The Orphan Sky (28 page)

I came home from the hospital on Saturday afternoon. Soon after, I heard the long vibrato of a doorbell. Loud. Obnoxious.

I opened the door. Fatima the mailwoman. Panting like a red-hot bellows. A white hijab on her head was stained with sweat, more of it running in torrents down her face.

“Here,
qiz
,” she said in her gruff voice, reaching inside her mailbag, “I thought I better put it in your hands. So the boys from the back alley don't use it for their
hesis
cigarettes.”

Letter from Tahir?

Of course. How could I have ever doubted his love? I waited for Fatima to produce a military postcard with Tahir's scrawled handwriting.

The envelope she retrieved from her bag had an unusual appearance: neither a gray square like the military correspondence from Afghanistan nor the typical white dove of the Soviet mail service. Beige, sprinkled with cacao powder. With stamps and stamps and more stamps in different shapes and configurations and languages, none of them Russian or Azerbaijani. In place of the sender's address: “The London International Piano Competition.”

“Thank you, Fatima
Khanum
,” I said, rushing inside, surprised that the sting of disappointment failed to deflate the excitement swelling inside me.

“Let it bring solace to your wounded soul, daughter,” she muttered after me. “And remember, Allah always finds a low branch for the bird that cannot fly.”

A
low
branch
for
the
bird
that
cannot
f
ly?
Gossip had obviously been hard at work wagging its tongue around the city. Oh well. One weaves her own carpet to sit on. Mine was filled with holes.

I opened the beige envelope and read the golden letters embossed on thick textured paper:

Dear Ms. Leila Badalbeili,

At the request of Her Royal Highness, Queen Elizabeth II, Lord and Lady Harvey of Ashleigh are honored to cordially invite you to participate in the Queen's First London International Piano Competition on the seventh day of November, year nineteen hundred and eighty-three.”

I read the letter again and again to make sure I hadn't misinterpreted the message until every pleasingly curved letter became imprinted in my head. No mistake—I was invited to join the international music elite. No more Siberian workers' concert halls with Lenin at their every corner.

I took a shower, washed my hair with iris water, smoothed it with saffron oil, put on my knitted coat-dress and black heels, and wrapped a shimmering Turkish scarf around my throat, still sore after the abuse of the breathing tube. Then, almost forgetting, I turned back, grabbed the letter from London, and ran out.

I ran into one of those magical days when the autumn sunset is too heavenly to believe. When you get drunk from looking at the wine spilled across the lavender of the sky and you smile at every stranger for no other reason than being alive. Renata was right in one respect—I did heal like a cat, feeling better and stronger than I had been in months.

As I entered the gate of Primorsky Park, I noticed a flock of young men crowding Mulberry Tree Alley, smoking, laughing, and joking coarsely. At the sight of me, their shouts became more intense and their gestures explicit. One of them, a thumb on scrawny legs, ran toward me and threw something. Mulberry juice splashed on my face, and a dark purple stain spread across my white coat.

“Hey, come here, Leila
fahise
,” shouted the thumb in a shrill voice. “I'll pay you five rubles to stick my
sik
in your
halva
pisik
.”

Another youth with a flattened shaved head separated from the rest of the crowd and headed toward me, demonstratively unzipping his pants. Now I could see the ringleader, hiding and snickering behind the group, his one-of-a-kind bulbous nose so huge it seemed to push the rest of the features off his face. I recognized him. A son of one of Papa's oil engineers.

I might have felt weakness in my knees, but the rest of me seemed to grow chain mail. I shoved the boy with half-unzipped pants aside. He stumbled against a mulberry tree. Then, like a lioness, I smashed into the crowd, facing the ringleader, screaming, “I'm going to call your father and tell him that you've been spending his money on boys and
hashish
. He'll believe me. And, by the way, do your friends know your nickname?”

The boy's face turned into a ripe tomato, his eyes blinking nervously, begging me to stop. Papa told me that he had a problem as a child—wet his bed into his teens. So his father, appalled at having a son like this, called him
Belekagi
. Diaper.

I could ruin his life, burn his tough
önder
reputation into ashes, and scatter them over Caspian Sea. I decided otherwise. I turned around and strutted away to the beat of Beethoven's
Turkish
March
. My victory march.

The square in front of the Music Conservatory was empty. The monument of the founder of Azerbaijani opera, Uzeyir Hajibeyov, the white column portico against the yellow stucco of the building—everything looked slightly different. Smaller, less impressive. Or had I changed—grown up—in the three months I'd been away?

The stairs to Professor Sultan-zade's studio on the third floor turned out to be a challenge. I had to stop at each landing to take a breath and calm my syncopating insides. I hated being a woman. How much better if I had been born some genderless creature. How much time and energy would have been saved. But no more. From now on I was eternally wedded to music, my only passion. That was the vow I took on Renata's kitchen table.

I leaned my ear against the door of Professor Sultan-zade's studio. Not a sound. I pushed it gently. Locked. I peeked through the keyhole. Darkness. And disappointment. I wanted so much to share my news with my professor. She had been at my side, unwavering. Neither a question nor a judgment throughout my hospital ordeal. She visited every day, bringing my favorite chocolate, Alenka. She sat with Mama and me, and shared our small talk, which must have been a task for her—Professor Sultan-zade and small talk lived on opposite sides of the Caucasus Mountains.

Then it hit me. Amid all my adventures, I had lost track of the days. Today was Saturday, and that's why the Conservatory, dimly lit with its granite and marble and cold, lethargic air, felt like an Egyptian sarcophagus. I was both frightened and thrilled to have this vast space all to myself. I rushed down to the second floor, each step echoing and multiplying into an orchestral arrangement as if a dozen ghost drummers followed me.

The door to the concert hall was closed but not locked. I hesitantly entered the dark auditorium. The Bechstein grand piano had been moved to the side for an orchestra rehearsal, its dark, polished wood gleaming from a janitor's always-lit backstage light.

I approached the piano, opened the lid, sat on the edge of the bench, took off my shoes, and placed the toes of my feet under the pedals. A quick glance into the dark auditorium, and I shut my eyes. I switched off my mind, leaving nothing but a blank canvas. A canvas waiting to be painted with the ever-changing palette of Rachmaninoff's
Piano
Concerto
no. 3
.

The dramatic opening of the third movement, “Alla breve.” The frothy-mouthed demons of pain, anger, and shame galloped past me amid barren desert wastes and the brown scabs of mountains before disappearing into the black horizon, into the nightmare they had come from. The keys moved my fingers to the highest register of the piano, urging them into an effortless flight—a lyrical theme in G major as sheer as the chiffon wings of Zümrüd
Qusu
in Tahir's painting.

No, not Zümrüd
Qusu
. It was me he painted. Those were the wings he had given me. I waved them. Weightless and powerful, they lifted me up into the air, into the infinite ocean of the sky where I could sail freely, carried by the legato winds of the west. A starry portamento of strings drifted by, followed by the stormy gusts of horns and flutes. Then nothing but a soulful, nocturnal chorale. Oblivion painted in greens, blues, and violets. The colors of the flowers Tahir promised to bring me from the mountains.

And the colors of burning flames. Flames inside my heart, spreading throughout my body, reaching the tips of my fingers, striking the keys with a cascade of ferocious passages, splashing and smudging blacks and grays all over the skies. Forcing them to explode with white-hot snow—the apotheosis of Rachmaninoff's
Piano
Concerto
no. 3
.

The sound of clapping seeped through my heavy breathing. Then footsteps. Someone was coming toward me. Who? The janitor? The night sentry? I strained and squinted but failed to see through the darkness until a figure became clear.

“I didn't mean to scare you. Sonia
Khanum
told me you would be here.”

Farhad. Was he here to try his chances with the easy virtue of a fallen woman?

He mounted the stage and approached me without his usual overbearing poise. Even humbly. A rather different Farhad wearing square glasses, dressed in a loose black sweater with a long mohair scarf wrapped around his neck, his hair wavier and longer than I'd ever seen it, giving him an uncharacteristically relaxed flair.

“I'm sor-r-rry if I intr-r-ruded on your pr-practice,” he said.

“Oh no. It's all right. I just came here to play.”

“I know. I've been listening to you. To your music. It touched me so deeply. You have a gift. A ver-r-ry special gift. And I can't let you r-ruin it.”

“What do you mean by ruin it?”

Farhad leaned forward on the side of the piano. I could see the shadow of a new mustache. His eyes were moist. He wiped them—quickly, nervously.

“What I mean is London,” he said. “The London Piano Competition in November. You've been invited.”

“How? How did you—”

“I work at KGB headquarters, Leila. We monitor everything that goes to and comes from the West. I shouldn't, but I'll disclose classified information. Your Professor Sultan-zade bypassed the official channels and sent a private letter to her contact in London on your behalf. I held that letter in my hands. I was obligated to report to my superior. Instead, I gave it the green light. Your professor has taken a tremendous risk because she cares about you. And so do I.”

A spotlight flashed, reflected off the piano, and died out leaving us alone in dark silence.

“We need to talk,” Farhad said, “but not here. I told Sonia
Khanum
I'd drive you home.”

Drive? Farhad had a car?

A brand-new green Moskvich waited for us outside the Conservatory. Farhad opened the door for me. We drove in silence, Farhad focusing on the road, making wide trajectories in each of his turns. The sign, Papa had once told me, of a new driver.

Outside, the streets seemed deserted, rain-soaked pavements glistening under the full moon, half of it veiled by a cloud. In the dim lunar glow, the Baku Opera House, with its Moorish pistachio-brushed domes and lacy carvings, resembled Scheherazade's tent.

“Are you hungry?” Farhad asked without taking his eyes off the road.

More than just hungry. I felt a breath away from fainting, my vision blurred by curly rings.

We ate at Baku Pearl, an open-air restaurant under a mother-of-pearl, shell-shaped crown, with the sea waves splashing languidly beneath our feet. The night air, crusty and tangible, kept me shivering, but I couldn't stop from devouring one plate after another—first, lamb shashlik, then lula kebab—as if I were trying to stuff myself for a coming famine.

Farhad whispered something to the waiter, a brown-skinned gypsy with a mane of unruly gray hair and a belly falling out of his slacks, and he brought a llama mantle and wrapped it across my shoulders.

“We have to talk, Leila,” Farhad said, sadness melting in his eyes. “There is a matter that has come to my attention, and it's critical to your future. I'm talking about the implications of your trip to Afghanistan. The implications of your time…the night you s-s-spent with…”

Farhad faltered, his tongue refusing to pronounce Tahir's name, his index finger fidgeting along the line of his coming mustache.

“A traitor,” he finished the sentence. “The implications of your involvement with a traitor, especially in light of the fact that the
person
of
your
interest
has been reported as a deserter. Apparently, he crossed the enemy line and deserted to the American side.”

I put my fork on the table quietly, my appetite gone. The last piece had fallen into place. Tahir didn't need me to defect. He had made up his mind long before I arrived in Kabul with my heroic proposition. I would have become an unnecessary burden for him. He desired his freedom much more than he desired me. I hid my face inside llama fur, watching the ribbons of city lights rippling in the mirror of the Caspian Sea sink down to its black bottom. Saying good-bye to the future that was not meant to be.

“Listen, Leila, I blame myself. For letting you make this awful mistake: to fly to Afghanistan, to put yourself in harm's way. And then to go through all the pain and humiliation you've been through since you returned.”

Farhad reached out and took my cold hands in his, bringing them close to his lips, blowing gently to warm them. “You're naive like all artists. You're like a butterfly that flies close to a flame and gets her wings burned.”

Hollow inside, stripped of my last illusion, I was losing myself in Farhad's words.

“Leila. My beloved Leila.” Farhad's eyes glistened with tears from behind his fogged spectacles. “Life means nothing to me without you. Please allow me to be your protector. Allow me to love and cherish you. Leila,
ey vefedarim
, my love! Be my lodestar. Be my bride.”