by Armin Wiebe
When the music started again it sounded more like girls with flapping dresses hopping around on a hopscotch scratched in the earth in the garden or in the dirt beside the Osterwick school. Then too I heard a knack and when I opened my eyes Grosspapuh was chewing on a piece of carrot he had bitten off. He smiled at me and I started chewing too. The piano was louder now so we could easy hear it even when we were chewing, so it didn’t take long for us to eat the carrots just before the music stopped for a second, and it’s a good thing too because when the music started again, it played so fast and so loud that we could have fuhschlucked ourselves if we had tried to chew along with that song. When I closed my eyes I could see Blatz’s fingers flitzing over the piano teeth, even if the music was different from what he was playing when Grossmamuh Susch brought him faspa.
I felt a step on the lawnswing floor and then Grossmamuh Susch sat down beside me. When I opened my eyes I saw she had a carrot too, but she hadn’t bitten the spitz off yet. She didn’t say nothing, even when Blatz finished playing the fast music and it was quiet enough to hear the birds again and the lawnswing squeaking back and forth like a tree branch that sounds like it will break. And then Blatz played again and at first it sounded like a song people sing in a church where they don’t a piano have and the benches aren’t all closed in. But then it started to sound like Blatz was playing the church song like it was a straight line, only he was scribbling crooked and curly lines over and under the straight line too, and then he would play the straight line for a while and then all of a sudden it would sound like there were two straight lines like tracks on a road and then the song would race off the road through the ditch and schwaäkjs all over a muddy field, and every once in a while it would sound fooss like if maybe Blatz couldn’t find the note on the Klavier that he was hearing in his head. But even when it was sounding fooss it sounded good to me, and the whole time we just listened. Grossmamuh Susch didn’t say nothing and Grosspapuh Obrum was quiet too. And then when the music finished was and our eyes opened again, I thought that Grossmamuh and Grosspapuh looked a little bit like Mahm and Pahp looked after they get up from their nap on a Sunday after dinner when nobody has come to visit. They always looked like they had been someplace where they would have liked to stay longer.
The music had made me a little bit sleepy, and Grossmamuh Susch took me by the hand and said that the shadows were getting long and it was time to go in to have something to eat and then she would show me where my bed would be. We were almost by the house door when I saw Blatz come out of his schpikja house. He walked across the yard and then behind the barn. Later, when I was upstairs where Grossmamuh had made a little bed close to the see-out window, I looked out and I could see far over Grosspapuh Obrum’s grass field and I thought I could see Blatz walking through the high grass, but the sun had gone almost all the way behind the world, and then I couldn’t see if it was Blatz or if maybe it was just a shadow from a small tree or some grass blowing in the wind.
I woke up when it was altogether dark and I thought I could hear Grossmamuh Susch and Grosspapuh Obrum snoring in the next room, and I thought about Mahm and Pahp driving far away in the car and I felt like I wanted to cry because I was missing them. But then I thought I heard something outside, so I went to the wire window and I heard Blatz playing the piano again and it sounded like he was playing that spider-crawling music again, only he would play a little bit, then stop, then play from the beginning again, over and over and over again until I went to sleep.
17
Susch
Darpslied Elders Villa
For sure, something was different after that snowstorm. Obrum still hadn’t come back by the time morning came. I put more wood in the stove and I went to milk the cows. Beethoven didn’t come to the barn in the light and I leaned my head against Elsie Schemmel and the milking took a long time because … I had to let myself go. My tears leaked down Elsie Schemmel’s coat, down to the straw. Just like Beethoven’s tears leaked when he told me his Sonia story. How could such a story make me so weak? When I carried the milk into the house, Beethoven still had his door closed. The house was still as a grave.
I creamered the milk and put the kettle on the stove. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t feel like cooking just for Beethoven, who hardly ate anything anyways, so I looked out the window to see if Obrum was anywhere coming. I felt a bit dizzy so I went into our bedroom and closed the door. I moved the curtains apart so the sunshine could come in. The storm had stopped in the night and the sun glanced off the fresh snow. I don’t know what made me do it but all of a sudden I had the wedding dress taken out from the closet and spread out on the bed. I spread the silk underskirt out beside it and I looked long and hard at the grease spots on the underskirt and then at the hole in the seat of the wedding dress where Obrum had hooked something that Sunday he wore it to church when he was full with poison ivy gnauts. I felt like weeping and I felt like laughing. Through the window I saw the lawnswing in a fresh snowdrift. I thought about Obrum out there someplace and I wished he wasn’t so unthinking haustijch about what he did.
The bedroom got chilly with the door closed but I didn’t want to go back yet where the stove was hot. I looked out the window and then I heard the hinges creak on Beethoven’s door. I held my breath in and listened to his steps. All was still again. I let my breath out. Still no sound. I hung the wedding dress and underskirt back in the closet. Then I slipped open the door and stepped down into the kitchen.
Beethoven Blatz looked at me from the stove where, with one hand and the pen pinched between his fingers, he wrote in the air. His eyes looked me through like I was a window. So strong I felt this that I looked down at my stomach to see if there really was glass to see through. I looked back up into Beethoven’s eyes. His head was texing up and down. Later, when I had often seen him do this, I knew he was hearing music in his head. And still Beethoven and me were looking hard into each other’s eyes, and after a while I started to hear music in my head too and that made me want to laugh because I couldn’t hold a tune if it was caught in a gopher trap. Lucky before I laughed I heard Obrum’s Model T horn outside and the music in our heads stopped.
Well, that horn hitzed me like a willow stick in my father’s hand, so when Obrum came in the door I was waiting to schulps him over with a slop pail of questions and I didn’t even want to hear answers. But before I could even spill him over with one “Wua weascht dü?” Obrum Kehler had stomped his snowy boots across my floor and grabbed me around with his arms and started to shrubber me with his two-day red beard and then he kissed me so hartsoft hard that I thought my lips would get stuck in his teeth and then he pushed his tongue into my mouth and I got scared that he would fress me all the way up like a fox with a chicken.
Beethoven slammed his door loud and started to play the hurrieder part of that Moonlight Sonata song, louder than he had played it before, until some notes didn’t sound right and then he started making such a hartsoft grülijch clanging that Obrum stopped kissing me and said, “What’s loose with him?”
I didn’t say nothing and shrugged myself out from his arms and went to the stove. “Hungat die?”
“Mie hungat, mie schlungat, mie schlackat dee …” Obrum pulled off his coat and hung it on the nail by the door. He sat down on the little bench to pull off his boots. I started to peel potatoes.
“Susch,” he said, “I will build us a new house when the snow is gone.”
“Where were you for the night?”
“I was in Gretna and it was storming so bad that I had to stay for night.”
“Why didn’t you say me something that you were going away? I went out to milk the cows and the Model T wasn’t there. And then it started to blow and snow and you weren’t home and I didn’t know where you could be and I was all alone here. Can’t you tell me at least where you are going?” I put the potatoes on the stove, then cut slices of schinkjefleesh and threw them into the frying pan.
&
nbsp; “Beethoven was here with you, not?”
“But he isn’t my man,” I said, and I had this funny feeling I had said something weighty but I didn’t know for sure what I meant. And then I started to sipple.
“Nah sure, he isn’t your man.” Obrum came up behind me and put his arms around my belly and shrubbered my neck with his whiskers. “I’m your man, Susch. Don’t you believe me that?”
“Let me the dinner cook already. I’m hungry too.”
“Ach heeat,” Obrum said, and he let me go. “I didn’t bring in the stuff from Gretna.”
“You mean you brought the new house in the car?” I said as he stepped into his boots.
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you no lies.”
“Shuft!” I said to him and he laughered himself out the door. I didn’t want to burn the schinkjefleesch in the pan, so I didn’t look when he came back in. Obrum didn’t say nothing and I just kept cooking until the meat was the colour that my mother had learned me was the way a man liked it. The potatoes had boiled soft by this time and I spilled them into the holey bowl I had set over my big pot so I could mash them with a plumps of milk so they wouldn’t be so dry. When I finished mashing the potatoes I said, “Tell that Blatz to come to dinner. He must be frozen already in that room with the door closed.”
Then I looked up. A shiny new rocking chair stood in the middle of the floor with a red ribbon around the chair back.
“Who is that for?” I said, as I set three plates on the table.
“For you to schuckel the baby,” Obrum said.
“You brought a baby from Gretna too?”
“No, but you will have a baby and then you will need this schuckel stool.”
I don’t know where I got the mouth from that day, but I said, “How is a woman anyways supposed to have a baby if her man is away in Gretna for night?”
Obrum grabbed me around again so fast that I almost dropped the pan of schinkjefleesch. “Obah Meyall, God made days too!”
“Blatz!” I yelled, “Come to eat!”
Holem de gruel, Obrum Kehler was so dringent in the bed that night that I thought it would never come to an end. Even on our wedding night after the dancing in Yelttausch Yeeatze’s machine shop, Obrum wasn’t so lostijch for me as he was that night after the storm, and I have to give in that I had been longing for his menschlijchkeit already too, because once Beethoven came to us to fix that piano, Obrum had mostly kept his hands to himself in the bed. Ach yoh, schmausing between men and women was gribbled out long before Elvis Presley. But even while I was giving myself all to Obrum and taking everything he had to give, there was a twieveling wonder in a back part of my brain about what had really happened with the piano coming and then this snowstorm that had brought me a rocking chair and now such dringent lostijchkeit that the window frost was starting to melt. And when Obrum at last poosted himself out on top of me, I wouldn’t let him go and I squeezed him so hard he squealed and we started laughing even as our lungs yaupsed for air and our hearts bounced into each other’s chests.
Then I shrugged out from under Obrum because even a sommamolijch little man can get weighty on top of a woman. He brushed the hair from my face and kissed me softly on the lips. I heard piano playing so quiet I thought I was hearing it in my head. Obrum went still and reached for my hand. The music was not that Moonlight Sonata, which was the only thing I had heard Beethoven play. This music would play and then stop and then play again, almost the same but a little different, then stop again, but Obrum and I had nutzed each other out so much that we soon drowned into sleep where we had only our own music that we hoped would hide what had happened with us during the storm.
The snowstorm and then the storm in the bed had mixed up the days for me, and because Beethoven stayed in that piano room with the door closed and hardly even came out to eat, I almost forgot he was there and didn’t even wonder how come he hadn’t gone back to Pracha Darp to hold school after Sunday was over. Well, maybe that isn’t altogether true, I mean, how could I forget that Blatz was there? The air was different in the house with the rocking chair with the red ribbon in the middle of the room, even if I stepped around it like it wasn’t there. Then, one afternoon when I had been up on my feet since I milked the cows in the morning dark, I let myself sit down in that rocking chair. The fire crackled and kjnistered in the stove behind me, warming me so that if I had been a cat, I would have purred.
A chill on the cross of my back woke me up. I grabbed a piece of poplar from the woodbox and put it in the stove. I looked to see what supper I should make these peculiar men who lived in my house, but then I saw the piano room door open. I couldn’t help myself. The piano stood in the middle of the room, handy for working on the back and the front at the same time. The piano looked together, at least I saw no leftover pieces lying on the floor. The top lid was closed and the ink bottle stood on some papers with the straight pen lying beside it. Two side-by-side pages with fresh ink writing stood on the music rack. I stepped closer.
By the top of the one page Beethoven had written “Klavieren Sonata 1 für Sonia,” but the “Sonia” was crossed out and beside it he had written “Susch.” I felt another chill on my back and then my heart clappered faster than it had in the bed with Obrum or even in the barn when it was storming. Under the title he had drawn lines across with little balls and sticks, and some of the sticks had flags. A tsittering feeling somewhere beside my blind intestine made me so dizzy I hurried myself back to the kitchen and sat down and put my head on the table until the world stood still again. I didn’t know if I wanted to be with Beethoven in the same room again.
18
Susch
Darpslied Elders Villa
Every morning after breakfast Beethoven Blatz would go outside to the beckhouse and then he would come back into that prost schpikja house we lived in and sit down by that piano, and play that Moonlight Sonata all the way through … well, he would stop at some places and play a part over and over. Then he would go behind the piano with his tools and try to schtimm it in better. He would play that part again and go on till the next part where something bothered him and he would play that part over and over and try to schtimm it in too. Sometimes he took an hour to get through that first slow, dreamy part, hearing things out of tune that I for sure couldn’t notice, just like I hadn’t felt that crack in the soundboard. Other times he heard troubles in the second part of that sonata that sounded like chasing cows gotten out of the fence. And when he was trying to fix the last part that sounds like a happy thunderstorm, the whole house shuddered, so hard he hammered on that piano. Then, when he was satisfied with the piano sound, he would play that Moonlight Sonata all the way through and I wondered over how fingers could wribble and wrips over those keys so fast without twisting themselves into knots. Sometimes hearing that Moonlight Sonata every morning got tiresome, but that music was the measure Beethoven used to see if the piano was working right.
Then it would get so hartsoft still that if I set a pot on the stove it clattered like some Himmelklang. I sometimes tiptoed close to his door to peek and he would be standing with his elbows on the top piano lid, scratching with the straight pen on a piece of paper. After maybe an hour of such stillness I would hear the piano so quietly I had to stretch my ears to hear it. He didn’t play the Moonlight Sonata then. Maybe a little the same, but different. It was good he played it so I could hardly hear it, because if I schlikjed myself closer to the door to hear it better, it made me feel like I needed to go to the beckhouse, and a woman doesn’t want to be so needijch all the time, especially in winter. Besides, a woman who is going to have a baby is needijch enough as it is! Oh yes, such it gives from a snowstorm too.
At first, I belittled this idea in my head because of what had happened on our wedding night and for two years anyways nothing. Even if I had been snooty with Funk about Obrum’s mumps and laughed with Tien about it, there was a twieveling doubt abo
ut Obrum’s bullets at the edge of my brain, so I didn’t have much worry or hope when I felt different in my belly. Then, when my blood really didn’t come—holem de gruel—all of a sudden the world was schwierijch komplizeat. I sank down on that rocking chair with the red ribbon still on it and for a long breath I looked straight at my wanting that I had febeizeled since my wedding night and how this wanting had reached my icy fingers to Beethoven’s cheek in the barn. Gott im Himmel, let it hold, I prayed, even as a shiver ran down my backstring. A piano clang stutzed me out of my prayer and I sat up and wondered that Blatz had not gone back to holding school after the snowstorm.
Beethoven Blatz never went back to hold school by Puggefeld after the snowstorm. Obrum wouldn’t say why this man was living with us in our vekjlämtet schpikja house with this broken piano that wouldn’t hold the tune from one day to the next. I was frightened to ask because I didn’t want to lose the warm feeling I mostly had with these two men in my home.
A few Sundays later, when we went to my parents’ place for dinner after church, Mamuh told me that she had heard from Mrs. Beluira Bergen that Beethoven Blatz had let the schoolchildren run loose all over the school inside and outside and up on the roof while he was drawing balls with sticks all over the blackboard with chalk and not learning the children. For sure, Mamuh wanted to know what that Mensch was doing with us anyways. “That I don’t know neither,” I said to Mamuh, and was happy to hear Obrum stand up in the sitting room where he had been neighbouring with Papuh and say that it was time to go home before the road was all peezahed full with blowing snow.
