Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

This fiercely mustached man, who was a civil servant on a holiday stroll, said he was well disposed towards Americans. He was aggrieved about the Armenians, who in the 1990s had captured the Azeri province of Nagorno-Karabakh, killing 20,000 Azeris and displacing a million more. The province is home to 100,000 or so ethnic Armenians. The UN Security Council had demanded the Armenian withdrawal in 1993, but the secessionists refused to comply. They were supported by many American politicians, whose efforts were greased by the Armenian lobby in the United States, which, like the Greek lobby, is small but wealthy and well organized. More than a hundred congressmen belong to the Armenian caucus. Until recently we had no embassy in Baku, and these days our relations with the country are poor. This is a pity, and shortsighted, since Armenia has carpets but Azerbaijan has oil.

Still, Ahmat said he felt friendly towards the United States and knew some American and English oil workers. Armenia was a problem, and so was Iran, he said.

From where we stood in Baku, the Iranian border was only about one hundred miles to the southwest. Ahmat said the Iranians were, in their way, a bigger problem than the Armenians, who didn't have much of an army. Culturally, Azerbaijan had little in common with Iran—much more with Turkey. Turkish and Azeri are almost the same language, and there was a move afoot to build a pipeline from Baku to Turkey, via Georgia. This would bypass Armenia and Iran.

In my quest to find a ferry, I met a voluble Azeri named Rashad, a man of about thirty, who said he would try to get me the ferry schedule.

"I like Bush!" he said when I told him where I was from. He began to laugh defiantly. "I don't care about Iraq. Maybe it's good for those Iraqis," he said, meaning the war. "Maybe Bush gave them a chance. We have some soldiers there."

I learned later that about 150 Azeri soldiers were stationed in Iraq, protecting a strategic dam.

"It's turning into a civil war," I said.

"Because they're Shiites and Sunnis. But Bush! What I like is his talk about Iran—maybe a war!"

The American president had made ambiguous threats against Iran for developing a nuclear capability, although Pakistan, Israel, India, and Russia—to choose a few neighbors at random—had the bomb.

"I want him to invade and destroy them," Rashad said. "Get rid of Ahmadinejad [the president of Iran] and make a lot of trouble."

"You want America to do that?"

"We'll help. It's good for Azerbaijan. It's good for me. We will join NATO!"

He was smiling and punching the air.

"So Iran is your enemy."

"Armenia is worse. Nagorno-Karabakh is the problem. They make Azeris into refugees—and it's our country. In football, Armenia is our enemy. In life, too."

***

I HAD COME TO AZERBAIJAN because I couldn't get a visa to go by train from Turkey to Iran, as I had done before. But although it had been forced on me, this northerly detour was welcome because it allowed me to visit the setting of Ali and Nino. When I mentioned this to an American I met in Baku, he said, "You have to meet Fuad Akhundov. He's done a study of all the places in Baku mentioned in the novel."

The topography of literature, the fact in fiction, is one of my pleasures—I mean, where the living road enters the pages of a book, and you are able to stroll along both the real and the imagined road. A walking tour called something like "Literary Landmarks" is not everyone's idea of fun, but it is mine, for the way it shows how imagination and landscape combine to become art: the Dublin pubs and streets mentioned in Ulysses, the railway in Anna Karenina, the towns on the Mississippi that are important in Huckleberry Finn, the marsh in Great Expectations, the Cairo streets that crisscross Palace Walk, the London of The Secret Agent,

the Congo of Heart of Darkness, the Paris of Tropic of Capricorn, the Chicago of Augie March, and—as I rehearsed earlier—Pamuk's cradle place of Istanbul.

So I was happy to meet Fuad Akhundov at the appointed spot, the main door of the Baku Philharmonic Society, built around 1910 by an Armenian architect to house the City Club, and mentioned in Ali and Nino as a casino. Because of Azeri wealth and Bakuvian pride, buildings like this one had been preserved and meticulously renovated over the past ten years.

"I am Bakuvian, born and bred. This is my city! Like Ali and Nino!"