A Well-tempered Heart (33 page)

By evening I was so tired that my eyes were falling shut already at dinner.

So passed the time. In the morning we worked in the field. In the late morning Thar Thar and I would return with one of the girls to the monastery. We spent nearly every minute there together. He helped me when I tended to my brother; we cooked and did the laundry together. When, as if by chance, we happened to touch, in the kitchen or at the well, it meant more to me than I cared to admit. I saw in his eyes that he felt the same way.

In the afternoon we taught our lessons, which now primarily consisted of my English instruction. I looked forward to it all day long, especially Moe Moe, whose contagious thirst for knowledge was gradually affecting everyone. Thar Thar always sat in the back row. His presence uplifted me.

We both tried to stay close, but still we could not find a quiet moment for conversations such as we had enjoyed during the first two days. Sometimes I even had the feeling that he was avoiding them. When I would sit on the steps after dinner, he would join me, but always with Moe Moe or Ei Ei or both in tow. Although I would have preferred to be alone with him, I was not disappointed. When the time came, I would have another chance to spend time with him. I had no doubt.

I felt better in the monastery than I had for a long time, in spite of the physical strain, in spite of having a wooden crate for a toilet, in spite of the absence of a shower. I slept
well. Had neither backaches nor headaches. At times I was filled with a lightness that I had not felt in years. Amy would probably have described me as “deeply relaxed.”

Moe Moe brought hot tea and a fresh hibiscus blossom to my bedstead every morning. Later she would tuck the blossom into my hair. Once I carelessly mentioned to Thar Thar that in New York I preferred coffee to tea. The next morning she appeared with hot water and a packet of instant coffee that, as I later learned, she had fetched from Hsipaw especially for me. Her breathless “You are very welcome” and the attendant smile, the loveliest, the saddest I had ever seen, accompanied me throughout the day.

U Ba, too, was slowly recovering. I was applying ointment twice a day, checking the mucus from his cough mornings and evenings without finding even a trace of blood. He experienced pain neither in his chest nor under his arms.

Thar Thar claimed that the coughing was not only less frequent, but now had a different quality, and that it was a good sign. I could not hear any difference.

Those first few days my brother had done little but sleep. Now he was recovering his strength, getting out of bed, and making an effort to help us. We fed the chickens together, gathered eggs, swept the house, cleaned and chopped vegetables. Only when doing laundry did he tire quickly.

I wanted to show him the fields from which I was always returning with overflowing baskets and muddy hands. We walked through the bamboo grove. He was still shuffling a bit. He would take my arm, and I would hold him fast.

We came to the end of the grove, before us a hilly landscape and the cultivated fields.

“How long have we actually been here?” he asked suddenly.

“No idea. A week? Ten days?” Normally I had a keen sense of time.

U Ba rested his head on my shoulder for a moment.

“It’s beautiful here,” he said.

“Very,” I agreed.

“Who would ever want to leave?”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at, and I didn’t react.

“How much longer are you thinking of staying?” my brother wanted to know, gazing at the field.

I had been dreading that question. I had been avoiding it for days because I didn’t have an answer to it.

“I don’t know. What do you think?”

U Ba looked askance at me. “It’s up to you.”

“Why?”

“I have no office to return to. No one is waiting for me. As far as I’m concerned we could stay another week. Or two. Or three …”

“How long we stay,” I said quietly, “depends on what we are looking for here.”

He nodded.

Another question I had no answer to. The voice had withdrawn, just as the old monk in New York had foretold. I did not expect to hear anything more from her now that we had found Thar Thar. So what was keeping me here? I
didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to harvest potatoes and ginger with Moe Moe, wash vegetables, teach English.

I wanted to learn from Thar Thar the secret of the heart tuner.

“Don’t you want to return to America at some point?”

“Of course,” I answered. “But there’s no hurry.”

I had arranged with Mulligan for an unlimited unpaid leave. Two or three weeks one way or the other did not matter. My visa was good for four weeks, but I had read online and in several travel guides that overstaying one’s visa would not cause difficulties at departure time, aside from a modest fine at the airport.

Who or what was waiting for me?

Amy. Anyone else?

“What is your intuition telling you?” my brother asked.

I gave his arm a little squeeze. “No idea. I’ve told you that mine doesn’t always work so well.” After a brief pause I bounced the question back to him: “And yours?”

“That we will leave soon,” he said gravely.

“Why?”

“Because I fear that we will otherwise bring unrest to this place.”

“What do you mean by that?” I asked, astonished. “What kind of unrest?”

“I find it difficult to put into words. That’s how it is with intuition.”

“You’re being evasive.”

“Perhaps.”

“What kind of unrest?” I insisted. “I have the feeling that everyone is happy to have us here. But maybe I’m missing something. Am I misreading their cues? Is their laughter when they see me not an expression of happiness, but of uncertainty? Discomfort? Are they afraid of me?” I made no effort to disguise my disappointment.

“No, no. You haven’t misunderstood anything. It’s only …” He paused, started again, sighed deeply. “I mean … that is to say … we’re not going to move into the monastery, are we?”

“No, of course not.”

“And our departure will only become more difficult the longer we stay.”

“You think it will make me too sad …”

“Not only you,” he interrupted me.

IN THE MIDDLE
of the night I was woken by a steady, rhythmic scratching or brushing. As if someone was sweeping the courtyard in the dark. I listened intently. My brother’s breath. Nearby sleepers. The sound receded slowly, gradually trailing off until it ceased. A short while later I heard again the dull, forceful blows of the previous nights, accompanied by groans of strain and the splitting of wood.

My watch showed 3:32. I rose and crept into the hall. Thar Thar’s sleeping mat was empty.

Outside, the moon bathed everything in a cold white light. The bamboo cast a dancing shadow on the clean-swept
courtyard. Thar Thar stood in front of the shed, swinging an ax, lighting with brutal force into the end of a log. The blade drove itself into the wood. He spread his legs, heaved it high above his shoulders, struggled with it above his head, and then let the ax and the log speed down onto a second, larger log, so that the smaller log burst into two pieces under its own weight.

I pulled a jacket around me and went outside.

It was a curious sight: a monk, barefoot, chopping wood in a reddish-brown robe that he had tied above his knees. Thar Thar was so engrossed in his work that he didn’t notice me approaching. To the left and right of him were big piles of freshly chopped logs.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m chopping wood,” he answered without turning.

“I can see that. Do you know how late it is?”

“No. Does that matter?”

“Why don’t you do it by day?”

The ax fell with such force into the next log that the ground vibrated beneath me.

I was startled by the expression on Thar Thar’s face. Sweat drenched his brow, running down his cheeks and neck. His lovely eyes were small and narrow, his full lips pressed thin. He was out of breath. In the pale light of the moon he looked older. Wearier than by day. Lonelier.

“I had a bad dream. It happens sometimes. Chopping wood helps.”

“Helps against what?”

“Against bad dreams. Evil spirits. Memories,” he said, wheezing.

“What kind of memories?”

Thar Thar paused, ax over his head, and looked at me for the first time.

“You wouldn’t want to know.”

“And what if I did?”

He hesitated, turned away, and chopped again with full force.

“And what if I did?” I repeated. Loudly and provocatively.

He ignored me.

Crash. Splinters flew through the air. Part of a log landed right at my feet. I took one step toward Thar Thar. And then another. If the wood were to split again as it just had, it would injure me. This might be the moment, I thought. Perhaps this moonlit night was the right moment to tell him what I knew. What the true purpose of my journey was.

I thought about Nu Nu.

About fists pounding a belly.

About offerings for an infant death.

I saw the blade sail through the air and pictured it falling on a chicken held in the hands of a child.

Thar Thar struck the ax lightly into the stump and turned to me.

“What do you want?” he asked, out of breath.

“To talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Bad dreams. Memories.”

“Why?”

“Because I have to tell you something.”

He wiped the sweat from his face, leaned with both hands on the haft of his ax, and looked at me in silence. With eyes on which the past had left its mark.

“I’m not a run-of-the-mill tourist.”

“I know.”

“How?” I asked, surprised. Had U Ba told him something after all?

“Intuition.”

“Do you also know why I have come?”

“No. And I’m not at all sure that I want to know.”

“Why not?”

“It’s been years since I’ve had nightmares like the ones I’ve had these past few nights.”

“And you think it has to do with me?”

“Yes.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Because something emanates from you that makes me uneasy.”

“It might not be me that’s making you uneasy,” I said.

“Then who?”

And so I began my story.

Of a voice that would give no rest. And of a young woman who suddenly and unexpectedly stood up. Because something inside her was talking back.

Of a mother whose heart was not big enough. But it was the only one she had.

Of an old woman who could not keep a grim tale to herself.

You keep one.

We’ll take the other.

When I was done I collapsed exhausted onto a tree stump. My whole body was shaking.

An eerie stillness surrounded us. The wind had died down. Even the insects had broken off their chorus. I heard Thar Thar’s heavy breathing.

“Do you think I’m crazy now?” I asked warily.

Thar Thar sat down on a stump across from me. Our knees were touching. He shook his head.

I could see tears running down his cheeks, and I took his hands. They were ice cold. I rose and put my arms around him. Pressed his head to my belly. He burrowed into my arms, into my jacket. Into me. His faint sobbing.

Should I not have told him everything?

I pictured Nu Nu, Maung Sein, Ko Gyi, and Thar Thar and thought that some families just have no luck. Or very little. And how long the shadow of misfortune can be. Families in which everyone gives as much love as they can, but still it isn’t enough. Where everyone shares as much as they are able, but still hearts go hungry. No one to blame. No malicious intentions. Where injuries occur that cannot be healed within a single lifetime.

The place where it all begins. Love. Longing for love. Fear of love.

The place we can never be rid of. Where hearts are too big or too little. Too greedy or too satisfied.

Where we are defenseless and vulnerable like nowhere else.

Because love knows no justice. Not even a mother’s love. Or a father’s.

I pictured a straw hut to myself and a building on Sixty-fourth Street on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, and I felt grief seize and shake me as if it were a hunting dog and I the long-sought quarry.

I tried with all my might to suppress my tears. I did not want to cry, but my own grief grew with every second I fought the tears.

I don’t know how long we sat there. Gradually Thar Thar’s breathing settled. I kissed him on the head. He looked up at me. With eyes on which the past had left its mark, but where again a spark shone. In spite of it all. I took his face in my hands and kissed him on the brow.

Once. Twice.

I caressed him. His mouth, his lips. I kissed his cheeks and nose, as if I could drive away my own sorrows with these kisses.

“Is my mother talking to you now?” he whispered.

“No.”

“Is she telling you to kiss me?”

“No. No. No.”

Sometimes we bond in joy. We become one in our happiness: for a few precious seconds we become one, because
one person alone simply cannot bear the intensity of the moment.

And other times we bond in grief. We become one in our pain: for a few precious seconds we become one, because one person alone simply cannot bear the intensity of the moment.

THAR THAR AND
I had holed up in the shed. I lay in his arms. An unfamiliar, but not unpleasant scent filled my nostrils. My body was still quivering. His, too.

Two hearts beating fiercely, unable to settle.

I felt hot in spite of the cool night air. He tenderly pushed my sweaty hair out of my face.

A soft smile.

“When did you last hear the voice?” he asked quietly.

“In Kalaw,” I answered, pondering. “What would you do if she were to pipe up now? Would you want to talk to her?”

Thar Thar took a long while to answer.

“No,” he said at last. “No, I wouldn’t.”

“Not now?”

“Not at all.”

“You have no questions for your mother?” I wondered.

“Not anymore.”

“After all that has happened?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“That time is past.”

“Do you hate your mother?”

“No.”

I thought about his answer and kissed the tip of his nose. “Would you at least want to know why she …?”