Richard Powers (91 page)

“It’s Bach,” Hans objected. “Other people already own this. People know these pieces, forward and retrograde.”

“They only think they know them. Like they thought they knew Rembrandt, until the grime came off.

Come on. ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song.’ Johnny Bach, heard for the first time.”

That became the project’s slogan, the one EMI promoted our recording with. Whatever the legitimacy of the performances, our agility justified them. The thing about Bach is, he never wrote for the human voice.

He had some less plodding medium in mind to carry his memo into space. His lines are completely independent. His part-writing combs out some extra dimension between its harmonies. Most performances go for majesty and end up mud. Voces Antiquae went for lightness and wound up in orbit.

The group’s turning radius, even at highway speeds, was uncanny. We brought out counterpoint in the works that even Hans had never heard. Every note was audible, even the ones buried alive in that thicket of invention. We goosed the giddiness and laid into the passing dissonances. We brought those motets back to their medieval roots and pushed them forward to their radical Romantic children. By the time we finished, no one could say what century they came from.

Our disc was notorious from its day of release. It started a pitched battle, venomous in proportion to how little was at stake and how few people cared. I don’t mean Le sacre du printemps or anything. But there was flack. The new had lost its capacity to shock; only the old could still rattle people. We were derided for emasculating Bach and praised for sandblasting a monument that hadn’t been hosed down in a long time. Jonah never read a single review. He felt we’d acquitted ourselves well, maybe even superlatively. Yet he wasn’t satisfied. He’d wanted to make that music give up its secrets. But that was something it wasn’t going to do until long after we were all dead.

We toured with the motets but returned, after a while, to our roots. We revived the Renaissance in every burg in Germany. We sang in Cologne, Essen, Göttingen, Vienna—every city Da had ever mentioned to us. But no relatives ever came out of the audience after any of our concerts to claim us. We sang in King’s College Chapel, a homecoming for Peter Chance and a stunned first for the Strom brothers.

Jonah craned up at the fan vault, which no photo can even be wrong about. His eyes dampened and his lips curled bitterly. “Birthplace of the Anglican hoot.” He was coming home to a place that would never be his.

We spent five days in Israel. I imagined that our Counter-Reformation Masses and courtier chansons would have to sound absurd in this permanently embattled world. But the halls wouldn’t release us without several encores. Memory was resourceful. It could reclaim any windblown trinket and weave it into the nest. In Jerusalem, on the tour’s last concert, we sang in a futuristic wood-lined auditorium that might have been in Rome, Tokyo, or New York. The audience was unreadable: two sexes, three faiths, four races, a dozen nationalities, and as many motives for listening to the chant of death as there were seats in the house.

From my spot on the stage lip, I keyed on a woman in the second row, her body stenciled with sixty-year-old state messages, her face an inventory of collective efficiencies. Four chords into our opening Machaut Kyrie, it hit me: my aunt. My father’s sister, Hannah, the only one of his family whose wartime death had never been certain. She and Vihar, her Bulgarian husband, had gone underground before my birth, and there the trail ended. My father, the empiricist, could never bring himself to declare her dead. Hannah was, compared to the size of history, a particle so small, her path could not be measured. The Holocaust had annihilated all addresses. Yet here Aunt Hannah was, returned by our performance. She must have seen the posters announcing our tour. She’d seen the name, her name, two men the right age and origin… She’d come to the concert, purchased a seat up close so she could study our faces for any trace of bloodline. Her resemblance to Da was uncanny. Time, place, even the nightmare gap between their paths: Nothing could erase the kinship. She looked so much like Da, I knew Jonah had to see it, as well. But his face throughout our concert’s first half showed no sign of any audience at all. Between this familiar stranger scrutinizing me and my brother refusing to catch my eye, it took a lifetime’s practice to go on singing.

I cornered Jonah at intermission. “You didn’t notice anything?”

“I noticed your focus flying around like some high-wire—”

“You didn’t see her? The gray-haired, heavy woman in the second row?”

“Joseph. They’re all gray-haired, heavy women in the second row.”

“Your aunt.” If I’d lost my mind, I wanted my brother to know.

“ Myaunt?” He put his fingers to his chest, running the calculations. “Impossible. You are aware, aren’t you?”

“Jonah. Everything’s impossible. Look at us.”

He laughed. “There is that.”

We went back on. At our first shared tacet measure, I caught him looking. He flashed me a quick peripheral glance. If anyone in the world is our aunt, it’s her. She, for her part, gazed into us like surgery.

She took her eyes off me only to look at Jonah. During the curtain call, she fixed me with a look that scorned all forgetting: Strom, boychik. Did you think I would never find you?

The reception lines that night were endless. Scores of people, still savoring the frozen hour they’d just inhabited, tried, by standing next to us and shaking our hands, to postpone, a little longer, their relapse into motion. I couldn’t focus on the compliments. I darted through the crowd, about to find a family, however small and distant. Excitement was just terror that hadn’t yet imagined its own end.

The crowd thinned out, and I saw her. She was holding back, waiting for a lull. I grabbed Jonah and pulled him with me toward our flesh and blood, using him like a shield. She smiled as we closed on her, a thrill that looked around for a place to bolt.

“Tante Hannah? Ist es möglich?”

She answered in Russian. In a broken pidgin of languages, we three worked it out. She knew the name Strom only from our recordings. She closed her eyes when we told our half of the story, said who we thought she was. Hers were my father’s closed eyes.

“This aunt of yours. I knew thousands of your aunts. I was with them.” She breathed in and opened her eyes again. “But now I am here. Here to tell you so.”

Every muscle in her face was ours. We couldn’t stop pushing for some proof of kinship: town names, what we knew of our grandmother’s Russian roots, anything to find the connection. She smiled and shook her head. The shake was Da’s. And in that one tremor, I knew him. Jewish grief. Grief so great, he never had an answer for kinship but to keep it from us.

Her English was weak, and she shuddered at German. What little Russian we had came from Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. But her words were clear as silence: You are one of us, always. Not by law, but the law is a technicality. You could convert. Rejoin. Relearn, even for the first time. “You know,” she told us, by way of good-bye, “if you want family? You are sharing family with half this audience.”

We were singing in late July of 1984, in the Palais des Papes at the Avignon Festival, when my family found me. Word came from our arts management in Brussels, who’d gotten it in a telegram from Milton Weisman, our old agent. Mr. Weisman would die the next year, never having owned a fax machine or heard of E-mail. Milton Weisman: the last man in the developed world to send telegrams.

The telegram was stuffed inside an envelope and sent by overnight courier to our hotel in Provence. I picked it up at the front desk with my room key, figuring it was some contract I’d forgotten to sign. I didn’t read it until I was in my room.

Bad news from home. Your brother has been killed. Call your wife as soon as this reaches you. My regrets. Forgive this messenger. Ever. Milton.

I read it again, and wound up even further from sense. For the sickest interval, it was really Jonah, dead in some freak alternate world just now collapsing into mine, replacing the one I’d foolishly held faith with.

Then it wasn’t Jonah, but some brother I’d never known. Then it wasn’t even me, my brother, my wife, but a split-off Strom family trapped behind soundproof glass, rapping on it in silent horror.

I went down the hall to Jonah and Celeste’s room. My hands were shaking so badly, I had to knock twice. Jonah opened the door and read my face at once. All I could do was shove the words into his hands. I followed him into his room. Jonah put the telegram on his bed, still looking at it. He raised his palms. “The man is a lot older than when we worked with him. That must be it.”

“‘Forgive this messenger’?”

Jonah nodded, conceding a point I didn’t even know I’d made. “So call.”

“Call who? My wife ?” But I knew who Milton Weisman meant. He was from another time, a moral man whose names for things were as dated as the music he represented. He’d neglected to give any phone number. He figured I’d remember.

I sat on Jonah’s hotel bed for minutes, eyes closed, a receiver in hand, a parody of prayer, trying to remember the number in Atlantic City I once knew as automatically as I knew the changes to

“Honeysuckle Rose.” Memory required forgetting everything, especially the hope of recall. At last my fingers dialed, the numbers still in my muscles, the way pieces of piano music still lived in my fingers long after I’d forgotten all about them. A pitched jangle at the other end announced the States . Colors that were submerged in me surfaced at that sound. I sat savoring them—Coltrane, high-fat ice cream, the Times on a Sunday, the sound of a Middle Atlantic drawl. I was like a wino window-shopping outside a package store.

The number had been disconnected. An operator with a Spanish accent gave me another. I dialed the new number, my courage beginning to falter. Then she picked up. For a moment, I’d called to tell her I’d be late for breakfast. Muscle memory, too, the thing that doesn’t stop until our muscles do. I heard myself ask, “Teresa?” A second later, before she could say anything, I heard myself ask again. My voice bounced back in maddening delay, the time it took for the word to make the loop from Europe to outer space to America back up to the communications satellite and down to Europe’s surface again. Canon at unison.

She needed no other sound. She struggled to say the syllables of my name, not quite managing. At last she got out a comic, choked “Joey!” The nickname she rarely called me, out of too much love. She laughed, and that sound, too, quickly broke up and weeded over.

“Teresa. Ter. I got the strangest message. From Milton Weisman…” I could barely talk, distracted by the echo of my own voice bouncing back like crazed, imitative counterpoint against my own words.

“Joseph, I know. I told him to write you. I’m so sorry. It’s so horrible.”

Her words were pure dissonance. I couldn’t find the key. I had to force myself to wait, so our words wouldn’t collide in the satellite echo. “What is? His cable made no…”

She drew up short. I heard her turn like a massive freighter, doubling back to fish me out of the water.

“It’s your sister. She called me. She called me . She must have remembered my name from…” From when I had never introduced them. The idea of hearing at last from a woman Teresa had wanted to love broke her down into time-lapse crying.

“Ruth?” At that syllable, Jonah jerked up in the chair where he listened. He stood and leaned toward me.

I held him off with a palm. “What’s happened? Is she…?”

“Her husband,” Teresa cried. “It’s so awful. They say he was… He didn’t make it, Joseph. He isn’t…

He never…”

Robert. My wave of relief— Ruth alive—snapped back in horror: Robert dead. The whiplash shut me down, and I couldn’t breathe. Teresa started talking again before I started hearing. She laid out a thing I’d need explained to me over and over again. Even now. She went on in detail, details impossible for her to know and useless to my understanding.

I must have cut her off. “Is there a way I can reach her?”

“Yes.” Excited, ashamed. Part of the family at last. “She gave me a number, in case… Just a minute.”

And in the seconds it took Teresa to find her address book, I lived all the lives that mine had beaten out of me. I sat holding the line, stopped. Robert Rider was dead. My sister’s husband—killed. Ruth, from nowhere, wanted me to know. She had tracked me back to the woman who would always know how to find me, the woman who faithful Joseph was sure to stay with forever. But I’d sentenced that woman to oblivion years ago.

In the seconds while I waited for Teresa to come back, she became infinitely vulnerable to me, infinitely good. I’d hurt her beyond imagining, and here she was, glad for the chance to help me in my hour. All good things were scattering. Death fed faster, the more it took. We get nothing; a handful of weeks. The best we have is broken up or thrown stupidly away. Teresa came back on the line and read me a number. I wrote it down, blindly. I’d forgotten how many digits an American phone number had. Teresa corrected my mistakes in dictation, and we were done.

“I love you,” I told her. And got back silence. Of all the things I thought she might say, this wasn’t one.

“Teresa?”

“I… I’m so sorry, Joseph. I never met them. I wish I had. But I’m as sorry as if he’d been…” When she started again, it was forced natural. “Did you know I got married?” I couldn’t even exclaim. “Yep, married! To Jim Miesner. I’m not sure you two ever met.” The bullet-headed man she used to come to my bar with, before me. “And I’ve got the most beautiful little girl! Her name is Danuta. I wish you could meet her.”

“How? How old is she?”

She paused. Not the pause of satellites. “Five. Well, closer to six.” Her silence was defensive. But we all have the right to make what we need. “I… I’m back with my family. With my father. You were right about all of that.”

I got off the phone, polite to the point of numb. I wobbled to my feet. Jonah was looking at me, waiting.

“It’s Robert.”

“Robert.”

“Robert Rider. Your brother-in-law. He was shot by a policeman over a month ago. There was an arrest. Some struggle. I…didn’t get all the details.”