“Magdeburg’s doing all that?”
“Joey. It’s Germany. Deine Vorfahren, Junge! They invented music. It’s their life’s blood. They’d do anything for it. It’s like…like firearms over here.”
“They’re using you. Cold War propaganda. You’re going to be their showpiece for how America treats its—”
He laughed out loud and doused his hands into the keyboard for a Prokofievian parody of the “Internationale.” “That’s me, Joey. Traitor to my country. Me and Commander Bucher.” He looked up at me, both corners of his mouth pulled back. “Grow up, man! Like the United States hasn’t been using us our whole lives?”
The United States had offered him the lead in a premiere of a new Met opera. Yet he could be an artist only if he’d wear the alien badge. Music was supposed to be cosmopolitan — free travel across all borders. But it could get him into the last Stalinist state more easily than it could get him into midtown. I looked at him, begging, a black accompanist, an Uncle Tom in white tie and tails, willing to be used and abused by anyone, most of all my brother, if we could only go on living as if music were ours.
He rubbed my head, sure that we’d always bond over that ritual humiliation. “Come with me, Joey. Come on. Telemann’s birthplace. We’ll have a blast.” Jonah detested Telemann. The man’s greatest claim to fame is turning down a job they then had to give to Bach. “You wouldn’t know it from our bookings in this country in recent months, but we two do have a salable skill. People will pay good money to hear us do what we do. It’s state-subsidized over there. Why shouldn’t you and I get in on a little of that action? Rightful descendants, huh?”
“What are you thinking? Jonah?”
“What? I’m not thinking anything. I’m saying let’s have an adventure. We know the language. We can amaze the natives. I’m not getting laid anytime soon. You’re not getting laid, are you, Mule? Let’s go see what the Fräuleins are up to these days.” He examined me long enough to see what his words were doing. It never occurred to him I might say no. He changed keys, modulating faster and further afield than late Strauss.
“Come on, Joey. Salzburg. Bayreuth. Potsdam. Vienna. Wherever you want to go. We can head up to Leipzig. Make a pilgrimage to the Thomaskirche.”
He sounded desperate. I couldn’t figure out why. If he was so sure of Europe’s embrace, why did he need me? And what did he mean to do with me once the requests started pouring in for concert work, solos with orchestras, and even — the grand prize he’d set himself — opera? I held up my palm. “What does Da say?”
“Da?” His syllable came out a laugh. He hadn’t even thought to tell our father. Our father, the least political man who’d ever lived, a man who’d once lived a hundred kilometers from Magdeburg. Our Da, who vowed never to set foot in his native country again. I couldn’t go. Our father might need me. Our sister might want to get in touch. No one would be here to take care of things if I let my brother drag me away for months. Jonah had no plan, and he didn’t need one. He didn’t really need anything except, for reasons that escaped me, me.
I weighed how much he expected me to throw away. When I didn’t step forward with a ready yes, it seemed to confuse him. His look of friendly conscription rippled with panic, then narrowed to a single accusing question: “How about it?”
“Jonah.” Under the pressure of his gaze, I slipped out and looked down on the two of us. “Haven’t you jerked me around enough?”
For a second, he didn’t hear me. Then all he could hear was betrayal. “Sure, Mule. Suit yourself.” He grabbed his cap and corduroy jacket and left the apartment. I didn’t see him for two days. He came back just in time for our next gig. And three weeks after that, he was packed and ready to go.
He had his visa, and an open ticket. “When are you coming back?” I asked.
He shrugged. “We’ll see what comes down.” We never shook hands, and we didn’t now. “Watch your back, Mule. Keep away from the Chopin.” He didn’t add, Decide your own life. He’d do that for me, as always. All he said on that score was, “So long. Write if you get work.”
August 1945
Delia’s on the A when she sees the headline. Not by law a Jim Crow car, but the law’s just a tagalong. Car color changes with the blocks above ground. Safety, comfort, ease — the cold comforts of neighborhood chosen and enforced. Choice and its opposite shade off, one into the other, so fluidly these last days of the war. She has come to know, close up, the blurred edge between the two — things forced upon her until they seem elected; things chosen so fiercely, they feel compelled.
Tuesday morning. David is home with the boys. She runs out, just for a minute, to buy an ice bag for the little one. He has fallen down the front steps and hurt his ankle. Not one cry from him after the first. But the ankle is a swollen dark stain, thicker now than her wrist, and the poor child needs the comfort only cold can bring.
She rides two stops, to the pharmacy she knows will serve her. They know her there — Mrs. Strom, mother of small boys. Two stops — five minutes. But she reads the headline in a flash, no time at all. Three fat lines run across the length of the page. They’re not as large as the headlines last May, declaring an end to Europe’s Armageddon. But they come off the page in a more silent burst.
A deep sable man sits next to her, poring over the words, shaking his head, willing them to change. The night has brought a “rain of ruin.” One bomb lands with the force of twenty thousand tons of TNT. Two thousand B-29’s. She tries to imagine a ton of TNT. Two tons. Twenty — something like the weight of this subway car. Now ten times that. Then ten times, and ten times that again.
The gaze of the man next to her freezes on the headline. His eyes keep scanning back and forth, the lines of text forcing his head through a stiff, refusing no. He struggles, not with the words, but with the ideas they pretend to stand for. Words don’t exist yet for what these words brush up against. She reads in secret, looking over his shaking shoulders.NEW AGE USHERED. His gaze remains unchanged.IMPENETRABLE CLOUD OF DUST HIDES CITY. Delia thinks: This city.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH.SECRECY ON WEAPON SO GREAT THAT NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW OF THEIR PRODUCT.
They heard last night on the radio. Confirmation of what her household long ago knew. But the story goes real for her now, seeing the words in print, in this Negro subway car. TheDAY OF ATOMIC ENERGY begins for this unchanged underground train. The jet-black man next to her shakes his head, mourning tens of thousands of dead brown skins, while for the rest of the car, life passes for what it had passed for the day before. A woman across from her in a red silk hat checks her lips in a compact mirror. The boy in a smashed fedora to her left studies his Racing Form. A little girl, ten, out of school for the summer vacation, skips up the aisle, finding a shiny dime some unfortunate has dropped.
She shouts at the whole car, in her skull. Don’t you see? It’s over. This means the war is over. But the war isn’t over, not for any of them. Never will be. Just one more story on a weary, turning page.JET PLANE EXPLOSION KILLS MAJOR BONG.KYUSHU CITY RAZED.CHINESE WIN MORE OF “INVASION COAST.” One more numbing war report, after a lifetime of war.
NOT EVEN WORKERS KNEW. How do the reporters presume to know that, a day after the blast? She knew. She’s known for almost a month, since the secret desert testing.SCIENTISTS AWESTRUCK AT BLINDING FLASH. She knows just how awed the scientists are, lit by the flash of the work they’ve done. In the cloud enveloping her, Delia Strom almost misses her stop. She dashes through the train doors as they start to close. She wanders up to the surface, then into her familiar pharmacy. A moment ago, she was filled with purpose. But when the clerk asks her what she wants, she can’t remember. Something for her hurt child. The smallest imaginable hurt, and its even smaller comfort.