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

you to sing at my wedding.”

“But you’re already married,” Joey, the younger boy, cried. “To Da!”

“I know, honey. Can’t I still want you to sing at my wedding?”

They loved it too well, music. The boys shrugged off sandlot sports, radio dummies and detectives,
tentacled creatures from the tenth dimension, and neighborhood reenactments of the slaughter at
Okinawa and Bastogne, preferring to flank their mother at the spinet. Even in those narrow hours before
their father returned, when Delia stopped their private lessons to prepare dinner, she had to force-march
the boys out of the house to take another dose of torture at the hands of boys more cruelly competent in
boyhood, boys who rained down on the two Stroms the full brutality of collective bafflement.

Both sides in the neighborhood’s standing war went after these stragglers, with words, fists,
stones—even, once, a softball bat square in the back. When the neighborhood children weren’t using the
boys for horseshoe stakes or home plate, they made an example of the freakish Stroms. They sneered at
Joey’s softness, covered Jonah’s offending face in caked mud. The Strom boys had little taste for these
daily refresher courses in difference. Often, they never made it to the playground at all, but hid themselves
in the alley half a block away, calming each other by humming in thirds and fifths until enough time had
passed and they could race back home.

Dinners were a chaos of talk and tease, the nightly extension of the years-long Strom-Daley courtship.
Delia banned her husband from the stove when she worked. She found the man’s pot-dipping an outrage
against God and nature. She kept him at bay until her latest inspired offering—chicken casserole with
candied carrots, or a roast with yams, small miracles prepared in those moments between her other
full-time jobs—was ready for the stage. David’s task was to accompany the meal with the latest bizarre
developments from the imaginary job he held down. Professor of phantom mechanics, Delia teased. Da,
more excitable than all his children, laid into the wildest of details: his acquaintance Kurt Gödel’s
discovery of loopy timelike lines hiding in Einstein’s field equations. Or Hoyle, Bondi, and Gold’s hunch
that new galaxies poured through the gaps between old ones, like weeds splitting the universe’s crumbling
concrete. To the listening boys, the world was ripe with German-speaking refugees, safely abroad in their
various democracies, busy overthrowing space and time.

Delia shook her head at the nonsense that passed for conversation in her home. Little Ruth mimicked her
giggle. But the preteen boys outdid each other with questions. Did the universe care which way time
flowed? Did hours fall like water? Was there only one kind of time? Did it ever change speeds? If time
made loops, could the future curl into the past? Their father was better than a science-crazed comic
book, Astounding Stories , Forbidden Tales . He came from a stranger place, and the pictures he drew
were even more fantastic.

After dinner, they came together in tunes. Rossini while washing the dishes, W. C. Handy while drying.
They crawled through loopy timelike holes in the evening, five lines braiding in space, each one curling
back on the other, spinning in place. They’d do workhorse Bach chorales, taking their pitches from
Jonah, the boy with the magic ear. Or they’d crowd around the spinet, tackling madrigals, poking the
keyboard now and then to check an interval. Once, they divvied up parts and made it through a whole
Gilbert and Sullivan in one evening. Evenings would never be so long again.

On such nights, the children seemed almost designed for their parents’ express entertainment. Delia’s
soprano lit across the upper register like lightning on a western sky. David’s bass made up with German
musicality what it lacked in beauty. Husband anchored wife for any flight she cared to make. But each