It sounded no different to me, the same muffled thumping and rumbling we’d been hearing ever since Marcy had returned home. I could hear the intensity in the crescendos that made the silverware clash, but it never occurred to me to care what she was playing. What mattered was that I could hear her play each night, could feel her playing just a floor above, almost as if she were in our apartment. She seemed that close.
“Each night Chopin — it’s all she thinks about, isn’t it?”
I shrugged.
“You don’t know?” Dzia-Dzia whispered, as if I were lying and he was humoring me.
“How should I know?”
“And I suppose how should you know the ‘Grande Valse brillante’ when you hear it either? How should you know Chopin was twenty-one when he composed it? — about the same age as the girl upstairs. He composed it in Vienna, before he went to Paris. Don’t they teach you that in school? What are you studying?”
“Spelling.”
“Can you spell dummkopf?”
The waves of the keyboard would pulse through the warm kitchen and I would become immersed in my spelling words, and after that in penmanship. I was in remedial penmanship. Nightly penmanship was like undergoing physical therapy. While I concentrated on the proper slant of my letters my left hand smeared graphite across the loose-leaf paper.
Dzia-Dzia, now that he was talking, no longer seemed content to sit and listen in silence. He would continually interrupt.
“Hey, Lefty, stop writing with your nose. Listen how she plays.”
“Don’t shake the table, Dzia-Dzia.”
“You know this one? No? ‘Valse brillante.’”
“I thought that was the other one.”
“What other one? The E-flat? That’s ‘Grande Valse brillante.’ This one’s A-flat. Then there’s another A-flat — Opus 42—called ‘Grande Valse.’ Understand?”
He rambled on like that about A-and E-flat and sharps and opuses and I went back to compressing my capital M’s. My homework was to write five hundred of them. I was failing penmanship yet again, my left hand, as usual, taking the blame it didn’t deserve. The problem with M wasn’t my hand. It was that I had never been convinced that the letters could all be the same widths. When I wrote, M automatically came out twice as broad as N, H, double the width of I.
“This was Paderewski’s favorite waltz. She plays it like an angel.”
I nodded, staring in despair at my homework. I had made the mistake of interconnecting the M’s into long strands. They hummed in my head, drowning out the music, and I wondered if I had been humming aloud. “Who’s Paderewski?” I asked, thinking it might be one of Dzia-Dzia’s old friends, maybe from Alaska.
“Do you know who’s George Washington, who’s Joe DiMaggio, who’s Walt Disney?”
“Sure.”
“I thought so. Paderewski was like them, except he played Chopin. Understand? See, deep down inside, Lefty, you know more than you think.”
Instead of going into the parlor to read comics or play with my cowboys while Mom pored over her correspondence courses, I began spending more time at the kitchen table, lingering over my homework as an excuse. My spelling began to improve, then took a turn toward perfection; the slant of my handwriting reversed toward the right; I began to hear melodies in what had sounded like muffled scales.
Each night Dzia-Dzia would tell me more about Chopin, describing the preludes or ballades or mazurkas, so that even if I hadn’t heard them I could imagine them, especially Dzia-Dzia’s favorites, the nocturnes, shimmering like black pools.
“She’s playing her way through the waltzes,” Dzia-Dzia told me, speaking as usual in his low, raspy voice as if we were having a confidential discussion. “She’s young but already knows Chopin’s secret — a waltz can tell more about the soul than a hymn.”
By my bedtime the kitchen table would be shaking so much that it was impossible to practice penmanship any longer. Across from me, Dzia-Dzia, his hair, eyebrows, and ear tufts wild and white, swayed in his chair, with his eyes squeezed closed and a look of rapture on his face as his fingers pummeled the tabletop. He played the entire width of the table, his body leaning and twisting as his fingers swept the keyboard, left hand pounding at those chords that jangled silverware, while his right raced through runs across tacky oilcloth. His feet pumped the empty bucket. If I watched him, then closed my eyes, it sounded as if two pianos were playing.
One night Dzia-Dzia and Marcy played so that I expected at any moment the table would break and the ceiling collapse. The bulbs began to flicker in the overhead fixture, then went out. The entire flat went dark.
“Are the lights out in there, too?” Mom yelled from the parlor. “Don’t worry, it must be a fuse.”
The kitchen windows glowed with the light of snow. I looked out. All the buildings down Eighteenth Street were dark and the streetlights were out. Spraying wings of snow, a snow-removal machine, its yellow lights revolving, disappeared down Eighteenth like the last blinks of electricity. There wasn’t any traffic. The block looked deserted, as if the entire city was deserted. Snow was filling the emptiness, big flakes floating steadily and softly between the darkened buildings, coating the fire escapes, while on the roofs a blizzard swirled up into the clouds.
Marcy and Dzia-Dzia never stopped playing.
“Michael, come in here by the heater, or if you’re going to stay in there put the burners on,” Mom called.
I lit the burners on the stove. They hovered in the dark like blue crowns of flame, flickering Dzia-Dzia’s shadow across the walls. His head pitched, his arms flew up as he struck the notes. The walls and windowpanes shook with gusts of wind and music. I imagined plaster dust wafting down, coating the kitchen, a fine network of cracks spreading through the dishes.
“Michael?” Mother called.
“I’m sharpening my pencil.” I stood by the sharpener grinding it as hard as I could, then sat back down and went on writing. The table rocked under my point, but the letters formed perfectly. I spelled new words, words I’d never heard before, yet as soon as I wrote them their meanings were clear, as if they were in another language, one in which words were understood by their sounds, like music. After the lights came back on I couldn’t remember what they meant and threw them away.
Dzia-Dzia slumped back in his chair. He was flushed and mopped his forehead with a paper napkin.
“So, you liked that one,” he said. “Which one was it?” he asked. He always asked me that, and little by little I had begun recognizing their melodies.
“The polonaise,” I guessed. “In A-flat major.”
“Ahhh,” he shook his head in disappointment. “You think everything with a little spirit is the polonaise.”
“The ‘Revolutionary’ étude!”
“It was a waltz,” Dzia-Dzia said.
“How could that be a waltz?”
“A posthumous waltz. You know what ‘posthumous’ means?”
“What?”
“It means music from after a person’s dead. The kind of waltz that has to carry back from the other side. Chopin wrote it to a young woman he loved. He kept his feelings for her secret but never forgot her. Sooner or later feelings come bursting out. The dead are as sentimental as anyone else. You know what happened when Chopin died?”
“No.”
“They rang the bells all over Europe. It was winter. The Prussians heard them. They jumped on their horses. They had cavalry then, no tanks, just horses. They rode until they came to the house where Chopin lay on a bed next to a grand piano. His arms were crossed over his chest, and there was plaster drying on his hands and face. The Prussians rode right up the stairs and barged into the room, slashing with their sabers, their horses stamping and kicking up their front hooves. They hacked the piano and stabbed the music, then wadded up the music into the piano, spilled on kerosene from the lamps, and set it on fire. Then they rolled Chopin’s piano to the window — it was those French windows, the kind that open out and there’s a tiny balcony. The piano wouldn’t fit, so they rammed it through, taking out part of the wall. It crashed three stories into the street, and when it hit it made a sound that shook the city. The piano lay there smoking, and the Prussians galloped over it and left. Later, some of Chopin’s friends snuck back and removed his heart and sent it in a little jeweled box to be buried in Warsaw.”