A Well-tempered Heart (20 page)

It was light when she awoke again, and the birds had fallen silent. She rose. Ko Gyi was still asleep. Beside the fire she found rice and a lukewarm curry.

There was no sign of Thar Thar. Alarmed, she ran into the yard and looked into the chicken coop. Three chickens ogled her as she stuck her head through the door.

All at once her son’s voice rang out from the neighbor’s yard. Nu Nu shoved her way through the hedge and saw him sitting in the shadow of a massive fig tree. Beside him, as tall as a man, stood a pile of dried bamboo leaves and grasses. In front of him a woven mat on which he was working.

“What are you doing there?” she asked in surprise.

“I’m helping U Zhaw,” he said softly. As if it made him uncomfortable.

“Your son is the most gifted weaver I’ve ever seen,” called the neighbor’s wife as she came out of the house. “And the most productive,” she added with a look at the mother that said as much as: hard to believe, given his mother. “He can make half a roof in less than three days.”

Nu Nu watched her son. Only now did she notice how nimbly his fingers moved, how deftly they intertwined the leaves and the tufts of grass. She saw the neighbor’s new roof and another already finished half of a roof leaning against a tree.

“Your house looks nice,” she said suspiciously, and gestured to Thar Thar’s work. “Who is that for?”

“We’ll sell that one.”

“Sell? To whom?”

“Whoever needs it.”

“For how much?”

“Two hundred kyat.”

“How much does my son get?”

“Twenty. He’s working off the money we’ve lent you.”

“Twenty kyat?” Nu Nu found it difficult to conceal her outrage. She tried to catch Thar Thar’s eye, but he kept his gaze lowered.

“How much longer?” she wanted to know.

The woman did some reckoning. “If he keeps up this pace, it won’t be more than four weeks.”

THAT EVENING SHE
noticed her son’s callused hands. The nails were lacerated, the fingertips reddened and bloody in places. They crouched with Ko Gyi by the fire. Nu Nu had a lot of questions, but Thar Thar was loath to answer. How long had he been working for the neighbors? When exactly had the money that Maung Sein had saved as a lumberjack run out? Did they have other debts? Instead of answering he just poked around in the embers with a stick.

Nu Nu wondered how they would get by in the future. Even if all three started to weave roofs and walls, the paltry pay would not amount to much. Their few savings were spent. They had nothing to sell besides the last three chickens and Maung Sein’s rusty tools. Their field lay fallow. None of them had sufficient experience as a farmer. Any relatives that might have helped them lived too far away. They could not count on the support of the village. The family’s fate was her bad karma, earned through her numerous misdeeds, and now there was nothing to do for it. Helping them out of pity or sympathy was, in the eyes of others, entirely inappropriate. Nu Nu knew that. She would have behaved no differently.

“We have to cultivate our field,” said Thar Thar suddenly, as if he had been reading her mind.

Nu Nu nodded. “But how?”

“The same way everyone else does,” he replied. “How else?”

“It’s not so easy. Trust me.”

“I know. But I always watched how Papa did it.”

“That was a long time ago.”

“I still remember a bit.”

“That won’t be enough.”

“We’ve got to try,” interjected Ko Gyi.

Thar Thar agreed with his brother. “The field is big enough. If we do it right, it can feed us.”

Nu Nu looked from one to the other. Two children with sober faces who already knew much too much about life. Did they have any idea what they were saying? What challenges awaited them? Until now they had barely been able to manage sharing a meal. What business did they have in a neglected field?

THE PARCEL LOOKED
worse than Nu Nu had feared. It was overgrown with weeds, a carpet that in sunlight shimmered in myriad shades of green. The intervening rainy seasons had abolished any trace of the irrigation system that Maung Sein had so painstakingly laid out. The sun burned in the sky. The shelter her husband built had collapsed. Nu Nu stood motionless, as if paralyzed, surveying
the landscape from atop an embankment. How would she ever be able to make this piece of earth productive again? They had four weeks tops before it would be time to sow. Four weeks. It would take a dozen hands or more even to have a chance. How would she feed her children if they did not manage it? Gathering firewood and selling it? Weaving bamboo baskets? While she was busy wondering if it would be better to turn back and maybe rent the land for a small sum, her sons were setting to work. They knotted their longyis up and started ripping the weeds out of the earth and turning the soil with their bare hands. Within a short time Ko Gyi’s fingers were bloody from the unaccustomed work.

That evening a great pile of weeds stood by the side of the road. And yet their work had made little visible impact on the field. To Nu Nu it seemed that they had bailed a bucket of water out of a lake. There was no sense in what they were doing. No sense at all. She had to think of something else.

The next morning Thar Thar shook her shoulder gently. He had already gotten everything ready to go. Packed provisions, brewed tea, fetched water, cleaned the tools, a job they had been too weary to do the previous evening. Nu Nu hesitated. Why prolong their agony? They didn’t stand a chance. But for lack of any better idea, she followed her children to the field.

By midday her sons’ hands were so swollen that they grimaced at every touch. Still they would not stop. The two of them would pause only when she compelled them to. They returned to their hut with agonizing headaches.

By the third day Nu Nu’s arms and legs hurt so badly that she could hardly move. Every muscle in her body ached. Ko Gyi, too, was noticeably slower than he had been at first.

Walking at dawn to their field after a week, they could spy the pile of weeds from a long way off, so much had it grown. Nu Nu gazed across the land, and for the first time she could detect a significant change: one corner of the field gleamed dark black in the rising sun.

After two weeks they made some provisional repairs to the shelter and decided to sleep there for the next few days in order not to lose any time on the long walk back and forth. Nu Nu still doubted whether they would manage it, but her sons’ optimism and zeal had left their marks on her. Whenever she watched Ko Gyi and Thar Thar working hand in hand in the field she had the growing feeling that anything was possible. They had only to keep their courage up.

And she discovered tokens whose significance she could not ignore. The thinnest and weakest of their three hens had hatched a chick on the very day they had started to work. It was so small, Nu Nu was certain it would not survive its first day. Yet it grew and throve.

The banana plants had sprouted an exceptional number of shoots for this time of year.

The incident with the snake was especially suggestive. It lay right in their path one morning as they made their way to the field. That was already remarkable for these shy animals. It let Thar Thar approach to within a few yards without taking flight. That was more remarkable still. It
raised its head, staring at Nu Nu and her sons, and rather than disappearing into the brush, it turned around and wound its way through the grass as if showing them the way. They followed the animal. Just before they got to the field it turned around again, paused, and then disappeared into the tall grass.

Nor did the omens disappoint. After four weeks there was nothing left of the green carpet. They stood together in the field, arms black to their elbows, longyis stained with grime and sweat. They looked around in silence, as if themselves unable to believe it. The air was redolent of fresh, humid, fertile soil. Nu Nu knelt down and dug into it with both hands. She handed a clod to Thar Thar. He smelled it, smiled, and crumbled it slowly between his fingers. It almost seemed to her that he was caressing the earth.

What had the midwife said that time? A child’s soul knows all. Whether it forgives she did not say.

But there was no time to lose. They had borrowed money and bought cauliflower, potato, and soybean seeds that needed to get into the ground as soon as possible. When they returned the next day rats and birds had stolen half the seed. They spent the night at the field again, driving off the vermin, working as long as the sun allowed. Planting seed beside seed, seedling beside seedling. Plowing furrows. To mollify the spirits of the field they built a little altar, where they made daily offerings of a banana and a small mound of tea.

Nature and the spirits smiled upon them. The rains came on schedule that year and in moderate quantities. The other
farmers could not remember the last time they had brought in such a rich harvest. Nu Nu even borrowed a water buffalo and cart to bring the vegetables from the field to the village. Ko Gyi sat proudly on the back of the beast, directing it with a switch as if he had been doing so all his life.

When she saw him with all those vegetables Nu Nu recalled the words of her late husband. Time had borne them out. He had told her, and she had not wanted to believe it: We have the power to change ourselves. We are not condemned to remain who we are. No one can help us do this but ourselves.

Fate had asked the three of them a question. The cultivated field and the abundant harvest were their answer.

The copious crops helped them through the dry season. During the hot months, when there was nothing to do in the field, they sat in their yard weaving roofs, walls, baskets, and bags. The money allowed them to restore their own roof and to replace a few rotten beams.

The second year, too, there was no shortage of food. What nature denied them by way of rain they made up for through hard work and skill.

The third year they were confident enough to plant rice, and Nu Nu discovered that Thar Thar had inherited not only his father’s powerful build, but also his great uncle’s agrarian talents. While the neighbors lamented the poor harvest, their field was more productive than ever.

The thing that did not change was his need for solitude. As before, there were days when he withdrew from them.
He would work alone in another part of the field, speaking not a word, ignoring mother and brother. Or he sat on a bank and played with his slingshot. She had never seen a better aim. He shot mangoes from trees, put pinpoint holes in leaves, drove birds from the field without injuring a single one.

These moods would disappear as quickly as they came, and after a few hours he would be available to them again as if nothing had happened. Nu Nu found it a strange mixture, her son’s temperament. He could be taciturn, composed, and caring like Maung Sein or volatile and melancholy, as she herself had once been.

In the fourth year, too, they increased their yield, and Nu Nu began to wonder if she had been mistaken. Maybe we did not come into the world with a limited allotment of luck that would eventually run dry. Perhaps there was some power that could renew our supply at opportune moments.

All the same, not a day passed on which she did not miss her husband, especially at night as she lay awake and the children slept. She would hear his breath, feel it on her skin. She would turn to lay her arm across his chest. The emptiness she felt at these moments made every part of her body ache.

The hole his death had torn in her life had not closed and never would, though it seemed that it might with time become overgrown.

Nu Nu did not wish to be an ingrate. They had been spared from illness in recent years. They were not hungry. On the contrary, they had enough money at the end
of every year to make improvements on the house. A new roof. New walls. A concrete latrine in a remote corner of the yard. Next year they were even planning to buy a water buffalo. Or a pig. She was proud of her sons, both of whom were industrious, modest, and obedient.

This is how happiness must look, she thought, when it does not have her husband’s mouth. When it does not smell like him. This is how happiness must look when it stands on its own two legs.

THERE ARE MOMENTS,
Nu Nu realized, that a person remembers as long as she lives. They burn themselves into your soul, leaving unseen scars on an unseen skin. So that when you touch them later, your body shudders with a pain that seeps into all of your pores. Even years later. Decades. Everything is present again: the stench of fear. The taste of it. The sound.

The moment Nu Nu heard the engines was such an occasion.

A late afternoon. A light drizzle came drifting across the hills and would soon reach the village. The air was warm and damp. It had rained often over the past few days; the muddy road oozed up between her bare toes with every step. Her feet and knees ached from the long day in the field. She and her sons and a few other women and their children were on their way back to the village.

Like the roar of an approaching predator the engines echoed through the valley where machines were otherwise absent.