Sonata
The noise the piano keys made was not ugly, although a man had just fallen dead across them. Indeed, I found that black and orange jangle of notes the noblest utterance the instrument had made all night, coming as it did at the end of some trifling baroque minuet whose name neither the dead maestro nor the audience cared to recall.
The concert hall was reduced to silence. The only sound (if it can be called sound) came from the mirror-like blackness of the Steinway itself, which, in its repose, seemed to zing with a kind of heartless perfection. It was inside that same blackness that, moments ago, I’d been watching the reflection of the pianist. The Maestro. He was like an oversized, top-hatted face on an old vaudeville poster, hypnotizing me, beckoning me forward until my cold forehead touched the cold piano lid…
Me.
It was I who had died. The fact momentarily eluded me, because, like most people, I am unfamiliar with the back of my own head. Seeing my cranium there, cheek squashed awkwardly by D sharp, I almost heard myself say, “that’s fine, thank you,” to the barber’s mirror. But it was unarguable. My body was a corpse.
Then the stage creaked, in that lonely, limelight way that only stages can. Unremarked by the frozen hundreds in the audience, someone was coming towards me. A sturdy man with a loafing gait and an unashamed limp; he wore a coloured plastic anorak and a coloured plastic gilet. When he walked, he rustled like a shopping bag.
“Hey, man,” he said. “You’re dead and shit.” He scratched his knee through a tear in his jeans.
“Who are you?” I asked. I wasn’t afraid. Once you detach the emotions from time and the onrush of constant panicking futurity, the more excitable ones just glaze over and give up, it seems; like retired admirals. “Are you Death?”
“Nah, man,” said the plastic apparition. “I’m a street artist. You know: graffiti?” He thumbed a ragged, pierced and re-pierced ear. “They call me Hall. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”
“No,” I said. I was a little annoyed that the powers of Hades had sent me someone so clearly lacking seniority. “Isn’t Hall a bit of an everyday name for a cosmic being?”
“It’s pronounced Hell,” he said.
“You just pronounced it ‘Hall’.”
“Ain’t no use being a ponce now, alright? It’s death, we’re all equal here. Well, not equal. But equal dead.”
He stretched out a hand. For the first time, he became truly sepulchral, truly mythic. I drew back.
“Time to go,” he said.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “To the afterlife?”
“It’s much worse than that.”
***
I took the man’s callused hand, and the concert hall vanished. It wasn’t that we ourselves whooshed away; rather, the ranks of curtains and fauteuils curled up and parted like mere mist, as if the light of some truer morning had dispelled a dream.
Without moving, and yet with inexpressible distances moving around us, I found myself standing on a sward of emerald green. On every side rose stone walls of a most tranquil and discreet grey. They were spaced with antique turrets, and in front of me I saw a lonely gatehouse, opening onto what I at first took for a tunnel. But when I looked closer, I saw it was a deep series of stone portals, one after the other, about seven in number.
We were profoundly alone.
“Is this the afterlife?” I asked Hall.
“This both is, and is not, the afterlife.”
“That sounds like something someone from the afterlife would say.”
The light, though solid enough, was somehow melancholy, like a clouded day following after heatwaves and storms: a day of injured truce.
“Listen,” said Hall, “I’ll tell you what the Gaffer told me.”
“What gaffer?”
“The old Gaffer. The bloke what was here before me. ‘This, O soul bereft,’ he told me, ‘is the Castle of the Noble Pagans, and here, before the uttermost eternity, thou enterest upon thy final choice. Choose well.’ Then he buggered off.”
Hall told the story in the manner of a street mural, layering one thought over another, interrupting and arguing with himself from six directions. But from what I understood, in the last phase of his life, he’d pursued his artistic calling from Walsall, which had buses, to Manchester, which had trams, and, being unused to the transverse symmetry of the latter, had been spray-painting what he thought was the back, when it obnoxiously became the front and ran him over. Whereupon the Gaffer had conducted or otherwise conveyed him to this serene Castle, explained his solemn task or choice, objected to the use of conversational profanity and then sodded or otherwise buggered off.
The gravamen was that he, I and the departed Gaffer (from the sound of him, some Victorian minor poet or philosopher) represented the universe’s last remaining noble pagans. And this place was not the “uttermost eternity” but some sort of final terminus of timebound Life, with multiple possible exits, and that, if we wished to go on to the very End, we had some last terrible work to perform.
“I’m not sure I should be here,” I said.
I didn’t like the sound of any task. I’d always hoped that death would grant some rest from being oneself. And one is always so much oneself during tasks, straining against limits and well-defined boundaries. At rest, one can almost pretend to be infinite.
“I’m not sure I can be called a pagan. I’ve always regarded myself as a humanist.”
“Forget how you ‘regard’ yourself,” said Hall. “Humanists, Rastas, nihilists—it’s not your laptop decals, it’s the truth you lived by. And there ain’t but three of those. There’s your folk who think there’s something desperate disappointing about everything humans do, and our own best thoughts are part of it; but there’s some help from outside can fix it for us. That’s your ‘Messianics’. Then you’ve got them as think the same, except there ain’t much fixing on the way. That’s us Pagans. Last, you’ve got the ones who think we don’t need fixing, or can fix ourselves, and that’s, in my opinion, your Daft Clarnets. They love to hear me tell them they’re daft; they buy my tat and call me ‘urgent’ in the glossy weeklies; but they stay daft.”
Unsure whether I followed, or perhaps afraid that I followed too well, I asked him,
“Grant that I’m a pagan: what about this solemn task?”
“That’s how you get out of here. Or choose not to.” He pointed towards the sevenfold gate. “It’s all about what’s through there.”
I could no longer delay looking at the gate. The walls, as I tiptoed towards it, were daubed with Hall’s artwork. The blocky colours and the bulging letters belched outward from the aperture like a violating jungle. As I got closer, the letters stopped being English. They twisted themselves into some proto-alphabetic, proto-semitic form.
“Remember I said, ‘you’re dead and shit?’” called Hall. “Well, this is the shit.”
I passed by a polished grand piano, standing among the dainty flowers of the lawn. It had no maker’s mark. I decided to ignore that problem for now.
The portcullis, when I reached it, was burst open from outside, as if by some gigantic strength. Only the edges remained, like broken cobwebs after a dusting. Across the remaining space was the only clearly human-made structure in that whole castle: a shoddy barrier of bare wood, with a shuttered peephole through it.
I knew I couldn’t turn back now. Through the cracks in the door, I could see only vague hints: something like a black sky beyond, with a glow as of approaching dawn. I hated to, but I opened the shutter over the hole.
What follows is perhaps the most important part of my account, yet I can say nothing about it. I can only offer this: I know, now, that the universe is balanced.
I mean that when a happy dog jumps up on his frail old owner and breaks her neck, then tries to lick her awake, alone in the house until he starves; when a young mother-to-be, not knowing she has a weak cervix, trips on her own slippers in the kitchen—splat—and laughs at herself, telling friends on the phone, “I had such a silly fright today!’’; and later the blood comes and she knows she is only a mother-that-was (this happened to my daughter Svetlana): when these things happen, there is a Something, sitting on the other end of the scale, balancing them so that they seem, somehow (appallingly), fair. And somehow (appallingly), better than fair.
This Something, I now saw. I closed the window and turned the handle neatly.
“What must I do?” I said. There was no getting emotional about it. What can the emotions possibly respond to that?
“Apparently, we have to do what the Castle grandgaffer Virgil did, thenadays,” said Hall, no relish in his voice. “With Dante.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell it how it is. That’s what he told me. ‘Communicate it successfully,’ were his words.”
There was only one possible answer to a thing like that.
“Merde.”
***
I found myself walking down a warm and curving street which, by the overgrown overhead railway and the overgrown Metro lettering, I took for my familiar, this-worldly Paris. How we got there I never knew.
Hall was heading somewhere with purpose, and an interior squirming told me that the purpose was going to be mine.
“You always talk in Russian,” he said.
“I do?”
“That’s yampy. Weird, I mean.”
“I am Russian. My mother was from Odessa. I was a student of Sviatoslav Richter.”
“See? Weird.” Hall grabbed a newspaper from a streetside stand. The paper itself turned somehow ghostly, while a whiter, solider copy came away with Hall’s hand. It was like he’d snatched away the paper’s soul.
“Are you…‘Yuri Platonov, Russian pianist, who died of a stroke mid-performance at the Salle Gaveau?’”
“I suppose I am.”
“—‘a virtuoso whom Glenn Gould called “translunar”, his universally-conceded brilliance inseparably bound up with his inhuman coldness?’”
“I am not cold,” I replied (even though, with the clarity of death, I heard my voice crunch like a chewed ice cube). “A musician is only a clear glass, for others to shine through. Personality is an imperfection in the glass. I let the composer speak.”
We had arrived somewhere. By the very ordinariness of the deep cool doorway, I had a premonition of whose it was, and recoiled.
Hall was scouring at a graffito on the wall. Someone had painted the Girl with a Pearl Earring, but with inflated googly eyes.
“Look at this,” he complained, with real sadness. “Your canvas is the real world, and still you got to be fake.”
“Hall,” I said, “who exactly is this? Whom do I have to communicate it to?”
By ‘it’ I meant what, within myself, I had come to call the Glory.
“Do I look like your secretary? Go up and have a look.”
I went up the stairs. I groaned, panted and took breaks, partly out of embodied habit (I had no chest to ache with), partly to delay the moment.
The apartment doors were closed, but my spirit knew the right one. My ghost went through it like a gaze penetrating a dirty window.
There were bags of groceries balanced by the coat stand. A cheap black hat and cheap black coat hung on the peg. Had she been to my burial at Père Lachaise? Was this really her house?
To say “her house” is misleading, because it makes it sound like someone’s private, inner world—a place strewn with personality the way a compost bin is strewn with recent meals. On the contrary, it was nauseatingly bland and diffuse: sofas, curtains, carpets all a pillowy waste of flesh-tones between which not even the most pedantic catalogue could distinguish.
There was a vague, unmusical humming coming from the kitchen, and the slam of cupboard doors, just stocked with food. I recognized that humming, and that careless, rudely-alive banging. She hadn’t changed the kitchen, not even after she’d lost her baby in it.
My daughter entered the hall, and I fled.
***
At the Castle, the unmarked piano was waiting for me, smiling blackly, as if to say, “Back so soon?”
I collapsed on the stool. Even here, hounding me beyond my life, was the Maestro, reflected in the open key lid. I hated him. The Maestro was the soul of the piano’s perfection; the Maestro was the one my audiences clamoured for and never quite met; the Maestro was the one with whose gaze I was perpetually locked: that translunar, masterly one who knew what all music meant, and waited exquisitely for me to disappoint him. Go on. Tell her what you saw, he dared me.
Hall was nearby, stretching his stubby, plastic-clad arm up the wall. He was correcting, minutely, an impressionistic flash of an assault rifle, a picture made as if by the swipe of a newly-painted tiger’s tail.
“Is there no one else?” I asked. “No one else in the living world I can communicate it to?”
“…oo can communicate it to any daft turnip you like, my friend,” said Hall, compassionately. He had a bundle of five fine brushes in his mouth. “Her’s the only one that’ll get you out of here, though.”
My fingers felt weak and mindless, like wriggling maggots. The keys withstood them, refusing to depress.
“Who made that rule?” I asked.
Hall never turned from his own hopeless labour.
“You did, Yuri.”
***
Svetlana’s apartment was better by night. In the concealing glow of shaded bulbs, you could imagine something that wasn’t there. A personality.
In a triumph of mindless precision, she’d recreated almost exactly the plain Rostov apartment where I’d raised her and where, before that, my sister had raised me.
My sister had made an ugly mother. She worked at the cigarette factory and she treated our home as an extension of the same. Same smell, same personnel. She was that factory’s human ashtray; weary workmen extinguished their meagre flames in her.
She’d never liked our true mother’s piano, a petit bourgeois old thing with candlesticks. If I played while she had one of her guests, she came out of her bedroom and smacked me.
“God save us from a sensitive man,” she’d rail. “Where’s your blood? Where’s your muscle? Only thing worse than a wifebeater—a sensitive man.”
It was then, I suppose, that I decided to become ‘translunar’. I didn’t answer back. But I decided that my friends—Brahms, Beethoven, Schumann—one day they would answer for me. I’d show her there was more blood and muscle in one sensitive man’s inside than in her whole vast workhouse of unsleeping Soviet pistons.
When Svetlana was born, I thought that day had come. The moment I saw those gentle nut-brown eyes, those unusually slender baby hands reaching out of the cot for my dangling tie, my imagination danced for joy: the universe had silenced my sister with a stroke better than I’d even hoped for. The disease of sensitive Alyosha Karamazov, of John Henry Newman, arcing across the gap and invading her own hard-headed, survivor sex. Svetlana, a sensitive woman—the age of brutes was slain!
Svetlana was six and my sister mercifully dead before I first realized I was wrong. She played her little rondeaus perfectly. She played them like a Swiss funicular, trundling along in perfect time, perfect mechanical regularity, and then she would smile perfunctorily at me as if to say, “I did my lesson right, didn’t I, Papa?”
There was no more sensitivity in her than in a butcher’s slab. An Alyosha, ha! I sweated away years trying to awake her, but my sister laughed last. One day—one of the last that we lived together—Svetlana was trundling around the house, plying the scrubwoman’s trade. She reached out to flip the piano shut, so she could dust the key lid. It was the only time I’ve ever raised my voice.
“Svetlana, if you close that piano, you are dead to me.”
Now, here, the Basilique of Montmartre was visible from her window, and she’d put a translucent sticker in front of it. For privacy. And I had to reveal to this mind the Glory.
Svetlana had finished the day’s chores. She’d taken a long time over something in the back room. But at last, she unclipped her mousy hair and shook off her shoes and took her place on the only dented part of the sofa. She opened a trivial magazine.
Her husband wouldn’t be back tonight (he was a plain, pleasant man, a gendarme on the night shift). It was time to play.
Who could help me reach that perished-rubber soul? Not Beethoven—too fully, merely human. Not Rachmaninov—too eager for a reaction. Most great music contained some fragment of the Glory. But to sing about the Glory, disappear into it? There was only one. Bach.
I waited till Svetlana turned the page of her magazine. Schlp. Well, here goes. I opened the tap of that sublime ocean.
The earthly keys of the piano stayed where they were, but the soul of the piano took flight. Strings like a war bow spoke in celestial resonance with my pure spirit. No careless muscle betrayed me, no small distraction, for I had neither body nor brain. It was the greatest performance I ever gave.
When I was done and the last chord died away, to that Valhalla where brave music slain in battle goes, I wiped my sweatless brow—for the mere fittingness of the thing. I looked around.
Svetlana rubbed her nose, licked her finger and turned the page. She hadn’t heard a note.
Worse still, someone else had. From that small back room came an inconsolable racket. Svetlana rolled backward on the sofa like a beached seal. How I rankled at the instant attention, the instant intelligent compassion on her face! There was some sensibility, at last.
She called out, heard more crying, then went to look. She came back holding a screaming baby.
***
“Hall, you’ve painted my piano again,” I complained. It was fourteen days since my disastrous first performance. For fourteen days, the waves of my spectral contrapuntal fury had broken uselessly over a cliff of middle-aged indifference and infantile distress.
Hall didn’t hear me. His spray can was in his hand, but it hardly moved. It was as if he were trapped inside his own mind, wrestling with maps and plans like someone trying to localize a bomb threat.
“Yeah, yeah,” he assured me, contemplating a half-finished giant hairy foot, whose toe trailed onto my piano lid.
I didn’t press the point. Lately, I’d found myself attacking the wooden barrier with Hall’s professional tools—a fire axe, a spray-can flamethrower—to no avail. The Task was the only way to the Glory. I knew I was far gone in the same madness as he.
“Do you like this chord, Hall?” I asked, more gently, pressing seven notes.
“Needs more blue. Like this foot?”
“Needs more hair.”
“True point. True point.” He leaned his head wearily against his painted wall. “Ah, we’ve took our eggs to a fine market, ain’t we?”
I felt rather differently about Hall, now. I’d discovered the truth about him by chance, in one of Svetlana’s magazines.
Street artist receives posthumous medal. Famous for the wry nihilism of his guerilla art, painter Jason Hall was at Manchester’s Freight Union railyard last October painting a cargo container when he heard cries for help coming from inside. After using bolt cutters to free what turned out to be two dozen trafficking victims, Mr. Hall was gunned down by gang members…
That was how he’d died, and it wasn’t enough. A hero’s death wasn’t enough to get him through those mystic gates. And what was I going to do? Play Bach a little better, with a more precise détaché?
Once, secretly, I shadowed Hall on his own task. His little prison was an alleyway in Salford Quays. He’d set the walls there aglow, burdened to toppling with his fiery shapes. To me, who could see the colours, the winged and eyed and feathered beasts, and know what they meant, it surpassed the Sistine Chapel. His audience was a lone man in a dark tracksuit, squatting on a fire escape with his phone. He couldn’t see the pictures, I thought—only bricks and stains. I shook him, cursed him in Russian and Yiddish. He only scratched his cheek, and muttered, “ninety pounds a gram.”
Later, during one of our hopeless hours working side by side, I remarked, “Hall, I’ve just thought of something important. You know what you said—we have to do what Virgil did? Communicate the Glory?”
“Yeah.”
“But Virgil didn’t. Communicate it, I mean. In the book, he left before Dante ever saw it.”
“Well, he ain’t here. I checked in all the bogs. He’s gone away, somehow.”
“Then we must be missing something. ‘Communicate’ can’t mean this thing we’re doing. This endless struggle to delineate, define. It can’t.”
“Well, what do you want to do instead? It don’t mean email.”
***
That evening, I was at Svetlana’s piano again, for my last-ditch effort. Bach’s Saint Anne: a constellated blizzard of interlocking sacred fugues. I could see what it was trying to say, and I knew I wasn’t equal to saying it.
The Maestro, reflected in the open lid, knew it too. Through an adjoining wall, a hoover ran.
We’d had our last lesson at this piano, after the miscarriage, while I was still hoping Svetlana might at least become a teacher.
I’d opened the book of Beethoven sonatas and placed it on the stand. As they always did, the dense, bumblebee-black forests of notes beamed themselves through my eyes into my mind, exactly as Beethoven had meant them. They bypassed the dumpy, heiferish form of Svetlana beside me. Before I knew what I was thinking, I’d said,
“Perhaps it will have given you something to play about.”
Svetlana said,
“It, Papa?”
I knew my mistake at once.
“Your life experience,” I prevaricated. “Your maturity.”
There was no emotion in her unpassionate body. Perhaps she knew that I merited none.
“You mean the death of my child,” she said.
I don’t know why she still hadn’t closed that piano.
Here she came at last, with her living baby, to sit on the sofa. The baby was crying already. He began at ten o’clock every day, whether I played or not. It was the first family routine we’d established in decades.
Svetlana was in a state. She didn’t even tie her dressing gown anymore, just stumbled over its loose ends, not caring if she fell: she who’d lost so much by falling.
As mother and child settled, it occurred to me I didn’t know the baby’s name. How long had I been dead? Then I remembered. She had told me about it on the phone, a few weeks back, when I was preparing the Chopin Scherzos. I’d said, “yes, hmm, great news, congratulations,” while pencilling more rubato over the lullaby section of No. 1.
Svetlana had given up reading, but she’d settled into that slow-breathing, open-eyed stare at the coffee table which now represented peak receptivity. I prepared my fingers.
The phone rang. She answered; the baby’s wails redoubled.
“—what? I can’t hear you!” It was the first time I’d heard her own, native voice, not softened for the baby’s benefit. It made me realize how much she used to soften it for me. “What? Yes, I can’t believe they printed that about Dad. ‘Inhuman coldness’! How can anyone write that about a living person? About… a person, anyway? I’m writing a complaint. What? Sorry—it’s no good, I can’t hear. It’s Andrei, poor love, we’re having a rough month. No, I don’t know when I’ll be able to talk. It’s like this all the time now. Bye.”
She cupped her face in her hands. She was like a dog that no longer reacts to air raid sirens.
And I played the piano.
Perhaps it was the Glory that prompted me, asking me, and if Platonov fails his task, what matter? Shall not that, too, be balanced out? Or perhaps it was the mere cacophony, to which I couldn’t bear to add. But I found I could play no fugues. Instead, I touched three notes, gently.
Three
“Here, Andrei,” I whispered. And as soon as I felt his name on my smiling lips, my soul ignited with delight. “Here, here, Andrei!” I said, louder, unable to hold back a laugh. “Look at me. Yoo!”
Three
The sound quickly died away. But for the first time since my fatal stroke—perhaps the first time since long before—living, loving eyes beheld me. The crying stopped.
***
I bounded back through the Castle in bright leaps, buoyed up by the freshness of that grass eternity.
“Hall, Hall!” I cried. “I’ve got it, I’ve got mine! I’m going to write the most beautiful lullaby. I’m going to help her be a mother every night. My daughter! My grandson! Oh, maybe I won’t play, I’ll sing!”
No answer came.
“Hall?”
When I reached my piano, it was a lonely, proper, purist black. The graffiti was gone. I cannot tell you how much, in that moment, I wished it back, and the piano flung over a cliff.
But in all that wide, more-than-planetary meadow, I could find only one trace of Hall left. A very neat, very tame, square sentence, written in correction fluid on my piano’s fallboard. Like a repairman’s note.
“For our Yuri—Communicate doesn’t mean explain. Ta, Hall and Virgil.”
***
My lullaby was ready. I had to write the damn thing myself (the only thing I ever wrote), but it was ready.
It was not great music. It was a mess. But, for Svetlana and Andrei, it was going to be the most beautiful mess since God personally sang Adam to sleep in the Garden. It would not, itself, show the Glory, but it would show the closest possible thing: it would show that the Glory was capable of turning even Yuri Platonov into a fragment of a father.
From that moment till ten, I sat at Svetlana’s open piano. I sat such as, in all my professional years, I had never sat at a piano before. With my back to it. Hey, look at me, no hands! I thought. The beige and pink apartment seemed to me like the inside of a rosy dawn cloud.
At ten, the bawling began. I grinned. The two came and collapsed on the sofa. My two! Snuggled together. It was a shame I had to turn away from them to play.
I did so. And, of course, the Maestro’s gaze locked with mine. This storm of new humanity had not dislodged him from his translunar orbit. He irked me; but I stilled my mind and prepared my hand.
Then something interrupted me. A music. A strange music, one I’d never heard before: so familiar and yet surprising that I momentarily forgot my cosmic task. It was a low, home-knitted melody that bumbled on, trying to evoke the grandeur of the Volga, yet continually falling back into something like the brown rivulet at the edge of a farmer’s field.
Svetlana was singing.
The crying only got worse, and her lullaby faltered. She stammered, “I’m sorry, Andrei. I’m trying. I can’t do music, I’m so sorry.”
The thirst for sleep was tugging at her voice.
I rallied to reinforce her; I placed my fingers on the keys. The Maestro ravened. Go on—communicate! I wished he would leave! I wished he would get out of the way! I wished—
I shut the piano.
Clunk, went the lid. The most woody, prosaic sound you’ve ever heard.
The wood behind the key lid had never been repolished. Svetlana had never been able to reach it. It was dull, scratched. There was no reflection there; no reflection anywhere.
I turned away from the piano. There, in the middle of that closed apartment, unveiling itself through the walls like a ship through autumn mists, was the sevenfold gate, and the wooden barriers had burned away from it like paper. It was open.
“Hall?” I called. “Hall, did I do it? Was that alright?”
Andrei was staring towards the Gate, completely silent. His face flickered with tones invisible to his mother’s eye.
But it is the measure of Svetlana that, exhausted and tortured as she was, she didn’t say “oh thank the Lord.” She merely smiled back at Andrei’s quiet smile.
She rose and was about to walk right through the apparition, when something made her turn. She frowned at the closed piano, lifted Andrei’s head—reassuring herself as much as him—and kissed him. “Ssh, ssh,” she said. Then, doing up her dressing gown, she carried him to bed.
Tao Yuan studied Latin, Greek and Theology at Cambridge. Fearing that his utility to society might still be too great, he withdrew to the rural Dordogne, where he now works as a writer, singer, organist and flower farmer. His best stories are to be found in the guestbooks of small holiday cottages strung along the Welsh border. They are free to read, if you can find them. There are orchids named after his father and grandfather, but he doubts there will be orchids named after him.
“Sonata” by Tao Yuan. Copyright © 2026 by Tao Yuan.
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The concert hall was reduced to silence. The only sound (if it can be called sound) came from the mirror-like blackness of the Steinway itself, which, in its repose, seemed to zing with a kind of heartless perfection. It was inside that same blackness that, moments ago, I’d been watching the reflection of the pianist. The Maestro. He was like an oversized, top-hatted face on an old vaudeville poster, hypnotizing me, beckoning me forward until my cold forehead touched the cold piano lid…
Me.
It was I who had died. The fact momentarily eluded me, because, like most people, I am unfamiliar with the back of my own head. Seeing my cranium there, cheek squashed awkwardly by D sharp, I almost heard myself say, “that’s fine, thank you,” to the barber’s mirror. But it was unarguable. My body was a corpse.
Then the stage creaked, in that lonely, limelight way that only stages can. Unremarked by the frozen hundreds in the audience, someone was coming towards me. A sturdy man with a loafing gait and an unashamed limp; he wore a coloured plastic anorak and a coloured plastic gilet. When he walked, he rustled like a shopping bag.
“Hey, man,” he said. “You’re dead and shit.” He scratched his knee through a tear in his jeans.
“Who are you?” I asked. I wasn’t afraid. Once you detach the emotions from time and the onrush of constant panicking futurity, the more excitable ones just glaze over and give up, it seems; like retired admirals. “Are you Death?”
“Nah, man,” said the plastic apparition. “I’m a street artist. You know: graffiti?” He thumbed a ragged, pierced and re-pierced ear. “They call me Hall. Maybe you’ve heard of me?”
“No,” I said. I was a little annoyed that the powers of Hades had sent me someone so clearly lacking seniority. “Isn’t Hall a bit of an everyday name for a cosmic being?”
“It’s pronounced Hell,” he said.
“You just pronounced it ‘Hall’.”
“Ain’t no use being a ponce now, alright? It’s death, we’re all equal here. Well, not equal. But equal dead.”
He stretched out a hand. For the first time, he became truly sepulchral, truly mythic. I drew back.
“Time to go,” he said.
“Where are we going?” I asked. “To the afterlife?”
“It’s much worse than that.”
I took the man’s callused hand, and the concert hall vanished. It wasn’t that we ourselves whooshed away; rather, the ranks of curtains and fauteuils curled up and parted like mere mist, as if the light of some truer morning had dispelled a dream.
Without moving, and yet with inexpressible distances moving around us, I found myself standing on a sward of emerald green. On every side rose stone walls of a most tranquil and discreet grey. They were spaced with antique turrets, and in front of me I saw a lonely gatehouse, opening onto what I at first took for a tunnel. But when I looked closer, I saw it was a deep series of stone portals, one after the other, about seven in number.
We were profoundly alone.
“Is this the afterlife?” I asked Hall.
“This both is, and is not, the afterlife.”
“That sounds like something someone from the afterlife would say.”
The light, though solid enough, was somehow melancholy, like a clouded day following after heatwaves and storms: a day of injured truce.
“Listen,” said Hall, “I’ll tell you what the Gaffer told me.”
“What gaffer?”
“The old Gaffer. The bloke what was here before me. ‘This, O soul bereft,’ he told me, ‘is the Castle of the Noble Pagans, and here, before the uttermost eternity, thou enterest upon thy final choice. Choose well.’ Then he buggered off.”
Hall told the story in the manner of a street mural, layering one thought over another, interrupting and arguing with himself from six directions. But from what I understood, in the last phase of his life, he’d pursued his artistic calling from Walsall, which had buses, to Manchester, which had trams, and, being unused to the transverse symmetry of the latter, had been spray-painting what he thought was the back, when it obnoxiously became the front and ran him over. Whereupon the Gaffer had conducted or otherwise conveyed him to this serene Castle, explained his solemn task or choice, objected to the use of conversational profanity and then sodded or otherwise buggered off.
The gravamen was that he, I and the departed Gaffer (from the sound of him, some Victorian minor poet or philosopher) represented the universe’s last remaining noble pagans. And this place was not the “uttermost eternity” but some sort of final terminus of timebound Life, with multiple possible exits, and that, if we wished to go on to the very End, we had some last terrible work to perform.
“I’m not sure I should be here,” I said.
I didn’t like the sound of any task. I’d always hoped that death would grant some rest from being oneself. And one is always so much oneself during tasks, straining against limits and well-defined boundaries. At rest, one can almost pretend to be infinite.
“I’m not sure I can be called a pagan. I’ve always regarded myself as a humanist.”
“Forget how you ‘regard’ yourself,” said Hall. “Humanists, Rastas, nihilists—it’s not your laptop decals, it’s the truth you lived by. And there ain’t but three of those. There’s your folk who think there’s something desperate disappointing about everything humans do, and our own best thoughts are part of it; but there’s some help from outside can fix it for us. That’s your ‘Messianics’. Then you’ve got them as think the same, except there ain’t much fixing on the way. That’s us Pagans. Last, you’ve got the ones who think we don’t need fixing, or can fix ourselves, and that’s, in my opinion, your Daft Clarnets. They love to hear me tell them they’re daft; they buy my tat and call me ‘urgent’ in the glossy weeklies; but they stay daft.”
Unsure whether I followed, or perhaps afraid that I followed too well, I asked him,
“Grant that I’m a pagan: what about this solemn task?”
“That’s how you get out of here. Or choose not to.” He pointed towards the sevenfold gate. “It’s all about what’s through there.”
I could no longer delay looking at the gate. The walls, as I tiptoed towards it, were daubed with Hall’s artwork. The blocky colours and the bulging letters belched outward from the aperture like a violating jungle. As I got closer, the letters stopped being English. They twisted themselves into some proto-alphabetic, proto-semitic form.
“Remember I said, ‘you’re dead and shit?’” called Hall. “Well, this is the shit.”
I passed by a polished grand piano, standing among the dainty flowers of the lawn. It had no maker’s mark. I decided to ignore that problem for now.
The portcullis, when I reached it, was burst open from outside, as if by some gigantic strength. Only the edges remained, like broken cobwebs after a dusting. Across the remaining space was the only clearly human-made structure in that whole castle: a shoddy barrier of bare wood, with a shuttered peephole through it.
I knew I couldn’t turn back now. Through the cracks in the door, I could see only vague hints: something like a black sky beyond, with a glow as of approaching dawn. I hated to, but I opened the shutter over the hole.
What follows is perhaps the most important part of my account, yet I can say nothing about it. I can only offer this: I know, now, that the universe is balanced.
I mean that when a happy dog jumps up on his frail old owner and breaks her neck, then tries to lick her awake, alone in the house until he starves; when a young mother-to-be, not knowing she has a weak cervix, trips on her own slippers in the kitchen—splat—and laughs at herself, telling friends on the phone, “I had such a silly fright today!’’; and later the blood comes and she knows she is only a mother-that-was (this happened to my daughter Svetlana): when these things happen, there is a Something, sitting on the other end of the scale, balancing them so that they seem, somehow (appallingly), fair. And somehow (appallingly), better than fair.
This Something, I now saw. I closed the window and turned the handle neatly.
“What must I do?” I said. There was no getting emotional about it. What can the emotions possibly respond to that?
“Apparently, we have to do what the Castle grandgaffer Virgil did, thenadays,” said Hall, no relish in his voice. “With Dante.”
“What’s that?”
“Tell it how it is. That’s what he told me. ‘Communicate it successfully,’ were his words.”
There was only one possible answer to a thing like that.
“Merde.”
I found myself walking down a warm and curving street which, by the overgrown overhead railway and the overgrown Metro lettering, I took for my familiar, this-worldly Paris. How we got there I never knew.
Hall was heading somewhere with purpose, and an interior squirming told me that the purpose was going to be mine.
“You always talk in Russian,” he said.
“I do?”
“That’s yampy. Weird, I mean.”
“I am Russian. My mother was from Odessa. I was a student of Sviatoslav Richter.”
“See? Weird.” Hall grabbed a newspaper from a streetside stand. The paper itself turned somehow ghostly, while a whiter, solider copy came away with Hall’s hand. It was like he’d snatched away the paper’s soul.
“Are you…‘Yuri Platonov, Russian pianist, who died of a stroke mid-performance at the Salle Gaveau?’”
“I suppose I am.”
“—‘a virtuoso whom Glenn Gould called “translunar”, his universally-conceded brilliance inseparably bound up with his inhuman coldness?’”
“I am not cold,” I replied (even though, with the clarity of death, I heard my voice crunch like a chewed ice cube). “A musician is only a clear glass, for others to shine through. Personality is an imperfection in the glass. I let the composer speak.”
We had arrived somewhere. By the very ordinariness of the deep cool doorway, I had a premonition of whose it was, and recoiled.
Hall was scouring at a graffito on the wall. Someone had painted the Girl with a Pearl Earring, but with inflated googly eyes.
“Look at this,” he complained, with real sadness. “Your canvas is the real world, and still you got to be fake.”
“Hall,” I said, “who exactly is this? Whom do I have to communicate it to?”
By ‘it’ I meant what, within myself, I had come to call the Glory.
“Do I look like your secretary? Go up and have a look.”
I went up the stairs. I groaned, panted and took breaks, partly out of embodied habit (I had no chest to ache with), partly to delay the moment.
The apartment doors were closed, but my spirit knew the right one. My ghost went through it like a gaze penetrating a dirty window.
There were bags of groceries balanced by the coat stand. A cheap black hat and cheap black coat hung on the peg. Had she been to my burial at Père Lachaise? Was this really her house?
To say “her house” is misleading, because it makes it sound like someone’s private, inner world—a place strewn with personality the way a compost bin is strewn with recent meals. On the contrary, it was nauseatingly bland and diffuse: sofas, curtains, carpets all a pillowy waste of flesh-tones between which not even the most pedantic catalogue could distinguish.
There was a vague, unmusical humming coming from the kitchen, and the slam of cupboard doors, just stocked with food. I recognized that humming, and that careless, rudely-alive banging. She hadn’t changed the kitchen, not even after she’d lost her baby in it.
My daughter entered the hall, and I fled.
At the Castle, the unmarked piano was waiting for me, smiling blackly, as if to say, “Back so soon?”
I collapsed on the stool. Even here, hounding me beyond my life, was the Maestro, reflected in the open key lid. I hated him. The Maestro was the soul of the piano’s perfection; the Maestro was the one my audiences clamoured for and never quite met; the Maestro was the one with whose gaze I was perpetually locked: that translunar, masterly one who knew what all music meant, and waited exquisitely for me to disappoint him. Go on. Tell her what you saw, he dared me.
Hall was nearby, stretching his stubby, plastic-clad arm up the wall. He was correcting, minutely, an impressionistic flash of an assault rifle, a picture made as if by the swipe of a newly-painted tiger’s tail.
“Is there no one else?” I asked. “No one else in the living world I can communicate it to?”
“…oo can communicate it to any daft turnip you like, my friend,” said Hall, compassionately. He had a bundle of five fine brushes in his mouth. “Her’s the only one that’ll get you out of here, though.”
My fingers felt weak and mindless, like wriggling maggots. The keys withstood them, refusing to depress.
“Who made that rule?” I asked.
Hall never turned from his own hopeless labour.
“You did, Yuri.”
Svetlana’s apartment was better by night. In the concealing glow of shaded bulbs, you could imagine something that wasn’t there. A personality.
In a triumph of mindless precision, she’d recreated almost exactly the plain Rostov apartment where I’d raised her and where, before that, my sister had raised me.
My sister had made an ugly mother. She worked at the cigarette factory and she treated our home as an extension of the same. Same smell, same personnel. She was that factory’s human ashtray; weary workmen extinguished their meagre flames in her.
She’d never liked our true mother’s piano, a petit bourgeois old thing with candlesticks. If I played while she had one of her guests, she came out of her bedroom and smacked me.
“God save us from a sensitive man,” she’d rail. “Where’s your blood? Where’s your muscle? Only thing worse than a wifebeater—a sensitive man.”
It was then, I suppose, that I decided to become ‘translunar’. I didn’t answer back. But I decided that my friends—Brahms, Beethoven, Schumann—one day they would answer for me. I’d show her there was more blood and muscle in one sensitive man’s inside than in her whole vast workhouse of unsleeping Soviet pistons.
When Svetlana was born, I thought that day had come. The moment I saw those gentle nut-brown eyes, those unusually slender baby hands reaching out of the cot for my dangling tie, my imagination danced for joy: the universe had silenced my sister with a stroke better than I’d even hoped for. The disease of sensitive Alyosha Karamazov, of John Henry Newman, arcing across the gap and invading her own hard-headed, survivor sex. Svetlana, a sensitive woman—the age of brutes was slain!
Svetlana was six and my sister mercifully dead before I first realized I was wrong. She played her little rondeaus perfectly. She played them like a Swiss funicular, trundling along in perfect time, perfect mechanical regularity, and then she would smile perfunctorily at me as if to say, “I did my lesson right, didn’t I, Papa?”
There was no more sensitivity in her than in a butcher’s slab. An Alyosha, ha! I sweated away years trying to awake her, but my sister laughed last. One day—one of the last that we lived together—Svetlana was trundling around the house, plying the scrubwoman’s trade. She reached out to flip the piano shut, so she could dust the key lid. It was the only time I’ve ever raised my voice.
“Svetlana, if you close that piano, you are dead to me.”
Now, here, the Basilique of Montmartre was visible from her window, and she’d put a translucent sticker in front of it. For privacy. And I had to reveal to this mind the Glory.
Svetlana had finished the day’s chores. She’d taken a long time over something in the back room. But at last, she unclipped her mousy hair and shook off her shoes and took her place on the only dented part of the sofa. She opened a trivial magazine.
Her husband wouldn’t be back tonight (he was a plain, pleasant man, a gendarme on the night shift). It was time to play.
Who could help me reach that perished-rubber soul? Not Beethoven—too fully, merely human. Not Rachmaninov—too eager for a reaction. Most great music contained some fragment of the Glory. But to sing about the Glory, disappear into it? There was only one. Bach.
I waited till Svetlana turned the page of her magazine. Schlp. Well, here goes. I opened the tap of that sublime ocean.
The earthly keys of the piano stayed where they were, but the soul of the piano took flight. Strings like a war bow spoke in celestial resonance with my pure spirit. No careless muscle betrayed me, no small distraction, for I had neither body nor brain. It was the greatest performance I ever gave.
When I was done and the last chord died away, to that Valhalla where brave music slain in battle goes, I wiped my sweatless brow—for the mere fittingness of the thing. I looked around.
Svetlana rubbed her nose, licked her finger and turned the page. She hadn’t heard a note.
Worse still, someone else had. From that small back room came an inconsolable racket. Svetlana rolled backward on the sofa like a beached seal. How I rankled at the instant attention, the instant intelligent compassion on her face! There was some sensibility, at last.
She called out, heard more crying, then went to look. She came back holding a screaming baby.
“Hall, you’ve painted my piano again,” I complained. It was fourteen days since my disastrous first performance. For fourteen days, the waves of my spectral contrapuntal fury had broken uselessly over a cliff of middle-aged indifference and infantile distress.
Hall didn’t hear me. His spray can was in his hand, but it hardly moved. It was as if he were trapped inside his own mind, wrestling with maps and plans like someone trying to localize a bomb threat.
“Yeah, yeah,” he assured me, contemplating a half-finished giant hairy foot, whose toe trailed onto my piano lid.
I didn’t press the point. Lately, I’d found myself attacking the wooden barrier with Hall’s professional tools—a fire axe, a spray-can flamethrower—to no avail. The Task was the only way to the Glory. I knew I was far gone in the same madness as he.
“Do you like this chord, Hall?” I asked, more gently, pressing seven notes.
“Needs more blue. Like this foot?”
“Needs more hair.”
“True point. True point.” He leaned his head wearily against his painted wall. “Ah, we’ve took our eggs to a fine market, ain’t we?”
I felt rather differently about Hall, now. I’d discovered the truth about him by chance, in one of Svetlana’s magazines.
Street artist receives posthumous medal. Famous for the wry nihilism of his guerilla art, painter Jason Hall was at Manchester’s Freight Union railyard last October painting a cargo container when he heard cries for help coming from inside. After using bolt cutters to free what turned out to be two dozen trafficking victims, Mr. Hall was gunned down by gang members…
That was how he’d died, and it wasn’t enough. A hero’s death wasn’t enough to get him through those mystic gates. And what was I going to do? Play Bach a little better, with a more precise détaché?
Once, secretly, I shadowed Hall on his own task. His little prison was an alleyway in Salford Quays. He’d set the walls there aglow, burdened to toppling with his fiery shapes. To me, who could see the colours, the winged and eyed and feathered beasts, and know what they meant, it surpassed the Sistine Chapel. His audience was a lone man in a dark tracksuit, squatting on a fire escape with his phone. He couldn’t see the pictures, I thought—only bricks and stains. I shook him, cursed him in Russian and Yiddish. He only scratched his cheek, and muttered, “ninety pounds a gram.”
Later, during one of our hopeless hours working side by side, I remarked, “Hall, I’ve just thought of something important. You know what you said—we have to do what Virgil did? Communicate the Glory?”
“Yeah.”
“But Virgil didn’t. Communicate it, I mean. In the book, he left before Dante ever saw it.”
“Well, he ain’t here. I checked in all the bogs. He’s gone away, somehow.”
“Then we must be missing something. ‘Communicate’ can’t mean this thing we’re doing. This endless struggle to delineate, define. It can’t.”
“Well, what do you want to do instead? It don’t mean email.”
That evening, I was at Svetlana’s piano again, for my last-ditch effort. Bach’s Saint Anne: a constellated blizzard of interlocking sacred fugues. I could see what it was trying to say, and I knew I wasn’t equal to saying it.
The Maestro, reflected in the open lid, knew it too. Through an adjoining wall, a hoover ran.
We’d had our last lesson at this piano, after the miscarriage, while I was still hoping Svetlana might at least become a teacher.
I’d opened the book of Beethoven sonatas and placed it on the stand. As they always did, the dense, bumblebee-black forests of notes beamed themselves through my eyes into my mind, exactly as Beethoven had meant them. They bypassed the dumpy, heiferish form of Svetlana beside me. Before I knew what I was thinking, I’d said,
“Perhaps it will have given you something to play about.”
Svetlana said,
“It, Papa?”
I knew my mistake at once.
“Your life experience,” I prevaricated. “Your maturity.”
There was no emotion in her unpassionate body. Perhaps she knew that I merited none.
“You mean the death of my child,” she said.
I don’t know why she still hadn’t closed that piano.
Here she came at last, with her living baby, to sit on the sofa. The baby was crying already. He began at ten o’clock every day, whether I played or not. It was the first family routine we’d established in decades.
Svetlana was in a state. She didn’t even tie her dressing gown anymore, just stumbled over its loose ends, not caring if she fell: she who’d lost so much by falling.
As mother and child settled, it occurred to me I didn’t know the baby’s name. How long had I been dead? Then I remembered. She had told me about it on the phone, a few weeks back, when I was preparing the Chopin Scherzos. I’d said, “yes, hmm, great news, congratulations,” while pencilling more rubato over the lullaby section of No. 1.
Svetlana had given up reading, but she’d settled into that slow-breathing, open-eyed stare at the coffee table which now represented peak receptivity. I prepared my fingers.
The phone rang. She answered; the baby’s wails redoubled.
“—what? I can’t hear you!” It was the first time I’d heard her own, native voice, not softened for the baby’s benefit. It made me realize how much she used to soften it for me. “What? Yes, I can’t believe they printed that about Dad. ‘Inhuman coldness’! How can anyone write that about a living person? About… a person, anyway? I’m writing a complaint. What? Sorry—it’s no good, I can’t hear. It’s Andrei, poor love, we’re having a rough month. No, I don’t know when I’ll be able to talk. It’s like this all the time now. Bye.”
She cupped her face in her hands. She was like a dog that no longer reacts to air raid sirens.
And I played the piano.
Perhaps it was the Glory that prompted me, asking me, and if Platonov fails his task, what matter? Shall not that, too, be balanced out? Or perhaps it was the mere cacophony, to which I couldn’t bear to add. But I found I could play no fugues. Instead, I touched three notes, gently.
Three
blind
mice.
“Here, Andrei,” I whispered. And as soon as I felt his name on my smiling lips, my soul ignited with delight. “Here, here, Andrei!” I said, louder, unable to hold back a laugh. “Look at me. Yoo!”
Three
blind
mice.
The sound quickly died away. But for the first time since my fatal stroke—perhaps the first time since long before—living, loving eyes beheld me. The crying stopped.
I bounded back through the Castle in bright leaps, buoyed up by the freshness of that grass eternity.
“Hall, Hall!” I cried. “I’ve got it, I’ve got mine! I’m going to write the most beautiful lullaby. I’m going to help her be a mother every night. My daughter! My grandson! Oh, maybe I won’t play, I’ll sing!”
No answer came.
“Hall?”
When I reached my piano, it was a lonely, proper, purist black. The graffiti was gone. I cannot tell you how much, in that moment, I wished it back, and the piano flung over a cliff.
But in all that wide, more-than-planetary meadow, I could find only one trace of Hall left. A very neat, very tame, square sentence, written in correction fluid on my piano’s fallboard. Like a repairman’s note.
“For our Yuri—Communicate doesn’t mean explain. Ta, Hall and Virgil.”
My lullaby was ready. I had to write the damn thing myself (the only thing I ever wrote), but it was ready.
It was not great music. It was a mess. But, for Svetlana and Andrei, it was going to be the most beautiful mess since God personally sang Adam to sleep in the Garden. It would not, itself, show the Glory, but it would show the closest possible thing: it would show that the Glory was capable of turning even Yuri Platonov into a fragment of a father.
From that moment till ten, I sat at Svetlana’s open piano. I sat such as, in all my professional years, I had never sat at a piano before. With my back to it. Hey, look at me, no hands! I thought. The beige and pink apartment seemed to me like the inside of a rosy dawn cloud.
At ten, the bawling began. I grinned. The two came and collapsed on the sofa. My two! Snuggled together. It was a shame I had to turn away from them to play.
I did so. And, of course, the Maestro’s gaze locked with mine. This storm of new humanity had not dislodged him from his translunar orbit. He irked me; but I stilled my mind and prepared my hand.
Then something interrupted me. A music. A strange music, one I’d never heard before: so familiar and yet surprising that I momentarily forgot my cosmic task. It was a low, home-knitted melody that bumbled on, trying to evoke the grandeur of the Volga, yet continually falling back into something like the brown rivulet at the edge of a farmer’s field.
Svetlana was singing.
The crying only got worse, and her lullaby faltered. She stammered, “I’m sorry, Andrei. I’m trying. I can’t do music, I’m so sorry.”
The thirst for sleep was tugging at her voice.
I rallied to reinforce her; I placed my fingers on the keys. The Maestro ravened. Go on—communicate! I wished he would leave! I wished he would get out of the way! I wished—
I shut the piano.
Clunk, went the lid. The most woody, prosaic sound you’ve ever heard.
The wood behind the key lid had never been repolished. Svetlana had never been able to reach it. It was dull, scratched. There was no reflection there; no reflection anywhere.
I turned away from the piano. There, in the middle of that closed apartment, unveiling itself through the walls like a ship through autumn mists, was the sevenfold gate, and the wooden barriers had burned away from it like paper. It was open.
“Hall?” I called. “Hall, did I do it? Was that alright?”
Andrei was staring towards the Gate, completely silent. His face flickered with tones invisible to his mother’s eye.
But it is the measure of Svetlana that, exhausted and tortured as she was, she didn’t say “oh thank the Lord.” She merely smiled back at Andrei’s quiet smile.
She rose and was about to walk right through the apparition, when something made her turn. She frowned at the closed piano, lifted Andrei’s head—reassuring herself as much as him—and kissed him. “Ssh, ssh,” she said. Then, doing up her dressing gown, she carried him to bed.
Tao Yuan studied Latin, Greek and Theology at Cambridge. Fearing that his utility to society might still be too great, he withdrew to the rural Dordogne, where he now works as a writer, singer, organist and flower farmer. His best stories are to be found in the guestbooks of small holiday cottages strung along the Welsh border. They are free to read, if you can find them. There are orchids named after his father and grandfather, but he doubts there will be orchids named after him.
“Sonata” by Tao Yuan. Copyright © 2026 by Tao Yuan.
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