Alexei

Alexei comes with his wife Natalia to repair my husband’s piano. They are a couple well in their 60s, and he has some illness: he is as thin as a reed and extremely fragile and weak. His delicate hands are not strong enough to do the necessary unscrewing. So, Natalia assists him. He guides her knowledgeably: now here, now there, and they take out the main mechanism – the heart of the piano. Natalia wraps it in a blanket like a baby, and they take it to their home where Alexei will work on it once the ordered parts come.

A few weeks later, they are back, and my husband, who was missing his instrument, is happy. Natalia screws the piano’s heart back, and Alexei starts his sensitive work. It lasts for hours and hours: just him and the piano, all of us around religiously silent. At noon, Natalia and I make a tea for Alexei. He would not have anything else. After some six hours they leave – Alexei exhausted, the piano still awaiting its rebirth.

At their next coming, the atmosphere is warm, our hearts more open. We talk about Russian culture with excitement. Alexei says he finished Moscow Conservatory. His uncle was a famous cello player. Then, he announces that he needs to work just a few more hours on the piano. And we watch him again in the perfect command of his universe.

Once finished, Alexei plays a little bit, for the purpose of check-up only. Yet, the music that his soft touch produces pulls both me and my husband towards the instrument. The beauty of the pristine and gentle sound fills up the room, the being, the soul…

“Do you hear this?” Alexei asks my husband, pressing repeatedly one key. “Yes, yes, it’s much better,” says my husband enthusiastically. “No, it’s not better,” says Alexei, “it’s perfect!”

They are leaving, and Alexei, shaky and insecure on his lags, holds himself to his wife. At the entrance door, he stops, turns back, and says, “There is a little bit of my soul left in that piano.”

The rest of the day my husband spends playing. And I, I do my poet’s work: I cry. And I think how we all need a piano in our life – something to pour our soul into before we leave.