Wildalone Read Free Page B

now.”
    â€œI haven’t touched a piano since I left Bulgaria.”
    â€œYou’ve got four days and classes haven’t even started yet. With your technique, snapping back into top form shouldn’t be a problem.”
    It was as if we were discussing a bike ride around the block.
    â€œProfessor Wylie, I’ve never carried an entire concert at a place like this.”
    â€œOf course not, no one assumes you have. Is that all?”
    I stared at him. What else did he expect me to say?
    â€œFantastic then, it’s done! You’ll have plenty of time to doubt yourself later.” He turned back to Donnelly, as if I had once again ceased to exist. “Revised announcements will go off to press tonight. We can give the ticket office a green light tomorrow.”
    â€œAnd the program?”
    â€œWhat about it?”
    â€œGiven the timing, I think we should let Thea choose it herself.”
    He made up his mind instantly, the way he seemed to decide on everything else. “Fine, go ahead.”
    Still in shock, I asked to play all Chopin.
    Wylie wasn’t thrilled. “I get it, I do—‘the Chekhov of the keyboard’ and all that. But give us a tour de force, not a tear fest.”
    Donnelly came to my rescue: “Let her do it, Nate. I like the idea: the music of one Eastern European played by another, both voluntary exiles to a life in the West.”
    They argued briefly about the pros and cons of an entire evening dedicated to Chopin, then Wylie agreed to let me have it my way. And so it was settled. Whether I wanted it or not, Friday was mine and there was no turning back.
    BY NOON THE FLYERS WERE all over campus, crisp white against a collage of colors on bulletin boards. Only from up close could one detect the thin border in Princeton’s signature black and orange, framing the date—September 14, 2007—and the two names placed side by side, as if a magical typo had linked me to one of the most gifted men to ever touch a piano:
    THEODORA SLAVIN PLAYS CHOPIN
    I adored his music. Many great composers had come before him: the indulgent complexity of Bach, the unleashed ornamentation of Mozart, the thunderous genius of Beethoven who had all Europe on its knees. But only Chopin managed to bring out the piano’s full ability to create extraordinary sound. He considered grandiosity vulgar. Loud playing—offensive. A frail man with a velvet touch, he devoted his life to a single instrument. And the result was phenomenal. “Everything I hear now seems so insignificant that I would rather not hear it at all,” wrote a well-known pianist after hearing Chopin play live. “That was beyond all words. My senses have left me.”
    Donnelly, of course, had guessed right away why I wanted to play Chopin, and how in his “voluntary exile to the West”—leaving his nativePoland, barely twenty-one, to brave the music salons of Paris—I saw my own. Now the proverbial window of opportunity had opened for me. And a foreign world waited, eagerly. A world ready to be charmed but unforgiving if you failed.
    At Forbes, I became a celebrity overnight. People had seen the flyers, so suddenly everyone knew my name and that of the obscure European country I had come from.
    â€œYou’ve put the Balkans on the map,” a guy said to me at breakfast, meaning it as a compliment and not realizing it could just as easily pass for an insult.
    â€œThanks. Although my country has been on the map for thirteen hundred years.”
    â€œYeah? Cool!” He grinned under his baseball cap. “What was there before, vampire castles?”
    â€œNo, that’s Romania. Still the Balkans, but a bit farther north.”
    â€œWhatever you say. By the way, I’m a bit north of you too. Room 208.” My blank look elicited an even wider grin. “In case you ever get, you know, bloodthirsty and stuff. Give me a shout. Or just come