Baby Grand

The piano weighed nine hundred and forty pounds in the crate and they had taken it off the ship at Tanjong Pagar in the third week of the monsoon and put it on a barge and taken it up the coast and put it on the back of a mule. The mule was a big bay mule from the Cameron Highlands, fifteen hands at the shoulder, and the trader who sold it had sworn it would carry a piano across a country. It carried the piano three days. On the morning of the fourth, on a corduroy road through a swamp full of leeches and the calls of birds the men had never heard before, the mule stopped, breathed twice, and went down on its side in the mud with the piano still strapped to its back. The men cut the straps and rolled the piano clear and stood looking at the mule, which did not get up. They shot it where it lay. They harnessed themselves to the piano. They got it to the camp in two more days, and a man named Olsen tore a muscle in his back that he carried for the rest of his life.

The camp was a tin-mining camp on the edge of a jungle that did not have a name on any map the men possessed. There were forty-one men in it in the first year and thirty-eight in the second and thirty-six in the third. They lost men to fever and to snakebite and to the slow particular madness that comes to men who have been wet for eleven months of the year. None of them knew how to play the piano. It sat in the corner of the mess hall through three winters, which were not winters but only the slightly cooler stretch of the rains, a great black mass that no one mentioned and no one moved. Once a year the camp cook, a Hainanese named Loh, dusted it with a rag. Otherwise it gathered the smell of the place — of wet canvas and of kerosene and of the coconut oil the men rubbed on their boots to keep the leather from rotting, which gave the room, faintly, the scent of a kitchen on a coast they were no longer on.

In the fourth winter a stranger arrived. He came up the river on a Malay prau with a man poling and no luggage of his own. He was small and dark and clean-shaven and he wore a linen suit that had been white once and was no longer. He did not give his name. He asked, in careful English, for a meal and a place to sleep and a glass of whatever spirit the camp had. The camp had a peated whisky the foreman had bought at the coast and a green spirit one of the engineers had distilled himself in a copper coil, sharp and medicinal, that the men called the doctor. The stranger drank one of each. He sat at the long table and ate rice and dried fish and did not speak. He looked, once, at the piano.

After the meal he stood up and walked to the corner and lifted the lid. The men stopped what they were doing. He sat down on the bench. He played, at first, a single note, and then another, and then he found the piano’s tuning, which was not good, and he adjusted what he was going to play to the piano he had. He played for an hour. He played something slow and then something fast and then something slow again, and at the end of the slow second thing one of the men, an Australian named Healey who had not cried since the death of his father when he was eight, put his face in his hands and wept without sound. The stranger did not look at him. He finished the piece. He closed the lid. He stood up.

The men paid him in whisky. They gave him the rest of the bottle of the peated one and a small flask of the doctor, and he took them both and bowed slightly and went out to the prau, and the man with the pole pushed off, and they went down the river in the last grey light. The men stood on the bank and watched until the boat was around the bend, and then they went back to the mess hall, and Healey washed his face at the rain barrel, and no one mentioned what had happened, then or after.

None of them ever heard the stranger play again. Most of them did not live another ten years. But for the rest of their lives, when they heard a piano — in a hotel lobby in Penang, in a parlour in Adelaide, in a church in a town in Yorkshire one of them had been born in and returned to — they thought of him, and of the mule, and of the long black mass in the corner of the mess hall that had been, all along, only a piano, waiting for a man who knew what it was.