Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  Danny dropped to his knees behind her, waving at Freddie Trumbull and the others to reconnect the human chain, lying on the ice. He reached out and grabbed the girl’s ankles as she sank forward onto the ice. Suddenly Omar’s exhausted cries turned furious, with him and the girl yelling at each other in that different language, broken only by his cries. “No touch! My sister no touch!” The girl was yelling over him, turning to Danny, and shouting at him not to pay attention to Omar.

  “Shut up or you’re gonna drown,” yelled Danny. “Do you wanna be saved or not?”

  “Inshallah!” rasped Omar. “No touch her,” as he tried to swat away the girl’s hand, but the water-sodden weight of his coat, and his exhaustion, pulled his arm down.

  “This guy’s a wacko,” yelled fat Freddie Turnbull.

  “Another crack in the ice!” someone farther down the chain yelled.

  “He won’t,” said the girl, turning to Danny. Much later, Danny came to believe that in that one moment when she turned back from where she lay on the ice to look at him, he knew they would be together. Danny played it out in his memory again and again over the next decade. And sometimes that look would go on forever.

  “Your brother’s going to drown.”

  The girl rose quickly, almost scampering on hands and knees, leaning into Danny, so close that he felt her warm breath on his face. “You cannot understand. Please.”

  It was all part of the same memory for Danny, that warm breath and her face so close to his own. And even though he was only fourteen and she was at least a year younger, he would, years later, insist that something irreversible had come from that moment.

  Danny whipped around to the ice-prone human chain. “Tape!” he yelled. “Who’s got the tape?” From somewhere in the chain an arm whipped up, flinging a roll of black tape toward him. It was the tape they used on the blades of their hockey sticks, and plucking it from midair, he unspooled a long strand. Grabbing two sticks, placing them blade to blade, and spinning the tape around them, he created one long pole that he thrust at Freddie Trumbull.

  “Hold on to it, all of you, and pull us out.”

  Then, holding the other end of the makeshift pole, he shoved himself into the freezing water beside Omar, who was now lapsing into thick, unintelligible speech. Omar was weighed down by his waterlogged clothing and, for a moment, Danny almost lost him, until he could thrust the taped-together sticks at the boys on the ice, yelling for them to pull slowly.

  Later, when they had gotten Omar onto the shore, lying bundled in their heavy coats, Danny knelt shivering beside him, wrapped in blankets that someone brought from a car. “You could have died.”

  Omar murmured something, his eyes closed. He sounded upset.

  Ahmed interrupted, furiously pointing at their sister and firing harsh vowels in that language of theirs. “What is he saying?” Danny asked, looking across Ahmed to the girl with the large, dark eyes.

  For a moment, Omar’s sister didn’t answer, averting her eyes. “He thanks you for saving his brother’s life,” Ariana finally said, still looking away.

  7

  We climbed through small arms fire toward the cave where those Black Hats had just gotten toasted by Danny. We climbed for a good part of the afternoon, all because of Danny’s vibes. To Danny, vibes were a tactical element.

  I was exhausted in all that altitude. At one point I was so fried I thought I was starting to imagine muzzle flashes, like little sparks behind my eyes. I had brain needles from all that thin air, my lips were getting eaten up by that cold, hard wind, I was dangerously low on water, and more than once aviation came in thinking we were Ninjas and tried to rocket us into Inshallah territory without the benefit of the seventy-two virgins.

  But Danny was oblivious to anything but getting to that cave. “I think I saw something back before I dusted those guys.”

  “What?”

  “A face.”

  “A face?”

  “Behind the guy with the grenade launcher that hit the Apache.”

  It was all he would say until we had climbed up through the traces of snow to the granite outcropping where the machine gun stood silent on its tripod, surrounded by the bodies of the dead Taliban—who Danny couldn’t even look at. The mouth of the cave had been hit with some kind of ordnance after we wiped out the machine gunners. The whole face of the cave was smoke-blasted, and not far from the entrance was a bizarre-looking little stick figure, frozen in some charred contortion with only the pinkness of its gums showing through the blackened sneer of death.

  “I didn’t do that.” Danny stood in front of it, looking horrified. “Did I?”

  “It’s a goat.”

  “Oh. Yeah.”

  Whoever heard of a cave with a roof that leaked? This one did. Inside the cave, there was a dripping sound, like ball bearings being dropped into a metal pan. Everything echoed. An old, untended stove was wafting filaments of smoke that stung our eyes. Our flashlights grazed the vastness of the cave, actually more like a cavern cut out of the granite with angular wedge marks where it had been cut away with jackhammers. AK-47s were hung from spikes driven into the high walls. “Look.” Danny sank to his knees in front of wooden boxes of ammunition and weapons. “Made in U.S.A.” He was reading the stenciled words. “Canada. This is all American and Canadian stuff.” In a corner was weightlifting equipment and skipping ropes next to the neat pile of Qurans. But Danny was barely aware of it all. He had moved deeper into the cave, his flashlight darting over a stack of grenade launchers and several pairs of Nike running shoes arranged near a radio that was connected to an antenna wire. Raw goat meat was hanging from hooks above a metal pan—the source of the dripping noise, as blood flowed down the freshly slaughtered shanks into the pan.

  Suddenly he bent over, pawing through blankets, papers, and weapons until some gravitational force pulled him toward a pile of papers near the goat carcass.

  “Do you know what you’re looking for?”

  “Not what,” he said, “who. The face.” He was on his hands and knees now, searching through a mass of papers, and then a duffel bag that he emptied out. Cell phones, dozens of them, clattered onto the granite floor. He crawled to a cardboard box covered with a cloth and turned it over. The box was practically a United Nations all its own, jammed with passports from places like Bulgaria, Britain, Kenya, Uruguay, and Trinidad. And those were only the first ones to tumble out. Many of them were blank with no names or photos. “Counterfeits,” Danny said. We started organizing them by photos and found the dead Black Hat now splayed behind the Dishka, showing up in four passports from different countries. With a different name in each.

  Danny stopped, staring into a passport from Belgium. Then another one from France. And finally one from Canada that got his thousand-yard stare from close range, like he was holding something that needed disinfecting. “This one is real.” He started trembling and I couldn’t tell if it was from rage or fear. “It’s been two years since I saw him. I knew it. I knew it was him.” He put the passports down on the floor of the cave, impaling each in turn with the beam of his flashlight.

  “Omar,” he said.

  Staring out from the passports was someone who almost dared you. In everything. With dark hair and eyes that seemed to have glints where the pupils should have been. And set into a long face that looked pulled down into the weight of a full, black beard. Omar Abdullah Shah, it said in two of the three passports.

  “The guy with the grenade launcher?”

  “I saw him. I saw Omar. Right here. For one split second.” Danny was whispering, like some mystical revelation had just occurred. “I almost got him. He knows it’s me.”

  “Oh yeah, right. From over a mile away.”

  “Each of us can sense when the other is in a position to kill him. I’m going to track him until I kill him. Or he kills me. He knows it as much as I do.”

  “I don’t recall this being part of any battle plan.”

  “This . . . he is why I’m here.�
�� Danny’s words sounded tough, but his face didn’t match. He looked like some kid about to get his marbles stolen.

  He reached into one of his pouch pockets and took out two small photographs, each one laminated. The first photograph showed a grinning Danny standing with a dark-haired young woman with piercing green eyes and wonderfully geographic cheekbones framed by a headscarf. Her smile matched his. The whole image just radiated some kind of goofy joy.

  “Me and Ariana,” he said in a voice that might as well have had an orchestra playing behind it. “Omar’s sister.”

  But something wasn’t right. All the different parts of Danny were battling one another: his voice, his expression, his words, like they were about to be flung into some inner space reserved for lost thoughts. I looked more closely at the photo. Someone’s arm and shoulder were next to Ariana.

  “Show me the second photograph.”

  He put it in front of me as if I was being dealt a card. It was the identical photograph except it was wider and showed a third person, the one whose shoulder and arm were next to Ariana. It was the same guy in the passport photos. “Omar?”

  He nodded.

  In the photograph, Omar was a study in contrasts. Where Ariana and Danny were joyful, he was severe; where they were looking forward, he looked sideways.

  “He had her kidnapped. Because she was in love with me,” Danny said. “He was going to kill Ariana. All because of me. Because we loved each other. And because I wasn’t one of them. But Zadran came up with a better idea. Zadran is from their tribe here. And he took care of their problem with Ariana.”

  Outside the cave, I checked the bodies of the Black Hats. “None of them is Omar,” I called out to Danny, who would not look at them.

  “Good,” he shouted from a perch overlooking Shah-e-Kot. He sounded relieved. The noise of the battle came from about a thousand feet below us until a Black Hawk medevac helicopter flashed past, dodging an RPG that tore through the hues of the late afternoon sky like something slashing a canvas.

  “What did Omar and Zadran do?”

  At first I thought he hadn’t heard me. He was watching the arc of the RPG. “Omar and I used to be closest friends. We grew up together.”

  I waited for what would follow.

  “I can’t talk about it,” he said finally.

  Omar was why Danny needed a psychic. He was obsessed with hunting down Omar. And the psychic could help. Surely. He kept saying how they’d been friends. Ever since they had gone to school together.

  But it now was about far more than that. He thought the psychic could help him find Ariana. If she was alive.

  8

  Even as we’re blazing up through map contours, a thousand feet at a time in an exhausting afternoon, I feel like there’s three of us on this journey. Not only me and Danny, humping gear and setting up positions in these mountains. She’s here too. Invisible. Unheard. But here. She’s here because Danny has brought her along. I can almost hear him talking to her in something other than words. And I feel the aching. The fury. I wish I didn’t. What we’re doing is tough enough without all this shit.

  A week after he pulled Omar from the hole in the ice at Grenadier Pond, Danny was crossing Bloor Street on his way home from school and he saw her. She seemed to be waiting for him. She was smiling, which he couldn’t remember her doing often. At first he thought it was just a chance encounter, but halfway through the traffic he figured out that she was there because she knew this was the way he went home after football season.

  “Be careful,” she called out, the cars whizzing past him in both directions as he straddled the double yellow line in the center of the road. Without acknowledging the thought, he wanted to stay there in the middle of the traffic just to hear her say it again. That she was concerned about him made him feel better than anything he could remember. Better than getting his dog. Better than any football game he ever played in. Better even than when his father came home after having left the family for those five months—months that he remembered mostly because of his mother’s anger about every little thing. It was an anger of hers that had started in those five months. And could never be extinguished.

  “I’m okay.” His words were drowned out by the traffic. He hoped he sounded nonchalant, the way movie stars like George Clooney or Brad Pitt would be. Or maybe like one of the Toronto Maple Leafs. Hockey stars would definitely be cool, sauntering across the street to the beautiful girl on the other side. Even when they were only fourteen. So he sauntered the way he thought they would saunter for as long as it took for a truck to sound a horn that sounded like a freight train. He was pleased when he didn’t flinch and she looked concerned.

  By the time he reached the south side of the street, it vaguely registered that he could not remember the last time someone had been glad to see him. It was a simple, unadorned thought that over the years broke through the surface. It never left him.

  “I have something to tell you.” And when she finished telling him, he was embarrassed because he hadn’t heard a word she’d said. He had been looking at the way her hair, jet black and shiny, parted slightly on the right side of her head, fell in waves that rolled occasionally across her left eye, only to be brushed back until the next cascade. Her normally serious expression was repeatedly wiped away by that blinding smile, erasing all that came before it. The funny thing was that her mouth barely parted, from the pouty fullness of her lower lip to the faint smile that lit up whatever his world was at any given moment. It was all in the eyebrows. They had a language all their own, arching to a crest above the outer edges of her eyes and then swooping down, like some tailing off of whatever emotion she was signaling.

  She was almost a foot shorter than he was, and looking down into her face, Danny went totally blank. And congratulated himself on how successfully he covered up not hearing what she said. When she finished talking, all he could think of to say was, “Would you like to go for a walk?”

  She would. And they walked through the huge park, around the ponds and over the hills until they came out the other side, not far from the edge of Queen Street, which was when she turned to him with a what-next? grin and said, “You didn’t hear a thing I said back there on Bloor Street, did you?”

  As he stumbled with fake indignation through parts of two different excuses woven into one impenetrable tangle of lost thoughts, she studied his face until she reached out, smiling, and put a finger to his lips. He stopped in mid-sentence, staring at her. Then they both laughed.

  Danny couldn’t remember feeling like he did at that moment. And long afterward, in the mountains of Afghanistan, when he was trying to describe it in words, he could not.

  They walked up Roncesvalles Avenue because neither of them wanted to go home. Passing one of the last of the Polish restaurants on the street, she stopped in front of the big plate-glass window where the late afternoon sun was shining through to an old upright piano. “I play here. They let me.”

  Inside, Mrs. Cach, the old Polish woman with heavy legs encased in rolled-down sheer stockings, peered over thick glasses and polished knives and forks while Ariana played something Danny thought he’d heard before. “It’s called ‘Für Elise,’” she said.

  “Slow,” said Mrs. Cach. “Play slow. No hard. Soft. Play soft.” With an accent that Danny couldn’t always decipher, Mrs. Cach was Ariana’s teacher. Every once in a while, she would glower over the top of her glasses, put down the knives and forks, come over to the piano, sit beside Ariana, and play what had just been played, but in a more fluid, graceful manner. Her fingers were short and stubby like fat little sausages, but somehow Mrs. Cach coaxed music from that piano that Ariana had not yet mastered.

  “She’s my secret teacher.”

  “Why secret?” Danny asked.

  Ariana didn’t answer.

  By the time the chef and the waiters showed up, Mrs. Cach had gotten her request of “Beer Barrel Polka,” which sent her stern face into an almost girlish fit of giggles over the way it was
played. And then something called “I’ll Be Seeing You.” Ariana was pleased that Danny knew the name of the tune.

  He didn’t spoil it by saying he could barely stand to listen to it.

  During the five months his father didn’t come home, his mother played a version of “I’ll Be Seeing You” sung by Frank Sinatra over and over again until Danny put the pillow over his ears and thrashed around on the bed, yelling to drown out anything that seeped through. His mother would sit alone in the living room of their little house near the pond, drinking Scotch until she started crying, and then yelling at the framed wedding pictures. One night she smashed the photos one by one as “I’ll Be Seeing You” played in the background. “Lotta good that’s going to do,” Danny said later, surveying the rubble. Which only made things worse.

  When Ariana finished playing “I’ll Be Seeing You,” she turned to Danny with a look that asked for approval without ever wanting to admit to it. For an awkward moment there was silence as they sat in the last warmth of the late-afternoon sun.

  Finally, Danny spoke. “It was wonderful.” She smiled.

  Afterward, he walked with her as far as she would let him. She stopped on Queen Street a few blocks away from the grimy yellow brick apartments built forty years earlier for the lower rungs of the Anglo-Saxon ladder but were now teeming with a U.N. in miniature. “I can’t let you come any closer.”

  “Why?”

  “It would be bad for me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I know,” she said soothingly. “It’s okay. You can’t.”

  “What do you mean I can’t?”

  “You have to promise me something—don’t tell Omar.”

  “Tell Omar what?”

  “About everything. About walking with me. About the old Polish lady. And especially about me playing the piano.”

  “Why?”

  She didn’t answer. But right after they parted she turned and called out, “Hey, dopey.”