Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (16 page)

"So Iran is your enemy."

"Armenia is worse. Nagorno-Karabakh is the problem. They make Azeris into refugees—and it's our country. In football, Armenia is our enemy. In life, too."

***

I HAD COME TO AZERBAIJAN
because I couldn't get a visa to go by train from Turkey to Iran, as I had done before. But although it had been forced on me, this northerly detour was welcome because it allowed me to visit the setting of
Ali and Nino.
When I mentioned this to an American I met in Baku, he said, "You have to meet Fuad Akhundov. He's done a study of all the places in Baku mentioned in the novel."

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction, is one of my pleasures—I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and the imagined road. A walking tour called something like "Literary Landmarks" is not everyone's idea of fun, but it is mine, for the way it shows how imagination and landscape combine to become art: the Dublin pubs and streets mentioned in
Ulysses,
the railway in
Anna Karenina,
the towns on the Mississippi that are important in
Huckleberry Finn,
the marsh in
Great Expectations,
the Cairo streets that crisscross
Palace Walk,
the London of
The Secret Agent,
the Congo of
Heart of Darkness,
the Paris of
Tropic of Capricorn,
the Chicago of
Augie March,
and—as I rehearsed earlier—Pamuk's cradle place of Istanbul.

So I was happy to meet Fuad Akhundov at the appointed spot, the main door of the Baku Philharmonic Society, built around 1910 by an Armenian architect to house the City Club, and mentioned in
Ali and Nino
as a casino. Because of Azeri wealth and Bakuvian pride, buildings like this one had been preserved and meticulously renovated over the past ten years.

"I am Bakuvian, born and bred. This is my city! Like Ali and Nino!"

Fuad wore, for effect, a red fez with a swinging gold tassel. He was tall, demonstrative, passionate, and funny, given to the sudden oration, the startling declaration, the recitation of a rhyming poem, usually one of his own, often in archaic English. Under one arm he carried a plump picture album with an enormous archive of old photos of Baku that he'd found around the city. He was thirty-eight, and his day job was as a senior inspector for Interpol's National Central Bureau in Azerbaijan—
good qualifications for a man in search of the truth behind the novel. He had also guided Tom Reiss in his pursuit of the real Lev Nussimbaum. As for Interpol business, smuggling was the problem—drugs, money, people. Fuad Akhundov was effusively talkative, and like most talkers, he rarely listened.

How talkative a nonlistener was he? Well, the edition of
Ali and Nino
that he carried—a book he'd become obsessed by because it had explained his city, his culture, his past, his own nature; a book that he had read and underlined, with page markers and exclamation points—this book he had in his hand contained an appreciative essay by me, which I'd written four or five years earlier. I thought it would interest him that I was the same man as the one whose name was printed with Kurban Said's on the book:
With a new afterword by Paul Theroux.

"That's me," I said, touching my name.

"I want to show you something," he said, deaf to my remark, whipping the book away and stabbing his finger at a dog-eared page.

He began to read: "'It was a big dusty garden with spare sad-looking trees and asphalt paths. On the right was the old fortress wall. In the center stood the City Club. " Fuad stood taller, waved his arms, became a manic weathervane, swinging his body around to point in four directions: "The garden, there! The trees! The fortress wall! The City Club before us!"

I did not mention my name again. I hardly spoke, because Fuad was in full cry.

"Baku is not a melting pot—it never was," he said. "But we lived together. There was no Jewish ghetto, as in some places. The Jews lived beyond the Pale of Settlement, about five percent of the population. They tended to be renters, not owners of real estate. Azeris owned the houses. So after the Soviets took over, the Jews moved on."

I said, "Nussimbaum was Jewish, but there are no Jews in the book."

"Because it's a love story between East and West! Ali and Nino. Jews were lawyers and doctors. They occupied a totally different niche in Baku, not covered in this book. But we still have some Jews—in the town of Quba. Now look at this wall."

We had walked downhill from the white building that had been the City Club and through the garden to get a better look at the fortress-like wall that divided the new city, where we stood, from the old city, West
from East, Ali from Nino. Fuad said that it had been built in the twelfth century by Manuchehr II.

"Georgians always looked down on us," Fuad was saying as we walked farther into the garden. "But we're closer because of shared problems."

"What about the Armenians?"

"Great friendship, great hostility with Armenians," he said. "But I believe there are no permanent enemies. Armenians became hostages of the past, and so they deprived themselves of the future. We're overwhelmed by emotions! Armenians don't make any distinctions between Turks and Azeris. Hey, it's all about 1915. When I was at Harvard—visiting scholar, wonderful experience—I met Armenians from Yerevan and had no problems. But Armenians from Watertown were very belligerent." Watertown, a streetcar suburb of Boston, was an Armenian enclave.

He hurried ahead, trotting past a low hedge to the centerpiece of a wintry garden of dusty ilex.

"Look at this sculpture." As he approached a large, mottled sculpted head, Fuad's cell phone began to ring. The ringing did not deter him from telling me that it was the head of the esteemed Azeri poet Vahid—"real name Iskanderov, 1899-1965." As he answered the phone, talking rapidly in Russian, he turned aside to translate the poem chiseled on the plinth from Azeri into English, "'By fate's unfairness—!'" and went on muttering in Russian.

Historically, Baku was full of proximities: mosque hard by church, Muslim adjacent to Christian, East near West, old next to new—as the book says, the old town in the new, like "a kernel in a nut." This persists into the present. The two schools mentioned in the novel still exist as schools, though no longer parochial ones. We walked up to the main road, Nikolayaskaya Street, towards the schools: Nino s, the Girls Lyceum of the Holy Queen Tamar, actually St. Nina's School; and Ali's school across the street, which was closed for the Novruz holiday. Nearby was the city hall and mayor's office, another seven-story pile of ornate stone, built around 1900.

"This city was built by money, greed, and oil," Fuad said. "In 1901, half of the world's oil came from Azerbaijan. Look at this picture." He flourished a page from the bulging album he carried. "The first oil tanker in the world, the
Zoroaster.
Built by Alfred Nobel in 1880—loaded in Baku, offloaded in Astrakhan."

Walking along the city wall that divided Europe from Asia, the new city from the old—the old one twenty-two hectares, the same size it had always been—I was thinking of Fuad's enthusiasm for his city, his national pride, his love for a novel that he said meant everything to him. "There is no other book in Azeri like
Ali and Nino.
" He was waving it. "Not just because—yes!—it tells how Chaliapin visits Baku to sing, and Chaliapin really did come to Baku. But look at this mansion."

We were in Sabir Square, beside the Muslim Charitable Society, a villa modeled after a Venetian mansion. The building, Fuad said, had been substantially destroyed in March 1918 in an Armenian uprising, when Armenians killed thirty thousand Azeris (Armenian sources claim half that number). Built by one Musa Nagi, a wealthy man of the Baha'i faith, it had been rebuilt in the 1920s.

"Now we turn to chapter sixteen. Here is Musa Nagi," Fuad said and began vigorously to read from the book.

I hate being read to. I hate the pauses. I hate the stammers and mispronunciations. Most of all I hate the slowness of it. I can read quickly and efficiently, and cannot stand someone taking charge and denying me the pleasure of reading the damned thing myself.

"Let me see that," I said. "Please."

"No, no, this is the best part!" Fuad said and snatched the book away.

And then he started to declaim it. I hated that, too.

"'I am an old man,'" he read, stabbing his finger at the page. "'And I am sad to see what I see, and to hear what I hear. The Russians are killing the Turks, the Turks are killing the Armenians, the Armenians would like to kill us, and we the Russians..."He continued, reading very loudly and gesticulating, and when he saw my attention wandering, he stood in front of me and shouted, "'Our soul strives to go to God. But each nation believes they have a God all to themselves, and he is the one and only God. But I believe it is the same God who made himself known through the voices of all the sages. Therefore I worship Christ and Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed. We all come from one God, and through Bab we shall all return to him. Men should be told there is no Black and White, for Black is White and White is Black. "

"How true," I said, hoping he'd stop.

But he wasn't finished: "'So my advice is this. Let us not do anything that might hurt anybody anywhere in the world, for we are part of each soul, and each soul is part of us. "

Fuad squeezed the book shut.

"Now I want you to look at the building again. You see how beautiful the façade. And there is Musa Nagi, the Baha'ist."

Carved in the stone façade of the building was Musa Nagi's benevolent face.

Fuad's arms were crossed and he was reciting again, this time a poem:

Every epoch has its face,
Every epoch leaves its trace;
Sometimes it is full of disgrace,
And not just in this particular case.

"I wrote that myself," Fuad said.

We continued through the square, which was named for Mirzah Sabir, a national hero who died in 1911. A statue of Sabir in the middle of the square depicted the man seated. It was, Fuad said, a visual euphemism, because "getting him to sit" was a Russian expression for imprisoning someone, and Sabir, a writer and satirist, had been imprisoned.

"He derided mullahs," Fuad said. "Mirzah Sabir said, 'I'm not afraid of a place of gods and devils. I'm afraid of a place with mullahs.'"

We strolled in the old city and Fuad showed me Ali's house, just as it had been described in chapter one.

"You see the second floor? Ali's room! Where he looks out and sees"

— now he read from the novel—"'the Maiden's Tower, surrounded by legends and tourist guides. And behind the tower the sea began, the utterly faceless, leaden, unfathomable Caspian Sea, and beyond, the desert — jagged rocks and scrub: still, mute, unconquerable, the most beautiful landscape in the world.'"

He was moved by his own performance.

"Do you agree with Ali?" I asked.

"What about?"

"The sea. The desert. The most beautiful landscape in the world."

"Yes, of course," he said.

I heard an unstated
but
in his delivery. I said, "But—"

"But I'm going to Canada," Fuad said.

After all this nationalistic fervor and literary history, the civic pride, the declaiming, the quoting, the extolling of statues and mansions, the florid poems, his blazing eyes, his gestures, his red fez, he was bailing out.

"This government is making a mess," he said, putting
Ali and Nino
into his briefcase. "Tearing down lovely buildings and putting up shit. So I want to leave."

"But this is a wealthy country, and you have an important job at Interpol," I said.

"My son is six. I don't want to bring up my child in an atmosphere of hostility. I want him to have more chances."

"What's the problem here?"

"Everything—the Russians mostly."

Russia was behind all the secessionist movements, all the embattled and besieged breakaway republics, from Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Dagestan and Nagorno-Karabakh. When I asked what sense it made for the Russians to foment nationalist movements in these places, he said that of course there was no sense in it. It was perverse political malignity to make life miserable for Georgians and Azeris.

"No, no," he said when I wanted to pursue this. "Listen to my poem." And he recited again from memory:

Baku is the place
Where every stone
Has a story of its own.

He crooked an admonitory finger in the air, sweeping the red fez off his head. His voice broke slightly as he finished:

And the stories could be magic
Should they not end up so tragic.

"'Let's go to Fillifpojanz,'" Fuad said. He was quoting the novel again, because the site of the Fillifpojanz coffee house still existed, a bulky white-painted building on Barjatinsky Street, and was being restored.

To get there, we passed the signs of Azerbaijan's prosperity: casinos and bars, shops selling luxury goods, and Internet cafés where shaggy youths were using video-mounted computers to speak with women—wives and girlfriends. The good times were reflected in the Azeris themselves, well dressed and busy, greeting the spring on this long sunny holiday. Fuad had other plans. He wasn't very interested in describing Fillifpojanz and was looking beyond
Ali and Nino
now. Having divulged his plan to emigrate, he spoke of how happy he'd be, how hard he'd work, when he got to Canada.

T
URKMENISTAN
, the Stan next door, was a tyranny run by a madman, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who gave himself the name Turkmenbashi, "Leader of All the Turkmen." He was one of the wealthiest and most powerful lunatics on earth and the ruler of an entire country. His people cringed at his name, his prisons were full of dissenters, his roads were closed to people like me. He had recently begun to call himself Prophet (
Prorók
), a harmless enough conceit if you're a civilian, but a pathological if not a fatal tendency in a despot. In support of his messianic claim he had written a sort of national bible, called the
Rukhnama
(The Book of the Soul), and he regarded himself as an accomplished writer, a clear sign of madness in anyone. Everything I had heard about this man and this country made me want to go there.