June 2002
Submersed in the twilight, I reached the conclusion of the “Finale” of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 3, its majestic sequences of octaves and chords fading into the rhythmic mantra of the Pacific Ocean.
And then I saw her—Maiden Tower. The magical tower of my childhood emerging from the purple glow of the horizon. So close, just a short flight away on Tahir’s magic carpet—sitting cross-legged beside him, sipping his pungent tea, drifting away on the clouds of his hashish.
And I knew that the time I’d resisted for so long had finally come. The time to make peace with the past.
Three days later, a British Airways flight unloaded me at Baku International Airport. As I walked from the plane to the terminal, bathing in an oh-so-familiar heat wave, I had the remarkable sensation that I had just returned home from a short trip. Well, twenty years short. And the spirit of the Azeri crowd in the waiting room, bursting with warmth and unquenchable energy, almost overwhelmed me at first. I’d succumbed long ago to the slow, placid, unemotional cadences of California.
“Salam eleykum,” a taxi driver greeted me. A dark-skinned young man with a thin face and a thick black mustache, he opened the door of his silver BMW for me, then placed my carry-on luggage in the trunk.
“Where do you wish to go?” he asked in broken English.
“To Maiden Tower, please.”
I’d crossed twenty years… Now only twenty kilometers left to reach the place from which I had taken my leap of faith—the crown of Maiden Tower.
Since then, the history of my country had been rewritten. In the nineties, the Soviet Union finally crumbled, the Iron Curtain came down, and the people of Azerbaijan grasped the opportunity to realize their own version of the American dream right here at home. From afar, I lamented having not participated in the excitement, in missing the chance to live in my country as a free person and an artist. But then, it was no longer my country.
Through years of repression, the accumulated craving for transformation was so vast that it hadn’t taken long to change Azerbaijan into a foreign place. Oddly, while living in the United States, I remained an exile from the Soviet Union, walking among the ghosts of my own past, while the destinies of the people I knew and loved had taken them to so many unimaginable places.
Mama had been living in India for the last decade, heading the pediatric department at Bombay Hospital, operating in the company of her new husband and colleague, British-born Dr. Peter Javankar.
Almaz had fallen in love with some Chechen militant and borne him five children. After her husband blew himself up, along with fifteen innocent passersby on Tverskaya Street in Moscow, she hid her beautiful face behind a niqab, moved to Iran, and joined the radical Islamic group Black Widows. No one had heard from her since.
My dear Professor Sultan-zade had succumbed to lung cancer in 1987, but she left her precious daughter, Eliza Sultan-zade, to the world of music. I met her last year at Lincoln Center in New York, where she performed Robert Schumann’s Carnaval op. 9, her mother’s favorite piece.
Even Farhad had changed—dramatically. Now an oil tycoon and a billionaire, married to a British model half his age, he had been living in London for the last six years.
Everyone had moved on. Everyone but me.
At first, right after my defection, the adrenaline ran high. My heroic flight out of the claws of the KGB—in the middle of the night, barefoot, in a nightgown—brought me instant fame, turning my fiasco performance at the London Piano Competition into the “triumph of an invincible spirit.” The Western world embraced and glorified me as their hero—the new Rudolf Nureyev. I was given one of the most lucrative contracts in the twentieth-century history of classical music to record Sergei Rachmaninoff’s four Piano Concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra for Deutsche Gramophone.
But unlike Nureyev, I didn’t deliver. I may have left the Kingdom of Darkness behind, but the darkness followed me.
A month later, on the night before my opening concert at the Wigmore Hall in London, I had a visitor. Ivan the Terrible casually invited himself into my hotel room.
“You’re doing splendidly well, Leila,” he said, looking around my suite with its Steinway grand piano, nodding his head in satisfaction. “Just as we’d anticipated.”
“What do you mean?”
He took my hand in his. Numb with fear, I shut my eyes, expecting to be stabbed with a dose of matreshka.
Instead, Ivan the Terrible kissed my fingers gently and released my hand. “I heard you rehearsing for tomorrow’s concert. You’ll be sensational—guaranteed. I’ve always preferred your Mozart over your Rachmaninoff, but who am I to voice my humble opinion?”
“What do you want?” I said, stepping back toward the door.
“I want you to relax, sit down, and listen. And please don’t do anything irrational. You don’t want your mother to spend the rest of her life in a psychiatric ward, do you?”
I shook my head.
“All right, Leila. Then down to business. I hate to do this to you, but that heroic defection of yours never would have happened if we hadn’t let it happen. That’s number one. Number two—you’d failed the London competition and along with it General Jabrailov’s plan, so we’ve switched to Plan B. In accordance with which, you’ll continue with a high-visibility international career—as our informer, waiting for directions from Moscow. Understood? And it’ll be my honor to keep an eye on you.”
The next day, I wrecked my Mozart performance at the Wigmore Hall, intentionally. And I did the same with the next few concerts, causing the organizers of my concert tour to cancel the remaining dates. Two weeks later, I packed and left London behind along with my music career. It was the most difficult decision I’d ever made—to give up my music and become a nothing. But it was the only way to free myself from my KGB masters. As Farhad once said:
“The only ones we don’t care about are talentless nothings who can do neither harm nor good.”
For a while, the music managers approached me, offering to revive my piano career. But gradually the world forgot about me, leaving me to drift between earth and sky, flapping my broken wings.
Until Tahir’s painting found me and drew me back to the place where I had left my heart.
The taxi pulled up to let me out at the entrance to Icheri Sheher, a few steps away from Maiden Tower. Still the same as I remembered her—mysterious, austere, majestic tower—but now restored to its ancient glory as a symbol of free Azerbaijan.
I bought a ticket and entered the Maiden Tower museum. Miriam Mukhtarov’s large photograph was exhibited in Coronation Hall, in a place of honor over the Mukhtarovs’ clavichord. She lived to see the day when evil was wiped out, when she proudly pressed the key of Maiden Tower into the hands of the government of the new Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan. Her tragic life had not been in vain after all.
And Tahir?
I found him rather easily—Professor Tahir Mukhtarov at the Azerbaijan State University of Culture and Arts. I called and left a message asking him to meet me.
Would he come?
I mounted the spiral staircase to the top and stepped onto the crown of Maiden Tower. The city of my childhood lay sprawled beneath my feet. So much the same as I’d seen it in my dreams throughout the years: a maze of cobblestone streets encircled by the ancient walls of Icheri Sheher; the ornate Mudéjar carvings atop the limestone mansions bordering glorious Neftchilar Avenue; the aquamarine of the Caspian Sea sprinkled with oil derricks looking like giant seagulls taking wing into the blue satin of the summer sky.
But the signs of change were everywhere—in the mustard-hot rays of sun reflected in the new futuristic glass-and-steel skyscrapers, in the exuberant atmosphere on streets dotted with Western cafés and clubs, in the fusion of the traditional “Bayati Shiraz” mugam and Missy Elliott’s “Hot Boyz” blasting out of neighboring teahouses. This was definitely not the city I had buried in the deep vault of my heart twenty years ago.
Click, click, click…
A group of Asian tourists, their fancy cameras cocked and loaded, acted like a firing squad on the command of a vivacious, toothy, smiling young guide who spoke in broken English: “You are standing at the crown of Maiden Tower—the soul of our Azerbaijan. From here, you can see the whole city of Baku. To the right, the fifteenth-century home of the Azeri rulers, Shirvanshahs’ Palace”…click, click, click…“Eleventh-century Synyk-Kala Minaret and Mosque”…click, click, click…
“Leila.”
I turned. And at once time stopped, vanished, evaporated, rewinding back to May 1979.
A thin and lanky man with wavy hair reaching to his shoulders, dressed in dirt-streaked, bell-bottom jeans and a white tunic stood behind me, his intensely violet-blue eyes locked with mine. He made a slow, uncertain step toward me. Then another. Now I could see the netting of fine lines on his sun-kissed face and the strokes of silver in his long chestnut hair. But the eyes were the same, mirroring every passing emotion—both his and mine—from the fear, anguish, and fatalism of Tchaikovsky to the nostalgia, longing, and timeless harmony of Chopin.
“I haven’t told you the ending of the Maiden Tower legend,” Tahir said softly, dreamlike, reaching out for my hand and leading me toward the edge of the crown, where, on the last day of summer 1979, he had told me the Legend of Maiden Tower. And once again, his hand against mine ignited the same electric glissando that had connected us into the same circuit, making us one, a long time ago.
As the powerful Khazri lifted us into the air, taking us farther and farther from the shores of reality, Tahir told me the rest of the Legend of Maiden Tower, about Princess Zümrüd and the Knight in Lion’s Skin. His own story. How the Knight in Lion’s Skin continued to dwell in the dark dungeons of his soul, long after his beloved Princess Zümrüd turned into the Firebird and left for the skies. How his splendid Lion’s Skin turned into rags, his besotted mind lost its sight, and his unforgiving heart grew a shield of anger and pain.
Once the pain became so unbearable that the Knight—like a mad man—ran to the top of Maiden Tower to hurl his useless life down its ramparts. But as he stood at the edge, asking his Princess Zümrüd for forgiveness, he heard the Firebird crying for help, crying out her sorrow, her loneliness.
The Knight turned his life around, determined to find the lost Bird and bring her back home. But how? How could he trace her through the vast sky? There was only one way left—to paint her the way he remembered her: a spirited, gifted, powerful half maiden, half bird.
We sat silent, entwined in destiny, alone under the infinite tent of the darkening sky. A soft breeze blew from the sea, bringing the familiar taste of our childhood—hot, thick, and buttery air saturated with the aroma of black gold and made fragrant by the fresh bloom of zùmrùd jasmine.
How could I have lived without it? I closed my eyes and slowly, hungrily, blissfully inhaled.