Richard Powers - Operation Wandering Soul

one."

"Yes, well, we weren't."

"Evidently." They packed the children on buses and brought them to the market square outside the cathedral gate. There, patriotically obligated villagers gathered round, sizing the wares, every so often issuing a sceptical "I'll take that one," or "Have you got two girls around eleven? We want a pair."

People came looking for cheap labor, replacements for dead offspring, a government subsidy. The Shirley Temple look-alikes went first, to the local child molesters. Some brothers and sisters refused to be split up; other sibs were dispersed to opposite sides of town without so much as a swap of address. The billeting officer made hurried notes of who had whom, but Chriswick knew the scribbling was worse than worthless. These children would never be found again.

Today's trip had already dispersed them past recall, even before the town had turned out to bid for them as for so many second-string elevens. And the solid Canterbury middle class, clucking at Hemming's head lice and the fungus behind Davis's ears: by tonight, these redoubtable folk would learn words long since banished from England's green and pleasant land.

In a modest few hours, an entire nation had abandoned itself to a scavenger hunt with consequences at least equal to those of the world war's latest test match. Was the country counting on being home for Christmas again this time? These children, doled out so freely in the Butter market, would grow up away, in the homes of strangers. A whole generation scattered at random, scientifically indifferent, city to country, south to north, Catholic billeted on Ñ of E, Formby fans descending on the lords of the manor, the desperately poor laid out on the thick linen of the privileged. The island had conducted an irreversible sociological experiment at a clap, almost without thought.

By tea, all the potential providers had disappeared, leaving Chris-wick and the billeting officer with the South Bank's least marketable. One of the Shillingford twins was wailing that nobody wanted them, while the other shouted excitedly how that meant they got to go back home. The rest of the rejected sat about fiddling with gas mask boxes, all in.

"All right then," the officer declared. "We'll just place the rest of these door to door." This they did, as if delivering milk. They paced the circuit of city walls, knocking on houses with known spare rooms. When the residents resisted, the officer bullied them. The Shillingford girls were split up, one going to a black-and-blue woman whose husband roared from a hidden back room, the other to a widower who had his paws up the girl's knickers before the door closed. The billeting officer mumbled something about correcting the situation tomorrow. Levy went to a mother of five who first ran an interrogating hand through the boy's hair, feeling for horns.

At length, they chiseled the group down to a grim cadre of remainders. The billeting officer sneaked a look at his watch. "Would you excuse me a moment? The wife's expecting me for dinner. I'll be back directly."

And Chriswick was left in the dark, in a strange city, alone with half a dozen dirty, cold, starving, fatigued, senseless children not his own. He ducked into a stall and bought them chips with salt and vinegar, out of his own pocket.

Down the lane, an ancient parish church held out the possibility of a place to sit. At the door, a tiny fist restrained Chriswick by the trouser turnup. "Sir, what sort of church is it?"

"What? Oh, for God's sake, Evans. Don't be an idiot. It's just to rest a minute."

Evans kept from breaking down only by viciously inscissoring his lip. "Really, sir. I can't go in if it's a… you know."

"It's a Saxon church, boy."

"Oh. Very well then."

The children collapsed in the pews, two or three finding the strength to genuflect. Chriswick busied himself with the tourist plaque — yet another Oldest Parish Church in England — to keep from ulcerating with murderous intent at the billeting officer, headmaster, the ARP board, and Hitler. A sudden, pure-pitched resonance rang out through the church, and Chriswick spun about in surprise.

In silence, while his back was turned, the chancel had filled with choristers. Boys, no older than his own vitiated group, stood decked in white surplices over crimson cassocks. They must have hid in some vestry and filed in while Chriswick wasn't looking. They now formed two reverent banks facing each other in the stalls, and, with no adult to be seen, they launched into a late evensong.

Chriswick rushed to the pews to discipline his group, sit them up straight, or drag them out of the church while he still could. But such was unnecessary. First, there wasn't a soul in the place for his Clink deportees to disturb. Further, Chriswick's children, amazed at a handful of boys their own age conducting an unassisted musical service, sat rapt on their benches, entranced by the sound.

The versicle line fell to a boy who couldn't have been more than fourteen. He sang the plainsong in head tones of a purity that would disappear with the arrival of adult conscience. While the last, long note of his chant still hung about in the vault, its answer arrived in a rush of chorus, slipping off into conductus, flowering full with Renaissance polyphony.

Chriswick knew something about church music, had even partaken once, when younger. But he was unable to place this setting. The moment he thought Dunstable, the piece slid off a further century and a half, to Tallis or Byrd. After another measure, it sounded like one of those imperial, last-century anachronisms, returning to ancient and better days while the world around this island went down in flames.

It started out Latin, but it soon became very Anglican. The text turned into a dog's breakfast — bits and pieces from the Book of Common Prayer. It had been too long to be sure, but Chriswick seemed to make out familiar lines, like forgotten but still familiar faces from old school photographs. Give peace in our time, Î Lord. (You'd think they might have suppressed that bit of questionable taste this evening.) Defend us from all perils and dangers of this night. All that are in danger, necessity, and tribulation. All that travel by land or by water. All sick persons, and young children. All prisoners and captives. The fatherless children, and widows. Keep us from the craft and subtilty of the devil and man.

Doubly odd: the setting did not correspond to any service Chriswick had ever heard. No speech — no invocations or readings or prayers. Only this pure singing, from voices of shockingly high calibre. How could a small parish barn, however historic, put together such a choir? Child voices, usually selected for sightsinging ability to perform two hundred settings a year while the trebly tint lasted, seemed here to have been chosen for nothing short of transcendent throats. Every lad in the dozen possessed uncanny musical maturity; they'd been singing for twenty minutes, a cappella, without straying from pitch.

The singing — at the end of evacuation, after hours in flight from the penultimate urban raid, deciding lifetimes by lot — was too much for Chriswick. Those pitches of absolute tone stripped of vibrato cut into his muscle like angel scalpels. A religion that worshipped always like this would have counted Chriswick still among the believers. Freely expanding parts — shared out among twelve boys, the lower voices pitched up into the innocence of airy rapture — interrogated the scar where his abdomen had been.

Assertion and response sounded fifths so clean it made no difference whether the purity was put on or not. This one thing alone of his race might be worth saving from the coming bombs. These soaring, high, head voices said what it was to be alive, to be anything at all. To be displaced, begging temporary address, a choirboy in this alien, bass body, under attack from on high. To be a child from the East End, father a sot, mother numbed by tons of others' washing, a boy duped by a good matric into going on and becoming a teacher, winding up by perverse twist of fate back in the Clink, now subaltern to a war that will send all England to final sleep. To be a functionary, assigned the pointless task of stripping children from their one anaemic chance at temporary home, children by adoption and grace just now discovering too late that all they ever wanted to do while alive on this earth was to sing out blamelessly, however laughably, Make us an acceptable people in thy sight.