The Orphan Sky (9 page)

We crossed our courtyard and stopped in the niche with no one around. Just Farhad and me. I kept my eyes down, fighting off the tremolo in my stomach.

“Where is your Komsomol badge?” he asked out of the blue.

My hand flew to my collar. The badge wasn't there. I took it off to go visit Tahir and forgot to pin it back on. I closed my eyes in embarrassment, expecting to be reprimanded.

“Don't worry, Leila,” I heard Farhad saying in an unusually mellow voice. “I have this special badge given to me by Comrade Popov himself.”

He pulled a large badge out of the pocket of his trousers and began to pin it to the collar of my blouse.

I wanted to put my foolish head on Farhad's shoulder and cry and confess my treasonous behavior and my confusion and my fears. He would understand and forgive because he really cared about me. How could I have been so foolish as to think that Comrade Farhad had wrecked my recital? It was stage fright. That's all. The rest I invented myself.

Farhad's pinkie seemed to slowly move down to my breast…poking…probing…reaching the nipple…all while attaching the Komsomol badge. Then he furtively looked around, grabbed my hand, and brushed it against his bulging crotch.

“That's what you've done to me,” he whispered in my ear accusingly, breathing flames. “You are mine now. Do you hear me? You belong to me, Leila. To me and no one else. I think about you all the time. All the things I'm going to do to you.” He grinned, yellow snakes dancing in his eyes. “And remember, I'm watching you. Watching your every step. So you better never—
never
—let me down.”

He turned and hastily walked away, leaving me standing in the shadowy niche. Staring absently at a faded fresco of the Snow Maiden in an azure gown, a gazelle at her feet, petting the bird in her lap.

Was it my fault? Had I done something to cause it? I stood numb, confused, shaken, wishing the last few minutes had never happened.

That night I couldn't sleep.

Why? Why did Farhad treat me so disrespectfully? Had I given him any reason? Had I somehow unconsciously prompted him to become rough with me?

Since childhood, we had been taught that girls would always be blamed for enticing men. That was engraved in our Azeri mentality. But how did I entice him? All I ever showed him was my respect and admiration. Maybe I showed it too much, giving him the wrong idea? I did dream that someday Farhad would choose me as his girl. And I did want Farhad to touch me. But not in the rude way he did, as if I was some unscrupulous, cheap, dirty street girl.

I had to talk to him. On Thursday, after the Komsomol meeting. To explain that what had transpired was wrong. That he had scared me, diminished my sense of self, and that his behavior reflected negatively on my relationship with him.

Would I dare to say all this to his face?

I pulled the blanket over my head and began counting camels:
One, two, three…seven
… Aunty Zeinab's recipe for sleep that had always worked. Even on the night before the chemistry exam, when all one hundred seventeen elements of Mendeleev's periodic table bounced around my brain like a horde of restless moths.
Twelve, thirteen
… Arabian camels began moving across the walls, slowly, one after another.
Eighteen, nineteen, twenty…thirty…fifty-nine
…

Hayya
alal-falah as-salaatu khairun minan-naum
…

The morning prayer,
Fajr
Adhan
, lifted me out of my dream. I opened my eyes to the lazy sunrise. To Muezzin Rashid's tranquil modulations suspended in the air.

I had an idea.

On my way to school, careful not to be seen, I snuck downstairs and knocked on the door of Muezzin Rashid's apartment that he had inhabited, as Papa told me, since the Revolution. He lived by himself, and he kept to himself, a hermit dwelling in basement rooms in the rear of our castle. No one ever visited him or talked to him. A pariah. A man of religion. An atavism of the old world. At the same time, though, a silent aura of respect for him—or maybe fear—reigned across the neighborhood.
A
fear
of
God?

Muezzin Rashid opened the door, the thick shrubbery of his eyebrows raised in surprise over faded eyes drooping inside hammocks of crumpled flesh.

“I need to ask you something,” I whispered.

“Come in, come in,
qiz
.” He took my hand and led me inside his apartment. “Anything you ask for.”

The place was tiny and dark, its linoleum floor filthy gray, mirroring a ceiling infested with moldy smudges and fissures. A decrepit television was set on top of a broken stove. An old rug, in need of soapy water, hung on the wall. Across its surface, two lovebirds flew on a magic carpet through dusty gray clouds instead of soaring into blue skies.

“Sit down,
qiz
. Let me bring you an
armud
of tea.”

“Thank you, Muezzin Rashid. I don't want to be late for school, but I need to ask you…” I stumbled. “It's about the Immortal. I mean, Miriam Mukhtarov. Did you know her? And is it true that our castle is not really Gargoyle Castle but—”

“Villa Anneliese,” Muezzin Rashid finished for me, a thin, nostalgic smile lighting up his creased face, baring his toothless mouth. “Villa Anneliese,” he repeated as if enjoying the sound of it. “The gardens were filled with roses. They bloomed all year around, each season a different fragrance. A lot of revelry we had here. In the Oriental Hall, all in azure tile, it looked like the tent of a Mauritanian princess.”

Was it in the forsaken part of our building, the black gap in the sky I stared at every evening?

“Let me show you something,
qiz
.” Leaning his wrinkled, blue-veined hands against the table, Muezzin Rashid lifted his feeble body. He shuffled to a wardrobe with a missing door, pushed aside a pile of ragged clothes, and rummaged around until he found a packet swathed in a piece of olive-green flannel. Unwrapping it as gently as though a rare rose had bloomed inside, he retrieved an old photograph.

“This is me.” He pointed at a young, flamboyant man, wearing traditional Azeri dress—a glossy satin
rubakha—
and a tall lambskin hat. “In Uzeyir Hajibeyov's production of
Arshin
Mal
Alan
. In 1921.”

“You sang Arshin Mal Alan?” I said, startled. Arshin Mal Alan? The swanky main tenor in the first Azerbaijani national comic opera—a wealthy bachelor who disguises himself as a cloth peddler and travels around to see women at their houses without chadors to choose his bride. I couldn't believe it.

Muezzin Rashid stared at the photograph, a reflective shadow across his face, slipping back to the distant rooms of his memory. “And here is Miriam.”

A young woman next to him, in a white gown, a garland of flowers in her long, blond hair, her eyes gleaming through the layer of tarnish on the aged paper.

“This is her?” I asked, astounded.

“Yes, irresistible Miriam Mukhtarov. The glowing mezzo. And oh, her magnetism… With a flicker of her eyelashes she could capture the audience and set their hearts aflame. A real diva.” Muezzin Rashid swallowed strenuously as if a pebble had gotten stuck in his throat.

Had she set his heart aflame as well?

“And who is this?” I indicated a young man in a beret and checkered breeches sitting in front of Miriam.

“Caspar the Poet.
Xeyalperest
, a dreamer with his head in the clouds. What did Miriam see in him? Ech.” Muezzin Rashid shook his head. “It is because of him that Miriam came back to the Soviet Union. To save him.”

“From what?”

“He was accused of intellectual and religious sabotage.”

“And did she save him?”

“No, they executed Caspar.”

“But why?” I exclaimed.

“Shhh.” Muezzin Rashid's finger flew to his lips.

I could sense his fear.

“Muezzin Rashid,” I whispered, “have you heard of the gulag?”

He didn't answer, just sat with his head in his hands, shaking back and forth, a little old man alone with the ghosts of his past.

“I didn't have Miriam's courage,” he said. “No one did. She was a steel maiden who never compromised even the least of her principles. She used to say: ‘An egg thief becomes a camel thief.' Who would have expected such spirit in a delicate, raised-in-gold-and-feathers princess?”

“I don't understand. If they executed that man, Caspar, because of the
religious
sabotage
, how can you be allowed to sing in the mosque?”

“Oyi,
qiz
.” Muezzin Rashid sighed. “Times have changed since then, and now they have to be clever with the Islamic revolution in Iran and Ruhollah Khomeini just across the Kura River from us. As the old
hikmet
says, to stay alive, a wolf will put on a fox's tail. So
they
play games—keep a few mosques around to show off their tolerance and respect for our national Islamic culture. But it's only a facade supervised by the KGB. And me? I'm just another puppet, wagging my lamb's tail to butter my rotting bones before they burn in Allah's fire.”

“This is not true,” I said firmly. “I can't even imagine the sun mounting the sky without your
Adhans
. They are so beautiful. And meaningful too. An inseparable part of our lives.” I paused before adding an old adage, “‘Even a blind man can hear the nightingale sing.'”

A slight wave of a hand. The faint, barely suppressed flush of a former operatic star. He walked me to the door.

“Muezzin Rashid, do other people know what you just told me?”

He hesitated for a moment, his breathing rapid and shallow, his head sinking lower, his eyes locked on the wall. “What did I tell you? I don't remember what I told you. I'm so old, I've outlived my own mind. Go to school,
qiz
, and have a sunny day, with Allah's help.”

The door closed behind me with a moaning rustle.

Even
a
blind
man
can
hear
the
nightingale
sing.
It was the least I could say to thank Muezzin Rashid for what he had given me. Now I knew—Tahir's story wasn't the fruit of his hashish imagination or political propaganda. He had told me the truth.

A shiny black Chaika waited outside the green door with the engine running. It was the type of car usually reserved for very important Communist Party members like Papa and a few of his friends in the government. When he wasn't traveling to the oil fields, he—and sometimes me and Mama—were driven around town in a car just like this. What was it doing here in this part of town? At the green door?

The back window rolled down, and a girl my age, maybe a year older, leaned out, showering her face with the sunlight. A doll-like face with perfect kohl lines around her eyes and iridescent, bright pink mousse drawing attention to her full lips and high cheekbones. Just the way Almaz liked to apply her makeup and unsuccessfully tried to teach me to do.

I snuck inside the fabric store across the street and took my post by the row of silks, happy that a wearisome customer was rambling nonstop and keeping the grumpy saleswoman busy and away from me. The clock on the wall showed two thirty. An eternity later, the minute hand still hadn't reached the thirty-five mark.

The boys kept running up and down the street, throwing stones at sparrows. One of them, delayed by his short, bowed legs, had a difficult time catching up with the rest. He was the son of the shoe-shop owner. Tahir's neighbor.

Finally, a short, stocky man in a gray suit emerged briskly from Tahir's shop carrying a painting of Mona Lisa, her face looking downward, peeking through the torn newspaper wrapping. The chauffeur leaped out of the car and threw the door open. The gray-suited man disappeared behind the tinted windows, and the Chaika roared away. I waited for a few minutes, crossed the street, and stepped inside the green door.

Tahir stood in the corner, counting a stack of cash.

“So you're running a lucrative business here,” I said, unable to suppress the chirping overtones in my voice.

“Hmm. It's you.” He scratched an eyebrow, trying to tone down his own apparent excitement. It didn't help. Not with the grin. Was it because of the money? Or me?

“I'm here, but don't you think for a moment that I'm here because I agree with your accusations about Communism and my beliefs.” I muttered a phrase I had been rehearsing tirelessly. It didn't come out in the strong, assertive way I had planned.

“Patience is the key to paradise.” Tahir smiled, his eyebrows arched like the wings of a soaring swallow.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that an illness comes by the pound and goes away by the ounce.”

I'd heard that old saying before but couldn't quite understand what he referred to as
an
illness
. I chose to sway away from his interpretation. “Did you just sell stolen art?” I asked instead.

“Oh yes, straight from the Louvre. Haven't you read in the paper that
Mona
Lisa
has fallen in value recently? So I thought—ah, first, Picasso, now me.”

“I don't understand.”

“It's a long story.”

“I've got time.”

“Aren't you supposed to practice piano all day long?” he said, failing to keep his face straight.

“Oh, thanks for reminding me. I better go, then.”

He shrugged. “You can stay if you want.”

“Then what about Picasso?”

“Picasso? Well, when
Mona
Lisa
was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, the magazines accused Picasso of the theft.”

“Did he do it?”

“No, some Italian nationalist did it. He wanted Leonardo da Vinci to hang in the Uffizi Gallery. But Picasso's name attached to the story gave the painting instant attention. And the value of
Mona
Lisa
rose astronomically.” He stopped, biting his paint-stained thumbnail. His nails had been chewed down almost to the quick.

“Very interesting,” I said, “but what about
your
Mona Lisa? And the black Chaika I saw outside with a man and his daughter.”

“She's not his daughter. She's a
keniz
, one of the many concubines he's picked up at the Turkish baths. That's where your glorious Communist deities hold their bacchanalias, you know.” He clicked his tongue in loud judgment. “Back to your inquiry. It's very simple. One has to do a lot of different things to survive in this Kingdom of Darkness.”

Kingdom of Darkness? “So you paint for important Party members while you actually loathe them?”

“That's quite perceptive for a girl of your age.”

For
a
girl
of
my
age?

How old was Tahir? Not that much older than me. Seventeen maybe? Judging by his self-assurance, his stories, and his knowledge, he had lived a few lives already, but his eccentric manners reminded me of the hyperactive five-year-old son of one of Mama's nurses.

Tahir put the money on the stool and slapped his hands against each other as if washing away the dirt. “At the moment,” he said, “Leonardo da Vinci is in fashion among the Baku Communist elite. I paint the phony replicas, good enough for Comrade This or Comrade That to impress their cohorts with their fine arts patronage and bring me more business. And the buffoon who was just here, I'm sort of his
court
painter
. And, on top of that, I run some not-quite-legal errands for him from time to time.

“In exchange, he provides me with flimsy but, nonetheless, vital protection. He's my safeguard—my
krysha
. I make him good money; he pays me the crumbs. For the time being, I'm safe from the KGB's Iron Maiden, so I can buy music records on the black market and lure foolish girls into my temple of music.”

He narrowed his lilac eyes, a sly smile hopping all over his face. “Would you like to have some tea and hear some music, Leila?”

Was he mocking me? “I think I'm going to leave now.”

“Oh no.” Tahir sucked in his lower lip and raised his eyebrows, looking like an apologetic child. “I'm sorry, that didn't come out right. What I said. Ignore that last part. The ‘foolish girls' part. The ‘tea' part stands though. So?”

I took my time. “I guess I can stay, but just for a few minutes.”

“Perfect. Give me a few minutes, and I'll change your world,” he crooned in his high voice, heading toward the alcove with the recordings. He sorted through the stacks and pulled an album from the shelf. “I'd like to play something very special for you. I think you're going to like her.”

“Who is this?”

“Nina Simone. No one can strip life down to a bare emotion the way she does.”

The blue light of the Rapsodija languorously illuminated the room as he placed the disc on the turntable.

The sweeping sound of an orchestral opening followed by a rough voice singing in English. The song defied every rule of classical music—the odd resolutions of the chords in the accompaniment, the distorted pitch of the singer, the almost unintended hint of light in the chromatic piano lines conflicting with the gloom in the vocal intonations—yet all together it had an emotional impact that I could only compare to the music of Richard Wagner with its poignant romanticism emerging out of symphonic mayhem.

“You said ‘she,' but it sounds like ‘he,'” I said after the song was finished.

“Many of the female jazz vocalists are black. Their voices are very guttural and feral, yet they carry the relentless power to reach deep inside your soul.”

“Isn't it prohibited to play or even listen to jazz music?”

“Of course it is. Just as prohibited as it is to breathe, to think, and to know. You see—” he started, then broke off. A naughty grimace broadened his face, twisting his mouth and revealing slightly crowded lower teeth. Mimicking a soldier's pace, he strutted theatrically across the room, stopped at the hearth, and swiftly turned to face me.

“Comrades,” he said in a low oratorical tone of voice, heartily hitting the air with the fist of his right hand. “Jazz is a hydra of Imperialist propaganda. Today you are listening to an American saxophone—tomorrow you'll sell your Motherland.” He hit the air. “Exterminate!” Another hit. “Wipe out!” Hit. “Burn to ashes!”

Feeling annoyed and amused at the same time, I watched as he quite accurately impersonated both Comrade Farhad and Comrade Popov in their addresses to the Komsomol Assembly, complete with a simulation of them banging their fists against the podium. Tahir's timing, though, was definitely better.

“We, the generation of selfless builders of Communism, we won't stop until we behead the hydra monster of Western Decadence one head at a time…”

I glanced at my watch. Five minutes to four. I could still make it in time for the Komsomol meeting. But I dreaded facing—and even more so, confronting—Comrade Farhad. So I decided to just call his office later and report that I was not feeling well.

“We, the mercenaries of Communism—”

“Stop it.” I cut Tahir off, even though part of me rejoiced. Carefree Tahir, with his bizarre performance, was so different from rigid, grim-faced Comrade Farhad. “You are ridiculing my beliefs. Do you want me to leave?”

At once, Tahir cast off the orator's image. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to upset your ideological sensitivities. And if I did so—unintentionally—I hope the distress hasn't spread its claws to your stomach and we still can share a pleasant feast together. Will you join me for
kutabs
? I'm famished.”

We ate on his Afghani rug, a pile of steaming
kutabs
—traditional Azeri crepes filled with meat and herbs—on a newspaper in front of us. Plunging one after the other into a glass bowl with coriander kefir, we stuffed them into our insatiable mouths. How weird. Here I was, alone in a room with a total stranger—a definitely odd stranger—sitting on the floor, inhaling the sweet scent of hashish, and feeling more comfortable than I had ever felt with anyone.

“
I
put
a
spell
on
you… I put a spell on you
,” wailed Nina Simone in her deep manly voice from the corner in a language that I, then, could not understand.

“Why do you smoke hashish?” I asked.

“Because it takes me back to places I'll never see again in this life—Paris, Rome, Barcelona. Beautiful cities. Beautiful people.”

“What do you mean by
again
?”

“I had the good fortune to see them. To be there.”

“What? You have been in the West?”

“A year ago, when I turned seventeen, I was sent to study art in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. By mistake, of course. A typical Soviet screw-up. When the right hand didn't know what the left hand was doing. Someone misspelled my name, missing a letter. So when I won a national art competition in high school, the KGB somehow didn't connect me to the Mukhtarovs,
the
dangerous
enemy
of
the
Soviet
people
, and gave me a visa.

“After a month there, I ran away. You see, even though Dresden is a part of East Germany, the atmosphere there is much looser than in the Soviet Union. I traveled all over Europe.” He sighed. “But I failed. Stupidly failed. Gorged myself on freedom. Choked on it. And ended up walking into their trap. They brought me back and threw me into a correctional institute.”

A convicted defector? Had I gone another stroke away from the shore into even more troubled waters? I remembered one morning at the Pioneer camp, two summers earlier, when my group went for a swim, I ended up going so far that when I looked back, the shoreline seemed more distant than the horizon. But I didn't feel scared, not at all. If anything, I had to fight the temptation to keep going farther toward the vast, thrilling unknown. Like now. With Tahir.

He leaned back on his elbows, inhaled from his cigarette, and closed his eyes, immersed in the music.

“Tell me about the places you've been to,” I said.

“You're hearing them. They're like the jazz music. Different. Tantalizing. Stimulating. An instant splash of color across a canvas.” Tahir reached for the shelf and pulled another album, holding it protectively against his chest with both hands. “Wait till you hear this one. My favorite artist of them all. She is like no one else. Her name is Billie Holiday, but the world called her Lady Day.”

The recording sounded to me as if it was playing at 20 instead of 33 rpms, slurring, hiccupping. Trying to follow Lady Day's vocal lines felt like stumbling into the unforeseen dead ends in the labyrinth of Icheri Sheher. She juggled her phrases tirelessly up and down her ample tessitura. At the same time, I felt her sitting next to me, speaking into my ear, saying something soothing and promising, drops of sunshine sifting through her dark, smoky voice.

“This music doesn't sound very happy, does it?” I said, unsure of my reaction.

“How could it? Jazz is a soundtrack of real life. And life isn't a very happy phenomenon.”

“Why do you think it's better there in the West than it is here at home?”

“You can be free there. You can choose how to dress, where to live, what music to listen to, which God to believe in. You can be
you
.”

Tahir looked ethereal amid the hashish rings hovering in the air. His body moved in rhythm with the music—slowly, in a trance—as if performing some ancient ritual.

“Jazz is good for you.” His voice drifted through the haze. “That's why they forbid it. Because it's so emotionally rudimental that the music finds its way straight to your soul and cleanses it from fifteen years of Soviet pollution.”

Soviet
pollution?

Another one of his attacks on my Communist ethics. Then why did I sit here like a stone? Why didn't I try to defend what I believed was right? The real question though—what was
right
?