October 2017. Lukas has sold his piano and put Cologne behind him. For two months he has not played a single note. In Bad Wildungen he rents a cheap room above a shop, and two streets away he finds a villa that has stood empty for thirty years. On the first floor, amid handwritten sheet music that water has baked together into layers, stands a Grotrian-Steinweg grand with its lid open. No tuner, no heat, frost reaching down into the strings every winter. He presses a key into the dust. The note sounds full and deep. The instrument is perfectly in tune. He returns the next day, and again the day after. The music he lost in Cologne begins to flow again, sixteen measures in four days, so easily that he stops to see whether it will end. But a sheet he left on the stool is back on the floor, beneath untouched dust. Around the grand there is a patch where no dust settles at all, as in a place where someone is always standing. One evening, as he walks away down the street, he hears an instrument behind the windows of the empty house. It is playing his sixteen measures. It breaks off where he broke off. Then it starts again and goes on.



Lukas sold his piano. He has gone two months without playing a note. A grand piano stands inside an abandoned villa. It has gone thirty years without a tuner or heat, with frost reaching down into the strings. He presses a key. The instrument is perfectly in tune.