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.