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

through to the double bar, the tempo falling to nothing as it passes through the fermata’s blackness, a boy
singing to a mother who can no longer hear him.

That voice was so pure, it could make heads of state repent. But it sang knowing just what shape rode
along behind it. And if any voice could have sent a message back to warn the past and correct the
unmade future, it would have been my brother’s.

Winter, Around 1950
But no one ever really knew that voice except his family, singing together on those postwar winter nights,
with music their last line of defense against the outside and the encroaching cold. They lived in half of a
three-story Jersey freestone house that had weathered over half a century to a chocolate brown, tucked
up in the northwest corner of Manhattan, a neglected enclave of mixed, mottled blocks where Hamilton
Heights shaded off into Washington Heights. They rented, the immigrant David Strom never trusting the
future enough to own anything that wouldn’t fit into a waiting suitcase. Even his appointment in the
Physics Department at Columbia seemed a thing so fine, it would certainly be taken away by
anti-Semitism, anti-intellectualism, rising randomness, or the inevitable return of the Nazis. That he could
afford to rent half a house at all, even in this tidal-pool neighborhood, struck David as beyond luck, given
the life he’d already owned.

To Delia, his Philadelphian wife, renting seemed as perennially strange as her husband’s pallid theories.
She’d never lived anywhere but the home her parents owned. Yet Delia Daley Strom, too, knew that the
world’s relentless purifiers would come after their happiness through any open chink. So she propped up
her refugee husband and turned their rented half of the freestone into a fortress. And for pure safety,
nothing beat music. Each of the three children shared the same first memory: their parents, singing. Music
was their lease, their deed, their eminent domain. Let each voice defeat silence through its own vocation.
And the Stroms defeated silence after their own fashion, each evening, together, in great gulps of
free-playing chords.

Rambling scraps of song started even before the children were awake. Strains of Barber from the
bathroom collided with Carmen coming out of the kitchen. Breakfast found them all humming against one
another in polytonal rowdiness. Even once the day’s home schooling started—Delia teaching the reading
and writing, David doing the arithmetic before heading down to Morningside to lecture on General
Relativity—song drove the lessons. Meter markings taught fractions. Every poem had its tune.

In the afternoon, when Jonah and Joey raced home from forced excursions to that strip of playground
adjoining St. Luke’s, they’d find their mother at the spinet with baby Ruth, turning the cramped drawing
room into a campsite on the shores of Jordan. Half an hour of trios dissolved into bouts of ritual bickering
between the boys over who got first dibs with their mother, alone. The winner set to an hour of glorious
piano duets, while the moment’s loser took little Root upstairs for read-alouds or card games without real
rules.

Lessons with Delia passed in minutes for the praise-heaped student, while stretching out forever for the
one waiting in line. When the excluded boy started calling out finger faults from upstairs, Delia turned
those catcalls, too, into a game. She’d have the boys name chords or sustain intervals from the top of the
stairs. She’d get them singing rounds—“By the Waters of Babylon”—from opposite ends of the house,
each boy weaving his own line around the distant other. When they hit the limits of their boy’s patience,
she’d bring them together, one singing, the other playing, with little Root inventing spectral toddler
harmonies that strove to join this family’s secret language.

The sounds her boys made pleased Delia so much, it scared them. “Oh, my JoJo! What voices! I want