The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (31 page)

He climbed the stairs, step by step. He was in no hurry. Not after fifty years.

He walked along the porch. The voices were muted now. When he stood in the doorway they fell silent.

He heard people slipping out past him and disappearing. Even the moths that had lately circled the lightbulb flew through the window out into the twilight. The beetles and cockroaches scurried hurriedly into cracks in the wood.

All was still.

He walked over to her without opening his eyes. He did not need them anymore.

Someone had built a bed for her.

Tin Win knelt before it. Her voice. Her whispers. His ears remembered.

Her hands on his face. His skin remembered.

His mouth remembered, and his lips. His fingers remembered, and his nose. How long he had craved this scent. How had he managed without her? Where had he found the strength to get through a single day without her?

There was room enough for two in the bed.

How light she had become.

Her hair in his face. Her tears.

So much to share, so much to give, so little time.

By morning their strength was spent. Mi Mi fell asleep in his arms.

The sun would be coming up soon, Tin Win knew from the song of the birds. He laid his head on her breast. He had not been mistaken. Her heart sounded weak and weary. It was ready to stop.

He had come in time. Just.

A RELATIVE FOUND
them toward midday. He had already been there once that morning and thought they were sleeping.

Tin Win’s head lay on her breast. Her arms were draped around his neck. When he returned a few hours later they were pale and cold.

The man hurried down to town to fetch the physician from the hospital.

The doctor was not surprised. Mi Mi had not left her property for more than two years. She had lain in bed for the past twelve months. He had been expecting her death any day. The sounds he heard through his stethoscope had not been encouraging. He couldn’t understand how she could go on living in spite of her weak heart and inflamed lungs. He had offered several times to bring her to the capital. The medical care there, while also miserable, was at
any rate better than here. But she had refused to go. When he asked her how on earth she managed to stay alive in spite of her several afflictions, she just smiled. Only a few days ago he had visited her and brought some medication. He had been amazed to see how vibrant she seemed. Better than in the previous months. She was sitting upright in bed, humming to herself with a yellow blossom in her hair. As if she was expecting company.

He did not recognize the dead man next to her. He was Mi Mi’s age, presumably of Burmese descent, though he could never have been from Kalaw or the vicinity. In spite of his advanced age, his teeth were flawless. And the doctor had never seen feet so well maintained. They were not the feet of a man who had spent much of his life walking barefoot. His hands were not a farmer’s hands. He was wearing contact lenses. Maybe he was from Rangoon.

He appeared to have been in good health, and the doctor could only speculate on the cause of his death.

“Heart failure,” he wrote on a piece of paper.

News of Mi Mi’s passing spread throughout the region as quickly as the rumor of Tin Win’s return had the evening before. The first townspeople were standing in the yard that afternoon with little wreaths of fresh jasmine and bouquets of orchids, freesias, gladiolas, and geraniums. They laid them on the porch and—when there was no room there—arranged them on the steps, in front of the house, and in the yard. Others brought mangoes and papayas, bananas and apples up the hill as offerings and constructed
little pyramids of fruit. Mi Mi and her beloved ought not to lack for anything. Sticks of incense were lit and stuck into the ground or into vases filled with sand.

Farmers came from their fields, monks from their cloisters, parents with their children, and anyone too weak or too old to climb the mountain was carried by neighbors or friends. By evening the yard was full of people, flowers, and fruit. It was a clear, mild night, and by the time the moonlight fell across the mountains, the road and the adjacent properties were overflowing with mourners. They had brought candles, flashlights, and gas lanterns, and whoever stood on Mi Mi’s porch looked out across a sea of lights. No one spoke above a whisper. Anyone unacquainted with the story of Tin Win and Mi Mi heard it now in hushed tones from a neighbor. A few of the oldest residents even asserted that they had known Tin Win and had never doubted he would eventually return.

The following morning the schools, the teahouses, and even the monastery were empty, and there was no one in Kalaw who did not know what had transpired. The procession that followed the deceased to the cemetery resounded with weeping and song, with dancing and laughter. In consultation with the military, the abbot, and other local dignitaries, the mayor had granted permission to confer in death one of Kalaw’s greatest honors on Mi Mi and Tin Win: that their bodies might be cremated at the cemetery.

Since the first light of day a dozen young men had been gathering kindling, twigs, and branches and piling them in
two heaps. It took nearly three hours for the funeral parade to make its way from Mi Mi’s house to the cemetery on the other side of town.

There were no ceremonies and no speeches. The people needed no consolation.

The wood was dry, the flames greedy. The bodies were alight within minutes.

It was a windless day. The columns of smoke were white like jasmine blossoms. They rose straight up into the blue sky.

U BA’S STORY
of my father’s death caught me off guard. Why? I had had ample time. But what in life can prepare us for the loss of a parent?

Every hour I had listened to him, my confidence had increased. His story had brought my father more vividly to life than my memories ever could. In the end he was so close that I could no longer imagine his death. He was alive. I would never see him again. I sat beside U Ba on the steps, certain they were in the house. I heard their whispering. Their voices.

The end of the story. I wanted to stand up and go inside. I wanted to greet them and put my arms around my father again. Seconds passed before I understood what U Ba had said. As if I had taken no notice at all of this final chapter of his tale. We did not go into the house. I did not want to see it from inside. Not yet.

U Ba took me back to his place, where I fell asleep exhausted on his couch.

I spent the next two days in an armchair in his library, watching him restore his books. We didn’t talk much. He sat bent over his desk, engrossed in his work. Examining pages. Dipping bits of paper in the glue. Copying
A
’s and
O
’s. Flouting every principle of efficiency.

The equanimity with which he pursued this routine calmed me. He asked no questions and demanded nothing. Now and then he would look at me over the rim of his glasses and smile. I felt safe and secure in his company, even without many words.

On the morning of the third day we went together to the market. I had offered to cook for him. As I did for friends in Manhattan. He seemed surprised but happy. We bought rice, vegetables, herbs, and spices. I wanted to make a vegetarian curry that I sometimes cooked with an Indian girlfriend in New York. I asked him for his potato peeler. He had no idea what I was talking about. He had one knife. It was dull.

I had never cooked over an open fire. I scorched the rice. The vegetables boiled over, dousing the fire. He patiently kindled another.

Still, he thought it was good. So he said.

We sat cross-legged on his couch and ate. The cooking had distracted me. Now my grief returned.

“Did you think you would see him again?” he asked.

I nodded. “It hurts.”

U Ba said nothing.

“Is your father still alive?” I asked after a pause.

“No. He died a few years back.”

“Was he sick?”

“My parents were old, especially by Burmese standards.”

“Did their deaths change your life?”

U Ba considered. “I used to spend a lot of time with my mother so I am alone more often now. Otherwise not much has changed.”

“How long did it take you to get over it? ”

“Over it? I’m not sure I would put it that way. When we get over something, we move on, we put it behind us. Do we leave the dead behind or do we take them with us? I think we take them with us. They accompany us. They remain with us, if in another form. We have to learn to live with them and their deaths. In my case that process took a couple of days.”

“Only a couple of days?”

“Once I understood that I had not lost them I recovered quickly. I think of them every day. I wonder what they would say at a given moment. I ask them for advice, even today, at my age, when it will soon be time to be thinking of my own death.” He took a bit more rice and continued: “I had no need to grieve for my parents. They were old and tired and ready to die. They had lived full lives. Dying caused them no anguish. They suffered no pain. I am convinced that at the moment their hearts stopped beating, they were happy. Is there a more beautiful death?”

“Maybe you need to be fifty-five in order to see things that way.”

“Perhaps. It’s more difficult when one is young. It was a long time before I could accept my wife’s death. She was not old, not even thirty. We had just built this house and were very happy together.”

“What did she die of?”

U Ba thought for a long time. “We do not allow ourselves that question because we would so seldom get an answer. You see the poverty we live in. Death is part of everyday life for us. I suspect that people in my country die younger than in yours. Last week a neighbor’s eight-year-old son came down with a high fever overnight. Two days later he was dead. We lack medications to treat even the simplest of diseases. The question why, the search for a cause of death, is too great a luxury under such circumstances. My wife died in the night. I woke up in the morning and found her dead next to me. That’s all I know.”

“I’m sorry.”

Neither of us spoke for a long time. I was considering whether I had ever lost anyone I knew well besides my father. My mother’s parents were still alive. A girlfriend’s brother had drowned in the Atlantic last year. We had sometimes gone with him to Sag Harbor and Southampton on the weekend. I liked him, but we weren’t especially close. I hadn’t attended his funeral. It conflicted with an appointment in Washington. My tennis partner’s mother had recently died of cancer. I had taken piano lessons with
her as a child. She had suffered a long time, and I had put off my promised visit to the hospital until it was too late. Apparently death was not ubiquitous for me. There was the world of the sick and dying and the world of the hale. The healthy and hale did not want to know anything about the sick and dying. As if they had nothing to do with one another. As if one false step on thin ice, one forgotten candle, were not enough to pluck you from the one world and land you in the other. An X-ray with a white nodule in the breast.

U Ba took the plates into the kitchen. He blew several times vigorously into the fire, added a log, and put on some water.

“No tea for me, thanks,” I called, and stood up, turning toward the door. “Will you come with me? ”

“Of course,” said U Ba through the wooden wall. “Where to?”

W
e slackened our pace. I was out of breath, but it wasn’t the hill. The incline was gentle enough. We were on the way to the last stop on my quest. I had stood in front of the house where my father died. I had eaten in the garden where he spent his childhood and youth. Now I wanted to know where his journey ended.

“There is no grave and no memorial stone. The wind scattered his ashes in all directions,” U Ba had warned me.
I was afraid of the sight of the cemetery. As if I would be admitting that my own journey also had an end.

The scantily paved street gradually gave way to sand, then turned into a rough, muddy track. Soon I could make out the first graves hidden among bushes and dried grass. Concrete slabs, grayish brown, many of them ornate and furnished with Burmese inscriptions, though others lay unadorned and uninscribed in the dust, like rubble from a long-abandoned construction site. Grass was growing out of the cracks in some of the stones. Others were overgrown with briars. There were no fresh flowers to be seen. None of the graves had been tended.