“How can I understand when you’ve told me so little?” she begins, and then stops in a horrible confusion, a fog of inarticulate feeling. She has come to know this man in his every gesture and reflex, and now he is going to disappear into alien landscapes, the violent scenes she’s glimpsed, the maiming … She thinks of the plastic-wrapped limb in Rotterdam. He will kill people, or he will be killed. Both are impossible thoughts. She was not meant to have such thoughts. She was not meant for this, not meant to know the world in this way, or to know such a world.
“Why must you go?” she asks, her voice muffled with hurt and accusation; although she knows it is a superfluous question.
“I must,” he says. “I have been summoned. I am needed in my country. It is my turn.”
“For how long?” she asks, her voice fragmenting a little with the chaos of her feeling.
“For a while,” he says, impatiently. “I do not know.”
The sheikh comes up close to Anzor and looks at him as if to say, it is time. He may have something to say to Isabel as well, because he’s turning toward her, when a man in a Burberry coat walks past them hurriedly, brushing against the sheikh so that a small briefcase falls out of the folds of his robe, and to the floor. Anzor, in a coiled movement, seizes the man’s shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.
“Anzor …” she begins, but the sheikh directs a look of such disgust at her that she stops.
“Apologize,” Anzor brings out, detaining the man with his grip, his voice strangled to the point of incoherence. “Apologize.”
The man looks taken aback, then coldly angry. He tries to take Anzor’s hand off his shoulder, but Anzor holds on, and the man stands still, in a display of perfect self-composure. “Apologize to whom?” he asks in a deliberately unexcited voice. “For what?”
“To him!” Anzor shouts, jabbing his forefinger in the sheikh’s direction. “You think just because he is—”
“I think nothing,” the man says coldly. “I was in a hurry. I am in a hurry. Please excuse me.”
“Anzor …” Isabel begins again, but again, the sheikh throws her a look of unmistakable warning. She must not speak. She must know her place. His finger, extended out of his robe, reinforces the message.
“You owe him an apology,” Anzor repeats, with a low, explosive emphasis.
The clerk behind the counter has been observing them closely, and is clearly trying to decide whether to intervene. The sheikh, who has picked up his briefcase, now shakes his head in Anzor’s direction, and makes a subduing movement with his hands, palms down. The man in the Burberry coat gives Anzor a look that is now frankly contemptuous, and walks out through the revolving door.
For a moment, Anzor looks as though he might run after him. Then, with an effort, he restrains himself. He stands as if not knowing where to turn. His face is flushed. He’s not looking at her, or at the sheikh.
She’s been following Anzor’s every gesture with her eyes. “For God’s sake, why do you get so angry?” she asks in genuine bafflement, some impulse to make contact with him overtaking her, as if it still mattered; as if they weren’t about to part.
Anzor snaps his head to face her in fury. “Didn’t you see his arrogance? His … condescension? They think they can be rude just because—”
“I think you’re imagining—” Isabel begins, and then stops. She realizes, in a flash of clarity, that to finish the sentence would be to undo what has happened between them; that if she thinks Anzor only imagines the offense, imagines all the slights against which she has seen him ignite, then she can no longer assent to
her feelings for him freely. Some measure of respect will have been lost. And the loss of respect, she instantly recognizes, is the beginning of the loss of love. Not that it matters any longer, she recognizes in the same flash; and yet it does.
“It is you who doesn’t see what’s going on,” Anzor hurls in an undertone, and his mouth twists with an expression that has cruelty in it, and a kind of weakness. “You don’t see what’s in front of you.”
Then he too stops, and they stand facing each other, his gaze filled with such ambiguous embers that it might as well be emitting its own infrared spectrum. She returns his look; she is, as yet, incapable of not doing so.
The sheikh summons Anzor to come closer with his expressive finger. They speak in an undertone, with the sheikh throwing glances in her direction as if she were an inanimate object of reference. They’re deciding what to do with her. Or about her. Then the sheikh, in the first English phrase she’s heard him utter, says, very clearly: “Stupid bitch.”
Anzor winces and half closes his eyes, as if in pain. She knows her own eyes are very wide open. She stares at the men, at the sheikh. A long moment passes.
Anzor comes back toward her, and spreads his hands, in a gesture of resignation. He looks tired now and very distant. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I mean, I’m sorry we have no more time. I must go now.”
“I wish you didn’t,” she says, before knowing that’s what she will say; but as she looks at his lean body and his face, which has gone pale and drained from the expense of emotion, she knows that this too is true.
The sheikh nods at Anzor sternly, and she allows herself to respond with a look of contempt. The sheikh moves toward the door, in his stately way. Anzor takes her hand in his, and brings it close to his eyes, as if to give it one last inspection. She’s still
surprised by the delicacy of his long-fingered hand. Her own, muscled through years of practice, is probably stronger than his.
The sheikh holds the door open, as if to say, it’s time. Anzor’s eyes, as he lets go of her hand, gather to a new focus; and, without a word, in an odd repetition of the gesture she remembers from their first meeting, he turns away from her abruptly, and follows the sheikh through the door. Outside, a silver Mercedes-Benz seems to be waiting for them, and a compact man in a dark turtleneck sweater emerges from it and holds the door open for them to get in.
The parenthesis has come to an end. Just put brackets around the whole interlude, she commands herself, pacing around her room, or a fermata, to suggest a long pause. Then move on. If I could, she answers herself from some other part of herself, if it were not for what I actually … feel. This, it seems, cannot be bracketed, it sloshes and swirls and threatens to spill. Unmediated, immediate, hurtful. The swirl includes her moment of clarity about Anzor, the clarity of doubt. She wants to rewind, to ask him questions. To shake him, shout at him, make him tell her what was really going on. Although, in a general way, it has been obvious enough. It is the specifics she has avoided, the awkward literal specifics of his ideas; his beliefs; his four-square declarations. Ideas, which have seemed to her to be mere surface, foamy froth of the mind. What did Anzor’s errant convictions matter, compared to the glow of Conviction itself, the dark light in his eyes? That was what convinced her, spoke to her with its own eloquence. That was what she wanted to be close to, essence to essence, flame to flame. Without rules or contracts, or limits on what to take and, especially, what to give. Without mediations.
The very thought of this is beginning to fill her with queasy embarrassment, as she winces to herself, goes down to the
fateful lobby for coffee to distract herself. Larry once compared her, meanly, to Madame Bovary. He was always big on tropes and archetypes. But was he right, was she misled by the promise of music, as poor Emma was once misled by her cheap romances … Was she misled by the intimations of beauty, truth, love? She read
Madame Bovary
in one of her literature courses, where Emma’s yearnings were taken apart sentence by sentence and shown to be cheap illusions, sentimental and paper-thin. Surely, she should know better. She comes after. She has read
Madame Bovary
, surely she cannot be Madame Bovary.
After a few days, she tries to call him, but his London phone has been cut off. His mobile number is no longer valid. Cut. Cut off. The unkindest cut of all. The loss, now that she really admits it, stabs as if a shark fin emerged from the deep, to puncture her through her diaphragm, her lungs. Perhaps her heart. The heart is a pump, she thinks, a mechanical instrument. We know that now, it’s the easiest part of the body to fix. We can take it apart and patch it together. She could get a new one if necessary, if this one continues to behave in this unacceptably retrograde way. She could get a more up-to-date organ. And yet she cannot stop the erratic movements of something inside her, the ebb and flow of blood, which informs her she’s suffering, as no one has suffered before. As everyone has suffered before.
She wonders where Anzor is, what he is doing. But she doesn’t know enough to imagine the setting in which he is operating, never mind the dramatis personae. She remembers the Kazakh horsemen whom he once described. Is it possible he is on a horse? Surely not, surely no one travels on horses anymore, and certainly no one goes to battle on them. The man on the horse is as outmoded as the heart, although men go on stabbing and killing. Is he, then, on one of those trucks, rattling and comfortless, surrounded by men casually holding their Uzis or Kalashnikovs, or whatever they carry, how is she supposed to
know about such things? She doesn’t want to know, surely she is allowed that much delicacy. But Anzor too is delicate, his hand, his mouth, how is he faring on a thuggish truck among men willing to maim and mutilate. Has he done so already, are his hands capable of it … But of course it is not his body which has taken him there, it is his mind and his rage, that is what has transported him all the way to the heart of violence. The shark fin surfaces and stabs. She’s pierced by fearfulness, for him, but also, for something else. What has she lost, what was she seeking … Anzor seemed to promise … what? Relief from the banality of the flat, concrete world, she tells herself sternly. She thought she could find in one person the completeness whose intimations she hears in the music. She wanted to be taken beyond her own borders, up into wholeness, and down into the innermost center, the molten source from which music proceeds. Was she, instead, falling for a tawdry metaphor, threadbare from overuse? Was Larry right about that too? Center, beyond, wholeness. How he would satirize those words. Her disappointment begins, gnawingly, to turn on herself. She has been her own biggest blind spot, and she peers into the void left by Anzor, trying to discern what it is she has failed to see, or so badly misunderstood.
Barcelona
The explosion comes—she’ll be sure of it later—simultaneously with the last chord of the Chopin Scherzo. It has been obviously well timed. Or perhaps whoever it was that set off the deafening inchoate noise had the natural impulse to wait till the Scherzo came to its inexorable, its bravura culmination.
She comes down on the last chords with her full force, gripping the keys with capturing fingers, like a large bird landing.
Something locks into place. It is complete. Simultaneously, an inarticulate roar shatters the air and reverberates through her like a horrible, distorted augmentation of the chord she is still gripping. In that distended moment, she is astonished, but not really surprised. Her hands come off the keyboard with their accustomed gracefulness as the thud reaches its climax. It is too late to modify the gesture, though she becomes aware, even as her hands fall softly into her lap, that it is somehow wrong. Inappropriate. Then, from the haze of her extreme focus, a realization comes forth. She has heard a bomb going off, she knows that instantly, though she’s never heard one before. The splintering, deafening ugliness: a bomb. The anti-music: a bomb. She stands up abruptly and doesn’t know where to turn. In the dark auditorium, there are angry shouts, fearful shrieks. In a second, the lights go up. Coming forward to the rim of the stage, she sees people scrambling toward the aisles, standing in awkward poses, trying to crouch in the narrow spaces between the seats, pushing others out of the way. A few remain calm, and they are oddly moving in their stoical dignity; but in a minute, the audience will turn into a herd, dangerous in its fear. A solitary shout of “Help!” rings out, small and trivial. A word from another era. Her gaze, from her stage promontory, alights on a figure at the back, standing still and looking at her very directly. It’s the sheikh, she’s sure of it, although he is now wearing a smooth suit and looks like any other member of the audience. Except for his demeanor, which seems entirely unaffected by the melee around him. Even from this distance, she can tell he is looking at her with a sort of brazenness. He has sent her a warning signal. Stay away. Do not dare to interfere in what is beyond you; in what is not your business. Well, she’s been warned. In the moment’s preternatural lucidity, she stares at the sheikh across the auditorium, and feels the force of his loathing. Then he turns away with deliberation, pushing a dark-haired
woman in front of him, steering her toward the exit. Amid the mass of clumsy, frightened bodies, neither of them looks disoriented or frightened.
Somebody is approaching her from the stage entrance, and putting his hands round her shoulders. She is led out quickly, while the man mutters reassuringly that it’s all right, it’s going to be all right. She nods, even as she’s beginning to shake. In the Green Room, someone sits her down and hands her a glass of water. She notices that her teeth are chattering. Then her Barcelona minder is there, taking her by the hand. What’s his name? Soldano maybe, that’s good enough. “Are you all right?” he asks, his voice concerned but very controlled. After all, he is the man in charge. Illogically, she wants to scream at him that so much control at such a moment is indecent, that it is immoral. They should all be screaming, in rage and protest. But he’s right, someone must stay steady, and she answers, through her chattering teeth, “Yes, I’m all right. Of course I’ll be all right, I’m fine, I’ll be fine.”
“The bastards,” he now spits out, having ascertained she’s not injured, and injecting the furious force of his Spanish pronunciation into the word. “
Salauds
.” She is in Barcelona, how long has she been in Barcelona? The wrecking noise back there has warped time. She’s been here … she doesn’t know how long. Something has been going on for a very long time.