The Piano Tuner (27 page)

Edgar dropped the bullet into his pocket and
peered back inside. “Actually not too bad. I will have to replace the
strings, and I need to take another look at the soundboard, but I think it will
be all right.”

“Perhaps you should start. I don’t
want to keep you any longer.”

“I probably should. I hope I
haven’t bored you.”

“No, not in the slightest, Mr.
Drake. It has been a pleasure—most educational. I can see I have chosen
my help well.” He extended his hand. “Good luck with the patient.
Shout if you need anything.” He turned and walked from the room, closing
the door behind him. The force sent a tremor through the floor. There was a
faint chime of the stirring of strings.

Edgar walked
back around to the bench. He didn’t sit; he always told his apprentices
that pianos were best tuned if the tuner was standing.

Now to begin, he
thought. He hit the middle-octave C key. Too low. He tried one octave below,
and then C in the other octaves. Same problem: both almost a full semitone off.
The treble notes were even worse. He played the first movement of the
English Suites.
Without the key with broken strings. He was always
self-conscious about his skill as a pianist, but he loved the cool ivory of the
keyboard, the swing and sway of playing a melody. He realized it had been
months now since he had played and he stopped after several measures; the piano
was so miserably out of tune that it was painful for him to listen. He could
see why the Doctor had not wanted to play it.

His first tasks would be
what he liked to call “structural repairs.” On the Erard this meant
mending the broken strings and the soundboard. He walked around the piano, to
the hinges of the lid, removed the hinge pins and put them in his pocket. He
pulled on the lid, sliding it along the top of the piano until it was balanced
on the edge of the case. He bent at his knees, lifted it, and set it gingerly
against one of the walls. With the lid out of the way, there was enough light
to work inside the piano body.

It was difficult to see all the damage
to the soundboard from above, so he climbed beneath the piano and inspected its
belly. The entry wound was more visible. A crack ran with the grain, but only
for several inches. This is good, he thought. Although the hole would remain,
he could easily repair the crack with “shimming,” which meant
inserting filler wood into the holes. He only hoped the crack wouldn’t
affect the piano’s sound. Although some tuners claimed that shimming was
necessary to reestablish tension in the board, he believed that for the most
part the repair was superficial, for clients who were disconcerted by long
cracks in the inside of their pianos. So he hadn’t anticipated
shimming—it seemed superfluous given the setting—and he
hadn’t brought a planer to smooth out the board. But the beauty of the
Erard caused him to reconsider.

There was another problem. Shimming was
usually accomplished with spruce, but Edgar hadn’t brought any, and he
didn’t know if spruce grew in the area. He looked about the room, and his
eyes settled on the bamboo walls. I would be the first to use bamboo to mend a
piano, he thought with some pride, And it is so resonant that perhaps it will
make a sound more beautiful than spruce. Besides, he had seen the Burmese
peeling strips off the bamboo, which meant that the wood could probably be
shaped with a penknife and he wouldn’t need a planer. It wasn’t
without risks; using two different types of wood meant that they might respond
to the humidity differently and the crack would reopen. But he welcomed the
opportunity to innovate, and decided to try.

First he had to file the
hole, which took nearly an hour. He worked slowly; the cracks could run and
damage the entire soundboard. When he had finished, he rose and sawed a piece
of bamboo from the wall. This he carved and coated with glue, and worked into
the hole. The broken strings allowed him to reach it from above, and he
smoothed it. It took a long time—the blade was small—and while he
worked, he realized that he could have gone to ask Carroll for help, for a
planer or another larger knife, perhaps for other wood. But something
discouraged him. He liked the idea that he could take the very wall of the
fort, a product of war, and transform it into the mechanics of sound.

When he had finished shimming, he set to work on the broken strings. He
removed and coiled them, and dropped them into his pocket. Another souvenir. In
his bag he found string of the correct gauge and unwound it, running it from
the tuning pin to the hitch pin and back. He attached the third string to its
own hitch pin, and then ran it alongside its companions. When he cut it, he
left a length the width of his hand, which would measure three turns around the
tuning pin. The strings were bright and silver next to the dullness of their
neighbors, and he tuned them sharp, for they would settle.

When the
strings and pins were finished he walked back to the front of the piano. To
raise the pitch of the entire piano, he began at the center of the keyboard and
moved outward, striking keys and tightening strings, now working quickly. It
still took nearly an hour.

It was early afternoon when he began the
task of regulating. The piano’s action is a complex mechanism, he would
explain to clients, communicating between key and hammer, and thus the pianist
and sound. Now he removed the nameboard to reach the action. He evened the
hammers’ heights, eased sluggish jack centers, and adjusted the setting
of the let-off, where the jack kicks out from beneath the hammer. Between
regulating, he took breaks, easing keys, adjusting the shift of the una corda
pedal. When he finally rose, dusty and tired, the piano was in workable order.
He had been lucky that there were no major repairs, such as a cracked pin
block. He knew he didn’t have the tools to carry out such a repair. He
had little idea how much time had passed, and realized only as he was leaving
that the sun was sinking quickly over the forest.

It
was dark when he met the Doctor in his office. A half-eaten plate of rice and
vegetables was resting on the desk. The Doctor was seated before a stack of
papers, reading.

“Good evening.”

The Doctor looked
up. “Well, Mr. Drake, you are finished at last. The cook thought I should
send for you, but I told him that you wouldn’t want to be disturbed. He
complained when I told him to wait until you had finished, but fortunately he
is a music lover himself, and I was able to convince him that the sooner you
finished, the sooner he would be able to hear the piano.” He smiled.
“Please, sit.”

“Excuse me for not washing,”
said Edgar, sitting on a small teak stool. “I’m starving. I thought
that I would bathe straightaway after dinner and then go to bed. I want to get
up as early as possible tomorrow. But I wanted to ask you something.” He
shifted forward on the stool, as if to speak in confidence. “I mentioned
this before—I do not know if the soundboard will be able to survive
another rainy season. Not everyone would agree with this, but I think that we
should try to waterproof it. In Rangoon and Mandalay, I saw a variety of wooden
instruments which must suffer from the same problems. Do you know who might
know about this?”

“Certainly. There is a Burmese lute
player who used to play for King Thibaw, who has a Shan wife in Mae Lwin. With
the fall of the court, he returned here to farm. Sometimes he plays when I have
visitors. I will find him for you tomorrow.”

“Thank you. It
will be easy to paint the bottom of the soundboard; the top is harder, as one
has to go beneath the strings, but there is space on the side so I should be
able to run a cloth coated with the stuff, and paint it that way. I think that
will do something to protect against the humidity, although it is far from
perfect … Oh, I have another question: when I work tomorrow, I will need
something to heat the voicing iron, a little stove or something. Can you find
that as well?”

“Certainly—much easier. I can ask Nok
Lek to bring a Shan-style brazier to the room. They can get quite hot. But it
is small. What is the tool like?”

“Small as well. I
couldn’t bring much here.”

“Excellent then,”
said the Doctor. “I am very pleased so far, Mr. Drake. Tell me, when do
you expect to be done?”

“Oh, it can be played by tomorrow
night. But I should probably stay longer. I generally make a follow-up visit
two weeks after the first tuning.”

“Take as long as you
want. You are not in a hurry to return to Mandalay?”

“No,
no hurry at all.” He hesitated. “You mean to say that I must return
to Mandalay once the piano is tuned?”

The Doctor smiled.
“We
are
running rather serious risks by allowing a civilian to
come here, Mr. Drake.” He saw the tuner look down at his hands. “I
think you are beginning to discover some of the reasons why I have lived here
so long.”

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.