65must give it a go,” he urged. “The tiger will bring you luck.”
So I began a treasure hunt that would last more than two
years and require eight trips to a land mass whose former
imperial boundaries stretch across 1/11 of the world’s surface.
I worked with Siberian piano tuners, who led me to interest-
ing instruments in private hands. I made appeals on the radio.
Sometimes it felt as if everything was against me: climate, logis-
tics, the eye of the authorities, who, after a full day of ques-
tioning halfway through the project, made it clear they didn’t
much like foreign writers poking around restricted zones.
I also felt my search for beauty in the region might be mis-
placed. Estimates say that roughly 1 million people had been
exiled here under the czarist penal system and an additional
2.7 million forced laborers killed in the Soviet Gulag. But when
I felt discouraged, the tiger would flash before me: persistence.
As my favor for a friend turned into a personal obsession, I
found the real hallmarks of the region were warmth and stoic
hospitality. During the czarist period, I learned, Siberians
would leave bread on their windowsills for exiles who would
walk past in chains. Today you can turn up as a stranger and,
by dinner, be sharing stories at a local’s kitchen table.
I also learned the twin values of taking risks and staying
patient—traveling for 2,000 miles on the back of a tip that
might come to something, or nothing. I itched to share those
lessons with my school-age kids; soon they were joining my
mission and camping with me along Lake Baikal.
The tiger did its job. I found the piano I was looking for,
and the story resulted in a book, The Lost Pianos of Siberia.
TRAVEL BloombergPursuits June 29, 2020
But just as my quest for the giant cat had taught me about the
forest and the trees and the acorns, the pursuit of the piano
revealed much about the world around it.
Along the way came a little miracle of a lead, then another.
One instrument I found had been gifted by members of a col-
lective farm to a child of precocious talent. Another, on a ship
in the North Pacific, was purchased by sailors to pass the long
polar nights. Each instrument came with heroic tales about
music’s transcendental beauty against all odds, whether
Catherine the Great’s 1774 piano anglais—which survived the
Siege of Leningrad—or the prerevolution grand piano once
treasured by concert pianist Vera Lotar-Shevchenko. During
her eight years in a gulag, she’d practiced on a keyboard
carved into the side of her wooden bunk. On the day of her
liberation, she walked straight into a local music school and
released a magnificent squall of Bach and Chopin, her stubby,
red-raw fingers not missing a single note.
How strange that the encounter with the tiger should have
led to this. I know now that only by trying to undertake some-
thing difficult do the most interesting things happen. This
sometimes naive, almost blindly optimistic ethos has since sent
me to northern Chad—digging into the life of an Italian explorer
trying to protect some of the oldest rock art in Africa—and
to the Tajikistan-Afghanistan border, where, as it happens, I
found a 19th century Russian piano. Next I’ll go deeper into
the Congo and farther into the Sahara. There will be difficul-
ties, of course. But there will also be untold beauty, as long
as I keep on looking for the tiger’s flare of golden light. <BW>A SHORT BREAK BY CLAIRE COURTADE