The Piano

I sit down to play the piano and am frustrated that I remember so little. My right hand isn’t too bad but my left hand… nada! Stretching to cover an octave, I picture my teacher Mrs. Kitchenbrand, sitting on a stool beside me, insisting that my eleven-year-old hands stretch the octave she strikes with ease. Her face is wrinkled; her neck speckled with warts and folds of skin. Her large hands, long bony fingers, swollen knuckles, fly across the piano in achromatic ripples like water over rocks and ravines. She taps my wrists, lifts my palms into the correct position, reminding me to strike the notes with the correct fingers.

My mother, a Hashomernik with no frills, sits in the lounge, delighting in the fact that she and Dad can afford to buy a piano and give their daughters lessons, kvelling that I am playing songs by the great composers. Later, she tells my father, “We murdered Fur Elise for three hours again, today!”

And now, 30 years later, my new piano nestles in a corner of the room, looking as though it has always been there. Its brown lacquered body-work is somewhat tatty, but my eye accommodates. I waited thirty years to buy this piano but having reached the time of ‘now or never’, I decided to do so in the hope that I might learn to accompany myself as I indulge my recent passion for singing.

I know my first song will be “Ve’ulai ” – the beautiful piece composed by the poet, Rachel. My mother, also a Rachel, used to sing it. Though untrained, she had a naturally gentle soprano and because she didn’t know Hebrew, the words sort of stuck together in odd and meaningless combinations. Sometimes she’d hit the high notes and grin triumphantly; more often she’d miss. She had no idea that the song could be sung in different keys and that if it had been transposed to one more suited to her range, she’d have sung it with ease. She and my father would sing together whenever we went anywhere by car. Their amiable and spontaneous harmonies gifted me with my love for singing.

When I learned piano as a child, I was persistent albeit not particularly talented. I could go on for hours and hours, forgetting the time, forgetting my friends, practicing scales and playing my pieces – until my parents felt dizzy from the repetitive dissonant chords hitting their eardrums and shooed me outside to play.

In the double-story next door, lived Alan, the love and torment of my teenage years. His bathroom overlooked our dining room and was the scene for cat-and-mouse games that kept me glued to my piano seat. Hurrying home after school, Alan would hide behind his bathroom window, both wanting and not wanting to be seen, while I, with my back to him, would steal furtive glances for signs that he was there. I’d pretend to be indifferent until I’d hear the splat of a well-worked tissue spit-ball on the window pane, and I’d look around and shout sarcastically, “I know you’re there! You’re such a baby!”

Then, with a coy shrug of my shoulders, I’d pretend to ignore him until I’d hear his inevitable nasal serenade: “When an irresistible force such as you, meets and old immovable object like me, you can bet as sure as you live, something's gotta give, something's gotta give, something's gotta give.” And then I’d melt, for how could I resist this appeal to my vanity?

I ask myself why I ever stopped playing. I suppose school and studies and boys vied for my attention and somewhere along the road, we closed the lid on the piano and for years it stood like against the wall; a symbol of middle class respectability. Years later, after I married, when I took lessons for a short period, again I remember how much I enjoyed them. But by then there was another generation of children in the family and the piano had to be handed down to them.

A lifetime has passed. After doing their obligatory stint none of the children turned out to be talented or interested. Life and its demands and vicissitudes filled the nooks and crannies of my life and I seldom thought about piano playing with more than a nostalgic ‘if only’.

Until recently, that is. When I turned 60, I started taking singing lessons. At sixty one I joined my first choir and longed to have a musical instrument to accompany me. So finally, in line with my new philosophy that I deserve to do the things that give me pleasure, I indulged my fantasy and bought a piano.

It stands next to my desk and I hover between my computer and the keyboard, playing it until I hear the ping that says I have new email and I simply have to check it – as if there’s ever anything really imperative demanding my attention! My piano isn’t new – but it’s mine and it gives me joy.

I don’t remember much of what I learned as a child – the left hand is a foreign language, kind of like Hebrew still is to me. My brain doesn’t recall the notes of the pieces I used to play but my fingers seem to have a memory of their own. Provided I just let things flow, I can plunk out a halting “Fur Elise”. My daughter Debbie, who listens to me agonizing over it, puts her arm around my shoulder and says with a wry tongue in her cheek: “I remember you playing it nearly thirty years ago, Mommy." She giggles,"and you’re still making the same mistakes!”

I can now play “Ve’ulai” – though my movements are studied and annoyingly uncoordinated. I try to sing, but multi-tasking has become harder and I can’t cope with reading the score, hitting the high notes, finding the right finger positions and actually sounding the notes. Nevertheless last night, my father sat down next to me and I played the song for him. Our eyes may even have become a little glassy and our throats a little foggy as we strained to sing, “Hakinneret sheli,” sometimes getting the pitch, sometimes wobbling off it, celebrating the spirit of our Rachel (who left us 12 years ago) and enjoying a cherished moment of closeness.