As soon as he honed in on it, people stopped jostling him. Those coming from behind parted around him as if sensing that pushing and shoving were of no further use. Tin Win listened hard. There it was. So tender and fragile, so steady. It would catch his ear amid all the noise in the world. From a distance he felt her skin in his hands. Her arms about his neck. He followed the beating that came to him from a remote corner of the market.
Chapter 10
MI MI SAT out of the way, beside a heap of potatoes. In her left hand she held a small round parasol to protect her from the sun. It was the dark red, nearly brown shade of monks’ robes. She was wearing her most beautiful longyi, red with a green pattern. She had finished weaving it only the previous evening. She wore her black hair in a braid. That morning she had asked her mother to paint two round yellow circles on her cheeks. All the older girls and women made themselves up this way, but Mi Mi had always put it off until now. Her mother smiled and asked no questions. Once Mi Mi was settled on her brother’s back, Yadana sent her daughter off with a kiss on the forehead. True, she did the same thing every time they parted, but this kiss had been different. Mi Mi sensed it, though she would have been hard pressed to articulate the distinction.
Now she was sitting on her handmade blanket and waiting. Indeed, she had done nothing else for the past four days. Whether crawling across the yard to gather chicken eggs or picking strawberries behind the house, whether helping her mother with the cooking, sorting potatoes, or weaving, she was waiting. For market day. For Tin Win.
She never minded the waiting. She had learned early on that it was a natural part of life for anyone who couldn’t walk, who depended on the help of others. Waiting was so interwoven with the rhythm of her life that it almost disturbed her when anything happened right away. She was mystified by people who were always hurrying things along. A time of waiting offered moments, minutes, sometimes even hours of peace, of rest, during which, as a rule, she was alone with herself. And she needed these breaks to prepare herself for anything new, for any kind of change. Be it a visit to her aunt on the other side of the village or a day in the fields. Or the market. She could not understand why it did not overtax her brothers to hurry with quick steps from place to place, from person to person. If ever she chanced to be carried unexpectedly and without waiting to see friends on the next hilltop, it always took some time before she really arrived. She would sit silently during the first few minutes in the new place. As if her soul were following more slowly across the valley. She felt that each and every thing required a certain amount of time. Just as the earth needed its twenty-four hours to turn once about its axis, or three hundred sixty-five days to orbit the sun, she felt that each and every thing required a certain amount of time. Her brothers nicknamed her Little Snail.
Worst of all were the trains and cars in which some of the British would travel through Kalaw, reportedly even as far as the capital. She was not frightened by the dreadful, loud clatter with which they rumbled through the village so that chickens took flight and horses and oxen recoiled. Nor was she much put out by the stench they drew in their wake. It was the speed that frightened her. Was it really possible for a person to shorten the time it took to get from one place or person to another? How could anyone think so?
Mi Mi was happy that four days would pass before the market, even if she would have liked most to see Tin Win again the very next day. Waiting meant she would be free to think about him at leisure, taking time to recall every detail of their last meeting. That, too, was an advantage of waiting—it gave her the chance to clear her mind. As always, whenever she let her thoughts roam, pictures arose in her mind, pictures she examined with care, as if they were gems or precious metals whose authenticity must be ascertained: She saw Tin Win approaching her; saw herself clamber onto his back; saw him later sitting beside her, quivering with excitement and joy. It had felt to her as if he was ready to take her on his back and run off with her, hot on the trail of ten thousand things unknown.
At home, then, she had sat for a long time on the porch with her eyes closed, trying to do as Tin Win had done. She listened hard. The pig was grunting beneath the house. The dog was snoring. There were the birds and the voices of the neighbors … but not the beating of their hearts. She wanted to ask Tin Win if there was a trick to it and if he might be able to teach her this art of hearing. At least the rudiments.
She told her youngest brother the story of the bird’s nest, but he made fun of her. How on earth could she believe that anyone’s hearing could be so acute? Someone probably told him ahead of time that there was an egg in the nest. Tin Win just wanted to impress her.
This left Mi Mi angry—more at herself than at her brother. She ought to have known. There were things a person who walked through the world on two sound feet simply couldn’t understand. They believed that people saw with their eyes. That footsteps overcame distances.
Chapter 11
THE MIDDAY SUN burned almost directly over the marketplace. Tin Win and Mi Mi sought shelter under the little parasol and edged closer together. Mi Mi’s brother stuffed the remaining potatoes into a sack. He would go ahead and come back for his sister.
“I can carry Mi Mi home. It’ll save you from making two trips,” said Tin Win.
The brother looked at his sister as if to say: How is this blind fellow supposed to carry you up the mountain? Mi Mi nodded to him: “Don’t worry.”
Her brother shouldered his sack of potatoes, mumbled something incomprehensible and set off.
“Would you mind if we took a detour through the town?” asked Tin Win.
“Wherever you like,” said Mi Mi. “You’re the one who has to carry me, not the other way around.” She laughed and draped an arm around his neck. He stood slowly. They went down a side street where several oxcarts and wagons were parked. Men and women crisscrossed the road, loading their vehicles with sacks of rice and potatoes and baskets full of fruit. The animals were restless. The horses whinnied and pawed the earth or stamped their hooves. The oxen snorted and shook themselves so that their yokes creaked. They are tired from the sun and from waiting, and they’re hungry, too, thought Tin Win. He heard their stomachs growling. The wagons stood this way and that in the street, and together with the many unfamiliar noises they seemed to him to form a wall he would surely bump into any moment now. Where was the guide who helped him to avoid the most grievous mishaps? Who warned him of pits and ditches, of stones and branches, houses and trees, at least when he paid attention? Now he felt as if he were creeping through a labyrinth in which high walls blocked his way. In which corners and edges waited to undo him. A maze in which he could not help but get lost. How would he ever bring Mi Mi safely home?
Never before had his blindness so burdened him. His knees went weak and he swayed. He lost his sense of direction. Where was he? Was he going in a circle? Was he walking toward an abyss? How was he to know that his next step would not be his last? Soon he would feel no ground beneath his feet. He would lose his balance and pitch forward into the great void he had always dreaded.
“Careful. Two more steps and you’ll bump into a basket of tomatoes.” Mi Mi’s voice was next to his ear. She was whispering.
“Another little bit to the left. Good. Straight ahead. Stop.” She pressed his shoulders gently to the right. He hesitated a moment before turning himself ninety degrees. There must be an ox right in front of them. Its mighty heart beat like the muted drum the monks sometimes struck at the monastery. The animal’s breath was moist on his skin.
“Straight ahead?”
“Straight ahead.” He shuffled his feet, not daring to lift them. A few steps later she pulled gently on his left shoulder, and he turned that way. He bumped into something wooden and winced.
“Sorry, the cart. I thought we were past it. Does it hurt?”
He shook his head and walked slowly on until she tugged again on one shoulder and cautiously changed their course.
“Step up, there’s a sack of rice
.”
He lifted his leg, felt for the sack with his toes, and took a big step.
“Good,” she said, and squeezed him briefly.
They went on, Mi Mi conducting him through the streets with her gentle movements as if guiding a boat through rapids. With each arc, each turn, each obstacle overcome, Tin Win’s steps became firmer and more confident. Her voice, so close to his ear, comforted him. He trusted her instructions. He, who so often could not trust even his own senses, found himself relying on her eyes.
She dried his neck with her longyi.
“Am I too heavy?” she asked.
“Not at all.” How could he explain that he felt lighter with her on his back?
“Thirsty?”
He nodded.
“We can get fresh sugarcane juice over there.” It was expensive, but her mother had allowed her to drink one juice a month after the market, and she would certainly have no objection to her treating Tin Win. He noticed that they had stepped into the shade of a large tree. “Stop here,” she said. “Set me down.”
He lowered himself onto one knee. She slid slowly from his back to the ground and settled onto a wooden stool that belonged to the juice stand. She placed a second stool behind Tin Win and tugged at his hand. He sat down without hesitating.
They sat under the broad crown of a banyan tree, and Mi Mi ordered two juices. He heard the sugarcane crushed in the press, something like the cracking sound a cockroach made when you stepped on it in the kitchen. Had Mi Mi noticed his fear? Did it matter? She had led him through the labyrinth. They had neither run into a wall nor fallen into an abyss. She had built bridges and torn down walls. She was a magician.
Mi Mi took a sip of her juice. She couldn’t imagine anything tasting better. She looked at Tin Win. She wouldn’t have guessed that a face with unseeing eyes would be capable of expressing so much joy. She smiled, and he smiled back. She didn’t even notice how odd that was.
“Tin Win, what do you hear now? My heart?” asked Mi Mi.
“That, too.”
“Can you teach me?”
“What?”
“To hear hearts.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Please try.”
“I wouldn’t know where to start.”
“But you know how to do it.”
Tin Win considered. “Close your eyes.” Mi Mi closed her eyes. “What do you hear?”
“Voices. Footsteps. The tinkling of harness bells.”
“Nothing else?”
“Well, sure. I hear birds and someone coughing and a child crying, but I don’t hear any hearts beating.”
Tin Win was quiet. Mi Mi listened more. After a few minutes the noises ran together, as obscured as pictures to a weeping eye. She heard the blood coursing in her ears, but not her heart, much less Tin Win’s or anyone else’s.
“Maybe it’s too loud here,” said Tin Win after a long pause. “We might need more quiet. Let’s go, and we can try it again when we find some place where we hear nothing but the birds, the wind, and our breath.” He knelt before Mi Mi. She took hold of his shoulders. He stood up, and she crossed her legs in front of his belly.
They were walking down a quieter street. Her breath on his neck. How light she was. He nearly stepped on a sleeping dog taking shelter from the sun in the shade of a house.
“Sorry. I didn’t see him,” she said.
“Neither did I,” he said. They laughed.
Just beyond the train station, Mi Mi directed him away from the street. “I know a shortcut,” she said. A few yards later they were standing on a small hillside surrounded by hibiscus bushes. Tin Win recognized their sickly sweet scent. He extended his foot and realized they would be going downhill. Not steeply, but enough to throw him off balance.
“Maybe backwards is easier,” suggested Mi Mi. She was accustomed to dashing down hills like this in a few quick leaps on her brothers’ backs. He turned around and began his cautious descent. Mi Mi, reaching with one hand into the bushes, had taken firm hold of the branches. Together they slid slowly down the slope, and soon Tin Win had stones beneath his feet.
“Where are we?” he asked.
“On the railroad embankment,” she explained to him. “We can walk on the wooden ties between the rails. My brothers do it all the time.”
He stood still. She might as well have said Mandalay. Or Rangoon. Or London. Until now, the embankment had been for him a place beyond all reach. He knew it only from the stories of other boys at school. They often boasted of their escapades on the tracks while waiting for the black steam engine. How they would set pinecones or the odd bottle cap on the rails, or how they would test their courage by creeping as close as they could to the passing train. At one time Tin Win had dreamed of joining in. Later he’d given up hope. The embankment was not part of his world. It belonged to the sighted.
Now he was the one walking between the rails, and soon he found a rhythm that allowed him to set his feet confidently on a tie at every step. He need not worry here about walking into a tree or a bush or about tripping over anything. He was climbing a ladder out of a cold, damp cave and the world grew brighter and warmer with every step. He walked more quickly, and soon he skipped one tie and then started to run. Mi Mi said nothing. Eyes closed, she was holding on tightly and rocking in time with his strides as if on horseback. Tin Win took great long steps, running as fast as he could. He had already stopped worrying about the distance between the ties, and he heard nothing but the beating of his heart, a drumbeat that spurred him on. Ever louder and harder, mighty and wild. A clamor that rang up the valley and beyond the mountains. Not even a steam train was louder, he thought.
When he finally came to a standstill, it was like waking from a dream. “I’m sorry,” he said, completely out of breath.
“What for?” asked Mi Mi.
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“Of what?”
They lay in the grass, and Mi Mi looked up at the sky. It was late, and the sun would soon be setting. Second only to the early-morning hours, Mi Mi found this the most beautiful time of day. The light was different, clearer, and the contours of the trees and mountains and houses were more defined than at midday. She liked the voices of the evening and the scent of the fires that burned in front of the houses before nightfall.
“Do you have any idea what a heart sounds like?” asked Tin Win.
Mi Mi considered whether she had ever heard a heart beating. “I once pressed my head to my mother’s breast because I wanted to know what was making that knocking. But that was a long time ago.” At the time she had thought there was an animal in her mother’s chest, knocking on her ribs to be let out.
Chapter 12
HE COULDN’T FALL asleep that night. Nor the next, nor the one after that. He lay beside Su Kyi and thought about Mi Mi. He spent three wakeful nights, yet was not tired. He felt more alert. His senses, thoughts, and recollections were clearer than ever before. They had spent one afternoon together. One afternoon that he cherished like a talisman. He remembered every word that had passed between them, every shade of her voice, every beat of her heart.
On that afternoon, with Mi Mi on his back, her voice in his ear, her thighs around his hips, he had, for the first time, felt something akin to ease, a touch of joy. An emotion so foreign to him that he did not even know what to call it. Happiness, lightheartedness, fun—these were for him words without content, speech without meaning. He realized how much energy each day cost him. Waking in that milky white fog. Groping his way through a world that had turned its back on him. He suddenly found the loneliness in which he lived unbearable, though he did have Su Kyi and U May. He revered both, trusted both, was infinitely grateful to both for the attention, the affection, they showed him. And yet, as with everyone he met, he felt an odd distance between them and himself. How often had he sat around the fire in the monastery with the other pupils or monks, wishing that he belonged, that he were part of some group, some system. Wishing that he
felt something for the others—fondness, anger, or even just curiosity. Anything. But he felt little more than an emptiness, and did not know why that was. Even when someone touched him, put an arm around his shoulder, or took him by the hand, Tin Win was unmoved. The same fog that clouded his eyes seemed to have insinuated itself between him and the world.
But with Mi Mi—her eyes saw for him. With her help he did not feel like a stranger in his own life. She made him feel a part of things. Of the happenings at the market. Of the village. Of himself.
With her, he turned toward life.
In the coming months, the two spent every market day together, exploring Kalaw and its vicinity as if they had discovered an uncharted island. They investigated the place with the meticulous care of two scientists, street by street, house by house. Often they would crouch for hours by the side of the road. On most of their expeditions they covered little more than a single street, a bit of meadow.
Over time they established a fixed ritual for unlocking the secrets of this new world. Having taken a few steps, they would pause, silent and motionless. Their silence might last a few minutes, half an hour, or even longer. Tin Win was soaking up the sounds, tones, and noise. Then he would describe in detail what he heard, and Mi Mi would tell him what she saw. Like a painter she sketched the scene for him, at first roughly, then with increasing precision and detail. When images and tones did not coincide they launched a search for the sources of the unfamiliar sounds. She crawled through hedgerows and bushes, dragged herself across flowerbeds and under houses, took apart stone walls and put them back together. She rummaged through woodpiles and dug with her hands in meadows and fields until she found what Tin Win heard: sleeping snakes and snails, earthworms, moths. With each passing day Tin Win came to know the world better. Thanks to Mi Mi’s descriptions, he could connect sounds with objects, plants, and animals. He learned that the wing beats of a swallowtail butterfly sounded brighter than those of a monarch; that the leaves of a mulberry tree rustled differently in the wind from those of the guava; that the chomping of a wood worm was not to be confused with that of a caterpillar; that the rubbing of hind legs was distinct from fly to fly. It was a whole new alphabet.