by Armin Wiebe
That night Obrum was reading the Bible while he soaked himself in the tub. Yodel Heinrichs had brought him a box of baking soda to put in the water and Obrum agreed that it took some of the itch away. I had laid out my second-best underskirt on the table and was going to cut out a pattern for some pyjamas that he could wear under his Sunday pants for going to church.
“Susch,” he said to me. “Don’t forget to wash that underskirt for church tomorrow.”
I had my cloth scissors ready to cut. “You mean you will wear a dress to church?”
“Well sure,” he said. “In the Bible the men are always going around with dresses on. People who go to church should know such a thing.”
I was so bedutzed by all this that I didn’t know if I was going to shame myself the next day because my man had a dress on or if I should be happy with a man who thought church was so important that nothing could keep him away. Maybe I could hide myself on the women’s side of the church.
So I washed that silk wedding underskirt with the gun grease spots on it and hung it up to dry. It had been a tiresome week what with feeding the thrashers and canning saskatoons and making catsup from the tomatoes that were ripening all at once. I had no room to think about what dress he would wear to church in the morning.
It would have been good to have a camera to take off a picture of Obrum that Sunday, but we didn’t have such a thing yet, and for sure in those days nobody would have brought a camera to church unless there was a wedding on. So I can’t show you what he looked like. At his funeral I wouldn’t let them open the coffin and people figured it was because of the way the cancer had eaten away at him when it took so long to die. The people can think what they want.
We should have hidden the Model T in the barn that Sunday afternoon, closed our windows, and pulled shut the curtains so it looked like nobody was home. But we didn’t. Instead, we sat at the dinner table longer than we should have and let the air from the wire window blow up our skirts. I still didn’t know if I should laugh or cry or shame myself.
And then the first buggy full of visitors clattered into the yard. We never talked about that Sunday, though I always felt that it meant something, something more than a joke, though for sure a joke it was. I am just a simple woman but I lived with Obrum Kehler for over forty-three years and in such a man there is always something else going on besides the ploughing and the thrashing and the sitting on the church bench on Sunday morning. By the time we got up from that dinner table, half a dozen buggies and three Model Ts had parked themselves in our yard and we were like Adam and Eve with no place to hide.
Obrum kissed my cheek and fuscheled in my ear, “Don’t even think about giving all these people faspa. If they don’t smell the coffee they will soon get tired and go away.” Then he walked outside wearing my white wedding dress over the silk underskirt and sat down on the lawnswing and schuckeled all afternoon without saying a word. The next Wednesday evening when I walked into the sewing circle I overheard Tien saying that Obrum had looked like he was praying with his eyes open.
I have to admit that I was envying myself over him. I mean, a woman only gets to wear such a dress one day in her life and then it just hangs there, though I once heard of a woman who made curtains out of hers. I was still crying on the bed when Obrum came in after the visitors had gone away. I wouldn’t let him touch me in the night for a whole month after that, long after the gnauts had disappeared. But by then the tarp had come off that piano again.
12
Susch
Darpslied Elders Villa
Time sure goes fast and slow at the same time when a person gets old almost like a centennial. You think Queen Elizabeth will send me a letter for my birthday if I live to be a hundred? I heard that Gracie Allen’s husband passed away the other day. We used to listen to them on our first radio that was almost as big as a piano. Obrum rigged up a washline between the top of the house and the spitz of the barn to pull those voices out of the sky. Lots of people for sure figured it was the devil talking. Obrum used to say, “We all know where the devil is so we hide him by pointing to him in the wrong place.” He could maybe have been a preacher, that Obrum, only I don’t think he could have lived double like Preacher Funk. He had too many freckles tickling his skin to live double so other people could stay comfortable. Once he said to me late in a dark night, “If they want us to believe in wondrous things, how come they don’t want us to wonder?” And another time he said, “If God had wanted us to have simple thoughts, he would have put us into a simple world.” Yes, we liked listening to Gracie and George on the radio. Of course, on the radio we couldn’t see George’s cigar.
My head wants not to talk about Beethoven Blatz, I mean, it’s not the easiest thing for me to talk about. Maybe I should just let such things die along with my old bones. But I had a grandmother who sat up in her coffin and laughed at me, and I’m the only person of us still living. So it is maybe for me to tell. Obrum would often say, “If the whole story isn’t told, people will just make the rest up.”
But anyways, the Friday after Obrum wore the wedding dress, he went to get Blatz and I got to see this man from close by. That piano tuner could have been Obrum Kehler’s brother. No, he wasn’t red-haired and freckle-faced. Blatz’s looks didn’t liken Obrum’s at all, but he had that same deepness to him, like a well that only a water diviner with a forked willow stick would find.
Beethoven Blatz’s hair was dark, almost black, and his skin was pale, blauss, though his face seemed dark because he didn’t shave very often. Something about the piano tuner made me want to duck his whole head into a wash basin of soapy water to wash his head and his face—something oily about his skin.
Obrum was greasy and sweaty too after a day’s work, but he always liked to wash himself even if he was just coming into the house for faspa. But this piano tuner looked like washing wasn’t something he thought about so often. It was as if his head was some other place where washing didn’t need to be done to hear the music. I think he was hearing music that the rest of us would never hear unless he played it for us. Maybe his head, or his whole body, wouldn’t hear the music right if he washed it so much. Not that in those days on the farm we were so clean all the time. A bath once a week, not like nowadays with a showerbath every day and even more if a person has worked hard and needs to go visiting in the evening. But when I saw him, that piano tuner hadn’t dipped his greasy body into hot soapy water for many months, I would have said, and his clothes probably hadn’t touched a scrub board neither.
Which was strange because darp’s people often had strange ideas about the schoolteacher. They would fuschel things like, “That teacher yet washes his feet everyday.” Even in my son Isaac’s day such things were said. People always are so fedajchtijch suspicious of those who might be different, as if God maybe didn’t make us all out of the same handful of mud. But what does an old woman know anyways? For sure, my memory slides along like a Model T on a muddy road, but Obrum used to say to me, “Look behind to see if the tracks are shiny. As long as the mud doesn’t stick to the wheels we won’t get stuck.” But now I am slipped even farther away from that piano, broken under the tarp there beside the house.
That first day, while Obrum was bringing it by to him how it could be fixed, I figured that Beethoven Blatz wasn’t very interested in that piano. I stood off to the side, watching, and it looked like he could see a lot of work, and that he would maybe have to be at our place every Saturday till Christmas. I still had to separate the milk, and I should have gone to make breakfast because Obrum had gone with the Model T to pick Beethoven up even before any chores were done or any breakfast eaten, and for sure Beethoven Blatz looked like he could use a good bowl of porridge. His schoolteacher suit looked like it was hanging loose on a bent cross made of laths. But I couldn’t quite tear myself away. I stared at his long, white fingers that he kept moving as he looked over the piano, fingers white with chalk dust. More chal
k dust was streaked along the hem of his suit coat where his hip must have brushed the blackboard.
I watched his hand slip into his pants pocket and bring out a little piece of chalk, so small he could hardly pinch it with his fingers. He held it for a moment and stared at it as if it was something ugly, like a bug or a squashed worm. Then he flicked it away into the grass. He looked at me then as he rubbed his hands to clear away the dust. Such dark eyes I had never looked into before. I tried to turn away but I couldn’t even blink.
Something else there was too. I remember thinking this Blatz was maybe a little frightened of that piano. When he looked back to the piano and took a step closer, it looked like that was hard for him to do. But then Beethoven Blatz stiffened his backstring and lifted the warped lid. He took a deep breath and plunked his chalky fingers down on the keys. A clashing squabble clanged from that piano. Blatz moved his fingers over and plunked again. More clashing clang. Twice more he tried, and then the fifth time something sounded different. He pressed two keys together and listened. He pressed again. The sound didn’t seem broken. “Hören sie diess!” he said. He played the notes again. Then he pounded the notes up and down the piano, sometimes stopping to say, “Hear you this!” Then he stood straight and looked at me again, this time with light in his eyes. “This Klavier I must fix,” he said. “Obrum, this I must fix!”
I felt grizzlijch inside and out of my eye corner I saw my grandmother sit up in her coffin and laugh. I hoped they would take the piano to Beethoven’s school, but Obrum argued that the schoolchildren would make a mess with it and febeizel the parts, and besides he didn’t want to take a chance that the piano would fall off the wagon again.
So the two men moved the piano into the granary room closest to the front door and there I was with a broken piano I didn’t want with a man who frightened me coming every Friday to stay for two nights so he could fix it in what was supposed to be our sitting room. We didn’t sit in there because the kitchen was anyway more comfortable. Beethoven was still holding school, so he could only work on it on Saturdays, well, Friday nights too, because Obrum would go pick him up on Friday after school and then on Sunday morning we would all go to the Puggefeld church so Beethoven would be home for Sunday afternoon.
“Das Schallbrett,” Beethoven Blatz said. “The soundboard, yes? That is the weighty thing. And the plate.”
“What mean you?” Obrum said.
Blatz pointed to the cast-iron frame inside the piano. “See, the soundboard is loose come from the plate.” The soundboard was a big, thin board that fit together with the plate like a lid on a box. “A crack in the board could troublesome be if the plate is bent from falling.”
While Obrum helped him lean the soundboard against the wall, I went back into the kitchen. “No cracks that I can see,” Obrum said. He stepped into the kitchen, gave me a little kiss on the cheek, then went to work outside, leaving me alone in the house with Beethoven Blatz.
I got busy kneading dough and I had my back turned to the sitting room door to shut the piano out of my head. I just looked down at the bread pan and put lots of flour on my fists so they wouldn’t stick when I punched down into the white dough. I always liked kneading. When I punched my fists into that white pillow, my head got wiped clean, or maybe not wiped clean but filled up with pure white fluff like a cloud in a blue sky. When I kneaded dough the whole rest of the world got pushed aside like there was nothing left except me and my soul. Ever since I was nine years old I always felt that when I was kneading dough, I was really kneading my soul. And sometimes that would take me almost all the way to heaven.
On that Saturday afternoon I must have kneaded my way through the roof and halfway to the moon because I never heard Beethoven Blatz’s foot stepping down from the sitting room into the kitchen. When he stepped before me, let me tell you, I fell down from the moon pretty fast. My backstring shivered like the notes on that piano when it rolled off the wagon and my fists sank through the dough to the bottom of the pan.
His eyes pulled at my eyes and for an eyeblink I feared him.
“I believe I have found in the soundboard a crack,” he said. “I feel with my fingers something, but if it is new or old I cannot say.”
My doughy soul was torn in two. I didn’t want to think how Obrum would feel when he heard about the crack, but I rejoiced that this might mean the piano could go—it would be impossible to repair.
“Have you a magnifying lens?” he said.
I couldn’t speak. A wisp of hair had slipped out from my kerchief and was tickling my eye. As if he thought he was somewhere else, his hand reached out and brushed that wisp aside with his fingers. My buried fists trembled in the dough and I wanted to know whose hair he had brushed away. For sure, this piano tuner had just brushed aside the hair of another woman.
“What mean you, lens?” I said. I pulled my fists from the dough and picked bits of it from my fingers. I had kneaded the dough a little too long.
“A magnifying lens,” he said. “A glass to make things look bigger.”
“Such a thing I don’t have,” I said. I reached for the knife and began cutting chunks of dough and putting them in the loaf pans to rise.
“You have eyeglass for reading, maybe?” He looked around the room to see if there were any books. I thought about the Bible on the side table in the bedroom. Our only other book was the Mackenzie Seed Catalogue under the chair by the window.
“No,” I said, “we aren’t yet so old that we need eyeglasses.”
“I am sorry, you are right.” He watched me cut the last of the dough into the pans. I covered the pans with towels, then went over to the washbasin to scrub the dough from my hands.
“Could you come and look at the board?” he said. “A woman sees sometimes things a man will miss.”
“I know nothing about piano,” I said.
“You just need to know what you see.”
The line he thought might be a crack was in the middle of the board. “Feel it,” he said, and he moved his fingers aside. I reached out and rubbed my finger across the faint line. I couldn’t feel any change. “Look at it,” he said. He had knelt before the spot and was squinting his eyes at the line. I knelt beside him and stared at the line but I couldn’t tell if it was a crack or just a line in the wood. I reached out to touch the line again when a shot rang out outside. The dog started to bark. Beside me Beethoven Blatz clasped his hands like he was going to pray.
“Gott im Himmel,” he cried. “Sie kommen wieder!”
13
Koadel
The Schpikja House
Istep to the window and raise the sheaf of papers to the light. The hand-drawn staffs and notes were darker then, yes, and now the music is faded, but that is not the realization that seeps into my brain … no, not that. What I could not know then when I trespassed on Beethoven Blatz’s space and incurred my father’s wrath were the implications of what I am holding in my hand. I squint at the title scribbled in the scratchy German letters we still learned in my father’s village school. Sonata 15 in C Der Sohn. My hands tremble as I think about what Grossmamuh Susch has told me.
I return the pages to the music rack and lift the piano bench lid. Two stacks of sheets rest seemingly undisturbed. I lift and rotate the piano bench so the lid leans away from the window, allowing the contents to catch the light. Mouse droppings litter the bottom around and in between the two stacks of paper, but through the thin film of dust, the top sheet of each pile appears unstained. I kneel before the bench, hold the sheets in place, and gently blow off the dust.
Both piles are handwritten music, but as I slip my fingers between the piles to lift one stack out, I notice the top sheets are similar but different. Both sheets have the same title: Klavier Sonata 14 in C# Minor op. 3 für Susch. Where the difference lies is that on the left stack, the staff lines are hastily drawn freehand, the treble clefs resembling the clumsy attempts o
f schoolboys to do their music lessons in one-room country schools. The notes are barely recognizable as notes, their stems leaning in different directions, the flags frequently separated from their stems. Sections are scratched out or scribbled over. Blatz must have been moving his hand with the rhythm of the melody he was trying to write down. The sheet on the right is a calm contrast to the left. The title is the same, but the lettering is clean and neat. The staffs have been drawn with a straight edge, and the treble clefs are so intricately drawn that I could easily mistake it for printed music. The notes are perfectly positioned on the lines and ledger lines, the flags of the sixteenth notes neatly parallel; the ties are perfect arcs and the joined flags of the eighth notes are meticulously drawn with a ruler. Though my music reading ability is limited, I see that both sheets convey the same music: the left stack, drafts; the right stack, corrected copies.
Michelena needs to see this, I think, as I ease the draft stack from the bench and slowly leaf through it, noting the sequence of the sonatas such as Klavier Sonata 13 in F# op. 1, Klavier Sonata 11 in B, all the way down to Klavier Sonata 1 in C# Minor op. 1 für Sonia, which is then crossed out and replaced with “für Susch.”
“I wonder if Grossmamuh Susch knows about this?” I murmur as I set the draft stack back into the bench and lift out the revised copies. Sonata 14 on top is dedicated to Susch, but I find no more dedications until I reach Sonata 1, which, like the draft, has “für Sonia” crossed out and “für Susch” added. I also notice an extra staff on some pages labelled “für Violin.”
