The Orphan Sky (13 page)

• • •

I didn't come home till after nine in the evening. The living room was dark, but a sliver of light slipped beneath the door of Papa's smoking room, along with the sound of his laughter. Papa had guests.

As I walked through the hallway to my room, I heard another voice—a familiar one—its sound making my knees tremble. I tiptoed to the smoking room. Pressed my ear against the door.

“—will worship and guard her till my last breath,” Farhad was saying.

“Leila is my only child, and she is the sunlight of my eyes. I'll do anything—anything—to see her well protected and happy.”

“Mekhti Rashidovich, the honor you are giving me is beyond any words of indebtedness. Only my future actions as your faithful and dutiful son will give me the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your noble kindness and acceptance. You have been my role model since I first heard you speak at a Komsomol meeting in September of my junior year. Since then, I have been determined to succeed in my academic and social activities, to achieve a position of esteem and power in our society. Something I could put at the feet of your flawless jewel, your Leila.”

“My precious girl… Time goes too fast. Just yesterday, she was a baby, sitting here in my lap. And today, look at her—a young, blossoming woman with a prosperous piano career and a man seeking her hand. It's hard for a father to see his daughter grow into a woman, you know. But that's the way life goes. Parents get older, and kids take their place. And some day, when the time comes, I will close my eyes in peace, knowing that I have left Leila in good hands.”

I stood, stunned, gasping for air. Hearing something that just couldn't be true. Or was it?

“Mekhti Rashidovich, with all my life I will strive to rise to your expectations,” Farhad exclaimed.

“I know you will! And remember—there are no limits to how much I can help you.”

I heard the floor creaking. The sounds of the footsteps approaching the door.

I darted into my room, my heart hammering in the hollow of my chest. Closing my door quietly, I threw myself on my bed, crying.

“Leila,” Papa called from the hallway. “Come here. Farhad wants to say good-bye.”

I wiped my tears and slowly entered the living room.

Papa, in his casual slacks and sleeveless shirt, holding a glass of cognac, stood next to Farhad, formal and impressive in his black suit and tie.

“Where have you been so late?” Papa asked.

“Practicing piano at the Conservatory,” I lied.

“Why couldn't you practice at home? Why did I pay a fortune for your grand piano? So you could practice at the Conservatory?” Papa laughed heartily.

“It's not the same, Papa. The acoustics of the concert hall are different.”

“All right. All right. You know better.” Papa put his arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead.

“Good evening, Leila,” Farhad said, bowing his head in a respectful manner.

“Good evening,” I replied, hating the way my voice trembled.

“Farhad came to talk to me. Man to man.” Papa took a sip of his cognac. “He asked for your hand, daughter, and I gave him my wholehearted consent. Now Farhad can leave town knowing that you've been promised to him.”

“Leave town? Where are you going?” I asked eagerly.

“I have been called to Moscow to take a summer course at the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB,” Farhad said, his eyes flicking between Papa and me. “A major honor for me, as well as for our 26 Baku Commissars Komsomol District Committee. If I distinguish myself and excel on the exam, then I will have a shot at staying at the Higher School and joining the ranks of the KGB.”

“I hope you will,” I blurted out, silently praying for the KGB to keep Farhad in Moscow and away from me forever.

“Thank you, Leila, for your faith in me. Thank you, Mekhti Rashidovich, for the honor of your acceptance of my marriage proposal. I will wait for as long as it pleases you and Sonia
Khanum
before we can proceed with the formal betrothal.”

They shook hands, and Papa slapped Farhad's arm heartily. “I'm proud of you, Farhad, and I've always felt close to you, like family.”

“We
are
family now, Mekhti Rashidovich. Knowing that Leila and I are promised to each other lessens the pain of having to leave her while I'm in Moscow.” Farhad turned to me, burning me with the intensity of his gaze. “Leila, I want you to know. I'm going to be far away geographically, but I'm never far from you. You will always be with me, right here.” He pressed his hand to his heart, turned swiftly, and left.

I slammed the door behind him.

“He is a great fellow, your Farhad.” Papa smiled, raising his glass in salute.

“He is not mine.”

“As of today, he is. I have given him my blessing—gladly.”

“There is no way I'm going to marry him,” I cried, stamping my foot.

“I don't understand. I thought you liked him.” Papa frowned in bewilderment.

“I used to. But not anymore.”

“You young girls.” Papa laughed. “With your ‘I like' yesterday and ‘I don't like' today and who knows what tomorrow. Your frivolous emotions are as capricious as a spring breeze. That's why you need someone steady and reliable. A man like Farhad. I'm not going to be around forever. But I've amassed a nice fortune for you, Leila. And with Farhad at your side, you will always be protected. He will be there for you—for the everyday demands of your life as well as your career as a famous concert pianist.”

“But, Papa, he is not an honest person. He's a hypocrite—”

“So what? Even the best of us have our hypocritical moments. What unsuccessful fools never realize is that to achieve high status in our society, you have to know how to maneuver the hearts and minds of people. And Farhad is a natural in that respect. Even with his humble upbringing, and especially with my help, he's going to rise higher than anyone in his generation. And someday, fairly soon, I'll have my son-in-law in one of the highest offices in the Azeri government. Maybe even in the Kremlin. Trust me.”

“But Papa! He mistreated me,” I shouted, trying my last weapon.

“Mistreated you? How?” Papa's brow furrowed in anger, giving me some hope.

“He kissed me. Against my will.” I uttered, embarrassed.

Papa rubbed his chin, a doubtful look in his eyes. “But what did
you
do? How did
you
behave? I can't believe he would have done that without you enticing him. That's the wicked power that you women have over men. But I'll tell you this: the fact that Farhad came to me asking for your hand—especially after he'd kissed you—only increases my respect for him.”

“I'll never marry him, no matter what you say.” I anxiously squeezed the bitter words through my teeth. “And Mama will understand me when—”

“What?” Papa's face turned pale, his eyes flashing fury. Angrily clutching his cognac glass, he hurled it to the floor, shattering the glass into pieces. “No one will ever overrule me! No one! You
will
marry Farhad,” he roared in the loudest voice I'd ever heard from him. “I have given my word. The day you turn eighteen,
you
…
will
…
marry
…
Farha
d
!
”

Pushing the boundaries of my golden cage, searching for new ways of expression and freedom, unveiling the ambiguities between music and art, friendship and love—that was my summer of 1979. My Farhad-free summer that I swore to live to the fullest.

I couldn't sleep anymore. I lay in bed counting the hours until Muezzin Rashid's morning
Adhan
, afraid that if I fell asleep I might wake up and lose my real-life dream. Every hour unclaimed by Professor Sultan-zade I spent either behind Tahir's green door or inside Maiden Tower. He painted; I listened to his jazz recordings or played the Mukhtarovs' clavichord. Sometimes we talked; often we didn't. We didn't have to—our art shared the same creative palette.

I had been studying Rachmaninoff's
Concerto
no. 3
, both terrified and fascinated by its unfathomable soul, its vertigo of sweeping texture, rhythm, and dynamics. Playing Rachmaninoff was like walking on a rope bridge across a gorge with dreamy skies above and a raging, muddy river below. Sometimes I switched from Rachmaninoff to my Mozart's
Concerto
in the middle of the piece without even thinking. Because I had followed in Tahir's steps and reached the most unique place of inspiration—my own island. The place where Mozart and Rachmaninoff and Billie Holliday and every single expression of joy or misery suddenly become one. The inner reflection of me.

The sun passed across the Islamic window in the cupola, spreading its garnet rings throughout Coronation Hall.

I stopped playing the clavichord and held out my hands, and a few rings melted into my open palms.

“Look. I caught the sun,” I said.

Tahir didn't respond. He was busy fighting his battle with a canvas, striking it metrically with a brush. Staccato in color. I couldn't see his face from behind the easel, only the smoke from his cigarette curling around the canvas like a restless sea horse. He was so unpredictable. Blissful one moment, withdrawn the next. His mood shifted like sands in the desert, his eyes mirroring every passing emotion. The most lasting shade was lavender, the lustrous lavender of the Caspian Sea during a summer sunset. That's why looking into Tahir's eyes felt like drifting in warm tranquil waters farther and farther from the shores of reality.

Had I complicated my life by tying my music—my whole being—to him, constantly seeking his approval? Never before had I cared about the way my hair looked or if my skirt matched my blouse. Not anymore. Every morning, I smoothed my curls with saffron oil and slipped into my silk
sarafan
, sundress. I even asked Almaz to put pink polish on my toenails so they would look fancy in my red gladiator sandals peeking from underneath the chador. Tahir never noticed.

But the connection between us was in the air, growing stronger with each stroke of his brush and with every cadenza of my piano performance as we struggled to find our unique voices. He by bringing musical tonality to his painting; me by unlocking my inner sluices, letting the palette of emotions spill freely into the art of my music.

Miriam came in quietly, a book in her hands. Guy de Maupassant. In French.

By now, I knew where Tahir received his gifts—his plentiful intellect, his knowledge of music and art and history. He was raised by Miriam as the only remaining Mukhtarov. As the glory of the vanished clan. And its last hope.

I played the opening theme of “Finale: Alla breve” slowly, the way Professor Sultan-zade taught me to approach difficult new material. Why did Rachmaninoff have to flood this piece with so many notes? An insane quantity of notes. I felt dizzy looking at the pages. My hands were too small to reach for the wide intervals he catered to his own long fingers. I couldn't do it. I stopped, embarrassed that Miriam witnessed my surrender.

“Don't think about the notes,” she said as if reading my thoughts. “Search for silence. Music is not in the notes but in what is between them. That's what makes it powerful, so powerful it can overcome evil.”

“Oh no. Not again,” Tahir muttered from behind his easel. “The jaunty illusion of an idealist. Music can provide an escape from evil, not fight it. Music is for the sake of music, nourishment for the soul. Evil is inevitable and incessant, at least in our lifetime.”

“Our lifetime is less than a square on a chess board,” Miriam said, “and we never know on which one—dark or light—we are going to land.”

“That's exactly my point. Why even bother trying?”

“Why? Because you might never have another chance to experience the joys of living.”

“I don't need ‘the joys of living.' All I need is to be left alone and paint. And hopefully, when the time moves to the light square on your chessboard of life, my works will be the one true statement of this miserable era.”

“What you're saying is escapism in its most debilitating form. No wonder you prefer to drift away into the world of hashish.”

“What do you expect from me? To be a hero like you? To fight? Fight whom? Evil? You of all people should know that he's a dragon with many heads. You cut one, two grow in its place.”

“I'm not saying you should fight evil, but I don't want you to fold your wings, either. You must keep a sense of perspective. The external evils are nothing compared to the evils that we harbor in our souls. This is our true enemy, not the temporary darkness.” Miriam turned to me. “What do you think?”

“Me?” While Tahir and Miriam debated notions of evil and light in the catacombs of Maiden Tower, I lived in their Villa Anneliese, a lucky recipient of both evil
and
light. “I think we need to discover goodness inside ourselves and hold on to it,” I said, avoiding Tahir's gaze.

“Beautifully said. The eternal goodness of humanity.” Miriam patted the stone wall as if finding confirmation in its thousand-year-old solidity. “Accumulated goodness will eventually break through the gates of evil, but we first have to find forgiveness in our hearts so we can recognize and welcome the light when it returns to our country.”

“Bravo.” Tahir sprang to his feet, applauding theatrically. “Now you've got yourself a follower. But the truth is, if your generation wasn't so naive, then
my
generation wouldn't be paying the price. And the price is our future. A future we don't have. So I guess I'd better leave you two to generate the goodness. Pardon me—
accumulate
goodness—while I have work to do.”

He packed his easel and brushes and stormed out of Coronation Hall.

“He's like a porcupine, my grandson. Sharp needles outside and a fragile soul inside.” Miriam sighed sadly. “When I learned I was pregnant with my daughter Ziya, Tahir's mama, I kept it a secret, working on lumberjacking in the Siberian taiga, afraid to be discovered and sterilized. My daughter spent her formative years in the gulag and returned to Baku with me in 1953. But her lungs were never strong. And eventually, she died.” Miriam paused, rocking her body. “Tahir is the reward we have been given for suffering. A miracle. What an abundant intellect he possesses. Just like his grandfather.”

I thought of the young man in breeches in Muezzin Rashid's photograph.
Caspar
the
Poet
.

“Who was he, Tahir's grandfather?” I asked.

“My best friend, Caspar. And the love of my life.” Miriam locked her eyes on the wall, smiling wistfully. “I had known him since childhood. A shy boy with big, dreamy eyes. We never spoke until the annual ball at the Lyceum when I invited him for a dance. After that, we became inseparable. The Troika Society.”

“What is this?”

“Caspar had a friend, Halil, and the three of us created the Society, wishing to bring the arts to the poor. I sang; Caspar recited his poetry; Halil impersonated famous people. When I turned sixteen, I left for Europe to study opera, and Caspar joined me in Paris just before the October Revolution. There he became deeply involved with the intellectual libertarian movement. He believed his place was not among cranky Azeri émigrés but in his beloved homeland where real history was being made.”

“So what happened?”

“He returned to Baku. But once he was home, he realized that his ideas of democracy had nothing to do with the reality of Communism. He published his ‘Fairy Tale about a Maiden Called Truth' in a small Azeri publication.”

“The story you told me?”

“Yes. And right after that, no more letters from him. I wrote Halil, asking for help. By then, he had a position of power in the Communist regime. He replied that the Azerbaijani government would welcome me back as their ‘national singing treasure,' and in exchange they would close their eyes on Caspar's treason. On November 3, 1937, I arrived in Baku. Caspar and I were blessed to spend three days together before they came for him in the middle of the night.”

Miriam traced her silver braid with her trembling hand, twirling the end of her lace collar between her fingers. The lace was as starkly white as her face etched against the impending darkness. The Caravaggio face, screaming out its silent heartache.

“But why didn't Halil help?”

“Jealousy knows neither morality nor empathy. I had chosen Caspar over him, and Halil was an ambitious young man who didn't like to lose. Even as a boy, he used to climb on the ledge of my balcony, and standing high up above the city, he would impersonate Napoleon. He did it very well. Maybe too well.” She sighed, shaking her head. “He didn't become the twentieth-century Napoleon, but he did get a city street named after him. Together with my balcony.”

“What—” I didn't have to ask. I knew. But maybe there was still a chance. “What was his name?”

“Halil Abbas Badalbeili.”

If I could have scraped off my skin together with my name, I would have done it.

• • •

I found Tahir in the courtyard outside Coronation Hall. Hunkered down in a recess, his back against the wall, he smoked, the light of his cigarette trembling in the shadows.

“You've known it from the beginning, haven't you?” I said.

He nodded.

I slid down next to him and hid my face between my knees. “I don't know what to say.”

“It's not your fault. Has nothing to do with you. We're all married to our destinies.”

“But we have the power to change our destiny, don't we?”

“Destiny is a stubborn maiden,” Tahir said. “She likes herself just the way she is. I can fool her though.”

“How?”

Tahir cupped his hands around his mouth and whispered eerily, “The sooner I burn myself into the ground this time around, the sooner I'll have a better stake in the next life. Hopefully as a human. And with Allah's help, somewhere far, far away from here.”

He pushed against the wall and got to his feet. “Let's go make peace with Miriam.”

• • •

In the evening, Tahir and I waited for Miriam to fall asleep before we snatched a cluster of keys from her sheepskin pocket and tiptoed to the inner gate leading to Maiden Tower. Matching one after the other with the gate's battered old lock, Tahir finally found the right key. The cast-iron portal growled in protest and opened reluctantly into sheer darkness.

“Don't be afraid. I'm here.” Tahir tapped softly on my shoulder. “Hold on to the railing. Some of the stairs are broken.”

It was a long way up—round and round—along a spiral stairway that kept getting steeper, sending my head into a spin. We reached the top of Maiden Tower and mounted its rocky peak, standing so high in the sky that the rondo of shimmering stars around us seemed closer than the city lights below.

“I used to come here all the time when I was young,” Tahir said, his face tilted to the sky, his long eyelashes flickering like a butterfly's wings. “At dawn, I hid behind the staircase, waiting for the Firebird to return and take on her human appearance. I imagined her—half princess, half bird—standing on the crown of the tower, her wings reaching into the sky. Once Miriam caught me here, and I confessed my fantasy. She sat next to me, right there on the
pebble
of
dreams”—
he pointed toward a fallen fragment of the stone crown
—
“and told me the
real
Legend of Maiden Tower and Princess Zümrüd.”

“I've heard so many variations.”

“But not this one.” Tahir reached for my hand and helped me to climb atop the pebble of dreams. There, aboard the vessel of the night, traveling from one rim of the sky to another, he told me the legend.

The Legend of Maiden Tower and Princess Zümrüd

A long, long time ago:

When the evil Shah of Darkness reigned over the Land of Fire, hiding the sun inside his underground caves;

When the orphan sky peered at the Caucasus Mountains from the black dome of sorrow;

When the rain shed its tears of ice upon the barren earth—

The old Shah Samir and his most favorite wife, Queen Mehriban, welcomed to darkness their only child, Princess Zümrüd.

No celebration took place in the Land of Fire. The court heralds didn't blow the plangent sounds of their powerful nays. The
ashiks
didn't pluck the harmonious strings of their golden sazes. And the sad troubadours recited in silence the admiring verses they had composed for a long-awaited royal heir. For it wasn't a daughter whom Shah Samir needed so desperately, but a son. A strong young man, a great warrior to stand up to the Shah of Darkness. To free the sun from the dungeons. To bring harvest to the fruitless soil. To return life and prosperity to the people of the shattered kingdom.

But the first time Shah Samir laid his gaze on the baby princess, he loved her with all his aging heart. Her olive skin was as clear as the spring air, and the sun had found its way into the brilliance of her deep brown eyes. With beauty like hers, the princess could only be a gift from heaven.