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

Jonah caps a hand over our father’s mouth. “Shh. Da. For Christ’s sake. Remind me never to take you
out in public. ‘Polack’ is an ethnic slur.”

“‘Polack’? You’re crazy. That’s what they’re called, bub.”

“Yeah, bub.” Ruth, our mimic, nails him. Even at sixteen, she’s passed for the man more than once, over
the phone. “What the hell else you going to call people from Polackia?”

The crowd flinches again, that look that pretends not to. We’re a moving violation of everything in their
creed. But out here in classically trained public, they keep that major-key smile. They push on to the
other winners, leaving us, for a last moment, once again our own safe nation. Father and eldest son reel
about on the remnants of Schubert still banging about the emptied hall. They lean on each other’s
shoulders. “Trust me,” the older one tells the younger. “I’ve known a few Polacks in my day. I almost
married one.”

“I could have been a Polack?”

“A near Polack. A counterfactual Polack.”

“A Polack in one of many alternate universes?”

They babble to each other, the shorthand jokes of his profession. Clowning for the one none of us will
name this night, the one to whom we offer every note of our contest prize. Ruth stands in the stage
footlights, almost auburn, but otherwise the sole keeper of our mother’s features in this world. My
mother, the woman my father almost didn’t marry, a woman more and longer American than anyone in
this hall tonight.

“You did good, too, Joey,” my little sister makes sure to tell me. “You know. Perfect and all.” I hug her
for her lie, and she glows under my grasp, a ready jewel. We wander back to Da and Jonah. Assembled
again: the surviving four-fifths of the Strom family chorale.

But Da and Jonah don’t need either of us accompanists. Da has hold of the Erl-King motif, and Jonah
thumps along, his three-and-a-half-octave voice dropping into bass to whack at his imitation piano’s left
hand. He hums the way he wanted me to play it. The way it ought to be played, in heaven’s headliner
series. Ruth and I draw near, despite ourselves, to add the inner lines. People smile as they pass, in pity
or shame, some imagined difference. But Jonah is the evening’s rising star, momentarily beyond scorn.

The audience this night will claim they heard him. They’ll tell their children how that chasm opened up,
how the floor dropped out of the old Duke concert hall and left them hanging in the vacuum they thought
it was music’s job to fill. But the person they’ll recall won’t be my brother. They’ll tell of sitting up in their
seats at the first sound of that transmuting voice. But the voice they’ll remember won’t be his.

His growing band of listeners will chase Jonah’s performances, prize his tickets, follow his career even
into those last, decoupled years. Connoisseurs will search down his records, mistaking the voice on the
disk for his. My brother’s sound could never be recorded. He had a thing against the permanent, a
hatred of being fixed that’s audible in every note he ever laid down. He was Orpheus in reverse: Look
forward , and all that you love will disappear.

It’s 1961. Jonah Strom, America’s Next Voice, is twenty. This is how I see him, forty years on, eight
years older now than my older brother will ever be. The hall has emptied; my brother still sings. He sings