And so on a Tuesday night, ungraded freshman history tests spilling from his lap, Talis Kimita hovered over his venerable machine, twisting its many silver knobs and clicking its bright levers up and down to no effect. His house fell silent for the first time, for the machine had been turned on every minute he was awake since he’d owned it, giving him classical music, the BBC, and the polite outrage of public radio commentators. In a panic, he read through his phone directory searching for repairmen, but soon discovered that there was no local technician who worked on old high-end audio equipment, and even on the Internet the closest place he could find was in central Texas, and they would repair it at a cost of $750, plus an absurd shipping charge. He had doubts the receiver would be safe in the mail, but the next day he called the Texas business, and a man who sounded like a parody of a cowboy told him cheerfully, “Hell yeah, ol buddy, we’ll have that unit a-singin’ like Willie Nelson in no time.” Talis distrusted cheerful Americans, suspecting they were out to trick him, that their good cheer was a cover for incompetence. Good cheer reminded him of his father, a minor Communist official in charge of lubricating oil consumption in Riga. His father had a round head, a black mustache, and a little shock of dark hair oiled down straight across his skull. He used to say, when a young Talis would come to him for advice on the big truths of existence, that nothing was of any significance unless it stopped your breathing. Then he would laugh and light a cigarette.
On Wednesday night, he walked around his quiet house, a renovated cypress cottage in the middle of an overactive Louisiana lawn, and mourned the loss of music. The machine was his heart, his thought, an ever-flowing well of Bach and Sibelius that buoyed him along through his bitter life. But with the music turned off, his thoughts turned into sheep escaping their pasture, and Talis became annoyed by his own mental activity. It occurred to him that the stereo receiver had insulated him from things to which he should have paid more attention.
For the remainder of the week he was grumpy with his colleagues, even more distant than usual at the coffee machine in the teachers’ lounge. He was big and round-shouldered, every hair on his body silver as Latvian frost. His fellow professors taught in short-sleeved shirts and tennis shoes, but even in the Gulf Coast climate Talis continued to dress in somber wool suits and glossy leather lace-ups. The smothering humidity of the region was a daily mystery he chose to ignore, as though the heat were a meteorological mistake that would disappear at any moment, to be followed closely by snow. No one had told him that it hadn’t snowed in Grand Crapaud since 1949. After work on Friday, he sat in his house and sweated in silence, as he loathed American television and had depended on the radio broadcasts to keep him informed of the world’s disasters, the daily history, as he termed the news.
On Saturday morning came the noise that always made him think of Russian helicopters trembling above his little childhood home in Lielvārde. It was Janice LeBlanc cutting the grass on his tiny lawn with her roaring, wheeled disk of a machine she steered by levers. A Dixie Chopper, he believed it was called. Janice came once a week because the St. Augustine of the front and back yards rose daily like slow green fire around his house. When she had finished edging the walk, she stepped up onto the porch, and Talis opened the door to hand her a check.
“Is a good job,” he said, glancing past the glistening middle-aged woman in a denim shirt.
“Thanks, doc. You got any other work to do, just let me know. Your porch could use pressure washing.”
Talis looked over at a rocking chair he had never used. He was unaware of what to do on a porch, since where he was raised people did not sit out enjoying the blizzards. “No, thank you, Janice.”
“All right. If you need a tune-up on that Volvo, I can do that too. There’s nothing I can’t fix if I set my mind to it.” She pulled off her leather gloves, and Talis saw that she had surprisingly nice hands, younger looking than his.
“The Volvo never gives me trouble. But thank you.”
Janice threw a backward glance at the old brick-red automobile parked against the curb. “Yeah, those cars are like defensive linemen. You can run into them, but you won’t hurt them much.”
The lawn lady, Talis noticed, personified her various machines. The complex and rumbling lawn mower sported a man’s name painted on the side in art deco script next to a tiny stick-on image of the Blessed Virgin. The tiny chainsaw she used to cut back the azaleas she referred to as Termite. He imagined she was a simple person who liked symbols, saw meanings in objects.
—
After Janice left, Talis ate lunch and checked his watch. It was time for the opera broadcast from a New Orleans station, and he stared at the old Pioneer receiver longingly, then walked over and for the hundredth time wiggled its electrical cord, its antenna, worried its bright buttons, knobs, and levers to no good result. He ran the station-indicator needle back and forth under the glass dial and gave the side of the cabinet several affectionate slaps. Finally, he sat back and stared. The lights inside the dial were on, but the machine was as soundless as one of his sophomores when asked about the causes of the Sino-Russian war. So he began to replay in his head some of the music that the box had given him in the past, but merely imagining a Puccini opera was no match for hearing the oiled and glossy walnut speakers sing through his bones.
—
Talis began to think it odd that he didn’t have any friends. The one speaking acquaintance he’d made at Marshland Community Junior College was an electrical engineer, Modred Stallings. So the next time they were seated at adjacent tables in the faculty lounge, not speaking, Talis leaned over and mentioned his failed stereo receiver.
Modred was a scientist, a Canadian, a man who understood the pointlessness of wasting time. He didn’t stop chewing as he spoke. “Buy a new stereo and throw the old one in the trash,” he told him.
“No, no. The new models don’t have the richness of sound. They are covered with nearly invisible black buttons in their black frames. With my old unit I can nurse along a weak station.” His hands sprung open like a bird’s wings. “It brings in music from all over.”
Modred’s Adam’s apple jiggled in his thin, pale neck. “The thing’s what, thirty-five, forty years old? It’s worn out. In America, we discard things that are worn out.”
Talis gave him a cold look. “Don’t talk to me as though I just passed through Ellis Island.”
Modred took another large swatch of sandwich into his mouth. “Seems like that old box is awfully important to you. Is that all you do? Just listen to it?” He swallowed, blinking hard. “Why don’t you come to the faculty parties on Fridays? Just for a beer.”
He shook his head. “I don’t know any of those people.”
“You might if you were less distant with them.”
“You’re saying I am cold?” An image of his wife of long ago flashed in his mind, a thin hand on a long hip, ebony hair sailing off to one side as she patiently berated him.
Modred seemed about to say something, but closed his mouth.
Talis leaned closer and clasped his hands. “Look, I was wondering if you would examine the receiver.”
Modred shook his head. “There are a thousand old components in that box of yours, and just about any of them could fail and stop your machine from working. It just doesn’t make sense to fix it.”
He sat back again. “I could pay you.”
“Not enough. That system’s before my time.”
Talis put his forehead down on the silly plastic table. He’d forgotten that Modred was only thirty and he was sixty. The young man had never lived through the deep-canyon sound of seventies audio and probably listened to nothing more complex than that Britney Spears person. “I’ve called around in Baton Rouge and New Orleans but can’t find anyone I’d trust to work on it.”
“The fact that there’s no one left who works on such equipment should tell you something.” Modred rose to leave, crumpled up his lunch bag, tossed it toward the trash can and missed.
/> By himself in the faculty lounge Talis scowled at his cooling coffee, pondering the lack of compassion among his colleagues. Modred could have volunteered to come by, drink a cup of tea, and at least make a symbolic examination of his receiver, but instead Talis had to endure his shallow ridicule. In the next few days he stopped colleagues he hardly knew to ask for advice about his problem, but no one seemed able to help.
—
At least once a day for the next week he turned the large silver knob that ran the glowing needle along the station numbers behind the glass front of the machine. Gently he exercised the filter buttons, the balance control, the muting switch, the stereo lever. The machine had been playing a piece by Melngailis the night he made love for the first time in his college hovel in Riga. It played Gershwin in New York and Chopin in Iowa after his divorce and was more of a companion than most people he had known in life. Its silence was like a death.
Saturday morning Janice parked her pickup at the curb on Delaune Street and backed her mower off the trailer. Talis watched her carefully through his kitchen window as he leaned over the sink, drinking black coffee. He had never paid much attention to the woman. That graying ponytail suggested she might not be as able as he hoped, but her eyes were steady with ability. She was not quite matronly, still quick moving. Always moving, as a matter of fact. Maybe fifty years old. When she came up on the porch after she’d finished his lawn, he asked her to come into the house. As she walked by, he took in a whiff of gasoline and soap.
He cleared his throat. “Janice, you mentioned that you can repair things?”
She blinked, adjusting her eyes to the dark room. “The Volvo’s acting up?”
“No, no. My Pioneer stereo receiver.” He motioned across the small living room as to a corpse. “Perhaps you know of someone who can examine it?”
“Hell, I’ll take a look at it.”
His eyebrows flew up in alarm. “You have experience in electronics?”
“They trained me in the army to test out circuit boards in tanks.”
“Yes, but this is audio and rather old.”
“I work on my son’s guitar amps and they have vacuum tubes. Trust me, I know about this stuff. It’s all made out of the same types of parts.” She pulled a red screwdriver from her back pocket and walked to the stereo. “Hey, a 1250. This thing’s got some thump in it, I bet.”
She had the wooden case off in less than a minute. Pulling a floor lamp over the machine, she peered in.
“Aren’t you going to turn it on?”
“Not yet.”
He watched her bring the light closer, shifting her head this way and that. She sniffed at the works. She flipped the power switch and turned her ear down to listen while holding her ponytail out of the dusty insides. Looking past her, he could see hundreds of pill-like electrical parts soldered down in soldierly groups to a green circuit board. He gazed on with no comprehension, as though he were examining brain tissue without a microscope. “Is no good,” he said, gesturing dismissively. “Nobody can make sense of that mysterious stuff.”
She glanced up at him. “There’s ways to deal with mysteries. You see these black things with two silver wires coming out? Now, look in here. The ones about the size of peanuts? Those are capacitors. They store and release electricity. There’s bigger ones and smaller ones, and they’re the first thing to go in these old sets. Here’s a big one with a drop of fluid running down its leg, so it’s leaking and not doing its job. And you see these guys the size and shape of Chiclets chewing gum? Those are the driver transistors. They run the show in here. And the forty-leven flat-sided cylinders wandering all over the board are smaller transistors, and those rows of three-quarter-inch-long things about the diameter of spaghetti are resistors. The little colored bands around them tell how much electricity they control.” She pointed with her screwdriver tip and explained the potentiometers, relays, fuses, and protection circuits, and as she did, Talis drifted close to her in the lamplight.
“If one thing goes out, everything stops working?” he asked.
“At least things’ll change. When this set was new, Frank Sinatra’s voice came through with a sharp edge to it.” She placed her screwdriver on a thumb-sized capacitor. “When this fellow gets weak, the voice’s edge goes. When that gray transistor over there loses a bit of control, Frank starts to sound gritty, like Rod Stewart.”
Janice sat back for a moment and stared into the case. “It’s like a big family in here. Every single thing affects everything else. When an uncle’s dying, the whole family’s blue about it. Mealtimes on Sunday just aren’t the same.” She gave him a sad smile.
Talis stared over her head for a moment, wondering where his ex-wife was. He hadn’t really thought of her in years. When they were first married, she had smiled at him like this simple woman did, indulgently, patiently. She could have smiled lovingly, and he began to question himself why she didn’t.
Janice continued checking the electronics, tapping with the screwdriver. “Do you have family?” she asked.
“No. I had only a brother and he was killed in Afghanistan.”
She looked up, out the front window. “No family. I can’t imagine it.”
Talis nodded toward the mechanism. “Now, I’m really alone. For the first time this machine has broken down.”
“Aw, it’s nothing I can’t fix.”
He straightened up. “Really?”
“Sure. But my computer got eat up by a virus, so I don’t have access to an online manual. I’ll write down the address of a website with all the specs on it, and you can download and print out the schematic for this particular model.”
“I can have it for you tomorrow afternoon.”
She reassembled the cover. “I’ll stop by to pick it up after church.” She looked at him. “Do you ever go to church?”
He moved his head and looked at the wall for just a moment.
“I thought not,” she said. “Most history professors are atheists.”
He raised his chin. “How do you know that?”
She slid the screwdriver back into her jeans. “I went to college for a couple of years. Long enough to know that you guys focus on the bad stuff—wars, famine, and dictators. That’ll mess you up, thinking that’s all the world’s about.” She glanced around the room as if looking for human failure.
“But those three things are history.”
She grinned and reaching out, poked his chest with a finger. “Yeah, what do you know about history, Mr. Loner Schoolteacher who doesn’t even own a TV? To me, history is what happens between famines as well. It’s about what people ate on holidays, what songs they sang after a day in the fields.”
He put a hand over the place she touched and could not resist frowning, as though it hurt. “Well, if you solve the tragedy of my stereo, I’ll sing you a peasant song.”
—
On Monday, Talis spread electrical schematics before Modred as if they were photos of his family.
Modred spat on his eyeglasses, rubbed them with a paper napkin, and put his face down close to the diagram. He nodded. “So. Many redundant systems. Interesting. It must’ve taken ten pounds of solder to put this thing together.”
“My yard woman says she can repair it. Should I trust her?”
“Hmm. If she’s had any electronics training she can do it. Everything’s so big a blind man could replace the parts.” He put a finger down on the page and frowned. “Warn her about those two big capacitors there. They’ll blow her across the room if she touches the terminals with a screwdriver.”
“She’s a careful person.”
Modred looked up at him, his eyes shrunken in his thick glasses. “Is she your age?”
Talis straightened up. “Younger. I mean, not too young.” His fair skin turned red up to his forehead.
“Does she interest you?”
“Don’t be silly. She’s a grass cutter.”
“But you’ll be in love if she brings Haydn back into your life?”
Talis scraped up the schematics in a noisy crinkle of paper and began walking backward toward the lounge door. “Thank you for looking at these.”
“No problem. Keep me posted,” he said with a smirk.
—
Back at his quiet house that afternoon, Talis began to reminisce, something he rarely did as there was usually no room in his head for such activity, every minute between lecture preparation and paper grading filled by music or intelligent commentary. He actually closed his eyes and tried not to think, but the machine’s absence caused his brain to take on tasks other than listening. He recalled that it had been twenty-two years since he’d seen his wife, and he began to go over the old intimacies he and Marlena had shared. They liked the same food, the same composers; they both liked to sit Indian-style on the sofa and listen to opera, following along in the same libretto. They differed, however, in what they read. She liked American fiction, and he read mostly biography and historical research. Their marriage lasted six years, his wife’s enthusiasm for compromise shriveling until one day she looked at him at the kitchen table and said, “Nothing is happening.”
He looked up from a new book on Nazi Germany. “What do you mean?”
“Between us. You read, I read, we summarize to each other what we read.”
He waved a hand at her. “You’re tired,” he said.
“I’m not tired enough.” And she looked at him accusingly. “I’m not doing anything.”
“You are an editor. You help people get published.”
She sniffed. “People with no tastebuds who write cookbooks. Loveless people who write about love.” He recalled the look that came over her face then, an expression of abiding emptiness.
Marlena, his dark-haired beauty, returned to upstate Indiana to work for Notre Dame. Talis, for a while at least, was ashamed that he enjoyed being alone, that he could play Bartók until his apartment trembled. He dated different women, but none would stay with him for long. He was a historian who repeated his own history, learning nothing in the process. And now, in the limitless silence of his tiny house, he began to wonder what his options were.
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