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.
That night I could not sleep, partly because the living room was very stuffy, partly because for a week I'd had a fever that made me anxious, but mainly because I could not put out of my mind the Japanese girl sobbing in the kitchen as she'd told the tale of her days, pressing her cheek against my chest while her pure transparent tears splashed down onto my hands. 1 believe her husband was in the bathroom. So, as I said, I could not sleep (and the next morning the sister-in-law told me that she had not slept, either — although for different reasons, according to the stars). At three in the morning, overrun suddenly by such grief and loneliness that I was compelled to bite my lip, I sat up. I considered going in to the sister-in-law, just to hold somebody, anybody, but that would have been awfully selfish. So I took the doll in my arms. I felt better at once. Finally I slept.
In the morning the sister-in-law passed by on her way to the bathroom. — You know, you can have that doll if you want, she said. I'd be happy to give it to you.
