The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (2 page)

“No. I speak of a love that brings sight to the blind. Of a love stronger than fear. I speak of a love that breathes meaning into life, that defies the natural laws of deterioration, that causes us to flourish, that knows no bounds. I speak of the triumph of the human spirit over selfishness and death.

“You shake your head. You do not believe in any such thing. You do not know what I am talking about. I am not surprised. Just wait. You will understand what I mean once I tell you the story I have borne in my heart for you these past four years. I require only a bit of your patience. The hour is late, and you are surely weary from your long journey. If you like, we could meet again tomorrow at the same time, at this table, in this teahouse. This is where I met your father, by the way, and, as a matter of fact, he sat right there on your stool and took up his tale while I sat exactly where I am now, astonished—I will admit—disbelieving, even confused. I had never before heard anyone tell a story like that. Can words sprout wings? Can they glide like butterflies through the air? Can they captivate us, carry us off into another world? Can they open the last secret chambers
of our souls? I do not know whether words alone can accomplish these things, but, Julia, your father had a voice on that day such as a person hears maybe only once in a lifetime.

“Though his voice was low, there was not a person in this teahouse who was not moved to tears by the mere sound of it. His sentences soon took the shape of a story, and out of that story a life emerged, revealing its power and its magic. The things I heard that day left me as firm a believer as your father.

“ ‘I am not a religious man, and love, U Ba, is the only force I truly believe in.’ Those were your father’s words.”

U
Ba stood up. He brought his open palms together in front of his chest, bowed ever so slightly, and left the teahouse in a few quick, light steps.

I watched until he disappeared into the bustle of the street.

No, I wanted to call after him. Do I believe in love? What a question. As if love were a religion you might believe in or not. No, I wanted to tell the old man, there isn’t any force more powerful than fear. There is no triumph over death. No.

I sat hunched and slouching on my low stool, feeling that I could still hear his voice. It was tranquil and melodious, not unlike my father’s.

Sit here with me just another little while, Julia, Julia, Julia …

Do you believe in love, in love …

Your father’s words, your father’s …

M
y head ached; I was exhausted. As if I’d woken from a relentless and sleepless nightmare. Flies were buzzing all around me, landing on my hair, my forehead, and my hands. I didn’t have the strength to drive them off. In front of me sat three dry pastries. The table was covered with sticky brown sugar.

I tried to sip my tea. It was cold, and my hand was shaking. Why had I listened to that stranger for so long? I could have asked him to stop. I could have left. But something had held me back. Just when I was about to turn away, he had said: Julia, Julia Win. I could never have imagined that the sound of my full name would unsettle me so. How did he know it? Did he in fact know my father? When had he seen him last? Could he know whether my father was still alive, where he might be hiding?

THE WAITER DIDN’T
want my money.

“U Ba’s friends are our guests,” he said, bowing.

Still, I took a kyat bill out of my pants pocket. It was worn and filthy. Repulsed, I stuck it under the plate. The waiter cleared the table but ignored the money. I pointed to it. He smiled.

Was it too little? Too dirty? I set a larger, cleaner bill on the table. He bowed, smiled again, and left it, too, untouched.

O
utside it was even hotter. The heat paralyzed me. I stood in front of the teahouse unable to take a single step. The sun burned on my skin, and the dazzling light stung my eyes. I put on my baseball cap and pulled it low over my face.

The street was full of people, yet all was oddly quiet. There were hardly any motorized vehicles to speak of. People were walking or riding bicycles. Parked at one intersection were three horse-drawn carriages and an oxcart. The few cars on the road were old Japanese pickups, dented and rusty, crammed with woven baskets and sacks to which young men clung for dear life.

The street was lined with low, single-story wooden shops with corrugated tin roofs, where vendors offered everything from rice, peanuts, flour, and shampoo to Coca-Cola and beer. There was no order—at least none I could discern.

Every second shop seemed to be a teahouse with patrons out front crouching on tiny wooden stools. Around their heads they wore red and green towels. In place of pants, the men wore what looked like wraparound skirts.

In front of me a couple of women had smeared yellow paste on their cheeks, brows, and noses and were smoking long dark-green cigarillos. They were all slender without seeming gaunt and moved with the same elegance and lightness I had always admired in my father.

And the way they stared at me, looking me square in the face and in the eye and smiling. I couldn’t make heads or tails of those smiles. How threatening a little laugh can seem.

Others greeted me with a nod. What, did they know me? Had all of them, like U Ba, been expecting my arrival? I
tried not to look at them. I walked down the main street as quickly as possible, my eyes fixed on some imaginary point in the distance.

I was homesick for New York, for the din and the traffic. For the unapproachable faces of pedestrians who took no interest in one another. I wanted to be back where I knew how to move and how to behave.

The road forked after about a hundred yards. I had forgotten where my hotel was. All I could see were the oversized bougainvilleas, taller even than the shacks they hid. The parched fields, the dusty sidewalks, the potholes deep enough to swallow basketballs. Wherever I turned everything looked strange and sinister.

“Miss Win, Miss Win,” someone called.

Hardly daring to turn around, I glanced back over my shoulder. There stood a young man who reminded me of the bellhop at the hotel. Or of the skycap at the airport in Rangoon, or of the cabdriver. Or perhaps the waiter at the teahouse.

“Are you looking for something, Miss Win? Can I help you?”

“No, thank you,” I started, not wishing to depend on this stranger. “Yes … my hotel,” I said, desiring above all some place to hide, if only within the hotel room I had checked into that morning.

“Up the hill, here, to the right. Not five minutes away,” he explained.

“Thank you.”

“I hope you enjoy your time in our city. Welcome to Kalaw,” he said, and stood, smiling, as I turned back around.

I
n the hotel I walked silently and quickly past the smiling desk clerk, climbed the massive wooden staircase to the second floor, and sank down onto my bed.

The trip from New York to Rangoon had taken more than seventy-two hours. Then I had spent a whole night and half of the next day in a ramshackle bus crammed with people who stank, people wearing nothing but grimy skirts, threadbare T-shirts, and shabby plastic sandals. With chickens and squealing piglets. A twenty-hour journey on roads that bore little resemblance to streets. Dried-up river beds, if you ask me. All just to get from the capital to this remote little mountain village.

I
must have slept. The sun disappeared; night fell. A semidarkness filled the room. My suitcase lay unopened on the other bed. I looked around, my eyes wandering back and forth as if I needed to remind myself where I was. An old wooden fan hung from the ceiling high above me. The room was big, and the Spartan furnishings gave it a monastic air. Beside the door a plain cupboard, by the window a table and chair, between the beds a little nightstand. The whitewashed walls were unadorned, without pictures or
mirrors. The old wooden floorboards were worn smooth. The sole luxury was a tiny Korean refrigerator. It didn’t work. Cool evening air wafted through the open windows.

In the twilight, at a few hours’ remove, my encounter with the old man seemed even more absurd and mysterious than it had by the full light of day. The memory of it was blurred and indistinct. Spectral images drifted through my mind, images I could not interpret, images that made no sense. I tried to remember. He wore a white shirt yellowed with age, a green longyi, and rubber flip-flops. He had white, thick, closely cropped hair. His face was creased with wrinkles. I couldn’t tell how old he was. Sixty, maybe seventy. On his lips yet another smile whose import I could not divine. Was it sneering, derisive? Compassionate? What did he want from me?

Money. What else. He hadn’t asked for any, but those remarks about his teeth and shirt were clear enough. I knew what he was getting at. He could have learned my name from the hotel. He was probably in cahoots with the front desk. A con man who wanted to whet my curiosity, to make an impression before offering me his services as a fortuneteller. No, no—an astrologer. I wasn’t buying it. He was wasting his time.

Had he said anything to suggest he had actually known my father? My father supposedly said to him: “I’m not a religious man, and love, U Ba, love is the only force I truly believe in.” My father would never even have thought such a thing, let alone have spoken it out loud. Least of all to a
stranger. Or was I kidding myself? Wasn’t it more likely a ridiculous presumption on my part to imagine I understood my father’s thoughts or feelings? How well had I really known him? Would the father I thought I knew have disappeared, just like that, without leaving even a note? Would he have abandoned his wife, his son, and his daughter without explanation, without ever sending word?

His trail evaporates in Bangkok, the police say. He might have been robbed and murdered in Thailand.

Or was he the victim of an accident on the Gulf of Siam? Was he hoping to enjoy two weeks of peace and quiet, for a change? Maybe he went to the coast and drowned there while swimming. That’s our family’s version, the official one at least.

The homicide squad suspected him of leading a double life. They refused to accept my mother’s assertion that she knew nothing about his first twenty years. They considered the very notion so preposterous that at first they suspected her of having played some part in his disappearance, either as his accomplice or as the perpetrator. Only when it became clear that there were no high-stakes life-insurance policies involved, that no one would profit financially from his purported death, did they shake off every shadow of suspicion. There very well could have been some side of my father lurking behind the mystery of those first, long-lost twenty years, a side that we, his family, had never seen.

MY LAST MEMORY
of him is already four years old. It was the morning after I’d graduated from law school. We had celebrated my graduation the previous evening, and I did not feel like going home that night. For some reason, I wanted to start the day within the safety of my childhood rituals. To feel that sense of security. Just once more.

Perhaps I’d had a premonition.

My father woke me early, standing at the foot of my bed wearing his old-fashioned gray overcoat and a brown Borsalino. As a little girl I used to watch him going off to work dressed like that. Every morning I would stand at the window waving good-bye, crying sometimes because I didn’t want him to leave. Even years later, when his chauffeur would wait for him and he had only to take three steps across the sidewalk to get into the limo, he always wore the
coat and the hat. In all that time he never varied his wardrobe; he just bought new coats and hats at regular intervals, the hats exclusively Borsalinos. He owned six of them: two black, two brown, and two navy. When he could no longer find the overcoats, even at the most conservative haberdashers in New York, he started having them tailor-made.

The Borsalino was his talisman. He had bought that Italian hat to wear to his first job interview. He got the job. Back then the hat had been clear evidence of his good style and taste. Over the years, though, it had come to seem old-fashioned, then eccentric, until finally he looked like an extra from a fifties film. As a teenager I had been embarrassed by my father’s choice of clothes. He looked so completely out of step, and he would greet my friends’ mothers with a bow. The other kids giggled when he picked me up at school. He never wore sneakers, jeans, or sweatshirts. He despised the casual American style of dress, which he said pandered to the lower human instincts, one of which was craving comfort.