The Year of Rice and Salt

'Well, let me get dressed and I will talk to you. I have done nothing wrong, I assume? I can get dressed before talking to my own countrywomen, I assume?'

'This is Nsara,' one of them said. 'You're from Turi, right?'

'True, but we are all Firanjis here, all good Muslim women in a zawiyya, unless I am mistaken?'

'Come on, get dressed,' the other one said. 'We have some questions to ask about affairs here, security threats that may be centred here. So come. Where are your clothes?'

'In my room, of course!' And Budur swept past them to her room, considering which jellabah would best hide her knees and any blood that might be seeping down her leg. Her blood was hot, but her breathing calm, she felt solid; and there was an anger growing in her, like a boulder from the jetty, anchoring her from the inside.

SEVENTEEN

Though they made a fairly thorough search, they did not find Idelba's papers, nor did they get anything but bewilderment and indignation from their questionings. The zawiyya filed suit with the courts against the police, for invasion of privacy without proper authorization, and only the invocation of wartime secrecy laws kept it from being a scandal in the newspapers. The courts backed the search but also the zawiyya's future right to privacy, and after that it was back to normal, or sort of; Idelba never talked about her work any more, no longer worked in certain labs she had before, and she no longer spent any time with Piali.

Budur continued in her routine, making her rounds from home, to work, to the Cafe Sultana. There she sat behind the big plate glass windows and looked out at the docks, and the forests of masts and steel superstructures, and the top of the lighthouse at the end of the jetty, while the talk swirled around ber. At their tables too, very often, were Hasan and Tristan, sitting like limpets in their pool with the tide gone out, exposing them wetly to the moon. Hasan's polemics and poetry made him a force to be reckoned with, a truth that all the city's avantgarde acknowledged, either enthusiastically or reluctantly. Hasan himself spoke of his reputation with a smirk meant to be self deprecating, wickedly smiling as he briefly exposed his power to view. Budur liked him although she knew perfectly well he was in some senses a disagreeable person. She was more interested in Tristan and his music, which included not only the songs like those he had sung at the garden party, but also vast long works for bands of up to two hundred musicians, sometimes featuring him on the kundun, an Anatolian stringed box with metal tabs to the side that slightly changed the tones of the strings, a fiendishly difficult instrument to play. He wrote out the parts for each instrument in these pieces, down to every chord and change, and even every note. As in his songs, these longer compositions showed his interest in adapting the primitive tonalities of the lost Christians, for the most part simple harmonic chords, but containing within them the possibility of various more sophisticated tonalities, which could at strategic moments return to the Pythagorean basics favoured in the chorales and chants of the lost ones. Writing down every note and demanding that the musicians in the ensemble play only and exactly the written notes was an act that everyone regarded as megalomaniacal to the point of impossibility; ensemble music, though very highly structured in a way that went back ultimately to Indian classical ragas, nevertheless allowed for individual improvisation of the details of the variations, spontaneous creations that indeed provided much of the interest of the music, as the musician played within and against the raga forms. No one would have stood for Tristan's insane strictures if it were not that the results were, one could not deny it, superb and beautiful. And Tristan insisted that the procedure was not his idea, but merely the way that the lost civilization had gone about it; that he was following the lost ways, even doing his best to channel the hungry ghosts of the old ones in his dreams and in his musical reveries. The old Frankish pieces he hoped to invoke were all religious music, devotionals, and had to be understood and utilized as such, as sacred music. Although it was true that in this hyper aesthetic circle of the avant garde it was music itself that was sacred, like all the arts, so that the description was redundant.