The Orphan Sky (33 page)

Panic. The entrance door was locked.

A green light on the side. I pushed the button. It worked.

I darted outside, stepping into an icy puddle, another one. The November rain fell at me from every direction.

The distant sound of a train. Or the echo of my sorrow?

No time to ruminate. Barefoot, in my silk nightgown, wrapping the towel I had stolen from the bathroom around my shoulders, I raced down the street. My destination—I'd seen it when the bus took us on a tour that first day in London. Just a few blocks away. With a red, white, and blue flag over its entrance.

The Embassy of the United States of America.

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.

1. The novel begins with Leila visiting an exhibition of Azerbaijani art in Los Angeles where she sees and recognizes herself in the Maiden Tower painting as “
a lonely princess—half human, half bird—standing on its crown, her wings reaching into the dome of the wakening sky
.” The novel ends with Leila returning to Baku and climbing to the top of Maiden Tower. Why did the artist paint Leila in this way? And why do you think that the author choose to frame the novel with those scenes?

2. Soviet Azerbaijan in 1979 was supposed to be a “classless” society, but there are several indicators that this is a fallacy (for example, Leila belonging to the Communist royalty—
Nomenklatura
). What did you think about this “classless” society? Do you think it's possible to have a society without class designations?

3. The novel is filled with descriptions of Baku on the crossroads of Turkish, Persian, and Russian cultures. How does the author create the imagery of this city using music and legends rooted in those cultural traditions?

4. In the novel, we see Communism fighting a “two-headed hydra”—religious fervor coming from the East and toxic hedonism (or the perception of such) coming from the West. We commonly think of those two ideologies warring against each other, but not against a third party in Communism. Discuss this unusual battle that takes place in Soviet/Islamic Azerbaijan—the last outpost of European Communism as it makes its way farther into Asia.

5. How does the author transcribe music into words using metaphors, fine art imagery, colors, and emotions? Are there any examples that particularly stood out to you?

6. Comrade Farhad sends Leila to spy on an American mole and his music shop that is supposedly a cover-up for anti-Soviet activities. Instead, Aladdin's shop becomes Leila's haven. Discuss Leila's transformation from a dedicated young Communist into a free-spirited artist.

7. Leila's mother describes Azerbaijan as the “kingdom of crooked mirrors.” Everyone in this novel seems to live with lies. Are there some lies that you forgive more easily than others? If yes, which ones are they, and why are they more easily forgivable?

8. The fairy tales and legends of Azerbaijan often serve as emotional references and metaphors throughout the novel. Discuss how the storyline mimics the Maiden Tower Legend; how the Legend of the Stone Heart mirrors Leila's fear of being rejected by Tahir; how an encounter with the Peri Fairy reveals Leila's guilt-torn soul.

9. How do Leila and Tahir unveil the ambiguities between music and art, friendship and love?

10. Leila betrays Tahir and later marries into the KGB—all for the sake of her music career, only to fail miserably at her most important final performance in London. Why?

11. Much of classical, jazz, and traditional Azerbaijani music flows throughout this novel: Chopin's
Ballade no. 1
; Czerny's
The Art of Finger Dexterity
; Beethoven's
Sonata Pathétique
; Mozart's
Piano Concerto no. 20
; Rachmaninoff's
Piano Concerto no. 3
; Tikhon Khrennikov's
Five Pieces for Piano
; Billie Holiday's “Body and Soul”; Nina Simone's “Strange Fruit”; and traditional Azerbaijani
mugams
. Listen to these musical works and discuss their depictions in the novel. Does the author's musical/literary palette resonate with your own imagery?

12. What do you think of the novel's ending? What do you think will happen with Tahir and Leila after the novel ends?