“So you weren’t serious about asking her out.”
“We’ll see.”
After a few moments Sophia and Joe joined us at the bar. She nodded with a collegial smile to the two women from the orchestra and glanced warmly at me, but her focus was on Jarrah in her spectacular red dress.
“Sophia Luca, this is my twin sister Jarrah.”
Jarrah tilted her head in a slight nod, and held out her hand. “Hello, Sophia.”
“You are very beautiful,” Sophia said, matter-of-factly.
“Thank you, and you play a mean violin.”
Sophia looked perplexed. “Mean?”
“She means accomplished,” Joe said quickly.
“But mean is cruel, yes?”
“I should have said alluring, or skilful.”
“Thank you, but it’s not me, it’s Rimsky-Korsakov and the whole orchestra. A short solo is nothing, I think.”
“But the effect was amazing,” said Joe. “You must all be flying. It’s been years since I’ve heard music take off like that.”
Sophia smiled. “Maybe this Rimsky-Korsakov gave us Russian wings.”
“No no, I’m serious, I was in a rock’n’roll band in high school and …”
“You left out very loud,” said Jarrah.
“Yes we were in this very loud rock and roll band, and most of the time we played just fine. We were usually in tune and most of it sounded right, but once or twice something amazing happened. The band took off into a whole new dimension. It was like we were high on some sort of supernatural energy. It was incredible, and I can still feel that sensation today. It was like a spectacular drug. I’ve never really felt pleasure like it since, at least not until tonight.”
While he talked, Sophia was watching him closely with a tender glow in her sea-green eyes. “There’s no need to say this,” she said, smiling. “But it’s true. What you say happens every night in a great orchestra, and this many people do not understand. In some moments it is ecstasy. You are the first person I have met who is not a musician who feels it too.”
Well, that’s it, I thought, Scheherazade has worked her magic once more. We all stood staring foolishly at each other while Joe preened.
“Alrighty then,” he said finally, “what’s for dinner?”
11
It was a fascinating meal because of what wasn’t said at our trattoria table on the Opera House walk. There was much discussed, but it was obvious to me that Sophia and Joe were also deep in a silent parallel conversation. How often, I thought, does it happen like this when two people are falling in love? The world around them barely notices their unspoken exchange and yet it’s louder than words. Thanks to the effort of swallowing considerable joy, Joe just pushed his penne arrabiata around his plate in circles. Jarrah was barely distracted by a bowl of minestrone.
Not so Sophia and me. We were famished. We worked our way through mounds of the simplest dishes available, me spaghetti aglio e oglio, and Sophia rigatoni alla carbonara. While we hammered the pasta, the talk was mostly about Italy, with Sophia funny and charming, telling tales of playing concerts in Venice and Rome. She was like an extra light on the Opera House walk, bathing us all in a special luminescence.
When she was close to the end of her meal she focused her fabulous gaze on Jarrah. “Joe says you’re a psychiatrist,” she said, wiping a crust of bread in carbonara sauce and slipping it into her mouth.
Interesting, I thought, when did he have time to say that?
Jarrah looked up with a faintly mischievous smile. “Did he now?”
“Do you like this work?”
“Very much.”
“It’s important.”
“I think so,” Jarrah agreed.
“Is it difficult?”
“Sometimes, but also very rewarding, the human psyche is a fragile domain, but amazingly resilient as well.”
“So you guide lost souls.”
Jarrah laughed, a little nervously. “I don’t think I’d put it in those terms. Psychiatry is not a religion and we don’t really believe in the supernatural.”
“You think there is no soul?” Sophia asked, surprised.
“To be honest, Sophia, I’m not sure what ‘soul’ really means.”
There was a pause with Sophia strangely immobile, her smile fixed on her face like it was carved in alabaster. I wondered if we were about to witness the return of the permafrost queen. Joe looked on with his mouth slightly open, in the manner of a man intensely concentrating when stuck without warning on a tightrope.
“If there is no soul, then what makes us spiritual?” Sophia finally asked.
“An awful lot really, but the human psyche is just too complex to describe in those terms.”
“So you have never seen it?”
“What do you mean?”
“You have never seen a person with a lost soul?”
“I doubt it, Sophia, but I don’t think it’s something anyone can know, at least not in my profession.”
Another pause from Sophia, who was definitely etched in ice. Whatever sunshine had emerged after Scheherazade was fast disappearing. “If a psychiatrist cannot know a soul when it is lost, then who can?”
It didn’t take extra-sensory perception to realise that Sophia’s questions were coming from somewhere personal.
“I think the soul is real,” said Joe suddenly. “There are physicists who think it exists at the quantum level, as crystals in tubular cell structures within the brain.”
Jarrah and Sophia both looked at him almost as if they resented the technical interruption, but he ploughed on. “It’s possible for the crystals to malfunction. When that happens, it’s called orchestrated objective reduction. The same process happens when we die.”
“But that still doesn’t define what a soul might be,” said Jarrah with a patronising smile.
“Sure, but you don’t have to define nature at the quantum level to make it real.”
Sophia gave him a grateful glance, the light back in her sea-green eyes. “I think it’s like the spirit in music,” she said turning back to Jarrah. “It’s on paper in a score, it’s in every instrument, but music only is real to a human soul.”
Jarrah smiled. “I’m sure you’re right, Sophia – reality does leave a lot to the imagination.”
There was an awkward silence, with the energy between Sophia and Joe doing most of the talking. It was a simple metaphysical discussion, something you’d hear among thoughtful teenagers, but somehow Sophia invested the short exchange with a weight that made it significant. I wasn’t sure if it was her Eastern European culture or her pendulum-like personality, or even the afterglow of Scheherazade,
“Well,” said Sophia with no warning, “now I must go.”
It was so sudden I’m sure we must have all looked shocked. Even though I hadn’t said a word, I felt guilty, as