The Old Piano

****

The Parfenov family was lucky to buy an apartment in an old building in a lane near the Arbat. It was being sold by an old woman who looked over a hundred years old—her face resembled a brown tree fungus, she was barely taller than a writing desk, and the joints on her fingers were so deformed that her hands looked like the dry branches of an old tree.

Apartments in that area are worth their weight in gold, but the old woman was asking little—she understood she was unlikely to spend it all, had no heirs, and wanted to get the money quickly and, at last, “live” like a human being.

A rare stroke of luck, incredible. Usually, old ladies like that are watched by predatory agents or taken in by scammers of all kinds, of which Moscow is full. But this one had somehow remained free. She made it to a newspaper’s ad office, dictated the text to a secretary, and that same evening the Parfenovs called her.

It was Mrs. Parfenova who insisted they “give it a try.” Mr. Parfenov didn’t believe in miracles (especially in the Moscow real estate market) and suspected he’d be dragged into some scheme. But the old woman’s documents were checked by an agent and a lawyer—everything turned out to be clean. And the deal went through.

The old woman moved in with a friend in a new building in Butovo. They were both lonely and planned to indulge together in simple hedonism—buy expensive food, take taxis to the theater, and spend the summer at a lakeside boarding house on Lake Senezh. She told all this to the Parfenovs herself while the lawyer read through the contract one last time.

The old woman was in such a hurry to move into her new life that she left half her belongings behind.

The apartment was small—two rooms—but with high ceilings, wide windowsills, and respectable neighbors. The Parfenovs decided not to renovate—it had “atmosphere,” and they liked that. They didn’t even change the wallpaper—though on one wall there was a large, rust-like stain. The couple decided to cover it with an antique piano, also left by the former owner. They kept the curtains too—plush, dark burgundy. Probably impractical—such fabric collects dust—but Mrs. Parfenova flatly refused to replace the plush with blinds. She was from a small Volga town, had settled in Moscow not long ago, and married almost immediately, quite successfully as she saw it.

Everything was new and delightful to her—crowds, traffic jams, the atmosphere of a perpetual fair and carnival. “Like in a theater,” she whispered, stroking the lavender-scented fabric, and Mr. Parfenov, touched by her simple enthusiasm, agreed to leave everything as it was.

The old woman’s dresser stayed, and the oak bed, and the chest, and even the things inside it. Mrs. Parfenova couldn’t bring herself to throw away all those half-rotten lace pieces, crushed hats, and crystal beads.

There was something magical in it all—sometimes in the evenings the new mistress would open the chest, sort through the “treasures,” and become a girl waiting for a miracle, even though, firstly, she was well into her forties, and secondly, back in her hometown she had worked as the manager of a vegetable warehouse, swore like a dockworker, and was generally known as a woman without sentimentality.

The old woman’s things grew dear to the Parfenovs, but they couldn’t get rid of her smell. They aired out the apartment all day, bought expensive air fresheners, sachets of dried herbs, aromatic candles. Sometimes it seemed they had won and the house had acquired a familiar, cozy scent—of sauerkraut, borscht, and Mrs. Parfenova’s jasmine eau de toilette. But every night they had to admit again: nothing had worked. For some reason, at night the apartment smelled completely different. As if the Parfenovs had nothing to do with it at all.

It smelled of damp wood, a little mold, a little rose water, a little lavender. The old woman loved lavender—Mrs. Parfenova had noticed during the general cleaning. Dried sprigs and buds were everywhere, and she threw them all out.

“You know,” Mrs. Parfenova whispered one night, “you’ll think I’m crazy… but I think my pillow smells like her hair.”

“What nonsense,” sighed Mr. Parfenov, irritated that she hadn’t let him throw out the junk and replace it with cheerful IKEA plastic and was now complaining. “First of all, both the pillow and the pillowcase are ours. Second, how do you even know what her hair smelled like? I’ve already forgotten her face.”

Mr. Parfenov lied. In fact, he remembered the old woman’s strange face in every detail—she had appeared in his dream the night before.

It was a terrible dream—he woke from unbearable thirst, his throat dry, mouth like a desert, tongue like sandpaper. He wanted to get up and go to the kitchen for mineral water, but he couldn’t move a hand or a foot, as if paralyzed. It was hard to breathe, as though someone was sitting on his chest, choking him.

He lay there silently, staring at the outline of the antique chandelier, thinking—it must be a stroke, how awful, I’m only forty-two. And only when he suddenly saw the old woman leaning over him did he realize—it’s just a dream. And he immediately felt relieved.

Mr. Parfenov wasn’t a timid man. Since youth he’d been into whitewater rafting, had navigated class-five rapids, conquered the rivers of the Caucasus and Altai, and wasn’t afraid of ghosts. People were scarier, he had always thought. But the old woman leaning over him was not human—this thought came suddenly and didn’t fit his worldview. He suddenly felt more frightened than ever in his life. As if someone had clenched his guts with an icy hand.

No, the old woman didn’t look like a horror movie monster—no white eyes, no dried blood in her hair. No sticky drool hanging from the corner of her gray, shriveled lips. But still, he looked at her and immediately understood—undead. Maybe it was the gaze—empty, like a dead fish’s. And the pupils narrow and motionless despite the dim light.

He lay there frozen with fear, and the old woman just stood over him, as if examining him. Then suddenly the alarm clock rang, Parfenov jolted upright in bed, rubbed his eyes energetically, and discovered there was no dimness and certainly no dead old woman around. It was already morning, pancakes smelled from the kitchen, his wife was humming some pop tune.

His heart pounded, he drank three glasses of water in one go, ate pancakes, and calmed down. By noon the illusion had faded.

“It’s all nonsense,” he told his wife. “If you want, we’ll move to a hotel for a couple of weeks. We’ll hire workers and have everything changed here. The apartment will be like new.”

“I don’t know…” she sighed. “It’s kind of a pity… I’ve gotten used to it… The chest… And the piano.”

“Then stop torturing me, I have to get up at seven!” he barked, turning to the wall.

Mrs. Parfenova couldn’t sleep. In her ears played music that didn’t exist in reality, quiet and beautiful. As if someone were playing the piano. She rubbed her ears hard with her palms, then sat up in bed, then got up and went to the window, looked down at the empty, dark yard. The music didn’t go away, kept playing in her head.

“I shouldn’t read before bed, my brain doesn’t have time to switch to sleep and starts acting up,” she decided.

For some reason she wanted to go to the other room and look at the piano. A draft of cold air came from the corridor—probably her husband had forgotten to close the balcony door again. She walked on tiptoe, holding her breath, as if afraid—either to disturb someone or to announce her presence. She felt simultaneously like a horror movie heroine and an impressionable idiot.

Mr. Parfenov was having a pleasant dream about a beach, warm sea, and white ships when suddenly a piercing animal scream burst into his mind like a Scythian invader. He jumped up in bed, nearly vomiting his own heart from fear. His wife wasn’t beside him. He jumped up and ran into the living room. Mrs. Parfenova sat on the floor, her face pale, lips trembling.

“What the hell…” he began, but she pointed with a shaking hand at the old piano.

“There’s blood under it, blood! I slipped on it… A whole puddle of blood, a huge puddle… My slippers are covered in blood.”

At that moment she looked insane. Mr. Parfenov turned on the light. Of course there was no blood on the floor. He went up to his wife and slapped her hard—he’d read somewhere that this calms hysterics. She fell silent and stopped shaking. Looked at him with an empty gaze and quietly said:

“I know you think I’ve gone mad… But it was there. I swear, there was blood.”

“You just dreamed it… Let’s go to bed.”

It was so hard for him not to be angry with her, but he managed. Even pretended sympathy. Put an arm around her shoulders, helped her up, led her to the bedroom.

She hung on his arm, pressed her nose into his shoulder, walked by touch. “Stupid woman,” he thought gloomily.

At the bedroom threshold Mr. Parfenov stopped. The familiar feeling of terror clenched his heart with an icy hand. He barely held back a scream. He knew if he screamed, his wife would truly go insane and never recover.

There was someone in the bed.

Someone lay in their bed, curled up and turned toward the wall.

Gray hair was scattered across the pillow.

Mr. Parfenov reached for the switch like a gun. He hit it with his fist, and the room flooded with orange electric light.

It was nothing.

Of course it was nothing.

No old woman, an empty, cooled bed. But sleep was gone for good.

Until morning the couple didn’t sleep. They sat silently in the kitchen, drank tea with chocolate, and were afraid to look at each other. Mr. Parfenov suddenly thought he should get a divorce. This woman had never become truly close to him. They hadn’t achieved that magical warmth that ideally comes after passion. There had been passion, yes. But it had been replaced by emptiness—emptiness and habit.

Mrs. Parfenova sat opposite and somehow understood what he was thinking. Strangely, it didn’t sadden her. She suddenly remembered how the day before she had been walking along the Arbat and stopped near a street musician, a saxophonist. She stopped not because she wanted to listen, but because he looked at her in a way… the way men don’t usually look at women like Mrs. Parfenova, but at girls from Wonderbra ads. And she had looked at him the same way. They stood like that for a while, facing each other, and then she got embarrassed, dropped a hundred-ruble note into his saxophone case, and hurried away. Then she spent the whole evening rereading *Madame Bovary*, in that kind of mood.

If her husband left, it wouldn’t be the end of the world. After all, they lived in Moscow, not in some Chukotka village, and Moscow was full of men of every taste. The only problem was how to divide the apartment.

When dawn fully broke, they calmed down a little and even had a fairly peaceful breakfast of pancakes. They were finishing their tea when the doorbell rang.

A stranger stood at the door.

“And who are you?” she asked the Parfenovs.

“We live here. Who are you?” Mr. Parfenov snapped.

“Yes, the neighbors called me… said some people moved in… But this must be some kind of misunderstanding. This is my apartment.”

“Lady, have you lost your mind?” Mrs. Parfenova advanced on her, chest thrust forward. “We bought this apartment, we have the documents! A lawyer checked them!”

“Documents…” The woman looked more confused than aggressive. “Very strange… My mother lived here… Evgenia Petrovna Miller. She was murdered a month ago.”

“Murdered?” Mr. Parfenov’s lips went dry.

He looked at the woman and didn’t understand why he didn’t just slam the door in her face. But he couldn’t. Something stopped him.

“Yes, it’s terrible,” she sighed. “My mom was a musician, played in an orchestra… After she retired, she started teaching. She had a piano here, students came to her all the time… One of them… shot her.” The last words were hard for her to say. “There’s a stain on the wall… He probably thought that if she lived in a nice building, she must have money.”

“Shot her…” Mrs. Parfenova whispered.

“Yes… In the living room… There was blood all over the floor… By eighty my mom had become very hunched, a tiny little old lady… It’s strange there was so much blood in her… And then I tried to live here… but couldn’t… I kept feeling like she was here, nearby… Not in a good way,” the woman laughed nervously, “not the way people feel the presence of a beloved deceased person…”

“She played the piano,” Mrs. Parfenova said gloomily. “And you smelled her scent.”

“Yes,” the woman agreed in surprise. “And I started having nightmares. I went back to my own place… Then the neighbors called and said some people were living in our apartment. So I came to check myself. You say you have papers?”

The Parfenovs looked at each other.

“We need to call the lawyer,” Mr. Parfenov said without emotion.

“Yes… He can also prepare the divorce papers,” Mrs. Parfenova replied just as impassively.

She still smelled lavender, faint and bitter, and in her ears sounded unfamiliar music, as if someone were lazily running their fingers over the keys of an old piano.