Dagmar's Daughter - By Kim Echlin Page 0,33

along the curve of the back was Heintzman & Co. Toronto, Canada. Agraffe Bridge Patented March 10 1896. From the vantage of Nyssa’s four-stringed violin, the row of musty hidden strings was exotic. Colin lifted out the piano’s action and turned it over. The very first tuner had scratched his name into the wood: Bob 1900. Nyssa ran her fingers over the dead man’s mark and her father watched.

It’s nothing but a big drum, he said, putting it back together. Here, hand me a screw.

She watched him choose objects from her hands and squeeze them between the clean row of strings until it looked like a rag mat.

Play, he said.

She sat down and looked at the piano’s insides. She placed her fingers on the ivory keys. She played a simple C major triad. There was a clank and a thud, a note and a cluck. She sped it up, changed keys and syncopated the rhythm to hear the drumming clanks of screws and thuds of rubbers.

We have to get this down! she said in delighted adoring, as if she were the first to hear it in the world.

Why? said Colin, What are you going to do with it?

Make a new tune! said his exuberant daughter. She shook loose her kinked hair, put her hands on the keyboard and played another rhythm.

Colin listened and poured himself a drink. Danny wandered in to listen too, pulled a rack comb and tissue paper from his pocket and played along with his sister.

Nyssa insisted on writing down her father’s music. They laid out long sheets, labelled the strings and noted where each eraser, screw and nail had been placed. Colin smelled the fresh salty scent of his daughter’s skin as they sat shoulder to shoulder. Nyssa imagined their writing to be an affair of posterity, caught in the fleeting moment.

She came home to Dagmar that night alight with the pleasures of writing something she thought completely new.

Her mother saw the glow of a girl in love and asked, How was your birthday?

Fine.

Did he give you a present?

Bach, said her daughter dismissively. But he’s showing me how to write down a song for a piano all stuffed up with nails and screws.

Dagmar too had once been Colin’s private audience on that old piano. She had watched Nyssa thrive under his teaching, heard the girl’s fiddling grow stronger and wilder. He’d taught her everything he knew, played tapes of the old people and recordings from abroad. His musical range was now hers and she excelled effortlessly beyond any other musician on Millstone Nether. Everyone could hear Colin’s stamp on Nyssa’s playing, her easy shifting between styles, already a master of the tradition. Dagmar thought, He is a bridge to her own spirit. Heaven only knows if the bridge will hold when she plays all that’s inside her. He never could bear anyone else’s ferocity.

Years are drops wrung from a rag. Still tethered to childhood, Nyssa was ready to leap, knowing little of flying. Music was her haunt. She played what she liked. In ancient times and distant places the people would have honoured her, a young woman alive to her own song. They would have beat drums and danced for her. They would have brought young men to her door and they would have sung, Like her lips, sweet is her vulva, sweet is her drink. But that song was lost long ago and Nyssa would have to find her own way. She was destined. To go, deeper, darker.

One Saturday night Nyssa gathered four boys with their fiddles and guitars and made them arrange themselves like a thick tree trunk in front of her. She led them to the pole house stage and when everyone arrived for a time, she hid behind them while they sang a sweet air together, then out she jumped from behind, the boys spreading like branches to both sides of her. Nyssa, centre stage, was the root to which all eyes turned. She put bow to strings, her flesh all power and excitement, a young girl standing exposed as a blade of winter grass in front of the flickering lanterns. She whooped and pounced on the first piercing note of “Nana’s Boots,” a medley she’d made up herself. The old people shook their heads at her showing off and called her a regular philandy and laughed. She knew how to pump it out. She danced and fiddled, wore her longing and hope naked for all to see.

She had a knack for