Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

Fuad wore, for effect, a red fez with a swinging gold tassel. He was tall, demonstrative, passionate, and funny, given to the sudden oration, the startling declaration, the recitation of a rhyming poem, usually one of his own, often in archaic English. Under one arm he carried a plump picture album with an enormous archive of old photos of Baku that he'd found around the city. He was thirty-eight, and his day job was as a senior inspector for Interpol's National Central Bureau in Azerbaijan— good qualifications for a man in search of the truth behind the novel. He had also guided Tom Reiss in his pursuit of the real Lev Nussimbaum. As for Interpol business, smuggling was the problem—drugs, money, people. Fuad Akhundov was effusively talkative, and like most talkers, he rarely listened.

How talkative a nonlistener was he? Well, the edition of Ali and Nino that he carried—a book he'd become obsessed by because it had explained his city, his culture, his past, his own nature; a book that he had read and underlined, with page markers and exclamation points—this book he had in his hand contained an appreciative essay by me, which I'd written four or five years earlier. I thought it would interest him that I was the same man as the one whose name was printed with Kurban Said's on the book: With a new afterword by Paul Theroux.

"That's me," I said, touching my name.

"I want to show you something," he said, deaf to my remark, whipping the book away and stabbing his finger at a dog-eared page.

He began to read: "'It was a big dusty garden with spare sad-looking trees and asphalt paths. On the right was the old fortress wall. In the center stood the City Club. " Fuad stood taller, waved his arms, became a manic weathervane, swinging his body around to point in four directions: "The garden, there! The trees! The fortress wall! The City Club before us!"

I did not mention my name again. I hardly spoke, because Fuad was in full cry.

"Baku is not a melting pot—it never was," he said. "But we lived together. There was no Jewish ghetto, as in some places. The Jews lived beyond the Pale of Settlement, about five percent of the population. They tended to be renters, not owners of real estate. Azeris owned the houses. So after the Soviets took over, the Jews moved on."

I said, "Nussimbaum was Jewish, but there are no Jews in the book."

"Because it's a love story between East and West! Ali and Nino. Jews were lawyers and doctors. They occupied a totally different niche in Baku, not covered in this book. But we still have some Jews—in the town of Quba. Now look at this wall."

We had walked downhill from the white building that had been the City Club and through the garden to get a better look at the fortress-like wall that divided the new city, where we stood, from the old city, West from East, Ali from Nino. Fuad said that it had been built in the twelfth century by Manuchehr II.

"Georgians always looked down on us," Fuad was saying as we walked farther into the garden. "But we're closer because of shared problems."

"What about the Armenians?"

"Great friendship, great hostility with Armenians," he said. "But I believe there are no permanent enemies. Armenians became hostages of the past, and so they deprived themselves of the future. We're overwhelmed by emotions! Armenians don't make any distinctions between Turks and Azeris. Hey, it's all about 1915. When I was at Harvard—visiting scholar, wonderful experience—I met Armenians from Yerevan and had no problems. But Armenians from Watertown were very belligerent." Watertown, a streetcar suburb of Boston, was an Armenian enclave.

He hurried ahead, trotting past a low hedge to the centerpiece of a wintry garden of dusty ilex.

"Look at this sculpture." As he approached a large, mottled sculpted head, Fuad's cell phone began to ring. The ringing did not deter him from telling me that it was the head of the esteemed Azeri poet Vahid—"real name Iskanderov, 1899-1965." As he answered the phone, talking rapidly in Russian, he turned aside to translate the poem chiseled on the plinth from Azeri into English, "'By fate's unfairness—!'" and went on muttering in Russian.

Historically, Baku was full of proximities: mosque hard by church, Muslim adjacent to Christian, East near West, old next to new—as the book says, the old town in the new, like "a kernel in a nut." This persists into the present. The two schools mentioned in the novel still exist as schools, though no longer parochial ones. We walked up to the main road, Nikolayaskaya Street, towards the schools: Nino s, the Girls Lyceum of the Holy Queen Tamar, actually St. Nina's School; and Ali's school across the street, which was closed for the Novruz holiday. Nearby was the city hall and mayor's office, another seven-story pile of ornate stone, built around 1900.