Music Boxes [1]
Peter Bichsel [2]
Translated by xia23
Once she said: “I want a piano”, and OK he knew that soon a black monster would be standing in the room. He said: “No, I’m not buying a piano.”
She cried.
“I don’t want a piano”, he said and went to his music boxes.
They were locked in the secret drawer of his desk. No one knew about them. No one knew that he always carried one with him, one made of dark wood with carved edelweiss [3]. No one heard them, music boxes are quiet and when he played them he would carefully wrap the big fairground organ [4] with cloth. They stood in the cellar.
She had wanted a piano and he bought a piano. He could have been able to buy her a fairground organ, but he would have betrayed himself away, she would have cried, she would have stopped greeting him, perhaps she would have gotten up at night and would have destroyed his alarm clock to annoy him. Surely, she would have broken his secret drawer.
She had learned in school that music boxes are kitschy. English people buy music boxes, they had told her. Since they learn that in school, he had the secret drawer for everything which they learn in school.
Now she played the piano and she said: “I know you love music.” And he listened to her play and thought, how is the music boxes compared to a piano.
“I don’t want you to play the piano”, he should have said that and worried that he could forget his music boxes, he could lose the key to his desk, someone could break his secret drawer. Perhaps he should have told her about that, but she would have understood too quickly and she would have said that she knew that he loves music.
And he dared to play his music boxes less and less often, he sat in the room, listened to her, saw the piano and her clumsy fingers and in the evening she hugged him and said: “I know you love music.”
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[1]. p. 24. Musikdosen. Eigentlich möchte Frau Blum den Milchmann kennenlernen. Suhrkamp Verlag Frankfurt am Main, Walter-Verlag AG, Germany. 1996.
Music box: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_box
A small wooden box with a handle, when you use the handle to crank a cylinder, teeth on the cylinder hits different pins to make a music song.
[2]. Peter Bichsel. 3/24/1935 - . Swiss writer and journalist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Bichsel
[3]. Edelweiss. A plant, growing high in the Alps, and having leaves covered with whitish down and small flowers surrounded by primarily conspicuous whitish bracts. The American Heritage Dictionary. Second College Ed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leontopodium_nivale
[4]. Fairground organ. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairground_organ
