A Twentieth of a Tone

For thirty-one years Jarmila has sung alto in Karlín, Thursdays, in a parish hall where the radiator knocks in B flat and the fridge in the kitchen has opinions about the sopranos. She stands second from the left. She brings her own pencil. Nobody has ever written about her in the newsletter except the year her coat was taken by mistake and brought back. This autumn the new choirmaster, Viktor, who is twenty-six and conducts with his whole back, props a phone on the piano with an app that draws each voice as a line in its own colour. On the replay the tenors climb like a fever chart. The basses sag through the Advent hymns and come back up for the Gloria. The sopranos go sharp when they're happy, which is always. And there is one line, a sort of grey, that does almost nothing, a hair above true on the long notes, a hair below on the cold nights, never further off, Viktor says, than a twentieth of a tone, and he holds the phone up to the room as if it were an X-ray. That's how I know it's you lot, he tells the tenors. Because she didn't move. Jarmila looks at the grey line the way you'd look at a photo of the back of your head. I thought I was just singing, she says. You were, he says. That's the point. That's the whole point. Afterwards in the kitchen, with the fridge going, somebody asks whether it's nice, after thirty-one years, to be useful at last. She thinks about it, rinsing the cups. I was useful on Thursdays, she says. Now I'm useful on a graph. Then she hums the alto for the Christmas carol to herself, under the fridge, and doesn't look at the phone to see whether it's true.