Saturday I played the accordion, possibly for the last time in my life. I had been taking lessons for seventeen years, from the age of seven to the age of twenty-four, and for much of that time I had also played in an orchestra. Tangos, Bach, Balkan music. “No tearjerkers”, I always added. Especially as a teenager I was ashamed of the street music image. For the thirteen years since I left the orchestra I had barely touched my instrument; the suitcase gathered dust in my parents’ attic. New interests, too little time. But every time my mother suggested selling the accordion, I firmly said: not now. Who knows if I’ll ever…
Now, in a fit of clean-up rage, she had done it anyway. Friday, in an app: “Sold your accordion on Marktplaats. Tomorrow he will be picked up by someone from Belgium.”
All things considered, it was their money and their attic. Still, I stood on high legs on the sidewalk on Saturday morning. Melodramatically, I stomped up the stairs. “I’m going to play now.” One hour and ten minutes before the buyer would arrive.
As soon as you open the box, the familiar smell of the leather shoulder straps. When putting it on, my fingers felt their way to the keyboard and basses. Astor Piazzolla’s ‘Libertango’. Adagio in G Minor by Thomas Albinoni. So many memories. The countless times on my bike to music school, hoping no one in my class saw me with that oversized backpack. Traveling with an orchestra to Osnabrück and Innsbruck, the feeling of happiness that welled up while playing together. The time I worked through my heartbreak by playing, and my teacher said in surprise: “Suddenly you manage to put emotion in it!”
I forgot how music can unleash feelings your brain can’t grasp, like a bath of soda on a splinter.
My mother stood in the doorway, despairing: “Shouldn’t we do it then?” But the man would be there in twenty minutes, he had told on the phone that he had lived in Italy next to the factory where my accordion came from, he himself gave weekly concerts and now he wanted to perform with his son. If I really cared about my accordion, I would give it this second life.
Our goodbye was like a divorce, precisely because of letting go the beautiful sides were visible again. To hold tight would be fear, not love.
Just before the man arrived, I took the train back to Amsterdam. I walked across the Museumplein, past the blooming lindens to the bicycle tunnel under the Rijksmuseum, where a Ukrainian duo had just started to play. In the acoustics of the vault, their accordions sounded like organ pipes, overwhelming and intimate. Their faces betrayed no emotion, but what did I know of loss, of letting go, compared to these men? More and more people gathered around them, it was as if the music created a temporary home. “Beautiful, that street music,” said a passer-by. For the first time I could nod proudly and in agreement.
Gemma Venhuizen is biology editor at NRC and writes a column here every Wednesday.
A version of this article also appeared in the newspaper on June 28, 2023.
2023-06-28 00:00:00
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