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 calclass="underline" 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.