Every time he went to pray at the Bialystoker shtiebel, which was their house of worship, Mikhail would emerge more and more depressed. The corners of his mouth would droop. His whole body would sag; he would actually grow shorter by the time services were over. One day as we trudged home with the slush coming in at the seams of our shoes, I turned to Mikhail and I saw him with his head ducked down inside his hood and his face tight against the cold and his whole body hunched over like he was in pain. “Mikhail!” I said. “You’re shrinking! Your whole being is shrinking from all this. I can’t let you go to the shtiebel anymore. This is not working for you.” “I must go, Sharon,” he said.
“No! You go in happy and you come out sad. You go in tall and you come out short. Is that what praying is all about? Praying is about joy! It’s about love! It’s about expansion! If it doesn’t come as naturally as leaves on a tree, then you shouldn’t go at all!” I said, paraphrasing the great poet John Keats.
We got to the vestibule of our old brick building. I swung the outer glass door open. We rushed inside and shut the door behind us. We were out of the cold. We could unsnap our hoods. “You hear me?”
He sighed. “Where else can I go?”
“Somewhere else!” I said. “We’ll go together somewhere else!” But even I wasn’t sure where that would be.
We trudged up the stairs to the apartment, and Aunt Lena was in the living room playing cards with her best friend, Natalya, and there were newspapers piled up in stacks on the living room floor. Aunt Lena had probably a year’s worth just of The Boston Globe. They made me nervous, because to me they looked like a fire hazard. I wanted to take them downstairs to the recycling bins, but she wouldn’t let me. Aunt Lena just liked having a lot of newspapers around. So there she was with her friend playing cards, and we came in and she tisked us for tracking slush into the apartment, and we meekly wiped our shoes on the mat, and Mikhail went into the kitchen and saw the mail there piled on the table, along with Aunt Lena’s various writings—her correspondence and memoirs and literary papers. “Sharon!” he said. There it was—a letter from the Polish Chopin competition that he had entered. I recognized it right away, since it was my handwriting on the envelope. It was one of those self-addressed jobbies with a foreign postal order for a stamp. Of course it occurred to me, Hmm, that letter looks thin, but I held the thought in. I didn’t want anything negative to escape me. I didn’t even want to breathe the wrong way on the envelope.
Mikhail opened it up and read it and then put it down on the table. He looked not so much disappointed, as bewildered. The folks at the Chopin competition didn’t want him to come out to Kraków. They didn’t want to hear him play. It was such a strange incomprehensible thing. It was one of those senseless tragedies. It was like choking to death on a fish bone. People didn’t want to hear Mikhail play Chopin. Mikhail couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand it. Aunt Lena was dumbfounded. When Natalya left, we discussed the letter over and over together, the three of us. All that night we talked about it, Aunt Lena and I on the couch. Mikhail pacing up and down. Why, oh, why did they refuse to hear Mikhail play? Why did they shy away from the chance to hear him? It was like having an opportunity to drink the elixir of life—the little crystal vial held out to your lips—and then saying, thanks, but no thanks.
Finally Aunt Lena had to conclude it was anti-Semitism, plain and simple. “Your name,” she told Mikhail. “They saw your name, Mikhail Abramovich. They saw that you were Jewish.”
“But why would the judges care if he was Jewish?” I asked her.
“It’s the Polish Chopin competition,” she said. “What do you think?” She turned to Mikhail and she said, “You need a name.”
“I have a name,” he said.
“A stage name,” she told him. “All performers have a name for the stage. You are American. You need an American name. Michael. Not Mikhail. Abramowitz. Not Abramovich.”
“Michael Abramowitz?” I asked.
“That is an American name,” Aunt Lena said.
“Abramowitz?”
“It has to be with a-witz,” she insisted. “Berkowitz, Kantowitz, Horowitz …”
“I will not change my name,” Mikhail said. “Then you will never win,” Aunt Lena said.
All of a sudden Mikhail got angry. “Did Yehudi Menuhin change his name? Did Jascha Heifetz?”
“Heifetz!” Aunt Lena shrieked, as if to say QED! “With an—itz!”
“Did Arthur Rubinstein?” Mikhail demanded. “Did Gil and Orly Shaham? Did Yo-Yo Ma? Does Yo-Yo Ma call himself Joe-Joe Moskowitz?”
“He doesn’t have to change his name,” Aunt Lena said.
“And why not?”
“Because,” she said, “he is Yo-Yo Ma.”
She was a little bit of a conspiracy theorist. She had a touch of paranoia in her makeup. She believed that Mikhail was doomed to obscurity because he was Jewish and because he did not have the right politics to become a concert pianist. We refused to believe her. We refused to let her get us down. Yet now more and more of our self-addressed stamped envelopes were returning to us. One after another the competitions were sending back letters, and not a single one wanted Mikhail. Not a single panel of judges wanted to hear him in person. He couldn’t even come and play in the first round. Hour after hour I would listen to Mikhail play. I was trying to find some answer or some clue. To me Mikhail sounded exactly like the angels must play piano up in heaven. And I had never been a huge fan of classical music before. I had never sat transfixed listening to Debussy and Satie and Joplin and Chopin before. But maybe that was the answer. Mikhail didn’t play like a classical musician. Whatever he played, he made it swing. Whatever waltz or rag or gymnopaedia he took on, he bent the rhythm a little bit and lushed out the phrases. He made it bloom up around your ears in an unbelievably sexy way. And I didn’t figure this out at the time. But now I realize what was really happening with his tapes when those piano judges listened to them in their dark judging room. They put on Mikhail and all of a sudden from the first notes they sensed this sensuality about him. They sat up straight in their chairs, five white males, and they said, but, no, no, this cannot be. They said to one another, “We cannot accept this one. I sense in his performance a whiff—good heavens—a whiff of the popular.” That’s what they said. What was actually happening was that Mikhail’s playing turned those judges on, and they couldn’t stand it. I see that now—although at the time I could not imagine what was happening.
It was the end of January and we’d spent all our money on the competitions. One hundred twenty dollars an hour just for the studio time, and then fifty dollars per hour for the cameraperson—since Mikhail had to be videotaped, so the judges could see that he was actually the one playing the music. And that was a special rate Mikhail got for the videotaping—since the cameraperson was an old friend of his! We couldn’t make our contributions to the rent, or buy food, or clothes, or anything, so we had to depend more than ever on Aunt Lena, which most of the time she took pretty well, but in the long term was not so great for our relationship with her. She tended to snap at us about all kinds of little things, and we’d have no recourse but to go to our room and sulk like kids. It was terrible how quickly we were disenfranchised. All of a sudden we were trying to figure out some way to buy just a little bit of dignity back. I sold all my old tapes and records at a used music store on Harvard Street. I took my precious collection I’d brought with me from Hawaii, and I sold them off. Mikhail tried to talk me out of it, but I said, “It’s okay, I don’t need them anymore.”
Then he sent his black frock coat and his good black felt hat, and all his black slacks, to a Hasidic consignment store in Brooklyn. He had to wear jeans and T-shirts after that. He wore an oatmeal-colored sweater with raggedy cuffs and a green embroidered Bokharan cap I’d got him for his birthday. I wore jeans, too, that relaxed-fit style, since I’d started expanding at the waist. We didn’t look like Hasids anymore, but, oh, well. We didn’t go to the Bialystoker
shtiebel anymore either.
“Your energy is way down,” Telemachus told me at work.
“Down!” I said. “I’m running on empty. You don’t even know, Telemachus.” When I first started working for him, I’d found it strange using that whole Homeric name all the time, yet now I hardly noticed. You just yelled, “Hey, Telemachus!” and you didn’t think anything of it.
“What’s going on?” he said.
“We’re broke, Mikhail can’t even get a toe in the door, and our rebbe has completely turned his back on us,” I said. We were standing there in the roar of the juicers, and our customers were straggling in with their rotten winter colds. It was a miserable gray day and every time the door opened you flinched from the bitter draft. All our customers were coming up and asking for citrus with extra C, and hacking all over the counter, and blowing their noses into soggy tissues. “I’m sure I’m going to catch a cold,” I said bitterly.
“Hey,” said Telemachus, “if you say you’re going to catch one, then you are. It’s up to you to decide. If you’re broke, I can’t do anything, since I don’t have the revenues to pay you any more than I already do. And I’m sorry about Mikhail’s toe. But if your rebbe has abandoned you, why don’t you come to our Brighton Havurah?”
THE second Shabbat in February we made our way to Telemachus’s apartment, where the Havurah was meeting. The Havurah was a group that came together every other week at different people’s homes to hold potluck Shabbat services. Potluck, Telemachus told me, didn’t just mean everyone brought a different vegetarian dish to share for lunch, but also that everyone should bring some spiritual contribution to share with the group as well. So this was a matter of some confusion for Mikhail, since he’d only really been exposed to the Hasidic branch of Judaism, where you concentrated on the liturgy that was already there in the prayer book and you didn’t add new material to the regular service. Mikhail wasn’t even sure he wanted to go to a service that wasn’t based on a fixed text. I was kind of dragging him up the stairs. I had him in one hand, and our side dish in the other. A great big plastic bowl of wild rice salad with dried cranberries that I’d thrown together from what I remembered of Kathryn’s recipe. I’d had to whip up our prayer by myself as well—which I kind of minded, but I didn’t grumble to Mikhail, because he was feeling so low.
We got to Telemachus’s apartment, which was in a much newer, cleaner building than ours, and he ushered us into his living room, which had beautiful soft sand-colored wall-to-wall carpet. Telemachus’s girlfriend, Chris, was there greeting everyone really politely and graciously. She was not at all what I’d imagined his girlfriend would look like. She was so small and scrubbed, and she had blond hair tousled just so. She probably even shaved her legs. I guess I’d expected the woman Telemachus had lived with for three years to be more au naturel. But she introduced us to everybody, and put our wild rice salad on the table with all the other foil-covered bowls and platters. And then we sat on the carpet in a circle.
“Shalom,” Telemachus said in his perfectly Zen-like way. He had a real gift. He had such peace inside of him. Then he reached behind him and he pulled out a guitar.
That was a shock. When we were Bialystokers Mikhail and I never went to services with instrumental music. It just wasn’t done, because all Jews were in mourning for the loss of the Temple. We could only pray with our voices, and no musical accompaniment. Guitars were absolutely verboten. So there was that initial prickle in our stomachs when we saw Telemachus’s guitar. Mikhail and I looked at each other for an instant in fear. Yet we didn’t get up to leave. Softly Telemachus started playing. Softly everyone began to sing.
Hinei mah tov umanayim
Shevet achim gam yachad.
And the English version:
Nothing on earth could be better
Than brothers and sisters together.
Then an older gray-haired lady took half the circle, and Telemachus took the other half, and we sang a round. Then Chris took a quarter of the circle, and the old lady took a quarter of the circle, and Telemachus took a quarter, and a bosomy girl in a low-cut T-shirt took the last quarter, and we did a four-part round. And softly, softly, we sang until the last notes died away—or rather, the last stragglers in the round finally made it to the end. And there was silence, and we all sat still. There was a beautiful gentle stillness.
Telemachus was about to speak when another humming could be heard, and it came from Mikhail! He was rocking gently back and forth and humming out a strange melody, intricate and in a minor key. It was in the style of a Bialystoker niggun, but just when I thought I had it pegged it changed. Everyone sat rapt listening to Mikhail. He closed his eyes. Back and forth, gently, gently, he was rocking. A new niggun was coming to him. He was actually right there before us receiving the transmission of a new niggun! Gradually the tune began to coalesce. Gradually the wordless syllables came together in a pattern. Ay die Ay die aaayyy aayyy, daydie daydie Oaaaay Dayyy. The other people in the circle began to follow. Other people started closing eyes. Then Telemachus picked up the notes on his guitar. Everyone was humming together; everyone was adding and embellishing. Telemachus and Chris were humming the niggun in descant. And I have to say the rest of the service had its ups and downs. When it came to dialogue, some of the people in that group were incredibly long-winded—not to mention positive that only they had the key to Biblical exegesis, so only their opinions were right! But at that moment in that wordless song, I could feel something I hadn’t felt in a long long time. I could feel the presence of the divine. God was there in that niggun, pulsing through the room. God was arising and manifesting in this sudden harmonic grace.
So that afternoon, when the Havurah was done and we left with our empty plastic bowl, I said to Mikhail, “See.”
“What do you see?” he asked.
“See,” I said. “You’re taller.”
And he was. After the music he’d created, and the divine inspiration, and the uproar he’d caused, with everybody wanting to learn more Hasidic melodies from him, Mikhail was at least an inch taller than he’d been when he came to the services. And as we walked back home on that February day even the weather seemed to have taken a turn for the better, and the dirty snow that had been piled up against the curbs for weeks was melting around the edges. “Everything is changing over,” I told Mikhail. “Everything is turning. There’s going to be a whole new year, and the baby, and everything is going to be different. Look, new people are moving in,” I said when we got back to our building. Right in front was a huge moving truck, and it said ALLSTON PIANO MOVERS on it. “And it’s a pianist,” I said.
We poked around the truck and the back entrance to the building to see where the piano was going, but no one was around, so we ran up the stairs to Aunt Lena’s apartment. Her door was standing wide open to the hall.
“This is strange,” said Mikhail.
I followed him inside, and that was when we saw that the piano movers were actually in our own apartment. And they hadn’t come to deliver a piano. They had come to take ours away. Aunt Lena was standing right in front of the baby grand and screaming at two of the piano movers and trying to beat them off the instrument. They stood there in their Allston Piano Movers jumpsuits listening to her sympathetically, and in the meantime two other men were actually unscrewing the top of the piano from its legs!
“Stop!” I screamed. “What are you doing?”
“We’re removing the piano, ma’am,” said what turned out to be the senior piano mover. He was an African-American gentleman with gray hair. His name, Richard, was embroidered in script on his uniform. He handed me a clipboard which he said had paperwork and was full of forms in legalese, and copies of contracts, that supposedly Mikhail had previously signed back when he’d bought the piano from the Bosendorfer store, about how he’d make monthly payments on the instrument and if he didn’t, then said instrument would be repossessed.
“This”—Mikhail put his hands on the piano’s satiny wood—“th
is is my livelihood!”
“Mm-hmm,” the head piano mover said sadly, with his eyes on the top of the baby grand.
“This is my art,” Mikhail said.
“Mmm-hmm. I know,” the head piano mover said.
The men just flipped the top of the piano on its side and onto a dolly. There they were, wheeling the piano out the door. There they were carrying out four dismembered piano legs. It was like watching someone being drawn and quartered.
“What can I do to stop this?” I begged Richard.
“You’re eleven months behind,” he said.
Eleven months! I thought. I guess Mikhail had sort of forgotten about making payments. “My husband has a gift,” I told Richard. “My husband has a magical gift. He just hasn’t yet been recognized. Don’t you see?”
Richard opened up the piano bench and took out all Mikhail’s music. Chopin waltzes, and preludes. Old dog-eared Satie. He started giving all the music to us—to me and to Aunt Lena and Mikhail.
“Why are you giving us all this?” I asked miserably.
“Because the music belongs to you,” Richard said.
“What’s the point of giving him his music, if you’re taking away the thing to play it on?”
“The music is your property,” Richard said. “But unfortunately how it works is the piano has to be paid up.”
“No, you aren’t listening!” I was starting to feel breathless. I could barely get the words out. I was panting for air.
“I know. I know,” Richard said, almost tenderly.
One of the guys was coming back now for the piano bench.
WHERE the piano had been was now a huge hole. It was like a crater in the living room. There was the dust that had gathered under the piano, and there were the newspapers that Aunt Lena had piled there. And there was just this empty space; this great silent void. You could only walk around it.