The Orphan Sky (7 page)

Aladdin went to the sink and turned the water on. The faucet gurgled, dredged up, and spit a funnel of brown water. He waited a bit, rinsed a glass, filled it, took a sip. “Quite an esteemed Communist retinue you had yesterday,” he said over his shoulder. “If only I had known that such a fancy butterfly had flown into my humble abode.”

It might have sounded like a joke, but it wasn't meant to be that harmless. Not with the air of hostility Aladdin projected.

So that was the reason for his resentment. He had seen me after the recital with my family, Comrade Farhad, and Comrade Popov. I represented the
other
side
of life, the side he obviously detested. The same dark glow shimmered in his eyes that I'd seen in Almaz the other night when she had her attack of jealousy. But my mission was far from being over. I had to do something before he kicked me out. To get on his better side, to cast a line with bait he couldn't refuse.

“Can I ask you a question?” I said.

“What is it?”

“Who is Vladimir Horowitz?”

“The greatest pianist of the twentieth century.”

“Then why did my piano teacher call him the enemy of the Soviet people? What did he do?”

“He left the Soviet Union in 1925 to study in the West and never returned.”

“So he
did
betray our Motherland,” I said.

“That's the Communist Party line.”

“Why do you have him in your collection?”

“So someone like you could sneak into my shop and hear him play and learn from him.”

He had programmed the whole thing—lured me into his lair and left Vladimir Horowitz playing on the turntable so I would hear his music and become contaminated. But how could he know about Comrade Farhad's assignment?

Oblivious to my inner turmoil, Aladdin leaned against the wall, carving a grape stalk with a pocketknife, trimming off its broken end. A sorcerer? No way. Even the idea of it seemed ridiculous. More like old wives' tales. Too irrational for someone as rational as me. So I had to admit the fact. Yes, Vladimir Horowitz was a traitor, but Aladdin's words made sense. As a student of piano, I admired Horowitz's phenomenal musicianship, and if I could, I would listen to and study every nuance of his playing, enemy of the people or not.

“Is he still alive, that Horowitz?”

“Yes, the maestro lives in America, while his recordings are banned in his own country. Any more questions?” He yawned and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands.

Oh, yes. I had more questions than there was air in the room.

Aladdin reached for a small ceramic jug with painted birds, poured some powder out of it onto a torn piece of newspaper, rolled it into a cigarette, and after a few attempts, lit it up. Blue smoke swirled around his face. He yawned again and tapped his toes, signaling his boredom and underscoring my irrelevance to him, but I had a feeling that he was trying too hard.

“It seems you know a lot about me,” I said in a cheery voice, “while I know nothing about you. Not even your name.”

“It's Tahir. Tahir Mukhtarov.”

So Aladdin had a real name, after all.
Tahir
—meaning “pure.” I liked it.

“Anything else you want to know?” He threw the grape stalk on the floor, folded his knife, put it inside the pocket of his jeans, and headed to his Afghani rug.

“I want to know everything, Tahir,” I said, enjoying the sound of his name.

“Everything?” He lay back on the rug, hands laced behind his head, and closed his eyes, inhaling hungrily on his cigarette.

“Everything,” I said, decibels louder.

“It's a long story.”

“I'm not in a rush.”

“I thought you said you had only a minute.” He lifted his puffy eyelids, took a deep drag on his cigarette, and blew slow smoke rings through the lopsided triangle at the corner of his mouth.

We stared at each other as two opponents deciding their strategies for the next round. I knew he wanted me to stay. I heard it in his voice, in the vulnerable, warm undertone slipping through the crust of ice. He could grimace, blow his arrogance together with smoke in my face, but if he really wanted me out, I would have been out a long time ago. The boy in front of me didn't stand on ceremony.

As if sensing my rush of confidence, he pushed harder. Without taking his squinting eyes off me, he patted the rug next to him. Challenging me to a difficult task—getting down on the floor in the tight skirt of my school uniform.

I approached the rug, kneeled, lowered myself to the side, struggled to free my legs from underneath my bottom, then finally stretched them out, awkwardly, one at a time, and perched alongside him. “So what is this long story?”

He smirked. “I didn't expect to be taken
that
literally. You could have sat on a chair, you know.”

After all the gymnastics. “No, I'm comfortable here.” I pulled the skirt over my knees.

He rolled over to the other end of the rug, allowing an ample space between us. “Is that better?”

I nodded.

He reclined, kicked off his sandals, and curled his toes in and out. They were as long and tapered as his fingers. “All right, Leila,” he said. “I assume you know what the word ‘Azerbaijan' means.”

Was he playing with me? “Of course I do. The Land of Fire.”

“Almost. Translated from Avestan, it is ‘Protected by Holy Fire.'”

“What is Avestan?”

“The language of Zoroastrian scripture. My family traces its roots to a group of Zoroastrian priests who arrived in Azerbaijan more than two thousand years ago. They came here to worship eternal fires erupting out of the earth and to become the guardians of truth.”

“‘Fire is truth,'” I recited, “‘pure as love, it burns the pollution…'”

“You've read Khatai?”

“I love old poetry.”

“‘Azerbaijan—you are a fire gem—stolen, looted, violated—but your beauty is a forever maiden,'” he finished the verse. “A Persian gem stolen by Arabs, looted by Turks, lost in the Mongolian Empire, tossed between the khanates, and finally picked up by the Tsar's Russia. Our Azerbaijan—a constant vassal of different changing powers. A poor vestige of the rich, long-forgotten past. But it all changed with the oil boom. When Baku began producing more than half of the world's supply of oil.”

“That's when the rich oil barons came and stole from the poor,” I said.

Tahir glances at me distastefully as if I had just slobbered all over myself. “You're so brainwashed by your comrades, Leila, repeating after them this total nonsense. Just like a parrot. Think—why would wealthy oil barons steal from the poor?”

“Because they were greedy capitalists who appropriated our oil fields, sold the oil to the West, and made fortunes, while the proletariat continued dwelling in their mud huts, their children dying from starvation.” I quoted our history textbook.

“You've committed that garbage to memory well. But what no one has probably taught you is that the oil barons—before they became rich—were very poor.”

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that starting at the end of the nineteenth century, many poor adventurers rushed here to our homeland to try their luck. They hoped to place their empty pockets under the gushing fountains of oil and quickly fill them up with black gold. Most of them ended up scooping dirt out of the oil wells with their bare hands. Earning just enough to pay for a chunk of bread, a piece of
pendir
, cheese, and a moldy cot in a crowded fleabag. Only a few succeeded.

“One of them was my great-grandfather, Akbar Mukhtarov. Quite a character, according to my grandmother, Miriam. He started at the oil fields at the age of nine when his father, a poor shepherd from a mountain village, sold him to a local lord. Fifteen years later—and with a patent on the first-ever mechanical oil derricks—he emerged as one of the foremost Baku oil barons. Illiterate, despite his huge wealth, and apparently good looking, he sailed for Europe to get a proper schooling and find himself a wife.”

Tahir paused to take another smoke, while I closed my eyes and imagined a boat gliding through the sea with its sails fluttering before the wind, a handsome young man, resembling Tahir, standing at the bow, looking down pensively at the blue waters. So romantic.

“He met her in Paris,” Tahir continued. “A Dutch princess, Anneliese, who studied drama at the Sorbonne. He fell madly in love with her and, in accordance with Azerbaijani tradition, he sent a matchmaker to her parents the next day.

“‘Their laughter could be heard all the way to the Caucasus Mountains,' Baba Miriam used to joke. You see, he had no relatives in Paris, so he went to the Oriental Bazaar, chose the most presentable looking old Turkish woman he could find, dressed her in brocade and sable, gave her gifts of gold and diamonds, and sent her to the Dutch princess's family castle to request permission for him to marry Anneliese.

“While the old woman went about her task, he waited outside, allowing the parents to take a look at their potential son-in-law. It was a hot summer day, and he was wearing a traditional frock coat and a large cylindrical lamb's wool
papaq
, hat. An elegant presentation in Baku. A true savage on the banks of the Seine. But their laughter changed to wholehearted acceptance when they learned how rich he was.”

A broad smile spread across Tahir's face, reaching even its farthest corners. “I saw their wedding photo. He is short, wiry, with a bushy mustache curled up at the ends like a snail's shell, while she is a statuesque snow queen.

“As a wedding gift worthy of his noblewoman, my great-grandfather built a four-story, Mauritanian-style ‘Villa Anneliese.' Right in the center of Baku. Light, ornate, carved out of limestone. Its gardens filled with Spanish roses and myrtles. With splashing fountains and shadowed marble arcades to shield his beloved one's fair skin from the burning Baku sun.”

I watched Tahir, mesmerized. He spoke in a stirring pianissimo with his eyes closed, his face reflecting its own chromaticism of feelings. His hands came to his aid whenever he couldn't find the right word, swaying in the air as if conducting Robert Schumann's Romantic piano concerto. Yes, he was an absolutely compelling storyteller. But how could I trust that this fairy tale was the truth?

“Anneliese died,” he continued, “shortly after giving birth to their only daughter, Miriam. Akbar never remarried. Instead, he poured all his energy into shaping the modern oil industry and rebuilding decrepit Baku into the Paris of the East. Working with other oil barons, they replaced the clay huts of workers with up-to-date urban flats, planted the first-ever Baku city park. The palaces grew around the city like mushrooms after the rain, housing the newly opened Opera, Philharmonic, and Theatrical College. They also created a new project that would later develop into the Nobel Prize Foundation.”

“The Nobel Prize?” I asked. “But it's in Sweden, isn't it? How could it be connected with Baku and your family?”

“The idea was born here at the Villa Anneliese, when Alfred Nobel—also an oil baron—visited my great-grandfather. They talked about designing a progressive international cultural institution for the future that would honor their names, and they agreed that there was no better emblem for that institution than the image of Maiden Tower. So they decided to restore Maiden Tower to its ancient beauty as the symbol of free Azerbaijan.”

“But Maiden Tower's never been restored. What happened?”

“Your Great October Socialist Revolution.” Tahir spat with disdain. “It set a killing machine in motion. Akbar Mukhtarov died at the doorway to Villa Anneliese when a revolutionary mob on horseback attempted to storm the grand stairway of the building, smashing the sculptures and relieving themselves in the fountain. He stood alone at the entrance with a gun. Guarding his home. Guarding a past that was being mocked and desecrated. Then he turned the gun on himself.”

“What about his daughter? Miriam?”

“My grandmother was abroad studying at the Conservatorio Santa Cecilia in Rome. That year, she had just received her first commission—to sing Despina in Mozart's
Così
fan
tutte
at the recently reopened Verona Arena. The great Maestro Feodor Chaliapin called her a phenomenon, the youngest and most intense mezzo-soprano he had ever had the honor to share a stage with.”

I crossed my legs, moving furtively from side to side to relieve my itchy bottom from the coarse fibers of the rug digging into my skin. My eyes floated across the ceiling while I tried to decide if Tahir's tale was truth. Or had I been fed the fruit of his inebriated imagination? By now, his hashish smoke swathed the room in patches of white and blue.

“Unwisely, Miriam came back to the Soviet Union in the midthirties hoping to use her international celebrity and save my grandfather,” Tahir continued, “but she underestimated the evil. Her Dutch passport was taken away. And, after two weeks of standing in line at the Foreign Ministry trying to obtain an exit visa, she was quietly picked up by a Black Raven and taken to a Siberian gulag.”

“A Black Raven? What is that?” I asked.

“Stalin's secret police car.”

“I didn't know there were secret police in our country, ever.”

“Still are. They're called KGB.”

Another slander. “And the Siberian gulag?”

“Not a very pleasant place. Overcrowded barracks, kilometers and kilometers of God-forsaken no-man's-land, and sixty million innocent deaths.”

“You're talking about Nazi concentration camps.”

“As bad as that, yes. But the gulag is our own national phenomenon with its own distinctly national flavor.”

“So you're saying that there were actual concentration camps in our country—that they still exist?”

“What I'm saying is that your beloved Soviet Union is just one big gulag.”