14. Chapter 14
It began with a sound.
La.
A sound so soft it was almost a hum. A tender note that betrayed the mechanisations of the knocking of wood on strings that was taking place beneath the lid.
Then, if he pressed harder, with a little more purpose, a clear note would emerge, plump with a percussive undertone and rich with vibration.
Lah.
Cassius stroked the keys of the piano in the pit.
Not playing. Not pressing. Only touching each one as he hummed.
That’s how he had first found the piano as a child.
He had watched from the corner as his sister played and memorised the notes as she practised.
When no one was nearby, he would place both hands on the seat and clamber onto the bench.
He had grown tall in the later years of his youth, but as a child, he’d always been shorter than his peers.
And on that very first day, the top of the piano seat still came up to his ribs.
Stiffening his back in imitation of his sister, he sat before the piano, not daring to depress any of the thin wooden lengths or tap a short black plank.
At first, he merely rested his small fingers on the places he’d seen his sister touch and sang the notes the same way that she sang them while playing.
La
La
La
La
La
La
La
La
Laah.
Once he grew bolder, he dared to press the keys so that they made a little sound, barely louder than a beetle’s wings or a bee’s buzz.
More vibration than note, he felt the music, then replicated it in his chest. Then the next.
And the next. His less obedient right hand soon joined his left, and he experimented with their placement, tickling the smooth surface, before dispensing with caution and pressing both hands hard onto the keys in a perfect mimicry of what he’d seen his sister do so many times before.
C major…
His father and sister both heard him from the next room and rushed in to listen. His father gave him an encouraging nod. Cassius played another chord, one that he would one day know as A minor.
‘Agnieszka,’ his father said to his sister. ‘Teach Kasjusz everything you know.’
Twelve winters and a dead brother separated the two of them, but Agnieszka never treated him as a nuisance. Whenever she returned home from her work in the fields, she would help him climb onto the seat beside her.
‘You will make a good life with the piano, Kasjusz,’ she would say as he played. Mozart for a few months. Then, after him, Beethoven. How he loved Beethoven.
‘You too, Agnieszka. We both will. We are both very good.’
She smiled at him in a way that he later learnt was a lie, for he was yet to learn that a young girl at the piano did not have the world before her the way a young boy did.
And for him, a good life was simple: her and their father, and the likeness of his mother on the mantle.
Some stew in a bowl, and every day, the piano.
With only five thaws behind him, Cassius knew nothing more.
Their father, a mediocre bureaucrat but a good talker, began to brag about his son’s talent at the tavern, at the coffee clubs, and on the street.
It wasn’t long before the first invitation from a family in a big house arrived.
That’s all Father would ever tell him. That he was going to play a different piano in a big house.
A bigger house. A manor. A castle. Some were a day away, and they travelled in lush carriages with plush leather upholstery, and Cassius would trace the edges of the round flat buttons on the seats.
They went by open wagon or by public routes to reach others, and sometimes they went in open vehicles he did not know the names of.
As the journeys took them further away—for nights at first, then for weeks—he would write to Agnieszka and tell her where he was and what it was like.
In their house, they spoke Latin for church, Polish to converse, and Austrian when working with papers or while speaking to men in uniforms. But with his father, Cassius heard other tongues and different concoctions of sounds and syllables.
German, his father explained, then Russian, in another place.
French came later, and one brief summer was filled with the beautiful cadence of Italian.
Over time, Cassius learnt to distinguish them, but for almost an entire year, his fingers ached with the strain of playing so much, and he could barely think in any language and spoke in a motley assortment of them all.
Vermiss ich obok tu, he wrote to Agnieszka. What she understood, he’d never know, but what he wanted to say was I miss you beside me.
In his thirteenth summer, with the sword swipe of a single sentence, his voice changed.
That same year, his body, drawing on all the good meals he’d eaten and warm beds he’d slept in, decided to make a late start, and he’d grown recklessly fast. By the time he was fifteen, he almost matched his father for height.
The invitations to play at estates and in large houses became less frequent, and his father’s letters enquiring if some former host would like a resident player for a month went unanswered.
Then came 1848, and Europe heaved with uprisings and revolutions.
Nobles ran. Men and women around them fought.
Cassius’s father drank.
They holed up in a series of taverns near the border of Alsace, where they were given a room beside the barn, food for Cassius, and vodka for his father in return for Cassius playing every evening.
From there, Cassius sent a letter with a few notes inside to Agnieszka, as he always did when he could lift them from his father’s pocket.
Then another, and another, until finally, he received one back.
Not from his beloved sister but from a neighbour.
Agnieszka had taken up arms in the fighting.
She had fought bravely for Poland.
She was dead.
And that morning, Cassius, only fifteen, walked out of the tavern and did not look back.
He fought to figure out the languages, as people on the border spoke a mix of German, French, and the local dialect.
On hard days, he dreamt of finding his way back to his father, but for what?
More promises that they would return home soon, more nights in taverns with a coward who would recite the poems of their lost country, while all he did was drink its vodka?
Slowly, he learnt and began to peel the languages apart from one another.
But music never changed.
C minor was always the same.
G flat, always the same.
C chord, E chord, E flat, all of them remained. Neither time nor distance, neither language nor location—be they castles or peasant huts or taverns—none of them ever changed how to play a chord.
When he could not speak, he played.
By the time he’d made his way from Alsace to Paris, the revolutions had been squashed, and the nobles had the temerity to make their way back to the theatres.
In this new world, it wasn’t hard to make enough money to survive, and as snow swirled through the streets, a different kind of pall fell on him.
He became colder. As deliberate as an icicle.
He’d started to lose the early fluidity of his playing long before the invitations dried up, but by the time he reached Paris, it became achingly obvious that his love of the keys had lost breath the moment he’d opened that letter.
And he continued like that for years. Playing technically perfect pieces, bouncing from town to town, piano to piano, bed to bed, finally crossing the Channel to avoid an angry husband who cared not for his wife, only for his reputation as a cuckold.
Different theatres, different taverns, earning just enough, but never able to move into the types of performances or contracts that would give him stability.
Rejections he’d never known as a child peppered his days, and he never reclaimed the spotlight, never regained the acclamation that, deep inside, he desperately wanted back.
Instead, he worked his way through a procession of London theatres without purpose, until a soprano who sang not just with skill, but with the love of music enriching every note, plonked down beside him on the bench, drank vodka, and slurred her words with a hint of his homeland.
That night, Odette laid a strip of sunlight over the frost.
And weeks later, when she came to him full of lightness and triumph, the jealousy, the hurt, the pain of all those rejections reared its ugly head.
He’d turned away from her.
Kept her at a distance.
Shut her out.
Damn it. What had he been thinking? Fucking her against the wall like that. No good could come of it.
Fuck.
Fuck.
Why did he want to do it again so badly?
He tolerated no obsequiousness, demanded nothing less than perfection from his musicians, but Odette tunnelled beneath his skin precisely because she laughed off his directions and yet he could never find fault with her.