“Me too. Are you in Music?”
“Yes.”
He looked around as though searching for escape. Leela noticed that the hand which pushed hair from his eyes was shaking. “Uh…” he said. “Today’s an anniversary. A sort of…a private one. I didn’t quite realize I was playing in public. That’s why I’m—” he gestured at the noisy chaos of Harvard Square—“I didn’t mean to be here. I usually play on the Blue Line.”
“Want to go for a latte?”
“Oh,” he said awkwardly. “Uh…” He looked at his watch. “It’s a difficult day for me.”
“An anniversary.”
Alarmed, he met her eyes briefly, then looked away. “Yes.”
“So you said. A sad one, I gather.”
His hands were cupped over the thin end of the violin case. The fat curved end rested on the pavement between his feet. He pivoted the case, very precisely, in a half circle, as though navigating a passage through a reef.
“I can tell it’s a sad one,” Leela persisted. “That’s why I’d like to offer a latte.”
The violin case made two complete revolutions, then another half circle.
“I know it’s inept,” Leela said, “but it’s the sort of thing we Americans do, we insist on doing.”
He studied his shoe. He met her eyes momentarily and again a flicker of a smile touched his lips. “Enforced goodwill?”
“Exactly. You have to let us be generous and compassionate.”
“Actually, I’ve got a rehearsal. I’m part of a West-meets-East quintet: violin, oud, cello, bass and tabla.”
“Where? In Paine Hall?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“It figures, doesn’t it?” she said. “I’m in math, not music, and I’m at MIT, but I did my undergrad work here and my particular thing is the math of music. I used to hang out at Paine Hall sometimes, pestering people. I’ll come and listen.”
He was drumming his fingers on his violin case. “That’s never—No really, it wouldn’t work. I don’t think the others would accept it.” He looked at her again, curious. “The math of music?”
“Specifically, changes in the employment of non-aligned wave frequencies from Monteverdi to Bach.”
“That’s my area,” he said, his interest quickening. “Early to high Baroque. My area in
Western
music, at least.”
“So I figured. From your instrument.”
“Custom-made. Authentic reconstruction.” He stroked the case as a proud father might stroke a child’s hair. His eyes glittered. His nervousness fell away like a coat discarded. He hummed a few bars of Monteverdi. “I prefer Monteverdi’s
Orfeo
to Gluck’s, actually, except for that one aria.”
“I thought you couldn’t do performance at Harvard.”
“You can’t. My doctorate’s in composition. But we all perform too.”
“So can I?” she asked.
He broke off humming and frowned. “Can you what?”
“Be a fly on the wall in your practice room?”
“Oh…no, really. It would interfere. For me it would, anyway.” He sighed, as though defaulting in advance on the ability to explain. “Look, the truth is, I’m a recluse. I live inside my music, really. I tend to shut out everything else.”
“We’re two of a kind, I suspect.”
He smiled politely at this, patently disbelieving.
“Except I live inside pure mathematics,” she said, “which makes less sense than living inside music, though in my own opinion, my private cave is just as beautiful.”
“You don’t understand.” He hefted the violin case under his right arm and raked the fingers of his left hand, agitatedly, through his hair. “I listen to music, I play music, I compose it. I don’t do anything else. I mean, I don’t know how. I’m just no good at anything normal. I don’t know how to have coffee with someone.”
Leela did lean toward him then. “I could teach you,” she said.
“Why?” He seemed genuinely curious to know the answer.
Why? Leela asked herself. A question of harmonics, perhaps, of vibrating at the same frequency. Or then again, because she could not bear to walk away from him. “I don’t know,” she said, though this was less than the absolute truth. Incongruously, she was awash in childhood sensations: the sense of an interlocking part.
“I don’t know,” she said again. “You remind me of someone I grew up with. That’s not a good reason, is it? I don’t know if this one’s any better, but I just want to. I want you to want to.”
Impulsively, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips.
He took a step back, affronted, but his eyes met hers again and they stood there, for seconds or minutes, and then he reached for her with his right hand and almost crushed her, the violin case pressed awkwardly between. He kissed her like a man starved for contact, and they stood there in the middle of Harvard Square, oblivious, devouring each other, crowds parting around them.
“Sweet Jesus,” Leela gasped, coming up for air.
“Where can we go?” he asked.
She raised her eyebrows and gulped a little with laughter. “What about the rehearsal?”
“I don’t need practice.”
“I mean your East-West quintet.”
“It’s actually not until tomorrow,” he confessed.
“In that case,” she decided, “we could go to my place. It’s close, if you don’t mind a short walk. I’m just north of the Yard.”
Hours afterwards, she said drowsily: “I don’t know your name.”
“I don’t know yours.”
“Mine’s Leela.”
He moved the bow of his mouth, as though feathering an instrument, lightly from her lips to her breasts, but said nothing.
“I could call you Orpheus,” she said.
“You could.”
“But what’s your real name?”
“I don’t know,” he sighed. “Not really. The one I have isn’t part of me.”
“The one I’m stuck with isn’t part of me either,” she said. She wrote her name in cursive script across his chest with the tip of her index finger. He reached for her finger and sucked it.
“I was baptized Leela-May Magnolia Moore in Promised Land, South Carolina, and you can’t get worse than that.”
“Promised Land?”
“It’s the kind of town you can’t wait to leave. To this day, in Promised Land, I’m known as Leela-May. My daddy calls me LeelaMayMagnolia like it’s one single word, but he’s the only living soul who can say it and not get shot.”
“The name on my passport is Michael Bartok.”
“Bartok!”
“No relation to the composer. Or if we are, it’s so distant, it doesn’t count. Bartok was my mother’s family name.”
“Is she Hungarian?”
“My grandparents were. Hungarian Jews. My mother was born in Australia.”
“Then there could be a link with Béla Bartók.”
“My grandfather and my great uncle played the violin, so there’s music in my genes, but as far as we know they’re not Béla Bartók’s genes. I get music from both sides. I get the Persian classical influence and the oud from my father.”
“Yet you choose to go by your mother’s family name. It can’t hurt your career.”
He recoiled and swung his feet to the floor and crossed the room. He pressed his forehead against her window and drummed his fingers on the glass. His agitation was violent. “I didn’t
choose
—I was born out of wedlock, as they say. That’s the name on my birth certificate. I’m legally stuck with it.”
Leela went to him and put her hands lightly on his shoulders. She pressed her cheek against his back. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“Forget it.”
“I don’t care about the history of your name. I just love the sound of it,” she said. “Michael Bartok.”
“No one has ever called me Michael. I was Mishka to the family and at school.”
“Mishka Bartok,” she murmured with her lips against his back. “That’s even more beautiful. A chromatic melody. It’s you.”
“It isn’t me. It doesn’t feel like me. I don’t know who it is. My visa says
non-resident alien
. That’s me.”
“Names are always a problem,” Leela said. “They’re never you. They’re baggage from your parents.”
“Mine is lost baggage,” Mishka said.
“Wish I could lose mine. I thought about changing it. Changing the Leela, I mean. Obviously anyone who calls me Leela-May is dead on the spot.”
“Today is my birthday,” Mishka said. “My father died before I was born. The only thing I know about him is that he played the oud. I didn’t even know his name until I was eighteen. Each birthday, I ask myself: how will I live without knowing who I am?”
“What I tell people here is that Leela is Sanskrit. Someone told me
lila
is Sanskrit for the Hindu gods at play. I like that. Sport of the gods. I thought of changing the spelling, but why bother?”
“Sport of the gods,” Mishka Bartok said. “That’s what we are.”
A
FTERWARDS
, L
EELA REALIZED
, the sliver of years she spent with Mishka were radiant fog. That time was without fixed landmarks. He moved into her apartment and she could remember the way the horse-chestnut candles brushed the windows but not what the headlines were saying. There was making love and making music and studying. There were comprehensive exams and dissertations, then post-doctoral fellowships. There were undergraduate classes to teach. From time to time, dreadful news pushed its loutish way in from the street—news of war, terrorists, suicide bombers, random carnage in American cities—but Leela and Mishka muffled such noisy intrusions with passion and their passions were brainy and carnal in equal parts. Leela, high on discovery, would explicate the mathematics of the sound holes of violins; Mishka would demonstrate tonal mysteries of the lute and the oud. Skittish with words but profligate with melodic expression, Mishka composed their lives. “Listen,” he would say. “Here is the sound of this morning before you woke up,” and he would close his eyes and draw his bow across the strings of his violin.
And how, given Gluck’s opening bars to the saga, could Leela have thought that the ending would be other than what it was?
Che farò senza Euridice?
What will I do without that which I cannot do without?
At night, after lovemaking, damp and satiated, Leela would light candles in the bedroom and Mishka would play: sometimes Persian music, sometimes early Baroque, sometimes his own compositions. He would sit naked in the chair by the gable window, backlit by neon updrafts of glare. Their apartment was on the third floor, tucked into the attic of an old Cambridge house. It was just far enough off the Square and off Massachusetts Avenue that police sirens and the urgent mating calls of ambulance vans were percussive but faint, as was the vulgar news of the nation and the world.
If Leela pulled at the sheet to cover herself, Mishka would protest, though not in words.
Please don’t do that
, his eyes and the strings would beseech. She thought of him as a kind of musical version of Renoir, as a Modigliani. He worshipped flesh; he painted in cadenza and cantabile, in major and minor mode. She would find scribbled scores under a flower on her desk: sonatinas, rondos, études.
Portrait of Reclining Nude with her Face to the Wall. Nude in Street Light Turning Away.
Mishka’s scoring was in heavy lead pencil with cross-outs and cloudy gray areas of erasure. The scores were signed:
To Leela, love Mishka
.
“But I don’t turn away,” Leela protested. “I never turn away. Why is your music about loss? Why is it always and only about loss?”
“Isn’t that what music is for?”
Leela was envious of the oud, of its voluptuous inlaid curves, of the way he held it, of the way it brushed the silk skin of his crotch. She was envious equally of his violin when it nestled in the curve of his neck. She was jealous of his oblivion: of the way he would play a few bars, pause, close
his eyes, hear silent and inner music, scribble down notes in a kind of frenzy, cross out, erase, play again. She would move languidly on the sheets and spread her legs. “Come back to bed,” she would coax, and though Mishka kept his eyes on bow or plectrum, though he focused on the fingering of chords, his penis would thicken and he would play more violently, tilting at arpeggios, crashing through thickets of thirds and diminished fifths until all his defenses gave way and he surrendered and offered up his instrument as truce flag and laid it down and went to her.
“You shouldn’t interrupt,” he would reproach, “when I’m composing.” He would touch his forehead to hers. “Can you hear the music inside my head? It gets loud when you interrupt.”
“I prefer the music of your body.”
“The music in my head is
Sonatina for Leela who Interrupts
. It gets loud for fear I’ll forget it before I can write it down. If you lie still and quiet—”
“How can I lie still and quiet?”
“Put your ear against my heart…Like that. Can you hear?”
“Mmm. Syncopation.”
“Not my heartbeat. Concentrate.”
“What am I supposed to be hearing?”
“The sonatina. Before I have written it down.”
“Mishka, you’re crazy,” she would say tenderly, biting shoulder or buttock or thigh.
“I’m not crazy. Can’t you hear it? What’s that line about heard melodies being sweet, but those unheard being sweeter? Who wrote that?”
“Keats, I think.”
“Keats was right.” When he was a child, he explained, in his grandparents’ house in northern Queensland, there was
never silence. The house was a refuge, remote from the small sugarcane towns, tucked into rainforest. Bird calls by day were noisy; the night birds were sometimes shrill, sometimes muted, always haunting. But over and under the hubbub, Uncle Otto, his grandfather’s brother, used to give a command performance every night. After dinner, once the dishes were cleared away, he would play his violin. “Mostly Beethoven or Mendelssohn. We always heard him by candlelight,” Mishka said. “That was one of the family rituals. My mother would light the candles and then Uncle Otto would play, but he would never play in front of us. He would never come downstairs. He played in his room, and the door of his room was always shut, but we would stare into the candle flame and hang on every note.”
“Why did he stay in his room?”
“He was a recluse. He taught at the Budapest Academy before the war. He was a concert violinist. You can still buy his recordings on the web.”
“On vinyl?”
“On vinyl. On old 33s. Otto Bartok.”
“And after the war?”
“He never performed in public again.”
“Is your Uncle Otto still alive?”
Mishka tapped his forehead lightly with one finger. “Very much so. He’s never quiet. I listen to his recitals every day.”
“You’re very strange, Mishka.” She kissed him. She loved the taste of his lips.
“Listen to this,” he might say. “It’s not finished yet. I’m working on it.” He would pull Leela’s head toward his chest. He would start humming, but then stop. “Can you hear it?”
“Mmm,” she would murmur, humoring him, but sometimes—so certain was his belief in the clarity of the music
in his head, so confident was his light tapping of the beat on her skin—she would believe she heard music, but what she heard was always Gluck. When she closed her eyes, she always saw Mishka as she had seen him the first time.
Sometimes, when he sat at the window playing, he would pause, trancelike, and she would catch on his face a look of such sorrow it would alarm her. She would go to him and take his face in her hands. “Don’t I make you happy, Mishka?”
“Yes,” he would say, burying his face between her breasts. “You make me happy.”
“Then why do you look so sad?”
He could not answer this question.
“Tell me about your mother and your grandparents and your Uncle Otto,” Leela would prompt.
But he would pick up his violin and play something sweet and mournful. “That is my mother,” he would say. “Those are my grandparents. This is Uncle Otto who is really my great-uncle in point of fact.”
“How come you don’t get letters from them?”
Mishka would bend over his violin. A lullaby, Brahms perhaps, would float across the room. Sometimes, if he did not have an instrument in his hands, he would finger imaginary frets and move an imaginary bow.
Leela reached for the framed photographs on his side of the dresser: his mother with a young man, his grandparents, Uncle Otto.
“Is the man with your mother—?”
“My father. Yes.”
“But you said—”
“They never married and he died before I was born.”
“You look like him.”
“So my mother says.”
“I was six when my mother died,” Leela said, “but I do remember her. Sort of. Sometimes I still dream she puts lavender on my pillow. She used to do that. And you know what’s odd? When I wake I smell lavender.”
“My father smelled of spices. So my mother said.”
“What else did she tell you about him?”
“He played the oud and sang. That’s all I know.”
“She’s very beautiful, your mother. Is your family orthodox? They look as though they are.”
“My mother’s a botanist and a painter. She thinks of herself as a secular intellectual.”
“But your grandparents and Uncle Otto. Are they orthodox?”
“Not orthodox, but they’re observant. They keep Shabbas.”
“Tell me about them.”
“I’ll tell you about the rainforest,” he said, and he described the house made of mahogany and silky oak, built on stilts so that tropical cyclones and the flooded Daintree River could pass underneath. He described the verandas reaching out into the treetop canopy, the verandas vivid and noisy with parrots, surrounded by eyes that gleamed in the night. He described the peculiarities of the house, held to be a local wonder along the Daintree River in north-east Australia, because his grandfather had built it with turrets and minarets and gables. “Local people call it Chateau Daintree,” he said. “It’s not meant as a compliment. It’s a regional joke. They even sell postcards of it.”
“Do you have a photograph of the house?”
“I’ll show you.” But he would reach for his violin and play. “This is called
Sonatina for Quandongs and Parrots
.”
“What are quandongs?”
“Rainforest trees with berries the color of cobalt.”
Leela would close her eyes and hear birds and night creatures and the swaying of treetops hung with blue fruit.
“That is the house in the rainforest,” Mishka would say.
“But I want you to show me pictures and give me details. I want you to tell me more about your family.”
“I do. My music says everything.”