I didn’t know where we were going. U Ba had said there was only one place he could finish his story. He had stood up, packed his thermos and mug into his bag, returned the bench, and gestured for me to follow him. He looked at his watch and eased his pace. As if we were early for an appointment.
I was nervous.
“There’s not much more I can tell you,” said U Ba, pausing for a moment in his tracks. “You know more than I do about his time in America.”
There it was again, the question I had suppressed for the past two days: What did I really know?
I had memories, many beautiful and tender memories for which I was very thankful, but what good were they when it came to understanding my father? It was the world through a child’s eyes. They couldn’t answer the questions running through my mind. Why didn’t my father return to Kalaw after the war?
Why did he marry my mother? Did he love her? Was he unfaithful to her with Mi Mi or to Mi Mi with her?
“U Ba, why did my father stay in New York after finishing law school?” I was startled by my tone. It was my mother’s tone when she was trying to contain her fury.
“What do you suppose, Julia? ”
I did not want to suppose anything. I wanted answers. The truth. “I don’t know.”
“Did your father have a choice? If he had returned to Burma, he would have had to bow to his uncle’s wishes. He was indebted to him. U Saw had assumed the role of the father, and a son does not defy his father’s will. It was not Mi Mi that awaited him in Rangoon, but an arranged life. A young bride. A big company. New York was his only chance to avoid that.” He looked at me as if he could read in my eyes whether or not he had persuaded me. “It was fifty years ago. We are a conservative country, now as then.”
I thought of U Ba’s decision to care for his mother instead of going to college. Maybe it was wrong for me to judge him or my father according to my own standards. Was it my place to pass sentence? Had I come here to find my father, to understand him, or to try him?
“He might have come back after U Saw’s death.” It was a suggestion, an implicit question, no longer an accusation.
“U Saw died in May 1958.”
Three months before the birth of my brother.
“Why did he marry my mother? Why didn’t he just wait for U Saw to die and then go back to Mi Mi?”
“I’m afraid I cannot answer that question for you.”
It was the first time I detected any irritation in U Ba’s voice. He was more perplexed than angry. I remembered what my mother had told me before my departure. My father had refused to marry her for a long time. He had warned her about their marriage. Why did he finally relent? Was he lonesome after all those years on his own in New York? Was he looking for solace? Had he hoped she would help him forget Mi Mi? Given everything I now knew, it seemed highly unlikely. Did he love her? It didn’t seem so. Not from my mother’s perspective. Did he hope he would eventually come to love her? Was the desire for a family of his own finally so great that he faltered?
Maybe he loved her, only she couldn’t see it, couldn’t believe it, because it was not her style of love.
My poor mother. I saw her hard, embittered face. I heard her cool, cutting voice when my father came home late because, once again, he had taken the ferry to Staten Island. I recalled the days she spent at regular intervals in her darkened room. Chained to her bed by some mysterious illness whose name we children never learned. No one besides the family physician was allowed to see her, not even my father. Now I know that she was suffering from depression. Each of my parents would have been better off without the other.
I felt sorry for both of them. Whatever my father felt for my mother, however much he enjoyed certain hours with us, his children, he was not where he belonged. He was not with Mi Mi.
Was he to blame for having succumbed to my mother’s coaxing? Or was she in the wrong for wanting something from him that he could never give her?
We walked on in silence. The path descended gently and took a sharp turn in front of a wildly overgrown hedge. We continued straight ahead, forcing our way through the brush, crossing the train tracks, hiking across a meadow and then turning onto a path that brought us to a rather isolated corner of Kalaw. U Ba led me past several yards in which children played. We stopped in front of a garden gate. The property was well maintained. Someone had swept it recently. There was fresh chicken feed in a trough. Under the porch was a stack of firewood and a pile of kindling. The house, though not large, was in very good condition. On the porch I saw tin pots and tableware. We sat down at the top of the stairs and waited.
I looked across the yard. A eucalyptus tree marked the border with the neighboring property. In front of the hen house was a wooden plank for sitting. In front of that a stone mortar. I looked at the broad stanchions of the porch railing—a child might easily have pulled herself up on them. It took a few moments before the pieces fell into place. I knew where we were. I jumped up and spun around.
I heard my father’s breath in the house. I heard Mi Mi crawling across the floor. I heard them whispering. Their voices. I had caught up to them.
U Ba resumed his tale.
Chapter 9
IT WAS QUIET in the teahouse when Tin Win finished telling his story. You could hear the candles guttering and the patrons breathing evenly. No one moved. Even the flies, sitting motionless on their sticky sugar pastries, had ceased to buzz.
Tin Win had said all there was to say. Now his voice failed. His lips formed words, but they were no longer audible. Would he ever say anything again? He rose, took a sip of cold tea, stretched briefly, and made for the door. It was high time. He turned around once more and bid farewell. A smile was the last they saw of him.
On the street was a truck full of soldiers. Children in green uniforms. The people seemed not to notice them, but still everyone gave the vehicle a wide berth. It had gotten late.
Tin Win tightened his longyi and strode slowly down the main thoroughfare. On his right was the monastery. Boards had broken out of the walls in several places, and the rusted, corrugated tin roof did not look as if it offered much protection from the rain. Only the little bells of the pagoda tinkled as they once had. Coming toward him was a pair of young monks in bare feet. The dust had turned their red-brown robes to gray. He smiled at them. They smiled back.
He walked past the empty marketplace, and at the little train station he crossed the tracks and walked slowly up the hill to where her property lay. He was certain she still lived in her parents’ house. He stopped often to look around. He was in no hurry. Not after fifty years. He was not even anxious. The moment his Thai Air Boeing 737 landed in Rangoon all his nervousness had ebbed away, and now he allowed himself instead the luxury of joy. A joy beyond all measure, no longer tinged with fear or caution, expanding by the hour. He had abandoned himself to it, and already it was so vast that he could hardly keep back the tears. Half a century had passed. There he was.
The sight of Kalaw fascinated him. At once strange and familiar. He remembered the aromas. He knew how the town smelled in winter and in summer, on market days and feast days, when the fragrance of the incense filled the houses and alleyways. And he knew how the place sounded. His Kalaw groaned and wheezed. It squeaked and rattled. It could sing and weep. But he did not know how it looked. He had seen it last as a child, and even then only through clouded eyes. He came to the English Club, in whose empty swimming pool saplings grew. Beyond it he saw the tennis courts, above them the Kalaw Hotel in Tudor style with its red roof. Just as Mi Mi had described it. Somewhere behind the next rise he must have lived with Su Kyi.
He stood at a fork in the road, not knowing which way to turn. Straight ahead or to the left, the steeper climb? For four years he had carried Mi Mi up this path without ever having seen it himself. He closed his eyes. They would be of no use to him now. His legs would have to remember, his nose, his ears. Something drew him straight ahead. Eyes closed, on he went. He smelled ripe mangoes
and jasmine. Tin Win recognized the fragrance. This must be where the flat rock lay on which they had sometimes rested. He found it easily.
He heard children playing in the yards, laughing and shrieking. These were no longer the voices of his youth, but their quality had not changed. He was amazed how confidently he moved with closed eyes. When he had tried it in New York he had run into pedestrians, bumped into streetlamps and trees. One time a taxi had nearly run him down.
Here he did not stumble once.
He stopped in front of a garden gate.
The scent of the eucalyptus. How often he had thought of this tree. How many hours he had lain awake at night in New York imagining this fragrance in his nose.
He opened the gate. How often he had envisioned this moment.
He stepped in. Two dogs scampered about his feet. The chickens were in the coop.
Tin Win heard voices in the house. He took off his sandals. His feet remembered this earth. This soft, warm soil that tickled between his toes. He felt his way to the stairs, reached for the railing. His hands remembered the wood. Nothing had changed.
He climbed the stairs, step by step. He was in no hurry. Not after fifty years.
He walked along the porch. The voices were muted now. When he stood in the doorway they fell silent.
He heard people slipping out past him and disappearing. Even the moths that had lately circled the lightbulb flew through the window out into the twilight. The beetles and cockroaches scurried hurriedly into cracks in the wood.
All was still.
He walked over to her without opening his eyes. He did not need them anymore.
Someone had built a bed for her.
Tin Win knelt before it. Her voice. Her whispers. His ears remembered.
Her hands on his face. His skin remembered.
His mouth remembered, and his lips. His fingers remembered, and his nose. How long he had craved this scent. How had he managed without her? Where had he found the strength to get through a single day without her?
There was room enough for two in the bed.
How light she had become.
Her hair in his face. Her tears.
So much to share, so much to give, so little time.
By morning their strength was spent. Mi Mi fell asleep in his arms.
The sun would be coming up soon, Tin Win knew from the song of the birds. He laid his head on her breast. He had not been mistaken. Her heart sounded weak and weary. It was ready to stop.
He had come in time. Just.
Chapter 10
A RELATIVE FOUND them toward midday. He had already been there once that morning and thought they were sleeping.
Tin Win’s head lay on her breast. Her arms were draped around his neck. When he returned a few hours later they were pale and cold.
The man hurried down to town to fetch the physician from the hospital.
The doctor was not surprised. Mi Mi had not left her property for more than two years. She had lain in bed for the past twelve months. He had been expecting her death any day. The sounds he heard through his stethoscope had not been encouraging. He couldn’t understand how she could go on living in spite of her weak heart and inflamed lungs. He had offered several times to bring her to the capital. The medical care there, while also miserable, was at any rate better than here. But she had refused to go. When he asked her how on earth she managed to stay alive in spite of her several afflictions, she just smiled. Only a few days ago he had visited her and brought some medication. He had been amazed to see how vibrant she seemed. Better than in the previous months. She was sitting upright in bed, humming to herself with a yellow blossom in her hair. As if she was expecting company.
He did not recognize the dead man next to her. He was Mi Mi’s age, presumably of Burmese descent, though he could never have been from Kalaw or the vicinity. In spite of his advanced age, his teeth were flawless. And the doctor had never seen feet so well maintained. They were not the feet of a man who had spent much of his life walking barefoot. His hands were not a farmer’s hands. He was wearing contact lenses. Maybe he was from Rangoon.
He appeared to have been in good health, and the doctor could only speculate on the cause of his death.
“Heart failure,” he wrote on a piece of paper.
News of Mi Mi’s passing spread throughout the region as quickly as the rumor of Tin Win’s return had the evening before. The first townspeople were standing in the yard that afternoon with little wreaths of fresh jasmine and bouquets of orchids, freesias, gladiolas, and geraniums. They laid them on the porch and—when there was no room there—arranged them on the steps, in front of the house, and in the yard. Others brought mangoes and papayas, bananas and apples up the hill as offerings and constructed little pyramids of fruit. Mi Mi and her beloved ought not to lack for anything. Sticks of incense were lit and stuck into the ground or into vases filled with sand.
Farmers came from their fields, monks from their cloisters, parents with their children, and anyone too weak or too old to climb the mountain was carried by neighbors or friends. By evening the yard was full of people, flowers, and fruit. It was a clear, mild night, and by the time the moonlight fell across the mountains, the road and the adjacent properties were overflowing with mourners. They had brought candles, flashlights, and gas lanterns, and whoever stood on Mi Mi’s porch looked out across a sea of lights. No one spoke above a whisper. Anyone unacquainted with the story of Tin Win and Mi Mi heard it now in hushed tones from a neighbor. A few of the oldest residents even asserted that they had known Tin Win and had never doubted he would eventually return.
The following morning the schools, the teahouses, and even the monastery were empty, and there was no one in Kalaw who did not know what had transpired. The procession that followed the deceased to the cemetery resounded with weeping and song, with dancing and laughter. In consultation with the military, the abbot, and other local dignitaries, the mayor had granted permission to confer in death one of Kalaw’s greatest honors on Mi Mi and Tin Win: that their bodies might be cremated at the cemetery.
Since the first light of day a dozen young men had been gathering kindling, twigs, and branches and piling them in two heaps. It took nearly three hours for the funeral parade to make its way from Mi Mi’s house to the cemetery on the other side of town.
There were no ceremonies and no speeches. The people needed no consolation.
The wood was dry, the flames greedy. The bodies were alight within minutes.
It was a windless day. The columns of smoke were white like jasmine blossoms. They rose straight up into the blue sky.
Chapter 11
U BA’S STORY of my father’s death caught me off guard. Why? I had had ample time. But what in life can prepare us for the loss of a parent?
Every hour I had listened to him, my confidence had increased. His story had brought my father more vividly to life than my memories ever could. In the end he was so close that I could no longer imagine his death. He was alive. I would never see him again. I sat beside U Ba on the steps, certain they were in the house. I heard their whispering. Their voices.
The end of the story. I wanted to stand up and go inside. I wanted to greet them and put my arms around my father again. Seconds passed before I understood what U Ba had said. As if I had taken no notice at all of this final chapter of his tale. We did not go into the house. I did not want to see it from inside. Not yet.
U Ba took me back to his place, where I fell asleep exhausted on his couch.
I spent the next two days in an armchair in his library, watching him restore his books. We didn’t talk much. He sat bent over his desk, engrossed in his work. Examining pages. Dipping bits of paper in the glue. Copying A’s and O’s. Flouting every principle of efficiency.
The equanimity with which he pursued this routine calmed me. He asked no questions and demanded nothing. Now and then he would look at me over the rim of his glasses and smile. I felt safe and secure in his company, even without many
words.
On the morning of the third day we went together to the market. I had offered to cook for him. As I did for friends in Manhattan. He seemed surprised but happy. We bought rice, vegetables, herbs, and spices. I wanted to make a vegetarian curry that I sometimes cooked with an Indian girlfriend in New York. I asked him for his potato peeler. He had no idea what I was talking about. He had one knife. It was dull.
I had never cooked over an open fire. I scorched the rice. The vegetables boiled over, dousing the fire. He patiently kindled another.
Still, he thought it was good. So he said.
We sat cross-legged on his couch and ate. The cooking had distracted me. Now my grief returned.
“Did you think you would see him again?” he asked.
I nodded. “It hurts.”
U Ba said nothing.
“Is your father still alive?” I asked after a pause.
“No. He died a few years back.”
“Was he sick?”
“My parents were old, especially by Burmese standards.”
“Did their deaths change your life?”
U Ba considered. “I used to spend a lot of time with my mother so I am alone more often now. Otherwise not much has changed.”
“How long did it take you to get over it? ”
“Over it? I’m not sure I would put it that way. When we get over something, we move on, we put it behind us. Do we leave the dead behind or do we take them with us? I think we take them with us. They accompany us. They remain with us, if in another form. We have to learn to live with them and their deaths. In my case that process took a couple of days.”
“Only a couple of days?”
“Once I understood that I had not lost them I recovered quickly. I think of them every day. I wonder what they would say at a given moment. I ask them for advice, even today, at my age, when it will soon be time to be thinking of my own death.” He took a bit more rice and continued: “I had no need to grieve for my parents. They were old and tired and ready to die. They had lived full lives. Dying caused them no anguish. They suffered no pain. I am convinced that at the moment their hearts stopped beating, they were happy. Is there a more beautiful death?”