Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

When we returned to Boston, we knew at least what country we returned to. But if we two were tinged with Moorish contamination, the famous conductor’s daughter was infected with something almost as bad. She represented everything wrong with albinohood the world over. She was the Empire gone hemophiliac and feeble-minded. She disgusted even her precocious schoolmates. All the operas of Verdi, in chronological order, at thirteen: Even music’s fiercest student had to call it freakish.

My brother loved that freak in her. Kimberly Monera confirmed his suspicion: Life was stranger than any libretto about it. That winter after we returned, she showed him how to read a full orchestral score, how to keep separate each threading cross section of sound. On Valentine’s Day, she gave him his first pocket edition, a shy, secret offering wrapped in gold foil: Brahms’s German Requiem. He kept it on the nightstand beside his bed. At night, after lights-out, he’d run his fingers over the printed staves, trying to read their strains of raised ink.

“It’s all decided,” Jonah told me on a cold March evening, three-quarters of the way through my first year at Boylston. Our parents had just stopped János Reményi from letting Menotti audition Jonah for Amahl in the opera’s NBC television broadcast, thinking they could still preserve a halfway normal life for their wholly abnormal child. “We have it all worked out.” He pulled from his wallet a picture Kimberly had given him: a tiny pinafored girl in front of La Scala. Proof irreversible of a lifetime pact. “Chimera and I are getting married. Just as soon as she’s old enough not to need her father’s permission.”

After that, I never looked at Kimberly Monera without shame. I tried not to look at her at all. When I did, she always looked away. I couldn’t love her anymore, or hope hopelessly that the world or any of us might be other than we were. But I felt a trickle of pride at our new, secret affinity. She now belonged to our little nation. One day, she’d sing with our family. We’d take her home to Mama and Da, where we’d show her, by easy example, how to relax into a tune.

Jonah and Kimberly performed their engagement with that deadly permanence available only to first-time adolescents. Their pact implicated us all in espionage. No one could know but we three, and the secret lent us a giddy gravity. But after Jonah informed me of their engagement, he and Kimberly had even less contact than the little they’d had before. He returned to our rooftop fort, Kimberly to her solitary study of scores. The school did its best to erase them both. Their great secret engagement went underground. She was his betrothed, and that was that. For once two just-teens declare their undying love, what else is left for them to do?

Did the boy soprano think he, too, was white? He didn’t have that name yet, nor the notion. Belonging, membership: What need had Jonah Strom for things that had no need of him? His self required no larger sea to drain into, no wider basin. He was the boy with the magic voice, free to climb and sail, changing as light, always imagining that the glow of his gift offered him full diplomatic rights of passage. Race was no place he could recognize, no useful index, no compass point. His people were his family, his caste, himself. Shining, ambiguous Jonah Strom, the first of all the coming world’s would-be nations of one.

“Geh weg von mir, geh weg von mir. Ich bin der stolze Hans!”He alone can’t see the figure he cuts, out there onstage, in the Dacron Alpine costume — permanent-press lederhosen and long socks, topped by a green felt elf’s cap — some Radcliffe costume designer’s fantasy of pre-Holocaust Grimm. A honey-amber southern Egyptian kid, a just-disembarking Puerto Rican plunked down into this Rhenish masterpiece of arrested childhood. Black Jewish Gypsy child with russet coiled hair, upstage left in a plywood hut as picture-perfect as it’s supposed to be poverty-stricken, singing, “Arbeiten? Brr. Wo denkst du hin?” But when he sings: when clever Hänsel sings! Then no one sees any seams, so lost are they in the seamless sound.

He can see his own arms and legs sticking out of the Schwarzwald fantasy costume. But he can’t glimpse the full-dress discord the audience must sort out. The costume feels good; the suspenders pull his shorts up into his crotch. The rub of the fabric as he dances fuses with the pull of his Gretel, alongside him, patiently teaching him the steps. His opposite these performance nights is Kimberly Monera, my brother’s first concentrate of desire. “Mit den Füsschen tapp tapp tapp.” The pull of her blondness draws him on. “Mit den Händchen klapp klapp klapp. Einmal hin, einmal her, rund herum, es ist nicht schwer!”

His sister-partner’s hold on him, the warmth that fuels his air supply courses through him in all three acts, a breadth underpinning his breath. Blinder Eifer: blind thrill in doses so large, they carry him through all the chance catastrophes of performance. He feeds off his sister’s instruction, the seed that will form his lifelong taste for the small and light. When his Gretel, sweet dancing teacher, stammers in a moment of stray stage bewilderment, he’s there to feed her back the courage she has lent him.

Any blondness might have done. But it’s with the Chimera that he lies down in this night forest, the warded circle where the spell first takes hold. She is his Waldkönigin, the queen of his woods, whose pale hand he holds, the one who comforts him on the dark stage of self-blinding childhood.

There is an evil in the woods. This is what the oblivious parents must discover with each new performance, after they send their unwitting children into the cursed place to make their own sighting. Eine Knusperhexe, baker of children, operator of her own child-ready ovens, hides in the copse, awaiting discovery. This is the doom the pair’s stage parents send them to, night after night, pretending to knowledge only after the fact.

Children, children?the forest asks. Are you not afraid? Some nights, when the cuckoo teases them with echoes from infinite space, clever Hänsel can feel the alarm pulsing from his Gretel’s flanks. The down on her arms dampens with fear, a fear more delicious than the rest of his life will ever succeed in recovering. The boy takes her fright through his fingertips, just touching her moistened arm hair. Her terror draws him inward, like a lens. How close they must huddle against each other, lost under these trees, their basket of berries eaten, darkness falling in their childish neglect, and no way on but under. She looks away from him, eyes forward, into the hall’s blackness, breathing hard, straining in her dirndl skirt and flower-embroidered white top, waiting again this evening for the wondrous pain, each new shape these accidental brushings take.

In that charm of darkness — a blue gel slipped over the megawatt spot — the little Arab child in his lederhosen grows more plausible. The amber boy and his blond, anemic sister grow to resemble each other in performance’s enchantment, splitting their difference in the falling dusk. They kneel in the dark, resorting to prayer, that version of magic already crusted with ancient protocols long before any word of the Semitic Savior reached these northern woods. Trembling Gretel folds her palms in front of her, cupped against her breasts’ slight buds. Her brother, kneeling alongside, plants his hand in the ravine running down the small of her back. Blocked from the eyes of the gazing audience, he lets it trickle south some nights, over the drumlin that tips up to meet it. Now I lay me down to sleep, fourteen angels watch do keep. This is how my brother closes out his childhood, in a series of repeat performances. Asleep in the woods, wrapped against blondness, surrounded by protecting angels. Two stand here above me. Two stand there below me. What color are the angels? No one can say, here in the half-light. Years later, in an Antwerp art museum, killing time before a recital, he’ll glimpse the creatures that protected him, their wings all the hues in beating existence, bent out of the colorless air.