by Banine
He would take up his refrain: ‘So you will leave, of course, but what will become of me? When will your father come? And will he send me any money? We need it for your journey, never mind anything else.’
These remarks would annoy me, especially made in the grating voice I had heard too often.
‘You’re getting on my nerves!’ I would reply callously.
Then he would begin to cry. He would be too upset to eat his sardines and I would polish them off, bones, skin and all.
A week before my departure we received some money from my father. It wasn’t a large sum but enough to pay our most pressing debts, buy my ticket for France and leave some for Jamil’s poker. For two evenings the gods of the card tables smiled on him and he won. So we went back to the best restaurants and resumed our evenings at the Black Rose.
Encouraged by our temporary wealth and a stunning sky, I decided to make some final excursions to Prinkipo, Therapia and other classic pilgrimage sites.
But what moved me most were the cemeteries around Constantinople, with their tall, straight cypresses and their tall, straight gravestones. That was where I felt most Muslim: in a place dedicated to peace I do not like crosses, rich, overblown mausoleums and flowers. I like simplicity in death—I like the ascetic appearance of a Muslim cemetery. The last one that I visited in an Islamic land was located on a hill overlooking the Bosphorus. The beauty of the sky, the place, the sea merged to create a vast, perfect loveliness—a source of suffering more than pleasure, but a strange kind of suffering with joy welling up beneath it. An initial sense of the transience of beauty gives way to an awareness of perfection as an eternal quality, an unchanging constant.
Beneath the cypresses the air vibrated in the early heat. This familiar cemetery gave off no air of melancholy, just the impression of peaceful sleep. It slept with its pointed stelae, sometimes crowned with a stone turban; only the cypresses kept watch. Here death seemed merciful, the gentle mother of the living. On the other side of the Bosphorus, I could see Asian Turkey; farther to the east I imagined Ankara, where Andrey should be. The happiness I felt changed to nostalgia. I was aware that we possess only snatches of happiness—I am now convinced of it—and these snatches fall but rarely into our ever-outstretched hands.
Forgotten, the mosques and the streets and the people; Constantinople, you remain to me that enchanted hillside, covered in pointed stelae; you are the blue sky above the water and the cypresses; you are this carefree profusion of beauty, this calm reflection of paradise. Moments lived on this hillside, you will never leave me; you will die with me, suspended somewhere in my memory. And if, as I hope, all the beauty we reflect returns to eternity upon our death, you will even become immortal.
At last I held in my hands the passport covered in visas in a host of European languages. Two days later I went to the station, accompanied by Jamil. The Orient Express, all sleeping carriages, looked like a rich relative of the train I had taken from Baku. With all its lamps lit, it shone like a grand celebration amid the grey of the station.
I took my place in my compartment, helped by a very pale Jamil. Disconsolate and distraught, he asked me every two minutes if I would write to him.
‘Yes, of course,’ I replied in good faith.
‘And you won’t forget me?’
‘Of course I won’t, of course I won’t,’ I reassured him, also in good faith.
But he must have had a premonition of a permanent separation; he embraced me, his expression at once fearful, respectful and imploring.
‘I feel that I’m about to lose you,’ he said, sitting down on the couchette and bursting into tears.
What could I do? What should I do? I reassured him that that was not the case; I talked to him about the future as though we would share it, consoling him as best I could. Jamil calmed down a little then. One minute before departure he left the carriage. As I looked at him above the door curtain, that minute was longer than eternity. I too wanted to cry, but for joy at leaving this man with whom I had been united against my will by the malice of fate, both of us victims of dramatic circumstance. The train moved off. Jamil walked next to my window for several metres; then, when the train gathered speed, he wanted to run, but the platform was too crowded and he had to stop.
The last words I heard in his grating voice were: ‘You will write to me, won’t you? You won’t forget me?’
The train gathered speed and the crowd became a shapeless mass in which I could no longer make out Jamil. I sat on the couchette and cried too. I held in my hands a great piece of happiness; I clasped it against my heart, offering my fervent gratitude to God, who had given it to me without my deserving it. I spent the whole night sitting at the open window. I could not bring myself to go to bed, let alone go to sleep. The night was dark and balmy. We crossed mysterious lands that did not appear on ordinary maps; there lived knights and dragons, mermaids and goblins. But whatever they were, they all sang and the train plunged into their song, breaking it up and scattering it far and wide, where it reformed and returned to us. So we advanced from melody to melody, from fabled land to fabled land, until morning. When the sky grew pink in the east, I lay down for a moment, fully dressed, and fell asleep.
I soon woke up and found the same joy intact, solid, almost too heavy to bear. I straightened my veil (yes, even in the train I continued to wear the Turkish veil) and went to the restaurant car for breakfast. The moment I walked in, my joy vanished. I realized that I was alone and surrounded by strangers, men travelling on their own to boot, and I was terrorized by the thought. I must have been a comical sight, with my veil and my expression of a frightened savage let loose in a hostile universe. I thought everyone was looking at me, and they might well have been: my attitude must have seemed strange to all these civilized people. My consternation grew; I kept my eyes lowered as I drank my coffee in an agony of fear and confusion. Now I realized the danger to which I was exposed; if a man or men took it into their heads to rape me, they had only to come into my compartment, where I would be defenceless before their lust, at their mercy, there for the taking. Then I started to miss Jamil’s male presence, my protection against these hazards. I gulped down my scalding coffee and hurried back to my compartment, where I double-locked the door.
Mealtimes were torture for me. When I heard the bell, my heart would start pounding and I would delay leaving for the dining car until the very last minute. My compartment was my harem—I opened the door only to go and eat or to let the couchette be prepared for the night. That was when I was happy again. During the day we travelled through familiar countries, but at night we would wander in an unknown world, crossing nameless empires and mysterious kingdoms.
But utter exaltation, equal to anything I’d ever dreamt of, or experienced with Andrey, came at dawn on the fourth day on the approach to Paris. The warm air carried the fragrance of the fields. The meadows divided by lines of trees, the wooded hills, the lakes and rivers all awoke to daylight, suffused with pink from the rising sun. In the sky motionless clouds appeared to be awaiting sunrise before starting their journey. ‘Your life seems to be spent in the clouds,’ Andrey told me one day. Yes, that had been the best part of my life. Now, as I approached the wonderful city where endless possibilities awaited me, I sloughed off my earthly past like an uncomfortable garment. I came to my new life receptive, open to everything, bringing with me from that past only its finest part—that spent in the clouds.
Brief Summary of the History of Azerbaijan at the Start of the Twentieth Century
I was born at the very end of 1905, the year of the first (abortive) Russian revolution that followed the disastrous Russo-Japanese war. I was eight when war was declared in 1914, eleven in 1917, year of the oh-so-victorious October Revolution.
Still a child, I could hardly comprehend the course of events or piece together history. I thought I remembered that the Turks had occupied Baku at a time when they were not yet defeated, and that the English had succeeded them after the defeat of 19
18. Now, having consulted historians, I have drawn up the following timetable:
In May 1917, Azerbaijan, along with other neighbouring peoples, profited from the civil war in Russia to break away from the empire and declare itself independent. But Armenian revolutionaries—the Dashnaks—led by Stepan Shaumyan and supported by the Bolsheviks, seized the country for a short time.
It is during this short time that we fled to Persia to escape severe reprisals and potential massacres.
This is how a Soviet text presents the events of that period: ‘However, in the early summer of 1918, the situation of Soviet power in Baku worsened… The interventionist Germans and Turks longed to seize this oil-rich region. Russia, which at this time was itself waging a bitter struggle against the forces of intervention and internal counter-revolution, was unable to support the inhabitants of Baku. On 31st July 1918 communist power was temporarily overthrown. The city was first occupied by British troops, then Turkish ones.’
During this period of anti-communist reaction, twenty-six people’s commissars were shot. When the communists returned to power, they erected a monument to commemorate them. The bust of Stepan Shaumyan, ‘one of the leaders of the legendary Baku Commune’, stands atop a tall pillar in a Baku park.*
When the communists were defeated, we were able to return from exile to Baku, where the elections of 7th December 1918 handed victory to the social democrats, the Musavat Party, which was my father’s party. He was named minister of commerce.
On 5th January 1920, the government of Azerbaijan was recognized de facto, though not de jure, by the Allies. This recognition was short-lived, as the country was reconquered by the Red Army on 27th April the same year. I have written that I witnessed the end of a world, our capitalist world, when at night I saw lorries full of Red soldiers from the window of our house.
My father was imprisoned for around ten months. His only thought on release was to join his family in Paris—without me. In spring 1921, I entered a sort of prison—marriage with a man I hated. It was two months after my fifteenth birthday.
I in turn was able to emigrate in spring 1924, leaving for good my country, to which I no longer had any connection. It joined the Soviet republics. Since my family has remained famous in the annals of Azerbaijan, and since I am its last representative—or almost—the Soviets invited me to come to Baku. But I did not accept their invitation. I would be lying if I said that I do not regret it now.
Banine
Paris 1985
* Stepan Shaumyan’s monument in Baku was dismantled in 1990. [Translator’s note.]
Photographs of Banine and Her Family
Banine, probably before her first birthday
Banine’s mother (right) with two of her aunts
Banine’s father
Banine’s grandmother
Fräulein Anna
Banine (left) and her sisters
Poker at the country house
In the garden of the country house. Left to right: Banine’s father, Uncle Ibrahim, Amina and one of Banine’s sisters. The uniformed man in the background is unidentified.
Banine’s father (left), with his brother and nephew
Banine at 16
Banine’s husband, Jamil
Banine in Paris, 1931
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Original text © The Estate of Banine 2019
English translation © Anne Thompson-Ahmadova 2019
Days in the Caucasus was first published as Jours caucasiens in Paris, 1945
First published by Pushkin Press in 2019
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