The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (7 page)

“Venerable master,” Mya Mya heard her husband say in a quiet voice after a long pause, “we have come to ask your advice.”

The old man nodded.

“Our son was born on Saturday three weeks ago, and we wish to know if calamity threatens him.”

The old one took up chalk and a little slate and asked for the exact date and hour of the birth.

“December third, eleven-forty a.m.,” said Khin Maung.

The astrologer wrote the numbers in little boxes and began to calculate. He added further numbers and signs, struck out others, and drew several full and half circles on various lines, as if he were writing the life in musical notation.

After several minutes he set the slate aside, looked up, and gazed at Mya Mya and Khin Maung. Any trace of a smile had left his face.

“The child will bring sorrow on his parents,” he said. “Great sorrow.”

Mya Mya felt herself sinking into a morass. Something was dragging her down, and there was no one to help her, nothing to hold on to. Not a hand. Not a branch. She heard the old man’s voice and her husband’s, but she no longer followed what was being said. Their voices sounded muffled
and very distant—as if in another room, in some other life. Great sorrow. Great sorrow.

“What kind of sorrow?” asked Khin Maung.

“Various kinds, especially medical,” said the old one.

He took up the slate and resumed his scribbling and reckoning.

“In his head,” he said at last.

“Where in his head?” asked Khin Maung, word by word, enunciating as if constructing each letter out of individual parts. In retrospect he would be astonished by his own utterly uncharacteristic bout of persistent curiosity.

The old one looked at the slate, which revealed to him all the secrets of the universe. It was the book of life and death, the book of love. He could have told the parents what else he saw, the exceptional capacities this child would develop, the magic and power latent in this individual, and the gift of love. But he knew that Mya Mya was not listening and that Khin Maung would not understand. So he said: “In his eyes.”

M
ya Mya had not registered this part of the conversation, and afterward, too, on the way home, while her husband fell into a stream of talk the like of which she had never heard from him, she stumbled on, uncomprehending. The words buzzed through her head like flies. Great sorrow.

In the ensuing months Khin Maung tried several times to explain to his wife that the astrologer had indeed spoken of sorrow, even of great sorrow, but primarily medical sorrow, and that there had been no talk of a curse or of a harbinger of calamity. She would not listen. He saw it in her eyes. He saw it in the way she treated their son, taking hold of him without touching him, looking at him without seeing him.

Tin Win’s life had not spanned twenty-one days when, at least from his mother’s perspective, its whole course had been decided. Lived. Forfeited. Now it was just a question of her getting through the rest of it gracefully.

It would prove too much.

NOW THAT THE
stars had spoken and her child’s fate was determined, Mya Mya slept more soundly. She knew what to expect. She felt right at home with strokes of fate and ill fortune. Happiness and joy made her nervous, strange and unfamiliar as they were. She needn’t plague herself with false hopes. There were no illusions gnawing at her soul, no dreams making her fancy run wild. That calmed her.

So now, in the days and weeks after the visit to the astrologer, it was Khin Maung who lay awake beside his sleeping wife and child while the most hideous thoughts wrought their mischief in his mind. Perhaps the old man had made a mistake? Was there really such a thing as a fate we could not escape? If we were not the masters of our lives, then who was? He had no wish to listen to the stars.

“Mya Mya. Mya Mya,” he said, sitting up in bed that first night. His wife lay sleeping next to him.

“Mya Mya.” It sounded like an incantation.

She opened her eyes.

There was a full moon, a cloudless night, and in the sickly light that fell through the window from outside he saw the outline of her face, the movements of her eyes, the slender nose. He thought how beautiful she was and that it had never occurred to him before. He had married her because his parents had selected her for him. Love will come later, they had assured him, and he had believed them—for one because he always did whatever they told him, and then also because he had only very vague notions about love. He considered it a gift, a boon bestowed on some and not on others. No one was entitled to it.

“Mya Mya, we have to, we ought to, we must not …” There was so much he wanted to say to her.

“I know, Khin Maung,” she said, sitting up. “I know.”

She crept to him, took his head in her arms, and pressed it to her bosom. A rare gesture for Mya Mya, for whom tenderness was a luxury as profligate as hot water in the morning or a smile when parting. It was something for dreamers or for people with an excess of time, power, and emotions. She did not belong to either category.

Mya Mya thought she knew what was going on inside her husband, and she pitied him. By his heartbeat, by the convulsions of his body, by the way he wrapped his arms around her, she sensed that he would need time. He still believed they could protect themselves, that there might still be a chance to alter what could no longer be altered.

Khin Maung lay in her arms and talked. Not loudly, not to her. She couldn’t understand a word he said. He was talking to himself, swiftly and without pause. His whispering sounded demanding, defiant, almost threatening, then pleading, beseeching, doubtful, a stream of talk that would not run dry. It was as if he were sitting at someone’s deathbed and only his voice could keep the patient alive.

He wanted to fight for his son. Every life held promise, he told himself, and in his son’s case, he, Khin Maung, would explore every possibility to realize that promise. If it must happen without his wife’s help, then so be it.

That’s what he wanted to tell her, first thing in the morning, even before breakfast. Then he fell asleep.

But the opportunity for a discussion never materialized, either before breakfast or in the evening after the day’s work.

The following night he recalled every detail of their visit to the astrologer. The house appeared before his eyes, blurry at first, then clearer and clearer, like a landscape when the fog lifts. He saw the room, the candles, the sticks of incense, the slate that revealed the mysteries of life. The great book of love. He heard the old man’s pronouncements, let them amble through his mind, slowly, word by word. There had been no talk of a curse. He would speak with his wife. Early tomorrow morning. The opportunity never presented itself.

S
o passed the nights. And the days. If Khin Maung had been a different person, he would not have waited for an opportunity; he would have looked for one and seized it. But that was not in his nature. He would have had to transcend limitations, his own limitations, and he was no hero. He could allow himself only the thoughts, and it was not long before his strength was spent. The doubts returned, and with his resistance broken, they fell on him like rats and vultures on carrion. The stars had it right. On a Saturday in December. Great sorrow in various respects. It could hardly have been plainer.

On the heels of the chicken incident, a great-aunt passed away—eight weeks to the day after the birth of the boy. She had been, admittedly, quite old and sick and had not left her hut in years, and for a brief moment Khin Maung had wanted to point these things out to his wife. A brief moment—then he also saw the sign and could not contradict his wife.

And so he withdrew from the life of his son, consoling himself with the thought that the boy would, after all, be only the first of many children that he, Khin Maung, would have with Mya Mya, and that not all of them would come into the world on a Saturday in December, April, or August. He leased out his field and took work as a gardener and caddy at the golf course of the English. That work paid better than farming and also allowed him to avoid his own house even in the dry season, when farmers had little work to do in the field. Golf was a year-round pursuit.

Mya Mya buried herself in her housekeeping. The family lived in a small hut of wood and mud behind a grand two-story villa belonging to a distant uncle of Khin Maung. It stood on a hilltop above the village, and like most of the houses of the colonial lords in Kalaw, it was built in a Tudor style. The town was especially popular during the dry season. When temperatures in the capital, Rangoon, and in Mandalay topped a hundred degrees, Kalaw, with an elevation of more than four thousand feet, offered relief from the heat of the flats and the delta. There were English nationals who stayed in the country after their retirement and who relocated to one of the mountain resorts such as Kalaw. An English officer had built himself this villa as a place to retire, but then tragically had not returned from a tiger hunt undertaken just two weeks after his release from His Majesty’s service.

The man’s widow had sold the house to Khin Maung’s uncle, who had won respect and a handsome fortune as a rice baron in Rangoon. He was one of the few who had managed to establish himself in a market dominated by an Indian minority, and he was one of the richest Burmese in the country. The villa had no practical value to him. In the six years he had owned it he had never yet seen it. Instead it was a token of his wealth, a status symbol the mere mention of which was calculated to impress his business associates in the capital. It was Mya Mya and Khin Maung’s responsibility to look after the property and to maintain it as if the master of the house might arrive at any moment. Since the
birth of her son, Mya Mya had dedicated all her energy to this task. She polished the wooden floors every day, as if the point were to transform them into mirrors. She dusted the shelves in the morning, and in the evening she dusted them again, though not a visible speck of dust had settled on them in the intervening twelve hours. She washed the windows every week and trimmed the lawn with a pair of scissors, which was more thorough than using the lawn mower. She kept the effusive bougainvilleas in check and tended the flower beds passionately.

M
ya Mya saw the two policemen coming up the hill. She was standing by the kitchen scrubbing carrots. It was one of those cold, clear December days, and Mya Mya was in a hurry. She had taken too much time polishing the floors on the second story and was worried now that she would no longer finish the kitchen that afternoon, and if the master should arrive tomorrow, he would not find his estate in immaculate condition, and then all the work of the previous years would have been for nothing because he would think that Mya Mya had not been maintaining his property. One day of disarray can count for more than a thousand days of order, she thought, looking into the valley.

Coming up the hill, the officers in their crisp blue uniforms had not followed the road used by oxcarts and the occasional car. Instead they had taken the narrow footpath that wound in tight serpentines first through the pine
wood and then among the fields up to the hilltop. Mya Mya saw the men approaching, saw their faces, and felt her panic mounting. It was Tin Win’s sixth birthday, and she had always been firmly convinced that especially on the anniversaries of his birth she had to be ready for just about any kind of catastrophe.

Within the space of two breaths dread had taken hold of her, of her soul, of her mind, of her body. Her stomach and intestines contracted as if wrung by giant hands. Tighter and tighter. She gasped for breath. She heard herself whimpering. She heard herself pleading. She heard herself begging. Let it not be true.

The men opened the gate, stepped into the yard, and closed the gate behind them. Slowly they walked over to Mya Mya. She sensed the reluctance in their movements. Each step was like a kick to her body. The younger of the two kept his head lowered. The older one looked her in the eye. She knew him from brief encounters in the village. Their eyes met, and for the duration of a heartbeat Mya Mya was able to read his gaze. That sufficed. She knew everything, and the dread, the monster that had been devouring her, disappeared as quickly as it had come. She knew that a terrible calamity had befallen her, that no one would ever be able to unmake it, that nothing in her life would ever be as it had been, that this was happening for the third time now, and that she did not have the strength to bear it.