The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (5 page)

EVEN THOUGH I
could hardly move from weariness and exhaustion, I lay awake for a long time and then slept poorly. The questions gave me no rest. Several times during the night I woke with a start, sat up in my bed, and looked at the little travel alarm next to me. 2:30. 3:10. 3:40.

Come morning, I didn’t feel any better. I was wide awake from one moment to the next. I had a headache and my heart was pounding as hard as if someone were pressing on my chest. I knew that feeling from New York, from the eve of important conferences or negotiations.

A light breeze drifted through the open window, and the morning chill crept slowly under my covers. A fresh, exotic fragrance that I couldn’t place filled the room.

It was light now. I stood up and went to the window. The sky was dark blue, cloudless. The sun still lingered somewhere behind the mountains. On the lawn in front of
the hotel were the trees, flowers, and blossoming bushes of a fairy tale—colors wilder and fiercer than anything I had ever seen. Even the corn poppies seemed redder than red.

There was no hot water for the shower.

The walls and ceiling of the breakfast room were paneled in dark wood, nearly black. One table by the window was set for breakfast. I was the only guest in the hotel.

The waiter approached with a deep bow. I had the choice of tea or coffee and fried or scrambled eggs. He had never heard of cornflakes. There was neither sausage nor cheese.

“Fried or scrambled eggs?” he repeated.

“Scrambled,” I said. “Coffee.”

I watched him disappear through a swinging door at the other end of the large room. He stepped so lightly that I couldn’t hear his footfalls, and so it seemed to me he must be floating through the room a few inches above the floor.

I was alone. The silence made me uncomfortable. I felt that the empty tables and chairs had eyes that were focused on me, that tracked my every move and breath. I was not accustomed to this kind of quiet. How long could it take to make coffee? To scramble eggs? Why were there no voices or sounds from the kitchen? The place oppressed me. I found it increasingly eerie and wondered if it was possible to turn up the silence in the same way one could turn up the volume. As if in response to my question, the stillness intensified with each passing moment until it hurt my ears and became unbearable. I cleared my throat and tapped my plate with my knife just so I might hear something.

I stood, walked to the door that led into the garden, opened it, and stepped out. It was windy. Never before had the rustling of a tree, the buzzing of a bee, the chirping of a grasshopper sounded so soothing.

When breakfast finally arrived, the coffee was lukewarm, the scrambled eggs burnt. The waiter stood in the corner smiling and nodding while I ate the burnt eggs, drank the lukewarm coffee, and nodded and smiled back. I ordered a second cup of coffee and flipped through my travel guide. Kalaw warranted barely a page.

Three pagodas and the market were highlighted as points of interest. There was apparently a Burmese, a
Chinese, and a Nepalese restaurant, a movie theater, and several teahouses. An Englishman had designed my Tudor-style hotel. Even in colonial times it had been the leading establishment in the area. There were, in addition, a number of small hotels and guesthouses “to satisfy the most modest needs.”

After breakfast I went into the garden and sat on a wooden bench under a pine tree. No trace of the morning’s chill remained. With the sun had come the heat. A heavy, sweet fragrance floated in the air.

Where to begin my search? My sole point of reference was the address on the thin blue envelope:

That was nearly forty years ago.

I desperately needed a vehicle and a local who knew his way around. What else?

In my notebook I made a list:

That was how I always got ready for conferences and negotiations with clients—making lists, systematic research. This was familiar and reassuring.

The hotel recommended a driver who could double as a tour guide. He was on the road at the moment with two Danish tourists but would be available in the coming days. He was supposed to arrive at the hotel around eight that evening. It made sense to wait for him, even though it meant putting off the search until the next day. Besides, it couldn’t hurt to ask U Ba about the address, even if he was a fraud. He had spent his whole life in Kalaw, by the looks of it.

It was just past noon, and I decided to go for a run. After the long trip my body was dying for some exercise. True, it was warm, but the dry mountain air and the wind made the heat bearable. I was in good shape and would run several miles through Central Park even on the hottest and muggiest summer evenings.

The physical exertion did me good. It freed me. I stopped caring about the stares. I didn’t need to avoid them because I was too busy concentrating on my legs. I felt as if I could run away from everything strange and sinister, as if I could
watch and observe, without myself being watched. I ran down into the village, along the main road, past a mosque and a pagoda, circling the market in a wide arc, overtaking oxcarts and horse-drawn carriages and several young monks. Only now that I was running did I notice how slowly and unhurriedly the local people dawdled along, for all they were light-footed. Now I was ready to take them on. I could set my own pace. I didn’t need to conform to their tempo.

After a shower I lay down and rested on the bed. I felt better. On the way to the teahouse, though, the weariness hit my legs. I felt every step. I was nervous and excited, wondering what lay in store. I’m not one of those people who likes surprises. What was U Ba going to tell me, and how much of it could I believe? I was planning to ask him detailed questions. If he got tangled up in contradictions I would be out of there in a flash.

U
Ba was already there. He stood up, bowed, and took my hands. His skin was soft, his palms pleasantly warm. He ordered two glasses of tea and a couple of pastries. After a moment he closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, and started again on his tale.

DECEMBER IN KALAW
is a cold month. The sky is blue and cloudless. The sun wanders from one side of the horizon to the other, but no longer climbs high enough to generate any real warmth. The air is clear and fresh, and only the most sensitive people can still detect any trace of the heavy, sweet scent of the tropical rainy season, when the clouds hang low over the village and the valley, and the water falls unchecked from the skies as if to slake a parched world’s thirst. The rainy season is hot and steamy. The market reeks of rotting meat, while heavy black flies settle on the entrails and skulls of sheep and cattle. The earth itself seems to perspire. Worms and insects crawl out of its pores. Innocent rills turn to rushing torrents that devour careless piglets, lambs, or children, only to disgorge them, lifeless, in the valley below.

But December promises the people of Kalaw a respite from all this. December promises cold nights and mercifully cool days. December, thought Mya Mya, is a hypocrite.

She was sitting on a wooden stool in front of her house, looking out over the fields and the valley to the hilltops in the distance. The air was so clear that she felt she was looking through a spyglass to the ends of the earth. She did not trust the weather. Although she could not remember ever in her life having seen a cloud in a December sky, she would not rule out the possibility of a sudden downpour. Or of a typhoon, even if not a single one in living memory had found its way from the Bay of Bengal into the mountains around Kalaw. It was not impossible. As long as there were typhoons anywhere, one might well devastate Mya Mya’s native soil. Or the earth might quake. Even, or perhaps especially, on a day like today, when nothing foreshadowed catastrophe. Complacency was treacherous, confidence a luxury that Mya Mya could not afford. That much she knew at the bottom of her heart. For her there would be neither peace nor rest. Not in this world. Not in her life.

She had learned her lesson seventeen years ago on that scorching hot day in August, playing down by the river, she and her twin brother, when he slipped on the slick stones. When he lost his balance and flailed his arms about, helpless, like a fly under an inverted glass. When he fell into the waters that swept him away. On his journey. The everlasting one. She had stood on the bank, unable to help. She had
watched his face emerge from the waters once again, one last time.

A priest would have called it God’s will, a test of faith that the Lord, in his infinite wisdom, had set for the family. The Lord moves in mysterious ways.

The Buddhist monks made sense of the tragedy by referring to the boy’s previous lives. He must have done something dreadful in one of these lives for which his present death was the consequence.

The day after the accident, the local astrologer offered his own explanation: The children had gone north to play, and they ought not to have done that, not with their birth date, not on that Saturday in August. It was no wonder they got into trouble. If only he, the astrologer, had been consulted earlier, he might have warned them. Life was that simple, that complicated.

Some part of her had died with her brother, but there had been no funeral ceremony for it. Her family hadn’t even noticed it was gone. Her parents were farmers busy with the harvest, with sowing, and with four other children. It was difficult enough just putting rice and a few vegetables on the table every evening.

Mya Mya, the half-dead, was alone. In the years that followed she worked hard to bring order into a world off-kilter. Every afternoon she went to the water to sit in the place where she had seen her brother for the last time, to wait for him to resurface. The river took his body as plunder and never returned it. At night before sleep she would tell him
about her day, knowing he could hear her. She slept on his side of their shared straw mat, under his blanket, and years later she still had the scent of him in her nose.

She refused to help her mother with the washing down at the river. Indeed, she avoided water altogether and bathed only in the company of her parents. As if she could drown in a bucket. She wore certain clothes on certain days, refused until she was fifteen to speak on Saturdays, and always fasted on Sundays. She wove herself an intricate web of rituals and dwelt entirely therein.

Rituals offered security. Since her brother’s death, the family was no longer consulting the astrologer just once a year. They saw him almost weekly. They crouched beside him. They hung on his every word. They followed his instructions, desperate to be protected from any of the world’s harm. Even more than her parents, Mya Mya took the astrologer’s words to heart. Having herself been born on a Thursday, she had to watch out especially for Saturdays, a day on which misfortune loomed, particularly in April, August, and December. In order never to take any chances, she refused to leave the house on a Saturday, until once, in April of all months, when a blanket next to the cooking pit in the kitchen caught fire. The flames were ravenous. In a few minutes they had not only devoured the wooden shack but also robbed Mya Mya of the last shred of confidence she had that any place in the world could be safe for her.