The Jewel Trader Of Pegu (19 page)

Your cousin,

Abraham

Some nights I wake in the darkness and Abraham is lying next to me, his eyes wide open, looking at the ceiling, listening to voices only he can hear. I know the perils of the kingdom worry him.

Death is dancing everywhere. Strange, but as the times grow more troubled, he seems to have become calmer. When I first came to this house, his hands darted about his head, and he ran his fingers through his hair and twirled strands between his fingertips. His hands had lives of their own. Now he sits like a statue. His hands rest quietly in his lap. Only once has he raised his voice, like other foreigners. Though I know he has his own god, sometimes I think he is one of us.

I know he won’t leave me, but I am frightened. I am frightened of the sea—of water whose bottom disappears into the darkness, whose shores can’t be seen. I am frightened of the monsters I have heard live at the edge of the world and swallow ships as easily as geckos swallow flies. Abraham comforts me with tales of his safe journey. He tells me not to believe the words of those who have never ventured past their paddy fields. Yes, the wind can churn the water, and the water can churn your stomach, he says, until you cannot stand and wish nothing more than to die and escape your misery. But he promises to cradle my head in his lap, to put a cool cloth on my forehead and croak—for he can’t sing—a lullaby to bring me rest. All my discomfort will drift away like smoke, he says, when I see the sun rise from its watery bed and return at night with colors more lovely than any Indian cloth. My heart believes him—I hope my stomach won’t betray my heart.

Abraham asks if I will be lonely so far from my people. Khaing has comforted me, and Myint San has treated me well; but they will grow old, and there are few who will grieve at my going. My father has sent no words to me since I left. Sometimes I see him in my dreams—that will be enough. Some mornings I may wake in Abraham’s city and want to smell the scent of jasmine, hear our women laughing in the market, or crack open a coconut and drink its cool liquid. I will have to learn to let go. It won’t be easy, but I think there will be curious things in his city to make me smile, new flowers to smell, even food that will please my tongue. Abraham says they have rice in his country, so my sadness won’t stay long.

I told him I would be happy in his country, as long he didn’t go on long journeys across the sea. If something were to happen to him, every bite of rice would taste like dust, every cup of water would be bitter with sadness and tears. He said he didn’t need to travel anymore—he had everything he needed.

He tells me that the people of his city burn trees in their houses to keep out the cold. The air is so cold, you must cover all your body with cloth, and no one can tell one person from the other.

When I told him that will make me happy, he was surprised. I said that until I learn the right words in his language, I will have to point, and I don’t want people to know who I am.

During the day he points to things and people and what they do and tells me the words in his language. Before we go to bed, he reads from a book he has brought all the way from his country. He treasures it as if it were the sacred words of the Buddha. It is the story of a man who travels to the Lower Depths of the House of Smoke and sees the punishments that befall evil people. Abraham doesn’t find it sad. The words are beautiful; and though the man is not of his faith, he is of his spirit. Abraham finds the words a comfort, like torches lighting the way at night.

I can’t read my language. I was never taught. He is teaching me the letters and words of his language. Someday I will be able to write words on a piece of paper for him. I will fold it until it is small enough to put in the pocket of his coat. When he walks through the city, he can take out the paper and hear my voice tell him how deep he dwells in my heart.

He shows me words in his book. “Amore”—I have learned that word.

19 August 1599

Dear Joseph,

I rose before dawn this morning after another restless night of dreams that fled the moment I awoke, leaving a gnawing unease and tiredness, as if I had carried a basket heavy with rocks up a steep hillside. My soul is burdened with decisions to be made and voices urging me in different directions. While the city still slumbered, I decided to walk the quiet streets to clear my mind. Trying hard not to wake Mya and to dress quietly, I grew clumsy, as often happens when we think too much about something as natural as putting one foot in front of the other. Haven’t you ever been so careful not to drop a fragile cup that the fear of an accident turns your fingers to wood and the cup almost tumbles from your hand? I stumbled against the bead curtain, and it clattered Mya awake. She, like Win and the others, finds my walking an object of amusement. For Win, walking is for servants. Walking without purpose makes no sense to Mya, especially in the heat of the day. Walking to the market or to the pagoda she understands. To walk simply to savor the sights and sounds of the city, she dismisses as some strange custom of “your people.” This morning, I joked and prodded Mya that without her I would stumble and harm myself or get lost and never be found.

With feigned grumbling, she agreed to come with me; but only because the sun still wouldn’t be high in the sky when we returned, and she could stop at the market on the way back.

We followed the fragrances of the flowers, turned at the play of light on the palms, and set a course drawn by the shadows the houses cast. A line of palms drew us to a small temple that neither she nor I had visited; in the courtyard a shaded pond shone with golden carp, large and lazy, floating among underwater islands of pitted rocks. The fish bumped each other when we bent over the water; but without bits of rice to feed them, they soon glided back to their rocky homes. In the calmed water, like Narcissus I saw myself but didn’t fall in love with what I saw. With Mya’s reflection shimmering beside me, I saw the self I had been, the self I left behind.

I am sure you remember that more than once, when chided by some prospective in-laws for my apparent moroseness or disinterest in the prospect of marrying their daughter, I claimed that I wasn’t a sad person. Nor, I claimed, was I a happy one. I took pride in my self-proclaimed balance—like some finely calibrated scale, I had achieved equilibrium between the depths of sadness, with its self-ab-sorption that with time bores even its bearer, and the giddy heights of happiness, which demand a level of blindness to the world I could never allow. I believed that with the scales in balance, I had attained some special level of wisdom.

When I looked at my face surrounded by the fish swimming aim-lessly in the confines of the small pond that was the ocean to them, it struck me that I hadn’t lived a balanced life—that I had lived no life at all. The only scales I had fashioned covered my eyes. Yes, I was neither a happy nor a sad man: I was no man at all. I was neither here nor there: I grieved over the past, I sleepwalked through the present, and I looked ahead hoping the future would be brighter by some magical energy of its own. I had damped down that part of my heart where emotions spark. How can you be a man, how can you be alive if you don’t live in the present?

When you last saw me, I believed that I alone suffered. There were beggars and widows in the Ghetto, mothers who had lost their children to the plague or their sons and husbands to the Knights of St. John to die in some dungeon unredeemed. Yet I thought their suffering was different, a lesser mark than mine. I thought myself born under a dark star, the child of death and destruction, arriving in the world between the great earthquake of 1570 and the plague in Padua a year later—none of this an accident in the dark universe at whose center I stood. I thought myself Job when my son died. Why had the Holy One, blessed be He, forsaken me? But my son was just one among many who died in their innocence. When smallpox swept away sixscore children from our community in less than a half year not too many years ago, the tears of those grieving fathers were no more bitter than mine, their rent hearts no less torn. I thought I had a royal monopoly on suffering. What presumption to think that God had deserted me alone or had chosen me above all others to be the bearer of some dark lesson.

Soon after I arrived here—forgive me if I have written of this earlier—there was a man who I could not help but notice at the godown. He went everywhere with his son, a child of nine or ten, with fine features, like a marble angel, and a pleasant disposition that made even the sternest customs official smile and joke. The love this man had for his son shone like a blazing hearth. He praised him for the smallest achievement, gave him dried fruit and sweets for ac-complishing the simplest task. Win said that the man, a gentle soul who had gone through life with little comment or distinction, saw in his son all that he wished for himself but had not become. One day the son took ill with a fever and died suddenly. The man sat in his garden wailing so loudly that the leaves of the palms shook with his grief. After a day of weeping and keening, he fell into a brooding sadness and wouldn’t move from his house, even to make offerings at the temple. Finally, after almost a week, an old monk, who knew the man well, came to the house and told him that he had invited all who had never suffered in their lives to come to the house the next day to console him. The man ordered his servants to stay up all night preparing food and drink for his guests. In the morning no one came, and by the afternoon still no one had walked up the steps of his verandah. By dusk, the man grew calm and went to the temple.

He remembered what he had forgotten in his grief—that he was no different from all other men. At the time, I thought the monk heartless, but now I understand.

Don’t think me an apostate when I say that Win and Mya and all the believers in the Buddha are right: I see now that pain is universal. God visits upon all of us, for reasons too mysterious for my mind to fathom, pain and suffering that can’t be weighed and compared by the souls who do not bear it.

I have struggled to find words to describe who I was before I arrived in Pegu. I was like the room of Asher Levi’s pawnshop where the pledges are kept. Built of stone and mortared so tight, not the thinnest beam of light can penetrate, not even one mote of dust can filter in. Thick and solid, no thief can peer inside. Without design or trowel, I became my own master mason. I built a room around my soul, stone by stone, trying to keep the pain outside. The light stayed outside, and all that was within the stone walls was my dark and dusty soul. But there was no treasure to safeguard from thieves.

All that I encased in stone was bitterness. The world couldn’t enter, and the bile bubbled up into that empty space and seeped into the crevices of my soul. I gave nothing of myself, so how could I receive any pledges of affection? I had become a walking Ghetto, my windows bricked and barred.

Ruth’s death was an excuse. Long before her death and the death of my son, I had cut myself off from life. I used their deaths to justify the person I had already become. I heard the talk: “That’s Abraham’s nature—he is a dark fellow.” Nature is the sum of the choices we make: thread after thread is woven together into a coat we find more and more difficult to remove.

I can see the contours of my old soul in the pond’s clear water and in the silent darkness of my room late at night, but I can’t fore-tell what soul is being reborn in this foreign soil. Like all of us human
strazzaria,
it will be an imperfect work, with tears and missed stitches. I do know that when Mya gave herself to me and I reached out to draw her close, the bricks of the pledge room began to crumble, the light began to stream in, and now even the dust floats and dances in the light. But Win is right, no matter how much light and breeze this love carries with it, my soul will never be free of pain.

We suffer because we love. Win would suffer less if he loved his son less, but he can no more choose to love his son less than I can parcel out my love for Mya like a cook ladles out soup. Better my heart be set ablaze than crumble like dried leaves. If pain is the cost of loving, then it is a cost I will bear. How can I be human, how can I wake from the sleep that I have called my life, if I don’t love?

As we walked back from the temple, I tried as best I could to tell Mya what I had seen in the pond, what I had learned from the images in the rippling water. She did not say anything for a few moments. Then, smiling, she said—
Those fish must have been wise
teachers in their previous lives to have taught you so much
. She covered her mouth with her hand, as Peguan women do when they laugh, and her eyes sparkled. Pity the poor man reborn a thousand times who never sees that smile.

Your cousin,

Abraham

22 August 1599

Dear Joseph,

We are in the bloody maw of history. Syriam has fallen. Antonio came to the house at first light with the dark news. As soon as word spread through the royal barracks, deserters headed for the gates and the jungle
.

If the Toungoo set siege to the city, we can hope to last only a few weeks: cut off from the countryside, we will become a city of walking cadavers, fighting the monkeys for rotting coconuts and scraps of rice. —
The king’s soldiers can beat their magical gongs till their arms turn to stone, but the enemy won’t wither away,
Antonio said
.
Our only hope is some accommodation with the king of Toungoo, but Antonio casts a soldier’s skeptical eye on any promises. What are promises to the victor?

—
When the armies of Toungoo enter the city, words will blow away
like chaff in the wind. There will be no barriers to the appetites of men
hungry for gold and women.
He looked at Mya. —
Forgive my bluntness.

I speak out of friendship. Abraham, if you live in a world of dreams, Mya
will be violated and you will die.

—
Aren’t you too quick to see the worst?
I asked.
There is no siege,
and there is talk that the king has sent cartloads of gold and jewels to
Toungoo.