Word: carmie
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...tone so beautiful that it had been called the Harp of King David. Its richly carved case-so people said-was hewn of wood from Solomon's temple in Jerusalem. That part was legend, but the piano itself was fact. It stood, the old man told young Avner Carmi, in King Victor Emanuel's palace in Rome, and Avner's mission was to call on the King one day, in order to see and hear the wondrous instrument...
That was in 1917. Young Avner Carmi went on to become a piano tuner (he worked for the late great Artur Schnabel, among others), and when his travels took him to Italy in the '30s, he tried to carry out his grandfather's wish. The famous piano was there, all right. It had been built around 1800 in Turin by piano-makers named Marchisio and a woodcarver named Ferri. Decades later, the city council of Siena had presented it to Crown Prince Umberto (later King Umberto I) as a wedding present. It seemed within Carmi's reach...
Then came World War II, and Carmi enlisted in a British transport unit. In North Africa, his outfit was attached to Montgomery's Eighth Army. One day at El Alamein, Carmi was collecting debris left by Rommel's retreat when he came across a bulky, grey object. It proved to be a piano, encased in a rock-hard coating of plaster, its innards too sand-clogged to sound...
Saved from the Fire. Along with other refuse of war, the piano was supposed to be burned on a giant scrap heap in the desert. Carmi did not suspect that there might be anything special about it, but he could not bear the thought of any piano's being burned, no matter how old and battered. He got permission from his superior officer to keep it out of the flames. Later, partially restored but still encased in plaster, the piano was given to a troupe of entertainers touring the British armies in the Mediterranean...
Somehow, the troupe and its piano kept crossing Carmi's path-at Palermo, again in Naples. Finally, as he learned later, the British left it at Tel Aviv. A beekeeper found it, tried to use it as a hive. A chicken farmer tried to use it as an incubator, a butcher as a meat safe. Finally it was cast out into the street as useless. There Avner Carmi-by now out of the service and once more a piano tuner-again found what he called "my plaster piano pal." When he saw that the insides had been ripped...