The Time of Our Singing

November 1945—August 1953

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Rootie comes. “It’s a miracle,” Da says. That much is obvious, even to me. First she’s pale and milky, like a potato without the skin. In a few weeks, she’s brown, like a potato with the skin back on. Nothing is one color for very long. First, Root is smaller than the smallest violin, but soon she’s too big for me to lift easily. Just like Mama was big before Ruth came, and now she’s back to small again.

I ask Mama if Root will be in our school. Mama says she already is. Mama says everybody’s in school, always. “You?” I giggle at the idea, embarrassed. “Are you still in school?” She smiles and shakes her head, like she’s saying no. But she’s not. She’s saying the saddest yes I’ve ever heard.

Jonah’s faster than I am in lessons, but Mama says when we’re alone that that’s because he had a head start. I try harder, but that only makes my brother try harder, too, just enough to stay ahead and beat me. Every day, we do something we’ve never seen before. Sometimes even Mama’s new to it. Little Rootie just lies there and laughs at us. Da’s away teaching physics to grown-ups because everyone’s always in school. When Da comes home, we play at more school, right through dinner and into the evening, when, to close each day, we sing together.

But even before the singing at day’s end, we have songs. Songs about animals and plants, the presidents, states and capitals. Rhythm and meter games about fractions; chords and intervals for our times tables. Experiments with vibrating strings teach us science. We learn birds by their calls, and countries by their national anthems. For every year that we study in history, Mama has the music. We learn a little German, French, and Italian through snippets of aria. A tune for everything, and everything a tune.

We go to the museums or the park, collecting leaves and insects. We take tests — sheets of questions on smudgy newsprint that Mama says the state needs in order to see if we’re learning as much as other boys. Jonah and I race through, trying to get the most questions done the fastest. Mama sings to us—“The race is not to the swift”—and makes us go back over.

Life would be practice for paradise if it were only this. But it isn’t. When the other boys on our street come home from their schools, Mama sends us out—“at least one hour”—to play. The boys always find something wrong with us, and our punishments are always new. They blindfolded us and hit us with sticks. They use us as home plate. Jonah’s not big enough to try to refuse. We hide in secret alley spots, inventing stories to tell Mama on our return, spending the hour singing funny, dissonant rounds, rounds so soft that our torturers can’t hear.

Mama has an answer for the world. When we’re out together, at the dentist’s office, in the grocery store, or on the subway train, and someone says something or shoots us the evil eye, she tells us, “They don’t know who we are. They think we’re somebody else. People are floating in a leaky boat,” Mama says. “Afraid they’re going under.” Our mother has an answer for that fear. “Sing better,” she says. “Sing more.”

“People hate us,” I tell her.

“Not you, JoJo. They hate themselves.”

“We’re different,” I explain.

“Maybe they’re not scared of different. Maybe they’re scared of same. If we turn out to be too much like them, who can they be?” I think about this, but she doesn’t really expect an answer. She cups us both by the crowns of our heads. “People who attack you with can’t are afraid you already can.”

“Why? How can that hurt them?”

“They think all good things are like property. If you have more, they must have less. But you know, JoJo? Everybody can make more beauty, anytime they need.”

Months later: “What do we do if they attack?”

“You’ve got a weapon stronger than anyone’s.” She doesn’t even have to say it anymore, she’s said it so often. The power of your own song. I don’t correct her. I no longer tell her that I don’t know what that means.

I come home one day, my upper-right canine knocked out by a boy three years older. I don’t tell my mother. It would only hurt her. When she sees my new gap, she shouts. “You’re getting so big, JoJo. So big so fast.” But the new tooth is weeks coming in. I smile at her, every chance I get. Once, she looks away, crying in what I think is shame at her gap-mouthed boy, grinning his obliging toothlessness. I’ll take fifty years learning to read her.

Why do we need to go out at all? This is what we boys want to know. Why can’t we stay in and read, listen to the radio, pitch pennies or skip rope in the cellar for exercise, like Joe Louis does? My parents can read each other’s minds. They always give the same answer to these questions. They practice in advance. They know when the other has already built up a boy’s will or countered a boy’s won’t.

“This family’s not fair,” Jonah says. “Not a real democracy!”

“Yes, it is,” Da tells him. Or maybe Mama. “Only, big people get two votes.”

They complete each other’s sentences and finish each other’s half-sung phrases. Sometimes, humming out loud over breakfast or housecleaning, they land on the same downbeat of the same tune, a piece neither has sung for weeks. Spontaneous unison. At the same tempo, in the same key.

I ask Da, “Where do we really come from, Germany or Philadelphia? What language did we speak before we learned English?”

He studies me to see what I’m really asking. “We come from Africa,” he says. “We come from Europe. We come from Asia, where Russia really is. We come from the Middle East, where the earliest people came from.”

That’s when Mama chides him. “Maybe that was their summer home, sugar.”

I know ten names: Max, William, Rebecca, Nettie, Hannah, Charles, Michael, Vihar, Lucille, Lorene. I see family pictures, but not many. On bad nights, when Ruth is ill or something has broken between Mama and Da, I send these names messages.

Jonah asks, “What color was Adam?” He smirks, knowing he’s breaking the law.

Mama looks at him sideways. But Da brightens. “This is a very good question! On how many issues do science and religion give exactly the same answer? All of the peoples on earth must have the same ancestors. If only memory were a little stronger.”

“Or a little weaker,” Mama says.

“Think of it! Arising once, in one place.”

“Except for those Neanderthal stallions jumping the fence.”

Da blushes, and we boys laugh, too, no clue except the general silliness. “Before that, I mean. The first seed.”

Mama shrugs. “Maybe that one blew in the window. From outdoors.”

“Yes,” Da says, a little startled. “Probably you are right!” Mama laughs, nudging him in scandal. “No, truly! This is more likely than native-grown. Given the earth’s youth, the size of all outdoors!”

Mama shakes her head, her mouth bunched up on one side. “Well, children. Your father and I have decided. Adam and Eve were little and green.”

We boys laugh. Our parents have gone mad. Speaking total nonsense. We can’t understand a word. But Jonah understands something I don’t. He’s faster, with a long head start. “Martians?”

My mother nods gravely, our great secret: “All of us, Martians.”

All the world’s people: We get them in geography, history. Tens of thousands of tribes, and not one of them ours. “We have no people,” I tell my parents one night before bed. I want them to know. Protect them, after the fact.

“We are our people,” Da says. Every month he writes letters to Europe. Searching. He’s been doing that for years.

Mama adds, “You’re out front of everyone. You three just wait long enough, everybody’s going to be your people.” We cobble up a national anthem out of stolen parts.

“Do we believe in God?” I ask.

And they say, “Let each boy believe in his own fashion.” Or something like that, just as unhelpful, just as impossible.

My mother sings at churches. Sometimes she takes us with her, but Da, never. The music is something she knows and we don’t. “Where does it come from?” Jonah asks.

“Same place all music does.”

Already, Jonah isn’t buying. “Where’s it going?”

“Ah!” she says. “Back toward do.”

We stand next to her in the pews, hands to the flat of her hips, feeling the vibrations coming through her dress, the deep fundamentals that surface from her with such clear power that people can’t help but turn around and stare at the source. We go to churches where everyone pretends not to look. We go to churches where the sound is ecstatic, cheered and clapped every which way, picked up and rolled into a dozen unplanned codas. We go to a place where the thundering, swaying, bliss-swelling choir sends a heavy woman in front of us into convulsions. She leans over, and I think she’s pretending to be sick. I laugh, and then I stop. Her body switchbacks side to side, first in time to the music, then cut time, then triple double. Her arms work like a sprinter’s, and her breasts fly out like counterweights to her heaving. A girl, maybe her daughter, holds her and sways with her, still singing to the music that mounts up from the choir. “Day is coming. Day is coming. When the walls will all come down.” The woman next to her, a perfect stranger, fans her with a handkerchief, saying, “That’s right; that’s all right now,” not even looking. Just following the mountain of music.

Maybe she’s dying. My mother sees my first-time terror. “She’s all right, JoJo. Just coming through.”

“Through to where?”

My mother shrugs. “To where she was before she came here.”

Every church we visit has its own sound. My mother sings them all, running beyond the roll of the notes. Shining like that far horizon, where all notes go. What you love more than your own life must finally belong to you. What you come to know, better than you know your own way home, is yours.

At night, we sing. Then music envelops us. It offers us its limited safety, here on our street, however long a way it has come. It never occurs to me that the sound isn’t ours, that it’s the last twitch of someone else’s old, abandoned dream. Each piece we do springs into being right here, the night we make it. Its country is this spinet; its government, my mother’s fingers; its people, our throats.

Mama and Da can sing right off the page, songs they’ve never seen before, and still sound like they’ve known them from birth. We sing a song from England: “Come Again, Sweet Love Doth Now Invite.” Soon we all climb up that scale together—“to see, to hear, to touch, to kiss, to die”—building step by step until we pull back at the peak, the “die” at the top of the phrase just a plaything sound we fondle, tuning to one another. Five phrases, sparkling, innocent, replaying the courtiers’ party game from the day of this tune’s making, that festive beauty, financed by the slave trade.

Jonah loves the song. He wants more by the same maker. We sing another: “Time Stands Still.” It takes me until this moment, this one, setting these words down half a century on, to find my way back, to come through to this song. To see the day and place we were signaling all those times we took the song on the road. To hear the forecast in that read-through. For prophecy just remembers in advance what the past has long been saying. All we ever do is fulfill the beginning.

“Time stands still with gazing on her face.” I gaze and time stands. My mother’s face, soft in the light of this song. We sing a five-part arrangement, which Jonah makes us take so slowly that each note hangs in the air, a broken pillar with vines growing over it. That’s all he wants: to stop the melody’s forward motion and collapse it into a single chord.

He doesn’t want us to finish. But when we do, for one last little specious now, he’s in bliss, the bliss underneath the chord. “You like the old ones?” Da asks. Jonah nods, although he hasn’t once thought that any of these tunes might be older than another. They’re all the same age as our parents: one day younger than creation.

“How old is that song?” I ask.

Our father’s eyes sweep upward. “Seventy-seven and three-quarters Rooties.”

My sister howls with pleasure. She waves her hands in the air. “No, no!” She puts her palm on her chin, her index on her cheek, her elbow in her other hand, mocking the posture of thought. Already she’s eerie, copying postures and poses, donning their worldliness as if she understands them. “I think it’s…yes!” Her finger shoots into the air, her head bobbing eureka. “Seventy-six and three-quarters Rooties! Not counting the first Rootie.”

“How many Mamas?”

Da doesn’t even have to think. “Just over eleven.”

Mama’s offended. She pushes away his attempt to hug her. “Almost twelve.”

I don’t understand. “How old is Mama?”

“Eight and a half hundredths of this song.”

“How many yous?”

“Ah! This is a different question. I’ve never told you how old is your old man?” He has, a million times. He’s zero, no years old at all. Born in 1911, in Strasbourg, then Germany, now France, on what was then March 10, but during the hours that were lost forever when Alsace capitulated and at last adjusted its clocks to Greenwich. This is the fable of his birth, the mystery of his existence. This is how a young boy’s life was snared by time.

“Not even nine of him,” Mama taunts. “Your old man is an old man. Only nine of your father’s great long lives, and you’re back to Dowland!”

My parents are different ages.

“Nay,” my father says. “One may not divide by zero!”

I don’t ask how many Jonahs, how many Joes.

“Enough foolishness.” Mama is the queen supreme of all American Stroms, now and forever. “Who let all this math in the house? Let’s get on with the counting.”

Stand still and gaze for minutes, hours, and years to her give place.Our father discovers how time is not a string, but a series of knots. This is how we sing. Not straight through, but turning back on ourselves, harmonizing with bits we’ve already sung through, accompanying those nights we haven’t yet sung. This is the night, or might as well be, when Jonah cracks the secret language of harmony and breaks into our parents’ game of improvised quotations. Mama starts with Haydn; Da layers on a crazed glaze of Verdi. The bird and the fish, out house hunting, lacing the nest with everything that fits. Then Jonah, out of nowhere, adding his pitch-perfect rendition of Josquin’s Absalon, fili mi. And for that feat, at so tender an age, he wins from my parents a look more frightened than any look that strangers have ever painted us with.

And later, when Einstein comes by the house for music night, playing his violin with the other physicist musicians, he needs give only the slightest push to shame my parents into sending their boy away. “This child has a gift. You don’t hear how big. You are too close. It’s unforgivable that you do nothing for him.”

The nothing my mother has given him is her own life. The unforgivable thing she’s guilty of: the steady rhythm of love. “The child has a gift.” And who does the great white-maned man think has given it to him? Every day, a school for that gift, costing no less than everything. She gives up her own gift, her own growth, her own vindication. But this is blackness, too: a world of white, declaring your efforts never enough, your sounds insufficient. Telling you to send the boy off, sell him into safety, let him fly away, give him over to mastery, lift him over that river any way you can. Never telling you what land you send him to, there on the far side.

Maybe she dies never questioning. Thinking the size of her boy’s skill has forced her hand. Believing in the obligation of beauty, a willing victim of high culture. Maybe she dies not knowing how there is no better school than hers. For here’s her boy, her eldest, stealing the keys of music, that music denied her. I see the look my parents trade then, pricing the experiment they’ve been running. Calculating the cost of their union.

What of Ruthie’s gift, had Mama lived? My sister, at four, is the fastest of all of us, latching onto the most elaborate melody, holding it high and clear, whatever the changing intervals around her. Soon, she is a genius mimic, doing Da, doing Mama, destroying in pitch-perfect parody her brothers’ walk and talk. Wheezing like the postman. Stuttering sententiously like our parents’ favorite radio sage. Doddering like the aged corner grocer until Mama, gasping through tears, begs her for mercy. This is not parroting, but something more uncanny. Root seems to know things about human invention that her handful of years can’t have taught her. She lives in the skin of the people she replicates.

But my sister is a lifetime younger than we are. Three years between us: time enough to split us beyond recognition. Each of us is a fluke of our one thin moment. Four and a half years from this night, Mama will be where no years can touch her.

Her death cuts us all loose in time. Now I’m almost twice my mother’s age. I’ve come through some warping wormhole, twisting back to see what she looked like, reflected in the light of her family. Her face stands still with gazing on all that it won’t live to see. Now it is as old, as young, as all other things that have stopped.

With nothing to check my memory, I can trust nothing. Memory is like vocal preparation. The note must center in the mind before the voice can land on it. The sound from the mouth has been sent out long beforehand. Already she opens to me in that look, one that takes years to reach me: her terror at hearing her prodigy son. This is the memory I send on ahead, my clue to the woman, when all other clues are long gone. She trades the look with my father, seeing what they’ve made, a secret, terrible acknowledgment: Our child is a different race from either of us.

I get my own look from her, to set alongside that one. Just once, and so fleeting that it’s over before she launches it. But unmistakable: It comes three days before I leave to join my brother in Boston. I’m taking what both of us know is our last private lesson together. We’ve been working through the Anna Magdalena notebook. Most of the pieces are already too easy for me, although I never say so. Even great players still play these, we tell each other. It’s a family notebook, Mama says, something Bach made to build his wife a home in music. It’s a family album, like the Polaroids my parents keep of the years we’ve been through. Postcards savored and kept safe.

Da is at the university. Ruth is on the floor, ten feet from the piano, working on her clothespin-family dollhouse. Mama and I flip pages in the album. We’re supposed to be doing social studies — the developing nations — but we’re playing hooky, with time so short. There’s no one to scold us. We play through a pack of easy dances, stretching them, jazzing them, as light as rain in the desert, turning to dust before it hits the roofs.

We turn to the arias, the part of the notebook we love best. With them, one of us can sing and the other play. We do number 37, “Willst du dein Herz mir schenken.” Mama sings, already a creature from another world. But I can’t hear that from here, the only world where I’ve ever lived. I start in on number 25, but before we can get three measures into it, Mama stops. I do, too, to see what’s wrong, but she waves frantically for me to keep playing. Rootie the mimic is towering above her clothespin family, standing as she’s seen Mama do a thousand times, posed in front of a room full of listening people, Mama herself, at one-third size. Little Root’s voice enacts an adulthood already in her. She takes over from my mother “Bist du bei mir,” singing it for her, to her, as her.

My seven-year-old sister has learned the stream of German words phonetically, just from hearing Mama sing it two or three times. Ruth can’t understand a word she sings in her father’s language. But she sings knowing where every word heads toward. She sings the song Mama and Da played in my grandparents’ parlor on his first visit there. Ach, wie vergnügt wär’ so mein Ende. Ah, how pleasant will my end be.

I play it through, and Rootie sails smoothly into harbor. Mama holds herself, her hands knotted in front of her, motionless, conducting. At the end of the song, my mother stares at me, dumbstruck. She begs me, the only other soul within earshot, for an explanation. Then she moves to Ruth, stroking and marveling, cooing and combing in thrilled disbelief. “Oh, my girl, my girl. Can you do everything?”

But for an instant, she sounds me. Da isn’t here; I’m her only available man. Maybe it’s me — the me who sees her now, half a century on — whom she seeks out. Her eyes strike down with prophecy. She searches me for explanations of what’s to come. She hears it in Ruth’s song: what’s waiting for her. In her panicked advance look, she makes me promise her things I can’t deliver. Her look swears me to a vow: I must take care of everyone, all her song-blasted family, when I’m the only one who remembers this glimpse of how things must go. Watch over this girl. Watch over your brother. Watch over that hopeless foreign man who can’t watch over anything smaller than a galaxy. She looks right at me, forward across the years, at my later self, grown, broken, the only person who stands between her and final knowing. She hears effect before cause, response before call: her own daughter singing to her, the one tune that will do for her funeral.

She packs me off to Boston to join my brother. On the day of my real departure, she’s all pained smiles. She never mentions the moment again, even in her eyes. I’m left to think I must have invented it.

But I was there for the rehearsal. And there again, with Ruth, in concert. And still here, brought back to do the encore, although my every performance was able to save exactly no one. Half a century past my mother’s death, I hear that cadence she caught that day. She doesn’t anticipate what will happen to her so much as she remembers it. For if prophecy is just the sound of memory rejoining the fixed record, memory must already hold all prophecies yet to come home.

Meistersinger

He met me at Zaventem Airport, Brussels, like a limo driver looking for his fare, holding up a hand-lettered sign readingPAUL ROBESON. The grand tour of Europe’s capitals had done little for his sense of humor.

In fact, I was glad for the cue. I might have missed him in the crowd without his waving the stupid sign for all countries to see. He had a beard, a little goatee midway between Du Bois and Malcolm. He’d grown his hair almost to his shoulders, and it was straighter than I could have imagined. He’d gotten bigger, for want of a better word, although his weight hadn’t changed from his days at Juilliard. The sea green shiny jacket and steel gray trousers added to the performance. He seemed more pallid. But then, he’d been living in a country where the sun canceled appearances more often than a hypochondriac diva. He looked like Christ should have been depicted these last two thousand years: not a Scandinavian in a toga, but a scruffy Semite clinging to the edge of northeast Africa, the oldest contested border between colliding continents.

He was more excited to see me than I expected. He waved the placard in the air, doing a little allemande. I dropped my bags at his feet and snatched the sign out of his hand. “Mule, Mule.” He hugged me, rug-burning my scalp with the butt of his hand. “We’re back, brother.” I was giving him something. I didn’t know what. He grabbed the larger of my suitcases, groaning as he deadlifted.

“It’s your fault,” I said. “They almost didn’t let me through customs, with all the peanut butter.”

He sniffed the bag. “Ah! My country’s supreme contribution to world culture. This stuff’s going to kill us — on a good baguette.”

“I had to throw away half my wardrobe to make room for it.”

“We have to rethread you here, anyway.” He picked at my clothes. I noticed the males around us, each with an urbane, shiny variant of Jonah’s own seasick tones. We pushed through the gauntlet waiting at the arrival door. “You get away okay?”

I lifted my shoulders and let them fall. I’d left Teresa, feeling as if I’d swung my legs out of bed and stepped on the collie that watched dutifully over me at bedside. Everything from my collarbone to my knees felt scrubbed hollow with steel wool. Teresa had nursed me through the anesthesia of my father’s death just so I could feel this: a jittery water-slide ride out over nothingness, into total autonomy. Everything I looked on felt like death. Even this airport wore the lurid colors of a Gothic Crucifixion.

Above the Atlantic coming over, trapped inside a bank of gauzy cumulus, I thought my skin was scaling off me. The seat tray, the paperback book I clutched, the seat underneath me all atomized. The choice to go to Europe closed back up around me, like the Red Sea in reverse. I’d abandoned a woman devoted to me, to devote myself again to my brother. I’d finally given up waiting for my sister to contact me, and I had left her no forwarding address. After such leaving, nothing could be wholly good again. I felt as miserable as I ever have in this life. And as free.

Jonah saw how shaky I was. I opened my mouth to answer his question, but no word cleared. Around us, heavy cigarette smoke, the scent of salty black anisette candy, posters for products priced in imaginary currencies whose uses I couldn’t guess, fragments of opaque language over the airport PA, leather suits and pastel dresses in outlandish and jagged cuts all eddied, illegible to me. I lived nowhere. I’d left my mate. I’d put everything decent and certain to the match. There was no one to save me from the aloneness that had always wanted me but my even more uncoupled brother. I opened my mouth. My lips threatened to keep on opening until they peeled off. Nothing would snag into sound.

“She’ll live,” Jonah said. He put his arm around me, humming some pulsing organum I couldn’t make out. “Don’t change your money here. It’s theft. Celeste’s waiting at the car. We’re parked illegally. All of Europe’s parked illegally. Come on. I can’t wait for you to meet her.”

We walked through the universal carbolic of airports, here mentholated. Conversations broke over us like newscasters covering the fall of Babel. A party of fey windmill faces fringed in straw made me think Dutch, until Portuguese invective poured out of them. A knot of swarthy smugglers — ridges of black bushy eyebrow cresting their foreheads — had to be Albanian, yet they swore at one another in singsong Danish. Turks, Slavs, Hellenes, Tartars, Hibernian tribesmen: all past tagging. I felt I was back in New York. Only the Americans were dead giveaways. Even if they babbled in Lithuanian, I knew my countrymen. They were the ones in white shoes and theJ ’AIME LA FRANCE stickers on their carry-ons.

Jonah dragged me through the arrival area as through a New Wave film. Europa. I should have felt something, some shock of recognition, having dedicated my life to re-creating this place in the colonial wilds. But I didn’t; not a spark. I might as well have been air-dropped deep into Antarctica. A hospital chill crept up my legs as we descended the escalator. We came out in front of the terminal. The first spring breezes of Flanders blew over me, and I thought I might suffocate. I needed Teresa like I needed air. And I’d deliberately come to a place where I’d never be able to reach her.

We crossed to the parking lot. Jonah stopped traffic with one hand, the way von Karajan pulled the full stampede of the Berlin Philharmonic into a brusque ritard. Ranks of Peugeots and Fiats seemed parked sideways, each no longer than a real car was wide. In front of us, a cigarette-dangling father and elegant, scenery-chewing mother herded their pastel children into a car smaller than the ones Shriners used for Independence Day parades. Five toy cars beyond, a mahogany woman in a shock white blouse and red wraparound skirt leaned against a green Volvo. I couldn’t help staring. The ensemble — sin red, snow white, forest green, and deep russet skin — was like some newly liberated country’s flag. She was breathtaking, and three shades blacker than anything I’d expected to see in Belgium. I imagined I’d be the most conspicuous entity this side of the Urals. I smiled at the worn provincial maps I carried in my head. However this woman had come, her route was at least as unlikely as mine.

We schlepped my bags toward the woman, until I got the sickening sense Jonah was going to try to pick her up, even with his own French mate waiting within earshot. I nudged his shoulder to change course, and he nudged back. I thought, Not on my first day. The woman turned when we were ten paces away, too close to duck. Before I could plead innocence, she broke into a dizzying smile. “Enfin! Enfin!”

Jonah was all over her, without setting down my bag. “Désolé du retard, Cele. Il a eu du mal à passer la douane.”

She answered in a stream so rapid, I couldn’t make out a word. She seemed happy with me but cross with him. Jonah was amused at the entire world. I was somewhere between the Azores and Bermuda. My chestnut-haired Celeste, with her striped chemise and soft felt hat, slipped her pretty neck into the notch of a custom-made guillotine and waved good-bye. I reached forward to shake the hand of Celeste Marin, the only Celeste there was. She said something welcoming, but all I heard were her lips. I mumbled, “Enchanté,” worse than the worst Berlitz flunky. She giggled, grabbed me to her, and kissed my cheeks four times in alternation.

“Seulement trois fois en Belgique!”My brother’s scold was pitch-perfect, some hectoring song by Massenet. With all those years of vocal coaching, his overdeveloped ear left him passing for native. Celeste swore floridly. That much I understood. But when she turned and asked me an extended question that couldn’t be answered by a coin-flipped oui or non, I could only tilt my head in what I hoped seemed sophistication and say, “Comment?”

Celeste erupted in distress. Jonah laughed. “She’s speaking English, Mule, you sharecropping woolhead.” Celeste lobbed a few more incendiary profanities in my brother’s direction. He cooed her out of her unhappiness. “Encore une fois.”

Now cued, I made her out. “How does it feel to be out of your country for this first time?”

“I’ve never felt anything like it,” I assured her.

We smashed the bags into the trunk and were off. Celeste rode shotgun and I hid in the backseat. For fifty kilometers along a highway that might have been I-95, except for the road signs in three languages and the tile-roofed towns with their Gothic spires, my brother pestered me with questions about the latest Stateside developments. I couldn’t answer most of them. Now and then, Celeste turned around to offer cheese or oranges. When she faced front again, I lost myself in her astonishing fall of hair. It took me thirty kilometers to remember enough French to ask where she came from. She said the name of a town — mere pretty syllables. I asked again: Fort-de-France.

“Est-ce que cela est près de Paris?”

My brother almost drove into the median. “Close, Mule. Martinique.”

We got to Ghent mercifully quickly. Friends of Mijnheer Kampen had rented them a row house last renovated in the late seventeenth century. “Fifty smackers a month. They just want to keep it free of squatters. It’s on Brandstraat,” Jonah announced. “Fire Street.” He seemed to enjoy speaking the name. The lot was just big enough to back a two-manual harpsichord into. But the roost went straight up, four stories in all. I was to live in the top, the highest aerie, outfitted with bed, basin, dresser, and two shelves of books I couldn’t read. Jonah led me up the stairs and sat a moment.

“She’s stunning,” I said.

“I’ve noticed.”

“What does she think of your line of work?”

“ Mywork? I didn’t tell you? She’s our high soprano.”

I holed up in that attic and slept for two days. When I came back to life, we sang. Jonah took me to a converted packing warehouse two hundred meters from Brandstraat that Kampen’s circle leased for rehearsal space. There my brother showed me what had happened to him. He threw his cardigan on the bare floor and dropped his shoulders as if he were a corpse preparing for ocean burial. He rolled his head through three complete circles. And then, like the silver swan, he unlocked his silent throat.

I’d forgotten. Maybe I’d never known. He sang in that empty packing-house as I hadn’t heard him sing since childhood. Every nub in his sound had been burned away, all impurity purged. He’d found a way at last to transmute baseness back into first essence. Some part of him had already left this earth. My brother, the prizewinner, the lieder recorder, the soloist with symphonies, had found his resounding no. He sang Perotin, something we’d had in school only as history, the still-misshapen homunculus of things to come. But in Jonah, all stood inverted: more good in the bud than in the full flowering. He’d found the freshness of always, of almost. He made that vast backward step sound like a leap ahead. The whole invention of the diatonic, everything after music’s gush of adolescence had been a terrible mistake. He hewed as closely to a tube of wood or brass as the human voice allowed. His Perotin turned the abandoned warehouse into a Romanesque crypt, the sound of a continent still turned in upon itself for another sleeping century before its expansion and outward contact. His long, modal, slowly turning lines clashed and resolved against no harmony but themselves, pointing the way down a reachable infinity.

His voice sounded the original prime. He’d gotten past any emblem that others had made of him. In the United States, he’d looked too dark and sounded too light. Here, in the stronghold of medieval Ghent, all light and dark were lost in longer shadows. His voice laid claim to a thing that the world had discarded. Whatever this sound had once meant, he changed it. Our parents had tried to raise us beyond race. Jonah decided to sing his way back before it, into that moment before conquest, before the slave trade, before genocide. This is what happens when a boy learns history only from music schools.

His voice was the child’s I once sang with, back at our lives’ downbeat. But onto the boy’s free-ranging soar, he grafted a heavier-than-air flight all the more exhilarating, filled with fallen adulthood. What had once been instinct was now acquired. The range had pushed upward by urgent relaxation. Time was already grinding his sound down, pulling it back in to earth and amnesia. The dullness that all voices suffer simply by sticking around long enough already announced itself in his tone’s zenith. But his turns felt even surer, more wire-guided, as precise as radar, like a monk’s surprise levitation in his isolated cell.

He showed me his new voice, exposing a tender wound. He was like someone who’d walked away from an accident, transfigured. He sang for only thirty seconds. His sound had pulled in so it might fit anywhere and never be denied. It defined itself, like a split in the side of the air. Everything that had happened to us, and everything that never would, returned to me, and I began to cry in recalling. This once, he didn’t mock me, but just stood, shoulders dropped, tilting his head toward where that sound had gone. “You’re next, Joey.”

“Never. Never.”

“Right. It’s never that we’re after.”

He broke me down, all that day and the next. We worked for hours before he let me even make a peep. He stripped me back to the root, reminding me. “Drop everything. You won’t know how much you’re carrying until you set it down. Let your skeleton hang from the base of your head. You knew how to do this, years ago. A baby holds himself with more grace than any adult. Don’t try,” he whispered from above the battlefield. “You’re being too much. Be nothing. Let it go. Lower yourself into your own frame.” He opened me from the core until I stood, a hollow tube. How much work it took to find the effortless. We went for days, until I couldn’t hear him, but only a voice inside me, repeating, Make me an instrument of your peace.

On the third day, he said, “Breathe a pitch.” I knew by then not to ask him which. He brought me up from a trance of repose into simple resonance. “God’s tuning fork!” He aimed only for solidity, sustain. He turned me into a solitary menhir, out in a green field, his fundament, his bass, the rock on which he could build perfect castles of air.

Everything I knew about singing was wrong. Fortunately, I knew nothing. Jonah didn’t insist that I forget everything I’d ever learned about music. Only everything I’d learned since leaving our home school.

He bid me open my mouth, and, to my amazement, the sound was there. I held the pitch for four andante beats, then eight, then sixteen. We sustained long, whole tones for one whole week, and then another, until I couldn’t say how long we’d been at it. We cycled out each other’s notes, blending. My job was to match my shaky color to his exact shade. He tracked me through my whole range. I felt each frequency coming out of me, focused and shaped, a force of nature. We held unison pitches all the way out to tomorrow. I’d forgotten what bliss was.

“Why are you surprised?” he said. “Of course you can do this. You used to do it every night, in another life.”

He banned me from the group’s rehearsals. He didn’t want me thinking about anything but pure held tones. When Celeste or the other Kampen disciples — a Flemish soprano named Marjoleine deGroot, Peter Chance, an astonishing Brit countertenor, or Hans Lauscher, from Aachen — gathered in the warehouse, trying out their sounds in various ensembles, I was sent back to my upper room to meditate on C below middle C.

Now and then, Jonah let me out for breaks. With a fold-up tourist map, I explored my new city. Jonah gave me a sheet of data he’d written out longhand, to hand to strangers if I got lost. “Careful. Don’t jog anywhere. Don’t say anything in Turkish. They’ll still beat you bloody, just like back home.”

A hundred steps from our front door, I could be in any year at all. I determined to take Flanders in, and Flemish, too, the way Jonah taught me to take in my own voice. I absorbed the streets at random, wandering through a place that had been going downhill since 1540. Shards of Ghent stuck out from the past’s sooty mass, gems that history forgot to spend before it died. I loitered along the guild houses on the Koornlei or roamed the torture museum of Castle ’Gravensteen. I wandered into St. Baafs Cathedral by accident and found myself standing in front of the greatest artwork ever painted. In the unfolded Mystic Lamb, three times longer than me, I saw the mythic silence that my brother wanted to sing.

Nothing about this place was my home. But neither was America anymore. I’d simply traded the discomfort of citizenship for the ease of a resident alien. I mimicked the native dress, ditched my tennis shoes, and never spoke an unsolicited word aloud. From the distance of four thousand miles and eight hundred years, I saw what I had looked like to my native land.

After two months, we tried a song. We did Abbess Hildegard: “O ignis spiritus paracliti, vita vite omnis creature”: “O fire of the comforting spirit, life of the life of all creation.” Jonah intoned the words, and I joined him in unison. We zeroed out the motionless chant. Then we set out on thousand-year-old canons. Jonah wanted to relive the birth of written music, to reach out for the extreme of what we weren’t, a thing we ought never, in a thousand years, have been able to identify. But we identified, idem et idem. He needed me to match his sound, to fuse our voices into a single source, to revive, in this foreign place, our old real-time telepathy. From years of touring, our minds could still meld without a word. We still turned as tightly as schooling fish, not me with him or him with me, but the two of us, fused.

At the keyboard, my fingers could generally do what my head wanted. My voice, so much closer to my brain, could rarely seize the prize. At times, Jonah sloughed me off like a kid flung from the end of a playground chain of Crack the Whip. But our calisthenics brought me up to speed, the speed of stillness, of Abbess Hildegard’s extraplanetary flight: vita vite omnis creature.

In this way, one day, years before any justice should have allowed it, I recovered a voice. The singer I’d begun life as came back from the dead. Jonah fished me out of myself, all but intact. “How did you know? How could you be sure I was still in there?”

“You used to sing. All the time. Under your breath. At the keyboard.”

“Me? Never. You lie.”

“I’m telling you, Joseph. I don’t lie anymore. I used to hear you.”

It didn’t matter how he knew, or what he thought he’d heard. I could sing. I’d do: a darker take on his genetic material, solid enough to carry the bass. When I was ready at last — the outward confirmation of his inner ear — Jonah added Celeste. For the first time since our school days, my brother and I made music with someone who wasn’t us.

I’d grown no closer to Celeste in Ghent than we’d been in the airport parking lot the day they picked me up. She and my brother had the rapport that exists only between two people incomprehensible to each other. They chattered all the time, but never about the same thing at once. When the three of us were together, the French blazed past my ability to split the elided syllables. Then Celeste would address me in an English so joyously makeshift, all I could do was nod and pray. At nights, in our ancient row house, I heard them doing each other, three stories below. They hummed to each other, like Penderecki’s threnody, like Reich, Glass, the new minimalists, the latest rage in stylish circles. Their voices ascended in slurred quarter tones, crested in held dissonant intervals, then cooled off by appoggiaturas. They were busy turning themselves into a new species, and for that, they needed a new courtship song.

So I’d heard Celeste Marin’s singing voice already, before we sang together. This daughter of Caribbean business elites — generations of mixed-race rum magnates — sang with antillais abandon. But I wasn’t prepared for our French fourteenth-century trios. When we three made our first attempt to harmonize, I stopped after eight notes. Her voice was Jonah’s, pitched up into soprano again, before his voice broke forever. Whatever her voice had sounded like in her days at the Paris Conservatory, before she met Jonah, it now sounded more like a female Jonah than Ruth or Mama ever had.

We tried out a piece — a Solage chanson: “Deceit Holds the World in Its Domain.” We surged to the end on rising delight. The last note died away, dust motes suspended in the light of light. I was beside myself. It had been lifetimes since I’d felt so lifted, so afraid. I couldn’t sleep that night, knowing what we had. Neither, it turned out, could Jonah. I heard him climbing the wooden stairs to my crow’s nest. He came into my room without knocking and sat on the foot of my bed in the dark. “Jesus, Joey. This is it. We’re home free.” I saw him in silhouette punch the air like some teenager finding himself alone with the ball in the end zone. “All my life. All my life, I’ve been waiting for this.” But he couldn’t say what “this” was.

“What about the others?” Some hunger had caught hold of me. I was ready to cast the others aside, rather than let them slow us down even a beat.

Jonah laughed in darkness. “You’ll see.”

I saw, the next week, when all six of Jonah’s hand-selected voices met to sight-read. The others had been singing together in assorted groups for two years, honing their precision sacraments. They’d sprung their combined sounds on audiences in Gothic ghost towns around the Low Countries, France, and Germany. They knew what they might do together, and were having trouble keeping their secret. But five-sixths is as shy of perfection as any fraction. Every new voice starts a group out again, from zero.

I went into that first rehearsal wrecked by stage fright. These people owned the world that I only glimpsed now from a distance. They’d spent their life singing; I was a recovering pianist. The languages we sang were theirs by birth; I got through them by phonetics and prayer. My brother staked his reputation on me. Everything set up for me to fall neatly on my ambiguous face. All I had was a scrap of prophecy, the days through which I came.

We read through a chanson by Dufay—“Se la face ay pale”—and then that oldest of parody masses, based on the same tune. It felt like breaking into a tomb that had been sealed for half a millennium. Ten years later, the rage for authenticity would prohibit using women’s voices at all. But for a brief moment, we thought we had the future pegged and the past cleanly identified.

When the body breaks free of its boundary skin, it rises. How many people, trapped in time’s stream, get to feel, even for an instant, that they’ve climbed up out of the current and onto the banks? Jonah grabbed the tenor and the women lifted, three steps and a leap into weightlessness, scraping the keystone of the highest vault. Their certainty powered me, and the notes rolled off the page into the air without my doing much but spotting them.

The blend was so tight that each new imitative line sounded like the same voice curling back on itself. I’d stepped in front of a dressing room mirror and splintered into whole societies. Now and then, the released lines collapsed back into the unity that birthed them. The universe, Da once proved to his own satisfaction, could be described by a single electron, traveling back and forth in time along an infinitely knotted path whose resulting connect-the-dots shapes formed all the matter in existence.

When we finished, the silence we’d opened rang like a bell. Peter Chance, who sang like a van Eyck angel but who spoke like an unsexed Anthony Eden, took out a pencil and began making tiny reprimands in his part. “Anyone care to place a modest wager on our prospects?”

Celeste asked Jonah for a translation. A grinning Marjoleine deGroot supplied it, for Jonah was staring up at the roof beams, exultant. We looked at one another the way musicians do, slant but seeing all, every one of us terrified to try it again. We wanted to put the sheet music down, walk away, and forever protect that moment. Jonah returned to earth and pulled another mass out of his binder. “Shall we have a go at the Victoria?”

The Victoria sailed up past the Dufay, dropped notes and all. The shower of sound from our initial try gave way to the first feel for how to group-drive this thing. Heaven’s signal bled in and out, like an FM station in a storm. But the message was firm in us. We sprang loose, cut capers, wheeled about. I was their man. My brother had known. When the notes stopped, Hans Lauscher looked down the bridge of his nose and said, “You are hired. How much do you want an hour?” His accent shocked me: the ghost of my father’s.

Celeste blessed me in profuse island slang. Marjoleine, with the closest thing to glee her native climate permitted, threw her Flemish arm over my shoulder and thumped me as if I’d just put a header in the back of the net in a qualifying match against the Netherlands. “You don’t know how many basses we have already tried! Good voices, too, but just not right with us. Why didn’t you come to us sooner? How much time we would have saved.” I looked at Jonah. He grinned without embarrassment, as pleased with his duplicity as he was with his brilliant hindsight.

The fusing of six jagged personalities didn’t happen at once. The delicate dance of negotiated tensions obeyed its own musical shorthand. We had our daily doses of nervous outbursts and repaired hysterics. We practiced in a ring of black music stands, everyone but the fastidious Hans in stocking feet. Sometimes we taped ourselves on an old reel-to-reel, and then the six of us lay flat on our backs against the wood floors of our warehouse stage, conducting our prior lives, singing unison encouragements to the fixed fossil record.

We were a synchronized underwater ballet. Ten hands worked the air, shaping the wayward notes, waving like a Flanders wheat field in the wind. Celeste and Marjoleine especially needed to dance, the arc of the music and the line of their muscles weaving and meeting. Peter Chance, who’d spent his choirboyhood in the chancel of King’s and had stayed on in Cambridge when his voice broke, delighted in the newfound freedom of movement the group allowed him. Hans Lauscher did at least wag his shoulders, which, for a Rhinelander, was almost Swan Lake. Even Jonah, who’d once shamed Mama into keeping still when she sang, and who, during his lieder years, had made unholy drama by standing dead stationary in the crook of the piano, now turned fluid. He crooked his knees and curled forward into the top of his phrase, ready to mount up into empty space and keep on climbing. The use of music is to remind us how short a time we have a body.

When we were hitting on all cylinders, Jonah blessed us. Tied to his omnipotent tenor, we might travel anywhere, run any theft. But when we were off, falling back to earth in a fiery ball like Icarus, his patience grew as thin as a snake’s skin. Then six bruised egos spent hours trying to coax the damn carcass back to life again.

We were like a commune or an infant church: from each according to her abilities. Hans was our font of Teutonic scholarship, a walking manuscript library on a par with Vienna or Brussels. Peter Chance, who’d read Renaissance history at King’s, was our source on performance practice. Celeste served as articulation coach, softening, closing, and relaxing our vowels while tightening our intonation and polyphonic textures. Marjoleine was the verbal interpreter, glossing sense and phrasing stress points in any language we sang in. I did the structural analyses, finding how best to juxtapose long note values and rapid passages or bring out the subtle undulations of pulse.

But Jonah ruled over us all. His face, our focal point, filled with driven will. Our years apart weren’t enough to account for everything he now knew. All I could figure was that he hadn’t learned it. He remembered, resurrecting that dead world as if it had always been his. Through Kampen, he’d acquired a grasp for early idiom. He knew, within a week of reading a piece, how best to find its otherworldly hum. He could get at the universe hidden in any work, find the meter of a line, play the text, harmony, and rhythm off one another, revealing the message that existed only in the tension among them. He led us through a thicket of counterpoint to those moments of convergence that life denied him.

He shaped the group like a Kyrie. He delayed our first appearance. We were ready to sing for months before we actually did. Each singer went on working outside the group. Marjoleine ran three church choirs. Celeste blasted out background vocals in Europop radio anthems. Hans and Peter both sang and taught. Jonah took on assorted gigs, performing early music, especially with Geert Kampen, whose Kampen Ensemble, now veterans, were our North Star. But the six of us, together, held back for a last bar, reluctant to lose this moment when we were the only ones who knew the ring of possibility.

We sang for Kampen, in the chancel of St. Baafs. The church was deserted except for a few startled tourists. It felt like singing for Josquin himself. When we were done, Mr. Kampen sat in his choir stall, his shock of white hair falling over his forehead. I thought he’d taken offense at some turn in our interpretation. He just sat there, for five whole lento measures, until, behind his tiny granny glasses, the man’s eyes dampened. “Where did you learn this?” he asked Jonah. “Surely not from me.” And over my brother’s horrified objections, he proclaimed, “You must teach me now.”

Voces Antiquae debuted at the Flanders Festival in Brugge and followed up at the Holland Festival in Utrecht. We made our initial beachhead in the fifteenth century — Ockeghem, Agricola, Mouton, Binchois, a motley mix of regional styles. But our great signature piece was Palestrina’s Mass, Nigra sum sed formosa, a private joke between Jonah and me. It’s a Daley-Strom thing; you wouldn’t understand. Jonah insisted we perform everything from memory. He wanted the danger. Soloists play without music all the time. But if they lose themselves, they can swim up alongside their own fingers, and no one but the fellow in row four with the pocket score is the wiser. With ensembles, each mind’s memory map must be identical. Lose yourself and there’s no return.

Written music is like nothing in the world — an index of time. The idea is so bizarre, it’s almost miraculous: fixed instructions on how to recreate the simultaneous. How to be a flow, both motion and instant, both stream and cross section. While you do this, you, you, and you do otherwise. The score does not really set down the lines themselves; it writes out the spaces between their moving points. And there’s no way to say just what a particular whole sums to, short of reenacting it. And so our performances rejoined all those countless marriage parties, births, and funerals where this map of moving nows was ever unrolled.

In the world lines traced out in these scores, Jonah at last came into his own at-one-ment. His six voices cartwheeled around one another in unleashed synchrony, each creating the others by supplying their missing spaces. We sang the Palestrina, a piece that, by the kind of rough estimate Da loved, had been performed on the order of a hundred thousand times. Or we brought to life the Mouton manuscript Hans Lauscher discovered, which hadn’t sounded a peep since its first performance five hundred years ago. In both cases, we slipped alongside every performance that had happened or was still to come.

That’s why Jonah insisted that we surrender the safety of the page. We lived, ate, and breathed the printed instructions until they vanished, until we composed the written-out invention afresh, in the moment of our repeat performance. He wanted us to stand onstage, open our mouths, and have the notes just there, like a medium possessed by the soul she channels. He had us walk out from as many entrances as possible, in our daily clothes, as if we’d just bumped into one another on the street. This was still the era of black-tie concert dress. Jonah had donned monkey suits for years. The biggest shock available to him was the ordinary. We just appeared, as impromptu as the gift of tongues. We stood, scattered across the floorboards, as far from one another as we could get, like some multiple-body physics problem. That gave us maximum voice separation, the fullest possible depth. It made blending, precision attacks, and releases that much harder to pull off, and it left us, each night, courting disaster. But that space turned us into six soloists who just happened to align into a single crystal.

The sound we made glinted like the best hedge against all debased currencies. Jonah wanted every interval redeemed. Every resolved suspension shone out like tragedy averted; every false relation was the drift of a soul in agony; every tierce de Picardie delivered a life beyond this one. A reviewer in De Morgen, still reeling from the effect, expressed the strongest reservation leveled against us: “If anything, the sonority suffers from relentless divinity. Too many peaks; not enough valleys.”

Even that barb was laced with gratitude. Everywhere, for an instant, people wanted to be saved. Our sudden popularity surprised everyone except Jonah. Within a year, every festival in Europe with an arts subsidy wanted us. In that most select of dying worlds, we were the flavor of the hour. Our recording of the Palestrina Masses on EMI — a label that could have bought and sold a hundred Harmondials — won a pair of awards and sold enough copies to pay the rent on Brandstraat through the next century.

A thousand years of neglected music came of age everywhere at once in a dozen countries. Not just our group: Kampen, Deller, Harnoncourt, Herreweghe, Hillier: an avalanche intent on remaking the past. Curators had championed dead music for decades, each with their own new versions of annihilated history to promote. And all that time, audiences had never treated these revivals as anything more than exotic wallpaper. Our new generation of performers was more razor-fine and aura-wrapped, more underwritten by scholarship. But that alone couldn’t explain why, for a few years, the Creator Spiritus had the nearest thing to a resuscitation it would ever get.

“I have a theory,” Hans Lauscher said in a hotel in Zurich.

“Careful,” Marjoleine warned. “A German with a theory.”

Jonah waved like a referee. “Easy, folks. Switzerland. We’re on neutral territory.”

Hans flashed the theory of a smile. “Why this rage for a deceased musical style that can mean nothing to anyone? I am blaming the recording industry. Capitalist exhaustion through the flooding of consumer markets. How many more Mozart Requiems can you make? How many Schubert Unfinisheds? The more we feed our appetites, the more appetite we have. We must give the buyers something new.”

“Even if it’s ancient,” Peter Chance said.

“All music is contemporary,” Jonah said. And that’s how he wanted us to sing: as if the world would never abandon this instant.

I remember the six of us, after a concert at the Castello di San Giorgio in Mantua, well after midnight in a warm May. The lights of the city threw the castle and Ducal Palace into enchanted outline. We stepped into a town square unchanged since the Gonzaga court stumbled upon the madrigal. We moved through the intact fantasy as through a stage set. “It’s a vein!” Celeste exclaimed. “We have a total vein!”

“Indeed,” Peter Chance echoed. “We’re supremely jammy.” As always, I was the only one struggling with English.

“How did we get here?” Marjoleine asked. “I trained for opera. Until a few years ago, I knew nothing before Lully.” She looked at Hans, our manuscript scholar.

He held up both hands. “I am a Lutheran. My parents would die all over again if they knew I was singing Latin Masses. You!” he said, fencing my brother with a finger. “You are the one who has corrupted us.”

Jonah gazed around the square, by the light of the Gonzaga moon, whose inconstancy he’d just that evening invoked in song. “Not my fault. I’m just a poor black Harlem boy.”

Peter Chance let slip a sound, half titter, half censor’s whistle. He gave his head a circumspect shake toward Celeste in the moonlight, decodable to everyone. Jonah returned the Cambridge chorister’s incredulity with his own, in American dialect. And there in the moon-muted Piazza Sordello, the penny dropped, in five different currencies.

“Are you having us on?” Chance sounded more Oxbridge than I’d ever heard him. “You can’t be serious!”

“You didn’t know? You didn’t know!” Some hybrid of amused and crestfallen.

“Well, I knew there was some…some ancestry, of course. But…you’re not black, for heaven’s sake.”

“No?”

“Well, not like, say…”

“We have counted up the numbers,” Celeste bragged. “We believe I may have as many— Comment dit-on? — arrière-grands-parents blancsas these men here.”

Peter inspected me: I, too, was turning on him. “And how many white great-grandparents, exactly?”

Jonah snickered. “Well, that’s being black, you see. Hard to say, exactly. But more white than black.”

“That’s just my point. How can you call yourself…looking the way you…?”

“Welcome to the United States.”

“But we’re not in the damn United…” Peter Chance tumbled headlong down the hill we’d made him. At the bottom, he sat in a dazed heap. “Are you sure?”

“Are we sure, Joseph?” Jonah’s smile was a calm Sargasso.

I turned toward a lost night, the last night I saw my grandfather. “That’s what it says on our birth certificates.”

“But I thought… I was under the impression you were… Jews?”

“Germans,” Hans said. He leaned against the rusticated walls, studying a thread in his shirt-sleeve. I couldn’t tell how many categories were on the table.

Jonah nodded. “Think Gesualdo. Ives. It’s a progressive idiom. Totally archaic. C’est la mode de l’avenir. ”

Celeste grabbed him under the arm. She clucked her tongue, bored. “C’est pratiquement banal.”

“C’est la même chose,”I offered. I’d die doing my own brand of Tomming. My very own.

The six of us stood under the Ducal Palace arcade. Peter Chance already looked at us differently. Jonah wanted to say something to break this group apart and lay waste to everything he’d made. But he’d already set alight every other place he might live. I figured the others would slink off in embarrassment, each to their own gens. But they hung tight. Jonah stood in the Piazza, a duke about to bid his courtiers good night. “I say we blame this whole early music boom on the English and their damn choirboys.”

“Why not?” Hans Lauscher grabbed the chance. “They’ve had the ownership papers for everything else, at one time or another.”

“A British plot,” Marjoleine agreed. “They never could sing with any vibrato.”

The evening’s exchange changed nothing, nothing visible anyway. Voces Antiquae went on singing together, more eerily synchronized than ever. From Ireland to Austria, we fell into what passed for fame, in early music circles. We were doomed to it. What Jonah really needed from that ringing, translucent sound was to be cut loose, unbranded, anonymous, as far away from notice as notice could get. But one last time, music let him down.

Since moving to Europe, I hadn’t kept up with the United States. I no longer followed current events, much less current music. I didn’t have time, given how hard I had to work to keep from dragging the others down. What little I did hear confirmed me; the place had gone stranger than I could imagine. Its appetite for law and order grew as insatiable as its taste for drugs and crime. I read in a Walloon magazine that an adult American man was more likely to go to prison than attend a chamber music concert.

In a hotel in Oslo, I chanced across an English newspaper headline: FOURTEEN DEAD IN MIAMI RACE RIOTS AFTER POLICE ACQUIT TED. I knew what the officers had been acquitted of, even before I read the lead. The paper was a month old, which only added to the horror of knowing. Worse could have happened since, and I’d never hear until too late. Jonah found me in the lobby. I handed the page to him. Giving him a newspaper was like giving Gandhi a stack of soft-core porn. He read the story, nodding and moving his lips. I’d forgotten that: My brother moved his lips when he read.

“We haven’t been away as long as it feels.” He folded the paper into neat vertical thirds and handed it back to me. “Home’s waiting for us anyway, anytime we need it.”

Two nights later, in Copenhagen, I realized why he’d dragged me across the world to be with him. We were in the middle of the Agnus Dei from Byrd’s five-part Mass, scattered across the stage, singing as hot as stars spun out somewhere in the gas clouds of the Crab Nebula. He was sending a message out to other creatures who’d never understand the expanse between us. For this, he needed me. I was supposed to give his monastic ensemble some street cred. Jonah had enlisted us all in a war to outshame shame, to see which noise — this shining past or the present’s shrill siren — would outlast the other.

We made some money, but Jonah wouldn’t move out of the Brandstraat. Instead, he sank a fortune into renovating the dive, filling it with woodcuts and period instruments that none of us played. Those panic spells and shortness of breath that had bothered him for years more or less disappeared. Whatever youthful terror they were recalling had been put to bed, outlived.

Voces Antiquae used two publicity photos, both black-and-white. In the first, some trick of the light made us all fall into a narrow tonal register. The second spread us over the latitudes, from equatorial Celeste Marin to sun-starved Peter Chance at the polar circle. Most magazines ran the second, playing up the group’s United Nations nature. A Bavarian feature called our sound “Holy Un-Roman Imperial.” Some overworked British journalist came up with “polychromal polytonality.” Flacks and hacks waxed on about how our multiethnic makeup proved the universal, transcendent appeal of Western classical music. They never mentioned how the earliest of our music was as much Near Eastern and North African as it was European. Jonah didn’t care. He had his sound, one that, with each passing month, grew clearer, finer, and less categorizable.

He and Celeste came home one day in the winter of 1981, giggling like schoolchildren who’d stumbled onto a dictionary of taboo words. She wore a garland around her temples, prim white daisies that her hair turned into tropical hothouse blooms. “Joseph Strom the First.” Jonah saluted me. “We’ve got a secret.”

“That you’re just dying to broadcast over the World Service.”

“Perhaps. But can you guess, or do we have to cue you?”

I looked, yet couldn’t believe. “This secret of yours. Does it sound like Mendelssohn?”

“In some countries.”

Celeste stepped forward flirtatiously and kissed me. “My brother!” I’d sung with her for four years, in ten nations, and she still seemed farther away than Martinique.

They went to Senegal for a honeymoon: vacationing in an imagined common origin. “It’s amazing,” his postcard from Dakar said. “Better than Harlem. Everywhere you look, faces darker than yours. I’ve never been so comfortable in my life.” But they came back shaken. Something happened on that trip they never spoke about. They’d toured some moss-covered coastal prison where the deeds had been transacted, the commodities stored. Whatever Jonah was looking for in Africa, he found it. He wouldn’t be going back anytime soon.

We made two more recordings. We won prizes, grants, and competitions. We gave master classes, did live radio, and even made occasional television appearances on the BRT, NOS, and RAI. Nothing was real. I lived in the sound alone, making sure only to catch all the trains and planes. My bass got better, simpler, more effortless, with month after month of work.

I reached that age where every six weeks, I had another birthday. I turned forty, and didn’t even feel it. It hit me that I’d given most of my thirties to my brother, as I’d once given him my twenties. Jonah had gambled on returning me to singing, and we made the gamble pay. I’d never be a transcendent bass; I’d started lifetimes too late. But I had become the foundation for Voces Antiquae, and our sound came from all six of us. Yet even as I reached my singing peak, I heard my tone wearing away, concert by concert, chord by chord. As doomed lives go, singers are not quite basketball players. But the eternity we make for fifty minutes every night lasts, if the wind is with us, for only a score of years.

It stunned me to discover I’d been in Europe for over half a decade. In the first year, I’d learned what it meant to be forever American. In the next two, I learned how to hide that fact. Then somewhere, I crossed an invisible line where I couldn’t tell how far I’d drifted from my inalienable birthright. All that time, we didn’t step foot on our home continent. There weren’t enough bookings to make a tour worthwhile, and we had no other reason to return. The country had named an actor to the helm, one who proclaimed it morning again in America and who napped most afternoons. We couldn’t go back there, ever.

I could follow conversation now in five languages and acquit myself in three, not counting English and Latin. I went sight-seeing when we toured, now that I no longer had to spend every waking hour vocalizing. Visiting dead landmarks became my hobby. Sometimes I saw women. In moments of unbearable loneliness, I thought of the years I’d lived with Teresa. Then being alone seemed more than complex enough. I was a forty-year-old man living in an adopted country that took me for a guest laborer, with my forty-one-year-old brother and his thirty-two-year-old wife, who treated me as if I were their adopted child.

Everything I had belonged to him. My pleasures, my anxieties, my accomplishments and failings: These were all my brother’s piece. So it had always been. Years would go by, and I’d still be working for him. There came a month when I needed a secret project or I would disappear forever into his accompaniment. The nature of the work made no difference. All that mattered was that it remain unsponsored, unaccountable, and invisible to my brother.

This time, my supplies were more modest. I carried around Europe a single A4 notebook, clothbound at the side, with eight blank staffs per page. On long train rides to distant concerts, in hotels and dressing rooms, in the dull, wasted stretches of fifteen minutes and half hours that ravage a performer’s life, I fished for tunes in me that were worth writing down. I did not compose. I was more of a psychic, a medium taking dictation from the other side. I’d hover with my pencil over the blank ledger lines and just wait, not so much for the prediction of an idea as for the revision of a memory.

Just as when I’d tried to compose in the States, everything I wrote down was some tune from my earlier days, changed just enough to be unrecognizable. If I studied what I wrote long enough, I could always find a source hiding in it, evading and yet craving detection. Only now, instead of the misery that this discovery caused me in Atlantic City, I felt an excruciating release in watching these hostages escape. Over the course of three slack afternoons, I labored over an extended passage that took me until I was free of it to recognize as a reworking of Wilson Hart’s chamber fantasy, the one that years ago had struck me as a reworking of “Motherless Child.” I’d sworn to him to write what was in me, and managed only to rewrite what had once been in him.

But the scribbling was mine, and had to be enough. My notebook filled up with floating, disconnected fragments, each of them pointing toward some urgent revision they couldn’t get to. The tunes spelled out the story of my life, half as it had happened to me, and half as I’d failed to make it happen. I knew that none would ever become the mystery it was after. All I could hope to do was stumble about, belatedly throwing open their cages.

Jonah often saw me struggling away. He even asked me once. “So what’s with the hush-hush hobby, Joseph? Business or pleasure?”

“Business,” I told him. “Unfinished.”

“You writing a good thousand-year-old Mass for us to do?”

“We’re not good enough,” I said. That was enough to guarantee he’d never ask again.

In the world we occupied, our future was fixed and we could do nothing about it. But the past was infinitely pliable. We were in the thick of a movement that made sure history would never be what it used to be. Every month brought a new musical revolution, constantly updating where music had come from. Supporting evidence for half the revolutions was scant, and the experts lashed into one another with the fury of the antiballistic missile treaty debate. Voces Antiquae was ahead of the curve on the newest developments in oldest performance practice. We sang one voice per line three hundred years after and five years before it was the hot thing. Jonah applied the ethereal sound to anything that stood still long enough for the treatment. He fully subscribed to Rifkin’s bombshell theory that Bach intended his sacred music to be sung one singer to a part. Jonah was convinced on sonority alone; no amount of documentary proof either way could alter his conviction.

He wanted to perform Bach’s six motets — just us and a couple of ringers to pad out the eight-part extravaganza, Singet den Herrn ein neues Lied. The others — Hans in particular — opposed the idea. The music was a full century younger than the latest piece we’d ever sung. It lay way outside the idiom we’d perfected. Our caution maddened Jonah. “Come on, you bastards. A world masterpiece that hasn’t been sung properly in all its two hundred and fifty years. I want to hear these things once before I die, when they’re not a Sherman tank with one tread falling off.”

“It’s Bach,” Hans objected. “Other people already own this. People know these pieces, forward and retrograde.”

“They only think they know them. Like they thought they knew Rembrandt, until the grime came off. Come on. ‘Sing unto the Lord a new song.’ Johnny Bach, heard for the first time.”

That became the project’s slogan, the one EMI promoted our recording with. Whatever the legitimacy of the performances, our agility justified them. The thing about Bach is, he never wrote for the human voice. He had some less plodding medium in mind to carry his memo into space. His lines are completely independent. His part-writing combs out some extra dimension between its harmonies. Most performances go for majesty and end up mud. Voces Antiquae went for lightness and wound up in orbit. The group’s turning radius, even at highway speeds, was uncanny. We brought out counterpoint in the works that even Hans had never heard. Every note was audible, even the ones buried alive in that thicket of invention. We goosed the giddiness and laid into the passing dissonances. We brought those motets back to their medieval roots and pushed them forward to their radical Romantic children. By the time we finished, no one could say what century they came from.

Our disc was notorious from its day of release. It started a pitched battle, venomous in proportion to how little was at stake and how few people cared. I don’t mean Le sacre du printemps or anything. But there was flack. The new had lost its capacity to shock; only the old could still rattle people. We were derided for emasculating Bach and praised for sandblasting a monument that hadn’t been hosed down in a long time. Jonah never read a single review. He felt we’d acquitted ourselves well, maybe even superlatively. Yet he wasn’t satisfied. He’d wanted to make that music give up its secrets. But that was something it wasn’t going to do until long after we were all dead.

We toured with the motets but returned, after a while, to our roots. We revived the Renaissance in every burg in Germany. We sang in Cologne, Essen, Göttingen, Vienna — every city Da had ever mentioned to us. But no relatives ever came out of the audience after any of our concerts to claim us. We sang in King’s College Chapel, a homecoming for Peter Chance and a stunned first for the Strom brothers. Jonah craned up at the fan vault, which no photo can even be wrong about. His eyes dampened and his lips curled bitterly. “Birthplace of the Anglican hoot.” He was coming home to a place that would never be his.

We spent five days in Israel. I imagined that our Counter-Reformation Masses and courtier chansons would have to sound absurd in this permanently embattled world. But the halls wouldn’t release us without several encores. Memory was resourceful. It could reclaim any windblown trinket and weave it into the nest. In Jerusalem, on the tour’s last concert, we sang in a futuristic wood-lined auditorium that might have been in Rome, Tokyo, or New York. The audience was unreadable: two sexes, three faiths, four races, a dozen nationalities, and as many motives for listening to the chant of death as there were seats in the house.

From my spot on the stage lip, I keyed on a woman in the second row, her body stenciled with sixty-year-old state messages, her face an inventory of collective efficiencies. Four chords into our opening Machaut Kyrie, it hit me: my aunt. My father’s sister, Hannah, the only one of his family whose wartime death had never been certain. She and Vihar, her Bulgarian husband, had gone underground before my birth, and there the trail ended. My father, the empiricist, could never bring himself to declare her dead. Hannah was, compared to the size of history, a particle so small, her path could not be measured. The Holocaust had annihilated all addresses. Yet here Aunt Hannah was, returned by our performance. She must have seen the posters announcing our tour. She’d seen the name, her name, two men the right age and origin… She’d come to the concert, purchased a seat up close so she could study our faces for any trace of bloodline. Her resemblance to Da was uncanny. Time, place, even the nightmare gap between their paths: Nothing could erase the kinship. She looked so much like Da, I knew Jonah had to see it, as well. But his face throughout our concert’s first half showed no sign of any audience at all. Between this familiar stranger scrutinizing me and my brother refusing to catch my eye, it took a lifetime’s practice to go on singing.

I cornered Jonah at intermission. “You didn’t notice anything?”

“I noticed your focus flying around like some high-wire—”

“You didn’t see her? The gray-haired, heavy woman in the second row?”

“Joseph. They’re all gray-haired, heavy women in the second row.”

“Your aunt.” If I’d lost my mind, I wanted my brother to know.

“ Myaunt?” He put his fingers to his chest, running the calculations. “Impossible. You are aware, aren’t you?”

“Jonah. Everything’s impossible. Look at us.”

He laughed. “There is that.”

We went back on. At our first shared tacet measure, I caught him looking. He flashed me a quick peripheral glance. If anyone in the world is our aunt, it’s her. She, for her part, gazed into us like surgery. She took her eyes off me only to look at Jonah. During the curtain call, she fixed me with a look that scorned all forgetting: Strom, boychik. Did you think I would never find you?

The reception lines that night were endless. Scores of people, still savoring the frozen hour they’d just inhabited, tried, by standing next to us and shaking our hands, to postpone, a little longer, their relapse into motion. I couldn’t focus on the compliments. I darted through the crowd, about to find a family, however small and distant. Excitement was just terror that hadn’t yet imagined its own end.

The crowd thinned out, and I saw her. She was holding back, waiting for a lull. I grabbed Jonah and pulled him with me toward our flesh and blood, using him like a shield. She smiled as we closed on her, a thrill that looked around for a place to bolt.

“Tante Hannah? Ist es möglich?”

She answered in Russian. In a broken pidgin of languages, we three worked it out. She knew the name Strom only from our recordings. She closed her eyes when we told our half of the story, said who we thought she was. Hers were my father’s closed eyes.

“This aunt of yours. I knew thousands of your aunts. I was with them.” She breathed in and opened her eyes again. “But now I am here. Here to tell you so.”

Every muscle in her face was ours. We couldn’t stop pushing for some proof of kinship: town names, what we knew of our grandmother’s Russian roots, anything to find the connection. She smiled and shook her head. The shake was Da’s. And in that one tremor, I knew him. Jewish grief. Grief so great, he never had an answer for kinship but to keep it from us.

Her English was weak, and she shuddered at German. What little Russian we had came from Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev. But her words were clear as silence: You are one of us, always. Not by law, but the law is a technicality. You could convert. Rejoin. Relearn, even for the first time. “You know,” she told us, by way of good-bye, “if you want family? You are sharing family with half this audience.”

We were singing in late July of 1984, in the Palais des Papes at the Avignon Festival, when my family found me. Word came from our arts management in Brussels, who’d gotten it in a telegram from Milton Weisman, our old agent. Mr. Weisman would die the next year, never having owned a fax machine or heard of E-mail. Milton Weisman: the last man in the developed world to send telegrams.

The telegram was stuffed inside an envelope and sent by overnight courier to our hotel in Provence. I picked it up at the front desk with my room key, figuring it was some contract I’d forgotten to sign. I didn’t read it until I was in my room.

Bad news from home. Your brother has been killed. Call your wife as soon as this reaches you. My regrets. Forgive this messenger. Ever. Milton.

I read it again, and wound up even further from sense. For the sickest interval, it was really Jonah, dead in some freak alternate world just now collapsing into mine, replacing the one I’d foolishly held faith with. Then it wasn’t Jonah, but some brother I’d never known. Then it wasn’t even me, my brother, my wife, but a split-off Strom family trapped behind soundproof glass, rapping on it in silent horror.

I went down the hall to Jonah and Celeste’s room. My hands were shaking so badly, I had to knock twice. Jonah opened the door and read my face at once. All I could do was shove the words into his hands. I followed him into his room. Jonah put the telegram on his bed, still looking at it. He raised his palms. “The man is a lot older than when we worked with him. That must be it.”

“‘Forgive this messenger’?”

Jonah nodded, conceding a point I didn’t even know I’d made. “So call.”

“Call who? My wife?” But I knew who Milton Weisman meant. He was from another time, a moral man whose names for things were as dated as the music he represented. He’d neglected to give any phone number. He figured I’d remember.

I sat on Jonah’s hotel bed for minutes, eyes closed, a receiver in hand, a parody of prayer, trying to remember the number in Atlantic City I once knew as automatically as I knew the changes to “Honeysuckle Rose.” Memory required forgetting everything, especially the hope of recall. At last my fingers dialed, the numbers still in my muscles, the way pieces of piano music still lived in my fingers long after I’d forgotten all about them. A pitched jangle at the other end announced the States. Colors that were submerged in me surfaced at that sound. I sat savoring them — Coltrane, high-fat ice cream, the Times on a Sunday, the sound of a Middle Atlantic drawl. I was like a wino window-shopping outside a package store.

The number had been disconnected. An operator with a Spanish accent gave me another. I dialed the new number, my courage beginning to falter. Then she picked up. For a moment, I’d called to tell her I’d be late for breakfast. Muscle memory, too, the thing that doesn’t stop until our muscles do. I heard myself ask, “Teresa?” A second later, before she could say anything, I heard myself ask again. My voice bounced back in maddening delay, the time it took for the word to make the loop from Europe to outer space to America back up to the communications satellite and down to Europe’s surface again. Canon at unison.

She needed no other sound. She struggled to say the syllables of my name, not quite managing. At last she got out a comic, choked “Joey!” The nickname she rarely called me, out of too much love. She laughed, and that sound, too, quickly broke up and weeded over.

“Teresa. Ter. I got the strangest message. From Milton Weisman…” I could barely talk, distracted by the echo of my own voice bouncing back like crazed, imitative counterpoint against my own words.

“Joseph, I know. I told him to write you. I’m so sorry. It’s so horrible.”

Her words were pure dissonance. I couldn’t find the key. I had to force myself to wait, so our words wouldn’t collide in the satellite echo. “What is? His cable made no…”

She drew up short. I heard her turn like a massive freighter, doubling back to fish me out of the water. “It’s your sister. She called me. She called me. She must have remembered my name from…” From when I had never introduced them. The idea of hearing at last from a woman Teresa had wanted to love broke her down into time-lapse crying.

“Ruth?” At that syllable, Jonah jerked up in the chair where he listened. He stood and leaned toward me. I held him off with a palm. “What’s happened? Is she…?”

“Her husband,” Teresa cried. “It’s so awful. They say he was… He didn’t make it, Joseph. He isn’t… He never…”

Robert. My wave of relief— Ruth alive — snapped back in horror: Robert dead. The whiplash shut me down, and I couldn’t breathe. Teresa started talking again before I started hearing. She laid out a thing I’d need explained to me over and over again. Even now. She went on in detail, details impossible for her to know and useless to my understanding.

I must have cut her off. “Is there a way I can reach her?”

“Yes.” Excited, ashamed. Part of the family at last. “She gave me a number, in case… Just a minute.” And in the seconds it took Teresa to find her address book, I lived all the lives that mine had beaten out of me. I sat holding the line, stopped. Robert Rider was dead. My sister’s husband — killed. Ruth, from nowhere, wanted me to know. She had tracked me back to the woman who would always know how to find me, the woman who faithful Joseph was sure to stay with forever. But I’d sentenced that woman to oblivion years ago.

In the seconds while I waited for Teresa to come back, she became infinitely vulnerable to me, infinitely good. I’d hurt her beyond imagining, and here she was, glad for the chance to help me in my hour. All good things were scattering. Death fed faster, the more it took. We get nothing; a handful of weeks. The best we have is broken up or thrown stupidly away. Teresa came back on the line and read me a number. I wrote it down, blindly. I’d forgotten how many digits an American phone number had. Teresa corrected my mistakes in dictation, and we were done.

“I love you,” I told her. And got back silence. Of all the things I thought she might say, this wasn’t one. “Teresa?”

“I… I’m so sorry, Joseph. I never met them. I wish I had. But I’m as sorry as if he’d been…” When she started again, it was forced natural. “Did you know I got married?” I couldn’t even exclaim. “Yep, married! To Jim Miesner. I’m not sure you two ever met.” The bullet-headed man she used to come to my bar with, before me. “And I’ve got the most beautiful little girl! Her name is Danuta. I wish you could meet her.”

“How? How old is she?”

She paused. Not the pause of satellites. “Five. Well, closer to six.” Her silence was defensive. But we all have the right to make what we need. “I… I’m back with my family. With my father. You were right about all of that.”

I got off the phone, polite to the point of numb. I wobbled to my feet. Jonah was looking at me, waiting. “It’s Robert.”

“Robert.”

“Robert Rider. Your brother-in-law. He was shot by a policeman over a month ago. There was an arrest. Some struggle. I…didn’t get all the details.”

Jonah’s shoulders tensed. What details? Death settled all the details. In his face, I read the extent of his banishment. Ruth had tried to contact me. The calls, the messages, all for me alone. She’d never once tried to reach him. “How is she?”

“Teresa didn’t know.”

“I meant Teresa.” He flicked his fingers toward his chest: Give it here. I didn’t know what he wanted until I looked down and saw the telephone number crumpled in my palm. I handed it over. “Area code two-one-five. Where is that?”

Nowhere I’d ever lived. He gestured toward the phone. I shook my head. I needed time. Time to put together all the time that had just come apart.

We sang that night. With what concentration I had, I braced for catastrophe. But somehow we survived, dragged along by overpractice. We took the slowest Josquin in history. Those in the audience who weren’t scandalized or bored to death fell through the auditorium floor and descended into the cracks between space. Whatever the final verdict, no one would ever hear its like again.

I lay in bed that night thinking of Ruth. Our sister had been way out ahead of us. She’d jumped into the future long before Jonah or I had admitted to the present. She’d seen what was coming down. She was riding the nightmare before her older brothers had awakened from the dream. I’d always imagined that Ruth’s suffering came from being too light to merit race’s worst injuries. That night, in a crowded hotel in Avignon where most guests assumed I was from Morocco, I finally saw. Race’s worst injuries are color-blind.

Something kept Jonah up, too. It wasn’t the Josquin. At 3:00A.M., I heard him pacing in the hall outside my door, wondering whether to knock. I called to him, and he walked in as if keeping an appointment. “Pennsylvania,” he said. I just blinked in the dark. “Area code two-one-five. Eastern Pennsylvania.” I tried to fit the information to my sister. Da’s last hallucination had her moving to California. That’s where I’d always imagined her. Jonah didn’t sit. He stood at the window and pulled back the drape. On the horizon, the Palais des Papes glowed like a monstrous Gothic illuminated manuscript. “I’ve been thinking.” He made the words stretch from last afternoon all the way back several years. “She must be right. Ruth must be right. I mean, about…the fire. No other way.”

He looked out the window, on all the violence he’d so long and beautifully denied. Jonah had met Robert only through me. The details of Robert’s death were to us still as obscure as God. But this death confirmed the central fact of our lives, the one we’d forever kept as abstract as the art we gave ourselves to. We’d lived as if murder weren’t constant in the place we came from. We hid in the concert hall, sanctuary from the world’s real sound. But thirty years ago — a lifetime — long before we knew how to read the story, stray hatred scattered us. As Jonah said the words, the fact turned obvious. And just as obvious: Some part of me had always believed.

He stood for a long time, saying nothing. Nor could I say anything to him. But Jonah was my brother. We had, at one time or another, played everything together. Alone of all things, we knew each other. He’d taught me, and I him: All music lived and died inside the rests. Sometime around four o’clock, he said, “Call her.” He’d been keeping his eye on the clock, on the time differences, for the very last moment it would be decent to call.

I jacked myself out of bed, threw on a robe, and sat again with a phone in my hands. I tried to pass the receiver to him, but he refused. He wasn’t the one she’d called. I dialed the number, methodical as scales. Again, the jangle of an American ring, followed by its transatlantic echo. Between each ring, I rejected a thousand opening words. Rootie. Root. Ms. Strom. Mrs. Rider. Laughing, grieving, begging her forgiveness. Nothing felt real. Ruth. It’s Joseph. Your brother.

Then the click of the receiver lifting on that other continent, the sound of a voice that killed all preparation. Instead of my sister, an old man. “Hello?” he challenged. A man who sounded a hundred years old. I froze in his voice, worse than stage fright. “Hello? Who’s there? Who is this?” On the line, in the room behind him, younger voices asked if there was something wrong.

Paths collapsed upon themselves. “Dr. Daley?” I asked. When he grunted, I said, “This is your grandson.”