TO ACCESS THE ASTROTURFED terrace, you had to squeeze through a narrow hallway of a room containing a single twin bed and an upright piano. The bed was Sami’s. The piano was there when we moved in. The space in between was so tight that my brother could reach up and trill the keyboard’s topmost octave even while he was lying down.
The piano had a plain boxy shape and was made of a dark wood that was nicked all over and turned reddish in the midmorning sun. It was an old Weser Bros., revamped during the Second World War, when the construction of new pianos could not meet the demand, inspiring manufacturers to rehabilitate used models with new arms, new legs, new key tops and new scrolls; they also hid the tuning pins on top with a long mirrored casing designed to make the instrument look smaller than it was. The mirror on ours had a diagonal crack across one corner and much of its surface had become mottled with age. I think it was Saul Bellow who said that death is the dark backing a mirror needs if we are to see anything; what, then, does one make of so much darkness already showing through?
I call it Sami’s piano but technically it belonged to our landlords, Marty Fish and Max Fischer, who lived downstairs.
Fischer played first violin for the New York Philharmonic. Fish played piano in a West Village piano bar popular with people who like their show tunes mangled by drunken sing-alongs. We Jaafaris referred to these two men jointly as the Fishes and Marty in the singular as Shabboot, because his extraordinary ovoid shape reminded my brother of the carp Baghdadi fishermen used to butterfly and grill on the Tigris. Maxwell Fischer, on the other hand, was too unassailably debonair for a nickname. A Bavarian graduate of the Paris Conservatoire, he was a devoutly trim man who took his early-morning constitutionals in paisley cravats that on the pavements of Bay Ridge looked as exotic as if he’d wound an Indian cobra around his neck. Fischer had a soft high voice and crisp German diction that lent all conversations with him an aura of the philosophical. We always knew when he was home, because instead of the muffled Sondheim or Hamlisch that signaled Shabboot battling a funk, floating up came the virtuous strains of Elgar, or Janáek, played if not on a cherished pair of hi-fi speakers then on Fischer’s Stradivarius by Fischer himself. The violin he flossed and buffed as if it were a surgical instrument. He swept the communal foyer once a day and on Saturdays vacuumed so protractedly that for half an hour afterward the silence rang in your ears. It became second nature for me to remove my shoes whenever entering the Fishes’ apartment, long before I no longer had to be told to take them off on going into a mosque. But all this domestic pulchritude was Fischer’s doing. Left to himself, Shabboot would have let the dust form drifts and the ironing a pastel hillock on the bedroom floor. The only thing Shabboot cleaned voluntarily was his answer to Fischer’s violin: a Macassar Ebony Steinway that, at nearly seven feet long, dwarfed the living room around it and was the reason the old Weser Bros. had been relegated upstairs.
Our mother’s tendency to mythologize our childhoods would have you believe that Sami, who had never touched a musical instrument before, sat down at that piano for the first time and was rolling out bagatelles by sundown. I don’t think it was quite like this. A more accurate version surely begins with a fact that has long confounded my parents, and me to a degree as well, and that is that my brother did not like living in America. Almost from the beginning he complained of missing his Baghdadi friends and pointedly lagged behind in school, although he was no less clever than his classmates and had spoken English as well as Arabic since he was three. At home, he became mopey and shiftless, getting off the sofa only for meals or to smoke marijuana in the basketball courts in the park with a Trinidadian girl who lived behind the synagogue on the next block. Then one afternoon Shabboot, who’d come upstairs to address a glitch in the plumbing, lingered over the Weser Bros. long enough to pluck out the opening measures of Bohemian Rhapsody and Sami got up from the sofa and asked him to do it again. Half an hour later the drainpipe in the kitchen was still leaking and Sami and Shabboot were sitting hip to hip at the piano, Sami chewing his lip and Shabboot humming corrections, rearranging Sami’s fingers, and jabbing indignantly at the keyboard’s sticky middle D. This is how one would find them nearly every Wednesday afternoon thereafter: in summer silhouetted against the terrace, in winter with mugs of tea steaming up the mottled mirror. In theory, there was no practicing allowed after ten thirty at night, but often Sami would wait until all was dark at the other end of the apartment and then resume his playing with one foot on the damper pedal and his head cocked so low to the keyboard you’d think his ear could vacuum up the sound. Of course, one can play a piano only so quietly. About as well as you can whisper a tune. But no one dared discourage my brother; he was unhappy and my parents blamed themselves. At least when he was playing the piano he was not shiftless.
Nor was he ambitious, in any conventional sense. He did not give recitals. He did not perform. For Sami, the aim in playing was simply to play: to match finger to key, one after the other or in their cherrylike clusters, and to enjoy the result as one enjoys listening to a story unfold. In his tiny bedroom that was more a corridor than a destination, my brother hunched over his piano with something like the charged necessity that grips chain smokers, or binge eaters, or people who bounce their knees. Maybe it absorbed a nervous energy. Maybe it blunted a pain; I don’t know. It could even seem wasteful, the way he went through sheet music, rarely playing a piece more than twice in favor of moving on: to another sonata, another concerto, another mazurka, nocturne, or waltz. As though their notes were part of an infinite current and Sami the copper wire through which they wanted to flow. Of course, every now and again he would stumble over a difficult passage and back up to play it again, but this was rarer than you’d expect. And never, not once—I cannot even imagine it—did he growl or drive his fists into the keys with impatience. I have always envied my brother his affair with that piano. You can tell when someone is unbedeviled by time.