The Orphan Sky (11 page)

The last school bell of the year rang in my ears like the finale of Gustav Mahler's
Symphony
no. 9
, the most tedious, long-winded symphonic climax ever written. Free at last.

By now spring had swayed into summer, keeping its clouds and cool mountain breezes with us longer than usual. The sun fox-trotted in and out of the sky, warming rather than roasting the air, promising rather than granting the irresistible bliss of Baku summertime—the blue-green waves of the Caspian Sea washing over
Zagulba
Beach with its soft-as-down sand dunes.

The delay suited me well since I had no time for pleasure. Professor Sultan-zade put me on an Olympic rehearsal schedule: every day counting down to March 17 and my performance at the Budapest piano competition, every hour devoted to Mozart's
Piano
Concerto
no. 20
.

At exactly five minutes before my scheduled lesson, I warmed up in the Conservatory practice room, playing Carl Czerny's études.

“How is our ‘Romanze' today?”

Professor Sultan-zade entered the practice room carrying a tray with a steaming teapot, a glass
armud
, and a mound of sugar cubes on a saucer. “Have you been working on fingering? Last time you were terrible with the middle section.”

“Yes, I spent two hours last night.”

“We'll see.”

“Should I start from the beginning?”

“Do you want to start from the end?”

“No, I just thought—”

“You thought? No, I'm here to think. You are here to play. Go.”

She settled in her plush chair, drinking tea and tapping her foot to keep me at a dainty tempo.

I closed my eyes and played the B-flat major theme of the rondo, imagining myself on the stage at the Grand Hall of Franz Liszt Academy of Music. As I glided through Mozart's hidden musical inflections, Tahir glided invisibly beside me. Opening for me an entirely unfamiliar dimension of emotions, teaching me to feel first and comprehend second, to weave harmonic tenderness around rhythmic consistency, to blend Baroque's reserve into Romanticism's expressiveness. The faint, white whispers of “Romanze” spun hypnotically in the air like snowflakes.

Oh, how I missed Tahir. If I could only sneak inside his refuge even just one more time. But how? I didn't dare. After reporting my discoveries about the green door, I had no official reason to be near the place. It would get me into trouble. Farhad's raven eyes followed me ubiquitously.

“Stop it already. It's dreadful,” Professor Sultan-zade shouted. “If I listen to another measure of this anarchy, sewage will pour out of my ears. Mediocrity meets Mozart. You are killing me, Leila. You are killing me alive. You sound like someone who has lost her footing on the slope of Mount Everest.”

I rubbed my sweaty palms against my skirt. Maybe Professor Sultan-zade was right. Maybe I was lost in the capricious waters of creativity, experimenting with a new, freer approach to phrasing, moods, dynamics—a scary musical challenge, a risk of losing what I had known and accomplished before I could fully grasp my new self.

Professor Sultan-zade swept to the piano and leafed through the pages of my Mozart score. “These are the instructions for you. Can you read?” She pointed her finger at a slur.

“Legato.”

“And this?”

“Pedal.”

She moved her face close, so close I could see bits of her scalp shining through her thinning hair. “Then why are you disregarding what Mozart himself has written here? The instructions are all over the place, and each has a precise meaning. All you have to do is to follow every one of them. It is so simple, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is. All I was doing was trying to reveal Mozart's emotional intentions through my own feelings.”

“Your own feelings?”

Professor Sultan-zade dramatically closed the lid of the piano, stroking it protectively with her fingers. “I'm afraid Mozart doesn't need your own feelings. And if you have such an urgent need to express them, find a different outlet. Go take polka lessons. Or buy yourself a chador and go pray at the mosque with crones.”

Chador.

Chador!

Why hadn't I thought of this before?

A black, body-length silk veil would make me invisible. A lot of old women still wore them, scurrying like crows around the town. No one paid any attention to them—they were a fading relic of the past. The Soviets even spread a mockery that the women wore chadors to hide their old, ugly faces.

“Thank you. Thank you, dear Professor,” I exclaimed.

“Thank you for what?” Professor Sultan-zade tilted her head sideways, staring at me in bewilderment.

• • •

Silver bullets of rain pounded the ground, threatening to blast the flimsy roofs of Icheri Sheher houses to pieces. A typical Baku summer rain—short-lived and tempestuous as a mountain river. Within a blink, the streets were flooded and deserted. What more could I have asked for? I ran through the puddles slashing and clowning, free as a monkey that had just escaped from the circus. I slowed down by the ruins of the ancient bathhouse and turned into its trashed yard—most likely a rat kingdom at night—and there, in the seclusion of a large, leafy oak tree, I wrapped the chador around my face, leaving a slit for my eyes. For extra security, I pinned the fabric to my blouse beneath the chador.

“You have a ghost for a visitor,” I said as I entered Tahir's shop, waving my arms underneath fluid silk.

“Nice.” Tahir sucked a long toke of hookah, exhaling lazy smoke rings and staring through me as if I was made of glass.

“Oh well. I guess you're used to ghosts.” I unfolded the fabric from my face.

“Wait. Don't move.” Tahir grabbed a brush from the table. His gaze caressing me, he traced the brush through the air, sketching invisible lines, then disappeared behind the easel. Occasionally, his eyes peered around the canvas to take me in. His bare feet fidgeted, doing a happy tap dance.

I stood still like a statue, soaked, chilled, but afraid to make the slightest move. The water from my chador dripped all over the floor. I didn't care. All I knew—I was being painted. What if my image stayed around long after I was gone? Like the image of Cleopatra on a two-thousand-year-old coin?

After what felt like a millennium, Tahir finally acknowledged the living, breathing me. “Want to check it out?”

“Yes.” I threw the chador off my face and gasped for air. Instead, hashish fumes tickled my lungs.

The painting looked nothing like what I had expected. No Cleopatra immortalization for my image, not even close. I saw a cluster of grotesque items thrown all over the canvas, fighting for attention. A rat with a long, hairy tail won my notice at once—a fat black rat sprawled across a crimson couch. Behind the rat was the silhouette of Maiden Tower, the jagged edges of its crown stabbing the sky. In a pale mauve sky, an ashen moon dueled with a carroty sun, and a red-orange bird helplessly flapped her wings, trying to escape from the rat.

Where was
I
in that chaos? I looked closer. The couch had two legs—one was shaped like a hammer, the other like a sickle. The rat's only eye was ablaze just like the red star on top of the Kremlin. In the upper-right corner stood an elongated female figure veiled in sheer black silk that illuminated and traced every hollow of her body. Tiny breasts, curvy hips, with a barely visible triangle between her legs. I felt embarrassed. And, at the same time, I couldn't take my eyes off the sensual creature.

“I wish you had come earlier,” Tahir said, wiping his hands with the wet towel. “Then I wouldn't have had to stick you in the corner. Oh well, we'll do another one. What do you think?”

My palms went sweaty. “I don't really know. So much is happening here, the rat and the sky and the moon. All jarring. And then the message—the negative message. No, I'm afraid it's not Mozart.”

“That's for sure. What else?”

“Maybe I'm wrong…but the figure wrapped in a veil… She is so lyrical in the middle of the dissonance, and all these evil creatures don't seem to overcome her even though she's pretty flimsy… And another thing, why did you paint me so thin? So stretched out?”

“For dramatic Amedeo Modigliani effect. To bring out the sensuality and—” Tahir stopped. “I'm sorry, sunshine. Sometimes I forget that you're just a little girl.”

“I'm not a little girl. I'm fifteen,” I said, staring into Tahir's eyes, struck by the same sensation I'd felt once before when our eyes had met—an irresistible connection. As if an electric glissando coursed through my body, joining Tahir and me into the same circuit, sparks flying off each other. Did he feel the same? Or was it just my imagination?

“I like the way you painted my hand,” I said, breaking the magical moment. “It seems to almost come out of the painting as if you gave it a third dimension.”

“That's the idea.” Stepping back, he examined his work from different angles. “I used a technique called ‘tenebrism'—dramatic illumination—created by Michelangelo da Caravaggio, the greatest painter of the seventeenth century. His light is starkly luminous against the darkness.”

“Like in a black-and-white photograph?”

“No. Not even close.” Tahir twisted his mouth from side to side, his habit when he was short of an explanation. “Think Bach. A few independent voices are interwoven into a polyphonic relationship. All of a sudden, one voice steps into the light while the rest become dimmed to create the dramatic disparity. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“You see, when you entered, light from there”—Tahir pointed toward a small hexagon-shaped window in the ceiling—“splashed onto your figure and gave me the idea. Now let me try something else.”

He reached for his brush and began to darken the silk of the chador on the painting until almost all the outlines of my body had disappeared. The hand, though, seemed to come to life, moving the fabric away from my stretched—but now quite animated—face.

“The effect has changed drastically,” I said.

“Maybe.” He skewed his head to the side, tapping his teeth, deep in thought. “Or maybe not. Not sure.”

“Why?”

“Because it has as much life as a week-old corpse.”

Gripping his brush, Tahir smeared thick, black strokes across the painting, destroying it. Then he threw the brush on the floor, zoomed back to his rug and his hookah, and soon disappeared behind a cloud of smoke.

But I didn't feel abandoned. Not at all. If anything, I felt jealous. Tahir, like all true artists, was impetuous, riding freely on his head-spinning carousel of emotions. Unlike me, who could never rise above the boring sameness of a dedicated, hard-working student of piano.

“I've been having a difficult time too,” I said, trying to win his attention, “with Mozart's
Piano
Concerto
no. 20
. It's the piece I'll be playing at the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in Budapest. My professor is in panic. She says that I'll never win the first prize if I continue to experiment. With just eight months left before the competition, I still can't settle on a particular voice, one that balances structure with color. Technique with emotion.”

“Neither could Mozart himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean,” Tahir repeated slowly, trying to catch the stream of his thoughts. “You see, the pleasing,
melodic
Mozart we know today is actually the outcome of
tragic
Mozart who tried to break away from the rigidity of the dying Baroque. As a court composer, he had to create in accordance with what was expected of him; as a performer, he had the liberty to reinterpret—even reinvent—his own scores. He rarely composed cadenzas, as you know, improvising them on the spot, moving closer and closer to the oncoming Romantic period.”

“Then there is nothing wrong with me playing it differently every time, the way the Romantics did, depending on my current state of mind?”

“Your state of heart, actually. That's the power you possess as an artist. To find and express your own unique message.”

“Have you found it?”

“Found what?”

“Your own unique message?”

“I've been able to formulate it internally through listening to music. But no, I haven't yet found the right tools to communicate it.”

“You mean to communicate the music in your painting?”

“Yes. For me, painting
is
music. Inseparable. To paint, I have to hear music.”

“And for me, to feel my music, I have to see images and colors.”

“The relationship between color and music is an old phenomenon,” Tahir said. “The spectrum of colors is arranged in scales, similar to the language of musical notation. Beethoven called B minor the black key. Schubert described the E minor key as a maiden in white with a red rose. And Kandinsky used musical polyphony to paint his works.”

“Then tell me, what would be the perfect score for your artistic message?” I asked.

“Rachmaninoff.
Piano
Concerto
no. 3
.”

Of course. How could Tahir have chosen anything less gripping than Rachmaninoff's
Piano
Concerto
no. 3
, the most challenging piano masterpiece ever written?

“Why this piece in particular?” I asked.

“It opens me to higher powers. It bridges Caravaggio and Renoir. Caravaggio—spectacularly bold, real, and imposing, demanding immediate attention. Renoir—dreamy, soft, suspended in time. The challenge for me is to bring those two languages together.”

Silence. Time to leave.

“I better get going,” I said.

“I'll see you soon?”

My heart skipped. Tahir wanted me to come back.