The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz
| Short fiction related to the playE | ||
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And Besides God Made Poison Ivy |
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the Piano Came A Story by Armin Wiebe (First published in Rhubarb, Spring 2003) Copyright © Armin Wiebe 2003 I should have buried you in that piano and set the lawn swing over the grave and planted poison ivy. By now that itchy gnauts would have ranked up those red and white boards half-way to the Himmel sky...oh Koadel, I didn't hear you come in. I had my eyes closed listening with these earplugs to the radio that your daughter brought me for a birthday present. Such handy things they have nowadays -- a radio with a little gramophone inside and I can hold it all in my hand yet -- and that little record she gave me to play, I am listening to it over and over. How did she know I like piano music? Oh yes, I remember now, you asked for the piano when I had to move out of the house. You never learned to play it either, did you? And I always thought you would...you liked to sit at it when you were so small and you would play on the keys. Your mother thought it was just noise you made and I guess lots of times that's all it was, but sometimes, when you were all alone with that piano and you didn't think anybody was listening I thought it sounded like you were trying to put notes together into a song. Not a song that you would play in church, dragging the people's singing along like a manure sled on a gravel road, no not that kind of piano playing. Even then I didn't think you would ever play that way. No, it sounded more like you were trying to make a different kind of song, almost like a story, it seemed like, maybe like that Peter and the Wolf record we had for the wind-up gramophone where there are different notes for the different people and animals in the story. But one person's music is another person's noise and your mother would take you away and close the lid tight and she even wanted the key to lock it shut. But I never had the key for that piano lid, it was old already when your grandfather brought it home to me on the wagon behind the tractor. I don't think your grandfather Kjrayel Kehler even had such a dunkel look on his face when the doctor told him that he had cancer as he had that day when he drove into the yard with the tractor and the wagon behind. I was pulling carrots in the garden and I thought he had gone to the neighbours to get some straw bales or maybe lend himself some yreitshoft machine and then got lost in some longwinded neighbouring because Kjrayel hadn't come home for faspa, but then in those days it often happened with the men if they were by somebody else's place at faspa time. It was expected that the wife would have enough faspa for whoever was there, not like nowadays when a person almost has to have an appointment to even go to the beckhouse. But yes, there was a dunkel schwoijk on your grandfather's face, almost like a hail cloud, though I didn't see it right away because I was bending over pulling carrots and I didn't think I needed to look over to what he was doing until I saw that he had backed up the wagon nearly to the sitting room door that we never used. Well, my heart fluttered when I saw that. I mean, Koadel, your grandfather had that morning at breakfast talked about maybe selling the farm and moving to Saskatchewan or Peace River but I hadn't thought that he would want to load up the wagon before the evening cows had been milked. Even Kjrayel Kehler wasn't that haustig a man. But like I've told you before, living with your grandfather was sometimes like trying to stand up on a moving lawn swing and so my heart fluttered when I saw the wagon backed up to the sitting room door. Kjrayel Kehler was still sitting on the tractor seat when I carried my pail of carrots to the kitchen step. He was looking straight ahead of himself away from the wagon, away from the house door. I had lived with him long enough already then to know that when he looked like that he wasn't looking at what was in front of him; he was looking someplace deep inside his head. I never quite learned how to hold the forked willow stick in such a way that I could see in there with him. That day I didn't have a forked willow stick anyways, but I had fresh carrots, so I rubbed the earth off from two of them and walked over to the tractor and tickled your grandfather's knuckles with the greens and then slipped the carrot into his hand. His fingers gripped the carrot but he didn't turn to look at me until he had bitten off the spitz and was crunching it in his mouth. Then he looked at me with that dunkel schwoijk and a tear sippled out of the eye corner beside his nose. "What's loose?" I said and grabbed on to the top of the wagon box and stepped on a wheel spoke. Before I looked over the edge I noticed that the wheel was stopped right in the middle of my begonia flowers, but I knew there was no use complaining about flowers to a man who would just say, "Nuh bloom kaun ye noch emma wada waussuh." A flower can yet always grow again. Still a part of me was maybe thinking that Kjrayel had such a cloudy face because he was sorry he had backed into my begonias. Yoh, Koadel, I was still pretty young then. A grey tarp was covering something that looked like a big box. For an eyeblink I saw a coffin under that tarp, I don't know why, but that's what I saw even when I could see right away that the shape under the tarp didn't look like a coffin at all. In those days coffins were made of boards and were just deep enough for a person to fit in, not like nowadays when everybody has to have a queen size bed to be buried in and then yet a stone rolled on top of it. Oh Koadel, forgive an old woman for talking about such dunkel things in the middle of a story, but I was thinking while I was listening to that piano music on this little radio that maybe you could make me one of those old style coffins like my parents were buried in, you know, just plain boards painted black, shaped like a trough I always thought. And I want somebody to play the piano by the funeral. Do you think you could find a man to play? It wouldn't be the same if it was a woman. For sure I don't want Klaviera Klassen or one of the other church players to play, no not those women. Say, isn't there a bengel among the Winkler Kehlers that piano plays? Yeah, that one with the shaved head and a ring in his nose, yeah that's the one. I saw him on the televison one time playing with a trio and he was wearing a little hat and the way he played...yes, you must ask him to play at my funeral. I just saw him for an eyeblink on the television, playing the piano, but for that eyeblink he had his tongue sticking out between his lips, just like your grandfather when he sat down with me on the piano bench and we played Chopsticks together. You know, God could have made us different. He could have made us so that we would be born old and then we would know everything from young on and then we would do everything right the first time...or maybe we wouldn't do anything at all then, maybe we would be afraid to even take a step because we would know we would fall down sooner or later. Who knows? Maybe God tried making people that were born old and then they couldn't do anything except die. I don't know but it seems to me now that if we knew everything when we were young that we know when we are old we would never make it through to old age. We would be too scared. At least it seems that way now, that if I had known everything that I know now I would never have...Koadel, could you reach me that water glass? Dankscheen...No, I would never have climbed up on that wagon and sat down on the piano bench beside Kjrayel Kehler. I had seen a piano one time in Hieberts' granary when they had a dance there after Shtucka Doft and Shtanka Shtienkje's wedding but I had never been close enough to one to touch it. But Kjrayel, the dunkel schwoijk suddenly gone from his face, made me sit down on the slippery shiny piano bench and he sat beside me so close that I could feel our hips touching and he lifted up the lid. I started to laugh because those black and white keys made me think of Fiestane Friesen's rotten teeth. I swallowed my laugh quickly though when Kjrayel started to play piano. Yeah, Koadel, your grandfather Kjrayel Kehler played piano. Oh, not like a person nowadays that has had piano lessons. No, Kjrayel Kehler never learned real piano playing, but that day he played a song that he liked to whistle. He played it with two fingers, one finger picking out the tune on the high keys and the other finger bouncing bass like a shtuck machine wringer washer. Later, when we were hurrying ourselves home because we were already late for the milking Kjrayel said that the song was called Chopsticks. He didn't tell me till years later how come he had learned to play such a song, but then in those days a woman just figured a man would know things and she never asked where he had learned them. But right then I didn't ask the name of the song my husband was playing, I was so yralled up with watching his farmer fingers bouncing on that piano that I wasn't even bothered by the trembling poplar leaf feeling the tune always gave me. Later I thought our hips had been touching and far apart at the same time. Over and over he played that tune louder and louder faster and faster, his tongue sticking out from his lips like baloney between pieces of bread, until it got so loud that the dog started barking and the swallows flew out of the mud nest under the eaves of the barn. Then he stopped, and he turned to me with his 'you can't say no look' and he said, "Suschkje, now you try." Before I could shrug away from him he reached me around and took my right hand and he used my forefinger to slowly pick out the high notes of the song. A few times he played the song through with my finger, his body closer to mine than I had let him since he wore my wedding dress to the church, and I was starting to feel like I should already give in to him, I mean his gnauts was healed up already and even a woman wants to be warmed up sometimes, only it was his hand playing piano with my finger, not my finger doing my will, and there was something inside me that wasn't altogether happy with that, and then he started bouncing the bass notes with his other hand and I was squeezed in between as the piano got louder and louder and I was happy for sure that we didn't live in the village where everybody would come to look at these two schnorrijch people making such a shtuck machine noise that the big spokey wagon wheels were starting to rock back and forth. And then Kjrayel Kehler started doing another thing, he started pressing his foot down on one of the pedals, and because he was a short-legged man and he was sitting a bit to the side to give me room he had to stand up a little so his hind end was bouncing on the piano bench yet. I was bouncing right along with him whether I wanted to or not, knocking back and forth between his arms, his bouncing hip knocking mine. The dog was barking harder than it did in a thunder storm and over it all I heard the cows mooing. Suddenly the whole world sank down, like going fast down a hill in a car— I felt it in my stomach. I clawed out for the piano keys but that piano had bounced up over the board Kjrayel had nailed in front of the wheels, and it was all Kjrayel and I could do to shove the piano bench back and get our feet out of the way as the piano rolled right out off the end of the wagon and shtucksed down to the grass. For a long second the piano looked like it would fall over on its face, then it leaned back and settled on its wheels. But before we could let our breath go, the front panel above the keys let loose and clattered down to the ground. For an eyeblink the yard was as still as it must have been before the world was made. I saw right away that something was winjksch with that piano. The corners weren't quite square anymore and one of the front legs was almost broken off. The lid had closed over the keys but now was lifted up on one side like a crooked lip. That piano could have been one of your grandfather's kjrayel-hauns jokes. I should have cried, too, and I almost did as I felt him around with my arms and then wiped his cheek with my garden hand, leaving a patch of mud on his red stubble. Yes, Koadel, I should have cried along with him, only when you have once lost your footing on a moving lawn swing with a man like Kjrayel Kehler it is easy to believe that the world is a ball and we are lucky we don't fly off, it is spinning around so fast. Besides it is hard to cry along with your man who at your wedding, when the preacher has just asked the most important question of a person's life, instead of saying, "Ya", sneezes instead and pulls his handkerchief from out of his pocket so fast that the wedding ring flies across the church and rolls all the way into the corner. If the piano had stayed on the wagon, maybe I would have cried then, but all I could think of to say was, "Well at least now we won't have to shlep it with to Peace River." Later, after we got home and the milking was done, we were so tired a cold supper with hot tea was enough. I put sugar in both our cups even if I usually just liked mine black, and we went to bed before we had to light the lamps. Such things people could do if they didn't live in the village. When the ten strokes on the clock woke me up I heard the rain drizzling against the tarp that covered the piano and I wondered why it had come. Kjrayel felt so warm lying with his arm across me, his cheek shrubbering my shoulder, and I wondered if I should let that piano into the house in the morning. All night long I saw that piano lid lifted up from the keys on one side like a crooked lip, laughing at me like Kjrayel Kehler had the first time I saw him in Yelttausch Yeeatze's machine shop brushing red paint on that lawn swing. Note: This piece is an excerpt from a novel-in-progress with the working title The Moonlight Sonata of Beethoven Blatz. |
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