The so-called instructor nodded four times in quick succession.
Without releasing his hold on the cad’s lapels, the Count leaned his head back so that he could study the mise-en-scène with a little more care. Upon closer inspection, the loveseat the two had been sitting on did, in fact, appear to be the bench of a piano. And in the spot where their hands had been intertwined there was an orderly row of ivory keys.
The Count tightened his grip.
“So that’s your game, is it? Seducing young women with jitterbugs?”
The so-called instructor looked aghast.
“Absolutely not, Your Excellency. I have never seduced a soul with a jitterbug. We have been playing scales and sonatas. I myself trained at the Conservatory—where I received the Mussorgsky Medal. I only conduct in the restaurant in order to make ends meet.” Taking advantage of the Count’s hesitation, he gestured toward the piano with his head. “Let us show you. Sofia, why don’t you play the nocturne that we have been practicing?”
The nocturne . . . ?
“As you wish, Viktor Stepanovich,” Sofia replied politely, then turned to the keyboard in order to arrange her sheet music.
“Perhaps . . . ,” the instructor said to the Count with another nod toward the piano. “If I could just . . .”
“Oh,” said the Count. “Yes, of course.”
The Count set him back on the ground and gave his lapels a quick brushing.
Then the instructor joined his student on the bench.
“All right, Sofia.”
Straightening her posture, Sofia laid her fingers on the keys; then with the utmost delicacy, she began to play.
At the sound of the first measure, the Count took two steps back.
Were those eight notes familiar to him? Did he recognize them in the least? Why, he would have known them if he hadn’t seen them in thirty years and they happened to enter his compartment on a train. He would have known them if he bumped into them on the streets of Florence at the height of the season. In a word, he would have known them anywhere.
It was Chopin.
Opus 9, number 2, in E-flat major.
As she completed the first iteration of the melody in a perfect pianissimo and transitioned to the second with its suggestion of rising emotional force, the Count took another two steps back and found himself sitting in a chair.
Had he felt pride in Sofia before? Of course he had. On a daily basis. He was proud of her success in school, of her beauty, of her composure, of the fondness with which she was regarded by all who worked in the hotel. And that is how he could be certain that what he was experiencing at that moment could not be referred to as pride. For there is something knowing in the state of pride. Look, it says, didn’t I tell you how special she is? How bright? How lovely? Well, now you can see it for yourself. But in listening to Sofia play Chopin, the Count had left the realm of knowing and entered the realm of astonishment.
On one level he was astonished by the revelation that Sofia could play the piano at all; on another, that she tackled the primary and subordinate melodies with such skill. But what was truly astonishing was the sensitivity of her musical expression. One could spend a lifetime mastering the technical aspects of the piano and never achieve a state of musical expression—that alchemy by which the performer not only comprehends the sentiments of the composer, but somehow communicates them to her audience through the manner of her play.
Whatever personal sense of heartache Chopin had hoped to express through this little composition—whether it had been prompted by a loss of love, or simply the sweet anguish one feels when witnessing a mist on a meadow in the morning—it was right there, ready to be experienced to its fullest, in the ballroom of the Hotel Metropol one hundred years after the composer’s death. But how, the question remained, could a seventeen-year-old girl achieve this feat of expression, if not by channeling a sense of loss and longing of her own?
As Sofia began the third iteration of the melody, Viktor Stepanovich looked over his shoulder with his eyebrows raised, as if to say: Can you believe it? Have you ever in all your years even imagined? Then he quickly looked back to the piano and dutifully turned the page for Sofia almost in the manner of an apprentice turning the page