Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

  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.

  The prophet Zarathustra, who gave his name to Zoroastrianism, flourished and was persecuted perhaps 3,500 years ago in what is now Iran and Afghanistan. So Novruz Bayram is one of the oldest holidays on earth, and it has always had celebrants. Zarathustra preached monotheism, advocated the equality of women, scoffed at the notion of priests (because they were middlemen, easily corruptible), railed against animal sacrifice, evangelism, and miracle-working. He denounced using the name of God to barter for power. He extolled the virtues of light and especially of fire. Novruz Bayram is a festival of springtime and sunshine.

  The humane aspects of Zoroastrianism probably accounted for its diminution as a faith, if not its failure. A religion needs harshness and hokum to succeed, and all Zarathustra taught was understanding the earthly elements, the turn of the year, the one God. And three simple rules to live by: good thoughts, good words, good deeds. Also a belief in the purifying nature of ire, which was central to the faith and a symbol of the Almighty.

  "The Persian word for fire is azer" Tom Reiss wrote in The Orientalist, a book about Kurban Said, "and since ancient times Azerbaijan's abundance of oil and natural gas, which led whole hillsides to naturally explode into flame, made it the center of Zoroastrianism."

  That was a few thousand years ago. Now only about 124,000 Zoroastrians remain—most of them in India, notably Bombay, where they're known as Parsis. They are a dying breed, the last gasp of an ancient belief system. Novruz Bayram is not celebrated throughout central Asia—indeed, it is condemned in some Muslim countries as pagan—but vigorous celebrations in Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan make it one of the highlights of the year. Its old origins have been forgotten. It is an excuse to stop working, a respite from political strife, a few days of good feeling. I could see Azeris wearing their new clothes and going for promenades and eating the food associated with the festival, especially malt (samani) and eggs, because they represented fertility.

  Most restaurants were open and, along with the malt and eggs, were serving other Azeri food: mutton pies, mutton wrapped in spinach, mutton kebabs, mutton balls, potato cakes, noodles, and big stodgy desserts. Although businesses were shut, there was more street life, more vitality in the city because of the festival. Groups of musicians played to crowds of people in plazas and on the Caspian seafront—and at each gathering there was a large police presence.

  In bars and cafés, people—usually young women, usually presentable, sometimes flirtatious—asked, "What is your company?" because an American my age in Baku was probably in the oil business. Why else would I be in Baku?

  "Just passing through," I would say. "To Turkmenistan."

  "They have gas."

  Baku got friskier at night, because the oilmen were typically roisterers, and I was assured that after midnight the roistering turned to debauchery, but I was asleep by that time.

  Here on the shore of the Caspian Sea I wanted to find a ferry to take me to Turkmenbashi (formerly Krasnovodsk), on the western edge of Turkmenistan. From there by train via (so my map said) Nebitdag, Gumdag, and Gyzylarbat to Ashgabat, the capital, reputed to be one of the oddest places on earth because of the demented predilections of the current dictator, Saparmyrat Niyazov, who styled himself Turkmenbashi and renamed the port town after himself. I was eager to visit his country and ride the train through its deserts, eastward, and into Uzbekistan.

  But first I had to find a ferry. Because of the holiday, the ferry port was closed. The travel agencies were shut. No one in Baku had any information about the ferry, and when I went to the port and found a dockworker, he said the ferry had no schedule.

  "When it's full, the ferry leaves for Krasnovodsk," he said in Azeri, and this was translated by an English-speaking passerby, whose name was Ahmat.

  "So I have to wait until it's full?"

  "Yes. And maybe a long wait!"

  "Why is that?"

  "No one wants to go to Krasnovodsk."

  I said, "I want to go."

&n
bsp; He muttered something and walked away.

  "What did he say?"

  "'Must be something wrong with you.' He's joking." Ahmat peered at me. "You are from?"

  "America."

  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!"

  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 dust
y 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.

  "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.