Music for Love or War

by Martyn Burke

  “We’re playing hockey tomorrow night.” Silence. “C’mon, we need a defenseman.” Meant as a joke, an awkward way of diving into what they had shared.

  “I am here only for a week. I serve only the Prophet, peace be upon him,” replied Omar, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “Serve the Prophet and play defense.” Danny found himself in withering range of an unsettling stare. And the disdain of Omar’s chilling serenity as he explained—as if he was talking to someone incapable of understanding. There was something called a caliphate that someone named Maududi had commanded people like Omar to fight for. A kind of Islamic rule that would wipe out kafirs—people like Danny.

  “People like me?” Danny asked, waiting for the punch line.

  “Yes,” said Omar with that unbroken gaze.

  Danny waited.

  “Unless you submit,” said Omar.

  “To what?”

  “La ilaha illa Allah.”

  “Oh well, that explains everything,” Danny said, hoping to summon up the old Omar.

  “There is no God but Allah.”

  Danny said nothing, choosing to focus on the prayer beads that were circling through Omar’s hand, the only part of him that was not perfectly still. The stare that Omar held until he turned around in the chair and saw only two women and a man standing nearby at the magazine shelves. “This is the work of Satan. I cannot stay.”

  “Hey Omar, it’s me, Danny, you’re talking to. What’s with this Satan business?”

  “Haram,” he said, motioning to the readers. Forbidden.

  “Reading People magazine? Or National Geographic?”

  Silence. Omar reached into a satchel and pulled out a DVD case. Looking closer, Danny could make out the images on the box cover of the DVD.

  “Is that what I think it is?”

  “What do you think it is?” Omar asked with a slit of a smile.

  “A photograph of dead people. And something that got blown up.”

  “Nairobi. We blew up the American embassy. And also their embassy in Tanzania. On the same day.”

  “We?”

  “Allahu Akbar.”

  “We?”

  “‘Then when the sacred months are drawn away, slay the idolaters,’” Omar said, his eyes drifting as he summoned up what he had memorized, “‘wherever you find them and confine them and lie in wait for them at every place of ambush.’”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “Al-Taubah 9:5,” said Omar, as if that settled any possible debate.

  “That’s it?” Danny took one of the DVDs and looked at the cover photograph more closely. Through the smoke and confusion, bodies of Africans were scattered through the rubble.

  “Keep it. It’s yours. A present.”

  Danny stared at the DVD, about to push it back across the table toward Omar. He changed his mind and kept his hand on it. “Will I like it?”

  “Maybe. Maybe not.” Then in a low, sharp voice: “I learned many things from the Zadranis. Some was from Pacha Khan Zadran. He is a military genius. I revere him for how he plays men like instruments. And other things I learned from a scholar, my teacher in Miram Shah. He told us that for centuries we have been fools—like wolves in the freezing mountains who are trapped by cunning men who leave a bloody knife for them to find. The wolf is driven crazy by the smell of the blood and pounces on it, licking the blood, which it loves. But it does not notice that the knife is slashing its own tongue and the blood, which now pours onto the knife, is its own. And the more blood it gets, the more it is dying, bleeding to death from its own stupidity and greediness.” Omar pointed to the magazines. “This is just one of the bloody knives left for us by the cunning men of the West. But we are finished with all that now. We are the ones with the knives.”

  “We?”

  “You will know soon, my Danny.” Omar looked around. “It’s late. And I have family business.”

  Danny would later wonder about the way Omar looked at him when he asked, “What business?”

  “Business. Zadran and my father are making a trade.” He turned and walked away and as he went, Danny was struck by the way his robes flowed and caught the light of the late afternoon sun.

  Danny went home, unsure of what of he had just been told. He tried to contact Ariana using their new e-mail accounts, and after several hours of getting no response, tore his memory apart wondering what he had missed in the talk with Omar.

  My Danny?

  That night Danny was overrun by fears he could no longer smother. Ariana still had not e-mailed him. He waited, paced, and raged against himself for not asking her to marry him months ago. Before Omar. Before this video. Eighteen bloody minutes of executions, carnage, and bombings interspersed with brightly colored lens flares as an attempt at artistry. All of it accompanied by prayers and cries of angry joy in a language he could not understand.

  Hours later, she still had not responded.

  The waiting and the pacing goaded him to do something, anything. Whatever was happening, Omar just had to be somehow involved. He reactivated an old code, the one he and Omar had used years ago for meetings. Over and over again he let the phone ring once and then hung up. Then he waited for his own phone to ring once, anywhere from one to five minutes later—each minute representing the hours until the meeting with Omar. Finally, his phone rang once, less than a minute after his last call.

  He waited in the deserted parking lot of the restaurant on the hill in High Park. The wind in the trees on the hill was howling in a way that first irritated, and then chilled. He thought of the howling winds in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” with its Headless Horseman thundering along the roads.

  It was this specter of decapitation that sent waves of scalding images hurtling through instincts long atrophied by civilization. It was the head on the pole. At least, that’s what it looked like on that website. The one in the video. Allahu Akbar!—the cry that came with the bloody human head swiveling at the will of whoever held the pole. Or was it even real?

  He waited. Walking back and forth through a darkness intermittently fought off by a palsied streetlight, flickering out of place in the huge park. The wind tore through the trees at will.

  Omar arrived. He appeared in the distance as a visage in white, almost floating through the darkness of a far-off hilltop, his long robes flying like a banner around him. “Ah, you waited, my Danny!”

  My Danny. That there is no my anything remained unsaid. And Danny did not even attempt to match the same slit smile that Omar flashed across the darkness. “What is it you want?”

  “Remember a couple of years ago? When one of us made the coded phone call? It wasn’t because anyone wanted anything. It was just the signal for meeting.”

  “Things are different now.”

  “I didn’t understand anything you told me today.”

  Omar smiled in that way he had. But to Danny, it was a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Perhaps because when the truth is revealed, only an infidel would not understand.”

  “And you know the truth now?”

  “I took shahada. And I follow in the footsteps of the Prophet, peace be upon him.”

  “Then what’s with that DVD you gave me? And that website?”

  “It is the way of the Salaf.”

  “Hey Omar, help out the infidel here—speak normal English. Instead of all the jargon.”

  “Ah, my Danny. How you have changed.”

  “Me? You go over there to spend two years memorizing some junk—”

  Omar’s hand flashed to Danny’s arm in a pincer grip. “Do not blaspheme, I warn you.” The smile was gone.

  Danny shook loose. “You come back practically a fucking Nazi? Telling me to watch a video that shows some guy getting his head cut off?”

  “Ah, I see. Danny, Danny. We had no choice. The man was against jihad, and providing information to our enemies in Kandahar, and—”

  “Oh Jesus Christ. C’mon, Omar, tell me it wa
s all staged or something—”

  “You blaspheme even as an infidel.”

  “That scene where the guy’s head was being cut off? And you’re standing there in the background? It was you.”

  “Is there a point to all this?”

  “Oh, probably not. Or maybe that somewhere in our old schoolbooks it said that heads getting cut off was something out of the Middle Ages, and wow, aren’t we all civilized now.”

  “There was no choice. The man was in the pay of the enemies of Allah. We went across the mountains to where he was betraying us and would not repent.”

  “We?”

  “My father is very powerful there. And now, thanks be to Allah, he and the Zadrans are as one. My father is helping to train Salafist warriors.”

  “Training them to do what? Wipe out ten centuries?”

  Omar stepped up on a small concrete parking divider, rising past his full height, making him taller than Danny and more visibly powerful, with a strength made menacing at will. “Danny, Danny, I hear this pain in you. The days we had together were what you would call ‘fun.’ And I won’t lie to you, Danny—I loved this ‘fun’ we had, the way that fools love what poisons them. It is this ‘fun’ that all of you here in these countries need like a drug. It stops you from thinking of your emptiness. It is an emptiness that is like pollution, sewage, and you have tried to drown us in it.”

  “Hey Omar, no one’s ordering you to go to Disneyland, watch MTV, or cheer for the Yankees.”

  “Ah, Danny, Danny.”

  “Joy and happiness are only an option, Omar. No one’s forcing it on you guys.”

  “I pity you, Danny.” Omar turned and walked across the grass leading to the treed hillcrest. He stopped. The smile held, but barely. “My father and I understand each other now.”

  “I’m happy for you.”

  “Why have you been wasting my time? You just want to know about her, don’t you? That’s the real reason you contacted me tonight, isn’t it?”

  Danny froze, fighting the breathlessness that surged through him. “Her?”

  “Aha. I was right.” Omar was walking toward the crest of the hill that overlooked Grenadier Pond. “The wedding,” he called out.

  It was an invisible tether that suddenly snapped. Danny spun around and confronted the renewed slit of a smile, gleaming in the night. “What wedding?”

  Omar just smiled.

  • • •

  Now!!!! Where streetcars turn!

  When her e-mail came hours later, he was staring into the screen, fighting off sleep by occasionally tapping the keyboard to keep his computer from going dark. He raced out into the rain, skidding through the remains of a yellow traffic light, his car fishtailing onto the wide road near the lake and racing toward where four streets converged at jagged angles and the streetcars from downtown turned north.

  She had never been able to meet him anywhere near this late. It was almost midnight. Now!!!! Whatever was driving them both into the night appeared as jumbled fears beyond the rain-swept windshield—the emptiness of the streets and the figures in doorways that vanished when he looked a second time. At the junction of the four streets converging, just east of the big hospital, some synaptic alarm system was tripped in the rain-lashed streets that usually had life stumbling through them. Now there was only the silence of a night where usually the clanging trolleys, the horns, the drunks, and the Parkdale hookers were all heard in their own loud arias.

  He turned onto Queen Street and idled without headlights, searching the shadows and the neon reflections shimmering across the slickness of the pavement. Then getting out of the car, his hand warding off the rain driving into his eyes, shapes and colors merged in watery convolutions that yielded nothing.

  Until, in the distance, he saw her. Huddled under the edge of a roof at the old streetcar barn, at the far edges of the geometric collision of streets. For a moment he wasn’t sure; he had never seen her on the streets without a headscarf. Ariana!—the wind sucked his voice out of the air. She was grasping onto what looked like a backpack and some clothes. He began running toward her, using parking meters to pivot onto the street, slipping and careening across it with headlights bearing down and then suddenly slowing as he stumbled once, pushing off against the sides of parked cars, yelling into the wind.

  He could see her coming toward him. At first hurrying, but then suddenly stopping and motioning wildly with her arms. His shadow from the headlights behind him became sharper. It was etched as if some magnetic force of light would not release him until it vanished in that instant before a violently opening car door was slammed into his back, sending him crashing to the road.

  Lights and the voices spun into jagged strands of consciousness. He was picked up and slammed back onto the street, barely able to form thoughts as boots appeared near his face, were cocked, and then fired into his ribs. Voices and more lights ripped through volleys of pain as he rolled away from the boots, lurching up and grasping a side mirror, catching the last glimpse of Ariana with hands clamped over her mouth as she was forced into the other vehicle, a van with no windows.

  He screamed out her name, or part of it before the fist drove into the back of his neck and Omar smiled down at him, drenched and filthy on the road. “Ah, my Danny. You are so lucky. I should have killed you for what you have done to our family.”

  Danny struggled to get up until the boot came down again.

  “You serve a purpose. Thank you. Alive, you are why she will be quiet when we take her.”

  “Take—”

  “Take. She knows you can be killed. If she behaves badly.”

  The silence returned as the sounds and the lights raced away, the van’s tires spinning in a rain-sizzled whir as it roared almost over him while he called out her name from where he lay in the street.

  And when he was found, he was barely aware of the blue lights of the ambulance that were blasting across his eyes in a pain coming from somewhere far away.

  • • •

  St. Joseph’s Hospital, about a mile away, had a series of rigid protocols for checking a patient out of its care. Danny observed none of them. When he awoke from the narcotic-induced sleep, he felt the bandages around his ribs and the plaster on the cast on his arm, making sure it had hardened. He groped for his clothes in the locker. Stumbling out some back entrance, fighting off orderlies, he kept going up to Sunnyside Avenue, circling back.

  Always circling back. Groping toward Jameson Avenue, asking passersby what day it was, what time it was. Tuesday. Tuesday? Early evening.

  But standing in front of the apartment, and feeling the pain arcing through his right arm, he had no idea what to do next. He walked into the wheezing elevator, pressed 8, and when it opened again, he went to the apartment they all lived in, knocking on the door.

  A muffled voice sounded from inside. The door remained closed. He knocked several more times. Finally it opened, and Ariana’s mother, looking more ancient than he remembered her, peered up at him.

  “Ariana? Is she here?”

  “No. No here.”

  “Omar? Is he here?”

  “No. Omar no here.”

  “Where?”

  “Where?” She did not understand the word.

  Danny tried again, shrugging this time.

  “They go. All go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Miram Shah. Go Miram Shah.” She made a fluttering airplane motion with her hand.

  “When?”

  “Today. Go today.”

  Danny felt the floor falling away beneath him.

  “Marry. She marry.”

  • • •

  Almost a week later, Danny wrote family next to his name in the after-hours registry of the Conservatory. Then he climbed the creaking stairs and went to the silent, lighted room at the end of the high-ceilinged corridor. The music teacher was seated in the single chair in the middle of the big room. Unlike the last time he was there, Danny entered the room. The music teacher, who
had seen Danny before but never acknowledged him hovering in the shadows, peered through his little wire-rimmed glasses.

  Danny was haggard and disheveled. He walked slowly up to the piano, touched it, and then stood there as if he was waiting for it to start playing on its own.

  “Is something wrong?”

  It took Danny a long time to answer. “They took her,” was all he could think of as a response. “She’ll be in Afghanistan by now. Maybe Pakistan.”

  The music teacher looked at the floor for a while. “I see.” An infinite sadness had settled over him. Then he got up and slowly left the room. Danny remained, turning out the lights and sitting on the floor beside the piano, where he talked to Ariana as if she was there. After a while he absent-mindedly reached up and tapped one of the keys. The single note sounded several times.

  He felt the key more closely. The top of it was loose. He was sure it was a sign. On his knees he examined it, wiggling the flat, ivory-colored surface until it loosened some more. Definitely a sign. He kept loosening the piano key until the top of it came away in his hands. The broken music. He apologized silently to the gods of music and held the smooth rectangle between his hands.

  The next morning Danny woke up under the piano, still holding the top of the key. He left, walking through the corridors, hearing a different sound. It was harsher, urgent voices coming from a television set in one of the offices. A small cluster of people was huddled around it, some letting out groans or gasps.

  The Twin Towers in New York were on fire. Danny stayed until the first one crumbled.

  Then he got a phone book, looked up an address, and an hour later was at an armed forces recruiting center. When he was asked why he wanted join up, he said simply, “To find the woman I love.”

  The recruiter asked the question again, got the same answer, and then wrote For patriotic reasons on the application form.

  And then asked Danny to sign the form.

  The Mountains