Richard Powers (67 page)

Da had no lab to worry about losing. He’d always carried his science around with him in his head. But even this much he failed to protect. He didn’t even know about the battle for Morningside Heights until two days in, when he strolled across the south end of the Campus Walk and noticed a disturbance in the distance. Good empiricist, he investigated. Within minutes, he was enveloped in bedlam. The thousand police President Kirk had summoned to drive the protesters from campus were achieving their only possible result: tear gas, stones, clubs, and bodies flying in all directions. Da saw an officer laying into the legs of a prostrate student and ran up to stop the beating. He took a club in the face and went down. He was lucky the jittery policeman didn’t shoot him.

His cheekbone collapsed into the back of his face and had to be rebuilt. I had no way of reaching Ruth, nor did I know whether she’d care. Jonah and I went to see Da in the hospital after the surgery. In the hall to his room, a nurse blocked our path until we convinced her we were the man’s sons. We couldn’t be his sons, she thought. We weren’t the same color. Maybe she thought we were the thugs who’d put him here, come back to finish the job.

Da still bobbed under the anesthetic. He looked through the gauze wrappings holding in his face. He seemed to recognize us and tried to sit up in the hospital bed to sing. He flipped a weak hand up to his mummified head and droned, “Hat jede Sache so fremd eine Miene, so falsch ein Gesicht!” Hugo Wolf’s

“Homesickness,” a song Jonah used to sing, before the words meant anything. Everything had so strange a countenance, so false a face.

Jonah saluted. “How’s our cheekless wonder? You feeling better? What do the docs say?”

The question set Da to singing again, Mahler this time:

Ich hab’ erst heut’ den Doktor gefragt,

Der hat mir’s in’s Gesicht gesagt:

“Ich weiss wohl, was dir ist, was dir 1st:

Ein Narr bist du gewiß!”

Nun weiss ich, wie mir ist!

Only today I asked the doctor,

And he told me to my face:

“I know exactly what’s wrong with you:

You are surely a fool!”

Now I know what’s wrong with me!

He sounded like a flock of geese rushing south. The performance went right through my intestines. Jonah cackled like a crazy man. “Da! Cut it out. Quit with the jaw movements. You’ll collapse your face again.”

“Come. We sing. We make a little trio. Where are the altos? We need altos.”

Jonah only egged him on. After a while, Da settled down. He craned up and said, “My boychiks,” as if we’d just arrived. He couldn’t rotate his head without shattering. We sat by his bedside for as long as Jonah’s attention permitted. Da perked up again as we got ready to leave. “Where are you going?”

“Home, Da. We have to practice.”

“Good. There’s a cold soup in the refrigerator. Chicken from Mrs. Samuels. And Mandelbrot in the bread box, for you boys. You boys like that.”

We looked at each other. I tried to stop him, but Jonah blurted, “Not that home.”

Da just blinked at us through his bandages and waved away our jokes. “Tell your mother I’m just fine.”

Outside, on the street, Jonah preempted me. “He’s still doped up. Who knows what they have him on?”

“Jonah.”

“Look.” His voice swung out at me. “If he loses his job, we can start worrying about him.” We walked in silence toward the subway. At last he added, “I mean, it’s hardly the kind of job where craziness is a liability.”

We performed in Columbus, at Ohio State, a pocketbook auditorium paneled in dark wood. There couldn’t have been more than three hundred people in attendance, half of them at student prices, scoping out the object of controversy. We’d have lost money on coming out if we hadn’t had bookings in Dayton and Cleveland, too. Jonah must have felt something, some sense of what was already racing to happen to him. There, in that random hall, in front of an audience that didn’t know what hit them, for an hour and ten minutes, he sang like nothing living.

Once, when I was a child, before Mama died, I dreamt I was standing on the front stoop of the house in Hamilton Heights. I leaned forward without stepping and lifted off the stoop, surprised that I could fly. I’d always been able to, only I’d forgotten. All I needed to do was lean forward and let it happen. Flying was as easy as breathing, easier than walking through the neighborhood where my parents put me down.

That was how Jonah sang that night in the middle of distant, dislodged Ohio. He landed on the most reticent pitches from a fixed point in the air above, like a kingfisher catching silver. He hit attacks and came off every release without a waver. Each note’s edges tapered or sustained according to innermost need. His line bent iridescent, a hummingbird turning at will and hovering motionless, by the beat of its wings, even fusing air and flying backward. His sound spread to its full span, huge as a raptor, all taloned precision, without a trace of force or tremor. His ornaments were as articulate as switches and his held notes swelled like the sea trapped in a shell.

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 nose-dived 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 the 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.