It is as she pauses at a street crossing that she sees him, waiting on the other side for the light to change. This time there’s no doubt: it is Anzor. He sees her too, and waves at her, signaling that she should stay where she is; he’ll come toward her. She stops, doubly disoriented because, in a way, he’s been present in her mind. She feels as if she has conjured him out of her thoughts, or the air; out of what she now recognizes as her wishes. She keeps him in the line of her sight as he crosses the street with a light, long stride. She has always been moved by human beauty. She takes in his unstrained movements, his well-defined face, with a sort of inward assent.
“Isabel,” he says simply, having reached her, “I am so glad to see you.” There is nothing desultory or playful about his tone, no formal bow this time, or concession to the improbability, the sheer capriciousness of their meeting. His earnestness adds to her confusion.
“How did this happen?” she nevertheless asks, and then realizing that even this holds too much of an assumption, rephrases: “I mean, what are you doing in Brussels?”
“Oh, it is my job,” he says dismissively, as if this were irrelevant. “There’s a conference we’ve been invited to by the European Union …” Then he interrupts himself and says, with a quiet emphasis, “I was thinking about you very much.”
She is taken aback by the directness of it. What is he assuming? But the pressure of his words carries its own conviction; and she says, “I thought of you too.” He asks whether he could accompany her to wherever she’s going, and she feels a background tremolo of anxiety. What is going to happen next? She could pull back; perhaps she should. But after the restless morning in an alien city, Anzor seems very vivid to her; very alive. She says she’s going to her hotel, not very far from where
they are. He accompanies her, talking inconsequentially. Their strides adjust easily to each other as they walk. The tremolo strengthens into a steadier excitement as she takes in the pleasure of his presence; his unqualified presentness.
At the hotel, he asks her if she would like to come to a reception which caps off the conference he is attending. It is on the minorities in Europe, or something of the sort. “But that’s not the point,” he says. “I just don’t want to say good-bye yet. To be truthful, I was hoping we would meet again. In our travels.” This time, the pressure of his words seems less incongruous. She says yes, she will come. “Good,” he says, and nods, as if something has been confirmed. He grasps her by both shoulders and pauses to look at her, into her. She looks back. Anzor Islikhanov is as arbitrary as all the other people she brushes up against in her nomadic drifts; but somehow, he is gaining a kind of inevitability. Like a Chopin motif, she silently thinks, starting with a mere wisp of suggestion … She sighs, and relaxes more deeply into his gaze. They stay still for a moment, in a sort of promise. Then he turns abruptly, as if his allotted time were running out—yes, that was the gesture she’s tried to place—and walks away.
The reception to which Anzor has invited her takes place on the top floor of a European Union building, in a low-ceilinged space whose windows, ranged into a wall of glass, reflect the city’s jeweled nighttime glitter. The building gleams too, though in a muted way, glass and chrome mingling with blond wood and unostentatious spaces. A becoming modesty, probably achieved at great cost. A graceful sculpture, made of delicate metal rods, cascades down several floors, into the well of a curving, conch-shaped staircase. She takes in the nicely dressed crowd, the sanitized hubbub of restrained conversation, the sideways glances. When it’s not a concert, the world is, apparently, a conference.
Anzor is nowhere in sight. Instead, another familiar face manifests itself out of the scattered groups. It is the Russian poetess introduced to her by that man in Paris—she’ll remember his name later—and she is hurrying toward Isabel as if they were old friends. Isabel restrains a gesture of slightly alarmed surprise. What is the Russian woman doing here, how come she is surfacing again in this unexpected setting? She was exhaustingly clever, Isabel recollects; and Katrina—yes, that is her name—instantly confirms this by launching into some playful disquisition in lieu of a greeting—something about the thickening of coincidence as a correlative of the increasing density of the modern world.
“But what are you doing here, darling?” she asks, stopping herself midstream. “I didn’t know this was your kind of scene!”
Isabel mutters something indistinct about having been invited by someone named Anzor Islikhanov, perhaps Katrina has come across him, he is from Chechnya …
“Ah, Anzorichka,” Katrina says liltingly, but her eyebrows go up a fraction, and she looks at Isabel with sudden attentiveness. “Good old Anzorichka …”
“What do you mean?” Isabel asks in increased confusion, but Katrina has turned toward the window, and is pointing to the view outside. “Isn’t this … poetic?” she asks, with a rhetorical gesture of her plump arm. “Surely, poets in such a country should have no difficulty finding subjects, don’t you think?” Her tone is hard to read, and Isabel isn’t sure whether she’s being taken into collusive confidence, or included among the objects of Katrina’s seemingly ubiquitous mockery.
“Why, do poets in Russia have difficulties finding subjects?” she asks.
“Ah, this Russia where I live,” Katrina answers, “it has nothing poetic about it. Except maybe its extreme ugliness, and we’ve never learned to make poetry out of that. Very backward of us,
don’t you think? But we Russians, you know, we need our poetry to be misty and ideal.”
Katrina is speaking with silver-quick merriment, but she continues to inspect Isabel quite carefully. Then Anzor is suddenly there, and Katrina raises her glass to him with sly complicity. “Isn’t that right, Anzorichka? That we all need an ideal, we children of the Soviet Empire?”
They clearly know each other well, Isabel notes, with a small but informative twist in her diaphragm. Jealousy is a possibility even when she has absolutely no rights to it.
“Ah, you’re impossible, Katrina,” Anzor says, and his gaze travels toward Isabel, in an implicit inquiry. He clearly wants to know what they’ve been talking about. “Is she bending your ear?” he asks Isabel, in his civil, urbane tone. Not the tone of their few private conversations. Isabel begins to say something polite, but Anzor interrupts. “If you don’t watch out, she will confuse you completely. She is our theorist at this conference, as well as our poetess. She has confused most of us already.”
“Poet,” Katrina corrects him sternly. “You have to keep up.”
“Yes, yes,” Anzor agrees, as if he’s heard this before. Their in-joke, apparently. Just how well do they know each other?
“I was just saying to Isabel,” Katrina lilts on, undeterred, “that the new ugliness in Russia is at least more interesting than the old ugliness. Don’t you think so, Anzorichka? That’s our great improvement, that these days we can afford to be ugly in a really vulgar sort of way. Camp, isn’t that what you would call it? I know it’s old news in the West, but in the past, we couldn’t even afford that. Kitsch is a sign of progress.”
“Is that your new theory?” Anzor asks, without a hint of humor. There are undertones in their exchanges that Isabel can’t quite catch.
“The newest,” Katrina drawls. “You have to keep up. And what interesting conclusions have you gathered from this conference,
darling?” she asks, raising her eyebrows again in sly expectation.
“Ah, conclusions …” Anzor repeats sardonically. “You know, they invite us, they observe us, they study us. Like noble savages. And we perform for them. We try to prove we are civilized.” His tone has traveled from irony toward something darker and more edgy. Katrina gives a brief laugh of appreciation.
“But sometimes it’s nice to perform, no? I mean, isn’t it more fun than always having this one
identity
?”
Anzor shrugs impatiently. “And there are all these good roles to choose from,” she continues, though her tone is again becoming unreadable to Isabel. “For example, you can be noble savage or ignoble savage, or a marginal of the margins, or of the center…. Ah, Ahmed,” she croons, without missing a beat, and greets a handsome chocolate-skinned man in a cream-colored Nehru shirt who is hovering hesitantly nearby. “Come and talk to us. I’m sure you can explain everything to our guest, can’t you? As a marginal, you can’t get any more central than Ahmed,” she informs Isabel. “Can you, Ahmed?”
She twinkles at Ahmed, as she twines her arm through Anzor’s conspiratorially, and leads him away. So they know each other very well. Isabel tries to turn her attention to Ahmed, whose manner and liquid eyes are almost excessively gentle, and who is looking at her with a compassionate, or maybe slightly pitying gaze.
“Katrina likes to mock everything and everyone,” he says feelingly, though whether in complaint or compassion, Isabel cannot tell. “I am actually not very important at all.” Isabel asks him where he’s from, and he says, smiling wistfully, that answers to simple questions are becoming ever more complicated. “But I was born right here,” he says, pointing at the floor. “In Brussels.” She must look surprised, because he says, “Yes, I know it is unexpected. But it is true. Although, you see, in some other, perhaps
truer way, I come from Bangladesh. That’s where my ancestors are from. That is the place that draws my soul.” He speaks soothingly, as if to soften the effect of his difficult disclosures. “You might say, that is where my soul comes from, even if my body came into the world right here.”
“But you live here,” Isabel notes, or asks. He smiles even more consolingly. “I no longer have any choice,” he says. “I have made my bed in Brussels and must lie in it. I have a responsible job, you see, I could not let people down. But my sons … I hope my sons will go back to Bangladesh, to find their true community. I hope their souls will be in better alignment with where they live.” He looks at her wistfully, and asks which country she is representing. She explains that she is there under false pretenses, a musician on tour who happened to be invited. A traveling performer, let in through the back door.
“A musician, is it?” he says appreciatively. “Then I think you may understand about having a true home, yes? A soul home.” She nods, charmed by his sincerity, his lack of guile. “Sometimes I go to Bangladesh, you see,” he continues, “and after several days there, I experience more human warmth than in several years here. I sense that you may understand this. You should go to my country, you would see the hospitality. People make sure things are nice for you, even if they don’t have much to give you. Here … they don’t care very much. It is cold here, isn’t it?”
Some embers light up in the soft liquidity of his eyes; Isabel thinks she detects the low burn of resentment, or of disappointment. She is about to respond, but they’ve been approached by a personage who causes her to stare in some amazement. His likes are known to her only from paintings: of Liszt, or Byron, or other romantic androgynous boys with wild hair and angelic faces. But this one is here and now. She thinks for a moment he might be in costume, but he’s much too serious for that. He’s wearing a short black cape over a brilliantly white shirt with an
upturned collar; and his long black hair is thrown into high relief by his very upright posture. Proud posture, that is the only phrase which will do. As for his eyes, they are black and fiery. The clichés apparently come from somewhere.
“Our guest from Catalonia,” Ahmed introduces him, as Isabel makes the effort not to stare too conspicuously. He too seems delighted to learn that she is a pianist, and is soon discoursing on the music of his country, of Catalonia. Does she know it? Yes, she says, she loves it, the mix of sensuousness and Christianity, of pagan rhythms and troubadour love.
“But that music expresses our very own, special character,” he asserts, his eyes flashing. Yes, his eyes flash. “That is what we are trying to preserve. Our special spirit. And our
sardanas
and
habaneras
are as important to us as our unique language.”
“I’m sure …” Isabel begins, but clearly, her tone is insufficient to the occasion, because the Catalonian’s posture becomes even more upright, and his voice stiffens with dignity. “It is the genius of the people …” he says. Then his mobile phone rings, and he fumbles for it beneath his black cape awkwardly, his posture suffering some impairment in the process.
Isabel briefly wishes she had Katrina at her side to provide the appropriate commentary, but instead, a short, broadly built man in a herringbone suit has come up and shakes hands with Ahmed and the Catalonian energetically. He acknowledges Isabel with a bare nod. Judging by his effect on the others, he must be the host of the gathering, or its director. He focuses their energies the way the minister did at the reception in Paris. The two men adjust their postures toward him. Ahmed’s voice shifts from dreaminess to something quite a bit harder. The Catalonian leans forward with an eagerness that almost sacrifices pride. The short man wants to know what the two guests think about some new European policy on immigration; and they volley some acronyms back and forth with speed and precision. She tries to
follow out of politeness, but as they pay her no attention, she turns away, and stands uncertainly, trying to spot Anzor somewhere in the room.
But it is Katrina who is again next to her, and who has apparently been observing her for a while. “Ah, the gender problem, it’s the same all over the world,” she launches in immediately. “They do exactly the same in Kiev and Manhattan. They’re extremely rude.”
“I don’t really mind,” Isabel says. “I suppose they have their concerns.”
“Ah, but you should mind, darling, you really should,” Katrina lilts at her, with a sort of collusiveness which suggests they might have much more to say to each other on the subject. “They shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it, it’s not … nice. They need to be shown how to behave.” Isabel smiles. “Even our Anzorichka,” Katrina continues, giving her words some odd emphasis. “Yes, even him. He’s very smart, of course, the darling. But he shouldn’t be taken too seriously, you know? He gets ideas. They all get ideas. That’s the problem, it’s always the problem.”