The Piano Tuner (41 page)

As he walked, he thought of little, but looked only for signs that could
lead him to Mae Lwin. It became hot, and he felt beads of sweat mix with the
drops of rain in his hair. He began to feel dizzy. He rolled up his sleeves and
opened his shirt and in doing so, felt something in his pocket. It was a folded
piece of paper, and for a moment he tried to remember what it could be, until
he recalled his last moments on the shore with the Doctor, and the letter he
had given him. He unfolded it as he walked, peeling the wet sheets open. He
held it out before him, and stopped.

It was a page torn from Anthony
Carroll’s copy of
The Odyssey,
a printed text annotated with
India ink swirls of Shan script, and lines underlined:

My men went on
and presently met the Lotus-Eaters,
nor did these Lotus-Eaters have
any thoughts of destroying
our companions, but they only gave them
lotus to taste of.
But any of them who ate the honey-sweet fruit of
lotus
was unwilling to take any message back, or to go
away, but they wanted to stay there with the lotus-eating
people, feeding on lotus, and forget the way home.

Through the
translucence of the wet page, Edgar saw more writing and turned the paper. In
dark strokes the Doctor had scrawled, “For Edgar Drake, who has
tasted.” Edgar read the words again, and slowly lowered his hand, so that
the page flapped at his side in the breeze. And again he began to walk, now
with less urgency, slowly, perhaps it was only because he was tired. In the
distance, the land rose to become the sky, blurring together in watercolor
strokes of distant rainstorms. He looked up and saw the clouds, and it was as
if they were burning, the pillows of cotton turning to ash. He felt the water
from his clothes evaporate, steaming, leaving him as a spirit does the
body.

He passed over a rise, expecting to see the river, or perhaps Mae
Lwin, but there was only a long road stretching forward to the horizon, and he
followed it. In the distance, he saw a single blemish on the open stretch of
land, and as he approached, he saw that it was a small shrine. He stopped in
front of it. This is an odd place to leave offerings, he thought, There are no
mountains or homes, There is no one here, and he stopped and looked over the
bowls of rice, the wilted flowers, joss sticks, the now-decaying fruit. There
was a statue in the spirit-house, a faded wooden sprite with a sad smile and a
broken hand. Edgar stopped in the road and took the paper from his pocket, and
read it once again. He folded it and tucked it next to the little statue, I
leave you a story, he said.

He walked and the sky was light but he saw
no sun.

In the afternoon, he saw a woman in the
distance. She carried a parasol.

She moved slowly along the road, and
he couldn’t tell if she was approaching him or walking away. All was very
still, and then from a distant memory came the echoes of a single summer day in
England, when he had first taken Katherine’s hand in his and they had
walked through Regent’s Park. They had said little, but watched the
crowds and carriages, and other young couples. She had departed with only a
whisper, My parents are waiting, I will meet you soon, and disappeared across
the green beneath a white parasol, which caught the sunlight and danced
slightly in the breeze.

He thought now of this moment, the sounds of
her voice growing clearer, and he found himself walking fast, now a half-run,
until from behind him, he thought he heard hoofbeats, and then a voice, a
calling to halt, but he did not turn.

Again, the shout, Halt, and he
heard mechanical sounds, clinkings of metal, but they were distant. There was
another shout, and then a shot, and then Edgar Drake fell.

He lay on the ground, a warmth spreading beneath him, and
he turned and stared at the sun, which had come back, for in 1887, as the
histories say, there was a terrible drought on the Shan Plateau. And if they
don’t tell of the rains, or of Mae Lwin, or a piano tuner, it is for the
same reason, for they came and vanished, the earth turning dry once more.

The woman walks into a mirage, the ghost of light and water that the
Burmese call
than hlat.
Around her, the air wavers, splitting her
body, separating, spinning. And then she too disappears. Now only the sun and
the parasol remain.

Author’s Note

An
old Shan monk sat deep in argument with the Hindu ascetic.

The
monk explained that all Shans believe that when a man dies, his soul goes to
the River of Death, where a boat waits to take him across, and this is why,
when a Shan dies, his friends place a coin in his mouth, to pay the ferryman
who takes him to the other side.

There is another river, said the
Hindu, which must be crossed before the highest heaven is reached. Everyone
sooner or later reaches its shore, and has to search out his own way across. To
some it is an easy and quick crossing, to others it is a slow and painful
struggle to reach the other side, but everyone gets home at last.

Adapted from Mrs. Leslie Milne,
Shans at Home
(1910)

Edgar Drake, Anthony Carroll and Khin Myo, the site of Mae Lwin, and the
delivery of an Erard piano to the Salween River are fictional.

Nevertheless, I have attempted to place my story within a true historical
context, a task facilitated by the fact that the history and characters of the
Shan Revolt are more colorful than any imagination can conjure. All historical
briefs in the story, from Burmese history to the Erard piano, contain true
information. The pacification of the Shan States represented a critical period
in British imperial expansion. The Limbin Confederacy was real, and their
resistance determined. My story ends in approximately April 1887, when the
principality of Lawksawk was occupied by British forces. Following this
military victory, British domination of the Southern Shan States was swift. The
Limbin Prince surrendered on May 13, and by June 22 Mr. A. H. Hildebrand, the
superintendent of the Shan States, reported that “the Southern Shan
States have now all given in their submission.”

True historical
figures referred to in this work of fiction include the political officer to
the Shan States, Sir James George Scott, who introduced soccer to Burma while
principal of St. John’s School in Rangoon, and Burma to me with his
scholarly and sympathetic work
The Burman,
the first academic piece I
read on the country and the inspiration for much of the cultural background of
my story. His books, from meticulous descriptions of the
yôkthe
pwè
in
The Burman,
to the encyclopedic compendium of local
histories in
The Gazetteer of Upper Burma and the Shan States,
to the
collection of his letters,
Scott of the Shan Hills,
were an invaluable
source of information, as well as an endless pleasure to read.

Dmitri
Mendeleev, the father of the periodic table, did meet with the Burmese consul
in Paris. What they discussed is still unknown.

Maung Tha Zan was a
star of Burmese
pwè.
He was not as skilled as Maung Tha
Byaw.

Belaidour,
which Berbers call
adil-ououchchn,
is known to Western science as
Atropa belladonna,
and is used
primarily for hearts that beat too slowly. It earned its species name because
its berries also make women’s eyes wide and dark.

Anthony
Carroll’s suspicions about the spread of malaria were correct. That the
mosquito carries the disease would be proven ten years later, by another
Englishman, Dr. Ronald Ross, also in the Indian Medical Service, but at a
different hospital, in the city of Secunderabad. His use of “a plant that
came from China” was also prescient. Qinghaosu is now used to make
artemisinin, a potent antimalarial drug whose efficacy was
“rediscovered” in 1971.

All the
sawbwas
are real,
and still local heroes in the Shan States. The meeting in Mongpu is invented.

As for Twet Nga Lu, the Bandit Prince was captured at last by British
forces, and the description of his death, by Sir Charles Crosthwaite, in
The Pacification of Burma,
is worth quoting here:

Mr.
Hildebrand was instructed therefore to send Twet Nga Lu back to Mongnai to be
tried by the Sawbwa. On the way he attempted to escape and was shot by the
Beluchi guard escorting him. The men returned to Fort Stedman and reported what
had happened, saying that they had buried him on the spot …

All doubt on this point was removed afterwards. The scene of the
brigand’s death was in the wooded hills which border Mongpawn. The day
after he was shot, a party of Shans from Mongpawn disinterred, or rather
lifted, the corpse from its shallow grave, and shook off the loose earth. The
head was cut off, shaved, and sent to Mongnai, and exhibited there at the
north, south, east, and west gates of the town during the absence of the
Assistant Superintendent at Fort Stedman. The various talismans were removed
from the trunk and limbs. Such charms are generally small coins or pieces of
metal, which are inserted under the skin. These would be doubly prized as
having been enshrined in the flesh of so noted a leader, and no doubt were
eagerly bought up. The body was then boiled down, and a concoction known to the
Shans as
mahe si
was obtained, which is an unfailing charm against all
kinds of wounds. So valuable a “medicine” did not long remain in
the hands of the poor, and soon found its way into some princely medicine-chest
… Such was the end of Twet Nga Lu. It was certainly, so far as the body
is concerned, most complete.

Or as Lady Scott, who edited
Scott
of the Shan Hills,
wrote of the Bandit Prince, “This was the
wholesale end of this remarkable man.”

Details of Shan myths and
culture, local medicine, and natural history I have collected in Burma and
Thailand, and the literature of the period. While I believe most of the
literature I encountered to be well intentioned and well researched, I fear
that many of the sources contain prejudices or simple misinterpretations common
to Victorian England. For this novel, however, what Victorians thought to be
fact at the turn of the century is more important to me than what is known to
be fact now. Thus I apologize for any factual inconsistencies that have
resulted from this decision, an example of which looms in the paragraph cited
above: the relationship of the Kachin
mahaw tsi
used by Doctor
Carroll, which according to the great plant hunter Frank Kingdon-Ward was made
from a species of
Euonymus,
and Crosthwaite’s etymologically
similar
mahe si
is still a mystery to me, yet clearly intriguing.

I am indebted to countless sources. Among the books I found indispensable,
in addition to those by Scott, Kingdon-Ward, and Crosthwaite were:
Burma’s Struggle Against British Imperialism, 1885–1895
by
Ni Ni Myint, for its discussion of the Shan Revolt from a Burmese perspective;
Shans at Home
by Mrs. Leslie Milne, a wonderful ethnography of the
Shan published in 1910; and
The Illusion of Life: Burmese
Marionettes
by Ma Thanegi, for its details of the
yôkthe
pwè. The Making of Modern Burma
by Thant Myint-U is worth noting
for its discussion of the Anglo-Burmese wars, a refreshing reanalysis of many
opinions long held by historians, as well as by characters in my book. Finally
I am indebted to William Braid White’s
Piano Tuning and Allied
Arts
for rounding out Edgar Drake’s technical skills.

On a final note, long after beginning this story, I
journeyed north from where I had once studied malaria along the southern
Thai-Myanmar border, to the small town of Mae Sam Laep on the Salween River,
far downstream from the imaginary site of Mae Lwin. There I traveled on a
long-tailed trading boat through the wooded, silent shores, where we stopped at
Karen villages hidden in the forest. It was hot that afternoon, and the air was
still and silent, but at a muddy trading post on the banks of a small river, a
strange sound rose up from the thick brush. It was a melody, and before the
motor kicked in and we moved away from the shore, I recognized it as the sound
of a piano.

Perhaps it was only a recording, creaking out on one of the
dusty old phonographs that can still be found in some of the more remote
markets. Perhaps. It was, however, terribly out of tune.

Acknowledgments

The
research for this book would have been impossible without the help of the staff
at the following organizations: in Thailand, the Mahidol University Faculty of
Tropical Medicine and Ranong Provincial Hospital; in the UK, the British
Library, the Guildhall Library, the National Gallery, and the Museum of London;
in the United States, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Strybing Arboretum and
Botanical Gardens in San Francisco, and the libraries at Stanford University,
the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of California at
San Francisco. The names of the many locations in Myanmar (Burma) that inspired
this story are too numerous to mention, but without the warmth extended to me
by the people throughout that country, this book would never have been
written.

I wish to acknowledge individually the support of Aet Nwe,
Guha Bala, Nicholas Blake, Liza Bolitzer, Mary Lee Bossert, William Bossert,
Riley Bove, Charles Burnham, Michael Carlisle, Liz Cowen, Lauren Doctoroff,
Ellen Feldman, Jeremy Fields, Tinker Green, David Grewal, Emma Grunebaum,
Fumihiko Kawamoto, Elizabeth Kellogg, Khin Toe, Peter Kunstadter, Whitney Lee,
Josh Lehrer-Graiwer, Jafi Lipson, Helen Loeser, Sornchai Looareesuwan, Mimi
Margaretten, Feyza Marouf, Gene McAfee, Jill McCorkle, Kevin McGrath, Ellis
McKenzie, Maureen Mitchell, Joshua Mooney, Karthik Muralidharan, Myo, Gregory
Nagy, Naing, Keeratiya Nontabutra, Jintana Patarapotikul, Maninthorn
Phanumaphorn, Wanpen Puangsudrug, Derk Purcell, Maxine Rodburg, Debbie
Rosenberg, Nader Sanai, Sidhorn Sangdhanoo, Bonnie Schiff-Glenn, Pawan Singh,
Gavin Steckler, Suvanee Supavej, Parnpen Viriyavejakul, Meredith Warren,
Suthera Watcharacup, Nicholas White, Chansuda Wongsrichanalai, Annie Zatlin,
and the countless others in Myanmar and Thailand who told me their stories but
whose names I never learned.

For advice on Burma, I am especially
indebted to Wendy Law-Yone, Thant Myint-U, and Tint Lwin. Two piano tuners
helped train Edgar Drake: David Skolnik and Ben Treuhaft. Ben’s
experience tuning pianos in Cuba and time spent repairing an 1840 Erard grand
once played by Liszt made him a perfect adviser for another grand, in another
tropics. Of course, all errors with regard to Burma, piano tuning, or any other
matter are entirely my own.

Finally, several people have been
particularly devoted to this book. My deepest gratitude and affection goes to
Christy Fletcher and Don Lamm for their advice and guidance on all matters, and
to Maria Rejt, at Picador, in the UK, for helping make Edgar Drake a truer
Londoner. Robin Desser at Knopf has been a wonderful editor; her insightful and
incisive comments, support, and sense of humor leave me, after so many days
spent discussing nothing but words, at a profound loss of them to express my
true appreciation.

From the day I first told them about a piano by a
river, my parents, Robert and Naomi, and sister, Ariana, have welcomed Edgar
Drake into the family and encouraged my imagination to leave home. My greatest
love and thanks go to them.