“M
ISHKA
,” L
EELA SAID
, “tell me about your best friend when you were five years old.” She was curled up against him, her breasts against his back, her thighs curved under his buttocks. The moon shone through their bedroom window.
“My best friend was my violin,” he said drowsily. “I got it for my fifth birthday and I loved it so much, I used to take it to bed with me.” He reached back with his left arm and stroked her leg. “I slept with my arm around it.”
“I meant your best human friend.”
“My mother, I suppose. Or Uncle Otto.”
“I mean a playmate. Another child. Your closest friend.”
“I didn’t know any other children before I was six.”
“Really?” Leela, startled, sat up in bed and leaned over him. “How come?”
“I was six when I started school. Before that, in the rainforest, we didn’t live near anyone else.”
“How strange.”
“It was paradise,” Mishka said.
“Well, tell me about your best friend at school.”
Mishka sighed. “I didn’t have one. There was a boy I wanted to have as a friend but mainly because I was scared of him. His name was Tony Cavalari. He came to play at my house one day and broke my heart.”
“What did he do?”
Mishka slid from their bed and reached for his violin. He stood by the window looking out, a dark shape against the gold wash of the streetlight from below. For some time he simply fingered chords without moving his bow, spelling out a memory to himself, and then he began to play. He played so softly she had to close her eyes. Only then could she hear. The melody was slow and lush and full of anguish, the bow—so it seemed to her—damp with its own grief.
“What
was
that?” she whispered.
“That is what happened the day Tony Cavalari came to visit.”
“I mean: what was that beautiful piece?”
“Schubert’s
String Quintet in C Major
, the second movement. He wrote it weeks before his death. He knew he was dying.”
“Oh Mishka,” Leela said. She put her arms around him and kissed the nape of his neck. “You live inside a rain cloud. Isn’t there anything I can do to shift it?”
“I don’t mind rain,” Mishka said. “I miss it. In the Daintree it rains every day.”
“You remind me of Cobb Slaughter when you talk like that.”
“Talk like what?”
“As though happiness is always out of reach.”
Mishka turned, frowning slightly. “I’m happy,” he said. “You shouldn’t assume there’s only your way to be happy.”
“That’s the sort of thing Cobb might say.”
“All right,” Mishka said quietly. “Since you want me to ask. Who is Cobb?”
“Cobb was
my
best friend when I was five.” Leela began, with a strange excess of energy, to tidy up books on her shelves,
bringing spines into alignment. “At least that’s what I would have said.” She offered this as though she had been challenged. “Cobb probably wouldn’t have said the same. I’m not sure he ever liked me, even though we were blood brother, blood sister. I mean, we cut ourselves and traded blood, the way kids do. You know how it is.”
“No,” Mishka said. “I don’t know how that is.”
“He’s like an amputated limb, a phantom limb. I keep thinking I see him, but I’m always wrong. I keep thinking he’ll call me one day. When there’s a wrong number and no one speaks, I always wonder if it’s Cobb.”
“What kind of a name is Cobb?”
“In high school, I think he had the hots for me, but he still didn’t like me. Once you’ve traded blood though…well, you know…”
Mishka moved his bow on the strings. The sound was too low to be heard.
“I got into a fight for him once,” Leela said. “Not that he thanked me. I could never figure him out.”
“You like things you can’t figure out.”
“We were both fish out of water. Plus we both lost our mothers when we were kids. That was some sort of bond. And we both had this thing about math. I suppose that’s why you remind me of him. The way you feel about music, he felt about math.”
“Hmm,” Mishka said. He closed his eyes and leaned into the music in his head. He fingered chords and moved his bow across the strings. There was no sound. “So what happened to Cobb?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen him since high school. He went to a military college and then he got into intelligence, code-breaking, that sort of stuff. I know he’s done time in Iraq, but I heard he’d got out of the army.”
Mishka stopped playing. He busied himself with his violin case. He rosined his bow and clipped it in place. He nested the instrument in its velvet-lined cradle. He snapped the case shut. “So you make inquiries about him?”
“Not really, but I get news. Promised Land’s a very small place and everyone knows everyone else.”
Mishka took his oud from the corner where it rested in the crook of the wall. His plectrum was as long as a quill. When he plucked at the strings, the sound was deep and resonant and he hummed as he played and the kind of song a peddler of silk carpets might hum filled the room. A thousand and one stories, none of them translatable by Leela, curled about her like smoke from an incense burner. Leela thought that if she rubbed the polished belly of the oud, a genie might suddenly appear. She would ask him if the riddle of Mishka could be solved.
T
HE NIGHT AFTER
the Prudential Tower bombing was the first night that Mishka disappeared.
“There was another incident today,” the news anchor said, “during the morning rush hour in Boston. Details were captured on security cameras in the underground garage of the Prudential. We warn viewers with children that coverage may be upsetting.”
Leela and Mishka had watched the replays, over and over, on CNN, ABC, CBS. In hypnotic state, they seemed unable to stop staring at the same footage that coiled and uncoiled itself in endless loops. They had seen the driver of the cream Toyota—the suicide car—caught on video just before the boom gate went up. He was reaching for his parking ticket. He smiled and gave a victory sign the way a frat-boy clown might act up for a security camera in a dorm. Television close-ups, enlarging the face, were grainy, but the man was young, dark-haired, good-looking. To almost all viewers, in spite of the blurred focus, he looked distinctly Middle Eastern. Footage of the explosion, which occurred five minutes later, was peripheral, but was caught by another video-eye three levels down.
The Toyota had parked in a bay marked B3-C: third underground level in the basement, area C. Viewers saw the mangled cars and the bodies. Concrete pylons had collapsed and
a sink hole had appeared in the main floor of the Prudential lobby. Down in the garage there were crevasses and mountains of rubble, flattened cars, hundreds of injuries, but only eleven deaths.
“Oh my God, oh my God,” a woman with a bloodied face sobbed. “This isn’t going to stop. It’s going to keep happening, and no one knows where or when.”
At Godiva Chocolates in the Prudential lobby, the store manager said: “Where next? First New York, then DC and LA, then Atlanta, and now Boston. Nowhere’s safe.” There was a splattered tide-line of chocolate wrack on the wall behind her. “Our stock is ruined,” she said. “But what are truffles compared to a life? Not one of our sales clerks was killed. And yes, we’ll be open tomorrow. If we folded our tents and crept away, we’d be letting the terrorists win.”
“I heard about it on my car radio,” a driver in downtown Boston said. “No, it won’t make me avoid the Callahan Tunnel. This is just something we have to learn to live with. Suicide bombings are like traffic accidents. You know they could happen any time, but you believe they will always happen to someone else. If you hear about one, you make a detour.”
“My daughter lives in Israel,” a woman told the roving reporter. “They’ve had to deal with this kind of thing for years. What can I say? You grin and bear it. You can’t let the terrorists win. You have to get on with your life.”
A mother was interviewed in Massachusetts General beside the bed of her four-year-old son. An oxygen mask covered the child’s face. “Ms. Dawson,” the reporter said. “I understand that you were just getting into the elevator on underground level three and that your husband was killed. Do you think the government is doing enough to prevent terrorist attacks?”
The woman turned her ravaged face to the lens. She could not speak. The camera zoomed into a close-up of the little boy inside the oxygen mask, and a strangled sob came from Mishka. He had his knees hugged up to his chest. He rocked back and forth on the sofa like a child trapped inside a bad dream.
“Mishka,” Leela murmured, holding him. She could feel him trembling. She turned the television off. “Let’s go to bed,” she whispered, and they made fierce and desperate love and clung to each other.
Afterwards, Mishka’s sleep was turbulent. He groaned and cried out. He warded off blows with his arms. He talked in scattershot bursts, sometimes shouting and keeping Leela’s nerves on edge. Most of his words were unintelligible. At certain moments he seemed to be pleading for his life. Twice Leela heard him cry out to his mother and once she heard him plead:
Uncle Otto, I promise I won’t open your door
.
She stroked his hair, helplessly, until she too fell into fitful sleep.
Hours later, when she woke in the dark and reached for him, the bed was empty.
“Mishka?” she called.
She groped for the light and checked the bathroom. She checked the landing, the staircase, and the front hall at street level, but he had gone. She noted that his violin was also missing.
He did not answer his cell phone. He did not answer the phone in his office the next day. He did not return until nightfall.
“Where were you?” she asked, baffled, angry, and weak with relief.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t want to disturb you. I went to the Music Lab and played for hours.”
“I called the Music Lab. You didn’t answer.”
“I unplugged the phone. I just wanted to be alone inside my music.”
“The entire day?” she asked, astonished.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s what I do when I’m upset.”
“You could play here, Mishka. I wouldn’t mind if you played all night.”
“I know that, but I have to be alone.”
“Is it because of your grandparents and Uncle Otto? Because of the war?”
“I don’t know. I suppose so. I’m sorry, Leela, but I did warn you. I don’t know how to be normal.”
“Normal people bore me to death,” Leela assured him.
That was how the absences began.
M
ISHKA MADE LOVE
as he made music.
When they made love, Leela believed whatever he said. She wanted to believe.
After each fresh incident, each scene of carnage, she came to expect his withdrawals. The absences grew longer. They grew more frequent. Always the violin or the oud went with him, sometimes both.
“Are you seeing someone else?” she finally asked.
Mishka was offended. “What kind of a question is that?”
“Last night, when you didn’t come home, I went to the Music Lab. You weren’t there.”
“Leela,” he said sadly, “I’ve never once asked you about all the other men before me, though I’ve heard plenty of gossip.”
“They became irrelevant once I met you.”
“That’s why I’ve never asked,” Mishka said.
“That’s not true. You were awfully curious about Cobb Slaughter.”
“You wanted to tell me. I didn’t ask. I hear there were plenty of men between Cobb Slaughter and me.”
“I swear to you, if that’s got anything to do with anything, that I have been one hundred per cent faithful—”
“It doesn’t have anything to do with anything,” Mishka
said. “The boring truth is, I’ve been playing my oud at Café Marrakesh in Central Square two nights a week.”
“The Marrakesh! I love the Marrakesh.”
“You’ve been there?” Mishka seemed slightly alarmed.
“Of course I’ve been there. It’s a stone’s throw from MIT. I often meet colleagues there. I knew they had live gigs at night, belly dancers, Middle Eastern musicians and stuff, but I’ve only ever been there for coffee or lunch. Next time, I’ll come when you’re playing.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“Why not?”
Mishka sighed. “My music, especially my Persian music…it’s just something I like to be alone with.”
“You’re not alone when you’re playing in a club.”
“Yes I am. I’m inside my music.” He turned away from her. “Leela, I’ll move out if you want. I’m afraid I take after Uncle Otto, better heard than seen.”
Leela was stunned. “How could you think for a second—?” What she felt was pure panic. What would I do without Orpheus? she wondered. She touched him, hesitantly, and was reassured when the familiar sexual fever engulfed them. “I don’t know how I would live without you,” she murmured.
“You would survive,” Mishka said. “Everyone does. People learn to do without whatever they have to do without.” He reached for his violin. He hummed then began to sing.
Che farò senza Euridice…
“Orpheus survived,” he said. “Even though he didn’t want to.”
Leela realized with shock that she had never before been afraid of losing someone. She had never been jealous. She had never before gone through anyone’s pockets or his violin case or his desk.
Not until Mishka’s next disappearance had she ever thought of following him.
A few weeks later, there was the incident in the subway: evening rush hour, the Red Line, an explosion between the Park Street station and Harvard Square, chaos.
Leela heard about it in a delicatessen store in the Square. She bought wine and salad and salmon for dinner but as she walked home she was thinking that now Mishka would disappear again. Harvard Yard, and even Massachusetts Avenue, seemed subdued. She walked more slowly. Perhaps she should go back to the Square. Perhaps she should eat in bright company, in the jazz lounge at the Charles Hotel. When she turned into her own side street, which was dark and deserted, she decided: If he’s not home, I’ll go back to the Square.
Then a black car pulled up and she was ordered to get in. Her cell phone was confiscated. A wall sealed off the back seat from the front and the windows were covered.
There was a man in the back seat beside her. “You will not be harmed,” he said, “provided you do not cause trouble. In case you do, as you already know, I have a gun.”
Leela felt something cold, like the muzzle of a dog, against her cheek.
She could see nothing.