Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"This city was built by money, greed, and oil," Fuad said. "In 1901, half of the world's oil came from Azerbaijan. Look at this picture." He flourished a page from the bulging album he carried. "The first oil tanker in the world, the Zoroaster. Built by Alfred Nobel in 1880—loaded in Baku, offloaded in Astrakhan."

Walking along the city wall that divided Europe from Asia, the new city from the old—the old one twenty-two hectares, the same size it had always been—I was thinking of Fuad's enthusiasm for his city, his national pride, his love for a novel that he said meant everything to him. "There is no other book in Azeri like Ali and Nino." He was waving it. "Not just because—yes!—it tells how Chaliapin visits Baku to sing, and Chaliapin really did come to Baku. But look at this mansion."

We were in Sabir Square, beside the Muslim Charitable Society, a villa modeled after a Venetian mansion. The building, Fuad said, had been substantially destroyed in March 1918 in an Armenian uprising, when Armenians killed thirty thousand Azeris (Armenian sources claim half that number). Built by one Musa Nagi, a wealthy man of the Baha'i faith, it had been rebuilt in the 1920s.

"Now we turn to chapter sixteen. Here is Musa Nagi," Fuad said and began vigorously to read from the book.

I hate being read to. I hate the pauses. I hate the stammers and mispronunciations. Most of all I hate the slowness of it. I can read quickly and efficiently, and cannot stand someone taking charge and denying me the pleasure of reading the damned thing myself.

"Let me see that," I said. "Please."

"No, no, this is the best part!" Fuad said and snatched the book away.

And then he started to declaim it. I hated that, too.

"'I am an old man,'" he read, stabbing his finger at the page. "'And I am sad to see what I see, and to hear what I hear. The Russians are killing the Turks, the Turks are killing the Armenians, the Armenians would like to kill us, and we the Russians..."He continued, reading very loudly and gesticulating, and when he saw my attention wandering, he stood in front of me and shouted, "'Our soul strives to go to God. But each nation believes they have a God all to themselves, and he is the one and only God. But I believe it is the same God who made himself known through the voices of all the sages. Therefore I worship Christ and Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed. We all come from one God, and through Bab we shall all return to him. Men should be told there is no Black and White, for Black is White and White is Black. "

"How true," I said, hoping he'd stop.

But he wasn't finished: "'So my advice is this. Let us not do anything that might hurt anybody anywhere in the world, for we are part of each soul, and each soul is part of us. "

Fuad squeezed the book shut.

"Now I want you to look at the building again. You see how beautiful the façade. And there is Musa Nagi, the Baha'ist."

Carved in the stone façade of the building was Musa Nagi's benevolent face.

Fuad's arms were crossed and he was reciting again, this time a poem:

Every epoch has its face,

Every epoch leaves its trace;

Sometimes it is full of disgrace,

And not just in this particular case.

"I wrote that myself," Fuad said.

We continued through the square, which was named for Mirzah Sabir, a national hero who died in 1911. A statue of Sabir in the middle of the square depicted the man seated. It was, Fuad said, a visual euphemism, because "getting him to sit" was a Russian expression for imprisoning someone, and Sabir, a writer and satirist, had been imprisoned.

"He derided mullahs," Fuad said. "Mirzah Sabir said, 'I'm not afraid of a place of gods and devils. I'm afraid of a place with mullahs.'"

We strolled in the old city and Fuad showed me Ali's house, just as it had been described in chapter one.

"You see the second floor? Ali's room! Where he looks out and sees"

— now he read from the novel—"'the Maiden's Tower, surrounded by legends and tourist guides. And behind the tower the sea began, the utterly faceless, leaden, unfathomable Caspian Sea, and beyond, the desert — jagged rocks and scrub: still, mute, unconquerable, the most beautiful landscape in the world.'"

He was moved by his own performance.

"Do you agree with Ali?" I asked.

"What about?"

"The sea. The desert. The most beautiful landscape in the world."

"Yes, of course," he said.

I heard an unstated but in his delivery. I said, "But—"

"But I'm going to Canada," Fuad said.

After all this nationalistic fervor and literary history, the civic pride, the declaiming, the quoting, the extolling of statues and mansions, the florid poems, his blazing eyes, his gestures, his red fez, he was bailing out.

"This government is making a mess," he said, putting Ali and Nino into his briefcase. "Tearing down lovely buildings and putting up shit. So I want to leave."

"But this is a wealthy country, and you have an important job at Interpol," I said.