‘But! What are you doing?’
He tried to glide across the room and knocked over a huge pile of old records – they weren’t even LPs, Marisa saw looking at them; they were fatter and older. Gramophone records. She picked them up, surprised at how heavy they were.
‘Be careful!’ she scolded. ‘I am not sure sport is for you.’
‘Is for everyone,’ said Alexei, hurt.
‘What is this?’ she said, holding it up. She’d seen albums before but this wasn’t the same thing at all.
His face softened.
‘Eroica,’ he said softly.
‘Pardon?’
He took the plain white cover of the record, looked around and turned a big switch on a cabinet he had against the back wall. It was the oldest record player Marisa had ever seen, older than her nonna’s, which had a 78 setting. But before he did so he set it down sadly.
‘But I forget,’ he said. ‘You do not care for music.’
‘I . . .’
Then she went for the truth.
‘I just don’t know much about music. I don’t know anything about classical music. I quite like . . .’
Suddenly fessing up to how much she liked Polly’s Backstreet Boys albums felt a little pointless to mention now.
‘Well, I like pop music. But I don’t know anything about what you play. It just sounds . . . so complicated and noisy and . . . a bit boring.’
‘Borink,’ said Alexei looking sad.
‘I just . . . I just don’t understand. I never learned an instrument. I don’t . . . I just don’t get it.’
He nodded. ‘I see.’
She hated to see him sad again.
‘You could . . . you could show me,’ she said quietly.
Again that long calculation with the brown eyes and the long eyelashes. Was that him thinking, or was it his circuits translating English? She couldn’t decide what he was like at all, it was the oddest thing. But she found she liked looking at him while he thought about things. It was quiet in the softly lit room for a moment.
‘Huh. Aha,’ he said. ‘Come with me.’
She stood up – slightly wobbly – as he refilled their glasses and carried them carefully over to the piano. There were piles of things everywhere but nothing on top of the piano except for two stubby pencils on the sides.
There was one bench, which he sat on, and a chair on the left-hand side, which he indicated for her to sit on. They were close; closer than Marisa would normally think of as comfortable. Or maybe abnormally. It had been so long. She was once again closer to Alexei, she realised, than she had been to another human being in a very long time.
It felt so strange. There was a heat coming off him; she felt the hairs stir on her arm, right next to him. His side was touching her elbow, but he seemed completely oblivious of the physical contact. She could think of nothing else; as if her elbow seared touching him. He was going through a huge pile of sheet music, humming and hawing to himself, while she felt every tiny pressure of him next to her, every movement, a warm human smell of him – the top of the piano, she noticed, was now actually covered in pencil sharpenings, which explained the woody scent that clung to him, as well as the cloves from his little cigarettes. Even the thick wool of his jumper brushed her like an electric shock and he was completely oblivious; buried in the loose papers with the strange little black markings on them, musical notes and lines and curves and odd squiggly characters that indicated who knew what, but made up a language he could read.
She looked down at the piano keyboard in front of her. She’d never sat in front of one before. She must have banged a few notes at a friend’s house. But to actually sit in front of one.
She found she was nervous. It was the proximity, she knew. The two of them so close, the night so quiet. The alcohol had gone straight to her head; she was out of practice with it and felt extremely peculiar. Experimentally, she leaned, just the tiniest way, to the right. Just the tiniest piece of pressure on his body, the tiniest breath of leaning. He didn’t notice. His bulk, his warmth though felt incredibly comforting.
‘Aha!’ he said, still completely oblivious. He pulled something out, with the same odd scribbles on it as everything else.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘We shall try this.’
‘What is it?’
‘You will know it,’ he said. ‘If you have ever seen film or watch TV it is everywhere. Some people say aha it is everywhere I hate it now. But! Because something is everywhere that does not mean bad everywhere.’
He placed it with a flourish on the stand. It appeared to be called after a gymnasium.
‘Am I just going to watch?’
‘No! You are going to play with me and feel with me.’
‘I can’t play though! Not at all! Not a note.’
‘Not a note,’ said Alexei. ‘Two notes!’
He looked down at her hand.
‘You haff very small paws. That is my bear joke.’
‘I get that.’
‘I show you?’
‘Uh . . . yeah?’
He lifted her small pale hand in his huge one. It was only when she felt it she got some sense of the sheer size of the man. Her own little fingers completely disappeared in the gap between his thumb and his second finger. The nails were very short and neat and tidy, squared away against the enormous long fingers themselves.
‘You’re hands are huge,’ she said nervously.
‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Tiny hands have hard job on the piano.’
Marisa frowned. ‘I suppose so.’
It felt nice, her hand in his large one. But before she had a chance to relax into it – and she didn’t feel in the least bit relaxed – he had taken her smallest finger and put it halfway down the bottom half of the piano. Then he opened the music and put it up on the stand.
‘Here are two notes,’ he said. He took her pinky up again and put it down on one. ‘This is D. It lives between two friends, you see?’
He indicated the two black notes surrounding the white one.
‘D feels very safe and comfortable here with his good friends, D flat and D sharp. They are all happy. It is cosy bed. Stay here.’
She depressed the note with her finger and it made a slippery loud plinking noise.
‘Good,’ said Alexei considering. ‘Although it is late. Perhaps he is quiet and a little sleepy and you do not have to hit him so hard.’
She tried again more tentatively and this time produced no sound at all.
‘Well, and also we continue and push maybe a little harder,’ said Alexei, and Marisa was conscious of holding her breath and found her mind wandering unavoidably – it was the vicinity of another living human being, she told herself firmly, and months and months of deprivation; it had absolutely nothing to do with just him. It could have been anyone, so there, how could she possibly be expected to control her own mind wandering?
But she couldn’t help but wonder – couldn’t help it – as he showed her how to play hard and soft, alternately pressing then lifting her finger, that if he had that much control over just one finger, what could the rest of him possibly be like?
She finally found a way to play the note, even as she felt her breath running a little faster than normal.