The Pianist

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He came to me that morning. It was a year since I had been shattered. Destitute of hope. Four whole seasons had passed and I found it impossible to forget, let alone to forgive, what had happened to me. My body hibernated in sadness, inside the self-imposed imprisonment of my apartment.

But he was more than music. A pulse. The most incredible sound of piano playing I had ever heard, vibrated through my apartment walls and into my ears; the same dysfunctional little organs that I believed were no longer capable of comprehending anything. And my hands, the damned hands of a painter who could not paint anymore, shuddered at its beauty.

That morning I woke up early to the sound. I had barely three or four hours of sleep but I did not feel tired at all. The moment my body absorbed the magic it was hearing I felt attached to the bed, like my limbs had forgotten how to move.

I remembered someone moving in a few days ago, when I had no choice but to leave my beloved jail to get groceries. Stepping out of the elevator drowsy and absent minded, I had watched men carrying boxes into the apartment next door. One of them wasn’t wearing the blue jumpsuit uniform of the moving company, rather jeans and a white collared shirt. I never saw his face, but only his back as he entered last, closing the door behind him. Medium height, short brown hair. How could someone that sounds so average be anything but that in my world?

So I imagined him as a silhouette. He liked to play for a few hours in the early morning, beginning from seven or eight, and then silence took over for a while until eight or nine at night when he made sweet music to me again for an hour or two. The tune gave me shivers, like the unexpected splash of cold water after the first turn of the shower knob. I imagined his piano, straight black and white blocks in a long cascade creating something thrilling. I pressed my ears on the walls to hear it closer. The sound started to consume me. I woke up in twilight, sweating and panting like a teenage boy who had his first wet dream, still able to feel it.

Every morning I woke up to the music. He was a routine visit to my obscure world. For hours I stayed between the sheets and listened to the piano, not censoring my hot tears as they fell, thinking and thinking again until my brain shut itself off to keep from bleeding.

I had been raped a little less than a year ago, and I had the exact date painfully tattooed in my head. I had become one of those poor women you read about in pamphlets at the gynaecologists and in women’s magazine articles with red capitalized headlines screaming this could happen to you. He was someone I knew as a girl – someone I thought had taught me things about painting – and maybe I was leading him on, giving him false impressions, all the accusations that two million shrinks tried to shut me up from. But not one of them could stop the pain that devoured me from inside like a tapeworm. No one could make me stop standing under showers for hours and hours every day because no amount of holy water could wash away the shame from my skin. There, the tears were unrecognizable, all blended in with the burning water.

I never wanted to paint again. It had led me to him and him to me. My passion defined me, what I discovered at age eight, the way I learned to live, my art, my only how. Yet, I stacked the brushes and the tubes and the pencils away, hid them in dusty places in the apartment, as if someone was trying to steal them. I thought soon I would forget those obscure locations. Soon I would forget the way of living that had brought him to me. But when I pulled my sheets over my eyes at night I could see them flashing at me like a black cat’s yellow eyes, from every shelf and corner where I had buried them. I tossed and turned over them until I finally fell asleep. In my dreams I retrieved them, embraced them all in my arms at once like a mother with too many children. I could move, I could think. I could paint.

But in reality I stayed lifeless, blaming the time that failed to heal me. After the music stopped I would go to the shower, the ocean where I dumped the trash of my mind. I let the hot water run and sat down, the tiles cold against my bare skin. Soon the steam fogged up the shower walls and I slid my finger to draw a straight transparent line through the milky vapor. I drew squiggly lines and circles and squares with soft edges. I drew flat faces with eyes that I filled in completely, making them two clear voids. These were my sketches now; this was my canvas.

Some days it was as if I could move them outside the shower. Some days when the piano played I saw the white walls of my apartment and got convinced that they were pinching me, poking at me, harassing and threatening and eventually on their knees begging me to do nothing but paint. They whispered in cryptic voices that it would feel good to. Images of candy colored graffiti flashed in front of my eyes, and I fantasized about pouring entire buckets of paint at the pleading walls until they shut up and I drowned in the paint.

Weeks passed and I was seeing those visions every day. Every day the quiet spirit who remembered the easel knelt before me and begged me to paint. I never listened to that ghost. I never listened to the walls. I swore to myself that I will, brutally, never let my hands know the joy of creation again. Even though sometimes a random staccato note of the piano would remind me of how I liked to splash a spot of bright, contrasting color atop lots of whites and greys to breathe life to the canvas, and even though his long sentimental improvisations would make me want to sketch a landscape of an imaginary country town, with a gentle river and roofs in warm colors like brick red and mustard yellow. It hurt too much to even think about the studio where one moment, I lost everything; I couldn’t bear myself to recreate it. The piano was a soundtrack, waiting for the movie to happen. I was the actor who didn’t know any of my lines.

But one day he stepped in and changed me. That strange Sunday I lay on the couch all afternoon, flipping through channel after channel of bad television, my mind absent. The music started around seven thirty. It interrupted my idleness and I made myself tea while I listened to the familiar tune, my heartbeat slowly rising. But that day something was different about it. I knew little about music but I realized when two notes didn’t fit, like a cup and a plastic top of different sizes. It was bumpy. Unharmonious. And it ignited a certain power in me that I didn’t even know I had. The hot tea burned my tongue and soaked my shirt as my hands let go of the cup. The sharp noise of the cup shattering on the floor created yet another discord that empowered me. I stepped all over the broken pieces as I ran out of the kitchen, but the blood that dripped off the soles of my feet was nothing compared to what was to come.

That day, after the piano stopped playing, I killed my rapist. I reached under my bed for the easel and the canvas stormed into the studio room where I set up the battlefield. I brought the brushes from the oven I never use, the tubes of paint stuffed into pockets of an old winter coat, the palette tucked in between dusty books. I squeezed out the red paint that begged to spill onto the white canvas, like burning lava devouring the earth. With each brush stroke I stabbed him, expunging rage out of my veins. My weapons lacerated his skin and punctured every organ. He deserved the most writhing pain, bruises a thousand times worse than every livid mark he left on my skin. My head was on fire but my hands, remembering how to paint, were lucid in their touch as I killed him over and over and over again. He died then, in front of my wide open eyes, a marvellous death. There, I rejoiced. It’s done. I broke into laughter at the beautiful hysteria in front of me, fluid remnants of his brains and guts and arteries exploding with blood and dripping off the palette that the last bit of control my fingers had released and onto the carpets.

Thank you! When I let that cry loose I began to sob, curled up in one corner, the cement walls so hard and unforgiving on the back of my wailing head. He was on the other side. He was the pianist, who had composed me from overture to end. In my vision cream curtains blew in the wind as he stood on his balcony, then he walked to his instrument and slowly lifted me out of the mud.

I slept perfectly, without a trace of dream marring the restfulness. When I woke up I could still smell the damp paint. I had dozed off right there on the floor, the crimson paint now crusty on my fingers. It felt almost like a hangover, my limbs heavy and drooping to the ground. But my mind was surprisingly clear. I looked at the battlefield, the canvas I went at like war last night, and smiled because I saw something beautiful and complete. I signed my name and date with happy trembling fingers and laughed because it was mine.

Then I heard it. The sound. The familiar thrill in my ears. But for the first time I didn’t sweat, or pant, or cry at the music. Instead, the muscles let go, and I could close my eyes, without opening them rapidly again for fear of fainting, I could stand still, without my toes giving up on myself. I could even call it comfort. Then suddenly courage swept over me and I walked out of my studio and into my living room. Could I – no – could I – but my feet betrayed my head and accelerated until they dashed out my door and into the hallway. In front of his door I stopped and took a breath of the delicious air that was life. Then I knocked, with two solid beats, waiting for the melody to fill in.

Read more: Short Story: The Pianist | Shortbread