The Girl with the Music Inside

~ Who am I? A clear note lingering in a big room. A clean whistle echoing down the street ~

My smile is big, when it catches me unawares, it takes up the width of my face. I know this because I have photographs. This is a small town, and the second war is not a distant past yet (although I have very few recollections of it) so, many things are basic, unornamented, just life with no frills, but there are a few photography studios, and this is where we go to have our memories stilled and framed. I do not know if anyone will keep and dwell on these little pieces of paper with wide white frames (often uneven, but it doesn't bother me), or for how long, or why. For now, I pile them up in little cardboard boxes -- some of them are Kodak boxes which contained rolls of film. I don't know how we got them -- someone must have given them to us, since we don't have our own camera. I do like photographs but I don't think much of them; my parents, who were born just after the first war, barely have a few each and it's just something to do in a special moment. When you're 17, you care more about being with your girl-friends, talking to them, perhaps walking up and down the promenade along the river in the centre of the town.

When you're 17, and you live in this small town, much of your time is not really yours. It belongs to your parents, to the house, to work. Before we moved to this town, we lived in my father's village not too far from here for a few years, but I don't remember that very well. They tell me there were two giant mulberry trees, a white one and a black one; my mother told me this is where once I waited for her to come back for days when I was about three, when during the war she had gone to look for my father in Belgrade around the time of the liberation and she had no news from him for many weeks. She found him, alive and relatively well, but it took her seven days to get there, and seven days to get back, walking most of the way and occasionally getting a ride on a horse cart. She says that when she finally made it back to the village, the sight of me standing despondent, "like a little orphan," waiting for her underneath one of those trees, engraved itself into her mind as one of the saddest things she'd ever seen. She still can't talk about it without crying. 

In the yard of our new house here, we have animals in a small shed. Usually a couple of goats, a few chickens, and even a skinny, rib-showing horse. He is Father's help for plowing the narrow stretch of field he owns by the railroad tracks, just outside of town. The animals require some work, and quite a bit of it is mine. The goats need milking early in the morning -- such a joy to hold the wide-rimmed metal bowl filled to the brim with warm milk, still steaming on chilly mornings, from which Mother will make small wheels of rubbery but delicious cheese, with traces of the cheese cloth netted on the surface! The chickens need feeding, and I must check for any new eggs too. In the beginning, we didn't have running water in the house, and all our water came from the fountain in the yard: if Mother didn't have time for it, I would have to wash the dishes there, my hands turning stiff and blue on cold days. 

And then there is music, and concerts in restaurants or taverns, which is what my parents also do, to make a little more money on the side. We are quite a musical family – out of necessity. I don't know with which ancestor it starts, but I do know that my grandfather on my mother's side -- the one who renounced her after she ran off with my father, who was just a poor accordion player from the neighbouring village -- sings very beautifully. A few years after my parents’ elopement, he softened a little, but never gave my mother her part of the inheritance and the relations are still somewhat strained; I did, however, have a chance to hear him sing. On rare occasions when we were invited to his house in the village, usually for some saint's day or the village feast, at some point after the plentiful dinner, served at the long table with a dozen people -- women puttering around with the dishes -- someone would start a song, at first just a note or two, casually, as if testing the acoustics or just letting a few tones off into the air, half-lost in thought. Then someone else would pick it up and carry it on until several voices joined in, and before long, the whole table would be singing, one voice in particular dominating the choir: my grandfather's, from the head of the table. His voice wasn't deep, but it was steadfast and clear (sometimes when I whistle, I think of it), and he would close his eyes while weaving a delicate melody like a tapestry, the pointed ends of his swirling mustache gently twitching. 

But most of our daily music comes from my father. He plays the accordion and the violin, and already in his teens he made a name for himself in the entire region. He used to play at village gatherings, which is how he met my mother -- and the rest is history. Literally, because the scandal their elopement created, inspired people to whip up a song about them and their rebellious act. The funny thing is, my parents actually included this song into their standard repertoire later on... So it goes without saying, I was trained on the accordion from as early as I can remember; another accordionist was appreciated in the band. And so I haul this bizarre instrument, a set of velvety breathing lungs, from home to wherever we are playing, and they've even enlisted me as one of the two head-accordionists at school so I often sit in front of the choir during school events and performances, and play whatever is in the charts. As for the family band, we are all included: Mother had to pick up the drums since there was no other drummer. Father says she is a natural, and with a perfect ear -- she only has to hear a melody once to know it. My brother is still young -- he is four years younger than me -- but he's been practicing the guitar (although he's been talking about the clarinet lately). We don't always all play, but when I'm there, my additional task is often to set the restaurant tables before the guests come. And it’s fun on the stage: people at the tables look at us curiously, even enviously – we are the stars, at least the local ones. They know us, sometimes by our name, and my whole world is there, my parents, my brother, and all the music.

But the music royalty for me, which no amount of tavern-performances can ever live up to, is the piano. The first one – and so far the only one – I’ve seen is the one at school. I walked into the piano classroom, and it was there: like a giant accordion laid on its back, with no lungs but with a brain filled with neurons firing synapses underneath the lid which is often open. I sat down, put my hands on the shiny and slick keys, and it was love at first sight. Probably the accordion training helped, and my fingers slid smoothly on the keyboard, finding chords, savouring the horizontal rather than vertical lines to work in. The piano won’t be very useful to our family business but I know this is what I want to do for the rest of my life: sit at the piano, and let my hands travel up and down the keys… Once a friend from school who isn’t taking any music lessons asked me how I make music, do I just touch the keys any way I want and the music comes out? I did not know what to say: the depth of her ignorance shocked me but a certain beauty in that simplicity touched me. I just smiled. Needless to say, we do not have a piano at home so I come to school whenever I have a spare moment to practice – my favourite pieces are classical, but I sometimes fool around on the keys, try this or that until I can reproduce a popular song or a hit that caught my ear on the radio; and to dream, of stages, of performances, of big audiences… of a piano all my own. And of delicate silk scarves, and dainty high-heel shoes, tapping lightly on the stage floor…

Most days are filled with the daily drudgery at home or at school, and there isn’t much time even for the thoughts of something else. But sometimes, in between two tasks, I take a few minutes to step outside of this life here, and feel a wider world somewhere where the sky sinks into the haze. And somewhere there, beyond our three bridges (which earned our town the nickname of “Little Venice”), and our river (resonating with loud frog-croaking at sunset), and the deep-green hills around (where my father sometimes goes to hunt for wild pigeons), I know there is an open road like an unfurled ribbon disappearing into the distance, where the big cities are; and I wonder if I will perhaps make it there one day. Will I be able to go to a good school, and study the piano? The next question is something that gives me the giggles, and it’s both intimidating and exciting, but will I have a family of my own? Will there be music in it?

And then a flood of sunlight filters through the branches of apple trees, and I forget what I was thinking about, and pay attention to the warmth on my skin, which makes me giddy and opens my face into one of those wide smiles, and I walk around as if in a blissful trance, filled with sweet anticipation of things to come, but mostly just happy with this life, the only one I’ve known so far. A life with a firm grounding, a life to be built upon, where I can hold a white dove in my hands, or stand by the window with my parents, and hail the world, and say, ‘I am here! let the music begin…’