The Piano Tuner

by Daniel Mason

  Edgar interjected, “Oh, I am hardly fit to live here! It’s just that with the condition the piano is in, I am afraid that with the onset of the rains, the piano will be driven sharp and create all sorts of tuning problems, or perhaps even more serious damage, and in two weeks I will receive another letter requesting that I return to Mae Lwin to mend a piano again.”

  “Of course, take your time.” The Doctor nodded politely, and turned back to his papers.

  That night Edgar couldn’t sleep. He lay inside the cocoon of mosquito netting and ran his fingers back and forth over the newly formed callus on the inside of his pointer finger, The tuner’s callus, Katherine, It is the product of the constant free plucking of strings.

  He thought of the Erard. Certainly he had seen more beautiful pianos in his life. Yet he had never seen anything like the image of the Salween, framed by the window, reflected in the upturned lid. He wondered if the Doctor had planned it, or even designed the room with the piano in mind. Suddenly he recalled the sealed envelope the Doctor had mentioned that afternoon. He slipped out from beneath the mosquito net and rummaged through his bags until he found it. Inside the draping he lit a candle.

  “To the Piano Tuner, to be opened only upon arriving in Mae Lwin, A.C.”

  He began to read.

  March 23, 1886

  Report on the Movement of an Erard Piano from

  Mandalay to Mae Lwin, the Shan States

  Surgeon-Major Anthony J. Carroll

  Gentlemen,

  I herein report the successful transport and delivery of the 1840 Erard grand piano sent from your office on 21 January 1886 to Mandalay, and subsequently relayed to my site. The following is a detailed account of the transfer. Please excuse the informality of some of this letter, but I feel it necessary to convey the drama involved in this most demanding effort.

  The shipment of the piano from London to Mandalay was previously reported by Colonel Fitzgerald. Briefly, the piano was carried on a P&O Line mail steamer bound for Madras and then Rangoon. The voyage was relatively uneventful: rumor has it that the piano was removed from its packing crate and played by a sergeant in a regimental band, to the delight of the crew and passengers. In Rangoon the piano was transferred to another steamship, and carried north on the Irrawaddy River. This is the typical route, and again the passage proceeded without incident. Thus the piano arrived in Mandalay on the morning of 22 February, where I was able to receive it personally. I am aware that there have been certain protests about my leaving my post to come to Mandalay to receive the piano, as well as, I might add, some criticisms about the effort, cost, and necessity of such an unusual shipment. To the former criticism, the Office of the Political Administrator will testify that I had been summoned to a meeting regarding recent insurgencies by the monk U Ottama in Chin State, and thus was already in Mandalay to receive the piano. Against the latter slander, I can only protest that such attacks are but ad hominem in nature, and I do suspect a certain jealousy in my detractors; I continue to control the only outpost in the Shan States not to have been attacked by rebel forces, and have made the most significant progress of anyone with regard to our ultimate task of pacification and treaty-signing.

  But I digress, gentlemen, for which I beg your forgiveness. To continue: we received the piano at the docks and transported it by horse cart to the town center, where we immediately began to prepare for its transfer. The route to our site presented two general types of terrain. The first, from Mandalay to the foot of the Shan Hills, is a flat and dry plain. For this leg I commissioned a Burmese timber elephant, despite my reluctance to entrust such a delicate instrument to an animal that spends its days hurling logs. Employing Brahmin cows had been suggested, but there are times when the trail grows too narrow for a pair, and it was decided that an elephant would be better. The second leg presented more daunting challenges, as the trails were too steep and narrow for such an animal. It was decided that we would have to continue on foot. Fortunately, the piano was lighter than I expected, and could be lifted and carried by six men. Although I had considered traveling with a larger group, and perhaps an army escort, I did not want the locals to associate the piano with a military goal. My men would be enough; I knew the route well and there had been only rare reports of dacoit attacks. We immediately set about making a litter on which to carry the piano.

  We commenced our walk on the morning of 24 February, after I had finished with official matters at army headquarters. The piano was loaded onto a large munitions cart. This in turn was attached to the elephant, a giant of a beast with sad eyes who seemed utterly unfazed by her unusual load. She moved briskly; fortunately we had received the shipment in the dry season, and we were blessed with excellent weather for our journey. Had it been raining, I think the trip would have been impossible, with inestimable damage to the piano, as well as a heavy physical toll on our men. As it was, it would be a difficult enough journey.

  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 occasional
ly 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 ca
ndle 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.