Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

THE TRANS-CAUCASIAN

A RAILWAY TRAIN in an old country seems to go backward into the dark, simple, and primitive hinterland that is the remote past. But that is an illusion. The train only appears to be a cruel artifact, as it crawls out of the huge neglected station crowded with passengers and rolls like a loud antique, looming rust-stained and sticky with grease, its bunks and seats obscured by dirty windows, the whole thing shaking from the whirs of its clacking engine, spattering black oil onto the tracks as it makes its way on what seems a route into history. The train offers the truth of a place: horrible or savage as it may seem, the hinterland is also the present.

I always felt lucky on a train, as on this one. So many other travelers are hurrying to the airport, to be interrogated and frisked and their luggage searched for bombs. They would be better off on a national railway, probably the best way of getting a glimpse of how people actually live—the back yards, the barns, the hovels, the side roads and slums, the telling facts of village life, the misery that airplanes fly over. Yes, the train takes more time, and many trains are dirty, but so what? Delay and dirt are the realities of the most rewarding travel.

Why don't you take the plane? the Georgian had asked me.

Because—I thought when I was in the corner seat of my railway compartment—airplanes are a distortion of time and space. And you get frisked.

Like a Soviet relic, complete with dented samovars in the vestibule and a very grumpy provodnik, a conductor in a stained uniform jacket, the Azerbaijani train was like something that had rattled out of a bygone era. Even the platform at Tbilisi Station looked like a tableau from the distant past—old women squatting near big sacks of oranges and piled bags of dried fruit—from where? Azerbaijan, perhaps. Ragged children, old men in heavy boots sleeping against the sacks, young girls in long skirts holding babies. It was an unromantic view of peasantry, Giselle with scruffy costumes and no music. Many people I met in Georgia spoke of the modernity and promise of the country, even its alleged prosperity—"And we can fly to Paris in a few hours." But what I saw at Tbilisi Station could have been a scene from some dismal period in czarist times. I felt it was a kind of luck for me to witness this.

It so happened that the railway tracks followed one of the roads to the Tbilisi Airport. I could see a colorful billboard on the widest thoroughfare that read (in English) President George W. Bush Street, a sign the visiting president could have seen, and read, on his visit to Georgia the previous year. With a vocal Muslim country on every border, Georgia was a natural ally of Bush's so-called war on terror, though I did not meet any Georgian who agreed with American policy, except in a shortsighted and self-interested way.

The outskirts of Tbilisi were dilapidated: tall dreary tenements on narrow potholed lanes, and beyond them ramshackle houses, small archaic-looking compounds—interconnected huts with courtyards, animal pens, stockyards. Peasant huts dominated—Asiatic jerry-building, a world apart from Tbilisi's casinos and city slickers and ballet and the velvety ritual of the christening.

After a while, the grumpy conductor in his soup-stained jacket and dented cap shoved open my compartment door.

"Ticket?" I asked.

"Nyet, nyet" he said and pushed past me. He insisted on making my bed, and then—rubbing his fingers together in the money gesture—demanded 10 lari, about $5. This seemed steep, but when a big ugly man wearing a uniform in a foreign country asks for a small, specific sum, I usually hand it over.

The long-distance bus was the more popular way of going from Tbilisi to Baku. Not that many people took it: Georgia was westward-looking and Azerbaijan was to the east, at the edge of central Asia. But the bus was slower because the roads were so bad, and of course there were roadblocks, manned by soldiers. The train just rolled on, but the train was a revelation, the crummiest I'd been on so far. Nothing worked, neither the lights nor the locks. It was very grubby; it was an express yet it made lots of stops, the stations growing creepier and more ruinous.

Big shadowy Soviet-era apartment blocks stood in scrubby fields in the middle of nowhere. Compared to them, the huts and cottages farther on were a relief for having a human scale. Old people plodded along dirt roads, like trolls vanishing into the growing dusk, which seemed to rise from the ground like dense fog. This twilight partially obscured Rustavi, a down-at-heels industrial city of steel mills and ironworks that had become antiquated. All this time we were following the winding course of the Kura River, which flowed through Azerbaijan and emptied into the Caspian Sea.

In the darkness of my compartment, rattling across eastern Georgia, I was thinking how my routines of travel were totally different from the routines of my writing life. The predictable regularity of humdrum domesticity is perfect for writing: monotony is the writer's friend. People said to me, "You're always away!" But it wasn't true. I loved being home, waking in my own bed beside my wife, watching the news on TV, spending half the day writing, and then cooking, reading, swimming, riding my bike, seeing friends. Home is bliss.

This—the closed compartment on the old train to Azerbaijan—was something else. Travel means living among strangers, their characteristic stinks and sour perfumes, eating their food, listening to their dramas, enduring their opinions, often with no language in common, being always on the move towards an uncertain destination, creating an itinerary that is continually shifting, sleeping alone, inventing the trip, cobbling together a set of habits in order to stay sane and rational, finding ways to fill the day and be enlightened, avoiding danger, keeping out of trouble, and, immersed in the autobiographical, for my journal, writing everything down in order to remember, reflecting on where I am and what I'm doing.

Still being jogged in the dark compartment, I recalled the woman—where had I seen her? maybe Ankara?—who said, "I want to live your life."

And I had thought: Really! My nagged and scolded childhood, my undistinguished school career as a punk, no good at games, bewildered in college, terminated early from the Peace Corps, disgraced in Singapore when my contract wasn't renewed, hard up in London, refused a credit card by American Express at the age of thirty-two because I had no visi ble credit, divorced—oh, sorry, you mean all the books and the fun of travel!

A knock at the door: two soldiers with rifles slung at me. "Gid owp."

So I was interrupted in my reverie by gun-toting soldiers at the Georgia border, a gritty settlement called Jandari. They went through the motions of a passport check, perfunctory and simple; but the train was jammed full of people, and it was two hours before we started again.

The next stop came fifteen minutes later—the Azerbaijan border at Beakykok, with many more soldiers and an imposing railway station. The soldiers tramped through the train, scrutinizing passports. I was apprehensive because my visa specified "Entry point—Baku." I was more than three hundred miles from there, but this didn't seem to matter to the soldier who licked his thumb and paged through my passport. He took no interest in my bag or its contents, but he admired my shortwave radio, tuned to the BBC. Fears of a civil war in Iraq are being expressed by officials at the highest levels, a woman was saying on the news.

After midnight we were rolling again. I woke in the darkness, urgently, to use the john but could not budge my door. It seemed I was locked in. The compartment was very hot and the train was moving fast, throwing me back and forth. It was too dark for me to see whether the lock was jammed. For five or ten minutes I struggled with the door in a cramped and growing panic—something I seldom feel. The light didn't work, but I dug out my BlackBerry and switched it on. No reception, but it proved a helpful flashlight illuminating my problem. At last, braced against the berth and kicking at the door, I managed to open it. The corridor was thick with Azerbaijanis gaping out the window at shadowy Tovuz, in the western province, and some of them were staring at me, presumably because they'd heard me kicking the door, or maybe it was my odd-shaped flashlight. The toilet was unspeakable.

At dawn, nine hours past the border, I saw great flat plains with muddy patches, looking overgrazed by the flocks of nibbling sheep—hundreds of them, a clear indication of mutton stews and shish kebabs farther down the line. The whole of the foreground was cropped flat, and in the distance were bare blue mountains.

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.

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."

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 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.

"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.

"My son is six. I don't want to bring up my child in an atmosphere of hostility. I want him to have more chances."

"What's the problem here?"

"Everything—the Russians mostly."

Russia was behind all the secessionist movements, all the embattled and besieged breakaway republics, from Abkhazia and South Ossetia to Dagestan and Nagorno-Karabakh. When I asked what sense it made for the Russians to foment nationalist movements in these places, he said that of course there was no sense in it. It was perverse political malignity to make life miserable for Georgians and Azeris.

"No, no," he said when I wanted to pursue this. "Listen to my poem." And he recited again from memory:

Baku is the place

Where every stone

Has a story of its own.

He crooked an admonitory finger in the air, sweeping the red fez off his head. His voice broke slightly as he finished:

And the stories could be magic

Should they not end up so tragic.

"'Let's go to Fillifpojanz,'" Fuad said. He was quoting the novel again, because the site of the Fillifpojanz coffee house still existed, a bulky white-painted building on Barjatinsky Street, and was being restored.

To get there, we passed the signs of Azerbaijan's prosperity: casinos and bars, shops selling luxury goods, and Internet cafés where shaggy youths were using video-mounted computers to speak with women—wives and girlfriends. The good times were reflected in the Azeris themselves, well dressed and busy, greeting the spring on this long sunny holiday. Fuad had other plans. He wasn't very interested in describing Fillifpojanz and was looking beyond Ali and Nino now. Having divulged his plan to emigrate, he spoke of how happy he'd be, how hard he'd work, when he got to Canada.