Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  “Then what is important?”

  “The only thing that is important is what I have to believe.”

  “Now I understand even less.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  The music teacher seemed lost in thought. “I am not religious. Not at all. Friends of mine would laugh at me for what I am about to say: I pray for you.” He opened the door again. Tchaikovsky rushed out.

  “Thank you. For everything.”

  The music teacher started to say something, stopped, and then returned to the auditorium, the music blasting out until the heavy door closed behind him. Danny sat on the cold marble floor waiting, somehow sensing that doing nothing was better than doing anything. She got up and quietly walked out of the school.

  He did not follow.

  For hours afterward he tore through all the possible places Omar could be: the hills in the park, the Starbucks on Bloor Street, Freddie’s, even the train tracks they often walked along. Finally, he found Omar in the dankness of a video arcade on Queen Street near Dufferin. The clanging, shrieking, and roaring video screens blazed against black walls, like a tunnel with fluorescent lights hanging unevenly from chains, accessorized with cigarette butts and ripped AC/DC and Metallica posters pinned onto all that blackness. Omar was strangling the steering wheel in front of a big screen, his digital race car careening into other vehicles.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I’m three laps from the finish line.” Omar’s eyes stayed fixed on the screen. “That’s what’s going on.”

  “Hey, c’mon. I’m just asking a question.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “What’s happened? With all you guys?”

  “All us guys? You talking about Ariana?” said Omar.

  Stay away. “That wasn’t my question.”

  “Sure it was. Hey, bro. Ain’t nothin’ you can do.” Omar cheered as his race car crashed into a wall in a hail of sound effects and kept going.

  Don’t. “Why is she quitting the school orchestra?”

  “Hah! That’s what it’s all about, ain’t it?” The video game wheezed to a sudden halt. “Shit.” For the first time, he looked over at Danny. “She’s grounded, man. No more music.”

  “What’s wrong with her music?”

  “Haram,” said Omar, waiting for Danny to show some degree of comprehension. “N-n-not allowed,” he said finally.

  • • •

  Twice he waited for Ariana on Bloor Street. He stayed until it was obvious she would not show up that day. Somehow she found other ways to go home, or perhaps she left early. Finally at the end of the week, Danny talked Freddie Trumbull into cutting classes. Freddie’s new car, the Toyota he got from his father when his parents separated in late August, served as the surveillance vehicle parked on Jameson Avenue.

  “We gotta watch out,” said Freddie, opening his second SlimFast. “They got laws against stalking you know.”

  “I’m not stalking her, okay?”

  “What are we doing, then?”

  “Surveillance.”

  “Cops do surveillance.”

  “I’m worried, okay?”

  “About what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did I tell you that Sue Chapman wanted to know if I could drive over to Oakville and pick up this special new crutch she’s been fitted with?”

  “Did she ask you to do her laundry too?”

  “Fuck off Danny. I’m getting close, I can sense it. Pass me another SlimFast.” Danny drummed his fingers lightly on the dashboard and handed him a can. “How’d you get that weird crooked finger?”

  Danny didn’t hear him. “Take a look.” On the opposite side of the street, about half a block away, an old white Buick with rust marks all over the fenders had stopped. Four men got out, leaving the driver to find a place to park. One of the four men was Ariana’s father, Sayyid Shah. With him was another man with a big turban that had to be tucked back into shape after he got out of the car. The man had angry eyes and a moustache so big and black that it made Danny think of a broom. The other two men were a kind of security detail, bodyguards dressed in tight-fitting, round, white caps and Afghan kameez—knee-length shirts with a slit up the side—over billowing pants. They were waving cars to a stop so the man in the turban and Sayyid Shah could cross the street. And then the two men hurried ahead to open the door to the apartment building.

  “Look at that willya,” said Freddie indignantly. “Guys dressed like it was fucking Halloween or something. They act like they own the joint. I mean for christsakes, would we just blow into their fucking countries and stop traffic? What a bunch of dickheads.”

  “That’s Ariana’s old man. And some guy named Zadran. A big warlord. From over there.”

  “The guy’s a Paki too, huh? Jeez. So, what now?”

  “I go up there.”

  “And do what?”

  “Get them to feel they have to invite me in for dinner.”

  “Oh, right.”

  “Her father won’t have a choice. It’s part of their code. This Pashtunwali stuff. It’s a kind of code for how they have to live. If you’re in their home, you’re their guest and they have to treat you like some long-lost friend. No matter how you got there. You’re smiled at. Given food. Hospitality. The works.”

  “And then what?”

  “Once you leave their place, all that changes. They can fillet you like a fish if they want to.”

  “You are out of your mind. Why would you want to go there?”

  “Because I got a bad feeling. I need to see some things for myself.”

  “What? Like you want to watch your own nuts roasted over an open fire? After they’ve cut them off with their daggers? These people aren’t like us, man.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Danny, listen, man, you gotta stick to your own tribe.”

  “She is my tribe,” said Danny, getting out of the car. “My whole tribe.”

  “You know what my old man would do if you banged on the door when he was throwing a dinner party for the honchos he works with? He’d file a class action lawsuit or something.”

  • • •

  The elevator rattled to a stop on the eighth floor, its doors opening into a cacophony of hardened apartment odors. The stained vinyl wallpaper changed hue in the twitching overhead light. He walked toward the loud voices coming from behind the most pungent of the doorways, the one with some kinds of spices he hadn’t smelled before. He hesitated, knocked, and then listened as the voices fell silent and then rustled in urgent whispers. The door opened as far as the safety chain would stretch and a bodyguard’s eye fixed upon him from slightly lower than his own eye level. A word was spat out, one he did not recognize.

  “Hi,” Danny said, plastering a smile across his face. There were more words spat out from behind the door. “Oh, I’m a friend of the family.” More confusion. He heard Omar’s loud whisper: “You idiot!” And then in broken English: “It is this Danny.” The door was unchained and opened. The bodyguard glared at Danny, who looked past the man, into the room where Sayyid Shah and Zadran sat together on the heavy rugs on the floor. Omar and Ahmed sat beside their father, and one of the two bodyguards sat beside Zadran.

  Sayyid Shah never took his eyes off Danny. “He saved Omar. Omar would die. Back. Years now.”

  “Ah,” murmured Zadran, “Assalamu alaikum.”

  Ahmed said something sharply to Zadran and his father in Pashtun, and then an angry fragment of English: “He is not with us.”

  His father waved him off with a motion of his hand. “He is here now.” He turned to Danny. “Welcome.” With his face arranging itself as a mask of stone. “Omar, prepare this person to be our guest.”

  Omar got up, motioning sharply to Danny, and led the way down the small hallway toward the bathroom. Danny could not hear what he was muttering. All the doors in the darkened hallway were closed until one of them shot light through a crack. Ariana flailed him with panicked eyes that Omar did not s
ee.

  “In here,” Omar called from the bathroom. “You have to wash.”

  “Coming.” Danny made a calming motion with his hands. Her eyes lashed. The door closed.

  In the cluttered bathroom, a cave of wall-hung toothbrushes, shampoo bottles, soap-on-a-string, various articles of indescribable clothing, and towels piled behind the door, Omar was waiting. “F-fuck you!”

  “What are you, the official greeter?”

  “You re-really fucked it up this time, man.”

  “C’mon, man. I just came by to see if you wanted to—”

  “There’s some heavy shit going down, man. You d-don’t belong here.” Omar grabbed Danny’s arm, his words pouring out in an urgent jumble. “Okay, here’s the drill. You wash your hands. Sit with your legs crossed when we start eating. Only use your right hand. Take the food with three fingers. Don’t stick your hand into the food up to your fu-fucking elbows. Understand?”

  Danny waited until Omar stopped breathing like he’d just run a race. “What’s up, bro?”

  “I’m fucked, bro. That’s what’s up. Me and my sis-sister.”

  “Jesus, Omar, what’s happening?”

  “This is bad, man. Bad! Z-Zadran’s an eight-hundred-pound gorilla. He could wipe any of us out. Even my old man wants to please him. And that’s the problem. So I don’t n-need you sticking your fucking nose in here t-tonight.” He threw a towel at Danny and started to walk out.

  Danny grabbed his arm. “What about Ariana?”

  Omar looked at him for a moment. “Well how about that.” He shook free and walked out.

  Minutes later they all sat together on the heavy rugs, reaching for food from the various platters that had been silently set in front of them by Ariana and her mother. And sometimes by her hunched old grandmother, who came and left like a ghost who flicked glances toward Danny. He ate only enough to act polite, and he tried not to be obvious, watching Zadran, who had fixed Ariana with an appraiser’s stare. From the instant she entered the room, Zadran’s eyes flashed to her and never left until she departed. Once he caught Danny watching him; for an instant, Danny knew they understood each other perfectly. He knew it even more when Zadran said something in Pashtun and ordered Omar to translate: “He says that our sister is well trained.” Zadran looked right through Danny as Omar said what he had to.

  “Tell him your sister is a very versatile and independent young woman.”

  “Ain’t going to translate that, man.”

  “Translate!” said his father.

  Volleys of Pashtun followed, with Zadran motioning toward Danny. Ahmed turned to Danny, his wild eye coming unhinged so that it flickered back and forth. “He says that the Quran provides for cases of independence, also called disobedience. By either denying the woman your bed or . . .”

  “Or what?”

  “. . . by beating them.” Ahmed allowed himself a small slit of a smile as his good eye held perfectly still.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “Drop it,” whispered Omar. Ahmed leaned over and talked in Pashtun, and then after several exchanges he turned to Danny. “You will want to know that we all agree our sister is not obedient.”

  “And how is that?”

  “She was secretly disobeying Allah.”

  Danny sat for a moment in silence. Utterly unsure of which way to answer. And of where the traps were. “Really?”

  “Yes. With music. The Hadith from the Bukhari Shareef condemns those from the Umma for ma’aazif—music,” said Ahmed. “It says it is the same as fornication and the drinking of wine.”

  “I don’t have a clue what you’ve just said.”

  “My sister was practicing evil things and now she is not. My father and I have stopped it.” Ahmed and Zadran began talking among themselves in a language Danny could not understand.

  “Every one of us hates the fucking piano,” Omar whispered. “Hates it. So drop it.”

  Danny waited for the other language to cease. “Your sister has a talent, a gift that you can’t begin to understand,” Danny said to Ahmed. He wondered if it was crying he heard from the kitchen. Or if maybe it was the old-fashioned steam kettle shrieking on the stove as it came to a boil.

  . . . and now when he wakes up in the mountains, flung from his sleeping bag in the middle of the night, stumbling into the tripwire that detonates our personally embossed form of hell, he thinks of that moment. And if it was really her or if it was the kettle shrieking as they made tea for the men.

  He wonders. Still.

  • • •

  Omar left the next day.

  It was almost a kidnapping. And when he started crying out on the street, he had to be forced into the rusting Buick on Jameson Avenue by his father and one of Zadran’s bodyguards. He was to be taken back to Miram Shah with Zadran and sent to a religious school, a madrasa, that his father had chosen where his progress would be carefully watched by Zadran. As a favor to Omar’s father. And a sign that the two families were now joining together.

  • • •

  “I think maybe it was planned a long time ago.” Ariana was standing in the silvery light flooding into the emptiness of the old house on Algonquin Avenue. “When my father decided Omar was being pulled away from the Umma. By the kind of life he was getting into. That he would not be able to cope with what is ahead.”

  “What is ahead?”

  She didn’t answer. It was now a week since Omar and Zadran left and two days after her father took off, going first to Hamburg and then some place in Afghanistan. She had sought out Danny, forcing a note into his hand as they passed in the hall at school. 7 P.M.? was all it said.

  It was different this time, right from the moment he tried the door of the old, empty house and found it unlocked. She was waiting for him when he arrived, breathless. There was none of the past awkwardness when they touched, the throttled forays into some steaming tangle of lust and regret. She simply stepped forward and kissed him.

  “Why—?”

  She put a finger to his lips. She reached around behind her and unraveled the scarf that hung around her head. It fell to the floor. Then she removed the clips that held the shawl encasing the upper half of her body. It too sifted onto the floor. She stood in a white blouse and a cotton skirt of many colors. She began unbuttoning the blouse. When she got to the lowest button, Danny reached out and took her hand. “What changed?”

  “I may have only one chance.”

  “For what?”

  She said nothing, removing her blouse, not even looking away as she had in the past whenever he touched her. Running his hand gently across her bare shoulders and then down her back, waiting for her to stop him when he reached the clasp, he spun into torrents of confusion. Falling with her onto the old brocade couch, tearing at clothing and whispering fragments of feelings, he pressed his lips against hers, overwhelmed by his own clumsiness and desire, both carrying him mercifully forward past all the awkwardness engulfing him.

  But later, in the months and the years that passed, up in the mountains, Danny swore it was the music he remembered the most, the music he somehow heard even before it was filling the room. No one was playing that battered old C.M. Schroder grand piano with a missing middle C key, standing in the oblique, silver light like a bulwark against the tide of oblivion engulfing—no one!—there was no one playing it! But he swore the music was there. As he rose above her and she spread herself out below him. It was there!

  • • •

  He fumbled and apologized to her but then felt her hands around his face focusing him on her faint smile, pulling him down toward her—and then into her. The music was there—he knew it was—when she cried for an instant as he went deeper into her, hearing her cry out again from somewhere that seemed so far away, with tears streaming down her face and pulling him into her, whispering words he could not translate, as he found some rhythm given him by raw instinct, thrusting into her in the undulating motion that suddenly bound them together.

&
nbsp; And it was there, this music, when it was over.

  He lay beside her on the couch and passed his hand across her blood, which was soaking into the brocade. “This was your first time?” he asked. Her eyes remained closed, her arms around him. For some small eternity they lay there in silence with only the sound of their breathing.

  But then the music was there before him as she rose and walked through that silvery light to sit naked at the piano playing “Für Elise.”

  He lay watching her in the faint filigrees of light and shadow as the onrush of moments passed into memory. It was an image of their nakedness together that he would recall. For as long as he lived the image would be relived somewhere in the farthest reaches of himself as she would return to life, his life, again and again playing the piano, her eyes closed and the light shimmering off the contours of her uncovered body.

  She finished playing “Für Elise.” There was silence until, with one hand, she played a low, slow chord and looked out into the light from the street. “I am afraid.”

  “Of what?”

  “That there will be no more music.

  “My father’s brother killed the brother of Zadran twenty-one years ago. It was part of a feud that no one really knows how it started. It was in the blood by the time I was born. Our family originally was from Bannu and theirs was from Miram Shah. They slit each other’s throats for years. Bodies were found by the side of roads, some without heads. It has gone on for all my lifetime. And long before.”

  She played the same chord again and again.

  Waiting for Danny to say something.

  “I can understand the words. But not what they mean. No one on my block came close to slitting anyone else’s throat. The most intense part of my life has been fighting with Freddie or making the football team or getting a date on Saturday night.”

  “Danny.”

  “What?”

  She was crying. “It has to be over with us now.”

  “Ariana—”

  “It ended the other night. When you should not have been there. It ended before your eyes.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Vani,” she said shaking her head.