Paradise Park (50 page)

That was a shock. When we were Bialystokers Mikhail and I never went to services with instrumental music. It just wasn’t done, because all Jews were in mourning for the loss of the Temple. We could only pray with our voices, and no musical accompaniment. Guitars were absolutely verboten. So there was that initial prickle in our stomachs when we saw Telemachus’s guitar. Mikhail and I looked at each other for an instant in fear. Yet we didn’t get up to leave. Softly Telemachus started playing. Softly everyone began to sing.

And the English version:

Then an older gray-haired lady took half the circle, and Telemachus took the other half, and we sang a round. Then Chris took a quarter of the circle, and the old lady took a quarter of the circle, and Telemachus took a quarter, and a bosomy girl in a low-cut T-shirt took the last quarter, and we did a four-part round. And softly, softly, we sang until the last notes died away—or rather, the last stragglers in the round finally made it to the end. And there was silence, and we all sat still. There was a beautiful gentle stillness.

Telemachus was about to speak when another humming could be heard, and it came from Mikhail! He was rocking gently back and forth and humming out a strange melody, intricate and in a minor key. It was in the style of a Bialystoker niggun, but just when I thought I had it pegged it changed. Everyone sat rapt listening to Mikhail. He closed his eyes. Back and forth, gently, gently, he was rocking. A new niggun was coming to him. He was actually right there before us receiving the transmission of a new niggun! Gradually the tune began to coalesce. Gradually the wordless syllables came together in a pattern.
Ay die Ay die aaayyy aayyy, daydie daydie Oaaaay
Dayyy. The other people in the circle began to follow. Other people started closing eyes. Then Telemachus picked up the notes on his guitar. Everyone was humming together; everyone was adding and embellishing. Telemachus and Chris were humming the niggun in descant. And I have to say the rest of the service had its ups and downs. When it came to dialogue, some of the people in that group were incredibly long-winded—not to mention positive that only they had the key to Biblical exegesis, so only their opinions were right! But at that moment in that wordless song, I could feel something I hadn’t felt in a long long time. I could feel the presence of the divine. God was there in that niggun, pulsing through the room. God was arising and manifesting in this sudden harmonic grace.

So that afternoon, when the Havurah was done and we left with our empty plastic bowl, I said to Mikhail, “See.”

“What do you see?” he asked.

“See,” I said. “You’re taller.”

And he was. After the music he’d created, and the divine inspiration, and the uproar he’d caused, with everybody wanting to learn more Hasidic melodies from him, Mikhail was at least an inch taller than he’d been when he came to the services. And as we walked back home on that February day even the weather seemed to have taken a turn for the better, and the dirty snow that had been piled up against the curbs for weeks was melting around the edges. “Everything is changing over,” I told Mikhail. “Everything is turning. There’s going to be a whole new year, and the baby, and everything is going to be different. Look, new people are moving in,” I said when we got back to our building. Right in front was a huge moving truck, and it said
ALLSTON PIANO MOVERS
on it. “And it’s a pianist,” I said.

We poked around the truck and the back entrance to the building to see where the piano was going, but no one was around, so we ran up the stairs to Aunt Lena’s apartment. Her door was standing wide open to the hall.

“This is strange,” said Mikhail.

I followed him inside, and that was when we saw that the piano movers were actually in our own apartment. And they hadn’t come to deliver a piano. They had come to take ours away. Aunt Lena was standing right in front of the baby grand and screaming at two of the piano movers and trying to beat them off the instrument. They stood there in their Allston Piano Movers jumpsuits listening to her sympathetically, and in the meantime two other men were actually unscrewing the top of the piano from its legs!

“Stop!” I screamed. “What are you doing?”

“We’re removing the piano, ma’am,” said what turned out to be the senior piano mover. He was an African-American gentleman with gray hair. His name, Richard, was embroidered in script on his uniform. He handed me a clipboard which he said had paperwork and was full of forms in legalese, and copies of contracts, that supposedly Mikhail had previously signed back when he’d bought the piano from the Bosendorfer store, about how he’d make monthly payments on the instrument and if he didn’t, then said instrument would be repossessed.

“This”—Mikhail put his hands on the piano’s satiny wood—“this is my livelihood!”

“Mm-hmm,” the head piano mover said sadly, with his eyes on the top of the baby grand.

“This is my art,” Mikhail said.

“Mmm-hmm. I know,” the head piano mover said.

The men just flipped the top of the piano on its side and onto a dolly. There they were, wheeling the piano out the door. There they were carrying out four dismembered piano legs. It was like watching someone being drawn and quartered.

“What can I do to stop this?” I begged Richard.

“You’re eleven months behind,” he said.

Eleven months! I thought. I guess Mikhail had sort of forgotten about making payments. “My husband has a gift,” I told Richard. “My husband has a magical gift. He just hasn’t yet been recognized. Don’t you see?”

Richard opened up the piano bench and took out all Mikhail’s music. Chopin waltzes, and preludes. Old dog-eared Satie. He started giving all the music to us—to me and to Aunt Lena and Mikhail.

“Why are you giving us all this?” I asked miserably.

“Because the music belongs to you,” Richard said.

“What’s the point of giving him his music, if you’re taking away the thing to play it on?”

“The music is your property,” Richard said. “But unfortunately how it works is the piano has to be paid up.”

“No, you aren’t listening!” I was starting to feel breathless. I could barely get the words out. I was panting for air.

“I know. I know,” Richard said, almost tenderly.

One of the guys was coming back now for the piano bench.

W
HERE
the piano had been was now a huge hole. It was like a crater in the living room. There was the dust that had gathered under the piano, and there were the newspapers that Aunt Lena had piled there. And there was just this empty space; this great silent void. You could only walk around it.

All the rest of that day Mikhail sat on an old folding chair in our room. We usually threw clothes on top of that chair, but he’d shoved the clothes onto the floor, and now he just sat and sat. His mouth was set in a hard line. His face was flushed, his fingers eerily still. I think that was what frightened
me the most. The way he didn’t even fidget. He had been such a fidgety person, always keeping time with all his fingers and his toes. Now he’d had all his fidgets stamped out. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to rant and rail with him, because it hurt so bad. It was as if somebody had taken away my hope, and my career, and stabbed me in the heart. It was as if somebody had repossessed
my
art, even though when it came to pianos I couldn’t play a note. And I was in crisis, and I was in turmoil, because Mikhail was. And I was grieving, because he was. And I doubted the whole world, because he did. And I just wanted to put my arms around him and cry, but I didn’t, because I thought maybe that would make him feel worse. So I kept away, and I let Aunt Lena go on about how Mikhail never opened any mail, and how I should have known that about him, that he just threw it away. Also Mikhail didn’t know how to run a business. He didn’t charge enough for lessons, and he allowed his students’ parents to become late with payments. Thus they took advantage of him, which I should have known. While meanwhile he himself kept spending, including money for competitions. Mikhail did not understand money, and Aunt Lena blamed me, which wasn’t really fair, but I let her, because she did it out of love for Mikhail—and it got her off his back.

Mikhail went to bed early. Then Aunt Lena went to bed. But I stayed up. I sat on the sofa in the living room and I stared at the piano crater on the floor. The newspapers and dust. A million practicalities buzzed in my mind. Like how would we tell all of Mikhail’s piano students? He had no instrument to teach them on. How would we tell them? He couldn’t call up all their parents. I would have to do it. I would have to tell them Mikhail was now making house calls. He would come teach in their own houses and apartments! Except we had no car. How would he manage to get to all of them? I thought, we’ve got to find some money. I thought, it’s up to me. I’ve got to find us some money to get that piano back. I have to beg, borrow, or steal some. Which brought to mind my father, of course, except as usual I didn’t know quite how to ask, given the awkward situation. All my situations were awkward situations. Given that I had used those options up before. The begging, borrowing, and stealing. And with Dad just plain helping never was a possibility. I stared ahead of me at the empty void, and I thought, how? How? How? But I could not see a way to get the piano back.

Then, for the first time, I saw how crazy we were to be having a baby
in September. We couldn’t even take care of a piano. How could we support a child? And where would we even put a baby in Aunt Lena’s apartment?

I thought and I thought until, even with all my worrying, I could barely keep my eyes open. I thought until I practically had to dive for bed. But when I lay down to sleep, I had a terrible dream. Mikhail and I were birds. We were huge white birds flying. We were albatrosses, but we were too big. Our wings were so heavy we could barely lift them up. Our wings stretched out, so we had to wait for the wind to help us fly. When the wind came, only then, we lifted off the ground. Then we pumped and pumped with all our might, and we stretched and reached until we felt as though all the fibers of our bodies were close to breaking. There above us was the sky, and it was cool and smooth and serene, and we gasped for air and opened up our beaks and we pumped our ungainly wings, and the wind lifted us like two gliders and we pumped some more and with all our effort we rose into that blue—it was such a color, not even blue, more purple. It was like blueberries and muscat grapes. We were so close we could taste it. Then all at once we crashed. We’d hit the ceiling. Glass sprayed down and cut our faces, and chicken wire tangled up our flight feathers, and we fell back again, and we were wounded, both of us. We were bleeding. But all the time I heard a voice, and it was calling, “Sharon! Sharon!” And I tried to raise up my wings again, but they didn’t work anymore. They were broken.

I opened my eyes. I was thrashing around on the bed. I was bathed in sweat, but Mikhail was holding me, calling, “Sharon, what is the matter?”

“What do you mean, what’s the matter?” I cried out. “You know what’s the matter.”

“I thought you were hurt,” he said.

“I am hurt,” I told him.

“Oh, Sharon,” he whispered to me. “I’m sorry I have made such a mess. It was my fault.”

“Your fault!” I said. “They didn’t even give you the benefit of the doubt. They just took the piano away!”

“It was my fault,” he said again.

“I’m afraid,” I told him.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “Please do not fear. We will start paying bills!”

“I don’t know. I don’t know,” I wailed. “We will.”

“I had a terrible dream,” I told Mikhail.

“What did you dream?”

“It was … I was …” Even as I began describing it, the whole scene was melting away. I was already starting to forget the whole thing. But I told him, “We were birds, and we were trying to fly, but we couldn’t get up there to the sky. It was like we were land animals, but we thought we could fly. And whenever we got close we got tangled in nets, and we broke our wings. But all the time a voice was calling to me.”

“A voice?” Mikhail asked intently. “What did it say?”

“Just my name. Over and over. Sharon. Sharon. And now I can’t sleep. And I’m afraid to go back to sleep,” I said.

“But this dream is from God!” Mikhail said.

I looked at him. He sat bolt upright in bed. “This dream is from God. It must be for us to instruct us what to do!”

I propped up my head on my hand.

“This is a vision,” Mikhail said.

“It didn’t feel like one,” I told him.

“At the time, no. You were asleep,” Mikhail pointed out.

“True,” I said.

“In the dream you were flying.”

“And you were too.”

“We were flying. We were moving. We were traveling. We must move!” he said.

“But how?” I asked.

“Then a voice was calling Sharon … Sharon … And saying what?”

“That was it,” I said. “Just my name.”

Mikhail got up. We both got up. We padded out into the living room. I was still wearing my shirt from the day before, but no pants. Mikhail was wearing his underwear. He started pacing around the apartment. He paced and paced, trying to come up with the meaning of my dream. He turned on one reading lamp by the couch so he wouldn’t trip. He began leafing through the last few days’ papers on the end table. He was looking for words. He was looking for any words of inspiration. “Real Estate,” he said to me. “Relocation. Houses. Sales. Rentals.”

“No,” I said, slowly.

“Allston, Belmont, Brookline, Cambridge …” He was skimming the names of the towns. “Medford, Newton, Peabody, Quincy, Randolph, Revere, Saugus … Sharon!” he exclaimed.

“What?” I said.

“Sharon, Mass. Apartments, sales, rentals. This is the meaning,” he told me. “Flying upward. Calling Sharon. This is what it means: go upward to Sharon.”

“You mean the town? The town of Sharon? But Sharon is south,” I said.

“Figuratively upward,” he told me.