The Midnight Piano

The piano came with the flat, and the flat came from her grandmother. Nadia had not asked for either. She had a job in a shop she did not like, and now she had three small rooms above a busy street and an old piano in the corner that nobody had touched for years.

It was not a beautiful thing. The wood was dark and marked. Two of the white keys had gone yellow, and one of them made no sound at all. On her first evening there Nadia sat down and put her hands on the keys and did not press them. Below the window a dozen cars waited at the lights. Next door a television was on.

Her grandmother had taught her to play when she was seven. That was the only part of those years she could describe clearly: the warm room, the old woman's hand flat on her back to keep it straight, and the way the music came out of her own fingers as if it had been sitting inside them all along, waiting to be let out.

Then her grandmother had become ill, and Nadia had stopped, and ten years had gone by.

On Monday there was a letter in the mail. A studio on the other side of the city, a modern building with a golden name above the door, ten new students taken each year. An appointment on Friday at four. Her grandmother had written to them months before the end and had put Nadia's name down without telling anyone.

Nadia read it three times, laid it aside on the table and went to work.

She came home at nine. She ate soup out of a bowl standing up in the kitchen, and then, because the flat was quiet and she could not think of a reason not to, she sat down at the piano and played the first thing her grandmother had ever taught her.

It was terrible. Her fingers were slow and stupid, and the dead key left a hole in every line. She played it again. And again. When she looked up it was midnight.

She did the same every night that week. On the third night the man from the flat below knocked and asked, in a friendly enough way, whether she could stop before midnight. Nadia said sorry, and gave him half a bar of chocolate, and finished earlier after that.

By the end of the week she could get through the piece without stopping. That night she lay awake at three in the morning in the dark, certain that she would not go.

She was not clever enough. She was years too late. There was a whole city of people who had never stopped playing, and she worked in a shop.

At dawn she got up, put on the light and played it once more while the sky turned white behind the roofs. It was better in the morning. She did not know why.

On Friday she wrapped herself in her grandmother's old jacket, which was too big and smelled of a house that no longer existed, and took a taxi she could not afford across the city.

The studio was all glass and clean floors. A woman with short white hair showed her into a room with a piano in the middle of it, a black one, new, and open.

"When you are ready," the woman said.

Nadia sat. Her hands were cold. She thought about going home. Then she put her fingers down, and every single key made a sound, and the piece came out into that big bright room the way it had always sounded in her head and never once in her flat.

She stopped. The room was very quiet.

"Who taught you?" the woman asked.

"My grandmother," Nadia said, and wiped her face with the back of her hand before it could get any worse.

That evening she came home and sat in front of the old piano with the dead key and did not play. She only looked at it for a while. It was not a victory yet. There would be an answer in two weeks, or there would not.

But the courage had been the hard part, and she had found some of it at last, and it had come from a woman who had been dead for four years and had still, somehow, got her through that door.