Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

Chip come trudging slowly up, breathless from his walk. ‘What was all that about?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Wasn’t nothing.’

Chip sat with a grimace where Hiero been just a minute ago.

‘I don’t think I should stay here,’ I said. ‘Chip? I think I got to go.’

‘Aw, Sid. What you tell him? What you say?’

But I couldn’t say it again. I glanced at him feeling scoured out, emptied. And then it didn’t seem to matter if he known it too. ‘It was me hid Hiero’s visas all them years ago. In Paris. You and Lilah was out of the flat, and they got delivered to the door when the kid was sleeping.’ My chest was giving me strange, anguished pains. ‘I wanted to finish the recording.’

Chip glanced sharply at me, as if to say, You did that? But no sooner did he look surprised than his face quieted down. He stared out at the field, at Hiero’s massive iron sculptures.

The silence was so painful between us I finally rose to go.

Chip put a hand on my arm. ‘We all done things we ain’t proud of, Sidney. Especially back then.’ He turned to me, frowning. ‘It wasn’t your fault the Boots picked him up. You couldn’t have known what would happen.’

‘He wouldn’t even been there if it wasn’t for me. He’d of been in Switzerland.’

Chip ain’t said nothing for a minute. ‘What you done was inexcusable, Sid. Absolutely wrong. And I say this as someone who has profited off that record. But I know damn well you’d have given you whole life to spare him if you could. That kid was blood to you. Don’t tell yourself it was any different.’

I felt sick. I made to stand up but Chip put his big hand on my shoulder.

‘Where you going?’ he said.

‘I got to go tell him something. I got to say something more.’

‘Aw, just give him time. News like that, it just take time.’

Chip led me back into Hiero’s living room, its wall of light. ‘This is what you missed last night, turning in so damn early.’ He smiled gently at me. I still felt sick, said nothing. But Chip folded open a closet door and kneeled down with a grimace. He drawn out an old milk crate filled with records. He started pulling them from their sleeves.

‘What, he got your records?’ I muttered.

‘Aw, ain’t no jazz at all,’ said Chip. ‘No. I ain’t never heard of this stuff. Look at it. Adamo Didur. Miliza Korjus. Georg Malmstén. Marcella Sembrich. Kid says it’s mostly Polish, some of it Finnish, Swedish. But you ain’t going to believe what it sound like. Hell. Listen.’

He set the needle into the groove of an ancient record player. And slowly, crackling, like from some great distance, a golden thread of voice started up. She sounded very old. Her voice rose and slipped a register and then rose again, like it was filling with this easy brightness, singing in a language I ain’t known. It might have been Polish. Her voice was pale and splintered, raw, and then it was just a single, stunning wholeness, and closing my eyes I felt like so much was still possible.

Then it was over. I opened my eyes. Hiero stood in the doorway, his face strangely calm.

Chip began rising from his seat when Hiero stopped him.

‘I don’t need your help, Chip.’

‘I wasn’t offering it,’ said Chip. ‘I got an urgent call. Hope you got a full roll in there cause I’m like to be a while.’ He gave me a look, slipped past.

The record was still turning in its grooves, the static from the old speakers hissing in the sudden silence. Hiero stood there in the doorway some moments, his eyes downcast. Then he stared right at me, his gaze like a blade.

He shuffled forward, sat himself down in his heavy leather chair. I had the feeling of being forced to go back, to confess again. With a soft grunt, breathing hard, he turned toward the fields beyond the glass, the twisted sculptures there. ‘This sky, Sid. It’s the sky of the great epics. The great Polish epics. Of Pan Tadeusz .’ He pursed his lips a little. ‘That’s the one thing I miss, the sky.’

I nodded.

‘I have seen it, you know. The sky was what decided it for me, all that gorgeous light. I followed it here. It’s why I stayed.’

I known what he was saying, what he seemed to be saying. His blindness wasn’t due to the camps, and he wanted me to know it. I hadn’t cost him that. I stared at him, those eyes so pale they might’ve witnessed the ruin of a world, the ruin and rebirth of a world.

He brought his palms to rest on his knees. ‘What was that just then? Was that Marcella Sembrich? I ain’t heard that in years. Her voice, that’s what the light was like.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I guess so.’

He turned his sightless eyes directly on me. ‘I see you, Sid,’ he said from out of his darkness. ‘I see you like it was fifty years ago. Exactly like that.’

I ain’t said nothing.

The vinyl crackled as the needle hit the centre.

‘Turn it,’ Thomas said, without smiling. ‘Play it again.’

John Williams, Rebecca Gray, Pete Ayrton and everyone at Serpent’s Tail; everyone at Key Porter Books in Toronto; Jackie Baker; Anne McDermid and all her excellent associates; Hannah Westland and Margaret Halton at RCW; Marie-Lynn Hammond; Sarah Afful; Todd Craver; Michelle Wright; Jack Hodgins; the Prices; the Edugyans; Jeff Mireau; Richard Hess; Graham Newton; Art Schiffrin; Andrew Hamilton.

Jane Warren — you are amazing.

Akademie Schloss Solitude; The Canada Council for the Arts; The British Columbia Arts Council; Stiftung Kuenstlerdorf Schoeppingen; Fiskars A-I-R program; Collegium Budapest/JAK; Het Beschrijf/Passa Porta; Hawthornden Castle; Klaustrid; Fundacion Valparaiso.

Hitler’s Black Victims: The Historical Experiences of Afro-Germans, European Blacks, Africans, and African Americans in the Nazi Era , Clarence Lusane, Routledge, 2003.

Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany , Michael H. Kater, Oxford University Press, 1992.

Destined to Witness: Growing up Black in Nazi Germany , Hans J. Massaquoi, HarperCollins, 1999.

Harlem in Montmartre: A Paris Jazz Story Between the Great Wars , William A. Shack, University of California Press, 2001.