The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (18 page)

“Careful. Two more steps and you’ll bump into a basket of tomatoes.” Mi Mi’s voice was next to his ear. She was whispering.

“Another little bit to the left. Good. Straight ahead. Stop.” She pressed his shoulders gently to the right. He hesitated a moment before turning himself ninety degrees. There must be an ox right in front of them. Its mighty heart beat like the muted drum the monks sometimes struck at the monastery. The animal’s breath was moist on his skin.

“Straight ahead?”

“Straight ahead.” He shuffled his feet, not daring to lift them. A few steps later she pulled gently on his left shoulder, and he turned that way. He bumped into something wooden and winced.

“Sorry, the cart. I thought we were past it. Does it hurt?”

He shook his head and walked slowly on until she tugged again on one shoulder and cautiously changed their course.

“Step up, there’s a sack of rice.”

He lifted his leg, felt for the sack with his toes, and took a big step.

“Good,” she said, and squeezed him briefly.

They went on, Mi Mi conducting him through the streets with her gentle movements as if guiding a boat through rapids. With each arc, each turn, each obstacle overcome, Tin Win’s steps became firmer and more confident. Her voice, so close to his ear, comforted him. He trusted her instructions. He, who so often could not trust even his own senses, found himself relying on her eyes.

She dried his neck with her longyi.

“Am I too heavy?” she asked.

“Not at all.” How could he explain that he felt lighter with her on his back?

“Thirsty?”

He nodded.

“We can get fresh sugarcane juice over there.” It was expensive, but her mother had allowed her to drink one juice a month after the market, and she would certainly have no objection to her treating Tin Win. He noticed that they had stepped into the shade of a large tree. “Stop here,” she said. “Set me down.”

He lowered himself onto one knee. She slid slowly from his back to the ground and settled onto a wooden stool that belonged to the juice stand. She placed a second stool behind Tin Win and tugged at his hand. He sat down without hesitating.

They sat under the broad crown of a banyan tree, and Mi Mi ordered two juices. He heard the sugarcane crushed in the press, something like the cracking sound a cockroach made when you stepped on it in the kitchen. Had Mi Mi noticed his fear? Did it matter? She had led him through the labyrinth. They had neither run into a wall nor fallen into an abyss. She had built bridges and torn down walls. She was a magician.

Mi Mi took a sip of her juice. She couldn’t imagine anything tasting better. She looked at Tin Win. She wouldn’t have guessed that a face with unseeing eyes would be capable
of expressing so much joy. She smiled, and he smiled back. She didn’t even notice how odd that was.

“Tin Win, what do you hear now? My heart?” asked Mi Mi.

“That, too.”

“Can you teach me?”

“What?”

“To hear hearts.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Please try.”

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“But you know how to do it.”

Tin Win considered. “Close your eyes.” Mi Mi closed her eyes. “What do you hear?”

“Voices. Footsteps. The tinkling of harness bells.”

“Nothing else?”

“Well, sure. I hear birds and someone coughing and a child crying, but I don’t hear any hearts beating.”

Tin Win was quiet. Mi Mi listened more. After a few minutes the noises ran together, as obscured as pictures to a weeping eye. She heard the blood coursing in her ears, but not her heart, much less Tin Win’s or anyone else’s.

“Maybe it’s too loud here,” said Tin Win after a long pause. “We might need more quiet. Let’s go, and we can try it again when we find some place where we hear nothing but the birds, the wind, and our breath.” He knelt before Mi Mi. She took hold of his shoulders. He stood up, and she crossed her legs in front of his belly.

They were walking down a quieter street. Her breath on his neck. How light she was. He nearly stepped on a sleeping dog taking shelter from the sun in the shade of a house.

“Sorry. I didn’t see him,” she said.

“Neither did I,” he said. They laughed.

Just beyond the train station, Mi Mi directed him away from the street. “I know a shortcut,” she said. A few yards later they were standing on a small hillside surrounded by hibiscus bushes. Tin Win recognized their sickly sweet scent. He extended his foot and realized they would be going downhill. Not steeply, but enough to throw him off balance.

“Maybe backwards is easier,” suggested Mi Mi. She was accustomed to dashing down hills like this in a few quick leaps on her brothers’ backs. He turned around and began his cautious descent. Mi Mi, reaching with one hand into the bushes, had taken firm hold of the branches. Together they slid slowly down the slope, and soon Tin Win had stones beneath his feet.

“Where are we?” he asked.

“On the railroad embankment,” she explained to him. “We can walk on the wooden ties between the rails. My brothers do it all the time.”

He stood still. She might as well have said Mandalay. Or Rangoon. Or London. Until now, the embankment had been for him a place beyond all reach. He knew it only from the stories of other boys at school. They often boasted of their escapades on the tracks while waiting for the black
steam engine. How they would set pinecones or the odd bottle cap on the rails, or how they would test their courage by creeping as close as they could to the passing train. At one time Tin Win had dreamed of joining in. Later he’d given up hope. The embankment was not part of his world. It belonged to the sighted.

Now he was the one walking between the rails, and soon he found a rhythm that allowed him to set his feet confidently on a tie at every step. He need not worry here about walking into a tree or a bush or about tripping over anything. He was climbing a ladder out of a cold, damp cave and the world grew brighter and warmer with every step. He walked more quickly, and soon he skipped one tie and then started to run. Mi Mi said nothing. Eyes closed, she was holding on tightly and rocking in time with his strides as if on horseback. Tin Win took great long steps, running as fast as he could. He had already stopped worrying about the distance between the ties, and he heard nothing but the beating of his heart, a drumbeat that spurred him on. Ever louder and harder, mighty and wild. A clamor that rang up the valley and beyond the mountains. Not even a steam train was louder, he thought.

When he finally came to a standstill, it was like waking from a dream. “I’m sorry,” he said, completely out of breath.

“What for?” asked Mi Mi.

“Weren’t you afraid?”

“Of what?”

T
hey lay in the grass, and Mi Mi looked up at the sky. It was late, and the sun would soon be setting. Second only to the early-morning hours, Mi Mi found this the most beautiful time of day. The light was different, clearer, and the contours of the trees and mountains and houses were more defined than at midday. She liked the voices of the evening and the scent of the fires that burned in front of the houses before nightfall.

“Do you have any idea what a heart sounds like?” asked Tin Win.

Mi Mi considered whether she had ever heard a heart beating. “I once pressed my head to my mother’s breast because I wanted to know what was making that knocking. But that was a long time ago.” At the time she had thought there was an animal in her mother’s chest, knocking on her ribs to be let out.

HE COULDN’T FALL
asleep that night. Nor the next, nor the one after that. He lay beside Su Kyi and thought about Mi Mi. He spent three wakeful nights, yet was not tired. He felt more alert. His senses, thoughts, and recollections were clearer than ever before. They had spent one afternoon together. One afternoon that he cherished like a talisman. He remembered every word that had passed between them, every shade of her voice, every beat of her heart.

On that afternoon, with Mi Mi on his back, her voice in his ear, her thighs around his hips, he had, for the first time, felt something akin to ease, a touch of joy. An emotion so foreign to him that he did not even know what to call it. Happiness, lightheartedness, fun—these were for him words without content, speech without meaning. He realized how much energy each day cost him. Waking in
that milky white fog. Groping his way through a world that had turned its back on him. He suddenly found the loneliness in which he lived unbearable, though he did have Su Kyi and U May. He revered both, trusted both, was infinitely grateful to both for the attention, the affection, they showed him. And yet, as with everyone he met, he felt an odd distance between them and himself. How often had he sat around the fire in the monastery with the other pupils or monks, wishing that he belonged, that he were part of some group, some system. Wishing that he felt something for the others—fondness, anger, or even just curiosity. Anything. But he felt little more than an emptiness, and did not know why that was. Even when someone touched him, put an arm around his shoulder, or took him by the hand, Tin Win was unmoved. The same fog that clouded his eyes seemed to have insinuated itself between him and the world.

But with Mi Mi—her eyes saw for him. With her help he did not feel like a stranger in his own life. She made him feel a part of things. Of the happenings at the market. Of the village. Of himself.

With her, he turned toward life.

I
n the coming months, the two spent every market day together, exploring Kalaw and its vicinity as if they had discovered an uncharted island. They investigated the place with the meticulous care of two scientists, street by street, house by house. Often they would crouch for hours by the
side of the road. On most of their expeditions they covered little more than a single street, a bit of meadow.

Over time they established a fixed ritual for unlocking the secrets of this new world. Having taken a few steps, they would pause, silent and motionless. Their silence might last a few minutes, half an hour, or even longer. Tin Win was soaking up the sounds, tones, and noise. Then he would describe in detail what he heard, and Mi Mi would tell him what she saw. Like a painter she sketched the scene for him, at first roughly, then with increasing precision and detail. When images and tones did not coincide they launched a search for the sources of the unfamiliar sounds. She crawled through hedgerows and bushes, dragged herself across flowerbeds and under houses, took apart stone walls and put them back together. She rummaged through woodpiles and dug with her hands in meadows and fields until she found what Tin Win heard: sleeping snakes and snails, earthworms, moths. With each passing day Tin Win came to know the world better. Thanks to Mi Mi’s descriptions, he could connect sounds with objects, plants, and animals. He learned that the wing beats of a swallowtail butterfly sounded brighter than those of a monarch; that the leaves of a mulberry tree rustled differently in the wind from those of the guava; that the chomping of a wood worm was not to be confused with that of a caterpillar; that the rubbing of hind legs was distinct from fly to fly. It was a whole new alphabet.

He had more trouble when it came to the tones produced by people. Soon after losing his eyesight Tin Win had begun
to pay attention to voices, learning to differentiate and interpret them. They became for him a kind of compass to guide him through the world of human emotions. If Su Kyi was angry or tired, he heard it in her voice. Whether his fellow students envied him his accomplishments, whether he was annoying the monks, whether a person liked him or not: all was revealed to him by the tone in which a person spoke to him.

Every voice had its distinctive repertoire of expressive forms, and so, too, did every heart. Recognizing strangers by their heartbeat on a second or third meeting posed no difficulty for Tin Win, even though the beating was never absolutely identical. It betrayed much about body and soul and altered with time or according to the situation. Hearts could sound young or decrepit, boring or bored, mysterious or predictable. Yet what was he to think when an individual’s voice and heart were at odds, each telling a different, mutually incompatible story? Take U May, for instance. His voice had always sounded strong and robust, as if untouched by the years. Tin Win had always pictured him as a great old pine with a mighty trunk, impervious even to the storms that occasionally swept the Shan Plateau. One of those trees under which he had previously felt secure and loved to play. U May’s heart, however, sounded neither strong nor robust. It sounded fragile and weak, spent and weary. It reminded him of the emaciated oxen he had seen as a child, passing by their house, behind them a heavy cart loaded with sacks of rice or wooden
beams. He had gazed after them, convinced they would fall dead before they reached the summit of the mountain. Why did U May’s voice not match his heart? Which should he trust? The voice or the heart? These were questions to which he knew no answer. Though he believed, somehow, that with Mi Mi’s help he would resolve them. Some of them, at least.