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
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 uneventfuclass="underline" 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.