The sun skewed through boards nailed across the frame of a window, casting strips of light onto neatly stacked rows of books. Nizami Ganjavi. Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi. Anna Akhmatova. Honoré de Balzac. All in different languages. Francisco de Goya’s cartoonish majas and caballeros flew a kite across the woven surface of a small tapestry on the wall.
We were inside Miriam Mukhtarov’s chamber.
The Snow Princess—sixty years older than her portrait in the courtyard of our Gargoyle Castle—sat at the head of the table. Her face resembled a dried-out tree stump with scars, knots, and warped lesions. Her eyes revealed irises almost fully buried beneath snowy sclera. Her spine curved so badly that she had to heave her neck up—like a turtle peering out of her shell—to see anything above the floor. A wispy silver braid slid down her shoulder from underneath a worn-to-threads straw hat.
But her black woolen dress with a white batiste collar and cuffs was starched and ironed as if she was waiting to go to an opera. And a figurine of the bird from the fresco in our courtyard sat proudly on top of her gramophone. The same swan-like neck with a frilled emerald necklace, folded wings of faded gold and scarlet, two curled ears. The bird had been beaten by life as much as her mistress, her beak broken, her tail gone, but her tiny claws were still in place holding tightly to the lid of the gramophone.
Tahir poured us tea from a green copper samovar.
“Baba,” he said, placing his hand on top of Miriam’s, “Leila is a serious student of piano. She has recently been studying Rachmaninoff’s Concerto.”
“Which one?” Miriam asked, her deep, chesty mezzo defying her withered body.
“Number three.”
Miriam smiled and sipped her tea, elegantly holding the handle of her tin cup between her thumb and index finger. “Do you come from a musical family, Leila?” she asked.
“No. My mama is a doctor, and my papa is an engineer.” I downplayed my heritage.
“Well. Then how and when did you discover your love of music?”
“On my sixth birthday. My mama took me to the Philharmonic hall to hear Sviatoslav Richter. On my way home, I told Mama I wanted to be a pianist. A week later, a baby grand Bösendorfer moved into my room.”
“That’s a bit too impressive an instrument for starting to learn piano, but I’m sure it fully complements your talent.”
“Baba,” Tahir said, “I told Leila that you knew Rachmaninoff. Please tell us about him.”
“In a minute.” Miriam rose heavily from her chair and shuffled to the corner. Her feet—the same feet depicted on the fresco, thin and delicate, peeking through the clasp of her golden sandals—were now twisted and troublesome, failing to hide their puffiness inside black felt boots. She took an angora shawl from the couch and wrapped it tightly around her shoulders. By now the daylight had vanished; the room had succumbed to brown haze. How had she survived in this wintry, damp stone chamber?
Miriam returned, an oil lamp flickering in her hands. She placed it in the middle of the table and eased into the chair.
“Sergei Rachmaninoff was a tall man, and with such a tendency to melancholy,” she said in her slightly hoarse voice. “Stravinsky called him a ‘six-and-a-half-foot scowl.’ Out of jealousy, of course. There was a lot of it between us émigrés. But there were close friendships too. Like between Sergei and Volodya—Vladimir Horowitz. Sometimes they would come over and play piano pieces for four hands. Bellissimo!”
Miriam smiled nostalgically, the light from the oil lamp illuminating her clouded eyes and accentuating every crevice in her wrinkled face. “The musical giants’ duo. But after the first time Sergei heard his Piano Concerto no. 3 performed by Vladimir, he never played it himself again. It had nothing to do with envy. He just simply explained that he might have composed the piece, but Horowitz absolutely owned it.”
“He definitely does.” Tahir turned to Miriam. “Can I play it for Leila?”
“The Concerto?” I asked, excited.
“Yes, the legendary Number 3. Recorded by Horowitz in 1930.”
“And Tahir’s favorite,” Miriam added. “I should blame both Rachmaninoff and Horowitz for Tahir’s love of art. The first time he heard the Concerto—he had just turned twelve—he told me: ‘Baba, I see this music. And I want to paint it.’ I went to the store, bought the aquarelles. He tried the color and said, ‘No, it’s too pretty. I need something thick and dark that sticks.’”
“Shall we hear the music?” Tahir interjected, bringing the gramophone to life.
The music began, passages of immense technical complexity fluidly bridging Caravaggio’s chiaroscuro with Renoir’s impressionism. The gloom and shadows of claustrophobic chambers contrasting with the vibrant radiance of a wide-open landscape. The realism of humanity down to its dirty nails and rotten wounds combined with the fleeting sanguinity of the moment. Vladimir Horowitz played piano along that fine line, crossing back and forth effortlessly as only a genius could have done.
Miriam listened with her eyes half closed, the exposed ashen slits making her look blind, the musical notes traveling along her lips, contorting them into a ghostly smile. But I could see that through her desecrated, crippled facade shone the indomitable spirit of the Snow Princess from my childhood. That through every crack in her face and voice spilled charisma of a magnitude reserved only for the world’s greatest opera divas.
“Have any of your performances been recorded?” I asked Miriam after the recording finished playing.
“I never thought I was good enough. Maestro Arturo Toscanini—oh, he had a quick temper—once stormed out of our dress rehearsal when I stopped in the middle of ‘Habanera’ for the third time. But what could I do? I had to make it right. Once, my impresario decided to record my Carmen at the Palais Garnier, and I said not yet. The tone of my upper register sounded too thin, lacking in overtones. I needed more meat to my voice, and I thought that it would come with age. That’s why I never stopped rehearsing. Even in the labor camps.”
Her white arched eyebrows collapsed. “And then it came—the right tone. When I was forty. The new warden had given me a privileged assignment. While everyone else was sent to the forest to cut trees—in terrible blizzards—I was left alone in the barracks to rid the prisoners’ clothing of lice using a piece of broken glass. I sang ‘Habanera’ to myself. I knew right away that my voice had reached that prime I had strived for. And that it was too late.”
I imagined the young woman from Muezzin Rashid’s old photograph, with her blond hair cut off sitting in her cell, killing lice, and humming Carmen’s aria.
“But how can it be,” I said, “that if…when…all those horrible things you’re saying happened, with millions of people disappearing in the gulags, how can it be possible that no one ever talks about it? I asked my papa about Stalin, and he said that Stalin was a great Communist leader with titanic vision and that his wisdom had saved the world from fascism.”
“Your papa is part of the generation of blind innocence, indoctrinated with lies from early childhood. Lies presented as truth. Darkness portrayed as light. Slavery labeled freedom.”
She leaned against the column, her mouth twisting nervously from side to side. How strange, sixty years apart, Tahir and Miriam shared the same verbal and facial expressions. Like this one, which indicated that she was deciding whether to respond to my question.
She finally did.
“I’ll tell you a little story. More like a fairy tale but without a happy ending.” She clasped her small hands against her chest. “It goes like this.”
Once upon a time, there lived a maiden called Truth. She was fair and sweet. And innocent. As only truth can be. Her voice, pure and powerful, reigned across the meadows and the seas until it reached both Heaven and Hell, but before Heaven could respond, Hell snatched Truth into the dark forest of Lies.
“Give up your voice,” he demanded of the chained and shackled Truth.
“Never,” she replied. “I’d rather die.”
Hell kept her without food or water. But Truth didn’t bend.
“Why don’t we just kill her and bury her so deep that nobody can ever find out?” the head of the Ministry of Lies asked Hell.
“If we do that, the enemies of the Soviet people will turn dead Truth into a martyr,” he answered with strong conviction.
“What if we buy her out and send her away?”
“Where? To the West? So the Imperialists can use her in their propaganda against us? No. Useless idea. I need her around. She will give credibility to Lies if she is alive but silent. We will pass her into the hands of the KGB. They have their methods.”
They did. They beat her until all her bones were broken. They burned her skin and blinded her eyes. They carved out her tongue. Then they dressed her in a jester’s costume and took her through the streets of their cities, greeted by the cheers of the happy Soviet people. And they kept a vigilant account of those who refused to cheer or didn’t cheer enough. For them, they built concentration camps throughout Siberia. Sixty million deaths later, nobody dared to question the truth of the lies of Communism.
• • •
Miriam pushed her hands against the table and lifted her weight with effort. “I’d like for you to see something, Leila,” she said, putting on a heavy coat and taking an oil lamp from the table.
Tahir and I followed her through a dark corridor to a rusty metal door. Rummaging in a pocket of her coat, she retrieved a key and, after a few failed efforts, finally fitted it into the keyhole. The door opened begrudgingly.
“Welcome to Coronation Hall,” Miriam said.
We entered a large room, the light from Miriam’s lamp making its ornamented stone walls shimmer like silk tapestries.
“It used to be a Zoroastrian sanctuary,” she continued, “with eternal fire burning in the middle. There is a large reserve of oil underneath. Priests used to sit here around the fire searching for the essence of existence, worshipping the good, burning evil. Later, in the times of Shirvan rulers, Shah Ismail turned it into his royal assembly hall, Divankhana. And it was right here where he held his sumptuous feasts and entertained guests with the most enlightened ideas and poetry of the time, sitting on his throne.” She pointed toward a raised stone pedestal interlaced with fig and vine leaves, then led me to an object in the corner covered with a woolen blanket.
“What is this?” I asked.
“One of a kind, the Mukhtarovs’ two-hundred-year-old clavichord. A very special instrument. The tone is so minimalist, no place to hide. It leaves you with nothing but the reflection of your own soul. Would you like to try it, Leila?”
I removed the blanket and carefully lifted the lid, revealing, on the inside panel, a lacquered pastoral scene with a sleeping shepherd boy and happily grazing sheep. I stroked the keys, their touch so sensitive, giving me the illusion of tapping the strings with my fingers. The sound soared to the cupola, rich and immensely powerful for such a small instrument, yet tender and pure as the voice of a child.
I played the rondo from the “Allegro assai” of my Mozart Piano Concerto no. 20, rippling upward, trying to impress—no, blow away—both Tahir and Miriam. But somehow the clavichord’s discolored but proudly elevated keys, the pink-cheeked boy shepherd sleeping peacefully on its grassy lid and, even more so, the surrealism of Coronation Hall steeped in dusk, called for something with less bravura. Maybe Bach’s French Suite in D Minor?
I switched to the fugue without even stopping, weaving three independent voices into a contrapuntal exchange of ideas, making the polyphony flawless, the dynamics precise, the emotions sustained.
But my fingers seemed to handle the musical notes on their own, merging Bach’s modulations into the first theme of Rachmaninoff’s Concerto no. 3, forcing my mind to release its claws from the steering wheel of my performance. I slipped into an emotional free fall—past the Cabaret poster with Liza Minnelli, past Billie Holiday’s heart-wrenching Body and Soul, past Goya’s grotesque majas and caballeros flying their kite, past Farhad’s intimidating glare, past Beggars Corner and Papa with his Ardabil carpet.
But before I hit the ground, a powerful Khazri lifted me into the air, carrying me over the ocean, farther and farther toward the horizon. To an island with the sand sparkling like gold coins, where the ocean meets the sky and the sky is as blue as Tahir’s eyes. Weightless, I drifted away, lost between the blue of the sky and the blue of the ocean, trailing Vladimir Horowitz’s smooth crescendo, listening to the distant echoes of approaching thunder.
I couldn’t have lived more vividly through my music if, dressed in a concert gown, I had been performing in front of hundreds of music aficionados. No, I was touching the heavens as I played Rachmaninoff on a dusty clavichord in Coronation Hall, buried within the catacombs of Maiden Tower, for two odd people standing in the corner: Tahir, his arm wrapped protectively around Miriam’s frail frame, and the old woman who, in the pearly moonlike glow of the lamp, had reverted to her youthful self—the Snow Princess from the fresco of her Villa Anneliese.
• • •
I didn’t come home till after nine in the evening. The living room was dark, but a sliver of light slipped beneath the door of Papa’s smoking room, along with the sound of his laughter. Papa had guests.
As I walked through the hallway to my room, I heard another voice—a familiar one—its sound making my knees tremble. I tiptoed to the smoking room. Pressed my ear against the door.
“—will worship and guard her till my last breath,” Farhad was saying.
“Leila is my only child, and she is the sunlight of my eyes. I’ll do anything—anything—to see her well protected and happy.”
“Mekhti Rashidovich, the honor you are giving me is beyond any words of indebtedness. Only my future actions as your faithful and dutiful son will give me the opportunity to prove myself worthy of your noble kindness and acceptance. You have been my role model since I first heard you speak at a Komsomol meeting in September of my junior year. Since then, I have been determined to succeed in my academic and social activities, to achieve a position of esteem and power in our society. Something I could put at the feet of your flawless jewel, your Leila.”
“My precious girl… Time goes too fast. Just yesterday, she was a baby, sitting here in my lap. And today, look at her—a young, blossoming woman with a prosperous piano career and a man seeking her hand. It’s hard for a father to see his daughter grow into a woman, you know. But that’s the way life goes. Parents get older, and kids take their place. And some day, when the time comes, I will close my eyes in peace, knowing that I have left Leila in good hands.”
I stood, stunned, gasping for air. Hearing something that just couldn’t be true. Or was it?
“Mekhti Rashidovich, with all my life I will strive to rise to your expectations,” Farhad exclaimed.
“I know you will! And remember—there are no limits to how much I can help you.”
I heard the floor creaking. The sounds of the footsteps approaching the door.
I darted into my room, my heart hammering in the hollow of my chest. Closing my door quietly, I threw myself on my bed, crying.
“Leila,” Papa called from the hallway. “Come here. Farhad wants to say good-bye.”
I wiped my tears and slowly entered the living room.
Papa, in his casual slacks and sleeveless shirt, holding a glass of cognac, stood next to Farhad, formal and impressive in his black suit and tie.
“Where have you been so late?” Papa asked.
“Practicing piano at the Conservatory,” I lied.
“Why couldn’t you practice at home? Why did I pay a fortune for your grand piano? So you could practice at the Conservatory?” Papa laughed heartily.
“It’s not the same, Papa. The acoustics of the concert hall are different.”
“All right. All right. You know better.” Papa put his arm around my shoulders and kissed me on the forehead.
“Good evening, Leila,” Farhad said, bowing his head in a respectful manner.
“Good evening,” I replied, hating the way my voice trembled.
“Farhad came to talk to me. Man to man.” Papa took a sip of his cognac. “He asked for your hand, daughter, and I gave him my wholehearted consent. Now Farhad can leave town knowing that you’ve been promised to him.”
“Leave town? Where are you going?” I asked eagerly.
“I have been called to Moscow to take a summer course at the Dzerzhinsky Higher School of the KGB,” Farhad said, his eyes flicking between Papa and me. “A major honor for me, as well as for our 26 Baku Commissars Komsomol District Committee. If I distinguish myself and excel on the exam, then I will have a shot at staying at the Higher School and joining the ranks of the KGB.”
“I hope you will,” I blurted out, silently praying for the KGB to keep Farhad in Moscow and away from me forever.
“Thank you, Leila, for your faith in me. Thank you, Mekhti Rashidovich, for the honor of your acceptance of my marriage proposal. I will wait for as long as it pleases you and Sonia Khanum before we can proceed with the formal betrothal.”
They shook hands, and Papa slapped Farhad’s arm heartily. “I’m proud of you, Farhad, and I’ve always felt close to you, like family.”
“We are family now, Mekhti Rashidovich. Knowing that Leila and I are promised to each other lessens the pain of having to leave her while I’m in Moscow.” Farhad turned to me, burning me with the intensity of his gaze. “Leila, I want you to know. I’m going to be far away geographically, but I’m never far from you. You will always be with me, right here.” He pressed his hand to his heart, turned swiftly, and left.
I slammed the door behind him.
“He is a great fellow, your Farhad.” Papa smiled, raising his glass in salute.
“He is not mine.”
“As of today, he is. I have given him my blessing—gladly.”
“There is no way I’m going to marry him,” I cried, stamping my foot.
“I don’t understand. I thought you liked him.” Papa frowned in bewilderment.
“I used to. But not anymore.”
“You young girls.” Papa laughed. “With your ‘I like’ yesterday and ‘I don’t like’ today and who knows what tomorrow. Your frivolous emotions are as capricious as a spring breeze. That’s why you need someone steady and reliable. A man like Farhad. I’m not going to be around forever. But I’ve amassed a nice fortune for you, Leila. And with Farhad at your side, you will always be protected. He will be there for you—for the everyday demands of your life as well as your career as a famous concert pianist.”
“But, Papa, he is not an honest person. He’s a hypocrite—”
“So what? Even the best of us have our hypocritical moments. What unsuccessful fools never realize is that to achieve high status in our society, you have to know how to maneuver the hearts and minds of people. And Farhad is a natural in that respect. Even with his humble upbringing, and especially with my help, he’s going to rise higher than anyone in his generation. And someday, fairly soon, I’ll have my son-in-law in one of the highest offices in the Azeri government. Maybe even in the Kremlin. Trust me.”
“But Papa! He mistreated me,” I shouted, trying my last weapon.
“Mistreated you? How?” Papa’s brow furrowed in anger, giving me some hope.
“He kissed me. Against my will.” I uttered, embarrassed.
Papa rubbed his chin, a doubtful look in his eyes. “But what did you do? How did you behave? I can’t believe he would have done that without you enticing him. That’s the wicked power that you women have over men. But I’ll tell you this: the fact that Farhad came to me asking for your hand—especially after he’d kissed you—only increases my respect for him.”
“I’ll never marry him, no matter what you say.” I anxiously squeezed the bitter words through my teeth. “And Mama will understand me when—”
“What?” Papa’s face turned pale, his eyes flashing fury. Angrily clutching his cognac glass, he hurled it to the floor, shattering the glass into pieces. “No one will ever overrule me! No one! You will marry Farhad,” he roared in the loudest voice I’d ever heard from him. “I have given my word. The day you turn eighteen, you…will…marry…Farhad!”