Page 22 - Vol V. #8

As a child, I lived in an apartment overlooking K Street, the imperial city centre of pageantry and postcards. When I started piano lessons with Mr Z, our music room contained only a piano and two stools. It was gradually filled up with tapes- tries, books, chatchkas, and outdoor clothes. Gar- den tools and furniture were added, then dressers and beds and wardrobes. Finally I saw that our country house now occupied the room.
A Gift from the Italians
focus for demonstrators and wreckers, and was killed with a spade, of all things.
Our servants had vanished, I had noticed. But by that time, kings were being shot in basements, dukes slaved as waiters, princesses took in wash- ing and danced in shows, and prime ministers’ heads were being sent around the country in biscuit tins; people went out for a newspaper, and never came back.
But, as if he were still at my side, I sat atop a pile of furniture and boxes in the music room, and practised. At night, with the light off, I was able to play without looking, emulating Mr Z’s blind- ness, which was the other thing he brought back from the war, a gift from the Italians, wrapped in shrapnel.
Mr Z complained, “This... junk ruins the acous- tics.” I was poised over one of my legendary tan- trums; that was our country house he was talking about and, I knew, a life we would no longer lead.
“Relay?” I knew him from the Eagle Café, where I breakfasted, his habitual seat beneath the por- trait of our president. He had cultivated the secret policeman look; it wasn’t just the drab clothes, more the anxious watchfulness in his eyes, the look of a man who wore glasses but had forgotten to put them on. The muscles in his face were soon reacting to the rhythm of my pupils’ clapping. I said, “Certainly, Hermes.”
He gave up on me as a pianist. One day he brought a small guitar, looted, he claimed, when he fought during the Great War, from the apartment of an Irish writer who had lived in Trieste but who had skedaddled at the start of hostilities.
After lessons, Mr Z ate supper and gushed about the arts to my parents, who were mystified by it all, despite the music lessons, the paintings on our walls, the books in our library. They only encour- aged me to play because my character, defined
“Hermes?” He looked puzzled. “That is not my name.”
by petulance and whim, fitted me for no practical subjects.
L’s painting was called “The Father of My Child.” News of her brought up images I rarely recalled.
I used to see her gazing out of windows in the block across from mine on K Street, and we ex- changed looks as a succession of nannies coincid- ed us in and out. Soon after the disappearance of the nannies, my father had gone out for a news- paper into a place nobody knew, and I had moved away, to relatives in the suburbs.
On my eleventh birthday Mr Z barked, “You will never be a musician,” and rapped my knuck-
les with his conductor’s baton. That night he didn’t stay for supper. He should have, because he blundered into a riot on K Street, by then a
I didn’t see L again till we were in our twenties,
13
Monstrous Men
The invitation to view the latest work by cel- ebrated painter LM came to my classroom one day when I was getting my eleven year olds to clap in time, which was my method prior to let- ting them loose on their instruments. The bearer opened the door and stepped to my desk, saying, “I will relay your reply.”
Quaintrelle’s Chorus
niCk Sweeney