It took me a long time to fall asleep that first night, even after the storm had passed and with my father’s arms holding me tight. In the morning I woke alone. I listened for the animals and the sound of my father chopping wood, but I could hear only a few birds and the wind rising up from the river. The cabin was cold in the early morning, but I got out of bed and opened the door in my nightie. My father was trudging up through the clearing, walking through the leaves and twigs that were strewn about. His pyjamas were wet and his hair stuck flat to his head. He was crying and shivering, and he scared me even more than the thunderstorm had.
“I couldn’t do it,” he said, curling into a ball on the doorstep, hugging his knees and making horrible noises. “I couldn’t do it.”
I knew he wanted me to ask what he couldn’t do, but instead I backed away from him and crouched in the corner beside the stove. I reached out and let my fingers touch the letters gouged into the wood under the bottom shelf. Reuben. After a while, my father gathered himself together and came inside. His pyjama bottoms were muddy and the knees ripped. He wiped his nose on his sleeve and opened the stove to put a log on the embers, then he removed his pyjamas and hung them on the length of rope that we had strung up to dry our clothes.
“I went over to the other side of the Fluss,” he said. Steady drips of water punctuated his words with a hiss each time they dropped onto the hotplate. “To see the damage from the storm. It’s worse than I imagined.” He sniffed. “The rest of the world has gone.”
That’s how he said it—just like that, matter of fact. And I continued to sit in the corner with my hand under the shelf and my insides hollowed out. He changed into dry clothes and neither of us said any more about it.
In the afternoon, my father gave me a present of a comb. He had carved it from a sliver of wood, filed and sanded it and given it half a dozen teeth. He made me sit on one of the mended stools and he combed my long dark hair. Where he found the knots too difficult to draw the comb through, he cut them out with his knife. When my hair was as smooth and sleek as it had ever been at home, he divided it with a centre parting and made me plait it. He tied the ends with string and we coiled them around my ears, sticking the loops in place with twigs. When it was done, he looked me in the eyes, holding my shoulders.
“We’ll be all right. It’s just you and me now, Punzel,” he said, and gave me a crooked smile.
I wanted to ask him if the Russkies had done it, but was too afraid to make him cry again. He picked up the buckets and said that he wouldn’t be long and that I should keep the stove going, but I stood at the door and watched him go, holding on to the door frame, terrified he would disappear into the trees and not come back. I stood there for a long time, just waiting. And almost too late, I remembered the stove. I opened its little door to a billow of smoke and prodded its red insides with the poker. The pointed end turned over a small charred book which lay amongst the embers and, as I watched, a flame caught it and curled it open as if an unseen hand flicked through the pages. I stared at my passport photograph while it blistered in the heat and my face melted away into the fire.
12
“Where’s the piano?” It was the first thing I said when I opened my eyes on our third morning in the cabin. I think my father had been waiting for the question, maybe since we had arrived.
He didn’t flinch; he was over by the stove, boiling a pan of water and fiddling with the flue. He twisted a section of tube to stop the smoke from seeping out, but it escaped from a different gap. He twisted it again, creating a new hole. A grey cloud loitered in the roof space.
“Papa! The piano,” I said, sitting up. “You told me die Hütte had a piano.”
I tried to imagine having the one from home inside the cabin. We would have to remove the roof and lower it in. An upright piano did not occur to me. In front of the single bed we shared, a dirty rag rug lay on the floor, one quarter torn off or eaten away. The table stood under the window, laid with forks and metal plates; the three-legged stools were stored underneath. Up against the opposite wall was the tool chest, with the remains of the tent rolled on top, and facing me was the stove, tucked into its wall of shelves. It had taken us a whole day to clean the bird poop and feathers off them—droppings stuck so hard to the planks we had to chip them off with a chisel my father had found in the chest. He carried bucket after bucket of water up from the river, but we had nothing to scrub with, so we improvised with grit, rubbing it under blocks of wood until the planks were sanded clean. Odd nails and hooks had been hammered into the sides of the shelves, and it had been another of my jobs to hang up the billycans and assorted saucepans and utensils we had unearthed as we cleaned. There was no room for a piano.
“I’ll make one,” said my father, putting two cups of weak tea on the table. We were already rationing the leaves.
Behind me on the bed, Phyllis made a noise which suggested she was tired of stories and promises.
“Oh, Papa,” I said. I sounded like Ute, and perhaps he noticed that too, because he looked at me with a sorry face.
“Maybe not a whole piano. I could just make the keys, find some wood, work out the mechanism. It shouldn’t be too difficult.” My father was fired up at the idea, running his hands through his hair, already planning.
I sat on the edge of the bed, feeling sceptical.
“I’ll make you one, Punzel, wait and see, and you can learn to play. Your mother might not have taught you, but I will. And I brought some sheet music with us.” He was like a child in his excitement. He stood on a stool to reach up into the rafters, tugging down his rucksack, which was stored there. “I wasn’t sure about showing it to you because I knew it would make you remember, about the piano.” He handed me a faded green booklet, the paper cover rubbed to felt from years of handling. “It was out on the piano when we left, so I took it. Your mother would have wanted you to have it.”
The cover had the word LISZT in black, and underneath, La Campanella. Above a line of writing that was probably German, a beautiful winged lady sat reading music and holding a small harp-like instrument, as though she had all the time in the world to choose what she wanted to play. Her face was serene, and she seemed to be untroubled by the fact that a baby was struggling under the weight of the book which he held open for her. All around them was an abundance of produce: grapes, pears, apples, flowers, leaves. I would have stepped into that world if I could, and swung on a drape of ribbon, while the lady played and the baby dropped grapes into my open mouth.
Impatient for me to look inside, my father took the music and laid it open on the table, the white paper shaded blue in the morning light that struggled through the canvas window pane. In the white spaces between the lines were handwritten words and numbers in green pen. Ute’s handwriting: beschleunigt!—underlined three times; achten; and, many times, springen. I imagined her leaning forward at the piano to write something, biting her bottom lip, and I remembered with a lurch that Ute, the piano, the room she sat in, had all gone.
The dots, sticks, and lines blurring in front of me meant nothing. Ute had never taught me even one note. Sometimes I had been allowed to stand beside her while she practised, as long as I didn’t fidget, but I never understood the translation of the cryptic symbols into the jumps and ripples she made with her fingers, and the sound that came out of the piano. As she had done with German, Ute had kept the music for herself.
My father put his index finger under the first three sticks along the bottom line and sang three identical notes, the third one a fraction shorter than the others. His finger moved along, and there were three answering chimes from the high notes. He didn’t hesitate; he didn’t have to search around for the right pitch, but sang them as though he were the instrument, and the sound that came out of his mouth was pure and sweet. He repeated the low notes, and the highs followed along behind them.
“This chord”—my father held his finger under two black circles, clinging to a single stalk—“is encouraging the high ones to take
over. Listen.” He sang the refrain from the beginning, low then high, low then high. “But just when you think they’ve got the hang of it, there is the tiniest of pauses, as if these—on the treble clef—are nervous.” My father held his right arm in the air, his thumb and forefinger pressed together and his lips pursed. Wait, just wait, he seemed to be saying. “And suddenly they find their courage.” He forgot the sheet music and sang a few bars of the melody from memory, fast and rippling, his arms conducting.
“Can you hear the little bell? A handbell made of china. It rings over the top, like this.” He was silent for a moment, and I strained to hear the bell amid the noise of the wind and the creaking of the roof and walls. My father sang a high trilling tune and went back to the sinuous melody.
I recognized the music from home, from lying in bed and hearing Ute play it. I thought it sounded more like a trapped bird fluttering against a window than a bell.
He dropped his arms and stopped singing. “Perhaps it’s too difficult. Your mother . . .” he paused, as if this was the first time since we had been away that he had thought about her at the piano; his voice sounded strained. “Your mother used to say it was one of the most difficult pieces. There are two separate tunes that tease each other, so many trills, and it’s so fast. It was a stupid piece of music to bring.”
I was worried that already his mood was changing.
I sat on the stool, my feet tucked under my nightie to keep them warm, and looked at the music. I ran my finger along the fine horizontal lines, remembering the sound of it flowing through the floors of our London house—soaking into the wood, coursing up the white walls, swelling against the windows, creating a backwash which flooded up the staircase to my bedroom and lifted me out of my bed, so that as I drifted off to sleep I was held aloft by a salty sea of music.
“I really want to try, Papa,” I said, attempting to sound eager but still examining the notes and the green writing. I spread the fingers of my left hand as wide as I could and placed them on the table beside the pages.
“Like this,” my father said, leaning over me and stretching my fingers even wider, to place them on imaginary keys. “Hang on,” he said, and fetched the pen, which hung by a piece of string from a nail. Shooing my hands away, he drew piano keys—fifty-two large and thirty-six small—along the edge of the table. The lines wiggled where the pen nib caught in the grain of the wood, and the keys tapered toward the low notes. Later, we tried colouring in the black keys with charcoal from the fire, but although it made the table look more like a piano, the soot coated my fingers and smudged across the white keys until they were all a uniform grey and we had to wash the table and start over again.
We moved the cups of tea out of the way and sat side by side on the stools.
“It’s going to take a lot of practise, Punzel. Are you sure about this?”
I knew it was a warning he thought he ought to give, rather than a challenge he wanted me to back down from. There was an enthusiasm bubbling inside him, like he hadn’t had since he started work on the fallout shelter. My father always needed to have a project.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Maybe we should start with scales first, or at least the names of the notes.” My father took my right hand and touched my thumb on one of the large keys in the centre of the table. “This is middle C.” He sang the note, a long, strong “laa.” “What’s this?”
“Middle C,” I said, singing it with him.
“C, D, E,” he sang, his hand moving rightward. He tucked his thumb under and continued, “F, G, A, B, C,” then rolled his hand back down again.
By the end of the morning, I could play and sing the C-major scale, up and down the table, my fingers rolling in a jerky crab across the wood. He chose one of the long sticks propped in the corner by the stove, ready for snapping into kindling, and used it as a metronome, tapping out the rhythm on the wooden floor while he paced from bed to stove and back again. We practised until my fingertips were sore from the friction against the table, and until hunger made us stop and we realized it was the middle of the afternoon and none of our jobs had been done.
Every day I practised, starting with scales and arpeggios with both hands until my wrists seemed thicker and the tendons on the backs of my hands stood proud. Eventually, when the leaves outside die Hütte showed a tinge of yellow, my father said I was ready to start playing “La Campanella.”
“Begin with the most difficult part,” he said, hovering in the same way that had made Ute snap at me whenever I had hung around her as she played in London. He leaned over the piano and put his hands on the keys, playing a bar or two and humming.
“Papa! I’m meant to be playing, not you.”
Reluctantly he went back to binding more sticks onto the twig broom while I flicked through the music and returned to the first page.
“Don’t start at the beginning,” he said, standing up again and coming over. He plucked the music out of my hands. “Every time you sit down at the keyboard, you’ll want to play the bit you know the best and that part will get the most practise, so you should always start a piece of music with the most difficult section.” He flicked through the booklet and stopped at page nine, where a run of notes formed the steady upward slope of a mountain, reached a peak, and fell away to a series of small hills. He propped the pages in front of two saucepans to keep them upright. The music slipped and he moved it up again, tutting. “I need to make a music stand.”
“Papa, it’s fine. Stop fussing.” I elbowed him away.
“Here’s the pen,” he said, handing it to me. “This is your music now, you must add to your mother’s annotations.”
I put my fingers on the keys, waiting, nervous. I thought about the beautiful music that had flowed from Ute’s hands and how, when she had played, everyone stopped to listen. I remembered a line from a review that had been framed and hung in the hall of our London home: “Ute Bischoff turns the music in on itself with the gentlest of touches.” When I was younger I had thought it meant that Ute sat at her piano with a sheet of music, folding the dots and the sticks inward with dexterity and precision, scoring creases until the page was a delicate piece of origami sitting in the palm of her hand. Taking hold of two corners, she pulled them in opposite directions so the sheet blossomed into a paper flower.
“How will I know if I’m doing it right, if I can’t hear the music?” I said.
“Beethoven was already deaf by the time he was my age,” said my father. My face must have shown that I wasn’t sure I believed him. “Really,” he insisted. “But he still played and composed.”
“But I’m not Beethoven,” I whined.
“Just hear the notes inside your head and watch your fingers—you’ll know when they go wrong.”
“But I need to read the music at the same time.” I pressed a silent chord with my left hand.
“You’ll work it out.” I could hear his impatience building, but when I glanced around, he had turned away to take the broom between his knees and carry on with his work.
My right hand started in the foothills, white and black notes rolling over each other as it climbed. And while my hand climbed, I sang. Sharps and naturals flowing under my fingers and out of my mouth. The need to breathe was frustrating. I had to gulp air even when there was no pause in the music. When my fingers didn’t match my voice, or my voice was too fast for my fingers, I started the run over again. I came to understand Ute’s green notes—when to be steady and which fingers she had used for the most difficult sections. I liked to think they were messages written for me to find, in the middle of a forest on a piano that made no sound.
When I played, my father would sometimes sing the bass line while I was the bell, or the bird; or one of us sang the treble clef with the other joining in on the high notes to create the chords. By page six, the bird was joined by a cat, and the fluttering became more desperate. The bird circled higher and higher, trying to escape the open maw that followed its flurries at the window. Whe
n the bird tired and swooped too low, the cat jumped, feathers were lost, and I despaired for the creature. In the final refrain, as if sounding an alarm call, the bird began to fight back. The animal I had taken for a sparrow or a wren became a fiercer creature, showing its talons and curved beak so that fur flew as well as feathers. By the time we reached the closing bars of the music the window was smashed, one of the animals had gone, and the other was dead, but whether it was the cat or the bird, I could never be sure.
La Campanella was the first thing in my head when I woke in the mornings and it was the song I collected kindling to, the tune I found I was singing without realizing when I checked the traps, and what I hummed while I stuffed handfuls of wood strawberries into my mouth when they should have been going into my basket—a mouthful of pips and a sharp burst of bitter forest.
When my father realized I wasn’t going to stop, that every day I would play without him having to remind me, that already music was as much a part of me as breathing, he decided it was time to make keys that moved. As the summer turned, my father drew his design on the inside covers of the Liszt: measurements, materials, and equipment. We had no idea that the making of the piano was likely to kill us.
My father planned the piano without hammers or pedals, strings or a soundboard. It had only keys, and the sound it made was the sound we made ourselves. Even once he was happy with the design, making it wasn’t simple: the tools he had found in the chest were blunt and rusty, and most of them were too large for making piano keys. Still he went at it in a frenzy of creation. He forgot to bring up water from the river or to chop wood for the stove. He barely stopped to eat, and I had to drag myself away from the pen-drawn keyboard to go into the forest to check the traps and pick plants and berries so that we had food.
Our Endless Numbered Days: A Novel Page 10