Richard Powers - The Time of Our Singing

We’re walking back toward 191st Street, and the subway home. I don’t know how we got from the Cloisters here. A piece is missing, frames clipped from the final cut. The concert has ended, but the sound goes on growing in my ears. It happens again, just as it did in the piece itself. No sooner do the clear, high voices bring in the melody than the low foundations pick it up and multiply.

We walk back a different way than we came. For a moment, I’m panicked. Then I’m just amazed that south followed by east can so perfectly undo north followed by west. Jonah laughs at me, but Da doesn’t. He finds it amazing, too. “Space is commutative. It does not matter in what order you take the axes. Why this should be, I have no good reason!”

We pass a building that has gone wrong. “What is this, Da?” I’m glad Jonah asks. I’m frightened to.

Da stops and looks. “This is a shul. A synagogue. Like the one I took you to on a Hundred and—”

Da will not notice. But this is not like the one he took us to. I try to read the words scrawled across its front door, but they’ve been scrubbed almost invisible. Da won’t help me sound out the missing ones. All he’ll say is, “Christian Front. Who could believe such people can come back now?”

“Da said now,” I tease, and Jonah picks up the taunt. But Da only gives us the crooked edge of his grin. He takes our hands, one each, and walks on. He studies the sidewalk where we step, as if the cracks he always swears are safe might be more dangerous than he thought.

We’re a block away when he says, “Hitler called it a Jewish plot.”

“What?” Jonah asks. “What’s a plot?”

“Relativity.”

“What’s relativity?” I say.

“Boychik! What we’re just talking about! All those different-running clocks.”

For me, a lifetime has intervened. But I want to keep him talking, forever, if possible. So I ask, “Why?”

“What why?” he answers.

“Da! Why, what you just said.” Just does not mean just, to my father, the professor of liquid time. “Why did Hitler say the clocks were Jewish?”

“Because they were!” His eyes glint with laughing pride, which they almost never show. “The Jews were the only people who figured out that everything we think is true about time and space isn’t! The Jews were everywhere, looking at what the world really looks like. Hitler hated that. He hated anyone smarter than he was.”

“Da was plotting against Hitler!” Jonah shouts. Da shushes him.

I can’t tell yet — I can’t tell anymore — whether Da is serious. I can’t even tell what he’s talking about, except for the Hitler part. Hitler, I know. On those torturing afternoons when Jonah and I are banished from the house and made to play with the neighborhood boys, it’s always the war — Normandy, Bastogne, crossing the Rhine. The world war lives on in small boys, still happily vicious, four years after the adults give it up. Somebody has to be Hitler, and that somebody’s always the Strom boys. One of us must be Uncle Adolf, and the other his demented officers. We two make the best Hitler, because we talk funny, die well, and lie so still for so long, it scares everyone. We lie still until the day our playmates recreate the fall of Berlin by setting us on fire. After that, for a long time, we get to stay home.

We walk along Overlook, my father bobbing his head at all the passersby. Twenty blocks and sixteen years away — depending on your clock — is the Audubon Ballroom, where Malcolm X will die. Already, a million lifelines lead there. Already, that murder is happening — on this block, the next, a mile away, more distant prisons. The strands of the killing tighten for decades, and my own threads weave around them.

We duck down the subway steps to the rank center of the earth, the scent of vomit, newsprint, cigarette stubs, and pee. Da is talking again, about mirrors and beams of light and people at the ends of oncoming trains, trains that could take us to Berlin in seconds. There’s a scuffle down on the platform. Da leads us away to safety, talking all the while.

“I had been already born for four years,” he says, “four whole years before anyone saw space-time as one single thing. I already lived four whole years before anyone saw gravity could bend time! It took the Jews!” The family he’s told us so little about. All dead.

Years pass. More than thirty of them. I’m in a train station in Frankfurt. We’re touring with Voces Antiquae. Jonah asks me to buy him some nuts at the snack stand. “Almonds.” It surprises me that, half-German, I’ve never learned so common a word. Then it surprises me worse: I have. I’ve known the magic substance my whole life. The stuff’s everywhere, as common and cheap as years.

If there is no single now, then there can’t have ever been a single then. Still, there is this Sunday, the spring of 1949. I’m seven. Everyone I love is still alive, except for the ones who died before I met them. We sit together on the hard subway seats, Jonah and I, with Da between us.

“Did you take pleasure, my boys?” He rhymes the word with choice. “Did you enjoy?”

“Da?” I’ve never heard Jonah so dreamy, so distant. He’s on a rocket ship, leaving this poor backward planet behind. But when he comes back, the world has aged away and he alone remains. “Da? When I grow up?” Not really asking permission. Just making sure to let us know well in advance. “When I’m an adult?” He waves back behind us, toward the Cloisters, falling away from us as fast as we fall forward. “I want to do what those people do.”

My father’s answer startles me, though not so much there and then. From here, half a century on, I can’t make it out. His every blood relation but us is murdered, killed for spreading relativity’s plot. He, too, should be dead, but he’s still here. A dozen years an immigrant, and in no time, he’s become pure American. “You two,” he tells us, grinning, his lone answer. “You two will be anyone you want.”

The fire didn’t kill her, Da said.

“She would have lost awareness a long time before. You must remember the rate of rapid oxidation for so large a blaze.” The fire would have sucked all the air from our house long before the flames touched her. “And then there was the explosion.” The furnace, that time bomb. “She would have been knocked unconscious.” That was why she never got out. The middle of the day, Mama quick and healthy, and no one else killed.

She couldn’t have felt a thing. That’s what Da meant, trying to comfort us. The fire did burn her. It did turn her to char, nothing but ash, bone, and her wedding ring. Da’s consolation was infinitely feebler: The fire didn’t kill her. She was dead already by the time she burned.

Still, he reminded us whenever he thought we needed it. The fire didn’t kill her. Jonah heard: Dead before the firemen even got there. I heard: Death by suffocation, her lungs getting nothing, just as bad as flames. Ruthie heard: Still alive.

For a long time, the four of us did nothing. Time, for us, was another facedown corpse, knocked out in the explosion. We must have spent five months in that little apartment that my father’s colleague loaned us. I didn’t feel the weeks pass, although most days I was sure I’d die of old age before the clock advanced from dinnertime to bed. We never sang, at least not all together. Ruth hummed to herself, scolding her dolls and telling them to shush. Now and then, Da put something on the record player. Jonah and I spent long afternoons listening to the radio. Broadcast seemed somehow less sacrilegious, inflicted on us, rather than chosen.

After a while, Ruth went back to her neighborhood school. She screamed on the first day, refusing to leave the apartment. But we three men stood firm with her. “You have to, Ruthie. It’ll help you feel better.” We should have known that was the last thing she wanted.