The Light and the Dark by Mikhail Shishkin Read Free Book Online Page A

said:
    ‘See how strangely it’s all arranged – in everything complicated and incomprehensible there’s something simple: all we’re doing is tapping away with felt hammers.’
    He forced me to practise, and in the end I came to hate our Rënish piano.
    I practise at home, I play endless scales and arpeggios, and he tells me:
    ‘Don’t frown!’
    The tension made me develop a wrinkle between my eyebrows – exactly like him.
    When my father wasn’t there, I used to cheat. I put a book on top of the music on the music stand and read it, playing endless exercises without looking. One day he caught me doing this and he swore terribly. He started running round the apartment, shouting that I had a tin ear and what had he done to deserve this punishment. He said that nature takes a break with the children of geniuses. That set me choking on my tears and I started playing even worse. He had never shouted at me before. It was as if someone had taken my daddy away and put someone else in his place. I couldn’t understand it then. But he’d got into the role and simply couldn’t get out of it.
    While I was playing he squatted down to see if my hand was slack, a false note made him shudder and groan as if he had bitten his tongue and once, when I thought he wouldn’t notice and Iplayed a trill with my second and third fingers instead of the fourth and fifth, as required, he got so furious, he almost beat me with our tattered copy of Czerny.
    Eventually Mummy glanced into the room with a wet towel on her head and demanded silence. I don’t know if she was really suffering from a migraine or it was simply her way of rescuing me.
    I remember him coming back home late in the evening, furious, blowing his nose and complaining that he had been struggling with a cold in the head all the way through the concert. And upset because he had played the wrong piece for the encore. Even his tailcoat, which Mummy hung up to dry on the balcony, just couldn’t calm down, it carried on conducting.
    And I remember how he used to rehearse at home, in his underpants, to a record of some symphony or other that he put on. I watched through a crack in the door as he conducted the table and chairs, the bookshelves, the window. The sideboard was the percussion section. The carpet on the wall was the wind instruments. The cups on the table with the breakfast that hadn’t been cleared away yet were the violins. He jabbed his baton at the sofa and it responded instantly with the bass voices. He darted his fingers towards the table lamp – and a distant horn started playing. He waved his arms and writhed about so hard that drops of sweat ran down his face like hail and flew off his nose.
    Mummy glanced in and said he would do better to change the burnt-out bulb in the chandelier, but Daddy just rolled his eyes up and kept on shaking his head about, then slammed the door right in her face.
    At the end he grabbed all the sounds together in his fist under the chandelier and strangled them.
    When he wasn’t at home, without asking permission I used to take the case in which his director’s baton was kept, put a recordon at full volume and start conducting for myself. I used to go out on the balcony and conduct our yard, and the nearby houses, and the puddles, and the dog with its leg cocked up against a tree, and the clouds. But the bit I liked most was strangling the music in my fist at the end.
    Then I would sit down at the piano and start hammering out Mendelssohn’s ‘Song Without Words’ once again, always fluffing it in exactly the same places.
    Later on Daddy became an Arctic pilot, and I liked that better.
    His long black raglan coat had such a glorious smell!
    The fur flying-suit, the high fur boots, the helmet with a microphone made him seem like a completely different person. I used to take the high boots, squeeze both my legs into one of them and hop around the apartment like that – like those people with one foot that he had told me