1001 Nights Cast

Whoever would have guessed that what was once considered such a small skill should have ultimately provided me with a livelihood here at the other end of the earth? When I was a small child at home in Baku, I would cry when my father sang. He thought it was because of the loudness of his bass voice, but my mother realised after a time that it was because he sang consistently flat. When I was a little older, I would tell the blind piano tuner who maintained our instrument when the key he was striking had reached its true pitch. The old man would laugh, and tell my mother that he would be happy to take me on as his apprentice.

But my parents had other ideas for me. Wealthy silk merchants, they were able to send me away to Paris to be educated. To my parents’ surprise, I became a civil servant, and was well placed within the bureaucracy when my country wrested back its independence. My education and fluency in French gave me the skills for diplomatic work, and for the two short years that were the lifespan of the Independent Republic of Azerbaijan, I was suddenly a man of influence.

My father used to say that my country was like the nipple of a woman’s breast, curving outwards into the warm waters of the Caspian Sea. He would wave his hand at the huge bowl of melons and figs, grapes and pomegranates that my mother would arrange on our table after meals and pronounce our country a Garden of Eden. When the Bolsheviks invaded us in 1920, I should not have been surprised—our position on the map has determined that, throughout our long history, we have been the possession of one or another major empire. But I was surprised, and outraged with all of the fury that a young passionate man can feel when, for the first time, he sees his most cherished political ideals dashed.

My parents used their last bit of influence and money to help me to escape to Switzerland. There, in Geneva, surrounded by a handful of other émigrés, I set up our government in exile. I had hoped that the League of Nations might take up our cause, but as those hopes faded, so too did the Independent Republic of Azerbaijan. We were ghostly ambassadors for a state that had ceased to exist, and for too many years I haunted the periphery of Geneva’s diplomatic and political circles, becoming increasingly invisible as time went by. At first I was buoyed up by my mission, and by the thought that I would return home to help re-establish our independence. By the time I realised that it was too late for my country, it was also too late for me. The events of the second War sealed us up in Switzerland for five long years, and when it was over, I had lost all belief in politics and my sole desire was to be somewhere as far away from Europe as I could be.

I am not the only person to have wished for that, I know. But now, having arrived here, those who wished for this oblivion complain about how raw and provincial this place is, how it is a place totally without culture. Having wanted to leave their homes, these people cannot forgive this country for not being Warsaw, or Budapest or Amsterdam. This city embodies everything that bothers my émigré acquaintances. Its streets are raw and new, as yet unsoftened by trees and gardens. There are stretches of uncultivated ground between its few public buildings; they call them ‘paddocks’ here, and on some I have even seen sheep grazing. Nothing is finished here, not even my name: unable to get their tongues around it, the people shorten it, and I am known everywhere as ‘Mr H.’

I say I am known everywhere, but I should qualify that: I am known everywhere in this city where there is a piano. That is, in truth, not very many places, but enough to make a modest living. I have tuned the instruments of most of the prosperous families who live here. I admit it is sometimes heartbreaking to encounter a fine Bechstein that has never been taxed by anything more complex than a medley of popular songs. In the city’s only concert hall, the janitor told me that Artur Rubinstein had once stalked off the stage in mid-concert in a fury, refusing to play the jangling old wreck I was now trying to coax into some semblance of tunefulness. And yet there is something about this city’s narrow provincial-ness that I find touching: it is full of a kind of egalitarian good-heartedness. The husbands greet me with gruff good humour, and their wives ply me with cups of tea and biscuits, and then more cake as I work.

Here at the bottom of the world, there are bigger and older cities with many more pianos than this one, cities where I could earn a much more comfortable living. And yet I stay here, and since you ask, it is precisely because of the newness of this place that I remain. In its unfinished streets I see a mirror reversal of all the ruined cities I have seen—my beautiful Baku, Warsaw, Berlin, mired in the ashes of all of our lost hopes. Here, though, the city’s incompleteness is about beginnings, not endings. On its maps, the ghosts of new suburbs are traced in white, and every vacant block of land is marked with signs identifying it as a ‘proposed site’ for some new building. Such dreams come too late for me, and if at night I dream of Quba, my mother’s birthplace, with its streets of carpet sellers and its orchards heavy with apple blossom, during the day I am content enough to tread the future streets of this city, and let its hopes and dreams wash about me.