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 camp-fires. 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.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, and opened my eyes to find myself lying by the sea, my legs half submerged in the water. There was a man squatting beside me. I saw his mouth move, but I couldn’t hear him. Several others stood along the shore, watching me. The man started to speak again, but I heard nothing, not his voice, not the wash of the waves as they lapped over my legs. I pointed to my ears and shook my head. “I cannot hear you,” I said, “I am deaf.”
Another man approached me and the two raised me to my feet. There was a small boat, its bow wedged into the sand, its stern shifting in the waves. They walked me to the boat and we boarded. If they spoke, I could not hear them. They paddled into the Red Sea and toward a waiting ship, whose marks I knew as a merchant ship from Alexandria.
For the entire narration, the old man’s eyes had not left Edgar’s face. Now he turned to the sea. “I have told this story to many,” he said. “For I want to find another soul who has heard the song that made me deaf.”
Edgar touched his arm lightly, so he would turn and see his lips. “How do you know it wasn’t a dream? That you didn’t hit your head in the accident? Songs cannot make men deaf.”
“Oh, I would wish it was a dream. But it couldn’t have been. The moon had changed, and by the ship’s calendar, which I saw the next morning at breakfast, it was twenty days after my boat had capsized. But by then I already knew this, for that night when I undressed for bed, I remarked at how worn my sandals were. And in Rewesh, our last port of call before the accident,! had bought a new pair.
“Besides,” he said, “I don’t believe it was the song that made me deaf. I think that after I had heard something so beautiful, my ears simply stopped sensing sound, because they knew that they would never hear such perfection again. I don’t know if this makes sense to a tuner of strings.”
The sun was now high in the sky; Edgar felt its heat against his face. The old man spoke. “My One Story is over, and I have no more stories to tell, for just as there can be no sound after that song, for me there can be no stories after that one. And now we must go inside, for the sun has ways of making even the sane delirious.”
They steamed through the Red Sea. The waters lightened, and they crossed the straits of Babelmandeb, the shore washed by waves from the Indian Ocean. They dropped anchor in the port of Aden, where the harbor was full with steamers destined for all over the world, in whose shadows tiny Arab dhows darted beneath lateen sails. Edgar Drake stood on the deck and watched the port and the robed men who clambered to and from the ship’s hull. He didn’t see the Man with One Story leave, but when he looked at the spot on the deck where the man always sat, he was gone.
5
The journey is faster now. In two days, the coast appears tentatively, as tiny wooded islands that dot the shore like shattered fragments of the mainland. They are dark and green; Edgar can see nothing through the deep foliage, and he wonders if they are inhabited. He asks a fellow traveler, a retired civil administrator, who tells him that one of the islands is home to a temple that he calls Elephanta, where the Hindus worship an “Elephant with Many Arms.”
“It is a strange place, full of superstitions,” says the man, but Edgar says nothing. Once, in London, he tuned the Erard of a wealthy Indian banker, the son of a maharaja, who showed him a shrine to an elephant with many arms, which he kept on a shelf above the piano. He listens to the songs, the man had said, and Edgar liked this religion, where gods enjoyed music and a piano could be used to pray.
Faster. Hundreds of tiny fishing boats, lorchas, ferries, rafts, junks, dhows, swarm at the mouth of Bombay harbor, parting before the towering hull of the steamer. The steamer slows into port, squeezing between two smaller merchant ships. The passengers disembark, to be met on the dock by carriages belonging to the shipping company, which take them to the railway station. There is no time to walk the streets, a uniformed representative from the ship’s line says, The train is waiting, Your steamship is a day late, The wind was strong. They go through the back gate of the station. Edgar waits as his trunks are unloaded and loaded again. He watches closely; if his tools are lost, they cannot be replaced. At the far end of the station, where the third-class cars wait, he sees a mass of bodies pushing forward on the platform. A hand takes his arm and leads him onto the train and to his berth and soon they are moving again.
Faster now, they move past the platforms, and Edgar Drake looks out over crowds such as he has never seen, not even on the poorest streets of London. The train picks up speed, passing shantytowns built to the edge of the track, children scattering before the engine. Edgar presses his face to the glass to watch the jumbled houses, the peeling tenements stained with mildew, balconies decorated with hanging plants, and every street filled with thousands of people, pushing forward, watching the train pass.
The train hurtled into the interior of India. Nasik, Bhusaval, Jubbulpore, the names of the towns growing stranger and, thought Edgar, more melodic. They crossed a vast plateau, where the sun rose and set, and they didn’t see a moving soul.
Occasionally they stopped, the engine slowing, screeching into windbeaten, lonely stations. There, from the shadows, vendors would descend on the train, pushing up against the windows, thrusting in pungent plates of curried meat, the sour smell of lime and betel, jewelry, fans, picture postcards of castles and camels and Hindu gods, fruits and dusted sweets, beggars’ bowls, cracked pots filled with dirty coins. Through the windows would come the wares and the voices, Buy, sir, please, Buy, sir, for you, sir, special for you, and the train would start to move again, and some of the vendors, young men usually, would hang on, laughing, until they were pried off by a policeman’s baton. Sometimes they made it further, jumping off only when the train started moving too fast.
One night Edgar awoke as the train pulled into a small, dark station, somewhere south of Allahabad. Bodies huddled in the crevices of the buildings that lined the tracks. The platform was empty except for a few vendors who marched along the windows, peeking in to see if anyone was awake. One by one they stopped at Edgar’s window, Mangoes, sir, for you, Do you want your shoes polished, sir, just pass them through the window, Samosas, They are delicious, sir. This is a lonely place for a shoeblack, thought Edgar, and a young man walked up to the window and stopped. He said nothing, but looked in and waited. At last Edgar began to feel uncomfortable beneath the boy’s gaze. What are you selling, he asked. I am a Poet-Wallah, sir. A Poet-Wallah. Yes, sir, give me an anna and I will recite for you a poem. What poem. Any poem, sir, I know them all, but for you I have a special poem, the poem is old and it is from Burma, where they call it “The Tale of the Journey of the Leip-bya,” but I only call it “The Butterfly-Spirit,” for I have adapted it myself, It is only one anna. You know I am going to Burma, How? I know, for I know the direction of stories, my poems are daughters of prophecy. Here is an anna, quick now, the train is moving. And it was, groaning as the wheels turned. Tell me quickly, said Edgar, suddenly feeling a swell of panic, There is a reason you chose my car. The train was moving faster, the young man’s hair began to whip with the wind. It is a tale of dreams, he yelled, They are all tales of dreams. Faster now, and Edgar could hear the sounds of other voices, Hey boy, get off the train, You, stowaway, Get off, and Edgar wanted to shout back when briefly there appeared at the window the form of a turbaned policeman, also running, and the flash of a baton, and the boy broke off and fell into the night.