The Weight of a Piano

by Chris Cander

  Katya nodded once more.

  “All set,” the man said, and handed Mikhail their temporary checkbook with a shiny plastic holder. “Let me know if there’s anything else I can do to help you while you’re getting settled in.”

  Ella translated, and Mikhail smiled broadly. “Отлично. Спасибо. Спасибо,” he said, nodding and pumping the manager’s hand. Then he elbowed Katya, who again was staring at the black-and-white picture on the wall, and she came out of the reverie she’d slipped into and said, “Thank you also.”

  * * *

  —

  That night, after her husband and son were asleep, Katya tiptoed into the kitchen and turned on the light. She looked around at the gleaming fixtures, the white tile counter, the large refrigerator that could hold more food than they would eat in a week. In Leningrad, their apartment was only twenty-seven square meters, exactly nine per person. This kitchen alone was almost that big, and they also had two bedrooms, a large bathroom, a living room, a backyard with a patio, all filled with far more donated furniture than they needed. The walls had recently been painted a white as bright as their future was supposed to be. The large windows on the perimeter walls made Katya feel exposed, even though they looked out on the vine-covered fence or lemon trees or rosebushes. She thought of her mother, always hunched over a pot in a dank corner, trying to turn next to nothing into a decent meal. She would be overwhelmed by the magnificence of this kitchen and probably insist on sleeping on a cot next to the breakfast table so that others could live under the same roof. I don’t need to sleep in my own room, what a waste! This is more than enough for me. I could die here it’s so beautiful. Katya thought of this, and of the other refuseniks waiting for approval to leave Russia. They didn’t care that they’d have to learn another language, a new currency, a new transportation system, a new set of rules. It was worth it. So what if they had to sell everything before they left? Maybe they didn’t care that they’d never again see their relatives or friends who stayed behind. But Katya did.

  At the airport, she’d sobbed until her head ached as she clutched her mother and father for the very last time. It was a fact. If you left, you never would return. And her parents, who’d never leave Russia, would be buried near where they’d lived their modest lives. She’d never even see their graves. After a year in Los Angeles, she would be given her green card and made a legal citizen instead of a refugee. In another five, she could take a test in English to become an American citizen. But the thought of getting buried in an American cemetery made her heart ache.

  Why are you thinking of your death, Ekaterina? Are you ready to join me? She had heard this harsh voice in her head ever since she’d left Leningrad. She didn’t know whose voice it was. Maybe it was a domovoi that followed her from house to house. Did Americans have house spirits? Probably not. They probably didn’t want hairy goblins keeping the peace for them. She opened the oven door and peered in. No domovoi there. More likely it was the lost music who was talking to her. But it wasn’t the music that could part the clouds and lift her into color; it was the music’s absence that was whispering. Her country was on the other side of the world. Her parents were muted by the distance. Her piano, gone. Without those things, there was too much emptiness in her head.

  “I would welcome it,” she said aloud in the tiled kitchen, her voice bouncing back to her off the bright whiteness.

  And your son? He is very young.

  She lowered her voice. “Grisha will be fine. Many opportunities exist here. He won’t need me.”

  Perhaps that’s true. American sons seem to find success. But what about your husband?

  “He isn’t the man I married. Angry all the time, except in front of other people. For them, he is happy and kind, but he saves the worst of himself for me. He always says he understands music, yet never remembers it. The same with the language. English words are too difficult for him. He drinks more now, and his excuse is that it helps to loosen his tongue.”

  It will be—

  “Stop.”

  She opened the refrigerator, the cold air hitting her nightgown, and peered inside at groceries she could hardly remember buying. She was hungry, but nothing looked appetizing. While Mikhail struggled to learn English, it came easily to her. Milk. Eggs. Orange juice. Lettuce. Mayonnaise. Carrots. Velveeta. She closed the door, sat down at the kitchen table, and laid her head down on her crossed arms.

  * * *

  —

  The three of them had flown from Leningrad to Vienna with eight suitcases, wearing as many of their clothes as they could beneath their coats even though it was mid-May and already quite warm. Because they had almost no money, their parents had given them as much as they could afford, and they’d used it to purchase goods that were in demand in Europe: Russian vodka, caviar, quality babushkas, hand-painted ornaments, matryoshka dolls, linens. Others had told them that selling these black-market imports was their only hope to make enough money to survive the emigration.

  After two miserable weeks in Austria, living in a tiny, dark apartment with two other families, all of whom were suffering from an intestinal flu that ruined the collective mood as well as the bathroom they shared, they were transferred by train to an Italian village on the Tyrrhenian Sea called Ladispoli. They had two rooms with damp, peeling plaster walls in a building filled with other Russian refugees waiting for permission to resettle permanently in the United States, Canada, or Australia. Katya remembered that first night in Italy. Standing on the balcony outside their walk-up railroad flat, she saw a full moon, yellow and heavy in the sky, that looked closer to the earth than it should’ve been. This scared her. The air was warm and smelled like the ocean, and it, too, scared her. She should have loved it, but she couldn’t.

  They lived in Italy for a year and nine months. They sold almost everything they’d brought along at the Sunday morning flea markets in Rome, but by the fall they needed more money to pay their rent and buy food.

  “Give me your records to sell,” Mikhail told her. Katya’s small collection was by her favorite Russian composers: Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky, Scriabin, Borodin, Taneyev, Shostakovich. All she had left of her home and her music, though of course they had no turntable on which to play them.

  “No,” she told him. “I’ll starve first.”

  “Then you will find work. I’m tired of you moping around every day, letting me bear all the burdens.”

  Mikhail had been taking minor off-the-books jobs in restaurants and construction. “Road building,” he’d said ruefully after a day of filling potholes on the Strada Statale. While Katya cleaned houses, an older woman in their apartment building looked after their son and told her she was lucky that she could find work, because not everybody was able to. She felt like a traitor, since she only wanted to go home.

  * * *

  —

  “Misha, I want to go to the Death Valley,” Katya told him a few days after they’d opened their bank account. She was tired of traipsing around the city with Ella, gathering castoffs and hand-me-downs with which to fill their too-big and already crowded house.

  To her surprise, he agreed. Perhaps he, too, was tired of the city, even though he would never dream of admitting to anything of the sort. On a Friday morning in mid-April, they packed their thirdhand car, a tan 1972 Cadillac DeVille of which Mikhail was unusually proud, with snacks and drinks and extra blankets for their son, and drove four hours to Panamint Springs without stopping. They had a late lunch, filled the gas tank, bought a map of the park, and asked the man at the counter to show them the route to Badwater Basin.

  “Now, you know it’s a mighty big place,” he said. “Lots more to see than just Badwater. You got the Mesquite Flat Sand Dunes, Salt Creek, Devil’s Golf Course, Mosaic Canyon, Ubehebe Crater, Racetrack Playa…” He held up a different finger for each location; then he looked down at them and
paused. “How long you plannin’ on stayin’, I guess I should’ve asked.”

  “For today,” Katya answered. “Then we go home to Los Angeles.”

  “Well, you might consider spendin’ at least a night if you can swing it. There’s a cheap place in Beatty on the other side of the park, got a casino and a swimmin’ pool. If you can manage that, then here’s how you could see a fair number of the more accessible areas.” Katya and Mikhail looked at each other and watched as he circled and numbered a few landmarks and drew a line east into and around the park to the town of Beatty, then southwest back into the park to a couple other places and finally out to the southeast side. “You can go on home from there, get a little different view of things.” They thanked him and, as they’d long been accustomed to doing, did as they were told.

  They drove mostly in silence as civilization became just a speck in the rearview mirror and a wholly different terrain unfurled around them. Katya looked out over the hood of their tan car to the tan road that cut through low tan hills dotted occasionally with clumps of tan vegetation. She began to worry that she’d made a mistake; it seemed lonesome and deserted, not starkly beautiful. Was this why someone had named it Death Valley?

  Grisha was too young to notice the landscape, but once they parked and got out of the car he squealed with delight and ran around in every direction. It made Katya laugh, too, watching him toddle over sand and rocks on his fat little legs. Even Mikhail seemed to relax. He did a series of stretches, then squatted down and extended his feet one at a time, as if performing a slow-motion Cossack dance; over the lusty wind, Katya could hear his knees pop. He offered her a Coca-Cola, which had gone warm, but she drank it anyway, letting the carbonation sting her nose.

  “I will take your picture,” Mikhail said. He held up the Polaroid camera they’d borrowed from Ella—“Enjoy it!” she’d commanded them—and pointed it at Katya. She’d been dusting sand off her son’s open hands and turned back toward her husband when he called to her; he snapped the shutter just as a gust blew her hair across her face.

  “Take another,” she said. “I wasn’t ready.”

  But he shook his head and closed the camera. “We can’t. It’s too expensive. Only one picture at each place.”

  They had only one eight-pack of instant film, and took five pictures that day before checking into the least expensive room in the hotel. They ate their leftovers from lunch in their room, and then Katya gave Grisha a bath. “I will go to the casino,” Mikhail told her, tapping his temple and smiling shrewdly, “to win back the cost of the hotel and even more so we can buy a fancy breakfast tomorrow and another pack of the film.”

  But when he stumbled back to their room hours later, stinking of alcohol, he slammed the door and let loose a barrage of curses. They’d tricked him, he insisted in a slurring voice, gotten him drunk and taken advantage of him because they were afraid of his superior gambling skills. Katya hushed him, worried that he would wake the neighbors, and helped him to bed. There was no breakfast at all the next morning.

  * * *

  —

  Back in Los Angeles, Katya kept up the habit of sitting alone in the kitchen after her family was asleep. She drank according to her mood: tea if she was melancholy; coffee if she was already anxious, though it might keep her awake for hours; vodka if the whispers of the domovoi or the lost music were too insistent in her ears. Tonight, a night in early May, with field crickets trilling outside her window, Katya poured herself a half glass of vodka from Mikhail’s stash.

  She spread out the eight photographs from their trip on the table and studied each one for minutes at a time. The film carton had said it could produce “Supercolor,” but all the images looked as dull and tan as the faded finish on their car, Katya always standing either alone or with their son in front of jagged peaks, dry lakebeds, or undisturbed sand. No trees, no flowers, no other people—just empty landscapes that suggested a cold and unpopulated otherworld. Even she didn’t look like herself. Mikhail had managed to capture her only when she was half-turned, or with her eyes closed, or bent down over her son. There was only one in which her face was clear. She was standing on the dry salt-covered Badwater Basin, the place that had looked like a frozen lake when she’d seen it on the banker’s wall. She was staring up at the cliffs above—Coffin Peak, she remembered one of them was called—with something akin to longing. Behind her, the scenery did appear frozen. That was how she felt inside—dead. As, in fact, she did in all the Polaroids. Even the bank manager had called this place desolate, a word she didn’t know but somehow understood.

  There’s no music there, came the whisper in her ears.

  The voice was right. These hot-weather vistas seemed frozen because they were trapped in time and silence. Just like she was.

  Maybe it wasn’t the case that she didn’t look like herself in these photographs. Instead, maybe it was that she did.

  ON THE HIGHWAY, the eastbound traffic was dense enough that Clara could keep the truck in sight without being conspicuous. She’d decided to trail them for a while, since she didn’t have anything better to do and the mountains were lighting up in a lovely fiery glow as the sun set behind her. She rolled her window down, then the passenger side to eliminate the annoying low-frequency buffeting that filled the car when she reached a certain speed. She would turn around soon, just not yet.

  * * *

  —

  When Clara was young, her mother never rode in a car with the windows down; she didn’t like the wind blowing her hair out of place, loose strands getting stuck in her mauve lipstick. But Uncle Jack always did. As a hobby, he fixed up old Chevrolet trucks from the 1950s, none of which had air-conditioning, and once Clara was living with them, he’d often take her for long drives during that lonesome stretch between dinner and bedtime. They would head out of Bakersfield toward the Sierras, driving past the oil fields, the bluffs overlooking the Kern River, the college. Occasionally they went as far as the big county park, where they might get out and take a walk, mostly in silence, looking for the peacocks that liked to wander there. Or else they went north into the Sierra Nevada foothills or south to look at the native grapevines, or west through citrus orchards and fields of almonds and pistachios. He didn’t try to make up for the lost, empty parts of her life; he just drove her around at a leisurely pace with the windows down, letting the wind do the talking for both of them.

  * * *

  —

  That was the comfortable rhythm she fell into now, secretly following the truck. The produce fields and vineyards scrolled by like moving pictures, then opened into grazing areas and low, grassy hills. Half an hour out of Bakersfield, they approached the Tehachapi Pass wind farm; off to her right, the giant white turbines made their slow, synchronized rotations. She imagined the inner workings, the energy created by the blades turning the drive shaft, the gearbox increasing its speed to power the generator, which then converted kinetic energy into an electrical current, which flowed down a cable inside the turbine tower. Watching the machines relaxed her; she loved the complicated simplicity of the moving parts, the static elements that could wring megawatts out of thin air.

  Her phone rang, startling her out of her reverie.

  “Hey,” Peter said when she answered. “You hungry?”

  Clara considered this. It was almost seven, and she hadn’t eaten since lunch. “Yeah, actually I am,” she said. “But I’m not around. I’m…on the road. I had to go somewhere.”

  “Oh,” he said. “So did those guys pick up the piano?”

  “They did.”

  “You okay about it?”

  “Not really.” She sped up just a little, again feeling the need to stay close to the Blüthner. She attached her gaze to the truck and let it pull her. She wanted to be eight years old again, or six, or two. She wanted to be in the car with her mother and father back when they were still a family that was going to live
happily ever after, all of them. She wanted to stretch out on the backseat and drift off to sleep, curled up in the murmur of their voices. She stifled a cry with a single sniff.

  “Clara, talk to me.”

  “I’m fine. I just want to make sure they get there safely.”

  “Where is there?”

  “Vegas, I think. And then they’re going into Death Valley, though I don’t know exactly where.” Abruptly she understood why she hadn’t yet turned around to go home. “I know it’s weird, but I want to meet Greg.”

  “Fucking hell, Clara. You went with them? What’s going on? Why do you want to meet this guy?” He paused. “Have you been talking to him?”

  “I’m not with them. I’m behind them, in my own car. And no, I haven’t been talking to Greg. This isn’t about him, it’s about the piano.”

  Peter’s long exhalation sounded like a soft wind in her ear. “Sorry, I know it’s none of my business, but it doesn’t seem right, you taking off like that, going who knows where to meet some dude you don’t even know. Where are you meeting him?”

  “I don’t actually know. Nobody knows I’m behind them. It was sort of spontaneous—”

  “For fuck’s sake, Clara. I’m leaving right now.”

  “Oh, stop it. I can take care of myself.”

  “It’ll be midnight by the time you get there. Nothing good happens at midnight in Vegas.”

  “Well, whatever happens will stay there, right?” She tried to laugh, but it sounded forced. “Look, I won’t do anything stupid. I just need to do this.”

  He was quiet for a beat. “Will you do one thing for me? Could you call me when you get there to let me know you’re okay?”

  She could picture him holding the phone against his scruffy cheek, hunched forward like he did when he was working, as if he could isolate and solve the problem by enclosing it inside his physical bearing. She smiled. “Yes, I will. I promise.”