Excerpt
two women crazy. After acquiring an excellent piano teacher at school, he knew at age of five that his instrument would be the piano but this was one gift they could not give him. They could neither afford it nor fit it in their apartment. He learned to find pianos elsewhere, and for eight years he took lessons, first from the school music teacher, then from a retired concert pianist who coached him with great enthusiasm. He might have attended the conservatory if he had continued to play classical music. But from the moment he first heard Fats Waller play on a bootleg recording—a tape of a tape, a third generation from the original recording—he knew that this glorious cadence was the music of his soul. In the Soviet Union in the late 1950s, to listen to jazz music was bourgeois foolishness. Though not punishable it made him suspect as a friend of westerners. To want to play jazz music for a living was heresy.
Then one day, just across the street from the featureless building that was his workplace, quite by accident he discovered another piano. The storefront was a state-owned furniture repair shop and in the back room among the dust and heaps of broken office furniture was a piano that no one was using. It had been sent for repair years ago and never claimed. The story went that it belonged to some government department that had since been axed. A side panel had split as if it had been punched by a fist, and the instrument listed to one side until Volodya shimmed it up with a block of wood. After that it had been easy for Volodya to decline a lift in the work vehicle, claim to be getting to his destination by bus or on foot, then slip across the street to spend his time in more useful ways. The repair shop technician, who worked by himself for most of the day, loved it; he would close the heavy inner door so no one could hear and he often provided an appreciative audience of one. He had even helped Volodya find a piano tuner.
It was too bad that Ivana the Terrible had such good hearing and that one day she had been nosy enough to follow Volodya into the repair shop. She stood in the shadows quietly until he began to play then marched up to him, shoulders quivering.
“Now I see why you skulk off, you hooligan!” she stormed. “You are a lazy Russian! This is not the socialist way—to play this decadent music.” Ivana often spoke in the language of the state’s propaganda as it helped her on her career path. She promptly reported him to her superior who had never really liked Volodya anyway, particularly after the young man
Libros Libertad 