It was thus for eminently fine reasons that while in Rangoon I felt impelled to make submission to the astrologers. My goal was to help somebody escape from Burma, just as if I were to release more sparrows from a cage for five kyats* apiece, feeling each tiny brown life beat so weakly in my palm, and then opening my fingers to see the bird go upward. The idea was to gain merit (for we all believe that Papal indulgences can be sold). I once bought a whole cageful of the little things and sent them into the air one by one, feeling so happy and good that I plain forgot they were only bird-puppets being retracted upwards on their star-pulled strings. What can their Heaven be but one of those dark stale restaurants on the second floor of some unpainted building? So I surmise, since all birds come down again, and when they do the bird-sellers catch them in order to sell their freedom again. After all, why should there be intermittence for sparrows? So they flutter busily down from the Sphere of Stars, and what do they see? — It was at Sule Pagoda that I usually bought my prisoners; and they did not fly far. That is why I know that they first saw how Sule's narrow gold spires grew from widening layers of silver roofs whose festoonings were as masses and strings of lichens; these guarded gold figures grew progressively larger as the sparrows neared the ground, then ended in steep wide red roof-plateaus comprised of long slats. Below this was the raised polygon on which all the towers and Buddhas were set (at the Buddhas' knees, offerings of leaves, flowers and bananas). The people walked barefoot on the wet white marble tiles. So many Buddhas! And I wondered this: If the Buddhas outnumbered the stars, could evil destinies be neutralized by calmness? I prayed at the first shrine roofed with silver leafery (darkness in between like ashes), and my prayer ascended those tapering gold towers which were strung between stars. I prayed at the second and the third, where I was kept company by a nine-year-old shavepate, a novice monk in scarlet robes. Passing a skinny old lady shaking a pair of joss sticks, I came to the place of glass hexagonal heads like giant lampshades inset with fringed and brassy bells. In a niche of compound mirrors were two Buddhas. I chose the left hand, the lesser, and prayed that I might do good for someone. Could the stars be appeased or tricked? Past me the sparrows flew down the tunnelled stain of lukewarm slippery marble where beautiful girls sat among strings of their blossoms and mounds of fresh leafy flowers like the treasures of vegetable stands, looking out at the warm rain and spitting flowers on long peeled sticks. They had sold me a bouquet for Buddha. They sat bare-brownfooted, wearing flower dresses, assembling votive umbrellas of all colors, and white thanakah-paste was smeared on their throats and faces. Below them the temple was encircled by puddled pavement around which trucks and buses slowly crept; there were stair-tunnels on every facet of the pagoda; and in that zone the sparrow-sellers waited with their cages. There, too, ranged around the base of the pagoda, were the fortune-tellers' booths.
Some made elaborate calculations on a notebook page before they pronounced, while others used a silver pencil on a slate, and still others saw everything through the immense metal-rimmed magnifying glasses that gave them power.
There was a fortune-teller with a tight brown face like a skull, shaved, with a long black goatee, a black-and-silver moustache, and thick black glasses. His skinny brown-veined fingers grappled my palm. The skull peered with deep concentration through an immense magnifying glass.
Eisenhower's palm was on the wall, seven times life-size. Other giant hands were continents of horses, elephants, towers, knives and flowers. The cell smelled like incense from the temple above.
You try to help others, to be of service to others, he said.
The skull's eyes were also magnified by his glasses. He wanted to know on what day of the week I had been born, and when I could not say he found it in a hundred-year calendar.
You have a strong lifeline, he whispered. You will not die a bad death. But you must be careful of your stomach.
In his pale gray jacket, which matched his dust-colored beard, his elbow on an immense black book with red pages, he sold me knowledge as sweet and plentiful as the smoke from one of those Burmese cheroots whose green cross-section contains a hundred chambers of fragrance.
You are not married?
I had to think about this.
No, I said finally.
Long brown fingertips probed the palm of the hand, seeking to align me with the wisdom that he kept in his narrow glass cabinet filled with books in gold wrappers.
You must meet a woman older than you who was born on a Wednesday or a Friday.
When he asked me if I had any questions I said: How can I help the people in Burma?
From a child you have been interested in Buddhism, he said. You must not try to help by any other means, but through study and religious concentration. You will have great difficulties, but you will overcome them after the seventeenth of September.
You will die peacefully, he added. You know, some die of hunger, and some are hanged, but never you! You will meet death in a better way.
And I said again, with my palms under the pressure of the skull's fingers: How can I help Burma?
Better to give the help to the religious, the true religious, whispered the skull.
What he was saying was that I must not go against the stars, that I had no right to decide anything without asking permission of those who oversaw him.
* In 1993, a kyat (pronounced chat) was worth slightly less than a cent on the black market.
And yet some of you still disbelieve in astrology. For me those star-rays of influence are as reliable as the steely light-strings that the trolleys slide on beneath the Sunset District's gray skies. My wife and I used to live there, and so did another couple, a white man of ill luck and his wife, a Japanese whose face was a long slender triangle. Years after we moved away a sad thing happened; and that night I slept in the apartment of their sister-in-law, who was my friend. The sister-in-law had a Japanese doll that the Japanese girl had given her (she was always giving presents like drops of blood from her loving heart). This doll was as long as my arm, and more slender. Flat in shape, almost like an immense tongue depressor, it had been constructed from paper wrapped around a cardboard core; somehow it lived as a woman in a red kimono of white flowers, bearing a blue gift in her arms. She had Japanese pigtails and inky black Japanese eye-dots. A calligraphed cartouche ran down her. I thought that I knew the sister-in-law, but I had never seen this doll before.
The sister-in-law was moving away after seven years. After she left there'd be nobody I knew in this neighborhood anymore. Her new home was a room in a flat with other women. She could not take all her possessions with her. So she was having a garage sale, and the Japanese doll already had a price tag on it that said three dollars. — She's given me so many nice things, the sister-in-law said to me. I have another wooden doll from her. This one has been on my mantlepiece for years. I feel sort of bad about getting rid of it, but, you know, it's something that could make some little girl very happy. I would have loved it when I was that age. I hope a little girl buys it.