Orpheus Lost (20 page)

“T
HOSE FUCKING BANDITS,
” Cobb fumed. “What do you mean, you don’t know where he is?”

“Sir, we contacted Military Intelligence the way you wanted. We arranged to hand over the father—”

“The
father
,” Cobb barked. “I told you to hold the son until I got there.”

“Special Forces barged in and took over, sir. They took both men.”

“You should have stopped them. They have no jurisdiction in Beirut.”

“But they do here, sir, in Baghdad. In the war zone.”

“They hate having their miserable intelligence failures shown up.” Cobb punched the desktop with his fist. “They wouldn’t have either man if it weren’t for us. Find out where they are.”

“I tried, sir, but they were ghosted. There’s no paper trail. There’s no way to trace them.”

“There’s always a way. Talk to the rank and file. Find out from barracks gossip where they went.”

“I’ve already done that, sir. For what gossip’s worth, the rumor is rendition. Egypt for the father, no one’s sure about the son. Probably still in Baghdad is the word, but turned over to certain Iraqi militia who know what to do.”

“Find out.”

“Yes, sir. Military Intelligence says we’ll get a commendation, sir. The father’s a very big fish.”

“They’re trying to buy us off.”

“Yes, sir. But we
have
pulled a major terrorist out of the game. We can all sleep better.”

Cobb did not sleep better. He slept fitfully and a phone kept ringing in his dreams. Sometimes it was Benedict Boykin, sometimes Leela.
Iraqi militia who know what to do
, they both accused.

With respect, sir
, Benedict Boykin said, and kept saying like a badly cracked record,
it seems to me that this does not absolve…

Cobb
, Leela said,
what have you done? Did you listen to the messages he left me? Mishka’s a lost soul looking for his father.

It’s not my fault
, Cobb pleaded.
The Iraqi militia wasn’t what I planned. I was planning to handle this myself. I play tough but I don’t play dirty.

He unplugged the phone but it kept on ringing.

T
HE SACKING SMELLED
like night soil and when Mishka breathed in—when he
could
breathe in—he felt grit and hair fibers on his tongue. His tongue seemed abnormally large and soon it would not fit in his mouth. Soon breathing would be impossible. Mostly he was not conscious of breathing but he was conscious of something that felt like hot skewers in his shoulders. His wrists were tied together, crosswise, and held in a carpenter’s vise. Someone was tightening the vise.

The pain came and went.

There were moments of sheer sweetness, moments when he could not remember where he was and then knew he was where he wanted to be.

He had found his father.

Or perhaps he dreamed he had found his father.

In some of the dreams his father embraced him. In others, his father smashed his oud. In still others, his father brandished a scimitar and slashed Mishka neatly in two from head to toe.

The pain was like a crowded city street. So much was happening that he could not translate the danger, could not distinguish mere agony from life-threatening risk. There seemed to be buses, cars, trucks, road tankers, dumpsters, eighteen-wheelers, all bearing cargoes of torment, all emptying their loads on his body,
all threatening to crush him, and the shouting drivers, buffeting pedestrians, horns, screaming tires, policemen’s batons were blurred into one vast cacophony of peril. He wanted to shout
Wait, give me a fighting chance, let me face one lethal collision at a time
, but the turnpike of pain was too foreign, the traffic was coming too fast, it was too…it was too…and then, unpredictably, it would switch to slow motion and a detail would flicker and pause and loom huge and close inside the sacking. For example: a car would brake, he would hear the scream of its tires, or perhaps the scream was his own, and one time he saw the face of a child pressed against the window of the car. It was the face of a little girl and he saw her in extraordinary detail: her wide frightened eyes, the freckles on her cheeks, the red barrette in her hair.

Mishka
, her lips mimed soundlessly, and he realized he was just inches away from his mother. What are you doing here? he asked, confused, because she should have been safely tucked in the family album, aged six or seven, behind the window of his grandfather’s car. He could see the down on her neck.

Neck, she echoed, nodding and nodding, and now he could begin to translate. He could identify one strand of the pain. He became conscious of a savage chafing where the hood was tied. His mother rolled down the window of the car. Mishka, she said, let me help, and he left his body and climbed through the window and she slid her cool fingers beneath the rope. You must identify each thread, she explained. You must isolate and catalog and name. When you are finished, the car can drive us away and we can leave your body behind. Look, she said. See? It isn’t you. It’s just a stage costume and you can climb in and out.

He joined his mother at the window and they stared at the effigy wearing the costume of his body. It was swinging by its
wrists from a hook. Its feet did not quite touch the floor. Apart from the hood, it was naked. The light changed, the car moved, and Mishka left his effigy behind.

He could hear screams.

He wondered which were the screams of his effigy and which were coming from the next cell.

The car—it was no longer his grandfather’s car, it was a limousine, and the driver was dressed entirely in black—drove into yesterday. Where are we going? Mishka asked the driver. My instructions are to monitor the arrival of your flight from Paris, the driver said. Mishka recognized the airport in Beirut. Very smoothly, very cleverly, the car cruised onto the tarmac and onto the plane and up a side aisle and stopped at Seat 36A. Here’s your row, his child-mother said. She was still with him in the back of the limo. You have to get off here, she told him. I’ll wait in the car till you need me again.

Mishka disembarked with the other passengers. He cleared Customs and Immigration. He took a cab from the terminal to the Beirut Dunes Holiday Inn and checked in with his small suitcase and his oud. Then he sat by the telephone and smoothed out the paper napkin which bore the logo of Café Marrakesh, Cambridge, Massachusetts. He read the phone number aloud. Three times his nerve failed him. He drank two miniature bottles of scotch from the mini bar and stood on the balcony and let the breeze off the harbor buffet him until he grew calm. He was on the sixth floor and the Mediterranean stretched as far as the eye could see like a shimmering crystal shawl.

He went to the telephone. He dialed the number of his apartment in Cambridge. He got the answering machine.

“Leela? It’s me, Mishka. I’m in Beirut. I’m safe, I’m fine, I’m at the Holiday Inn, the Beirut Dunes Holiday Inn. I was afraid to tell you where I’d be staying in case things went wrong, but
everything’s fine. I had no trouble at all. I should be meeting my father today. I’ll call you later, after we’ve met. I love you, Leela.”

He hung up. He took three deep breaths. He dialed his number in Cambridge again.

“It’s me again, Leela. Look, just in case something goes wrong…This is silly, because the worst that can happen is my father will reject me, or he’ll turn out not to be my father, or he’ll be my father and I’ll be horrified by him, and I’m already braced for all of those possibilities, but I have this…I have a premonition, I have a feeling of dread. I suppose it’s just nerves.

“Anyway, in case something does go wrong, I’m going to mail you a postcard today. It’ll have the phone number of my father on it, I mean of Marwan Rahal Abukir, who’s probably my father. It seems silly not to read it to you right now, but there are reasons I can’t. I don’t want you to do anything unless something goes wrong. And I’ll also send a letter for my mother, but I don’t want you to mail it on unless, you know…

“I’ll call back later tonight or tomorrow, after I’ve met him.”

He opened the drawer of the desk and found the stationery folder. There were two identical postcards:
View of Beirut Harbor from the Holiday Inn
. He wrote the phone number of Marwan Rahal Abukir on the back of one card and scrawled:
Leela, This is the number. Love, Mishka.
He wrote a letter to his mother on hotel stationery and sealed it in a hotel envelope and addressed it:
Devorah Bartok, c/- Daintree Post Office, Queensland, Australia
. He placed both the postcard and the sealed letter inside another envelope which he addressed to Leela. Then he went down to the reception desk and asked for an airmail stamp to the States.

“We can take care of that for you,” the receptionist smiled.

Back in his room, he felt safer. He dialed the number Sleiman Abboud had given him.

A voice answered in Arabic.

“This is Mikael Abukir,” Mishka said. “I would like to speak to my father.”

Someone was tightening the vise on Mishka’s wrists and lifting him. His feet were not touching the floor. His shoulders were burning. A black wave, tidal, engulfed him and he was floundering, but his father was floundering too and a great access of energy made itself available to Mishka. He could have swum, if necessary, from Beirut to the heel of Italy. Certainly he could swim across the lobby of the Holiday Inn which was under black water. In the spaces between manta rays and sharks and armed soldiers he could see himself in a time-lapse image and his swimming arms pulled at the waves, stroke after stroke, and he was there.

His father embraced him. “My son,” he said. “Allah be praised.”

Mishka was sobbing and could not speak. What word should he use? Dad? My father? When he managed at last: “We do look alike, my mother said that we looked alike,” he could see that his voice was a shock.

His father, agitated, turned away and covered his face with his hands. “You have an Australian accent,” his father said, and Mishka thought his father was weeping. His father’s accent was British boarding school but there was an overlay of Aussie diphthongs, a faint hint of surf beaches and Aussie pubs.

“It brings back a lot of memories,” his father said. “Your accent.”

“Where did you learn English?” Mishka asked.

“School. A British school here in Beirut. My father paid for the best education for his sons.” His father seemed nervous in
the lobby. He kept looking behind him. “Shall we walk on the beach,” his father asked, “and pretend it’s Bondi?”

“Can I show you something first? In my room?”

Mishka felt an intense urgency to display his oud, to play the oud for his father. He felt that something decisive would be learned.

“In your room?” his father said. “Why in your room?”

“Why did you go to your room?” the voice demanded over and over. It was booming very large inside the hood. It was the voice of a hostile schoolteacher and Mishka was being caned again and again and he could see the sugarcane fields and the Mossman schoolroom and the expanse of Beirut Harbor and the strange indecipherable look on his father’s face when Mishka showed him the oud, but he could not see the right answer to the question and the teacher was enraged and was shouting and striking and pushing and his mother came by in the car again and they drove into the dark.

His mother must have dropped him off near the Holiday Inn because he was walking with his father along the boulevard, the Mediterranean on one side, the canyon of high-rise hotels on the other. “It’s very beautiful,” Mishka said. “Beirut is a beautiful city. Very different from what I expected.”

“Does it remind you of Sydney Harbour?” his father asked.

“It reminds me of Queensland beaches. Surfers Paradise. Noosa. The esplanade in Cairns.”

“I never visited Queensland,” his father said. “But this always reminds me of Sydney Harbour. And Sydney Harbour reminded me of Beirut. I rode the ferries every day, sometimes for hours, because I was homesick. I met your mother that way.”

“Yes,” Mishka said. “She told me.”

They left the boulevard and walked along the beach. Without thinking about it, Mishka sat on the sand and removed his shoes. He tied the laces together and slung the shoes over his shoulder. His father watched without comment, but did not remove his own shoes. They walked for a long time without speaking.

At last his father said: “Is your mother still living?”

“Yes.”

“How is she?”

“She is well,” Mishka said.

“She has married?”

“No. Never.”

“Your mother was a beautiful woman.”

“She is still beautiful,” Mishka said. He counted one hundred steps in the sand before he said: “The last time I saw her, we were walking along the esplanade in Cairns, beside the Pacific. The tide was out.”

“We used to take the ferry to Manly,” his father said. “We used to walk on the beach.”

“My mother loves shells. She loves gathering seaweed and shells.”

“I remember that.” His father stopped to pick up the black empty wings of a mussel. “I felt passion for your mother, but I am no longer the young man I was in Sydney. She would understand.”

“She did not know what to think. She believed you were dead.”

“It seemed less cruel that way.”

Mishka said nothing. He walked diagonally, moving closer to the water. His father followed. Mishka crossed the wet sand and let the tide splash around his ankles. He kept walking. There was a distance between his father and himself.

“I was already betrothed before I went to Australia as a student,” his father said. “I came back to dissolve the betrothal honorably. That was my intention, but it was not possible. Family honor required that I marry.”

“I see,” Mishka said. He wanted to ask:
And were you never curious? Did you never wish to know anything about your Australian child?
But he was afraid to know the answer to this. Instead he asked: “Do I have half-brothers and half-sisters?”

“You have five half-sisters. I have no other sons. That was my punishment, the will of Allah.”

Mishka kept walking into the water until the waves were at his knees and then sharks or predators, or perhaps fishermen with poles and sharp hooks, were tearing at his flesh and black water closed over him.

The sack over his head was like a night sky.

Floating lights, like small moons, came and went. Mishka floated. Perhaps he was flying. Perhaps one wing was ripped off. He felt as though one wing had been ripped off. The pain was excruciating, but it came and went. Sometimes the moons disappeared completely and the sky was so black that Mishka wondered if he were in fact not part of the sky at all but sunk deep in the ocean, below light. There were long stretches of nothing and he would wonder where he had been. Sometimes a great bird—an eagle, a vulture—tore at his liver with its beak.

The bird would fix him with its basilisk eye, demanding answers, and he could see the eye through the hessian sack. The eye burned him.

Yes, Mishka confessed. Prometheus. That is my name.

He confessed that he was in possession of hidden knowledge and he was keeping that knowledge hidden from the gods, though he understood it would be plucked from him.

Sometimes he said: “My name is Orpheus,” and then he realized that the snarling shapes in the room were Cerberus and his fierce brood of pups.

He tried to explain that he had not descended into the dark world of Cerberus to steal secrets. Love had brought him. He had wanted to know if he could love his father and if his father could love him. He had come to call love to himself with his oud. If he could play his oud, if he would be permitted to play for Cerberus…

His answers were always wrong and brought punishment.

He tried to remember the secrets he had filched. This was required. Yes, he confessed, he knew of incidents. He knew about the bombing in Boston. He knew many details: the Park Street stop, the train after his, the bodies, the torn limbs, the severed head of Jamil Haddad. What more did he know of Jamil Haddad? He knew much. He knew that Jamil was an engineer. He knew that Jamil hated music. He knew that Jamil Haddad knew Sleiman Abboud.

Cerberus snarled and growled and continued to tear at Mishka’s flesh. Mishka’s wings—he was still suspended in flight, his wings caught in a tree perhaps, or in a net—were dislocated along the muscle where his feathered limbs were attached to his back. If he gave names, Cerberus promised, the pain in his wing sockets would be eased. He gave the name of his father and Uncle Fadi. He gave again the name of Jamil Haddad. He gave the name of Dr. Siddiqi who had introduced him to Jamil Haddad. He gave the name of Sleiman Abboud. He gave the name of Mr. Hajj, his music teacher in Brisbane, Australia, who had taught him to play the oud.