Free The Piano Tuner by Daniel Mason

EWS
L ONDON
    The sight of the tiny card with curlicue lettering in the wrinkled hands of
the old man suddenly embarrassed him. But the old man puzzled over the card.
“An English piano tuner. A man who knows sound. Would you like to hear a
story, Mr. Edgar Drake? An old deaf man’s story?”
     
    Thirty years ago, when I was much younger and not
crippled by the pains of old age, I worked as a deckhand, traveling this very
route from Suez to the Strait of Babelmandeb. Unlike today’s steamers
that plow directly through the sea without stopping, we rode by sail and
crisscrossed the sea, dropping anchor at dozens of tiny ports on both the
African and Arabian shores, towns with names like Fareez and Gomaina, Tektozu
and Weevineev, many of which have been lost to the sands, where we stopped to
trade with nomads who sold rugs and pots scavenged from abandoned desert
cities. I was traveling this same route when our boat was caught in a storm.
She was old and should have been forbidden from sailing. We reefed the sails,
but the hull sprung a leak, and the rush of the water split the boat. When the
hull ruptured I fell and struck my head, and entered blackness.
    When I
awoke I was lying on a sandy shore, alone amidst some wreckage of the hull that
I must have clung to by good fortune. At first I found myself immobile and
feared I had been paralyzed, but found only that I was wrapped tightly in my
headdress, which must have unraveled and clung to my body like a child’s
swaddling or the mummies they pull out of the Egyptian sands. It took me a long
time to regain my wits. My body was badly bruised, and when I tried to breathe,
pain shot through my ribs. The sun was already high in the sky, and my body was
caked with the salt of the sea, my throat and tongue parched and swollen. Pale
blue water lapped at my feet and at the piece of broken hull, which still bore
the first three scrawled Arabic figures from what was once the ship’s
name.
    At long last I unraveled my headdress and retied it loosely. I
rose to my feet. The land around me was flat, but in the distance I could see
mountains, dry and barren. Like any man who has grown up in the desert, I could
only think of one thing: water. I knew from our travels that the coastline is
marked by many small estuaries, most brackish, but some of which, according to
the nomads, merge with sweet water streams draining aquifers or the snows that
have fallen on the peaks of distant mountains. So I decided to follow the
coast, in the hope of finding such a river. At least the sea would keep me
oriented, and perhaps, perhaps, I might sight a passing ship.
    As I
walked, the sun rose over the hills, which I knew meant that I was in Africa.
This realization was simple but frightening. We have all been lost, but it is
rare that we do not know on which continent’s sandy shore we wander. I
did not speak the language nor did I know the land as I did Arabia. Yet
something emboldened me, perhaps youth, perhaps the delirium of the sun.
    I had not walked one hour when I reached a turn in the coastline where a
sliver of the sea sliced into the shore. I tasted the water. It was still
salty, yet beside me lay a single thin branch, which had been washed
downstream, and on it, a single leaf, dry and shaking in the wind. My travels
and trading had taught me a little about plants, for when we anchored in Fareez
and Gomaina, we traded for herbs with the nomads there. And this little leaf I
recognized as the plant we call
belaidour,
and Berbers call
adil-ououchchn,
whose tea brings the drinker dreams of the future, and
whose berries make women’s eyes wide and dark. Yet at that moment I
thought little of the preparation of tea and much of botany. For
belaidour
is expensive because it does not grow along the Red Sea, but in wooded
mountains many miles west. This gave me the faint hope that man had once been
here, and if man then perhaps water.
    So with this hope alone, I turned
inland, following the sliver of