Don't Count

It was the third day the key had been lying on my table, but I don't touch it, as if it were red-hot. Tomorrow at nine the man who bought the workshop will come, and I have to give him this key. The lock is stiff, so the key only turns if you lift the door by the handle. My love, you carried it for forty years in your right pocket, until the pocket wore through and I re-sewed it twice. And all those years I thought I knew everything about that workshop.

But, as it happens, it turned out I didn't. I'll begin the story with the piano. Ninety-eight, winter, the debt for your mother's operation. There wasn't money even for firewood for the stove - we heated every other day, slept in sweaters. That's when you decided to sell the piano. The buyers came on a Saturday, brought the money in a plastic bag. You said nothing for a whole hour.

Only before they carried it out, you took a flannel rag and wiped the keys - slowly, gently, from edge to edge, as if it were going away on a visit. And I, fool that I was, thought: "he didn't even notice that I'd stopped playing." After that you started staying late. First till eight, then till ten. You took the orders others refused: boots split at the seams, bags with dead zippers, wedding shoes needed urgently by morning.

I ate supper alone and told Olha: "he loves leather more than he loves me." You'd come home smelling of glue and wax, eat your food cold, and never try to justify yourself. It was easier for me to take offense than simply to ask. That's me talking all grown-up now. Back then I just put out the light before you reached the room.

But there was that July too, one of ours. You closed the workshop in the middle of the day - the only time I can remember. Bought cherries, we sat on the workbench, spat the pits into the bucket of leather scraps, and you hammered metal taps onto my heels. - So you'll click, - you said. - So I can hear you from the end of the street, little one.

Something old was playing on the radio, we danced between the shelves of shoe lasts, I clicked, and you laughed so hard you dropped the hammer on your foot and didn't even swear. By spring you could no longer lift the door by the handle. Your bad back. I started going with you: you held the key, I pulled the door up, and the lock gave way to our hands. You only said: - Don't stand in the draft.

The doctor ordered you to close the workshop in February. Why didn't you? It was your decision, and I still don't know whether it was the right one. In May I was handing people their unfinished shoes and apologizing for you. No one took their money back. The day before yesterday I was clearing the shelves, getting the workshop ready for the new owner. Behind the boxes of lasts, under some rags, stood a heavy coffee tin. Inside - money.

Hryvnias, and at the very bottom still karbovantsi, the years in layers, like the rings of a tree. And a scrap of paper in your handwriting, slanted, pressed hard: "For a new piano." I sat down on the workbench. It was very quiet, and I wanted those cherries so badly. For years I carried inside me the thought that you were running away from me into that workshop. And there you were, putting aside hryvnia by hryvnia for my music. Why did you keep silent?

I suppose I'll never know now. There was always a room in you where you didn't let me in, and no door there to knock on. But I know this: while I sulked over your evenings, every evening you were putting something into that tin, something more than money. I closed it with its lid and took it home. In the morning I called about an ad. The piano is secondhand, black, with a scratched lid; they'll bring it on Thursday.

My fingers aren't what they were, I'll play badly and little, but it doesn't matter, because you will go on being my melody, my love, and I your eyes and your soul. And tomorrow I'll hand over the key and tell the new owner: "you have to lift the door by the handle, otherwise it won't turn." Let his hand learn it too. The old rag I kept for myself; on Thursday I'll wipe the keys with it - slowly, from edge to edge.