Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

She received my trembling gift, her face pinched between pleasure and pain. “No one ever gave me anything like this before.”

“Like what? You haven’t opened it.”

Malalai opened the box, the hush of her pleasure horrible. An animal cry escaped her lips at the flash of silver. “It’s so beautiful, Joseph.” The first time she spoke my name. I flipped between pride and annihilation. She held the bracelet up. “Oh!” she said. And I knew I’d bungled things.

I grabbed the trinket. It looked flawless, just as it had in the drugstore.

“There’s nothing on it.” Her eyes shot downward, my lightning education in intimacy. “This is an ID bracelet. They usually have names.”

The very idea of engraving had never occurred to me. The clerk had said nothing. My brother had said nothing. I was a pitiful idiot. “I… I wanted to see whether you liked it. Before I put your name on it.”

She smiled, flinching at my words. “Not my name.” The magazines must have told her. She knew more about my country’s ways than I ever would. My name was to be chained to her wrist from now until the day all scripture was overthrown. And I’d done nothing. Nothing wrong.

Malalai placed the flashing bracelet around her near-black wrist. She played with the bare faceplate, its purpose now so obvious, even to me.

“I’ll get it engraved.” I could borrow cash from Jonah. At least enough to spell out J-O-E.

She shook her head. “I like it this way, Joseph. It’s nice.”

She wore the blank bracelet like a prize. It gave the girls more to mock her with: unengraved ID jewelry. Malalai must have thought I didn’t want anyone seeing her wearing my name. But the bracelet was already more connection than she’d ever hoped for, in such a place. Little changed between us. We managed to sit near each other during one school assembly and a special holiday meal. She was happy with our silent link. When we did talk, all I could talk about was concert music. She loved music as well as the next Boylston student. But it didn’t grip her like movies or magazines or the Kitchen of the Future. She grasped it long before I did: Classical music wouldn’t make you American. Just the opposite.

It slipped out one day, after one of her quiet confidences — something about how wonderful she found the 1950 Nash Rambler convertible. I laughed at her. “How did you ever land in a place like Boylston?”

Her hand strayed to her mouth, effacing and erasing. But she couldn’t make my question disappear or mean anything but attack. She didn’t cry; she got away from me before sinking to that. Still, she managed to avoid me for the rest of that school term. I helped with that. In late December, before the vacation, she sent me the white mausoleum box back, with the blank bracelet in its tomb. Also a record, Music of Central Asia, with a note: “This was going to be for you.”

The school performed our string of annual holiday concerts. These were, for Boylston, what exams were for ordinary schools. Jonah and Kimberly headlined the recitals with prominent solos. I rowed in the galleys. János Reményi took us on tour to area schools — Cambridge, Newton, Watertown, even Southie and Roxbury. Kids our age sat in darkened school gyms, as stunned by our music as they might have been by a band of organ-grinding, hat-tipping monkeys. One or two of the local principals seemed to want to make some special mention of Jonah, some object lesson in tolerance or opportunity in the speeches they delivered after the music ended. But our last name, combined with Jonah’s inexplicable coloring, left them fumbling and mum.

Before our show in Charlestown — the first time any of us had been to the wrong side of Boston Harbor — the chorus was milling in our usual preconcert jitters, when János came looking for me. I thought he wanted to reprimand me for the two notes I’d dropped at the Watertown concert, the day before. I was all set to assure Mr. Reményi that the inexcusable wouldn’t happen again.

But Reményi cared nothing about my performance. “Where is your brother?”

He scowled when I said I had no idea. Kimberly Monera was missing, too. János blasted away as quickly as he’d blown in, his face clenched the way it was when he conducted triple fortes. He darted off, determined to stop catastrophe before it started. But that required speeds János could never reach.

More versions of my brother’s disgrace exist than there are operatic treatments of Dumas. János found his star pupil and the great conductor’s daughter back behind the stage flats, fumbling underneath each other’s clothes. He hauled them out of a supply closet, in the late throes of heavy petting. They were locked in a back dressing room, naked, about to do it standing up.

Of it, I guessed only the barest, mangled logistics, inferred from offstage goings-on in Puccini matinees. When Jonah reappeared, one look warned me off ever trying to ask. I knew only that all three principals fled the scene in one of those explosive third-act trios: János enraged, Kimberly broken, and my brother humiliated.

“That bastard,” Jonah whispered, four feet from the thrilled knot of our buzzing schoolmates. I died at the sound of the word in his mouth. “I’ll finish him.”

He never told me what the man said, and I never asked. I didn’t even know my brother’s crime. All I knew was that I’d failed him. All life long, we’d kept each other safe from everyone. Now I was on the outside, too.

The Charlestown concert didn’t live in anyone’s musical memory. Yet the student audience might have mistaken our sound for joy. János beamed and bowed, and with that easy harvest of his hands, he made the chorus do the same. Kimberly somehow pulled off her solo. When Jonah rose to take the flourishes we’d heard him do a hundred wondrous times, it shot through my head, the slow-motion preview given those about to have an accident: He was going to take revenge. All he had to do was hold his breath. Nonviolent resistance. That little ritard he loved to take prior to plunging in, the slight pause awakening his audience that even our conductor knew to back off from, spread wide. Silence — the motor drive of nothingness underneath all rhythm — threatened to last forever, a spell of sleep cast over the entire kingdom of listeners.

In panic at Jonah’s stunt, my brain began dividing and subdividing the beats. János just waited out the endless hesitation, hands poised in the air, refusing even to blanch. Jonah neither caught his eye nor looked away. He stayed inside his perfect silence, hung on the stopped, forward edge of nowhere.

Then, sound. The web tore, and my brother was singing. Familiar melody drew me back from the end of the world. No one in the audience felt anything but heightened suspense. János was there, alongside Jonah, bringing the chorus in from my brother’s silent cadenza right on the downbeat.

By the end of the piece — one of those myopic medleys of English folk tunes that spelled, for 1950s America, the height of holiday nostalgia — the whole choir caught fire. Jonah’s spark of defiance awoke their showmanship, and the final chord brought down the house.

János wrapped his arm around his prodigy’s shoulders and embraced him in front of everyone, the boy’s protector, the idea of any falling-out between them as silly as the bogeyman.

Jonah smiled and bowed, suffering his master’s hug. But as he turned from the applauding audience, his eyes sought mine. He locked me in a look past mistaking: You heard how close I was. Easiest thing in the world, someday.

In the postconcert bedlam, I tracked him down. Charlestown kids were coming up to him to see if he was real, to touch his hair, befriend him. And Jonah was cutting them dead. He grabbed my wrist. “Have you seen her?”