Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

On this great Gromboolian plain was a village of steep-roofed bungalows. Some of the bungalows had a graceful roofline, the curvature with a hint of Asia in the pitch. The landscape looked unfinished, like an Edward Lear watercolor—no trees, no people, the usual sheep, a few sketched-in paths, and I was reminded that I had not seen a tourist or a green leaf or any sunshine since leaving Paris.

Crossing the middle of this plain was a pipeline, like a snake or an above-ground sewer pipe. It was of course oil, the basis of Azerbaijan's wealth. In front of and behind the oil pipeline were more houses with those curved roofs, and muddy roads, and from the way the old women were dressed, in smocks and high boots, the way the shepherds stood like sentinels in the fields, I realized that I was in a different place altogether, not just the whiff of Asia in the appearance of things but a part of Asia I had never seen before, the on-ramp to the Silk Road.

In all this antiquity, an enormous floodlit oil depot gleamed on the plain, with flames whipping from tall chimneys, like a city of steel and fire.

Weather-beaten one-story settlements gave onto more solid ones of two and three stories, and towards noon a metropolis loomed in the distance, the city of Baku, the whole place floating on oil. After the bleak plains, the huddled settlements, the muddy villages, and the muddier shepherds—the boomtown. Baku was sited on a wide bay of the Caspian Sea, at the tip of a hawk-nosed peninsula, and believed by many of its inhabitants to be the dividing line between Europe and Asia. This belief was dramatized in the great Azerbaijani novel Ali and Nino, in which I'd first read the name Baku, a book so persuasive in its detail and mysterious in its origins it made me want to go there. By "mysterious in its origins" I mean that its author, a Muslim named Kurban Said, was a man who had also used the Turkish name Essad Bey, and had been born a Jew in Baku, named Lev Nussimbaum.

No tourists stood in the train corridor gazing at the well-built suburbs of the capital, the look of prosperity increasing as we got nearer the station. All the passengers were Azeris—we'd picked them up at Ganca and Yevlax and Ucar and Kurdemir, and they seemed dazzled by the big city.

Baku doesn't need tourists. It is a wealthy place. The economy had grown 25 percent the previous year, 2005, and was doing better this year—the fastest-growing economy in the world, exclusively from oil revenues. At the turn of the twentieth century, Azerbaijani oil was gushing from onshore wells, but now it is found mainly offshore, in the Caspian Sea, so that deep-water oil-rig specialists had to be brought in from Brit ain and the United States. These foreign oil workers swarm the bars, fill the hotels, and get into drunken brawls—exactly as I had seen in Iran in the early seventies, during its oil boom, which had produced xenophobia, notions of jihad, and the Ayatollah Khomeini.

"Azerbaijan is a police state," a Western diplomat said to me not long after I arrived. "TV is controlled. Print media is somewhat free, but an opposition editor was gunned down last year."

We were strolling through a plaza where some people were playing music. The spectators were surrounded by heavily armed police. The diplomat said, "Wherever there's more than ten Azeris gathered you find a big police presence. This festival brings out the heavies."

***

TWO OF THE MOST APPALLING words a newly arriving traveler can hear are "national holiday." They send my heart into my boots. My train had stopped in Baku on the first day of spring, and this vernal equinox was celebrated by a festival called Novruz Bayram. Novruz

—Farsi for "new day." Everything was closed, every shop shut, every market empty, the whole city, its harbor, its high road and back alleys; and I, who never planned ahead, had trouble finding a hotel room because all of Azerbaijan was enjoying a three-day holiday of general idleness and government-sanctioned frivolity. Nothing happened during the long festival of Novruz Bayram.

It is sometimes falsely stated that militant Islam had destroyed or displaced all the ancient pieties and rituals in the countries where it took hold, outlawing even the memory of these pieties. But Novruz Bayram was proof that some old rituals persisted, in spite of being heresies.

Rooted in Zoroastrianism, a creed much older than Islam and more than a thousand years older than Christianity, Novruz Bayram is a festival of renewal, a time for buying new clothes, dusting the furniture, scrubbing the floors, planting flowers, and being happy for the onset of warmer and longer days, overcoming the chill and darkness of winter.