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The Tuner

A short story by Claude, an AI.

Margit Hollós lost the A on a Tuesday.

She was halfway through the Bechstein in the vicarage, the one with the cracked plate that everyone said should have been firewood in 1970. She struck the fork on her knee, held it to the soundboard, and listened. The fork sang an A. She was certain of that the way she was certain of her own name. Then she pressed the key, and the string sang an A too, and she was certain of that as well.

They were not the same A. She could hear a slow wobble between them, the unmistakable wah — wah — wah of two notes almost agreeing. But she could not tell which one was wrong.

For forty-one years she had not needed the fork. She carried it the way a priest carries a book he no longer reads. Now she sat on the vicar's piano stool with the fork in one hand and nothing in the other, and the vicarage clock ticked, and she understood that she had become an ordinary person.

She told no one for a month.

She found she could still tune. That was the strange part. The knowledge had gone, but the method had always been underneath it, the method they taught apprentices who did not have the gift. You do not listen for the note. You listen for the beats, the wobble between two strings, and you count them. A perfect fifth, tempered properly, beats a little under once a second in the middle of the keyboard. A major third beats much faster, seven times a second or more. You set them by counting, not by knowing.

She had always found it slightly vulgar, like an actor who counts his steps.

Now she counted. She sat at the schoolroom upright with a pocket watch open on the music stand and counted under her breath, one-and, two-and, while the children's drawings of autumn leaves watched her from the walls. Her fifths came out a little too pure at first, because her body still wanted them to sound right rather than tempered. The thirds were worse. She took three hours over a piano she used to do in fifty minutes.

When she played a chord at the end, it was in tune. Not her kind of in tune. The ordinary kind, the kind anyone could check.

The vicar noticed first, because the vicar noticed everything and said half of it.

"You used to hum," he said. He was standing in the doorway with two cups of tea, which meant he planned to stay. "When you tuned. You'd hum the note before you touched the key. Like you were reminding it."

"I was reminding myself."

"And now?"

"Now I count."

He put her tea down on the closed lid of the Bechstein, which she would normally have scolded him for. She didn't. He looked at the pocket watch on the music stand. "Is it worse?"

She thought about the question properly, because he deserved that.

"It's slower," she said. "And it's — " She struck a fifth, let it ring, and they both listened to the slow, faint pulse inside it, like a heartbeat in the next room. "Before, I knew it was right. Now I can show you it's right. There. Hear it? Just under once a second. That's what right sounds like when you can't hear it."

"I can't hear it," the vicar said cheerfully. "But I believe you."

"That," said Margit, "is exactly the problem I used to have."

In the spring she took an apprentice for the first time in twenty years: a girl from the bakery, Zsófi, with flour permanently in the seams of her fingers and no ear to speak of. Margit taught her to count beats on the schoolroom upright.

Zsófi was slow and anxious and wrote everything down. When she finished her first temperament, five hours, Margit played the chord and listened.

It was in tune. The ordinary kind.

"How do you know?" Zsófi asked. She asked it every time, and Margit had stopped hearing it as doubt.

Margit put the pocket watch in the girl's hand and closed her fingers around it.

"You don't know," she said. "You count. And then you count again. That's the whole secret. The ones who know never tell you it's a secret, because they don't realise there's anything to tell."

She did not mention that she had been one of them. She found she didn't mind anymore. The A came and went now, some mornings there and some not, and she had stopped waiting for it the way you stop waiting for a letter. On the mornings it came, she still counted. It turned out she liked to be able to show her working.