The Piano Tuner (15 page)

The soldier
stopped. There was silence. Even the rowdiest of the soldiers had quieted, awed
by the story.

“What was the song?” asked Edgar,
finally.

“Sorry?”

“The song. What was the
song that he played on his flute?”

“The song … a
Shan love ditty. When a Shan boy courts his sweetheart, he always plays the
same song. It’s nothing, rather simple, but it worked like a miracle.
Carroll later told the soldier who told me the story that no man could kill one
who played a song that reminded him of the first time he had fallen in
love.”

“Bloody amazing.” There was soft chuckling,
the men having drifted into contemplation.

“Any more
stories?” asked Edgar.

“About Carroll? Oh, Mr. Drake, so
many stories. So many stories.” He looked down into his glass, now nearly
empty. “But tomorrow maybe, I’m tired now. The journey is long, and
our destination’s days away. We have nothing but stories until bloody
Mandalay.”

They steamed up the river, steadily,
passing towns, their names streaming together like an incantation. Sitsayan.
Kama. Pato. Thayet. Allanmyo. Yahaing. Nyaungywagyi. As they moved farther
north, the land grew dry, the vegetation sparse. The green Pegu Hills soon
tapered to a flat plain, the dense foliage changed to thorn trees and toddy
palms. They stopped at many of the towns, dusty ports with little more than a
few huts and a fading monastery. There they picked up or unloaded cargo, and
occasionally passengers, soldiers usually, ruddy-faced boys who joined the
nightly conversations and brought their own stories.

And they all knew
of Carroll. A trooper from Kyaukchet told them that he met a soldier who had
been to Mae Lwin once, who said that it reminded him of stories of the Hanging
Gardens of Babylon, a fort like none other, festooned with the rarest of
orchids, where one could hear music playing at all hours and there was no need
to take up arms, for there were no
dacoits
for miles. Where men could
sit in the shade by the Salween and eat sweet fruit. Where the girls laughed
and tossed their hair and had eyes like those you see in dreams. A Pegu
rifleman told them that he had heard that Shan storytellers sang ballads about
Anthony Carroll, and an infantryman from Danubyu told them that there was no
sickness in Mae Lwin, for cool fresh winds followed the course of the Salween,
and one could sleep outside under moonlit skies and awake without a mosquito
bite, and there was none of the fever or dysentery that had killed so many of
his friends as they waded through steaming jungles and pulled leeches from
their ankles. A private traveling with his battalion to Hlaingdet had heard
that Anthony Carroll had dismantled his cannons and used them as planters for
flowers, and the guns of the soldiers who were lucky enough to pass through Mae
Lwin grew rusty, as the men spent their days writing letters and growing fat,
and listening to the laughter of children.

More men joined in the
stories, and as the steamer groaned northward, Edgar began to realize that the
tales were less what each soldier knew was true than what he needed to believe.
That although the Commissioner proclaimed there was Peace, for the soldiers
there was only Maintaining Peace, which was very different, and with this came
fear and the need for something to keep the fear away. And with this
realization came another: that he was surprised at how unimportant truth had
begun to be for himself. Perhaps more than any lonely soldier, he needed to
believe in the Surgeon-Major he had never met.

Sinbaungwe. Migyaungye. Minhla. One night he awoke to hear an eerie song
drifting in from the riverbank. He sat up in his bed. The sound was distant, a
murmur, disappearing beneath the sound of his breath. He listened, barely
moving. The boat moved on.

Magwe. Yenangyaung. And then, in Kyaukye,
the long slow pace of the journey upstream was broken by the arrival of three
new passengers in chains.

Dacoits.
Edgar had heard the word
many times since he read his first brief back in London. Thieves. Warlords.
Highwaymen. When Thibaw, the last king of Upper Burma, had ascended to the
throne almost ten years ago, the country had fallen into chaos. The new king
was weak, and the Burmese hold on their land began to crumble, not to any armed
resistance but to an epidemic of lawlessness. Throughout Upper Burma, bands of
marauders attacked lone travelers and caravans alike, raided villages, demanded
protection money from lonely farmers. Their capacity for violence was well
known; testimony lay in the hundreds of razed villages, in the bodies of those
who resisted nailed up along the roads. When the British inherited the rice
fields of Upper Burma along with the annexation, they also inherited the
dacoits.

The captives were brought on deck, where they
squatted, three dusty men with three parallel lines of chain from neck to neck,
wrist to wrist, ankle to ankle. Before the boat pushed off from the rickety
docks, a crowd of passengers had already gathered in a semicircle around the
prisoners, who let their hands dangle between their knees and stared back,
emotionless, defiant of the crowd of soldiers and travelers. They were watched
over by three Indian soldiers, and Edgar was terrified to think what the
dacoits
must have done to deserve such a guard. He didn’t have
to wait long for an answer, for as the crowd of passengers stared down at the
prisoners, the Italian woman traveler asked one of the soldiers what the men
had done, and the soldier in turn asked one of the guards.

The three
men, explained the guard, were the leaders of one of the fiercest bands of
dacoits,
who had terrorized the foothills east of Hlaingdet, near the
British fort established during the early military expeditions into the Shan
States. Edgar knew the name Hlaingdet; this was where he was to receive an
escort on the road to Mae Lwin. The
dacoits
had been bold enough to
attack villages in the vicinity of the fort, where villagers had thought that
by moving close to army headquarters they would be safe from the marauders.
They had burned rice fields and robbed caravans, and finally had attacked and
burned one village and raped women and girls by holding knives to the throats
of their children. It had been a large band, perhaps twenty men. When tortured,
they had pointed out these three men as their leaders. Now they were being
taken to Mandalay for questioning.

“And the other men?”
the Italian woman had asked.

“Killed in the encounter,”
said the soldier stoically.

“All seventeen?” asked the
woman. “I thought you said they were captured and confessed
…” But she let the sentence trail off into silence as her face
flushed red. “Oh,” she said, weakly.

Edgar stood and
stared at the prisoners, trying to see in their expressions evidence of their
terrible deeds, but they revealed nothing. They sat in the heavy irons, their
faces covered with thick dust that colored their dark hair a lighter brown. One
of them looked very young, with a thin mustache and his long hair tied up in a
bun on his head. His tattoos were blurred by the dirt, but Edgar thought he
could make out the deep stain of a tiger across the boy’s chest. Like the
others, his face was set and defiant. He stared back at those who stood around
and condemned him. For one brief moment, his eyes met Edgar’s, and held
there, before the piano tuner was able to look away.

Slowly, the
passengers lost interest in the captives and filed away to their rooms. Edgar
followed, still shaken by the story. He would not write to Katherine about
this, he decided; he didn’t wish to frighten her. As he tried to sleep,
he imagined the attack, and thought of the women villagers, of how they must
have carried their children, wondering if they were merchants or if they worked
in the fields, wondering if they wore
thanaka
too. He lay down and
tried to sleep. The images of painted girls came to haunt him, the swirls of
the white paint over skin blackened by the sun.

On the deck the
dacoits
crouched in their shackles.

The steamer pushed on. The
night passed, and the day, and the towns.

Sinbyugyun. Sale. Seikpyu.
Singu. Like a chant. Milaungbya.

Pagan.

It was
nearly sunset when the first of the temples appeared on the vast plain. A lone
building, fallen into ruins and covered with vines. Below its crumbling walls,
an old man sat on the back of an oxcart pulled by a pair of humpbacked Brahmin
cows. The steamship was moving close to the shore to avoid sandbanks in the
center of the river, and the old man turned to watch them pass. The dust turned
up by the cart reflected the rays of the sun, casting the temple in a golden
haze.

A woman walked alone under a parasol, heading somewhere unseen.

The soldiers had told Edgar that the ship would stop “for
sightseeing” at the ruins of Pagan, the ancient capital of a kingdom that
had ruled Burma for centuries. At last, after nearly an hour of steaming past
rows of fallen monuments, as the river began its slow turn to the west, they
stopped at a nondescript quay and a number of passengers disembarked. Edgar
followed the Italian couple over a narrow plank.

They walked with a
soldier who led them up a dusty road. More pagodas soon became visible,
structures that had been obscured by the scattered foliage or the rise of the
bank. The sun was setting rapidly. A pair of bats flapped through the air. Soon
they reached the base of a large pyramid. “Let’s climb here,”
said the soldier. “The finest view in all of Pagan.”

The
steps were steep. At the top of the stairs, a wide platform circled the central
spire. If they had arrived ten minutes later, they would have missed the sun as
it cast its rays over the vast field of pagodas that stretched away from the
river to the distant mountains, floating in the dust and smoke of burning rice
fields.

“What are those mountains?” Edgar asked the
soldier.

“The Shan Hills, Mr. Drake. Finally we can see
them.”

“The Shan Hills,” Edgar repeated. He stared
past the temples that stood like soldiers in formation, to the mountains that
rose abruptly from the plain and seemed to hover in the sky. He thought of a
river that ran through those hills, and how somewhere, hidden in the darkness,
waited a man who perhaps stared out at the same sky, but who had yet to know
his name.

The sun set. The mantle of night crept across the plain,
enveloping each pagoda one by one, until at last the soldier turned, and the
travelers followed him back to the ship.

Nyaung-U,
Pakokku, and then it was day again. Kanma, and the confluence of the Chindwin
River, Myingyan, and Yandabo, and then it was night, and as the Sagaing Hills
rose to the west, the passengers went to sleep knowing that during the night
the steamship, plowing upstream, would pass the old capital of Amarapura, which
means City of the Immortals. Before the sun rose, they would arrive in
Mandalay.

9

T
he
following morning, Edgar was awakened by the sudden arrival of silence. The
steamboat, after groaning relentlessly for seven days, cut her engines and
drifted. New sounds slipped into the cabin: a faint sloshing, the whispered
shriek of metal on metal as a kerosene lamp swung on its chain, the shouts of
men, and the distant yet unmistakable clamor of a bazaar. Edgar rose and
dressed without washing, left his room, and walked the length of the corridor
toward the spiral stairs that climbed to the deck, conscious of the creaking of
the floorboards beneath his bare feet. At the top of the stairs, he almost
collided with one of the young deckhands, who swung down the banister like a
langur. Mandalay, said the boy, grinning, and swept his arm toward the
shore.

They were floating past a market. Or into it; the boat seemed
to be descending, the bank and its inhabitants swirling to overflow from the
quayside and onto the deck. The market pressed in on either side, hustling
shapes and voices shouting, the floating outlines of
thanaka
in the
shade of broad bamboo hats, the silhouettes of traders rising from the backs of
elephants. A group of children laughed and leaped over the rail and onto the
boat, chasing each other, weaving through the piles of coiled rope, the stacks
of chain, and now bags of spices, carried forward by a row of vendors who swept
over the deck of the ship. Edgar heard singing behind him and turned. A
roti-wallah stood on the deck, grinning a toothless smile, his dough spinning
on his fist. The sun, he sang, and raised his lips to point at the sky, The
sun. His dough spun faster and he hurled it skyward.

Edgar looked
back toward the steamer, but he could no longer see the ship, it was all the
bazaar. Spices spilled from the bags onto the deck. A line of monks wound past,
chanting for alms, circling him as he watched their bare feet track patterns in
scattered dust the color of their robes. A woman shouted at him in Burmese,
chewing betel, her tongue the color of plums, her laughter turning into the
pattering of footsteps. The children again ran past. Then laughter again. Edgar
turned to look back to the roti-wallah, and then up at the spinning dough. The
man sang and reached up and picked the sun from the sky. It was dark and Edgar
stared into the darkness of his cabin.

The engines had indeed stopped.
For a brief moment he wondered if he was still dreaming, but his window was
open and no light poured in. Outside he heard voices, and at first he dismissed
them as those of the crew. But the sounds seemed to be coming from farther
away. He climbed to the deck. The moon was nearly full, casting blue shadows on
the men who swiftly rolled barrels toward the gangplank. The bank was lined
with shacks. For the second time that night, Edgar Drake arrived in
Mandalay.