The Piano Tuner (31 page)

And now he floats above the bed, he can see himself. Water
rushes from his skin, pooling, it begins to move, it is no longer sweat but
ants that crawl out of his pores and swarm. He is black with ants. He falls
back into his body and he screams, slapping away at the ants, they fall on the
sheets and turn to tiny fires, and as he brushes them off they are replaced by
more, emerging from his pores like from an anthill, not fast or slow, but
incessant, they cover him. He screams and he hears rustling at the bedside,
there are many forms now, he thinks he knows them, the Doctor and Miss Ma, and
now another figure, standing behind the other two. The room is dark and red,
like a fire. He sees their faces, but they blur and melt, and their mouths
become the muzzles of dogs, laughing mouths, and they reach for him with paws,
and everywhere they touch him it is like ice, and he screams and tries to beat
away their arms. One of the dogs leans toward him and presses its muzzle
against his cheek, its breath stinks of heat and mice, and its eyes burn clear,
like glass, and in them he sees a woman, she is sitting on the bank of a river
watching a pair of bodies, and he sees them too, the brown arms gripping the
broad white back, pale and dirty with sand, faces close and panting. There is
one boat left on the sand, and she takes it and begins to paddle away, he tries
to rise, but now he lies in the grip of the brown arms and he feels a
slipperiness, a heat, and feels the muzzle part his lips, a rough tongue slip
into his mouth. He tries to rise but others surround him, he tries to fight but
falls back, exhausted. He sleeps.

He awakes hours later and feels a
cold moist towel on his head. Khin Myo is sitting by his bed. One hand holds
the towel to his forehead. He takes the other in his. She doesn’t move
away. “Khin Myo …” he says.

“Quiet, Mr. Drake,
sleep.”

16

T
he fever broke alongside the dawn. It was the morning of the
third day since he became ill. He awoke and he was alone. An empty water basin
sat on the floor next to the bed, two towels hung over its side.

His
head ached. The night before was a feverish blur, and he lay back and tried to
remember what happened. Images came but they were strange and disturbing. He
turned over onto his side. The sheets were moist and cool. He slept.

He awoke to the sound of his name, a man’s voice. He
turned over. Doctor Carroll sat at the bedside. “Mr. Drake, you look
better this morning.”

“Yes, I think so. I feel much
better.”

“I am glad. It was terrible last night. Even I was
concerned … and I have seen so many cases.”

“I
don’t remember it. I only remember seeing you and Khin Myo and Miss
Ma.”

“Khin Myo wasn’t here. It must have been the
delirium.”

Edgar looked up from the bed. The Doctor peered at
him, his face stern and unexpressive. “Yes, perhaps only the
delirium,” said Edgar, and he turned over and slept again.

Over the course of the next few days, the fevers came
again, but they were not as strong, and the terrible dreams didn’t
return. Miss Ma left his bedside to take care of the patients in the hospital,
but returned to visit him throughout the day. She brought him fruit and rice
and a soup that tasted like ginger and made him sweat and his body shiver when
she fanned him. One day she came with scissors to cut his hair. The Doctor
explained that the Shan believed this helped fight illness.

He began to
walk. He had lost weight, and his clothes hung even more loosely on his thin
frame. But mostly he rested on the balcony and watched the river. The Doctor
invited a man to play a Shan flute for him, and he sat in his bed beneath the
mosquito netting and listened.

One night, alone, he thought he could
hear the sound of the piano being played. The notes drifted down through the
camp. He thought it was Chopin at first, but the song changed, elusive,
elegiac, a melody he had never heard.

Color returned to his face, and
he began to share his meals with the Doctor once again. The Doctor asked him
about Katherine, and he told him how they had met. But mostly he listened. To
stories of the war, of Shan customs, of men who rowed boats with their legs, of
monks with mystical powers. The Doctor told him that he had sent a description
of a new flower to the Linnean Society, and that he had begun to translate
Homer’s
Odyssey
into Shan, “My favorite tale, Mr. Drake,
and one in which I find a most personal significance.” He was translating
it, he said, for a Shan storyteller who had asked for a legend of “the
kind that is told at night, around campfires.” “I am now at the
song of Demodokos. I don’t know if you remember it. He sings of the sack
of Troy, and Odysseus, the great warrior, cries, ‘as a woman
weeps.’”

They went at night to listen to musicians play,
drums and cymbals and harps and flutes mixing in a jungle of sounds. They
stayed until it was late. When they returned to their rooms, Edgar went out
onto his balcony to listen again.

After several days, the Doctor asked,
“How are you feeling?”

“I am well. Why do you ask
now?”

“I have to go away again. It should only be a couple
of days. Khin Myo will stay. You won’t have to be alone.”

The Doctor didn’t tell Edgar where he was going, and
Edgar didn’t see him leave.

The following morning, he rose and
walked to the river to watch the fishermen. He stood in the brush of blooming
flowers and watched bees flit between the patches of colors. He played football
with some of the children, but tired quickly and returned to his room. He sat
on the balcony and looked out on the river. He watched the sun move. The cook
brought him lunch, a broth with sweet noodles and fried crisp pieces of garlic.
Kin
waan,
he said when he tasted it, and the cook
smiled.

Night came, and he slept a sweet sleep in which he dreamed he
was dancing at a festival. The villagers played strange instruments, and he
moved as if in a waltz, but alone.

The next day, he
decided to write to Katherine, at last. A new thought had begun to bother
him—that the army had notified her that he had left Mandalay. He had to
convince himself that the military’s obvious lack of interest in her
before he left—which had angered him so then—meant that they were
even less likely to be in contact with her now.

He took out paper and a
pen and wrote her name. He began to describe Mae Lwin but stopped after several
lines. He wanted to describe to her the village above the mountain, but
realized he had seen it only from a distance. It was still cool outside. A fine
time for a walk, he thought, The exercise will do me good. He put on his hat
and—despite the heat—a waistcoat he usually wore on summer strolls
in England. He walked down to the center of camp.

In the clearing, two
women were wandering up from the river carrying baskets of clothes, one against
her hip, the other balancing the load on top of her turban. Edgar followed them
along the small trail that ducked into the forest and climbed the ridge. In the
quiet of the woods, the women heard his footsteps behind them, and turned and
giggled, whispering something to each other in Shan. He tipped his hat. The
trees thinned, and the women climbed a steep rise, up the mountain, toward the
village spread over its back. Edgar followed, and as they entered the village,
the women again turned and giggled, and once again he tipped his hat.

At the first set of houses, perched on stilts, an older woman crouched in
the doorway, the patterned fabric of her dress taut against her knees. A pair
of scrawny pigs lay sleeping in the shade, snorting and twitching their tails
through their dreams.

She was smoking a cheroot the width of her wrist.
Edgar greeted her. “Good day,” he said. She slowly took the cheroot
from her mouth, gripping it between her gnarled and ring-laden third and fourth
fingers. He half expected her to growl, goblinlike, but her face broke into a
big toothless smile, her gums stained with betel and tobacco. Her face was
heavily tattooed, not with solid lines like the men, but with hundreds of small
points, in a pattern that reminded Edgar of a cribbage board. Later he would
learn that she was not Shan but Chin, a tribe from the west, that this was
written in the details of her decoration. “Good-bye, madam,” said
Edgar, and she returned the cheroot to her lips, inhaling deeply, sucking her
wrinkled cheeks into the cavern of her mouth. Edgar thought again of the
ubiquitous advertisements in London: Cigars de Joy, One of these Cigarettes
gives immediate relief in the worst attack of Asthma, Cough, Bronchitis, and
Shortness of Breath.

He continued to walk. He passed small, dry fields,
patterned in rising terraces. With the drought, the planting season had yet to
begin, and the soil was turned up in hard, dry clods. The houses were raised at
varying heights, their walls like those of the camp buildings, interlaced
strips of bamboo woven to create geometrical patterns. The road was empty
except for scattered bands of dusty children, and he saw many people gathered
in the houses. It was hot, so hot that even the best soothsayers had failed to
forecast that today would be the day the rains would come again to the Shan
Plateau. The men and women sat and talked in the shade and couldn’t
understand the Englishman who took walks under such a sun.

At one
house he heard a ringing, and stopped to look. Two men crouched shirtless in
loose blue Shan trousers, hammering metal. He had heard of the Shans’
reputation as skilled blacksmiths; Nash-Burnham had pointed out knives in the
Mandalay market that were forged by Shans. I wonder where they obtain the
metal, he thought, and looked closer. One of the men held a railway spike
between his toes, which he hammered against an anvil. Don’t build a
railway through a country of hungry blacksmiths, he thought, and it sounded
eerily like an aphorism.

A pair of men passed him on the road. One was
wearing a gigantic wide-brimmed hat like those worn in common postcard images
of rice-field workers, except the brim sloped down over the ears so that the
front framed the man’s face like a giant duckbill. It is true, they
are
like Scottish Highlanders, thought Edgar, who had read this
comparison but had never understood it until he saw the broad hat and wide
kiltlike trousers. Ahead, the women he had followed entered another house,
where a girl stood, holding a baby. Edgar stopped to watch the flight of a
mynah bird, and saw them peering out of the doorway at him.

Soon he
came across a circle of older boys playing
chinlon.
It was the same
game played by the children in the camp clearing, although it always turned to
football once Edgar tried to join. Here he stopped and watched. One of the boys
held up the ball to him as if inviting him to play, but he shook his head and
nodded at them to continue. Thrilled by an audience, the boys returned to the
game in earnest, using their feet to keep the woven rattan sphere in the air.
They tapped and dived and back-kicked, and did high-whirling cartwheels to send
the ball soaring. Edgar stood and watched for a while, before a stray ball flew
his way and he put his leg out to stop it, and the ball bounced back into the
circle and one of the boys continued to play. The others cheered, and Edgar,
slightly out of breath and flustered by the effort, couldn’t help but
smile as he bent to dust off his boots. He watched for several more kicks, but
then, fearful that he wouldn’t be so lucky the next time the ball flew
his way, he continued his walk.

He soon passed another set of homes,
where a group of women sat in the shade of the house by a loom. A naked little
boy chased some chickens across the road and paused to watch Edgar as he
passed, this new animal being apparently much more interesting than squawking
birds. Edgar stopped by the boy. His face was completely covered with
thanaka,
pale like a forest sprite.

“How are you, little
chap?” said Edgar, and crouched and held out his hand. The boy stood and
stared impassively, his abdomen swollen and dusty. He began to urinate.
“Aaaii!” A young girl ran down the steps of a house and picked up
the boy, pointing him away, trying to contain her giggling. When the boy had
stopped urinating, she rotated him and placed him on her thin hips, in
imitation of the older women. She wagged her finger at the child. Edgar turned
to walk away and saw that more children had gathered in the road behind him.

A woman led a water buffalo up the road, and the children parted for
the mud-caked beast to pass. Edgar watched the animal’s thick, brushlike
tail flick lazily at the flies that landed on its back.

He continued to
walk, the children following at a distance. Soon the trail rose slightly, and
he could see out over a small valley covered with terraced, fallow rice fields.
At the side of the road, a pair of men sat and grinned the broad Shan grin that
he had become accustomed to. One of the men pointed to the group of children
and said something, and Edgar answered, “Yes, quite a lot of
children,” and they both laughed although neither understood a word the
other had said.

It was near noon, and Edgar found himself sweating
profusely. He stopped for a moment in the shade of a small grain store and
watched a lizard do push-ups on a bare stone. He took out a handkerchief and
mopped his forehead. He had spent so much time tuning the piano or sitting on
his balcony that he hadn’t experienced the sun, nor the drought. The dead
fields shook in the searing heat. He waited until he thought he was dull enough
for the children to leave, but the crowd only grew in number.

He
walked along a road that seemed as if it led back to the camp. Soon he passed a
small shrine where someone had set out a wide assortment of offerings, flowers,
stones, amulets, small cups whose contents had long evaporated, dry sticky
rice, small clay figurines. The shrine itself was built like a small temple. It
was similar to ones he had seen in the lowlands, built, the Doctor had
explained, to please a spirit whom the Shan called “the Lord of the
Place.” Edgar, who never counted himself a superstitious man, searched
his pockets for something to leave, but found only the bullet. He looked
nervously around him. There was no one there but the children, and he backed
away.