Adrienne Celt - The Daughters

The worker leaned in as if he hadn’t quite caught her words.

“The what?”

“The tour, of course. For the exhibition guests? I was told it would be starting sharply.”

It was a gamble: he might easily have remembered Greta from town, but as luck would have it, the worker’s natural nervousness eroded his attentiveness to detail. He started to blush up over his collar, craning his head around for some possible authority.

“I’m not—” he said. “That is, I don’t. ”

“Yes,” Greta said. “Quite. Well, anyway, if Gustaw is unavailable—”

“Gustaw!” the man cried. Really, he was no more than a boy; his relief was almost embarrassing. “Yes, Gustaw! That is, Mr. Lindemann.” A frown spread over his face. “I’m afraid he’s gone, for the rest of the day.”

“Hmm, how like him.” Greta was really enjoying herself, despite a small twinge of pity for the boy in front of her. “Well, that’s no trouble. I’ll just look around myself. Unless”—she eyed the nervous youth and turned her mouth down into a mock sulk—“that’s against some sort of regulation? I promise I’ll be as quiet as a mouse.”

“No.” The boy deflated gently back into his socks. “Quite all right. As long as it’s no trouble to you.”

Greta gave a nod and slid away before he could change his mind.

The air buzzed with conversation as men walked past, the top buttons of their shirts undone, rolls of paper tucked under their arms. Some of them seemed to recognize her, their eyes lingering on her face with momentary curiosity. But she was lucky. Whether because they were too busy to stop or whether they thought she was there on some errand for Saul, no one did more than nod hello. Greta took deep breaths to keep her heartbeat even as she had in preparation for giving birth, when the first sharp pains shot up her spine. But she found that she wasn’t nervous. Her body moved smoothly and her mouth remained kinked into a small, smug smile. She was looking for something, without knowing quite what.

( She wanted something , Sara said, that she couldn’t admit to herself that she wanted. )

To her left, a pair of legs extended from the bottom of a discordant, groaning instrument, one bent at the knee and tapping its toe. Farther off was a tunnel. Could that be right? Greta approached and saw a man reaching up and making pencil markings on an arch of white wood, and realized the tunnel was in fact a caterpillar queue of grand piano frames, lined up with their bottoms in the air.

Everywhere around her were sounds. Not just factory sounds, but echo chambers, hollow demi-music. A fist connected with a keyboard on the left side of the room, and the dissonant chord stormed across the warehouse like a wave. When it passed, Greta could hear wire coiling, stretching, snapping, and below this the great rumbling of boxes being moved on wheeled trays with a rhythm all its own. She felt she was being tugged in all directions at once, and the effect was familiar somehow, that yearning, gnawing urge. A high trill here, a rough scratching there, as pianos were pulled and warped into life.

Greta tried not to stay in one place for too long, silently imploring the men ( everywhere, men) to ignore her, to pass over her with a glance and move on to more important things. She reached a hand up to rearrange the curls of her hair. Back home the oven temperature would soon puff them out into a shapeless, floating floss, or else sweat them down in rivulets along her neck. But she was here, a part of the factory machinations, and she knew that for once she looked the way people expected a lady to look.

As she walked towards the showroom in the factory’s rear, the tinkering fell away. First the pallets of raw materials were shed, then the sand-shaved, pretreated wood that still retained its faint scent of needles and leaves. Greta felt she could see all the detritus — the tools, the wood chips — being swept backward away from her, though in fact it was she who moved away from it. Her eyes were keyed on the sleek floor before her, peopled by a black herd of perfect glassine surfaces. At last even the sound of conversation died away, so that stepping onto the polished showroom floor was like walking into a world where everyone held their breath.

Greta felt a pinch in her abdomen, and wondered if she would find another small trickle of blood on her leg when she went home and stripped off her town stockings. The thought made her nauseous, and she sat down before an imposing baby grand piano — her back was turned to the piecemeal beasts in the workshop, but her mind strained towards them. Not so different , Greta thought, as her stomach clenched. How many unfinished things have I abandoned? Her left hand found its way to the keyboard, and she suddenly felt very angry and foolish. A cough resounded behind her.

“Excuse me?”

Turning sharply, Greta found herself staring into the face of the gentleman she’d seen outside the factory, the one who’d laughed so freely when his graying companion said failure and mad . He had white blond hair and a strange smile on his face, his hands tucked carefully behind his back.

“My name is Gustaw,” he said. “Gustaw Lindemann. I’m a senior designer here at Łozina.” He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, as if uncertain how to proceed. Greta noticed that he rocked gently back and forth on his heels. “I heard that there was a lady looking for me on the showroom floor. Would that lady by any chance be you?”

Lindemann smiled at her, gently now. His suit was made of tidy pin-striped wool, and Greta supposed his was the sort of polite society that noticed when a woman was wearing mourning blacks, that made a point of knowing the difference between fashion and funereal garb.

“Oh,” she said, blushing. “You design these?”

“Yes.” He gave a slight bow. Or perhaps he was still just rocking back and forth. “Well, that is to say, not all of them. Not alone. But I do have a degree of oversight over the direction of our movements. Glandt and I share a certain, shall we say, particularity about the way our instruments sound. But I’m also interested in their longevity, so—” He stopped. “You don’t really know what I’m talking about, do you?”

Greta frowned.

“How can you design a piano? Doesn’t it already more or less have its own design? Built in?” She stroked the keys of the instrument in front of her like they were little finger bones.

His hand going lightly to the nape of his neck, Lindemann laughed again. His fingers were clean, scrubbed pink.

“Well, I can’t say it’s the first time I’ve heard that question. Let me put it this way: I believe there is an ideal piano out there”—he gestured vaguely, into the distance, not the factory—“somewhere. A fixed form, if you will, which if you found it would allow you to make a perfect piano every time, without fail. But at the moment, you see, no one knows what it is. So when I say I’m designing pianos, what I mean is I’m trying to shave away all the mistakes that the other piano makers — and, well, also that I — have made.” Lindemann grinned. “Trying to get closer to that piano in the sky.”

Greta looked out over the gathered instruments. Was each one different? Each one an infinitesimal improvement? Were they lined up, then, in the order of their creation so that discerning buyers could easily select the finest or choose, with greater consideration to price, the third from best? Fifth from best? Perhaps it gave Lindemann a pang of regret to depose each glorious princeling with the new generation. After all, each of them began with him. “You must be very well known for your work. You speak about it beautifully.”