His mother was waiting. She was leaning on the steel railing watching him.
“Mishka, I’m sorry,” she said.
“We should turn back.”
“Your clothes are sopping wet.”
“Tell me about my father.”
“Yes,” she said in a small voice, as though he had pressed on a bruise. “I know I should have.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“We were students together, I don’t mean in the same field. He was Lebanese, doing a degree in civil engineering. We were both very lonely. We used to do what lonely people do in Sydney: ride the harbor ferries a lot. That’s how we met. For weeks, we would see each other every day and smile and nod but never speak. And then one day we made conversation, and we began having coffee at Circular Quay when the ferry docked. It became a daily ritual and I would wake up every morning looking forward to it. I told him about the rainforest. He told me about Beirut. And we both loved music. He took me to a concert that some Middle Eastern students put on. He was one of the performers. He played the oud. It’s a Persian stringed instrument that looks like a lute and the Persian word for it is
barbat
. It’s the ancestor of the lute. It came to Spain with the Moors, though not to the rest of Europe until the Crusades. His oud was a beautiful thing, a deep-bellied wooden instrument inlaid with ivory. And he sang. He had a beautiful voice.
“Afterwards he took me back to his apartment in a taxi. I sat up front. He had to share the back seat with the oud.” They were passing one of the esplanade benches and his mother sat down and set her silk bundle of seaweeds on the bench beside her. She folded her hands in her lap and studied them like a penitent. “That was the night we became lovers,” she said.
“Did you…?” But Mishka did not know what he wanted to ask.
“Mishka,” she said. She was pressing her hands against her chest. She spoke as though in considerable pain. “I’m afraid to remember it. I’m afraid to fall back down that well. It took me so long to climb out.”
There was a fallen palm branch beside the bench and Mishka pulled off several fronds and began braiding them.
“When people are starving,” his mother said. “When they are really starving…My father told me that after the liberation, when they were offered food, real food, chocolate bars, by American soldiers, they couldn’t eat it. It made them sick.”
Mishka twisted his braided fronds into a circle and knotted them. He placed the bracelet on his mother’s lap.
“That is what we were like,” she said. “We were famished. We were voracious. But we didn’t know how to manage so much feeling.” She put the palm bracelet on her wrist. “I was frightened.” After a while she said: “You were conceived in great passion.”
Mishka pulled more fronds from the palm branch and began shredding them furiously with his thumbnail.
“After a while he moved in with me. He and his oud. We lived together for several months.”
“He wasn’t Jewish.”
“No.”
“So you didn’t—”
“What was strange though…he used to play in the evenings after dinner.”
“Like Uncle Otto.”
“Except of course I would watch him.”
“And hear him.”
“I used to hear Uncle Otto,” his mother said quietly.
“And except he wasn’t Jewish.”
“He came from a Muslim family, but he wasn’t anything. He was secular. We were intellectuals. We didn’t believe in belief systems, we used to say.”
“What was his name?”
“His name was Marwan Rahal Abukir.”
Something like a small muffled explosion at the base of his spine shook Mishka and traveled in shock waves throughout his
bone cage. He felt giddy. His sense of balance had gone. Michael Abukir, he thought. I am Michael Abukir, son of Marwan Rahal Abukir, oud player.
“What happened?” he asked coldly. “Did he leave you?”
His mother studied his face in the moonlight. “King David was an oud player, Marwan said. When King David sang the psalms, he accompanied himself on the oud. Marwan used to sing something in Arabic that reminded me of that beautiful psalm,
By the rivers of Babylon I sat down and wept…
Uncle Otto used to play that in the camp.”
“Did he leave you?”
“I suppose that is what happened.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“When I told him I was pregnant, he said we would get married but first he had to go home to tell his parents. He never came back. I never heard from him. I was numb. I lived in a fog.”
“He doesn’t know I exist.”
“Three months later I had a letter from his brother to say he’d been killed in a car crash. That’s when I decided to come back to the Daintree. I didn’t think I could manage living anywhere else.”
“So you have the name and address of his brother?”
“The postmark was Beirut. There was no return address.”
“Have you still got the letter?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a photograph of my father?”
“He did not like to have his photograph taken, but I do have one,” she said. “It was taken by a street photographer at Circular Quay, the ones who used to prowl around and take pictures of tourists. We had just come off one of the ferries and the flash went off in our eyes. The photographer handed me a card with the date and a number and a studio address. Months
later, after I knew he was dead, I found the card in my drawer and I went to the shop and they still had the proofs, so I bought a postcard-size print. I’ve had a copy made, and your grandfather has made a frame. I’d planned it as your going-away present, but I’ll give it to you tomorrow when we get back to the Daintree.”
Mishka leaned on the railing of the seawall. He had the sensation that he was falling, falling right through the day when Tony Cavalari opened the door to Uncle Otto’s room, falling again like a shot parrot down a black hole with no bottom to it. And then something stirred in the black nothingness below and came rushing up to meet him like an oil gush coming in. It almost swept him over the wall, and he held the railing so tightly that his fingers turned white.
“We should go back to the hotel,” his mother said.
“You go in. I’ll walk for a while.”
“You’re getting a cold,” his mother said. “Your voice sounds throaty.”
“It’s just the night air.” He was already walking away.
“Mishka,” she said after him. “You look like your father.”
“Good night,” he said. He did not turn back. He could not bear to look at her. He walked for miles and miles as though he were drunk. The thing that was surging and roiling within him was an anger so terrible that it frightened him.
He walked all night.
Just before dawn, he went back to his room at the hostel and wrote a note to his mother. He left it at the desk of her hotel.
There was no salutation.
I won’t be coming back to the Daintree
, the note said.
Had an offer to play dinner music at the resort on Green Island and have decided to take it until I leave
for Brisbane. Please mail me the photo, care of Green Island Resort. Mishka.
He walked back from her hotel to his room, collected his violin, a duffel bag of clothing and the framed diptych and walked to the wharf. He took the morning’s first catamaran to Green Island. He stood on deck and watched the green water curling away from the twin keels like shavings of mango peel. He watched as the dark green gave way to the turquoise lagoon around the island.
In the room assigned to him at the resort, he set the diptych given to him by his grandparents on the dresser. He sat on the bed, the pillow at his back, his hands behind his head, and studied it.
“So, Uncle Otto,” he said aloud. “It turns out I’m a bit of a mongrel. What do you think of that?” He realized that he did not know if his mother had ever told her parents about Marwan Rahal Abukir. Then he realized that of course he did know. She would not have told. They would not have asked. His grandfather would have made a tiny frame to his mother’s specifications, but he would never have seen the photograph she planned to insert. “So, Grandpa,” he said aloud, “I’m an Abukir, not a Bartok. What do
you
think of that?”
Uncle Otto and Grandpa Mordecai gazed back impassively, mournfully, from their tea-colored faces.
“You are right,” he told them. “Even at Chateau Daintree, I don’t belong.”
When the little parcel with a Daintree postmark arrived, he let several days pass before he opened it.
It was a diptych in a wood frame with a hand-crocheted jacket: a twin to his other graduation gift.
To the left of the hinge was a black and white photograph of a young man and a young woman. The woman, his mother, was beautiful, her lustrous black hair like a shining weight on her shoulders. The man had dark curly hair that fell across his brow. There were hollows below his cheekbones: a sculpted face. His lips were full and sensual: one might have thought they were the lips of a woman.
Mishka studied his own face in the mirror.
This might have been a photograph of himself.
On the right side of the diptych was a miniature watercolor: red leaves, blue quandong berries, tasseled flowers.
Elaeocarpus angustifolius (Blue Quandong)
, ran the delicate script beneath.
This was the mighty tree, Mishka grimly reminded himself, that could not survive beyond the rarefied ecosystem of North Queensland rainforest.
Inside the package, there were also two envelopes. One was frail and curled and yellow. It was addressed to Mlle. Devorah Bartok, 25 Willow St., Sydney, NSW, Australia. It bore a Beirut postmark. Inside was one sheet of paper with a brief message written in baroque swirling script in fountain pen:
June 17, 1977
Mademoiselle Bartok:
I have the sadness to inform that my brother Marwan Rahal Abukir has been killed in car accident some month ago. I have found your address in personal papers.
I am, mademoiselle, your respectful servant, Fadi Rahal Abukir.
Mishka picked up the photograph of the father who had died before he was born. “You are less real than Uncle Otto,” he told the image.
There was also a sealed envelope, addressed simply:
Mishka
, in his mother’s handwriting. He could feel several pages of a letter inside. He did not open it. He kept it on the dresser for several days and then he dropped it in the incinerator behind the resort kitchen.
A month later, he left for Brisbane.
I
N THE SOUND
booth off Harvard Square, the candle flickered and Mishka leaned into the music and watched the way that small golden moons seemed to rise from the wick and float into the dark. One of the moons floated over Brisbane and settled there and those years became glowing and clear to him. They were not much different from the years in Cairns, except for the luminous bubble of Mr. Hajj’s apartment in Kangaroo Point, and the moon settled over that apartment and the apartment was enveloped by the light and that time was so ineffable, so rare, so out of time, that it floated free, it had nothing to do with Brisbane at all.
Except for Mr. Hajj, the Brisbane years were a blur. They had the shape of hostel rooms or of the practice rooms at the university. They had the texture of total immersion in work. They had the odor of frugality, which did not bother Mishka in the least. His habits were ascetic. He survived on his scholarship money and he put some aside. He was saving his airfare. On the advice of his professors, he was applying to graduate schools in America. He wanted to be somewhere unknown. He wanted to be nowhere. He wanted to be gone.
He supposed he must have known fellow music students in Brisbane. He supposed he must have been at a party or two. He had trouble remembering.
He remembered the pieces he had composed, a diary of sorts.
Green Island Largo. Rainforest Gigue. Sonatina for Quandongs and Parrots. Homage for Uncle Otto. Night Music for the Brisbane River.
He could hear these from first note to last in his head. He could mentally finger the chords, he could relive his bowing technique.
He could remember and date precisely the convulsive encounter that produced something altogether new in his musical vocabulary and in his compositional diary, the fork in the journey of his life that gave birth to so many pieces that his professors described variously as “problematic” or “disturbing” or “daringly original”:
My Road to Damascus; The dream of the man with the oud: Trio for violin, oud and tabla; Elegy for Uncle Otto and Mustafa Hajj; Message for Uncle Fadi
. The path to these compositions began with two separate advertisements he had placed in the newspaper under separate category headings.
WANTED TO BUY
: Persian stringed instrument known as oud.
WANTED
: teacher of Middle Eastern classical music.
Both had been answered by the same person, a man with an elegant but slightly accented voice, who called the number given for both ads. “I am Youssef Hajj,” he said. “I teach Persian classical music and I can import for you from Damascus a custom-made oud.” He gave an address in Kangaroo Point, the inner-city loop of the river where apartment blocks huddled beneath the Storey Bridge. “You must come in the evening,” Mr. Hajj said. “I teach only at night.”
When Mishka found the ugly concrete block of flats under a harsh yellow street light and pushed the buzzer for number 3A, a gnome-like man came to the door.
“Mr. Hajj?”
Mr. Hajj bowed by way of acknowledgment. “Youssef Hajj.”
“Michael Abukir.” Mishka had not planned to say this. He had not thought to rehearse what he would say, but he was only mildly surprised by this spontaneous reinvention of himself.
“Come in, come in,” Mr. Hajj said. “You are Lebanese.”
“Uh…partly.”
“But not raised Lebanese.” Mr. Hajj put a gentle restraining hand on Mishka’s chest. He was looking at Mishka’s feet, his eyebrows raised. “May I request that you remove your shoes? In Syria, this is our custom. In Lebanon too.”
“Sorry.” Embarrassed, Mishka unlaced his shoes. “You are right. I was born and raised in Australia.”
When he passed through the front door in socked feet, he stepped into a jewel box. The floor was thickly covered, wall to wall, with overlapping Persian rugs in rich shades of crimson and peacock blue. Cushions in silks and satins were strewn about. There was no other furniture. Propped against one wall were three stringed instruments, big-bellied, the richly grained wood sensuous to the gaze and to the touch. Mishka held his breath. Without being conscious of his action, he moved toward them as toward long-lost family members or lovers. He stroked the great pregnant bellies of the instruments, he traced the outline of the sound holes, he caressed with his fingertips the ivory inlay, he ran the palm of his hand along the neck—there were no frets, he observed—and lightly plucked the double-coursed strings. Two of the instruments had five double strings; the third had seven.
“Beautiful,” he murmured. “Beautiful woodwork.” Mahogany, silky oak…his grandfather would die for such instruments. “My grandfather is a cabinet-maker. He would love these. Why does this one have seven strings?”
“That one is antique Persian,” Mr. Hajj said. “In Persian, it is called a
barbat
.”
“May I hold one?”
“Of course.”
For Mishka, this was an act of reverence. He had a sense of touching simultaneously his father and his Grandfather Bartok. “How do you hold the instrument? Like a guitar?”
“I will show you.”
Mr. Hajj sat cross-legged on his rug and rested the instrument in his lap.
“More like a lute,” Mishka said. “Will you play for me?” He sat opposite on the floor, legs crossed.
Mr. Hajj began to play and Mishka closed his eyes and imagined himself in Ali Baba’s cave. He saw dark-eyed girls in diaphanous silks with veiled faces. Rainforest intruded, but with cedars of Lebanon instead of quandongs, peacocks instead of parakeets, minarets where Uncle Otto incongruously played the oud and Marwan Rahal Abukir, sitting opposite, played the violin. Grandfather Bartok whittled at big-bellied ouds emerging from silky oak boughs.
Perhaps hours passed by, perhaps no time at all.
“You are weeping,” Mr. Hajj said.
“My father used to play the oud. He died before I was born.”
“Ah,” Mr. Hajj said. “And you wish to learn to play?”
“Yes.”
“To honor him?”
“To know him, I think. To communicate with him.”
“You have studied Western music?”
“I play the violin. I am a music student at the university. In composition.”
Mishka could see a quickening of interest in Mr. Hajj.
“I have entertained for some time a little dream, of duets for violin and oud.”
“That would definitely interest me, but first I want to learn to play the oud.”
“Yes, yes, of course, but you understand that the system is completely different from the Western system of music.”
“I understand.”
“I have two students for the oud. One is Syrian, as I am. The other is from Iran. And I have a student who plays the tabla. You may join this class. You may learn on one of my instruments until you obtain your own.”
Mishka used half his airfare money to buy an oud, which was shipped from Damascus, a transaction that took some time and involved convoluted connections and customs arrangements. The city of Damascus, Mr. Hajj told him, crafts the finest ouds in the world, but for reasons of history and politics, Mr. Hajj had to negotiate with Damascus via a contact in Beirut. When the shipment came, it was addressed to Mikael Abukir.
Mishka lived in two worlds, traveling between alien planets like an astronaut. By day, he was Mishka Bartok who lived in Brisbane, took his classes and played his violin. In his hostel room and in the practice rooms at the university, he composed for the violin. By night, he was Mikael Abukir, a man who spent hours in Ali Baba’s cave and played the oud. The rhythm of movement between his two worlds felt natural to him. His childhood had trained him for such a life, which was not unlike the movement from Chateau Daintree to school in Mossman. Mishka knew the rules for living parallel lives: keep things separate. Render unto Ali Baba the things which are Ali Baba’s, because everything you needed to know to function in Ali Baba’s world was counterproductive to survival in the world of a Brisbane university student.
And vice versa.
Once, in mid-afternoon, hungry for the onset of night, he had taken the city catamaran—the Rivercat—downriver from the university dock to Kangaroo Point and had gone walking through the maze of back streets beneath the bridge. He had stopped at a greengrocer’s barrow to buy an apple and found himself, to his astonishment, face to face with Mr. Hajj.
Mr. Hajj smiled. “You are surprised, Mikael?”
Mishka, overcome with embarrassment, could think of nothing to say.
Mr. Hajj laughed a little. “One cannot pay the rent by teaching Persian classical music in Brisbane,” he said. “I am a greengrocer by day.”
Mishka felt that he had done something gross and improper.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” “I am not sorry,” Mr. Hajj said. “I am grateful.”
“But in Damascus—”
“Yes, in Damascus I was a famous musician and professor of classical music.”
“It’s not fair,” Mishka said. “It’s not right.”
“Many things are not fair,” Mr. Hajj said. “In Damascus, my brother Mustafa was a very well-known lawyer. But he represented a client whom President al-Assad did not like.”
Mr. Hajj was polishing tomatoes and arranging them in his barrow. He would take two at a time from a crate behind him, wipe them with a damp cloth, and then place them in his display case in neat rows.
“What happened to your brother?”
“He was tortured and then executed. The body was returned to the front door of our family house.”
“Mr. Hajj,” Mishka said in anguish, but what was there to say?
“I escaped,” Mr. Hajj said. “I am grateful.”
“My grandfather,” Mishka said, “lost a brother. The circumstances were…similar. And very painful.”
“Your Lebanese grandfather?”
“No. The…my other one. Hungarian. He escaped to North Queensland.”
“For loss, we have music,” Mr. Hajj said. “And that is why we have music. For love and for devotion and for sorrow. Tonight, bring your violin.”
That was the beginning of
Elegy for Uncle Otto and Mustafa Hajj
, a duet for violin and oud.
Thereafter, however, Mishka knew that his two worlds were night and day, and he kept them apart.
In his day world, he had won some university prizes: plaques, certificates, checks. He had signed the checks over to his mother and had mailed them, along with the plaques and certificates, to the Daintree. He included a card with the plaques:
For Uncle Otto.
He signed the card:
Mishka
.
He knew there was cruelty involved in his refusal to write letters, to send news, to make phone calls, to go back for the High Holy Days. He loved his mother and his grandparents—they must know that; he was confident they took such knowledge as a given—but his love was on the far side of a roiling crevasse of anger. He knew his anger was illogical and unjust, and he did not understand it. He feared it, but he could not cross it. It was elemental and volcanic. It was like the turbulent rivers of hot lava beneath the earth’s crust. He was afraid of stepping into it. He was afraid of fault lines and fissures through which it might erupt.
Instead he busied himself with applications for graduate school: the forms, the transcripts, the reference letters, the fees. It seemed that every American transaction required a fee that gobbled Australian dollars. He skipped lunches and gave up the
buses to make ends meet. He used his student pass on the Rivercat or he walked along the path beside the river. The daily walking calmed him, four miles each way, from campus to city.
When notification of acceptance with fellowship came from Harvard, he had no one but Mr. Hajj to tell, and Mr. Hajj said only: “I will miss you.” Mishka made a photocopy of the letter from Harvard and mailed it to Chateau Daintree. What followed was the bureaucracy at the American consulate, the airline reservations, the special packing arrangements for his violin and his oud, the flight. After that, what he remembered was a blur of jetlag and disorientation and meaningless formalities and much playing of his oud in secret in his room, and much playing of his violin, much playing of Gluck and Monteverdi in practice rooms and sometimes—because of the resonance, because the shadowy underground made him think, incongruously, of the rainforest—in the subway.
He finished his first year, his second, his third. He remembered only the pieces he composed. And then: disruption. Two meteors turned his life upside down. One meteor was named Leela Moore; the other was Jamil Haddad.
Long minutes before he and Leela stood face to face for the first time, he sensed her presence. He sensed her as the pressure of air ahead of a subway car. He sensed her as he used to sense Uncle Otto waiting in the closed upper room when his mother climbed the stairs in Chateau Daintree. All his nerves stood on tiptoe. His skin read barometric changes in the air. He knew a major disturbance was moving in.
When she was there, in front of him, speaking to him, all he heard was static. His pressure gauges went wild. There was a moment when an image came to him of his mother and his father at a boat railing as a harbor ferry docked at Circular Quay. He was standing in Harvard Square at the hub of a
cacophony of car horns and swooping traffic and he had that old childhood sense of warm rising floodwater that was rushing him to some secret ecstatic place where he was part of the rainforest and the lorikeets and the parakeets and then there was simply the sense of joyful drowning in Leela’s kiss or of falling into a vortex of light, terrifying, but exhilarating too. He had given himself to the flood. He had been swept beyond all hope of return.
Famished people are unable to eat sensibly, his mother had said. He remembered that. Something like that.
I am afraid to remember that time
, she had said.
I am afraid of falling back down that well
.
He had not forgiven her then for her sheer indifference to consequence.
He understood now.
In the sound booth off Harvard Square, the day after the subway bombing, surrounded by Uncle Otto’s music, he had an urge to dial a telephone number in Australia. “Mum,” he would say. “I understand now.” Simply that. “I understand about you and my father.” And then he would say: “Something terrible’s happened. I had nothing to do with it, but I’m involved. I don’t know how to climb out of this well.”