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.