The Jewel Trader Of Pegu (22 page)

Antonio, a soldier of the king’s and one of your father’s people, came by for a brief farewell. You owe your life to this brave man—this is a story I will tell you often. This day I said little for fear my words would lead to tears. I bowed to him. He grasped my hands between his large, rough hands and told me to look after your father. It grieves me to think that I will never see this good man again.

Uncle Win said that when the city was built, in ancient days, the king chose four of his bravest soldiers—a great honor they embraced for themselves and their families—and buried them alive, one in each of the four corners of the city to protect it from evil spirits and human enemies. That was long ago: the tears and blood of the innocents slain by our king have washed away the power of their sacrifice.

Our three-cart caravan moved slowly through the gate and out of the city. The road was dry and pounded smooth, but the wagon still bumped and jarred my insides. I didn’t want you to be harmed, so part of the day I walked alongside your father. The lumbering oxen and heavy wheels covered our hair and faces with a thin veil of dust. Dust was in everyone’s eyes. Your father blink-ed and rubbed his eyes. I moistened a corner of my shawl in my mouth and cleaned the dust from his eyes.

Near dusk we approached the paddy fields on the edge of a village. Bloated bodies floated in the muddy water. Your father didn’t look away. They were just bodies, impermanent bodies. We camped for the night on the grounds of a deserted temple. The roof and pillars had been stripped clean of their gilding. We slept inside the temple, beneath the sad-eyed gaze of the Buddha. Some evil men had gouged out the jewels that had once shone from the Buddha’s forehead and palm. Your father and the other men took turns standing guard to protect us from bad men roaming the forest. When I went to sleep, I smelled the faint odor of burning wood.

In the morning, the sky was dark over the distant city. Everything was burning.

We were not alone on our journey. The roads were crowded with people, most much worse off than us—sarongs dirty and torn, their arms stick thin, and their cheeks sallow and sunken. In this river of desperate people, if we had given only a handful of rice to each outstretched palm, we ourselves would have been beggars in two days’ time. Your father and Uncle Win did share some of our food with clumps of orphaned children whose eyes had the dull glint of water in a deep well. But your father worried about me and you—concerned that I ate enough rice and drank enough water for the both of us, concerned that I didn’t tire myself out by walking too much or get bounced about by the cart over the bumpy roads.

The farther we got from the city, the worse the roads became. The villagers had stopped giving the king the labor they owed him.

Elephant grass grew tall at the side of the road, and deep holes, where the rains had washed away the earth, rattled and cracked the carts.

I am not a soft woman born in the city, I told your father. I have spent more time bent over in paddy fields, more time slapping the rump of a water buffalo than I have fanning myself on a shaded porch in Pegu. Win, who was as close as a brother to your father, warned that he would make a poor husband and an even poorer farmer if he pampered me: “A woman is like an ox; one should not display affection to either.” I had heard these words before in the village, and I’m not sure they came from Win’s heart. For sure, they found no home in your father’s.

As dusk approached on our second day out of Pegu, we came to the edge of a small village. A short walk from the village gate, a stream made a gentle loop before heading north, away from the road. Two young girls, who looked only a few years younger than I, splashed and laughed in the shaded shallows. Their swinging arms sent water fanning into the air. The fires of Pegu and my simple village days seemed years away—ancient stories told by old women.

We rose early with the sun, rested the oxen during the midday heat, and traveled on until dusk. The heat, the dust, and the uncertain future that hovered above us like a flock of crows kept us all silent on the road, even Uncle Win. A touch, a look, a few words—this was how your father spoke to me. Your father looked with fresh eyes at what I and others born in the village pass by without pause or comment. Sometimes a sight would so move him that he would just stop walking, rooted where he stood, as the carts rolled ahead.

Three days from my village, we had spent the morning traveling a narrow road through a thick bamboo forest. Bits of sunlight struggled through the trees—it was as if we were walking under a large pale green umbrella. We came out of the forest onto a grassy plain with paddy fields at its edges and blue hills on the distant horizon. Your father and I were walking side by side. He stopped and threw his arms wide, as if he were trying to embrace the sky that surrounded us. In his city the sky is never so close, he said.

The streets are narrow, not much bigger than a forest path; and the buildings, taller than palm trees, lean over the streets, and force you to walk like a hunchback, your eyes tethered to the gray stones at your feet. You can see the sky, but you have to choose to lift up your eyes, he said. You have to shake yourself out of the habit of looking down. Days pass without looking up, until you forget the sky is there.

As we walked, he spoke again of the strange city that floats on water and his people who dress themselves dark as crows and live cooped up like songbirds in a cage. When he first opened his heart to me and spoke of his life before Pegu, I asked if his people were slaves. Did they lose their freedom in battle? He said no, and this confused me. I don’t understand the ways of these tall hairy men from across the sea with their dog teeth. They all look alike to me—no one marked a master, no one a slave.

Looking out at the paddy fields stretching toward the horizon, he said that on the day he sailed away from his home he sat among his people in the house of prayer, speaking to his god who has no name and prayed to return safely to live as he had always lived. “Now,” he said, spreading his arms wide once more, “look at me—here I stand bareheaded under a blue sky thousands of miles from who I was.” Smiling, he shook his head and strode ahead in silence.

At midday we rested the oxen, and we ate a few handfuls of cold rice from the night before and some small bananas we had picked on the journey. His meal was meager, but your father didn’t fail to thank his god before and after for the food he had received. Remember, your mother knows little of the world beyond the kingdom and the gods people there pray to. I asked your father how his god would judge me, since I didn’t know how to speak to him, what prayers to offer him. Your father took my right hand in his, my palm and fingers rough from years in the paddy field and vegetable garden. He traced gentle circles in my palm. “My God, blessed be He, will love you as I do.” Your father touched a small scar on my finger where I had carelessly cut myself harvesting rice when I was a young girl.

“The first thing He did after making heaven and earth was to plant a garden.” That is a god, I thought, that would listen to my heart.

Did I miss my home? your father asked. Was I happy to be going home? No one was close enough to hear, so I spoke the truth. “I am happy that I am with you, but part of me is sad. I’m not returning home, I’m leaving it. Pegu is my home. Pegu is where I found love.

Pegu is where I found you.”

The next night, we camped in a village of no more than a dozen houses a half hour’s walk off the main road. War and our troubled times had seemed to pass this village by. The children didn’t rub their stomachs and hold out their hands. They smiled and laughed and had color in their cheeks. Even a few young men had stayed, protected by the smallness of the village and its isolation.

A narrow path ran west from the village well to a small pagoda, its back lined with mango trees. An ancient banyan tree stood at one side; its creepers hung down like braided ropes. On the other side, a thick grove of bamboo gently arched over the roof, like the fingers of hands held high to bless and protect the Buddha inside. It was a cool, quiet place whose beauty silenced us all.

Not even the faint trill of birdsong broke the stillness, and the oxen went meekly to graze without a smack on their haunches.

The villagers must have fed well the spirits who dwelled here. In this blessed place, our prayers for safe travel and health would surely be heard.

The fire made and our rice cooking, a young boy and girl crept, hand in hand, near the pagoda, to where we sat eating. The boy stared at your father. He had never seen a white stranger before.

The little girl would go no farther, but the boy came closer, step by halting step. Your father pretended not to see him so as not to frighten him away. Taking a deep breath and one long stride, the boy poked your father in the ribs to see if he was made of flesh and not smoke and air like a ghost. Surprised that his hand didn’t go straight through your father, the boy stood still, not sure what to do next. Your father turned and poked him gently in the stomach, and we all laughed. Our laughter melted away the boy’s fear. He stood his ground and poked your father’s chest, then his shoulder, even ran his fingers up and down the hair on his arm. Like a loyal puppy, the boy stayed at your father’s side until the fire turned to glowing embers, and we went into the pagoda to sleep under the Buddha’s gentle gaze.

In the night I was wakened by the sound of bamboo crackling and moaning in the wind. Rain beat down on the roof and against the walls of the pagoda. I moved closer to your father, who slept soundly through the storm. He didn’t awake even when a cascade of thuds pounded the roof, as if a giant were beating on it like a drum. In the morning, he was surprised to find the ground strewn with mangoes shaken from the trees by the violent wind. It was a good sign, food from the heavens, he said. I wanted to believe that, but the sight of the now naked trees chilled my heart, and the fallen mangoes looked like golden teardrops shed by the Buddha for reasons I didn’t then understand.

As the cart turned a remembered bend in the road, I told your father that we would soon be in my village. I hadn’t been gone so long that I would have forgotten where my own village was. But there, where no houses had stood, where no smoke had curled from home fires, where no well had been dug, a line of newly thatched houses was strung out between the road and the forest. A young boy stood by the side of the road as we approached. When he saw me, he waved and called out my name. I didn’t know this pockmarked boy. He waved again. I stared at him and saw in now familiar eyes and smile the smooth-cheeked child he had once been.

My village was dead. The house where I was born was deserted, home to rats and crows. My father was gone, both my aunts were gone, my cousin a widow scarred and blind in one eye. The healthy ones, untouched by the pox, had left the old village and built this new one, as soon as their neighbors’ skin began to burn and blister.

Old Min-Tun was alive, prince among the pocked and blinded.

The pox must have found his twisted body not a fit meal to feast on. He said a vision came to him in the gray hour between night and dawn, the half-life between sleep and wakefulness. He awoke and scraped the scabs from the face of a child who had survived the pox’s curse. He ground the scabs into a fine powder and inhaled the powder while many of my neighbors looked on, too frightened to even call him crazy. A few, who he had cured of pains and fever and whose trust and desperation were greater than their fear, did as he said and breathed in the powder. One got the pox and died, but all the rest had a fever for only a day or two and lived. It was too late for my father and all whose blood I shared. I had come back, like dear Abraham your father, an orphan.

Though the pox had passed almost two months before, if the sun had been higher in the sky, Win and a weeping Myint San would have left that very hour. They had no choice but to wait until the morning. Though your father wanted me stay away from the old village, afraid that evil vapors clung to the earth, I had to go—I owed my father’s spirit my prayers.

We walked quickly past the cemetery, where hungry ghosts scavenged the rotting mangoes and clumps of rice scattered amidst the dead. We didn’t slow down until we reached the paddy fields. Inside the gate, rain and crows had swept clean the last grain of rice from the village shrine. The village spirit had cursed the village and disappeared.

I stood before an empty house full of death and summoned life one last time. I saw my mother pounding rice, heard her voice singing a soft lullaby, felt her hand in mine. I saw my father on the Buddha’s birthday—his hair oiled and wearing a new, brightly colored sarong. I stood at his side, a small child barely up to his waist, proud to help carry offerings of fruit and sticky rice to the pagoda. He smiled at me. I remember—he smiled at me.

I asked the Buddha to see the man he was and not the man he had become. I asked the Buddha to watch over you on your journey to life and to protect your father, who was for us both the giver of new life.

We had just hurried past the cemetery, on our way back, when a high-pierced shriek tore apart the late-afternoon stillness. I grabbed your father’s hand, and he squeezed mine. Our fear bound us together. He was about to run back to the camp, certain that robbers had attacked and were strangling Myint San. Wait, I said, for I remembered that sound. Another shrill shriek and a low, trembling, moaning hoot—it was the Devil Owl. Just a bird, I said. Your father loosened his grip, but I continued to hold his hand tightly. I closed my ears to the tales of old women and their dark omens of death.

When we returned to the others, Auntie Myint San was too upset to eat. She was afraid of the night, sleeping so close to death.

She was afraid of the coming day, once more traveling past forests where she was sure brigands lay waiting to rob and kill her.

She couldn’t stop her trembling and her tears. “Where will we go?

Where will we find refuge?” she wailed. “We must take refuge in the Buddha,” Win said. The truth didn’t comfort her.