitting on her handmade blanket and waiting. Indeed, she had done nothing else for the past four days. Whether crawling across the yard to gather chicken eggs or picking strawberries behind the house, whether helping her mother with the cooking, sorting potatoes, or weaving, she was waiting. For market day. For Tin Win.

She never minded the waiting. She had learned early on that it was a natural part of life for anyone who couldn’t walk, who depended on the help of others. Waiting was so interwoven with the rhythm of her life that it almost disturbed her when anything happened right away. She was mystified by people who were always hurrying things along. A time of waiting offered moments, minutes, sometimes even hours of peace, of rest, during which, as a rule, she was alone with herself. And she needed these breaks to prepare herself for anything new, for any kind of change. Be it a visit to her aunt on the other side of the village or a day in the fields. Or the market. She could not understand why it did not overtax her brothers to hurry with quick steps from place to place, from person to person. If ever she chanced to be carried unexpectedly and without waiting to see friends on the next hilltop, it always took some time before she really arrived. She would sit silently during the first few minutes in the new place. As if her soul were following more slowly across the valley. She felt that each and every thing required a certain amount of time. Just as the earth needed its twenty-four hours to turn once about its axis, or three hundred sixty-five days to orbit the sun, she
felt that each and every thing required a certain amount of time. Her brothers nicknamed her Little Snail.

Worst of all were the trains and cars in which some of the British would travel through Kalaw, reportedly even as far as the capital. She was not frightened by the dreadful, loud clatter with which they rumbled through the village so that chickens took flight and horses and oxen recoiled. Nor was she much put out by the stench they drew in their wake. It was the speed that frightened her. Was it really possible for a person to shorten the time it took to get from one place or person to another? How could anyone think so?

Mi Mi was happy that four days would pass before the market, even if she would have liked most to see Tin Win again the very next day. Waiting meant she would be free to think about him at leisure, taking time to recall every detail of their last meeting. That, too, was an advantage of waiting—it gave her the chance to clear her mind. As always, whenever she let her thoughts roam, pictures arose in her mind, pictures she examined with care, as if they were gems or precious metals whose authenticity must be ascertained: She saw Tin Win approaching her; saw herself clamber onto his back; saw him later sitting beside her, quivering with excitement and joy. It had felt to her as if he was ready to take her on his back and run off with her, hot on the trail of ten thousand things unknown.

At home, then, she had sat for a long time on the porch with her eyes closed, trying to do as Tin Win had done. She listened hard. The pig was grunting beneath the house.
The dog was snoring. There were the birds and the voices of the neighbors … but not the beating of their hearts. She wanted to ask Tin Win if there was a trick to it and if he might be able to teach her this art of hearing. At least the rudiments.

She told her youngest brother the story of the bird’s nest, but he made fun of her. How on earth could she believe that anyone’s hearing could be so acute? Someone probably told him ahead of time that there was an egg in the nest. Tin Win just wanted to impress her.

This left Mi Mi angry—more at herself than at her brother. She ought to have known. There were things a person who walked through the world on two sound feet simply couldn’t understand. They believed that people saw with their eyes. That footsteps overcame distances.

THE MIDDAY SUN
burned almost directly over the marketplace. Tin Win and Mi Mi sought shelter under the little parasol and edged closer together. Mi Mi’s brother stuffed the remaining potatoes into a sack. He would go ahead and come back for his sister.

“I can carry Mi Mi home. It’ll save you from making two trips,” said Tin Win.

The brother looked at his sister as if to say: How is this blind fellow supposed to carry you up the mountain? Mi Mi nodded to him: “Don’t worry.”

Her brother shouldered his sack of potatoes, mumbled something incomprehensible and set off.

“Would you mind if we took a detour through the town?” asked Tin Win.

“Wherever you like,” said Mi Mi. “You’re the one who has to carry me, not the other way around.” She laughed
and draped an arm around his neck. He stood slowly. They went down a side street where several oxcarts and wagons were parked. Men and women crisscrossed the road, loading their vehicles with sacks of rice and potatoes and baskets full of fruit. The animals were restless. The horses whinnied and pawed the earth or stamped their hooves. The oxen snorted and shook themselves so that their yokes creaked. They are tired from the sun and from waiting, and they’re hungry, too, thought Tin Win. He heard their stomachs growling. The wagons stood this way and that in the street, and together with the many unfamiliar noises they seemed to him to form a wall he would surely bump into any moment now. Where was the guide who helped him to avoid the most grievous mishaps? Who warned him of pits and ditches, of stones and branches, houses and trees, at least when he paid attention? Now he felt as if he were creeping through a labyrinth in which high walls blocked his way. In which corners and edges waited to undo him. A maze in which he could not help but get lost. How would he ever bring Mi Mi safely home?

Never before had his blindness so burdened him. His knees went weak and he swayed. He lost his sense of direction. Where was he? Was he going in a circle? Was he walking toward an abyss? How was he to know that his next step would not be his last? Soon he would feel no ground beneath his feet. He would lose his balance and pitch forward into the great void he had always dreaded.