by Chris Cander
“And if you get tired, you know, just blow it off. We had a guy in here this week fell asleep behind the wheel and drove into a telephone pole. Lucky he wasn’t going very fast. So, keep the windows open.”
“I will.”
“I know,” he said.
By the time they hung up, the sun’s remnant glow was nearly gone. She put in a CD that had been her uncle’s favorite, one he’d called his driving collection, though they rarely played anything during their jaunts: James Taylor and Cat Stevens, Neil Young and Bob Dylan. She fast-forwarded until she found the song she liked the most, Simon and Garfunkel’s “Homeward Bound,” and she listened to it as the night engulfed her. The temperature dropped quickly in the foothills, but she kept the windows down anyway, her hair blowing against her face, catching at her lips. The red lights of the U-Haul moved steadily forward.
* * *
—
She began to feel sleepy, and her mind wandered back to her childhood home, as it sometimes did. It was only in these moments that she might catch a glimpse of her parents’ faces.
Their images had started to fade from Clara’s memory almost immediately. The harder she tried to conjure them, the fuzzier they became. Within days, she couldn’t summon the shape of her father’s birthmark. She couldn’t remember which side of her mother’s face had the dimple, or if her eyes were brownish-green or greenish-brown, or when was the last time she’d given her a hug. She had hugged her good-bye before she went to her friend Tabitha’s house that night, hadn’t she? She could smell the cigarettes, could hear the music, but was it Chopin? Or maybe one of the Russians? Their faces, though, were slowly disappearing, melting like they must have in the fire.
A few years after they died, she did some research. As the flames lick a body, the outer layers of skin begin to fry and peel away. After a few minutes, the deeper, thicker layers of skin shrink and split, leaking the yellow body fat contained underneath, which further fuels the fire. Then the muscles dry out and shrink, and finally the bones, which take longer to burn, until all that’s left is a charred skeleton, unrecognizable except to dentists and doctors with X-rays and other medical records.
She had only one photo to rely on—the family albums had burned along with them—because her mother had sent it to Ila many years before. Someone had taken it on the beach near their house on a late-summer afternoon; the shadows in the image were long, the light low and glowing on their bodies. Her mother wore a blue one-piece and hat, the blunt ends of her reddish-blond hair sticking out from underneath. She faced the camera head-on, her weight shifted onto one leg. She was hiding a cigarette behind her back, but not well; smoke curled up over her shoulder like it was whispering in her ear. Her smile showed no teeth. Her father was in a pair of swim trunks, his midsection not yet paunched. His bucket hat shaded his forehead, and because both of them were wearing sunglasses they looked like they were in disguise. They could have been an anonymous pair of thirty-something parents, strangers plucked off the boardwalk and asked to pose, except that Clara was clearly herself in the picture, a toddler sitting in the sand between them, her eyes closed against the sun. She resented the picture for what seemed like a cruel withholding of the features she wanted most to see.
She blamed herself, of course. If she had loved them better, she would’ve been able to recall every detail of their living features. If she had loved them harder, then maybe they wouldn’t have died.
* * *
—
They drove for another two hours before the truck pulled into a gas station off the highway. Now that they’d probably notice her and want to know why she’d followed them for three hours deep into the middle of nowhere in eastern California, Clara was embarrassed. Wanting to meet Greg seemed like an inadequate explanation under the circumstances, so she tried to hide by pulling up to a pump a few rows down and standing where they couldn’t see her while she filled her tank.
Both men stood outside the truck while Beto pumped the gas, stretching and making jokes she couldn’t overhear. It didn’t matter, as long as they didn’t spot her or her white Corolla. They stopped laughing and settled into what looked like a companionable silence, and Juan’s gaze passed over the pumps and the outbuilding and lighted, briefly, on her. She turned away. A minute or two later, she heard doors slamming and the truck starting up again, and she sheathed the pump nozzle and climbed back in her car, dark mountains and the impending strip lights of Vegas ahead of her.
But then, after forty-five minutes, just east of the California-Nevada border, the truck pulled off the highway and drove into a tiny town filled with shopping outlets and seedy casinos. Clara followed them down the mostly abandoned main street toward a cartoonish neon sign for Lucky’s Golden Strike Inn and Gambling Hall, the kind of place she imagined would attract more insects than patrons. For a Saturday night, it didn’t seem very busy. But maybe that was to be expected at a run-down hotel in the middle of nowhere. A few semis were parked in the big parking lot, and a middle-aged valet was slumped in a chair next to a pegboard where he’d hung a few sets of keys. Clara pulled in behind a semi and watched Beto drive up an empty row and make a wide, careful turn into a spot near the entrance. Juan hopped out and did a couple of knee bends, stretched his shoulders back, tipped his head side to side. Then he went around and opened the back of the truck. He pushed against the piano, shaking it gently as though to check the integrity of the tie-down. Apparently satisfied, he grabbed the two duffel bags and tossed one to Beto. Their voices carried on the crisp, clear air, but she could understand only a few disconnected words: cansado and tomar algo and en la mañana. Juan locked the truck and they went inside the hotel, past the valet, with whom they exchanged juts of their chins without stopping, a greeting that suggested some sort of mutual recognition, not as individuals but as members of a social order that frequented run-down border-town casinos in the middle of the night.
She killed the engine and the headlights, and rolled the windows mostly up. She was hungry and tired and would’ve loved to stretch out on a bed—even one in a room that rented for only $29—but if the drivers weren’t going to keep an eye on her piano overnight, then she would. She thought of Peter, and how worried he would be if he knew what she was doing. How stupidly he’d think she was behaving. Why babysit a locked-up piano in a casino parking lot? That was a downside of loyalty: logic didn’t always disrupt its manifestation.
Reluctantly she dialed Peter’s number and was relieved when it went to voice mail. “I’m at a hotel,” she said. “I’m going to crash, so you don’t need to call back. Just wanted to let you know I’m all right. Okay?” She hated leaving voice mails. It made her feel lonesome, speaking into the void like that.
KATYA TOOK THE POLAROIDS out of the drawer, laid them on her bed, and ran her finger around the white borders that had begun to fray at the edges. Throughout the five years she’d been in Los Angeles, she looked at the photos whenever her heart felt like it was breaking, whenever the blinding joyous sunshine was too much for her to bear. She thought that making herself feel worse might somehow make her feel better.
She tried to be happy. Ella had introduced them to the extensive Russian immigrant community, acquainting them with industrious, conscientious people who were eager to share meals and information. Ella invited them to the synagogue, though they weren’t religious. She helped Katya enroll Grisha in preschool, where he learned English and made friends. She also went with her to the Salvation Army to buy a used upright Yamaha piano with a nice walnut finish. After being delivered and tuned it sounded all right, but was nothing special. To Katya it had a hollow tone that lacked the essential warmth she was accustomed to, and the music she played on it barely stirred her. With Ella’s recommendations, she acquired a few students. But none of them, even the Russian ones, had a passion for the piano. America was too sunny. Nobody wanted to stay indoors and practice. In Russia, the winters were long and people tur
ned to music for warmth and light. Music, if it was played properly, could melt the tundra. But who needed a piano when there were beaches all around?
To make things worse, her husband was now even unhappier than she. He’d failed to learn the language and therefore had no prospects in his field of expertise. Instead of becoming a top engineer, overseeing the construction of beautiful American roads, he was forced to drive on them behind the wheel of a yellow taxi. As his former comrades flourished, building wealth and establishing new roots, Mikhail withdrew from society. He was too embarrassed by his lack of success to enjoy the company of other Russians, and became paranoid that his American neighbors would reject him if they knew what a failure he was. When he was at home, he kept the windows closed so they couldn’t spy on him, and he forbade Katya from playing any Russian music, lest anyone hear her and think they were Communists. Although he was miserable in Los Angeles, he knew he would die of shame if for any reason they were sent back to the Soviet Union. Ironically, going back was what she wanted most. No matter how much time passed, she didn’t miss her homeland or her parents any less. She still felt like part of her heart had been cut out, and she still couldn’t forgive her husband for doing the cutting.
* * *
—
Grisha wandered into Katya’s bedroom and sat down beside her. “Will you tell me the story?” he asked.
He was eight years old now, the same age she had been when the old German gave her the Blüthner, so many years ago.
“Chi-chi-chi,” Katya told him, still looking at the Polaroids. “You already know this fable so well already. You don’t need me to tell it.”
“But I want to hear it again,” he said, turning onto his back and putting his head near her lap.
She sighed and shuffled the photographs until she found the one taken in the part of Death Valley known as Racetrack Playa. It had been a long and difficult drive to get there; the roads were bad and their teeth had chattered against their will. Toward the end their son began crying, pleading for them to stop the car, first in English and then in Russian. But Mikhail only gripped the steering wheel harder. “We have come this far already,” he said.
In the foreground of the photo was a large, almost square rock. Behind it was a long trail in an otherwise undisturbed floor of dry mud that had cracked into polygon shapes that stretched out to the horizon. Because Mikhail had clicked the shutter too early, Katya could be seen walking toward the rock but was slightly out of the frame. They’d been told that these rocks were called “sailing stones” because they moved around Racetrack Playa without human or animal intervention, inscribing trails in the fine clay surface of the lakebed.
The rock reminded Katya of her Blüthner, shiny and black and alone. Like it was sailing away from her even as she chased after it. She wondered where her piano was right at that moment, if it was in a truck stuffed with drugs or shoved against some tavern wall or burned as firewood, gone forever. “This big rock looks like a piano, yes?” she said to her son. She said the same thing every time. “And the desert, it looks so lonely, because there is no one to play it. Lonely and frozen, no matter how hot it gets there.” Then she sighed, and began:
* * *
—
“There once was a girl named Sasha who lived with her family in the far north of Russia where the reindeer herders were. It was always very, very cold in her small village. There was ice and snow everywhere, and always blizzards during the harsh winter months. The villagers were not happy. They had no music or dancing, and could only tell each other stories to keep Death’s cold hands away from their throats for another night.
“But then one day a foreigner was passing through, carrying his belongings in a wagon. A crazy man, a gypsy. He was trying to cross the world but he had gotten lost and ended up in Sasha’s village. The villagers weren’t trusting of strangers, so when the foreigner went around begging for food and shelter, nobody would help him. When everyone had shunned him, he dropped his chin low to his chest and resumed his crooked journey, pulling his heavy sled behind him. Sasha saw this, and her heart ached. She ran to the basket where there was but one crust of bread left for her family, and she put it into a cloth along with some dried reindeer meat. She took a pouch that had just a sip of wine left inside and she ran through the snow, following the tracks the foreigner’s sled had made. When she gave him this gift, he dropped to his knees, took her hands in his, and begged her to accept a token of his gratitude for her kindness. They walked back to her tiny home, and there he unloaded something that none of the villagers had ever seen before: a piano. He told her he had been carrying it with him for thousands of kilometers. A prince had given it to him and, heavy as it was, it was too special to abandon in the woods or in the snow for the elements to destroy. But you, he said, are deserving of this music box, and he showed her how to press the ivory keys to make sounds.
“Sasha was enchanted and spent day after day trying to understand the piano. She pressed one key at a time, learning the notes, then added more, finding patterns. She listened carefully to the sounds in nature, to the wind hissing across the ice and the clacking and braying of reindeer and the whipping of fire flames. And she learned how to emulate them with notes coming from the piano. Soon she was blending those notes into melodies, adding layers of harmony, and changing the tempo to make the lonely sounds of hissing and braying and whipping into something different, something like how we think of springtime when the ice melts and colors burst where before it was only gray. Sasha was very happy making these songs, and her family was made happy listening to them.
“Then they noticed that the ice and snow around their house was melting, and in little patches, green things emerged for which they had no names. Then the sun itself pried away some clouds and showed its face to them. Well, soon the other villagers also noticed, and before long they were gathered around the piano, listening as Sasha played her strange music, which seeped into their skin like a chill, only it was warm and tingly and it made them want to stand on their toes and sway and twirl! Sasha played wonderful, joyful compositions and the villagers danced and the patches of green expanded and small animals came to nibble there and rest. In just a few weeks, the village had changed entirely. It became a place of enchantment and music and happiness, a warm asylum from Death’s icy touch, and this went on for many years.
“The music drifted on warm breezes across the lands around them and to the northern seas, spreading hope and cheer. More foreigners came to visit, having heard strange tales from traders and trappers, or even the music itself, and sometimes they chose to stay. One such visitor was a man who hid his greedy heart behind a handsome face. He was extremely charming and flattered Sasha by listening very carefully to her as she played and giving her many compliments about the beauty of it. When after several weeks he proposed marriage, she said yes.
“They lived happily together for a time, and at first Sasha didn’t notice that a certain darkness crossed her husband’s face whenever villagers came to sit or dance around her piano. He then decided that people should pay to enjoy his wife’s music. Why should she give it away for nothing? They were poor. Why should they not profit from her playing? But Sasha disagreed. The piano had been a gift to her, and a gift before that. It was meant to be shared, just like the warmth of the sun shining on the village when she played. Besides, all the villagers were poor as well and had nothing with which to pay.
“Then one day came a new stranger who was also enchanted by Sasha’s music. A wealthy trader passing through, he shared her husband’s mercenary view of the piano’s magic except he wanted it all for himself, thinking he could make himself an even richer man. He offered more money for the instrument than Sasha or her husband could ever have dreamed of, but she refused him. Sasha could not imagine being separated from her piano, nor from the joy it brought her and all the villagers. Yet the next day, when she was visiting her parents, her husband a
ccepted the stranger’s offer, and together they moved the piano into the tent he had set up during his stay. When Sasha returned and found her piano missing, she was heartbroken. Though she fell to the ground and wept, the husband was unmoved. ‘With this money, we can build a bigger house and buy anything we want,’ he told her. But Sasha didn’t want a bigger house, nor did she want to buy things.
“As she lay weeping, an unfamiliar wind blew through the village. The sun, whose face had shone for so long, receded behind a thick curtain of clouds and the temperature began to drop. Suddenly the villagers, by now accustomed to their warm climate, were shivering without their coats or boots. The husband did not worry; he was busy counting his money.
“On the door came a furious knocking. The wealthy trader who had bought the piano stood with a face red from anger and his fists clenched by his sides. The piano was broken, he said. He could not make music with it like Sasha had, could not make the flowers bloom nor the ground green, and he demanded his money back. The husband stood up to his full height, and he was much bigger than the stranger. He made no pretense of hiding his greed behind a charming face. He advanced toward the trader, threatening to kill him if he did not leave.
“The man ran away to save his life, and he took his anger with him. If he could not make music and he could not have his money, then he would burn the piano. He chopped it into pieces and put bits of kindling beneath the pile. He sat beside it for warmth as it burned, because without Sasha’s music the harshness of winter had quickly returned. The villagers huddled together but could not stop the cold from seeping into their bones. Snow fell, and ice formed, and the villagers froze to death in their beds. The greedy husband died holding his money, and the wicked trader died when the last ember from the burned piano cooled to ash. Soon there was nothing but a stark and barren land, empty of animals and villagers. It was so cold that even the reindeer and their herders stayed far to the south.
