This is long overdue. I don’t talk much about my brother nowadays, our relationship died a few years ago. I’ve made my peace with it, although I do wonder from time to time if he’s ok and if his life is going according to his dreams and hopes (I seriously doubt it). I’m not sure what would have to happen for me to ever talk to him again… EVER. But that doesn’t mean I should ignore him as if he never existed at all. Because he did exist, very much indeed, during my childhood. During those times when I didn’t have a father anymore, when I needed protection, when I needed my fears chased away and my sled pulled through the snow, when I made mistakes and needed help hiding them from my mother, when I got good grades and wanted to brag (because he never did), when I needed to escape and used his music to do it over and over again, he did exist.
Imagine a bunch of sailors playing poker while waiting to hear if they would travel anywhere or go home for a while. They’re drinking whiskey and they’re getting loud, they’re cussing and wishing some of the wives and kids weren’t there so they could REALLY cuss like the sailors they are. Some of them run out of money or things to bet, my father wants to keep playing. One sailor bets an old piano he had found somewhere and wants to get rid of because it made all this “infernal noise”. My father wins it. Two hours later, four sailors are helping my father drag a piano up two flights of stairs (if you know anything about communist buildings, you’d know how damn difficult that is), all the way to my brother’s room. My brother is ecstatic. He has never touched a piano before but somehow knows this is his destiny. He waits patiently for the sailors to set the piano down, its skeleton more like, because some pieces that could be taken apart were, to make it a little lighter. He waits until they all go to the living-room to celebrate with more whiskey and additional poker, because the night is far from over. I’m in the middle of all this, about four years old, not really knowing what’s going on but excited because all my father’s friends adore me and play with me and intermittently proclaim “You’re just too cute!”
And then there’s music. Everyone stops what they’re doing because no one is yet sure that’s what we’re hearing. After a few moments of deep silence, that is definitely music. My parents look at each other: Where is that coming from? He doesn’t know how to play the piano! We go back to my brother’s room and watch him play while standing up in front of the skeleton. His fingers are fighting each other to reach the keys, it is plenty obvious he doesn’t know the proper way of holding his hands over the keyboard, his wrists are so inflexible that he’s having a hard time with it, but he’s playing. He’s playing something no one has heard before, something eerie and burning, scary and inviting at the same time. It doesn’t have a name, and it would stay that way. We would later refer to it as “the song you played the first time”. We watch him play for a while, and listen in wonder, and try to figure out where and when and how this was born. My brother doesn’t know himself. He was never able to explain it. He kept playing while everyone left him alone. It was obvious he didn’t care about the outside world at that point. He was lost in his imaginary world, submissive to the piano in a way no one knew he was capable of, completely entrenched and with no obvious desire to do anything else. He was 13.
We lost him after that, to a world of music he couldn’t live without anymore. He’d play for hours, learning on his own, discovering classical pieces one at a time, with the hunger of the man deprived for years, with a stubbornness no one knew a human being could possess, with intention and intensity, as if his life depended on it. He forgot to play with me, to pull pranks, to argue as a proper teenager compulsively does, to study anything in school, to play with his friends. Instead, his friends would gather in front of our building, under our apartment’s balcony, to tease him and tempt him with worldly adventures. They quit that and started listening after a while. My brother was lost to them as well.
I grew up listening to him and witnessing his wars with music. His tears when he couldn’t understand the technicality of a piece, his exhaustion after playing ten hours a day, my mom’s yelling because he missed school again, his refusal to stop until he was the master of the piece and could control it and change it to fit his whims. He’d play different rhythms based on the time of day. Allegrissimo for mornings, to wake everyone up and urge them to start living, andante for lunch time, so we could slow down a bit and enjoy some good home-cooked meals, adagio to lento for afternoons, to help wind down and settle in, and grave for nights, to accompany the night sky and induce sleep. He played the Moonlight Sonata for me again and again, sometimes in the dark while stars were the only emissaries for light. He played other people’s music until he realized he could make his own. It was only then that the magic really started. He turned his dreams into music. He would wake up in the middle of the night, write the notes on a piece of paper half asleep, then play it for us in the morning. I lost count of how many times I cried because of his music. I lost count of how many times I hated him for being so devilishly gifted. I lost count of how many times I heard people mention him, but not me, in casual conversations. I disappeared for a long time. His star was too bright for anyone to miss it, and I didn’t matter anymore. I was jealous and bitter, and started thinking that, if I could play the piano too, maybe people would talk to me again. When I tried to learn, everyone made fun of me. My mother said: “You just don’t have the gift, sweetie, you need to stick to your books”. She wasn’t mean about it, but still, that’s how I perceived it. And I hated him even more. At the same time, his magic was too powerful, his music too much like that of sirens, alluring and deceiving, messing with your head and making you think unspeakable things. I could never get enough of it. I pleaded and begged, and he would play for me again. I would fall asleep on his bed, writing stories in my head, guided by the notes emanating from his hands, fooled by emotions I didn’t know existed.
The magic stopped abruptly when I was in high-school and he got married. His wife took him away from us, literally. She was so afraid and insecure that she prohibited him from even coming to visit. He would wake up at four in the morning to come have coffee with my mom, because his wife always slept late and it was the only way for her to not know he came to see us. He never played for me again. It broke my heart, and I don’t think that can ever be fixed. All I have now are the memories that come flooding whenever I hear a classical piece played by someone else. I listen and say to myself You’re playing it wrong, that section needs to be softer. I miss his magic, and I’m infinitely grateful that I got to be a part of it for a while even if no one paid attention to me. I now understand why. But the magic is still gone, and I feel deprived.