A Long Postponed Visit: Reviewed and Extended Edition by Arthur Friedberg

Author:Arthur Friedberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

*

After a prolonged pause, Jerry didn’t want to continue the conversation about Marianne’s drinking problems. He even felt that he had already told Magda far too much than he should have done, so he suggested going to a restaurant in the village near the palace, for lunch.

Magda asked him whether he remembered any funny events from the past in which her mother had taken part.

Jerry thought for a while and said, ‘Let me see. I think I have one. We often used to meet in a coffee house, which was located in the basement of the so-called Tourist House along the Nowy Swiat Street, opposite the Copernicus statue. In that coffeehouse, they kept a somewhat old-fashioned habit: in the afternoons and evenings, on certain days, discreet piano music of well-known composers was played. The purpose was, of course, to maintain the illusive ambience of the pre-war ‘good old times’ of the coffee houses tradition. The piano player there was a good friend of Marianne’s, who was studying Japanese. He used the breaks between his musical performances in order to learn new or practice already learned Japanese words and expressions. He was rightly proud of his progress in mastering the language and working at the same time.’

‘Once, when we visited the place together, as we often did, he came to us during a break and said, ‘I am in awful trouble. In half an hour I have to be at the University for an Exam and if I go now, I will be fired from my job here. Jerry, could you substitute for me for a while?’

‘I agreed, so he left me some scores he used to play and I played some of those pieces, but improvised in the style of Erroll Garner, because I liked his music very much. So, while the fellow was away, I spent the time at the piano with pleasure and I think Marianne was interested in listening to my music, as she asked me afterwards what I had played. The following week, I received a letter from Marianne telling me that the pianist friend had come to her with a complaint, that I had put him in an embarrassing situation because his boss from the coffee house had told him that he had received very warm remarks from his customers about his performance the day before and that he should play those pieces of jazz music more often, because the public liked them and wanted to hear more. He didn’t know what I had played, so Marianne told him that she would tell him all about it when he returned the two books he had borrowed from her for a week and then kept for five months. He had no choice but to return them. Finally, he was forced to learn Garner’s compositions from the records, and, the funny thing was, he had never played jazz music before.’

Magda liked the story and laughed. ‘Jerry, a propos, did you ever, in your youth, consider becoming a

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.