The Orphan Sky (22 page)

I struggled through the first movement, keeping the volume down, sneaking glances into the audience. Sleep had once again claimed Mark Slavkin, and seven more minutes of my dreadful piece still remained. I had to do something. I desperately wanted to impress this man. But what could I do?

My
heart
is
sad
and
lonely
—Billie Holiday whispered in my ear in her stirring, daring voice, dimming the obnoxious cacophony of Khrennikov, bringing in the aura of Tahir's room with its timeless, unbroken harmony.

Without even resolving Khrennikov's dissonant chord, I switched into “Body and Soul.” At first just accompanying Billie Holiday. Unobtrusively. Giving her vocal lines a subtle harmonic support. I gradually picked up the emotion, elaborating her melody with passages and intervals of my own, building it up to the point where I couldn't even tell where Tahir's favorite jazz song ended and mine began.

After the concert, Mark Slavkin came up to me, bent over, and kissed my hand. “Bravo,
bravissimo
,” he said, avoiding the microphone. “If you could breathe life—
body and soul
”—he winked—“into that Khrennikov opus, then let the skies be your limits. Your range of emotions and that inimitable quiet intensity…well, it touched my heart.”

What a revelation. Mark Slavkin knew Billie Holiday. Mark Slavkin loved jazz music. Mark Slavkin—my clandestine partner in crime. I felt terrible taking advantage of this great man's kindness, but I didn't have a choice.

“Comrade Slavkin,” I spurted out, right into the microphone, “on behalf of the Komsomol of my beloved Azerbaijan, I humbly ask for the honor to be named a music ambassador of my republic and sent to Kabul. So I can share the joy of music with our heroic army.”

He stared at me as if questioning whether I had been bitten by a mad dog, then shrugged in bewilderment. “As you wish. I'll pass on your request.”

• • •

The next morning, as I walked out of our building, I saw a car parked a block away. A very unusual car—silver and squat. I'd never seen a car like it before. The yellow license plate beneath the snow contained English letters.

“Leila.”

Almaz? Behind the car's tinted window, her face peeked out of a shimmering silk
kelegayi
.

She rolled her window down and stuck out her head. She had changed so much. Everything about her seemed to sparkle—her emerald eyes beneath the kohl arrows, her ruby hair, gold earrings with diamonds, her lips painted cherry-red beyond their contours, overwhelming the rest of her face.

“Get in,” she said.

I thought of the possible repercussions of me entering a foreign car. No, I shook my head. I couldn't take a risk. Not now.

“Then meet me at Governor's Park. By our tree.”

She waved to the driver. The car took off.

I stood, uncertain, my mind in a tumult of emotions. No doubt, I was thrilled to see Almaz, but her sudden appearance ripped off the bandage from my wound that had never healed, testing my loyalties again.

I decided to go. And to keep it a secret from Mama.

By the time I reached Governor's Park by tram, Almaz was pacing underneath a weeping willow where years ago we took our vows of everlasting sisterhood. She rushed toward me. “I missed you so much. And a thousand times over.” She threw her arms around me.

I
missed
you
too
, I wanted to say but the words refused to come out.

“I've been following all your successes, you know. Your win at Budapest, your performance at the Tchaikovsky Concert Hall, the interview you gave to
Pravda
. I clip every single newspaper story about you and keep them in my jewelry box. I'm so proud of you. But…” She stumbled, the look of uncertainty in her eyes. “I've heard about your performance yesterday. And it got me worried… I know why you want to fly to Afghanistan. But you don't realize how dangerous it is there. Not all hymns and flowers they show on TV. It's a really nasty war there.”

“How do you know all this?”

“From Bulut.”

“Who is Bulut?”

“I met him a year ago in Kishlak Gadzhi, of all places.
Allah
akbar
.” Almaz rolled her eyes to the sky. “What a mafia there, you wouldn't believe it. They live like in feudal times. No electricity. No water. But my cousin had a million rubles buried underneath his barn. Crazy, ha? He forged the numbers of the cotton crop, bribed everyone all the way to the Ministry, received government rewards, and then sold all of the crop to the Turks through my…” She paused. “Through Bulut. He works at the Turkish consulate.”

“How long since you've been back?”

“Almost three months. Have my own apartment. Here it is.” Almaz scribbled her address and phone number in her little blue book, tore the page, and held it out. “Come visit me anytime.”

I took it. “I will.”

“Please don't go to Afghanistan,” Almaz pleaded, her eyes welling up. “If you don't care about yourself, then at least think of Sonia
Khanum
. After everything she had been through…”

Her words hit me hard, raising an instant wall of ice between us.

“I have to go now,” I said.

“I understand.” Almaz hugged me and kissed on both cheeks. “Just please be careful.”

The following night, I lay in bed, counting camels.

One
hundred
sixty-seven
,
one
hundred
sixty-eight…sixty-nine
…
seventy
… Hoping Arabian camels would start moving against the maroon damask of the casement, across the foliage of the wallpaper…
one
hundred
eighty-five
… Into the silence of the nocturnal sky…
one
hundred
ninety-eight
… Into the glow of a virgin crescent… Into the Desert of Sleep.

Not tonight. The camels refuse to leave my room. Instead, they walk in a circle, gazing at me with their unblinking doe eyes, breathing out hot vapor. Multiplying. Crowding my room. Crowding my mind, out of control—dusky, beige, taupe, fulvous…eyes, tails, humps…one hump…two humps…

I threw off my blanket. Sat up. Aunty Zeinab's remedy for insomnia didn't work. I was too restless. Too excited.

I switched on the lights. The camels were gone, and with them went any possibility of falling asleep.

Drip
…
drip
…
drip
… I listened to the sound of droplets slamming against the basin. What started as a random drizzle gradually metamorphosed into a pelting rain.

I rushed to the bathroom and twisted the faucet handle with all my might.

Silence.

Interrupted by the howl of the wind. By the rustle of the cypress trees. By my heartbeat.

A face stared at me from inside the mirror, shadows moving across her skin like the fragments in a revolving kaleidoscope. Her eyes were quite expressive, just like Papa's used to be. And the black curls that once spread wildly in every direction finally reached down to her shoulders, framing her oval Modigliani face.

Mirror, mirror on the door; I'm not an ugly duckling
anymore.

But not yet a swan, either. A fresh pimple bloomed on the bridge of my nose. And my teeth were as crowded as Taza Bazaar.

I tiptoed back to my room, climbed onto my cozy yellow chair, and turned on the radio. The Voice of America broadcast from Washington came through the speakers. I had discovered this station by accident while browsing through the radio waves, fighting insomnia.

With my ear to the radio, through the avalanche of noises, I listened to snippets of information that never appeared in the Soviet press:

“…The Helsinki Committee for Human Rights demands the release of the dissident Andrei Sakharov, a Soviet nuclear physicist…had been exiled… Soviet Union and Maoist China resumed their tepid relationship… And now,
Voice
of
America
Jazz
Hour
.”

I turned the sound up a bit and closed my eyes, letting Duke Ellington's “Take the A Train” carry me to my dream.

Tahir
and
I—our faces, our skin all covered with oozing bubbles and blisters—are crossing the desert, a barren desert with no beginning or end. The lights
f
lash ahead. Oasis or mirage? We run toward the lights, the sand dunes scorching our feet, pulling us down. The lights are getting closer and closer, until a curved triangle of Ei
f
fel Tower appears against the night sky. Not a mirage. Not at all. The real Ei
f
fel Tower is waiting for us, so real I can touch it with my
hands.

• • •

The next morning, I lingered in bed, replaying the images from the night on the insides of my eyelids. It was Sunday, and I didn't have to go anywhere.

The doorbell rang.

“Mama, can you open the door?” I shouted. “I'm going to take a shower.”

A few moments later, I heard a voice that made my body break into a cold sweat. A frightening sense of entrapment returned from the past.

Why? Why now? I hadn't heard from him for over a year. Not since his last letter, when he informed me that the Higher School of KGB was sending him to study in Germany. I never responded to any of his letters, hopeful he would vanish from my life, along with his obsession to control me.

I stayed in the shower for a long time hiding in the steam. Then I dressed slowly—as if going to my own execution. Waiting for a miracle that would take Farhad away. Then, having no alternative, I finally entered the living room.

Sprawled out on our living room couch, Farhad slurped tea, his mouth disappearing into and out of a teacup with pink roses. Mama hadn't taken this special-occasion set of china out of the cupboard since her birthday. Her doomed birthday. An older woman sat across the table from him. His mother?

Mama came out of the kitchen, carrying a tray with fruit and nuts.

“What a beautiful daughter you have, Sonia
Khanum
,” the woman said, pursing her heavily painted lips and knitting her brows. Actually, a single brow that traveled—nonstop—across the complete span of her eyes and nose. Undivided. A visage stamped with the perpetual “bandit's mask” of a raccoon.

I gasped for air.

The Raccoon. Baku's premier matchmaker. Her skills were legendary, her reputation repulsive. She matched vulnerable sheep with hungry wolves for a sweet commission.

“Thank you, Tamara
Khanum
, for your kind word,” Mama replied with a courteous smile, placing the tray in the middle of the table.

“With Allah's help, let all your grandchildren, Sonia
Khanum
, be as beautiful as Leila. Don't you think, Farhad
jan
?” Raccoon patted the cluster of fur tails attached to her stole. Dozens of them. Lives cut short for the sole purpose of giving her an aura of importance.

Farhad bowed slightly to Mama. I couldn't deny his good looks—athletic, dark-skinned, with spiky black hair, wearing a parade KGB uniform with two shiny stars. But I knew too well how those stars had landed on his broad shoulders. After all, there weren't many heroes aged twenty-one walking around Baku, rewarded with the rank of a lieutenant in the KGB for saving his country from Tahir's
imperialist
act
of
terrorism
.

How could he show his face to me?

Then it hit me—the timing. Farhad saw me on TV appealing to Mark Slavkin to be sent to Afghanistan. That brief exchange had been shown all over the news. That's why he was sitting in my living room accompanied by the Raccoon.

I had to play it safe. Maybe even give him some hope. Anything to put to sleep his suspicion of my enthusiasm to fly to the war zone because of Tahir.

“It's so nice to see you, Farhad. Back home from Germany,” I chirped.

He nodded. An ignition of pleasure in his eyes. A curl of satisfaction on one side of his mouth. “It does my heart good to see you, Leila,” he said, pressing his hand against his heart.

As we settled at the table, Raccoon began a nuptial talk:

“I will say this—there is one most important thing in Leila's favor: having such a distinguished family. Honorable Mekhti Rashidovich”—she wiped an invisible tear and pointed her finger at Papa's photograph on the wall—“let Allah bless his generous soul. And you, Sonia
Khanum
. What an enviable example of a long-suffering, tolerant wife and mother.”

Raccoon caressed her single eyebrow and stroked her dead animals' tails.

“But let's face it,” she said, “Leila has had an involvement with a person of perversion. A dangerous element from a family of enemies of the Soviet people.”

She paused for dramatic impact. “If not for the timely intervention of Farhad
jan
, Leila's innocence would have been compromised, taken away by that filthy element. She would have been expelled from the Komsomol, and she would have had no chance at a piano-playing profession. Even now, there are plenty of rumors around town about Leila's indecent behavior. You can close the city gates, but you can't close the people's mouths. Farhad
jan
has come for a rose, but the rose has some
qüsur
on it. Farhad
jan
is willing to brush the dust from the rose so it can bloom again.

“And what is even more shameful”—Raccoon rolled her eyes before delivering the final blow—“Leila's best friend is a
fahise
. A whore.”

The room plunged into iron silence. Mama sat motionless, as pale as the wall behind her, gazing at the bottom of her teacup. Farhad tried his best to display his shock, a titanic slice of baklava stuck in the gap between his front teeth.

“Farhad
jan
is like a son to me,” Raccoon continued plaintively, her voice a poisoned arrow dripping with honey. “Look at him. An honor graduate of the Higher School of the KGB in Moscow, he has a highly regarded, bright future and will provide plentifully for his wife and children. His former professor, General Tamerlan Jabrailov—our compatriot—has been appointed to launch a new department at the Azerbaijani KGB head office, and he has recruited Farhad
jan
as his assistant.”

Taking the cue like a character in a well-scripted play, Farhad rose from the couch. With great pomp and circumstance, he unwrapped and displayed an engagement ring with an ostentatious, boulder-size diamond.

“Dear Sonia
Khanum
,” he said, displaying as much humility and sincerity as he could generate, “I've been in love with your daughter since the first day I laid my eyes upon her pure face. I have loved her through thick and thin. I have loved her despite her troubles and her impetuous actions, and I helped her to learn a life lesson.”

A
life
lesson
? By humiliating me and using me for his own advancement? That was his gift of love. I could only imagine what other gifts of love would await me if I agreed to marry him. A rehabilitation program, perhaps? A labor camp? My own personal gulag?

How I wanted to roar in anger at this insult, to kick both Farhad and the Raccoon out the door. Or, better yet, out the window.

“Thank you for your kind words, Farhad,” Mama said, in her official, indisputable, head-of-the-surgery-department voice. “And the ring is absolutely lovely. I'm sure you have gone to great effort in choosing it. But I'm afraid Leila is too young for a marriage proposal, even such a praiseworthy one.”

The Raccoon, unwilling to lose the commission, swiftly placed herself between Farhad and Mama. “Sonia
Khanum
,” she moaned, “we can agree on a betrothal now and plan the wedding in a year.”

“I'm sorry.” Mama got up, bringing the negotiations to a halt.

Farhad lowered his head, not knowing what to do.

“Leila has been promised to me, Sonia
Khanum
,” he said at last, his voice cold, his resentment barely contained behind a mask of politeness. “And I will not allow anyone to disregard the consent given to me by honorable Mekhti Rashidovich. I had sworn to him to marry Leila and to take care of her. And that's what I intend to do. This is my word!”

Crumpling the package with the ring and shoving it into the pocket of his coat, Farhad marched to the door and closed it behind him. Quietly. Ominously.