Sounds Like Titanic

by Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman

  One night I overhear The Composer speaking with a tearful woman who has waited for an hour after the concert to speak to him. Her son has been deployed to Iraq since the war began, she tells him.

  The Composer sits with her for a long time, listening and nodding. The woman’s son is being transferred tomorrow to be a medic in the Special Forces. It’s a more dangerous assignment.

  “I will pray he returns safely,” The Composer says in a soft but genuine voice of concern. It is clear that the woman is comforted by his presence. She brushes her dark hair away from her eyes, which are no longer full of tears.

  “I want him back here now,” she says. “But he says he doesn’t want to come home until the job is done.”

  “That must be so hard for you.”

  “Listening to your music really helps,” she says. “It is so calming. It gives me a few minutes of peace. You played so beautifully up on that stage. I really loved it. I really needed a night like this.”

  “Thank you,” he says. “God bless you.” And then, without any awkwardness, he wraps his arms around her and gives her a long hug.

  Itzhak Perlman Leaves the Concert Early

  New York City, 2000

  One of the first of many jobs you work in New York City is as an assistant for a production company that organizes major concert events for Carnegie Hall, including “Fiddle Fest,” the charity concert for a Harlem string program featured in the 1999 Meryl Streep movie Music of the Heart. The Harlem kids are still fiddling their hearts out onstage when your boss asks you to find Itzhak Perlman in his dressing room and ask him if he will be performing what she calls “the Palladio.” Perlman has already performed several pieces that night and the producers have made the Palladio optional for him.

  Regardless of whether Itzhak Perlman participates in it or not, the Palladio is sure to be a crowd-pleaser. It is a piece that has been chosen for this concert not for its complexity or rich musical history but because it was featured in the 1990s De Beers diamond commercials, the ones where husband-and-wife silhouettes progress through life’s touching milestones—the husband carrying his new bride over the threshold to their kid’s college graduation. Audiences love the Palladio; it is simple, dramatic, and comes with a preexisting set of mental images.

  When you were in high school, teachers and other students would occasionally ask you to play the Palladio (though everyone, yourself included, knew it only as “the diamond commercial song”). It was up there with “the beef commercial song” (Copland’s Hoedown), “that Mozart song” (Eine Kleine Nachtmusik), and “The Devil Went Down to Georgia” on every violinist’s list of Most Clichéd Requests.

  And now you are going to go ask Itzhak Perlman, the most famous violinist in the world, if he will play it.

  You are very nervous.

  You knock softly on the open door of his dressing room.

  There he is, Itzhak Perlman, looking older than the photographs on your CD jackets. He is seated at one of those vanity tables that have lightbulbs around the mirror.

  “Excuse me, Mr. Perlman,” you half-whisper. “They need to know if you will be performing the Palladio.”

  The famous, legendary Perlman—looking at you! Listening to you!

  “It’s pronounced Pa-LAH-dio,” he says, annoyed. “And no, I’m going home.”

  Cairo, Egypt

  2001

  By the end of your freshman year of college, you have dropped any lingering pretentions of majoring in music or becoming a professional musician. The scariest part about giving up the dream to become a violinist is the absence of a dream large enough to take its place. But gradually, and then quite dramatically, something else does.

  It begins, like so many interests that begin in college, when you are assigned a random course on a subject you know nothing about: Introduction to Islamic Civilization. You have no idea what Islam is, let alone Islamic civilization, but as you slog through the assigned readings and the discussion sections, you begin to realize that this is a field of study where your ignorance might be an advantage. While your classmates fight the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in each seminar, boys wearing yarmulkes trading heated jibes with girls in hijabs, you observe silently from the back of the classroom. Before going to college, you had never met a Muslim or Arab, and the only Jewish person you had ever known was your ex-boyfriend Fernando, whose family was half Jewish, religiously unobservant, and politically ambiguous. While a surprising number of your Muslim and Jewish classmates struggle with the urge to write one-sided political polemics, you are able, by no other virtue than being unfamiliar and unaffiliated with either side, to take a more objective approach. You begin to realize that you are receiving the top grades in these courses—that your rural-bred ignorance, in this one discipline, gives you an undeserved but real edge. You don’t spend much time worrying about the absurd irony that your lack of knowledge about the Middle East is what’s helping you excel in Middle Eastern studies. You just enroll in more courses: Zionism, The Quran, Palestinian Literature, The Egyptian Novel, Arab and Israeli Women’s Literature. By the end of your sophomore year, the spring of 2001, your major is Middle Eastern studies, you are capable of writing twenty-page papers about the destruction of religious icons in Taliban-run Afghanistan, and you have decided to study abroad in Cairo in the fall so that you can learn Arabic.

  You leave for Cairo on August 19, 2001. The first few weeks of your study abroad experience are spent learning the new currency, the essential Arabic phrases needed to buy groceries or ask for directions, the layout of Cairo, and how to live as a woman in a city that is recognized as the world capital of street harassment.

  Then one afternoon, around 4 p.m. Cairo time, just a few weeks into the semester, you stroll into the smoky student cafeteria after Arabic class to get a snack, shooing a stray cat off a chair so you can sit. You notice a TV across the room with a crowd of people around it. It is showing Al Jazeera streaming CNN, which is depicting live footage of two blazing holes in the World Trade Center towers. It immediately becomes apparent that your study abroad experience in the Middle East is going to be very different from the one you had been expecting.

  The first order of business is to ascertain whether or not the United States is about to bomb the living shit out of Egypt, the home country of head-hijacker Mohammad Atta, whose family home is a few blocks away from the cat-filled student cafeteria. It takes a few days before that scenario is seen to be unlikely. There is a mandatory meeting at the American Embassy for all Americans in Cairo. The ambassador explains the evacuation procedures. Many Americans—including the majority in your study abroad program—flee to Europe (it will be weeks before international flights are allowed into the United States). But you do not want to go. You see now that this study abroad experience could be a direct pipeline to a future career. The United States will need people like you, people who know about the Middle East. So you stay in Cairo, along with a few dozen other American students.

  Your classes are canceled for a week while the Egyptian military surrounds the campus with soldiers and tanks. You leave the student hostel, which seems like it could be a target, to join six other American students in a penthouse apartment near Tahrir Square. For days after the attacks, the six of you watch Al Jazeera, drink Nescafé, and chain-smoke Cleopatra cigarettes. When you tire of watching gruesome footage on TV, you climb to the roof of the apartment building and look out across the rooftops of Cairo as the muezzin calls the evening prayer. In the coming months, you and the other students experience an aftermath of September 11th that is radically unlike the American one. You navigate the complexities of the Cairene streets, where some Egyptians personally apologize for the attacks, while others claim that the United States or Israel have staged the attacks as an excuse to kill Muslims. You and the other students find yourselves in strange political waters, defending George W. Bush to Egyptians who suddenly think he is Hitler, blasting him over email to Americans back home who suddenly think he is Jesus.
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br />   As you stand on a Cairo rooftop while thousands of muezzin sing “Allāhu Akbar,” you come to understand that your violin—which you have left behind in the States—will be truly abandoned in the pursuit of another dream: to become a journalist in the Middle East. What you’re really thinking is war correspondent, and in preparation for your future résumé, you begin to write articles about what you witness in Cairo and email them to your hometown newspaper, which publishes them verbatim. Becoming a war correspondent seems like an easily achievable goal, for it looks certain that there will be a war, the kind of war people your age know about only from grandparents and history books. It is hard at first for you and the other American students in Cairo to articulate what you are feeling, but you try, in the only language that seems appropriate: the language of Hollywood. You actually say to one another, “The whole world is on fire,” as if you are the lovers in The Last of the Mohicans, the movie’s famous violin soundtrack looping in the background of the blaze. You know this is the apocalypse because you’ve seen it before in Independence Day and Deep Impact and Armageddon and Fight Club. It is almost as if, in planning the attacks, the terrorists have used your own movies against you.

  And yet here you are, this tiny circle of Americans, college juniors who have already spent years at university studying the Middle East, students who are so dedicated that you aren’t fleeing the region like the other Americans. You argue about culture and language and religion and politics, but on one thing you are in agreement: You have all chosen your majors wisely. You will all be able to help with this crisis, this scary new reality. Your once-obscure studies of Arab language, literature, culture, and religion will surely now be acknowledged by everyone back home as useful and relevant and well chosen. You can prevent more bloodshed. You can build understanding. You will be put to good use by news organizations or think tanks or the State Department. You are all the heroes of this movie, for the heroes of such movies are always the nerds, the professors, the ones who speak the language, the ones who have the crucial info, the intel, the scoop.

  There is no way of knowing that ten years after you stand on that rooftop, watching the sun set over Cairo, the last one of your group will slouch homeward, feeling defeated after years of struggling to make a living as a foreign correspondent, despite his fluency in Arabic and talent for analyzing complex and dangerous situations in Iraq and Lebanon and Libya. There is no way to know that the new America will have very little interest in learning anything accurate about the Middle East—that instead there are powerful interests that will need Americans to think of the Middle East as a homogeneous region full of terrorists. That Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia and Iraq and Iran are all the same. An acidic current of anti-intellectualism and prowar sentiment will corrode nuance, subtlety, and complexity into a dull, generalized fear. As you stand on the roof in Cairo with six other young, idealistic Americans on the dawn of a new era, you have no idea that despite hailing from the best Middle Eastern studies programs in the country at Georgetown and Yale and Columbia, despite studying abroad in the Middle East during a time of crisis, despite learning Arabic and analyzing the Quran and spending months assimilating into Arab culture—it will be more difficult to make a living by providing accurate information about the Middle East to an American audience than it will be to make a living by fake-playing the violin.

  Kansas

  September 2002

  A few days after the gig at the Lincoln Center craft fair, Becca Belge calls again.

  “Can you work this weekend?” she asks.

  “Of course.”

  “Great. You’re going to Kansas.”

  “Kansas?”

  “Yep. Motherfucking Kansas!”

  You have never been somewhere so full of endless yellow light. In the early morning the fields outside of Wichita blaze for miles. Sunflowers, rows and rows of them, each one a tiny fire burning through the morning mist. You watch the sunflowers and the weather vanes and the grain silos pass by from the backseat of a rented minivan. The Composer is driving, Kim sits beside him. Neither one speaks to you.

  You arrive at a large fairground and set up the equipment on the stage of an outdoor amphitheater. The Composer and Kim stick together while you set up your music stand and rosin your bow in silence. Just as with the other venues, crowds of customers mob the CD table as soon as you and Kim begin to play. They ooh and ahh at the sounds of Titanic but are more discerning in their purchases than the Lincoln Center crowd, spending time weighing their options, selecting only one or two CDs. An outer ring of audience members forms around the customers. They watch you for hours; some even go to their cars and return with lawn seats and picnic blankets. Their spouses or adult children join them with refreshments—whole turkey legs, country ham sandwiches, cotton candy—and they listen as you loop and loop through the set list, not realizing or not caring that they are listening to the same six three-minute songs over and over again.

  From your post behind the microphone, you study the Kansans. The men wear FDNY baseball caps with etchings of the Twin Towers; the women wear t-shirts with the words “We Will Never Forget.” Though it has only been a year since the attacks, you rarely see such patriotic attire on New Yorkers, at least not on the Upper West Side. Most of the New Yorkers you know are struggling to achieve what the Kansans’ t-shirts warn against: forgetfulness. New Yorkers know the danger of remembering too much. Their memories might make it impossible to go to work every day on the subway, to take an elevator, to leave one’s warm bed in the morning.

  “You must be so scared,” a Kansas woman says as you man the CD table while The Composer and Kim get lunch.

  “Not really,” you say.

  “My wife and I are saving to go there,” another Kansan says. He is wearing an FDNY t-shirt and a somber expression. “To see Ground Zero. I’ve never been out East. But we want to go now and pay our respects.”

  You notice that The Composer’s music—which is blasting out of the speakers at its usual rib cage–rattling volume—imbues these conversations with a heightened sense of importance, enhances the depth of the tragedy. It seems impossible, but with The Composer’s music playing in the background, September 11th becomes even more dramatic.

  “You play such beautiful music,” says one elderly woman. “We need music like this in times like these.”

  The Geography of a Lead-Up to a War

  OCTOBER 2002

  “I have a suspicion,” the professor says. He is older, maybe in his seventies, with white tufts of hair sprouting from his ears and nostrils. He emigrated from the Middle East at a young age, studied in Europe, and now speaks with a faint German accent. He is brilliant and lively and you love him and his course, Theories of Middle Eastern Culture.

  “All of you are upperclassmen, correct?” he asks.

  Correct.

  “All of you are Middle Eastern studies majors, correct?”

  We are.

  “And it is true this so-called Middle Eastern studies department is seen to be the best of its kind in the country? Perhaps the world?”

  It is.

  “Excellent, excellent, very good,” he says. “And you can all argue the theoretical points and counterpoints, perform Foucaultian analysis on Egyptian novels, delineate the important post-colonial theories and their relationship to Palestinian poetry, apply feminist theory to Quranic verse. I have seen you do so. Very well.”

  “But,” he continues, “if I pass out a map of the Middle East right now, a blank map, can you fill in the names of each country?”

  We look around nervously.

  “I have this suspicion—it is small but very insistent—that perhaps you are not able to do this thing,” he says. “You are all very smart. Yes, very smart. But do you know the precise location of things?”

  “I know where Jordan is,” your friend Ahmed calls out from the back of the room. We laugh. Ahmed’s uncle is King Hussein of Jordan.

  “Very well!” the professor says. “But what
about the rest of you? Can you locate Jordan? Do you know Iran from Iraq? How to be sure? Ah! A quiz!”

  He passes out photocopies of a blank map of the Middle East and tells us we have ten minutes to show him our knowledge of geography. He says, “Let us see how many of you—the so-called best and brightest Americans—know the precise location of the country you are about to invade.”

  NOVEMBER 2002

  “Where is the main courtyard?” you ask the mall security guard. You are somewhere in Connecticut, though you aren’t sure which part or which city. Not that it matters, as malls in Connecticut tend to be the same: large and fancy and full of people buying Christmas presents, weeks before the Thanksgiving bird has been cooked.

  After your gig with The Composer in Kansas, you begin to go on gigs every weekend. Every Thursday night you meet someone from the Ensemble—sometimes Yevgeny, sometimes Becca, sometimes a musician you have never met before and will never see again. They pick you up outside of your dormitory or meet you at an airport or train station or bus depot. You take night buses to Buffalo and Albany and Vermont. Flights to Oklahoma City and Fayetteville, Arkansas. You wake up on Friday mornings and ask, “Where the . . .?” and the answer is Miami. Or Cleveland. Or Washington, D.C. You learn to open up the drawer next to the hotel bed, the one with the Bible in it, and look for the phone book, which will reveal where you are: Scranton, Pennsylvania; Ocean City, Maryland; Providence, Rhode Island; Rochester, New York. You return, exhausted, to your dorm on Sunday nights with jugs of craft fair apple cider and write papers about the ongoing feud between Edward Said and Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis claims that all Arabs have a hidden terrorist bone. Edward Said offers, as counterevidence, the fact that he loves classical music and is proficient at the piano. If you are going to tackle this level of bullshit on no sleep, you’re going to need something stronger than coffee. A friend swears cocaine has miraculous effects on the quality of her essay assignments. She offers you a half gram. You snort line after line and stay up for three days writing a paper in which you call both Said and Lewis ridiculous, elitist old men. Men who have no idea what life is like for real Americans (read: West Virginians), or real Arabs (read: the few poor Egyptians you had conversations with in Cairo), or women (read: you). You get an A on this paper. You write more, you get more As. You learn to write while shaking, how to go to class on no sleep. You lose weight—weight you don’t need to lose—and you look skeletal, anemic, ill, yet people compliment your weight loss, another paradox of life in the body. You receive a letter from your mom. She is worried you might be on drugs. You assure her you are not—not so much because you are ashamed to tell her that you are on drugs (though you are ashamed) but because you are ashamed to tell her that some of the money you make each week ($50 of the $450) is being spent on them. You convince yourself that she will not understand this complicated calculus of drugs and money—the whole point of using drugs is so you can make money in the first place—and write back to tell her everything is fine.