Orpheus Lost (11 page)

B
ERG’S OFFICE WAS
in the late Paleozoic wing of MIT and alpine collisions were constant. There were books, dissertations, student term papers, sheaves of lecture notes, off-prints, mathematical journals, all of them piled on desk and floor, all of them collapsing and cascading and folding into each other in seismic rearrangements of rift valleys and peaks. Entering the office was hazardous. One incautious step could kick off an avalanche.

Leela cleared a space, moved a pile of papers from a chair, and sat down. There was a shifting of tectonic plates: a tower of books teetered and slithered forward in a perfectly calibrated arc, the books overlapping like dominoes. Leela re-stacked them on the floor.

Berg’s secretary called through the door: “He should be back from class any minute, if he’s not waylaid by a student.”

“I’ve found a spot on the shore of the Tethys Ocean,” Leela said.

“Pardon?”

“Joke. It’s where the alps happened, when Africa rammed into Europe.”

“Oh. Got it.” Berg’s secretary laughed. “I don’t dare touch a thing for fear of starting an earthquake. Speaking of which, there was a bit of a crisis this morning when you didn’t show up.
Much flailing of arms and cascades of stuff from his desk. Your section of the grant proposal is probably deep under last term’s rubble.”

“No. I can see it on top of the earthquake,” Leela said. “But that’s not a good sign. It means he doesn’t think much of it. He’s going to make me rewrite.”

“It doesn’t mean anything,” the secretary said. “He freaks out at least once a day.”

“I’ve always sort of liked that about him,” Leela admitted. “Things that matter,
matter
.”

“Hmm,” the secretary said. “He makes me think of my two-year-old.”

“What I know,” Leela said, “is that when I’ve done something that ascends into his calm zone, I’ve done something really first-rate.”

She studied the photographs on Berg’s desk. The one of Berg with his wife and the children as toddlers had disappeared, though Leela remembered it from her first year as a graduate student. It seemed to her a sound working strategy: to expunge from consciousness those who caused pain. The gossip was that Berg’s divorce was very messy. Did removing a photograph help? Suppose she tore up or threw out the photograph of Cobb in her wallet? (And why had she kept it all these years? The answer seemed zigzag and murky and she did not want to go where it might lead.) She would have liked to take a photograph of her muddled emotions at this moment and then burn it. As for Mishka: he lived in sound and sensation, he lived in melodies trapped in her head. She would have liked to blank them out with white noise. She would have liked to take a photograph of the sense of dread that was closing in like fog. She would have liked to tear that photograph to shreds.

One by one, she picked up the framed images that were still on Berg’s desk. There was an elaborate filigree border around his daughter at her college graduation and another around his son’s wedding. There was a photograph of Berg on an archeological dig, somewhere in the Middle East. Leela studied it with interest, noting the brush in Berg’s hand, his painstaking attention to the detail in a carved fragment of pediment, mud-crusted. The site was somewhere in the Sinai desert. Berg had gone there, Leela knew, a few summers back, the summer of his son’s wedding. His son and daughter-in-law, he had told her, lived on a kibbutz.

Berg entered his office and she set the photo down guiltily. “Sorry. I was just—”

“Where were you?” Berg demanded. “The deadline is this week, and you give me this inadequate, this insufficient”—he lifted it and let it fall back to the desk, a dead weight—“words fail me.”

Leela winced. She felt bruised. She despised female students and junior faculty members whose desire to please their male mentors was as great as their desire to excel. Apparently she was one of them and the knowledge shamed and infuriated her. To compensate, she protested with undue combativeness, “I’ve done a
substantial
survey of harmonics and violin construction, and the history and math of the f-holes—”

“This isn’t a history department. Where’s the math on resonance?”

“I’ve got a whole section on that.” Leela picked up her proposal and flipped through it. “Here. Page five. Factors affecting volume of air in the violin and Helmholz resonance: the f-holes; placement of the sound post; placement of the bridge; thickness of plates in the body of violin.”

“It’s not enough to get us the grant. There’s a technique to writing proposals that rake in funding. Diagrams, equations,
graphs of the changes in sound. Stay up all night if you have to and add some dazzle to this.”

“I’ll get it done.”

Berg was scribbling notes furiously on a legal pad. “And what about the matter of your boyfriend?”

“Excuse me?”

Berg tore the top sheet from his notepad and crumpled it violently and hurled it at a waste paper basket several feet from his desk. He missed. “I believe I spoke to him on the phone.”

“He said you’d called.”

“It’s none of my business,” Berg said, “but do you know what you’re getting into there?”

Leela said evenly: “Is this relevant to our grant proposal?”

Berg gestured vehemently, precipitating small convulsions in the unstable files on his desk. “Do you know the kind of company your boyfriend keeps?”

“Dr. Berg, may I ask why my partner is of such interest to you? And why you think you know what company he keeps?”

“You may well ask,” he said—his words were staccato, hard and sharp—“and I will tell you.” But the intention to tell seemed swamped by agitation or anger. Elbows on his desk, head in his hands, Berg clutched handfuls of his own hair and pulled.

“Dr. Berg,” Leela said, alarmed.

Berg stood abruptly and paced the small section of office floor not covered with books. “I’ve been getting hate mail,” he said. “Anonymous. It’s been going on for months.”

“That’s shocking.”

“It’s not pleasant.
Death to Israel. Death to Jewish imperialists and racists.
That sort of thing. In my departmental box. So either from a colleague or a student or staff.”

“Wait a minute,” Leela protested. “Anyone could hand the secretaries a letter addressed to you. Or they could just stick it
in the departmental mail slot and it would wind up in your box. Anyone could walk in off the street and do that.”

“It was on Math Department letterhead.”

“Oh.”

“It gives you a very sick feeling, but you figure, you know, the sender’s unbalanced.”

“Before you go any further,” Leela said, “in case you’re implying this has anything to do with…with my boyfriend, as you call him, Mishka is Jewish.”

Berg stopped pacing and turned to look at her, startled.

“I didn’t know what his name was.” He sat down at his desk again and stared at Leela. “I thought he was Muslim.”

“You can’t possibly have thought that
Mishka…
?”

“No, no. I found out who was doing it. Not your boyfriend.”

Leela said: “So why have you been following me?”

Berg raised his eyebrows. “Following you?”

“Please. I happen to have photographic evidence. Why were you doing it?”

“In fact, I wasn’t following you. I was following my personal hate-mail correspondent and then his contacts.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Your boyfriend is one of my hate-mailer’s regular contacts. I learned that before I found out he was your boyfriend. And then when I discovered that
you
…which was something I discovered entirely by accident…Well, you can imagine. It felt like a violation. I had to ask myself: is my protegée spying on me? Is she putting these letters in my box?”

“I’m dumbfounded,” Leela said. “But I do know you were spying on
me
.”

“I had my eye on the contact of a contact. I had to ask myself: is Leela the go-between?”

Leela could feel her breathing turning ragged. “I can’t believe this.”

Mentor and former graduate student faced off, warily, across the sheaf of grant proposal.

“How did you meet him?” Berg asked.

“Under the circumstances,” Leela said, “I think you should explain how
you
met him, and what grounds you have—”

“I haven’t
met
him, I’ve observed him.”

“Where?”

“There was some vandalism in my apartment building, run-of-the-mill stuff at first. The mezuzah would be ripped off my door. At first once every few weeks, then more often. Shit smeared on my
New York Times
. Scratches along the side of my car. Tires slashed. I didn’t connect this with the mail at my office at first, because if you live on the northern side of Cambridge, stuff like this just happens. Though not usually as frequently.”

“It just happens at MIT, too. I’ve had trash outside my office door. I’ve had rude notes on my bulletin board. Did you fail someone? Give them a D?”

“Ds and Fs come and grovel and beg and sob for higher grades. They don’t send hate mail.”

“I’m not sure that’s true. One unsigned note on my bulletin board said:
To the Bitch from Dixie
.”

“The Bitch from Dixie?”

“From a Yankee who got a C or a D is my guess. It’s not an insult another Southerner would make.” Leela smiled grimly. “Southerners are unfailingly courteous, especially when angry. And when Southerners stab someone in the back, they always wear clean white gloves.”

Berg stared at her. “I suppose that’s meant to be funny,” he said. “But I don’t find death threats funny.”

“Sorry. Lousy attempt to lighten the mood.”

“I started getting threats at my apartment. In the mailbox. They hadn’t been sent through the mail, they’d been put there.
Your son’s kibbutz has been targeted.
Math Department letterhead, same font, same format, one line in the middle of the page, business envelope.” He picked up the framed photograph of his son’s wedding. “Then there was a laser copy of this photograph, with a hole through my son’s face. So it has to be someone with access to my mailbox key and to my office.”

“You can’t seriously have thought I was involved.”

“I didn’t know what to think. I thought you might have been used.”

Leela could feel a chill beginning at her toes and fingers and creeping along her limbs. She closed her eyes.

“I had to find out who it was,” Berg said. “I outfitted myself with a disguise. Canvas drop sheets, white coveralls, cap, paint, rollers: the real thing. A house painter. I arranged subs for my classes. I was ready for however many days it was going to take.”

Bizarre images bounced around inside Leela’s head: Berg in paint-spattered coveralls and surgeon’s coat performing post-mortems.

“I repainted the entryway walls in my apartment building,” Berg said. “And the stair risers and the railings. Primed them. Painted them. Repainted them. The landlord owes me. High-hiding-white primer, semi-gloss finish, high gloss on the trim. It’s amazing, frankly, a real eye-opener for an academic. You’re invisible, day after day. No one even looks at you. You’re part of the wall.”

“I’m trying to imagine this,” Leela said.

“Third day, I see one of my undergraduates, a bright intense kid named Ali Hassan. He sees me, well, he sees a man painting the stairs. He doesn’t even bother to see if I’m watching or not.
I don’t register. He opens my box with a lock pick. He leaves one of his charming notes.”

“Did you get him on camera?”

“Didn’t want to alert him. I just wanted to know who he was. I began to watch him in classes, I began to follow him. He meets contacts at that Moroccan coffee shop on Mass Ave.”

“Café Marrakesh.”

“That’s the one. Your boyfriend is often there at night.”

“He’s a musician. He plays there two nights a week. It’s a moonlighting gig.”

“Where he hangs out with anti-Semitic thugs.”

“He doesn’t
hang out
with—Why would someone Jewish—?”

“Perhaps he’s not. Not really.”

“He is. His grandparents are Holocaust survivors. After the war, they got to Australia.”

Berg turned his hands palm up in a gesture of mystification.

“Scads of people hang out at Marrakesh for the coffee,” Leela said. “And for the live music at night. They sit at a table with strangers and start talking. They don’t necessarily know who they’re talking to. It doesn’t mean anything at all.”

“Hassan only ever meets with the same few people, most often with a contact named Jamil Haddad. Sometimes your boyfriend arrives with Jamil Haddad.”

“Jamil Haddad!”

“I found out his name from a waiter. He didn’t know who your boyfriend was, but he knew Haddad.”

“He’s the suicide bomber.”

“What?”

“Yesterday. Jamil Haddad blew himself up in the subway.”

“How do you know that?”

“I guess it was on the news.”

Berg was stunned. “I don’t know how I could have missed that.” He kept smoothing his hand across the top of their grant proposal, pressing down, ironing it in four-four time, wiping a smear from its skin. “What exactly was your boyfriend’s connection with Jamil Haddad?”

Leela said miserably: “I don’t know.”

“Don’t you think you’re playing with fire? Look, I’ll be blunt. When you were a student, the rumor was you’d pick up anyone in Harvard Square and take him home for a fuck.”

Leela stood abruptly and caused a small landslide of books. “How dare you?”

“Don’t shoot the messenger. I hear stuff. Students, guys pissing in the bathroom, staff gossip. I’m not making judgments. I’m just telling you what I hear and that you have a bit of a reputation—”

“It’s out of date,” Leela said coldly.

“I just thought a warning might be in order. If you pick up trash, you might catch more than an STD.”

Leela said icily, from the door, “I’ll get the rewrite to you by morning.”

“Oh shit,” Berg said. “Look, I apologize. I was out of line.” He moved between Leela and the door and closed it again. He returned to his desk. “Sit down,” he said. “Please.” He picked up her proposal essay and tapped it, one side after another, on his desktop, in pursuit of perfect alignment, all edges straight as a die. “Look, if I was out of line—and I was—it’s because no one can take hate mail lightly. Not me anyway. Not these days. Every time there’s a bombing—”