She was a quadriplegic, confined to her bed for life and resigned to her limitations, thankful for the limited satisfactions available to her. She had known the man was different the moment they'd begun talking, different from anyone who had come to visit her in many years. Her sister had met him in a mall where he was sitting at a piano playing holiday songs, they'd got to talking, and she'd suggested the visit. He too had a sister who was a quadriplegic. Small world.
So he came to visit Hannah Reichstadt in her third floor apartment, where she lay in bed beside the window and watched the sun rise, watched it shine throughout the day on the busy, fruitful lives of others, and then watched it set in the evening. Clive Woerhoeven wound up talking to her for hours that first day, and came back to sit beside her and talk for two or three evenings each week. They never spoke directly about her sister, and whether Clive continued to see her or not, but Hannah assumed he did. And yet how his face lit up every time he arrived and laid his eyes on Hannah!
One of the things Hannah confided in him was how much she would love to see an actual concert--to watch someone like himself sitting at a piano and making the wonderful music she could only experience second hand. But getting her out of the apartment was not practical, it was risky to her safety, too much effort was involved, and the list of prohibitive reasons went on. But Hannah wasn't complaining. She was reconciled to what she could and couldn't do. She could see and hear and smell and taste, she could feel warmth and coolness on her skin, she could think and dream and write wonderful stories in her head, and weren't all these things marvelous? Yes, they were, she knew. So she didn't foolishly lust after things she could never have, that would have been pointless.
Then one day while staring up at the ceiling, awakening from a nap, Hannah began to hear the sound of falling raindrops, a tap-tap-tapping at her window. It was the twilight hour, when nothing much ever happened and not much of interest was generally heard. But she listened to the sound of the raindrops and soon began to perceive a strange kind of rhythm and even a melody of sorts forging a path among the tap-taps and the drip-drips and the rap-raps. And then she suddenly perceived that the melody was not composed merely of the sound of raindrops, but that it was a separate melody, a distinctive sound, very much like the notes of a piano, plinking and plunking along, regardless of the rain. She lifted her head and gazed out the window, and way down there, in the middle of the street, she saw a man standing at a piano. A piano -- in the middle of the street! In the pouring rain! It was the most fantastic thing! And then it dawned on her that the man was her friend Clive, Clive Woerhoeven, hammering on the keys, throwing his head back as he sang loudly enough for her to hear. She heard the notes, the chords, the melody, and the gradual buildup of intensity until the music reached a brilliant crescendo, accompanied by the sound of the rain and the occasional crack of thunder like an accent supplied by a skilled percussionist.
Hannah bathed in the sound of the piano and it refreshed her like nothing ever had. Gazing down at the street she would never walk upon, she noticed people with umbrellas walking to and fro, as though a man playing the piano in the street in the rain were something that happened every day. And she noticed a cat sitting in the street, looking back up at her, directly at her, as though wanting to tell her something. Why did the cat just sit in the rain, why didn't it run for shelter? And that was when she realized what the cat was trying to tell her. She might just as well have asked why Clive Woerhoeven stood in the rain, why he had arranged for a piano to be placed in the street beneath her window, why he came back to sit with her night after night, and why--while looking fondly into her eyes--he never ever mentioned her sister.
Though Hannah couldn't make out the words of the song Clive was singing, and didn't recognize the melody as anything she'd ever heard before, she knew in her heart what kind of song it was. And knew it was being played and sung for her and her alone.
D.E. Sievers
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