...of remembering

I get up, cross the waiting-room and climb the old wooden staircase. Feeling my way, I come to the bay window of the restaurant. The darkness is complete. Running my hand along the wall, I reach a dead-end, stumble over a pile of sleeping-car blankets, decide to abandon my investigation. A very slow chord resounds lingeringly at the other end of the corridor. I make my way towards it, guided by the fading sound, push open a door and find myself in a passage into which a little light now filters. Lined up along the walls stands banners, placards with portraits of the Party leaders, all the apparatus for demonstrations. The passageway leads to a room that is yet more cluttered. Two wardrobes with open doors, pyramids of chairs, piles of sheets. From behind the wardrobes shines a beam of light. I move forward, feeling as if I had caught up with the tail-end of a dream and were taking my place in it. A man, whom I see in profile, is sitting at a grand piano. A suitcase with nickel-plated corners stands behind his chair. It would be easy to mistake him for the old man sleeping on the pages of his Pravada. He is dressed in a similar overcoat, longer perhaps, and wearing an identical black shapka. An electric torch laid to the left of the keyboard throws light on the man's hands. He has fingers that are nothing like a musician's fingers. Great, rough, lumpy knuckles, tanned and wrinkled. The fingers move about on the keyboard without depressing the keys, pausing, springing to life, accelerating their silent course, getting carried away in a feverish flight: one can hear the fingernails tapping on the wooden keys. Suddenly, at the very height of this mute pandemonium, one hand loses control, crashes down on the keyboard, a shower of notes bursts forth. I see that the man, doubtless amused by his own clumsiness, breaks off his soundless scales and begins emitting little suppressed chuckles, the quiet mirth of a mischievous old man. He even raises one hand and presses it to his mouth to restrain these splutters of laughter... All at once I realise he is weeping.

[A Life's Music, Makine, A.]