Darragh McKeon - All That Is Solid Melts into Air

“I’m sorry.”

“No. It’s not so bad. She has times where she’s lucid, and I’m grateful for them, and there’s often a strange pleasure when she experiences the past. She looks at me sometimes like she did when we first met—the awe of first love. It has many unexpected blessings.”

“Alina said she was a teacher.”

“Yes. They let her keep her job when I was arrested. Her father was part of the nomenklatura. She cut off all contact with him, but he obviously couldn’t bring himself to let her starve or have her taken.”

He has an angled nose, broken at some point, a shoulder that drops away, disproportionate to the other. But he sits with beautiful poise, direct and upright, despite the natural inclination of his body. His voice has an unusual richness to it, a honeyed rasp.

Maria is tempted to ask him more, but she’s here for a reason. She shifts position.

“Zhenya.”

“Yes.”

“What’s the problem?”

“There’s not an easy answer to that. I don’t presume to know the child, I just teach him piano.”

“He says he’s not happy with having to play the tarantella. He says he doesn’t want to play Music for Children , he thinks it’s patronizing.”

“It’s a very proud child you have there, a very stubborn child.”

“Try living with him. Does he want to choose another piece?”

“He’s nine years old. He doesn’t have the first idea what he wants.”

A raise of her eyebrows, a downturn of her mouth.

“My manager is very set upon the selection. I’m not sure we could get permission to change it regardless. He likes the image. In his mind, I think, even if Zhenya isn’t all we say he is, he doesn’t lose too much face. Prokofiev wrote it for children, it’s not supposed to be perfect—this is his attitude, or at least that’s what I imagine it to be.”

“It sounds as though you don’t have full confidence in the child either.”

She shrugs, no need for pretence; this man has done some serious living.

“I feel as though I’ve placed him in a difficult situation against his will. But I know you think we smother him.”

“I think a musician plays because they need to play. They don’t whine because the lighting is bad or the room is too cold or they’re not ready. A natural musician attacks the keyboard, tames it. They’re willing to fight, no matter the circumstance.”

Mr. Leibniz’s tone changes, a more formal diction. Maria feels like a student herself.

“So his sense of timing?”

“His sense of timing, nothing. He practises what, four days a week, a few hours each time. This is completely ridiculous. He still believes he can just think the music into being. He hasn’t spent enough time immersed in the notes, he doesn’t know how to read the flow of a piece. His instincts are fine. The boy has incredible natural musicality. But music is a demanding mistress. It requires total commitment. He has to understand it before he can charm it or beat it into submission.”

“He’s only nine years old. It’s a little too young for a death sentence.”

“You know what Prokofiev was doing at Zhenya’s age?”

“I don’t think I want to.”

“Writing operas, that’s what. And the boy complains because he has to play a piece with a prissy name.”

“Do you think he’ll make an impression on Sidorenko? Tell me honestly.”

“It depends on Sidorenko. Most of the graduates of the Conservatory come out with incredible technique and very little appreciation for natural musicality. They play like our footballers, all coaching and drills and tactics, very little individual skill. Zhenya is blessed with a musical language that’s all his own, but right now he’s too caught up in right and wrong, in technicalities. But you can’t learn what the boy has. Maybe Sidorenko understands enough about music to recognize this. On the other hand, maybe he doesn’t know how to listen.”

“What if we skipped the concert, just let him audition?”

“An audition will be more difficult. The committee will judge his schooling, his technique, they’ll want see he’s the right kind of candidate, that he’ll uphold their reputation.”

“And you don’t think they will?”

“I say it again, the child doesn’t even have a piano in his home.”

A movement from the corner. Mr. Leibniz’s wife raises her right arm. Mr Leibniz stands and guides the arm back down to her lap, but she raises it again, her head lolling, puppetlike, listening, tuning in to whatever silent impulses are surrounding her.

“Under the desks, under the desks.”

She calls this out in a warbled voice, no strength in the breath, but Maria recognizes something in the words, the force of intent there. This phrase formed a routine that cut through her school days too.

Flakes of snow ruffle against the window, and the old woman turns her attention to these, and Mr. Leibniz shows confusion, his eyes questioning. Maria realizes that his education took place at an earlier time.

“It was a school exercise. In case of nuclear attack.”

“Ah yes. Of course I’ve heard about them.” He sits beside his wife, holds her hand. “They must have been terrifying.”

“Actually, I loved them. I remember very little of school. But I remember the nuclear drills. I remember how we’d do them sometimes on rainy days, straight after assembly, when everyone’s clothes were still wet, and we’d crouch under the tables and I’d smell the damp and steam and feel close to everyone.”

“People talked of nothing else. There were plenty of grand statements about our absolute power, but the fear was so immediate, naturally. Those missiles sitting in Italy and Turkey, pointing straight at us. I’m sure you felt it too as a child, probably more so.”

“I remember raising my head during one of the drills—we were under strict orders to lie still—and looking around and thinking that this is what it would look like if a bomb actually hit. All of my friends crumpled on the floor, only the teacher still standing.”

She laughs at this detail.

“At that age you think teachers are indestructible.”

Mr. Leibniz pats his wife’s clenched hand. “If only that were so.”

After a silence he says, “Katya brings the past in here, she guides my memories, makes me relive the things that departed from me as a young man or things which I chose to ignore.”

“Are there particular years that she remembers more clearly?”

“Yes. Sometimes in the middle of the night, she sits up in bed, listening, hearing things. She has an incredible sensitivity to noises in the night. I know she’s reliving the Stalin years, the months before I was taken away. We had so many nights when we were waiting for a knock on the door.”

“It must have been terrible when it finally came.”

“Not so terrible. There was actually a great sense of relief. I stood in this room in my robe and slippers, and they pushed through from the corridor, surrounding me, and told me to get dressed, and I remember an odd sense of justification, that at least I hadn’t made the whole thing up in my mind. Waiting in dread is an incredible strain.”

“How long were you in the gulags?”

“Ten years. Then they closed them and I came home and stayed out of sight. I tuned pianos and walked in the park.”

Maria rises and steps to the piano near the door, taking it in; it strikes her as being much bigger than the proportions of the room would seem to allow.

“It was a gift. It belonged to an engineer, a lonely man, very respected. When he died, it was passed to me according to his wishes.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“Do you ever play?”

“No. I don’t have that kind of patience. My husband used to, occasionally.”