A Well-tempered Heart (29 page)

“What would I be worrying about?” I countered, forcing a smile.

“I am not deathly ill. Trust me.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I sense it.”

“Intuition?”

“Intuition!”

He saw me laughing. “What a beautiful woman you are.”

“Oh, U Ba, stop,” I replied wearily. “You’re not taking me seriously. I’m worried about you.”

“Why?”

I wasn’t sure whether he meant it seriously, or whether his innocence was feigned. “Because it might be that you are very ill.”

My brother finished off his soup before answering. “It’s true. That is a possibility. For you, too.”

“I don’t have a nodule on my lung.”

“You woke up this morning with a headache. It might be a tumor in your head that you are as yet unaware of.”

“It’s a tension headache. I know what they feel like.”

“Or it might be …”

“I could get hit by a car on our way to the train station,” I interrupted him. “That’s not what it’s about.”

“What then?”

“It’s about the fact that you have severe symptoms. That you might … that we have to do something …”

“We are waiting. The doctor explained it to you. There’s nothing else we can do at the moment.”

“I don’t believe it. I can’t imagine it.”

“If there were something we could do, would it frighten you less?”

“I don’t know. At least I wouldn’t feel so helpless. Waiting to see what happens: I can’t bear it. There’s always something that can be done.”

“Who am I to contradict you?” he answered with an impish grin. His ironic undertone was suffused with tenderness.

The worlds we came from were too different for us to reach agreement on this point.

“Have you heard anything from the voice?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No. She’s had nothing to say, not even about Maung Tun’s story.”

“Curious. I would have thought she would have spoken up by the time we learned that her son was still alive, if not before then. Perhaps it is enough for her to know that he survived it.”

“Either that or she’s just as anxious as you and me to see whether we’ll find him.”

IN HSIPAW WE
sat down in a teahouse near the train station. My brother ordered Burmese tea and struck up a conversation with the waiter. Patrons at nearby tables quickly joined in, and a few minutes later he turned back to me, very pleased.

“They all know him. He lives with a dozen children and youths in an old monastery that had long stood empty. It’s just a few kilometers from here in the direction of Namshaw. We have to follow the main road and turn right at a white pagoda. The waiter will take us there on his moped.”

Half an hour later the three of us were squeezing ourselves onto a Honda Dream II. I sat at the back with the luggage wedged between me and U Ba. The waiter opened the throttle. The first few yards were a wild zigzag all over the street until he finally got control of the moped. By the white pagoda just outside the town we turned onto a dirt road. In my excitement I was shifting so restlessly back and
forth on the seat that the driver had difficulty keeping the moped on the track. Were we about to meet Thar Thar? What might he look like? Would he be willing at all to talk with us? Had he really survived that hell in the jungle? What marks had that time left on him? Nu Nu’s decision? His father’s early death? What kind of person would we find? What had become of Ko Bo Bo?

We climbed a hill and saw the monastery in the distance, a large, dark wooden structure, standing on pillars, with a tin roof and several turrets on whose gables bells and flags were hung. It was situated among trees and protected, it seemed, by a large bamboo grove that towered several yards above the turrets.

The young waiter stopped and pointed to it, as if it were our last chance to turn back. U Ba coughed briefly, gestured to him, and we rolled down the hill.

A few minutes later we pulled into the sandy courtyard to be greeted by two barking dogs and dozens of hens cackling vociferously and running about excitedly. We dismounted. The driver turned around, and we thanked him, but my brother nipped in the bud my attempt to pay him for his trouble.

“He is happy that he could do us a favor.”

We looked around full of curiosity. The courtyard was teeming with flowerbeds and hedges blooming in stunningly beautiful colors. I saw rosebushes, yellow and red hibiscus, oleander, violet bougainvillea, gladiolus, and amaryllis.

The monastery itself was not in very good condition. Many of the pilings looked rotted, there were boards
missing from the walls in several places, brown rust was eating through the corrugated tin roof, and one wing of the building was partially collapsed. A broad staircase with crooked railings led up to the entrance. At the back of the courtyard reddish brown monks’ robes hung to dry on a bamboo framework. U Ba called out, but there was no answer. The chickens and dogs had settled down. We heard nothing but the gentle tinkling of the bells on the roofs.

A boy and a girl appeared at the top of the stairs. They wore the red robes of novices and looked at us inquiringly. A moment later a monk appeared behind them. He put his hands on their shoulders, whispering something to them. They laughed. He descended the staircase slowly and approached us with deliberate steps that had, at the same time, a gentle spring in them. I felt my heart pounding. Could that be Thar Thar? Of whom I knew so much, and then again almost nothing? He was even taller and more muscular than I had imagined. His hair was closely cropped, his teeth as white as the jasmine blossoms of the day before, a shapely head, full lips, powerful arms reaching out of his monk’s robe. I immediately recognized the birthmark under the chin. The scar on the upper arm. The missing finger on the right hand. He welcomed U Ba with a friendly “
Nay kaung gya tha lah
,” then turned to me. He offered me his hand and looked me straight in the eye, speaking English with an accent similar to that of an Italian friend of mine: “Welcome to my monastery, Signora. How are you?”

THAR THAR LAUGHED.
Apparently I was not the first visitor to be caught off guard by his greeting. He had a wonderful laugh. A laugh he had no right to, given his past.

The next thing I noticed was his eyes. I had never met anyone with eyes like that. Unusually large, dark brown, focused on me in a calm way, a way that I found pleasant. More than pleasant. In them dwelt such power and intensity that I got goose bumps. He was someone in whose company I would feel at ease without being able to explain why.

My brother would have called it intuition.

Our hands touched. For one moment we stood silent, face-to-face. I had no idea what to say.

“Do you not speak English?” he asked, perplexed.

“No, I do … of course.”

“What brings you to us?” Thar Thar looked first at U Ba, then at me.

My brother looked at me with a question in his eyes. I hesitated.

“We have come …” U Ba began.

“Out of curiosity,” I interrupted.

Astonishment in my brother’s eyes.

I did not want to tell Thar Thar the truth. Not yet. Maybe because I feared it would mean the end of our journey. Or because I didn’t know how he would react. Would he think we were crazy? See me as some kind of medium through which he could quarrel with his mother? Turn away from us, send us packing so that he would not have to be reminded of his past? I really didn’t know what was holding me back.

“Did you hear about us in the city?” asked Thar Thar, apparently oblivious to the confusion between my brother and myself.

“Yes, exactly,” I quickly confirmed. “That’s why we’re here.”

“Just as I thought. We have …”

He was interrupted by my brother’s coughing fit. U Ba turned away. Thar Thar regarded him with concern and waited until he had recovered, then carried on: “We have curious tourists visiting us from time to time. They hear of us in Hsipaw. But you are Italian, aren’t you?”

I shook my head, surprised. “No, I’m American.”

“Che peccato.”

I was stumped. “I’m sorry …”

“How unfortunate.”

For a moment I doubted it was Thar Thar standing there before us. Why should he, who as far as I knew had never gone to school, why should he know two foreign languages? “Do you speak Italian?”

“
Un poco.
A little.”

“Where … where did you pick that up?”

He was tickled by my growing confusion.

“From an Italian priest. He taught me English, a bit of Italian, and much, much more.”

“Where? Here in Burma?”

“Yes. But that is a very long and regrettably also rather uninteresting story that I would not wish to bore you with. I’m sure that you did not come here to hear my life story. I imagine you’ll want to see the monastery and meet a few of the children, no?”

U Ba nodded, embarrassed.

“Follow me, then.”

Thar Thar led the way and we followed. My brother seemed to be just as irritated as I was.

I kept expecting to hear from the voice. Here we were, face-to-face with her son. Why silence now? Shame? A guilty conscience? What does a mother say to the unloved child she sent to his death, but who beat the odds and survived? Maybe it was enough for her just to see him alive. To see that he was doing well. Would she find her rest here? Without another word? Without asking for forgiveness?

THE GROUNDS WERE
more expansive than they initially appeared to be. Behind the monastery was a well with a walled creek, a shed with a stack of chopped wood in front of it, and a soccer field with two cockeyed homemade goals. Beside the field was the bamboo grove. In the distance I could see a couple of people working in a field. A gentle wind brushed the bamboo stalks against one another. Their creaking groans mingled with the bright tinkling of the bells into a singular song.

In the other corner of the monastery stood a grayish-white stupa with a gilded steeple. Large chunks of plaster had broken off. Two novices sat in front of it among dried leaves and branches, weaving baskets. Thar Thar called to them. They put down their work, rose with difficulty, and came over to us. One of them walked with slow, tentative steps, head bowed, as if looking for something. The other walked bent beside him, a large hump in his back. Both were barefoot, their feet and legs riddled with scars and scratches. When they stood before us, they put their hands together and bowed politely. On top of his other difficulties, the younger one had a severe cleft lip, and when the older one lifted his head a shiver ran down my spine. His eyes were milky white. He was blind.

U Ba took my hand.

“This is Ko Aung and Ko Lwin,” said Thar Thar. “No one can weave baskets like they can. I used to have clever hands of my own, but I was a klutz by comparison.”

They whispered something in chorus that sounded remotely like “How are you?”

“I instruct them in school subjects every other day,” Thar Thar explained with a hint of pride in his voice. “Including a bit of English.”

I answered that I was doing well and that I was happy to be here. Inscrutable smiles crossed their faces; they bowed and went back to their work.

Thar Thar explained that the other novices were in the field and invited us to join him for a cup of tea in the monastery.

We climbed a rickety staircase and entered the main building. I stood frozen in amazement. It was a spacious hall. Across from the entrance a dozen diverse Buddhas stood on a podium. Some of them glinted golden in the light of the electric bulbs; others were made of a dark, almost black stone, and still others of a light-colored stone. There was a reclining Buddha, head propped up on one arm, an erect and also a sitting Buddha, one hand raised in admonition. Another statue had him plump and clownish, like a sumo wrestler laughing himself silly. In vases were red gladioli, jasmine, hibiscus boughs; rose blossoms floated in a bowl. Above the altar hung paper lanterns and a yellow valance with colorful stones stitched onto it. Offerings lay on plates—rice, tiny plastic packets,
candies, batteries, pastries. Smoke from incense drifted across it all, mingling its perfume with the fragrance of the fresh flowers. On the wall behind it, two crucifixes caught my attention. On one column there was a gilded poster of the Virgin Mary, and on another column a similar poster of the Magi. I wanted to ask my brother about it, but he was crouched on the wooden floor, coughing and spent.