Selling an Organ

I was one of the earliest ones to arrive. Taking a seat close to the exit, I tucked my coat between my knees and waited. People trickled in. Couples, a family with twins, others like me, alone. There was still a while till the show started. I folded one leg over the other and tried listening to shards of conversations as they found their seats.

“…she and Patrick have called off the wedding…”

“…need to book Mexico…”

I was desperate to know more. It wouldn’t be hard to ask, a little intrusive maybe, slightly disconcerting I would imagine, on further thought possibly quite rude. I could never bring myself to ask anyway, and without the rest, I could only speculate on the scraps and lost interest quickly.

I played with the thinning hair around my crown. My fingers raked over more bald skin than I remembered, and I felt loose strands pulling up from the scalp.

My watch suggested only four minutes had passed.

Desperate, I studied the ceiling. The show was inside a heritage building in the city centre. It had impossibly high ceilings with tessellating patterns, decorated with tiny, intricate carvings of cherubs triumphing over demons. The sandstone creatures looked like they might flutter down into the crowd at any moment if it weren’t for the thick marble pillars that pinned them up there at arm’s length. The carvings drew my eyes to the stage. Behind it stood upright brass pipes of various diameters, a row of soldiers at the helm of the cavernous room. A set of black and ivory white keys clung between them with more angels piercing the hearts of dog-like gargoyles.

“Gorgeous, don’t you think?”

A woman appeared in the seat next to me. I hadn’t noticed her sit down, yet her coat was already off and in her lap, like mine. She was frail-looking, an elderly woman with whisps of short hair, so white they could have been strands of cloud. A singular orange hair-roller was tangled up behind her ear. Her voice startled me.

“Do you think it works?”

We both studied the shiny organ for a moment.

“It has to, right?” I replied. “The city’s got the money for it, and it would seem like a bit of a waste otherwise.”

The corner of her mouth wrinkled into a smile, as if she was relieved to hear this.

“Have you been here before?” I continued.

“Well, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure.” Seeing me waiting, she went on with a sigh, “Many years ago, I was in a bit of a tight spot and decided to get this surgery done.” A pale finger traced a curved line down the side of her abdomen. I wondered if I had made a mistake. “Anyway, I’ve been on this medication for it ever since. Mostly the stuff is fine, but it does have a side effect.”

“What’s that?” The intrusiveness of the question struck me as it left my tongue, but the old woman didn’t hesitate.

“I think the pills are ruining my memory.”

“Right.”

“Every day more of me goes down the drain. Things are…slipping, for lack of a better word. But it’s the lesser evil I suppose. And now and then, something will come through crystal clear. The point is, I may well have been here before but I’m just not certain.”

“That sounds hard,” I offered, trying my best to sound sympathetic.

“Hard?” she laughed, “Dear, how many people do you think get to look at this place even once?” She gestured to the ceiling and the pillars of swirling marble. “I might have been here one hundred times, and I get to see it for the first time, every time. Things are always more beautiful the first time you see them.”

The gaps of seats were filling, and the ambient chatter swelled as another wave of bodies shuffled in out of the cold. We went back to admiring the great instrument in silence.

“I’ll tell you what though, it does remind me of something.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“See, I was watching this show a while ago, one of those house renovation ones. In this episode, a couple were renovating a church in some quiet town that they were going to transform into their home. But the problem was, the old thing had an enormous organ in it that was taking up a great deal of room. Knowing nothing about the things, the couple eventually found a man, an organ expert I suppose, who was going to fly over from Germany and buy it from them.”

“Buy it from them?” I had an image of an entire church organ sitting on the curb, awaiting collection, “I didn’t know you could sell only the organ part of a church. I always thought they were built into the walls or something.”

The old woman chuckled, “That’s what I thought too. Anyway…”

“The German.” I was invested.

“Yes. The German flew over and decided that he would buy it. Now, the little church was quite known around this town. The townsfolk had grown up with it, many even worshipped there before it was sold. The couple decided they would do something for them before it got rebuilt, and so they asked a favour of the German. He was a good man, and with his specialised tools he spent an entire extra day fixing the organ. The townsfolk gathered in the church, filling every pew, and he played for them all afternoon. Many of them hadn’t heard those bellowing pipes work in years. It belonged to them.”

She pondered something out of reach again with that contented smile.

“But, then the couple sold it.” I felt the pessimism in my voice damage the soft air, slicing it like a scalpel widening the middle of an otherwise uniform surface.

“Yes. Then they sold it,” she said bluntly.

I hated myself for saying that, for mutilating a rare moment of lucidity from this woman who had entrusted me with something so fragile.

“The German took it apart, piece by piece, removing it from the body of the church. But then he still had to get it back to Germany with him.”

“How did he do it?”

“The way he did it was rather funny actually. What he did was carefully measure out each individual piece of the organ, and then he bought padded suitcases that had the same corresponding dimensions. Once he had carefully packed away every pipe and key, all he had to do was check in at the airport with his fleet of suitcases and fly home!”

We shared a childish giggle. The image was astonishing. One man trying to coax a mess of bulging suitcases through the narrow line towards the service desk. There was something undoubtedly comedic about it, yet at the same time a strange sadness overcame me at the thought of the church, left behind with its insides gutted like a fish in a market.

“Seems like a shame though, doesn’t it,” I said.

The woman nodded solemnly as if I had beat her to saying just this. “It’s funny how the element that seemed so integral to the very structure of the place can be ripped out like that. Forever. And sold off to the highest bidder, no less. It only took one man for the job.”

Her blank face stared out at the gleaming pipes behind the stage, thumbing the spot on her abdomen again. She seemed inaccessible, as if I could only view her through the other end of one of those hollow organ pipes. I could only see what was illuminated within the finite circle of her memory and couldn’t recognise what form it was taking, only that it was coming to a painful, inevitable close.

“The German was a good guy though, right? I mean, he fixed the thing and played it for the townspeople. There’s something to that.”

“Yes. He was a good man,” she said. There was an aching behind her face.

“But, I suppose, the thing that bothered me,” she was choosing each word before allowing herself to speak it into truth, “What bothered me was the way that something so grand could so easily be turned into…luggage.”

I pictured the empty church, a skeleton. It was still a church by definition, but it no longer took the same form for those who it belonged to. Without the organ, it wasn’t the townspeople’s church anymore, it was something else entirely.

There was nothing for me to say back to her. I felt responsible for the heavy air that blanketed us then. I found myself turning to her, my lips beginning to part. But the words had escaped me. My gaze retreated to my lap. The lights dimmed, and a hushed applause washed over the crowd as a figure took the stage.