The Piano Tuner (28 page)

We marched out of Mandalay,
followed by a line of curious children. I rode on horseback. The ruts in the
road caused the hammers to bounce against the piano strings, which made a
lovely accompaniment to an arduous walk. We made our first camp at dusk.
Although the elephant moved steadily, I realized that once on foot, we would
progress much more slowly. This concerned me: I had already been in Mandalay
for one week. I contemplated returning to Mae Lwin ahead of the piano, but the
men tended to be rough with the instrument, and despite repeatedly explaining
the delicacy of its internal parts, I still had to order them to treat it
gently. Seeing the great effort the army has put into transporting the piano,
and the important purpose it will serve, it seemed foolish to lose the
instrument to impatience so close to our final goal.

Wherever we
stopped, we attracted a group of locals who crowded around the piano and
speculated as to its use. In the early days of our trek, either I or one of the
men would explain its function, and we would then be barraged with requests to
hear it played. In such a manner, I was cajoled into playing no less than
fourteen times in the first three days of our journey. The locals were
delighted by the music, yet the constant playing exhausted me, as they would
only disperse when I told them that the instrument had “run out of
breath,” while of course I really meant the musician. By the third day, I
commanded my men not to tell anyone the true function of the piano. To any
inquiring villager, they reported it was a terrible weapon, and subsequently we
were given a wider berth for our passage.

The fastest route to Mae
Lwin is to travel northeast to the Salween River, and there descend by the
river to the site. But with the drought, the water has run low, and fearing for
the piano, I chose to march to the bank directly across from Mae Lwin and cross
there. After three days the road became steeper, rising out of the Irrawaddy
Basin onto the Shan Plateau. Reluctantly, we unloaded the piano off the
elephant cart and transferred it to the litter, which we had constructed in the
form of the palanquins used in Shan festivals—two parallel beams for the
men to hold with added supporting crossbeams beneath the piano. The piano was
loaded so that the keyboard was facing forward, since it was best balanced this
way. The elephant’s driver returned with her to Mandalay.

As
the trail rose, I realized that the decision to carry the piano was well
informed—the trail was far too treacherous to carry it on the cart as we
had across the lowlands. But my satisfaction with this decision was tempered by
the sight of my men struggling beneath the load, slipping and stumbling to keep
it from crashing to the ground. I truly pitied them and did my best to boost
their morale, promising a festival in Mae Lwin to celebrate the arrival of the
piano.

Days passed, and the routine was the same. We rose at
sunrise, ate a quick breakfast, and then once again raised the litter and
continued our walk. It was unusually hot and the sun was merciless. I must
admit that despite the discomfort I felt at making my men labor under such a
burden, it was a stunning vision, the six men dripping with sweat and the piano
glistening, like those new hand-colored photographs that are now so in fashion
in England and occasionally trickle into the marketplaces here—the white
turbans and trousers, the dark brown bodies, the piano black.

And
then about four days from camp, with some of the steepest terrain remaining,
disaster struck.

On a particularly eroded jungle trail, as I rode
ahead chopping at the overgrowth with my sword, I heard a scream and a ringing
crash. I ran back to the Erard. The first thing I saw was the piano, and after
hearing the crash and thinking it destroyed, I was momentarily relieved. But
then my eyes moved to the left of the piano to where the five tattooed bodies
huddled around a sixth. Sensing my presence, one of the men yelled
“
Ngu
!
” or “Snak e!” and pointed to
his fallen comrade. I understood immediately. Struggling forward, the young man
had not seen the serpent, which must have been angered by my footsteps and
struck his leg. He had dropped the piano and fallen. The remaining men had done
their best to balance the Erard and keep it from crashing to the ground.

When I reached the young man, his eyelids were already beginning to droop,
the paralysis setting in. Somehow he, or another of his companions, had managed
to catch the snake and kill it; when I arrived at the scene, it lay dead and
broken by the trail. The men were using a Shan word for it which I didn’t
know, but called it
mahauk
in Burmese, known to us by the genus
Naja,
or the Asian cobra. But I had little stomach for scientific
investigation at the time. The wound still bled from two parallel gashes. The
men looked to me for medical advice, but there was little we could do. I
crouched by the young man and held his hand. The only words I could say were
“I am sorry,” as he had fallen in my service. Death from cobra bite
is terrible: the venom paralyzes the diaphragm so the patient suffocates. It
took but half an hour for him to die. In Burma, few snakes other than the Asian
cobra kill so fast. A Shan remedy for snakebites is to tie off the wound, which
we did (although all knew that this would be to little avail), to suck on the
wound (which I did), and to apply a paste of pounded spiders (but we had none
and, in truth, I have always doubted the efficacy of this cure). Instead one of
the Shan men said a prayer. At the side of the trail, flies had already begun
to gather about the snake. Some landed on the young man, and one of us swatted
them away.

I knew from Shan custom that we couldn’t leave the
body in the forest, an act that would have also offended the respect for a
fallen comrade that I believe is one of the shining principles of our armed
forces. And the horse spooked when we approached her with the body. Yet simple
arithmetic suggested the difficulty of carrying him out of the jungle. If six
men had struggled under the piano, how would five carry the piano and their
friend? Thus I realized that I too would have to bear the litter. At first the
men protested, suggesting instead that one of them return to the nearest
village and hire another two porters. But I objected; we were already several
days behind my expected arrival in Mae Lwin.

We lifted the young man
and set his body on the top of the piano. I searched for rope, but we did not
have enough to adequately secure the body to the piano. Seeing this, one of the
men removed the young man’s turban and unraveled it. He tied it around
one of the young man’s wrists, passed it beneath the piano, and tied it
to the other wrist. Then he passed it back under and across to do the same with
the opposite leg. For the young man’s other leg we used the short rope.
His head fell back over the keyboard, his long hair still tied in a small
bundle. We were fortunate to find the means of securing the body; all were
loath to think of the corpse sliding off the piano as we passed along the
trail. Had not one of the Shan suggested using the turban, I do not know how we
would have proceeded. Admittedly, the idea had also occurred to me, but to
remove a Shan’s turban in life is a mortal insult. And I did not know the
customs with regard to such a death.

And so we set out. I took the
young man’s place at the left side of the piano, and doing so, sensed a
certain relief among my friends as I suspected that superstition held this to
be a cursed position. By my reckoning, if we continued at our previous pace, it
would be four days before we reached Mae Lwin, and the body’s stench
would be horrific. In my mind, I made the decision that we would walk through
the night, but did not tell my comrades, as I sensed their spirits were already
flagging following the death of their friend. And so I joined the trichrome
photograph, and we marched on, our friend with arms stretched over the piano,
the horse now tied behind, where it walked at a leisurely pace and nibbled on
the trees.

What can I share about the following hours but that they
were some of the most terrible of my life? We tripped and struggled beneath the
load of the piano. The litter dug into our shoulders. I tried to protect myself
by removing my shirt and rolling it up to place on my shoulder, but it did
little to lessen the scrapings of the boards, and my skin was soon torn and
bleeding. I felt pity for my friends, as they had not once asked for something
to soften their loads, and I saw their skin was raw. The trail grew worse. One
of the front bearers was forced to carry a sword in his free hand to try to
clear our path. The piano caught on creepers and branches. Several times we
nearly fell. On the piano’s back, the young man’s body had begun to
stiffen with rigor mortis, so that when he shifted on the piano, his arms
seemed to pull up at their tethers, giving the fleeting impression that he was
trying to escape, until one looked once again at the open, empty eyes.

Late that evening, I told the men that we would walk through the night. It
was a difficult decision, as I felt as if I could hardly raise my legs. But
they did not protest; perhaps they were equally concerned about the body. And
so, after a short break for supper, we loaded the piano back onto our
shoulders. We were fortunate that it was the dry season, the sky was clear, and
we had a half-moon to partially light our trail. But in the deeper parts of the
jungle, we fell into darkness, stumbling. I had one small lantern, and this I
lit and hung from the cloth that bound one of his legs, illuminating the
underbelly of the piano so it must have seemed as if it was floating.

We marched for two full days. Finally, one evening, the front man shouted
with tired glee that he could see the bank of the Salween through the trees.
The news itself unburdened our load, and we began to walk faster. At the edge
of the river, we shouted to the guard on the other side, who was so surprised
to see us that he took off running up the trail and into camp. We set the piano
down on the muddy bank and collapsed.

It wasn’t long before a
group of men had gathered on the other end of the bank, piled into a dugout,
and rowed across. The shock over the dead body was mitigated only by their
relief that all of us had not suffered the same fate. They had long feared us
dead. After much discussion, two men rowed back across the river and returned
with another dugout. This we lashed to the first, and on top placed the piano
and the young man. In this manner, the piano crossed the Salween. There was
space on the raft for only two men, so I watched it from the bank. It was a
strange sight indeed—the piano floating in midstream, with two men
squatting below it, and the body of a third stretched out above. As they
lowered the piano onto the beach, the lines of the body reminded me of van der
Weyden’s
Descent from the Cross,
an image which will be
permanently fixed in my memory.

And so our journey ended. A funeral
was held for the young man, and then, two days later, a festival to celebrate
the arrival of the piano. There I had my first opportunity to play it for the
village, but only briefly, for sadly it is already quite out of tune, a problem
that I will attempt to correct myself. The piano was temporarily stored in the
grain room, and we made hasty arrangements to begin construction of a separate
music room. But this is a story for another correspondence.

Surgeon-Major Anthony J. Carroll

Mae Lwin, the Shan
States

Edgar blew out the candle and lay back. It was cool in the
room. On the roof, branches scratched against the thatch. He tried to sleep,
but found himself thinking of the story, of his own journey to camp, of the
burned fields and the steep jungles, of the
dacoit
attack, of how long
it had been since he left. At last he opened his eyes and sat up. The room was
dark, its features blurred by the mosquito net.

He lit the candle and
looked back at the letter. The light of the flame cast his shadow against the
inside of the net, and he began to read it again, thinking, Perhaps I will send
it to Katherine with my next letter home. He promised himself this would be
soon.

Somewhere in the course of the Erard’s journey onto the
Plateau, the candle flickered out.

He awoke with the letter still
resting on his chest.

He didn’t bother to shave
or wash, but dressed quickly and walked straight to the piano room. At the
door, he reconsidered, and decided it would be proper to say good morning to
the Doctor, and ran back down the stairs to the river. Halfway down, he met Nok
Lek.

“Is the Doctor taking breakfast by the river?”

“No, sir, not this morning. This morning the Doctor is
away.”

“Away? And where did he go?”

“I
don’t know.”

Edgar scratched his head. “That’s
odd. He didn’t tell you?”

“No, Mr. Drake.”

“Is he often away like this?”

“Yes, he is. Very
often. He is important. Like a prince.”

“A prince
…” Edgar paused. “And when do you expect him
back?”

“I don’t know. He doesn’t tell
me.”

“Well then … did he have any messages for
me?”

“No, sir.”

“Strange … I
would have thought—”

“He said you will tune the piano
all day, Mr. Drake.”

“Of course.” Edgar paused.
“Well then, I will be off to work.”

“Shall I bring
breakfast to your room, Mr. Drake?”

“Thank you, that would
be very kind.”

He began the day’s work by
voicing the hammers, repairing damaged felt so that the hammer strike would
produce a good clean tone. Back in England, he often waited until fine-tuning
was complete before voicing, but he had been bothered by the tone: it was
either too hard and tinny or too dull and soft. He needled the harder felt to
soften it and pressed the softer felt with the voicing iron to harden it,
reshaping the hammerheads so that they presented an even-angled surface to the
strings. He tested the voicing by running through each octave chromatically, in
broken arpeggios, and finally by pounding individual keys, so that the hardness
deep within the felt would be noticed.