The Piano Tuner (8 page)

We followed the canyon for several miles, until
at a bend identical to hundreds we had passed in our route the goats scampered
instinctively up a steep trail. The boys followed nimbly, their sandals finding
impossible toeholds in the sandy wall. I tried my best to keep up, but slipped,
skinning my knee before finding a solid grip and pulling myself up the trail
they had so delicately trod. At the top I remember stopping to inspect my leg.
It was a small, superficial wound and would dry immediately in the heat. And
yet I remember this action, not for itself but for what followed. For when I
looked up, the boys were running down a broad slope, chasing the goats. Below
them stretched one of the most stunning visions I have ever seen. Indeed, had I
been struck with blindness, rather than deafness, I think I would have been
content. For nothing, not even the pounding surf of Babelmandeb, could match
the scene that stretched out before me, the slope descending, flattening into a
vast desert plain that stretched into a horizon blurred with sandstorms. And
out of the thick dust, whose silence belied the rage known to anyone who has
ever been caught in the terror of one of the storms, marched legions of
caravans, from every point on the compass, long, dark trails of horses and
camels, all emerging from the blur that swept across the valley, and all
converging on a tent encampment that lay at the base of the hill.

There must have been hundreds of tents already, perhaps thousands if
approaching caravans could be counted. From my perch on top of the mountain, I
gazed out over the tents. A number of the styles I recognized. The peaked white
tents of the Borobodo people, who often came to the ports at which we called to
trade camel skins. The broad flat tents of the Yus, a warrior tribe who haunted
the southern reaches of the Sinai, famous among the Egyptians for raids on
traders, so fierce that ships would often not drop anchor if the tents were
sighted onshore. The Rebez, an Arabian race, who dug holes in the sand before
laying skins as a roof and setting a long pole at the thresholds of their
homes, which serves as a beacon should shifting sands bury a home and its
inhabitants. Beyond these, however, most of the structures were foreign to me,
suggesting perhaps that their people came from deeper in the African
interior.

I heard a piercing whistle from down the hill. Halfway
between me and the tent city, the older boy was shouting and waving his staff.
I ran and soon I reached the boys, and we descended the remainder of the hill
together. We passed another group of boys playing with rocks and sticks, and my
friends called out to them in greeting. I noticed they held their heads high,
and pointed frequently to me. I was, I imagine, an impressive find.

We
passed the first tents, where camels were tethered outside. I could see
firelight through their entrances, but no one came out to greet us. Then more
tents, and as I followed my guides to a mysterious end, the paths between tents
began to bustle with more activity. I passed hooded nomads whose faces I
couldn’t discern, dark Africans bedecked with fine furs, veiled women who
stared at me and dropped their eyes quickly when our gazes met. In such a
gathering, I caused little sensation. Twice I passed men I heard speaking
Arabic, but both my shame at my dishevelment and the haste of the boys kept me
from stopping. We passed several campfires, where silhouetted musicians played
songs I did not recognize. The boys stopped briefly at one, and I could hear
the older one whisper the words as they watched the singers. Then we turned and
plunged back into alleyways of tent and sand. At last we reached a large
circular tent with a flat, slightly pointed roof and an open hole in the center
from which wisps of smoke followed the glow of the fire into the darkening sky.
The boys tied the goats to a post outside the tent, next to a pair of camels .
They lifted the tent flap and motioned me inside.

Before I saw the
people sitting beside the fire, I was struck by the rich smell coming from the
central spit. It was testament to my hunger that I should notice the roasting
flank of meat before I noticed my new hosts. It was a single leg of goat, and
drops of blood swelled on the simmering meat until they dropped to the fire. At
my side the boys spoke rapidly, gesturing at me. They were addressing a
withered old woman, who reclined on a thin camel-skin rug on a raised bed near
the edge of the tent. Her hair was wrapped tightly in a thin, translucent
shawl, lending her head the illusion of a desert tortoise. She held a long pipe
to her mouth and puffed it in contemplation. The boys finished talking, and for
some time the woman said nothing. Finally she nodded to them, and they bowed
and scampered to the other edge of the tent, where they threw themselves onto a
rug, pulled their knees to their chests, and stared at me. There were others in
the tent as well, perhaps ten silent faces.

“You have come from
far away,” said the old turtle woman.

I was shocked. “You
speak Arabic?” I asked.

“Enough to trade. Please,
sit.” She nodded at a young girl who sat near the door. The girl jumped
to her feet and brought a small rug that she laid on the sand for me. I
sat.

“My grandchildren said that they found you near the coast of
the Red Sea.”

“They did. They gave me water and, by doing
so, saved my life.”

“How did you get there?” Her
voice was stern.

“An accident. I was on a ship traveling from
Suez to Babelmandeb when there was a storm. The ship was wrecked. I do not know
what happened to my shipmates, but I fear them dead.”

The turtle
woman turned to the room and spoke to them. There was nodding and hasty
chatter.

When she stopped speaking, I spoke again. “Where am
I?”

The old woman shook her head. One eye, I noticed, deviated
from the other, giving her an eerie sense of watchfulness, as if while she
scrutinized me she was also carefully watching the room. “That is a
dangerous question,” she said. “Already there are those who feel
that the fame of the appearance has spread too far, that if too many people
come She will not return. You are fortunate to have found me. There are those
here who would have killed you.”

With those words, the relief of
finding civilization was washed over with the nausea of fear. “I
don’t understand,” I said.

“Do not ask too much. You
have come at an auspicious time. The Bantu astrologers say that tomorrow She
may appear to sing. And then your questions will be answered.” And with
those words, she raised her pipe to her mouth once again and turned first one
eye, and then the other, back to the fire. No one spoke to me for the remainder
of the evening. I feasted on the roasted leg and drank a sweet nectar until I
fell asleep before the fire.

I awoke the next morning to find the tent
empty. I prayed and then lifted the flap of the tent, emerging into the heat.
The sun hung in the center of the sky; in my exhaustion, I had slept nearly to
noon. The camels were still tethered, but both goats were gone. I went back
inside the tent. I had no water to wash myself, but I tried my best to fold and
smooth my headdress with my hands. I returned outside.

The paths were
relatively empty; everyone must have been hiding from the sun. I saw a group of
men saddling camels in preparation to hunt, and nearby a group of young girls,
dressed in a vivid blue, grinding grain. Toward the outer edge of the
encampment I saw the new arrivals, some of whom must have arrived at dawn, who
still worked to unroll tents from the backs of stoical camels. I walked to the
edge of the camp, where the tent city ended suddenly, and where a line had been
etched, drawn by many tribes as a ritual barrier between their camp and the
desert. The sands stretched out unbroken. I thought back on the old
woman’s words. Long ago, when I was a child, I had accompanied my brother
to Aden, where we spent the night with a tribe of Bedouin. The Bedouin speak
their own dialect, but I understood some, as much of my youth had been passed
in trading bazaars, where the young acquire a great collection of tongues. I
remembered we had joined the family by their fire, and listened to their
grandfather tell a story of a congress of tribes. In the light of the fire, he
had described in exquisite detail each tribe, the robes they wore, their
customs, their beasts, even the color of their eyes. I had been spellbound, and
sometime during the night fell asleep before the story was finished, to awake
only when my brother prodded me, and we crawled back into the tent. Now,
standing at the edge of the open desert, something in that old man’s
story returned to me, a sensation only, like a memory of a dream.

In
the distance, beyond a small dune, I saw a flutter of red fabric, tickled by
the wind. It was brief, like the short flight of a bird, but such visions are
rare in the desert and beg inspection. I stepped across the line—at the
time I thought this a superstition of infidels, although now I am not so
certain. I climbed the dune and descended into a plain of sand. There was no
one. I felt a presence behind me and turned. It was a woman. She stood nearly
one hand shorter than me and stared up from behind a red veil. I thought by the
darkness of her skin that she must be from one of the Ethiopian tribes, but
when I kept staring at her, she greeted me.
“Salaam
aleikum.”

“
Wa aleikum
al-salaam,”
I answered. “Where are you from?”

“From the same land as you,” she said, but her accent was
strange.

“Then you are far from home,” I said.

“And you as well.”

I stood speechless, entranced by the
softness of her words, by her eyes. “What are you doing alone in the
sands?” I asked.

For a long time she didn’t speak. My eyes
followed her veil down to her body, which was covered in thick red robes that
gave no clue to the form that lay beneath. The fabric fell and pooled on the
ground, where the wind had already dusted it with a layer of sand, giving the
impression that she had risen from the dunes. Then she spoke again. “I
must fetch water,” she said and looked down at an earthen pot she was
balancing on her hip. “I am afraid I will get lost in the sand. Will you
come with me?”

“But I don’t know where to find
any,” I protested, shaken by the boldness of her proposition, by how
close she stood to me.

“I do,” she said.

But
neither of us moved. I had never seen eyes the color of hers—not dark
brown like the women from my home, but softer, lighter, the color of sand. A
breeze danced about us and her veil shook, and I had a fleeting glimpse of her
face, strange in ways I couldn’t understand, for I blinked and again she
was hidden.

“Come,” she said, and we began to walk. A wind
whipped up around us, firing sand against our skin, stinging, like a thousand
pins.

“Perhaps we should turn back,” I said. “Or we
will be lost in the storm.”

She kept walking.

I caught up
with her. The storm was getting worse. “Let’s turn back. It is too
dangerous to be caught out here alone.”

“We cannot go
back,” she said. “We are not from here.”

“But
the storm—”

“Stay with me.”

“But—”

She turned. “You are
frightened.”

“Not frightened. I know the desert. We can
return later.”

“Ibrahim,” she said.

“My
name.”

“Ibrahim,” she said again and stepped toward
me.

My hands hung limply at my side. “You know my
name.”

“Quiet,” she said. “The sand will
stop.”

And suddenly the wind disappeared. Fine particles of sand
froze in the air, like tiny planets. They stayed suspended in space, unmovable,
whitening the sky, the horizon, erasing everything but her.

She
stepped toward me once more, and set the pot on the ground.
“Ibrahim,” she repeated and lifted her veil from her face.

I have never seen a vision so beautiful and yet so hideous. With
woman’s eyes she stared at me, but her mouth wavered, like a mirage, not
the mouth and nose of a woman, but of a deer, its skin soft with fur. I
couldn’t speak, and there was a howling, and the sand took motion once
again, spinning about us, blurring her. I raised my hands to my eyes.

And then again the sand stopped.

I lowered my hands tentatively. I
was alone, suspended in the sand. My eyes knew not what to focus on, nor what
direction lay the sky or the earth.
“Salaam,”
I
whispered.

And then from somewhere hidden came the sound of a woman
singing.

It began softly, and at first I didn’t recognize it as
song. It was low and sweet, a song like wine, forbidden and intoxicating, like
nothing I had ever heard. I could not understand its words, and its melody was
utterly foreign. And yet there was something so intimate in it that I felt
naked, ashamed.

The wailing crescendoed, the sand began again to spin
about me. Through its whirling, I caught glimpses of images. Of circling birds,
of the camp, the cities of tents, the sun setting quickly, splintering,
igniting the desert into a giant flame that stretched out across the dunes,
enveloping all and then receding, leaving only scattered campfires. Then it was
suddenly night, and around the campfires gathered travelers, dancers,
musicians, drummers, a thousand instruments that wailed like shifting sand,
rising, louder and piercing, and before me a snake charmer came and played an
oud, and his snakes climbed out of their basket and over his legs. Girls
danced, their bodies buttered and scented, glistening in the campfires, and I
found myself staring at a giant, with scars on his skin like stars, a flesh
tattooed with stories, and the scars became men clothed in the skins of lizards
and children made of clay, and they danced, and the children shattered away.
And then it was day again and the visions vanished. I was left only with the
sand and the scream, and suddenly this stopped. I lifted my hand before my
face, and called out, “Who are you?” But I could no longer hear my
voice.