Murmuration

Written by Steven B. Rosenfeld

“The impact you have made becomes legacy and the life you have spent becomes a story. Life is a shadow chase it with care.”

― Adewale Osunsakin

The mourners watched silently as her casket descended into the earth, hunkering under windblown umbrellas, leaning in to hear the prayers and the eulogies about Leila Siman, barely audible above the wind and pounding rain.

Although surely in mourning, Desmond Tate wasn’t paying attention. He was watching a huge flock of starlings that seemed to fill half the gray sky above the vast graveyard. Hundreds, no thousands, of them swooping and rising in unison, in a mesmerizing display of aerial acrobatics.

Tate was spellbound by the birds’ murmuration, how they moved like a single organism ─ now a dense funnel, seconds later a wide net spread out as if to snare an unsuspecting prey ─ twisting, turning and changing direction but heading nowhere.

Tate had read that in some cultures flocks of starlings symbolize family, community, co-existence. The constantly shifting patterns are formed when one starling changes direction or speed, and each of the other birds responds almost instantly regardless of the size of the flock.

Tate sighed as he pondered whether something like that hadn’t brought him here. Leila had been the first person he’d allowed into his life in any meaningful way in more than twenty years. She had helped him find his heart, but now she had broken it.

As Tate lined up to toss his shovelful of dirt onto her casket, he looked down at the mud caked on his calfskin boots and the cuffs of his suit, recalling the clumps of soil, stones and twigs he’d frantically brushed away as he screamed for Leila on that Alpine mountainside. At the moment when he could have saved her life, she had resisted, and now she was dead.

Before he met Leila, Desmond Tate had been just a self-indulgent billionaire. Nothing he had planned, but who knew that the tiny computer chip he’d invented many years ago as a young engineer would become the nerve-center for online hotel, restaurant and concert ticket reservations? That little chip was still bringing him millions, even after he’d sold his startup company for a cool billion plus residuals.

At the time, Tate viewed that sale as his liberation – liberation from a loveless marriage he could now afford to end, and from supporting two grown sons who were once his joy but had lately made it clear they no longer wanted or needed his attention.

He’d paid a small fortune in the divorce settlement, set up trusts for his sons, generous enough to meet their needs for life, and bought himself a co-op on Fifth Avenue, a weekend retreat in East Hampton, and villas on Lake Maggiore and on the beach in Anguilla.

In fact, he rarely paid attention to the news, except when it affected the market. So he spent his time monitoring his assets, reading and re-reading books spanning the classics and current thrillers, and taking a succession of glamorous but unknowable younger women to the theater, the best restaurants, and, with a little help from Viagra, into his several beds.

It was a Sunday afternoon in November 2019. Tate had completed his daily online perusal of his investments and residual payments, checked in with the staffs at his several abodes, and spoken with his Swiss banker, Georg Müller. So with nothing else to do, he found himself at an opening in a small gallery in SoHo . He’d never heard of the artist and didn’t know the gallery, but something had drawn him to drop by ─ maybe just the need to be in contact with people who didn’t work for him. Or maybe, if he were being honest, it was because he hadn’t had sex in at least four months.

As it turned out, the minimalist paintings in somber colors did nothing for him, the cheap wine was undrinkable, and he hadn’t noticed anyone he thought a potential bedmate. So after fifteen minutes, he put down his plastic glass and was headed for the door, when he felt a tap on his shoulder.

He turned and saw her grinning at him, her olive-green eyes sparkling through rimless glasses. His first reaction was simply annoyance.

“I guess this stuff doesn’t turn you on either, does it?” she said.

“How could you tell?”

“I’ve been watching you since you came in,” she replied. “I go to a lot of openings. Usually people pretend to show some interest in the art, even if they really came just to have a free drink and see and be seen. But not you. You took one lap around the room, one sip of wine, and you were headed out.”

“And that attracted you?” Tate replied.

Her comeback was only a shrug, and another grin. Now, Tate was interested. He spent considerable time and money on his appearance. On his trips to Maggiore on his private Gulfstream, he frequented an exclusive spa in Milan, where Enrico styled and colored his hair and gave him facials meant to keep his skin wrinkle-free. But recently, when forced to look at himself in a mirror under bright lighting, as in an elevator or a fitting with his tailor, he could not escape the truth: he was approaching sixty-five, the age when the media, despite his good looks, would start including him among the “elderly.”

Not only had this woman been watching him, but she was so different from the string of women he’d been with. Her plain white t-shirt and faded jeans called attention to her slim body, but that wasn’t what struck Tate. It was her lustrous long black hair, showing more than a few traces of gray, the simple gold hoop earrings that were her only jewelry, a face that revealed no effort to hide its few lines, and, above all, those eyes.

“I can’t drink that shit either,” she said, pointing to his unfinished wine glass on the table.

“So why don’t we get out of here and I’ll buy us something worth drinking?”

“Well, I am partial to dry Austrian Riesling.”

She led him to a tiny wine bar down the block from the gallery.

Into the second bottle of Riesling, Tate found himself exposing more than usual about himself: the computer chip, the sale of his company, the divorce, his children and their trust funds. The one thing he didn’t convey was happiness.

“Your mid-life crisis?” Leila Siman asked. “So why don’t you just give some of it away?”

He wasn’t about to go there, so the conversation turned to her. Much more interesting, Tate concluded. Leila spoke about her family’s flight from Iran. As Persian Jews, Yehuda and Esther Siman had been forced to flee after the 1979 Islamic Revolution when Leila was barely two, and she had grown up in Great Neck, on Long Island. “But don’t get the wrong idea,” Leila said. “My parents had to leave almost everything behind when they left Iran.”

They had abandoned their successful dry goods business in Tehran, hoping, wrongly, that a cousin could sell it, and left their home of twenty years, joining over 30,000 Iranian Jews who fled to the United States in those years. “My father had to struggle to get back into business in New York,” she told him. “So yeah, I grew up in Great Neck, because that’s where Iranian Jews went, but I always knew I wasn’t as rich as the other kids, and I didn’t have many friends.”

She had paid her way through Hunter College and CUNY Law School on scholarships, student loans and odd jobs. Now, she practiced arts law out of her walk-up loft in the East Village, where she also crafted Persian-themed sculptures that she occasionally managed to sell. Her clients were mostly-young artists, writers and musicians – “people you’ve never heard of,” she told Tate. And, unlike Tate, she was engrossed by politics – and ardently anti-Trump.

The second bottle was half empty when Tate suggested dinner.

“Sorry, I’ve got plans this evening,” she said, perceptibly checking her watch.

"OK, so how about Saturday?”

She pulled out a small card: Eastside Settlement House on Houston Street. “If you want to see me Saturday, you’ll find me here. Come by at about 4 p.m. and I’ll put you to work.”

“Work?” Tate asked. “Doing what?”

“You’ll find out when you get there – if you do.”

Desmond Tate was not used to challenges like that, but he couldn’t stop thinking about seeing Leila Siman again. So the following Saturday afternoon, he found himself sitting on a kid-sized chair in a small room,

reading Charlotte’s Web and several more books to a half-dozen children

of various ages and colors.

At 5:30, the children disappeared, and soon after, Leila peeked into the room. “OK, you’ve earned dinner,” she said, “but it’s on me.” They walked several blocks up First Avenue to Ravagh Persian Grill, where Leila ordered creamy eggplant dip, chicken and lamb kebabs, and a bottle of Anatolian wine.

Now Leila gradually revealed more of her hazy childhood memories. “I remember being awakened by my mother late at night and being bundled into a car that took us across the border into Turkey and then flying to New York. But the rest is what my father told me many times as I grew up.” Tears came to her eyes as she recounted the fear and chaos that had swept the Jewish community after the Ayatollah came to power, how Yehuda and Esther’s friends and relatives suddenly began disappearing, and how Yehuda’s first cousin had been imprisoned and then executed for his Zionist writings. “‘Leila,’” my father said, “‘I fear we won’t see him again.’ And we never did.”

In the weeks that followed, they were constantly together. Tate reluctantly told her more about the years when he enjoyed being a husband and father, but said no more about his wealth; he knew it was written in his wardrobe, the house seats he got to sold-out musicals and the menus of the restaurants where the maître d’s greeted him by name.

After reading sessions at the settlement house on Saturday afternoons, Leila introduced Tate to more Persian and Tajik restaurants downtown and in Brooklyn, where she always insisted on paying. Occasionally, she mentioned some of her clients – a young songwriter being exploited in looking for a first recording contract, a muralist whose work had been captured in a hit movie without her consent. And she told him about her

passions ─ voting rights, freedom of choice, the plight of refugees, and nurturing young artists and musicians, particularly immigrants.

They talked about books they’d read in college. Leila treasured Jane Austen and George Eliot. “No, not just because of their gender,” she told Tate, who favored Dickens. They remembered Jay Gatsby vividly – but agreed that Tate was no Gatsby; his wealth was honestly earned. And they laughed when both admitted they’d given up less than halfway through Ulysses but always claimed to have read it. They made a list of favorite movies to watch again together.

But when it came to music, it was as if they’d grown up on different planets. Leila didn’t know Mendelssohn from Mahler, Toscanini from Stokowski, Bellini from Puccini. And he had to concede he’d always confused Elton John and John Denver, David Bowie and David Gilmour, The Eagles and The Byrds. So they agreed to educate each other. They went to La Boheme at the Met, where Leila bonded with Mimi and actually wept when she died. And Leila got Tate to listen, really listen, to her Pink Floyd, Queen and Rolling Stones CDs.

And when Leila took him to bed, it was like nothing Tate had ever experienced. She moved without urgency and led him deliberately where she wanted him to go. Making love to Leila made him feel like he was twenty-five again – and Leila told him what he wanted to hear: that he made her feel like she was twenty-five too.

Before long, being with Leila forced Tate to accept the shamefulness of going from one beautiful but vapid woman to the next. Sometimes he wondered what she saw in him beside his wealth — why she stayed with him. But he decided he didn’t have to know, so long as he passed whatever tests she was contriving. With Leila, he could give regret a rest and acknowledge that perhaps he was becoming a better man.

And just maybe, Tate thought, she was starting to realize it, too. One evening between bites of morasa polow at Shiraz Kitchen on 17th Street,

Leila mentioned Eric Clapton’s song, “Layla.” Tate admitted he didn’t know it.

"Why am I not surprised? Well, guess what? It was inspired by a Persian poem written in the 12th century! You can look it up.”

“I’ll take your word for it, but at least tell me it’s a love story.”

“Well yes,” Leila said, “but it’s a sad love story.”

“Then it’s not about you ─ or me,” said Tate.

“Don’t be so sure,” Leila replied. “I mean, the first verse goes ‘What will you do when you get lonely? No one waiting by your side. You've been runnin' and hiding much too long. You know it's just your foolish pride.’ Maybe that’s both of us.”

“Until now,” said Tate.

But then, in the midst of their escapade, COVID-19 suddenly descended. Lockdowns and mask mandates. Stay-at-home orders. Restaurants closed indefinitely. Theatres, concert halls, the Met, all shuttered. Both could see that their carefree spree had suddenly ended.

“OK, but we can’t be apart,” Tate said on the phone. “Let’s quarantine together in East Hampton until all this comes to an end. It can’t be very long.”

“No, Des,” Leila replied.

“Why not? What’s stopping us?”

“I’m at my parents’ place in Great Neck. My folks have insisted that the three of us ride this thing out together. I just can’t leave them alone in the middle of it. They’re not young, and as I’ve told you, they’ve been through a lot. They really do need me.”

“Well I need you too. They do know about me . . . about us, don’t they?”

“Not really, no. I’ve made some vague hints about seeing someone, but they have no idea who you are, your age, and how . . .”

“How rich I am?”

“Definitely not that. They wouldn’t approve if I told them. Anyway, that’s not the point. They can’t be alone, so we’ll just have to be apart for a while.

“Leila,” Des sighed. “I can’t get through this alone.”

“Yes you can. Anyway, we won’t be apart. We can FaceTime every day. My folks nap every afternoon and go to bed early. We’ll have plenty of time together.”

“Face Time? Oh God,” Tate moaned. “Leila, I can’t just talk with you on a goddamn cell phone. I need to touch you, feel you, to . . . .”

“To fuck me? I’m going to miss that too. But I’ll bet you don’t have much experience with phone sex, do you?”

“Well, no, but . . .”

“I promise you’ll love it,” Leila replied. And that settled it.

So they spent the next several months apart, connected only electronically. To the phone sex, they added streaming old movies together. They talked about Dr. Fauci, and the coming election. And Leila told him in tears that two of her impoverished clients had died in the ICU.

Soon, Tate was unable to stand the distancing. He considered driving to Great Neck, rescuing her from her parents and whisking her off to his villa at Lake Maggiore, ignoring Italy’s own COVID debacle. He couldn’t just give her up and return to his commitment-free life.

By then, in addition to re-reading David Copperfield and Great Expectations, he’d read and re-read Nizami Ganiavi’s Persian poem "Layla and Majnun" that had inspired Clapton’s song. He’d memorized Clapton’s lyrics and felt the whole song applied to them: “I'm beggin' darling please. . .won't you ease my worried mind? . . . .Your old man won't let you down . . . like a fool, I fell in love with you, you turned my whole world upside down . . . .”

Then, after months of this torment, it all ended as quickly as it had begun. Vaccines were available, theatres and restaurants re-opened. Leila got herself and her parents vaccinated and moved back to the East Village to attend to the clients who needed her now more than ever. Tate and Leila picked up where they’d left off, and the summer flew by.

Still, the months of solitude had convinced Tate that he wanted Leila in his life to stay.

“Come with me to Italy, Leila,” Tate said one night in her apartment.

"Maggiore is glorious in September. And I want to take you hiking in the Alps with my friends the Müllers. Please say you’ll come.”

Leila turned to face him in bed, propping her head on one elbow, her long black hair flowing across her shoulder, and just stared, saying nothing.

“What’s wrong?” Tate asked. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

“Fun, yes. But really, Des, that’s not me. I have too much to do right now. Clients who need me. You must know I can’t devote my life helping you spend your money on food, wine and fun. If that’s what you want, you’ll have to find another woman. And my parents . . . .”

“You still haven’t told them about me, have you?” Leila just shrugged. He felt she was again testing him, but this was a test he desperately wanted to pass.

“OK, so how about this? Let’s spend the time in Italy figuring out how to give my money away. We can set up a tax-free foundation together, the Tate-Siman Foundation. To support the things you talk about ─ immigrant artists, musicians, writers. In fact, Georg Müller is exactly the man to help us with that. What do you say? Come to Italy with me and let’s see what we can do.”

She rolled onto her back and stared at the ceiling. Several minutes went by. Then she sat up and shot him a look he’d never seen from her.

“If you really mean that, Des, I’ll give it a go ─ but I have two requests.”

“What?”

“I want to do something to honor my parents. They deserve that. And I’d like your man in Switzerland to try to find out if any of my cousins in Iran are still alive. ”

“Deal,” said Desmond Tate.

They flew directly to Lake Maggiore, Leila having persuaded him to skip his usual treatment with Enrico in Milan. For five days, they took long walks beside the lake and lunched at small restaurants; they had candlelit dinners on his terrace overlooking the lake and the mountains beyond,

downing countless bottles of Barolo, Amarone, Erbaluce. They slept late and made love in the mornings, and sometimes in the late afternoons.

And they talked for hours about what the foundation could accomplish – and how they could help prevent Trump’s re-election. To Tate, it seemed that they were crafting a life together.

Then it was time to head to Switzerland for a weekend of hiking with the Müllers ─ and consulting Müller about creating their foundation. Usually, on his annual trip to Switzerland, Tate flew from Milan to Bern, and had a car take him to the Müllers’ home in Spiez on the Thunersee. But this time, with Leila, Tate decided he wanted to drive his Lamborghini Urus over the Simplon Pass into Switzerland.

“Are you sure it’s safe?” Leila asked.

“I’m sure,” he replied. “It will be an adventure, like the one we’re planning.”

The Lamborghini dealer in Milan had assured Tate that the Urus “merged the soul of a super sports car with the functionality of an SUV.” He had driven it over the Apennines and on the corniches in the South of France. He’d never crossed the Alps, but neither had Hannibal before he did it – with elephants – in 218 B.C.

They set out from Maggiore on a sunny Friday morning, the majesty of the mountains spread out before them. Tate stroked Leila’s wonderfully smooth hand, and she gave him a smile that sent his heart racing. At first, the road was a well-maintained highway, with occasional roadside inns and restaurants that became fewer and further between as they neared the pass. Tate drove slowly and carefully, allowing the typically fast European motorists to pass on every straightaway.

Then, before they knew it, they were in the Simplon Pass. Snow-capped and rock-faced peaks loomed ahead, growing taller as they ascended. Steep slopes, sometimes thick with evergreens, but often just rocky inclines, fell off precipitously on one side and climbed sharply on the other.

Every few minutes, Tate took one hand off the wheel to again caress Leila’s hand and point at another breathtaking vista. But Leila remained strangely quiet.

“Is something bothering you?” Tate finally asked.

After more silence, Leila pointed out the window. “All this splendor. Why are you always so good to me, Des?” she asked. “I can’t get over feeling that you’re trying to buy my love . . . to buy me, control me. Am I so wrong?”

“That’s really not fair,” Tate replied, his voice rising. “You’ve changed me, Leila. I don’t want to control you, I want to share with you. I’ve never shared so much with anyone.”

“I don’t want to share what you own, Des. What I want is . . . well, who knows what I want? Just keep your eyes on the road.”

Again silence fell, and the road kept ascending. As it twisted and climbed, tunnels and easy curves gave way to hairpin turns so steep and narrow that drivers going up had to stop to allow traffic going down to pass. But Tate was comforted to see that there were guard rails of steel or concrete on the downslope side of the road and rock retaining walls on the upslope. Many of them were new, but in some places the walls looked ancient, built of rough-hewn stones and boulders, sometimes even crumbling, sometimes with gaps where there were no roadside barriers at all.

He felt a momentary scare when they came to a spot where there was only a pile of rubble where the wall should have been – the remains of a rockslide that hadn’t been cleared away. But he pushed it to the back of his mind and talked again about the scenery.

Then, just before yet another hairpin, they came to a turn-out into an unpaved clearing at the foot of a steep incline, just big enough for one,

maybe two, cars. A place for leg-stretching and picture-taking.

He abruptly pulled off the road and into the clearing, not noticing that there were no guard rails on either side.

“Brilliant move, Des,” Leila proclaimed. “I’ve been keeping watch for a place to pee, but it wasn’t looking like we’d find one before Switzerland. Keep guard and I’ll just go behind the car.”

As she got out, Leila was silhouetted against the empty sky of the deep Alpine valley, and Tate thought she looked taller, stronger, more loveable than ever. Then she disappeared behind the car, while Tate took photos of the tall peaks, exulting in the fresh, crisp wind blowing across the clearing.

“Leila!” he called, “we should get going.” But she couldn’t hear him in the wind. Several minutes passed and still she hadn’t reappeared. Now Tate looked up the slope behind her, and a sudden dread swept over him.

First, he heard a faint rumble and then he saw it – a mass of dirt, rocks and uprooted bushes, high above them, but gathering speed and heading right at them. He called her again and she finally emerged, but she was looking the other way, smiling her smile and gazing across the valley behind him.

“Leila! Quick! Get down!” Tate yelled. Without another thought, he grabbed her wrist to pull her around the car and shove her under it before the rockslide hit. But Leila resisted him, looking puzzled, trying to tug her hand away. As he rolled under the car, pulling her with him, she broke free.

Seconds later, the mass of stones, dirt and broken branches smashed into the car’s side and around its front and rear fenders, then continued across the clearing and down the cliff on the other side. Tate exhaled and opened his eyes. A few rocks, and a lot of dirt and twigs, surrounded him under the car, but he hadn’t been hurt. Then he looked around for Leila and saw to his horror that she wasn’t under there with him.

The rain had stopped, and the pack of starlings, still twisting and turning above the cemetery, veered and disappeared over a hill in the distance.

The officiant intoned a final benediction and the mourners began to head for their cars. It hurt that, when Tate had called her parents to convey his sympathies, he’d been given to understand he wasn’t invited to their home after the funeral.

Even now, he didn’t know why Leila hadn’t introduced them, and her parents probably blamed him for her death. But he was a father too, so he could try to understand. So a limo waited to whisk him to the East Hampton airport, where his jet was set to fly him directly to Anguilla.

There, he would spend hours alone thinking about Leila and finalizing his plans for the foundation.

A week later, Tate sat on the beach in the shade of a palm tree, sipping a piña colada and turning the pages of the thick black binder of documents labeled “Leila Siman Memorial Foundation” that had arrived overnight from Georg Müller’s Zurich office.

Not for the first time, he told himself that creating the foundation in her memory wouldn’t bring her back, but maybe it would ease the pain of having caused her death and also exemplify the new person she had helped him become. He’d already doubled the initial endowment Müller had proposed and directed grants to the small arts and immigrants’ rights organizations Leila had spoken about. And remembering what she’d said that night when she’d agreed to come to Italy, he had established and endowed an “Esther and Yehuda Siman Immigration Law Clinic” at CUNY Law School.

After a few minutes of staring at legalese, Tate closed his eyes and saw again Leila’s shimmering hair and green eyes, felt the softness of her skin. Leila had liked Maggiore, and he knew she would have loved Anguilla. But could he ever be happy here without her? Maybe he would sell the property and put the proceeds into the foundation. “Your old man won't let you down,” he sang softly. “I fell in love with you, you turned my whole world upside down . . . .”

Noticing that the sun had shifted slightly, Tate got up and moved his recliner back into the shade, disturbing a flock of sandpipers who were foraging on the beach, bobbing up and down as they skittered along. He settled back in his chair and returned to the binder. After reviewing the grants one last time, he flipped to the back and read again the letter to Georg Müller from a Tehran lawyer who had located two families named Siman.

Closing the binder with a sigh and putting it on the sand beside him, Tate lay back and looked up at the sky. Minutes ago, it had been cloudless, but now a sudden tropical rain shower was gathering to the west and a breeze began whipping across the beach. The flock of sandpipers stopped their foraging and rose in unison, heading together away from the storm clouds, across the water toward St. Martin on the horizon.

The birds swooped over Tate’s head, reminding him ─ how could they not? ─ of the starlings. He wondered again whether these avian clusterings meant love or heartbreak, a good omen or a bad one. Was Leila’s death really his fault, or was she dead because she had not followed him, had resisted his last effort to pull her to safety? Yet without her, would his life again become like a murmuration, twisting and turning but heading nowhere? In the Persian poem, Majnun, prevented from marrying Layla, went insane and spent the rest of his days wandering in the desert.

Tate vowed that would not be his destiny. As he watched the sandpipers fly unswervingly south, a new thought came to him. Perhaps a murmuration wasn’t directionless after all: don’t these birds instinctively know where they are going and, despite all the winding and weaving, don’t they usually end up there?

Tate knew he couldn’t stay there ruminating – he had to get inside before the storm hit. So he rose from the recliner, picked up his beach towel and sandals and headed for the path through the dunes that led to his villa. None too soon, for moments later the cloudburst came and torrents poured down on him.

Already soaked, he began running up the path. But then he remembered the black binder and suddenly spun around.

“Leila!” cried Desmond Tate, as, drenched and short of breath, he rushed back to the beach to retrieve it.

About the Author:

STEVEN B. ROSENFELD is a retired New York lawyer (Columbia College ’64, Columbia Law School ’67) who began writing short fiction in 2015. Since then, his stories have appeared in Jewish Fiction.net, Reflex Fiction, Good Works Review, Flatbush Review, The Rush, Magnolia Review, Sunspot Literary Journal and Blueline, among others.

His story, “Separation,” a finalist for the 2018 Short Story America Prize, appeared in Short Story America Anthology, Volume VII. His flash fiction piece, “For the Rest of Our Lives,” won First Place in the 2018 Writer Advice Flash Fiction Contest.

He is a member of the Columbia Fiction Foundry, where “MURMURATION” was workshopped. He lives in New York’s West Village with his wife, Joan, and their two spoiled cats, Orville and Wilbur.