The Time of Our Singing

by Richard Powers

  He walks from Georgetown, where two old friends from his Berlin days put him up, sparing him from looking for a room, an act of practical politics that would have defeated him. He has come down by train last night from New York, where he has lived this past year, sheltered by Columbia. Yesterday, David Strom was out in Flushing Meadows, getting an advance peek at the World of Tomorrow. Today, he woke up in Georgetown’s parade of yesterday. But now there is only and ever now, every infinitesimal in the delta of his step a subtended, theoretical forever.

  He’s here by George Gamow’s invitation, to talk at George Washington University on possible interpretations of Milne and Dirac’s dual time scales: probably imaginary, he concludes, but as staggeringly beautiful as truth. He was down three months before, for the Conference on Theoretical Physics, where Bohr told the assembled luminaries about the existence of fission. Now David Strom returns, to add his private notes to the growing stockpile of infinitely strange things.

  But he makes the trip for a more pressing reason: to hear again the only American singer who can rival the greatest Europeans in tearing open the fabric of space-time. Everything else—the visit with his Georgetown friends, the talk at George Washington, the tour of the Library of Congress—is excuse. His thoughts tunnel backward. His each step toward the Mall peels back the four last years, exhuming the day when he first heard this phenomenon. That sound still hangs in his mind, as if he were reading it off the conductor’s score: 1935, the Wiener Konzerthaus, the concert where Toscanini proclaimed that a voice like this woman’s came around only once every hundred years. Strom doesn’t know the maestro’s timescale, but Toscanini’s “hundred years” is short by any measure. The alto sang Bach—“Komm, süsser Tod.” “Come, Sweet Death.” By the time she reached the second strophe, Strom was ready.

  Today is Easter, the day Christians say death died. To date, Strom has seen little evidence supporting the theory. Death, he feels reasonably confident, is poised to make an impressive comeback. For reasons Strom cannot grasp, the angel has passed over him three times already. Even the most confirmed determinist must call it caprice. First, following his mentor, Hanscher, down to Vienna after the Civil Service Restoration Act, escaping Berlin just before the Reichstag erupted in flames. Then getting the habilitation. Making a splash at the Basel conference on quantum interpretations, and winning an invitation to visit Bohr in Copenhagen just months before Vienna dismissed its Jews—practicing or otherwise—from the faculty. Escaping with the letter of recommendation from Hanscher, the shortest, most effusive that man ever wrote:

  “David Strom is a physicist.” At last securing asylum in the States, a mere year ago, on the strength of a single theoretical paper, whose confirmation came a decade before it might have, hastened by a cosmological confluence that happens once every other lifetime. Three times, according to David’s own count, saved by a luck even blinder than theory.

  It all seems proof of a temporal rift no theory can mend. Four years ago, he was happily attending European concerts, as if Europe still heard some fixed key. Nothing sounds the same on this repeat listen, old music in a newfound land. In between that theme and its recapitulation, only a harrowing development section, jagged, atonal, unlistenable. His parents in hiding near Rotterdam. His sister, Hannah, and her husband, Vihar, trying to reach his country’s capital, Sofia. And David himself, a resident alien in the land of milk and honey.

  Time may turn out to be quantized, as discontinuous as the notes in a melody. It may be passed back and forth, carried along by subatomic chronons as discreet as the fabric of matter. Tachyons, restricted to speeds faster than light—fantasies allowed by Einstein’s most rigorous prohibitions—may bombard this life with word of everything that awaits it, but life below the speed of light can’t see them to read them. David Strom shouldn’t be here, free, alive. But he is. Is here, walking across Washington, to hear a goddess sing, live, in the open air.

  Strom turns onto Virginia and sees the throng. He has never been so close to such numbers. He has seen them back in Europe only on newsreels—the crazed World Cup finals, the mobs that turned out three years ago to watch Hitler refuse to give out gold medals to the non-Aryan Ubermensch. This crowd is more sweeping, more blissfully anarchic. Music alone cannot account for this. Such a movement can only come from some vaster libretto. Until this instant, Strom has no idea what concert he walks into. He fails to grasp the issue until he corners and looks on it.

  This eye-level wall of flesh knocks the wind from him. The shimmer of tens of thousands of bodies, humanity broken down to atoms, an electrostatic n-body problem beyond any mathematics’ ability to solve, panics him with its groundless physics, and he turns to run. He heads back up Virginia toward the safety of Georgetown. But he can’t erase more than a few dozen meters of his path when he hears that voice up inside his ears. Komm, süsser Tod. He stops on the sidewalk and listens. What’s the worst that oblivion might do to him? What better sound to bring on the end?

  He turns back toward this roiling crowd, using the terror in his chest the way a seasoned performer would. Breathing through his mouth, he slips into the churning surf. The fist in his chest relaxes into eddies of pleasure. No one stops him or asks for identification. No one knows he is foreign, German, Jewish. No one cares that he’s here at all. Ein Fremder unter lauter Fremden.

  Sunlight breaks free for a minute, to shine on earth’s most mutable country. David Strom wanders lost inside a social realist drawing, hemmed in by a crusade he can’t identify, waiting again, this year, for the myth to turn real. Where else in the world have so many for so long believed that so much good is so close to happening? But today, these New Worlders may be right. He shakes his head, working his way toward the makeshift stage. Prophecy may yet come true, if there’s anyone left to receive it. Already, Europe has slid back into the flames. Already, the smokestacks are hard at work. But that is tomorrow’s fire. Today has another glow altogether, and its heat and light draw Strom forward.

  He bobs in sync with the bodies around him, searching for a good sight line. Monuments hem this huge hall in—State Department, Federal Reserve—white lintels and pillars, the hallmarks of indifferent power. He is not the only one staring at them. It strikes Strom, in America only a year, that he might come to say my country more easily than half of those he passes, people who arrived here twelve generations ago, on someone else’s travel plan.

  A hundred thousand drifting feet batter the April ground into a cattle trail. He passes a preacher waving a pigskin-bound Bible, three small children standing on an orange crate, a squad of blue and brass police as dazed as the swarm they patrol, and three dark-suited, broad-shouldered men in felt hats, menacing gangsters compromised only by the beaten-up bicycles they push alongside them.

  A shout comes from the forward ranks. Strom’s head jerks up. But the crisis has passed by the time its wake reaches him. Sound travels so slowly, it might as well be stopped, compared to the now of light. Miss Anderson is on the platform, her Finnish accompanist beside her. The dignitaries packing the cobbled-up bleachers rise for her entrance. Half a dozen senators, scores of congressmen including one solitary Negro, three or four cabinet members, and a justice of the Supreme Court each applaud her, all for private reasons.

  The secretary of the interior addresses the brace of microphones. The crowd near Strom stirs with pride and impatience. “There are those”— the statesman’s voice bangs around the vast amphitheater, launching three or four copies of itself before dying—“too timid or too indifferent”—only the echo shows how immense a cathedral they stand in—“to lift up the light … that Jefferson and Lincoln carried aloft …”

  God in Heaven, let the woman sing. In the burst of idiom he heard on the train coming down, Clam up and take it on the lam. Where Strom comes from, the whole point of singing is to render human chatter irrelevant. But the secretary politicks on. Strom inches toward the Memorial, the wall of people in front of him solid yet somehow always leaving a little
space to fill.

  Then Miss Anderson stands, a modest queen, her long fur coat protecting her against the April air. Her hair is a marvelous scallop shell, open against both cheeks. She’s more otherworldly than Strom remembers. She stands serene, already beyond life’s pull. Yet her serenity shivers. Strom makes it out, over the heads of these thousands. He has seen that wavering before, up near the pit of the Vienna Staatsoper, or through opera glasses, from the student leaning posts in the halls of Hamburg and Berlin. But so unlikely is the tremor in such a monument that Strom can’t at first give it a name.

  He turns and looks out across the crowd, following her glance. Humanity spreads so far over the Mall that her sound will take whole heartbeats to reach the farthest ranks. The numbers undo him, an audience as boundless as the ways that led it here. Strom looks back to the singer, alone up on her Calvary of steps, and names it, the ripple that envelops her. The voice of the century is afraid.

  The fear coming over her isn’t stage fright. She has drilled too long over the course of her life to doubt her skill. Her throat will carry her flawlessly, even through this ordeal. The music will be perfect. But how will it be heard? Bodies stretch in front of her, spirit armies, rolling out of sight. They bend along the length of the reflecting pool, thick as far back as the Washington Monument. And from this hopeful host there pours a need so great, it will bury her. She’s trapped at the bottom of an ocean of hope, gasping for air.

  From the day it took shape, she resisted this grandstand performance. But history leaves her no choice. Once the world made her an emblem, she lost the luxury of standing for herself. She has never been a champion of the cause, except through the life she daily lives. The cause has sought her out, transposing all her keys.

  The one conservatory she long ago applied to turned her away without audition. Their sole artistic judgment: “We don’t take colored.” Not a week passes when she doesn’t shock listeners by taking ownership of Strauss or Saint-Saëns. She has trained since the age of six to build a voice that can withstand the description “colored contralto.” Now all America turns out to hear her, by virtue of this ban. Now color will forever be the theme of her peak moment, the reason she’ll be remembered when her sound is gone. She has no counter to this fate but her sound itself. Her throat drops, her trembling lips open, and she readies a voice that is steeped in color, the only thing worth singing.

  But in the time it takes her mouth to form that first pitch, her eyes scan this audience, unable to find its end. She sees it the way the newsreels will: 75,000 concertgoers, the largest crowd to hit Washington since Lindbergh, the largest audience ever to hear a solo recital. Millions will listen over radio. Tens of millions more will hear, through recordings and film. Former daughters and stepdaughters of the republic. Those born another’s property, and those who owned them. Every clan, each flying their homemade flags, all who have ears will hear.

  NATION LEARNS LESSON IN TOLERANCE, the newsreels will say. But nations can’t learn lessons. Whatever tolerance graces this day will not survive the spring.

  In the eternity that launches her first note, she feels this army of lives push toward her. Everyone who ever drew her on to sing is here attending. Roland Hayes is in this crowd somewhere. Harry Burleigh, Sissieretta Jones, Elizabeth Taylor-Greenfield—all the ghosts of her go-befores come back to walk the Mall again, this brisk Easter. Blind Tom is here, the sightless slave who earned a fortune for his owners, playing by ear, for staggered audiences, the piano’s hardest repertoire. Joplin is here, the Fisk and Hampton jubilees, Waller, Rainey, King Oliver and Empress Bessie, whole holy choirs of gospel evangelists, jug banders and gutbucketers, hollerers and field callers—all the nameless geniuses her ancestors have birthed.

  Her family is there, up close, where she can see them. Her mother stares up at Lincoln, the threatening, mute titan, appalled by the weight her daughter must carry for the collected country, now and forever. Her father sits even closer, inside her, in the shape of her vocal cords, which still hold that man’s mellow bass, silenced before she really knew him. She hears him singing “Asleep in the Deep” while dressing for work, always the first line, endlessly caressing, never managing to get all the way to the phrase’s end.

  The size of the crowd, its gravity, splinters her measure’s first beat. Common time goes cut, allegro to andante to largo. Her racing brain subdivides the notes in her first number’s introduction, eighth note turns into quarter, quarter becomes half, half whole, and whole expands without limit. She hears herself inhale and the pickup spreads into standstill. As she forms the note’s forward envelope, time stops and pins her, motionless.

  The tune that the minuscule grand piano strikes up opens a hole in front of her. She can look through and see the coming years as if scanning a railroad timetable. Down this narrow strip of federal land she witnesses the long tour ahead. This day changes nothing. She’ll sit outside the Birmingham, Alabama, train station four years from now, waiting for her German refugee accompanist to bring her a sandwich, while German prisoners from North Africa occupy the waiting room she can’t enter. She’ll be given the keys to Atlantic City, where she’ll perform to sold-out houses but won’t be able to book a room in town. She’ll sing at the opening of Young Mr. Lincoln, in Springfield, Illinois, barred from the Lincoln Hotel. All coming humiliations are hers to know, now and always, hovering above this adoring, immeasurable crowd as the piano homes in on her cue.

  The Daughters will repent their error, but repentance will come too late. No later justice can erase this day. She must live through it for all time, standing out here in the open, singing in a coat, for free. Her voice will be linked to this monument. She’ll be forever an emblem, despite herself, and not for the music she has made her own.

  These faces—four score thousand of them—tilt up to seek hers out, Easter’s forgetting bulbs seeking the feeble sun. Those who until this afternoon were sunk in hopeless hope: too many of them, swarming the shores of Jordan, to get over in one go. Their ranks carry on swelling, even as she traces their farthest edge. In the convex mirror of 75,000 pairs of eyes she sees herself, dwarfed under monstrous columns, a small dark suppliant between the knees of a white stone giant. The frame is familiar, a destiny she remembers from before she lived it. A quarter century on, she’ll stand here again, singing her part in a gathering three times this size. And still the same hopeless hope will flood up to meet her, still the same wound that will not heal.

  Down one world line she sees herself crushed to death, twenty minutes from now, when the audience surges forward, 75,000 awakened lives trying to get a few steps closer to salvation. Those who’ve spent a life condemned to the balcony will push toward a stage that is now all theirs, release driving them toward themselves, toward a voice wholly free, until they trample her. She sees the concert veer toward catastrophe, the mass accident of need. Then, down another of this day’s branching paths, she watches Walter White stand and come forward to the microphones, where he pleads with the crowd for calm. His voice turns the mass back into its parts, until they are all just one plus one plus one, able to do no worse to her than love.

  Oceans past this crowd, larger ones gather. Six hours ahead, six zones east of her, night already falls. In the town squares, vegetable markets, and old theater quarters where she has performed, inside the Schauplätze that wouldn’t engage her, voices build. She looks on the world’s only available future, and the coming certainty swallows her. She will not sing. She cannot. She’ll hang on the opening of this first pitch, undone. Her choices close down, one after the other, until the only path left is to turn and run. She casts a panicked look back, toward the Potomac bridge, across the river into Virginia, the only escape. But there’s no hiding place. No hiding place down here.

  A girl’s spinto soprano inside her strikes up its best warding-off tune. When you see the world on fire, fare ye well, fare ye well. She uses the time-honored performer’s cure. She need only focus on one face, shrink the mass down to one p
erson, one soul who is with her. The song will follow.

  Deep in the crowd, a quarter of a mile forward, she finds her mark, the one she’ll sing to. A girl, an earlier her, Marian on the day that she left Philadelphia. That soul looks back, herself already singing, sotto voce. The girl calms her. In the frozen fermata before her downbeat, she reviews the program she must complete. “Gospel Train,” and “Trampin’,” and “My Soul Is Anchored in the Lord.” But before that, Schubert’s “Ave Maria.” And before the Schubert, “O mio Fernando.” Of this whole grab bag of tunes, she’ll remember singing exactly none. It will be as if some ghost placeholder walks away with the experience and she comes away with nothing. She’ll read of her delivery much later, learning through the clippings how each song went, long after the fact, after the deed is done and gone.

  But even before the coming amnesia, she must make it through “America.” Time thaws. The piano starts up again, unrolling the last of those simple block chords, a sequence under the skin of anyone born in these parts, a perfect cadence, as familiar as breathing. All she can hear as the brief lead-in starts up again a tempo is the sound of her own lungs. For one brief beat that stretches out as far as the filled horizon, she forgets the words. Their overlearned familiarity blocks them from coming. Like forgetting your name. Forgetting the numbers from one to ten. Too known to remember.

  Again, the crowd surges forward, a great wave needing only to sweep over and drown her. This time, she lets them. She may forget. But time reorders all. A lightness rises, a way point in this gathering sea of dark, the darkness that belonging itself has made. For a moment, here, now, stretching down the length of the reflecting pool, bending along an arc from the shaft of the Washington Monument to the base of the Lincoln Memorial, curling down the banks to the Potomac behind her, a state takes shape, ad hoc, improvised, revolutionary, free—a notion, a nation that, for a few measures, in song at least, is everything it claims to be. This is the place her voice creates. The one in the words that come back to her at last. That sweet, elusive thee. Of thee I sing.