American Music

by Jane Mendelsohn

  Back at the inn it was their last day together like this for who knew how long and every moment felt like a last moment and they enjoyed it but she said she would not give herself to him completely until he had told Pearl. It wasn’t right. And he looked in her green eyes and he knew that she meant it and so he did not try to change her mind.

  There were sock cymbals and Low Boys and Hi-Hats for keeping time. There were larger cymbals for punctuation, riding, and choking. There were cymbals with names like Plop, Sizzle, Sting, Whang, and Swish. And there were the very thinnest cymbals of all. Cymbals with a sharp brilliant tone that could instantly be damped, cymbals with a silver resonance. It was the shimmering sound of cymbals that she would later think had made them fall in love. A silver sound that led the music and kept time and moved life forward. A sound of fantasy and romance that swept up the whole world. A sound that was made in America. It came by way of Istanbul but most people didn’t know that. It was a sound that people thought was the essence of America: light and swinging and free. But it was a sound that had explosions in it. “Our business is hazardous,” Avedis said. Even with his experience he was apt to have an explosion once a week. In the beginning, the factory had so many explosions that their insurance company canceled the policy and returned the premiums paid in advance. When he told Joe, Joe said, Too bad you can’t get insurance for everyday life. I could really use some of that.

  At night, again, the beating of his heart under her head. She woke him up. What will she do without you? she said. He was half asleep, in love, not thinking, mostly dreaming. He said: She’ll probably be better off.

  •

  She couldn’t sleep. She pulled a chair up to the window and looked out at the sleeping town. Across the street, one of those perfect white clapboard houses. She looked at the shape of the house and the relationship of the windows to one another and the moonlight bathing the house in a calm but tragic yellow and blue light. She thought for the first time in a long time about painting that light. She went back to bed and instead of putting her head on his chest, she held his hand.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Milo and Honor

  Milo saw a white clapboard house on the ceiling. A raw damp smell of ocean air flew through the room. Suddenly lights arrived in the windows of the floating house and out came big-band music as if heard from a distant radio, Count Basie playing from Kansas City. When he opened his eyes Honor was holding his hand.

  You were saying something to me, calling me.

  There was a house on the ceiling and it was swinging.

  I see, she said.

  Then: What was I saying?

  Something about the Bosphorus, a tipping boat, a pavilion carved out of jewels. I’ve just been sitting here holding your hand. Then you pulled away and I put my hand on your arm. That’s when you started talking. When I touched your arm the story changed.

  He was back now, sitting up. He shook the hair from his eyes. His face had been filling out again. He looked healthier, stronger.

  There was something about cymbals coming from Turkey, wasn’t there? The beginning of everything, the origin of all this music and mess. If we understand how all of this got started, even if it’s just a myth, a story that isn’t true, maybe we can make some sense out of what went on with Vivian and Joe, what’s going on with us. That older guy from Constantinople, the cymbal maker, was I talking about him?

  I don’t think so. It seemed like you were talking about a woman, a girl really. It seemed like you were the girl, talking through her.

  Where was it that you put your hand?

  She pointed to a spot on his arm below his shoulder where the muscle twisted, and he grabbed her wrist.

  Keep it there, he said.

  1623

  In the orchard, on her way to the New Palace, the girl tried to jump out of the carriage, but the eunuch stopped her with his hand on her arm. It was a touch that did not so much hurt her as communicate a desire to keep her alive.

  Later, she had a bruise, which the Sultan found charming. Turning back to sit solemnly in the midst of four escorts, she found herself frightened by the sight of sunlight licking the small tough leaves on the fruit trees. She didn’t know what to expect—the stories of what lay ahead for her were so strange they seemed impossible to believe—but she knew that without the force of that hand on her arm her fear would have made her run straight to her death.

  They had bathed her and rubbed rose oil on her body before swathing her in layers of colored silk. Her veil panted above her mouth. She could smell the sea. At one point on the ride they crossed a garden and looking out of the carriage she saw hundreds of flowers, vivid yellows and pinks and reds that smeared across her vision and made her want to vomit. The carriage itself was festooned with roses and tulips and carnations. The perfume was overpowering, poisonous. The carriage stopped at the Gate of Felicity.

  Flanked by two escorts on either side, she entered the Third Court. She was not taken to the White Eunuchs’ Quarters or to the Throne Room or to the Library, but instead accompanied directly to the Royal Chamber. In her confusion, she thought the grapes depicted in the shimmering mosaic that confronted her when she entered were real, and she sensed her mouth watering, instinctively. The luxury and almost disgusting beauty of the room were familiar to her from having seen the Valide Sultan’s suite, but what she witnessed here was of another magnitude. It was a terrifying sumptuousness, and she felt an ache of pleasure in the midst of her fear. When the eunuchs left her, she tried to meet the eyes of the one who had stopped her from jumping, but he held his gaze steadily in front of him, his lips firmly set, his long black lashes only slightly darker than his skin, and seemed as unreachable as the grapes in the mosaic.

  She was waiting, for many hours, on heaps of pillows and embroidered sheets. Women had come to attend to her, but she had not been fed, and as her hunger and anxiety escalated, she passed her hands nervously over the fabrics surrounding her, and felt every gold thread like a needle in her skin. An old woman named Kaya was mainly responsible for her, and had brought her water. In a moment of desperation she had blurted out, “My name is Parvin.” “Farvin,” Kaya repeated, because she had no front teeth.

  She was waiting to be raped. She knew it and Kaya knew it. But it was not called rape and it was not thought of that way. It would have been considered treasonous, or demented, to have such a thought.

  In her state of increasing panic, she imagined hundreds of birds were screeching and trying to enter the room through the space under the door. But as the sound grew more distinct she realized that it was the sound of swords scraping in their sheaths. She thought it must be the Sultan. The door opened, and in walked two of the eunuchs and a third man. They introduced him as the Royal Alchemist. He was a tall man, not Turkish but Armenian, and he had a mustache and long, compassionate eyebrows. He came toward her, slowly, and he could tell by her voice that she was Persian. She was talking now, feverishly, asking him to help her escape. His face was so gentle that she assumed he could rescue her. Which direction should I run? she asked, and he said, There are guards everywhere. Hide me, then, she said, and his eyebrows angled more steeply, giving her hope. She was not aware, in her delirium, that he was as much a servant as she, and that although he would have loved to lift her up and run off with her in a cloud of colored silk, he had a job to perform. He was here to work.

  He knelt down to look into her face and took her hand, almost as if he were a physician taking her pulse. He explained that he was a metalsmith, and that in addition to his practice of alchemy, he was a craftsman, that he made objects, including musical instruments.

  “I understand you are a wonderful dancer,” he said.

  “Oh, no, not at all,” she said. “I’m clumsy, and my arms are too long.”

  He told her that the Sultan had asked for her because he had seen her dance. He had seen her in his mother’s, the Valide Sultan’s, suite, where Parvin had been selected as a favorite and often performed for th
e head of the harem’s entertainment. One of the girls would recite poetry and Parvin would move, using traditional steps but often inventing gestures of her own, and it was during one of these graceful exercises that the Sultan had spotted her through a curtain. He came often, to pay tribute to his mother and to enjoy the company of his consorts, but the time he had witnessed her dancing she had not been aware of his presence.

  “The Sultan has requested that I make a special set of cymbals to be played while you perform for him. I am here to watch you dance, so that I can be inspired to create the perfect instruments.”

  She said that she usually performed to poetry, and that in any case she was not moved at the moment to dance. Her delirium had transmuted into fearlessness, and now she said whatever she felt.

  Then one of the two eunuchs stepped forward. He had been standing in the shadows and she hadn’t realized until now that he was the one who had stopped her from jumping. He stepped forward and began to recite a passage from the great poet Firdusi. His shoulders were very broad and as he spoke his white tunic swelled with the energy from his lungs and chest. He looked straight ahead, and still would not meet her eyes, but his gaze was less stern now than before. For a moment, she thought she could sense him shaking slightly, but his words betrayed nothing; they were strong and clear and mellow. The quality of his voice reminded her of the wind pushing little waves far out on the ocean. For the first time in days she felt a lightness in her body. She stood up from the pillows and began to dance.

  2005

  Some nights after she left Milo, Honor would turn up the music until it thundered in her ears. She hoped that she would blow out an eardrum. She liked the crash of the cymbals in her head. The music was the music Sam had left her. Sam had played drums as a kid. He loved the sound of cymbals. Listen to them, he would say to her, they can shimmer or they can crack. Now, either way, they broke her heart. He’d taught her about how, in his humble opinion—he would say that, his humble opinion, ironically of course because he knew that there was nothing humble about him—he had taught her that so much of jazz was all about cymbals. Symbols? Like symbols on a sign or in a poem, she had asked, looking out the car window, because she hadn’t really been paying attention. That’s cute, he’d said. No, cymbals with a c, he went on, they really changed the music in this country because it was when they started using the cymbals for the beat that jazz really began to swing. Swing music, he said, it really all started with cymbals.

  And where did cymbals start? she asked playfully, only somewhat curious. A pathetic attempt at flirting, she thought. She was unable to distract him.

  That’s a good question, he said thoughtfully. Always the teacher, always the journalist. Always honest:

  I have no idea.

  The Cymbal Maker

  Avedis had a workshop far from the Sultan’s chambers, on the other side of the palace grounds. Here he and his assistants made cups to be used in the baths, kitchens, and harems of the palace, and poured bronze for the enormous vessels in which the cooks prepared feasts for the Sultan. He was a metalsmith because his father, who had immigrated to Constantinople in 1598, had been a metalsmith. Avedis had done well in the family trade. Recently, he had been given authorization to make cymbals and bells for the Sultan’s court. But his passion, his intellectual lust, was for alchemy. The Sultan, Murad IV, was indulgent of Avedis’s interest not only because it promised riches, but because he had a taste for gold jewelry. A savage warrior who had had seventeen of his eighteen brothers murdered when he ascended to the throne, Murad evidently also saved a place in his heart for beauty. He was a drunk who loved the poets. He adored women and soulful music. And he dreamt of marrying his passions, as he had explained to Avedis while posing for a miniature portrait in jeweled chain mail armor, in a vision of Parvin, the Persian girl with the long limbs, dancing to the rhythm of heavenly cymbals. He wanted Avedis to create the perfect accompaniment to her movement, a sound that would capture her grace.

  After seeing her dance himself, Avedis understood his Sovereign’s obsession. His insides bled a little when he thought of her. Sitting in his workshop, hunched over a stained and ancient copy of Paracelsus’ The Tincture of the Philosophers, he could not keep himself from picturing the curve of her elbow as it swept before her face, and the bend of her knee, seen behind folds of silk, as it dipped and allowed her ankles to soften and then push her delicate feet off the ground. He tried to concentrate on the words in front of him, which were explaining that all that was necessary to obtain the Philosopher’s Stone was to mix and coagulate the “rose-colored blood of the Lion” and the “gluten of the Eagle,” but it was hopeless. He heard over and over her pleas to him to help her escape, and he was ashamed at himself for having paid so little attention. But what could he have done? Risk execution for the sake of a girl he didn’t know? He had worked long and hard to acquire his status within the palace, and his dream was to start his own factory in Constantinople. Besides, when she’d asked him, he hadn’t yet seen her dance.

  As soon as that thought bubbled in his brain, the rationalization disgusted him. He was a gentle man, but severe with himself. He seemed to seek out the same kind of magical perfection in his own behavior that he sought in his laboratory. But it was too late for nobility in action. Now he was left to wonder about her. What made her so headstrong and unhappy? Most of the girls in the harem would have been pleased to be picked by the Sultan. It was an opportunity to better their circumstances, perhaps even give birth to a princess and be taken care of for life, or to a prince and possibly become the Valide Sultan, the head of the harem and the true power behind the throne. Or, if the Sultan fell deeply for a consort, he might make her a Haseki, one of his favorites, and she could live in the New Palace, and receive a higher allowance than his own daughters. To be a Haseki was in many ways the most powerful position of all, and most girls in the harem would not even dream of such good fortune. But obviously the Sultan’s latest infatuation had no craving for power or security. She appeared to live through her feelings alone: fear, need, dancing, abandon. Maybe she was too young to appreciate her situation; she looked to him to be about sixteen, although something in her eyes told him she was older. Or maybe she was just a fool. It didn’t matter. His heart bent like one of his molten metals when he pictured her. He would have turned her to gold to save her, if he’d known how, but in spite of his years of study and experimentation, he did not. All he could hope to give her at this point was a set of cymbals that would do justice to her art, an instrument whose purity might equal hers, and, if he was lucky, whose vibrations might also contain a hint of the longing he felt for her—his, and this was how he had already begun to think of her, as his—his lovely and unobtainable, his mysterious and imprisoned Parvin.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  1936

  When will you tell her?

  She already knows, Joe said.

  How can you tell?

  She suggested we go to see Basie, at Roseland. It wasn’t like her. She doesn’t like the music that much, and it’s too expensive. She never thinks of that kind of thing.

  She loves you very much.

  She used to. Not anymore.

  People don’t really stop loving other people, Vivian said.

  She had her head on his shoulder. Her hair in twisted ribbons down his back.

  She’s frightened, she said.

  I’m frightened, he said.

  He touched her face with his hand.

  But you’ll never stop loving me? he said.

  I don’t see how that’s possible.

  1623

  In the mornings when she awoke, the Sultan was already gone. He left the bed sequined with silver coins, a sign that he was pleased, and every morning she collected the coins and threw them in the base of the ceramic pot where a leafy flowering plant grew in the corner. One day, as she was covering the coins with dirt, Kaya walked in wearing a tense expression on her face, and behind her was the eunuch. He nodded his head for
Kaya to leave, which she did, but not before going over to the flowerpot and pretending to clean it, while quickly hiding the last of the coins. When she left and Parvin was alone with the eunuch, they stood facing each other for several long seconds before he spoke.

  It was unexpected that there would be so much tension; the black eunuchs were in charge of the harem women and Parvin had spent almost her entire life in the harem. She had been followed by, tended to, practically siblings with these men. They had seen her unveiled, unclothed, unwashed. But she had never seen this man before the day he had stopped her from jumping out of the carriage, and she felt a deep and inevitable bond to him. She did not blame him for taking her to the Sultan because he had saved her life and he had done so even though—and this was absolutely clear to her—he had done it even though he had no illusions that her life included any more joy or hope or liberty than his. It was simply hers. He recognized that, and she wanted to thank him for it.