"Richard Powers - The Time Of Our Singing" - читать интересную книгу автора (Powers Richard)

brother again to let me go, to find an accompanist who can do him justice. And again he’ll refuse. “I
already have one, Joey.”

I’m there, up onstage with him. But at the same time, I’m down in the hall, in the place I always sit at
concerts: eight rows back, just inside the left aisle. I sit where I can see my own fingers moving, where I
can study my brother’s face—close enough to see everything, but far enough to survive seeing.

Stage fright ought to paralyze us. Backstage is a single bleeding ulcer. Performers who’ve spent their
whole youth training for this moment now prepare to spend their old age explaining why it didn’t go as
planned. The hall fills with venom and envy, families who’ve traveled hundreds of miles to see their lives’
pride reduced to runner-up. My brother alone is fearless. He has already paid. This public contest has
nothing to do with music. Music means those years of harmonizing together, still in the shell of our family,
before that shell broke open and burned. Jonah glides through the backstage fright, the dressing rooms
full of well-bred nausea, on a cloud, as though through a dress rehearsal for a performance already
canceled. Onstage, against this sea of panic, his calm electrifies. The drape of his hand on the piano’s
black enamel ravishes his listeners, the essence of his sound before he even makes one.

I see him on this night of his first open triumph, from four decades on. He still has that softness around his
eyes that later life will crack and line. His jaw quakes a little on Dowland’s quarter notes, but the notes
do not. He drops his head toward his right shoulder as he lifts to the high C, shrinking from his entranced
listeners. The face shudders, a look only I can see, from my perch behind the piano. The broken-ridged
bridge of his nose, his bruised brown lips, the two bumps of bone riding his eyes: almost my own face,
but keener, a year older, a shade lighter. That breakaway shade: the public record of our family’s private
crime.

My brother sings to save the good and make the wicked take their own lives. At twenty, he’s already
intimate with both. This is the source of his resonance, the sound that holds his audience stilled for a few
stopped seconds before they can bring themselves to clap. In the soar of that voice, they hear the rift it
floats over.

The year is a snowy black-and-white signal coming in on rabbit ears. The world of our childhood—the
A-rationing, radio-fed world pitched in that final war against evil—falls away into a Kodak tableau. A
man has flown in space. Astronomers pick up pulses from starlike objects. Across the globe, the United
States draws to an inside straight. Berlin’s tinderbox is ready to flash at any moment. Southeast Asia
smolders, nothing but a curl of smoke coming from the banana leaves. At home, a rash of babies piles up
behind the viewing glass of maternity hospitals from Bar Harbor to San Diego. Our hatless boy president
plays touch football on the White House lawn. The continent is awash in spies, beatniks, and major
appliances. Montgomery hits the fifth year of an impasse that won’t occur to me until five more have
passed. And seven hundred unsuspecting people in Durham, North Carolina, disappear, lulled into the
granite mountainside opened by Jonah’s sound.

Until this night, no one has heard my brother sing but us. Now the word is out. In the applause, I watch
that rust red face waver behind his smile’s hasty barricade. He looks around for an offstage shadow to
duck back into, but it’s too late. He breaks into leaky grins and, with one practiced bow, accepts his
doom.

They bring us back twice; Jonah has to drag me out the second time. Then the judges call out the winners
in each range—three, two, one—as if Duke were Cape Canaveral, this music contest another Mercury
launch, and America’s Next Voice another Shepard or Grissom. We stand in the wings, the other tenors
forming a ring around Jonah, already hating him and heaping him with praise. I fight the urge to work this