Published in Emerson College's Stork Magazine
At six years old, my mother decided she would be a pianist. She had always been a strong-willed child. It first manifested in her refusal to attend preschool; even when her parents hired the thirteen-year-old girl next door as a nanny of sorts, my mother still spent most of her time by herself in the tiny apartment, suffering from self-inflicted loneliness. To fill the time, she flipped through old books and played her father’s scratched vinyls on the half-broken record player. Hours spent singing along to same few classics planted the idea of an extravagant musical career in her little mind, and she paced around her narrow futon for three days before taking the matter into her own hands. She taped several sheets of notebook paper together on the kitchen floor and laid out on her stomach to draw out a full keyboard in pencil. You could tell she was very careful to color the black keys inside the lines from the way her head tilted and her lips pressed together. Satisfied with her work, she rolled the paper out on the kitchen table and sat down to play. A tea stain seeped through the white keys and my mother understood she didn’t know how to begin.
The beginner’s pianist book my mother had spotted at the record store cost about the equivalent of two or three dollars. But it is very difficult to purchase something for oneself at six years old, especially when all that’s in your pockets are wrinkled chestnuts from the chestnut tree behind the playground. So she set herself to prying kopeikas out of the sidewalk cracks, one at a time. At the end of one week, she had gathered not even a quarter of the total cost of the book. It was not going fast enough; she would have to find another way. Fame waits for no one.
As it turned out, an easy alternative was her Mama’s wallet. After only a few instances of undetectable theft, my mother had acquired the necessary funds to buy the book. And after only a couple weeks, she had it memorized from cover to cover. One week later, in her first music class on her first day of first grade, her fingers danced over the keys and the other children stood in silent awe. My mother came home beaming to find her Mama standing in the kitchen with a frown, the paper keyboard and piano book in her hand. There were few places to hide something in an apartment so small.
“Where did you get this from?”
“I made it.”
“I mean the book.”
“I bought it.”
“With what money, Larisa?” My mother shrank.
“...Yours,” she whispered.
There was a long silence, during which her Mama unrolled the paper keyboard and examined her daughter’s careful tracing. “Well, are you any good?” she asked.
Despite her family’s lack of wealth, my mother had a piano teacher within the month. Yana was an exceptional musician; she’d taught at a conservatory in Kiev for many years before meeting her husband and moving to Kozelets. Once a week, my mother would make the long walk to Yana’s house, where the two of them would sit hip-to-hip on the piano bench to drill scales and rhythm exercises and simple tunes.
“You’re a quick learner,” Yana told her once. “I could see you on a stage some day, Larisa.”
When Yana’s husband wasn’t home, sometimes the two of them would sit down for tea after the lesson. There would be honey-biscuits and jam and two cups of rosehip tea on little saucers painted with rabbits. Yana would ask after my mother’s school, her Mama, her Papa. My mother’s favorite days were when Yana would tell stories about her performances in Kiev.
“Is it true you played for ten thousand people?”
Yana laughed and spooned some sugar into her tea. “Oh, no. Definitely not ten thousand. I’m not sure exactly how many, but it was one of the larger halls in Kiev, yes.”
My mother gaped, starry-eyed. “Wow… Tell me about the time you played for the Kiev mayor again! Or the time the soloist you were accompanying arrived halfway through the show!”
And Yana would. But every once in a while, Yana’s husband would come home early from a bad day at work. My mother would watch him storm about the kitchen, slamming cabinets and muttering foul words under his breath. Whenever Yana tried to calm him, he would slap her hands away, hard enough to leave angry red marks. She always apologized to my mother.
“I’m sorry, I’ll have a talk with him. He knows he shouldn’t act like this in front of my students. Would you like some more tea? I bought pryaniki, too. Here, have two.” But all my mother could think about were how Yana’s red-beaten hands would shake as she placed the biscuits on her rabbit-painted plate.
On my mother’s birthday, Yana leaned over a plate of lemon meringues and handed her the sheet music to “Für Elise” by Beethoven, rolled up and tied with a pink ribbon.
“Happy birthday, little pianist,” she said, and tucked a loose strand of hair behind my mother’s ear. Meringues forgotten, my mother reached over the narrow kitchen table and wrapped her small arms around Yana’s neck.
“Spasibo.”
That evening, my mother traced the music notes with her meringue-sticky fingers under the lamp by her bedside until her Mama came in to scold her and turn out the light. In the dark, she pressed the sheets of music to her chest and smiled at the cracks in the ceiling.
On the first day of snowfall that winter, my mother’s Mama sat her down at the kitchen table. The chair was cold through her woolen skirt.
“Your piano teacher is dead,” she told her. It had been a lover’s quarrel. Yana found out about her husband’s mistress. You could hear their screaming from a block away until Yana’s husband grabbed the kitchen knife that sat on the shelf under the painted rabbit teacups.
For two full days, my mother wouldn’t speak. She refused to go to school, spent hours shut in her room curled under the quilt on the futon, shaking quietly. When she finally emerged, the floor was littered with shredded sheet music.
“I know you liked Yana,” her Mama said. “We’ll find you another teacher.”
My mother said nothing, only rolled out her paper keyboard on the kitchen table and began to tear it apart.
She never let me touch the piano in our Kiev apartment. It was stationed permanently in the living room, dusty and crowded with picture frames and vases of wilted flowers.
“It’s not for playing, Lena,” my mother would say. “You look, but you don’t touch.”
But on the days I came home from school before either of my parents returned from work, I would pry up the creaky fallboard and choose a key to play—just one. The neighbors were nosy, and I was clever enough to know they would ask questions about a new pianist living in our flat, so I kept to one key each day, working my way from left to right. The piano was long out of tune, so each key rang slant and sour when I pressed it with my small finger. After eight keys, I was in love. And after twelve, I had mustered up the courage to ask my mother for lessons.
It was a Sunday morning, and she was frying syrniki at the stove, a sunflower-patterned apron tied around her waist. I wrung my hands beneath the kitchen table.
“Mama?”
“Da, Lenchik.”
“You know the piano in the living room?”
She flipped a syrnik. “I hope you haven’t been playing with it.”
My palms were damp with sweat. “I was hoping I could use it.”
“Use it?” My mother turned around, the wooden spatula in her hand slick with butter. Her eyes narrowed. “So you have been—”
“I thought I could have lessons,” I blurted, then promptly shut my mouth. A silence followed, during which my mother’s face went very pale and she set the spatula down against the rim of the pan. She leaned back against the counter beside the stove.
“Lessons,” she repeated.
“I know we can’t afford much right now, but I could get a job! Oksana sews toys and sells them by the playground—she made enough money to buy new shoes…” Her expression made me stop.
“Lessons,” she repeated again, pulled out the chair beside me, and sat down heavily. There was a streak of flour across her cheekbone. I held my breath, ready for her to gather her wits and scold me, tell me how ungrateful I was, that we were only just managing to pay the rent on time.
But instead, she looked at me in a way I couldn’t understand. I could smell the syrinki burning on the stove and I thought she might be about to cry.
Guilt pooled in my stomach. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have asked, I—”
She waved me silent and shook her head with a small smile.
“Well, are you any good?”
Comments