“Come in, Leila.”
Professor Sultan-zade opened the door, took my coat, hung it on a rack, and led the way to her living room. Recently, we’d had a few of our piano lessons at her apartment, followed by tea and conversation. These special times had become my escape from my own home, which had turned into a reformatory.
“Take a seat.” Professor Sultan-zade pointed at a settee by the electric radiator. “Still no heat in the building. I’m freezing. Can’t even bend my fingers. Would you like a shawl?”
“No, thank you. I’m not cold. Not at all.”
It was quite stifling in her apartment. Maybe she had a fever?
“Would you like some tea?”
“If you don’t mind, I’ll make it myself. For both of us. May I?”
“Be my host.”
I stepped inside the kitchen. Always tidy. Gzhel china behind the glass doors of the cabinet; silver trays and pitchers on a side table; a vase on a windowsill holding a single tea rose. I turned on the stove, boiled water, brewed tea, added coriander and honey, and carried the tray to the living room.
Professor Sultan-zade reclined on the settee, her head back, eyes closed. The crow’s-feet spread from the corners of her eyes all the way down to the smoker’s lines around her mouth. The bronze tint of her skin looked tarnished. A few strands of silver spilled out of her beehive. She no longer looked like Nefertiti. I placed the tray on the floor, poured tea in her armud, added three sugar cubes, and mixed it.
“I should probably take it easy on the sugar,” Professor Sultan-zade said. “I was seven when my mama had both legs amputated because of diabetes. And in my current condition I have to be cautious. It’s not just about me anymore.”
Current condition? I glanced at Professor Sultan-zade. Her long fingers flew to her eyes, concealing tears. Her lips trembled, trying to hold back sobs.
Unsuccessfully.
“I’m pregnant. Almost four months pregnant. How could I have been so stupid? I didn’t even realize it until last week. I thought I was finished as a woman. And here I am. Pregnant with that double-faced, lying donuz’s baby.”
“Double-faced? Lying?”
“This monster, this careerist Najafov, got engaged last week. In secret from me. Do you know to whom?” she asked, seeing my face.
“No.”
“To the widowed daughter of the Third Secretary of the Party. She’s twenty-five with two children. She’s her father’s darling. And she’s my death sentence. Can you imagine what a scandal it’s going to be when they learn that I’m pregnant with his child?”
I shook my head.
“They’ll cut me out like a cancerous growth. They’ll force my resignation from the Conservatory, the place I’ve built into one of the finest institutions in the country. That’s it. How could I have been so stupid as to not see him for who he was—a liar and imposter? He needed me at the beginning of his appointment as a rector. He was nothing then. Nothing but a peasant kemancha player with a hundred-word vocabulary.
“That was the only reason they appointed him. A benign figurehead to temporarily fill the chair. And to stay, the weasel needed my unconditional support. He acquired it by playing a game no man can ever lose. He used me, chewed me up, and spat me out like a rotten fig. Now, I’ll be dragging my swollen legs across the corridors of the Conservatory, and the monster and his prized bride will be moving into a government building right across the street.”
Professor Sultan-zade breathed rapidly, choking on her hurt. I nestled next to her and put my arm around her shoulders. If not for her daring endeavor, I wouldn’t be going to London. She had risked everything to help me when I was at the lowest point in my life. Now it was my turn.
“Enough. Waste of time.” She rose to her feet. “I’ve been thinking. It’s not the first movement’s ossia or the buildup to the toccata climax in the third movement that worries me. You’ve got enough technique to play them in your sleep. It’s the opening theme that haunted me throughout the night. I don’t think we’ve given it enough attention.”
In her wide steps, she strutted to the piano, opened the cover, and lowered herself onto the bench. “Listen,” she said, playing the first theme of the “Allegro ma non tanto,” sharing single-note octaves between her hands, drawing clear-as-glass lines. “The melody here is so bare, so exposed, with nothing to work with, nowhere to hide. Imagine a lone birch tree in the middle of a snowy valley bathed in the moonlight. This is the mood of intimacy you need to establish, to draw yourself and the audience into the turbulent, unpredictable inevitability of what is to come.”
A tear snaked down Professor Sultan-zade’s cheek, leaving behind a black mascara trail.
• • •
I left Professor Sultan-zade and strolled down the street, aimless. The rain intensified. The stakes had risen. I had to win the competition at any price. For my professor—to give her the incentive to fight her enemies. For myself—to avoid burning in the hell of General Jabrailov’s wrath. How could I take the pressure? I looked skyward. No help there. The heavy, cloud-infested sky echoed the requiem of my soul.
I needed Almaz’s opium. Ignoring Farhad’s order not to see her, I headed to her place.
Almaz wasn’t home. I waited, scouting around her new building, admiring the green cupola on top of its slick, glass-and-concrete carcass. Thinking. After all, we both hadn’t sold ourselves that badly. With the KGB’s blessings, Almaz’s Turkish attaché had moved her to the most prestigious address in town and placed Almaz the Doll in the exhibition hall of the Baku Museum of Arts. And I had just been promoted to the role of the KGB’s new “sex symbol.” I spat on the ground and headed toward Taza Bazaar.
I hadn’t been there in years, but it looked the same—scruffy, smelly, noisy antiquity, its usual cast of characters in place. A hairy midget juggled tomatoes, slicing them in midair with his bejeweled dagger. An old woman with the face of a Caspian tiger stuck a bunch of her greens to my nose. Turkish triplets in chadors sitting cross-legged on the ground guarded their burlap bags with nuts. The Rose Garden Fairy in a rabbit-fur vest hassled passersby: “Sunny day, with Allah’s help. Don’t you want to try my halva? My halva will melt in your mouth like rose sherbet. If you don’t like my halva, taste my pakhlava. It will take you to Allah’s rose garden.”
I swept through the rest of the Bazaar like a sandstorm—past Tea Alley with the young man with his filthy stare, guarding a tea shop; past Fish Row with its deathbeds for belugas and sevrugas. Until I reached my destination: Beggars Corner, where Almaz had told me she bought her opium from an invalid nicknamed Genghis Khan.
I identified him right away. A hulking shaved head as if axed from the trunk of a tree, slanted Mongoloid eyes perched at the temples of his flat face, his torso hunkered down on a wooden cart with the wheels of roller skates. A brick on each side with which he pushed the cart against the ground. A sailor’s hat full of coins in front of him.
“I’m a friend of Almaz,” I whispered, bending over him.
“A friend of Almaz Khanum is my friend too.” He raised his eyes at me. “How much?”
I held out ten rubles. “Is that enough?”
He grinned, baring his blue gums with a few rotten teeth, then retrieved a small package out of the breast pocket of his soiled military shirt. “My tiryek is smooth. All the way from the Khizi Mountains. Send my regards to honorable Almaz Khanum.”
Clutching the package in my hand, holding my breath to avoid the revolting odors, I darted through the island of human misery toward the exit.
And there, as I reached the rusty exit gate of Beggars Corner, I saw Tahir.
• • •
Not the Tahir I kept seeing in my dreams: handsome and free with hair swinging in the wind, crossing St. Mark’s Square in Venice, posing in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, sunbathing in Central Park to the sounds of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.” Oh, how I hated that Tahir, cursed him every time I woke up inside those dreams.
No, the Tahir I saw crouching next to a box with rotten oranges had nothing to do either with my dreams or with the Tahir I once knew, the boy who was ingenious and stubbornly unbeatable, cruising through a haze of hashish into skies of creative illusions and artistic breakthroughs.
I wanted to be wrong. I prayed that I was terribly wrong. That this comatose, hopelessly lost stranger couldn’t possibly be Tahir. Couldn’t be. Of course not. How could he? My Tahir had defected to the West long ago. He had been living in his America or somewhere else he always wanted to be, enjoying his freedom, his art, not even remembering my name.
But it was him. Inside that awful tattered clothing. Behind the wild shrubbery of his face. The same unmistakable eyes, intelligent and deep.
“Tahir,” I called softly.
No response. And not a sign of recognition.
“Tahir, it’s me. It’s me, Leila.”
I came closer and carefully patted his shoulder. My touch had the effect of a key turning on a wind-up toy. Tahir began to shake his head, rapidly muttering something incoherent. Then he gradually slowed down and returned to his detached stillness.
“Lover boy is high up.” A crippled drunkard hobbled toward me, waving his crutch dangerously close to my face. “But I’m here. And I can do you better with one leg than this homo with no balls.” His filthy laughter ignited the crowd. Other invalids oozed out of the cracks in Beggars Corner, flowing toward me from every direction.
“Tahir!” I shouted in desperation. “Just look at me! Please! Don’t you recognize me? What have they done to you? What have they done?”
I reached to grasp his arm. Instead, I felt a hollow, empty sleeve. Where was his arm? I pulled my hand away in horror. Could he have hidden it somewhere under his shirt? I froze, my eyes searching, desperate to find Tahir’s missing right arm.
“Rehmi… Take pity on a veteran of two wars… Money… Bread… Allah… Yaziqliq…”
The sea of misery was closing in, the inhabitants of Beggars Corner almost upon me. Showcasing their stitched stumps and blistered skin, their festering lesions and empty sockets. Begging, cursing, confiding their wretched histories.
I pushed my way out of the circle, jabbing my elbows, shoving the horde aside. And I ran. Ran, out of the rusty iron gates of the Taza Bazaar. Ran, afraid to look back, as if the earth behind me might swallow me up. I could never have imagined this nightmare—a nightmare in which I played the two leading parts—villain and victim.
Suddenly I stopped. I knew what I was running from. But where was I running to? To the golden cage of Gargoyle Castle, with Farhad as my warden? To the win at the London competition so the KGB could parade me as their trophy?
Above, a caravan of clouds passed, veiling and unveiling the moon, her face luminous against the starless sky. Caravaggio’s tenebrism—intensified lucidity of light against obscurity of darkness. Darkness held Tahir prisoner. Why? How did he end up there?
It didn’t matter. He was there—beaten, maimed, and despondent. My Tahir. He needed me. But even more, I needed him. Because since I had lost him, I had lost myself, wandering the dark alleys of my destiny—my own Beggars Corner—clinging to my music as the only road sign. But even music could no longer give asylum to my homeless heart.
I turned back. I knew exactly what I had to do.
• • •
At about eight o’clock, one of the Taza Bazaar’s guards, a brawny Russian woman in a rubber apron, lamb’s wool vest, and tarpaulin boots, marched to Beggars Corner.
“All right, comrades invalidiki,” she shouted, waving a massive key chain that could easily have knocked someone unconscious. “Take your crud and be gone, or I’ll call the militzia. And if I see someone shat here—and I better not see it—I will kill with my own two fists.”
As if responding to a military command, the inhabitants of Beggars Corner lined up along the fence. A well-nourished, animated man with a rumpled black beard came out of the alley, planting every step of his wooden leg in a wide sweep. A vozhak. One after another, the beggars handed him money. When Tahir’s turn came, the vozhak unceremoniously tapped his hands all over his body, didn’t find anything, spat on the ground, and pushed Tahir away. All the cache collected, the vozhak gestured to the guard with a smile, retrieved a stack of banknotes from his trousers, spat on his thumb, counted a few, and passed them to her. She hastily stuck the money under her apron.
“Good night with God’s help,” she hollered. “Good peaceful night to you, poor souls. God is kind to those who sacrificed for Motherland.” She waited patiently as the beggars shuffled out of the Bazaar, even helping Genghis Khan by pushing his cart with the toe of her boot when it got stuck at the curb, then soundly locked the gate and crossed herself.
I watched through the shattered glass of a telephone booth as the group wandered off. Tahir and a few others, including the one-legged monster who had threatened me with his crutch, slowly made their way up Bakikhanov Street toward the Circus Arena. I followed a safe distance behind, unable to take my eyes off Tahir’s wobbly, shrunken figure. As they reached the Circus, they turned left and headed down toward Kubinka—Baku’s most dangerous neighborhood.
Named after merchants from the town of Kuba who used to own this area at the beginning of the twentieth century, Kubinka was a haven of brothels and a black market. Crooked, narrow streets, sewers spilling into the roads, a havoc of broken bottles, scraps of food, and dog and human waste. Merchants and buyers never met in the light of the day. All transactions took place inside cramped stone-walled shacks.
Drugs, Marlboros, Kalashnikovs, fancy Western clothes, and fine objets d’art all exchanged hands there. The common saying was that if one could afford to buy a star from the sky he’d find it in Kubinka. Once, Almaz dragged me there to buy Caspian manna seeds for one of her love potions.
It looked much scarier now in the darkness. No streetlights. The only illumination came from the dimly lit windows of the shacks. I tried to keep track of the turns: one to the right, two to the left, three shacks and another left turn. The group stopped by a dark house, larger than most we had passed by, with someone guarding the entrance.
“Salam! Hello!”
“Axsaminiz xeyir! Good evening.”
The door opened, and Tahir and his companions disappeared inside. I leaned against the wall of the next shack, trying to blend in without creating any shadows. My initial courage—or maybe it was just an adrenaline rush—had given way to panic. I was shaking, afraid to move. The distant lights of safe Baku twinkled three lifetimes away.
And yet, overhead, the vast, starlit tent extended from one rim of the sky to the other. Promising another chance. I tore myself away from the wall and headed toward the flickering cigarette light.
“I’m looking for my brother,” I said to a man—a boy?—no, a midget. He stared at me.
“A brother?”
“Yes, a brother. My younger brother.”
I had no money left in my wallet, and the midget’s gaze promised trouble. I pulled my wedding ring off my finger and stuck it in front of his face. “Want it?”
Greed won. He grabbed the ring and opened the door.
The stench of mold, urine, sex, and hashish insulted my nose. I waited at the entrance and let my eyes adjust to the darkness. A single kerosene lamp swung overhead, dispensing more shadows than light across a long, narrow room. People sat along the walls, smoking, the lit ends of their cigarettes moving like fireflies in and out of the opaque blanket of smoke, the whites of their eyes following me as I walked through the room.
Tahir wasn’t there, but as I reached the far end, I noticed a stairway leading downward. I stepped on one creaky step, then another. Ten altogether, leading into a small dungeon.
An opium den. I was inside an opium den. That’s how they looked in movies about the West. I never imagined they could exist in Baku. A few human ghosts sat around a hookah, taking turns, gulping the fumes of the bubbling amber potion as if it was their last living breath. Tahir wasn’t here, either. The room’s stoned silence was disturbed only by the muted sounds of some commotion coming through another doorway. I pushed it open and peeked inside.
A pile of bodies—convulsing, jerking, moaning—copulated in the most repulsive ways across several cots, their deformed extremities, twisted heads, and patches of ashen flesh moving in a macabre dance. As if Francisco de Goya’s dark, nightmarish painting Casa de locos, with its grotesque apotheosis of perversion, had come to life. Was Tahir among them?
No, I didn’t want to know. I shut the door. The opium circle, submerged in the glow of the bubbling potion, felt like a safe haven. I sat next to a woman with a black scarf wrapped around her face.
The pipe traveled from ghost to ghost, ever closer toward me. When my turn came, I accepted it from the shaking hands of the woman, brought it to my mouth, and took a long, deep, hungry inhale.
• • •
“What are you doing here?” the woman asked, removing her black scarf and letting her gold tresses fall freely down her shoulders. She waved her hands in front of her face, blowing away the ashes, leaving her skin as pure and radiant as if it were made of milk and honey.
“Who are you?” I asked.
She laughed in a crystal clear coloratura. “Don’t you recognize me?”
“No.”
She leaned in closer, her breath emitting the scent of lilacs. “I’m Peri. And I’ve been guarding you for a while. Not an easy task, you know, with all the vicissitudes of your life.”
Of course. How could I have not recognized her? The Peri Fairy—born out of fire and nourished by lilacs—from my Legends from the Land of Fire book. She looked exactly the way she did in the picture with long, golden hair and a veil of mauve silk.
I reached to touch her hand but my fingers went right through her flesh, feeling nothing but air.
Then I remembered. Peri had been banished from heaven and turned into a bodiless xeyal, a ghost destined to live between light and darkness, life and death, right and wrong.
“And that’s what I’ve being doing ever since,” she said, as if reading my thoughts. “Wandering everywhere, shedding tears, collecting them into my sack. Only after it is so full that it bursts at the seams, only then will I be redeemed. So, as you see, you and I are very much alike.”
“How can we be alike?”
“How? I’m a fallen maiden, exactly as you are. I sold my soul to wicked Div for a pair of faster wings so I could be the first to reach the firmament of the sky. And you? You chose a path of conformism from the very beginning, with one compromise leading to the next, until your soul sank into the darkness.”
“I didn’t have a choice—”
“La, la, la, la, la… I didn’t have a choice. An eternal excuse. Nothing other than self-indulgence. Evil tempts every soul, but a weak soul tempts evil. And you have done it not once but three times. First, when you signed your name under Tahir’s death warrant. Second, when you woke up alone in that Kabul hotel.
“You know, I never stop wondering. It’s kind of a mystery to me. If you really loved him, if you really cared about him so much as to fly to the war zone and save him, then how could you let your wounded ego blind you? Didn’t it ever occur to you that your childish proposition to escape to the West could have been overheard? That the Kabul hotel room had KGB ears? That they were waiting outside the door to pick Tahir up?
“Of course you thought of it. But you preferred the role of a victim. With all the misery and diva melodrama.”
Peri caught a tear sliding down her cheek and held it between her thumb and index finger, dropped it into a sack hanging on her neck. “And then your destiny presented you with the last test—your daughter.”
“My daughter? How do you know it was a girl?”
“How? Didn’t you give her the name Ziya—Light?”
“Yes, I did.”
“Right before you butchered her.”
“I didn’t… I didn’t want to… I was scared, terribly scared and alone. And mad. Abandoned and betrayed by the one I loved.”
“I never betrayed you, Leila.”
Tahir?
In his white tunic, freshly shaven, his lavender eyes a shade lighter than the sky behind, a sunbeam bouncing through his hair. “They seized me, the KGBs, the moment I stepped out of the hotel room,” he said. “I thought I would surprise you with fresh flowers still filled with morning dew from the Kabul Mountains. Remember I told you—those greens, blues, and violets exactly like in Renoir’s Bouquet of Spring Flowers?”
He smiled, opening his arms—both arms—calling me, inviting me for a long-craved embrace. So the nightmare in Beggars Corner, his missing arm, the opium den—all this had been just a delusion.
I rushed to him, yearning to disappear inside his embrace, to feel my body inseparable from his, to touch his eyes, his lips, his two healthy hands, to make sure he was real, that he was here with me. Forever. The old Tahir. The love of my life.
“I love you. I love you. I love you,” I wailed, kissing his face and his hands, smudging my tears all over his white tunic. “Don’t ever leave me again. I’m weak. I’m nothing without you, just a drained, empty xeyal living off the memories of those moments of happiness you gave me. I’ve shed enough tears. My sack is filled to the brim. The seams are bursting.”
• • •
I felt a rapid, jolting motion.
“Get out of here.” A pair of murky-gray eyes stared at me. “And don’t ever follow me again. Do you hear me? We’re finished playing your little princess games.”
Tahir. He grabbed my arm and, in one swift, forceful movement, lifted me off the ground and dragged me out of the room and up the narrow, creaky staircase. Doing it all with his left hand while the empty right sleeve of his stained, discolored flannel shirt hung alongside his body.
“Please let’s talk. Please,” I cried, trying to stop him, to free myself from his hurting grasp. “Let me explain. I’ve made wrong choices. Terrible choices. But I never let you out of my heart. I’ve been a broken vessel for a long time. Scared, confused, brainwashed, blackmailed. I’ve lost myself. But I’m here now. With you. We need each other. Let me help you. Let me get you out of here. This is no place for you. I’ll give up everything. I’ll sacrifice everything to be with you. I need you for my soul. I need you for my music. I’m just a cracked, shattered glass. Tahir, please…”
Ignoring my cries, Tahir hauled me through the long room, its few remaining dwellers following us with their blank eyes. When we reached the door, he accidentally bumped his head against the kerosene lamp swinging overhead, swore coarsely, and released me for a moment to open the door before throwing me out. I tripped, lost my footing, and stumbled to the ground, landing in a muddy, trash-filled puddle.
“I could have forgiven you for betraying me,” Tahir said in a raspy voice. “But I’ll never—never—forgive you for marrying into the KGB for your fucking career. You—Badalbeilis—are our worst curse. Go away, Leila. I never want to see your Medusa face again.”
The door slammed shut.
I had turned Tahir’s heart into stone, and now he had returned the favor, stoning my heart.
I had no tears left to cry. I just sat in the puddle, next to a trench of sewage, and watched a stray dog and a rat fighting over a piece of garbage.