Read The Orphan Sky Online

Authors: Ella Leya

The Orphan Sky (8 page)

Enough. Time to leave. The sooner, the better. He had hypnotized me with his story, made me hang on every word. But now his smearing propaganda reminded me of the reason I came here in the first place. To expose an attack on Communist values, to prevent these lies from spreading around and contaminating our youth.

“Miriam spent sixteen years there,” Tahir continued his saga. “Until Stalin's death in 1953. By then, everyone assumed that Miriam Mukhtarov had perished like millions of others. But she came back. From Siberian exile where the temperature rarely rose above freezing, where catlike rats shared her cell and ratlike wardens assaulted her repeatedly. She came back with her daughter—my mother. The new Soviet Azerbaijani government extended its apologies for the ‘unfortunate excesses' of Stalin's regime and offered Miriam an apartment in the center of the city and employment at the Baku Opera House.”

“So what did she say?” I held my breath rooting for a happy ending, startled by my emotional involvement.

“She said nothing. Just laughed in their faces and demanded to be released from the evil Kingdom of Darkness. It landed her in a mental hospital in
Mastaga
, outside Baku, along with many other dissidents. She was detained there until 1964 when the building she lived in was burned to the ground, and the patients wandered off in different directions.

“That's when Miriam returned to Baku. I was three. My mother died from tuberculosis. Miriam raised me. And to do so, she took a job, working as a guard of Maiden Tower and living in its basement.”

“The Immortal?” slipped off my tongue.

“Her name is Miriam Mukhtarov. Miriam—Mukhtarov,” Tahir uttered, a word at a time. “Miriam Mukhtarov—one of the greatest dramatic mezzo-sopranos of our century.”

Silence settled between us like a dense fog. I had achieved my primary goal by making Tahir expose himself. All I had to do now was to report my findings to Comrade Farhad and forget about this whole encounter. But the very thought of leaving this place, this strange boy, and never coming back stung me with the same sense of inevitability that I had experienced when I first faced the notion of mortality. And once again, I wanted to slow down the time, to hold back the seconds that seemed to gallop onward like wild horses.

Tahir stretched out on the rug, his eyes closed, his body rocking to the rhythm of some silent chant, his face reflecting its shifting emotions. Radiant one moment, withdrawn the next. A strange boy, indeed. Had he been manipulating my feelings from the moment I stepped inside his green door, twisting the truth, turning my head upside down?

Secret police? Concentration camps in the Soviet Union? Nonsense. Lies. I had been pulled into murky waters. Maybe the smoke from his hashish, after all, was carefully planned to intercept my rational thinking. Every minute I stayed here, I was betraying my family, my Communist values. I was putting in jeopardy my music career, my entire life.

Like Comrade Farhad said: “Disloyalty starts with the small things.” He had warned me, but I had failed.

“Why did you tell me all this?” I asked Tahir, more harshly than I intended, fighting off my inner shame, seeking his eyes.

They were changing a shade at a time from dark indigo all the way to lavender blue, warm and bottomless. And for a moment—a fleeting moment—I drowned inside them. All of me.

Embarrassed, I turned away.

“I told you because you are the girl who played Beethoven's ‘Adagio' the other day. You are brainwashed and confused, but you've got a soul. You've got a free-roaming soul.”

If I had died right then, I
'
d have been the happiest man on
earth.

I rose to my feet, prickly after sitting in the same position for a long time. “I am going to keep everything you've told me a secret, but I want you to know that I do not believe you. Not a word,” I fired off in one quick round and staggered—on porcupine needles—toward the door.

“By the way, it's not Gargoyle Castle,” Tahir said after me. “It's Villa Anneliese.”

“What?” I stopped. “How do you know where I live?”

Tahir didn't bother answering. Just took a long drag from his hashish cigarette and departed into his own dimension.

And that was the beginning. The beginning of the end of my cloudless Soviet childhood. My first glimpse into the tragic history of Tahir's family and into the horrors and lies of Communism. Into darkness I had never known before. Darkness that someday would enter my soul.

CHAPTER 9

I left Tahir's shop and roved the streets, the same mantra playing like a rondo in my head:
Lies… Lies… Nothing but lies…

The city had awakened by now. Vendors had turned their shops inside out, blocking the sidewalks with baskets overflowing with fabrics, shoes, copper vases. Cars and noisy motorcycles zoomed by, their exhaust choking the air. A jet plane shot through the sky, then another, their milky contrails crossing, sweeping across the boundless blue. A flock of kids dashed past me trying to catch up with the rockets, almost knocking me off my feet. I used to do that too—run fast, exuberantly cheering the greatness of our country. Now I felt nothing. An empty swing dangling in the wind. An alien in my own city.

What a mistake it had been to go there, to nurture a fantasy of a magical world hidden behind the green door. There was nothing there but a treacherous scheme to lure and corrupt foolish innocents like me. And I—
I
who had been given the honor of exposing the treachery—had almost succumbed to it. To Tahir's music. To his absurd stories.
Open
your
ear
to
a
mullah's preaching, and a bee gets in
—just like a
kelam
says.

Why did I give him my word to keep it a secret? How had he pulled me so far off my senses and captured my empathy? Burdened my soul with a promise I couldn't keep?

My
free-roaming
soul.

More like my free-roaming
gullible
soul. Lost in a maze of sophisticated anti-Soviet conspiracy. No. I had to expose it. I had to fulfill my duty and report Tahir as a traitor, as someone who distributed awful, dishonest propaganda about our political and social system.

And he lied about going to the Philharmonic too—
I
rarely
miss
a
good
performance
. Then why hadn't I ever seen him there any time before the day he showed up accidentally—
accidentally?
—at my recital? Nonsense. And his hashish smoking, his Western behavior, the pornography on his wall. All American, all probably bought or stolen from the black market or supplied by his handlers in the West.

But, no matter how I tried, I couldn't get the images out of my head—Tahir, a quirky teenager, walking barefoot on a busy street. Tahir, in a white tunic, standing alongside his painting. Tahir, seated cross-legged on the burgundy rug in his cozy lair, surrounded by music albums and ancient books, his deep, intelligent eyes following me.

Enough!

“Out of my sight—out of my heart,” I muttered, pushing my weight against the heavy oak door of Gargoyle Castle.

Villa
Anneliese?

I glanced down at the granite floor of the entryway. Was it here where Tahir's great-grandfather had turned his gun on himself? And then a hurricane of the riddle's pieces swirled through my mind—the Snow Princess on the fresco in our courtyard…the rumor that she was the daughter of the oil baron who built our castle…the world's greatest mezzo…Tahir's grandmother…the Immortal?


Salam
eleykum
, Leila.”

Chingiz's warped smile flashed at me from beyond the curvy balustrade girdling the third-floor balcony, followed by the piercing sound of an ivory piece slammed heartily against a game board. Chingiz was playing
shesh
besh
with his uncle Ali Khan—his only positive contribution to the old man's life.


Salam
eleykum
, Ali Khan. Are you killing Chingiz again?” I shouted. Ali Khan had lost most of his hearing after a bomb explosion during the war.


Eleykum
salam
, Leila. Of course I am. As the old man looks for a bridge, the young man rushes to wade across the river.” He slammed the checker and chuckled harmlessly. “And the young fool always drowns.”

The door to our flat was open, the scent of oranges drifting in and out of the vanilla-saturated air, which meant Papa had baked my favorite sweet bread,
seker çörek
. A chorus of clanging dishes came from the kitchen, accompanied by the happy chatter of sparrows outside the window.

I was back to my life. My wonderful, real life. But along with the reality, the anxiety over my piano performance also returned. Had the decision been made by now? What if I didn't win?

“At last. The wandering star has returned.”

Professor Sultan-zade?

She sat on the couch next to Mama, her revolutionary maroon dress defying the serene pastel greens of our living room, but today she wore something else that I had rarely seen on her—a rosy, gap-toothed smile.

“Good morning, Professor,” I said, impatient to hear the verdict.

Papa entered from the kitchen, Mama's red-and-white polka-dot apron on top of his trousers. He carried a steaming potbellied samovar.

“There is nothing better than a good stroll in the morning,” he said, pecking me on the top of my head. “That's what we all should be doing.”

“What's the occasion?” I asked.

“Sunday family breakfast. What can be a better occasion to celebrate?”

“Stop teasing her.” Mama got up, fresh and elegant in a pleated skirt and a blouse with gem buttons, her golden locks falling on her shoulders, framing her freckle-peppered face. “Professor Sultan-zade stopped by to make an informal announcement prior to the official one.”

“Yes, indeed.” Professor Sultan-zade stubbed out her cigarette in the ashtray. “What can I say other than that you were absolutely outstanding? And fully deserving of the win.” She rose to her feet, her face radiating pride, the crow's-feet at the sides of her eyes cracking the foundation layer of her makeup. “You won, Leila. You won a big A-plus. Both jurors loved you. Especially Professor Levina. She just couldn't stop praising you, and this is not something that comes easily to her. Starting right now, you are an official ambassador of Azerbaijan at the International Piano Competition in Budapest. Congratulations. I am extremely pleased.”

“I won! I won!” I shouted, jumping up and down, laughing and crying at the same time, releasing the nervousness that had been mounting inside me since the recital. I was thrilled. Yes. But deep inside I wasn't surprised. I expected to win. I knew that my performance in the competition, despite its shaky start, deserved the win. I played my Beethoven; I pushed the keys. I always did, but in the past, only as a messenger of Professor Sultan-zade's emotions and visions, never having experienced my own so intensely before.

I stopped, trying to catch my breath. “Professor, do you believe in the divine presence in music?” I asked.

“Divine presence?” Professor Sultan-zade's green eyes examined me closely for a few moments before looking away thoughtfully. “No, Leila. Music is about the notes, the technique, and the precise execution of the dynamics. Done well, that combination creates a performance that can become a strong emotional weapon. But to attribute it to anything mystical? No.”

“But where does music come from? How does it inspire us? Or make us lose ourselves in those irresistible musical phrases composed by, for example, Chopin more than a hundred years ago?”

“I would say that's the humanity of music,” Professor Sultan-zade said. “But definitely not its divinity.”

We celebrated by having breakfast, sitting around our large table, a set of fine china with pink roses in full display on the snow-white tablecloth. The conversation ran as fluidly as the tea out of the samovar's crooked nose.

“There will be big changes at the Conservatory,” Professor Sultan-zade said. “Our rector is being moved to the Azerbaijani State Institute of Arts—our longtime rival. The years under his leadership had been the most victorious in the history of our institution. Of course it didn't hurt that the Minister of Culture was married to his sister and provided the Conservatory with unlimited funding.

“Now the situation is on the verge of changing. The choice for whoever will be appointed in the rector's place is a big secret. Everybody's been on tiptoes. Especially a recently hired Professor Kulik. She says that she graduated from the Leningrad Conservatory of Music, but I don't believe it. I heard her playing a recital with her students—amateur level.”

Professor Sultan-zade shook her head, her heavy, Egyptian, gold-chandelier earrings jangling, pulling the earlobes down and threatening to tear them loose.

She looked a bit like Nefertiti. The same long aquiline nose, high sunken cheeks, slanted eyes, extended neck. Even the yellowish color of her skin, the result of her intense smoking, was the same as the tinting on Nefertiti's bronze bust. I asked Papa once why she never married. He laughed, said she had a stinger instead of a tongue, and that men didn't like bees that couldn't make honey. That's what he called her behind her back—Old Stinger.

I put three cubes of sugar in my cup with boiling hot tea, mixed it with the spoon, and let it stand for a while.

“I don't understand how you can drink it warm,” Papa said. “For me to enjoy the flavor of tea, it has to burn my lips.”

“You're a man of extremes.” Mama smiled.

“Being with the two smartest girls, I have to find some excuse to stand out.”

“All you have to do to stand out, honorable Mekhti Rashidovich, is to stand up,” Professor Sultan-zade interjected, the corner of her mouth curling up.

Oh yes, Papa's height was quite striking, especially measured against the Lilliputian sizes of Mama and myself.

Papa slowly blew air through his mustache. “I'm in bad shape if my height is my
highest
achievement. I definitely need to do something to improve my reputation, don't I?”

Retrieving a small, dark blue box from his pocket, he placed it ceremoniously on the table in front of me. “Let's see if this helps.”

“What is this, Papa?”

“Open it.”

I did. Inside, a dazzling ring sat on a blue velvet pillow.

“It's braided platinum with sapphire—a gift for you, Leila,” Papa said, his brow glistening with a sheen of sweat. “I ordered it from a very special jewelry maker in
Samax
i
. Cost me a fortune. But for you, my precious
brilyant
, I'd give up my last breath. Try it on.”

Carefully lifting the ring out of the box, I slid it down my second finger. The oblong sapphire immediately captured a sunbeam and swelled into a huge orange sphere of light.

“Perfect fit! The same size as your finger, Sonia.” Papa smiled, took both Mama's and my hands and kissed them, then turned to Professor Sultan-zade. “How am I doing?”

She clapped her hands theatrically. “You've done very well, Mekhti Rashidovich. A very lavish gift, indeed, and in such exquisite taste. Beethoven's
Pathétique
is definitely deserving of such splendor. As for Leila, she still has a long way to go, and a reward of such magnitude might spoil her sense of humility, which is vital for a student of piano.”

“Don't worry, Professor,” Papa said. “My Leila has Badalbeili ambitions, and a major interruption, even one the size of this sapphire, won't slow her down.” He winked at me and burst into roaring laughter.

“Oh, well.” Professor Sultan-zade smiled courteously. “I have a different kind of gift for you, Leila.” She reached for her bag and retrieved a brand-new copy of the score for Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's
Piano
Concerto
no. 20
. “This is the piece you'll be playing in Budapest—your best friend for the next nine months.”

I reverently touched the smooth, satined cover of the score—an entry into Mozart's delicate, romantic, eloquent soul. And, hopefully, the passport to my first international success.

The front doorbell rang.

Probably Almaz. We had made a tentative plan to go to the movies. I jumped up to open the door.

Comrade Farhad's black eyes shone from behind a large bouquet of bloodred roses.

“Good morning, L-l-leila, I'd like to speak to your father if I m-m-may.”

“Oh, Farhad, how nice to see you.” Mama came to the door. “Would you like to join us for breakfast? We're having a small celebration here. Leila has won the competition.”

“Congratulations!” Comrade Farhad placed his right hand across his chest and bowed his head briefly. “I'm very proud of your daughter. But no thank you, Sonia
Khanum
, I don't intend to intrude on your f-f-family time.” A henna-red blush ran across his cheek.

“This is for you, Sonia
Khanum
.” He held out the bouquet to Mama. “Is Mekhti Rashidovich available for a second? I'm here to ask if he would kindly agree to be our point speaker at a conference I am planning for June.”

“I'd be honored.” Papa joined us at the door and shook hands with Farhad. “I've heard a lot of good things about your dedicated, hard work on behalf of our Young Communists League. And we, Sonia and I, have been most pleased to have you as an excellent role model and mentor for our dear Leila.”

“Thank you, Mekhti Rashidovich, for your kind words.” Comrade Farhad pressed his hands to his chest, tilting his head sideways to convey humility. “We strive to continue the legacy of illustrious leaders such as yourself and your distinguished family. Again, I apologize for the intrusion, Sonia
Khanum
.” He turned toward me. “You played exceptionally well, Leila. You've made us all very proud. I'll see you—”

“Leila dear.” Mama gently moved a curl off my eyes. “Why don't you walk Farhad out?”

“Of course, just a moment.”

I zipped to my room, kicked off slippers in favor of my heeled shoes, and joined Farhad outside the door. We went downstairs in total silence except for the
clack-clack
of my heels slapping the granite. I could feel his presence, strong and manly. And suddenly I became very much aware of the four-year difference in our ages. He was a man, unlike my immature schoolmates who
talked
about all these
things
. How would it feel if Farhad took my hand in his, brought it to his face, and touched my fingers with his lips? The way Papa had just kissed Mama's hand? How would it feel to hear a beating heart inside Farhad's steel armor?

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