Asymmetry - Lisa Halliday Page 0,45

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