by Chris Cander
An idea she’d never before entertained came to her and calmly settled in. She unpacked her laptop and found an online auction site, then created a new listing:
For sale: Antique upright Blüthner piano built circa 1905. Ebonized case in good condition—see photos for specific markings. Needs tuning, possibly new strings and hammerheads. Asking $3,000.
She had been told by one of her teachers that her Blüthner would’ve been common in Russia or the U.K., but very few tsarist-era uprights would have been imported to America. He’d warned her that, if she ever decided to sell it, not to go through a dealer; they might pay her an undervalued price before turning around to sell it for a considerable profit that should’ve been hers. Serious pianists, he said, would want only a grand, though she could probably sell this one to a collector for $1,000 to $3,000 because it was rare and in such good condition. But compared to the newer designs available, her old Blüthner was too big and ugly to have any value or appeal to anyone in the general market.
Clara really had no idea if $3,000 was a fair price, because she couldn’t find anything comparable for sale. She chose the higher price not so much because she needed the money, although she did, but to mitigate the guilt she’d begun to feel when uploading the pictures of it she’d taken with her phone.
She closed the computer, lowered the fallboard over the keys, and went about the unhappy business of unpacking her boxes with only one hand.
MIKHAIL STOOD IN a shopping line in the wet, gray snow one morning so his wife, Katya, could stay home with the baby. Their son was only six weeks old, too young to be outside all day in the cold, especially with influenza going around like a plague. Already the line was long, wrapping around the building, people grumbling as the reports filtered back: They’ve run out of sausages, They say they’ll close in an hour—that’s not time enough to get to all of us, Somebody bribed the butcher, so the cashier let him buy a whole suitcase of bacon. Occasionally people tried to jump the line, claiming a friend was holding their place, and citizens farther down shouted, “Get back! Don’t think you’re special!” Mikhail often shouted the loudest.
Finally, when it was almost five o’clock, he rode the trolley back to the grimy, seven-story concrete Khrushchyovka where they lived in a three-room apartment. It was dark and he was nearly frozen, with only a few items in his avoska, the string “maybe bag” he always carried in case there was anything to buy. At least the apartment was heated. He could be grateful to the Soviet regime for that.
He let himself in, quietly. Whenever he heard Katya playing through the door, he liked to steal a moment watching her before she noticed him. The baby was swaddled and sleeping on the floor near her slippered feet. Her dark hair was down, swaying like a curtain in a gentle breeze along with the music. She looked thin, despite the swell of her belly that still remained. This made him feel guilty, even though he preferred to blame the Party for all their troubles.
“Here I am,” he said when she was finished. He pulled off his wool hat and she stood up to greet him with a kiss on the cheek.
“What did you bring?” She peered at the contents through the string. A bag of rice, cigarettes, soap, a tea towel stamped with blue and ocher-yellow wildflowers, two bananas, six cans of green beans, a portion of meat. “No milk?”
“They ran out. I can try again tomorrow.”
“You have to work tomorrow.”
“Afterward, then.”
She nodded and carried the avoska into the kitchen. Mikhail opened the cupboard and pulled down two glasses and a bottle of vodka.
“Mama?” he asked.
Katya turned on the burner to heat water for tea. “Resting. She didn’t feel well today.”
“Katyusha,” he said in a lower voice. She turned to him. “We have to go. I can’t do it anymore.” He poured a finger of vodka and handed it to her.
“I can’t. The baby,” she said, and pivoted away. “Please, let’s don’t talk about this now.”
He poured more into his glass and drank it in one shot, then poured himself another and watched it settle until it was as still as the frozen Neva. Soon he would be able to feel his toes again. He sank into one of the metal kitchen chairs. “We have to talk about it, Katya. Listen to me. We can have a new life in America, a better life. Someplace warm. We can buy produce and meat and milk and butter whenever we want.”
“No,” she said softly, her back still to him. “No. I keep telling you. Leningrad is home, not America.”
“Leningrad is a beautiful city, but it’s a terrible time. It doesn’t feel like home anymore. It’s no good for us.”
“What about our parents? Our friends?”
“Irina and Pyotr are going.”
“How? We can’t even change money. Did Pyotr say they were leaving? Are you making this up?” The kettle began to scream.
“There are ways. I’ve been asking around.” Mikhail stood up, took the kettle off the burner, and put his hands on Katya’s waist. “Remember when we met? Such big dreams we had! So many plans! You would be a famous concert pianist. I would be a top engineer. But look, now you can only play for Goskontsert, making no money, even though you are so good. You didn’t go to the conservatory only to play music the Kremlin allows, did you? You taught me that. Why should Brezhnev be the highest musical authority? You are twenty-five already, Katya. We must think about the future.”
She pulled away from him. “Our future is here, Misha. In Leningrad.” She thought of the International Tchaikovsky Competition. Held only once every four years, it was like the Olympics of classical music. The next one was just over two years away, in 1982. She had been practicing for it already.
“I can’t move up,” he said. “I’m the best one there, but I can’t move up. They call me Zhid now, did you know that? That fucking Vasily, telling everyone. Fucking KGB. I don’t even have a nose like my father, but still they all know. How can you expect me to rise up, Katya? It’s hard enough to feed ourselves. Now we have the baby. In America there’s no communism, no limit. You understand?”
“No,” she said, “it’s not fair. You’re not saying this because of Grisha. You only want to go because of you.”
Mikhail put his hands together and shook them, pleading. “No, it’s only for you, Katya. You deserve much better than what you get here. It will be an adventure, starting over. Make a new home in a happier place. We will be happier in America.”
“I don’t want to go,” she told him.
“I can’t do anything here, don’t you understand that? I’m a Jew—we’re Jews!—and now I won’t get the positions I deserve!” He kicked the chair from beneath the table, crashing it against the wall. The apartment was so small that the sound woke the baby and Mikhail’s mother, sleeping in the bedroom.
“Misha, please,” she begged.
“You can’t tell me no.” Though he lowered his voice, it still carried the weight of his frustration. “Anyway, you won’t be playing concerts anywhere for a while. You have to take care of Grisha. By the time we get to America he will be bigger—then you can play. But I”—he pounded on his chest with a fist—“I have to take care of everyone. You can’t say anything about it.”
“Why do you get to make the choices, Misha? Why don’t you think about me?”
“I am thinking about you! Aren’t you listening?”
Katya’s mother-in-law carried her grandson into the kitchen, but when she saw the chair on its side and the look on her son’s face, she handed him to Katya and hurried out. The baby began to cry, so Katya righted the chair and sat down to feed him.
“Besides,” he said more quietly, “it is too late now. I filed the application yesterday.” Then he sat down next to her and put his hand on her son’s small head as he nursed. “They made me quit work.”
“Quit work!” The baby started, his tiny hands flying up by his face as th
ough to defend himself. “They will charge us with parasitism!”
“It is required. While we are processed.”
“It could take years to get approved for exit, Misha. You think I don’t know what’s happening? All this time while we wait, we will be enemies of the state, enemies of the people. You know the Moral Code: he who does not work, neither will he eat. We will lose friends. We will lose water and electricity. How are we supposed to take care of a baby then, eh? What will we do for money?”
“I have a little saved, not much. But your father is doing good. The piano-tuning business always seems to be doing good. You can ask him for money if we need it.”
“Papa’s just as poor as us! I won’t ask him for money!”
Mikhail shrugged. “Then we’ll find another way.”
“How? By sweeping streets? Begging?”
“Stop! That is being selfish. I won’t accept this kind of talk. It’s too late, I told you.”
Over three years of marriage, after a tender beginning, she had learned not to cross the threshold of his anger. She calmed her voice, but her heart was still beating ravvivando, like it used to out of passion. Now it happened only out of fear. “How long do we have to wait? What will happen? Where will we go?”
“Austria first, I am told. From there to Italy, until America gives us entrance visas. Maybe it will take a year? Maybe longer.”
“What are we supposed to do in these places, Misha? Where will we live? How will we eat? And what am I supposed to do with my piano, eh? Carry it around on my back?”
He shrugged. “I am talking to others who are also waiting to leave. There are agencies to help. Jewish agencies to help us find what we need. We can take a small amount, maybe three or four suitcases each. But no piano.”
“No piano!” She leapt from the chair and, with the baby’s mouth still attached to her, ran the few steps into the small front room, where her Blüthner took up most of the space. She sat down on the bench, as though to hold it in place. How many times had she sat there since the old German bequeathed it to her? How many notes had she played on its keys, first one by one, and later the beautiful, complicated pieces that transported her to a place inside her mind like nothing else could? From the time she was eight years old, the Blüthner had been her constant companion. She had played it nearly every day for the past seventeen years. When she’d moved from her parents’ home in Zagorsk to study at the conservatory in Leningrad, she’d insisted on taking it on the eight-hundred-kilometer journey. Besides her family, it was her only treasure. Even if she was forced to go, the piano was something she could not—would not—leave behind.
Mikhail stepped up behind her, resting a hand on her shoulder. “Katya, I will find a way. We will take the piano. Yes? Are you hearing me? I love you.”
After a moment, she nodded. She closed her eyes and cried through her fingers. Then they moved across the sleeping baby, a silent performance of Beethoven’s sonata À Thérèse. There were so many sharps in that piece, the crosses could fill a cemetery.
CLARA SAT AT HER BLÜTHNER on a large stage, wearing a formal black dress. Her white cast glowed under the spotlights, and she had the urge to hide it. A large audience sat in hushed rows. Her father, up front, sat on the edge of his seat, clapping and whistling into the amphitheater’s curved space. Next to him, her mother told him over and over to settle down. Clara lifted her hands above the keyboard and began to play the Scriabin prelude, but her fingers kept slipping off the keys, which were slick, and the only note she could play was a C with one finger on her left hand in quick, rapping salvos: C C C C C followed by a pause, and then again. She looked up to see if it was snowing and it was—falling flakes of sheet music melting on the keys when they landed. She looked down at the mystery of this snow and saw that both of her hands were sheathed in plaster casts from her elbows to her fingertips, except for the one index finger that was able to tap out the C in bursts of five. Profoundly embarrassed by her performance, she gazed into the audience, ready to mouth a desperate apology to her parents. But her father had turned and was whispering to a woman next to him, someone she didn’t recognize, and her mother was tapping cigarette ashes onto his lap and saying, loudly, “See?”
“Clara!” She turned her head toward her name. “Clara!” But it wasn’t someone in the theater; the voice was coming from someplace farther away, so she departed the stage of her dream and followed it, begrudgingly, through the strange portal into consciousness, becoming slowly aware that the C’s were actually knocks on her door, and the person calling her name was Peter.
She opened the door a few inches, then staggered back to the futon. Peter, carrying a large Tupperware container, elbowed the door wide open. “I brought you avgolemono. Greek chicken soup.”
“I’m not sick,” Clara said, her voice muffled by the pillow she’d dragged over her face.
Peter went into the kitchen and opened cabinets until he found a bowl. “Avgolemono is good for anything—colds, flu, broken hands.” He pushed aside empty Chinese food containers to make room on the tiny counter. “Besides, you can’t live on takeout forever.”
“Why not? What time is it, anyway?”
“Close to eleven.”
“Shit, I had no idea it was so late. I’ve got a lot to do.”
Peter looked around and opened his hands in a wide, questioning gesture. “What do you have to do? You’re almost done unpacking. It’s Sunday. You got soup. I was going to hook up your television so we could catch the race. Should be a good one. Kansas Speedway redid their track—now nobody’s got an advantage.” He walked over and handed her a bowl and a paper towel. “Here,” he said.
She pushed off the pillow and sat up, holding the bowl in her right hand and trying to maneuver the spoon with her left, but soup splashed onto her lap. “Don’t watch. This is humiliating. Also, I can hook up the TV.”
Peter laughed. “Yeah, I know.” He walked over and picked it up anyway, set it on the little bar that separated the kitchen from the front room. Clara watched him moving his bulk around as if he were half that size. He was tall, well over six feet, and broad, with big bones and solid muscle and thick hair that was as black and glossy as motor oil. That, along with his steady, placid gaze, made him an imposing figure. In the garage, he could pick up tires and engines without grunting, yet he could also somehow slip in and out of a room without drawing attention to himself. “You need a better set,” he said. “A flat-screen.”
“Sure, when I win the lottery,” she said, raising one eyebrow, then taking another spoonful. “This soup is good. Did your mother make it?”
“No,” he said, “I did.” His back was to her, but she could see his ears turn pink at the top.
“Well,” she said. “Thank you.”
He shrugged and continued threading the cable into the port behind the television.
* * *
—
A few months after Clara had broken up with Frank, a massive power outage had darkened most of the city, and Peter had driven over to bring her a battery-powered space heater. “It’ll get down into the thirties tonight,” he said, almost apologetically, when she opened the door. They’d been working together for over a year and were now close friends. They shared an October birthday two years apart, as well as a passion for fast cars and fixing engines, Bakersfield’s hometown NASCAR champion Kevin Harvick, and long drives with no destination in mind. They also shared a love of music and the failure to make it; Peter’s mother had insisted that he learn to play the traditional Greek bouzouki, but his friends at school had teased him about it until Anna let him quit. Over beers after work, they developed enough trust to tell each other their important stories, and eventually agreed that they probably knew each other better than anyone else did.
But Clara never let their friendship become romantic until the night of the storm. Something about how Peter stood at the
doorstep of the apartment he’d helped her move into just a few months before, with flashlight and heater in hand, filled her with an unexpected tenderness.
“Do you want to come in?” she asked, and he nodded, slowly, as a cold wind blew his hair into his face. She looked at him as though for the first time, noting his strong jaw and straight nose, his deeply kind, coffee-colored eyes. Without thinking, she reached up to brush his hair back and felt a shimmer of electricity flash from her fingertips through the rest of her body. He must’ve felt it too, because he looked at her with an expression of wonder. She took his hand and led him into her bedroom.
Before dawn the next morning, with Peter’s sleeping body curled around hers, Clara woke to a feeling of despair. She crawled out from beneath his arm and shook him awake. “I feel like I’m at a funeral,” she told him.
He rubbed his eyes and tried to make her out in the darkness. “What? Why?”
She could hardly speak, with the sensation of impending loss welling up inside her.
“Clara, what’s wrong?” He reached for her, but she pulled away.
“We can’t do this,” she said. “Not ever again.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I don’t want to lose you.” She felt twelve years old once more, the same way she’d felt back when she still had to remind herself upon waking each morning that her parents were dead.
“But you won’t lose me, Clara.” Again he reached out, but she turned away.
“Yes I will. If we do this, things will eventually go sideways and it’ll end. It always does.”
“You just haven’t been with the right guy until now.” He smiled and pulled her back into his arms.
She wrested herself from his embrace and clambered out of bed. “That’s right.” She began gathering up and dividing their discarded clothes. “And for good reason.”