by Chris Cander
“Da,” she answered. Then she remembered where she was and said, “Yes.”
“I was asked to bring you this.” He handed her the envelope. The return address was that of a hotel in Finland. In the center, her name was written in Cyrillic and, in a different ink color and handwriting, her Los Angeles address in English. She slid her finger beneath the flap, her heart quickening.
Дорогая Катя!
Если ты получила это письмо, значит, ты уже живешь в своей американской мечте. В Калифорнии действительно много солнца? Может быть, ты думаешь, что я плохой человек, и, возможно, ты права. Но я не настолько плох, чтобы забыть о тебе. Не настолько плох, чтобы не вернуть пианино, даже спустя столько времени.
Может быть, когда-нибудь, я расскажу тебе, где путешествовал твой отважный инструмент. Он был надежным партнером, умел хранить свои секреты. И мои тоже. А какой сильный звук! Хотя никто не мог добиться от него такого звучания, какое удавалось извлечь тебе, Катя. Как зверь, покинувший любимого хозяина и вынужденный служить другому, он должен подчиняться, но дух его уже сломлен.
Твой муж разузнал кое-что обо мне, но он ошибся. Я не так жаден, как он. Я всего лишь позаимствовал идеи у наших капиталистических врагов, чтобы заработать для более благородного дела. Пожалуйста, не суди строго; каждый несет свой крест. Сейчас гласность меняет нашу жизнь, не так ли? Возможно, ты была права. Балет не изменит мир. А гласность изменит. Как и те Mauerspechte, которые разобрали обломки старой стены и дали возможность пройти с востока на запад.
Что бы ни говорил тебе муж, я приобрел у тебя пианино только для того, чтобы когда-нибудь потом снова вернуть его тебе. Я не позволял никому играть на нем, если не был уверен, что руки исполнителя чисты. Если бы оно могло говорить, то поведало бы тебе, что о нем хорошо заботились. Теперь оно снова твое. Пианино находится в распоряжении одного моего знакомого из музыкального отделения UCLA, который обещал его отреставрировать. Так что инструмент вернется к тебе в целости и сохранности.
Я все еще надеюсь, что однажды ты сочинишь музыку для моего балета. Может быть, его темой станет ослабление напряженности.
Твой Борис
Dear Katya!
If you are reading this, then by now you are living an American dream. There is a lot of sun in California, yes? You maybe think I’m a bad person, and maybe you’re right. But I’m not so bad I forgot about you. Not so bad I won’t return your piano, even if it took a long time.
Someday maybe I’ll tell you where your sturdy instrument traveled. It was a reliable partner, and kept its secrets well. My secrets, too. And such robust tone! Nobody could coax music out of it like you could, though, Katya. It was like a beast that had gone from a beloved master to a new one; it might be obedient, but its spirit was broken.
Your husband discovered something about me, but he was wrong to assume that I was as greedy as he. I only borrowed ideas from our capitalist friends to make money for a nobler cause. Please don’t criticize me too severely; we all have our own shame to bear. Now there is glasnost that changes the world, yes? Maybe you were right. It’s not ballet that changes the world. It is glasnost that will change the world. And the Mauerspechte who have taken away the rubble of the old wall and made it possible to pass from east to west.
Whatever else your husband told you, you should know that I only bought your piano so that I might somehow return it to you. In this time, I always made sure the hands that played it were clean. If it could talk, it would tell you that it was always handled with good care. Now it is yours again. It is in the possession of an acquaintance in the music department at UCLA, who promised to have it rehabilitated. He said he will get it back to you safely.
I still hope that you will someday compose a score for my ballet. Maybe with a new theme of détente.
Your Boris
Tears fell. Thirteen years and five months had passed since she’d last touched the Blüthner. Over the years, the very faint hope that Mikhail and Boris had not betrayed her, that the piano would be returned, had slowly dwindled until her mourning was not for her separation from the Blüthner but for its death, and she had finally stopped believing that she might ever see it again. The man on her front porch offered her a handkerchief.
“You have my piano?” she asked, with hope creaking her voice.
“Me? No. No, I don’t have it. I just brought the letter. My colleague was going to deliver it but then had to leave town—his wife’s mother is ill, I think—so he asked me to find out where you live. I guess the guy who had your piano knew you were in L.A., just didn’t know where. Anyway, Andries—that’s my colleague—happened to tell me this story about how this old choreographer friend of his shipped him a piano. Boris, was it? Yes, that’s right. So somehow Boris got in touch with Andries—they hadn’t talked in more than a decade, I guess. And apparently he’s in some Siberian gulag for drug trafficking. I think he said it was Krasnoyarsk—”
“Prison! Boris is in prison?”
The man put his hands up. “Hey, I don’t know anything. Andries told me all this just before he took off for Amsterdam. But yeah, he said Boris was in prison on drug charges or something. Anyway, this piano—your piano, I suppose—shows up in a big crate at the university with two letters, one to Andries and this one.” He indicated the paper in Katya’s hands. “He said he wasn’t in a position to deal with it, but said Boris told him it was urgent that he get the piano fixed up and returned to you as soon as possible. Between you and me, I think Boris paid him pretty well to do it. It pretty much covered his family’s tickets to Holland.”
“Where is my piano?”
“Oh, right. He had some of his students take it down to Immortal Piano. Apparently they’re the best when it comes to fixing up a banged-up instrument.”
“What do you mean ‘banged up’?”
“Don’t worry. After I found your address, I called them and they said it’s good as new and all ready to deliver.” He lifted his pale eyebrows like a shrug. “I can take you down there now if you want.”
Katya rushed at him, landing with her cheek against the buttons of his dress shirt, squeezing him as though he were her savior, as though she loved him. Maybe he was, and maybe she did; he had found her, and would take her to her beloved piano, and bring her back to life, just like in her fairy tale. “Thank you, thank you!” she said.
He laughed. “Пожалуйста,” he told her.
“You speak Russian?” She stood back to regard him.
“Oh no, just a few words here and there. I speak Czech and Polish, though. And English, of course.”
“I will repay you for helping me. Help you with Russian, if you’d like me to. Or teach you
piano. Do you play the piano?”
“No, no. I don’t have an ear for it. I wish I did, though.”
“I can teach you if you want. I don’t have much, but I can do this as a thank-you for bringing my piano back to me.” She leaned into him again, pressing her cheek to his heart, and he laughed again and hugged her lightly back.
“DO YOU KNOW WHAT that marking is?” Clara asked Greg.
He nodded, still staring at it. “It’s a name,” he said quietly. “Grisha.” After a pause he said, “I can’t believe it. I can’t fucking believe it.”
“What?”
He turned on her. “Where did you get this?”
She was startled by the accusation in his voice. Or maybe it was panic. “It was a gift. From my father.”
“When?”
“For my twelfth birthday,” she said. Then, growing defensive: “Why?”
“And now you’re…?”
“I just turned twenty-six.”
Greg’s pale face blanched. “So that would’ve been in”—his brow furrowed as he calculated—“1998?”
“Yeah,” she said, and he nodded, absently, for what struck her as an unusually long time. “Are you okay? Why do you want to know all this?”
“Do you happen to know where your father got it?”
“As a matter of fact, no. I never had the chance to find out. My parents died right after he gave it to me.”
“In a fire,” he said after a beat, staring at her.
Clara felt a chill that raised the fine hairs on the back of her neck. A rapid series of images flipped through her mind: Tabitha’s mother, crouched next to her sleeping bag, There’s been a fire; herself, wearing a stiff new dress and standing between her long-faced aunt and uncle at her parents’ funeral; the glossy black Blüthner reflecting her curled-up image as she lay on the concrete floor of her uncle’s garage. “How do you know there was a fire? Did you research me?”
Clara had once looked herself up on the Internet, wondering if there was anything out there. She’d found a social media profile belonging to a different Clara Lundy. A website that listed people’s locations and net worths showed her still living in an apartment complex that was three addresses ago. There was an obituary for a Clara Louise Lundy who’d died in 1976, a thoughtful account of that other woman’s life that had actually made her jealous. The only meaningful hit was in a comment somebody posted on a site that reviewed local businesses. Having overhauled the customer’s engine, she was complimented as being “nice, knowledgeable—and hot.” But there was nothing about losing her parents in a house fire. She’d been a minor when it happened, and they’d left her first name out of the news reports.
“No, that didn’t occur to me. I didn’t have any reason to. When I saw your listing for an upright Blüthner, it was exactly what I wanted—the right era, the right color—and I just thought maybe they weren’t so rare after all. I would’ve researched you if I’d known your Blüthner was this Blüthner. But all this time I thought this Blüthner was gone, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. That’s what my mother told me, anyway.”
Clara shook her head. “I don’t understand. How did your mother know about the fire?”
“Because before you got this piano, it belonged to her.”
“What? How do you know that?”
“The marking. The one on the back. The name.”
“Grisha,” she said.
“I’m Grisha.” He pointed to his own chest like someone pantomiming the fact to a non–English speaker. “I am Grigoriy in Russian. Greg in English. And Grisha’s what my mother called me.”
“So my father bought it from her?”
For what seemed like minutes, his face was still except for a vein that seemed to have come into relief down the center of his forehead. “Not exactly.”
“What, then? Are you saying he stole it?”
“No, no, not at all. It was a legitimate transfer of ownership.” He passed a hand over his face, squeezing his temples, and when he released them any hint of friendliness between them was gone and he again looked as he had in his portrait: cold, focused, aloof. “Never mind. The terms of their agreement aren’t important.”
“They are to me,” Clara said. Her father hadn’t told her the first thing about where he’d gotten the Blüthner, not why or how, or who had owned it before her. Of course it had never occurred to her to ask when she was twelve, and in the intervening years, its provenance had seemed irrelevant. She was privy to neither its music nor its mysteries. “Please,” she said.
Greg closed his eyes, took a deep breath. “It’s not a happy story, okay? My mother loved that piano, but something happened and her only hope of protecting it was to get rid of it. She didn’t sell it; she gave it away.”
Clara was so taken aback that for a moment she just looked at him, though her mind was swirling with questions.
“But wasn’t it in the fire?” he asked.
“It was at the technician’s, getting the case repaired.”
He nodded. “Yeah, that makes sense.” Then he looked at his watch. “The guys will be out any minute, and we need to get moving if I’m going to get all the photos done before our contract expires.” He extended his hand and Clara automatically slipped her palm against his, which was dry and warm. He held it for just a beat longer than seemed necessary, looking at her carefully. She thought she felt something significant pass between them, riding on a current of shared history. But then he abruptly released her and said, “Nice meeting you” in a businesslike manner, and held out his newly free hand toward the open cargo door in an after-you motion of dismissal.
“Wait a minute,” Clara said. “You can’t just walk away after telling me your mother used to own my piano. You grew up in Los Angeles, right? So did I, in Santa Monica. How did your mother know my parents?”
“I didn’t say she did.”
“Then what are you saying? Why did she think the piano was in the fire?”
“Someone told her. It’s no big deal.”
“Who?”
Greg trapped her with that level stare, his countenance entirely calm. After a moment he brushed off the front of his pants, though there wasn’t a speck of dust on them. He did it as though to mark the end of something, a gesture of resolve, and when he spoke again his voice had a decisive clarity. “That was a difficult time in my life. I have no interest in discussing it, not with you or with anyone else. It makes me angry, and I don’t want to get angry.”
Juan and Beto ambled toward them, both looking pink-eyed and a little blurry around the edges, following whatever late-night solace the casino had offered. She turned away. She felt silly standing there, obviously having slept in her car, and for thinking that she’d followed them without being noticed. She touched her hair, and thought of her breath and her need of a bathroom.
“Vámonos,” Greg said to them in a fairly convincing accent. “Quiero empezar temprano.” Then he addressed her: “I’ll take care of your piano.” His mouth smiled, but his eyes didn’t. “Enjoy your drive home.”
She had no reason to balk; she’d gotten what she’d told Peter she wanted: to meet Greg, to make sure the Blüthner was in good hands. She didn’t know how good his were, of course, but she could still feel the ghostly impression of his palm against hers and was a little embarrassed for thinking it might’ve meant something. She responded now with a jut of her chin, a gesture she’d picked up from being around men all her life, a way to acknowledge a person or a fact without exposing anything too intimate. Then she dusted her hands over the front of her jeans, wiping off the moment as he apparently had, and jumped down off the truck.
She walked backward to her car, watching the movers toss their duffels back into the bed, pull down and secure the door. They exchanged information with Greg, who pointed vaguely at the horizon in the direction of the border, where sh
e herself would go. Then Greg limped to his own car, a black SUV that seemed bigger than necessary and—in spite or because of the chic make—was a model known to routinely break down. “Asshole,” she said aloud. But they had all slammed their doors closed, so nobody except maybe the valet, back on duty, heard her.
She stopped at the gas station on the corner, filled her tank, emptied her bladder, bought a Slim Jim, a pack of peanut-butter crackers, and a half-pint of milk for breakfast, which she ate ravenously, sitting in the parked car, remembering that she hadn’t had a thing in almost twenty hours. It was only seven-thirty in the morning, and already the day felt old. Her hand was throbbing, her neck stiff. She wanted a shower, a bed, some music to fall asleep to.
She thought about Greg’s mother giving the piano away to protect it. From what? How and why had her father acquired it? Perhaps someone had known that he was looking for one to give Clara for her birthday. A mutual acquaintance? And then someone told Greg’s mother that it had been destroyed in the same fire that killed her parents. The same person who’d connected them in the first place, or the co-worker who’d helped her father bring the piano home the night he gave it to her, or someone else from the university. It could have been anyone, really. If Greg’s mother hadn’t actually known her parents, it probably wasn’t important. Or possibly she was just too exhausted and irritated to care.
