The Orphan Sky (12 page)

“I can stop by tomorrow at two.”

“I'll be here.”

Outside, not a trace of rain other than an occasional silver thread of moisture trapped in the salty air. I headed to the music store a half an hour away by bus—enough time to replay over and over again every word and every glance Tahir and I had exchanged, to scrutinize each one for possibly missed, unspoken messages.

At the music store, I bought a secondhand copy, published in 1957, of the score for Rachmaninoff's
Piano
Concerto
no. 3
.

“Let's go to Taza Bazaar,” Tahir suggested the next day when I came to his shop.

“Why Taza Bazaar?”

“Because there's no better place to get inspired. And to get deliciously stimulated too. Remember what Rumi said—‘Thirst drove me down to the water where I drank the moon's reflection.'”

It was reckless enough to come to his shop. To go out into the city with him would be suicidal.

A few minutes later, wrapped in my chador, I strolled through Taza Bazaar next to Tahir. I'd never seen him gleeful like this, bouncing between the vegetable rows like a violin bow playing “Flight of the Bumblebee.”

Behind the nearest stand, a hairy midget juggled fat, juicy tomatoes, slicing them in half in midair, then holding them out on the end of his bejeweled dagger.

Outside the bread store, three old women, Turkish triplets, sat cross-legged on the ground, overstuffed burlap bags filled with all kinds of nuts and dried fruit in front of them. Each triplet had to be at least a hundred years old.

“Sunny day with Allah's help,” a woman with the face of a Caspian tiger and the voice of a Persian gazelle greeted us, baring her toothless mouth, her hair—whatever was left of it—henna-dyed into blinding flames. She sold greens and herbs, stashing cash inside the kilim purse hanging from her neck on a rope thick enough to moor a ship.

“Wait,” Tahir said to me. “I need to sketch her.”

And he was gone—into his creative process. Sitting on a wooden box filled with rotten potatoes, chewing on his pencil, he devoured the woman and her greens with his eyes. Nearby, someone was singing
mugam
—a traditional Azeri art form that wedded classical poetry and musical improvisation—its lamenting, throaty calls untamed for a thousand years, zigzagging through the air like calligraphic lines, embroidered with the pearls of ancient verse.

I'm a poet, no ridicule touches me.

I'm a king, no arrow touches me,

Only her sweet smile bites into my heart.

I'm a man, only beauty touches me…

I rambled by stands overloaded with ready-to-burst peppers and eggplants from Lankaran, sweet-smelling apples and pears from Guba, pinkie-long grapes from Fuzuli, squashy, mouthwatering persimmons from Khachmaz.

The wide-screen panorama through the slit of my chador resembled a worn and tattered Azeri rug woven centuries ago in a swirling paisley motif—a cacophony of conflicting figures and colors that somehow managed to coexist and even benefit from each other.

Tahir waved at me.

“What do you think?” He showed me his drawing—total chaos. Half-human, half-animal figures shifted across the page, all on top of each other.

“I don't know. Everything is happening so close together,” I said, careful not to offend him.

“That's the idea. The breathing, living, hiccupping real world. I'm trying to capture its spontaneity.”

Spontaneity
. Maybe that's exactly what I'd been missing in my Mozart, getting more and more predictable, polishing, cleaning, stripping it of any
spontaneity
.

The Rose Garden Fairy—a short, stout woman in a tattered rabbit-fur vest—guarded the Rose Garden stand with its honey-saturated desserts, seducing passersby. “Try my
halva
. It will melt in your mouth like rose sherbet. If you don't like my
halva
, smell my
pakhlava
. Oh, it will take your soul to Allah's rose garden.”

Tahir did a fast sketch for her—a flattering one—with the face and wings of an angel. She loved it and gave Tahir a huge, juicy chunk of
pakhlava
.

“You just compromised your artistic integrity,” I teased him.

“It was all worth it. Want some? Would be fun to see you eating through your chador. Like a mouse.” He pulled his shirt over his head and stuck the
pakhlava
underneath, making squeaky, munching sounds.

“Don't make fun of me.” I slapped him playfully on the shoulder.

We turned into Tea Alley. A tall, dark young man guarded a tea shop, his bloodshot eyes trailing every passing woman with a filthy stare.

Why did he make me think of Farhad?

I couldn't get past him soon enough. Tea Alley opened into Fish Row, the most privileged section of the bazaar. Here, the members of the Caspian Sea's royal family of sturgeons—belugas, osetras, sevrugas—lay in barrels, twisting their tails in a last agony. Next to the barrels stood large jars filled with beluga caviar.

“Phew…I hate fish.” I pinched my nostrils closed with my fingers. “And I can't stand the taste of caviar. When I was little, my mama used to force it down my throat. Literally.”

Tahir bit on his lower lip, started to say something, chose not to, then changed his mind. “Let me show you some people who'd kill to taste a single roe of caviar, even if they had to lick it off the ground. Follow me.”

It was the first time I'd ever stepped foot into Beggars Corner, the far section of Taza Bazaar. I felt both appalled and guilty. How could such poverty and destitution exist in Baku? Beggars Corner was mobbed with invalids, some of them still dressed in World War II uniforms decorated with medals. They begged for money and food, pleaded for sympathy by parading their stumps.

Their “elder”—his legs amputated just below the knees, his left arm missing below the elbow—sat on a soiled rag at the exit of Taza Bazaar, waving a bunch of dried plants with the little white bulbs,
uzarlik
. In front of him lay a service cap with a few coins. He wailed: “Burn my
uzarlik
and inhale the scent, then spread the ash on your forehead and neck. No evil will ever harm you. Buy my
uzarlik
, one portion—25 kopeks.”

Tahir bent over and placed a ruble in the invalid's gnarled palm.

We left Taza Bazaar and wandered through the city, winding our way down to the ancient burial grounds. We ambled among the remains of tombstones dating back to the twelfth century, deciphering the inscriptions and snacking on sunflower seeds and halva. I found a place to sit in the shade of an apple tree, and Tahir climbed on top of a moss-covered stone fence and recited an eight-hundred-year-old ghazel by Nizami Ganjavi.

Oh my friend, to lose my soul in the garden of your love is a blessing.

To saddle a horse of misfortune that would take me to you is a blessing.

To thaw like a candle in the silver of your smile against the night sky,

To empty your cup of tears and overflow it with happiness is a blessing…

How different Tahir looked in the light of day. No longer a sage. Just an eccentric eighteen-year-old teenager in black slacks and white shirt, a wicker basket filled with pink-headed radishes at his feet. He smiled at me, his eyes catching a shaft of sunlight darting through a cocoon of climbing vines.

“You know, I bought the score of Rachmaninoff's
Piano
Concerto
no. 3
,” I said.

“Bravo!” Tahir clapped. He jumped down from the fence and dropped next to me, rubbing his hands in delight. “I'm proud of you. To take on Rach 3—it requires guts. But you can do it. There's enough power in your hands, and at the same time, you make piano sound like a human voice. Now we can really work in sync with each other.”

His brushstroke—my musical note.

“Look at the Immortal's bastard.”

A hissing voice came from a group of lowlifes congregating outside a tobacco shop.

“Now the little shit's got his own whore to himself. Why is he hiding her under a chador? Maybe she's got balls instead of a cunt just like the Immortal.”

The gang broke into dirty laughter, punching each other, stirring themselves to move from insults to action. A scrawny hashish freak with a fresh pink scar across his forehead separated from the crowd and wobbled toward us, obscenely sticking his thumb in and out of the curled fingers of his other hand. “Come here, slut, I'll do you better than the old witch's fairy,” he shouted, waving at the rest to join him.

Tahir sat frozen, blinking nervously, his face ablaze, eyes spilling hot lava, teeth clenched tightly. Embarrassed or frightened? I couldn't tell, but deep inside I rooted for him to act as my hero.

He didn't.

“Let's go.” He grasped my arm tightly and pulled, his hand so hot I thought it would burn me to the bone. I tripped, almost tumbling to the ground, Tahir keeping me on two feet until we turned a corner.

We kept the pace for a few more blocks, both of us breathing hard, neither saying a word, until we reached the busy intersection of Kirov and Torgovaya streets and stopped.

“Please listen… I mean,
don't
listen to those dirty, filthy lies,” Tahir said, his voice cracking almost into a sob, his pleading eyes seeking mine. “Don't listen to what they're saying. She is an incredible woman…my grandmother. You wouldn't even believe whom she knew in her previous life—Rachmaninoff, Horowitz. She's like no one else.” He squeezed his hands into fists, banging the air, at a loss for words.

“I'd like to meet her,” I said, a bee buzzing inside my stomach. “After all, I grew up in her home. She's been a part of my life since long ago, since I was a little girl who dreamed of being like her. Like the Snow Princess.”

“Don't tell her that.”

“What do you mean?”

Tahir cleared his throat. “Don't tell her that you live in her Villa Anneliese.”

• • •

The gray bastion of Maiden Tower obscured the sun. The streets of Icheri Sheher, drenched in light just a minute ago, were now dark, as though they had suddenly dropped to the bottom of a well. A brown mound surrounded the tower. All dirt, with patches of burned grass and trampled dandelions.

Gingerly, I followed Tahir through the rusty gate and along the crumbled stone-laid walkway. Four steps down, a door with loose shreds of paint, fortified by an iron belt, led into a small gallery. Across the gallery, another door. This one arched, with intricate metal carving along the edges. Tahir pushed the door with his shoulder. It opened with a low rasp. He held it for me to enter.

Thin Mudéjar columns, bearing the weight of the ornate arcade on their shoulders, surrounded a small octahedral courtyard with moss creeping up its walls, with the soggy smell of
once
upon
a
time
, with the echoes of dripping dew and rain. The sun peeped through an Islamic window grill in the towering cupola.

A dark silhouette separated from one of the columns and stepped into a red cone of sunlight.

“You have a guest?” the Immortal said in a deep, slightly croaky mezzo.

“Yes. This is my friend Leila.” Tahir turned to me. “Leila, meet my grandmother, Miriam Mukhtarov.”

The sun skewed through boards nailed across the frame of a window, casting strips of light onto neatly stacked rows of books. Nizami Ganjavi.
Jala
l ad-Din Muhammad Rumi
. Anna Akhmatova. Honoré de Balzac. All in different languages. Francisco de Goya's cartoonish
majas
and
caballeros
flew a kite across the woven surface of a small tapestry on the wall.

We were inside Miriam Mukhtarov's chamber.

The Snow Princess—sixty years older than her portrait in the courtyard of our Gargoyle Castle—sat at the head of the table. Her face resembled a dried-out tree stump with scars, knots, and warped lesions. Her eyes revealed irises almost fully buried beneath snowy sclera. Her spine curved so badly that she had to heave her neck up—like a turtle peering out of her shell—to see anything above the floor. A wispy silver braid slid down her shoulder from underneath a worn-to-threads straw hat.

But her black woolen dress with a white batiste collar and cuffs was starched and ironed as if she was waiting to go to an opera. And a figurine of the bird from the fresco in our courtyard sat proudly on top of her gramophone. The same swan-like neck with a frilled emerald necklace, folded wings of faded gold and scarlet, two curled ears. The bird had been beaten by life as much as her mistress, her beak broken, her tail gone, but her tiny claws were still in place holding tightly to the lid of the gramophone.

Tahir poured us tea from a green copper samovar.

“Baba,” he said, placing his hand on top of Miriam's, “Leila is a serious student of piano. She has recently been studying Rachmaninoff's
Concerto
.”

“Which one?” Miriam asked, her deep, chesty mezzo defying her withered body.

“Number three.”

Miriam smiled and sipped her tea, elegantly holding the handle of her tin cup between her thumb and index finger. “Do you come from a musical family, Leila?” she asked.

“No. My mama is a doctor, and my papa is an engineer.” I downplayed my heritage.

“Well. Then how and when did you discover your love of music?”

“On my sixth birthday. My mama took me to the Philharmonic hall to hear Sviatoslav Richter. On my way home, I told Mama I wanted to be a pianist. A week later, a baby grand Bösendorfer moved into my room.”

“That's a bit too impressive an instrument for starting to learn piano, but I'm sure it fully complements your talent.”

“Baba,” Tahir said, “I told Leila that you knew Rachmaninoff. Please tell us about him.”

“In a minute.” Miriam rose heavily from her chair and shuffled to the corner. Her feet—the same feet depicted on the fresco, thin and delicate, peeking through the clasp of her golden sandals—were now twisted and troublesome, failing to hide their puffiness inside black felt boots. She took an angora shawl from the couch and wrapped it tightly around her shoulders. By now the daylight had vanished; the room had succumbed to brown haze. How had she survived in this wintry, damp stone chamber?

Miriam returned, an oil lamp flickering in her hands. She placed it in the middle of the table and eased into the chair.

“Sergei Rachmaninoff was a tall man, and with such a tendency to melancholy,” she said in her slightly hoarse voice. “Stravinsky called him a ‘six-and-a-half-foot scowl.' Out of jealousy, of course. There was a lot of it between us émigrés. But there were close friendships too. Like between Sergei and Volodya—Vladimir Horowitz. Sometimes they would come over and play piano pieces for four hands.
Bellissimo
!
”

Miriam smiled nostalgically, the light from the oil lamp illuminating her clouded eyes and accentuating every crevice in her wrinkled face. “The musical giants' duo. But after the first time Sergei heard his
Piano
Concerto
no. 3
performed by Vladimir, he never played it himself again. It had nothing to do with envy. He just simply explained that he might have composed the piece, but Horowitz absolutely
owned
it.”

“He definitely does.” Tahir turned to Miriam. “Can I play it for Leila?”

“The
Concerto
?” I asked, excited.

“Yes, the legendary Number 3. Recorded by Horowitz in 1930.”

“And Tahir's favorite,” Miriam added. “I should blame both Rachmaninoff and Horowitz for Tahir's love of art. The first time he heard the
Concerto
—he had just turned twelve—he told me: ‘Baba, I see this music. And I want to paint it.' I went to the store, bought the aquarelles. He tried the color and said, ‘No, it's too pretty. I need something thick and dark that sticks.'”

“Shall we hear the music?” Tahir interjected, bringing the gramophone to life.

The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio's chiaroscuro with Renoir's impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. Vladimir Horowitz played piano along that fine line, crossing back and forth effortlessly as only a genius could have done.

Miriam listened with her eyes half closed, the exposed ashen slits making her look blind, the musical notes traveling along her lips, contorting them into a ghostly smile. But I could see that through her desecrated, crippled facade shone the indomitable spirit of the Snow Princess from my childhood. That through every crack in her face and voice spilled charisma of a magnitude reserved only for the world's greatest opera divas.

“Have any of your performances been recorded?” I asked Miriam after the recording finished playing.

“I never thought I was good enough. Maestro Arturo Toscanini—oh, he had a quick temper—once stormed out of our dress rehearsal when I stopped in the middle of ‘Habanera' for the third time. But what could I do? I had to make it right. Once, my impresario decided to record my
Carmen
at the Palais Garnier, and I said not yet. The tone of my upper register sounded too thin, lacking in overtones. I needed more
meat
to my voice, and I thought that it would come with age. That's why I never stopped rehearsing. Even in the labor camps.”

Her white arched eyebrows collapsed. “And then it came—the right tone. When I was forty. The new warden had given me a
privileged
assignment. While everyone else was sent to the forest to cut trees—in terrible blizzards—I was left alone in the barracks to rid the prisoners' clothing of lice using a piece of broken glass. I sang ‘Habanera' to myself. I knew right away that my voice had reached that prime I had strived for. And that it was too late.”

I imagined the young woman from Muezzin Rashid's old photograph, with her blond hair cut off sitting in her cell, killing lice, and humming
Carmen's
aria.

“But how can it be,” I said, “that if…when…all those horrible things you're saying happened, with millions of people disappearing in the gulags, how can it be possible that no one ever talks about it? I asked my papa about Stalin, and he said that Stalin was a great Communist leader with titanic vision and that his wisdom had saved the world from fascism.”

“Your papa is part of the generation of blind innocence, indoctrinated with lies from early childhood. Lies presented as truth. Darkness portrayed as light. Slavery labeled freedom.”

She leaned against the column, her mouth twisting nervously from side to side. How strange, sixty years apart, Tahir and Miriam shared the same verbal and facial expressions. Like this one, which indicated that she was deciding whether to respond to my question.

She finally did.

“I'll tell you a little story. More like a fairy tale but without a happy ending.” She clasped her small hands against her chest. “It goes like this.”

Once
upon
a
time, there lived a maiden called Truth. She was fair and sweet. And innocent. As only truth can be. Her voice, pure and powerful, reigned across the meadows and the seas until it reached both Heaven and Hell, but before Heaven could respond, Hell snatched Truth into the dark forest of
Lies.

“Give up your voice,” he demanded of the chained and shackled
Truth.

“Never,” she replied. “I'd rather
die.”

Hell
kept
her
without
food
or
water. But Truth didn't
bend.

“Why don't we just kill her and bury her so deep that nobody can ever find out?” the head of the Ministry of Lies asked
Hell.

“If we do that, the enemies of the Soviet people will turn dead Truth into a martyr,” he answered with strong
conviction.

“What if we buy her out and send her
away?”

“Where? To the West? So the Imperialists can use her in their propaganda against us? No. Useless idea. I need her around. She will give credibility to Lies if she is alive but silent. We will pass her into the hands of the KGB. They have their
methods.”

They
did. They beat her until all her bones were broken. They burned her skin and blinded her eyes. They carved out her tongue. Then they dressed her in a jester's costume and took her through the streets of their cities, greeted by the cheers of the happy Soviet people. And they kept a vigilant account of those who refused to cheer or didn't cheer enough. For them, they built concentration camps throughout Siberia. Sixty million deaths later, nobody dared to question the truth of the lies of
Communism.

• • •

Miriam pushed her hands against the table and lifted her weight with effort. “I'd like for you to see something, Leila,” she said, putting on a heavy coat and taking an oil lamp from the table.

Tahir and I followed her through a dark corridor to a rusty metal door. Rummaging in a pocket of her coat, she retrieved a key and, after a few failed efforts, finally fitted it into the keyhole. The door opened begrudgingly.

“Welcome to Coronation Hall,” Miriam said.

We entered a large room, the light from Miriam's lamp making its ornamented stone walls shimmer like silk tapestries.

“It used to be a Zoroastrian sanctuary,” she continued, “with eternal fire burning in the middle. There is a large reserve of oil underneath. Priests used to sit here around the fire searching for the essence of existence, worshipping the good, burning evil. Later, in the times of Shirvan rulers, Shah Ismail turned it into his royal assembly hall, Divankhana. And it was right here where he held his sumptuous feasts and entertained guests with the most enlightened ideas and poetry of the time, sitting on his throne.” She pointed toward a raised stone pedestal interlaced with fig and vine leaves, then led me to an object in the corner covered with a woolen blanket.

“What is this?” I asked.

“One of a kind, the Mukhtarovs' two-hundred-year-old clavichord. A very special instrument. The tone is so minimalist, no place to hide. It leaves you with nothing but the reflection of your own soul. Would you like to try it, Leila?”

I removed the blanket and carefully lifted the lid, revealing, on the inside panel, a lacquered pastoral scene with a sleeping shepherd boy and happily grazing sheep. I stroked the keys, their touch so sensitive, giving me the illusion of tapping the strings with my fingers. The sound soared to the cupola, rich and immensely powerful for such a small instrument, yet tender and pure as the voice of a child.

I played the rondo from the “Allegro assai” of my Mozart
Piano
Concerto
no. 20
, rippling upward, trying to impress—no, blow away—both Tahir and Miriam. But somehow the clavichord's discolored but proudly elevated keys, the pink-cheeked boy shepherd sleeping peacefully on its grassy lid and, even more so, the surrealism of Coronation Hall steeped in dusk, called for something with less bravura. Maybe Bach's
French
Suite
in
D
Mino
r
?

I switched to the fugue without even stopping, weaving three independent voices into a contrapuntal exchange of ideas, making the polyphony flawless, the dynamics precise, the emotions sustained.

But my fingers seemed to handle the musical notes on their own, merging Bach's modulations into the first theme of Rachmaninoff's
Concerto
no. 3
, forcing my mind to release its claws from the steering wheel of my performance. I slipped into an emotional free fall—past the
Cabaret
poster with Liza Minnelli, past Billie Holiday's heart-wrenching
Body
and
Soul
, past Goya's grotesque
majas
and
caballeros
flying their kite, past Farhad's intimidating glare, past Beggars Corner and Papa with his Ardabil carpet.

But before I hit the ground, a powerful Khazri lifted me into the air, carrying me over the ocean, farther and farther toward the horizon. To an island with the sand sparkling like gold coins, where the ocean meets the sky and the sky is as blue as Tahir's eyes. Weightless, I drifted away, lost between the blue of the sky and the blue of the ocean, trailing Vladimir Horowitz's smooth crescendo, listening to the distant echoes of approaching thunder.

I couldn't have lived more vividly through my music if, dressed in a concert gown, I had been performing in front of hundreds of music aficionados. No, I was touching the heavens as I played Rachmaninoff on a dusty clavichord in Coronation Hall, buried within the catacombs of Maiden Tower, for two odd people standing in the corner: Tahir, his arm wrapped protectively around Miriam's frail frame, and the old woman who, in the pearly moonlike glow of the lamp, had reverted to her youthful self—the Snow Princess from the fresco of her Villa Anneliese.