The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (30 page)

I looked at him and was moved by the sight: a little man, dressed in rags, with stumps for teeth, who with a bit of luck might just as easily have been a professor with a luxurious apartment in Manhattan or a house in some London suburb. Which of us had lost perspective? Was it me with my demands or him with his modesty? I was not sure what I felt for him. It wasn’t pity. It was a curious kind of affection. I wanted to shelter him even while I knew very well that he had no need of my protection. At the same time, I felt secure—cozy, almost—in his company. As if he were shielding me from something. I trusted him. Until then I had thought you needed to know a person in order to like him or feel close to him.

MY FATHER AND
I are standing on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York. I’m eight or nine years old. An autumn day with a crisp wind that already hints at the cold of winter. I’m dressed too lightly, and I’m freezing. My father puts his jacket around my shoulders. The sleeves are much too long. I’m drowning in it, but it warms me. Through the cracks in the boards at my feet I see sunbeams dancing on the surface of the East River far below. Would my father be able to save me if the bridge were to collapse right now? I size up the distance to the bank. He’s a good swimmer, and I have no doubt. I don’t know how many times we stood there like that. Often without a word.

My father loved those parts of New York that are really of interest only to tourists. The Circle Line ferries that loop around Manhattan. The Empire State Building. The Statue of Liberty, the bridges. As if he were only passing through.
Most of all he was drawn to the Staten Island Ferry. Sometimes after a full day’s work he would walk down to the pier just to take the boat ride out and back. I remember one time when we stood at the ferry’s railing, just above the cars, and he said that he couldn’t fathom how much the harbor and the skyline of the city had changed. When he closed his eyes he could still see the same image as on that bitter cold morning in January 1942, when the wind was so icy that hardly anyone besides him could stand to be on deck.

At the time I couldn’t understand what he saw in the very places most New Yorkers avoided except when they had uninitiated visitors. Later I found it boring. As a teenager it got embarrassing, and I wouldn’t go with him anymore. Now I think it was among tourists that he found the distance he needed between himself and the city to which he never really belonged. I suspect these places were his vanishing points when he was beside himself with longing. Is that where he felt closest to Mi Mi? Did he see himself leaving New York by ship or plane? Was he dreaming of it?

U Ba and I walked up the ox trail to the summit. The afternoon was getting on now. The first fires were burning in front of the huts, and the wind wafted the smoke across the yards. By now I had grown accustomed to the scent of burning wood in the evening.

I didn’t know where we were going. U Ba had said there was only one place he could finish his story. He had stood up, packed his thermos and mug into his bag, returned the bench, and gestured for me to follow him. He looked
at his watch and eased his pace. As if we were early for an appointment.

I was nervous.

“There’s not much more I can tell you,” said U Ba, pausing for a moment in his tracks. “You know more than I do about his time in America.”

There it was again, the question I had suppressed for the past two days: What did I really know?

I had memories, many beautiful and tender memories for which I was very thankful, but what good were they when it came to understanding my father? It was the world through a child’s eyes. They couldn’t answer the questions running through my mind. Why didn’t my father return to Kalaw after the war?

Why did he marry my mother? Did he love her? Was he unfaithful to her with Mi Mi or to Mi Mi with her?

“U Ba, why did my father stay in New York after finishing law school?” I was startled by my tone. It was my mother’s tone when she was trying to contain her fury.

“What do you suppose, Julia? ”

I did not want to suppose anything. I wanted answers. The truth. “I don’t know.”

“Did your father have a choice? If he had returned to Burma, he would have had to bow to his uncle’s wishes. He was indebted to him. U Saw had assumed the role of the father, and a son does not defy his father’s will. It was not Mi Mi that awaited him in Rangoon, but an arranged life. A young bride. A big company. New York was his only
chance to avoid that.” He looked at me as if he could read in my eyes whether or not he had persuaded me. “It was fifty years ago. We are a conservative country, now as then.”

I thought of U Ba’s decision to care for his mother instead of going to college. Maybe it was wrong for me to judge him or my father according to my own standards. Was it my place to pass sentence? Had I come here to find my father, to understand him, or to try him?

“He might have come back after U Saw’s death.” It was a suggestion, an implicit question, no longer an accusation.

“U Saw died in May 1958.”

Three months before the birth of my brother.

“Why did he marry my mother? Why didn’t he just wait for U Saw to die and then go back to Mi Mi?”

“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question for you.”

It was the first time I detected any irritation in U Ba’s voice. He was more perplexed than angry. I remembered what my mother had told me before my departure. My father had refused to marry her for a long time. He had warned her about their marriage. Why did he finally relent? Was he lonesome after all those years on his own in New York? Was he looking for solace? Had he hoped she would help him forget Mi Mi? Given everything I now knew, it seemed highly unlikely. Did he love her? It didn’t seem so. Not from my mother’s perspective. Did he hope he would eventually come to love her? Was the desire for a family of his own finally so great that he faltered?

Maybe he loved her, only she couldn’t see it, couldn’t believe it, because it was not her style of love.

My poor mother. I saw her hard, embittered face. I heard her cool, cutting voice when my father came home late because, once again, he had taken the ferry to Staten Island. I recalled the days she spent at regular intervals in her darkened room. Chained to her bed by some mysterious illness whose name we children never learned. No one besides the family physician was allowed to see her, not even my father. Now I know that she was suffering from depression. Each of my parents would have been better off without the other.

I felt sorry for both of them. Whatever my father felt for my mother, however much he enjoyed certain hours with us, his children, he was not where he belonged. He was not with Mi Mi.

Was he to blame for having succumbed to my mother’s coaxing? Or was she in the wrong for wanting something from him that he could never give her?

W
e walked on in silence. The path descended gently and took a sharp turn in front of a wildly overgrown hedge. We continued straight ahead, forcing our way through the brush, crossing the train tracks, hiking across a meadow and then turning onto a path that brought us to a rather isolated corner of Kalaw. U Ba led me past several yards in which children played. We stopped in front of a
garden gate. The property was well maintained. Someone had swept it recently. There was fresh chicken feed in a trough. Under the porch was a stack of firewood and a pile of kindling. The house, though not large, was in very good condition. On the porch I saw tin pots and tableware. We sat down at the top of the stairs and waited.

I looked across the yard. A eucalyptus tree marked the border with the neighboring property. In front of the hen house was a wooden plank for sitting. In front of that a stone mortar. I looked at the broad stanchions of the porch railing—a child might easily have pulled herself up on them. It took a few moments before the pieces fell into place. I knew where we were. I jumped up and spun around.

I heard my father’s breath in the house. I heard Mi Mi crawling across the floor. I heard them whispering. Their voices. I had caught up to them.

U Ba resumed his tale.

IT WAS QUIET
in the teahouse when Tin Win finished telling his story. You could hear the candles guttering and the patrons breathing evenly. No one moved. Even the flies, sitting motionless on their sticky sugar pastries, had ceased to buzz.

Tin Win had said all there was to say. Now his voice failed. His lips formed words, but they were no longer audible. Would he ever say anything again? He rose, took a sip of cold tea, stretched briefly, and made for the door. It was high time. He turned around once more and bid farewell. A smile was the last they saw of him.

On the street was a truck full of soldiers. Children in green uniforms. The people seemed not to notice them, but still everyone gave the vehicle a wide berth. It had gotten late.

Tin Win tightened his longyi and strode slowly down the main thoroughfare. On his right was the monastery. Boards had broken out of the walls in several places, and the rusted, corrugated tin roof did not look as if it offered much protection from the rain. Only the little bells of the pagoda tinkled as they once had. Coming toward him was a pair of young monks in bare feet. The dust had turned their red-brown robes to gray. He smiled at them. They smiled back.

He walked past the empty marketplace, and at the little train station he crossed the tracks and walked slowly up the hill to where her property lay. He was certain she still lived in her parents’ house. He stopped often to look around. He was in no hurry. Not after fifty years. He was not even anxious. The moment his Thai Air Boeing 737 landed in Rangoon all his nervousness had ebbed away, and now he allowed himself instead the luxury of joy. A joy beyond all measure, no longer tinged with fear or caution, expanding by the hour. He had abandoned himself to it, and already it was so vast that he could hardly keep back the tears. Half a century had passed. There he was.

The sight of Kalaw fascinated him. At once strange and familiar. He remembered the aromas. He knew how the town smelled in winter and in summer, on market days and feast days, when the fragrance of the incense filled the houses and alleyways. And he knew how the place sounded. His Kalaw groaned and wheezed. It squeaked and rattled. It could sing and weep. But he did not know how it looked.
He had seen it last as a child, and even then only through clouded eyes. He came to the English Club, in whose empty swimming pool saplings grew. Beyond it he saw the tennis courts, above them the Kalaw Hotel in Tudor style with its red roof. Just as Mi Mi had described it. Somewhere behind the next rise he must have lived with Su Kyi.

He stood at a fork in the road, not knowing which way to turn. Straight ahead or to the left, the steeper climb? For four years he had carried Mi Mi up this path without ever having seen it himself. He closed his eyes. They would be of no use to him now. His legs would have to remember, his nose, his ears. Something drew him straight ahead. Eyes closed, on he went. He smelled ripe mangoes and jasmine. Tin Win recognized the fragrance. This must be where the flat rock lay on which they had sometimes rested. He found it easily.

He heard children playing in the yards, laughing and shrieking. These were no longer the voices of his youth, but their quality had not changed. He was amazed how confidently he moved with closed eyes. When he had tried it in New York he had run into pedestrians, bumped into streetlamps and trees. One time a taxi had nearly run him down.

Here he did not stumble once.

He stopped in front of a garden gate.

The scent of the eucalyptus. How often he had thought of this tree. How many hours he had lain awake at night in New York imagining this fragrance in his nose.

He opened the gate. How often he had envisioned this moment.

He stepped in. Two dogs scampered about his feet. The chickens were in the coop.

Tin Win heard voices in the house. He took off his sandals. His feet remembered this earth. This soft, warm soil that tickled between his toes. He felt his way to the stairs, reached for the railing. His hands remembered the wood. Nothing had changed.