The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  Technique no longer dictated what sound he could or couldn’t make. The full palette of human song was his. Every protection racket he’d lived through gave him something to sing about, something to escape. He’d always been able to hit the notes. Now he knew what the notes meant. In his mouth, hope hung, fear cowered, joy let loose, anger bit into itself, memory recalled. The rage of 1968 fueled him and fell away, amazed by the place he made of it.

  His sound said, Stop everything. The votes are in. Nothing but listening matters. I had to force myself to keep playing. I stumbled, pulled along in his wake. To do him justice, to match what I heard, my fingers turned extraordinary evidence. For the shortest while, I, too, could say everything about where we’d come from. Playing like that, I didn’t love Jonah because he was my brother. I loved him—would lay down my life for him, already had—because, for a few unchanging moments onstage, backing up into the crook of the piano, he was free. He shed who he was, what he wanted, the sorry wrapper of the self. His sound traveled into sublime indifference. And for a while, he brought back a full working description for anyone to hear.

  That’s how the music came out of him. Silk slid across obsidian. The tiniest working hinge in a carved ivory triptych the size of a walnut. A blind man, lost at a street corner in a winter city. The disk of affronted moon, snagged in the branches of a cloudless night. He leaned into the notes, unable to suppress his own thrill in the power of making. And when he finished, when his hands dropped down flush to his thighs and the bulge of muscle above his collarbone—that cue I always watched like the tip of a conductor’s baton—at last went slack, I forgot to lift my foot off the sustain. Instead of closing the envelope, I let the vibrations of that last chord keep traveling and, like the sign of his words on the air, float on to their natural death. The house couldn’t decide if the music had ended. Those three hundred midwestern ticket holders refused to break in on the thing they’d just witnessed or destroy it with anything so banal as applause.

  The audience wouldn’t clap. Nothing like it had ever happened to us. Jonah stood in the growing vacuum. I can’t trust my sense of time; my brain still ran that tempo where thirty-second notes laze through the ear like blimps at an air show. But the silence was complete, soaking up even the constant coughs and chair creaks that litter every concert. It grew until the moment for turning it into ovation was lost. By silent agreement, the audience held still.

  After a lifetime—maybe ten full seconds—Jonah relaxed and walked offstage. He walked right past me on the piano bench without looking my way. After another frozen eternity, I walked off after him. I found him in the stage wing, fiddling with the sash ropes that ran up into the theater’s fly tower. My look asked, What happened out there? His answered, Who cares?

  The spell over the audience chose that moment to break. They should have gone home in their chosen silence, but they didn’t have the will. The clapping began, halting and stunted. But making up for the late start, it turned into a riot. Bourgeois normalcy was saved for another evening. Jonah resisted going back and taking a bow. He’d had enough of Columbus. I had to shove him out, then wait a step and follow along behind him, smiling. They brought us back four times, and would have gone five except that Jonah refused. The third curtain call was the point when we always trotted out an encore bonbon. That night made an encore impossible. We never even looked at each other. He dragged me out to the loading dock before anyone could come backstage to congratulate us.

  We headed to our campus guest room at a trot. Five years ago, we might have giggled in triumph the whole way. But that night, we were grim with transcendence. We got to the student guest house in silence. The all-reaching creature became my brother again. He undid his tie and took off his burgundy cummerbund even before we entered the elevator to our room. In the room, he lost himself in gin and tonics and televised jabber. For a while, he’d hovered above the noise of being. Then he nosedived back in.

  The world we returned to likewise fell apart. I could no longer tell cause from effect, before from after. Robert Kennedy was shot. Who knew why? The war—some war. Chickens roosting. Impossible to keep track of what futures were being decided or what scores were being settled. Thereafter, all crucial decisions would be made by sniper. Paris boiled over, then Prague, Peking, even Moscow. In Mexico City, two of the world’s fastest men raised their black fists in the air on the Olympic medal stands in a silent, world-traveling scream.

  Toward the end of summer came Chicago. The city hadn’t yet recovered from “shoot to kill.” We were supposed to perform at a summer festival up at Ravinia, on the eighteenth of August. Jonah, on a hunch, canceled. Maybe it was the hippies’ threat to lace the city water supply with LSD. We stayed in New York and watched the show on television. The presidential nomination turned into a bloodbath. It ended as every recent battle for our souls had: with an airlift of six thousand troops equipped with every weapon from flamethrower to bazooka. “Democracy in action,” Jonah kept repeating to the flickering screen. “Power of the vote.” Filled with his own helplessness, he watched the country descend into the hell of its choice.

  In October, he bailed. He came to me waving an invitation to a monthlong music residency in Magdeburg starting before Christmas and running past New Year’s. “You gotta love this, Joey. The one-thousandth anniversary of the establishment of the archbishopric. The town is gung ho on reviving their one brief moment at the center of civilization.”

  “Magdeburg? You can’t go.”

  “What do you mean ‘can’t go,’ bro?”

  “Magdeburg is in East Germany.”

  He shrugged. “Is it?”

  I may have used the term Iron Curtain. It was a long time ago.

  “So what’s the big deal? I’m an invited guest. It’s a special occasion. Practically a state function. Their foreign service or whatever it’s called will get me a visa.”

  “It’s not about getting in over there. It’s about getting back in over here.”

  “And why, exactly, would anyone want to?”

  “I’m serious, Jonah. Aid and comfort to the enemy. They’ll hassle you over this for the rest of your life. Look what they did to Robeson.”

  “I’m serious, too, Joey. If there’s a problem coming back, I don’t want to.” I couldn’t bear to look at him. I turned away, but he spun a little impish pirouette to keep his face in front of mine. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Mule. This country’s totally fucked up. Why would anyone want to live here if he didn’t have to? What choices do I have? I can stick around and tote bales, and if I stay out of trouble long enough, they’ll let me be a certified black artist. Or I can go to Europe and sing.”

  I grabbed his flailing wrists. “Sit down. Just. Sit. You’re making me nuts.” I took his shoulders and shoved him down on the piano bench. I chopped at him with my index finger—performers” obedience school. “Europe is fine. Musicians … like us have been going that route forever. Germany? Why not, for a little while? But go to Hamburg, Jonah. Go to Munich, if you have to go.”

  “Munich hasn’t offered to pay my way and put me up with a healthy honorarium.”

  “Magdeburg’s doing all that?”

  “Joey. It’s Germany. Deine Vorfahren, Junge! They invented music. It’s their life’s blood. They’d do anything for it. It’s like … like firearms over here.”

  “They’re using you. Cold War propaganda. You’re going to be their showpiece for how America treats its—”

  He laughed out loud and doused his hands into the keyboard for a Prokofievian parody of the “Internationale.” “That’s me, Joey. Traitor to my country. Me and Commander Bucher.” He looked up at me, both corners of his mouth pulled back. “Grow up, man! Like the United States hasn’t been using us our whole lives?”

  The United States had offered him the lead in a premiere of a new Met opera. Yet he could be an artist only if he’d wear the alien badge. Music was supposed to be cosmopolitan—free travel across all borders. But it could get him into t
he last Stalinist state more easily than it could get him into midtown. I looked at him, begging, a black accompanist, an Uncle Tom in white tie and tails, willing to be used and abused by anyone, most of all my brother, if we could only go on living as if music were ours.

  He rubbed my head, sure that we’d always bond over that ritual humiliation. “Come with me, Joey. Come on. Telemann’s birthplace. We’ll have a blast.” Jonah detested Telemann. The man’s greatest claim to fame is turning down a job they then had to give to Bach. “You wouldn’t know it from our bookings in this country in recent months, but we two do have a salable skill. People will pay good money to hear us do what we do. It’s state-subsidized over there. Why shouldn’t you and I get in on a little of that action? Rightful descendants, huh?”

  “What are you thinking? Jonah?”

  “What? I’m not thinking anything. I’m saying let’s have an adventure. We know the language. We can amaze the natives. I’m not getting laid anytime soon. You’re not getting laid, are you, Mule? Let’s go see what the Fräuleins are up to these days.” He examined me long enough to see what his words were doing. It never occurred to him I might say no. He changed keys, modulating faster and further afield than late Strauss.

  “Come on, Joey. Salzburg. Bayreuth. Potsdam. Vienna. Wherever you want to go. We can head up to Leipzig. Make a pilgrimage to the Thomaskirche.”

  He sounded desperate. I couldn’t figure out why. If he was so sure of Europe’s embrace, why did he need me? And what did he mean to do with me once the requests started pouring in for concert work, solos with orchestras, and even—the grand prize he’d set himself—opera? I held up my palm. “What does Da say?”

  “Da?” His syllable came out a laugh. He hadn’t even thought to tell our father. Our father, the least political man who’d ever lived, a man who’d once lived a hundred kilometers from Magdeburg. Our Da, who vowed never to set foot in his native country again. I couldn’t go. Our father might need me. Our sister might want to get in touch. No one would be here to take care of things if I let my brother drag me away for months. Jonah had no plan, and he didn’t need one. He didn’t really need anything except, for reasons that escaped me, me.

  I weighed how much he expected me to throw away. When I didn’t step forward with a ready yes, it seemed to confuse him. His look of friendly conscription rippled with panic, then narrowed to a single accusing question: “How about it?”

  “Jonah.” Under the pressure of his gaze, I slipped out and looked down on the two of us. “Haven’t you jerked me around enough?”

  For a second, he didn’t hear me. Then all he could hear was betrayal. “Sure, Mule. Suit yourself.” He grabbed his cap and corduroy jacket and left the apartment. I didn’t see him for two days. He came back just in time for our next gig. And three weeks after that, he was packed and ready to go.

  He had his visa, and an open ticket. “When are you coming back?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “We’ll see what comes down.” We never shook hands, and we didn’t now. “Watch your back, Mule. Keep away from the Chopin.” He didn’t add, Decide your own life. He’d do that for me, as always. All he said on that score was, “So long. Write if you get work.”

  AUGUST 1945

  Delia’s on the A when she sees the headline. Not by law a Jim Crow car, but the law’s just a tagalong. Car color changes with the blocks above ground. Safety, comfort, ease—the cold comforts of neighborhood chosen and enforced. Choice and its opposite shade off, one into the other, so fluidly these last days of the war. She has come to know, close up, the blurred edge between the two—things forced upon her until they seem elected; things chosen so fiercely, they feel compelled.

  Tuesday morning. David is home with the boys. She runs out, just for a minute, to buy an ice bag for the little one. He has fallen down the front steps and hurt his ankle. Not one cry from him after the first. But the ankle is a swollen dark stain, thicker now than her wrist, and the poor child needs the comfort only cold can bring.

  She rides two stops, to the pharmacy she knows will serve her. They know her there—Mrs. Strom, mother of small boys. Two stops—five minutes. But she reads the headline in a flash, no time at all. Three fat lines run across the length of the page. They’re not as large as the headlines last May, declaring an end to Europe’s Armageddon. But they come off the page in a more silent burst.

  A deep sable man sits next to her, poring over the words, shaking his head, willing them to change. The night has brought a “rain of ruin.” One bomb lands with the force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Two thousand B-29’s. She tries to imagine a ton of TNT. Two tons. Twenty—something like the weight of this subway car. Now. ten times that. Then ten times, and ten times that again.

  The gaze of the man next to her freezes on the headline. His eyes keep scanning back and forth, the lines of text forcing his head through a stiff, refusing no. He struggles, not with the words, but with the ideas they pretend to stand for. Words don’t exist yet for what these words brush up against. She reads in secret, looking over his shaking shoulders. NEW AGE USHERED. His gaze remains unchanged. IMPENETRABLE CLOUD OF DUST HIDES CITY. Delia thinks: This city. SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH. SECRECY ON WEAPON SO GREAT THAT NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW OF THEIR PRODUCT.

  They heard last night on the radio. Confirmation of what her household long ago knew. But the story goes real for her now, seeing the words in print, in this Negro subway car. The DAY OF ATOMIC ENERGY begins for this unchanged underground train. The jet-black man next to her shakes his head, mourning tens of thousands of dead brown skins, while for the rest of the car, life passes for what it had passed for the day before. A woman across from her in a red silk hat checks her lips in a compact mirror. The boy in a smashed fedora to her left studies his Racing Form. A little girl, ten, out of school for the summer vacation, skips up the aisle, finding a shiny dime some unfortunate has dropped.

  She shouts at the whole car, in her skull. Don’t you see? It’s over. This means the war is over. But the war isn’t over, not for any of them. Never will be. Just one more story on a weary, turning page. JET PLANE EXPLOSION KILLS MAJOR BONG. KYUSHU CITY RAZED. CHINESE WIN MORE OF “INVASION COAST.” One more numbing war report, after a lifetime of war.

  NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW. How do the reporters presume to know that, a day after the blast? She knew. She’s known for almost a month, since the secret desert testing. SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH. She knows just how awed the scientists are, lit by the flash of the work they’ve done. In the cloud enveloping her, Delia Strom almost misses her stop. She dashes through the train doors as they start to close. She wanders up to the surface, then into her familiar pharmacy. A moment ago, she was filled with purpose. But when the clerk asks her what she wants, she can’t remember. Something for her hurt child. The smallest imaginable hurt, and its even smaller comfort.

  Something the shade of melted clay. Tough gray rubber and hard white cap. She grips it to her all the ride back. The bottle is a skinned lapdog, half as large as her little one, and twice as resilient. At home, she covers his wounded foot with it. The day is so hot already, they’ve made his invalid’s bed right inside the window casement, his little swollen foot practically hanging out the screens. Her Joey can’t understand why his mama wants to inflict him with freezing cold. But he suffers the torture with a smile meant to absolve her.

  Her husband, the awestruck scientist, finds her in the kitchen, laying furiously into the bottom of the saucepan with copper cleaner. “Everything is good?”

  She drops the scouring pad and grips the lip of the sink. She’s pregnant again, in her fifth month, past the early spells of bodily revolt. This is a different dizziness. “Everything,” she says, “is what it is.”

  Two years ago, when Charlie was still alive, when it might have kept her flesh and blood from harm, she wanted this bomb. Now she only wants her husband back, the world she knows. Those hundred thousand brown bodies. How many of them children, as small or smaller
than her JoJo? Hundreds of men involved: scientists, engineers, administrators. He can’t have contributed anything. Nothing the others wouldn’t have figured out on their own. He’s never told her just what part he worked on. Even now, she can’t ask.

  At night, in bed, she wants to whisper, Did you know? Of course he knew. But what her David knows, she can only guess at. He’s never done anything but play with the world, that bright hypnotic bauble. Like Newton, he says: gathering pretty shells on the beach. His life’s work, chosen because it is more useless than philosophy. Avoiding trouble, evading detection, expelled anyway. Jews and politics do not mix. She remembers his interview with that national academic honor society: “Are you a practicing Jew?” How he almost lied, on principle, just to force them out of hiding. And how they rejected him anyway, claiming, “We don’t accept people who renounce their given faiths.”

  She watches as he undresses, hanging his rumpled trousers on a chair, exposing his shocking whiteness, a strangeness even greater than she’d suspected before they married. Stranger, even, than the strangeness of men. This white, this man, this unpracticing Jew, this German shares her room with her. But the room they share is stranger than either of them.