The Jewel Trader of Pegu Page 5

Dear Joseph,

  The Dutchman took from the young bride what can be taken only once. Win heard from her mother that it was a night of tears. He would not let her leave until he had his way with her a second time. He might well have kept her until past noon, but he fell into a deep sleep from wine and exhaustion, and she escaped from under his hairy bulk and now sleeps wanted in the arms of her husband. I am sorry for the young woman’s discomfort, but I had no choice.

  Win has not said anything more, but I can tell by his eyes he wishes me to reconsider. He has several times praised my house as a safe haven from evil spirits that seem numerous as motes of dust in this place. Every tree, hill, rice field, and house has its own spirit that must be kept happy. These spirits are constantly hungry (perhaps you with your ravenous appetite are one of these spirits who has wandered far from his jungle home). These idolaters are always feeding them: coconuts, bananas, a sweet sticky rice, and even chicken. Khaing hangs a coconut in a corner to appease the spirit she believes protects this house. Since I am a guest in this house and she looks after me well, I humor her idolatry.

  Win is as superstitious as all his countrymen. He told me last year a whole family—parents and two children—in the village where his cousin lives had died because they had cut down a banyan tree without making an offering to the tree spirits. A few days after I arrived, Win summoned a friend to paint a magic design above the door to protect me in my new home. You see these designs everywhere—on gates and arches, on the shields and banners of the king’s soldiers. This painter is a quiet fellow who speaks in a whisper. I think he is afraid of awakening the demons and dark spirits Peguans believe hide under eaves, in dim, damp corners, and at the bottoms of wells. The nails of his thumb and small finger on his left hand looked as if they had never been cut—they were several inches long and had begun to curl toward his palm. I am sure he caught me staring. I thought this was some heathen custom to pierce the invisible bodies of malicious spirits, but Win said long nails showed that he did not do the rough work of a slave or a commoner. Before he painted the magic squares that now greet my arrival and send me safely on my daily way, he asked the date and time of my birth. Though more conjecture than certainty in the minds of Auntie and Uncle, I remembered my supposed early-morning arrival, since our friend Leon, who wished to see what fate the stars held in store for me on my journey, had asked me the same question before I left.

  How such a prodigious, learned mind can play among the stars confounds me. If all is ordained by birth—by some auspicious star—then what need have we to study the Torah? What right would the Holy One, blessed be He, have to punish or reward us puppets of the stars? But there is no hope in arguing with Leon and his charts and pages of scribbling that only he can decipher.

  —Don’t tell me I am going on a long journey, I already know that, I told Leon.—Tell me if I will see your face again.

  —God forbid your eyes should be robbed of such beauty, he laughed that high-pitched cackle that sounds like a cat screeching in an alley.—

  God forbid you should die among the idolaters. But if that is your sad fate, take comfort—I will write you an epitaph fit for the Assembly president or the Messiah himself. I thanked him for his reassuring words and left my fate in the hands of God.

  I find Win’s faith an incomprehensible jumble—the more he speaks of it, the more confused and puzzled I become. I put my hand over my mouth and chin to appear a serious student of his words, while actually I am smiling, bemused by this stew of blasphemy, fantasy, and folly. You would think every man here was a Talmudic scholar, the way they carry on. Men who cannot write their names love to talk about their Buddha, his teachings, and subjects so esoteric that the Rambam and Aristotle would scratch their heads in exasperation.

  Last night I asked Win to tell me about his Lord.

  —King Nandabayin, what do you wish to know?

  —No, the Buddha, your god, the lord you talk about.

  —I have no god.

  —But you call him lord.

  —As the king is my lord. Buddha is only a good guide pointing the way to a land of safety. He is not like Massimo’s god. A very strange god. Dying for everyone—what good is that? Only a man can save himself, not another man, not even a god, not even our Buddha. If you are lost, the Buddha can give you a map, but it is you who must follow it and walk with your two feet out of the jungle.

  What kind of faith is there without a god, even if he is not the God of our fathers, blessed be He? What kind of world is it that has no creator, no protector, no divine guide to lead us? What good is a map, if we are doomed to suffer such an endless wasteland? Are we all just madmen babbling prayers in an empty room? Their loneliness is something I could not bear. Not even a god against whom to rail, to beat one’s chest? What use is sackcloth and ash, if there is no god to take pity on us, to forgive us, to allow us to redeem ourselves through study and good deeds?

  On this morning’s walk, Win dropped coins in the begging bowls of two monks but left empty the outstretched palm of a thin, wretched beggar standing on the corner of the main thoroughfare to the market. When we passed an especially hollow-eyed stick of a man, I asked politely, as one who wished to understand the ways of his people, what marked this man and the other man left empty-handed so unworthy. Win motioned toward him with a turn of his head.—He was a merchant in a prior life who so loved money that he cheated even his own kin, and so he earned this life as a beggar.

  I wanted to ask if all the beggars crowding the edges of the market had so earned their misfortune but held my tongue. The business of the day turned us from further talk on this matter, but later this afternoon while we drank tea on the porch of Win’s home, he returned to this subject, which is clearly a constant concern. He asked me if I remembered a friend, a perfume maker for the king and his many wives, whom I had met briefly at his home soon after my arrival. He is a small, pockmarked fellow with an equally unattractive wife, who showed her scorn for him with dismissive looks and harsh words that needed no translation.—Poor man, he has the perfumer’s power to mix scents and potions that could lure any beauty to his bed but, Win lowered his voice, his face scrunched with seriousness, his noble organ is small as a baby’s thumb—cruel punishment for his wanton adultery in a prior life.

  Was this just a tale to scare Win’s sons to marital fidelity? I was trying to make sense of this primitive notion of divine retribution, when Win told me a longer tale. His grandfather’s cousin had been a wealthy man who prized his material possessions with overweening desire. One day, fire burst out in his house just as he was approaching his gate on his way back from the market. Without pausing to listen for the cries of his wife and young son, he rushed into the house to save precious double ikats stored in a camphor chest in his sleeping room. He ran out through the flames, cradling the folded silk like a child. Safe outside, he found his wife, who was visiting a neighbor and, seeing the flames, had rushed back. She screamed that their son, barely three, was asleep in the house. The man rushed back into the burning building and found the boy cowering in a corner. He saved his son, but not before the flames had blistered the boy’s tender skin and the foul smoke had weakened his young lungs. A sickly child, he died before he could marry and bear his father a grandson. With a somber voice that matched the dimming light of day, Win said this avaricious man was reborn a louse that lived upon the silk he so blindly loved.

  —Ab…ra…ham, when Win wishes to say something of importance, he speaks my name very slowly. We all will be punished or rewarded in our next life for the life we lead now. He rattled off a chorus of punishments that a man might suffer in his next life for evils done in this one. I cannot remember them all, but a discontented man might be reborn a monkey, a man who in anger hurt others with his words would be reborn a ghost with a mouth burning like a furnace, those full of pride in their own beauty and contemptuous of others would find themselves hunchbacks or dwarves in their next lives, and a lecher who took pleasure in adulterous love affairs
would be reborn a woman.

  Perhaps his tale of retribution might scare into goodness a child who had not yet attained the natural reason to know the wisdom and righteousness of the mitzvoth. But no man old enough to make a minyan would be frightened by this primitive reckoning of consequences. What a dark faith that denies the soul’s rebirth in this life. Cannot we change and make up for our youthful errors? If not, you are doomed. No marble crypt on the Lido for you: I am afraid, exhausted by your flirting and amorous indiscretions, you too may end up a louse—your home the unwashed hair of some aging courtesan. Or even worse, you will be reborn a woman who will have to ward off the lecherous advances of callow youths.

  —Could not, I asked Win, this poor fellow have seen the error of his ways, repented, and through good deeds tipped the scales of your faith’s divine justice?

  —Oh, yes, we can harvest good deeds like a hardworking farmer his rice, and they may change the present fate our past deeds have earned. But we can never erase completely the punishment our bad deeds deserve. We cannot escape the next life our many deeds merit.

  Win shook his head.—Massimo’s god frightens me. To be banished to the Lower Depths of the House of Smoke forever for what you have done in only one life. That is so cruel. That Buddha would have spent forever in the Lower Depths for one sin in an earthly life is beyond my understanding. Why is Massimo’s god so unforgiving? Has his god no heart? What good is shame if you have no chance to make up for your sins? Forever—that is very difficult for my small mind to comprehend.

  —Massimo’s god is not mine. My people do not think so much about your House of Smoke. Our God has given us the laws to obey. It is our sacred duty to live our lives according to His laws.

  Win smiled.—Your people are wise to think that way. Let me show you something.

  He went to a chest in the corner of the room and returned with a long ledger of palm leaves. He calls it his merit ledger. I can’t decipher this script—all curves and semicircles, like scraps of spaghetti left on a plate. Here he keeps track of his good deeds, like a clerk. His accounts are more detailed than a pawnbroker his pledges. All his giving, down to the last coin—how much, how often, the pleasures he has forgone to make his gifts. I thought he might need another several entries to offset the pride with which he presented his ledger. I cannot say where his pride dwelled most, with the ledger or with the actions it so thoroughly documents. Where is the anonymous giver? Where is the purity of faith, the goodness of heart?

  Win told me of a man who claims to be the father of his own wife, but Win has no recollection of his own past lives. But he must think that he has lived lives of sufficient generosity and merit to have been reborn in finest Cambay cloth and not rags, to go to sleep with a full belly, and not scrounge for roots in the forest, or worse, be born a mongrel scratching fleas and howling at the moon.

  Who am I to mark the angels among us, to rank men of goodness? Though it seems odd that merit for Win and the others of his faith is nothing but giving, and then only to monks with begging bowls, to gild already grand monasteries and pagodas, or to fund holiday feasts for holy men. Win thinks it better to feed a plump monk than a starving woman and her suckling child. Better to build a new monastery or, even better, a pagoda, though the streets glitter with them, than a lean-to of cane and palms for the homeless streaming into the city. It seems all a show. This religion is like these pagodas, all gold and ornamentation but nothing inside.

  Joseph, one human life is enough for me, given the losses I have suffered. Those who follow the Buddha believe to be born an animal is to be reborn in a state of woe, one realm below the demons. But if the Holy One, blessed be He, granted me another life before resurrection, I would not think it punishment to be reborn a seagull floating on eddies of air or, since you say I look like one with my gangly gait, a crane snapping up fish in the muddy shoals of the Lagoon. Freed from worldly woe, left alone—that seems a quiet life, more reward than punishment.

  The more I listen to Win speak of his belief in the Buddha, intently as my mind is able, the more I feel myself sinking with every step deeper and deeper in the swampy mud. He and his fellows could make a Sophist blush. They never kill a mosquito or a fly—they only brush them away. A fisherman doesn’t kill fish—he only takes them from the water. At first I smiled at the warp and weft their words weave, but now I grow somber at the tortures I have witnessed in my brief stay here. Their hands hover harmlessly over a mosquito on their bare arms, but with their own hands they hang in cruel fashion innocent women and children.

  I am learning that “the sad hypocrites’ assembly” can gather anywhere, and golden calves can be found in more places than the Sinai. How harshly can I condemn these believers in the Buddha, when on my travels I have found fools in every port? They at least embrace their fanciful faith with a childlike innocence, more endearing than the hauteur of Christians. The Gentiles laugh at the Peguans for their reverence of the Buddha’s tooth, kept in a magnificent temple built by the king’s father and enshrined in a golden casket studded with rubies and sapphires. They joke that he probably had more teeth than an ear of corn has kernels. Before the Gentiles laugh too loudly, they best look in their own naves, where their brethren kiss the bones of Jesus and pray to pieces of the cross kept in their own bejeweled reliquaries. If all his bones and all the slivers of the cross were put back together, he would be a grotesque giant and his cross heavier than the ship that brought me from India.

  So no need to worry that my long stay will turn me into an apostate. I will neither don the monk’s yellow robe nor take up residence in the House of the Converts when I return. Believers here must wash their feet before they enter a temple. I cannot imagine this practice in Venice: before feet touched water, the stench would overwhelm us all. We would never be able to revive the fallen for a minyan.

  I may make light with you of Win’s fantastical beliefs, but I would not insult his faith to his face. We have too long suffered the Gentiles’ revulsion to visit ill will on another man’s faith, even if he be an idolater praying before his gilded idols. Unlike our Gentile countrymen and the viper-tongued Franciscans, Win lives his faith humbly and makes no effort to save me by scourge and flame. There is much foolishness and childishness about this Buddha, but Win treats me fairly and is a man, for all I can see, who tries as best he can to live a decent life. I would wish no gentler epitaph.

  As always my thoughts are with you and Uncle.

  Your cousin,

  Abraham

  My father gave me my mother’s prayer beads the morning I left. “Take refuge in the Buddha, and remember,” he said, “wake before your husband and go to bed after he has lain down for the night.” Those were his last words to me. I left the village well before midday, when angry spirits might be about.

  I must go to Pegu. It is my fate. Father tells me the man I will marry is the son of a rich merchant. His father must have lived past lives of merit to be so rewarded in this one. I am fortunate, Father says, to be accepted by such a family. I know the man I will marry was born on an auspicious day. I know he has all his fingers and toes, and his body is unmarked by signs of past sins. I know that his cheeks are smooth, without a pockmark, since I never left a single grain of rice in my bowl. That is all I know. That is enough, my father says.

  I was ready to become a woman when the time came for my ears to be pierced. I am ready to wed. I thought I would marry a man from my village, but few young men remain. Many have fled into the forest; and those who have not, the king has taken for soldiers at the point of his bloody sword. When we were children, Ye Shwe vowed he would marry me one day, but he ran away in the spring. I am lucky to find a man who will have me. Even if I must go far away to Pegu.

  I will miss the smell of roses and jasmine. I will miss tending the betel vines. I will miss lying on the riverbank looking up at a fierce elephant in the clouds turn into a dancing goddess, and she float apart into more orchids than I could count. I will miss my dog, closer to me than m
y shadow. I will not miss my father and his angry words.

  I told my aunts and cousins that I’m not afraid of going to Pegu, but I am. I have heard you can walk all day and not leave the city gates. The streets are crowded with strangers from distant lands, tall as ghosts and with skin white as spiderwebs, who have pointed teeth like dogs. There are men from islands at the edge of the world, who take their parents, when they are too old to work, and sell them in the market for others to eat. There are men, skin dark as river mud, who have never heard of the Buddha and bow before angry demons. I pray my husband will protect me.

  13 December 1598

  Dear Joseph,

  Your humble cousin, who in Venice tips his hat more than he opens his mouth, has just returned from speaking to the king of Pegu. From now on, I will expect greater respect and bended knees from your even more humble person.

  Win and I were summoned to the king’s presence on a day’s notice. Win spent the day in great turmoil for fear that, out of ignorance, I would bow too few times, lift my head at the wrong moment, or simply behave with such impropriety as to put my business and his, if not our lives, at jeopardy. Last evening Win summoned me to his home to practice our entrance and exit and acts of supplication. I felt I was a thirteen-year-old ready to recite his first blessing at the Sabbath reading, receiving last-minute instruction from an anxious rabbi. I have never seen Win so agitated, so imperious with his slaves—a woman and her two young daughters. A year ago, her husband failed to pay for some stones he had pledged to buy, and, as is the custom here, Win took his family as his slaves. For how long—if not forever—I am not sure. Win does not seem to treat them badly, no worse than a rich Israelite treats his maid or manservant. But yesterday he was quick to raise his voice and pushed the two girls roughly to their places as they played our parts as subject and supplicant. At evening’s end, he had achieved the opposite of his intentions, and I was almost as nervous as he. Before I left, he showed me with glowing pride a small silver spittoon the king had bestowed upon him for his loyalty and faithful performance as a royal broker. It seemed a ridiculous object of honor, but I held my tongue and praised its workmanship.