Not to mention the heaving sea, the spray that affronted his face, and the creaking speech of the bunks and walls and covered pipes, which he recalled with the vividness of nightmare, although these memories were more continuous and complete than those he retained of London under the Blitz or of Britain during the bland baconless days of victory and reclamation. The only positive spaces were the spaces of the church where Miriam brought them for mass after Rudi ran off, memorable because they felt made of the music that filled them. Mostly, when he recalled parental faces, he saw anguished eyes and swollen cheeks, voices tired beyond terror — flat, dry, hoarse — bodies that could scarcely bear their clothes: these were the companions of his every moment, and their figures became faintly superimposed upon the interested eager jolly features of his teachers whose feigned enthusiasms were no more encouraging to him than the false hopes his mother had — over and over — held out to him, even when she wished he’d cry and carry on the way his sister did instead of sitting silently, as if his wish to be elsewhere, in his small case, were a success, and he was.
A sack of groceries would remind him of a bit of body he had encountered in the rubble when he was barely able to walk, a coated shape lying in a soft soilous heap he hadn’t recognized of course but had held in his head for labeling later. Then the ghost of a bathtub he’d mistaken for a corpse, when his eye caught — beneath wallpaper tatters, wallboard shatter, and plaster dust — a gleaming porcelain rim, rounded like an arm, humanly smooth, bloodlessly pale. And something smelly he’d been asked to eat would push his present plate away as if it were a threat to his life.
Why, he would wonder, had his father thought this nightmare world of bees that buzzed before they bombed was better than Austria’s woodsy hillside peace, especially when his mother would speak about the land they — at least she — had been taken from, with its quiet village, comfy cottage, its honest close-knit farming life. She painted cockcrow and sunset on a postcard and mailed it to their imaginations. She made them hear fresh milk spilling in the pail. Woodpiles grew orderly and large while they listened. Flowers crowded the mountain trails and deer posed in glades cut by streams whose serene demeanor was periodically shattered by leaps of trout that only lacked for lemon.
Later on, when the family was living in its small sterile London reclamation box, he saw on a walk his mother made him take (because, though walks were Austrian, they were also British), black and outrageously out of place in the middle of the street, an abandoned piano that he now knew was an upright, warped and weathered, whose scattered, broken keys he struck again when he began his lessons from Miss Lasswell, as if he were returning them to their tune and time and harmonic order.
His approach to playing was like that of someone trying to plug always fresh and seemingly countless leaks — his fingers were that full of desperation — so Miss Lasswell was soon out of patience with him. Easily, easily … softly, softly …, she would croon, her voice moving smoothly and quietly and slowly at first but soon running up the scale of her own impatience toward staccato and the shriek. She told Miriam, whose idea the lessons had been, that Joey was hurting her instrument, and she couldn’t allow that, think of all the other children who had to learn upon it how to court and encourage the keys, although they were black and white now because they’d taken a beating.
Putting that piano back together, hauling it out of the street where it had fallen from a truck or otherwise been left to die, getting it over the curb, and carting it up a flight of stairs into a proper alcove in a splendid room became Joey’s daydreamed crusade, and to his later lessons with Mr. Hirk (cheaper at least) he brought an intensity and a commitment that impressed even that morose man and caused him to move his arthritic fingers as finally Joseph’s moved, up and down the scales, through tunes, in and out of motifs and their identifying phrases.
Nevertheless, Joey learned every note and stave in a wholly backward way. He heard a piece of music, then found by hit or miss, by hunt-and-peck, the combination that would reproduce it, forking about until he was able to bunch familiar combinations together almost automatically: in short, his fingers felt for the sounds he heard in his head, so that the score meant, at first, very little to him. Hum it and he would hit it was the motto of Joey’s music making. His skills were suitable for a saloon. He was a honky-tonk kid. Yet they led to — they fostered — his subsequent career.
Joey’s general schooling followed a similar pattern. He appeared to learn from the air rather than from any focused or ordered instruction. Algebra he nearly failed, chemistry as well, but he read like a pirate bent on prizes and plunder. He swallowed the contents of shopwindows; he kept up on the news, unnatural in an American youngster; and he browsed through mail-order catalogs like a cow in a meadow. So Joey was self-taught, but what self got taught, and what self did the teaching?
Mr. Hirk’s hoarse instructions, the tunes he fairly howled, the beat he banged out with a book upon the piano seat: none of these meant music. Mr. Hirk had been found living in penury at the edge of town, his livelihood, as meager as it had been, taken from him by the stiffness in his fingers and the popularity of the guitar, which could apparently be played by sociopaths without any further training, its magnified twings and twangs emerging from an electrical outlet as if the little holes spoke for appliances of all kinds and for unoiled engines everywhere. Perhaps Miriam pursued the problem with more determination than she did most things because her husband had possessed some small skill with the fiddle, and as a mother she wanted to find in her son something of that talent, since she saw in Joey otherwise nothing of his father that she wished to see, only his ability to mimic and to mock, especially after she had to endure the fury and flounce of Joey’s sister when he pretended to twirl her baton, pucker up to kiss her date, or slide about in a pair of socks to a tune she had never heard.
In any case, Miriam gossiped around until Mr. Hirk’s odd name came up. To Joseph it had to seem to be a motherly whim that became a parent’s punishment, because, quite apart from the lessons, which were by definition disagreeable, Mr. Hirk was a hideously misshapen man, bent and gnarly, with hands like two ill-fitting boots. He held a pencil by its unsharpened end and poked the keys with the eraser. The poking was so painful to Mr. Hirk it seemed that the sounds themselves were protests, and they were produced with rests between them marked by sighs and groans, not by signs or words of instruction: tangk aah tongk ooh tingk oosh. Perhaps Joey’s ear-to-finger method was the only one with a chance to achieve results.
For all Joey saw, Mr. Hirk’s house had just one square room whose several small windows were hidden by huge plants, a feature that Miriam found reassuring. Wide thick fleshy leaves intercepted what of the sun there was so that greenish shadows were the ghoulish consequence when the day’s light was bright. These shadows came in shades of several kinds and seemed to fall with great reluctance as if lying down on things the way Mr. Hirk had to — awkwardly, slowly, and with groans. A goosenecked lamp with a low-watt bulb hung over the playing surface, always on, always craning its brassy cord in the same curve, causing the black keys to cast in turn a smallish almost dainty darkness of their own. Yussel Fixel saw torn wires and a violence-infested space into which he was being asked to submerge his fingers, so at first he poked them in and out at great speed.
A few pieces of furniture that Joseph Skizzen would later recognize as in the style of mission oak gloomed in those corners the piano didn’t occupy, and his feet often scuffled with a rag rug. Dim walls held dimmer portraits up to failing eyes. Dust kept time, wafted as if on sound. Nothing was propitious. Yet when Joey lifted the lid of the piano bench as Mr. Hirk instructed him, he saw sheets of music whose character was heralded by the picture of a canoe on a moonlit lake or that of a lady in a dress with a preposterous behind, perhaps even hers, or a boy and a girl on a two-seated bike or, better, in a merry Oldsmobile. He practiced scales, of course, pursuant to the mastery of “Indian Love Call” or “Song of India” or “A Bicycle Built for Two.”