I drunkenly sauntered over to the man playing the piano in the bar. He was wearing a white dinner jacket and shiny black shoes.
I plonked my beer on top of the piano, a little slopped over the lip of the glass and onto the polished surface. The 5 previous beers I'd already consumed pummelled any lingering guilt about this into tiny pieces.
"Do you do requests?" I asked - the dirge that he'd played so far was eating away at my soul.
"Oh no sir, I cannot play requests"
"Why not?" I asked, incredulous, "Some sort of bizarre corporate policy?"
"No sir, you see," he said conspiratorially, lifting his hands from the keyboard, "I cannot play the piano. It plays itself. I just sit here and pretend."
They keys carried on being pressed by either a phantom pianist, or some clever Japanese servos mounted within the piano. The romantic in me wanted to believe the former. My engineering side believed the latter.
"Can I have a go?" I asked.
"Sure" he replied.
It was surprisingly difficult trying to match my fingers to the keys as they went down.
"If you've memorised all these keypresses, surely you can play without the machine?"
"I'm afraid not sir. It would be against policy. I do sing though. There is no machine for that," he said. I looked carefully at his big, round German face for a trace of sarcasm or bitterness and found none.
As if on cue, the piano segued into "Fly Me To The Moon". I carried on pretending to play while the pianist, for possibly the first time in his career as make-belive musician, stood, leant against the piano, and sang.
I'd like to say he sang like Frank Sinatra. Or maybe Dean Martin. But that would be a lie. His heavily accented English flattened any notes he might have carried while I drank in the surreality of it all.
Who said the Germans have no sense of humour?
