He was so secretive about the piano. She only discovered by accident that he played, late one night when the hospital was deserted. Miri had just begun her apprenticeship with him three months earlier. She’d stayed to watch over a lonely old woman who surely wouldn’t make it through the night. Miri knew the nurses could tend to her patient in her absence, but she was fond of the woman and wanted to stay with her until the end.
Near midnight the woman took her last breath. Miri pulled the sheet over her patient’s face, then stood and walked toward her office. Miri meant to fetch her things and go home, but she was stopped by music. Gorgeous, tragic music. It came from the piano in the basement—the only space the hospital had had for the instrument when it was donated. The notes were quiet and slow. Melancholic. She tiptoed around the hard, squared edges of the stone stairwell leading down to the basement, needing to see who could play so beautifully.
She tried not to make any noise. She didn’t want to interrupt, assumed it was a patient’s brother when she saw a man at the keyboard. And she didn’t want to be seen. Baba had warned her against being alone with strange men enough for her to know better. As she slid closer, she heard more fury in the notes. Then a finger that dragged instead of struck. Miri wedged herself against a crate of bandages stacked along the wall. The smell of damp mixed with the earthy scent of the underground.
The pianist played by the light of a single candle that lit the keyboard, not his face. He didn’t have music in front of him; he played as if the instrument were an extension of himself, his fingers dancing at an impossible pace. And then a pause. Miri held her breath until he sank back into the keys, this time at a softer, slower rhythm. How long did she listen? She couldn’t say. When he finished, he bent forward in exhaustion. Miri felt she was intruding on a moment more intimate than any man would want a stranger to see, but in that silence she was trapped.
Eventually, the man let out a mournful sigh and pushed back from the piano. When he turned, she saw his face. She must have made a noise at her surprise. “Who’s there?” he asked.
“Miriam Davydovna.” He looked as startled as she felt, staring into the dark, searching for her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to intrude.” She wanted to say more, to explain she’d been moved by the music, that it was the most gorgeous she’d ever heard, but she didn’t dare. Not with him looking for her like that.
“Do not apologize.” His lips turned up. It wasn’t quite a smile but it was close, and it helped her step forward. “Music is meant to be shared. How long were you there?”
“Not long.” She hated lying. “Awhile. You play beautifully.”
“It’s an awful hobby.”
“How can you call it awful?”
“What doctor’s down here in the basement instead of up with his patients?”
“A human one,” Miri said.
They walked back up the stairwell together. She said she should be getting home, but he invited her to stay and have tea. Before she’d seen him as a mentor, as a brilliant surgeon focused on medicine, but now she wanted to know why a musician with so much talent hid in the basement playing for no one. Why wasn’t he at home, with his family? She’d been working with him for months, she realized, and yet she knew nothing about him.
She set a tray of biscuits on the table. The chair scraped the floor as he pulled it out for her. Babushka taught her grandchildren to be aware of their surroundings at all times, to look for clues that could reveal a person’s true story, what lay beneath their veneer. It was crucial to know who would risk their life to save yours, but before, Miri had never dared to try to scrape beneath Yuri’s surface. Now she took in his buttoned-up vest and jacket, his stiff doctor’s coat. Appearance was important to him, that was clear. How had she missed that scar just above his lip? The skin had been stitched back together. It was a cut she’d treated on many children, the result of a fall, but Yuri’s scar wasn’t that old. It was still tinged pink, not white. Didn’t he say he’d left Zhytomyr recently? “You never told me why you left home,” she said.
He kept his eyes on the steam coming off the tea between them. “Please, don’t ask me about home, or about the piano.”
“Why not?”
“It’s my only request.”
“Will you play for me again?”
The biscuit in his hand snapped. “When I secure your promotion.”
She was certain he’d forgotten that promise made years ago. But now he took her hand as they stood, again, in the dark hospital, with Sukovich recovering near them. He guided her down the squared marble staircase and back into the basement, invited her to share the piano bench. She sat so close their legs pressed together. She could feel he was nervous.
“This is Schubert. A sonata. His saddest and most gorgeous,” Yuri said.
“That’s why you like it? Because it’s sad?”
“No. And yes.” He shook his head. “I think it sits where it should.”
He played even more beautifully than she remembered, and just as the music had carried her away before, it did so again. She felt his love and loss. The sadness he’d never wanted to share with words poured out, tangling with her own anguish over Sukovich and her mistake that could have cost him his life. Yuri’s hands moved so quickly there was a dark rage to them, and then they stopped, paused before sneaking back into the light. By the time he finished, they’d both been transported beyond themselves, and as the keys still vibrated, he turned and kissed her with a passion she’d never felt from him before. She wrapped herself around him, broke into goose bumps at the electric thrill of his hands, his fingers reaching up her skirt. He’d never touched her like that, and she found herself lost and open to him. But just as he trailed the top of her stockings, he pulled away.
VIII
After his confrontation with Kir, Vanya didn’t bother taking the tram back to the house. He ran with an abandon he hadn’t felt since their summers in Birshtan, where he and Miri used to spend the hottest months of the year with Baba at their dacha. The summer cabin was tucked in the hills, near a river and sulfur springs. It was small, with two rooms and a loft where they slept, tucked in by flowers, trees, and Baba’s vegetable gardens. They’d stopped going when Vanya was made a professor, but before that they spent every summer under their grandmother’s eye, training in self-defense the way she herself had once been trained after she escaped Odessa and was saved by the Romani in their camp in the woods. “Enjoy what we have but always prepare for it to disappear,” she’d said. Though Baba meant the warning to be taken seriously, those summers were idyllic. The only time they’d been able to truly relax and laugh since their parents died. Vanya and Miri spent half the summer floating in the water, stuffing themselves with berries and vegetables so fresh the soil on them was still moist. The other half they spent skinning what they’d killed. Or, to be precise, Vanya spent watching Miri skin what she’d killed because he could never bring himself to do either. And when she was done, they would run, play games, and race, pretending an enemy was behind them. Which was how Vanya ran now, only none of what he ran from was a dream. Kir hovered as real as Baba had warned.