A shiny black Chaika waited outside the green door with the engine running. It was the type of car usually reserved for very important Communist Party members like Papa and a few of his friends in the government. When he wasn’t traveling to the oil fields, he—and sometimes me and Mama—were driven around town in a car just like this. What was it doing here in this part of town? At the green door?
The back window rolled down, and a girl my age, maybe a year older, leaned out, showering her face with the sunlight. A doll-like face with perfect kohl lines around her eyes and iridescent, bright pink mousse drawing attention to her full lips and high cheekbones. Just the way Almaz liked to apply her makeup and unsuccessfully tried to teach me to do.
I snuck inside the fabric store across the street and took my post by the row of silks, happy that a wearisome customer was rambling nonstop and keeping the grumpy saleswoman busy and away from me. The clock on the wall showed two thirty. An eternity later, the minute hand still hadn’t reached the thirty-five mark.
The boys kept running up and down the street, throwing stones at sparrows. One of them, delayed by his short, bowed legs, had a difficult time catching up with the rest. He was the son of the shoe-shop owner. Tahir’s neighbor.
Finally, a short, stocky man in a gray suit emerged briskly from Tahir’s shop carrying a painting of Mona Lisa, her face looking downward, peeking through the torn newspaper wrapping. The chauffeur leaped out of the car and threw the door open. The gray-suited man disappeared behind the tinted windows, and the Chaika roared away. I waited for a few minutes, crossed the street, and stepped inside the green door.
Tahir stood in the corner, counting a stack of cash.
“So you’re running a lucrative business here,” I said, unable to suppress the chirping overtones in my voice.
“Hmm. It’s you.” He scratched an eyebrow, trying to tone down his own apparent excitement. It didn’t help. Not with the grin. Was it because of the money? Or me?
“I’m here, but don’t you think for a moment that I’m here because I agree with your accusations about Communism and my beliefs.” I muttered a phrase I had been rehearsing tirelessly. It didn’t come out in the strong, assertive way I had planned.
“Patience is the key to paradise.” Tahir smiled, his eyebrows arched like the wings of a soaring swallow.
“What do you mean?”
“What I mean is that an illness comes by the pound and goes away by the ounce.”
I’d heard that old saying before but couldn’t quite understand what he referred to as an illness. I chose to sway away from his interpretation. “Did you just sell stolen art?” I asked instead.
“Oh yes, straight from the Louvre. Haven’t you read in the paper that Mona Lisa has fallen in value recently? So I thought—ah, first, Picasso, now me.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s a long story.”
“I’ve got time.”
“Aren’t you supposed to practice piano all day long?” he said, failing to keep his face straight.
“Oh, thanks for reminding me. I better go, then.”
He shrugged. “You can stay if you want.”
“Then what about Picasso?”
“Picasso? Well, when Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, the magazines accused Picasso of the theft.”
“Did he do it?”
“No, some Italian nationalist did it. He wanted Leonardo da Vinci to hang in the Uffizi Gallery. But Picasso’s name attached to the story gave the painting instant attention. And the value of Mona Lisa rose astronomically.” He stopped, biting his paint-stained thumbnail. His nails had been chewed down almost to the quick.
“Very interesting,” I said, “but what about your Mona Lisa? And the black Chaika I saw outside with a man and his daughter.”
“She’s not his daughter. She’s a keniz, one of the many concubines he’s picked up at the Turkish baths. That’s where your glorious Communist deities hold their bacchanalias, you know.” He clicked his tongue in loud judgment. “Back to your inquiry. It’s very simple. One has to do a lot of different things to survive in this Kingdom of Darkness.”
Kingdom of Darkness? “So you paint for important Party members while you actually loathe them?”
“That’s quite perceptive for a girl of your age.”
For a girl of my age?
How old was Tahir? Not that much older than me. Seventeen maybe? Judging by his self-assurance, his stories, and his knowledge, he had lived a few lives already, but his eccentric manners reminded me of the hyperactive five-year-old son of one of Mama’s nurses.
Tahir put the money on the stool and slapped his hands against each other as if washing away the dirt. “At the moment,” he said, “Leonardo da Vinci is in fashion among the Baku Communist elite. I paint the phony replicas, good enough for Comrade This or Comrade That to impress their cohorts with their fine arts patronage and bring me more business. And the buffoon who was just here, I’m sort of his court painter. And, on top of that, I run some not-quite-legal errands for him from time to time.
“In exchange, he provides me with flimsy but, nonetheless, vital protection. He’s my safeguard—my krysha. I make him good money; he pays me the crumbs. For the time being, I’m safe from the KGB’s Iron Maiden, so I can buy music records on the black market and lure foolish girls into my temple of music.”
He narrowed his lilac eyes, a sly smile hopping all over his face. “Would you like to have some tea and hear some music, Leila?”
Was he mocking me? “I think I’m going to leave now.”
“Oh no.” Tahir sucked in his lower lip and raised his eyebrows, looking like an apologetic child. “I’m sorry, that didn’t come out right. What I said. Ignore that last part. The ‘foolish girls’ part. The ‘tea’ part stands though. So?”
I took my time. “I guess I can stay, but just for a few minutes.”
“Perfect. Give me a few minutes, and I’ll change your world,” he crooned in his high voice, heading toward the alcove with the recordings. He sorted through the stacks and pulled an album from the shelf. “I’d like to play something very special for you. I think you’re going to like her.”
“Who is this?”
“Nina Simone. No one can strip life down to a bare emotion the way she does.”
The blue light of the Rapsodija languorously illuminated the room as he placed the disc on the turntable.
The sweeping sound of an orchestral opening followed by a rough voice singing in English. The song defied every rule of classical music—the odd resolutions of the chords in the accompaniment, the distorted pitch of the singer, the almost unintended hint of light in the chromatic piano lines conflicting with the gloom in the vocal intonations—yet all together it had an emotional impact that I could only compare to the music of Richard Wagner with its poignant romanticism emerging out of symphonic mayhem.
“You said ‘she,’ but it sounds like ‘he,’” I said after the song was finished.
“Many of the female jazz vocalists are black. Their voices are very guttural and feral, yet they carry the relentless power to reach deep inside your soul.”
“Isn’t it prohibited to play or even listen to jazz music?”
“Of course it is. Just as prohibited as it is to breathe, to think, and to know. You see—” he started, then broke off. A naughty grimace broadened his face, twisting his mouth and revealing slightly crowded lower teeth. Mimicking a soldier’s pace, he strutted theatrically across the room, stopped at the hearth, and swiftly turned to face me.
“Comrades,” he said in a low oratorical tone of voice, heartily hitting the air with the fist of his right hand. “Jazz is a hydra of Imperialist propaganda. Today you are listening to an American saxophone—tomorrow you’ll sell your Motherland.” He hit the air. “Exterminate!” Another hit. “Wipe out!” Hit. “Burn to ashes!”
Feeling annoyed and amused at the same time, I watched as he quite accurately impersonated both Comrade Farhad and Comrade Popov in their addresses to the Komsomol Assembly, complete with a simulation of them banging their fists against the podium. Tahir’s timing, though, was definitely better.
“We, the generation of selfless builders of Communism, we won’t stop until we behead the hydra monster of Western Decadence one head at a time…”
I glanced at my watch. Five minutes to four. I could still make it in time for the Komsomol meeting. But I dreaded facing—and even more so, confronting—Comrade Farhad. So I decided to just call his office later and report that I was not feeling well.
“We, the mercenaries of Communism—”
“Stop it.” I cut Tahir off, even though part of me rejoiced. Carefree Tahir, with his bizarre performance, was so different from rigid, grim-faced Comrade Farhad. “You are ridiculing my beliefs. Do you want me to leave?”
At once, Tahir cast off the orator’s image. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to upset your ideological sensitivities. And if I did so—unintentionally—I hope the distress hasn’t spread its claws to your stomach and we still can share a pleasant feast together. Will you join me for kutabs? I’m famished.”
We ate on his Afghani rug, a pile of steaming kutabs—traditional Azeri crepes filled with meat and herbs—on a newspaper in front of us. Plunging one after the other into a glass bowl with coriander kefir, we stuffed them into our insatiable mouths. How weird. Here I was, alone in a room with a total stranger—a definitely odd stranger—sitting on the floor, inhaling the sweet scent of hashish, and feeling more comfortable than I had ever felt with anyone.
“I put a spell on you… I put a spell on you,” wailed Nina Simone in her deep manly voice from the corner in a language that I, then, could not understand.
“Why do you smoke hashish?” I asked.
“Because it takes me back to places I’ll never see again in this life—Paris, Rome, Barcelona. Beautiful cities. Beautiful people.”
“What do you mean by again?”
“I had the good fortune to see them. To be there.”
“What? You have been in the West?”
“A year ago, when I turned seventeen, I was sent to study art in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. By mistake, of course. A typical Soviet screw-up. When the right hand didn’t know what the left hand was doing. Someone misspelled my name, missing a letter. So when I won a national art competition in high school, the KGB somehow didn’t connect me to the Mukhtarovs, the dangerous enemy of the Soviet people, and gave me a visa.
“After a month there, I ran away. You see, even though Dresden is a part of East Germany, the atmosphere there is much looser than in the Soviet Union. I traveled all over Europe.” He sighed. “But I failed. Stupidly failed. Gorged myself on freedom. Choked on it. And ended up walking into their trap. They brought me back and threw me into a correctional institute.”
A convicted defector? Had I gone another stroke away from the shore into even more troubled waters? I remembered one morning at the Pioneer camp, two summers earlier, when my group went for a swim, I ended up going so far that when I looked back, the shoreline seemed more distant than the horizon. But I didn’t feel scared, not at all. If anything, I had to fight the temptation to keep going farther toward the vast, thrilling unknown. Like now. With Tahir.
He leaned back on his elbows, inhaled from his cigarette, and closed his eyes, immersed in the music.
“Tell me about the places you’ve been to,” I said.
“You’re hearing them. They’re like the jazz music. Different. Tantalizing. Stimulating. An instant splash of color across a canvas.” Tahir reached for the shelf and pulled another album, holding it protectively against his chest with both hands. “Wait till you hear this one. My favorite artist of them all. She is like no one else. Her name is Billie Holiday, but the world called her Lady Day.”
The recording sounded to me as if it was playing at 20 instead of 33 rpms, slurring, hiccupping. Trying to follow Lady Day’s vocal lines felt like stumbling into the unforeseen dead ends in the labyrinth of Icheri Sheher. She juggled her phrases tirelessly up and down her ample tessitura. At the same time, I felt her sitting next to me, speaking into my ear, saying something soothing and promising, drops of sunshine sifting through her dark, smoky voice.
“This music doesn’t sound very happy, does it?” I said, unsure of my reaction.
“How could it? Jazz is a soundtrack of real life. And life isn’t a very happy phenomenon.”
“Why do you think it’s better there in the West than it is here at home?”
“You can be free there. You can choose how to dress, where to live, what music to listen to, which God to believe in. You can be you.”
Tahir looked ethereal amid the hashish rings hovering in the air. His body moved in rhythm with the music—slowly, in a trance—as if performing some ancient ritual.
“Jazz is good for you.” His voice drifted through the haze. “That’s why they forbid it. Because it’s so emotionally rudimental that the music finds its way straight to your soul and cleanses it from fifteen years of Soviet pollution.”
Soviet pollution?
Another one of his attacks on my Communist ethics. Then why did I sit here like a stone? Why didn’t I try to defend what I believed was right? The real question though—what was right?
Comrade Farhad with the yellow snakes in his eyes? Touching me, intimidating me, diminishing me to just a garnished piece of meat sitting on his plate, waiting to be devoured?
No. There had to be a reason why I landed on Tahir’s magic carpet, on the other side—the wrong side—of the green door. Why I enjoyed sitting cross-legged next to him, listening to the crackling fire dragon, sipping pungent mekhmeri tea as strong and smooth as an Armenian cognac. There had to be a reason why I was so persuaded by his confusing, esoteric perspectives, perspectives that had taken me far beyond my own horizon. Drifting away in clouds of hashish, surrendering to his forbidden LPs with their bewitching musical potions, there had to be a reason why I was beginning to take it all in, making it part of me.
Cleansing my soul?