The Weight of a Piano Read online

  She didn’t answer right away. Maybe she hadn’t really loved Ryan after all, certainly not how he wanted her to. But she was used to being with him, to having someone to go home to, and life with him had been easy. “Will you help me move?” she asked Peter.

  He pulled off his ball cap—Havoline, Protect What Matters—and raked his fingers through his thick black hair. “Of course,” he said, and put the cap back on. “You know I will.”

  * * *

  —

  Clara refused both Anna’s suggestion that she leave early to take care of herself and Teddy’s invitation to stop by the Early Ford V-8 Club swap meet to help him pick out some flathead engine parts for a restoration project. Instead, she splashed water on her face and went back to work. She’d told Peter she’d handle the rack-and-pinion job, and she would, even though she knew that under the circumstances he’d gladly do it himself.

  When she was finished, she returned her tools to their places in the chests that lined the wall beneath a shelf of Chilton service manuals, gathered up the dirty towels and threw them into the rag bucket, and told everyone good night.

  Peter stepped across the pit and the greasy cement floor and met her at the open bay door. “We’re going for a beer later,” he said. “Want to come?”

  “Thanks, but I have to start packing.”

  “Want some help?” Peter asked. She could’ve mouthed the words as he said them. At least once or twice a day, whenever he’d finished whatever he was doing, he’d wander over to wherever she was to see if he could lend a hand. When Ryan was out of town, as he often was, Peter would show up with cling-wrapped plates of his mother’s cooking or tickets to a game or a DVD to watch. During the most recent forest fire, he’d defied evacuation orders and driven to her house and convinced her to go south with him to the coast. Clara had always prided herself on maintaining her composure, something her mother would’ve admired as stoicism. Even if she was sick or lonely or worried, she was always “fine” to anyone who asked. Yet Peter could always tell when she wasn’t, and there he’d be, loyal as a dog, never asking for anything in return. It grated on her, how much she relied on him. She allowed herself to like certain people, but that didn’t extend to needing them. Especially him.

  “No, you guys go,” she said with a small wave. “I’m good. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Outside, though the sun was low, there was no relief from the stagnant heat in the air, no westerly breeze to blow away the visible heat rising off the cars’ quivering engines or to move the thin, dust-covered palm trees that lined the chain-link fence by the road. Clara stood next to a stack of old tires that separated the Kappas Xpress Lube entrance from the trailer park next to it, looking out between passing trucks at the empty dirt lot across the street. The soot and ozone that always hung in the air in Bakersfield seemed especially thick and yellow today, like the sky was infected with something.

  She played a game with herself: if she turned around and someone was standing there watching her, Peter or even one of his brothers, she’d go back inside and say yes, let’s go get a beer. She would postpone the inevitable return to the rental house she had shared with Ryan, where a different key to some unknown place awaited her. She could have a beer or two or maybe three, and forget that she was about to start over, alone, again. She looked back just as Teddy was pulling down the rolling door on the last open bay from the inside, and she took that as a sign. When there was a break in the traffic, she jogged across the street to her car.

  She stopped at the Mexican grocery store where she and Ryan had met and subsequently shopped, and immediately regretted it. The piñatas hanging from the ceiling and banda playing over the loudspeaker seemed too festive for her errand. She asked someone stacking produce if they had any empty boxes, and while he went to find some she browsed the liquor department for beer. Ryan had been fussy about alcohol, especially beer, talking importantly about bitterness, notes, and finishes. He never drank straight from a bottle, insisting that it diminished things like creaminess and mouthfeel. Clara strode past the displays of craft brews and imports, picked up a six-pack of Pabst, then went to the checkout to pay and collect the stack of collapsed boxes the worker had left for her there.

  “KATYA, COME. I have something to show you.”

  Ekaterina Dmitrievna looked from her father to her mother, who was kneading dough for their dinner—again there would be no meat or butter. Her mother smiled and nodded. Katya put down her doll, took her father’s extended hand, and they walked down the hall of the four-story prewar apartment building, through the scent of cabbage and the sound of babies crying, past the tattered propaganda posters. EXPLOITS ARE WAITING FOR THE BRAVE! BREAD—TO THE MOTHERLAND! POWER TO SOVIETS—KHRUSHCHEV! She was tired—they all were tired—but for her it was because she’d lain awake all night in her small bed listening for the music that had stopped three nights ago.

  “Where are we going, Papa?”

  “Chi-chi-chi. You will see. A surprise.”

  Katya grew anxious, though, as they approached the apartment belonging to the old blind German. He’d been her father’s acquaintance, a client. Her father visited him more often than he did his other customers, because his piano went out of tune so frequently. “He plays too hard,” Dmitri told his daughter. “He puts all his sadness into his songs. Bad for the piano but good for me, eh?”

  The German had been banging on his piano for as long as Katya could remember. Mostly he played at night, when the children in the building were trying to sleep. The music made them restless and their mothers angry, but they feared speaking up. They imagined they knew what he would say in his gruff, bellowing voice: It is always night to me! He rarely left his rooms, and whenever he did he groused loudly in German as he shuffled his too-large body down the halls, knocking into the walls with his cane, his empty blue eyes roving over everything. He grew monstrous in their imaginations, and the neighbors whispered rumors about him that might or might not have been true: Wilm Kretschmann was not his real name. He had volunteered with the Waffen-SS. He was half Jewish, not one of Hitler’s Aryan Herrenvolk, but still had killed hundreds of Jews and partisans. He’d defected from his SS division, Das Reich, in 1941, before his ethnicity could be discovered, slipping away from his unit in Naro-Fominsk during the Battle of Moscow; Hitler would’ve had him executed otherwise, because no “subhumans” were allowed membership in the Waffen-SS, even if they were willing murderers. He’d hidden in a textile factory, listed as missing, until the Wehrmacht had been pushed back by Soviet forces. He’d been blinded by either shrapnel or guilt. Who knew how he’d made it to Zagorsk? He had made his money as a building contractor or a thief. He still carried his Mauser HSc in his jacket pocket. The music was proof of his torment. He was a monster, a demon, an ogre.

  Katya loved him.

  The first time she followed her father to the German’s apartment, she was six. The door had been left ajar. She slipped inside and crouched down against the wall, her back pressed against the peeling wallpaper, ready to run if she had to. Her father didn’t see her; he was bent inside the case. The German sat straight in an old chair like a soldier, looking at nothing, his ear cocked toward the piano. Katya worried that he could hear her heart beating, it was going so fast, like one of his musical pieces, so she hugged her knees to quiet the sound. After sitting unnoticed for several minutes, she grew bold. She stuck her tongue out at him. Nothing. She did it again, then pulled a silly face. The German was impassive. Only when Katya stifled a giggle did he turn toward her. She was silent after that, and directed her attention to the shiny black piano that had swallowed her father’s head.

  In the months to come, she went repeatedly, stealing inside to watch the German as he listened to her father tune his piano. What she wanted most was to watch him make the music she heard at night. Unlike others in the building, she liked the strange and complicated lullabies that came from his apartment.
She wanted to know how it was done.

  “Please will you play,” she finally said one afternoon, emboldened by this desire, the words lisping from the gap where her two front teeth had fallen out. She had just celebrated her seventh birthday. Her father turned and spoke her name sharply. “What are you doing here?” But the German only lifted his hand, as if in blessing, and beckoned her from where she stood in the doorway. “I wondered if that was what you were here for,” he said in a voice not at all like an ogre’s.

  He paid her father, asked him to sit down, and guided Katya to the near end of the piano, his giant hand warm and slightly trembling on her shoulder, and told her to stand there. He maneuvered himself onto the bench, sitting heavily, and rested his hands in his lap. Katya held her breath. After a moment, his hands floated up elegantly to the keyboard for a beat, a moment of silence, then drifted down to touch it: careful, slow, gentle. Katya thought of how her mother stroked her hair when she was upset or had difficulty sleeping.

  But what was this music? It wasn’t the wild, pounding music he played at night; it was more like soft rain, or clouds passing overhead, or the dance of snow fairies. It unfolded like a story she’d never heard before. Secretly, she pressed her hand against the shining wood. She watched the old German’s fingers moving over the keys, barely touching them, and felt the music enter her entire body through her ears, her eyes, her feet, her hand. When he finished, her smock was wet with tears, and when he stood up—his movements gruff again, shaking from age and blindness—there were tears on his face, too.

  “A Russian composition for you,” he said in his strange accent. “Piano Sonata no. 2 in G-sharp Minor by Alexander Scriabin. First movement. You know him?”

  She shook her head, forgetting that he couldn’t see her.

  He put his thumb against her cheek and felt the tears.

  “Blagodaryu,” he said. “Thank you.”

  Her father understood his statement as a dismissal, so he took Katya by the hand and led her away. “Thank you,” she said over her shoulder. “Thank you.”

  She had hoped he would invite her back and teach her something, but he never did, and she was too awestruck to sneak in on her own.

  For the past three nights, she hadn’t heard him playing, and when she and her father entered the old German’s apartment, it was empty except for his big, glossy piano. “Where is he, Papa?” she asked. “Where is his chair? His bed?”

  “Chi-chi-chi, calm down, Katen’ka. He is gone. But there is something. He left you his piano.”

  “Gone where?”

  “He is dead. Someday I will explain. He left us a letter.”

  Katya hadn’t noticed that her father was holding something in his hand. “What does it say?”

  “Only that he wanted you to have the Blüthner. He bid me to take care of it for you, and that you should learn to play. He said even a blind man could see the music beating in your heart.”

  * * *

  —

  Katya’s father and three neighbors pushed the piano down the hall and into the tiny living room. Two new families moved into the old German’s apartment, and began complaining of ghosts. He blew his brains out with that Mauser HSc, the whispers went. He’s gone home to the land of ogres and fiends. We’re glad to be rid of him!

  But without the German and his music, Katya could fall asleep only if she lay down with her head beneath his piano. With her hair tangled in the pedals, she dreamed of snow fairies dancing, and gentle rain, and clouds blithely passing by overhead. In the mornings she tried to copy the sounds, picking the notes out one by one, learning their order. Her father encouraged her, taught her what he knew. He said the German’s gift was proof of the goodness in mankind’s heart. To her, this meant there was magic to be discovered in such a special piano.

  And she did.

  It was the first great love of her life.

  UNTIL SHORTLY BEFORE her twelfth birthday, Clara and her parents lived in a Santa Monica neighborhood that was within walking distance of both her elementary school and the beach and only seven miles from UCLA, where Alice and Bruce both taught. From the outside, their house was picturesque: a Craftsman-style cottage, just big enough, painted a pale yellow and surrounded by an actual white picket fence. It was filled with books and art and sunlight and an industrious sort of silence they ignored by keeping the vintage Marantz stereo system in the living room on much of the time—NPR for her mother, the classical music station for her father. They worked a lot, even at home, while Clara read or watched TV or made up gymnastic routines.

  The stereo hid other silences, too. Those that came before and after her parents’ fights. Or seeped out from their separate studies, where they spent hours after dinner. Her mother usually kept the door to her study closed; Clara could smell her Virginia Slims smoke through the jamb. Her father left his door ajar, and sometimes he let her do her homework on the red Kazakh rug while he read aloud in languages she didn’t understand. His silences, though, were the loudest. Hush, they said. I’m busy or Maybe later or I forgot.

  Yet Clara was certain it hadn’t always been like that. There were flashes of memory, faint proof of happier times: the three of them walking to the beach with cardboard buckets of fried chicken for a sunset picnic, or sitting outside playing cards on the small back patio. After they died, these were the moments Clara recalled most vividly. The greasy chicken, the creaky wicker patio furniture, the crisp, salt-flavored air, the warmth of holding hands with both of them at the same time, walking between them.

  Her only remaining family was her father’s sister, Ila, and Ila’s husband, Jack. She and her parents had visited them at their home in Bakersfield a few times—holidays and her grandparents’ funerals—and it was obvious that these trips were obligations, not adventures. Whenever they entered the city limits, her mother would shake her head at the pall outside the car window and say, “I still can’t imagine how you grew up in this wasteland, Bruce.” He would look at her sideways and reply, “Go easy, Alice.”

  Ila had what her father called a nervous condition, often exacerbated by Alice’s aloofness. Ila pointed out flaws in her own cooking or housekeeping or reading habits, overfilling conversational gaps with twaddle. Once, during a meal there, she knocked over a water glass, looked like she might cry, and kept apologizing for ruining the tablecloth, even after Alice assured her coolly several times that it was only water, it would be fine. Jack, on the other hand, with his old jeans and soft, worn shirts, his kind blue eyes and southern drawl, didn’t seem to mind being either underdressed or undereducated. Adjacent to the house, he had a garage and body shop that he’d built into a steady business. He had a curious nature and liked to hear what Alice had to say about politics, and he often asked Bruce for book recommendations, though he didn’t follow up on them. He always asked Clara about school, and when it came time to leave he would shake her hand and say, “It was a real pleasure to see you again, young lady,” and she could tell he meant it.

  After her parents’ memorial service—there were no remains to bury; the fire had taken almost everything—Ila and Jack drove her from Santa Monica to Bakersfield, her aunt crying and repeating how awful it all was, how terrible to lose everything like she had. Clara didn’t speak. She watched out the rear window as the sky darkened and everything she knew receded until her eyes were dry from not blinking, not crying, and her knees ached from kneeling on the seat. She curled up in her stiff new black dress, the patent leather shoes pinching her toes, and for the rest of that seemingly endless two-hour drive thought only about how badly she wanted to go home. But home as she knew it was gone.

  It was in her uncle’s garage that she learned how to live with her losses. While her aunt tried to soothe her with soft, idle chatter and constant expressions of grief, Jack understood Clara’s need for quiet. He made a comfortable place for her under an old desk in the corner of the shop’s office wh
ere she could rest or hide, but where they could keep an eye on each other. Eventually, as she emerged from her shock, he showed her how to check tire pressure, refill windshield-washing fluid, jump-start a dead battery. She was enrolled in a new school where she made some acquaintances and then a few friends, but she was always drawn to the safety and comfort of the shop. Over the years, she learned how to fix tires, change oil, do minor engine tune-ups, handle auto inspections and, later, to troubleshoot breakdowns and repair electrical systems. She worked as many as twenty hours a week throughout high school, even though her uncle encouraged her to spend more time with her friends, to start thinking about college and her future. He brought home a brochure from CSU Bakersfield, but when she looked at the endless list of majors offered, she panicked.

  “Clarabell,” he said. “Listen here. You’re the little girl your aunt and me never had. I’m glad for it, you know that. But this wasn’t supposed to be your life.” He swept his arm through the air, indicating the house, the shop, even the city. “You don’t have to stay here. You can do anything you want.” The only problem was that she didn’t know if there was anything else she wanted to do.

  Then, shortly after she turned twenty, she met Bobby, a UCLA philosophy student who was driving through Bakersfield to visit friends up in Fresno. His Jetta had been misfiring as he drove up 99, and when his engine light came on, Jack’s shop was the first one he could find. Clara adjusted his throttle and smiled as she handed him back his keys. He smiled in turn, and their dinner that night was the start of a year-long relationship. He was a few years older, and talked with gravitas about his ideas for several start-ups, and said that after graduation, he wanted to found his own company. She liked that Bobby opened doors for her, and held her hand when they were in a movie or walking anywhere, and gazed at her when she was speaking. It turned out that he lived not far from where she’d grown up in Santa Monica. At her request, they spent a Saturday on the beach she’d once considered her own, and then he drove her up the street she’d lived on with her parents. “Drive slow,” she said, and he did, making no clumsy attempt to cheer her as she suffered that intensely difficult experience.