The Time of Our Singing
In fact, I was glad for the cue. I might have missed him in the crowd without his waving the stupid sign for all countries to see. He had a beard, a little goatee midway between Du Bois and Malcolm. He’d grown his hair almost to his shoulders, and it was straighter than I could have imagined. He’d gotten bigger, for want of a better word, although his weight hadn’t changed from his days at Juilliard. The sea green shiny jacket and steel gray trousers added to the performance. He seemed more pallid. But then, he’d been living in a country where the sun canceled appearances more often than a hypochondriac diva. He looked like Christ should have been depicted these last two thousand years: not a Scandinavian in a toga, but a scruffy Semite clinging to the edge of northeast Africa, the oldest contested border between colliding continents.
He was more excited to see me than I expected. He waved the placard in the air, doing a little allemande. I dropped my bags at his feet and snatched the sign out of his hand. “Mule, Mule.” He hugged me, rugburning my scalp with the butt of his hand. “We’re back, brother.” I was giving him something. I didn’t know what. He grabbed the larger of my suitcases, groaning as he deadlifted.
“It’s your fault,” I said. “They almost didn’t let me through customs, with all the peanut butter.”
He sniffed the bag. “Ah! My country’s supreme contribution to world culture. This stuff’s going to kill us—on a good baguette.”
“I had to throw away half my wardrobe to make room for it.”
“We have to rethread you here, anyway.” He picked at my clothes. I noticed the males around us, each with an urbane, shiny variant of Jonah’s own seasick tones. We pushed through the gauntlet waiting at the arrival door. “You get away okay?”
I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. I’d left Teresa, feeling as if I’d swung my legs out of bed and stepped on the collie that watched dutifully over me at bedside. Everything from my collarbone to my knees felt scrubbed hollow with steel wool. Teresa had nursed me through the anesthesia of my father’s death just so I could feel this: a jittery water-slide ride out over nothingness, into total autonomy. Everything I looked on felt like death. Even this airport wore the lurid colors of a Gothic Crucifixion.
Above the Atlantic coming over, trapped inside a bank of gauzy cumulus, I thought my skin was scaling off me. The seat tray, the paperback book I clutched, the seat underneath me all atomized. The choice to go to Europe closed back up around me, like the Red Sea in reverse. I’d abandoned a woman devoted to me, to devote myself again to my brother. I’d finally given up waiting for my sister to contact me, and I had left her no forwarding address. After such leaving, nothing could be wholly good again. I felt as miserable as I ever have in this life. And as free.
Jonah saw how shaky I was. I opened my mouth to answer his question, but no word cleared. Around us, heavy cigarette smoke, the scent of salty black anisette candy, posters for products priced in imaginary currencies whose uses I couldn’t guess, fragments of opaque language over the airport PA, leather suits and pastel dresses in outlandish and jagged cuts all eddied, illegible to me. I lived nowhere. I’d left my mate. I’d put everything decent and certain to the match. There was no one to save me from the aloneness that had always wanted me but my even more uncoupled brother. I opened my mouth. My lips threatened to keep on opening until they peeled off. Nothing would snag into sound.
“She’ll live,” Jonah said. He put his arm around me, humming some pulsing organum I couldn’t make out. “Don’t change your money here. It’s theft. Celeste’s waiting at the car. We’re parked illegally. All of Europe’s parked illegally. Come on. I can’t wait for you to meet her.”
We walked through the universal carbolic of airports, here mentholated. Conversations broke over us like newscasters covering the fall of Babel. A party of fey windmill faces fringed in straw made me think Dutch, until Portuguese invective poured out of them. A knot of swarthy smugglers—ridges of black bushy eyebrow cresting their foreheads—had to be Albanian, yet they swore at one another in singsong Danish. Turks, Slavs, Hellenes, Tartars, Hibernian tribesmen: all past tagging. I felt I was back in New York. Only the Americans were dead giveaways. Even if they babbled in Lithuanian, I knew my countrymen. They were the ones in white shoes and the J’AIME LA FRANCE stickers on their carry-ons.
Jonah dragged me through the arrival area as through a New Wave film. Europa. I should have felt something, some shock of recognition, having dedicated my life to re-creating this place in the colonial wilds. But I didn’t; not a spark. I might as well have been air-dropped deep into Antarctica. A hospital chill crept up my legs as we descended the escalator. We came out in front of the terminal. The first spring breezes of Flanders blew over me, and I thought I might suffocate. I needed Teresa like I needed air. And I’d deliberately come to a place where I’d never be able to reach her.
We crossed to the parking lot. Jonah stopped traffic with one hand, the way von Karajan pulled the full stampede of the Berlin Philharmonic into a brusque ritard. Ranks of Peugeots and Fiats seemed parked sideways, each no longer than a real car was wide. In front of us, a cigarette-dangling father and elegant, scenery-chewing mother herded their pastel children into a car smaller than the ones Shriners used for Independence Day parades. Five toy cars beyond, a mahogany woman in a shock white blouse and red wraparound skirt leaned against a green Volvo. I couldn’t help staring. The ensemble—sin red, snow white, forest green, and deep russet skin—was like some newly liberated country’s flag. She was breathtaking, and three shades blacker than anything I’d expected to see in Belgium. I imagined I’d be the most conspicuous entity this side of the Urals. I smiled at the worn provincial maps I carried in my head. However this woman had come, her route was at least as unlikely as mine.
We schlepped my bags toward the woman, until I got the sickening sense Jonah was going to try to pick her up, even with his own French mate waiting within earshot. I nudged his shoulder to change course, and he nudged back. I thought, Not on my first day. The woman turned when we were ten paces away, too close to duck. Before I could plead innocence, she broke into a dizzying smile. “Enfin! Enfin!”
Jonah was all over her, without setting down my bag. “Désolé du retard, Cele. Il a eu du mal à passer la douane.”
She answered in a stream so rapid, I couldn’t make out a word. She seemed happy with me but cross with him. Jonah was amused at the entire world. I was somewhere between the Azores and Bermuda. My chestnut-haired Celeste, with her striped chemise and soft felt hat, slipped her pretty neck into the notch of a custom-made guillotine and waved good-bye. I reached forward to shake the hand of Celeste Marin, the only Celeste there was. She said something welcoming, but all I heard were her lips. I mumbled, “Enchanté,” worse than the worst Berlitz flunky. She giggled, grabbed me to her, and kissed my cheeks four times in alternation.
“Seulement trois fois en Belgique!” My brother’s scold was pitch-perfect, some hectoring song by Massenet. With all those years of vocal coaching, his overdeveloped ear left him passing for native. Celeste swore floridly. That much I understood. But when she turned and asked me an extended question that couldn’t be answered by a coin-flipped oui or non, I could only tilt my head in what I hoped seemed sophistication and say, “Comment?”
Celeste erupted in distress. Jonah laughed. “She’s speaking English, Mule, you sharecropping woolhead.” Celeste lobbed a few more incendiary profanities in my brother’s direction. He cooed her out of her unhappiness. “Encore une fois.”
Now cued, I made her out. “How does it feel to be out of your country for this first time?”
“I’ve never felt anything like it,” I assured her.
We smashed the bags into the trunk and were off. Celeste rode shotgun and I hid in the backseat. For fifty kilometers along a highway that might have been I-95, except for the road signs in three languages and the tile-roofed towns with their Gothic spires, my brother pestered me with questions about the latest Stateside developments. I couldn
’t answer most of them. Now and then, Celeste turned around to offer cheese or oranges. When she faced front again, I lost myself in her astonishing fall of hair. It took me thirty kilometers to remember enough French to ask where she came from. She said the name of a town—mere pretty syllables. I asked again: Fort-de-France.
“Est-ce que cela est près de Paris?”
My brother almost drove into the median. “Close, Mule. Martinique.”
We got to Ghent mercifully quickly. Friends of Mijnheer Kampen had rented them a row house last renovated in the late seventeenth century. “Fifty smackers a month. They just want to keep it free of squatters. It’s on Brandstraat,” Jonah announced. “Fire Street.” He seemed to enjoy speaking the name. The lot was just big enough to back a two-manual harpsichord into. But the roost went straight up, four stories in all. I was to live in the top, the highest aerie, outfitted with bed, basin, dresser, and two shelves of books I couldn’t read. Jonah led me up the stairs and sat a moment.
“She’s stunning,” I said.
“I’ve noticed.”
“What does she think of your line of work?”
“My work? I didn’t tell you? She’s our high soprano.”
I holed up in that attic and slept for two days. When I came back to life, we sang. Jonah took me to a converted packing warehouse two hundred meters from Brandstraat that Kampen’s circle leased for rehearsal space. There my brother showed me what had happened to him. He threw his cardigan on the bare floor and dropped his shoulders as if he were a corpse preparing for ocean burial. He rolled his head through three complete circles. And then, like the silver swan, he unlocked his silent throat.
I’d forgotten. Maybe I’d never known. He sang in that empty packinghouse as I hadn’t heard him sing since childhood. Every nub in his sound had been burned away, all impurity purged. He’d found a way at last to transmute baseness back into first essence. Some part of him had already left this earth. My brother, the prizewinner, the lieder recorder, the soloist with symphonies, had found his resounding no. He sang Perotin, something we’d had in school only as history, the still-misshapen homunculus of things to come. But in Jonah, all stood inverted: more good in the bud than in the full flowering. He’d found the freshness of always, of almost. He made that vast backward step sound like a leap ahead. The whole invention of the diatonic, everything after music’s gush of adolescence had been a terrible mistake. He hewed as closely to a tube of wood or brass as the human voice allowed. His Perotin turned the abandoned warehouse into a Romanesque crypt, the sound of a continent still turned in upon itself for another sleeping century before its expansion and outward contact. His long, modal, slowly turning lines clashed and resolved against no harmony but themselves, pointing the way down a reachable infinity.
His voice sounded the original prime. He’d gotten past any emblem that others had made of him. In the United States, he’d looked too dark and sounded too light. Here, in the stronghold of medieval Ghent, all light and dark were lost in longer shadows. His voice laid claim to a thing that the world had discarded. Whatever this sound had once meant, he changed it. Our parents had tried to raise us beyond race. Jonah decided to sing his way back before it, into that moment before conquest, before the slave trade, before genocide. This is what happens when a boy learns history only from music schools.
His voice was the child’s I once sang with, back at our lives’ downbeat. But onto the boy’s free-ranging soar, he grafted a heavier-than-air flight all the more exhilarating, filled with fallen adulthood. What had once been instinct was now acquired. The range had pushed upward by urgent relaxation. Time was already grinding his sound down, pulling it back in to earth and amnesia. The dullness that all voices suffer simply by sticking around long enough already announced itself in his tone’s zenith. But his turns felt even surer, more wire-guided, as precise as radar, like a monk’s surprise levitation in his isolated cell.
He showed me his new voice, exposing a tender wound. He was like someone who’d walked away from an accident, transfigured. He sang for only thirty seconds. His sound had pulled in so it might fit anywhere and never be denied. It defined itself, like a split in the side of the air. Everything that had happened to us, and everything that never would, returned to me, and I began to cry in recalling. This once, he didn’t mock me, but just stood, shoulders dropped, tilting his head toward where that sound had gone. “You’re next, Joey.”
“Never. Never.”
“Right. It’s never that we’re after.”
He broke me down, all that day and the next. We worked for hours before he let me even make a peep. He stripped me back to the root, reminding me. “Drop everything. You won’t know how much you’re carrying until you set it down. Let your skeleton hang from the base of your head. You knew how to do this, years ago. A baby holds himself with more grace than any adult. Don’t try,” he whispered from above the battlefield. “You’re being too much. Be nothing. Let it go. Lower yourself into your own frame.” He opened me from the core until I stood, a hollow tube. How much work it took to find the effortless. We went for days, until I couldn’t hear him, but only a voice inside me, repeating, Make me an instrument of your peace.
On the third day, he said, “Breathe a pitch.” I knew by then not to ask him which. He brought me up from a trance of repose into simple resonance. “God’s tuning fork!” He aimed only for solidity, sustain. He turned me into a solitary menhir, out in a green field, his fundament, his bass, the rock on which he could build perfect castles of air.
Everything I knew about singing was wrong. Fortunately, I knew nothing. Jonah didn’t insist that I forget everything I’d ever learned about music. Only everything I’d learned since leaving our home school.
He bid me open my mouth, and, to my amazement, the sound was there. I held the pitch for four andante beats, then eight, then sixteen. We sustained long, whole tones for one whole week, and then another, until I couldn’t say how long we’d been at it. We cycled out each other’s notes, blending. My job was to match my shaky color to his exact shade. He tracked me through my whole range. I felt each frequency coming out of me, focused and shaped, a force of nature. We held unison pitches all the way out to tomorrow. I’d forgotten what bliss was.
“Why are you surprised?” he said. “Of course you can do this. You used to do it every night, in another life.”
He banned me from the group’s rehearsals. He didn’t want me thinking about anything but pure held tones. When Celeste or the other Kampen disciples—a Flemish soprano named Marjoleine deGroot, Peter Chance, an astonishing Brit countertenor, or Hans Lauscher, from Aachen—gathered in the warehouse, trying out their sounds in various ensembles, I was sent back to my upper room to meditate on C below middle C.
Now and then, Jonah let me out for breaks. With a fold-up tourist map, I explored my new city. Jonah gave me a sheet of data he’d written out longhand, to hand to strangers if I got lost. “Careful. Don’t jog anywhere. Don’t say anything in Turkish. They’ll still beat you bloody, just like back home.”
A hundred steps from our front door, I could be in any year at all. I determined to take Flanders in, and Flemish, too, the way Jonah taught me to take in my own voice. I absorbed the streets at random, wandering through a place that had been going downhill since 1540. Shards of Ghent stuck out from the past’s sooty mass, gems that history forgot to spend before it died. I loitered along the guild houses on the Koornlei or roamed the torture museum of Castle ’Gravensteen. I wandered into St. Baafs Cathedral by accident and found myself standing in front of the greatest artwork ever painted. In the unfolded Mystic Lamb, three times longer than me, I saw the mythic silence that my brother wanted to sing.
Nothing about this place was my home. But neither was America anymore. I’d simply traded the discomfort of citizenship for the ease of a resident alien. I mimicked the native dress, ditched my tennis shoes, and never spoke an unsolicited word aloud. From the distance of four thousand miles and eight hundred
years, I saw what I had looked like to my native land.
After two months, we tried a song. We did Abbess Hildegard: “O ignis spiritus paracliti, vita vite omnis creature”: “O fire of the comforting spirit, life of the life of all creation.” Jonah intoned the words, and I joined him in unison. We zeroed out the motionless chant. Then we set out on thousand-year-old canons. Jonah wanted to relive the birth of written music, to reach out for the extreme of what we weren’t, a thing we ought never, in a thousand years, have been able to identify. But we identified, idem et idem. He needed me to match his sound, to fuse our voices into a single source, to revive, in this foreign place, our old real-time telepathy. From years of touring, our minds could still meld without a word. We still turned as tightly as schooling fish, not me with him or him with me, but the two of us, fused.
At the keyboard, my fingers could generally do what my head wanted. My voice, so much closer to my brain, could rarely seize the prize. At times, Jonah sloughed me off like a kid flung from the end of a playground chain of Crack the Whip. But our calisthenics brought me up to speed, the speed of stillness, of Abbess Hildegard’s extraplanetary flight: vita vite omnis creature.
In this way, one day, years before any justice should have allowed it, I recovered a voice. The singer I’d begun life as came back from the dead. Jonah fished me out of myself, all but intact. “How did you know? How could you be sure I was still in there?”
“You used to sing. All the time. Under your breath. At the keyboard.”
“Me? Never. You lie.”
“I’m telling you, Joseph. I don’t lie anymore. I used to hear you.”
It didn’t matter how he knew, or what he thought he’d heard. I could sing. I’d do: a darker take on his genetic material, solid enough to carry the bass. When I was ready at last—the outward confirmation of his inner ear—Jonah added Celeste. For the first time since our school days, my brother and I made music with someone who wasn’t us.