Orpheus Lost by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

microphone ears in the drapes and promptly hung up.
    She got up from her chair and left the room. In the bedroom, she pulled down the blind. Would that help? Shestood on a chair and draped a pillowcase over the light fixture that dangled from the ceiling in one corner. She looked in the closets. She looked under the bed. She could not see any foreign object.
    She gathered up sheets of paper from the messy pile on Mishka’s desk. The sheets were lined with staves and scribbled over with the draft notes of the composition in progress. In one of the margins, Mishka had scribbled: Bach meets Saladin . On another page, beneath the heading Rūmī , he had copied the lines of a poem:
At the time when we shall come into the garden, thou and I.
    The stars of Heaven will come to gaze upon us:
    We shall show them the moon herself, thou and I.
    Thou and I, individuals no more, shall be mingled in ecstasy…
    Below this there were notes:
Check Rūmī translations with Siddiqi.
Prepare critiques of ghazal compositions for Siddiqi’s seminar.
Persian Classical CDs in Music Lab. (Catalog; make copies.)
Write paper for conference: Comparison of Persian dastgah system with Western octave.
Incident: experiment with fusion of Western octave and dastgah system. Possible in same piece?
    Leela went to her own computer and summoned up Google and typed in Rumi .
    Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī , she read on a website, who died in 1273, was the greatest mystical poet of Persia and also one of the supreme masters of Sufism. In current brands of fundamentalist Islam, Rūmī and Sufism are condemned as Western-influenced corruptions.
    She then visited the Harvard School of Music website and scrolled through the faculty listings. She found Siddiqi, Abdul-Hakeem, Distinguished Professor, who was teaching a course in History of Persian Classical Music. She clicked on his email address. Dear Dr. Abdul-Hakeem Siddiqi , she typed. She stared at her screen. If Cobb’s information was reliable, Mishka, along with the suicide bomber, was auditing Dr. Siddiqi’s course. Perhaps Mishka went to the mosque as part of a course assignment. It might be that simple.
    Dear Dr. Abdul-Hakeem Siddiqi:
    I am curious to know , she typed, whether your junior colleague Mishka Bartok, whom you possibly know by the name Mikael Abukir—he has a post-doc, but I believe he is auditing your course—has ever discussed…
    But what did Mishka ever discuss besides music?
    She erased her message. She clicked CANCEL .
    She knew everything and nothing about Mishka Bartok.
    She knew the taste of his skin. She knew the sweet smell of him before and during and after making love, she could summon up those fragrant stages at will. She knew what it was like to be enclosed in the haunting cocoon of his music—early Baroque, high Baroque, his own compositions, which Leela could only describe as Baroque Postmodern—and she would simply sit with her eyes closed and listen.
    Then he would switch to the oud and play for hours. He would sit cross-legged on a cushion on the floor.
    “Is that required?” Leela joked. “Oud players have to sit on the floor?”
    Mishka smiled but did not deign to answer as his left hand fingered the chords. In his right he held not a bow, but a long pick shaped like a quill. “It’s called a risha ,” he told her.
    “When did you learn to play the oud?”
    “I’ve been playing for years.”
    “The math of the rhythm blows my mind, but you never play chords on your oud. No harmonics.”
    “No. Persian music’s melodic and rhythmic, not polyphonic. Totally different system.”
    “So what’s the attraction? I don’t understand.”
    “My father played the oud. He was a singer.”
    “Ah, I’d forgotten. But he died before you were born.”
    “Right.”
    “Do you have relatives on your father’s side?”
    “I do, yes.”
    “Are they in Australia?”
    “No.”
    “Where are they?”
    “Beirut, I believe. We have no contact.”
    “Aren’t you curious?