'Are you Budur Radwan?' one of the policewomen demanded.

'Yes! What do you want?'

'We want to talk to you! Where have you been?'

'What do you mean, where have I been? You can see very well where I've been! What is this all about, why do you want me? What could have brought you in here?'

'We want to talk to you.'

'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.

It was also true that treating art as sacred often meant smoking opium or drinking laudanum to prepare for the experience; some even used the stronger distillates of opium developed during the war, smoking or even injecting them. The resulting dream states made Tristan's music mesmerizing, the practitioners said, even those who were not fond of the lost civilization's simplistic tootles; opium induced a deep absorption in the sensuous surface of musical sound, in the plainsong harmonies, vibrating between a drugged band and a drugged audience. If the performance was combined with the fanned aromas of a scent artist, the results could be truly mystical. Some were sceptical of all this: Kirana said once, 'As high as they all get, they could simply sing a single note for the whole hour, and smell their armpits, and all would be as happy as birds.'

Tristan himself often led the opium ceremonies before leading the music, so these evenings had a somewhat cultic air to them, as if Tristan were some kind of mystic sufi master, or one of the Hosain actors in the plays about Hosain's martyrdom, which the opium crowd also attended after crossing into dreamland, to watch Hosain putting on his own shroud before his murder by Shemr, the audience groaning, not at the murder onstage, but at this choice of martyrdom. In some of the Shiite countries the person playing Shemr had to run for his life after the performance, and more than one unlucky actor had been killed by the crowd. Tristan thoroughly approved; this was the kind of immersion in the art that he wanted his musical audiences to achieve.

But only in the secular world; it was all for music, not for God; Tristan was more Persian than Iranian as he put it sometimes, much more an Omarian than any kind of mullah, or a mystic of Zoroastrian bent, concocting rituals in honour of Ahura Mazda, a kind of sun worship that in foggy Nsara could come straight from the heart. Channelling Christians, smoking opium, worshipping the sun; he did all kinds of crazy things for his music, including working for many hours every day to get every note right on the page; and though none of it would have mattered if the music had not been good, it was good, it was more than that; it was the music of their lives, of Nsara in its time.

He spoke of all the theory behind it, however, in cryptic little phrases and aphorisms that then made the rounds, as 'Tristan's latest'; and often it was just a shrug and a smile and an offered opium pipe, and, most of all, his music. He composed what he composed, and the intellectuals of the city could listen and then talk about what it all meant, and they often did all through the night. Tahar Labid would go on endlessly about it, and then say to Tristan, with almost mock aggressiveness, That's right, isn't it Tristan Ahura, then go on without pausing for an answer, as if Tristan were to be laughed at as an idiot savant for never deigning to reply one way or the other; as if he didn't really know what his music meant. But Tristan only smiled at Tahar, sphinxlike and enigmatic under his moustache, relaxed as if poured into his window seat, looking out at the wet black cobbles or spearing Tahar with an amused glance.