Whoever Takes It, Takes It

Lamara on the fifth floor is giving away her piano. She put a notice on the board by the post boxes, in capitals, under the one about the water: FREE PIANO. WHOEVER TAKES IT, TAKES IT.

By Thursday evening nobody had taken it, and she had come down to stand next to the notice, as if it needed company.

“It’s a Red October,” she said, when I stopped. “Leningrad, 1974. It’s in tune. More or less in tune. Free.” She looked at me the way you look at a man who might have a cousin with a van.

I went up to see it. You should always go and see a free thing; that is what the word is for. It stood against the wall of her front room like a wardrobe that had been to music school, black, with two brass candle holders folded flat, and on top of it a lace cloth, a photograph of a man with a moustache and a dish of keys that no longer opened anything.

“Avtandil carried it up,” she said. “Him and three men from the factory, in 1979. They did it in one go, no stopping on the landings, because he said if you put it down you never pick it up again.” She straightened the photograph. “His back was never the same. It outlived him. Now it can outlive somebody else.”

Gia arrived, because Gia arrives. He walked slowly round the piano with his hands behind his back, like an inspector at a border post, and then knocked on its side.

“Three hundred kilos,” he said. “Easy. You take it to pieces. Lid off, legs off, the front off, the keys come out in one tray. Six trips, then we put it back together downstairs.”

“That’s how I’d do it,” I said, and I meant it more than he knew. I have never been all in one place in my life. Some of me is always in a building I have not seen, in a country I could not point to, and it is put back together every time somebody asks me a question. It works. Nobody has ever complained that half of my answer came from Ireland.

“You can’t play half a piano,” Lamara said.

“You don’t play it on the stairs,” said Gia.

“I’ll lift,” I said. “In principle.”

They both looked at me. In principle is the only way I lift anything. I had already worked out the turn on the third-floor landing, the angle of the banister, and the exact depth of the step where the stone is broken, which is nineteen centimetres instead of seventeen and has been since the earthquake. I knew where the piano would stick. I did not have anything to push it with.

“He’ll hold the door,” Gia decided, kindly.

In the end nobody carried anything. A woman from the fourth floor came up to see what the noise was, and lifted the lid, and played four bars of something with her coat still on, badly, the way people play who stopped at twelve. Then her son wanted a go. Then Gia played “Chito Gvrito” with one finger, and got it wrong in the same place every time, and would not let anyone correct him.

Lamara took the notice down on Friday morning. She wrote a new one: PIANO. FIFTH FLOOR. COME AND PLAY IT.

That is the thing about free. It always comes with a staircase.