When the children were gone, Anabin remained seated before the piano. The day was warm and the room was sunny and he had no particular place he was required to be.
He lifted the piano lid and began to pick out, with one finger, a song. There were so many songs. This one, like many others, had been forgotten. He played it, fairly certain as he did so that he was unintentionally remaking it. And so, the song he was playing, could it even be said to be the same song? There were only one or two besides Anabin who would have the knowledge to correct him where he substituted one note for another. It was not a song that had been meant for a piano.
There had been words as well as a melody. He did not sing the lyrics, though those he remembered.
It had been a song meant to summon a lover. Anabin played all the way through and then began it again. No one else was in the room. No one came into the room as he picked out the melody, meandering, cajoling, never resolving. There was only Anabin and the piano and the window where the broken glass was beginning to fit itself together again.
Well. If someone wouldn’t come for the sake of a song, there were other ways. Anabin deliberately played a wrong note. Then another.
No one came into the room. The door was shut and remained so. But now someone stood behind Anabin. He felt them there. He felt their terrible agony as if it were his own, but he disregarded it. He played the wrong note again, and now a white hand came down on his own, fingers on top of his own fingers. Dirt and grime beneath those fingernails, as if Bogomil had never heard of baths. Anabin waited until he felt Bogomil’s index finger exert the faintest of pressure on his own index finger. In this way they finished the song.
Bogomil’s hand moved from Anabin’s. Now it rested on Anabin’s shoulder so lightly it might not have been there at all.
“I know what you hope for,” Anabin said. “What you still hope for. But it would not be right for you to have it. And I do not want it.”
When he turned around, Bogomil was no longer there.