by Banine
So his mother nursed the hope he would marry his cousin Surayya, but neither my father nor the interested party had ever approved of her intentions. Nonetheless, when Surayya’s engagement became official, my aunt made such fervent protests that one might have thought her wronged or robbed, though my father had never promised her anything. The whole family was in ferment: some—the minority—supported marriage to Murad, while the others—the majority—opposed it and were not sparing in their threats to the fiancé and his family or their invective about my father. Their rage did not bother my father, who maintained his usual composure.
One night as Murad was leaving our house a revolver was fired in the darkness, but the bullet missed him. No one had any doubts who was behind this attack, but precisely because of this the incident was smoothed over and not taken any further.
For his part, Murad found it all highly amusing and laughed at the ‘natives’, who were a revelation to him, raised as he was in the aristocratic circles of the capital. He would happily mimic others, had an eye for the slightly ridiculous and enjoyed himself immensely at the expense of his new relatives. He paid visits to all the members of the family, taking delight in the most colourful. His visit to Uncle Suleyman was the high point.
‘I arrive by car,’ he told us, ‘and get out to walk to the door when I see your cousin Gulnar on the balcony. I greet her as one should. Instead of replying, she shouts at the top of her voice, “What do you want?”
‘I reply: “Nothing, Mademoiselle, nothing. I simply crave the honour of presenting my respects to your mother.”
‘“What?” cries Gulnar who seems to have mistaken the meaning of my words. She studies me with a dubious, angry air, then shouts, “Very well, wait there,” then disappears into the depths of the house.
‘I wait. I wait so long in the street, on the pavement, that I start to wonder if the pretty but rude Gulnar has forgotten me. No, she hasn’t forgotten me. She herself eventually opens the front door and tells me in a mocking tone to follow her. She leads me to a strangely furnished salon, where the whole family has gathered.
‘“You know,” Uncle Suleyman shouts at me, “I’m not impressed by uniforms and all that. We don’t have any, but we have something better—money.”
‘And he strikes his chest in the place where wallets are usually kept.
‘After this noble introduction, everyone starts asking questions designed to make fun of me; as they ask them, they look round at each other to make sure their wit is appreciated, and the children snigger into their hands and nudge each other with their elbows. What a delightful and original family! And why the devil do they never speak but shout all the time? Is it a custom?’
Surayya flushed in shame for her relatives. Unlike Murad she had no khans or ambassadors in her family, only poor millionaires of whom she had no cause to be proud.
Murad had an uncle who was president of one of the new republics of the north Caucasus, freshly Free, Proud and Happy, which he was representing in Paris at this historic moment. As there was nothing to keep him in the Caucasus, Murad decided to join him—a trip that could be most agreeable if combined with a honeymoon, ‘while waiting for the Bolsheviks to go…’.
This sentence was still repeated, but with qualification. Of course, they would go but perhaps not as quickly as had been expected. There were even people who did not think they would leave Russia at all; others, clearly irresponsible, claimed that instead of leaving they might come to the Caucasus once the civil war was over. Many things were said, but no one knew anything, other than that all was uncertain.
Murad’s plan made Amina sick with nostalgia. It was inconceivable to her that anyone should leave for France while she remained in Baku. She convinced my father that she should go to Paris as well, accompanied by Zuleykha. She found new reasons to make the trip: she had an illness that could be treated only in France; Surayya, a young wife, would not feel isolated in a foreign country; Zuleykha, who definitely had a talent for painting, should perfect her skills in a Parisian academy to become an Azerbaijani Ingres (the beloved homeland so needed one!); and both of them really had nothing to wear and lacked the most essential items.
They definitely had to go.
My accommodating father eventually agreed to the trip but on one condition: he wanted Amina to take my brother with her. He thought, not without good reason, that during these uncertain times a son should remain with his mother. Amina was ready to make any sacrifice.
There was no question of my going—and more than ever I felt like Cinderella. There may have been reasons for leaving me in Baku, but I have never understood them and a great sense of injustice has remained with me.
Surayya and Murad were first to leave, on a gloriously sunny day. The air was warm and the compartment from which Surayya sent us her last smiles was overflowing with flowers; Surayya thought her future would be flower-strewn too and so did we. She was wrong. None of us knew we had years of uncertainty ahead, and it was better that way.
Then it was time for the others to leave. I thought against all reason that they might change their minds at the last moment and take me to Paris too. The day came closer, though, and there was no change of plan. Their travelling clothes were finally ready, the suitcases buckled, and the day of departure arrived.
The train left at nine in the evening. At quarter past eight we began to say our goodbyes. I cut them short on some pretext or other and, not wanting anyone to see my sorrow, I went up to the Moorish salon, from where I could hear them leave.
In the total darkness of that large room, I pressed my forehead against the windowpane; I waited, listening. The main door opened downstairs, I heard voices, the door slam and the car move off. Then it was the silence of the end.
The inconceivable had happened. Amina and Zuleykha had left without me for something too radiant to name. They had gone and I was left behind in the darkness with no way out. I imagined with unbearable clarity the life that awaited me: grey and joyless, a life where hopes were always dashed and an overwhelming sense of injustice reigned. While there, in Paris, in that city that had lost all geographic meaning for me and become a fairy-tale land, more dream than reality; there in Paris, Amina and Zuleykha… and I finally began to cry; I wept a flood of tears. Why couldn’t I dissolve into tears, become a stream and disappear, escaping life and its sorrows? Like all naive fools, I asked myself what I had done to deserve such injustice. But tears dry up, leaving you wrung out, a rag only fit to be thrown to the winds.
I was wrong to imagine a grey future. My life was to be many things but it was never grey.
A month later my grandfather Musa died. He left us, his four granddaughters, a vast fortune, even by the standards of Baku, where there were dozens of millionaires. This ironic legacy made me a multimillionaire at the age of thirteen, but only for a few days, for I was soon woken at dawn by ‘The Internationale’ sung in the street. I got up and saw soldiers who neither resembled nor wore the uniform of Azerbaijani askaris. It was the Russians.
During the night an armoured train, just one, had crossed the ephemeral border of the ephemeral independent Republic of Azerbaijan and deposited Red Army soldiers at Baku’s sleeping station. In a matter of moments, without a shot being fired, the Azerbaijani army had melted away. The Republic was dead and victorious Russia was reclaiming its subjects.
With my own eyes I had seen the end of a world.
PART TWO
1
I saw with my own eyes the end of a world, namely, the ephemeral Republic of Azerbaijan, and with it came the end of my childhood. ‘What, Madame, at the age of thirteen?’ Well yes, and why not? The departure of my stepmother, two of my sisters and my brother for Paris came as a psychological shock, and opened my eyes to the cruelty of the world. Isn’t that the point from which to date my break with childhood? To my mind, the definition of childhood is very simple: belief in stability and the goodness of the world. Take away that belief, and childhood comes to an end.
Am I overcome with emotion at the joy of innocence and childlike naivety? Not at all: I abhor that state of innocence precisely because it is ignorant of the real world in all its magnificence, horror and divinity. To accept the world and love it just as it is—herein lies the glory of mankind. It would be too easy to love a good world.
The departure of my two sisters induced in me a sense of injustice, which I found hard to bear; though bear it I must, as there was nothing else I could do. In theory, my father and I were supposed to join them later—in theory… In fact, I remained on my own, overcome with a sense of yearning, of having been wronged and wrenched apart from loved ones. True, my eldest sister Leyla stayed behind, but she was married, and a mother, and so capricious, so rarely there that she became quite elusive; there was no connection between us. Our governess Fräulein Anna was more highly strung and unwell than ever. Devastated by the decline of her sight, she used the little strength she had left to look after my nephew; and if she should turn to me, my reserved nature and stupid pride stopped me accepting her affection. Even more distant was my relationship with my father, as he was extremely reserved and cold. I was intimidated by his presence, afraid almost, and my only feeling for him was frosty respect.
So, I was alone with my first major sorrow. The departure played a decisive role in my psyche, inclining me towards pessimism for many years. A while later, I saw my first death (I don’t include the anonymous bodies swinging from nooses in the public park). My maternal grandfather lay on his bed, his corpse swollen with dropsy and covered in a sheet, as though he were a secret, shameful object that had to be hidden from public view. No, I didn’t love him and had never loved him. His death caused me no pain, and even seemed a deliverance—a deliverance from the interminable visits we paid to him once a week throughout his long illness: mortal hours that we spent at his sickbed, hours when we did not know what to say, how to kill the minutes; seconds that stretched into eternities at the spectacle of a man dying, unloved. I had come to long for his death—why hide it?—as must his wife, who had become his faithful nurse, as must all those who suffered in one way or another from the poor, dying man. What about the patient himself? He was said to be afraid of death; but his illness was so awful that it might have made him long for a final peace. All his life he had so feared this death that he forbade his closest relatives to speak of it in his presence. According to an ancient oriental belief, death does not take anyone who builds. Inspired by this, my grandfather built house after house as soon as his vast fortune, derived so suddenly from oil, permitted. By the time of his death, he had built more than sixty houses. He seemed to collect them, as other people collect snuffboxes or postage stamps. But superstition had lied: despite the last house being under construction, death had no compunction in coming to look for Grandfather Musa.
So, it was the first time I had seen the corpse of a relative—I looked at the body without love but with unbounded curiosity, coupled with fear. Grandfather had far more prestige to me dead than he had ever had in life. Where was he? In what other world, in what unimaginable void did he now think and live in the manner of the dead? I gazed in horror at the sheet covering the corpse; a large bulge indicated the location of his stomach, swollen by illness. His exposed face was not improved by death; he had a long, bony nose, hollow cheeks covered with a white beard, dotted with just a few dark hairs, evidence of an old colouring of henna. His sunken mouth turned inwards, seemingly drawn inside by a force still intact within his body. Then an obsession began to grip me, one so revolting that I find it hard to acknowledge—but I would like to get as close as possible to the truth: I wondered, with shudders of revulsion running through my body, what that mouth might smell like. It pursued me for months, poisoning my dreams with its imaginary breath. I felt like a monster and was disgusted at myself. The obsession eased very gradually until it eventually disappeared. I returned to it today, of my own choosing, following the guiding thread of memory.
After the corpse had been washed, it was placed on a litter in the middle of the large room, according to Muslim tradition, and covered in a cashmere shawl. Prayers were said over the corpse. A string of mullahs succeeded one another in the room, which did not empty for two days. Women were not admitted; veiled in black, they sat on the floor in other rooms, reciting the Koran and weeping. I wept with them, not out of grief for my deceased grandfather, but carried along by their emotion and, especially, out of bitter regret that I was there and not in Paris with my sisters.
The funeral was impressive. A dense crowd, stretching farther than the eye could see, surrounded the litter, which rocked the body, now like that of a child, small and defenceless. Only the men, heads covered with a fez or an astrakhan hat, followed the litter.
For a week chicken pilaff was given out to all comers: hundreds of poor people came to mourn the dead man and afterwards to eat their fill from the enormous copper cauldrons, used to cook the meat and rice. Then everything returned to normal, and talk began about the deceased’s legacy. His immense fortune was to be shared among his four granddaughters and his wife. I wasn’t terribly interested in this fortune, as it seemed unreal to me, and in this I was not wrong: I was never to take possession of it; it was never to enslave me.
The Red Army’s reconquest of Azerbaijan returned us to the bosom of the Russian Empire, which in the meantime had become Soviet. Capitalism was dead; we possessed nothing now.
My father, the family, the whole city were stupefied as they struggled to grasp that everything had finished—or rather that everything was just beginning. The naive dreamers of a Pax Azerbaijani, of a great, future Muslim empire, mourned their foolhardy visions; those who loved their wealth lived in fear and trepidation. Believing they were millionaires by divine right, they called upon Divine Mercy to ensure the preservation of their fortune. But to the outrage of the believers, Divine Mercy seemed to have abandoned them and joined their enemies. There were more Red soldiers in the city by the day; then came the commissars and spring blossomed with its buds and butterflies, committees of this and soviets of that. Spring had arrived, pristine and lovely, without a care for the affairs of man, transcending them in its eternal glory.
Despite the call of the glorious weather, my father went to ground, not daring to leave the house. His ministerial, tanned-leather portfolio lay abandoned in a drawer; there was no longer a parliament or parliamentarians, only poor men ignorant of their fate. During the two years of this rickety republic on the margins of Russia, the whole of Baku had repeated complacently, ‘We are independent. It was declared in Geneva. They would never dare to come here. And we are armed, while they are exhausted by the war and civil unrest.’
My father was devastated, almost prostrate. He constantly ground his teeth, and I could imagine the dialogue going through his mind, the reproaches he made to himself: he had not left Baku in time; he had not transferred money abroad; he had got caught up in his ministerial functions, which, in the light of what followed, seemed derisory. The tan portfolio was empty now and sentries no longer guarded his residence. My father paid dearly for his blindness.
Life dragged on for a time, as we waited for something decisive to happen. Then, one morning, my father was arrested; minister, rich man and president of a reactionary party, he had no hope of escaping the vigilance of the new masters.
The next day a commission came to inspect our house and the inspection concluded, not without reason, that we did not need so many rooms for so few people. The same day, a commissar, accompanied by his wife and members of staff, moved in with us.
Our first contact with the world of the revolution was cordial. The commissar’s wife, a petite blonde with a snub nose, often invited us, that is to say Leyla and me, to take tea with her; it was served in our finest tea service (she denied us nothing) and accompanied by literary conversation. She was a passionate reader and though she usually discussed only books with suggestive covers promising the heights of intellectual pleasure, and tragic titles, such as A
Captive Heart or A Secret in the Night, the intention was none the less good and a sign of a curious, romantic spirit.
Aunt Rena, who still lived on the top floor of the house, and Fräulein Anna were incensed that Leyla and I should accept ‘that woman’s’ invitations. On the one hand, though, we thought it politic to do so, and on the other we were burning with curiosity to know more about this unfamiliar world. Perhaps you are surprised that a child should be invited to join adults for tea. I was neither mentally nor physically a child, despite my age. I looked like a young woman and spoke like one too, and I could certainly keep up conversation with the wife of the commissar. I already had more extensive literary baggage than she did. My evenings at Aunt Rena’s devouring all the books in the library had not been in vain. So we spoke about literature and quizzed one another about our respective worlds, especially when the commissar husband joined us. A curious man, with a very agile mind, he wanted to understand this strange life that we led: half-Islamic, half-Western. He hated all religions, holding them responsible for most of humanity’s misfortunes (the revolutionary slogan ‘Religion is the opium of the people’ is well known). He wanted to convince us of it, and sometimes succeeded, but as soon as we had left, our atavism would regain its hold on us.
These instructive tea parties did not last long. Summer was coming and my father, from whom we received regular letters during his incarceration, wanted his mother and his daughters well away from the city, in the country, which seemed to him a refuge from the social vicissitudes. We could not see him nor be any use to him staying in town, so we obeyed him.
In summer Baku is the most desperately stifling, dusty city, and we always felt the call of the countryside in spring. Moreover, too many people were being arrested; people were afraid—afraid for their worldly goods, afraid for their lives. We were in a hurry to leave the city and be reunited with the pools and trees.