Read Online The Art of Hearing Heartbeats by Jan-Philipp Sendker - Free Book Online

death she had been forced to sell the hut they had finished building only a short time earlier. Since then shehad been living with relatives, more tolerated than welcome. To her family she seemed a crotchety, somewhat unnerving old woman with eccentric views on life and death. In contrast to everyone else, she read no deeper meaning into the misfortunes fate had dealt her. Nor did she believe that unfavorable arrangements of the stars had occasioned her loved ones’ deaths. Instead these losses merely showed that fortune was capricious, a fact one must accept if one was going to love life. And love life she did. She did not have much use for predestination. Happiness might find a home in every individual. She never dared say so out loud, but everyone knew of her convictions, and they made her into Tin Win’s first ally.
    Over the years she had frequently observed her neighbors’ son and been astonished at his fair skin, like the light brown of fallen pine needles or eucalyptus leaves. He was so much fairer than his parents. She had watched the child grow into a tall, almost gangly boy, shy like one of the owls she heard calling so often but never spied, a boy she never saw in the company of other children.
    She had met him once in the woods. She was on her way into town, and he was sitting under a pine tree watching a small green caterpillar crawl across his hand.
    “Tin Win, what are you doing here in the wood?” she asked.
    “I’m playing,” he said without looking up.
    “Why all alone?”
    “I’m not alone.”
    “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.
    I n 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