“Come with me,” he said suddenly.
“You know I can’t.”
“By this evening I will be miles downstream, by morning you and Doctor Carroll may be dead, and I will never know—”
“Don’t say those things.”
“I…hadn’t planned for this. There is so much left that I…I may never see you again, I don’t want to say this, but—”
“Mr. Drake…” She began to speak but stopped. Her eyes were moist. “I am sorry.”
“Please, come with me.”
“I must stay with Anthony,” she said.
Anthony, he thought, I have never heard his name. “I came here because of you,” he said, but already his words sounded empty.
“You came here for something else,” she said, and from the river came a call.
22
They carried the piano through the flowering brush at the edge of the camp and down to the river. There, a raft was waiting, a rough contraption of logs three times the length of the piano. The men splashed into the shallows and set the piano on the raft. They lashed its legs through spaces between the logs. They worked quickly, as if familiar with the task. When the piano was secured, a chest was placed on the other end of the raft, and similarly fastened. “Your belongings are inside,” said Carroll.
It was still unclear who among the many men wading through the water, twisting rope, tying, adjusting, would accompany him, until at last the piano was secured and the raft balanced. Then two boys walked up to the bank, picked two rifles each, and walked back to the raft.
“This is Seing To and Tint Naing,” said the Doctor. “They are brothers. They are very skilled boatmen and they speak Burmese. They will accompany you down the river. Nok Lek will go as well, but in a dugout, to scout the rapids ahead. You will float to Karen country, or perhaps as far as Moulmein, which would take five or six days. There you will be deep into British territory and safe.”
“And then what should I do? When should I return?”
“Return? I don’t know, Mr. Drake…” The Doctor was silent, and then held out a small piece of paper, folded and sealed with wax. “I want you to have this.”
“What is it?” said Edgar, surprised by the offer.
The Doctor thought for a moment. “That is for you to decide. You must wait to read it.” Behind him one of the boys said, “We are ready, Mr. Drake, we need to go.”
Edgar extended his hand and took the paper, and folded it once more and slipped into his shirt pocket. “Thank you,” he said quietly, and he stepped onto the raft. They pushed off from the shore. Only looking back at the bank did he see her, standing in the flowers, her body half hidden in the brush. Behind her Mae Lwin rose to the mountain, layers of bamboo homes, one without a wall, open and naked to the river.
The raft was caught by the current and swept downstream.
The rains had swollen the river considerably since Edgar had first floated down months before. He thought of the night they had arrived, descending silently through the darkness. How different a world it seemed from the one in which he now traveled, the wooded banks drenched in heavy sunlight, the garish scintillation of the leaves. Sensing their approach, a pair of birds took off from the shore, flapping under the weight of the light until they caught a current of air and banked downstream. Hoopoe, Upupa epops, Perhaps they are the same ones I saw the day I arrived, he thought, surprised that he knew their name. The boat followed the birds, sunlight flashing off the case of the piano.
No one spoke. Nok Lek paddled ahead, singing a soft song. One of the brothers sat on the chest at the back of the raft, a paddle in his hand, his lithe muscles flexed against the current. The other stood at the bow, staring downstream. From the center of the raft, Edgar watched the bank reel past. It was an unworldly feeling, the smooth descent past hills and streams that tumbled down to join the Salween. The raft rode low in the river, and at times, water washed up over the logs and touched his feet. When it did this, the sunlight flashed on the waves, hiding the raft beneath a thinness, a fluttering of light. He felt as if he and the piano and the boys were standing on the river.
As they floated, he watched the birds diving and rising on the currents of air, coursing in flight with the river. He wished he was with the Doctor, to tell him that he had seen them, so that the Doctor could add them to his collection of sightings. He wondered what the Doctor was doing now, how they were preparing, if he too would bear arms against the attack. He imagined the Doctor turning back and seeing Khin Myo standing in the flowers. He wondered how much he knew and how much she would tell. No more than twelve hours had passed since he had touched his lips to the warmth of her neck.
And from Khin Myo, his thoughts drifted to a memory of the old tuner he had once been apprenticed to, who used to sneak a bottle of wine from a wooden cabinet after they finished work in the afternoons. What a distant memory, he thought, and he wondered where it came from, and what it meant that now was the moment of its remembering. He thought of the room where he had learned to tune, and the cold afternoons when the old man would wax poetically about the role of a tuner, and Edgar would listen with amusement. As a young apprentice, his master’s words had seemed maudlin. Why do you want to tune pianos? asked the old man. Because I have good hands and I like music, the boy had answered, and his teacher laughed, Is that it? What more? replied the boy. More? And the man raised a glass and smiled. Don’t you know, he asked, that in every piano there lies a song, hidden? The boy shook his head. Just the mumblings of an old man perhaps, But you see, the movement of a pianist’s fingers are purely mechanical, an ordinary collection of muscles and tendons that know only a few simple rules of rate and rhythm. We must tune pianos, he said, so that something as mundane as muscles and tendons and keys and wire and wood can become song. And what is the name of the song that lies in this old piano? the boy had asked, pointing to a dusty upright. Song, said the man, It doesn’t have a name, Only song. And the boy had laughed because he hadn’t heard of a song without a name, and the old man laughed because he was drunk and happy.
The keys and hammers trembled with the sway of the current, and in the faint ringing that rose up Edgar again heard a song with no name, a song made only of notes but no melody, a song that repeated itself, each echo a ripple of the first, a song that came from the piano itself, for there was no musician but the river. He thought back to the night in Mae Lwin, to The Well-Tempered Clavier, It is a piece bound by strict rules of counterpoint, as all fugues are, the song is but an elaboration of one simple melody, we are destined to follow the rules established in the first few lines.
It makes you wonder, said the old man, lifting his wineglass, why a man who composed such melodies of worship, of faith, named his greatest fugue after the act of tuning a piano.
They floated downstream. In the afternoon, their progress was slowed by a steep drop through rapids, around which they were forced to portage.
The river widened. Nok Lek tied his dugout to their raft.
In the early evening, they stopped at a small deserted village by the edge of the river. Nok Lek paddled the canoe to shore and the two other boys jumped into the shallows, splashing while they pulled the raft. At first it resisted, like a recalcitrant animal, but slowly they pulled it out of the current and into an eddy. They fastened it to a log that lay on the beach. Edgar helped them untie the piano and lift and carry it to the bank, where they rested it on the sand. The sky was heavy and they pitched a shelter with woven mats and covered the piano.
At the edge of the buildings, the boys found a discarded chinlon ball and began to kick it about in the shallows. Their playfulness seemed incongruous to Edgar, whose thoughts raced one upon the other, Where now are the Doctor, and Khin Myo, Has the fighting begun, Perhaps the battle is already over. Only hours ago he had been there, but now he could see no smoke, nor hear gunfire, nor screams. The river was calm, and the sky clear save for the gathering mist.
He left the boys and walked up the bank. It had begun to drizzle lightly, and his feet punched out dry footprints in the moist sand. Curious as to why it had been deserted, he followed a trail that ran up from the shore and toward the village. It was a short climb; like Mae Lwin, it had been built close to the river. At the top of the path he stopped.