(First published in Prairie Fire, Spring 2005)

Mensch, could that Beethoven Blatz play piano. I hadn’t really thought about that—that he would be able to play—and Kjrayel hadn’t said nothing about that neither. Beethoven Blatz was a piano tuner, somebody who knew how a piano was made, knew how to fix it so it would play good. And how was I supposed to know different? Pianos were still a seldom thing in those days and it was only years later that a blind piano tuner would come around and tune all the pianos in the district.

It must have been the fifth or maybe sixth Saturday that I heard Beethoven play the first notes on that broken piano. I was just bending over to put some more wood into the cook stove when I heard the first note. It shtutst the firewood out of my hand so I got a sliver in my finger.  I don’t know why it scared me so much, bu my backstring shivered like the notes on that piano when it rolled off the wagon.

At first the notes sounded grülich terrible, I would have said, because none of the strings were in tune yet, and there is something about strings not in tune that shivers a person’s skin. Beethoven Blatz was not concerned with music at all, he was only concerned with the workings of the keys. Kjrayel came in from outside and watched for a while. Your grandfather always liked to figure out how things worked, and later I sometimes wondered how come he never tried to fix that piano himself. But like I said before, I was only twenty years old then and had only lived with your grandfather a little over a year and I still had lots to learn. One thing I noticed though on that Saturday when Beethoven Blatz played the first notes, I noticed that when Kjrayel was in the house in the sitting room with him, Beethoven pounded on those piano keys a lot harder than when he was alone in the house with me. Not that he was pounding on the piano the whole time, no, but when he had fixed one key he would be testing it out before he went to the next key and then he would pound on all the keys he had fixed already, making such a thunder noise that I thought the window would break.

After faspa when Kjrayel had gone back outside again, Beethoven just didn’t hit the keys so hard—sometimes he played them so quietly that I could hardly hear them. I took a peek at him through the door and saw how he pressed on the same key again and again and again. Then I saw a tear drop from his cheek to the black key beside his hand. That tear was as big as a drop of rain and it fell on the black key almost on the end where it ran down the slanted edge into the crack between the white keys. There must have been lots of salt in that tear because I thought I could afterwards always see a faint white stain on that black key beside Middle C. I never told anybody about that stain. I maybe was scared that nobody else could see it except me, but I was always really careful with the dust rag around Middle C.

On the next Saturday the notes started to sound more like music, though most of the day Beethoven Blatz kept climbing up and down those notes like angels climbing up and down Jacob’s ladder. I would hear the notes go up and down over a part of the piano and then he would stop and I would hear clinking as he did some tuning on those hundreds of wires in the back, then he would play up and down the notes again. Sometimes I would hear the ping of a tuning fork and I would half expect him to start singing like my father would in church. But I never heard him sing, not even along with his piano playing, not even a hum. Beethoven Blatz didn’t sing, but he did play. After he had played note ladders up and down the piano maybe a hundred times he started to play something like a song. He didn’t play it all the way through at first, he still only played a few notes, then he stopped, tightened some wires, then started playing it again. Later, I found out that the music he was playing was called “Moonlight Sonata” made up by the real Beethoven from long ago, but right then, of course, I didn’t know such a thing because for sure we had no radio or gramophone yet in those days and we for sure never went to Winnipeg to hear music in that auditorium beside the Hudson Bay store.

Your grandfather Kjrayel Kehler must have gone away somewhere after dinner because he never came back into the house, not even for faspa, while Beethoven Blatz played that “Moonlight Sonata” beginning over and over, each time moving the song a little farther along, before stopping to do more tuning, and I stood there leaning against the table where I was pressing Kjrayel’s Sunday shirt with an iron that had heated up on the cook stove. At long last he played that sonata all the way through without stopping and I wanted to smile and cry at the same time, it was so beautiful, like a mourning dove cooing back to a person early in the morning. If I had been kneading bread I would have floated my soul up past the moon all the way to the stars. But I was pressing clothes and when the music stopped, I heard the cows mooing outside and my hot iron had burned a corner of Kjrayel’s shirt.

I shivered then beside the hot stove and the iron clattered as I set it down on the black stove beside the edge of the round lid that showed a sliver circle of orange flames underneath. I thought I heard sniffling from the piano room, and I shivered again. I was suddenly frightened to be in the house with him and was thankful that the cows were mooing.

I put on my barn coat and four-buckle overshoes and picked up the milk pails from beside the door. The wind almost blew the door off the hinges as I stepped outside.

The sky was dark already and there were no stars. The clouds seemed almost low enough to touch. It was a cold fall with very little snow on the ground yet even though it was into November already. The barn stood like a shadow across the yard and it was the mooing of the cows that helped me keep my direction. The lantern hung in the barn, and I knew there should be matches in a little can Kjrayel had nailed to the beam underneath the little shelf where the lantern always stood. I knew my way across that yard, I mean, I went that way three or four times a day at least, but that night the dark seemed darker than an ordinary dark, almost like a wool cap pulled over a person’s face, and that moonlight piano playing was still ringing in my ears, and still heard the sniffling from the piano room, and I didn’t even feel the frozen ruts under my feet and then I bumped my bent head into the barn door.

In the barn the dark was even blacker. You have to remember, Koadel, that this was thirty years before we got hydro on the farm so a person couldn’t just reach in and switch on the light. You have to remember, too, that this barn was the semlin, the sod house that Kjrayel lived in on that section of prairie before we got married. Now it was where we kept the two cows I got from my parents after the wedding, though through that cold winter in those granaries I sometimes wondered if we wouldn’t have been better off living in the sod house, because whenever I stepped into that little barn with the two cows inside it always felt so warm, while in that clappered-together granary house I felt fekjlämt always, even under the quilt beside your grandfather Kjrayel Kehler. But once I was in the barn with the lantern lit hucked down on the three-legged stool beside Elsie Schemmel shtripsing milk into the pail somehow the whole world suddenly felt lots warmer and I could almost feel like it was summer. I don’t know why, I mean, a barn smelled like a barn though I guess in those days our noses were used to it, that’s just how it was living on a farm, and I always liked milking cows right from the time I was ten years old and maybe as I leaned my head against the side of Elsie Schemmel’s belly I could forget that I was living in a cold granary married to a man who had broken a piano at my feet instead of building me a warm house.

I had the first pail three-quarters full when I felt the door open; the cold wind blew in like a sheet of ice. “Kjrayel, make that door closed!” I called out. “Where have you been so long?” I didn’t stop milking. I felt the door close and the barn warmed up a little again. “How come you didn’t tell me that you wouldn’t be home for faspa?”

I heard a throat rasple. “I am sorry…this is Blatz.” A shiver shuddered my backstring. Elsie Schemmel swatted my head with her tail as if all of a sudden she had felt a swarm of flies.

“Is my man home?”

“No,” Blatz said. For a few minutes the only sound was the milk strulling through the layer of foam rising in the pail. I had stopped milking for a moment when I heard his voice, but now I was afraid to stop. Maybe Blatz, too, was afraid to speak because he didn’t say anything more until the pail was full and Elsie Schemmel’s udder hung empty. I stood up and carried the milk over to a box beside the door and set it down. Blatz was leaning against the door and even in the shadows from the lantern hanging from the roof beam his face looked white as a moon in a cloudy sky. Outside the wind whistled around the corners of the barn and then I heard the snow clittering against the door.

“It is snowing, yes?” I said and I picked up the empty pail. I didn’t look at Blatz, I just stepped back between the cows to pick up the stool then I stepped around to the other side of the brown cow, the one that never had a name, and I settled down beside her and tried to shtrips myself away from Beethoven Blatz there in the barn and from the thought that my man Kjrayel Kehler was out someplace in the blowing snow.

But that only worked until the milk was deep enough so that the squirts didn’t zing against the bottom of the pail any more. That’s when Beethoven Blatz spoke again, spoke so softly, yet so clearly, his voice almost sounding like the beginning notes of that “Moonlight Sonata” piano, only a hundred times sadder than that. “It was on such a night,” he said, “a night when the wind and the snow came between us and I never saw Sonia alive again.” My fingers went cold and not even the heat from the cow’s tits warmed them up again that night. There was nothing warm about the story he told me. No that’s not altogether true, he didn’t exactly tell me a story, not a story that went from beginning to end, no, not like that, maybe more like a Bible verse from someplace in the middle of the Bible, a verse that doesn’t make much sense except if you know all of the Bible from beginning to end, because each word in the verse reaches out to other words in other verses somehow. Does that make sense to you, Koadel, I mean, I am just an old woman who never even went to English school, except for two years after the German schools were closed down and those that were against the English schools went away to Mexico, like Kjrayel’s family. But where was I?

My head must be getting tired, and my throat is getting sore and they still won’t have any Wonder Oil and sugar to make it feel better. But yes, Beethoven Blatz talked to me while I was milking the other cow with frozen hands, he talked me a kind of picture that was made up of piano music, a Russian woman named Sonia, a broken violin, and blood on the snow. When he finished telling me this picture, my cold fingers were still squeezing the other cow’s empty tits and then the lantern flickered out and I held my breath as I listened to Beethoven Blatz’s tears leak down to the straw.

Koadel, let me ask you this thing...I mean, you maybe won’t want to tell me an answer but...ach heeat, what is it with people who have been living for six thousand years at least, if you just go by the Bible, and still we have to figure out the most important things all alone like nobody in the world has done the things that we have to do, even with all the preaching and newspapers and books and televisions and catalogues full with underwear we know so much only we don’t know nothing, at least we behave like we don’t know nothing...Koadel let me ask you this thing...did your father Knackbaul Kehler ever say you anything about Beethoven Blatz?

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For sure, something was different after that storm . Kjrayel still hadn’t come back by morning. I put more wood in the stove, then I went to the barn to milk the cows. Beethoven didn’t come to the barn in daylight and I leaned my head against Elsie Schemmel and the milking took a long time because I couldn’t help myself I had to let myself go and cry so the tears ran down Elsie’s schemmel coat. When I got back into the house with the milk Beethoven still had his door closed and everything was still as a grave.

I creamered the milk and put the kettle on the stove to make some prips coffee. I wasn’t hungry and I didn’t feel like cooking just for Beethoven who hardly ate anything anyways, so I looked out the window to see if Kjrayel was anywhere coming but I couldn’t see nothing and then like I was feeling a little bit dizzy I went into our bedroom and closed the door. I moved the curtains apart so the sunshine could come in. The storm had stopped in the night and the sky was clear with the sun glancing off the fresh snow. I don’t know what made me do it but all of a sudden I had the wedding dress taken out from the closet and spread out on the bed I hadn’t even made yet. Then I spread the silk underskirt out beside it and I looked long and hard at the grease spots on the underskirt and then at the hole in the seat of the wedding dress where Kjrayel had hooked something that Sunday he wore it when he was full with poison ivy gnauts. I felt like weeping and I felt like laughing. I looked out the window to where I could see the lawn swing in a fresh snowdrift. I thought about Kjrayel out there someplace and I wished he wasn’t so unthinking haustijch about what he did. Why couldn’t he at least have told me where it was he was going to? I got a little bit mixed up because along with worrying about Kjrayel I was thinking about Beethoven’s woman Sonia and I remembered how Beethoven had brushed aside the loose hair with his fingers that time I had my hands buried in bread dough and yes, it maybe was Sonia’s hair that his fingers were brushing aside but it was my skin that those fingertips touched.

The bedroom got chilly with the door closed but I didn’t want to go back into the kitchen yet where the stove was hot. I looked out the window at the lawn swing and then I heard the creak of the hinges on Beethoven’s door. I held my breath in and listened to his footsteps on the kitchen floor. Then all was still again. I let my breath out. Still no sound. I got up and hung the wedding dress and underskirt back in the closet. Then I slipped open the door and stepped down into the kitchen.

Beethoven Blatz stood warming an ink bottle over the stove. He had a straight pen in his hand. He turned his head to me but his eyes gave me this grizzlijch feeling that I was a window and that Beethoven Blatz was looking through me to see something else. This feeling was so strong that I looked down at my stomach to see if there really was window glass to see through. I looked back up at Beethoven. He was still glutzing through me but he was holding his pen like he was writing in the air with it, only I couldn’t see what letters he was making with the tip of the pen. At the same time his head was texing a little. Later, when I had seen him do this more often I thought that he was hearing music in his head. Have you ever heard music in your head, Koadel? Does it give such a thing? The whole time Beethoven and me were looking hard into each other’s eyes, and you know, Koadel, after a while it was like I was starting to hear music in my head, too, and that made me want to laugh because I couldn’t hold a tune if it was caught in a gopher trap, but lucky before I laughed I heard the horn from Kjrayel’s Model T outside and the music in both our heads stopped.

Well Koadel, that Model T horn hitzed me like a willow stick in my father’s hand and when Kjrayel came in the door I was waiting to shulps him over with a slop pail of questions and I didn’t even want to hear answers. But before I could even spill him over with one “Wua weascht dü?” your grandfather Kjrayel Kehler had stomped his snowy boots across my floor and grabbed me around with his arms and started to shrubber me with his two day red beard and then he kissed me so hartsoft hard that I thought my lips would get stuck in his teeth and then he pushed his tongue into my mouth and I got scared that he would fress me all the way up.

Beethoven slammed his door loud and then the piano started to play the hurrieder part of that Moonlight Sonata song, louder than Beethoven had played it before, until some notes didn’t sound right and then Beethoven started making such hartsoft grülich jeläve that Koadel stopped kissing me and said, “What’s loose with him?”

I didn’t say nothing and shrugged myself out from his arms and went to the stove. “Hungat die?”

“Mie hungat, mie schlungat, me schlackat dei…” Kjrayel pulled off his coat and hung it on the nail by the door. He sat down on the little bench by the door to pull off his boots. I had started to peel potatoes for dinner.

“Suschkje,” Kjrayel said. “I will build us a new house when the snow is gone.”

“Where were you for the night?”

“I was in Gretna and it was storming so bad that I had to stay for night.”

“Why didn’t you say me something that you were going away? I went out to milk the cows and the Model T wasn’t there. And then it started to blow and snow and you weren’t home and I didn’t know where you could be and I was all alone here. Can’t you tell me at least where you are going?”  I put the potatoes in the pot on the stove, then cut slices from the schinkjefleesh on the cupboard and threw them into the frying pan.

“Beethoven was here with you, not?”

“But he isn’t my man,” I said, and I had this funny feeling I had said something weighty. And then I started to sipple right then and there while I was slicing the meat.

“Nah sure, he isn’t your man.” Kjrayel had come up behind me and put his arms around my belly and started shrubbering my neck with his whiskers. “I’m your man, Suschkje. Don’t you believe me that?”

“Let me the dinner cook already. I’m hungry, too.”

“Ach heeat,” Koadel said, and he let me go. “I didn’t bring in the stuff from Gretna.”

“You mean you brought the new house in the car?” I said as he hurry put on his coat and stepped into his boots.

“Kjinga froaw met zukka bestreit.”

“Shuft!” I said to him and he laughered himself out the door. I didn’t look when Kjrayel came back in. I didn’t want to burn the shinkjefleesch in the pan. Kjrayel didn’t say nothing and I just kept cooking until the meat was the colour that my mother had learned me was the way a man liked his meat. The potatoes had boiled soft by this time and I spilled them into the holey bowl I had set over my big pot so I could mash them for brie. I put a plumps of milk in with the potatoes so they wouldn’t be so dry. Koadel had told me that by Yeltausch Yeeatse’s place the brie always so dry was that he had to drink a dipper full of water after each meal to wash it down. Not that I believed him that because Mumpkje Yeeatse was one of the best cooks in the darp everybody said. When I finished mashing the brie I said, “Tell that Blatz to come to dinner already. He must be frozen already in that room with the door closed.”

That’s when I looked up and saw what Kjrayel had brought in. A shiny new rocking chair stood in the middle of the floor. A red ribbon was tied around the rungs of the chair back .

“Who is that for?” I said, as I set three plates on the table.

“For you to schuckel the baby,” Kjrayel said.

“You brought a baby from Gretna, too?”

“No, but you will have a baby and then you will need this schuckel stool.”

I don’t know for sure where I got the mouth from that day but I said, “How is a woman anyways supposed to have a baby if her man is away in Gretna for night?”

Kjrayel grabbed me around again so fast that I almost dropped the pan of shinkjefleesch. “Oba meyall, God made days, too!”

“Blatz!” I yelled, “Come to eat!”

Oh Koadel, your grandfather Kjrayel Kehler was so dringent in the bed that night that I thought it would never come to an end. Even on our wedding night after the dancing in Yelttausch Yeetze’s machine shop Kjrayel wasn’t so lostijch for me as he was that night after the storm, and I have to give in that I had been longing for Kjrayel’s menschlijchkeit  already, too, because once Beethoven came to us to fix that piano your grandfather had mostly kept his hands to himself in the bed.

Does it bother you, Koadel, to hear such talking from your old groutmuttachi?  Ach jung, schmausing between men and women was gribbled out long before your Elvis Presley, not? But Koadel even while I was giving myself all to your grandfather and taking everything he had to give, there was a twievel ling wonder in a back part of my brain about what had really happened with the piano coming and then the snowstorm that had brought me a rocking chair and now such dringent lostijchkeit that the frost on the window was starting to melt. And when Kjrayel at last poosted himself out on top of me I wouldn’t let him go and I squeezed him so hard he squealed like a pig and we started laughing even as our lungs yaupsed for air and our hearts bounced into each others’ chests.

Then I shrugged out from under Kjrayel a little because even a sommamolijch little man can get weighty on top of a woman. Kjrayel brushed the hair from my face and kissed me softly on the lips. I heard piano playing, so quiet I thought I was hearing it in my head, and then I felt Kjrayel go still and then reach for my hand. The music was different than that Moonlight Sonata which was the only thing I had ever heard Beethoven play and it seemed like the music would play and then stop and then play again, almost the same but a little different, then stop again, but your grandfather and I had nutzed each other out so much that we soon drowned into sleep that had only our own music. Music that we hoped would hide what had happened with us during the storm.