The Jewel Trader Of Pegu (23 page)
We set out early the next morning for the village of Win’s cousins.
We backtracked for a day before heading north again. The road branched in three directions. The driver of the first cart asked Win which way we were to go. I think Win had been polishing the answer, hoping for the question. “The Buddha says to take the middle way,” said Win. Even your father, new to the Buddha’s teachings, couldn’t help smiling.
The road Win knew all along to take ran between the forest on one side and a stream on the other. The road curved left to cross the river an hour or so into the morning. Timbers from a burned bridge lay in a jumble in the shallow water. It was not a broad stream, but I got out of the cart, afraid of another jolting ride across a stream’s rocky bottom. I pulled up my sarong with one hand, and held your father’s hand with the other. We entered the stream hand in hand. The cool water barely came up to my knees.
Nearing the far shore, your father slipped and stumbled, but he caught himself on the shallow bottom with his free hand, before he could fall all the way in the water. He laughed at his clumsiness.
I never let go of his hand.
By midday, the sun had dried his damp clothes. By dusk, his shirt was damp again from hours of walking under the sun in the clear sky. Your father was quieter than usual that evening. We lay side by side under the stars. He brushed his hand across a tuft of grass that poked up between a narrow space where the edges of our mats didn’t meet. He raised his hand and pointed with his finger at the stars. “Every living thing, every blade of grass, has a guardian star that watches over it and whispers, ‘Grow.’ ” He placed his hand on my belly. Before I could speak, he had fallen asleep. I could feel his hand warm through my sarong.
The next morning, even after a bowl of rice, he didn’t look well.
His face was pale, and his cheeks were cool to my touch. He started the morning walking behind the cart to keep Uncle Win company.
Your father was a tall man, and walked with long strides when he was in a hurry. Now his steps were short and slow. He said he was fine, just a bit tired, and the walking would get his blood flowing.
But his body told a story different from his words. I played the pregnant wife, and it didn’t take much convincing for him to keep me company in the cart. He ate little during the day, complaining that his stomach bubbled and churned. At night I made him eat a bowl of plain rice, telling him that when you came, you would need a strong father.
I was awakened late that night by his body next to mine shaking and burning with fever. His forehead was hot as a hearthstone. I tore a strip of cloth from an old sarong, dipped it in water, and held the cool cloth against his forehead. Your father kept saying that the fever would soon pass. The heat of his fevered body quickly turned the cloth dry. I applied more wet rags to his forehead and cheeks all through the night. When he slept, I dozed off. When he awoke fevered, I awoke, as if our bodies were one.
In the morning, his body still burned, and he lay exhausted from the night’s battle. Uncle Win and his servants tended him while Auntie Myint San and I went into the forest in search of a remedy for his fever. I looked with Min-Tun’s eyes as best I could remember, and we returned with three handfuls of roots, leaves, and pieces of rough bark. Over the fire, we brewed a special tea.
I let it cool a bit and raised your father’s head and made him sip as much as he could through his parched lips. He was weak and spoke little and then only in a whisper and most times in the special language he used to talk to his god.
Uncle Win wouldn’t let us travel the next day or the day after.
Your poor father grew weaker. I offered rice and prayers to the Buddha that I’d brought with us. I offered rice and wild bananas found in the forest to spirits we might have unknowingly offended on our journey. I prayed for him and for you and for all those he held dear in his distant city.
His fever didn’t break. Throughout the fourth day your father fell in and out of sleep. I dipped my fingers into the warm tea and wet his lips. At dusk, exhausted, I dozed off. I woke under the first evening stars to the sounds of your father gulping for air, like a drowning man.
Oh, how I wish I could delay with words the course of fate.
I crouched by his side, leaned over, my cheek next to his and my hand on his heart. He grew calm, and in a voice soft as the evening wind through the palms, he spoke to his god. Your father’s gentle eyes looked into mine. “Thank you, Mya,” he said. His eyes wandered beyond me, into the darkening evening sky. He seemed to be searching for one star among the many. He raised his hand and his fingers weakly brushed against my belly. “Grow,” he whispered.
I spoke his name three times. My dear Abraham didn’t answer.
We did what must be done. We wrapped his body in clean cotton and lay it in a cart. We set out to find a village pagoda. We met a young boy on the road who said in a half hour we would come to a path that would lead to a village near the river. Uncle Win said that your father had come by water and should leave by water.
We found the path, but it was too narrow for the cart, so Win and the servants carried your father. We made our way single file to the bank of the river. We gathered up branches and dried palms and made a bed for your father at the river’s edge. We all chanted prayers over your father’s body. They were our prayers, not his, but I am sure his god understood our hearts.
Before Uncle Win and his servants lifted your father onto the pyre, I thought of you. I unwrapped the cotton that covered your father’s neck and shoulders. I took off the chain from around his neck and slipped it over my head. I bent down and kissed your father’s lips one last time. When his body was put on the pyre, I placed on his chest the two books that began and ended his day.
Rubbing two pieces of bamboo against each other, one of the servants started a fire and lit a small torch of twigs. I tried to light the pyre, but the branches wouldn’t catch. I think they had gotten damp from the splashing water. Win told me to be patient: not all wood, he said, takes flame in a sudden burst.
We waited in silence. I could hear the sound of the birds and insects in the forest. The twigs crackled, and the cotton caught fire. White smoke billowed from the pyre, and the wind blew the smoke toward the bank. The pyre hugged the river’s edge in the still water for several minutes. On the far bank, two egrets sat high atop an overhanging branch, their heads bowed in mourning. Win and I gave your father a gentle push to send him on his way. The others moved away from the smoke that swirled over the bank.
I walked along the bank, following the blazing body as it drifted downstream.
I put my hand over my belly, and told you then as I tell you now that someday you will meet your father reborn in the body of another good man, and both of you will know each other. I prayed then as I do now that you do not think ill of your mother, poor worldling that she is. I am unenlightened—I love this man, I cling to him. My love is a fetter that I cannot sever. The path of suffering awaits me.
I watched your father’s flaming, impermanent body float toward a slight bend in the river. Billowing clouds of white smoke rose from the water, and my dear Abraham was gone.
p…. the wretched inhabitants being slain, the former seats of great and powerful lords became the abodes of tigers and other wild beasts, without any more trace being left at all, but the horrid cinders, and a greater silence on earth than human thought can imagine.
—
A Brief Account of the Kingdom of Pegu,
1605
He kept his cousin’s letters in the drawer of a small chest next to his bed. They were bound with the same black ribbon and in the same worn leather bag in which they had been delivered.
On Rosh Hashanah and Abraham’s birthday, Joseph sat by the window and read these letters one after the other, along with the letters that had been sent earlier in his journey. He slowly unfolded and folded the letters, careful not to tear or crumble the yellowed paper. Some of the letters, impersonal in their rich description of strange peoples and exotic places, he had given to his uncle, who in the early days reread them with great pleasure. Now when an aunt or cousin would reminisce about Abraham at a holiday dinner, his uncle’s eyes would mist, and he would turn the talk to other things or smother their memories under a cloak of silence.
Joseph’s wife had lived in Ferrara before their marriage and had never met Abraham. Wanting to know her husband better, she was curious to learn about his cousin, as close to him as a brother.
She asked Joseph to read the letters to her and tell her of their lives together and his adventures in distant lands. But soon she grew bored of thrice-told tales. With the birth of her son, she had more important matters to attend to than spending her time listening to stories woven by a lonely fabulist.
His uncle had done well with the jewels that Abraham sent. He hadn’t wanted to check the goods, stone for stone against Abraham’s list, trusting the good faith of the man who had saved his nephew’s life and who had honored his word by enduring much to deliver them. But this stern fellow would not leave the house until his uncle had counted and examined every stone, down to the smallest spinel.
His uncle knew right away the profit that could be made from the jewels and generously rewarded this Israelite, whom he thanked God for being true to his blood. The fellow took the pouch, heavy with gold coins, and put it in his coat pocket without even looking inside.
He had dinner with the family and left for Lisbon the next day.
The treasure from Pegu was soon the talk of goldsmiths along the Rialto. Joseph’s uncle had more suitors than a rich widow, and the jewels soon adorned the necks, wrists, and fingers of the rich and the hilts and scabbards of the powerful. All but one—the pigeon-blood ruby.
Joseph saw the ruby once and only once. His uncle took it from a simple silver box and placed the stone on a piece of black felt.
The ruby pulsed with life, its red glow bathing crimson the walls of the small room. Word of the magnificent stone traveled from one workshop to the other, gaining carats and becoming more brilliant with each telling. Those who had never seen it spoke with assured awe of its beauty. But his uncle refused to sell it. Agents from all over Europe left Venice empty-handed. Bishops of the church, princes, and pashas all were rebuffed, their dreams of the mythic stone disappointed. “I will sell it when my nephew returns,” his uncle said. “It was his eye that saw its value.” His uncle was certain Abraham would come to his senses. He could not imagine that he would not return to his family and the life he had led. Some nights, when everyone in the house was asleep, Joseph’s uncle would take the silver box from its hiding place. He would sit at his desk in the flickering candlelight, holding the ruby in the palm of his hand. Its beauty comforted him.
Abraham would return. The old man waited.
Among the many sources I consulted to try to inhabit the worlds of Mya and Abraham, several were especially helpful: Anthony Reid’s
Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450–1680;
Robert Bonfil’s
Jewish Life in Renaissance Italy
; Mark R. Cohen, editor and translator,
The Autobiography of a Seventeenth-Century Venetian Rabbi: Leon Modena’s Life of Judah;
and Melford E. Spiro’s
Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradi-tion and Its Burmese Vicissitudes.
All of this research would have come to nothing without the help of others: Cathy Song’s early encouragement and advice, Mike Levine’s unsparingly constructive reading of an early version of the manuscript, and Rabbi Barry Kenter’s thoughts on Renaissance Jewish beliefs and practices. I am grateful to Michael Radulescu for his early and continuing faith in the book.
I am forever indebted to my agent Marly Rusoff. She believed in the book; she was my ally and advocate and her comments have made it better. Stephen Dunn has written that he would “be happy in this world / to be quietly significant / like a good editor.” I am happy to have in Jennifer Brehl an editor whose advice, comments, and support were beyond good. Last, I want to thank my wife, Mee-Seen Loong, and my daughter, Lixian, for their patience and encouragement—they are the jewels of my life.
Jeffrey Hantover has written on social issues, art, and culture for publications the United States, Europe, and Asia. He and his wife make their home in New York City.