The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  “Maybe you need to be fifty-five in order to see things that way.”

  “Perhaps. It’s more difficult when one is young. It was a long time before I could accept my wife’s death. She was not old, not even thirty. We had just built this house and were very happy together.”

  “What did she die of?”

  U Ba thought for a long time. “We do not allow ourselves that question because we would so seldom get an answer. You see the poverty we live in. Death is part of everyday life for us. I suspect that people in my country die younger than in yours. Last week a neighbor’s eight-year-old son came down with a high fever overnight. Two days later he was dead. We lack medications to treat even the simplest of diseases. The question why, the search for a cause of death, is too great a luxury under such circumstances. My wife died in the night. I woke up in the morning and found her dead next to me. That’s all I know.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Neither of us spoke for a long time. I was considering whether I had ever lost anyone I knew well besides my father. My mother’s parents were still alive. A girlfriend’s brother had drowned in the Atlantic last year. We had sometimes gone with him to Sag Harbor and Southampton on the weekend. I liked him, but we weren’t especially close. I hadn’t attended his funeral. It conflicted with an appointment in Washington. My tennis partner’s mother had recently died of cancer. I had taken piano lessons with her as a child. She had suffered a long time, and I had put off my promised visit to the hospital until it was too late. Apparently death was not ubiquitous for me. There was the world of the sick and dying and the world of the hale. The healthy and hale did not want to know anything about the sick and dying. As if they had nothing to do with one another. As if one false step on thin ice, one forgotten candle, were not enough to pluck you from the one world and land you in the other. An X-ray with a white nodule in the breast.

  U Ba took the plates into the kitchen. He blew several times vigorously into the fire, added a log, and put on some water.

  “No tea for me, thanks,” I called, and stood up, turning toward the door. “Will you come with me? ”

  “Of course,” said U Ba through the wooden wall. “Where to?”

  We slackened our pace. I was out of breath, but it wasn’t the hill. The incline was gentle enough. We were on the way to the last stop on my quest. I had stood in front of the house where my father died. I had eaten in the garden where he spent his childhood and youth. Now I wanted to know where his journey ended.

  “There is no grave and no memorial stone. The wind scattered his ashes in all directions,” U Ba had warned me. I was afraid of the sight of the cemetery. As if I would be admitting that my own journey also had an end.

  The scantily paved street gradually gave way to sand, then turned into a rough, muddy track. Soon I could make out the first graves hidden among bushes and dried grass. Concrete slabs, grayish brown, many of them ornate and furnished with Burmese inscriptions, though others lay unadorned and uninscribed in the dust, like rubble from a long-abandoned construction site. Grass was growing out of the cracks in some of the stones. Others were overgrown with briars. There were no fresh flowers to be seen. None of the graves had been tended.

  We climbed to the top of the hill and sat down. A desolate place. The only signs of human activity were the footpaths that ran like ant trails through the mountains. It was quiet. Not even the wind was rustling.

  I thought of our walks. Of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Staten Island Ferry, of our house and the scent of warm cinnamon rolls in the morning.

  I could not have been farther from Manhattan. Yet I didn’t miss it. Instead, I felt an almost eerie peace. I thought of those evenings when he would tell me fairy tales. The opera productions in Central Park. Folding chairs and a much-too-heavy picnic basket. My father would not tolerate plastic cutlery or paper cups. He wore a black suit as if he were at the Met. A warm summer night. Candlelight. I fell asleep on his lap every time. I thought of his soft voice and his laugh, his glance and the powerful hands that would toss me into the air and catch me.

  I knew why he had stayed with us and why he had returned to Mi Mi after fifty years. It was more than a sense of duty that had kept him in New York. I was certain he had loved his family, my mother, my brother, and me, each in our own way. And he loved Mi Mi. He remained faithful to both loves, and I was grateful to him for that. “There is one more detail that might interest you,” said U Ba.

  I looked at him inquiringly.

  “Mi Mi’s pyre stood there,” he pointed to a round circle a few steps away, “and your father’s over there, about twenty yards farther down. The fires were ignited simultaneously. The wood was dry, and the flames devoured the branches. The air was very calm that day. The columns of smoke rose straight into the sky.”

  He had told me as much already, and I wondered where this was leading. “And? ”

  “Then it became quiet,” he said, and smiled.

  “Quiet?”

  “Completely. In spite of all the people. No one said a word. Even the fires ceased to crackle, burning on in silence.”

  There was my father again, sitting on the edge of my bed. A light pink room. Bees striped black and yellow hanging from the ceiling. “And the animals began to sing?” I asked.

  U Ba nodded. “Several mourners reported later that they had heard the animals singing.”

  “And suddenly—no one knew why—the two columns of smoke began to move?”

  “I can personally attest to it.”

  “Although there was no wind, they drew toward each other until …?”

  “Not all truths are explicable, Julia,” he said. “And not all explicable things are true.”

  I looked at the places where the piles of wood and the bodies had been and then into the sky. It was blue. Blue and cloudless.

  Chapter 12

  I AWOKE IN darkness. I lay in my hotel bed. A dream had roused me. I was twelve or thirteen years old. It was the middle of the night at our place in New York. I’d heard sounds from my father’s bedroom. My brother’s and mother’s voices. My father was gasping, a loud, terrifying, inhuman sound that filled the whole house. In my white nightshirt I got up and walked across the hall. The wood was cold on my bare feet. There was a light in my father’s room. My mother knelt beside his bed. She was weeping. “No,” she stammered. “For God’s sake, no. No, no, no.”

  My brother shook my father. “Wake up, Dad, wake up.” He was kneeling over him and massaging his chest, giving him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. My father was swinging his arms. His eyes were popping out of his head. His hair was soaked with sweat. He clenched his fingers. He struggled. He did not want to go.

  Again he groaned out loud. His arms moved more slowly. They twitched and went slack. Moments later they hung motionless out of the bed.

  The dream had woken me, and I appreciated how merciful reality had been.

  I closed my eyes and tried to imagine my father’s final hours with Mi Mi. I couldn’t do it. I had to admit that this was a part of him I did not know. Yet the more I thought about it the better I understood that I had no reason to mourn. I felt a closeness to my father that I could neither explain nor describe. It was the intimacy of a child, natural and unconditional. His death was no calamity, neither for me nor for him. He had not resisted it. He had taken his leave. He had died at the time and place of his choosing. In the company of his choosing. That it was not me sitting by his side was of no consequence. It in no way diminished his love for me. I fell back asleep a few minutes later.

  It was late morning by the time I woke again. It was hot in my room, and the cold shower felt refreshing.

  The waiter was dozing in a corner of the dining room. He’d probably been there since seven. Scrambled or fried. Tea or coffee.

  I heard the woman from the front desk shuffling across the dining hall. She came straight toward me and, with a perfunctory curtsy, laid a brown envelope on my table. U Ba had brought it early that morning, she sa
id. It was too thick to be a letter. I opened it. It contained five old, hand-colored photographs that reminded me of postcards from the twenties. The dates were marked in pencil on the back. The first was from 1949. A young woman sitting in lotus position in front of a light wall. She was wearing a red jacket and longyi, her black hair up in a bun with a yellow blossom in it. A ghost of a smile. It had to be Mi Mi. U Ba had not been exaggerating. She commanded a grace and beauty that impressed me deeply, and there was a calm in her features that moved me in an odd way. Her gaze was quite intense, as if she were looking at me and only me. Beside her sat an eight-, maybe nine-year-old boy in a white shirt. The son of a brother? He was gazing with earnest mien into the camera.

  The pictures, taken at ten-year intervals, always featured Mi Mi in the same pose. In the second one she seemed hardly to have aged. Behind her stood a young man, his hands on her shoulders. Both were smiling in the same open and friendly way, but with a clear trace of melancholy.

  In the next picture the years had begun to tell on her, though it did not detract at all from her radiance. On the contrary, I found the older Mi Mi even more beautiful. I didn’t know a single woman back home who had not resorted to cosmetics or surgery in a vain attempt to stave off—or at least mask—any signs of aging. Mi Mi looked as if she was growing old with dignity.

  Again there was a man in the picture.

  The last picture had been taken in 1989, two years before my father’s return. Mi Mi had lost weight. She looked weary and sickly. Beside her sat U Ba. I recognized him only at second glance. He appeared younger than now. I spread the photos out in front of me and reexamined each one closely.

  My heart was first to sense the resemblance. All at once it pounded so fiercely that it hurt. It took my brain a few seconds to formulate the preposterous thought and put it into words. My eyes flew from one picture to the next. The man in the picture from 1969 was likewise U Ba. The one ten years earlier presumably as well, and the resemblance to the child beside Mi Mi was undeniable. I calculated. I pictured U Ba in front of me. His strong nose. His laugh. His soft voice. The way he scratched his head. I knew who he reminded me of. Why had he not said anything?

  I wanted to see U Ba at once. He was not at home. A neighbor said he had gone into town. It was already late afternoon. I walked up and down the main street inquiring after him. No one had seen him.

  He had already been to the teahouse. He generally stopped in twice a day, the waiter explained, recognizing me. Today, though, he would certainly not be coming back. Today was the fifteenth. Tin Win and Mi Mi died on the fifteenth, you know, and for more than four years, on the fifteenth of every month, the people of Kalaw held an evening memorial for the lovers. U Ba would be on his way to Mi Mi’s house by now. I needed only to cross the tracks and follow the crowd.

  There was no missing it. As soon as I got to the train station I could see the procession winding up the hill. Women balanced bowls and baskets of bananas, mangoes, and papayas on their heads. Men carried candles, incense, and flowers. The red, blue, and green of their longyis, the fresh white of their shirts and jackets shone in the evening sun. Halfway there I caught the sound of children’s voices. Accompanied by bells tinkling in the wind, they were singing the same melody that had rolled down from the monastery in the mountains a few days earlier.

  I would not have recognized Mi Mi’s house. It was decorated with colorful pennants. Below the eaves hung a chain of little bells. The yard and the porch teemed with people who greeted me with smiles. I made my way carefully through the throng. Beside the porch the children sat singing, and many of the adults were humming along quietly. Again and again people climbed the steps and disappeared into the house while others came back into the yard. Where was U Ba?

  I pushed my way forward, moving with the current up onto the porch.

  The house consisted of a single large room, unfurnished save for a bed. The shutters were closed. Dozens of candles, spread out across the floor, bathed the room in a warm reddish-yellow glow. On a shelf near the ceiling stood a large Buddha. Flowers, plates of fruit, tea leaves, cheroots, and rice were piled on the bed, which was entirely covered in gold leaf—the posts, the foot- and headboards, even the slats that had once supported the mattress. It sparkled in the flickering candlelight. Vases stuck full of incense and additional basins and bowls with offerings stood on the floor. It smelled of incense and cheroots. The women exchanged fresh fruit for old, took wilted flowers from the bed and put fresh arrangements in their place.

  They bowed before the Buddha, then stepped up to the bed, closed their eyes, raised their hands, and brushed their fingers across the wood. As if they might thus awaken the virus. The virus lurking in all of us.

  “Death,” U Ba had said, “is not the end of life, but a stage thereof.” He would not have had to explain himself to a single person there.

  I hung back, motionless, in one corner. Darkness had settled over the yard. Through a crack in the wall I could see that the whole place was now illuminated by candles.

  Suddenly U Ba was standing next to me. He smiled as if nothing had happened. I wanted to say something, but he put his finger to his lips, signaling me to keep silent.

  Author’s Acknowledgments

  I wish to thank my friends in Burma, especially Winston and Tommy, for their generous and tireless assistance with research in Kalaw and Rangoon.

  I am especially grateful to my wife, Anna, without whose advice, patience, and love this book would never have come to be.

  JAN-PHILIPP SENDKER, born in Hamburg in 1960, was the American correspondent for Stern from 1990 to 1995, and its Asian correspondent from 1995 to 1999. In 2000 he published Cracks in the Great Wall, a nonfiction book about China. He has since written three novels; The Art of Hearing Heartbeats marks his English-language debut. He lives in Berlin with his family.