The Orphan Sky (3 page)

“Nobody.”

“Nobody means—a ghost. So you've been running from a ghost. Oh, there she is.”

I anxiously turned in the direction of his pointed finger.

“Got you!” He soundly slapped his thigh and brayed like a donkey. His gold teeth glowed in the night, and his eyes ogled me with a malignant, unmovable stare.

I dipped into my pocket to retrieve the key and opened the door to our apartment. Actually two doors. An exterior heavy oak door identical to those of the rest of the apartments. And a bunker door, as I called it. A year ago, Papa brought a brigade of workers who spent an entire week setting the solid steel door and fortifying it with German locks and bolts sturdy enough to protect the treasures of the Hermitage Museum.

It may not have been the Hermitage, but our apartment did resemble a museum. The largest unit in the building, it had four rooms altogether: a sitting room with a vaulted ceiling and arabesque tapestries on the walls; my parents' boudoir, furnished with the Versailles bedroom set of Louis XVI (not the real one, of course, but a magnificent handmade replica); my room, airy with a balcony, split by a screen into a bedroom and my music rehearsal space; and Papa's pride, the smoking room.

It was filled with so many interesting things: his X-shaped wood-and-brass throne with an eagle's head, perched on carved lion's feet; a dragon-wrapped chandelier, emitting shadows instead of light—a gift from Chairman Mao in 1973 when Papa visited China with a Soviet delegation; a dagger studded with massive rubies, suspended in front of a Persian rug hanging against the wall. Papa liked to joke that he had found it in Genghis Khan's hidden tomb.

With Papa, I never knew if he was joking or not. He was an avid—no, compulsive—collector. He hunted his treasures the way he hunted his oil reserves. Fanatically. But if you asked him, he'd just shrug and laugh.
A
little
hobby
, he called it. And why the bunker door?
Just
to
keep
safe
the
biggest
treasures
of
my
life, my beautiful wife and
daughter
.

Why did my family live in such luxury? Why was my papa allowed to acquire and display his riches instead of using them for the common good? Why did I myself preach the equality of our Communist society to the younger generation?

Because that was the normal way of life in Soviet Azerbaijan, something I never would have thought of questioning. There were common citizens and there was
Nomenklatura
—the ruling class of Communist Party members, who held key positions in government, industry, and culture. To become a part of
Nomenklatura
was an ultimate ambition of every Soviet citizen.

I was born into it.

“I thought we'd miss you,” Mama said without taking her eyes off her mirror. Dressed in a beige evening suit, she was applying her neutral lipstick. Her only fake means of beautification, as she called it. She didn't need more. Her natural colors mixed into a bouquet of spring. She had the eyes of the morning sky, and the sun seemed to get stuck in the silk of her hair. Today she allowed it to swing freely in the air. So different from her usual professional hairdo—a braid wrapped around the top of her head designed to add a sense of gravity to her youthful face with its skin as transparent as Carrara marble.

I had received none of Mama's gifts, except for her petite frame. I was all Papa's daughter. Our hair was as black and stubborn as mattress springs. We usually wore out at least one ivory comb a month. Mama bought the combs a dozen at a time at a small shop on Torgovaya Street. The owner, an Armenian craftsman with a bald, pear-shaped head, always swore the next batch of his combs would last a lifetime. But I didn't believe it. I doubted there was an elephant romping through the jungle anywhere with tusks strong enough to tame our hair.

“What happened today?” Mama dropped the lipstick into her snakeskin clutch, snapped it shut, and raised her eyes at me. She spoke with a flat voice, usually reserved for a negligent nurse or the reckless parent of a little patient. “So, Leila, what have you gotten yourself into?”

“Nothing to worry about,
Mamochka
. It's about a Komsomol assignment.”

“An assignment that involves carrying anti-Soviet material?”

“Of course not. I mean yes. The anti-Soviet material is the evidence. You see, Comrade Farhad has chosen me for this very, very important task.”

“What kind of important task?” Papa came in, freshly shaved, wearing a linen suit and his signature canary tie. He was as dark as if he bathed daily in a Baku oil well. His mane still shone inky black, but a gray mouse had run through his square-shaped little mustache. Tall and trim, he resembled the cypress tree outside my window, swaying in rhythm with the wind, grasping the essence of the earth with its powerful roots.

“It's a secret, Papa.”

“Secret? Secret between you and Comrade Farhad?” Papa poured himself a cognac from the bar and took a sip from his glass. “I like the fellow,” he said, enjoying his drink. “He's ambitious, knows what he wants and how to get it. Who knows, maybe someday you'll make a nice couple. I wouldn't mind having a son like Farhad.”

Papa winked, wrapped his free arm around me, and plopped a kiss on the top of my head. I drew in the aroma of Papa's tobacco mixed with cologne, the same cologne I'd detected on Comrade Farhad earlier. My head spun a little.

“Don't plant those seeds in her head,” Mama said with an air of casualness, but I could tell by the presence of a low overtone in her voice that Papa's words had struck a wrong chord.

She slipped into her new pumps, exactly the same shade as her suit—always a perfectionist—and turned to me. “Your Komsomol commitments are vital and beneficial, but your music comes first. Don't get distracted from your piano practice, no matter how wonderful Comrade Farhad is and how important his assignment is. You hear me?”

“I can handle it all. Don't worry. Where are you going?”

“Comrade Bagirov's nephew's engagement.” Papa rolled his eyes and twitched his head in Mama's direction. “It's all part of being married to a celebrity.”

Half joke. No one doubted who wore the tiara of celebrity in the family, but Papa did feel proud of Mama's accomplishments. She was one of just a handful of women to rise in a society in which women, even though they had taken off their chadors—black Islamic veils of modesty—fifty years ago, still very much lived in the shadows of their husbands, with their triumphs limited to the kitchen. As a
hekim
—a surgeon-healer—with a heart of gold and hands of silk, Mama was a well-known person. On the streets of Baku, total strangers rushed over to her, breaking into tears, kissing her hands, blessing her over and over for bringing their little loved ones back to life.

Mama grew up in an orphanage in a small village and came to Baku to study medicine at the Academy. She supported herself by working as a cleaning nurse at the hospital—the same hospital where she would later become the head of the pediatric surgery department. Papa, the only son of Azerbaijan's great Communist hero, spent his childhood in our fancy apartment, raised by his widowed mother.

They met in the emergency room where Mama was doing her medical internship and where Papa was delivered with a brain concussion, several broken bones, and cuts all over his body, the result of a motorcycle crash. They got married a month later. “Your mama tamed the wild beast in me,” Papa liked to complain. She did, for the most part. But Papa still had quite an explosive temper. A common joke among his friends was that he owed his success in discovering new oil fields to the power of a roar that could shake the earth and make fountains of oil spurt from under the ground.

“The usual story.” Papa creased his forehead and raised one bushy eyebrow then the other so they seemed to leap off his face. “Your mama gets invited, and I tag along. I'm just a chauffeur here.”

“Is that why you are wearing a linen jacket to a black-tie party?” Mama played along.

Safe territory. Papa liked being different. Liked to disregard and even break rules and traditions, as if still rebelling against the Black Widow, as Mama called his mother. An old woman in black who never smiled and pinched my forearm every time I attempted to laugh—that's how I remembered her. She died before I turned six.

Her oval photograph hung in Papa's smoking room between two pictures of her husband, Comrade Badalbeili. In one of them, my grandfather, still nearly a boy, rode a big white horse at the head of the Bolshevik brigade in 1920. In the other photograph, taken in 1943, he resembled Generalissimo Stalin. The same thick mustache and a general's trench coat with a row of medals and orders.

Unlike my ideologically zealous grandfather, my parents were
social
Communists. Highly dedicated members of the Party, they worked tirelessly in their professional capacities on behalf of our country. Deep inside, I always questioned whether their Communism was anything more than a comfortable and gratifying routine, a way of maintaining a status-filled life in their social and professional establishments.

“I cooked your favorite
chykhyrtma
.” Papa pressed his fingers together and brought them to his mouth. “Ummm…delicious.”

“Thank you,
Papochka
.”

“Anything for you,
qizim
. Whatever you need, just ask your papa.”

He finished the cognac, wiped his mustache with the back of his hand, and scooped me in his arms. “I love you, my precious
brilyant
, my diamond,” he said, kissing me on the forehead and rubbing his scratchy cheek against mine.

“I'm ready, Mekhti. Let's go.” Mama wrapped a silk
kelegayi
, scarf, around her shoulders. “And you, Leila, don't waste precious time. Warm up dinner and get to your practicing.”

Sometimes I thought she envied my closeness with Papa. But every time I tried to tell her how much I loved her, she stopped me: “The more you say ‘I love you,' the less you mean it. Words are cheap.”

Cheap or not, I yearned for them.

Mama followed Papa to the door, trailing her inimitable scent of lilacs. When I was little, I used to climb in her bed after she had left and squash my face against the softness of her pillow. It felt like rolling on a warm spring day into a valley of lavender lilacs, still slightly moist from the fresh touch of the rain.

How much I wanted to put my arms around her and feel—even for a moment—that she was right here with me and not in surgery or at her parties.

“And don't wait for us. We'll be late.” Mama closed the door.

I warmed Papa's
chykhyrtma
—a chunk of lamb stewed with zesty bouillon—and filled my bowl to the brim. Careful not to spill any on our sparkling ebony floor, I carried it to the balcony.

Clouds had cleared from the sky. The half-moon swayed in its cradle. The deserted part of our building loomed before me, its limestone turrets resembling the bows of a fairy-tale ship sailing across the starlit sky.

How many evenings had Almaz and I spent here alone with our dreams, imagining the invisible, magical world of Peri-faced princesses and lion-skinned knights?

In the sanctuary of the night, we practiced our witchcraft, spinning a piece of broken carafe to hear the voices of the dead and drinking a magical
sehrli
potion to read our destiny in the quicksilver of the stars. And as the city below lay drunk with sleep, we flew to the Desert of the Blind Dervish to swirl in the flames of the earth and receive our mystic powers from the Zoroastrian fire.

“Hey, I'm back,” I greeted the headless gargoyle sitting on my balcony. The stone creature with wings spread wide had given our building its name: Gargoyle Castle. And it did look like a real castle. Soaring horseshoe arches draped its facade. Limestone
muqarnas
decorations hung like stalactites from the vaulted ceiling in the atrium. And marble cherubs danced atop the remains of a Baroque fountain in the middle of our courtyard.

One summer night when Almaz and I were nine years old, we cleaned up the fountain and carried bucket after bucket to fill it with water. Then we lounged on the marble balustrade, soaking our feet, gliding the soles back and forth across the smooth Moorish tile of the sky blue, sea green mosaic. Staring at the object of our infinite fascination: the faded fresco image of a fair-haired princess in an azure gown with a gazelle resting at her feet and a vermilion-colored bird perched in her lap. The Snow Princess.

Rumor had it that she was the daughter of the oil baron who had built our Gargoyle Castle to win the heart of his beloved from a faraway land. I still had a Snow Princess dress hanging in my wardrobe, one of two that Aunty Zeinab had made for Almaz and me for the New Year's Eve masquerade of 1973. Blue satin cloth with short, puffed sleeves and a flared skirt with a hem of sparkling tulle. She even crafted stuffed animals—a gazelle for Almaz and a bird for me.

I gobbled my dinner, listening to the noise of the city as it gradually surrendered to the harmony of the night and peeking into a brightly lit window across the street where a family was having dinner together. I felt the usual sting of loneliness.

“Time for piano practice.” I patted the broken wing of my gargoyle. “The more I practice, the better pianist I become. And soon…”

I closed my eyes, visualizing myself in a shimmering dress on the stage of Franz Liszt Academy of Music, gliding to the piano, waiting for the orchestra conductor's call to action. Oh, how I loved the thrill of the stage!

“If I win in the Budapest piano competition—right after that I'll be playing in the Chopin piano competition in Warsaw. And then the most important of them all—the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow. To win! Always win!”