Orpheus Lost (23 page)

W
ATER CURLED ITSELF
away from the ferry’s prow like a green fin edged with cream lace. Behind the boat, the V grew wider and wider, lapping the forecourt of the Opera House and imperceptibly touching the pylons of the bridge itself before leveling out entirely and merging with the sun-flecked skin of Sydney Harbour.

“It’s beautiful,” Leela murmured, leaning over the railing, transfixed. It was mesmerizing, looking down into the water. A red streamer of silk swooped by and she heard a child at the railing cry: “
Mummy, Mummy, my scarf
!” She watched the silk buck in the air like a bird, then drift, then settle on the water and darken and disappear. She wondered how much was lost down there. She imagined wrecked boats, drowned bodies, lost scarves beneath the keel. “Mishka told me you liked to ride the ferries.”

“Yes. When I was a student. I did it for whole afternoons. We’re approaching the Heads now. You’ll notice the water turn choppy.”

“You’re right. That’s so sudden.”

“It’s the Pacific pushing in,” Devorah said.

“The harbor’s far bigger than I imagined. It’s like a sea.”

“That’s what it is. A sheltered sea.”

Wind buffeted them and their hair streamed out behind their heads like flags. Their eyes watered and rivulets of damp
crisscrossed their cheeks. Devorah was hunting for something in her shoulder bag.

“Here.” Leela offered a tissue.

Devorah shook her head. “No, that’s not…” She found what she was looking for and held it tightly in her fisted hand. She stared down at the pleated wake. “I know how Mishka would score this,” she said. “I can hear it in my head. Rondo for wind and water. He was like Mozart, you know. It was amazing, the pieces he composed when he was little. And then by high school, well…He won a scholarship. Of course, you know that.” She opened her fist and showed Leela what looked like three vivid marbles, cobalt blue. “Quandong berries,” she explained. “I was planning to give them to him.” She smiled mournfully. “I got them through all those levels of security.” She extended her arm over the railing, the berries in her open palm, as though making an offering to the gods. Then she tipped her hand and let the berries fall into the water.

They did not sink.

They were tossed high in the froth like lottery tokens and then they bobbed backward inside the wake, three small buoyant dots.

Leela slid her hand along the railing and placed it over Devorah’s.

“I do not understand anything,” Devorah said. “I do not understand how the Marwan I met on these ferries could become what they say he has become.”

“How does anyone know?” Leela murmured. She did not understand how Cobb could have become what he seemed to have become. She did not really believe it.

“Mishka’s letter said his father had become a music-hater,” Devorah said. “At least, that’s what he’d been told. That’s what
he feared. But I don’t know how that would be possible. It’s like asking me to believe that trees can swim. Mishka couldn’t believe it either. He was certain that once he played the oud for his father…”

Below them, the dark green water of Sydney Harbour made soft slapping sounds against the hull. The wind skimmed music from the waves.

“I wonder if Mishka got the chance,” Devorah said. “It is very strange.” She put her hands over her face. “To have gone on loving a man—the memory of a man—who hates music. It means there’s something defective about me.”

“It doesn’t mean any such thing,” Leela said. The scent of honeysuckle, of Cobb, of Mishka, were all in the air. Love was a predator, she knew that. It roared around like a hurricane and blew anyone in its path to kingdom come.

They both stared into the water.

Leela could hear a low antiphonal chant from the ferry engines and the wake:
Cobb must know, Cobb must know, Cobb must know where Mishka is.

“K said that poor boy, the one we saw, was actually an American,” Devorah said. “K told me he died. They had to ship the body back to Arizona.”

‘“I know. She said it’s not the first time. It’s chaos in Iraq, bodies get mislabeled and lost.”

They stared into the wake.

“I’ll put Mishka’s violin in Uncle Otto’s room,” Devorah said at last, “until he comes for it.”

“I keep thinking I hear him playing. It’s usually Gluck, but sometimes it’s his own compositions. I don’t just mean in dreams. I really hear him. Either I’m going mad, or it’s a sign.”

“I think there’s a sorrow gene,” Devorah said. “I think I inherited it. I think I passed it on.”

Leela moved closer, so that body warmth flowed between the two women. “My mother died when I was very young,” she said. “It was like a black hole I had to keep filling.”

“You could have Mishka’s room,” Devorah offered, “if you want to stay until we get news.”

“This is what we know,” K told them. “We know Mishka and his father were picked up together. We’ve got witnesses who saw them get into a black limo on the main drag beside the harbor in Beirut. It was done in broad daylight.

“We know they were then flown to Baghdad. We know that within an hour Marwan was put on a flight to Cairo.

“We know Mishka arrived at an underground prison in Baghdad—it used to be one of Saddam’s—later that day. We know he was still alive three days later when the man in the next cell got released. His name’s Ali. He talked to Amnesty’s field workers. The prison’s run by local militia and there was torture.”

Devorah closed her eyes and began rocking back and forth like someone in pain or at prayer.

Leela managed to ask: “How can you be sure it was Mishka?”

“He told Ali his name. Sometimes he’d sing. Ali had been held for two weeks and then released.

“After Ali, we lost the trail. We think Mishka’s a ghost in American hands, but we can’t be sure. Even they aren’t sure. He could be a ghost in Shiite militia hands.”

“A ghost.”

“No records kept. So there’s no way to trace him. The ambassador tried, the Red Cross tried, the Australian Government tried. They honestly believed they’d found him and got him repatriated. And at least some American military sources thought they’d got rid of an embarrassing mistake. I can
tell you, everyone’s nervous. Everyone’s hedging bets and trying to cover their arse. Either nobody knows where he is, which is definitely possible, or the people who know can’t afford to let it be known that they know.”

“What do we do now?” Leela asked.

“I’ve activated every feeler and every antenna that I have,” K said. “And my feelers are hooked up with other feelers, here, in the US, in the Middle East. Eventually we’re going to hear something. Someone else who was in detention with him will be released and will talk. Guards talk. Guards and soldiers take photographs. Someone has photographs of Mishka. Gossip travels on the internet these days. We’re going to learn what happened to him and where he is. That’s a hundred per cent sure wager on my part. But I’m not going to lie to you. It could be years before we know. Or we might know tomorrow. He might be alive, he might not be. But in the meantime, you should both go back to your lives. There’s nothing else you can do.”

Leela called her own number in Cambridge, Mass. She left a message on her answering machine.

“Cobb,” she said, “this is Leela. I’m in Australia. There’s been a horrible miscarriage of justice.” She had a wild hope that Cobb would be listening in, that he’d cut in, that he’d respond. “I’m sure you know what I’m talking about.” She waited. She heard the hum of her empty apartment. She almost gave a call-back number but thought better of it. “I can’t believe this is what you want. I won’t believe it.” She lowered her voice. “This isn’t you, Cobb. It just isn’t you. If you know where Mishka is…” She closed her eyes. “You could leave a message on my answering machine,” she said. “I can check by remote.” She waited. She wanted to believe in magic. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “We’re blood brother, blood sister, remember?”

“Wherever he is,” Leela said on the wide veranda of the house above the Daintree, “this is where Mishka is in his mind. This was his perfect retreat. I think that’s why he was afraid to come back. In case it had changed.”

“It is changing,” Devorah sighed. “Developers are coming closer. They’ve cut roads through virgin-growth rainforest. They’ve sold lots.”

Mordecai cradled Mishka’s violin in his arms. “After all these years,” he said, “it has come back to the family. It is Otto’s. I’d know it anywhere.”

“They live more and more in the past,” Devorah murmured. “They’ve moved back to Hungary before the war. There’s no snow and there are parrots, but they don’t notice little differences like that.”

“Oh, the parrots!” Leela gasped. “Mishka told me, but I didn’t have the faintest idea—”

“It’s because we’ve got food on the veranda. They’ve become quite shameless.”

With a brilliant whirring of wings—there were flashes of crimson, emerald, cobalt, gold—birds settled on Leela’s head and shoulders and arms. “If Mishka could see me,” she said.

“He used to say that when he grew up he’d write a concerto for quandongs and parrots.”

“He did,” Leela said. “Except it’s a sonatina.”

“Devorah,” Mishka’s grandmother said. “Will you ask Otto to play?”

“…and I can see him,” Leela said, “just feet away from me, but there’s this
airlock
, this force field, some sort of resistance between us.” She reached out, miming the impasse of an invisible barrier, her palms flattened against its sheer surface. “He’s singing the aria from Gluck.”

Berg put a hand on her arm. “Where are you?”

“Is someone watching?” She looked about nervously, knocking her wineglass over. “I know Cobb is probably listening, but he won’t get in touch.” She stared at the rivulet that dripped from table to floor. “Did I do that?”

“Forget it. That’s the least of your worries.” Berg reached for a napkin and mopped at the spill. Leela trailed her fingers through the puddle of chardonnay, bewildered. “Just explain to me where you’ve been,” Berg said. “Explain why you disappeared. I’m sure you realize you almost cost us the grant.”

Leela played the words back to herself. She wrote them in the spilled wine and studied them. “None of it makes sense,” she said.

“No,” Berg said, “it doesn’t. You don’t answer emails, you don’t answer your phone, you disappear for a couple of months just when we’ve won a major grant, and then suddenly you show up but you keep tuning out.”

“He was singing an aria from Monteverdi.”

Berg took a deep breath. He said carefully: “I thought it was Gluck.”

“Monteverdi’s
Orfeo.
”

“Gluck’s
Orfeo ed Euridice
, you said.”

“Sometimes the Gluck, sometimes Monteverdi.” Her hands tested the air in front of her, surreptitiously, but the imaginary wall was unyielding. She pressed her fingers against it.

Has she been practicing this? Berg wondered. Does she practice against a mirror? She was still floundering in the tunnels of her nightmare, yes, but the thought crossed his mind that she could moonlight as a mime artist. He could almost see her wall. He could almost feel it between them. She was agitated. She was looking through him, at someone else. Her distress spoke in ballets of restrained elegance and for some reason he needed to locate the right word—the exact word—to describe her strange gestures. Fey? Delicate? Courtly?
Courtly
, yes. He gulped at his scotch.

Of course, she could be slightly deranged. She could be on drugs. Pressure did that: competitive pressure for grants, for prizes, for research breakthroughs. Marriages—his own, for instance—went down the drain; children—his own, for instance—moved out of the country or grew estranged. He was not unfamiliar with the phenomenon. One former student had lofted himself from a balcony ten floors up and had flown to his death, arms tracing slow curves as he plummeted. ICARUS, ran the student newspaper headline, FLIES TOO CLOSE TO SUN. Icarus had already won a major research grant. He’d been working on aerodynamic forces, computing the velocity profile for nonsingular arcs. He’d run into a snag.

So. Berg knew where students—especially the brilliant ones—could go.

“He has blood all over his face,” Leela said in a low voice,

“and I call out to him,
Mishka, Mishka!
He looks around as though he hears something, but he can’t see me. I can tell he’s in an interrogation room. It’s as though I’m studying him through one-way glass.”

“The way you study everyone.”

“Pardon?”

“Look, it doesn’t matter.”

“Do I? Do you think that’s true?”

“It doesn’t matter. We understand numbers, not people. Go on.”

“He’s cradling his smashed oud. He holds it out to me—or to someone in the interrogation room, someone I can’t see—but when I reach for him”—she leaned forward against the invisible wall—“when I try to offer comfort, there is always this obstruction. Sometimes I pound on it till my hands are bloody, but it’s useless.” She offered her hands as proof, extending them first as fists. She opened them. She displayed the veined backs, the unblemished palms. “I’m afraid to think what that wall might mean.”

“You keep having the same dream.”

“Almost every night. I’m scared to go to sleep.”

“Well, the absent are always wrong,” Berg consoled.

Leela rested her crossed arms on the table and leaned forward to nest her face in them. Berg wondered if she practiced this posture in front of her bedroom mirror. He imagined how she might lean slightly this way or that to get the spill of her shoulder-length hair just right. When it brushed the table, soft detonations of her perfume were released and the fragrance buffeted him in a succession of slight but pleasurable shockwaves. Perhaps she rehearsed her movements. He had begun to cultivate this kind of uncharitable thought about Leela
to neutralize the fact of his desire and to tamp down his anxiety about the state of her mind.

In between their recent encounters—and how should he think of them? as rescue attempts? as random mentoring sessions?—he had begun to dream about her. In his dreams, he studied her through one-way glass. Last night, for example, a man was painting her portrait. A man, he thought grimly, was
executing her likeness
. The man wore a Red Sox baseball cap and a white T-shirt that said MISHKA across the front. The man was singing a jingle at the top of his lungs, singing in the style of Pavarotti,
o mio spaghettio, o mio pomodoro
, and he was taking liberties with his model, flicking chunky tomato sauce at her from his paintbrush and licking it off as he worked. Berg, watching through one-way glass, was greatly offended. He smashed the screen—after all,
technically
, Leela was still his protegée, his former graduate student, his junior colleague, and he had manifest responsibilities. He woke in a shower of glass splinters, brushing crumbs and dried pasta from his sheets.

“You are wrong about absence,” Leela told him.

Berg sucked in his bottom lip and bit on it and thought about the painting in his dream, an act of rank plagiarism since the original hung in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Berg often studied it on Sunday afternoons.
Lips That Have Been Kissed
it was called. Berg was in love with the porcelain face and the mane of coppery hair. He wondered if Leela had seen the painting. He could ask her if she liked the Pre-Raphaelites. He could start with that. He could mention Rossetti casually, Dante Gabriel, he would say, the one who was obsessed with a particular model, and did Leela know that one of the finest examples, etcetera, and he could suggest next Sunday afternoon.

“The absent accuse us all the time,” Leela told him. “If I’d trusted him, if I hadn’t frozen him out when he needed me most, he might never have gone to Beirut.”

Berg watched Leela trace an M with her index finger in the puddle of wine and felt a jealous rush, baffling and humiliating.

“Syllogism one,” he announced, professorially. “Primary premise: the absent accuse us. Secondary premise: absence of the plaintiff in a court of law renders the charges invalid. Conclusion: the absent are wrong, and the defendant inflicts the charges on herself. Yes, a tab,” he told the bartender. “And another glass of white wine for my young colleague, unless she—yes, another glass.”

“You don’t understand,” Leela sighed.

“I’m trying to,” he said. “And I do understand irrational guilt. It requires our collusion.”

“What about actual guilt?”

Berg thumped the table and a small wave of scotch crested above the lip of his glass and pooled by his coaster. “You are not responsible for what happened to Bartok.”

“I think dreams can mean something,” she said earnestly, “that we don’t have equations for. Sometimes they can. There’s no reason why you would believe that. I wouldn’t have, before this happened.”

“Do you know how many people, in this city alone, claim after every bombing incident to have had a dream that predicted it? There’ve been articles. It’s a syndrome: not just the prevalence, but the predictable categories. One of our colleagues, well, Dowell, I think you took a course with him, Dowell did a statistical sampling at Student Health Services of sleep disorders reported post 9/11, then again after the Park Street bombing, and the mathematical spike—”

“Don’t you concede—”

“And again after that Chicago incident three weeks ago, which is nowhere near us.”

“Don’t you concede that it’s at least possible, at least a possibility, that someone close to us, someone
in extremis
who has been kidnapped—”

“
Kidnapped
is not a neutral—”

“Isn’t it possible, even in a universe governed by the laws of physics and math, that such a person could make psychic connection?”

“But you see, when you say
kidnapped
you’re revealing that you’ve already told yourself a certain story, that you’ve already established a certain explanation for why your boyfriend decamped. I did warn you to be careful, given the company he kept. The truth is, you have no idea what he was up to in Beirut. You really don’t. The story you’ve constructed informs your dreams.”

She leaned toward him, her hands clasped. She might have been praying. It was her controlled intensity that Berg found so alluring and so dangerous. He imagined a glass safety wall between them. “But I do know what happened,” she said. “I did find out. Well, not precisely, but we do know…Amnesty has a deposition from someone who was in the next cell…” She opened her hands and pressed them lightly against the invisible wall. She clasped them again. He watched the way her knuckles turned white. “I can’t talk about it.”

“You’ve been talking about it non-stop.”

She put a hand over her mouth, embarrassed. “I shouldn’t drink.”

“It’s not easy to make sense of what you’ve said.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything at all. I don’t want to talk about this any more.”

“Okay,” he said. “Let’s talk about something else. Our grant. Your stalled post-doc project.”

She opened her eyes then, met his briefly, and studied the surface of the table. “I’m not sure it’s possible,” she said in a flat voice. “I’m not sure I’m capable any more.” She tapped her forehead with an index finger. “Something got broken.”

“Most scholars go through stages like that. Let’s look at it this way: what led you to mathematics in the first place?”

“Is that relevant?”

“It might be. And I’m curious. It’s still rare to get a female colleague of your caliber.”

“I grew up with numbers. Crazy numbers, Bible codes, hidden messages from God in Social Security numbers, in dates, in whatever, completely nutty, but weirdly enough I did get addicted to numbers.”

“Hmm. Well. We’re all number junkies. Nothing unusual there.”

“And I was lucky enough to have a fantastic teacher very early…Even though she…”

“Yes?” Berg prompted. “Your teacher?”

“She was Cobb’s mother…” Leela looked behind her. “I have an ominous feeling he’s watching but he won’t get in touch.”

“You’ve lost me.”

He watched Leela press against her glass wall.

“Your math teacher,” he said, breathing hard. “What about her?”

“What? Oh. Nothing. She got me hooked on math. I loved solving equations, I loved pinning down the unknowns. I loved taking on a problem set and not letting go till I’d untangled it.”

“And that’s the way back. We’ve got some knotty problems sitting waiting. Start untangling them.”

She shook her head. “Won’t work any more.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s different now. Because back then…”

Her silence went on so long that he had to nudge her again: “Back
when
?”

“Back then, before Mishka…before what’s happened, math made sense of everything. It was so
pure
, it was just so beautiful, it was so…” She shrugged. “It was an addiction. It was my beautiful cocoon.”

“Mathematics constructs an ideal world,” Berg said, “where everything is perfect but true.”

“Yes. Exactly.”

“I was quoting Bertrand Russell.”

“I guess I still believed—just like my Dad, I suppose, which is a sobering thought—that there was some underlying key, some great secret code, and I was deciphering it. My father’s code was magical but mine was scientific truth.”

“And you want to give up the search.”

“I no longer believe there’s any code. It’s just static. It’s scrambled noise and scrambled numbers. Nothing makes sense to me.”

“That’s the starting point for every mathematical breakthrough in history. You slam into a wall and you blast a new doorway. That’s probably the real meaning of your dream.” Berg leaned across the table, excited, and seized her wrists. “You’ve hit a wall. You’re dazed. It’s part of the process. You know, every year I get one student, or sometimes in a good year two, who makes me say to myself: this one is going to change the rules of the game. That’s if he doesn’t go astray, or if she doesn’t fall off the world. I can’t tell you how pleased I was, how relieved, when you came back looking for me.”

“I didn’t come looking for you. It was you who came after me.”

Berg narrowed his eyes. “Only because you came to my office first.”

“I came to your—? No.”

“Three weeks ago. The day after the suicide bomber in Chicago. You told the department secretary you needed to see me.”

“No I didn’t.”

“You’re on our security camera. I checked it in case the secretary got the wrong name.”

“I don’t remember doing that.”

“I could play you the tape. By the time I came out of my office, you’d disappeared. On the tape, you pace around the department office like a caged tiger and then you leave.”

He was still holding her wrists. Leela looked at his fingers curiously—they were symbols that had to be decoded—but she made no move to disengage. “I know I’m not in great shape,” she said.

“Your hands are shaking.”

“I have trouble concentrating—”

“Are you on medication?”

“I don’t know. I mean, no. No, I’m not. I’m not on medication.” She seemed to be struck, for the first time, by the sheer strangeness of the two of them—former dissertation supervisor and former graduate student—sitting in the induced twilight of a bar, holding on.

“I know anxiety attacks when I see them,” Berg said. “Well, everyone’s on edge. We’re all waiting for the next bombing. But whether you’re conscious of it or not, you’ve been sending me SOS signals.”