“But we’ll have our reasons,” I told her. “You’ll have something we all want and can’t have, and we’ll be so jealous of you that sometimes we’ll feel like blowing up.”
In my dreams, until I was six or seven years old, I lived with Greta in her small cottage at the edge of the woods. When I wanted to be alone, I sat on a footstool in the corner of the kitchen so that I could be near the fire but also smell the sharp resin of the wooden walls. The footstool was covered in scratchy brown wool. Greta reached into the stove and took out fistfuls of flame with her bare hands.
She and I stared at these balls of fire, asked them questions as if they were tiny stars come down to visit. You must have seen so much, we said.
Each time I learned a new song I rushed to sleep, to Greta, and sang it for her. Each time I coaxed my voice towards a new high note, I saw her eyes shining with pride. We walked through her Poznań township hand in hand, and the people on the street parted ways for us — they shifted the sea of their movements to let us through, and we walked as though on the sandy floor of the ocean, marveling at all that was around us. Sometimes Greta pointed up to the sky and said, Look! And a bird flew past so fast that no one but us noticed it obscure the sun. Just for a moment. The bird’s wings a black cape across the clouds.
“We’ll want to see what you see,” I told Kara. At that moment her eyes were shut against their gentle bath, the warm water I stored for her within me. She saw geometric combinations, Escher portraits of the sounds on the other side of her swaddling wall. Or maybe she saw nothing, since she hadn’t yet the experience to know that there are shapes to name and colors to fill the shapes in and make them shine.
As I grew older, Greta’s cottage receded from me; the weight of her hand on my own diminished. When Ada told me the stories of her mother’s life, all I saw was that they explained who I was supposed to be. I didn’t see the knots in the floorboards anymore or the mammoth iron mouth that was Greta’s cookstove. And I only had a faint, haunting memory of the last trip Greta and I took out to the forest, when she helped me climb up into a tree and together we hummed the river’s song. I had some notion of the person who happened towards us and, hypnotized, scrambled up the tree to sit beside us.
That person was, I thought, my mother, Sara, with her dark hair and her almond eyes. She took our hands in her own and lifted to each of our lips a crust of bread fresh from the oven, watched me chew and swallow and open my mouth for another. And she looked at me, looked so reproachfully, when from either side Greta and I leaned in to kiss her cheeks. I remembered faintly the way the color drained from my mother’s face and how her body fell like a rag to the forest floor. She got up and brushed herself off, walked away, but I could see that something was missing from her from that moment, and that I had taken it for myself.
“Now you’ll be strong,” Greta told me. “Like I was.”
I put my hand on my belly and could feel through the taut skin the basic outline of a foot. I inspected it for toes and searched for a heel, but everything was still too indistinct, too much a part of me. Kara was sleeping, soothed by who knows what. The sound of my heart? The thrum of my blood? Something nourished and protected her. Some piece of me that lay beyond my control.
Interlude
As I learned at the age of four — leaning my rib cage against the window sash and stretching my neck into the dirty Chicago air — sound is a product of its environment. Anyone can test this with a pop bottle and a small amount of embouchure controclass="underline" flatten your lips and blow across the top of the bottle. When it’s full you get a whistle. As you drink the soda down, the sound deepens.
The principle is just as true inside your body as out in the world — a soprano is born, and you can see it in her silhouette. More often than not she’s small, like me. Her thin neck means that her vocal cords are slender and tightly packed together. They resonate at a high frequency when air rattles through them. Her jaw is strong, the mouth an echo chamber. Every tuck and fold a part of the instrument.
As a singer you have to be careful with your body the same way you’d be careful transporting crystal or glass. When the temperature varies too drastically, molecules shift and expand. Things shatter. The pen in my purse spills ink everywhere during altitude changes; and after plane rides longer than two hours, I need to avoid citrus fruits for a week, drink only herbal tea.
Travel, then, has always been dangerous for me. It can affect a performance in unexpected ways — hemming my voice in with static from the dry velveteen seats on the train into a new city, and desiccating it with the train’s hot, recirculated air. High elevation breaks sounds into brittle sheets of paper; the color and texture of grain bins in a city’s street markets bleed through into my tonal quality. Resonance comes from a barrel of smooth red quinoa seeds you can stick your hand in up to the elbow. Sharp color from hard, ridged bulgur wheat. Airiness from vats of flour that feels like silk when you lay your palm on top — if the frowning merchant will let you handle his wares so freely.
A voice is spongelike. It can absorb, and it can be wrung out.
When I step off a plane, I need to take a long walk in open streets to shake off the tin can aura of my transportation. Without the walk, without the wind to flush me, my lungs remain compressed and I can’t go onstage — I hear the atonal ding of the seatbelt sign when I should be hearing the key changes my accompanist is running through on the piano, and I become convinced that the audience in the recital hall will be populated by duplicates upon duplicates of my fellow airline passengers, shifting around their neck pillows and cricking their knees.
What I mean is this: sound is never described with the density or complexity that it deserves, because we imagine it as separate from the texture of the rest of our lives. Words like crystalline and booming, full and sharp, reduce music to decoration, something adjectival. When in fact it’s more like an animal. Living. Hungry. It sucks up atmosphere, emotion, experience. Pushes you to feed it by doing things you wouldn’t otherwise do.
It’s the whole of life, round and plump as a planet. Ample as a memory or dream.
Mongolia held its first opera festival in Ulaanbaatar and unwisely scheduled the festivities in December to appeal to the singers’ sense of a snowy Christmas. At least that’s my best guess at their intentions. We arrived during what’s called the Nines of Winter: nine sets of nine days that each hold a special place in a hierarchy of bitter chill. The nine days when vodka freezes upon contact with the air. The nine days when you can walk up to a baby ox and crack its tail off in your hand.
I was not yet pregnant. Back then, I was only vulnerable in the ordinary ways. I descended from the plane already wearing silk long johns, lined pants, a sweater, a scarf, and my Chicago winter coat, but the weather hit me like a frying pan to the back of the skull. A man named Zhenjin met me on the tarmac and immediately wrapped me in a fur cloak the size of a bear. He grinned.
“You need to gain at least two inches.” His gloved hands indicated a bubble around his waist. “On all sides. Then you will be a proper Mongolian woman prepared for winter.” The bearskin, he explained, would stand in as my two inches since I didn’t have time to gain the weight au naturel.