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

group, to assure them my brother is not special, that each performer has sung as well as anyone. The
others sneak glances at Jonah, studying his unstudied posture. They go over the strategy, for next time:
the panache of Schubert. Then the left hook of Dowland, striving for that floating sustain above the high
A. The thing they can never stand far back enough to see has already swallowed my brother whole.

My brother hangs back against the fly ropes in his concert black, appraising the choicer sopranos. Stands
still and gazes. He sings to them, private encores in his mind. Everyone knows he’s won, and Jonah
struggles to make it mean nothing. The judges call his name. Invisible people cheer and whistle. He is
their victory for democracy, and worse. Jonah turns to me, drawing out the moment. “Joey. Brother.
There’s got to be a more honest way to make a living.” He breaks another rule by dragging me onstage
with him to collect the trophy. And his first public conquest rushes to join the past.

Afterward, we move through a sea of small delights and epic disappointments. Congratulating lines form
up around the winners. In ours, a woman hunched with age touches Jonah’s shoulder, her eyes damp.
My brother amazes me, extending his performance, as if he’s really the ethereal creature she mistakes
him for. “Sing forever,” she says, until her caretaker whisks her off. A few well-wishers behind her, a
ramrod retired colonel twitches. His face is a hostile muddle, duped in a way he can’t dope out. I feel the
man’s righteousness, well before he reaches us, the rage we repeatedly provoke in his people simply by
appearing in public. He waits out his moment in the queue, his anger’s fuse shortening with this line.
Reaching the front, he charges. I know what he’ll say before he gets it out. He studies my brother’s face
like a thwarted anthropologist. “What exactly are you boys?”

The question we grew up on. The question no Strom ever figured out how to read, let alone answer. As
often as I’ve heard it, I still seize up. Jonah and I don’t even bother to exchange looks. We’re old hands
at annihilation. I make some motions, ready to smooth over the misunderstanding. But the man backs me
off with a look that chases me from adolescence for good.

Jonah has his answer; I have mine. But he’s the one in the spotlight. My brother inhales, as if we’re still
onstage, the smallest grace note of breath that would lead me into the downbeat. For a semiquaver, he’s
about to launch into “Fremd bin ich eingezogen.” Instead, he pitches his reply, buffo-style, up into comic
head tones:

“I am my mammy’s ae bairn,

Wi’ unco folk I weary, Sir…”

His first full night of adulthood, but still a child, giddy with just being named America’s Next Voice. His
unaccompanied encore turns heads all around us. Jonah ignores them all. It’s 1961. We’re in a major
university town. You can’t string a guy up for high spirits. They haven’t strung up anyone for high spirits in
these parts for at least half a dozen years. My brother laughs through the Burns couplet, thinking to leave
the colonel sheepish with eight bars of good-natured cheek. The man goes livid. He tenses and puckers,
ready to wrestle Jonah to the ground. But the eager line of admirers moves him along, out the stage door,
toward what the prophetic look spreading across my brother’s face already knows will be a paralyzing
stroke.

At the end of the conga line, our father and sister wait. This is how I see them, too, from the far side of a
life. Still ours, still a family. Da grins like the lost immigrant he is. A quarter century in this country, and he
still walks around like he’s expecting to be detained. “You pronounciate German like a Polack. Who the
hell taught you your vowels? A disgrace. Eine Schande! ”