The Art of Hearing Heartbeats (8 page)

The policemen stood in front of her, the younger one still not daring to lift his head.

“Your husband’s had an accident,” the older one said.

“I know,” said Mya Mya.

“He’s dead.”

Mya Mya said nothing. She did not sit down. She did not cry. She did not break out in lamentation. She said nothing.

She heard the men saying something about an accident, about a golf ball apparently driven off course by the wind. Right in the temple. Dead on the spot. The Englishman will take over the funeral expenses. A small compensation. No acknowledgment of any guilt. A gesture of sympathy. Nothing more. Mya Mya nodded.

When the officers had left she turned around and looked for her son. He sat alone behind the house, playing. Next to him lay a great pile of pinecones. He was trying to throw them into a hole he had dug a few yards away. Most of them far overshot their target.

Mya Mya wanted to call to him, to tell him of his father’s death. But why? Presumably he already knew about it. He was, after all, the one who had brought on the calamity, and Mya Mya noticed how for the first time she was admitting that she blamed him for it. It was not merely the inauspicious arrangement of the stars; it was Tin Win, that inconspicuous boy with his black hair, those enigmatic eyes so inscrutable that she never knew whether he was really looking at her. She could read nothing in them. It was he who had brought on the misfortune, he who had wrought the havoc. He created it the way other children built caves or played hide-and-seek.

Mya Mya wanted somehow to leave it all behind. She wanted never to see that child again.

Over the course of the next thirty-six hours she operated the way a person does who has only one goal in mind, a goal that drives her, a goal she serves above all else. She played the mourning widow, received neighbors and friends, organized the burial for the next day, stood before her husband’s open grave, and watched the wooden casket vanish into the earth.

The next morning she packed her few belongings—a couple of blouses and longyis, a second pair of sandals, a comb, a hair clip—in an old bag for golf balls her husband had once brought home from the club. Tin Win stood mute beside his mother, watching.

“I have to go away for a few days,” she said without looking up.

Her son said nothing.

She left the house. Her son ran after her. She turned around, and he stood still.

“You can’t come,” she said.

“When are you coming back?” he asked.

“Soon,” she said.

Mya Mya turned away and walked to the garden gate. She heard his light steps behind her. She turned around.

“Didn’t you hear what I told you?” she said loudly and in a sharp tone.

Her son nodded.

“You stay here.” She pointed to the sawn-off stump of a pine tree. “You can sit there and wait for me.”

Tin Win ran to the old tree stump and clambered onto it. From there he had a good view of the path leading to their house. Mya Mya set off again, opening and closing the garden gate without turning around. Walking quickly, she took the road into the village below.

Tin Win watched her go. He saw her walk through the fields and into the wood. This was a good spot. From here he would be able to see his mother coming even from a long way off.

TIN WIN WAITED
.

He waited the rest of that day and night. He squatted on the flat tree stump, feeling neither hunger nor thirst, nor even the cold that settled over the mountains and valleys in the evening. It passed over him without touching him, like a bird over a clearing.

He waited the next day. He watched it get dark and then watched as the fence and the bushes and the fields reemerged out of darkness. He gazed into the distance, where the trees stood on the edge of perception. That’s where his mother would be coming from, and with her red jacket he would recognize her even from afar, and he would scramble down the tree stump, climb over the fence, and run to her. He would cry out loudly with joy, and she would kneel down and wrap him in her arms and press him to her. Very firmly.

That’s how he often pictured the scene to himself—when playing alone and dreaming—even though Mother and Father never actually bent down to pick him up, not even when he stood in front of them, hugging their legs. He sensed their reluctance even to touch him. It was his fault; there was no doubt about that. It was a punishment, a just one, only he didn’t know what for, and he hoped that whatever the crime, the period of atonement would soon be over. This hope was more fervent than ever now that they had laid his cold, stiff father in a casket of wood and buried him deep in a hole. His longing for his mother and her love compelled him to tough it out on that tree stump, to wait patiently for the red dot on the horizon.

On the third day a neighbor brought him water and a bowl of rice with vegetables and asked whether he wouldn’t prefer to wait at her house. He shook his head vehemently. As if going there might cause him to miss his mother. He didn’t touch the food. He wanted to save it for her, to share with her when she returned hungry from the long journey.

On the fourth day he sipped at the water.

On the fifth day Su Kyi came, the neighbor’s sister, bringing a pot of tea and more rice and bananas. Preoccupied with his mother, he ate none of that, either. It couldn’t be much longer. Soon, she had said.

On the sixth day he could no longer make out the individual trees. The forest was blurred, as if he had water in his eyes. It looked like a cloth, waving in the wind, mottled with tiny red dots. These came nearer to him and got
larger, but they weren’t jackets; they were red balls hurtling violently in his direction. They whistled past him left and right and over his head, so close that he felt their draft. Still others flew straight at him, only to lose their momentum in the last few yards and crash into the ground just inches in front of him.

On the seventh day he squatted stiff and motionless at his post. When Su Kyi saw him she thought he had died. He was cold and white as the hoarfrost that covered the grass in front of the house on many an especially cold January day. His face was sunken, his body like an empty shell, a lifeless cocoon. Only when she got closer could she see that he was breathing, that under his shirt his lean chest was fluttering, like a fish from the market gasping for breath in her kitchen.

Tin Win neither heard nor saw the woman. The world around him was veiled in a milky white fog into which he was slowly but surely vanishing. His heart was pounding. There was still life enough in him, but his hope had faded, and that made him resemble a corpse.

He felt two hands touching him, lifting him up, hugging him and carrying him away.

It was Su Kyi looking after him. A vigorous older woman with a deep voice and a laugh over which the trials of life had passed without a trace. Her only child had died at birth. Her husband had died later the following year of malaria. After his death she had been forced to sell the hut they had finished building only a short time earlier. Since then she
had been living with relatives, more tolerated than welcome. To her family she seemed a crotchety, somewhat unnerving old woman with eccentric views on life and death. In contrast to everyone else, she read no deeper meaning into the misfortunes fate had dealt her. Nor did she believe that unfavorable arrangements of the stars had occasioned her loved ones’ deaths. Instead these losses merely showed that fortune was capricious, a fact one must accept if one was going to love life. And love life she did. She did not have much use for predestination. Happiness might find a home in every individual. She never dared say so out loud, but everyone knew of her convictions, and they made her into Tin Win’s first ally.

Over the years she had frequently observed her neighbors’ son and been astonished at his fair skin, like the light brown of fallen pine needles or eucalyptus leaves. He was so much fairer than his parents. She had watched the child grow into a tall, almost gangly boy, shy like one of the owls she heard calling so often but never spied, a boy she never saw in the company of other children.

She had met him once in the woods. She was on her way into town, and he was sitting under a pine tree watching a small green caterpillar crawl across his hand.

“Tin Win, what are you doing here in the wood?” she asked.

“I’m playing,” he said without looking up.

“Why all alone?”

“I’m not alone.”

“Where are your friends?”

“All around. Don’t you see them?”

Su Kyi looked around. She didn’t see anyone.

“No,” she said.

“The beetles and the caterpillars and the butterflies are my friends. And the trees. They are my best friends.”

“The trees?” she asked, surprised.

“They never run away. They’re always there, and they tell such beautiful stories. Don’t you have any friends?”

“Of course I do,” she said, and added after a pause: “My sister, for example.”

“No, real friends.”

“No trees or animals, if that’s what you mean.”

He raised his head, and the sight of him frightened her. Had she never really looked at him before, or was it the light in the wood that so altered his face? It seemed hewn of stone, so well proportioned and at the same time so terrifyingly lifeless. Then their eyes met, and he looked at her, much too sternly and seriously for a child, and she was frightened a second time, because she sensed that he knew far too much about life for a boy his age. Seconds later a smile—wistful and tender like none she had ever seen—swept over that stony face. It was that smile that had stuck with her. So deep was the impression it made that it had taken her days to get over it. She saw it at night when she closed her eyes and in the morning when she woke.

“Is it true that caterpillars turn into butterflies?” he asked suddenly, just as she was about to go.

“Yes, that’s right.”

“And what do we turn into?”

Su Kyi stood still and reflected.

“I don’t know.”

Neither spoke.

“Have you ever seen animals cry?” he asked.

“No,” she answered.

“And trees and flowers?”

“No.”

“I have. They cry without tears.”

“Then how do you know they’re crying?”

“Because they look sad. If you look closely, you’ll see it.”

He stood up and showed her the caterpillar on his hand. “Is she crying?” he asked.

Su Kyi considered the creature awhile.

“No,” she ultimately decided.

“Right,” he said. “But you were guessing.”

“How do you know that?”

He smiled again and said nothing, as if the answer was too obvious.

I
n the weeks following his mother’s disappearance, Su Kyi looked after Tin Win, caring for him and restoring him to good health. When the first month had passed without any word from his family in Rangoon and Mandalay, she moved in with him and promised to care for him and to keep his uncle’s house in order until his mother’s return. Tin Win did
not object. Instead, he withdrew further, so that even the vigor and optimism of a woman like Su Kyi could not reach him. His mood fluctuated from day to day, sometimes from one hour to the next. He would go for days without uttering a word, spending most of his time alone in the garden or the nearby wood. On days like that, in the evening, when they sat at the fire in the kitchen eating their portions of rice, he would keep his head down and say nothing. When Su Kyi asked him about the games he had played in the wood, he would gaze at her through transparent eyes.

Nights were an entirely different story. In his sleep he would crawl over to her and cuddle into her round, soft body. Sometimes he would put his arm around her and squeeze so hard that it woke her up.

On other days he would take her along into the garden and the wood, reporting to her whatever his friends the trees told him. He had given each one a name. Or he would come to her with a handful of beetles, snails, or the most wonderful butterflies that had landed on his hands and flew off only when he stretched his arm high into the air. Animals were not afraid of him.

In the evening, before going to sleep, he would ask Su Kyi to tell him a bedtime story. He would lie motionless until the end, then say: “Sing another one.” And Su Kyi would laugh and say: “But I’m not singing at all.”

And Tin Win would answer: “But you are. It sounds like a song. Please, another one.”

Su Kyi would tell another and another, and she would keep on talking until he had fallen asleep.

She suspected that her words only ever reached him in that way, encoded, that he lived in a world closed to her, one she must approach gingerly and respectfully. She had experienced so much sorrow of her own, so much of life, that she knew better than to press for access to his places of refuge. She had witnessed herself how individuals became prisoners of these strongholds, of their loneliness, confined therein until their dying day. She hoped that Tin Win would learn what she had learned over the years: that there are wounds time does not heal, though it can reduce them to a manageable size.