The Orphan Sky (2 page)

“All right. I will give you a task. A very important task.” Comrade Farhad unlocked his briefcase and rummaged inside until he retrieved a yellow notebook. He leafed through the pages. “Here it is. Listen attentively. A few blocks from here, in Old Town, a new shop opened last week. The one with the green door. Near the Maiden Tower. The address: 33 Ashuglar Street. I've received an urgent warning that the owner is an American mole. And the shop is a cover-up for anti-Soviet activities. The mole uses a highly sophisticated scheme to lure in the youth of our neighborhood, contaminate them, and then spread the cancer throughout our city. We must stop him.”

To catch and expose a Western spy—there was no higher feat for a Soviet citizen. We knew the Americans had their secret cells planted in our society, posing as merchants, teachers, even members of the Communist Party. They lurked, waiting for the first opportunity to strike. That's why we always had to be on guard, watch vigilantly for any suspicious behavior, and report it to the authorities. Now I had a real chance to trap an American vermin and become a hero. To rise to Comrade Farhad's expectations. To impress him.

On the other hand, an assignment of such magnitude could distract me from my preparation for the piano competition in Budapest. I dithered, shifting from foot to foot, my heart beating inside my ears. What to do?

Comrade Farhad, tapping his fingers on his thigh, let out a sigh of impatience.

I lifted my hand in salutation. “I swear to show myself deserving of the special task you've given me.”

He returned the salutation. “This is the chance you've asked for. This is your chance to regain my trust. Report to me every Tuesday. Congratulations. The mission is yours.”

He shook my hand, squeezing my fingers in a firm grip. Leaving my palm slightly wet. “See you around, Leila.”

Poised and assertive, planting his feet in wide steps, he crossed busy Communist Street and disappeared inside the lace arch of Baku City Hall. But not before throwing a furtive look back at me over his shoulder.

Inspired, I wanted to act right away. To prove to the whole world that I was worthy of Comrade Farhad's choice. The clock on Baku City Hall showed quarter to two. I had more than two hours before my piano lesson. And Maiden Tower, with its nest of anti-Soviet activities, was just around the corner.

• • •

The jagged edges of Maiden Tower's crown cut into the sky.

A creepy, damned place. Baku folklore had it that the old woman who lived in the Tower's basement and took care of the grounds was the maimed soul of one of the maidens imprisoned by the Shah of Darkness a thousand years ago. People called her the Immortal.

The legend said that if the Immortal's eyes should meet mine, I would first lose my hair. Then I would go blind. At the end, I would inherit her damnation—be buried alive.

I had never actually seen her. Those few who did claimed the Immortal had rooster-like yellow eyes emitting dreadful flames.

Thankfully, my destination—33 Ashuglar Street—was located a few blocks before Maiden Tower. I spotted it at once.

A screamingly green door. As if someone had hurled a bucket of paint from afar, leaving a fat blot in the middle and random splatters thrusting their clutches around the door like the tentacles of a giant sea monster.

A shoe merchant exited next door, carrying a large basket loaded with traditional Azeri leather-and-brocade slip-ons,
charigs
, their curled-up toes gleaming in the sun like precious gems. He placed the basket in the middle of the sidewalk, retrieved a pack of Kazbek cigarettes from his trousers, and stuck one between his teeth. Striking a match against the wall, he lit his Kazbek, leaned against the threshold of his store, and stared in my direction.

On a narrow, busy street in broad daylight—where could I hide? I slowed down, settling into the tempo of the “Adagio sostenuto” from Beethoven's
Moonlight
Sonata
. I planted my steps in rhythm with its lamenting melody, stopping at the end of every eighth measure to look at store windows. All the while, I kept my focus on the green door.

What was inside? What did a spy's nest look like? A dark basement with a single bulb swinging from the ceiling? A figure hunched over an iron desk, turning the knobs of his radio, transmitting our top national secrets to his handlers in America? Did he have a gun?

I kept ambling back and forth…back and forth…while watching cautiously for any sign of action around the green door.

There was none. Merchants from adjacent shops and their customers all went about their own business. No one but me seemed to care about 33 Ashuglar Street.

Instead, I was gradually becoming the center of attention. Negative attention. The men seated under the vines of the
c
haikhana
, teahouse, smacked their greasy lips with a vulgar
tztztz
and cackled every time I passed by. A fat grocer with a shaved head and black stubble on his face threw a lewd three-finger gesture at me and whispered, “Hey,
gözellik
, beauty, come to my basement. I give you ten rubles.” And he rubbed his crotch.

I darted away, crossed the street, and entered a fabric store. There I found a surveillance spot behind a shelf piled with silks. I examined the fabric bolts slowly, one at a time, unfolding them, feeling the texture, laying the silks against my skin without taking my eyes off the target.

It didn't take long before the green door opened, and a young man stepped out.

No, he was too young to be called a
man
. More like a lanky teenager, with long, wavy chestnut hair reaching his shoulders. The way he was dressed—in dirt-streaked, bell-bottom jeans and a loose white shirt embroidered with flowers—made him look like a foreigner and completely out of place on a Baku street. What a strange way for an undercover agent to disguise himself. Wasn't a spy supposed to blend in with the environment?

The boy closed the door behind him and remained still for a moment, deep in thought, as if making sure he hadn't forgotten anything. His face—thin and sun-kissed—seemed strangely familiar. A high forehead, a few stubborn curls hanging over his large, deep-set eyes, thick eyebrows, as if sketched in one sweeping stroke of charcoal, reaching from the bridge of his nose to the edges of his temples. And the wide, slightly asymmetrical mouth, moving in some silent dialogue the boy was having with himself, adding a touch of quirkiness to his refined, intelligent face.

I had definitely seen him. But where?

“Are you looking to buy a silk
parça
,
qiz
?”

A middle-aged saleswoman with henna-dyed red hair rushed toward me, a servile smile on her face. Before I had a chance to say no, she tugged on the end of one of the rolls, and a waterfall of cerulean and indigo silk poured onto the floor in shining folds.

“Made for your skin,
qiz
. Swear, as if you were my own daughter. Buy five meters and sew a dress with a long, pleated skirt. Boys will sweep the floor under your feet with their eyelashes, take Allah as my witness. Are you listening,
qiz
? Or are you counting flies in the air?” The saleswoman pursed her lips.

“I'm, uh, sorry, but I'm not looking to buy. I don't have money with me today.”

“
Sonra menim vaxt serf etmeyin
. Then do not waste my time.” She waved her hand dismissively.

Outside, the boy was walking away, his bare feet slapping against the pavement, raising little puffs of dust. He stopped at the
k
utabkhana
, bought a pile of steaming
kutabs
—crepes filled with meat and herbs, took a huge bite, and disappeared around the corner.

I decided to take my time and count to ten.
One, two, three
…With each count I became more energized, driven by the significance of my task. Before I reached
seven
, I charged across the street, slightly opened the green door, and squeezed through.

The door slammed shut behind me with a sinister D-F-G-flat triad. Too fast. Too tight. Darkness splashed into my eyes and drew me into a bottomless hollow of night. Was it a trap?

Something flickered in the distance, dressing the darkness in a soft veil of blue. Out of the blue came an explosion of sounds followed by the seamlessly expressed melancholy of Chopin's “Ballade no. 1.” My fingers traced the melody on an invisible keyboard—my usual way to connect with the music, to feel its emotions on my fingertips. I touched the keys softly, as if gliding my hands through water, but the musical notes kept slipping between my fingers like bubbles, waltzing away in the blue radiance.

My hands brushed against the walls as I moved through a long, narrow corridor. Three steps down, the corridor opened into a small room, its floor and walls overlaid with ancient rugs, their diamonds, rosettes, and sprays of vine spinning in a slow trance.

A Rapsodija radio gramophone, the source of Chopin's nostalgic “Ballade no. 1,” rested its bulk on four skinny legs. A tamed fire dragon waved feeble tongues behind the iron screen of the hearth, adding to the illusion of timeless harmony reigning in the air, fragrant with something sweet and tangy. Black currant maybe?

Leaning against the wall, Leonardo da Vinci's
Mona
Lisa
smiled at me, alive with the shadows of the dancing fire dragon. I came closer. The painting
did
look like
Mona
Lisa
, except there was no landscape in the background. Only bare canvas, placed on a table next to an oil lamp with a tear-shaped glass.

Piles of books covered the rest of the table. The books looked as old as the rugs, proudly wearing frayed leather and gold bindings. One of them, a large volume, lay open. In the dim light, calligraphic verses written in Azeri curled across the pages like coral snakes. Underneath the verses were faded Islamic miniatures depicting Layla and Majnun. I leafed through the book, a legendary twelfth-century love
s
er
penned by Azerbaijani poet Nizami Ganjavi.

“Young and innocent, they savored the violet-scented wine of first love and became deeply intoxicated… Oh, first love's wine, how can any heart resist your bittersweet
taste…”

I picked up another book wrapped with a leather flap and released the flap carefully. It was a sketchbook with images of old Baku streets, painted in brilliant colors, entwined with gold, surrounded by exquisite calligraphy. Under one of the miniatures—of Maiden Tower—a few handwritten lines:

Once upon a time, when the evil spirit of darkness reigned over the Land of Azerbaijan, 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…

A ghazel. As suspended in time as the rest of the room. Was this really a spy's nest? Or was I inside some medieval troubadour's castle that had been locked away from the world for centuries?

A glissando, three dreamy chords, and the spectacular finale of Chopin's “Ballade no. 1.” Then silence, invaded only by the crackling fire and the whispering of the turntable's needle against the recording. I tiptoed to the gramophone to turn it off, stopping in a slim alcove stacked floor to ceiling with music albums. Rows and rows of them, neatly lined up against the wall. One album in front had a dated photograph of a handsome young man in a tuxedo on its cover and the title written in English:
Vladimir
Horowitz
Plays
Chopin
. The album sleeve was empty. I hesitated, then slipped it inside my bag as material evidence of the American connection.

Time to leave. I dashed through the corridor, grabbed the doorknob, threw the door wide open, and—
Allaha
s
ükür
!
Thank God!—almost fell on my face in sun-splashed Ashuglar Street.

I made it just in time for my piano lesson.

Not good enough. According to Professor Sultan-zade, to be “just in time” was about as good as not being there at all. She wanted her students outside her rehearsal room at least a half hour early. Like lambs waiting to be slaughtered, we paced between the marble bust of Comrade Lenin and the iron railing with the winged horses, listening to the broken musical passages, occasional slaps, and angry shrieks flying out of her lesson-in-progress, guessing which one of her torture techniques she would inflict on us today.

Professor Sultan-zade, the chair of the piano department of the Baku Conservatory of Music, was a dedicated advocate of Soviet pedagogy based on the motto of a former Russian Empire generalissimo, Alexander Suvorov: “Hard training, easy combat." In affirmation of her hard training, her students had been steadily gathering prizes at competitions all over the world. I was accepted into her class at the age of ten after winning second place in a regional competition and being classified as a “potential national treasure.”

The Soviet Union did treasure its classical musicians and ballet stars above all other achievers. Sergei Prokofiev, Dmitri Shostakovich, Aram Khachaturian, Sviatoslav Richter, and the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi Theater, Maya Plisetskaya. All highly revered by the Kremlin and the Soviet people, they formed the cultural Olympus of our society. It had become my goal to reach that summit, and to do so I had learned to sacrifice.

Four hours of daily piano practice left me out of the social life in my old school, and I graduated from the eighth grade with neither friends nor the skill of making them. Last autumn, I began my first year at the specialized Asaf Zeynally Music College, where the education catered to the individual music talents of its students. The academic subjects, even though obligatory, had been moved into the background. In my case, the fact that Professor Sultan-zade herself had taken me under her wing meant even fewer academic demands—flexible attendance in classes and almost guaranteed good grades.

I mounted the long, oval staircase and rushed to the rehearsal room. Ear to the leather-upholstered door, I heard nothing but daunting silence. The previous student, a girl with a flat round face that seemed on fire every time she exited the room, had gone. I waited a few seconds for the clock to announce four thirty, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door.

“You may come in, Leila.”

Professor Sultan-zade, tall and arid in her usual dark maroon dress, black stockings, and hair pulled back in a bun, leaned against the wide-open window. The smoke from her cigarette danced with the breeze in and out of the room.

“You obviously had important business to attend to,” she said sternly.

“I…I was actually here, waiting to come in.”

“Czerny,
The
Art
of
Finger
Dexterity
.” She pronounced her verdict, took another puff of the cigarette, and turned away as if she had lost interest in me.

For the next hour and a half I played Karl Czerny's fifty most difficult études, addressing every aspect of piano technique—clear passages, chords, double octaves. I actually loved those études, because in them, unlike most of the piano material used for the development of technique, I had found inner dynamics and understated beauty.

But Karl Czerny wasn't the instrument of torture. The metronome was. Every time Professor Sultan-zade finished with a cigarette, she threw the butt out the window, lumbered to the piano, her stilettos screeching with every step like unworn military boots, and slid the weight down the pendulum rod to speed the metronome up to the next tempo. By the time I reached “Étude no. 33,” with its arpeggios in the left hand and chords in the right, I couldn't even look at my hands. I felt dizzy.

“Good effort today.” Professor Sultan-zade patted my shoulder at the end of the lesson, my wrists swollen and my fingers burning as if they had crossed the Sahara Desert.

“Excuse me, Professor.” I retrieved the empty American album sleeve. “Today, I heard the most remarkable interpretation of Chopin's ‘Ballade no. 1.'”

“Who is the artist?”

“Vladimir Horowitz,” I read.

“
That
person
was a traitor,” she whispered, her mouth so tight it looked like an old scar. “If you want to have a career in music—and you very well might have one—then don't be stupid.
Never
tell anyone what you just told me. And I'd better call your parents too.”

She grabbed the album cover from my hands and threw it into the fire.

• • •

Why would Professor Sultan-zade, who treated every written or recorded musical note as life's most precious gift, burn Chopin's album? What harm could Chopin's music cause, even being played by a very bad person?

On my way home, I rehearsed the explanation I would give to my parents. How Comrade Farhad gave me an assignment and how I took my chances and went behind the green door.

And the things I wouldn't tell them about. The way Chopin's “Ballade” made me feel, Mona Lisa's painting, the boy…

Aladdin.

Yes. That was it. He looked exactly like Aladdin—slender and boyishly agile, with long, curly brown hair, almond-shaped sapphire eyes, a faraway look on his thin face. A barefoot alien from the past.

As I turned onto my street, I heard the familiar
s
ikay
e
tl
e
r
, complaints.

“What have I done, Allah, to deserve your curse?”

Aunty Zeinab. In her usual place—in the middle of our courtyard, next to the lemon tree. Her hands on the tops of her massive hips, the layers of skin on her neck folding and unfolding like the bellows of an accordion, she cried to the heavens: “Why did you give me a donkey for a husband? Why? The son of a whore is a drunkard, a gambler, and an adulterer. Let him fall in a pit and die.”

Aunty Zeinab could be a tigress, but her heart was made of sweet jasmine
serbet
, syrup. We were not blood-related, but our families had a fifteen-year history together, going back to a day in the delivery room of the Baku Railway Hospital. My mama had just finished giving birth to me when she spotted a blue, motionless baby thrown on a waste tray for hopeless newborns. The only medical staff, a tired midwife, hovered over unconscious Aunty Zeinab, choosing to save her over the baby. Mama cut my umbilical cord, slid off the surgical table, reached for the newborn, and began spanking, rubbing, and twisting her until the baby inhaled her first breath and joined me in a scream. With two dark, hairy infants in her arms, Mama stumbled to Aunty Zeinab's table.

“Which one is mine? They look the same,” Aunty Zeinab cried.

Mama studied the babies, realized that she didn't have the answer, and fainted next to Aunty Zeinab. Later, she recalled seeing a beauty mark above my belly button before cutting the cord. How many times had we heard that story?

Mama didn't have milk so Aunty Zeinab insisted on nursing me. Every morning she took two tram rides from her tiny communal dwelling on the edge of the city to come to us. Luckily, an apartment downstairs in our building became vacant, and my papa, using his connections within City Hall, secured it for Aunty Zeinab's family.

“Good evening, Aunty,” I said, hoping to sneak past her. It was a custom to call our family's close friends aunts and uncles.

“Daughter, sweet daughter of my heart.” Aunt Zeinab clutched me in a hug, pressed against her soft belly. From under her arm, I noted Uncle Zohrab, her husband, peeking from behind the kilim that hung at the entrance to their apartment. Taking his chances, he tiptoed behind Aunt Zeinab's back and out of the courtyard.

I loved Uncle Zohrab. One quarter the size of his wife, with a smile that never left his face, he was kind and caring; he'd never even hurt a lizard. Zeinab and Zohrab were second cousins, and they continued a family tradition of artisanship that started almost five hundred years ago with the creation of masks for medieval mystical spectacles, later shifting to doll making for
kilim arasi
—puppet shows played between folded carpets.

I loved watching them work. With his large, robust hands, Uncle Zohrab mixed clay and water into a paste, molded and fired the paste into unglazed porcelain figures, and applied skin color to each. And when they lay on the table, indifferent and cold, Uncle Zohrab's hands performed magic—illuminating the porcelain figures' faces with exquisitely human expressions.

Then Aunty Zeinab dressed the dolls in traditional Azerbaijani costumes—silk pantaloons and chemises, velvet skirts trimmed with golden braid, brocaded knitted jackets, chiffon veils, bracelets, buttons, and pendants made from gems, copper, and silver. Their bisque dolls were national treasures, exhibited and exported to the West. We heard that only millionaires there could buy them.

But their masterpiece, Almaz the Doll, stayed home in the permanent display at the Baku Museum of Fine Arts. With her emerald eyes, smooth olive skin, and fiery red hair, she was a precise replica of their daughter, Almaz, my milk sister, whose life Mama had saved.

Gently, I squirmed out of Aunty Zeinab's embrace. “Aunty, is Almaz home?”

“Yes, rose petal, she is. With Allah's help, how have you grown to be your noble parents' pride, while my flesh-and-blood is nothing but a gossipy thorn?”

“Gossipy” was exactly why I needed to see Almaz. As Aunty Zeinab liked to say, “Before a rooster started his crow in the faraway Khizi Mountains, Almaz already knows how many eggs his hens have laid.”

Almaz and I grew up inseparable, sharing our secrets and dreams. We learned to swim in the Caspian Sea and to climb Besh Barmag, the sacred Five Finger Mountain. A pair of
jorabs
, multicolored socks, everyone called us.

And then she changed. Overnight. Changed so drastically that I thought a wicked dervish had stolen the best friend of my childhood and replaced her with a vain, empty-headed double. Our paths diverged. While I divided my passion and time between my Komsomol responsibilities and my music, Almaz sweltered in the Turkish baths, gathering gossip. She even became bored with studies and dropped out of school after the eighth grade. Mama came to help, enrolling her in a prestigious nursing program that would provide her with useful skills.

Maybe the change was the result of Almaz's bad birth. She suffered from epilepsy. Twice I witnessed her shaking as violently as if possessed by witchcraft. Mama even taught me how to prevent her from choking during the convulsions.

I moved the kilim aside. “Can I come in?”

Inside, the air was humid, the floor wet. Almaz sat astride a towel on the kitchen table, painting her toenails cherry-red, her long, damp hair spilling over her bronzed back and bare breasts. She had nothing on but a pair of black panties trimmed with red lace. A henna snake coiled around her leg all the way to the knee.

“How was your date?” she asked without lifting her head.

“How do you know?”

“The whole town knows.” She paused and scratched her temple with the tip of a red thumbnail. “A match made in Communist heaven. Comrade Leila and Comrade
Aži
Dahaka
.”

Aži Dahaka
—a mythical serpent-dragon that spits out fire—was a nickname Almaz gave to Farhad after she heard him speak at a Komsomol rally.

She was jealous. I would be too if I was in her place. Six months ago, Aunty Zeinab surprised all of us when she betrothed Almaz to Chingiz from the third floor, a beanpole with gold teeth, an unevenly shaved pea-sized head, and lethargic cow eyes. He loitered around the neighborhood, the sleeves of his nylon shirt rolled up high, trying to look like a diligent laborer. In truth, he hadn't worked a single day in his entire twenty-five years and lived shamelessly off his childless uncle, Ali Khan. Like a flatworm.

“I need to ask you a question,” I said.

“Wait.” Almaz blew on her toes. “What is it?”

“Have you heard anything about the new shop near Maiden Tower with the green door and—”

Like an iguana, she slid off the table, scurried toward me, and sealed my mouth with her hand, the beads on her bracelet pressing hard against my cheek. “Where have you been? The whole city has been talking about it. It's a
music
shop
. But not for real. The owner is an offspring of the Immortal.”

“The Immortal?” My heart dropped.

“Yes, can you believe it? And just like her, he is a wicked sorcerer. He sells poisonous music records from the black market.” Almaz's eyes glistened darkly, her voice lowered to a whisper. “If you listen to his music, your skin will turn into fish scales.”

• • •

Clusters of dirty clouds raced across the starless sky like a pack of hounds loosed from their chains. I counted the steps; only sixty-three to go along the narrow balcony and then up the stairs to our apartment on the fourth floor. But there was definitely someone following me.

The Immortal?

I glanced back. Nothing except my shadow trailing behind. Was it fear that made me feel as if my shadow was improvising? Stepping on my feet, trotting ahead of me, crawling up the walls, slowly enclosing me. The words of an ancient curse whispered in my head, turning to acid in my stomach.

From the dome of a moonless sky

The dead maiden's evil eye

Casts a spell upon a soul

Who wanders all alone.

The Immortal's hex. A punishment for entering the green door.

In panic, scared of my own shadow, I ran toward a tiny beam of light flickering at the end of the balcony where, to my total humiliation, I bumped into Chingiz. He leaned on the railing, smoking a cigarette.

“Is somebody after you?” He puffed smoke into my face.