I next visited Sidon, and from this place went into the parts of Tiberias, which it was my wish to see. The whole was, however, in ruins, but the magnitude of it was sufficient to shew that it had been a large place. The place is wonderfully hot, as are also its waters.
I told my Israeli friend about Ibn Battuta. From North Africa, I told her. I mean, this was centuries and centuries ago.
“Maybe there’s some Jewish in you,” she said.
“Oh, I don’t know about that. But, yeah, I guess it’s possible.”
The next time I came to Jerusalem, I took a bus to her neighborhood. We met at her house and went for a walk out along the old railroad track into Sheikh Jarrah. We talked about my family, about her family, her children, my parents.
“Didn’t we decide you were Jewish?” she said.
Al-Shidyaq:
When an ugly, misshapen (shawhā’) woman looks at her face in the mirror, she says, “I may be ugly and misshapen to some but to others I am handsome,” which is why the author of the Qāmūs [dictionary] says, “Shawhā’ means both ‘a woman who frowns’ and ‘a beautiful woman’; a word with two opposite meanings.” When a man with a big nose looks at that crag on his face, he says, “It may well be that some good-looking women will desire it and see in it no crookedness or curve.”
I was gone for only two weeks. I took a shared taxi one morning from Ramallah through Jericho to the King Hussein Bridge. The snow on the ground thinned as we traveled down to the center of the earth, until it disappeared entirely in the rocky valleys by the Dead Sea. The passage out was easier than expected; I took a taxi to Amman, and then a plane to Aqaba. I stayed there for a weekend, swam in the sea. The hotel was walking distance from the Eilat checkpoint, and on the following Monday morning I took my suitcase and wheeled it over.
They kept me there for only a few hours waiting, while they “checked” my passport. And what is your father’s religion?
Al-Shidyaq:
We see the sun as though it had risen, when according to the scientists it hasn’t yet done so, and we see a stick in water as though it were crooked, though “there is therein no crookedness.” A mirage shows a person as though double and certain colors appear in two different forms. Magicians make observers think they are walking on water or going through fire without being burned. To a person in a ship plowing along opposite houses and property, the part of the land closest to him appears to be moving and mobile, when it is unmoving and fixed.
If I am honest, I will say I deceived myself about our differences. I wanted badly not to make him other than me. He thinks like a Westerner! Honest, intelligent, seeing through it all; we can roll our eyes together and smile at that nonsense one-upmanship, people as boastful about steadfastness as others are about praying. How many years was your son in prison? How many tears shed for the homeland? But it was lighthearted mockery. We too wept, of course. And still he was gracious and full of forgiveness.
So in a way I did him an injustice. Projecting as I did.
But he also, he wanted me to be like him.
(“Be human,” he would tell me, when I said goodbye).
Too many times, he had said, “You know I never had sex with any woman since I met you? This is not fair. These women, I have them, yanni, in the palm of my hand. If I want it, I can have it. You know, I’m charismatic. This prison story, what can I say, it’s sexy. But you know what? I can’t do it. Not since I met you.”
O Men of Peace, Messiahs holding women in their upturned palms. When you strip off the arrogance, what are you leaving behind?
Naively, I thought I could teach him what openness he hadn’t learned in his prison of men. And of course there were other reasons. Loneliness, that was one of the reasons.
ṣafīḥah (“slab of stone”), ṣaldaḥ (“wide stone”), iṣlinṭāḥ (“widening out (of a valley)”), muṣalfaḥ (“large headed”), taḥḥ (“spreading”), mufalṭaḥ (“large headed”), fashḥ (“standing astraddle”), faṭḥ (“broadening”), falṭaḥah (“flattening”), and so on to the end of that rubric. To these may be added numerous words whose connection to the idea of amplitude and expansiveness is not obvious and can be detected only with careful scrutiny, such as sujāḥ (“air”), tasrīḥ (“divorce”), samāḥah (“generosity”), and sunḥ (“good fortune and blessing”).
In my determination to overlook differences of education, upbringing, expectation, social formation, I had overlooked other things.
“I never get what I want,” he said.
It was the day I said (again) I couldn’t see him anymore.
“I never get what I want.”
I had never seen him so angry.
“Did I ever tell you how they arrested me?” he said, and he stared.
I shook my head.
“They put handcuffs on us. And they put us in the back of this car, where you can hardly breathe, and it’s completely dark. Then they drove us around a lot so that we wouldn’t know where we were. So we were completely lost. And then they took us into the fucking prison.” He kicked the wall. “And how did I survive? In my imagination. That’s how it was. I’m not making it up. I was far away. I was in Haifa by the sea, I was in Jaffa. I was in fucking Switzerland, yanni.”
And Ibn Battuta writes in his Rihla:
I left Tangier, my birthplace, on Thursday, 2nd Rajab 725 [June 14, 1325], being at that time twenty-two years of age [22 lunar years; 21 and 4 months by solar reckoning], with the intention of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and the Tomb of the Prophet [at Medina].
He did say he had learned some things from me. And I did learn from him.
I set out alone, finding no companion to cheer the way with friendly intercourse, and no party of travelers with whom to associate myself. Swayed by an overmastering impulse within me, and a long-cherished desire to visit those glorious sanctuaries, I resolved to quit all my friends and tear myself away from my home. As my parents were still alive, it weighed grievously upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow.
NOTES.
Ibn Battuta, The Travels of Ibn Battuta (1355), trans. Samuel Lee (London: Oriental Translation Committee, 1829).
Shidyaq, Ahmad Faris al-, Leg Over Leg: Volume One (1855), ed. and trans. Humphrey Davies (New York and London: New York University Press, 2013).
The Spinal Descent
Tim Horvath
As far as Leonard Dahl was concerned, only Johannes Nachbor in his generation had been his equal, not to mention the only human being who’d been as loyal to him as the chills. He’d never taken a public shot at Nachbor, even as his friend began to do some of the very things he abhorred. Writing music for television shows. For a chain of waffle dives, the waffles flapping and grinning like giant mouths. For a period of time a few years after they’d graduated, Nachbor was everywhere. Leonard couldn’t avoid his music—he’d flip on the radio and there would be the unmistakable strains, or he’d be watching some TV show and grow suspicious, and he’d force himself to scrutinize the credits, more often than not catching the tiny name as it flew by. That same name was so reliably on the Tanglewood program that he might as well have been some elite donor. On one occasion he and his dad were in the bleachers at Shea watching the Mets clobber the Cubs, and his dad, several beers in, was hugging him, which was embarrassing, but who was he to turn away such affection? And then, blaring from the speakers, came something decidedly Nachborean, and he stiffened and froze, nearly paralyzed, looking up as though he could see the music in midair, a plume wafting over Flushing. If Dahl could’ve penned a single musical instruction across Nachbor’s work in italics, it would’ve been Etcetera—he seemed to have bottomless reserves. It was around this time that there was a painter in Soho who was reputed to hire others to do his paintings, and Leonard pictured a giant loft full of Nachbor’s minions, awaiting instructions and then going off into their own corners to compose under his name. He wondered when he’d be able to go to the movies
again, could board a plane without hearing the song that the airline had decided you should listen to while you were waiting on the runway for takeoff, a soothing piece that would stave off thoughts of an inferno of twisted metal and made it feel like the plane had started to rise, was already soaring. For this piece too was unmistakably Nachbor’s, and if it wasn’t, it was so blatantly influenced by him that that was almost worse. You’d overcome your fear of flight with this transcendent music, and you’d know something too of what dying might be like, he thought, shedding your body, the soul unburdened at last. He plugged his ears and waited for cruising altitude and shitty wine and the oblivion of the plane’s neutral gray hum.
Whoever’d decided to put them together in the same dorm room their freshman year, they determined right away, was either a genius who wanted to push them, neck and neck, to greater and greater feats, or else some sick prankster. Their room was a study in contrasts, Dahl’s shit everywhere, while Nachbor’s side could’ve almost passed for unoccupied. Nachbor would sit there composing at his desk in his neat, calligraphic hand, while Dahl would scrawl like a graffiti artist on any available surface—a carton of Cinnamon Pop Tarts or the wall itself. Nachbor actually made use of his closet for clothes. Hanging in that closet were all of the T-shirts from all of the music camps that he’d gone to—the North Country Harmony Camp, Interlochen, while Dahl was working summer jobs, moving corn dogs on the boardwalk at Coney Island and swabbing out instruments at a repair shop, the squeak of his rag in the belly of a horn till he could see his own zits reflected in it. Sometimes when Nachbor was in class, Dahl would open his closet and flip through those T-shirts—the Bach Festival with its chirping chickens, musical notes spelling out the name of the camp, and try them on like they were Brooks Brothers suits, carefully returning them to their hangers and hoping Nachbor wouldn’t suspect a thing.
So diligently had they abided over the decades by the ironclad rule that they’d established for themselves in their first year together as roommates at the University of Hartford that they might as well have been shaggy, sheepish freshmen well into their forties, Dahl down to a single zit but still his deep-set eyes—he still imagined one as blackened from a childhood fight, though of course it had faded in the weeks after he’d gotten it. And in this corner, Jo-hannes Nach-bor, doing everything he can to cover up the fact that he was raised in the posh-er parts of Stam-ford, Con-neC-ticut! “Middle C,” Dahl called him, part reference to the letter in the middle of his home state, part jab. The rule was this: they could talk about anything, absolutely anything under the sun, except music. The rule came about in the glimmer of a morning light during their second semester as roomies. They were staying up till dawn, arguing some arcane point without resolution—whether Webern owed more to Zemlinsky or to Schoenberg, or who was more radically revolutionary, Ligeti or Xenakis, or whether Stravinksy had not just lost his mojo but misplaced his ever-loving mind somewhere in the Swiss Alps during World War I, somewhere between the ambush of The Rite of Spring (how could it not have single-handedly won the war?) and the fussless, yawn-worthy Pulcinella, indistinguishable from a hundred other ballets. To an outside observer, they were just splitting hairs, goading each other on. That’s what Maudsley would’ve said, a premed getting in his last bong hits while he still could, pounding on their walls in the dead of night, nary a sense of rhythm, as Dahl pointed out while pounding back in gradually shifting time signatures, which in turn caused Nachbor to guffaw as soon as he figured out what Dahl was up to. Maudsley’s mean, heavily capillaried face in their doorway was enough to get them to knock it off, but not enough to keep Nachbor off academic probation, since he was sleeping through the nine thirty German class that his parents were making him take. He was supposed to be getting to know his roots. To justify it to himself, he’d claimed it was bringing him closer to Beethoven and Stockhausen, but at that hour he was more likely dreaming about them than learning their tongue.
If music was verboten, what else was there? Plenty of other fertile topics: June Finchner, Letitia Jablowsky, and Midge Archibald, among others, whether they were sleeping with classmates or professors, and professors themselves, but only about their beards, their blazers, and slumgullions of sweat, their crazed mannerisms, not their music. Later, when Nachbor went all Jesus-y for a while—his girlfriend’s father was a minister, and he’d gone to her house over one vacation and come back brimming with the holy spirit—they’d talked about God. And once they’d graduated, when the meetings began to spread further and further apart, they caught one another up as best they could. They spoke of shitty jobs and first apartments and bodegas that were fronts for brothels; they spoke of sexual exploits and conquests and the relationship between pain and pleasure and pretentious artists and neo-hippies and road trips and movies—no, film—my God did they talk about film. They talked about shady landlords and academia and being outside academia and they used code words like uptown and downtown, and they talked about minimalists but only the painters and architects. Someone might have said that they were speaking of nothing but music. Occasionally one of them slipped and mentioned something—a commission he was hoping to get, a run-in with a famous musician who didn’t give you the time of day—and they’d enter warily into the forbidden zone, their voices dropping a little bit as if to acknowledge that they’d crossed some border and now could be shot at on sight. But one of them would say, “The rule.” And the other would respond, either in kind or “Fugga the rule.” “Fugga the rule” usually led to verbal fisticuffs. They couldn’t go far into any conversation without getting hung up on something or falling back into some conversation that they’d already had and agreed to disagree on years earlier. “This isn’t even hairsplitting,” Dahl said once. “It’s splitting split ends.”
“It’s splitting atoms,” Johannes shot back, his mouth approximating an explosion, his hands a billowing mushroom cloud.
It was easier, for them at least, to talk about God or the Middle East or the value and scourge of capitalism than about a single C-major chord, simpliciter; that they concurred on. They did the dance of visiting one another in various cities—Nachbor moved to San Francisco, where he met Lindsay, and then, as a couple, relocated, first to Portland, then back east to the Berkshires to be closer to their families.
Meanwhile, Dahl had never really left New York, though pin-balling from the East Village to Nolita, Williamsburg to Greenpoint. With the exception of when he was out of town at a residency, he still strolled into his parents’ walk-up Friday night for dinner, his mother’s cooking surrounding him like some kind of salve after a week of the city’s flagellations. The city, after all, took its toll on him. It gave and took away, always. Nothing was easy in or about it.
Occasionally they flouted the rule and always seemed to regret it. A few years after they’d graduated, Nachbor flew into New York to see him. They began drinking early in the evening while Dahl heated up some pierogi he’d picked up at a local Polish dive. After a few shots of cheap vodka, Nachbor brought up one of their contemporaries who had just started to achieve widespread acclaim, the kind that comes with a glossy spread in The New York Times Magazine sandwiched between an article about a golfer and another about artichoke dip. The guy was, Dahl was certain, a fraud, yet Nachbor somehow had been duped with all the others, fallen under his spell. “Were you high? When you first listened, I mean. Just tell me, I won’t judge. If I sense a pattern, we’ll revisit.”
“No more high than you are now,” Nachbor scoffed.
“I’m pretty fucking high right now,” said Dahl. “I might smoke some pot just to come down a little.”
“You really oughtn’t dismiss it so a priori. Maudsley.” This invocation of their old neighbor, still a running joke after all these years, was considered a low blow.
“‘So a priori.’ Listen to you. Save the dirty talk for your wife, OK?” Then, after a moment, “Where do you think Maudsley is right now?” Dahl looked to the wall, as if he might be right there. “Is he prac
ticing delicate surgery right now or lying in some gutter?”
“Seriously, will you suspend your cynicism for thirty seconds and give it a listen?”
“Are you proposing we make a Tower run?” asked Dahl. He motioned toward his stove, where pierogi were starting their boil, their scent holding their own in the general mustiness of Dahl’s apartment. Nachbor’s stomach groaned around a G, Dahl’s started at A and curled into a chromatic half scale.
It happened that they knew the DJ who would be coming on at six. Neither of them liked him much, but that was no matter—he had, at his disposal, not only a record collection and the means to diffuse music throughout the entire city, but the record in question.
Nachbor got on the phone—it pained Dahl, the idea of giving this whippersnapper, this hype-ridden, derivative upstart, any recognition whatsoever, much less free airplay. The fact was, though, that since The Times article had come out, the station probably would’ve played him anyway.
“Hey, Richard,” said Nachbor into the phone, “Johannes Nachbor here. Listening to you as always on a Thursday night. Sure, I’ll hold.” He covered the mouthpiece and said to Dahl, “He’s busy. Says he’s working or something. Something neither of us would know about, right?” The joke was that Dahl would be able to live off the proceeds from his Sousa number and that Nachbor had a sugar mama in his then-still-girlfriend Lindsay. A few minutes later, Nachbor announced, “He says he’ll play it.”
Dahl messed around on a few instruments, but the occasion seemed to call for the trumpet. He clicked open the case and screwed on the mouthpiece like an executioner readying himself for the task at hand. They sat there for a solid half hour playing Name That Tune until they were shaking drops out of the vodka bottle, and at last the station played something Dahl didn’t recognize. Nachbor’s face took on a knowing look, and Dahl, who’d insisted he’d be able to hear it with an open mind, waited a full two and a half minutes before hoisting the mouthpiece to his lips and forming an embouchure that, while not professional, was pretty good for someone who played only for his own ears. And then he began blowing the bejeezus out of it, cheeks flaring like Gillespie’s, like a blowfish puffing itself up to fend off a shark. Nachbor was folded on the divan that, like most of Dahl’s furniture, had been salvaged from the sidewalk, and he grew tighter and more involuted as the piece went on, Dahl’s embellishments getting more and more outrageous, and then, suddenly, he yanked the cord out of the socket as if simply hitting “off” wouldn’t be decisive enough, and Dahl was laughing, reaching for the cord like a dog off the leash. Nachbor grabbed too, and the trumpet came clanging to the floorboards with a dull crash.
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