The Orphan Sky (6 page)

The next night, I lay in the dark, sleepless, replaying in my mind obsessively—over and over—my performance of Beethoven's
Pathétique
at the recital. A major disaster in the beginning. A bold—too bold?—approach to the “Grave” theme. Did I slow down a bit in the middle of the “Adagio cantabile”? Did they notice that I missed an A-flat in the left-hand arpeggio of the “Rondo: Allegro”? It just slipped from under my finger…

Professor Levina certainly liked my performance; otherwise she wouldn't have given me a standing ovation. But would the jury overlook my almost-meltdown and vote me the winner? If not, then good-bye, Budapest. After all the months of practice. Oh, how I would have let my parents down… Professor Sultan-zade didn't say a word about my performance, only that the decision would be announced sometime tomorrow afternoon. How could I last until then?

At dawn, I left Gargoyle Castle. From the minaret of Gevharaga Mosque, Muezzin Rashid chanted the first
Fajr
Adhan
: “
Allahu
akbar
…
Hayya
alal-falah as-Salaatu khairun minan-naum…
as-Salaatu
khairun minan-naum
…” The yodeling of the prayer drifted through the air, bouncing between the walls of the buildings before disappearing into the pink dome of the sky.

I turned into the labyrinth of Old Town—Icheri Sheher—with its narrow cobblestone alleys twisting between old, shabby, crammed-together houses. Icheri Sheher was awakening, slowly, lethargically, the air hot and creamy, moistened by the sea and sprinkled with the aroma of black gold. The one-of-a-kind concoction called Baku air.

I passed by the ruins of the ancient baths and Caravanserai—the last frontier stop before Europe for the Silk Road caravans that carried sandalwood, saffron, and myrrh from China, India, Persia, and Egypt all the way to the Roman Empire. Here, a few centuries ago, merchants tied their fatigued camels to iron hooks still sticking out of the walls and rested for the night.

Lore had it that the merchants of the Silk Road believed in the magical powers of Maiden Tower. They called her Shrine of Wishes. Before daybreak, they rushed to the tower, eager to reach her walls before the other merchants so they could place their hands on her cold stone and make a wish as the first ray of the sun struck her crown: “Turn everything my hands touch into gold. And turn everything my rival's hands touch into stone.”

Before I knew it, her silhouette loomed in front of me. Closer than I had ever before dared to go. Maiden Tower. Just a stone's throw away. The old, obese, decaying, and surprisingly majestic Maiden Tower, bathed in the soft pastels of the rising sun. A witness to glorious conquests, bloody defeats, hearts broken, and lips sealed. A stubbornly silent monument that refused to reveal its past.

More mystery surrounded Maiden Tower than the amount of stone and limestone used to build it. Of which, according to the archaeologists, there was enough to encircle the entire city ten times over.

No one knew how and when Maiden Tower came to be. The historians claimed that it had been built as a fortress in the twelfth century to defend the Khan of Baku from invaders, a hypothesis based on the age of an inscription found on one of the walls.

The archaeologists argued that the inscription was at least a millennium younger than the stone on which it was written. Excavations at the beginning of the century revealed that it was built between the fourth and sixth centuries on a large rock sloping toward the Caspian Sea. The combination of its anti-earthquake wooden girders, its cylindrical shape with five-meter-thick walls, and a massive beak-like buttress helped it survive the years.

The astronomers believed that the tower served as an observatory. They detected thirty hewed stone protrusions on the tower's lower section and thirty-one protrusions on its upper section, linked with a belt that correlated the days of the month.

The anthropologists dismissed the views of the historians, archaeologists, and astronomers. They insisted that Maiden Tower was once a
dakhma
, a tower of silence, dedicated to the disposal of the dead. They seemed to win the debate because an illustration of the tower in our history textbook showed a corpse wrapped in a rug being lifted to the top of the tower, where ravenous birds were waiting to feast.

While learned men argued about the tower's origins over the centuries, ordinary people sought their own explanation of its name, passing their accounts from mouth to mouth, creating a fusion of Arabic-, Persian-, and Ottoman-influenced legends. Some of them referred to the tower as a fortress never taken by force, metaphorically explaining its name as Maiden's Tower.

Some believed in the goddess of water, Anahita, who once visited the tower and ordered priests to worship her with the fire gushing from the bowels of the earth. The Legend of Love told about a Byzantine princess whose father, the king, fell in love with her and wanted to marry her. The girl's heart belonged to a young knight so she tried to delay her father's advances by begging him to build the tallest tower in the kingdom. When the tower was completed, she leaped from its crown into the sea.

But the most popular was the Legend of Haunted Castle about the evil Shah of Darkness who conquered Azerbaijan and pronounced himself its supreme ruler.

The Shah of Darkness called upon his loyal minions and ordered them to erect an impregnable castle from the bottom of the Caspian Sea.

Caravan after caravan arrived, carrying stones for the tower. Enough stone to enclose the whole town with walls ten times and over. Endless columns of savages, from every corner of the world, were marched through desert sand dunes and snow-peaked mountains. Many died torturous deaths. Those who survived the journey and reached the Land of Fire were forced into brutal labor.

Seven years later, when the tower finally touched the sky, every maiden was taken from her family and imprisoned inside the tower, waiting for her wedding night to the Shah of Darkness. One maiden each night for the Shah's pleasure. The next morning, their maimed bodies were washed up on the shores of the Caspian Sea, all bearing the same expression of horror on what were once their lovely faces.

It continued until one morning when the Firebird soared over Maiden Tower, awakening the people of Azerbaijan, leading the sun to its rightful place in the firmament of the sky.

Once, a few years ago, two students from the nearby Civil Engineering Institute arrived to dig underneath the tower, sleeves rolled up, power drills and shovels in hand, eager to get to the bottom of the shrouded past. Witnesses saw them smoking cigarettes, drinking Armenian cognac, and shouting at each other before putting their gear on and disappearing inside the tower. They were never seen again. The efforts of a military rescue squad amounted to nothing besides discovering a bottomless well underneath the tower. No bodies. Did the students unleash the menacing spirit of evil Shah of Darkness, or were they pulled down by the souls of his dead maidens?

“Hey, old hag, show me your kefir smile, so I can barf on your face.”

A shout came from a grapevine terrace, snuggled up against a sidewalk of Old Town where a dozen highlanders basked in the sun playing
shesh
besh
, drinking tea as dark as their parched faces and harassing an old woman in a shabby gray coat and an old-fashioned straw hat. She hobbled around the plaza swinging her long broom, punishing the littered pavement and ignoring the insult, her face frozen in a mask of squeamishness as if she had just swallowed a dead rat.

“Look at the witch,” barked one of the highlanders. “Isn't she juicy?”

“Look how she walks like she's got a broom shoved into her ass.”

They broke into raucous laughter, hitting each other on the shoulders in camaraderie.

“Shame on you for insulting an old woman,” I yelled at them. “Would you want someone to insult your mothers like this?”

“No, no, no.
Iraq
olcun!
God forbid!” One of the men, his head wrapped in a checkered kaffiyeh, raised himself slightly and pressed his arms across his chest in a mocking apology. “She's no old woman. And she's not somebody's mother. She's the Immortal. The bloodsucking ghost of a dead maiden. So you better be on your way,
qiz
, before she spits her curse in your pretty face.”

The Immortal? The old woman was the Immortal? I took a few more steps but stopped, fighting a temptation to sneak a closer look at her. She was nothing like what I'd expected her to be—a gorgon with rooster-like yellow eyes emitting mortal fires.

I thought of the night around a campfire we once had in summer camp when we told scary stories about the Immortal. “Go away or burn in fire!” we shouted into the darkness to scare her off before she could stick her teeth into our necks and inject us with her dead maiden soul. For years, those yellow eyes continued to follow me into every dark alley.

If this was her, she was an old, withered Thumbelina. With her head down, her elbows pushed outward, she reminded me of a wounded sparrow ruffling her feathers at the sight of one more stone flying in her direction.

• • •

Ashuglar Street was still asleep, the shops closed. A
chaikhana
owner fired charcoal under a gigantic silver samovar. It would take a while for the water to boil. His wife sat on the steps, a bowl with cardamom pods next to her. She bruised them slightly with a pestle and removed the seeds.

I slipped inside the green door and into the familiar sweet-and-tangy aroma of hashish. But today something else hovered in the air, something as intense and bitter as the odor of tree sap.

The smell of paint. Aladdin, his white tunic stained and crumpled, stared into emptiness from behind a large easel. Next to him, a wooden palette with a rainbow of oils.

“Good morning,” I said. “I hope I'm not too early.”

He raised his bloodshot eyes, gazing at me as if I were some sort of apparition. “Ahhh…it's you again.”

Not the greeting I had expected. Especially after yesterday's recital.

“I had a minute. And I was just passing by—”

“No, princess. You weren't just
passing
by
. You stopped to check on me.”

“Check on you?”

“Yes, check on me. Because people like you just
love
checking on people like me.”

“You don't make any sense.”

“I don't, ha?” His mouth twisted in a sneer.

Aladdin picked up his palette, went to the basin, and started washing the brushes gently, one at a time, lining them up in orderly rows on the table. Ignoring me. Why?

Rejected and humiliated, I remained standing in the middle of his room, refusing to leave, feeling a strange sense of loss. I knew intuitively that if I responded to his rudeness and left, I would never come back and would miss something very important. I would never know who this odd person really was—a spy, a painter, a sorcerer? All of that? And I would never have a chance to ask him why he came to my recital and saved me from total fiasco.

“I saw you yesterday,” I said in a small voice.

Aladdin washed the last brush, shook it in the air, and wiped his hands with his tunic. He gave no indication he had heard me.

“I had a difficult time with my performance. The noise threw me off. Your presence there helped me.”

“Really?” Aladdin muttered from the corner. “I thought you did pretty well on your own.”

Pause.

“I enjoyed your ‘Adagio' the most. It brought tears to my eyes. If I had died right then, I'd have been the happiest man on earth."

“How did you know I would be performing?”

“It's natural for a spy to know everything, isn't it?”

“So you
are
a spy?” I looked straight into his dilated pupils, ready to detect the slightest sign of lying, not wanting to believe it. “And you
have
been working for the Americans?”

Aladdin stared at me point-blank, his expression unreadable, slowly blowing his cheeks out until they popped like a balloon. His mouth buckled into a zigzag, and he exploded with hysterical laughter. The room bounced as if struck by an earthquake. Was he trying to deceive me? If so, he was overdoing it. I waited patiently until the last aftershocks died out.

“Who sent you here?” he asked, wiping his watery eyes with the stained sleeve of his tunic.

“No one did.”

“Witch hunt in progress. All right, let's put an end to the ‘American spy' rumor. You can tell your handlers that no, I haven't been working for the Americans. Even though I'd do it in the blink of an eye. I just have never been asked.”

“Then how did you know that I was performing on Saturday?”

“I didn't.”

“Then why were you there?”

“I'm afraid it had nothing to do with you. I love music. And I rarely miss a good performance at the Philharmonic.”

Aladdin pulled his tunic off and tossed it in the corner, tightening the belt on his jeans but leaving his thin upper body exposed. So thin, his smooth, golden-brown skin seemed wrapped tightly around his spine with nothing between. Slowly, lazily, he stretched his arms—an uncoiled spring celebrating its release, a millimeter at a time—then he glanced at me. My eyes flew away from his chest. Not soon enough. His lips suppressed a smile, but the sound of a snort escaped through his nose. He bent over, picked up a shirt from the rug, and put it on.

His taunt intensified my timidity. My toes felt stuck in icy water while my underarms were taking a Turkish bath. How could I open up to this smug boy about what happened at the recital yesterday? How I'd walked through his green door and into the haunting valley of Beethoven's
Pathétique
, captivated by the reflections of the Chopin recording by Vladimir Horowitz, translating, reinterpreting the music into my own style. Would he laugh at me?