the piano player

Passing by the grand houses on the cobbled streets the man in rags looked in the windows. It was Christmas and he saw Christmas scenes; of fir trees and bobbles, boxes with bows, fat geese encircled by steaming vegetables, carried by servants. The fathers sat sharpening knives at long tables. The children held hands singing songs. The dogs slept by open log fires making their applause of crackling wood.
The shabby man pulled his coat closer around him and hurried on, vanishing behind a curtain of fast falling snow.
The first day of spring was the first time he dragged the old upright piano out from his little cold rooms to a corner of the park. He sat down and began to play.
The people walking by stopped. Frozen like photographs they stood listening, completely unaware of anything else.
Others heard the string of notes drifting like the smell from a bakery, turned their ears and wandered into the park and were also transfixed.
The man with his clothes falling off him like the skin of a snake sat playing the most beautiful music, tapping his worn shoes gently under the shade of a blossoming tree.
By the evening he was the talk of the entire town, and lay stuffed like a food parcel in one of fifteen bedrooms offered to him for the night –in fact he never slept in his cold little rooms again.
The summer was warm and lazy and the town sat rapturous about him in their fold-away chairs, under their sun shades and hats, day after day; forgetting their work, listening to those marvellous notes glittering like the sun in the leaves.
Then a painter did the pianist's portrait and quite strangely the crowd split in two. Half sat listening to the piano and half stood on their toes to see the canvas which was in its own way as marvellous as the music.
Someone jotted down a poem and the crowd was split yet again. It was the best poem anyone there had ever heard.
By the end of the week, an architect sat scribbling plans; a woman stood with a chisel at a block; a child recited his favourite play; a man sang, a woman danced, someone had a fiddle, someone cut material, fashioning a coat. The crowd split and split again until everyone was doing something. No one was watching; everyone was busy.
On the last day of summer, clouds came over the sun and the piano player stood up, clapped his hands and begged the crowds attention. He told them he had to go.
There was outrage; people sobbed like mourners. They agreed the man who had brought them all this could not leave them now. He had to play for them in the park, now and forever.
He told them he was very sorry but he really did have to leave.
But they shook their heads and they chained him to the piano and kept him under guard day and night. Without any choice he continued to play and everyone carried on with what they were doing, on into the Autumn.
And all this time they were getting thinner; they didn't sleep; they didn't work; they lived only to create. And they were, all of them, becoming ill.
One night there was a great fire throughout the town, but all anyone did was paint marvellous pictures of it or write poems for those dying in the fire or compose melodies of sadness to the high distant screams across the town.
"I shall play you one last piece," said the man sadly on the first day of winter, now naked at the piano; all his rags had long since fallen off. He sat in the cold sunlight, gleaming like a wet pebble, and he took a look around the park, at all the eyes looking back at him.
After the last note, he fell off his stool and lay dead on the ground.
And as soon as his heart stopped and his breath slid out with the sound of a rusty sword pulled from a scabbard, the people looked at what they were doing. They looked at their paintings, their poems and their statues and their songs. And they felt embarrassed and foolish.
They built a great fire, and they burnt everything they had created.
They hurried quickly back to their lives, to their work, to sleep, and began rebuilding the town.
Years later they all laughed guardedly about that summer, and to show they had no hard feelings they put up a poor shabby statue of the dead piano player in the corner of the park. They brought their children to see it and they told them that if they didn't work hard they would all end up just like him.