Miriam Toews - All My Puny Sorrows

When he gently placed the pasta on the table, he said, I have seen your sister play.

What? I said. You have? You never told me that.

In Prague, he said. And I am not surprised.

Surprised by what? I asked him.

By her suffering, he said. When I listened to her play I felt I should not be there in the same room with her. There were hundreds of people but nobody left. It was a private pain. By private I mean to say unknowable. Only the music knew and it held secrets so that her playing was a puzzle, a whisper, and people afterwards stood in the bar and drank and said nothing because they were complicit. There were no words.

I thought about his words for a while, his old European charm, and the way he talked. Maybe we could fall in love and move together with Will and Nora to Prague, and my life would become less like my life and more like Franz Kafka’s. Will and Nora could study tennis and gymnastics and Radek and I could go to operas and ballets non-stop and become intense and poetic and revolutionary.

I would put her in the same category as Ivo Pogorelich, or perhaps Evgeny Kissin, he said. She understands that the piano is the perfection of the human voice.

She has a glass piano inside of her that she worries will break, I said.

Yes, he said. Maybe it already has. And she’s barely holding the pieces in place before it shatters. I think I fell in love with her just suddenly that evening. I wanted to protect her.

Oh, great, you’re hot for my sister? He laughed and said no, of course not but I figured he was lying. So much for my Prague fantasy. Well, I thought, Prague obviously hadn’t been a barrel of laughs for Franz Kafka anyway, so never mind, never mind!

Do you want more wine? he asked. What was she like as a child?

All she did was play the piano, I said. And petition for things.

Ah well, if there is one thing you’re going to do in life it may as well be playing the piano, said Radek. But you must have other memories, no?

She learned French when she was really young, I said, and sometimes that’s all she spoke and sometimes she’d stop talking for long periods of time like our father. She had different nicknames for me: Swivelhead, Mayhem. She tried to pretend that our Mennonite town was an Italian village in Tuscany or something by renaming everything and everyone. All the streets, everything. She became obsessed with Italy. When our old Mennonite relatives came over she’d address them as signor and signora and offer them espressos and grappa. People made fun of her. It was a bit embarrassing for me too.

Ah, but she was only creating excitement, said Radek, yes? Being funny and sophisticated!

Yeah, I can see that now, I told him, but at the time … you know. A town like ours is not the best place to work on your comedy routine. Our house was once shot at.

What? said Radek. Because of Elfrieda?

I don’t know, I said. We never found out. A lot of people made fun of our dad too for riding his bike all the time and wearing a suit every single day and reading books. That made Elf cry. She would get really angry. She would fight with people, mostly with words, trying to defend him. When she went away to Oslo to study music she sent me tapes of herself talking about her life in the city, and then she was studying with some guy in Amsterdam and after that a woman in Helsinki. I listened to the tapes over and over in the dark and pretended she was there with me. I had them memorized, every inflection, every breath, and I talked along with her, over her, even her little chuckles. I had memorized it all.

Radek poured us each another glass of wine and said he was thinking of something Northrop Frye had said about the energy it takes to get out of a place and how you must then move forward on that momentum to keep creating, to keep reinventing. Would I agree?

I would agree, yes, I said. Is it even legal to disagree with Northrop Frye?

Of course, said Radek, perhaps you—

I know, I know, I was just kidding. But I do agree.

You missed your sister, said Radek succinctly.

Yeah, but it was more than that. I didn’t really want her to come back. I don’t know if I was conscious of that at the time but I knew, somehow, that she had to stay away. And yet at the same time I felt I needed her in order to survive that place, so I was really busy and anxious trying to figure out for myself how to be brave when she was gone. She played tennis a lot with me when she came back to visit. We played in the dark. Blind Tennis. It was fun but we lost a lot of balls. She told me I had to listen very carefully when we played Blind Tennis, that was the thing. We laughed our heads off in the dark and screamed when we got hit with the ball. When she played the piano I could tell what her mood was. She got all the top scholarships in school, she was even on some TV quiz show, but a lot of things made her mad. People not trying hard enough made her so mad. Bad form made her crazy. When the pastor and his old guys from our church came to our house to tell our parents they shouldn’t let Elf go away to study because she’d get big ideas, she lit his revival tent on fire that night and the cops came to our house …

Oh my, said Radek.

But first, when the church guys were at our house she played Rachmaninoff in the other room. My mom and I were hiding in the kitchen. And it was like the more pressure they applied to my dad, the deeper she screamed. Well, screamed with the piano. She drove them away with her brilliance and her rage, like Jesus with the money changers or you know like Dustin Hoffman in Straw Dogs …

Like sunlight to vampires, said Radek.

They were such simple, brutish men, it was like playing for an audience of mastodons … She didn’t—

Which piece was it? asked Radek.

G Minor, Opus 23.

What happened when the police came to your house?

My parents wouldn’t let them put her into juvenile detention or send her away to the Christian reprogramming camp in the woods, I think it was just a threat anyway, but we all went on a long road trip to Fresno, California, to get away from the police and when we came back they’d forgotten about it. Elf convinced a boy in Fresno to be her boyfriend while we were there and he tried to hide in the trunk of our car on the day we were leaving but our father felt the extra weight when we drove off and stopped to get rid of him. Elf and this boy started making out like crazy after my dad hauled him out of the trunk and my dad couldn’t deal with it so my mom had to get out of the car and tell Elf we had to go. I remember her tugging on Elf’s arm while she was still kissing the boy. And then Elf finally got into the car sobbing her eyes out and the boy ran behind us for as long as he could like the farm dogs around East Village.

Radek laughed. Do you have a photo of her? he asked. I took one out of my wallet and showed it to him. She was all huge green eyes and shiny black hair. She looks like an alien, doesn’t she?

He said, She is beautiful.

The first time I ate at Radek’s table I told him that I had been faithful to my husband and had raised children with him, and Radek smiled sweetly, nodding, as though he liked that woman, preferred her even, but you know, here we were. I’m so tired these days that often I put my head down on his table and fall asleep while he cleans up the dishes and then he picks me up and carries me to his bed and removes my clothing carefully, draping my jeans over his chair so that my lip balm doesn’t fall out of the pocket and roll under his bed into the dust, and he places my shirt over his lamp to cast an interesting aura, and he makes love to me very gently, like a gentle gentleman. Those are the words my grandmother used to describe my grandfather when I asked her what he’d been like as a husband. Gentle. It’s all I can think of too to describe Radek. When he comes he says something softly in Czech, one word. I like to play with the tips of his fingers, feeling the hard ridges and grooves that are formed from pushing down on his violin strings for five or six hours a day.