That’s the way it is with us, Mishka
, his mother would say.
“Mum,” he would say. “There’s something else. I’ve met someone who knows my father. He says Marwan Abukir isn’t dead.”
In the silence that came over the line, he would feel the bruise spreading over her body. He would hear her footfall on the stairs. She would look back over her shoulder
. Marwan is in the upper room
, she would say,
with Uncle Otto. We preserve our lost ones however we can, Mishka. We preserve them as we knew them. We survive. We go on.
Then the line would go dead and he would be back there at the moment when he first met Jamil Haddad in Professor Siddiqi’s class. Professor Siddiqi had just introduced them: “Mishka Bartok…Jamil Haddad.”
Jamil Haddad had stared. “You are an Abukir,” he said.
Mishka had a sensation of cyclonic disturbance in his head, of a storm surge rampaging up the Daintree, of huge black waves. He had a memory of shot parrots falling. He reached for the wall.
“Are you one of the Saida Abukirs,” asked Jamil Haddad, “or the Baalbah Abukirs?”
“I don’t know,” Mishka said.
“Why do you whisper? I can’t hear you.”
Mishka felt as though he were shouting. “How did you know I was an Abukir?”
“How do I know a cat is a cat? You look like one. You are Lebanese.”
“My father was Lebanese.”
“Speak louder.”
“My father was an Abukir.”
“I am Lebanese. I know your family.”
“I believe I have an uncle in Beirut,” Mishka said.
“Many of the Baalbah Abukirs are in Beirut now. What is your uncle’s name?”
“It is Fadi Rahal Abukir.”
“I have not met your uncle, but I know his name and reputation. I also know the reputation of your other uncle, Marwan, who is a hero to me.”
Mishka remembered the way the room turned upside down and began to spin like palm branches in a storm. He remembered the way the floor came to meet him. He remembered the thump on his head.
Jamil Haddad did everything violently. He spoke in blunt flashes of certainty. He gestured furiously. In the seminar on Persian Classical Music, he argued constantly with Dr. Siddiqi. He launched into long verbal attacks. There was ferocity in his hatred of music. Once, to Mishka’s horror, he kicked at the oud in Dr. Siddiqi’s office and Mishka gave an involuntary cry of pain.
“I don’t understand,” Mishka said. “Why do you take this class? Why do you study music?”
“I do not study music,” Jamil Haddad said scornfully. “I am studying engineering. I study the pollution of Islam by the West. I am taking Siddiqi’s course on the history of corruption from the fourteenth century onwards, when European contamination began. Music is licentious. It is forbidden.”
“But what about Rūmī?” Mishka asked. “What about the saints and mystical poets? I thought in Islam, music is always religious, it’s always devotional.”
“Not in pure Islam,” Jamil said. “There is no music.”
“But you sing the Qur’an in the mosque.”
Jamil was furious. “The chanting of the Qur’an is not music. It is
tajwid.”
Something came off Jamil Haddad: an aura of hot intensity, a kind of white light. “Long live the Islamic Nation,” he would say to Mishka by way of salutation. “Allahu Akbar,” he would announce at the start of Dr. Siddiqi’s class.
God is great.
“Long live the Islamic Nation.”
Dr. Siddiqi would say mildly: “This is a seminar in the history of Persian Classical Music, Jamil. Not in politics or religion.”
“All of life is religious,” Jamil would say. “Every statement is political.”
“In this seminar,” Dr. Siddiqi would say, “we will restrict ourselves to the discussion of music.”
“He is not to be trusted,” Jamil confided to Mishka. “He is a Sufi, and he has been further corrupted by his life in America. He is not like your Uncle Marwan, who burns with a pure flame.”
“My Uncle Marwan plays the oud,” Mishka said. “He is a singer and a musician.”
“That is a lie. Marwan Rahal Abukir abhors music.”
“Perhaps this is a different Marwan Abukir. What does he do, the one you know?”
“I don’t
know
him. It is his reputation I know.”
“What does he do?”
Jamil lowered his voice to a whisper and recited in a weirdly rapid melodic chant: “Islam is our aim, Qur’an is our constitution, Jihad is our path, War till victory; God is great, Allahu Akbar!”
Mishka choked back a spasm of laughter. All he could think of was rugby games and Cairns high school: the spectators huddled, faces painted in school colors, the chant of team war-cries, the mock-epic rivalry, the mimicry of blood sport. The enforced warrior intimacy had always seemed to him silly and juvenile and distasteful, but he was wary of it too. He had seen too many games turn into brawls. In his experience, a chanter of war-cries could turn savage in the blink of an eye.
“Marwan Abukir has trained in Afghanistan,” Jamil said quietly. “You understand? He is preparing himself. We are all preparing ourselves.”
Now the swallowed laugh felt to Mishka like a hot pepper. He almost choked. His instinct was to get away, to run, to dive into salt water and wash himself clean. He had an image of himself leaping over the seawall in Cairns and running to catch
the receding tide and the shadow of his dead father’s name. The memory was so intense that he could smell kelp, his pounding feet were sending up spray—
“So what is this Bartok business, anyway?” Jamil demanded.
“What?” Mishka blinked. He was astonished to find he had not moved.
“Did your mother marry a Jew?”
“Uh…no,” Mishka said, truthfully.
“I know one of your uncle’s sisters lives in London, but she married a Lebanese man. Bartok is not a Lebanese name.”
“No. It’s Hungarian.”
“Marwan Abukir’s sister married a Hungarian?”
“I never knew my father. He died before I was born.”
“That is good. That is Allah’s will. You must reclaim your family name.”
One day, after Dr. Siddiqi’s class, Jamil Haddad told Mishka:
“There is a man who lives in the Back Bay who is a Saudi. He is a very wealthy man. He knows your Uncle Marwan personally. He is in contact with your uncle. If you come to the mosque, I will introduce you to this man.”
That was the first time, though the meeting with the man who knew Marwan Abukir took place before they ever reached the mosque. It took place at Café Marrakesh in Central Square.
“This is Sleiman Abboud,” Jamil said. “The man who knows your uncle.”
The man who knew Marwan Rahal Abukir had piercing black eyes. The moment he saw Mishka, he said: “You are your uncle’s double.” He held Mishka’s chin between his forefinger and thumb and turned his head first one way, then the other. “Amazing,” he said. “Amazing. Very useful.”
Mishka’s heart was jumping about in his chest.
“Your uncle and I met in Afghanistan,” Sleiman Abboud said. “But now he is back in Beirut. We cooperate. You understand what I mean?”
Mishka made a vague gesture with his hand. He was afraid to speak.
“Visas. IDs,” Sleiman Abboud said. “What is your citizenship?”
“Australian.”
“You have an Australian passport?”
“Yes.”
“You have a Green Card?”
“No,” Mishka said. “A student visa.”
“That might be useful. I will let Marwan Abukir know we have met. Perhaps a meeting will be arranged.”
Mishka felt as though he were being sucked into Sleiman Abboud’s black eyes. His sense of balance had gone, though perhaps that did not happen when he was talking to Sleiman Abboud; perhaps it happened when he submerged himself in the multi-celled organism of the men on the floor of the mosque. He had an eerie sense of becoming one particle of water in a wave that crested and poured itself out, crested and prostrated itself, over and over again. Mishka felt that he could not breathe. He felt that he was trapped in a rugby huddle. He had a sense of being trampled by a mob, of being dragged and held under a wave.
Allahu
Akbar, Allahu Akbar, Allahu Akbar
moved like an ocean about him.
He did not think he would leave the mosque alive.
Night after night, like an addict, he returned. He returned to Café Marrakesh and he returned to the mosque. He returned to
hear Sleiman Abboud’s stories and prophecies and rants. He was searching for nuggets of his father. He discarded the rant like rind.
“Marwan Rahal Abukir is a brilliant structural engineer,” Sleiman said. “He has built bridges in the most difficult terrain in the world.”
“Where has he built bridges?” Mishka asked.
“In Jammu and Kashmir. One of his bridges was blown up two months ago by the Jaish-e-Mohammad group.”
“How terrible,” Mishka said. “Was my uncle—?”
“Was he hurt? Of course not. His planning is perfect.”
“I meant, was he devastated?”
“On the contrary,” Sleiman Abboud said. “Marwan Abukir is the magician who knows exactly which card to remove. You understand me?”
It was important, Mishka thought, to meet Sleiman Abboud’s gaze steadily but inscrutably until Sleiman Abboud himself looked away, which he did, finally, with a brash smile, by waving a twenty-dollar bill at a dancer. At Café Marrakesh, there was always a belly dancer. She moved, she
flowed
toward their table, the garlands of cheap silvered coins at her wrists and hips tinkling.
“Make these young men happy,” Sleiman Abboud ordered, gesturing at Mishka and Jamil Haddad. The gesture was intended, Mishka thought, to provoke. It was intended to humiliate. Why was it, Mishka wondered, that people mistook reticence for weakness? He kept his eyes on Sleiman Abboud.
“You remind me of someone I knew at school in Australia,” Mishka said. He calmed himself by imposing Tony Cavalari’s face on the shoulders of Sleiman Abboud. The belly dancer was wreathing Mishka’s head with a silk scarf. She let the silk trail over his cheeks, around his neck. A glass jewel was pasted in her
navel and gold stardust glittered across the tanned amplitudes of her skin. Her belly moved like a separate live thing, dimpled and twitching, and she thrust it closer and closer to Mishka’s lips. As though unaware of her gyrations, Mishka smiled at Sleiman Abboud until Sleiman Abboud stood abruptly and left the café. Only then did Mishka realize that his own hands, clasped below the level of the table, were shaking.
He dreamed that night that he was with his mother and his father on a ferry that was passing beneath the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was an explosion, and he saw in slow motion how the bridge, like a spectacle of shimmering firecracker beauty, sent girders and cross-braced steel spinning like wheels in the sky. He watched the whirring spark-spitting ascent of half a ton of curved metal, coiled like a white-lightning snake. It hovered. It began to fall like a spent rocket. It torpedoed the ferry and the ferry went down without a splash.
At Café Marrakesh, there was nightly entertainment: belly dancers and performing musicians who played tabla and oud. Mishka went night after night for the music, and he went also to hear the rambling anecdotes of Sleiman Abboud. He could not begin to explain this to Leela. He could not speak of the precious but ominous thing he had found: his father’s existence. It was like one of those double-edged treasures in Scheherazade’s tales: a jewel that brings death to the finder.
He left Leela notes.
I’m working on a new composition. Can’t blame you if you’re sick of living with a monk, but you know what I’m like. I’ll be obsessed till it’s done. Working late in the sound lab again. Don’t wait up. Love, Mishka.
One night, when the regular oud-player was ill, Mishka took his place on the dais at Café Marrakesh. He was conscious of the disdainful eyes of Jamil Haddad. He was conscious that the eyes of Sleiman Abboud never left him. Even during the tabla solo, it was Mishka whom Sleiman watched. After the musical interlude, he beckoned, and Mishka responded as though on a leash. Sleiman Abboud tugged; Mishka went.
Until I know all I need to know about my father
, he told himself.
Only until then.
“We must walk,” Sleiman Abboud said.
They walked the back streets of Central Square. “I have been in conversation with Marwan Rahal Abukir,” Sleiman said. “He wants to know if you are his son.”
Mishka reached out to steady himself against a wall. He could not speak.
“Marwan Rahal Abukir had a relationship with a woman in Australia,” Sleiman Abboud said. “The relationship shamed his family. He repudiated the woman and her unborn child, but if that child was a son, he says
Allah be praised
. He says the will of Allah has been revealed.”
Mishka leaned against the wall of a building.
“He would like to meet his son,” Sleiman Abboud said. “Does the son want to see the father?”
Mishka was unable to reply.
“When you are ready,” Sleiman Abboud said, “we will provide an air ticket to Beirut.”
I
N THE
M
USIC
Lab, the candle had guttered out. Mishka sat in the dark, cocooned between earphones, and listened to Mendelssohn. He was playing the
Concerto in E Minor
, one of Uncle Otto’s favorites, and he listened in spite of interference. He turned up the volume. He filled every cranny of thought with the lush sound of Yehudi Menuhin and the Philharmonia, but still a rogue drumbeat interfered, arrhythmic, jarring, discordant, the blaring headline intruding,
BOMBER IDENTIFIED, BOMBER IDENTIFIED, BOMBER IDENTIFIED
, and below the headline, like counterpoint from an out-of-tune instrument, the picture of Jamil Haddad.
Jamil Haddad grew louder and larger, ballooning out of the sound system like a
jinn
. Mishka switched on the light to dispel him.
From his briefcase, he took the envelope he had collected from the Music Department’s receptionist one hour earlier. First there had been a phone call. “The receptionist has a message for you,” someone said. He had recognized the voice of Sleiman Abboud. The envelope had contained an e-ticket link and flight itinerary: Air France, round trip, Boston to Beirut, via Paris. The outbound flight was two days away. There was also a typed message.
Don’t go to Café Marrakesh again, the message read. Don’t go to the mosque, don’t go back to your
apartment before you leave. A room has been reserved for you at the Airport Marriott. In the lobby is a booth for the taking of passport photographs. You must have a photograph taken. A sealed envelope will be delivered to you at the Marriott. It will contain a Lebanese passport made out in your real name: Mikael Abukir. Attach the photo in the appropriate place.
Tonight he would sleep in his office, his head on his desk.
He pulled from his pocket the paper napkin on which, earlier in the day, Sleiman Abboud had written his father’s phone number in Beirut. There was a logo on the napkin, an oud and a crescent moon, with CAFÉ MARRAKESH written below. He studied the phone number scrawled above the oud in ballpoint pen.
Suppose he were to dial that number now? At the mere thought, his blood knocked against his temples like a drum. He heard his heartbeat, thump thump, like heavy footfalls on stairs. He felt small and fragile, like a child waiting for his mother in the dark.
He sat with his left hand resting lightly on the receiver. He closed his eyes, and the phone number of the house in the rainforest was visible to him as though written in blue quandong berries on the leaf-strewn ground. It would be already tomorrow morning along the Daintree. If he called, his mother would answer, or his grandfather would. He imagined his own voice like some mythical creature in Ovid, a changeling, caught in the act of metamorphosis, translating itself from sound to electronic pulse. His voice would travel in sine waves that Leela could calibrate and graph, it would coil into the whorls of his mother’s ear and spill out again, slipping along the veranda with glider possums, wafting itself up the
stairs and across the landing and slinking under the door of the upper room.
But suppose his grandfather answered. Suppose he heard his grandfather say: “Hello? Hello…?”
Grandpa, it’s me, Mishka
.
Suppose he heard his grandfather say, “Hello? Is anyone there?”
They will have moved me into the upper room, Mishka thought. That’s why I saw Uncle Otto this morning, leaning against the newspaper stand.
He picked up his pencil and scribbled furiously at the draft of his score:
Incident in a Nightmare.
He wove in the strains of Uncle Otto’s violin: Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Bartók. He wrote the sound of the gunshot to Uncle Otto’s head. He wrote in the ferry on Sydney Harbour. He wrote in Marwan Abukir’s oud.
Two days ago, he had said to Jamil: “There must be two people with the same name. The Marwan Abukir who is my uncle plays the oud. He sings. He loves music.”
And Jamil had spat on the sidewalk. “Marwan Abukir,” he said, “testified in the blasphemy trial of Marcel Khalifa in Beirut.”
“Who is Marcel Khalifa?”
“A musician, a singer, a darling of the degenerates. He performed a song that included words from the Qur’an. We demanded his death.”
A day later, Jamil Haddad had blown himself up.
Approximately thirty hours ago, Jamil Haddad had blown himself up and he had blown up Mishka’s life too.
In the margin at the bottom of the page of
Incident in a Nightmare
, Mishka wrote a note to himself
. The Marwan Abukir who testified in the blasphemy trial of a musician cannot be the Marwan Abukir who is my father.
He lifted the receiver and dialed the international access code. He dialed the 61 for Australia. He dialed the 7 for Queensland. He paused.
What would he say?
Mum, I’m flying to Beirut to meet my father. I don’t see how he can be my father but I think he is. I’m afraid he is. He’s no longer the man you loved. He hates music. He’s become a fanatic
.
He replaced the receiver. What right did he have? Better that Marwan Abukir stay dead for his mother. Better that his mother lock her memories upstairs with Uncle Otto. He lifted the receiver again. He knew exactly what he wanted and needed to say.
Mummy, I’m frightened, but I have to know. I have to meet my father, but I’m afraid of what I’ll find out. I’m taking my oud and I’m going to play for him. I want to know if he’ll play for me.
Everything depends on the oud. That’s how I’ll know.
He replaced the receiver. He had no right.
He wanted comfort. He wanted Leela. She would be asleep in their bed; or perhaps she would be sitting up, wide awake, waiting for him, or not trusting him, or thinking of someone else.
He wanted to call their apartment. He wanted to speak to her. He wanted to touch her.
Che farò senza Euridice?
He wanted to look at her again, but if he went back now, if he looked back, he feared she would disappear forever. Those were the rules.
But he could speak to her, surely? There was no interdiction against speaking.
Are you still there?
was what Orpheus must have called out, and when there was no answer he made his fatal mistake. He looked back over his shoulder.
There must have been a moment, Mishka thought, a single
moment when he caught one radiant glimpse of his love before he lost her.
Mishka picked up the receiver and pressed it against his chest. He began to dial his own number. It was after midnight, but what would Leela care? She might in fact be sick with worry. Or she might be thinking of someone else, a childhood love just re-found. He stopped and hung up. He was afraid. Suppose the line was busy? Suppose she was not at home?
That morning, after Berg called, he had written a note. He had stood at the edge of their bed for whole minutes and studied Leela. She slept like a child, defenseless, her cheek crumpled against one arm. He had wanted to take off his clothes and crawl back into bed beside her. He had wanted to lick her, head to toe, the way a cat licks a kitten. He did not know how he could go back to living without her.
He understood why Orpheus had gone mad.
He pulled out a yellow-lined legal pad and began to write Leela a letter. He would mail it from the airport. She would get it after he had gone.
Dear Leela
, he wrote.I lied on the note I left earlier today. I’m not going to the west coast, I’m flying to Beirut. The only auditioning I’ll be doing is auditioning for the role of long-lost son. I think it’s possible I’ve located my father. I never realized how much I needed the answer to this riddle.
Who am I?
It seems likely that I won’t want to know. It seems likely that my father will appall me. It seems likely he is a fanatic and a terrorist. I still have to find out. I still need to meet him face to face.
I don’t know if I hate him or love him.
There are some things that I need to ask him to his face: Why did you abandon my mother? Why didn’t you ever have the slightest curiosity about me?
Leela, I realize now that you must have known about the mosque. I was in search of my father, that’s all. Jamil Haddad, the suicide bomber who was in one of my classes, introduced me to a man who knows my father. I don’t know why I couldn’t talk about that, but it has something to do with panic and something to do with shame.
I have a premonition that things may go wrong. This is probably stupid, but just in case…
I’m taking the oud with me. I want to play it for my father.
If something goes wrong, will you call my mother and my grandparents in Australia? If you slide the photograph of my parents out of the diptych, you will find the phone number of their house in the Daintree Rainforest on the back. I want you to meet my family. I want my family to meet you.
If something goes wrong, I would be very grateful if you would ship my violin back to the Daintree. Tell them I’ll move in upstairs with Uncle Otto. Tell them I will watch over them from wherever I am.
Leela, if anything goes wrong, I would like to leave the diptyches to you. Next to my violin and my oud and the pieces I have composed (which belong to anyone who loves music), these are the most precious things I own.
I have never owned you, but you are even more precious to me than music and I would play my violin
or my oud till Cerberus wept in order to keep you if that would work.Love,
Mishka.
Before he cleared security, he mailed the letter.
He would use his Australian passport until he reached Beirut. He had only one small suitcase. Checking in the oud as
FRAGILE—HANDLE WITH CARE
had required considerable paperwork, but he had seen it move off at last, safely, with his suitcase. He watched until the conveyor belt took them from sight.
It was not until his flight was called, at his gate, that he felt compelled to go to the pay phone. The message on the answering machine had not been changed.
Hello. You’ve reached Leela and Mishka. We’re not available at the moment, but if you will leave your name and number and a brief message after the tone, we’ll return your call as soon as we can.
“Leela,” he said. “It’s me. My flight’s been called. I should only be gone a week or so. I’ll call you when I get to Beirut…
“Uh…I miss you, Leela. I wanted to say goodbye, just in case…They’re boarding and I have to go now.”