The Piano Tuner (11 page)

6

I
t was morning when they first sighted land, three days from
Calcutta, a lighthouse perched on a tall red stone tower. “The Alguada
Reef,” Edgar heard an elderly Scotsman beside him tell a companion.
“Bloody hard to navigate. She’s a graveyard for passing
ships.” Edgar knew from the maps that they were only twenty miles south
of Cape Negrais, that soon they would reach Rangoon.

In less than an
hour, the ship passed buoys marking the shallow sandbanks that spilled out from
the mouth of the Rangoon River, one of hundreds of rivers which drained the
Irrawaddy Delta. They passed several anchored ships, which the old man
explained were trading ships trying to evade port dues. The steamer turned
north, and the sandbars rose above the land to become low wooded shores. Here
the channel was deeper, but still almost two miles wide, and were it not for
the large red obelisks on either side of the mouth, he wouldn’t have
known they were navigating inland.

They steamed upriver for several
hours. It was low, level, mostly unremarkable country, yet Edgar felt a sudden
excitement when they passed a series of small pagodas, their coats of whitewash
peeling. Further inland, a collection of shacks clustered at the water’s
edge, where children played. The river narrowed, and both shores came into
closer focus, the sandy banks fringed with thickening vegetation. The ship
followed a tortuous course, hindered by sandbanks and sharp bends. At last, at
one of these bends, boats appeared in the distance. On deck there was a murmur
and several passengers filed toward the stairs to return to their rooms.

“Are we there?” Edgar asked the old man.

“Yes,
soon. Look over there.” The man raised his arm and pointed to a pagoda
that capped a distant hill. “That’s the Shwedagon Pagoda. You must
have heard of it.”

Edgar nodded. Actually, he had known of the
temple before he had been given the Erard commission, reading of its splendors
in a magazine article written by the wife of a judge from Rangoon. Her
descriptions were loaded with adjectives: gilded, golden, glittering. He had
scanned the article, wondering if he’d find mention of an organ, or a
Buddhist equivalent, conjecturing that such an important house of worship
needed music. But there were only descriptions of “shimmering, golden
jewels” and the “quaint ways of Burmans,” and he tired of the
article and had forgotten about it until now. In the distance, the temple
looked like a small, shiny trinket.

The steamer slowed. The dwellings
that dotted the shore now began to break through the foliage with regularity.
Further along the bank, he was startled to see timber elephants working, their
drivers sitting across their necks as they hauled giant logs from the water and
stacked them on the shore. He stared, incredulous at the strength of the
animals, at how they whipped the logs out of the water as if they were
weightless. As the boat approached the bank, they came into clearer view,
rivulets of brown water spinning down their hides as they splashed along the
shore.

They passed other vessels on the river, now with increasing
frequency, double-decked steamers, worn fishing boats painted with swirling
Burmese script, tiny rowboats and thin skiffs, fragile and scarcely large
enough for a man. There were others, vessels of unfamiliar shape and sail.
Close to the shore, they were passed by a strange ship with a vast sail
fluttering over two smaller ones.

They were approaching the docks
quickly now, and a series of European-style government buildings came into
view, stately structures of brick and gleaming columns.

The steamer
approached a covered landing attached to the bank by a long, hinged platform,
where a crowd of porters waited. The steamer hesitated, its engines churning in
reverse to slow its course. One of the deckhands threw a rope to the quay,
where it was caught and wrapped around a pair of bollards. The porters, naked
except for loincloths tied around their waists and tucked between their legs,
clamored to lower a plank from the dock. It slapped loudly against the deck,
and they crossed it to help the passengers with their luggage. Edgar stood in
the shade of the awning and watched the men. They were small and wore towels
wrapped around their heads to guard against the sun. Their skin was patterned
with tattoos, stretching over their torsos, emerging on their thighs to twist
and twine and end above their knees.

Edgar looked at the other
passengers: most stood idly on the deck, talking to each other, some pointing
and remarking on the buildings. He turned back to the porters, to watch them
move, the shape of their tattoos changing as the sinewy arms tensed under the
leather trunks and portmanteaus. On the shore, in the shade of the trees, a
crowd waited by the growing pile of bags. Beyond them, Edgar could see the
khaki uniforms of British soldiers standing by a low gate. And beyond the
soldiers, in the shade of a line of sprawling banyan trees that followed the
shore, hints of movement, shifting patterns of darkness.

At last the
tattooed men finished unloading the luggage, and the passengers walked across
the gangplank to waiting carriages, the women emerging under parasols, the men
beneath top hats or sola topis. Edgar followed the old man he had spoken to
earlier that morning, checking his balance as he crossed the rickety gangplank.
He stepped onto the dock. His itinerary said that he would be met at the port
by military personnel, but little more. For a brief moment, he felt a sudden
surge of panic, Perhaps they don’t know I have arrived.

Beyond
the guards, the shadows stirred, like an animal awakening. He was sweating
profusely and took out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

“Mr. Drake!” someone shouted from the crowd. Edgar looked for
the voice. There was a crowd of soldiers standing in the shade. He saw a raised
arm. “Mr. Drake, over here.”

Edgar pushed his way through
the crowd of passengers and servants milling about their bags. A young soldier
stepped forward and raised his hand. “Welcome to Rangoon, Mr. Drake. It
is good you saw me, sir. I would not have known how to recognize you. Captain
Dalton, Herefordshire Regiment.”

“How do you do? My
mother’s family is from Hereford.”

The soldier beamed.
“Fine luck!” He was young and tanned, with broad shoulders, and
blond hair combed back diagonally across his head.

“Yes, fine
luck,” said the piano tuner, and expected the young man to say something
else. But the soldier just laughed, if not for the small coincidence, then
because he had recently been promoted to captain, and he was proud to state his
rank. And Edgar returned the smile, for the journey, after five thousand miles,
suddenly seemed to have brought him back home.

“I trust you had a
pleasant trip?”

“Pleasant indeed.”

“I
hope you won’t mind waiting for one moment. We have some other luggage to
carry to headquarters.”

When everything had been gathered
together, one of the soldiers called to the porters, who loaded the trunks onto
their shoulders. They walked past the guards at the gate and into the street to
where the carriages waited.

Later Edgar would write to Katherine that
in the fifteen paces that carried him from the gate to the waiting carriages,
Burma appeared as if from behind a curtain lifted from a stage. As he stepped
into the street, the crowd swelled around him. He turned. Hands struggled to
thrust baskets of food forward. Women stared at him, their faces painted white,
their fists grasping garlands of flowers. At his feet, a beggar pressed up
against his leg, a mournful boy covered with scabs and weeping sores, and he
turned again and tripped over a group of men carrying crates of spices
suspended between long poles. Ahead, the soldiers pushed through the crowds,
and had it not been for the branches of the giant banyan trees, those looking
out from the office buildings would have seen a line of khaki passing through
the mosaic, and a single man moving slowly, as if lost, turning at the sound of
a cough, now staring at a betel vendor who had spit near his feet, trying to
discern if this was a threat or perhaps merely an advertisement, until he heard
one of the soldiers say, “After you, Mr. Drake,” for they had
arrived at the carriage. And as quickly as he entered the world, he escaped,
ducking his head inside. The street seemed to recede immediately.

Three
of the soldiers followed, taking seats facing him and at his side. There was a
scuffling on the roof as the baggage was loaded. The driver mounted the box,
and Edgar heard shouting and the sound of a whip. The carriage began to
move.

He was seated facing forward, and the position of the window made
it difficult to see outside, so that the images passed in quick succession,
like the flipping pages of penny picture books, each vision unexpected, framed.
The soldiers sat across from him, the young captain still smiling.

They moved slowly through the crowd, picking up speed as the vendors
cleared. They rode past rows of more government houses. Outside one, a group of
mustachioed Englishmen in dark suits stood talking, while a pair of Sikhs
waited behind them. The road was macadamized, and surprisingly smooth, and they
turned up a small cross street. The wide facades of the government offices gave
way to smaller houses, still in European style, but with terraces festooned
with languid tropical plants and walls stained with the dark, musty patina he
had seen on so many houses in India. They passed a crowded shop where dozens of
younger men sat on small stools around low tables laden with pots and stacks of
fried food. The acrid smoke of cooking oil wafted into the carriage and stung
his eyes. He blinked and the tea shop disappeared, replaced by a woman holding
a plate of betel nuts and tiny leaves. She pressed close to the carriage and
stared inside from beneath the shade of a wide straw hat. Like some of the
vendors by the shore, her face was painted with white circles, moonlike against
her dark skin.

Edgar turned to the soldier. “What’s that
on her face?”

“The paint?”

“Yes. I saw
it on some of the women by the docks. But different patterns. Peculiar
…”

“They call it
thanaka.
It is made from
ground sandalwood. Almost all the women wear it, and many of the men. They
cover the babies with it too.”

“Whatever for?”

“Protects against the sun, they say, makes them beautiful. We call it
‘Burmese face powder.’ Why do English ladies wear face
powder?”

Just then the carriage jolted to a halt. Outside they
could hear voices.

“Are we here?”

“No, still
quite far. I don’t know why we stopped. Wait a moment while I look
outside.” The soldier opened the door and leaned out. He pulled himself
back into the carriage.

“What’s happening?”

“Accident. Look for yourself. This is always the problem of taking
the small streets, but today they are repaving Sule Pagoda Road, so we had to
go this way. This could take several minutes. You may get out and watch, if you
like.”

Edgar poked his head out of the window. In the street in
front of them, a bicycle lay sprawled amidst scattered mounds of green lentils,
spilled from a pair of overturned baskets. One man, apparently the rider,
nursed a bloodied knee while the lentil wallah, a thin Indian man dressed in
white, frantically tried to salvage the few lentils that had not soaked up the
muck of the street. Neither man seemed particularly angry, and a large crowd
had gathered, ostensibly to help, but mostly to stare. Edgar stepped down from
the confines of the carriage.

The street was narrow, flanked by a
continuous facade of houses. In front of each one, steep steps climbed three or
four feet to a narrow patio, now filled with onlookers. The men were wearing
loosely tied turbans, and long cloth skirts wrapped around their waists, passed
between their legs, and tucked in back. The turbans were distinct from those of
the Sikh soldiers, and, remembering a traveler’s account of Burma, Edgar
guessed they must be
gaung-baungs,
the skirts
pasos.
On women
the skirts hung loose, and carried a different name,
hta main,
strange
syllables that seemed breathed, not spoken. The women all wore the sandalwood
paint, some covering the cheeks in thin parallel stripes, others with the same
circles as the woman they had just seen from the carriage, others yet with
swirls, with lines descending the crests of their noses. To the darker-skinned
women it gave an eerie, ghostlike appearance, and Edgar noticed that some of
the women also wore a red lipstick, giving the
thanaka
an aura of the
burlesque. There was something disturbing about it that he couldn’t
identify, but once his surprise wore off, he would admit in his next letter to
Katherine that it wasn’t unattractive. Perhaps not befitting an English
complexion, he wrote, but beautiful, and he added with emphasis,
in the
same way that one appreciates art.
There is no need for any
misunderstandings.

His eyes followed the faces of the buildings up to
balconies draped with hanging gardens of ferns and flowers. These too were
filled with spectators, mostly children, their skinny arms interlaced in the
wrought-iron banisters. Several called down to him and giggled, waving. Edgar
waved back.

In the road, the bicyclist had righted his machine and was
straightening the bent handlebars, while the porter had given up on salvaging
lentils, and had set about repairing one of the baskets in the middle of the
road. The driver shouted something at him, and the crowd laughed. The porter
scurried to the side of the street. Edgar waved at the children once again and
climbed back into the carriage. And again they were moving, the thin street
opening onto a wider road that circled around a vast gilded structure bedecked
with golden umbrellas, and the Captain said “Sule Pagoda.” They
passed a church, then the minarets of a mosque, and then, by the town hall,
another market that was set up in the promenade before a statue of Mercury, the
Roman god of merchants, which the British had erected as a symbol of their
commerce, but who watched over the street merchants instead.