The soothing voices of the women around her. Maung Sein wiped the sweat from her face with a moist cloth. They took her son, washed him, tried to calm him with rocking and patting. In vain.
He must be hungry, she ought to nurse him, said the midwife.
Nu Nu did not want to. She was too tired. Later.
Not be resisted, the midwife laid him at her breast.
It hurt from the very first. He did not drink. He guzzled. He sucked at her furiously, voraciously, as if hoping to drain his mother utterly, looking up at her with clenched fists all the while.
“An unusual child,” the birth attendants declared unanimously, congratulating her. She could be proud. She was now the mother of two healthy sons. Such good fortune! Every woman in the village should be so lucky!
Nu Nu did not want to hear it. She did not wish to feel thankful. She wanted only to be left alone.
His bawling woke her in the night. Maung Sein was already up, having lit a candle, kneeling beside his son and watching him, full of concern. Thar Thar’s body was stiff like a dead animal’s, his mouth and eyes wide open, his lips quivering. He was belting out cries that shook his whole body, each one eerier than the last. What suffering could cause him to make such dreadful noises?
“Maybe a nightmare,” said her husband, looking at her helplessly.
Nu Nu wondered what a newborn might dream about.
“Or he’s hungry?”
She slid over to her son and tried to put him on the breast, but he turned away, screaming all the louder.
Her husband rubbed his head and belly but got no reaction. “Do you think he’s in pain?”
Nu Nu shrugged, confounded. To her ears his bellowing sounded less like suffering and more like an irate, desperate denunciation.
“Maybe he doesn’t want to be with us?” she muttered as if to herself.
“Where else would he want to be?” snapped her husband.
“I don’t know. Ko Gyi never cried like that.”
Maung Sein shook his head, daubed tiny droplets of sweat from Thar Thar’s brow, took him in his arms, and carried him around the shack. He sang. Whistled. Swayed, turned in circles.
No matter what they tried, their son remained beyond their reach. In the end he would fall silent from exhaustion. His little body would twitch a few more times, then his eyes would close. Even in his sleep he would sob deeply a few more times.
The midwife examined him the next day but could find no reason for his complaints and recommended patience. Every child is different. Some babies cry more, some less. She mustn’t forget his long journey here. Her firstborn seemed so calm to her only because the two of them had hovered for weeks between life and death.
Within three days her breasts were so inflamed that she could feed neither Thar Thar nor his brother. Ko Gyi was old enough to eat rice porridge and vegetables, but Thar Thar was nursed by a young woman from the village who had recently delivered a child of her own. Nu Nu was happy every time Maung Sein took him away and for a while quiet prevailed in the hut once again.
Thar Thar would make his impending return known even from afar.
Nu Nu felt the tension in her body.
She marveled at her husband’s patience. Between carrying, rocking, and singing he was now almost always able to soothe his son. A calm that never lasted long.
When his wailing continued undiminished, the midwife examined him a second time. Pressing his stomach, she could feel a bit of gas. With a few deft movements she was able to entice it out of him in the form of a long, loud fart. Checked his mouth, ears, and nose; no sign of an infection. He could focus on her finger and follow its movements. His reflexes were in order; arms and legs, hands and feet were as they should be. Thar Thar lay naked before her, looking with interest at the strange woman and tolerating her examination without protest.
“He is physically healthy,” she said, wrapping him back up.
“So why does he cry so much?”
The midwife shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Nu Nu thought back to the hours she had spent awake at night wishing that the life within her would cease to grow. Was it possible that he understood something of that?
Of the rice, the papayas, and the bananas she had offered, hoping for his death? Of her black tears? The desperate punches to her abdomen? Did he know of her wish to give him to some other family? Impossible. He was just a few weeks old. What an absurd idea.
All the same Nu Nu asked the midwife as casually as she could whether she thought that infants could remember things.
The woman gazed at her as if astonished by the question. “Of course,” she replied.
“Do you really think so? My parents died when I was two,” Nu Nu countered doubtfully. “I couldn’t even tell you now what they looked like.”
The midwife nodded. “That’s a different matter. Images can fade. Sounds and smells disappear from our memory. But our heart forgets nothing. A child’s soul knows everything.”
Nu Nu felt a shiver run down her spine.
“Why do you ask?”
“Just curious.” She left it at that.
But the midwife’s words stayed with her. What if she was right? If in some part of his heart the knowledge lay hidden that he had not been wanted? What might it do to him? Would it be forgotten over the years, the way she forgot mundane things? Or would it follow him his whole life long?
She asked her husband if he believed that thoughts alone could cause harm.
“Everything has consequences,” he replied.
“Even thoughts?”
“Everything.”
“Even thoughts from long ago?”
He could not understand what she was talking about.
“I can’t believe it,” she said after thinking it over awhile. “I believe thoughts simply disappear unless we act on them. Like clouds. Or water that seeps into the ground.”
Maung Sein smiled. “Just because you don’t see it anymore doesn’t mean the water is gone. Plants live off it. The bananas we eat. The rowanberries that poison us. Nothing is lost. Even thoughts have consequences.”
In the weeks and months following this conversation no one could have claimed that she did not do everything in her power to help her son. She wanted to be a good mother to him the way Maung Sein was a good father.
Nu Nu sang for him. Talked to him. If Maung Sein was working in the field, she would carry Thar Thar around with the same patience his father exercised. He would lie in her arms, but he found no peace there.
Why did he cry when she held him? Why was he so sparing with his smiles? Why did he so often kick and punch?
Even his gaze made her uncomfortable. He looked at her penetratingly. With a wrinkled brow. Much too serious for a child. Or was it mistrust she read in his dark, nearly black eyes?
A child’s soul knows everything. A heart forgets nothing.
She had bonded with Ko Gyi at first sight, but Thar Thar was still a stranger to her.
Maung Sein implored her to stop comparing the children. “Comparison is the mother of discontent.”
Nu Nu wondered whether troubled spirits were born or made. A question to which she found no satisfactory answer, regardless of how long she pondered it.
In Thar Thar’s case the birthmark under his chin might offer a clue. She had first noticed it one day after his birth, when she had not given it a second thought. Now she realized who it reminded her of: her father’s brother, a drunkard who had squandered every kyat he ever earned on rice wine. His wife and children had abandoned him, and he had disappeared from the village one night shortly thereafter, never to be seen again. Perhaps he had died recently, and maybe his spirit had been reincarnated in her son? A birthmark of that size on the same part of the body. Could that be a coincidence?
Maung Sein was incensed when she cautiously shared her thoughts with him. Said uncle, if the stories could be trusted, would have amassed so much bad karma during his lifetime that he could never have been rebor
n as their son. Crippled, perhaps. Or blind. Or the son of some other drunkard. Not as the son of two parents who loved their children and cared for them as they did. Did she really think it a punishment to be born into their family?
He had a point.
But still.
How does a mother share out her love?
If it came in the form of beads or leaves or grains of sand she could count them and allocate them evenly.
If she wanted to.
If it came in a big, warm, soft lump like a rice cake she could divide it into pieces of equal size.
Or in a viscous, fragrant extract that she could measure drop for drop into glasses and offer to her two children.
But love does not know justice. Love follows its own laws. Even a mother’s love.
Chapter 11
THAR THAR DID not make it easy for anyone. Not for his father. Not for his mother. Least of all for himself.
He remained a glum and fretful baby who regarded his surroundings with suspicion. Maung Sein alone could coax the odd chuckle out of him with his antics.
He was becoming an impatient child, for whom nothing happened quickly enough. He wanted to sit upright before his body had the strength for it, and he would burst into a rage the moment he fell over. He wanted to crawl before his muscles would carry him, and he bawled when his energy flagged after only a few feet.
He had trouble settling down, twitching while he slept as if plagued by pains and starting frequently out of his sleep during the night.
A tiny spirit. A gigantic fear. Nu Nu lay beside him. With a heavy heart. And a conscience heavier still.
As soon as he finally learned to get around on all fours he scorned being carried. It seemed to his mother that his crawling always had a singular purpose: to get away. Away from her. If she laid him down beside her it was only a matter of seconds before he was off to some other corner of the hut, most often toward the door, without ever looking back. He was deaf to Nu Nu’s cries. She would have to hurry after him, scoop him up, and haul him back, a furious, struggling child. No sooner had she set him down than he would resume his battle with her.
In contrast to his brother. Ko Gyi was happiest in close proximity to his parents. He would rather be carried than walk himself, and when he explored his environment, he did so cautiously and deliberately, never straying more than a few yards away and turning back at the first word of warning. When Nu Nu crouched beside him and rolled an orange across the floor he would waddle after it, swaying, squeaking with delight. The moment he had caught up with the fruit he would take it in both hands and carry it proudly back to show his mother. Mother and son would frequently race around the hut. Or she would hide behind a wooden beam. His joy when he found her!
Thar Thar was not interested in their games.
On one occasion—Nu Nu was preoccupied with Ko Gyi—he crawled clear across the hut to the fire. He squatted in front of it and gazed in fascination at the flickering flames and the glowing coals. Listened to the crackling. Curious, he leaned forward and reached for an ember the size of an egg. Nu Nu reeled in terror. Thar Thar closed his hand around it.
The smell of burnt skin.
He cried out briefly, dropped the ember, looked in astonishment at his fingers, at that glimmering something in front of him, then back at his hand, now bright red. Rather than wailing in pain, he turned around and looked at his mother. Outraged.
As if she were to blame.
Nu Nu rushed over to him, took him in her arms, and plunged the burned hand into water, blew on it with all her might, tried to comfort him. It hurt her even to look at the wound.
Thar Thar, on the other hand, exhibited no further reaction. No crying. No moaning. A serious injury. A silent child. A bewildered mother.
He was and remained a mystery to her. In the years that followed she was frequently disquieted by his ability not to feel pain, or not to let on that he felt it, she wasn’t quite sure which it was.
But she was also comforted.
Who was this person she had given birth to? A troubled spirit, to be sure. Not the only one in the family. But what might have brought mother and son together served instead to divide them.
Nu Nu did not have the same patience with him that her father had shown with her. Without patience a troubled spirit can never come to rest.
It is our own flaws that we are least ready to forgive in others.
As soon as Thar Thar was confident on his feet he set about investigating the world. All warnings and prohibitions notwithstanding. He crawled again and again through the thick hedge that bordered the yard and roamed about the village. After he had fallen into the well a second time—whence he was rescued only by chance—and after Maung Sein and the neighbors had vehemently berated her for her negligence, Nu Nu took a rope and tied one end around his waist and the other to one of the pilings that held up the house. As soon as Thar Thar understood that his world had been reduced to a five-yard radius, he took up a raging outcry of protest the likes of which the village had never heard before. She ignored him in the hope that he would eventually stop of his own accord.
She threatened to tie him directly to the post if he did not settle down. When he did not, she made good on her threat. She would not untie him until he calmed down.
Thar Thar was not a child to be impressed by punishments.
That evening Maung Sein heard his son’s bawling as soon as he came near the village. It was the familiar mixture of rage and desperation. At home he found a distraught Ko Gyi and two captives. One tied to a post, the other not.
He had never seen his wife so riled up.
He wanted to know what had happened. Nu Nu had no answers to his questions.
That evening she was heavyhearted as never before. She felt that her world and whatever good fortune remained in it were crumbling bit by bit. Ko Gyi retreated ever further into silence. She and Maung Sein, exhausted by the sleepless nights, fell to quarreling. The relatives who might have helped her lived two days away on foot. The neighbors had their hands full with their own fields and their own children.
A short time later Maung Sein had an epiphany and took Thar Thar with him to the fields. From that day on father and son left the hut together every morning just after sunrise and often came back only after darkness had fallen. Thar Thar would walk the first mile or so on his own. After that he wanted to be carried. Hands full with heavy tools, Maung Sein would set his son on his shoulders. The lad would cling to his father’s hair and sway in rhythm with his step. Sometimes he would hold his father’s eyes shut, and Maung Sein would pretend that he could no longer see. He would start to stagger or walk straight toward a ditch or tree, only to turn on his heel at the last moment while his son on his shoulders would squeak with delight. Now it took him an hour longer than previously to get to the field. Time that he might have spent working.
In the field he built a shelter for Thar Thar out of bamboo and palm leaves, a protection against sun and rain, and he showed him a bit of land that was his own to “farm.”
During the first few months he made animals out of clods of dirt and played with them day in and day out. Later he loved to dig holes and little caves with his bare hands, selecting the bigger stones out of the ground, dragging them to the edge, building dams and levees and creating a miniature irrigation system. He was utterly disinterested in his surroundings. Maung Sein could have worked in some other field for hours; Thar Thar would not have noticed. Maung Sein found it touching to see how engrossed his son was in his work. With what devotion he would rebuild trenches and dikes, without a word of complaint any time a rain shower had washed them away.
At lunchtime they would crouch together in the shade of the shelter, eating their rice, drinking water, and gazing without a word across the fields to the green mountains in the distance. They heard nothing but their own breath and—during the rainy season—a babbling brook. Sometimes a big black bird with a long, sharp beak would land not far from their refuge. He would strut b
ack and forth looking greedily at the grains of rice that fell next to their bowls. Thar Thar would edge his way closer to Maung Sein, who would put his arm protectively around the boy. After their meal they would rest together. With his head on his father’s chest Thar Thar would fall asleep within minutes.
At moments like these Maung Sein had to wonder why mother and son had never bonded. Were there people who simply did not belong together? Who loved each other, but who were nevertheless happier when they were apart? Certainly not a mother and her child. It would just be a matter of patience and self-composure on Nu Nu’s part.
Every evening on the way home both of them would be so tired that Maung Sein would have to carry Thar Thar all the way, pausing several times to rest. Twice it happened that they fell asleep arm in arm by the side of the road and made it home only because passing farmers woke them.
Chapter 12
PERHAPS THINGS WOULD have turned out differently if Maung Sein had stayed at home. Perhaps the intimacy and bond with his father would in the long run have given Thar Thar the peace and security he could not get from his mother.
Perhaps it might have helped his heart to forget.
But two much-too-dry rainy seasons and Maung Sein’s ineptitude as a farmer were enough to turn an already low-yielding field into so much worthless acreage. No matter how he drove himself, Nu Nu and the children were going to bed hungry with increasing regularity.
“I’ve got to find some other work,” he said one evening while the children slept and they sat by the fire.
How often Nu Nu had feared that sentence in the last few months. While secretly knowing it was true.
“What kind of work?” she asked tentatively. There was no one in the village but farmers.
“As a lumberjack.”
It was the only answer that made sense. Still, it was not the one she wanted to hear.
“Maybe one of the neighbors could use some help?” she offered without much conviction.
“They certainly could. But what would they pay me with?”
A Well-Tempered Heart Page 12
