Orpheus Lost (14 page)

Musical hallucinations were invading people’s minds long before they were recognized as a condition of malfunctioning neural networks. Plenty of composers have had musical hallucinations…Toward the end of his life, for instance, Robert Schumann wrote down the music he hallucinated; legend has it that he said he was taking dictation from Schubert’s ghost.

N
EW
Y
ORK
T
IMES
, J
ULY
12, 2005

It is a great shame to ban music but there are worse things you can do to it: turn it into muzak, for example.

I
AN
B
EDFORD
,

T
HE
I
NTERDICTION OF
M
USIC IN
I
SLAM

F
ROM THE MOMENT
he left the apartment, Mishka had a sense of massive risk. His life was in danger. He knew it as surely as he knew how to play Beethoven: that is to say, without giving the matter any thought. His hands knew what to do. The knowledge was stored in his body. He knew he was a marked man. Simultaneously he knew this phobic dread was clearly absurd, it was neurotic, ridiculous, shaming, yet the intuition was extraordinarily intense. It was so intense that he was unable to cross Massachusetts Avenue. He stood transfixed by the newspaper stand at the corner of his street and Mass Ave. A man was propped against the stand, watching him.

“Uncle Otto,” Mishka whispered, and the moment he spoke Uncle Otto disappeared and the
Boston Globe
fixed him with its headline through the drop-glass gate: BOMBER IDENTIFIED. Below the headline, Jamil Haddad, with his habitual smirk, stared out of cold black eyes.

Mishka had to back away from the curb.

“Hey. Are you okay?” someone asked.

Mishka leaned against a shop front and fought back the urge to be sick. Cars were coming at him every which way. There was a bull’s-eye painted on the front of his shirt.

“You look as though you need a doctor,” someone said. “Should I hail you a cab?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine.” Mishka waved the man on. “Thanks. It’s nothing. Just a dizzy spell.”

He had change in his pockets. He dropped quarters into the slot and pulled the glass door of the newsstand toward him. He reached in and extracted the
Boston Globe
, then he turned the paper around and put it back. Now the lower half of page one, inverted, faced the street. He let the glass door swing shut. He leaned on the stand.

He had a class. He was responsible for teaching an undergraduate class, but he could not get himself across Massachusetts Avenue. Every driver had a bead on him. Twenty minutes ago—could that be right? Could that have been only twenty minutes back?—he had answered the phone and spoken to Dr. Berg, Leela’s colleague. Dr. Berg had been angry, ostensibly about Leela, though Mishka had the illogical impression that the hostility was directed at him. He had never met Berg. Was Berg jealous? Was that it? Was there something between Leela and Berg? In any case, Mishka had handled the matter. He had been courteous. He had spoken as an adult speaks. He had sounded normal. He left Leela a note.

Where had Leela been all last night?

What was happening to him?

He could not cross Massachusetts Avenue, which seemed to him as lethal as a booby-trapped DMZ in a movie. He could not teach a class. He was not capable of standing in front of a group of people and speaking. He walked south, hugging the store fronts. Car horns made him jump. He crossed quiet side streets, steeling himself against panic, until he reached Harvard Square. He took the subway to Central. At Café Marrakesh he made a phone call, and then he waited for Sleiman Abboud.

“I am ready to meet him now,” he said on the phone.

“I have to see him.” He felt as though he had said:
I have to see
him before I die
, and having said that, or having thought it, the terrible pressure inside his rib cage eased and he unclenched his hands and thought to himself with amazement: It was just that. It was the need to acknowledge my want, my desire to know the Abukir side of myself, the X in my identity, no matter what it turns out to be. His body felt lighter, relaxed. He felt almost jovial. It had nothing to do with premonition or death, he told himself. It was the collision of desire and of fear.

“I have to see him,” he said again when Sleiman joined him in the smoky café. “As soon as possible.”

“Arrangements will be made,” Sleiman told him. They ordered Turkish coffee and sweet bread. “Wait for my email,” Sleiman said. He wrote something on a paper napkin that bore the Café Marrakesh logo. “Here’s the contact number. I wouldn’t advise calling from your apartment. Your phone may be tapped. In fact, I wouldn’t advise calling from anywhere in the States. Call when you get to Beirut.”

Mishka could not stop himself from asking: “Did you know about Jamil Haddad? Did you know in advance?”

“Don’t ask questions,” Sleiman said. “And don’t come here again before you leave.”

“When do I leave?”

“Two days, three at the most. We have contacts with certain airlines. You will leave as soon as our contacts can get you a seat. Don’t go back to your apartment before you leave.”

“But I have to go back for my things.”

“There’s nothing you need. Buy some changes of clothes and a suitcase. You’ll be reimbursed.”

“If I don’t go back, Leela—my girlfriend—will call the police.”

Sleiman frowned. “All right. Go when you know your girlfriend is out. Be gone before she gets back. Leave the kind of
note that will reassure her, so she doesn’t go calling the police or anyone else.”

The sound booth in the Harvard Music Lab was like a womb. All day Mishka had walked the streets of Cambridge in some sort of a trance. He had been in and out of the apartment while Leela, presumably, was parrying Berg’s irritation in his office. He left another note:

Dear Leela:

I’m off to the west coast for a week. Have lucked into incredible job opportunity. I’m flying out for interview. Wish me luck. Will call to let you know how it goes.

Mishka

He had taken a suitcase and his oud and there had been an awkward moment when the tenant on the floor below, pausing on the landing, had said: “That’s quite a load, Mishka. Are you off on a concert tour or something?”

“Audition on the west coast. Job interview,” Mishka said. Auditioning a family, he thought. Auditioning for the role of member of the family tribe.

“Good luck then. Not easy carting that Persian thing around, I imagine. You look a bit like a walking piñata. I assume you won’t try to get to Logan on the T.”

“I’ll hail a cab on Mass Ave.”

“Have fun.”

Fun, Mishka thought sourly. A funny thing happened on the way to Beirut.

He had walked to the Music School and stashed suitcase and oud in his office, and then he had walked around the city until it grew dark, and then he had holed himself up in the
Music Lab like a nocturnal creature in its burrow. Now he was calm. He had his bearings.

The sound booth cradled him. There was white fluorescent tubing to simulate day, but Mishka preferred to light a candle and sit in the dark. He supposed he must have been happy in the nine floating months before his birth. He supposed contentment must also have bathed his mother in that time when she could rest a hand on her belly and she and her son could converse in code, tapping out musical notations in the blood. He remembered also the womb-like contentment of the first six years of his life. He knew this was why the small dark space of the sound booth and the wick’s nimbus and the music and the sound of his heartbeat all added up to an addiction. Cradled by the felted walls, headphones on, Mendelssohn’s
Violin Concerto in E Minor
or Gluck’s
Orfeo
or Saliba al-Qatrib’s classical Persian meditations on the oud seemingly emanating from inside his head, from inside his blood vessels, from the underside of his skin, Mishka was in a state of perfect peace. He was also, simultaneously, at his grandparents’ dining table in the house made of silky oak and mahogany and black walnut—the house where he was born—with the rainforest pressing in close.

The house was a curio along the middle reaches of the Daintree, a crocodile-thick torrent that hurled itself down the coastal range and into the Coral Sea.
Where the rainforest meets the reef
ran the brochures luring tourists and real estate buyers to the north-eastern corner of Australia. Visitors could go crocodile hunting up the Daintree or they could take the catamarans out to the coral cays that littered the Pacific or they could rent diving equipment to gawk at the wrecks of schooners and clippers and American battleships impaled on coral claws. If they made their way upstream into tunnels of jungle in a recycled Army Duck, a guide would certainly point out the
unlikely dwelling that locals called Bartok’s Belfry or Reffo Castle, though postcards in Port Douglas and Cairns identified the place, tongue in cheek, as Chateau Daintree.

There were normal aspects to Chateau Daintree. Like all equatorial habitations, the house rested on twelve-foot stilts so that cooling breezes and cyclonic floodwaters could pass beneath. Above the stilts there was more outdoors than indoors: more covered veranda than walled rooms. All this was proper and acceptable, and the dining table was where it was supposed to be: on the covered veranda. Everything except the corrugated iron roof was made from rainforest timbers—the walls, the floors, the furniture—and this too was as it should be, the wood grain extravagantly gorgeous and gleaming like tea-tree oil.

Everything—house and furniture—had been made with his own hands by Mishka’s grandfather in the late 1940s when the house was one of the few dwellings between Cairns and Cooktown, and this was when the abnormalities had crept in. Perhaps because there were no other houses, no templates, for Mordecai Bartok to copy, he had created his own idea of refuge, fusing details well suited to equatorial wetlands with Hungarian memory and dreams of safety and imperial Hapsburg fantasies. There were anomalous European flourishes that had nothing to do with adaptation to the tropics. There was, for example, a second story above the main living area—which was itself perched high on its tree-trunk stilts—and that extra floor was adorned with a turret and gabled windows, so that someone in a pontoon with outboard motor, rubber-nosing a route upriver between estuarine crocodiles and mangroves, would be startled by the triple-decker rising out of forest scrub and epiphyte creepers like a fantasy in a child’s book of wonders. The staghorn ferns and rainforest undergrowth that were rampant between the stilts seemed intent upon swallowing the house, and
indeed there were tree orchids that climbed up the veranda posts and kept climbing and trailed across the roof and up the turret and hung down again across the gable windows like bunting. No one had ever seen such a building except in picture books in the Children’s Room of the Cairns public library.

On the top floor behind the gabled windows, it was rumored, the reffo family slept. Mishka did not know, until he began attending the regional school in Mossman at the age of six, that he was a reffo. He was born in the Daintree. His mother before him was born in the Daintree. But his grandparents had arrived as refugees from a concentration camp in 1946 and the Bartoks were still a reffo family.

There were good reasons for this. Strange things happened at Chateau Daintree, strange sounds and strange smells wafted up and down the river from Bartok’s Belfry where the nightly after-dinner menu rotated from Gluck to Monteverdi, from Beethoven to Mendelssohn and Bartók, and back. From the first note of Gluck or Mendelssohn, the sound booth off Harvard Square became rich with the aromas of goulash and
pogácsa
and cinnamon-scented
kipfel
and mud-strong coffee. Small wildlife would skitter across the desk top and the white tablecloth. Sometimes Mishka would hear the tiny feet of glider possums on the lab equipment, and if he moved, the creatures would freeze and regard him warily from their black liquid eyes. There was always a vein bleating visibly in their necks and their bushy tails would twitch and shiver like the skin of a river under wind.

Beyond the veranda posts—and the veranda posts always materialized in the sound booth and the rainforest pressed up against them—beyond the veranda, iridescent against the violent orange and mauve of sunset, there would be green flashes of parakeet wings and the strange harsh calls of scrub turkeys and pink-breasted lorikeets.

Mishka’s grandfather was always at the head of the table, his grandmother at the foot, his mother across from him. After dinner, when the dishes were cleared away and the nightly recital began, all four heads were bowed slightly, all eyes were closed. All four listened raptly, while upstairs Uncle Otto played.

Uncle Otto would never join them for dinner.

Every night, as the family sat at table, Mishka’s mother would be sent upstairs to ask Uncle Otto to come down.

“Devorah,” Grandpa Mordecai would say, “will you ask Otto if he will join us?”

Mishka loved this ritual. His eyes lingered on the soft swirl of his mother’s skirt, the way it fluted itself around her legs. He loved the
pad pad pad
of bare feet on the wooden stairs. He liked the soft silence as she vanished into the upper rooms.
The upper rooms.
That was the family term for the story that was not supposed to exist in north Queensland. At the table, his grandparents would watch the stairs with rapt faces. Then his mother would reappear.

“Uncle Otto does not wish to join us, Papa,” she would say. “He will eat later. But he will play for us after dinner.”

“Good, good,” Grandpa Mordecai would say, his smile benign across the table. “He will play for us later.”

And then Mishka’s grandmother would bring out the steaming paprika-scented bowls in spite of the fact that the wet air pressed down on the dishes and on the diners like the hot towels that Grandma Malika placed on Mishka’s chest when he was sick. It did not occur to anyone that the meal was not entirely appropriate, but certain changes, certain concessions to climate, did creep in. Instead of
kipfel
, there might be sliced mango or pineapple before the coffee, and often, during the wet season, when the rain would begin before the first course was done, Mishka would lean from the veranda railing with a pitcher, which would brim over in a minute or so, and they
would all drink the rain from crystal goblets. They would laugh and toss it over each other because there were two seasons, the Wet and the Dry, and the downpour meant the Wet had begun and living in the house was like living in a grotto behind a cascade.

The rain was splendid and thrilling music, drumming against the iron roof. Palm fronds and silky oak branches thrashed the sides of the house and quandong berries pelted the verandas like hail.