The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (24 page)

I went into the kitchen. A small fire smoldered in one corner, above it a kettle. The smoke drafted straight upward and disappeared through a hole in the roof. Still, my eyes burned. Against the wall stood an open cupboard with a pair of white enameled tin bowls and plates, glasses, and sooty pots. On the lowest shelf were eggs, tomatoes, a huge bunch of scallions, ginger root, and limes.

“Julia?” His voice came from the next room.

U Ba sat at a table, surrounded by books. The whole room was full of them. It looked like a library gone to seed. The books filled shelves from floor to ceiling. They lay in piles on the wooden floorboards and in an armchair. They towered on a second table. Some were finger-thin, others the size of dictionaries. There were paperbacks among them, but most were hardcovers, a few even bound in leather. U Ba sat hunched over an open book whose yellowed pages resembled a punch card. Beside it an assemblage of various tweezers and scissors, and a jar of viscous white glue. Two oil lamps on the table offered additional light. U Ba looked at me over the rim of his thick glasses.

“What are you working on, U Ba?”

“Just passing the time.”

“Doing what?”

He picked up a tiny scrap of paper with a long, thin pair of tweezers, dipped it briefly in the glue, then positioned it over one of the tiny holes in the book. With a fine black pen he then inked in the upper half of an o. I tried to read the text to which the letter belonged.

U Ba looked at me and recited the complete lines by heart.

“From a collection of Eliot poems,” he said. “T. S. Eliot. I hold him in high regard.” He smiled, satisfied, and showed me the first pages of the book. They were studded with bits of glued-on paper. “Not as good as new, perhaps, but at least it is legible once again.”

I looked from him to the book and back. Was he serious? That volume must have contained at least two hundred hole-ridden pages. “How long does a book like that take you?”

“These days, a few months. I used to be faster. Now my eyes no longer fully cooperate, and my back objects after only a few hours of hunching over. On other days my hands tremble too severely.” He leafed through the remaining pages and sighed. “This particular book is in a truly pitiful state. Even the worms seem to fancy Eliot.”

“But surely there’s some more efficient method of restoring books. You’ll never manage it like this.”

“No method within my power, I fear.”

“I could send you new editions from New York of the ones that mean the most to you,” I suggested.

“Don’t go to the trouble. I read the most important ones while they were still in better condition.”

“Then why are you restoring them?”

He smiled.

Neither of us spoke, and I looked around. Here I stood, in a wooden house without electricity or running water, surrounded by thousands of books. “Where did you get them all?” I asked.

“From the English. I was enamored of books even as a boy. Many of the British never returned after the war, and after independence more of them left every year. Whatever books they did not wish to take they left to me.” He rose, walked over to a bookcase, pulled out a leather-bound tome, and leafed through it. The pages looked perforated. “You see, many have shared the same sad fate as the Eliot volume. The climate. The worms and insects.” U Ba walked over to a little cupboard behind his desk. “These are the ones I’ve finished.” He pointed to a couple of dozen books, took one of them, and handed it to me. It had a sturdy leather binding and a lovely feel. I opened it. Even the title page was dotted with paper bits.
THE SOUL OF A PEOPLE
, it read in a large font. London, 1902.

“Should you care to learn more about our country, this is a good place to start.”

“It’s not exactly current,” I said, slightly irritated.

“The soul of a people does not change overnight.”

U Ba pulled at his earlobes and glanced around, looking for something. He took a few books from a lower shelf. He had shelved them one row behind the other. Taking a key from a red lacquer box on his desk, he opened a drawer. “Just as I thought—I’ve locked it away,” he said, taking a book out. “It’s in Braille. Su Kyi gave it to me just before she died. It’s the first volume of one of Tin Win’s favorites. She forgot to pack it when he set off for Rangoon.”

It was heavy and awkward. Several pieces of tape just barely held the spine together. “You should sit down. Come with me. We’ll have a cup of coffee, and you can examine it at your leisure.”

We moved into the living room. U Ba poured hot water from a thermos into a glass and made me a coffee. I set the book on my lap and opened it. The pages were as riddled with holes as those of the other books. I brushed my index finger across one page, casually, as if inspecting my cleaning lady’s attention to detail on a dusty shelf. The book unsettled me. I snapped it shut and put it on the table. In the distance I heard singing. Several voices, faint and barely audible, so soft that they threatened to fade away before reaching my ear. A wave melting into the sand before ever washing over my feet.

I listened hard into the silence, but heard nothing, picked up the song again, then lost it, held my breath and sat stock still until I heard the notes again, somewhat louder now. Loud enough that I would not lose track of them again. It could only be a children’s choir untiringly repeating a melodic mantra.

“Is it the children from the monastery?” I asked.

“Not the ones from the monastery in the town, though. There’s another in the mountains, and when the wind is right, their song drifts down to us in the morning. You are hearing what Tin Win and Mi Mi heard. It sounded no different fifty years ago.”

I closed my eyes and shuddered. The children’s voices seemed to pass through my ears into my body and to touch me where no word, no thought, and no person had ever done before.

Whence this magic? I could not understand a single word they sang. What was it that affected me so? How can a person be moved to tears by something she can neither see, understand, nor hold on to, a mere sound that vanishes almost the moment it comes into being?

Music, my father often said, was the only reason he could sometimes believe in a god or in any heavenly power.

Every evening before going to bed he would sit in the living room, eyes closed, listening to music on headphones. How else will my soul find rest for the night, he had said quietly.

I cannot remember a single concert or opera at which he did not weep. Tears poured down his face like water from a
lake silently but forcefully spilling over its banks. He would smile the whole time.

Once I asked him which he would take to a desert island, given the choice between music and books.

I wished the children’s chanting might never end. It should accompany me through my day. Through my life. And after that. Had I ever felt so close to my father? Perhaps U Ba was right. Perhaps he was nearby, and I had only to look for him.

 

I WANTED TO
see the house where my father spent his childhood and youth. Maybe he and Mi Mi were hiding there? U Ba hesitated.

“The buildings are in dismal condition. You will need a lot of imagination to find traces of his childhood there,” he warned me.

But already I could hear my father’s breath just a few yards ahead of me. He was panting from lugging her up the mountain. She was heavier, and he was older. I heard them whispering. Their voices. A few steps more and I would overtake them.

Just a few steps more.

“There’s something I need to take care of,” U Ba told me. “Will you go on ahead?” He pointed out the way and said he would catch up with me.

So I trudged over the mountain ridge alone. U Ba had described it in precise detail, the mud path with the deep pits and ruts. It was oddly familiar to me. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my father walking along the road. I was startled by the many and varied noises I suddenly heard. Birds. Grasshoppers. Cicadas. An unpleasantly loud buzzing of flies, the distant barking of a dog. My feet got mired in the holes and ruts in the earth. I stumbled but did not fall. It smelled of eucalyptus and jasmine. An oxcart overtook me. The animals were truly wretched. The skin clung to their ribs, and their eyes protruded from their skulls as if they were about to burst from the strain.

Beyond the summit I saw the house. I slackened my pace. At the garden gate I halted, dispirited.

The gate hung askew, its lower hinge broken off. Grass grew out of cracks in the masonry pillars. The wooden fence was overgrown with shrubbery. Every second or third slat was missing. The grass in the yard was grayish brown, scorched by the sun. The main building, a yellow two-story Tudor villa, had a grand balcony on the second floor from which one must have had a view of the town and the mountains. Its supports, the eaves, and the window frames were ornamented with wood carving. There was a conservatory, and several bay windows. A tree was growing out of the chimney. The thin framing of the roof was partly exposed where several tiles were missing. The balcony railing had lost nearly half its uprights, and the rain had bleached the color of the façade. Most of the windows were broken in.

Vacant buildings depressed me, even in New York. As a child I had always given them a wide berth, crossing the street whenever I came upon one. They were haunted. Behind their boarded-up windows ghosts lay in wait just for me. I dared to walk past them only when my father was with me, and even then I had to take the street side.

This villa had that same eerie quality. Why wasn’t anyone maintaining it? Its former grandeur was still plain to see. Anyone could have kept it up without much effort. Could have.

What might have been, if? What lurked within? Phantoms? Two unlived lives?

Somewhat below the house was the ruined shack in which Su Kyi and my father must have lived. It was smaller than our living room in New York. I could see no window and only one empty doorframe. The brown corrugated tin roof was destroyed by rust, the clay crumbling out of the walls. I spotted the fire pit, a stack of weathered kindling, and the wooden bench. Two young women were sitting on it with babies on their laps. They looked at me and smiled. Beside the hut, four longyis hung in the sun. Two young dogs roamed about the yard. A third arched its back to shit, then cast me a mournful expression.

I drew two deep, even breaths and stepped through the gate. Ahead of me on the lawn was the tree stump. It must have come from a very old and large pine. Ants streamed over its thick bark. The wood was soft and eaten away in several places, but the heartwood was still sound, even after
all the years. I climbed onto it without difficulty. It was damp and firm. The view into the valley was obstructed by several large bushes. I knew now why I had wanted to see this place at all costs and yet had dreaded it. Here was the key to U Ba’s narrative. Ever since I had heard the children singing in the monastery this morning, his story had ceased to be a fable. It reverberated in my ears, and I could smell it and touch it with my hands. This was the tree stump where my father had waited in vain for his mother, my grandmother. Where he had nearly starved himself to death. In this yard he had lost his eyesight, and he had lived in this odd town where little had changed over the past fifty years. He and Mi Mi. U Ba was leading me to them. I heard their whispering. Their voices. Just a few steps more.

What if the next thing I knew they were standing right in front of me? I was panic-stricken at the thought. Perhaps Mi Mi and my father were holed up in this derelict villa. Might they already have spotted me from a window? Would they hide from me, run away, or come out of the house and approach me? What would I say? Hi, Dad? Why’d you ditch us? How come you never told me about Mi Mi? I missed you?