The Art of Hearing Heartbeats

by Jan-Philipp Sendker

  I read it a second time and a third, folded it and tucked it back into its envelope. I looked at the time. It was Saturday morning, just after seven. The rain had stopped, the clouds had given way to a deep blue sky under which Manhattan was slowly waking. The sun rose across the East River. It was going to be a cold and beautiful day.

  I grabbed a piece of paper in order to make a few notes, to analyze the situation, to come up with a strategy, just as I would have done at the office. But the paper remained blank; I had already passed the point of no return. The decision had been made for me, though I could not have said by whom.

  I knew the number for United Airlines by heart. The next flight to Rangoon would be leaving on Sunday and traveling via Hong Kong, then Bangkok. I would have to get a visa there to continue on Wednesday with Thai Air to Burma.

  “And the return flight?”

  I thought for a moment.

  “Leave it open.”

  Then I called my mother.

  Chapter 5

  MY MOTHER WAS already having coffee and reading the Times when I got there.

  “I’m going out of town tomorrow.” My voice sounded even more cowardly than I had feared. “To Burma.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said without looking up from her paper.

  It was with sentences like this that she had been able to silence me all my life. I took a sip of mineral water and looked at my mother. She had had her gray hair colored dark blond and cut short again. Short hair made her look younger, but also more severe. Her sharp nose had grown more prominent over the years. Her upper lip had almost disappeared, and the corners of her mouth, tending ever downward, gave her face an embittered air. Her blue eyes had lost the glint I remembered from my childhood. Was it age, or was it the look of a woman who hadn’t been loved—at least not in the way she needed or wanted to be? Had she known about Mi Mi and hidden it from her children? She took a sip of coffee; I could not interpret her expression.

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “And your job?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re risking your career.”

  She was right. I didn’t know who Mi Mi was, where she was, what role she had played in my father’s life, or whether she was even still alive. I had a name and an old address from some village whose precise location was unclear to me. I’m not the kind of person to act impetuously. I trust my intellect more than my instincts.

  Still.

  “What do you expect to find over there?” she asked.

  “The truth,” I answered. It was supposed to be a statement, but it sounded more like a question.

  “Whose truth? His truth? Your truth? I can tell you mine here and now in three sentences. If you care to hear it.” She sounded tired and empty.

  “I’d like to know what’s happened to my father.”

  “What does it matter now?”

  “Maybe he’s still alive.”

  “So what if he is. Don’t you think he would have gotten in touch if he had wanted anything more to do with us?”

  She could see that I was taken aback and added: “Or is it that you want to play detective?”

  I shook my head and looked at her.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “The truth.”

  Slowly she put down the paper and looked at me for a long time. “Your father left me long before the day he disappeared. He betrayed me. Not once and not twice. He betrayed me every hour, every day of the thirty-five years we were married. Not with any lover who accompanied him secretly on his travels or with whom he spent the evenings when he was supposedly working late. I don’t know whether he ever had an affair. It doesn’t matter. He made false promises. He promised himself to me. He became a Catholic for my sake. He repeated the priest’s words at the wedding: ‘In good times and in bad.’ He didn’t mean it. His faith was a sham, and his love for me was a sham. He never gave himself to me, Julia, not even in good times.” She paused.

  “Do you think I never asked him about his past? Do you really think I didn’t give a damn about the first twenty years of his life? The first time I asked him he consoled me, gave me that soft, knowing look that I hadn’t yet learned to resist, and promised that one day he would tell me everything. That was before we got married, and I believed him, trusted him. Later I pestered him. I wept and wailed and threatened divorce. I told him I’d move out and come back only when he stopped keeping secrets from me. He would say that he loved me, why wasn’t that enough? How can anyone truthfully claim to love someone when they’re not prepared to share everything with that person, including their past?

  “After you were born I found an old letter in one of his books. He had written it shortly before our wedding. It was a love letter to a woman in Burma. He wanted to explain it to me, but I didn’t want to hear anything about it. It’s odd, Julia, but a confession, a disclosure, is worthless when it comes at the wrong moment. If it’s too early, it overwhelms us. We’re not ready for it and can’t yet appreciate it. If it’s too late, the opportunity is lost. The mistrust and the disappointment are already too great; the door is already closed. In either case, the very thing that ought to foster intimacy just creates distance. For me, it was too late. I had no more interest in tales. They would not have brought us closer together; they would only have deepened the wounds. I told him I would leave him if I ever found another letter like that, no matter how old it was, and that he would never see me or his children again. I never found anything else, though I went through his things thoroughly every couple of weeks.”

  She paused, drained a glass of water, and stared at me. I tried to take her hand, but she pulled it away and shook her head. For that, too, it was too late.

  “How could I defend myself? How could I make him pay for what he was doing to me? I decided to keep secrets of my own. I shared less and less with him, kept my thoughts and feelings to myself. He never asked. As far as he was concerned, if I wanted to tell him something, to share something with him, I would do it. And so we went on living in parallel worlds until the morning he disappeared.”

  She stood up and got another glass of water, walked around the kitchen for a while, sat down again. I remained silent.

  “I was young, not even twenty-two, and very naïve when we met. It was at a friend’s birthday party. I saw him coming through the door, tall and lean, with his full lips, a mouth that seemed always to smile slightly. He was good-looking, and women adored him, whether their attention was welcome or not. Maybe he didn’t even realize it. Any one of my girlfriends would have been happy to get him. His strong nose, high forehead, and those narrow cheeks gave his face an ascetic look that attracted everybody. His black, round glasses emphasized his beautiful eyes. There was an ease to his movements, an elegance in his face and voice, an aura that impressed even my parents. He would have made the perfect son-in-law for them—educated, intelligent, flawless manners, self-confident without a trace of arrogance—if only he had been white. Even on their deathbeds they never forgave me for marrying a ‘colored man.’ It was the first and last time that I truly rebelled against them.

  “As you know,” she said, “that’s not the kind of person I am. I stepped out of line just once, and I’ve been paying for it the rest of my life.”

  She told me my father didn’t want to marry her.

  “At first he said that we didn’t know enough about one another, that we ought to wait until we knew one another better. Later he claimed we were too young, that we ought to take our time. Shortly before the wedding he warned me that he couldn’t love me the way I perhaps expected or needed him to.

  “But I wouldn’t listen to him. I wouldn’t believe him. His reluctance, his hesitation, only strengthened my resolve. I wanted him, him and no other. During the first few months I suspected him of having a wife in Burma, but he said that he wasn’t married. That was all he would tell me about those years in his native country. And at that poi
nt it didn’t really interest me, anyway. I was convinced that in the long run he wouldn’t be able to resist me and my love. Burma was far away.

  “I was the one who fell asleep and woke up next to him,” she said. “I wanted to conquer him. Was it my bruised vanity? Or the well-behaved child from a respectable family rebelling against her parents? What better protest against my father’s world than to marry a dark-skinned man. I don’t know. I still don’t know.

  “I’ve tried for many years to find an answer to these questions. Without success. Maybe it was a combination of reasons. By the time I realized that I couldn’t change your father the way I had hoped, it was already too late. At first we stayed together for your sake and your brother’s. Later, we lacked the courage to separate. At least I did. As for your father, I can’t really say what motivated him.

  “Go to Burma if that’s what you want,” she said, exhausted. “When you get back I won’t ask you a thing, and I don’t want you to tell me anything, either. Whatever you find there, it’s no longer of any interest to me.”

  I left the next morning. The limousine to the airport was waiting right outside my building. It was a cold, clear morning. The taxi driver’s breath smoked in the frigid air as he walked back and forth in front of the car. The doorman carried my bags to the car and loaded them into the trunk. I didn’t feel well. I was scared, anxious, and sad. I never realized how unhappy my mother had been in her marriage. I thought of a sentence my mother had said to me the day before: “Your father left me long before the day he disappeared.” And how about me, I thought. How long ago had my father left me?

  Chapter 6

  EVEN THOUGH I could hardly move from weariness and exhaustion, I lay awake for a long time and then slept poorly. The questions gave me no rest. Several times during the night I woke with a start, sat up in my bed, and looked at the little travel alarm next to me. 2:30. 3:10. 3:40.

  Come morning, I didn’t feel any better. I was wide awake from one moment to the next. I had a headache and my heart was pounding as hard as if someone were pressing on my chest. I knew that feeling from New York, from the eve of important conferences or negotiations.

  A light breeze drifted through the open window, and the morning chill crept slowly under my covers. A fresh, exotic fragrance that I couldn’t place filled the room.

  It was light now. I stood up and went to the window. The sky was dark blue, cloudless. The sun still lingered somewhere behind the mountains. On the lawn in front of the hotel were the trees, flowers, and blossoming bushes of a fairy tale—colors wilder and fiercer than anything I had ever seen. Even the corn poppies seemed redder than red.

  There was no hot water for the shower.

  The walls and ceiling of the breakfast room were paneled in dark wood, nearly black. One table by the window was set for breakfast. I was the only guest in the hotel.

  The waiter approached with a deep bow. I had the choice of tea or coffee and fried or scrambled eggs. He had never heard of cornflakes. There was neither sausage nor cheese.

  “Fried or scrambled eggs?” he repeated.

  “Scrambled,” I said. “Coffee.”

  I watched him disappear through a swinging door at the other end of the large room. He stepped so lightly that I couldn’t hear his footfalls, and so it seemed to me he must be floating through the room a few inches above the floor.

  I was alone. The silence made me uncomfortable. I felt that the empty tables and chairs had eyes that were focused on me, that tracked my every move and breath. I was not accustomed to this kind of quiet. How long could it take to make coffee? To scramble eggs? Why were there no voices or sounds from the kitchen? The place oppressed me. I found it increasingly eerie and wondered if it was possible to turn up the silence in the same way one could turn up the volume. As if in response to my question, the stillness intensified with each passing moment until it hurt my ears and became unbearable. I cleared my throat and tapped my plate with my knife just so I might hear something.

  I stood, walked to the door that led into the garden, opened it, and stepped out. It was windy. Never before had the rustling of a tree, the buzzing of a bee, the chirping of a grasshopper sounded so soothing.

  When breakfast finally arrived, the coffee was lukewarm, the scrambled eggs burnt. The waiter stood in the corner smiling and nodding while I ate the burnt eggs, drank the lukewarm coffee, and nodded and smiled back. I ordered a second cup of coffee and flipped through my travel guide. Kalaw warranted barely a page.

  Situated on the western edge of the Shan Plateau, a popular mountain retreat among the British. Today a quiet, peaceful town with plenty of residual colonial atmosphere. Elevation 4,300 feet, pleasantly cool, an ideal spot for hiking in pine and bamboo forests, impressive views of the mountains and valleys of the Shan Province.

  Population: a unique mixture of Shan, Burmese, various mountain tribes, Burmese and Indian Muslims, and Nepalese (Gurkhas who once served in the British army), many of whom attended missionary schools. Until the 1970s American missionaries taught in the schools. Many of the older residents especially still speak English today.

  Three pagodas and the market were highlighted as points of interest. There was apparently a Burmese, a Chinese, and a Nepalese restaurant, a movie theater, and several teahouses. An Englishman had designed my Tudor-style hotel. Even in colonial times it had been the leading establishment in the area. There were, in addition, a number of small hotels and guesthouses “to satisfy the most modest needs.”

  After breakfast I went into the garden and sat on a wooden bench under a pine tree. No trace of the morning’s chill remained. With the sun had come the heat. A heavy, sweet fragrance floated in the air.

  Where to begin my search? My sole point of reference was the address on the thin blue envelope:

  38 Circular Road

  Kalaw, Shan State

  Burma

  That was nearly forty years ago.

  I desperately needed a vehicle and a local who knew his way around. What else?

  In my notebook I made a list:

  Hire car and driver

  Find tour guide

  Track down phone book

  Buy local map

  Find address

  Question neighbors and/or police

  Ask police about father

  Check with mayor and/or local residency office

  Maybe try to find other Americans or Brits

  Show father’s picture in teahouses, hotels, and restaurants

  Check all hotels, clubs, etc.

  That was how I always got ready for conferences and negotiations with clients—making lists, systematic research. This was familiar and reassuring.

  The hotel recommended a driver who could double as a tour guide. He was on the road at the moment with two Danish tourists but would be available in the coming days. He was supposed to arrive at the hotel around eight that evening. It made sense to wait for him, even though it meant putting off the search until the next day. Besides, it couldn’t hurt to ask U Ba about the address, even if he was a fraud. He had spent his whole life in Kalaw, by the looks of it.

  It was just past noon, and I decided to go for a run. After the long trip my body was dying for some exercise. True, it was warm, but the dry mountain air and the wind made the heat bearable. I was in good shape and would run several miles through Central Park even on the hottest and muggiest summer evenings.

  The physical exertion did me good. It freed me. I stopped caring about the stares. I didn’t need to avoid them because I was too busy concentrating on my legs. I felt as if I could run away from everything strange and sinister, as if I could watch and observe, without myself being watched. I ran down into the village, along the main road, past a mosque and a pagoda, circling the market in a wide arc, overtaking oxcarts and horse-drawn carriages and several young monks. Only now that I was running did I notice how slowly and unhurriedly the local people dawdled along, for all they were light-footed. Now I was ready to take them on. I cou
ld set my own pace. I didn’t need to conform to their tempo.

  After a shower I lay down and rested on the bed. I felt better. On the way to the teahouse, though, the weariness hit my legs. I felt every step. I was nervous and excited, wondering what lay in store. I’m not one of those people who likes surprises. What was U Ba going to tell me, and how much of it could I believe? I was planning to ask him detailed questions. If he got tangled up in contradictions I would be out of there in a flash.

  U Ba was already there. He stood up, bowed, and took my hands. His skin was soft, his palms pleasantly warm. He ordered two glasses of tea and a couple of pastries. After a moment he closed his eyes, drew a deep breath, and started again on his tale.

  Chapter 7

  DECEMBER IN KALAW is a cold month. The sky is blue and cloudless. The sun wanders from one side of the horizon to the other, but no longer climbs high enough to generate any real warmth. The air is clear and fresh, and only the most sensitive people can still detect any trace of the heavy, sweet scent of the tropical rainy season, when the clouds hang low over the village and the valley, and the water falls unchecked from the skies as if to slake a parched world’s thirst. The rainy season is hot and steamy. The market reeks of rotting meat, while heavy black flies settle on the entrails and skulls of sheep and cattle. The earth itself seems to perspire. Worms and insects crawl out of its pores. Innocent rills turn to rushing torrents that devour careless piglets, lambs, or children, only to disgorge them, lifeless, in the valley below.