They Do the Same Things Different There (14 page)

And, in another story, the Nazis get him. He lives to be an old man, but it’s no good, history catches up with him. The Nazis break down the front door to his house. They find Louis in the drawing room, sitting at the piano. Maybe he’s playing. Maybe he’s just caressing it, like he does every day—because that’s enough now, there’s no more performance left in him, but if he caresses the piano and strokes the wood and kisses at the keyboard there’s still music of a sort. He doesn’t rise for them. He doesn’t even turn around. The soldiers jab the old Jew with their guns, and laugh, and tell the music man to play them something good—something patriotic—Deutschland über alles! Louis doesn’t play that, of course. Maybe he even tries to, but Lizbeth won’t let him. Whatever his fingers tell the keys to do, the piano will only play Chopin. And no matter the shouts of anger, the threats, Louis won’t even change the tempo—this is a calm Chopin, something sweet to be savoured, he won’t be rushed or panicked. They shoot him. Or maybe they’re so overcome by the music’s beauty, and the dignity of the old man and his darling piano, maybe they leave him in shame. No, they shoot him, clean, in the back of the head, and then, and then the piano keeps on playing. The Chopin won’t stop. The love just won’t stop, not for them, not because
they
say so, not because
they
will it, it’s more powerful than anything they will ever feel in their uniforms and jackboots, this is his
grande dame
playing, his grand lassie, Miss Grandiosity, in tribute to the man she adored. The piano plays until, in rage, the soldiers chop it into firewood.

Or, in one last story. And this one seems real to me. This one true. Because what more magic can Louis and Lizbeth expect? In a lifetime that has given them such miracles already?

Louis falls in love. He doesn’t mean to. Oh, don’t blame him, he doesn’t want to. He tells the woman this. He says, I can’t do this, and she says she’ll be patient, and she is, and it’s all right.—And he’s been lonely enough, surely? Hasn’t he had his fill of suffering?

And when she smiles her face doesn’t dimple. But her face does entirely new things he couldn’t even have guessed at.

On their wedding day he feels as if he’s inviting a curse upon his head. But nothing happens. He toasts his new love, and she toasts him, and everyone applauds, and is happy for them as they cut the cake and kiss and dance their first dance as husband and wife.

He doesn’t tour again. That part of his life is over, and besides, his new wife doesn’t love him for his music. This doesn’t make her a bad person. She loves him for other things. But he keeps the piano. He keeps it, and he buries it under a rug, and he locks it away upstairs, and keeps the key hidden.

They have a daughter. He loves his daughter. At this late stage in his life, third time lucky, Louis has at last created a work of art all his own.

He indulges the girl, but he won’t spoil her. If she wants to ride a horse, he’ll find the money for riding lessons. If she wants a new toy, a new dress, a pet dog, a pet parakeet even, that’s all right, she can have them. But he won’t let her learn the piano. No more music. Enough.

And one day he hears it. He has been out walking with his darling wife; they’ve walked hand in hand through the parks of Paris, as they like to do, they’ve smelled the flowers in bloom, they’ve kissed. But it begins to rain, and they hurry home.

And though the locked room is right at the very top of the house, really so very far away, he hears it immediately. Fingers bashing at keys, not knowing how hard or light to be, and the notes straining in protest. All that discordant music. All that ugly din.

He races up the stairs as fast as he can. He has never been so angry. He can feel his heart pounding in his chest, and he thinks of his father, and how angry he always was, and he thinks, is this it? Will I kill myself with my anger too? But he keeps running, and below him he hears his wife distraught, Louis, she cries, go easy on her, Louis, come back!

She’s beating away at the piano so loudly she doesn’t even hear him until he bursts into the room. She’s lifted the rug from the piano lid, but most of the piano is still smothered; it looks now like something old and dead—it looks like something embarrassing. And her hands are dirty, he sees, she hasn’t even washed them, she’ll be smearing her fingerprints all over those gleaming white keys, she hasn’t even put on
gloves
—and as she hits the keys,
plink plonk plunk
, in any order, she keeps time by kicking at the wood—sitting on the stool and so short she can’t even reach the floor, her legs dangling in mid-air and scuffing the side of the piano as she finds some sort of rhythm.

She turns around now, and she still doesn’t know, still doesn’t see he’s angry. She smiles at him, as if she’s been clever, as if she’s just uncovered a big secret—there’s music in the world! And her smile is so big, and no, the cheeks don’t dimple for her either—but that smile certainly has something good about it.

“Papa,” she says. “Teach me! Teach me how to do it!”

When he puts his hands on her he still doesn’t know what he’s going to do. But he lifts her off the stool gently, ever so gently, and she laughs. He sets her down safely on the floor. He pulls the rug off the piano, it comes off in one hard tug, and the piano doesn’t look dead anymore, or embarrassing—it’s
old
, certainly, but that’s all right, he’s old too. And he sits down upon the stool. And lifts little Lizbeth up onto his knee. And begins to play for her.

Your sister’s phone call wakes you. You know it must be your sister even before, fumbling, you pick up the receiver. Who else would call at half past four in the morning?

“Emma?” you say, and you’re right, it’s Emma.

“For Christ’s sake,” your wife mutters, and sighs loud and heavy, and you think that Emma must have heard.

“What do you think of camels?” Emma asks.

“Emma, is something wrong, it’s the middle of the night. . . .”

“No, no. I checked. There’s an eight-hour time difference, it’s early evening for you now.”

“I don’t think so.”

“Are you sure?” she says. And you can picture her narrowing her eyes, giving you that long hard glare, the way she always does when you contradict her—nothing hostile, not as such, not aggressive, just very forthright. Right from childhood you could never hold that glare, you’d always look away. “Are you sure, because I
checked.
”

“Maybe you’re right. Are you in London? Is everything okay?”

“Everything’s wonderful,” Emma says. “I’m in Egypt. It’s very hot in Egypt. What’s it like in Sydney?”

You don’t live in Sydney, you live in Melbourne. “It’s hard to tell, it’s dark outside. . . .”

“Yes, yes, it doesn’t matter, listen. Listen, I’m getting married.”

“Well,” you say. “My God. I mean. Well done.”

“Christ,” says your wife, and she sighs again, and this time it’s so loud that Emma
must
have caught it, and you cradle the phone away defensively. “If your sister is going to be rude enough to wake us up in the middle of the night, when we’ve both got work in the morning, there’s no reason why you should have to
compound
that rudeness by carrying on a conversation with her in the bedroom.”

“No, sorry,” you say to your wife, and you get up, you take the phone with you. “Sorry,” you say to Emma.

You close the bedroom door gently, you open the door to the sitting room, you close that too behind you, gently. You sit down on the sofa. “Right,” you say to Emma. “So. Start again.”

“I’m getting married,” she says.

“Yes, I got that bit.”

“I decided to go on holiday. I wanted a little bit of me time, I hadn’t had any me time in a long time. Barry never gave me any me time, so when Barry and I broke up, I thought, this is my chance, I went straight to Expedia.”

“And Barry is . . . ?”

“Barry is nothing, Barry is history,” Emma says. “Keep up. I’m not marrying Barry.”

“No.”

“I
thought
I was marrying Barry, but Barry wasn’t the marrying type, or so it turned out. Forget about Barry, I don’t want to hear about Barry again.”

“Fair enough.”

“Besides, Barry never proposed. I’m marrying Abdul.”

“And Abdul is . . . ?”

“I’m getting to that. I wasn’t looking for romance, you know, frankly, that’s the
last
thing I was looking for. I’d worked it out, men are just shits, I’m better off without them. Well, you’ll know. But Abdul and I connected right away. There was just a bolt of electricity, you know, when we first met? It was the same for both of us, I thought, at last, this is the one. And besides, Abdul isn’t a man, he’s a camel.”

“You did,” you agree, “say something about camels.”

“What do you think about camels?”

“Erm,” you say. “I don’t think I’ve ever met one.”

“Not even at a zoo?”

“I might have seen one at a zoo,” you concede. “I don’t think I
met
one at a zoo.”

“I haven’t told Mum yet,” Emma says. “I think Mum will be very angry. I think she’s a bit racist. And a bit animalist. In fact, I don’t think I’m going to tell her. She’ll only try to upset me, and I don’t need upset, not in my life, not right now. The only person I’m inviting to the wedding is you.”

“Oh, right,” you say, and you do actually feel flattered, “thanks.”

“Will you give me away?”

“Yes,” you say, “yes, of course. Emma. When you say ‘camel’. . . .”

“Yes?”

“I mean. Are you really happy?”

“I’m very happy,” she assures you. “I’ve never been happier.” And you know, you can hear the sincerity in her voice, and it makes you happy too. “Do you think that you can get here for Thursday? The wedding’s not ’til Saturday, but there’s all sorts of things to prepare, and I could do with a hand.”

“Thursday?” you say. “Hang on. Why so soon?”

“Why wait? I tell you, Abdul and I are in
love
.”

“Right.”

“And anyway, Abdul is nice and heavy at the moment, he’s been storing food. Best get it done whilst the weight is in the zone.”

“Right. Well. I’ll get on and book my flights then.”

“Great. I love you.”

“I love you too.”

“How’s your wife . . . ?”

“Kirsten’s fine.”

“And your daughter . . . ?”

“Tammy’s fine.”

“Good,” she says. “See you soon then.” And hangs up.

When you go back to bed your wife is very deliberately pretending to be asleep, and when your alarm wakes you in the morning she’s doing the same thing, her eyes are squeezed tight and she’s refusing to stir. So it’s not until you get home in the evening you can tell her your plans. In your lunch hour you went to the bookshop and bought a guide to Egypt, you think the pictures of the Sphinx and the pyramids will excite her as much as they do you.

“That’s so typically selfish of your sister,” she says. “How dare she decide when and where we take our holiday!” She points out that she only gets four weeks leave a year, and one of those has to be spent visiting her father in Brisbane, and another her mother in Adelaide, and the two remaining weeks are consequently very precious, and it’s up to
her
where she spends them, not your bloody sister. “Going all the way round the world for her wedding, as if. It’s not as if she came to our wedding.”

The location of your wedding created the need for much negotiation between your family and your wife’s—it began like negotiation, anyway, but soon took on the air of a war summit, with demands flying back and forth across the oceans in ever more hectoring language and with ever less room for compromise. And the Australian contingent eventually won, they dug their teeth in and refused to budge, they won the war not with better ammunition but simply by sheer reserves of manpower, it seemed as though Kirsten had unlimited numbers of cousins her family could produce whenever they needed more muscle. The ceremony finally took place in a chapel in Melbourne with a vast army of in-laws in attendance, and none of your own family at all. The concession made in the treaty was that before the wedding you and Kirsten would take a holiday in England, so that the bride-to-be could be met by
your
family; Kirsten said it was like being inspected under a microscope, like being poked at and prodded by a whole gang of slack-jawed drongos who’d never seen an Aussie before. “But you like Emma,” you say. “You don’t mind Emma.” And at this Kirsten snorts in derision, she
hates
Emma, didn’t you know?—and you didn’t, you knew that Kirsten hated your parents, and Uncle Bill and Aunt Val, and your only surviving nanna, and your cousin Tim, and your cousin Tim’s kids—but that she hated your sister as well is news to you. And it makes you feel just a little sad.

“But we’ve always talked about going to Egypt someday,” you point out, “so now seems as good a time as any!” And Emma tells you you’ve
never
talked about going to Egypt, when on earth have either of you even mentioned Egypt, and on reflection you think maybe she’s right, maybe you’ve never discussed Egypt whatsoever. So.

“If you want to spend your money flying to Egypt, then that’s fine,” your wife says. “But I’m saving
my
money for
my
holiday.” You ask whether you can take Tammy, but Kirsten tells you that taking her out of kindergarten would be disruptive to her emotional wellbeing, she’ll take her on holiday herself later in the year. You check the prices to Cairo, and it costs a couple of thousand dollars. When you click on the “buy now!” button on the webpage your heart skips at the expense of it all. You speak to Emma again on the phone; she explains that because of circumstances, circumstances she’ll feel more comfortable explaining face to face, she can’t offer to put you up—perhaps you could find a hotel? And you do, and that’s another thousand dollars gone right there.

Your little girl gets very excited about the idea that you’re going to Egypt. She races around the kitchen shouting that Daddy is going away, and drawing little pyramids everywhere. She’s never spent a day without you there since she was born. “You do understand you’re not coming with me?” you ask her. “You do understand I can’t disrupt your wellbeing?” “Yes, yes!” cries Tammy, and she races around all the more. It’s an early flight to Cairo—you have to make your goodbyes to Tammy the night before. “I’ll bring you back a present,” you promise her, “something nice and Egyptian,” and she says, “No worries.” You bite your tongue, you do wish she wouldn’t say things like that. You don’t mind the fact that your daughter will be Australian, you just don’t want her to end up like one of the crass ones. When you talk to Tammy, you sometimes feel it’s just to cram English accented conversation into her head—Kirsten gets to talk to Tammy lots, she has more time to do so, so you do your very best in the evening to counter that, you’ll sit your little daughter on your knee and speak proper English phrases at her. But just recently it’s been hard to find things to say.

“You be good for Mummy,” you say, and Tammy smiles at you, and she promises she will; “You be good for Mummy too,” she says. And at that moment you’ve never loved your daughter so much or so fiercely, you want to pick her up and hold her close and never let her go and press down kisses hard upon her head, you want to fold her up and stuff her in your suitcase—you can’t wait until she’s older, what a perfect little woman she is going to be! But you don’t do any of these things. You smile back at her, you give the mobile over her head a little push so that Tammy can see all the animals in the zoo twirling gently above, you close her bedroom door.

It’s two long flights to Cairo, and by the time you get through customs you’re really very jetlagged, and that’s why when your sister greets you you don’t recognize her at first. That, and the fact she’s wearing a black hood over her face.

“It’s called a burqa,” she says helpfully.

“I thought that was a Muslim thing.”

“But I’ve become a Muslim,” she said. “In honour of my husband-to-be.”

You hail a taxi. “It’s quite a long way,” Emma says. “I hope you’ve got lots of money.” You ask Emma whether you can look at her face, and she tells you she’s pretty sure only her husband will be allowed to do that, and you assure her that family members are allowed to as well, though really you’ve no idea—you’d have looked it up in the Egypt guide book if you’d thought it was going to be an issue. So she sort of shrugs, and checks that the taxi driver isn’t peeking in the rear-view mirror, and lifts her veil. Her face is a bit fatter than you remember, she looks so happy and she can’t stop smiling, it’s obvious she’s been smiling a lot. She looks beautiful. Being in love suits her. You tell her so. She beams all the more.

“I’m so excited for you,” you say. “My big sister, getting married! The Muslim thing’s a bit weird, though, isn’t it?”

She frowns. “Everyone here’s Muslim. Anybody who’s anybody, anyway. It’s not hard. I’ve looked in the Qur’an, it’s just like being a Christian, it’s all about being nice to people, with Eastern bits.”

You realize you’re far too tired to talk to your sister. She’s always easier to deal with after a solid eight-hours sleep; you knew that even when you were children—there was an exact time to leave her and go hide in your bedroom. You’ve come all this way to see her, and now you suddenly feel shy, and you’re annoyed at yourself for that. So you watch the road for a while. You wonder why the taxi driver is going so fast, and how he’s able to fit his car into the little gaps in the traffic without crashing, and whether he’s ever run anyone down on the pavement. And after only a few minutes’ such musing it dawns on you you’d far rather talk to your sister after all—and you manage to wrench your eyes away from the window and the chaos around you and turn back to Emma. But she’s done talking now too. She’s back behind the burqa, and it seems to have sealed off her face, there can be no conversation through all that cloth. But she sees you’re looking at her. And although her expression is of course unreadable, she takes your hand. She squeezes it.