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Hermann practices the piano for his father, it’s expected of him, but he plays the piano for his mother.
Once a week his mother always meets with him in the study to listen to him play, it's their silent agreement. She goes to an arm chair and pretends to read a book. Hermann hovers his shaking hands over the keys of the piano. His fingers warm from the sunlight gently breaking through the window. He closes his eyes and inhales deeply. He lets the numbers in rhythm swirl in his mind. He sees the patterns in the measures, and feels the pulse of the work in his chest. It feels so similar to academia. Whatever mathematical concepts he can visualize, he can always put to paper, always able to express it. But where he excels at pencil to paper, he fails at fingers to keys.
His hands, the ones that are capable of lengthy formulas cannot translate the simplest of musical lines to its true beauty. His playing is always too fast, too aggressive, too short and loud, and this time is no exception. His passion cannot decipher the music he feels inside. It feels like a lie. Tears well up in frustration. He turns to look at his mother; sure she is disappointed like his father would be. But where a scowl is expected, instead only a soft, warm, and understanding smile is present.
Raising his head and chest, he continues. He presses on. There was more than himself to consider. He knew it was absurd, he knew he failed too often to really make an impact on his mother. He saw how the recordings of skilled musicians would lift her up. He knew she used to play herself, but had stopped for reasons he would never discover. But he had a lingering hope. If he could solve the mystery of how to play beautiful music, like he could unlock the secrets of efficiency of mathematics, maybe he can cast a light onto the darkness that haunted his mother. The shadow that made her lock herself away in her bedroom for days at a time. Perhaps she would play again as well. Maybe he can even stop the disappointment and harsh words that spill from his father that are directed at both his siblings and his mother. Maybe he could somehow fix all this, fix himself, if he could allow his body to become the vessel of musical poetry.
No matter how little he grasps in the performance of music, she always encourages him. No matter how much weight she lost, or how foggy her eyes would become, her smile was always sincere. It would slowly pour into his heart like a warm honey, filling the cracks and ache in his chest. She would smile when he became frustrated with the piano, she would smile when he looked back in embarrassment from spotting an error in his calculations, she would smile when he asked for his hair to be cut short, she smiled when he wanted to sit from the ache in his leg instead of playing outside with his siblings, she smiled when he asked for the boys uniform for his school instead of the assigned girls uniform, she smiled when she soothed the cuts and bruises from his school mates beating him, and she smiled when he cried silently, curled next to her. He felt that with her smile, she always understood, even if she hadn’t known that her little girl would one day grow into the man he always was.
So every time he presses fingers to key, no matter the sound, he always thinks of her warmth.
***
It’s nearly three decades later. Over the years he had discovered that he proved more capable at writing music than playing it. Hermann was pleased that pencil and paper have yet to fail him in that respect, but his musical activities had died with his mother. Now his life’s work has also drawn to a close along with the collapse of the breach. They had done it, he and Newton, together.
As he wandered into the empty lab, escaping from the noise of the ending of the war, Hermann does not find himself drawn to his chalkboards. Instead, he is traces his fingers over the worn keys of Newton’s old upright piano, the wooden base splintering from countless moves. He, along with the small piano stool, groan as he eases unto it. After hooking his cane over the wooden edge, his hands hover over the keys. They do not shake, and instead are splayed out over the chords in anticipation. As he presses down, he feels a release.
The warmth inside, one he did not know was still there, spills out. Beautiful vibrations echo through the empty lab. It bounces off the walls and reverberates in his torso, filling it. There is an instinct that is his, but not his own. The awkward child is not present, but the sure hands of musician. (A musical genius!) an enthusiastic whisper tells him in the back of his mind. He closes his eyes and allows his hands to wander over the keys, his mind swirls with the music he had written long ago. The rhythm, measures, and patterns are tinged with sparks of blue.
In this trance, his mind rolls over warm moments in his life, he feels like he’s drifting. He thinks of his first published paper in his teens, the first letter he received from Newton, when he wore his first binder, when he moved into his first apartment alone, the last time his mother embraced him in a hug, his drinking nights with the Kaidanvosky’s, Vanessa’s first sonogram… It all blurs and spills onto the keys below him.
Hermann senses, feels him, before he sees him.
Newton sits down next to Hermann on the small stool. Hermann stops playing, the lab having an unfamiliar silence. He looks up, raising his eyebrows, but Hermann cannot find the usually challenge he initiates with Newton. Instead Newton gives him a lopsided smile, and proceeds to flourish his hands with an overdramatic crack of his knuckles. Gently, Newton places his hands on the keys and looks at Hermann expectantly. Hermann gazes down at their hands, sharing the small space together with no line separating them. They press down on the keys together.
They flow into each other’s notes, it’s seamless. The music stretches out, and the warmth extends from their bodies and reaches every empty and cold corner of their lab. The time passes and expands without tracking. For every chaotic argument that had broken the space apart in their scientific partnership, is now filled with their passion within this musical harmony. It dawns on Hermann that they are playing a duet he had written years ago, in hopes of his mother playing with him. As his heart continues to overflow with warmth, he thinks that perhaps it had always been meant for Newton.