The Orphan Sky (20 page)

I came back home a national hero. A crowd of my new music fans greeted me at the airport with flowers, and I had to sign a few dozen copies of
Komsomolskaya
Pravda
—a newspaper from Moscow that had printed my photograph on the first page. It showed me in my mermaid dress accepting the Grand Prix from the head of the jury, Sviatoslav Richter. My icon—before I heard Vladimir Horowitz, of course. Underneath the picture, his accolade: “One of the most uninhibited and dramatically succulent interpretations of Mozart I have ever heard.”

A fancy Mercedes with dark windows picked us up at the Baku airport.

“Why?” I asked Professor Sultan-zade when we were alone inside the car. “Why did the jurors unanimously choose my performance over all the others, despite the fact that I didn't give them their conventional Mozart? Instead, I played Mozart in my own way.”

Professor Sultan-zade smiled knowingly. “Why do you think that the Mozart you played yesterday wasn't the real Mozart?”

“Because I abandoned quite a few of the written dynamics in the ‘Allegro,' took my time in the middle of the ‘Romanze,' and played the ‘Allegro assai' as if it had been composed by Beethoven, or even Rachmaninoff.”

“What a nice cocktail that would be.” She opened the car window, lit a cigarette, and blew the smoke outside. “I'm afraid, Leila, that what you're saying is too cerebral. Just think—how many times has your Mozart
Concerto
been performed by every acclaimed pianist, not to mention every mediocrity? Thousands and thousands in the past two hundred years, every performer trying to reflect the real genius of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart through his or her own talent or the lack of it. So by now, we've fashioned a Mozart canon—as well as Beethoven and Rachmaninoff canons and everyone else who can't rise from the dead, put their foot down, and scream: ‘Leave me alone. I didn't mean it. Not at all.'”

Professor Sultan-zade smiled and turned toward the sun, allowing the sunbeams to hop all over her face.

“Anyway,” she continued, “there are two schools of music pedagogy, or, rather, two egos—the more powerful one sees its mission as locking their performances into those canons; the other will do anything to break them, usually at the cost of the music itself. And poor music—as the most illusive and subjective of all forms of art—ends up being a bouncing ball between the egos and politics. What happened yesterday was a phenomenon. Your performance was so visceral it reached into the souls of your listeners, completely bypassing their reason. You brought emotions that can be felt but can't be described.”

The Mercedes drove us to City Hall, where Mama was waiting for us. The Secretary of the Baku City Communist Party presented Professor Sultan-zade with the title of “Public Teacher of Soviet Azerbaijan” and rewarded Mama and me with a trip to a government resort on the Black Sea.

A telegram from Farhad waited for me at home: “You Made Me Proud!”

I had made everybody proud. Everybody but myself. Guilt—voracious guilt—devoured me from inside. I had kept it at bay through the weeks of relentless piano practice, rehearsals, and more piano practice before my travel and performance in Budapest. But now, after returning home, greeted by praise and festivities, I knew that only Tahir's forgiveness would free me from the pointy barbs of guilt.

I needed to see him. To explain that I had no choice but to go ahead with the competition. To let him know that his artistic guidance had led me to victory. To confess that I had been in love with him from that very first moment I saw a boy with lavender eyes walk barefoot down a busy street, lost in his own world. Since then,
his
world
had become mine. The only place where I really belonged. My heart knew it always, but the mind had wicked ways of dealing with feelings. It pushed them into the corner with the whip of doubts and jailed them behind the bars of common sense.

But the bars had come down. They crashed to the ground when I took the spotlight on the stage of the Grand Concert Hall of the Budapest Music Academy. The winner. Adored by the crowd, bouquets of flowers landing at my feet. Whispering under my breath, “I dedicate my victory to my love. To my only love. To you, Tahir.”

I waited for evening to fall, watched the sun sink slowly toward the west. The sky finally darkened, unlit by an anemic sickle moon. Even better. Swiftly, I made my way across the heavy-eyed city, slipped inside Icheri Sheher, and zipped through its web of alleyways toward Ashuglar Street. To my great relief—and even greater surprise—the green door was still there. I reached it in a heartbeat, grabbed the brass knob, pushed the door open, and stepped inside.

Into a blinding cascade of fluorescent light illuminating—in all its grotesqueness—a corps de ballet of dancing cows. All dead. All hanging from a rack. Suspended in the midst of their fatal grand jeté.

Promenading between the corpses was the maestro himself—a Robespierre. A tall, emaciated butcher dressed in white coveralls and a blood-spattered apron swinging at the slaughtered herd with his ax of terror. Slicing off ribs, loins, chucks, and thighs.

“
Salam eleykum, qiz
,” he greeted me with a syrupy smile.

“
Eleykum
salam
,” I said in a state of shock, my eyes searching for any sign of Tahir's shop inside this butchery. “This place. It used to be a music—”

A loud thumping cut me off in mid-sentence. A huge, industrial-size blower yawned and began to spin, faster and faster, generating a steady roar, setting the dead cows in motion, splashing me with a burst of air saturated with the odor of death. The blower was mounted on the wall, right on top of Liza Minnelli's poster, a slice of her fishnet stocking peeking from behind the gray metal.

“It used to be a music shop,” I screamed over the fan's noise. “Do you know where the owner is?”

“Ahhh, the outlaw. He's gone.”

“Where?”

Robespierre sized me up, a licentious grin shriveling his face into a rotten fig. “Why would a nice girl like you be walking around inquiring about a felon?”

“Oh, it's my elderly neighbor Ali Khan who sent me,” I lied, my stomach turning. “The music shop owner owes him some money.”

“Ohhh. Too bad. Tell your neighbor the kid's gone.”

“Where?”

“How do I know? Back to prison or dead.” And he threw a freshly hacked bloody tongue on the scale right next to me.

I vomited before I could struggle to the door.

The butcher rushed to help me, wiping his bloody hands on his apron, causing me more sickness. I pushed the door open and darted away, stumbling down the dark, deserted street.

I had to find out what happened to Tahir. Now. Right now. But where? Could I face Miriam after what I had done?

I stopped, leaned my head against a cold metal lamppost.

The sound of a whistle. Was it for me? My stomach tightened. Another whistle. Then a nasal voice, “Hey. I have something for you.”

I turned around. A boy waddled toward me like a bowlegged duck. The son of the shoe-shop owner, Tahir's neighbor. I'd seen him a dozen times, sitting on the threshold of their shop playing
shesh
besh
with his father or running with other boys, throwing stones at sparrows.

“What is it?” I asked.

The boy huddled in a shaded corner a few meters away. “It's about your artist. Come here. I'll show you.”

I approached him cautiously. He glowered at me, making a
tztz
sound with his tongue, trying to get rid of something stuck between his teeth. “I'll show it to you if you show me your tits,” he said.

“What?” I raised my hand to smack him. Hard. Then stopped. The kid couldn't be older than twelve. And he was even small for that age.

“You did more than that with the artist,” he whined. A child who was just refused a treat.

“How about if I give you ten rubles instead?”

“Ten rubles,” he repeated, confused, not believing his luck. “Show me.”

I retrieved a wad of cash from my coat pocket, let him see it, then slid it back. “So what do you have for me?”

“It's just this thing. This man stopped by a while ago. He's really tall and important. He told my father and me to spy on you. And we did. And I followed you home and told him who you were. And he gave me a pocketknife. That was after I called him and they came and caught you here in your chador.”

Something sounded rotten. “Do you have it with you?”

“What?” He looked suspiciously from one side to the other.

“The pocketknife.”

“Give me my money first.”

“No. Show me the pocketknife.”

He fidgeted, then pulled the knife out of his trousers. A Finnish Army pocket knife with the large letters KGB imprinted on its handle. A small engraving underneath. I took the knife to a shaft of light from a nearby window and read the engraving:
To
Comrade
Farhad
for
his
dedicated
service
.

The kid snatched the knife out of my hands. “Now give me my money.”

I did. And he left. But not before sliding his hand against my breast and sticking an obscene
dulya
in my face—a hand with fingers curled, a thumb thrust between the index and middle fingers.

I deserved worse than that. How could I have not figured it out from the beginning? Farhad had staged the whole spectacle, with my exposure and humiliation.

He brilliantly executed his own motto: “Let your rival throw a stone that kills two rabbits at the same time.” The first—to teach me a lesson that when Farhad said I belonged to him, he meant it. And the second? To use the situation for the advancement of his own career.

He had set up Comrade Guseinov—his former superior—to prosecute my immoral conduct and then showed up to embarrass him and to blackmail me into signing the fabricated report against Tahir. And he ended up as a hero who rescued my honor and my music career, while exposing and preventing a terrorist attack against our country. How could I have been so stupid?

• • •

The door to Miriam's chamber was ajar. What if she was gone too?

Anxious, I pushed the door open. It was so dark I couldn't see a thing. Then familiar objects began to materialize, their silhouettes indented on the walls by the glow of a kerosene lamp. Glimmers of light parachuted like dandelions around the room, spread by the lamp's etched glass. A nippy draft across my feet. Only midautumn. How had she survived winters here?

Miriam sat on the sofa, wrapped in a woolen blanket, drowsing to the recording of Bach's
Goldberg
Variations
.

The
best
sleeping
pill
, she called that haunting opus.

The serpentine saraband glided across the chamber along with its counter lines, speeding up the steps, spiraling into a polyphonic euphoria. I remembered a conversation we had at the table here when Tahir and Miriam crossed swords. Tahir called Bach's polyphony abstract and mind-bending and compared it to Wassily Kandinsky's paintings. Miriam shook her head, insisting that Bach's counterpoint was the most logical artistic technique ever created. I just sat there, my eyes flying from one to the other, having no idea what the quarrel was about. How I missed those times.

Miriam looked up, saw me, and gestured toward a hassock between her sofa and the coal stove. “You'll be warmer here,” she said. The tone of her voice indicated no anger, just heartbreaking grief. Could it be that she wasn't aware of the truth, that she didn't know who had betrayed her Tahir?

I landed on the hassock, and together we listened to the twenty-fourth Goldberg variation until a barking cough rocked Miriam's body. She leaned forward, trying to reach a mug on the table. I leaped up from the hassock to help. No—she waved her hand. She repositioned herself closer to the table, lifted the mug, and shaking, brought it to her lips for a hungry sip. Then she replayed the same painful effort in reverse, returning the mug to the table without ever lowering her aristocratic pinkie finger.

“You know, the type of cough you have can be a dangerous one,” I said. “It sounds wet. There might be some viral infection in your lungs. You need to see a doctor.”

“Don't ever trust those who tell you that old age comes with dignity.” Miriam sighed, ignoring my insight. “No. It comes with disgrace. Youth is a blessing; old age is a nuisance.”

Another bout of coughing traveled through her body. This time I dismissed her attempt at self-sufficiency and helped her with the tea.

As I came close, she grasped my forearm. “They sent Tahir to Afghanistan,” she wheezed, painfully suppressing her cough. “They sentenced him to three years in punitive battalion. Some terribly lost soul accused him of serving the Americans and instigating some terrorist activities.”

Terribly—lost—soul
. Every word branded across my forehead. How could she not see it?

Miriam released my arm, but I couldn't move. Couldn't speak. My whole being seemed to melt into a puddle. One big, dirty puddle.

“I had the pleasure of watching him grow up,” she said, her voice hoarse after the coughing spell. “He was a shy boy. Was bullied a lot. But I taught him to be careful about choosing which battles to fight. Some just weren't worthy. I took him to his first art class. I knew that the Mukhtarovs' charisma would shine through in him in one way or another.”

She smiled through tears. “He liked you, Leila. I could see it in his eyes. And when we Mukhtarovs take someone into our hearts, they stay there forever and beyond.”

“Aria da Capo.” The
Goldberg
Variations
returned to the opening saraband, wistful and resigned like something coming to an end.