The Piano Tuner (37 page)

The Doctor looked up and his voice grew suddenly stern. “She will
stay with me.”

“I only asked because—”

“She is safer here, Mr. Drake.”

“But
Doctor—”

“I am sorry, Mr. Drake, but I cannot talk
longer. We must make preparations to leave.”

“There must be
a way I can stay, now.” Edgar tried to control the panic in his
voice.

“Mr. Drake,” said the Doctor slowly, “I do not
have time for this. I am not giving you a choice.”

Edgar stared
at him. “And I am not one of your soldiers.”

There was a
long silence. The Doctor massaged the back of his neck again and stared down at
the maps. When he looked up again, his face had softened. “Mr.
Drake,” he said, “I am sorry that this had to happen. I know what
this means to you, I know more than you think I know. But I have no choice now.
I think one day you will understand.”

Edgar
stumbled out into the sun.

He stood still and tried to calm himself.
Around him, the camp spun with dizzying activity. Men arranged sandbags or ran
to the river with rifles and ammunition. Others cut and tied bamboo into sharp
ramparts. A line of women and children worked as a fire brigade, filling
buckets, clay vessels, cooking pots with water.

“Mr.
Drake.” These words from behind him. A small boy held his bag. “I
am taking this to the river, sir.” The piano tuner only nodded.

His eyes followed a line of activity up the mountain, where the front wall
of the piano room had been completely removed. He could see men working inside,
shirtless bodies toiling at a bamboo-and-rope pulley. A crowd had gathered
below to watch, buckets of water and rifles still in their hands. Above he
heard shouting. Further up the trail, a group of men strained at a rope. He saw
the piano lurch into the air, uneasy at first, but in the room the men steadied
it, pushing it onto a slide made of long pieces of bamboo that had been lashed
together. The men at the rope groaned, the piano swung out on the pulley,
flying now, slowly, down, and Edgar heard a ringing as they let it drop, the
rope burning their hands. For a long time the piano remained suspended, inching
slowly down the bamboo, until at last it touched the ground, and another group
of men rushed to catch it, and Edgar took his first breath since he had looked
up.

The piano stood on a dry patch of earth. It seemed very small in
the light, against the backdrop of the camp.

More shouts and running,
bodies moved about him in a blur. He remembered the afternoon he left London on
the steamer, how the fog swirled, how all became silent, and he was left alone.
He felt a presence beside him.

“You are leaving,” she said.

“Yes.” He looked at her. “You know?”

“He told me.”

“I want to stay,
but—”

“You should go. It isn’t safe.” She
looked at the ground. She was standing so close to him that he could see the
top of her head, the stem of a single purple flower twisting itself into the
darkness of her hair.

“Come with me,” he said
suddenly.

“You know I can’t.”

“By this
evening I will be miles downstream, by morning you and Doctor Carroll may be
dead, and I will never know—”

“Don’t say those
things.”

“I … hadn’t planned for this. There
is so much left that I … I may never see you again, I don’t want
to say this, but—”

“Mr. Drake …” She
began to speak but stopped. Her eyes were moist. “I am sorry.”

“Please, come with me.”

“I must stay with
Anthony,” she said.

Anthony, he thought, I have never heard his
name. “I came here because of you,” he said, but already his words
sounded empty.

“You came here for something else,” she
said, and from the river came a call.

22

T
hey carried the piano through the
flowering brush at the edge of the camp and down to the river. There, a raft
was waiting, a rough contraption of logs three times the length of the piano.
The men splashed into the shallows and set the piano on the raft. They lashed
its legs through spaces between the logs. They worked quickly, as if familiar
with the task. When the piano was secured, a chest was placed on the other end
of the raft, and similarly fastened. “Your belongings are inside,”
said Carroll.

It was still unclear who among the many men wading
through the water, twisting rope, tying, adjusting, would accompany him, until
at last the piano was secured and the raft balanced. Then two boys walked up to
the bank, picked two rifles each, and walked back to the raft.

“This is Seing To and Tint Naing,” said the Doctor. “They
are brothers. They are very skilled boatmen and they speak Burmese. They will
accompany you down the river. Nok Lek will go as well, but in a dugout, to
scout the rapids ahead. You will float to Karen country, or perhaps as far as
Moulmein, which would take five or six days. There you will be deep into
British territory and safe.”

“And then what should I do?
When should I return?”

“Return? I don’t know, Mr.
Drake …” The Doctor was silent, and then held out a small piece of
paper, folded and sealed with wax. “I want you to have this.”

“What is it?” said Edgar, surprised by the offer.

The
Doctor thought for a moment. “That is for you to decide. You must wait to
read it.” Behind him one of the boys said, “We are ready, Mr.
Drake, we need to go.”

Edgar extended his hand and took the
paper, and folded it once more and slipped into his shirt pocket. “Thank
you,” he said quietly, and he stepped onto the raft. They pushed off from
the shore. Only looking back at the bank did he see her, standing in the
flowers, her body half hidden in the brush. Behind her Mae Lwin rose to the
mountain, layers of bamboo homes, one without a wall, open and naked to the
river.

The raft was caught by the current and swept downstream.

The rains had swollen the river considerably since Edgar
had first floated down months before. He thought of the night they had arrived,
descending silently through the darkness. How different a world it seemed from
the one in which he now traveled, the wooded banks drenched in heavy sunlight,
the garish scintillation of the leaves. Sensing their approach, a pair of birds
took off from the shore, flapping under the weight of the light until they
caught a current of air and banked downstream. Hoopoe,
Upupa epops,
Perhaps they are the same ones I saw the day I arrived, he thought, surprised
that he knew their name. The boat followed the birds, sunlight flashing off the
case of the piano.

No one spoke. Nok Lek paddled ahead, singing a soft
song. One of the brothers sat on the chest at the back of the raft, a paddle in
his hand, his lithe muscles flexed against the current. The other stood at the
bow, staring downstream. From the center of the raft, Edgar watched the bank
reel past. It was an unworldly feeling, the smooth descent past hills and
streams that tumbled down to join the Salween. The raft rode low in the river,
and at times, water washed up over the logs and touched his feet. When it did
this, the sunlight flashed on the waves, hiding the raft beneath a thinness, a
fluttering of light. He felt as if he and the piano and the boys were standing
on the river.

As they floated, he watched the birds diving and rising
on the currents of air, coursing in flight with the river. He wished he was
with the Doctor, to tell him that he had seen them, so that the Doctor could
add them to his collection of sightings. He wondered what the Doctor was doing
now, how they were preparing, if he too would bear arms against the attack. He
imagined the Doctor turning back and seeing Khin Myo standing in the flowers.
He wondered how much he knew and how much she would tell. No more than twelve
hours had passed since he had touched his lips to the warmth of her neck.

And from Khin Myo, his thoughts drifted to a memory of the old tuner he had
once been apprenticed to, who used to sneak a bottle of wine from a wooden
cabinet after they finished work in the afternoons. What a distant memory, he
thought, and he wondered where it came from, and what it meant that now was the
moment of its remembering. He thought of the room where he had learned to tune,
and the cold afternoons when the old man would wax poetically about the role of
a tuner, and Edgar would listen with amusement. As a young apprentice, his
master’s words had seemed maudlin. Why do
you
want to tune
pianos? asked the old man. Because I have good hands and I like music, the boy
had answered, and his teacher laughed, Is that it? What more? replied the boy.
More? And the man raised a glass and smiled. Don’t you know, he asked,
that in every piano there lies a song, hidden? The boy shook his head. Just the
mumblings of an old man perhaps, But you see, the movement of a pianist’s
fingers are purely mechanical, an ordinary collection of muscles and tendons
that know only a few simple rules of rate and rhythm. We must tune pianos, he
said, so that something as mundane as muscles and tendons and keys and wire and
wood can become song. And what is the name of the song that lies in this old
piano? the boy had asked, pointing to a dusty upright. Song, said the man, It
doesn’t have a name, Only song. And the boy had laughed because he
hadn’t heard of a song without a name, and the old man laughed because he
was drunk and happy.

The keys and hammers trembled with the sway of the
current, and in the faint ringing that rose up Edgar again heard a song with no
name, a song made only of notes but no melody, a song that repeated itself,
each echo a ripple of the first, a song that came from the piano itself, for
there was no musician but the river. He thought back to the night in Mae Lwin,
to
The Well-Tempered Clavier,
It is a piece bound by strict rules of
counterpoint, as all fugues are, the song is but an elaboration of one simple
melody, we are destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines.

It makes you wonder, said the old man, lifting his wineglass, why a
man who composed such melodies of worship, of faith, named his greatest fugue
after the act of tuning a piano.

They floated
downstream. In the afternoon, their progress was slowed by a steep drop through
rapids, around which they were forced to portage.

The river widened.
Nok Lek tied his dugout to their raft.

In the early evening, they
stopped at a small deserted village by the edge of the river. Nok Lek paddled
the canoe to shore and the two other boys jumped into the shallows, splashing
while they pulled the raft. At first it resisted, like a recalcitrant animal,
but slowly they pulled it out of the current and into an eddy. They fastened it
to a log that lay on the beach. Edgar helped them untie the piano and lift and
carry it to the bank, where they rested it on the sand. The sky was heavy and
they pitched a shelter with woven mats and covered the piano.

At the
edge of the buildings, the boys found a discarded
chinlon
ball and
began to kick it about in the shallows. Their playfulness seemed incongruous to
Edgar, whose thoughts raced one upon the other, Where now are the Doctor, and
Khin Myo, Has the fighting begun, Perhaps the battle is already over. Only
hours ago he had been there, but now he could see no smoke, nor hear gunfire,
nor screams. The river was calm, and the sky clear save for the gathering mist.

He left the boys and walked up the bank. It had begun to drizzle
lightly, and his feet punched out dry footprints in the moist sand. Curious as
to why it had been deserted, he followed a trail that ran up from the shore and
toward the village. It was a short climb; like Mae Lwin, it had been built
close to the river. At the top of the path he stopped.

It was, or had
been, a typical Shan village, a collection of huts gathered in disarray,
crowded on the bank like a flock of birds. Jungle swelled behind it, flowing
down between the huts in tangles of vines and climbing plants. Edgar sensed the
burning before he saw it, a mistiness in excess of the rain, a stench of soot
that sifted up from the charred bamboo and mud. He wondered immediately how
long ago it had been abandoned, if the stench of burning was fresh or but a
reincarnation in the rain, Moisture destroys sound, he thought, but enhances
smell.

He walked slowly. Details emerged from soot stains and
ashes.

Most of the huts were badly burned, leaving many of the
structures standing bare and roofless. In others, walls had collapsed, and
roofs of intertwined leaves undulated in half suspension. Burned fragments of
bamboo lay scattered on the ground. At the base of the lowest houses, a rat ran
through the debris, the pattering of its feet violating the silence. There were
no other signs of life. Like Mae Lwin, he thought again, but absent were the
chickens that pecked at fallen grain from the path. Absent the children.

He walked slowly through the village, passed burned and abandoned rooms,
looted, empty. At the edge of the jungle, creepers had already begun to sneak
through the interlacings in the walls, the slats in the floorboards. Perhaps it
has been abandoned long ago, he thought, but plants come quickly here, as does
decay.

It was nearly dark, and mist from the river sifted through the
burned structures. Suddenly Edgar felt afraid. It was too silent. He had not
wandered far, but now could not tell the direction back to the river. He walked
swiftly through the mass of homes, which seemed to loom, doors like burned
mouths, skeletal, leering, mist collecting on the rooftops and coalescing into
droplets, rivulets, running now. The houses weep, Edgar thought, and through
the slats of a hut he saw the flames of a fire, lighting the mist, and darkened
shadows that swelled against the hillside and danced.

The boys were
sitting around the fire when he approached.