Issue 23

Luciano Funetta
Translated by Scott Belluz

It was very late when he came home from work. His wife was sleeping; the apartment was dark. Despite the hour and the building’s noise regulations, he could still hear Frau Paffgen playing her piano. A German-language teacher at a private college, she’d moved into the building just a few months before to the apartment above. Her arrival had gone unnoticed, as if a squad of sleepwalkers had silently moved all of her possessions, including the cumbersome upright piano, into the apartment under cloak of darkness. The presence of this new tenant was made clear just after nine o’clock one evening when they heard her play for the first time. The news came as a surprise. The apartment had sat vacant for so long that everyone (well, not everyone, but he definitely) expected it to remain that way forever.

It wasn’t long before they realized that Frau Paffgen practiced the same piece every night. It was a sonata written by one of her compatriots long before the dead began walking the streets—or rather before the streets, valleys, cliffs, and oceanic trenches began to reclaim their children. Late into the night, her ham-fisted attempts continued, the music halting so often that the complete sonata was never heard. At times, listening to Frau Paffgen felt like examining the X-rays of shattered legs. Occasionally, the sound of the damper pedal woke him in the middle of a dream. The miserable, funereal music would accompany him until, exhausted by restlessness, he fell back into a torpor, his dream resuming while the fragmented music decomposed and cracked open like the ice on a river at the first sign of spring.

One night he dreamed of skating—strange, for someone who’d never skated—and the ice suddenly opened beneath his blades. He plummeted, smiling, into the dark arctic water that resounded with the German woman’s music, as though a piano hammered into the bed of this majestic European river was sounding just for him, the drowning, dreaming skater.

This wasn’t his first dream, nor would it be the last. If, in the last weeks, his sleep had grown dark and incomprehensible, it was definitely because of Frau Paffgen’s practicing. Whenever he met her in the stairwell, he found himself begging her not to play so late in the evening or during the night.

“When exactly might I play, then?” she’d asked, genuinely curious.

“From nine in the morning until nine at night,” he’d responded.

“Very well,” she’d said. But he got the sense that she was merely indulging him, as she might a lunatic at the bus stop. Indeed, that very evening, after a day of complete silence, she began playing at nine-thirty and continued until he, with bloodshot eyes, dozed off, not knowing where the music would take him.

Although Frau Paffgen’s habits annoyed his wife, she wasn’t as troubled by them. When he recounted his dreams about visiting a castle on a cliff uninhabited but for a skeletal girl who played some dust-covered piano in a filthy dungeon, or a shed packed with bodies thrashing to the piano’s music like a sounder of swine at the smell of blood … she’d smile and remind him that his dreams had always been bizarre—and that was a reason she’d married him. Admittedly, he didn’t mind the destinations of these dreams, but as the days passed, he had the growing sensation that his neighbor’s piano playing was all for him—to rattle his nerves, to keep his eyes open, to wear thin his patience as he tried to sleep under these circumstances.

“If she could actually play, you wouldn’t think twice about it,” his wife offered.

“That’s true,” he agreed. “It would be a completely different story if what she played were less a lament or violation, if the piano were in tune, if her repertoire were varied … but the music is atrocious. It makes me think of an abandoned child devouring whatever he can find at the edge of a landfill. He was in my dream too, you know? And in the dream the landfill was resounding with mountains of garbage jangling like hammered piano strings. And the yellow-eyed child just listened, no longer hungry, his shoulders jutting out like tombstones in an English cemetery.”

He’d seen the piano once when he entered Frau Paffgen’s apartment to inform her of a leak. The instrument stood against the wall under a mirror. She’d welcomed him courteously – in every other way it was a tidy apartment.  She was mortified by the damage the water had caused and offered to call a plumber. While she was on the phone, he went to the piano and saw that, apart from the sonata by the German composer open on the music stand (a certain maestro from Bonn, to be precise), there were no other scores lying around. When she came back, she looked embarrassed to find him standing next to the instrument.

“You’re not going to practice today?” he asked.

“Later,” replied the professor. “I have the day off, so, as usual, I’m spending the afternoon reading newspapers. I was just reading an article about police torture in Egypt when you arrived. It gave me the shivers—such a terrible thing.”

“What did it say?” he asked.

“Oh, hard to say, really. Nobody knows the particulars. We can barely imagine.”

“For so many years we heard nothing about the torture by Americans either,” he said. “Do you remember that photo of the hooded man? It seemed to have been taken in another dimension or another time, like the souvenir of a nightmare.”

“True,” said Frau Paffgen.

“Perhaps we are also torturers, without realizing it,” he continued.

“Indeed. Our children will be the ones who discover what we are,” she said.

“Do you have children, Frau Paffgen?”

“Fortunately not,” she said.

He turned to look at the piano, its lid concealing the keyboard, which was likely protected by the usual red felt. This polished ebony beast was dressed to the nines.

“The plumber will come later this afternoon,” said Frau Paffgen. “I promise the ceiling won’t be leaking by the time you get home tonight.”

At breakfast the next morning, he and his wife stared silently at the ceiling for a long time. The putrid water’s dripping had left a damp yellow halo that would take several days to dry.

“She’s a woman of her word,” his wife said.

Nodding, he took another sip of coffee and, like every morning, recounted his dream from the previous night.

On a street corner in front of the metro, an old woman grabbed him by the sleeve and dragged him down into the station, then slid a ticket into his hand, ordering him to use it only in the event that what she was about to tell him “made him crazy” (in the dream she’d said “made him hear the laughter of the dead”). She sat him on a stool in front of a tiny folding table and began laying down cards decorated with complex, indecipherable drawings. Only after placing the last card did she resume speaking, and, rather like Frau Paffgen, who played the sonata of men who in their dreams can’t sleep, it seemed as though from the depths of her being, this fortune-teller was extracting a noisy sonata of failure and incompetence, a miserable grimace deforming her lips and cheekbones with every unprophetic error.

“I already knew everything, why did I keep listening?” he asked his wife.

Before the old woman could give her predictions, he’d left in a hurry, using the ticket to go through the turnstiles, then headed down to the tracks, where he’d walked along the platform and entered the dark mouth of the tunnel, where he’d wandered until waking up.

“You dreamt you were walking in a subway tunnel?” asked his wife.

“The whole night, or at least I think so.”

“Could it be because of the book you’re reading at the moment?” she asked him while showering.

He was sitting next to the sink, smoking, the sleeves of his white work shirt rolled up.

“The one about Schumann?” he asked.

“Yes. Didn’t you tell me it felt like a ghost story?”

“It is,” he said. “But it’s about Schumann. Frau Paffgen plays Beethoven, and the dreams started before I bought the book. I don’t see the connection. Anyway, I’ve decided to attend the next residents’ meeting to ask about noise regulations. If she won’t listen to me, she’ll have to listen to the other inmates.”

“I like it when you tell me your dreams,” she said. “You’ve had to concentrate harder to recall them ever since Frau Paffgen arrived, but you’ve gotten better at it, and you choose your words more carefully now.”

“It’s hard to describe what happens when the music starts. It’s agony. I can see her fat fingers tripping over the keys, striking two together, like they’re the positive and negative cables of a battery connected to my brain. Sometimes I think the score is defective, that it contains errors, and in reality she’s executing it perfectly.”

“She’s just a bit crazy,” said his wife. “She’s all alone up there. We’ve never heard any visitors.”

“Oh, I can just imagine it,” he said bursting into laughter. “Her playing that delirium for some friends who are tipsy after dinner. She’d sit, close her eyes and drunkenly play like she’s slitting the throats of robins. It’s enough to make my blood freeze.”

“What do you think our children will discover about us?” he asked one night while waiting for Frau Paffgen’s concert to start. “What will they exhume from everything we think we’ve carefully hidden, burned, or buried?”

His wife looked at him like an insane person whose sinister strangeness she’d nevertheless forgiven.

“Do you think she’ll make it to the end of the sonata this time?” she asked.

“Impossible,” he said. “The score won’t let her.”

From above they heard the slipper-clad steps of Frau Paffgen begin to move, followed by the piano stool being dragged across the floor. Was she bowing and greeting her audience, he wondered aloud.

“Aren’t we her audience?”

“We might not be the only ones,” he replied. “Perhaps Frau Paffgen imagines herself in front of a packed theatre every night. The Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert-Von-Karajan Street.”

“Maybe that’s why she never starts earlier than this?” hazarded his wife.

“Could be,” he said. “Imagine all those people falling asleep listening to her cruel concert. You hear that? It’s the teeth of the audience grinding over her every error. Look how she’s smiling—she’s ecstatic! The painted fingernails of her right hand clicking on the keys while the left hand holds the chord like an overstuffed shopping bag. Are you tired, darling? Come, lean here. Let’s listen. She’s starting. Sleep well, my love.”

She curled up on the sofa, her head on his legs. He remained upright, ears straining toward the point on the ceiling over which Frau Paffgen’s piano loomed. The first notes fell like teeth onto the floor. Plink. Plink-plink. The low notes entered his ears, reverberated inside his skull, and flooded his brain like molten metal. Dah-dum. As the divine Paffgen’s nocturnal concert began, he promised himself that he wouldn’t sleep tonight. And even if he did, he wouldn’t dream, wouldn’t let this music violate his sleep. Tonight he would resist, he’d refuse to confess. Keep the metal box closed. Pum. Pa-pum. Resist being dragged into the traitor’s pit.

There were nine hours left until dawn. Condemned to his cell, he could hear the footsteps of the guards as they flushed out his cellmates one by one. Frau Paffgen halted unfailingly at every measure of music, as she prepared her fingers for the next. There was real genius in this, he thought, an inspiration that comes from studying extinct diseases. He sank into his chair, his chest gripped by desolation. Pum Pa-pum. A collective grimace overtook the audience as Frau Paffgen swayed on her stool. With a sigh, he closed his eyes and, as with every other night, his mind went where she wanted.