An odd detail was the Russian soldier's delight in throwing a piano out of a window. In the last months of World War II when a city like Danzig, Poznan or Breslau had been liberated, the Red Army commander granted his men two days to drink, rape and destroy. Their ultimate joy was to locate a piano in some looted building and then tug, push, grunt, sweat it up the stairs, crash it into the apartment at the top landing, and then, after smashing the window frames with gun butts, to shove it out of the window and let it drop to the sidewalk below.
Imagine if you can the fall of a piano from a four-story building, the explosion when it hit, the unbelieveable sound of shattering wood and torn wires in a hundred different tones. If you met someone whose soul had been ravished by the same experience, you would know that he knew, and together you might set out to recapture the moment, like the perfect high, the perfect orgasm, the perfect rock concert, that those who had not shared could never grasp in a thousand years. One absolute moment of creation and destruction, both as one, that the Eastern mind could comprehend and the Western, fettered to sterile rationalism until the student uprising of the 1960s, could not.
Charles Merrill, The Journey
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