“Where are your friends?”
“All around. Don’t you see them?”
Su Kyi looked around. She didn’t see anyone.
“No,” she said.
“The beetles and the caterpillars and the butterflies are my friends. And the trees. They are my best friends.”
“The trees?” she asked, surprised.
“They never run away. They’re always there, and they tell such beautiful stories. Don’t you have any friends?”
“Of course I do,” she said, and added after a pause: “My sister, for example.”
“No, real friends.”
“No trees or animals, if that’s what you mean.”
He raised his head, and the sight of him frightened her. Had she never really looked at him before, or was it the light in the wood that so altered his face? It seemed hewn of stone, so well proportioned and at the same time so terrifyingly lifeless. Then their eyes met, and he looked at her, much too sternly and seriously for a child, and she was frightened a second time, because she sensed that he knew far too much about life for a boy his age. Seconds later a smile—wistful and tender like none she had ever seen—swept over that stony face. It was that smile that had stuck with her. So deep was the impression it made that it had taken her days to get over it. She saw it at night when she closed her eyes and in the morning when she woke.
“Is it true that caterpillars turn into butterflies?” he asked suddenly, just as she was about to go.
“Yes, that’s right.”
“And what do we turn into?”
Su Kyi stood still and reflected.
“I don’t know.”
Neither spoke.
“Have you ever seen animals cry?” he asked.
“No,” she answered.
“And trees and flowers?”
“No.”
“I have. They cry without tears.”
“Then how do you know they’re crying?”
“Because they look sad. If you look closely, you’ll see it.”
He stood up and showed her the caterpillar on his hand. “Is she crying?” he asked.
Su Kyi considered the creature awhile.
“No,” she ultimately decided.
“Right,” he said. “But you were guessing.”
“How do you know that?”
He smiled again and said nothing, as if the answer was too obvious.
In the weeks following his mother’s disappearance, Su Kyi looked after Tin Win, caring for him and restoring him to good health. When the first month had passed without any word from his family in Rangoon and Mandalay, she moved in with him and promised to care for him and to keep his uncle’s house in order until his mother’s return. Tin Win did not object. Instead, he withdrew further, so that even the vigor and optimism of a woman like Su Kyi could not reach him. His mood fluctuated from day to day, sometimes from one hour to the next. He would go for days without uttering a word, spending most of his time alone in the garden or the nearby wood. On days like that, in the evening, when they sat at the fire in the kitchen eating their portions of rice, he would keep his head down and say nothing. When Su Kyi asked him about the games he had played in the wood, he would gaze at her through transparent eyes.
Nights were an entirely different story. In his sleep he would crawl over to her and cuddle into her round, soft body. Sometimes he would put his arm around her and squeeze so hard that it woke her up.
On other days he would take her along into the garden and the wood, reporting to her whatever his friends the trees told him. He had given each one a name. Or he would come to her with a handful of beetles, snails, or the most wonderful butterflies that had landed on his hands and flew off only when he stretched his arm high into the air. Animals were not afraid of him.
In the evening, before going to sleep, he would ask Su Kyi to tell him a bedtime story. He would lie motionless until the end, then say: “Sing another one.” And Su Kyi would laugh and say: “But I’m not singing at all.”
And Tin Win would answer: “But you are. It sounds like a song. Please, another one.”
Su Kyi would tell another and another, and she would keep on talking until he had fallen asleep.
She suspected that her words only ever reached him in that way, encoded, that he lived in a world closed to her, one she must approach gingerly and respectfully. She had experienced so much sorrow of her own, so much of life, that she knew better than to press for access to his places of refuge. She had witnessed herself how individuals became prisoners of these strongholds, of their loneliness, confined therein until their dying day. She hoped that Tin Win would learn what she had learned over the years: that there are wounds time does not heal, though it can reduce them to a manageable size.
Chapter 12
SU KYI COULD not remember the first time she noticed it. Was it on that morning standing in front of the house? Tin Win had been by the fence. She’d called to him, and he’d looked around, turning his head this way and that, as if looking for her. Or perhaps it was a few days later, at dinner, as they squatted on a wooden beam by the kitchen, eating their rice. She had pointed out a bird sitting a few yards in front of them on the lawn.
“Where?” he asked.
“There, beside the stone.”
“Oh,” he said, nodding in the wrong direction.
He always seemed to follow the same routes in the yard, in the house, or in the adjacent meadows and fields, and he often stumbled over sticks or stones when he deviated from his accustomed paths. When she offered him a bowl or cup he would reach out and feel the space between them for a split second that seemed to her to last forever. He squinted slightly whenever he focused on anything more than a few yards away. As if he were peering through the thick mist that drifted through the valley on so many mornings.
Indeed, Tin Win himself did not know when it had started. Hadn’t the mountains and clouds on the horizon always been somewhat unclear?
The condition seemed to worsen after his mother disappeared. At some point he could no longer see the woods from the yard; the clean, dark lines of individual trees ran together and blurred into a distant brown-green sea. A gray mist slowly enveloped the teacher at school. He heard the voice plainly enough, as if they were sitting side by side, but he could no longer make out the visual image—no better than the trees or the fields or the house or Su Kyi from more than a few arms’ lengths away.
So Tin Win simply no longer oriented himself to objects and their details. Instead he lived in a world that now consisted primarily of colors. Green meant the wood, red meant the house, blue the sky, brown the earth, purple the bougainvillea, and black the fence around the yard. Nor were colors themselves entirely reliable. They, too, faded away, until eventually a milky white cloth settled over him, obscuring everything outside a radius of a few yards. Thus the world vanished before his eyes, dying like a spent fire that gives neither warmth nor light.
Tin Win privately had to confess that it did not particularly bother him. He had no fear of the everlasting darkness—or of whatever might replace the pictures his eyes had once seen. Even if he had been born blind, he told himself, he would not have missed out on much. Nor could he imagine he would miss much now should his blindness become complete, as indeed came to pass. Upon his waking and opening his eyes three days after his tenth birthday, the mist had entirely engulfed the world.
Tin Win lay still in his bed that morning, breathing quietly. In and out. He closed his eyes and opened them again. Nothing. He looked up to where until recently the ceiling had been and saw nothing but a white hole. He sat up and turned his head this way and that. Where was the wooden wall with the rusty nails? The window? The old table where he kept the tiger bone his father had found in the woods all those years ago? Everywhere he looked was a featureless white vault with neither foreground nor background. Without limit. As if he was looking upon infinity.
Next to him, he knew, lay Su Kyi. She was sleeping but would soon stir. He could h
ear it in her breath.
Outside it was already light—the birdsong told him that. He rose cautiously, feeling with his toes for the edge of the straw mat. He felt Su Kyi’s legs and stepped over them, then stood in the room and considered briefly where the kitchen ought to be. He took a few steps and found the door without collision. He walked into the kitchen, around the fire pit, past the cupboard with the tin bowls, and out into the courtyard. He had not stumbled once nor even stretched out his hands to feel his way. Outside the door he paused, sensing the sun on his face, bemused by the confidence with which he moved about in this mist, in this no-man’s-land.
Except that he’d forgotten about the wooden stool. His face hit the hard earth, and the pain in his shin made him cry out briefly. Something tore up his face, which was now a mess of saliva mixed with blood.
He lay still and unmoving. Something crept along his cheek, over his nose, and onto his forehead before disappearing into his hair. It was too quick to be a caterpillar. An ant perhaps? A beetle? He didn’t know and he started to cry, softly, without tears. Like the animals. He didn’t want anyone ever to see him crying again.
He groped with his hand across the ground, noted the irregularities, reached with his fingers through the little dips and rises as if exploring uncharted terrain. How rough the ground was, how ridden with stones and ruts. How had he failed to notice them before? He rolled a twig between his thumb and forefinger and felt as though he could see it. Would that image, and all the visual impressions in his memory, eventually fade? Or in the future would he see the world only through a window of recollection and imagination?
He listened hard. The ground was humming, singing softly, barely audibly.
Su Kyi lifted him up.
“The stool was right in front of you,” she said. It was an observation, not an accusation.
She fetched water and a cloth. He rinsed out his mouth, and she washed his face. Her heavy breathing betrayed how frightened she had been.
“Does it hurt much?” she asked.
He nodded. He had the sour taste of blood in his saliva.
“Come into the kitchen,” she said, standing up and leading the way.
Tin Win sat unmoving, uncertain of the direction. A few seconds later, Su Kyi came back out of the house.
“What’s keeping you?”
Her wail carried all the way down to the town, and for years afterward the people of Kalaw would talk about how deeply it had frightened everyone who heard it.
The doctor in the little hospital at the end of the main street was nonplussed. Blindness, at this age, without any trauma, just like that. He had never known of anything like it. He could only speculate. It could hardly be a brain tumor, since the patient exhibited neither dizziness nor headaches. Perhaps some neural or genetic disorder. Without knowing the precise cause, he could not prescribe any therapy. There was no remedy. The best one could hope for was that his eyesight would return as mysteriously as it had failed.
Chapter 13
IN THOSE FIRST months Tin Win struggled to reclaim his world—the house, the yard, the nearby fields. He sat for hours in the yard, at the fence, on the stump of the pine tree, under the avocado tree, and before the poppies, trying to discover whether each place, each tree had its own unique fragrance, like a person. Did the garden behind the house smell different than it used to?
He paced out his pathways, calculating distances and drafting mental maps that incorporated everything his feet and hands touched, every bush, every tree, every stone. He wanted to preserve them. They would replace his eyes. With their help he would impose order on the opaque fog enshrouding him.
It didn’t work.
The next day nothing would be where he remembered it. As if someone had rearranged the furniture overnight. Nothing in this world had a fixed place. Everything was in motion.
The doctor had assured Su Kyi that the other senses would eventually compensate for the loss of eyesight. Blind individuals learn to rely on their ears, their noses, and their hands, and in that way, after a phase of acclimation and readjustment, they learn to renavigate their environment.
For Tin Win the case seemed to be precisely the opposite. He tripped over stones he had known for years. He collided with trees and branches upon which he had previously clambered. Even in the house he ran into doorjambs and walls. Twice he would have stepped into the fire pit had Su Kyi’s timely cries not spared him.
A few weeks later, on his first venture back into town, he was nearly run down by a car. He stood at the roadside, listening to the sound of the approaching motor. He heard voices and footsteps, the snorting of a horse. He heard birds and chickens and an ox defecating, and none of it made any sense or gave him any indication of which way to go. His ears were of less use to him than his nose, which could at least smell a fire, or his hands, which could alert him to obstacles. Not a day passed without torn knees, dark bruises, bumps on the head, or scrapes on his hands and elbows.
It was especially hard at school with the nuns and the padre from Italy. Although they now allowed him to sit in the front row, and although they frequently inquired whether he was following the lessons, he understood less and less of what they said. In their presence he felt lonelier than ever. He heard their voices and felt their breath but couldn’t see them. They stood beside him, an arm’s length or a hand’s breadth distance, yet they were out of reach, miles away.
The proximity of other children was even more intolerable. Their voices unnerved him and their laughter still rang in his ears when he lay in bed at night. While they ran about in the courtyard next to the church, romping and frolicking, he would sit on a bench under the cherry tree as if tied to it, and with every step he heard, every cry, every expression of joy, however insignificant, he felt the bonds tightening.
Su Kyi was unsure whether the world had truly melted away before his eyes or Tin Win had somehow buried himself far from it. And if he was so inclined, how far would he go? Would his ears, too, eventually cease to function? His nose? Would his delicate, slender fingers cease to feel, degenerating into numb, useless appendages? He was strong, much stronger than he himself knew or his lean body betrayed. She had come to understand that over the years. And he no doubt had the power to withdraw to the very ends of the earth. The boy could will his own heart to stop beating if he wished it, just as his eyes had ceased to see. In the deepest core of her soul she sensed that he would one day end his life in just that way and no other.
Chapter 14
U BA FELL silent.
How long had he been talking? Three hours? Four? Five? I hadn’t taken my eyes off him, and I now suddenly noticed that everyone else had left. The tables were empty. The room was quiet. There was no sound at all but the soft snoring of a man sitting behind the glass pastry display. His breath hissed and rolled like steam rising from a teakettle. Two candles burned on the table between U Ba and myself. I realized I was shivering. The rest of the room was dark.
“You don’t believe me, Julia?”
“I don’t believe in fairy tales.”
“This is a fairy tale?”
“If you knew me as well as you claim to, it would come as no surprise that I don’t believe in magic. Or supernatural powers. Or even in God. Least of all in stars or constellations. People who abandon a child because of some alignment of the stars at his birth? They must be sick.”
I took a deep breath. Something had set me off. I tried to calm myself. I didn’t want him to see I was angry.
“You have traveled far and wide, Julia, while I have seldom left our village. And when I did, my road took me no farther than to our little provincial capital, a day’s journey in a horse-drawn cart. My last excursion was many years ago, but you have seen the world. Who am I to contradict you?”
His humility angered me even more.
“If you say it is so,” he continued, “then I will gladly believe that there are no fathers or mothers in your world who cannot love their children, for whatever reasons. Pe
rhaps only stupid, uneducated people behave that way, a further proof of our backwardness, for which I can only beg for your continued forbearance.”
“Of course I didn’t mean that. But for us it’s not about the stars.”
He looked at me and fell silent.
“I didn’t come six thousand miles to hear tales. Where is my father?”
“Please have a bit more patience. This is your father’s story.”
“So you say. Where’s your evidence? If at any time in his life my father had been blind, don’t you think that we, his family, would have heard about it? He would have told us.”
“You are certain.”
He knew I was not.
I told him I had no use for introspection and navel-gazing. I was probably one of the few New Yorkers who had never been to a therapist. I was not the type to go looking for the causes of all my problems in my childhood, and I had no respect for those who did. I reiterated that I could not believe my father had been blind at any time in his life, but the longer I talked, the less I was addressing myself to U Ba. He listened and nodded. It seemed as if he understood exactly what I meant and agreed with me. When I was done, he wanted to know what that was, a therapist.
He took a sip of his tea.
“I fear, Julia, that I must excuse myself for now. I am no longer accustomed to speaking at such great length. I often spend entire days in silence. At my age there is not much left to say. I know that you would like to ask me about Mi Mi, the woman to whom your father wrote. You would like to know who and where she is, and what role she plays in your father’s life and thereby—perhaps—in yours.” He stood up and bowed. “I’ll see you to the street.”
We went to the door. I was a full head taller than he was, but U Ba did not seem small. On the contrary, I was too big. His quick, easy strides left me feeling clumsy and stiff.
“You will find the way to your hotel?”
I nodded.
“If you wish, I can collect you there tomorrow after breakfast and show you my home. We would be undisturbed there. I could show you a few photographs.”