The Orphan Sky (24 page)

“Okay, that's enough, you assholes,” shouted Medvedev.

“Not enough. That
blyad
broke my nose.”

More scuffling, gradually subsiding beneath muttered curses and obscenities.

“What's the difference if I do her in the mouth?” the slurred one tried to reason. “Nobody's gonna know. I'll give you two bags of poppy.”

Pause. Then the flick of a lighter. Another one. “I can't, pal. Prokhorov will hang me.”

“He won't know.”

“You've got a dick that smells like a dead horse—and you think he won't know?”

Coarse laughter. “I better get moving before fucking
churki
blow up the crossing.”

“Be safe,
bratok
.”

The door banged shut; the vehicle was heaved into gear and drove off. Shaking violently, I pulled myself into a sitting position and looked back. Two small figures in long overcoats—just like the boys in my audience at the Kabul stadium—stood with their guns in the middle of the dirt road wrapped in a cloud of dust, looking after our UAZ speeding away. Behind them nothing but a void-black sky.

I pushed the tarpaulin aside and quietly vomited over the side of the fast-moving jeep.

“I'm sorry,” Medvedev said without taking his eyes off the road. “It's the war, you know. No promise of tomorrow. So you take what you can today.”

We drove in silence as I tried to still jabs of sickness coursing through my abdomen. We drove along a too-narrow road edging a cliff: on the left, austere snow-peaked mountains fading into the sky; on the right, a deep gorge shrouded in darkness. In front of us, a blizzard of insects twirled in their final suicidal dance, smashing into blurred streaks across the windshield of our jeep.

I was alone in a vast foreign space with a very bad person who traded women for drugs. And who, tonight, had chosen to be my hero.

Air, crisp and cold, tasted heavenly. Just like the air in Swallow Nest, a resort in the Caucasus Mountains where Mama used to take me every summer to drink
narzan
from the mineral water stream and stock up on its magical, curative energy for another year. We used to wake at dawn and hike through the Valley of the Rising Sun and up the mountain trails to Swallow Grotto, carved out over the centuries by the stream's ancestor, the feral, fast-flowing mountain river, Baksan.

Once there, Mama placed her glass
armud
under the thin stream, filled it with cool, crystal clear water, and watched me drink it, a contented smile on her face. Then we sat on a rock coated with spongy moss and watched the birth of the sun. How it drew apart the sea and the sky and emerged bashfully from behind the regal snow fedora of Mount Elbrus, the highest mountain in all of Europe.

I remembered one morning. Mama, her golden hair spilled across her shoulders, wearing my favorite
sarafan
with daisies, stood against a backdrop of stern glaciers and deep green valleys. The toe of her sling shoe probed the edge of the cliff, sending a few small rocks on a tumbling journey downward. Fear seized my throat, buckled my knees.
What
if
she
slips
and
falls
down
into
the
abyss? What if I never see my mama
again?

“Don't worry,” she said, moving away from the precipice, her sky-blue eyes smiling. “I'll always be there for you.”

A wave of guilt surged through me. What was I doing here in the middle of the night, hiding like a thief in the back of a military truck? How could I have planned this crazy mission? What if I never saw Mama again?

A few minutes later, as we descended to a level plain, a cascade of blasts shook the earth, killing the fragile stillness of the night, slicing the black canvas of the sky into red shreds of flames.

“Bad luck.
Churki
shooting their fireworks,” Medvedev shouted against the wind, speeding up. “Might be a problem.”

He was right. Our journey ended at the next checkpoint, a makeshift shed at the side of the road surrounded by a dozen busy soldiers. Erecting barricades, arguing with the drivers of trucks and jeeps, they directed every vehicle to reverse direction and head back the way they had come. A scraggy, gray-haired officer with the withered face of a retired accountant—so out of place amid the squad of young soldiers, most of whom seemed no older than me—approached our jeep.

“Ai-yi-yi.” He waved a finger at Medvedev in a fatherly gesture. “These recruits are fighting the war here, and you're still driving around in your mobile trading post.”

Medvedev leaned out of the car holding a fresh pack of Belomorkanal cigarettes. “Listen, Ivan Anatolievich. The thing is, I gotta get through to Bagram. Very big deal.”

“Can't let you through.” The gray-haired officer hastily stuffed the cigarettes inside the pocket of his coat. “
Dushmans
blew up the bridge. As for your
very big dea
l
”—he waved mockingly in my direction—“it will have to wait.”

We arrived back at the hotel long after midnight. Saying good-bye, nervously pacing from one foot to the other, Medvedev held out the day's edition of the military newspaper with my photo on the front page.

“Will you give me your autograph? Please? And would you write”—he hesitated for a moment—“‘with love'? You know, we're not bad…not really…not in real life. The brute—Kolya—is from a village in Siberia, just like me. And he saved my life, you know…six months ago.” Medvedev touched a scar on the side of his forehead. “A stray bullet grazed my head, you know. And he covered me, kept me going until we could find a safe place in a cave. With no food, no ammunition. Only three of us survived, out of twenty. So I owe him.”

I took the pen, drew a heart, and wrote in big letters: “To my dear friend Lieutenant Medvedev—From Leila with Love!”

• • •

A single kerosene lamp dangled on a chain from the ceiling, dispersing murky shadows across the long, narrow corridor. I dragged my feet toward a room at the very end, a whirlwind of regrets spinning in my head. I had done the Zümrüd
Qusu
part—spread my wings and leaped into unknown. And the result? Never got to see Tahir. Instead, I could have been raped by a Siberian village boy with pimples, my fire wings chopped off and thrown into Panjshir Valley for the hyenas.

Stupid, childish me. Princess Zümrüd belonged in Tahir's legend, not in the middle of an ugly war. Oh, how I wanted it all to be a dream, to wake up from this nightmare in my own bed, to smell the fresh Baku morning air instead of the vapor of vomit and the stench of moldy uniforms. A spasm clenched my stomach. The back of my throat tasted bile.

I rushed to the room and started to use my key, but the door opened the moment I touched it. I surely remembered locking it when I left. No time to worry about that. The spasm overwhelming me, I groped my way in the darkness, found the sink and threw up, emptying my guts of the rest of Babrak Karmal's dinner. Then, a drip at a time from the rusty faucet, I rinsed my mouth. And the fear returned.

The door. Why was it open?

I turned around. A silhouette. Someone sitting on my bed.

“Princess Leila.” The silhouette rose, stepped toward me.

Tahi
r
?

In the million possible visions of our reunion, this was the one I'd missed. Tahir in my hotel room, waiting for me to come back from my expedition to find him. An absolutely irrelevant expedition as it turned out. Because there he was, standing in front of me. All I had to do was just reach out and hold him.

But I couldn't. In some bizarre way, I felt that by making it so easy he had minimized my heroic task, dismissed my daring efforts to find him. To save him. To redeem myself.

He had changed. Taller, broader in the shoulders than the lanky boy I remembered from almost three years ago. Almost an eternity. What if the war had changed him in other ways too? What if he'd become like the pimply-faced monsters on the road? They too had probably been nice, idealistic boys before life presented them with the miseries of Afghanistan.

Except Tahir had more reason to be angry than any of them. Angry at me. After all, I was the sole reason for him being here.

“It's so nice to see you,” my mouth muttered, stupidly, just to say something. The words so banal and clumsy. And so out of place. My feet did no better, tripping over a Kalashnikov rifle leaning against the wall.

“I'm sorry.” Tahir rushed to move the weapon aside and help me keep my balance.

Tahir. So close. His warm breath brushed against my neck, sending fireworks up my spine.

“I saw you in the concert,” he said. “It brought back good memories.”

Good
memories?

“I…I played the Rachmaninoff…tonight. My first public performance. At first, I couldn't find any focus. Lots of different emotions, you know. The flight and the sense of danger.”
No. The anticipation of seeing you. The thrill of finding you and the fear of being
rejected.

“I know what you're saying.” Tahir paused. “It was the same with me. With my art here at the beginning. No matter how I mixed paints, the images kept coming out gray.” He smiled wistfully, his eyes taking on a shape of a crescent. “I enjoyed your Rach 3, the way you blended conflicting reds and blues into harmonies…”

How sad. There we were, two strangers in a dark room, desperately trying to keep our disjointed, reserved conversation alive. One long pause after another, interrupted only by the buzz of a hungry fly spinning in circles. My eyes adjusted to the darkness, I studied the new Tahir. Head shaved, dressed in a neat uniform with a sailor shirt peeking out. I wouldn't have recognized him in a crowd with the other boy soldiers.

“So…I guess I better get going.” Tahir reached for his Kalashnikov. “You had quite an eventful day. With the flight and the show and the fancy dinner at the Puppet's palace,” he said, a touch of the old Tahir sarcasm in his voice.

I felt rejected. I knew I should stop him. Ask his forgiveness. Tell him that I had come to Afghanistan to make his wish for me come true. That I had grown wings, traveled with a stranger on a dangerous road in my quest to find him. That he had become my obsession, my destination.

“Good-bye, Princess Leila. Have sweet dreams,” he said and hastily left the room.

I watched as he disappeared in the dark corridor. Tahir the stranger in heavy combat boots, their clumping hobnails echoing his footsteps.

How could I have come here to meet him, to save him, to share the rest of my life with him, and then let him go? What was it—fear? Pride?

He stopped for a brief moment, then the sound of his steps resumed. But now the echoes grew louder and louder. Tahir was walking—no, he was running—back to me.

“You know, I was thinking,” he stammered, out of breath. “Would it be too rude if I asked you to sit for me? Now?”

“It would be more rude if you didn't,” I said, my heart ripping through my chest.

“Oh, great. I brought really good paper with me. Traded it for poppy.”

“Poppy? Do you still smoke hashish?”

“Not once in the past year. You know me, I don't like being part of a crowd.”

Opening his bag, he retrieved a wood palette and a few sheets of paper. He obviously had come prepared. The same old Tahir, obsessed with his art.

“Touch it, doesn't it feel like canvas?” he said. “The best German paper for oil painting. It's saturated with a special chemical that will keep the texture and the vividness of color forever.”

“How will you paint me in the dark?”

“In the dark? Look at this.” He reached over and gently turned me toward the window. Outside, a half-moon with a misty halo fought its way through the dense clouds.

“I couldn't see it like this before,” he said, “beauty in its rudimentary way. Remember how I used to be obsessed with creating my own
unique
formula? Too much ego gets in the way when you're young and stupid. Here, though, in this dreadful place, life reduces your most powerful ambitions to mere shades of gray, yet it frees you from your own self-imposed boundaries.”

“‘Who can say that today's key will not be tomorrow's lock, or today's lock not tomorrow's key?'” I recited an ancient verse.

“That's true. Nothing ever stays the same.” Tahir carefully organized his brushes. “Life is a desert of shifting sand dunes. Unpredictable. Erratic. Harmony changes into dissonance, the immediate outlives the profound, esoteric becomes clichéd. And vice versa. Isn't it weird? All those experiments I did with colors and techniques. Looking for the perfect greens, blues, and violets that would express the transparent beauty of the Zoroastrian fire. And I found them here. Right here, in the middle of macabre fighting in this war-torn country. They have been here for a thousand years. Juno irises. Growing on the top of the Kabul Mountains. Waiting for me. The precise cocktail of hues breathing with life. You see, if I didn't come here, I wouldn't have found them. So it was all worth it.”

He placed a chair next to the window and urged me to sit down, holding my shoulders for a brief moment, taking me back to the night at the top of Maiden Tower when I offered myself to him and he refused.

“Here you'll be bathed in a natural light—like Caravaggio's light, remember?” he said, walking around the dark room, considering the best spot for himself, checking the light and angles, moving the table to different positions before settling near the sink. Rubbing his hands in delight, he commanded, “Do not move.”

Then he painted in total silence.

Was this the only reason he came to see me?

I sat motionless for a long time, my body itching, my head swarming with half thoughts, waves of sadness rising inside my heart until I wanted to scream it all out, to let this self-centered stranger know that I had gone through hell to find him and to be with him. Not to pose like a lifeless mannequin for his painting.