The Piano

WE HAD BEEN PREPARING for months, slowly ridding ourselves of possessions we had once thought essential. By the time we left, everything that was ours fit into three brown vinyl suitcases. My parents told me this would be enough, but, like so much they said, these words of comfort were not particularly plausible. Still, there was consolation. On our last day in Russia, as the fall of 1979 slid into winter, my brother Viktor lost his piano.

Viktor had always been our family’s main attraction. My parents would look at him and smile at each other in mutual congratulation, as if to say, See, there is something to having children after all. Then their gaze would move to me and settle into an abstracted, businesslike affection. I was older, I was jealous, but even I didn’t question the common judgment that deemed me simply “the brother.”

Viktor never stole, not even a pencil from our schoolmaster’s unguarded desk. His growth was orderly, and his sweaters always lasted the entire winter. Even the town bullies seemed to recognize his superiority, sparing him the pummelings that were a rite for every other child. He didn’t cause trouble. And, to be fair, Viktor was a genius. He played Chopin with such conviction that Mr. Zanusz, the foul-mouthed local composer, mumbled after Viktor’s first recital, “You’d almost believe the little pig had a Polish soul.” Zanusz had been swept up by the Second World War decades earlier and never made it back to his hometown in Poland, where, as he told anyone who would listen, even young schoolchildren and deaf war veterans once had hummed his tunes. Like our town’s other battle trophy — a German Stuka bomber smashed nose-first into a field at the town’s edge, decaying amid rows of sugar beets — he was intriguing and a bit pathetic. The half insult he gave Viktor was probably the highest compliment he could imagine.

We lived in a magnificent old flat far from the tannery that gave our town its foul smell. Officially, our family shared the space with ancient Ivan Dezhnev and his wife, both retired soil chemists. But they had long since moved to a farm near the Sea of Azov, where, we had heard, they grew enormous tomatoes. My father was a librarian, and my mother was a high-school teacher, respectable professions that implied trustworthiness. And my parents had college friends who had done well in the government.

One night, perhaps a month before my twelfth birthday, my father summoned my brother and me to the dining room, where he waited with my mother. “Boys,” he said after we’d assembled, “what do you know about Jews?”

I shrugged.

“Nothing?” asked my mother. “You haven’t heard the word?” Directness was her great virtue, and she was quick to point out when it was lacking in others.

“Jews,” I said hopefully, “are dirty.” She raised an eyebrow, and I continued, stumbling over the complex syllables, “Cosmopolitan and stateless.” This was from the outdated textbook with which I had begun the school year.

Viktor wisely kept silent, and as my mother turned to him, her face softened into a half smile. “We’re Jews. Our family. Your father and I never said anything, because it was better you didn’t know.” She paused, daring us to contradict her. “But now you have to.” She clapped her hands once, as if she were ushering a genie into the room.

This made no sense to me. Our name wasn’t Jewish. Viktor was blond. We were Russian, proletarian enough, and certainly not scheming, disloyal bohemians.

“But Uncle Crane,” I said. This was the nickname I had given the tall Muscovite with a lush mustache who visited us occasionally. He was my distant cousin, not an uncle at all, and had a seemingly endless supply of milk chocolate. “He’s not a Jew, is he?”

“Of course he is,” my mother snapped, “and he’s ahead of us on the list.”

My father explained: “We’re on a list to leave the country. A list for Jews.”

“But why would we leave?”

He lowered his chin onto his hands and sucked at his teeth. My mother’s face went blank, and I could see that he had asked her the same question. Viktor sat unblinking, and I took advantage of my parents’ distraction to throw a punch at his shoulder. He moved a fraction to the left, and my fist touched only air.

My mother finally sighed and looked up, annoyed at the silence. “We’re lucky we have the name we do. Of course we’re Russians.” She stopped, as if this were enough explanation.

Hearing her slip into ambiguity was the most disturbing part of the announcement. “But why?” I asked. “Why didn’t you tell us, ever? Why are you telling us now?”

She cocked her head to one side and caught my father’s eye. “It would only have made life harder. But now they’re letting us out. And isn’t this better? To know who you really are?”

I knew enough of who I was to know that I didn’t like this. “Where are we going?”

“Israel first, then maybe Canada, maybe the United States.” She lifted her shoulders dismissively.

I looked at Viktor with a sudden smile. Did they even have pianos in those countries? I saw Israel as a vague swirl of desert and war, surely no place for sensitive musical instruments. And America had better attractions than ancient music. I was a nobody, average at schoolwork, exceptional only at making fart noises with my armpit. But Viktor had something to lose.

As if sensing my thoughts, he cleared his throat. “And my lessons?”

My mother smiled; she had clearly prepared for this question. “They’ll continue, naturally.”

“Maybe we’ll even find a better teacher than Mr. Zanusz,” added my father. My mother and brother frowned. “But certainly one as good,” he hastened to add. “We’ll make sure of it.” He smiled unconvincingly.

I wanted to counter with a loss of my own, something precious, but I couldn’t think of anything. “What about my friends?” I asked. I often played soccer with other boys. Some occasionally came over for a desultory afternoon of ogling our large apartment and comparing cosmonaut-stamp collections. But these were bonds of mutual boredom, nothing more. 

My father looked puzzled.

“Your lives will be better,” my mother said, her tone telling us this was all the information we could expect.

I thought our lives were fine as they were. Because teachers, books, and every television program I watched told me so, I thought our country was doing better than it ever had. A missile treaty had been signed with the United States, and a few Russian troops were even coming back from East Germany. General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev was awarding himself many of the 114 medals he would be buried with a few years later, and my school ran contests, “medal bees,” to see who could name the most.

Meanwhile dissidents, especially Jewish leaders, were being arrested for speaking in public, for signing protests, for apparently nothing at all. There were shortages of food, and the country had to humiliate itself before the West to secure grain imports. Even I knew the jokes:

A man and his wife are standing in line for soap. He starts grumbling. “Things are getting bad — two hours just for a bar of soap. And we haven’t seen a peach since 1975.”

His wife scolds him. “That was 1974, you idiot!”

“You see? There’s even a shortage of calendars!”

But I was eleven, and these concerns seemed minor compared to the inconvenience of moving.

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