'Why don't you ever answer me!' Tahar exclaimed once.

Tristan pursed his lips and whistled a response at him.

'Oh come on,' Tahar said, reddening. 'Say something to make us think you have a single idea in your head.'

Tristan drew himself up. 'Don't be rude! Of course there are no ideas in my head, what do you think I am!'

So Budur sat next to him. She joined him when, with a tilt of the chin and pursing of the lips, he invited her into one of the back rooms of the cafe where the opium smokers gathered. She had decided ahead of time to join them if the opportunity was offered, to see what hearing Tristan's music under the influence would be like; to see what the drug felt like, using the music as the ceremony that allowed ber to overcome her Turic fear of the smoke.

The room was small and dark. The huqqab, bigger than a narghile, sat on a low table in the middle of floor pillows, and Tristan cut a chunk from a black plug of opium and put it in the bowl, lit it with a silver cigarette lighter as one of the others inhaled. As the single mouthpiece was passed around the smokers sucked on it, and each in turn began immediately to cough. The black plug in the bowl bubbled to tar as it burned; the smoke was thick and white, and smelled like sugar. Budur decided to take in so little that she wouldn't cough, but when the mouthpiece came to her and she inhaled gently through it, the first taste of the smoke caused her to hack like a demon. It seemed impossible she could be so affected by anything that had been in her so briefly.

Then it struck deeper. She felt her blood filling her skin, then all of her. Blood filled her like a balloon, it would spurt out if her hot skin didn't hold it in. She pulsed with her pulse, and the world pulsed with her. Everything jumped forwards into itself somehow, in time with her heart. The dim walls pulsed. More colour revealed itself with every beat of her heart. The surfaces of things swirled with coiled pressure and tension, they looked like Idelba said they really were, bundles of bundled energy. Budur pulled herself to her feet with the others, walked, balancing carefully, through the streets to the concert hall in the old palace, into a space long and tall like a deck of cards set on its side. The musicians filed in and sat, their instruments like strange weapons. Following Tristan's lead, conveyed by hand and eye, they began to play. The singers chanted in the ancient Pythagorean tonality, pure and sugary, a single voice wandering above in descant. Then Tristan on his oud, and the other string players, bass to treble, sneaked in underneath, wrecking the simple harmonies, bringing in a whole other world, an Asia of sound, so much more complex and dark – reality seeping in. and, over the course of a long struggle, overwhelming the old west's plainchant. This was the story of Firanja that Tristan was singing, Budur thought suddenly, a musical expression of the history of this place they lived in, late arrivals that they were. Firanjis, Franks, Kelts, the oldest ones back in the murk of time… Each people overrun in its turn. It was not a scent performance, but there was incense burning before the musicians, and as their songs wove together the thick smells of sandalwood and jasmine choked the room, they came in on Budur's breath and sang inside her, playing a complex roundelay with her pulse, just as in the music itself, which was so clearly another speech of the body, a language she felt she could understand in the moment it happened. without ever being able to articulate or remember it.

Sex too was a language like that; as she found later that night, when she went home with Tristan to his grubby apartment, and to bed with him. His apartment was across the river in the south wharf district, a cold and damp garret, an artistic clich6, and uncleaned, it appeared, since his wife had died near the end of the war some factory accident, Budur had gathered from others, a chance of bad timing and broken machinery – but the bed was there, and the sheets clean, which made Budur suspicious; but after all she had been showing interest in Tristan, so perhaps it was only a matter of politeness, or self respect of some heartening kind. He was a dreamy lover and played her like an oud, languorous and faintly teasing, so that there was an edge to her passion, of resistance and struggle, all adding somehow to the sexiness of the experience, so that it nagged at her afterwards, as if set into her with hooks nothing like the blazing directness of Kirana – and Budur afterwards wondered what Tristan intended by it, but realized also in that very first night that she was not going to learn from Tristan's words, as he was as reticent with her as he was with Tahar, almost; so that she would have to know him by what could be intuited from his music and his looks. Which were indeed very revealing of his moods and their swings, and so of his character (perhaps); which she liked. So for a while she went home with him fairly often, arranging for prophylactics with the zawiyya clinic, going out at night to the cafes and taking the opportunity when it came.

After a time, however, it became annoying to try to have conversation with a man who only sang melodies – like trying to live with a bird. it echoed painfully that distance in her father, and the mute quality of her attempts to study the remote past, which were equally speechless. And as things in town got tighter, and each week added another zero to the numbers on the paper money, it got harder and harder to gather the large ensembles that Tristan's current compositions required. When the district panchayat that ran the old palace chose not to lend a concert room, or the musicians were occupied with their real jobs, in class or on the docks or in the shops selling hats and raincoats, then Tristan could only strum his oud, and finger his pencils and take endless notes, in an Indian musical notation that was said to be older than Sanskrit, although Tristan confessed to Budur that he had forgotten the system during the war, and now used one of his own devising that he had had to teach to his players. His melodies became more morose, she thought, tunes from a heavy heart, mourning the losses of the war, and the ones that had happened since, and were still occurring now, in the moment of listening itself. Budur understood them, and kept joining Tristan from time to time, watching the twitches under his moustache for clues as to what amused him when she or others spoke, watching his yellowed fingers as they felt their tunes forwards, or noted down one quicksilver lament after another. She heard a singer she thought he would like, and took him to hear her, and he did like her, he hummed on the way home, looking out of the tram window at the dark city streets, where people hurried from streetlight to streetlight over gleaming cobblestones, hunched under umbrellas or serapes.

It's like in the forest,' Tristan said with a lift of the moustache. 'Up in your mountains, you know, you see places where avalanches have bent all the trees down sideways, and then after the snow melts, the trees there all stay bent sideways together.' He gestured at the crowd waiting at a tram stop. 'That's what we're like now.'