by E.C. Traganas
Prague 1968
She sat deep in thought, her eyes darting first from one corner of the room to the next, finally resting on the cast iron stove burning faintly in a forlorn alcove of the frigid old classroom. People’s School of Arts read the fading stenciled lettering on the cracked and blackened bucket nearby filled with scrappy bits of tinder. Remember, Lutka, always be respectful of him, her father once warned coming home late one night a little unsteady on his feet. He knows people. Try not to call attention to yourself. In an agony of trepidation, she looked up at the imposing face glaring down at her: two heavy grooves were framing the horizontal bar that formed the man’s stern fixed mouth like immovable iron window brackets. A pair of dark eyes was rankling like glowing pebbles behind thick myopic spectacles. For a second, her eyes flitted on the sparse bushy patch that formed the last vestige of thinning hair on the man’s now bald scalp and then looked away as if they had committed an unforgivable breach of etiquette. She could no longer tergiversate. The next word that spilled out of her mouth would likely be the most important word of her life to that point. Words have consequences, her father counseled. Be careful what you say. He could break us. Her mind went blank. The man towering above her would brook no vacillation.
“Well?”
She looked awkwardly into his grim eyes and heard herself say, “millipede.”
A muted hush rustled throughout the schoolroom strangling Lutka’s slim resolve. She looked up from her seat at the baby grand piano and let her glance fall on the oppressive powder-blue walls of the room. She could feel the frightened stares of her classmates boring into her like hot cinders and felt the relentless pounding of her heart choking her with every breath. Professor Rezník looked down at her timid frame, snorted, then walked away and began to pace the room impatiently.
“What did you say?” he hissed under his breath addressing no one in particular.
“Sir? I…I said millipede—”
“Wrong!” Professor Rezník barked, cracking his baton on the nearest wooden desk.
“—I meant, centipede…” Lutka tried in vain to suppress the frivolous image of a cartoon she had once seen featuring the long-legged insect sporting dozens of tiny boots slinking in and out, dancing in comical march step, and quickly swallowed her voice in embarrassment.
“Wrong, wrong, wrong,” the professor said twisting his mouth with sneering contempt. “Wrong arthropod! Imagine what historians would have thought if his students claimed he played like a…centipede! Pah, stupid girl! No, by common knowledge it was said by all who saw him perform that Chopin’s hands stretched and glided across the keys like a—”
“Like a spider!” piped a boyish voice from the back of the room.
“Precisely, like a spider. Bravo—thank you, lad,” nodded the professor to the beaming student. The brown-nosed teacher’s pet was Professor Rezník’s own young son, but no one dared point out the boy’s unfair advantage. The schoolmaster’s tentacles held the community in thrall and a policy of passivity was in everyone’s best interest. “Now, Lutka, play the Chopin waltz for us.”
The girl sat helplessly staring at the keyboard, mesmerized by the long slanting rays of the paling afternoon sun forming angular patterns on the linoleum floor, and for a brief moment envisioned the hot cocoa and plum-filled knedle dumplings dusted with breadcrumbs and sugar her mother would have waiting for her at her cozy kitchen table. She lifted her hands clumsily, consciously trying to control the nervous twitching in her wrists. The old Petrof piano was impossibly beyond repair, but over the years the students had been castigated for their ingratitude towards the state’s generous provisions for their general edification and were by now conditioned to accept it for what it was and to just make do. Lutka took one wistful look out the softly curtained window framing the alluring hilly vista stretching just beyond her reach, and wished longingly for the boldness to jump from her seat and run away. Always remember, her father would say, spring is just around the corner. We’ll see better days…
“Stop dawdling, child!” snapped the professor. The girl was jolted to attention like a marionette hoisted by invisible threads, took several deep breaths matching the tempo of the piece and plunged headlong into a tentative string of pearly trills. Every few notes her thumb would thunk on the one broken key where the ivory had fallen off and get trapped on its wooden groove.
“Stop!” commanded Professor Rezník gruffly, holding up his hand like a traffic monitor while checking his stopwatch. “Too long, too labored—this is the Minute Waltz you know, my dear,” spurring the class to erupt in muffled tittering. “Silence!” he brayed.
Lutka lingered at the piano, paralyzed with humiliation while struggling to hold back the floodgate of acrid tears welling up and blurring her vision. Terrible, terrible, she thought she imagined the professor tsking to himself. She felt her estranged peers gaping at her accusingly, their eyes saying shame on you. “I…I,” she found herself stuttering, her mouth suddenly immobilized. “Sir, I did my best…” she wanted to say when the scene was brutally interrupted by the shrill alarm bell clanging an end to the day’s lesson.
“You’re a loafer. Don’t flunk the course,” Professor Rezník warned, locking eyes with her in a predatory leer. “Words do have consequences, you know. You owe it to your pledge, to work hard, to devote all your strength to the cause…”
Lutka curtsied mechanically, gathered her books and sweater brushing past the censorious whispers of her classmates, and ran outside into the cocoa-colored twilight with the swiftness of a hundred pairs of booted limbs marching in formation towards a long-awaited spring.
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