breakfast the Queen always made at which he ate and drank coffee while he read the black of the paper (the SPORTS, the ARTS, the ARTS again), as the Queen only after serving Aba and me serving herself instant café or tea she read the front of the paper again, which are the HEADLINES, which tell the importance of the day or of yesterday and what will not happen now or cannot ever hope upon hopes happen again to walk through the hallway from the kitchen to the frontdoor where he walked right into his shoes waiting painfully on the mat that said the word SHALOM we’d always wipe our shoes on and just step all over, opened the frontdoor and walked out with a kiss for each of us but the Queen’s on one cheek of two sumptuously risen Sabbath loaves despite the day of the week though mine was always on my forehead, on the head even then growing out of my head and right out the frontdoor but out of which what walking and where I did not know exactly, precisely, not to the step this walking the Queen said All over the whole world Creationdom and Why do you do that to yourself? was what she’d always ask Why don’t you take a staff position at the Symphony Philharmonic Orchestra? or at the Opera? Aba would always answer her by saying that he had enough opera at home Particularly Straussified, Richard and so a Freelancer he was a true Freelancer and to remain a true Freelancer as opposed to a Staff Jobber because he was a tuner, he was a piano tuner Aba always said I don’t want to tune the same pianos month after month, moon in and moon out, I want to tune different pianos, and as many as possible, to redeem, to save as many as possible, pianos, that’s the job of a piano tuner Aba always said meaning he often joked A failed pianist then the Queen would stare him evil then hug him tight (but we didn’t have a piano in our apartment on Tchernichovsky Street because Aba wouldn’t allow a Big black cancer noise to interfere with his life Aba once said and I just now remember that my Aba he once also told me that When two strings are mathematically perfectly in tune they actually sound discordant. And that The job of a piano tuner is to tune a piano, Aba once said, the strings of a piano, Aba once said, intentionally discordant, knowledgeably dissonant, slightly Aba once said ever so slightly and that only then will all the strings sound as they should—when the hammers come crashpedaling down—In perfect, total harmony Aba once said Which Aba then added is of course only our perception of—), but after the Queen had enabled his enabling then let him go, hugged him only to let him loose for a kiss once again on the other loaved cheek as if to demonstrate her sympathy with his empathy and the both of their last, I did not know where he went (and whether or not the Queen’s cheeks were lonely without him, as I’d always leave for school alongside my Aba who’d leave me at the school halfway down Tchernichovsky Street on his way off to wherever), rather I knew that he went to the Symphony Philharmonic Orchestra and to piano showrooms and musicstores throughout Jerusalem and even greater Tel Aviv and to grandQueens’ attics and basements and cellars and to hospitals and schools and theaters and fancy Frenchtalian restaurants and also though not as much as I think he wanted to to the Opera and the Ballet and to the Conservatory or Conservatories, but I had never been to any of those places, not to the Philharmonic neither to piano showrooms nor to musicstores and all my grandQueens all my grandQueens were As dead as music as my Aba used to say and our apartment on Tchernichovsky Street though it had a garden and tree did not have an attic or a basement or even a cellar and thank God I’ve never been in the hospital (though school is school and next door at that, five shoe-lengths away if I didn’t do my homework), but then neither have I ever been to the theater not Yiddish nor Shakespearean nor to fancy Frenchtalian