by Banine
Under their protection and tipsy on rose water and buttermilk which we imbibed in unlikely quantities, Gulnar and I became daring too. Fräulein Anna was a long way away as no one had thought to invite her to this Islamic wedding; Grandmother, however, was there, but she still had a weak spot for us and restricted herself to throwing us a gentle ‘children of dogs’ or other unmentionable insult when our bad behaviour got too much. But even then we had only to plant a kiss on her permanently damp cheeks for our misdeeds to be forgotten. A smack for fun, a supposedly angry look, a few harsh words and it was over—we could start again.
There was lots of dancing at those weddings. All the women, except the very old or the very weak, showed off their moves to the accompaniment of oriental instruments and rhythmic clapping.
The gentlemen were even more spoilt. Professional singers and energetic dancers were invited. I hated the local singing, and when I saw a singer raise his hand to his cheek, a gesture that heralded a song, I was out of there in a flash. Brought up on Mozart and Bach, I loathed those strange songs, a sort of lament that continued indefinitely on two or three notes but seemed to fill the audience with rapture.
As for the dancers, they were always effeminate young men, and dancing was not their only weapon with which to charm the gentlemen. Pretty by and large, with plucked eyebrows and wasp waists, they would slay a roomful with one killer look. Render to men what is men’s!
I was starting to fall for one of these Adonises, whose sinuous grace seemed to me extraordinary, when Asad whispered in my ear in tones of utter contempt, ‘Yuck, that’s not a man, it’s a goetveren. When I’m older, I’ll…’.
‘Is it?’
I didn’t really understand, but pretended to know all about it.
‘Come on, a doll like that isn’t made to be a man. I’ll be an ushaqbas.’ This literally means ‘a lover of children’, while the word goetveren translates as ‘giver of one’s behind’.
The two sorts of pederasty—active and passive—flourished in Baku among men condemned to the company of their male peers. The former, more or less respected, was practised by almost all men, at least until their marriage, and considered to perform some kind of public service. The second, on the other hand, was practised only by young, effeminate boys for mercenary ends, and held in deep contempt. It was an insult to call a man a goetveren, but no one found fault with a respectable gentleman belonging to the brotherhood of the ushaqbas.
I haven’t introduced the groom yet: he was a handsome man, with a youthful appearance and dyed hair. Smartly turned out, he was admirably preserved by his marriages to young girls. Farida was to be his fourth wife.
Of course, the three other wives attended the wedding. They sat near their young rival, casting her solicitous glances from time to time; they were the only people present who appeared to show the least interest in her, prompted by the solidarity of fellow spouses.
It was obvious from looking at the old young groom that the marriage would be consummated in the proper fashion with no hesitation on the groom’s part. His attractive demeanour boded well, so I don’t think it occurred to anyone to pity his future wife. In fact, the wedding night went admirably, according to the rule book. Farida was taken to her husband’s house in a carriage, escorted by horsemen who fired rifle shots into the air in honour of the newly weds. Deposited into the hands of wise women, Farida was undressed and prepared for the wedding night. This done, it was time for the groom to demonstrate his savoir faire. While the youthful sexagenarian was doing his job as young groom, a woman waited in the neighbouring room. What was the eavesdropper waiting for? The prime exhibit—a sheet with the marks confirming the young girl’s virginity. Her parents were waiting anxiously to see it—only then could they give a sigh of relief and glorify Allah. If not, everything would be ruined: cheated over the merchandise, the husband might return his bride to her parents, covering her in shame and dishonour. But to general satisfaction Farida proved herself to be immaculate. You might think I was too young to keep up with it all; indeed, had I been the young girl Fräulein Anna imagined me to be, I wouldn’t have understood. But make no mistake—that would be to forget both oriental precocity and the lessons of my cousins, who already knew everything about sex. If they were not yet having it, it was only for lack of opportunity, not knowledge.
Though having only just developed, they tried hard to be men. I didn’t know until later about their activities in this regard, when a playmate chose to confide in me.
Tamara was a product of two enemy races—Armenian and Turkish. Her father was somehow related to the family, while her Armenian mother had converted to Islam to please her husband. An only daughter, spoilt by her parents and taken good care of by a German governess, Tamara should have had a carefree childhood. But Allah decided otherwise when he sent her to us. Her father bought a property not far from ours and her governess became friends with Fräulein Anna; her age meant she was destined to be our playmate. It was more than enough to make Tamara our regular visitor.
She was the prettiest girl in the world, with beautiful almond eyes, a straight nose, clean, firm lips and long silky tresses. When we happened to stop tormenting her, she would immediately start to smile and show affection to the whole world; she was as gentle as she was beautiful. Such a successful product of the two races should have encouraged Turco-Armenian rapprochement, but not a bit of it—fanaticism raged on.
Tamara paid a heavy price for having an Armenian mother.
‘You’re a vile, salty Armenian, Tamara,’ Ali said, pinching her arm. (When attached to ‘Armenian’, the word ‘salty’ was an insult, for reasons that remain unclear.)
Tamara gave a cry of pain, then lowered her lovely head, sighing in defeat.
‘Come here, Tamara, and I’ll straighten your dirty, crooked Armenian nose,’ Asad shouted. He ran up and twisted her perfectly straight little nose.
She had tears in her eyes but kept quiet. She put up with everything with courage worthy of a better cause.
On holidays we played at massacring Armenians, a game we loved above all others. Heady with racist passion, we would sacrifice Tamara on the altar of our ancestral hatred. First we would make arbitrary accusations against her of murdering Muslims and shoot her on the spot, doing it several times in succession to savour the pleasure. Then, when we were drunk at the sight of her blood, we would revive her for the good of the cause before massacring her once more, this time in the prescribed manner. We would tie her up and throw her to the ground; then we would cut out her tongue and cut off her limbs and head; we would tear out her heart and guts and throw them to the dogs to show our contempt for Armenian flesh. When we had finally sated ourselves with our ferocity and there was nothing left of the poor girl, we would dance around her corpse, waving our wooden guns in the air and uttering savage cries. If a governess or other adult appeared in the distance, we would promptly pick up Tamara, frightened out of her wits, take her by the hand and begin dancing in a friendly circle, singing nursery rhymes.
It didn’t occur to Tamara to complain; she would have been called an informer, a traitor, and once again a dirty Armenian, and been deprived of all contact with us; even though she was humiliated, mistreated and massacred at regular intervals she could not do without our company. Anybody else would have been dull by comparison.
‘You know, Asad and Ali forced me to play with them without you and Gulnar,’ Tamara told me several years later, ‘in secret.’
‘Really?’
I couldn’t get over it and bitterness pierced my heart.
‘That’s disgusting. What did you play at?’
‘At rape,’ Tamara murmured.
‘At rape? Oh!’
I felt even more deprived.
‘Yes, at rape, at rape the Armenian.’
I was an exclamation mark.
‘Yes, it happened during the afternoons on the hottest days, when everyone was having a nap. Asad and Ali would come to find me and take me to the vineyard ne
ar the Devil’s house.’
The Devil’s house was a derelict cottage on the edge of the vineyard, abandoned to the spiders and lizards. An air of doom emanated from its unglazed windows, wholly justifying the house’s name. Even those people who seemed to laugh at the Devil were none too keen on going anywhere near that ruin. One can never be sure.
‘You know I don’t really like that place,’ Tamara went on, ‘but they made me go there, saying that I had nothing to fear from the Devil when I was with them. They said they had seen worse. Can you believe it?’ she exclaimed admiringly. ‘They took me to the fig tree there, you know, the large fig tree to the left of the house. Then they told me to take off my bloomers. I didn’t want to at first but you know what they’re like; they started to hit me, so I took them off. There I was without my bloomers and they stood behind me and did things, first one, then the other; sometimes they started all over again. I got so hot!’
‘But what did they do exactly?’
‘I’ve no idea. I was just so hot. I would start off in the shade of the fig tree, but you know how quickly the shade moves. So I was left in the blazing sun. It didn’t bother Asad and Ali. They could have a rest under the tree, but the sun was beating down on my head and the sand was burning my bare feet and Asad and Ali didn’t finish. It was no fun. They said they were doing it to punish me for being a bit Armenian.’
‘I’d still like to know what exactly they were doing.’
‘Well, I think… You won’t tell anyone, will you?’ Her eyes wide in fright, Tamara whispered, ‘I think they put spit on that thing that they have and we don’t and tried to push it in my back.’
‘Goodness,’ I said. ‘If the Fräuleins had found out…’
‘But they couldn’t have found out. I wasn’t going to tell them, was I?’ She sighed. ‘Do you think it was bad?’
‘Yes, I do, I think it was bad.’ Then I shrugged my shoulders and said philosophically, ‘Bad, good; good, bad? Happy the person who can tell the difference.’
Then Tamara blinked and lowered her gaze, flushing. ‘You know, I have to say… it wasn’t unpleasant all the time, rape.’
But it’s time I said something about my own love life, which began very early and was rich and turbulent throughout my childhood. Began very early? At least I think so, since I was ten when I experienced my first love.
You already know that we had many gardeners. They were indispensable in a desert land where nothing grew without plenty of watering. One gardener was extraordinarily handsome, I thought at the time. He had the fine name of Ruslan, which added to his attraction. I became aware of this love during a humdrum walk together to the vegetable patch where Grandmother had sent me to find a ripe juicy melon. When Ruslan passed me the fragrant yellow fruit, I felt the first pangs of this celebrated malaise. It was to remain essentially the same for me, irrespective of the variety and number of people who would be its object in future. I came back carrying my melon in my hands, but it weighed less than the freshly blooming love in my heart. On that day I became a different—I was going to say woman—a different child.
I swooned whenever Ruslan passed by, so great was my emotion when I saw him; I dreamt of him day and night. I knew it would take a miracle for me to marry him, so I made up scenarios that would have allowed me to become his wife one day. For example, my father would be ruined and I would be left penniless. This also required the ruination of my maternal grandfather, from whom I would inherit, and I destroyed him with cruel skill for the good of the cause—nothing could stop me. I never imagined then that my dream would one day become reality by a twist of history. So I became desperately poor. I led the life of a beggar. I lived in a garret, mending my rags (which were clean despite my new social status). I gathered pieces of wood on the beach to feed the mean fire in my attic on which I cooked my equally mean soup. I was glad to be utterly destitute as this brought me closer to paradise—possible marriage to the glorious Ruslan. One day when I was sadly wandering the streets of Baku, barefoot and the wind in my hair, though not without a touch of vanity as my rags were still clean, I met Ruslan. Struck by my beauty and dignity, he took me by the hand and led me to his home to make me his wife. I imagined what followed with a beatific, knowing smile. The opposite miracle involved making Ruslan fabulously wealthy after the discovery of a distant relative in Persia or Turkey. He was given a rapid education, taught good manners, inducted into the ways of polite society, and his providential relative considered all the possible brides in Baku and chose me, the most beautiful and accomplished. Ruslan showered me with sumptuous jewels and built me a palace entirely in black marble—I was very keen on it as a child—and became the most infatuated of husbands. We floated along in perfect happiness and had many children.
This passion was extinguished when Ruslan made the blunder of marrying the daughter of one of our gardeners—a large, coarse girl who wasn’t even pretty. At first I was indignant at the worthlessness of my victorious rival, but then found consolation in it: if this was Ruslan’s taste, I was better off without him.
After this bitter disappointment, which was to be the first of many, I fell for a Russian boy, a friend of Asad and Ali but a few years older. Spotty, with a tendency to sweat and a shock of artfully tousled blonde hair, he seemed, despite this or perhaps because of it, the archetype of the classic foreigner and intellectual. He could say ‘I acknowledge that fact’ better than anyone else in the world, which to me was the height of erudition. Having ‘acknowledged the fact’ that I admired him desperately, he would swagger before me and even try to court me by pinching my arm, leaving me breathless with emotion. This romance came to an abrupt end when his heartless parents took my spotty knight away to another city.
My third love was divided in two, as its object was two brothers. They were both radiantly handsome, and that wasn’t blind passion speaking; I still have photographs to prove it. It was an agonizing love, as I loved them both equally, but differently. All the more agonizing as I was very virtuous at that time and could not conceive of love outside the well-worn path of marriage. I didn’t know how to reconcile the double demands of my heart. When I finally settled on one, the image of the other would appear before my eyes, stopping me from making a definitive choice. I could see no way out, as there was no polyandry in Islam, only polygamy. I spent sleepless nights imagining myself reaching marriageable age and having to choose between the divine brothers, whatever the cost. Scenes of tragedy gave way to scenes of pathos, but everything remained up in the air. When I could no longer deny my powerlessness to cut the Gordian knot, something happened to distract me from amorous thoughts about men, at least for a while.
5
My father had gone to Moscow, where his brother, Uncle Ibrahim, joined him. On his return ten days later, my uncle made an astonishing announcement at the dinner table that stopped the daily race for mutton in its tracks.
‘Your father is getting married,’ Uncle Ibrahim said, addressing us girls sitting at one end of the table, ‘and he wants Leyla to come to Moscow with me to attend the wedding.’
There was silence for a moment, followed by an explosion of shouts, exclamations and questions.
‘Who’s her father? Who’s her mother?’ one of the aunts asked hysterically. ‘How much money have they got?’ shouted a second aunt, while the third wanted to know, ‘What does her father sell?’ Grandmother must have been in the know, at least to some extent, as for the moment she maintained a scornful silence.
‘She’s poor,’ Uncle Ibrahim replied.
‘What? How?’ cried the aunts, receiving the news like a stab to the heart.
Every reply spelt equal calamity. At least ‘She’ was Muslim; her family were Ossetian (a people from the North Caucasus) and in the bosom of Islam; Allah be praised, but that said…
First on the list of misfortunes: her father didn’t sell anything. His failure to belong to the merchant caste (it didn’t matter whether they sold oil or watermelons, as long as they sold som
ething) was already deeply suspect. So, her father sold nothing and wasn’t at all rich; he was an ordinary engineer, may Allah forgive him! A railway inspector, neither more nor less; an employee—a government employee, true, but even so, he was still a common employee. When his first wife, the mother of Amina (my future stepmother) died, he married a Jew.
‘That’s nothing to be proud of either, but at least it’s better than those Christian dogs, may Allah curse them,’ my grandmother interjected judiciously at this moment in the story.
We hung on Uncle Ibrahim’s every word, hungry for news.
This strange family lived in Moscow, where the father had raised his two daughters in the European fashion, or, to be more exact, what passed for the European fashion. At this point Uncle Ibrahim cast a look presaging doom around the whole assembly—I knew he loved to try and terrify his audiences and enjoyed himself enormously when he succeeded. From this moment on his account was constantly interrupted by sighs, more in keeping with a burial than a marriage announcement.
He (the engineer who sold nothing) had not been content with a Muscovite education for his daughters and had later sent them to Paris. They lived there on their own, completely on their own (there were no more cries now, just a terrified silence). Uncle Ibrahim was not qualified to say how they had lived there, but his expression gave us to understand the worst. For example, he knew that in Moscow they had moved in artistic circles (general amazement mixed with incredulity) and gone out alone at night with men (here Grandmother let out vehement cries of ‘Yah Allah’, seconded by all her daughters at once). Amina had married a Muslim from the Volga at twenty (‘So old!’ exclaimed the aunts), but had divorced six months later and returned to live with her engineer father and Jewish stepmother. My father met her at a soirée at the home of some mutual friends and catastrophe soon followed—he fell in love with her. Now he was determined to marry her. Amina had hesitated for a long time before agreeing to marry him. ‘What?’ Bitter laughter rang out on all sides. The daughter of a ‘nobody’, a poor man, an employee, had hesitated to marry the eldest son of an illustrious family, one of the richest in Baku? ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve heard in years,’ said the women, on the verge of tears.
