Read A Well-tempered Heart Online
Authors: Jan-Philipp Sendker
“Julia?”
Not a word. Not one. Shortness of breath. Where was this voice coming from? Who was that talking to me? What did she want? What did I have to fear from my colleagues?
“Feel free to jump right in. We’re all ears.” Mulligan’s growing impatience. Disapproving coughs.
Take great care. Watch what you say. Be careful who you look at.
I raised my head and glanced cautiously around. Upper bodies rocking uneasily. Marc’s worried expression; he felt my pain. I imagine. A smirk flitted across Frank’s broad face. As if he’d always known the day would come when I would crumble pathetically under the pressure.
You mustn’t trust them, no matter what they say.
That voice cinched my throat shut. I was paralyzed. Their faces ran together. Sweaty palms. My heart beat faster.
“Julia. Are you okay?”
No one will help you.
“If I may …” I began.
Utter silence once again. It had sounded louder than necessary. More of a cry than a polite request for attention. Their glances. The ensuing silence. I felt dizzy. On the brink of collapse.
“Would you like some water?”
It sounded sincere. Or was I fooling myself? Did I need to be on my guard?
Not a word, now. Hold your tongue.
A dark chasm opened before me, yawning wider by the second. I wanted to hide, to crawl off somewhere. What in the world was happening to me? I was hearing a voice, plain as day. A voice I had no control over. A stranger. Inside me. I felt myself getting smaller and smaller. Smaller and needier. I would not be able to say another word until it was quiet again in my head. I pressed on my ears a couple of times, quickly and sharply, the way I did when the occasional rushing got too loud. I tried another deep breath and knew right away it was pointless.
They mean you no good. Their smiles are false. They are dangerous.
Scream. Drown her out with my own real voice. LEAVE ME ALONE. STOP TALKING. STOP. STOP.
Not a word. Not one.
Mulligan and I exchanged looks. I realized it was true that no one in this room could help me. I had to get out. Immediately. I would go to the restroom, to my office, home, it didn’t matter, as long as it was away from here. They were here for a presentation. They were expecting ideas and proposals, and if I wasn’t up to the job, at least I owed them an explanation for my behavior. An apology. I was in no position to give them either one. I didn’t have the strength. I had nothing to say. A brief hesitation, then I slowly straightened up, pushing back my chair and rising. My legs were quivering.
What are you doing?
“What the hell is going on here, Julia?”
I gathered my papers, turned away, and headed for the
door. Mulligan was shouting something, but I could no longer understand a word he was saying.
I opened the door, stepped out, and closed it quietly behind me.
Now what?
I walked down the hall past the restrooms to my office, set the documents on my desk, took my coat, tucked U Ba’s letter into my handbag, and left the office calmly and without another word.
I had as yet no idea that I had unwittingly set off on my journey. On that fall day, icy cold and clear as a bell, in the week before Thanksgiving.
Kalaw, November ninth
In the year two thousand six
My dear little sister,
I hope this letter finds you in good spirits and good health. Please forgive my long silence. I no longer recall precisely when last I found the time to write you a few lines. Was it in the heat of the summer or yet before the turn of the monsoon?
It seems that an eternity has passed since then, though little enough has transpired in my life and in Kalaw. The astrologer’s wife has fallen ill and will soon die; the daughter of the owner of the teahouse where we first met now has a son. It is the same kind of comings and goings as anywhere else in the world, is it not? And yet our life here has a different rhythm from yours, as you may recall. As for me, I must confess that I am unable to imagine how quickly your world turns.
I myself am doing well. I continue to restore my old books, though the task grows increasingly strenuous and exhausting with the passage of time. It is my eyes, little sister. They deteriorate from day to day. I am gradually reaching the age of fading light. To make matters worse, my right hand has fallen further into the unwelcome habit of trembling slightly, which does not make it any easier to paste the little bits of paper over the holes bored incessantly into the pages by the ravenous vermin. Where previously three months sufficed to restore one of my books to legibility, I now require half a year or even more in the case of weightier volumes. Yet what good does it do, I sometimes ask myself, to spur myself on? If there is one thing I possess enough of, it is time. Only in old age do we fully appreciate the value of time, and I am a wealthy man. But let me not burden you with an old man’s ailments! If I do not rein in my pen, you will soon begin to worry about your brother, an utterly unfounded concern. I lack nothing.
Unless I am mistaken, it must by now be autumn in New York. I read once in one of my books that autumn was New York’s most beautiful season. Is that true? Alas, how little I understand of your life.
Our rainy season is gradually drawing to a close, the skies are once again dry and clear, the temperatures are dropping, and it will not be long before the first frost settles on the grasses in my garden. Oh, how I prize the sight of the delicate whiteness on the deep green blades!
Yesterday something extraordinary happened here. A woman dropped dead under the banyan tree at the crossroads. Moments beforehand, according to my neighbor who witnessed the event, she wailed in lamentation. She had been on her way to the market when she was stricken by a sudden fainting spell. Clutching her sister for support, she cried out repeatedly for forgiveness. Enormous tears ran down her cheeks, the size of peanuts supposedly, though I can hardly believe that. You know of course how people here are prone to exaggerate. She had turned suddenly away from her sister to follow an unfamiliar young man, calling out a name repeatedly that no one in the village had ever heard before. When the young man turned in surprise to see what all the racket was about, their eyes met. The woman froze and fell down dead. As if she had been struck by lightning on that clear, cloudless day. No one had any explanation for it. Her sister is inconsolable. They had shared a secluded life for years on the periphery of the village. The two of them had few friends, and even the neighbors had no information. Very odd, I must say; they generally know everything. The incident has since dominated the conversations in our little city, in the teahouses and the marketplace. Many people claim that the young man has magical powers and that he killed her with his glance. The poor fellow denies this of course and insists on his innocence. For the time being he has retreated to his aunt’s house in Taunggyi.
And you, my dear sister? Have the wedding plans you cautiously referred to in your last letter, yours and Mr. Michael’s, taken further shape? Or perhaps I raise the question too late and you have married already? If so, then I want only to wish you both the best from the bottom of my heart. For me, I have always regarded the few years I was fortunate enough to share with my wife as a great, even a superlative, pleasure.
And now my letter has grown longer than intended. The garrulousness of old age, I fear, and I hope that I have not taken too much of your time. I will sign off now. Dusk is here, and the electrical power in Kalaw has been unreliable for the past few weeks. The lightbulb on my ceiling flickers so badly that you might think it was trying to send me secret messages. I suspect, however that it augurs nothing more than another power outage.
Julia, my dear, may the stars, life, and fate smile upon you. I think of you. I carry you in my heart. Take care of yourself.
Yours with heartfelt affection,
U Ba
I put the letter aside. My fear that the voice would return had subsided. I was instead overtaken by a sense of intense intimacy mingled with longing and a deep melancholy. How I wished to see my brother in the flesh! I recalled his antiquated way of expressing himself, his habit of apologizing needlessly for anything and everything. His
courtesy and humility, which had so moved me. His little hut of black teak, standing on stilts, danced before my eyes, the pig grunting and wallowing in the mud, the scuffed leather armchair, its cushions worn thin to reveal the outline of the springs, a couch with torn upholstery on which I had passed many a night. In the midst of it all a swarm of bees, which had moved in with him and whose honey he did not touch lest he use anything that did not belong to him.
I saw him sitting before me, flanked by oil lamps, hunched low over his desk, surrounded by books. They filled shelves that reached from floor to ceiling. They lay in piles on the planks of the wooden floor and rose in towers on a second couch. Their pages resembled punch cards. On the table was spread an array of tweezers, scissors, two little jars among them, one with a stiff white glue, the other filled with tiny bits of paper. I had watched for hours as he grasped bit after bit of paper with the tweezers, dipped them in the glue, and positioned them over the holes. Then, as soon as the glue had set, he would retrace the missing letters with a pen. In this way, over the years, he had restored dozens of books.
My brother’s life. It bore so little resemblance to my own, and yet it had touched me so deeply.
My eyes lit on the shelf with the souvenirs of my trip to Burma, half obscured by books and newspapers. A carved wooden Buddha, a gift from my brother. A dusty little lacquer box adorned with elephants and monkeys. A picture of U Ba and me that we took shortly before my departure
from Kalaw. I was a full head taller than him. He was wearing his new green and black longyi, freshly laundered only the night before so that it would be clean. He had wrapped a pink cloth around his head, as had previously been the custom among the older Shan. He gazed into the camera seriously and solemnly.
I could hardly recognize myself in that picture. Flush with joy from the most exhilarating days of my life, uplifted by the most beautiful love story I would ever hear, the story of my father, I beamed without a care—maybe slightly enraptured—at the camera. When I showed the picture to friends they couldn’t believe it was me. When Michael saw it for the first time he wanted to know if I was standing there stoned out of my mind with my guru in India. Later he frequently made fun of my expression, claiming that I must have inhaled too deeply on a Burmese opium pipe before the shot.
Ten years had passed since then. Ten years during which I had time and again resolved to return, to visit my father’s grave, to spend time with U Ba. I put the journey off from one year to the next. Twice I had booked a flight only to cancel it at the last minute when some other more pressing matter arose. Something so pressing that I could no longer even say what it had been. Eventually mundane routines took the shine off my memories; desire lost its urgency and gave way to a vague intention for some unspecified future occasion.
I could not remember when I had last written to U Ba. He begged my pardon for his long silence. It was I who owed him
an answer to his last letter. And probably to the one before that. I couldn’t recall. We corresponded regularly during the first few years after my return, but gradually the frequency of our exchanges decreased. He sent me one of his restored books every other year, but I have to confess that I had never yet gotten all the way through a single one. They were, in spite of his efforts, much the worse for wear: faded, dusty, soiled. I always washed my hands after handling them. He had graced them with affectionate dedications, and every one of them had lain initially by my bedside, migrating quickly to the living room and landing ultimately in some carton or other.
On a couple of occasions I had sent him money through a contact at the American embassy in Rangoon, maybe ten thousand dollars all told. He would invariably confirm receipt in a subsequent letter, casually, without putting his gratitude into so many words or even explaining what he was doing with what by Burmese standards was a tidy sum of money, which left me thinking that my financial gifts must be awkward for him. At some point I dropped the practice, and neither of us ever said another word about it. I had often invited him to come visit me in New York, explaining that I would of course attend to all the formalities and cover all the expenses. At first he demurred. Later, for reasons that were never clear to me, he declined outright, politely but very firmly, time after time.
I wondered why in all those years I had never managed to see him again, though I had promised both of us when I left that I would return within a few months. How is it that
he, to whom I owed so much, had disappeared again from my life? Why do we so often put off the things that matter most to us? I had no answer. I would have to write to him at length in the next few days.
The memories of Burma had distracted and calmed me. From the taxi I had e-mailed Mulligan, blamed the problem on severe light-headedness, and promised to explain the whole thing on Monday. I considered taking the afternoon to straighten up my apartment. It was looking pretty dire. The cleaning lady had been sick for two weeks, and dust had piled up in the corners. The bedroom was still cluttered with unopened boxes; pictures waiting to be hung leaned against the walls, even though four months had passed since Michael and I had parted ways and I had moved back into my old apartment. My friend Amy claimed that the state of my apartment reflected my reluctance to accept the separation from Michael. That was nonsense. If the disarray betrayed anything, it was my disappointment with the fact that I was living in the same apartment at thirty-eight that I had lived in at twenty-eight. It felt to me like a step backward. I had moved out four years ago because I preferred living with Michael over being on my own. The apartment reminded me each day afresh that the attempt had failed.