In the evening Nina wrote, Pavel's wife.
Pavel worked as an electrician at the tram depot and identified a fault by the sound before anyone had got the casing off. Here too, standing at the counter with his own shoe, he told Igor the machine was running unevenly, a week before it stopped. Igor was offended then, and afterwards told the story to everyone for two weeks.
I asked Pavel then whether he heard anything besides faults that way. He left, thought for two days, then found a tuning fork in his pocket and in the end went away to learn bells. Nina has sent me recordings ever since, about three times a year.
This time she sent a recording of a belfry in some town whose name I didn't catch: a minute and a half, wind and bells. By the sound it had been recorded from the ground and not very close.
"Pavel asks me to thank you."
We listened over supper, twice.
Igor said something trembles in the second half. I explained that it doesn't tremble, that it's meant to be like that, and that it's called the hum. Igor said it still sounded like the way our fridge hums when it hasn't been shut, and we argued a little, and he played it a third time to show me where the resemblance was.
"So it wasn't for nothing," I said.
Igor asked how much a bell like that can actually weigh. I didn't know. He went to look it up on his phone, found it, was astonished, read me three figures in a row aloud and said he didn't understand how you hang that.
"And does he hang them himself?"
"I don't think so. He tunes them."
"Tunes them how?" Igor put the phone down. "It isn't a string. You can't tighten it."
I explained as I had understood it from Nina's messages: something is pared away from the inside, metal is taken off at particular places, and the tone changes from that. Igor listened and was dissatisfied.
"So they spoil it to make it sound right."
"They don't spoil it, they work it."
"Aha." He thought. "Like the welt."
About the welt he explained to me for another ten minutes afterwards, and on the whole the explanation was convincing.
I wrote to Nina: thank you, tell him too that we listened. She replied within a minute: I'll be sure to.
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