Free The Piano Maker by Kurt Palka Page A

rebels.”
    “And you?” she said. “Your own safety? I worry about you. We miss you.”
    “Oh, I’m fine, sweetheart. I have developed a sixth sense about the dangers here.”
    In the newspapers, she read that Indochina was not the only place where colonial trouble was stirring; hatred of the foreign exploiter, of the self-appointed, pale-faced overlord, was rising like the tide everywhere: in India and in Africa and many other places; against the British and the French and the Germans; against the Belgians and the Portuguese; and, in their own corners of the Far East, against the Dutch. In Eastern Europe against the Austrians.
    In February 1914, Pierre was recalled and permitted a short leave before being reassigned. He stepped off the train, thin and yellow-eyed with tropical fevers, and she and Claire took him home in a horse-drawn carriage and put him straight to bed. Dr. Menasse examined his blood and in it found microscopic creatures, self-propelling forms of life, he said, that he did not recognize. He sent a report to the Ministry of Health in Paris, and their colonial office sent vials of a drug to be injected into Pierre’s veins.
    At first he got worse, then he got better. By then the Austrian archduke and his wife had been shot dead and all the Balkans were in turmoil. The papers were full ofspeculation and fearful predictions. Juliette said that war was coming, anyone could feel that. She said she was old enough to remember 1870. Every generation had its own war, but perhaps hers had two. Perhaps not, said Hélène. Perhaps the politicians had learned from the last one. But Juliette only shook her head and turned away.
    In those days Hélène was torn in several directions at once: having Pierre in the house was new and mostly wonderful, but she also had a factory to run and orders for pianos to fill. Her workers depended on her.
    The electrification of the plant had been undertaken, but because a Molnar piano was in every single stage still made by hand, the increase in production efficiency was less than she’d hoped. Monsieur Bendix Raoul had predicted as much, when she’d first consulted him; now, rather than remind her of that, he said that with the transmission belts gone the factory was much safer, and the power was good and constant whether the water in the river ran high or low.
    Less than a month later, war did break out.
    It happened on a day when she was in the cork room voicing a piano for a St. Petersburg dealer, struggling with the subtlety of a triple string, closing her eyes and cocking her head to the sounds with absolute concentration, striking the key again and again, and then making the tiniest shifts of the pins – tiny, tiny nudges, hardly any movement at all. This, while all over the country and all over Europe newspaper presses fell silent and a new headline was inserted or a special edition set. That evening she read it in
Le Figaro
.
    Pierre received his orders, and he was pleased about them. He tried not to show it, but she could tell. Honourable action for a soldier at home, he said to her. A known enemy who would fight in the open, not by night and with booby traps. But no serious threat for the French army, he assured her. Such discipline and excellent training and leadership. It would be over soon. Perhaps not by Christmas as the newspapers were saying, but certainly by spring.
    There was time for a short holiday before he had to report for duty, and they travelled by train to the Belgian town of Oostende and stayed at a resort hotel. They walked the beach at low tide and they swung Claire between them and watched her do cartwheels. She was so much in love with her little family, the three of them so fortunate, with a fine protective light around them. They rented a beach boat on wheels, and they skimmed along with the wind filling the sail and wet sand arching high in their wake. At night in the hotel she and Pierre had a room to themselves, and they made love to sweet