Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

It all seems proof of a temporal rift no theory can mend. Four years ago, he was happily attending European concerts, as if Europe still heard some fixed key. Nothing sounds the same on this repeat listen, old music in a newfound land. In between that theme and its recapitulation, only a harrowing development section, jagged, atonal, unlistenable. His parents in hiding near Rotterdam. His sister, Hannah, and her husband, Vihar, trying to reach his country’s capital, Sofia. And David himself, a resident alien in the land of milk and honey.

Time may turn out to be quantized, as discontinuous as the notes in a melody. It may be passed back and forth, carried along by subatomic chronons as discreet as the fabric of matter. Tachyons, restricted to speeds faster than light — fantasies allowed by Einstein’s most rigorous prohibitions — may bombard this life with word of everything that awaits it, but life below the speed of light can’t see them to read them. David Strom shouldn’t be here, free, alive. But he is. Is here, walking across Washington, to hear a goddess sing, live, in the open air.

Strom turns onto Virginia and sees the throng. He has never been so close to such numbers. He has seen them back in Europe only on newsreels — the crazed World Cup finals, the mobs that turned out three years ago to watch Hitler refuse to give out gold medals to the non-Aryan Über-mensch. This crowd is more sweeping, more blissfully anarchic. Music alone cannot account for this. Such a movement can only come from some vaster libretto. Until this instant, Strom has no idea what concert he walks into. He fails to grasp the issue until he corners and looks on it.

This eye-level wall of flesh knocks the wind from him. The shimmer of tens of thousands of bodies, humanity broken down to atoms, an electrostatic n — body problem beyond any mathematics’ ability to solve, panics him with its groundless physics, and he turns to run. He heads back up Virginia toward the safety of Georgetown. But he can’t erase more than a few dozen meters of his path when he hears that voice up inside his ears. Komm, süsser Tod. He stops on the sidewalk and listens. What’s the worst that oblivion might do to him? What better sound to bring on the end?

He turns back toward this roiling crowd, using the terror in his chest the way a seasoned performer would. Breathing through his mouth, he slips into the churning surf. The fist in his chest relaxes into eddies of pleasure. No one stops him or asks for identification. No one knows he is foreign, German, Jewish. No one cares that he’s here at all. Ein Fremder unter lauter Fremden.

Sunlight breaks free for a minute, to shine on earth’s most mutable country. David Strom wanders lost inside a social realist drawing, hemmed in by a crusade he can’t identify, waiting again, this year, for the myth to turn real. Where else in the world have so many for so long believed that so much good is so close to happening? But today, these New Worlders may be right. He shakes his head, working his way toward the makeshift stage. Prophecy may yet come true, if there’s anyone left to receive it. Already, Europe has slid back into the flames. Already, the smokestacks are hard at work. But that is tomorrow’s fire. Today has another glow altogether, and its heat and light draw Strom forward.

He bobs in sync with the bodies around him, searching for a good sight line. Monuments hem this huge hall in — State Department, Federal Reserve — white lintels and pillars, the hallmarks of indifferent power. He is not the only one staring at them. It strikes Strom, in America only a year, that he might come to say my country more easily than half of those he passes, people who arrived here twelve generations ago, on someone else’s travel plan.

A hundred thousand drifting feet batter the April ground into a cattle trail. He passes a preacher waving a pigskin-bound Bible, three small children standing on an orange crate, a squad of blue and brass police as dazed as the swarm they patrol, and three dark-suited, broad-shouldered men in felt hats, menacing gangsters compromised only by the beaten-up bicycles they push alongside them.

A shout comes from the forward ranks. Strom’s head jerks up. But the crisis has passed by the time its wake reaches him. Sound travels so slowly, it might as well be stopped, compared to the now of light. Miss Anderson is on the platform, her Finnish accompanist beside her. The dignitaries packing the cobbled-up bleachers rise for her entrance. Half a dozen senators, scores of congressmen including one solitary Negro, three or four cabinet members, and a justice of the Supreme Court each applaud her, all for private reasons.

The secretary of the interior addresses the brace of microphones. The crowd near Strom stirs with pride and impatience. “There are those”—the statesman’s voice bangs around the vast amphitheater, launching three or four copies of itself before dying—“too timid or too indifferent”—only the echo shows how immense a cathedral they stand in—“to lift up the light…that Jefferson and Lincoln carried aloft…”

God in Heaven, let the woman sing.In the burst of idiom he heard on the train coming down, Clam up and take it on the lam. Where Strom comes from, the whole point of singing is to render human chatter irrelevant. But the secretary politicks on. Strom inches toward the Memorial, the wall of people in front of him solid yet somehow always leaving a little space to fill.

Then Miss Anderson stands, a modest queen, her long fur coat protecting her against the April air. Her hair is a marvelous scallop shell, open against both cheeks. She’s more otherworldly than Strom remembers. She stands serene, already beyond life’s pull. Yet her serenity shivers. Strom makes it out, over the heads of these thousands. He has seen that wavering before, up near the pit of the Vienna Staatsoper, or through opera glasses, from the student leaning posts in the halls of Hamburg and Berlin. But so unlikely is the tremor in such a monument that Strom can’t at first give it a name.

He turns and looks out across the crowd, following her glance. Humanity spreads so far over the Mall that her sound will take whole heartbeats to reach the farthest ranks. The numbers undo him, an audience as boundless as the ways that led it here. Strom looks back to the singer, alone up on her Calvary of steps, and names it, the ripple that envelops her. The voice of the century is afraid.

The fear coming over her isn’t stage fright. She has drilled too long over the course of her life to doubt her skill. Her throat will carry her flawlessly, even through this ordeal. The music will be perfect. But how will it be heard? Bodies stretch in front of her, spirit armies, rolling out of sight. They bend along the length of the reflecting pool, thick as far back as the Washington Monument. And from this hopeful host there pours a need so great, it will bury her. She’s trapped at the bottom of an ocean of hope, gasping for air.

From the day it took shape, she resisted this grandstand performance. But history leaves her no choice. Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for herself. She has never been a champion of the cause, except through the life she daily lives. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

The one conservatory she long ago applied to turned her away without audition. Their sole artistic judgment: “We don’t take colored.” Not a week passes when she doesn’t shock listeners by taking ownership of Strauss or Saint-Saëns. She has trained since the age of six to build a voice that can withstand the description “colored contralto.” Now all America turns out to hear her, by virtue of this ban. Now color will forever be the theme of her peak moment, the reason she’ll be remembered when her sound is gone. She has no counter to this fate but her sound itself. Her throat drops, her trembling lips open, and she readies a voice that is steeped in color, the only thing worth singing.