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- Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
'A scintillating book' TLS'Her company is a delight' Tatler'Part memoir, part social history... sumptuous and unsparing' Financial Times A brilliantly witty memoir telling the story of a young woman's determined struggle for freedom The Orient Express hurtles towards the promised land, freeing Banine from her past. Escaping her ruined homeland and forced marriage, she aspires to a dazzling future in Paris. As a chic Parisienne she mingles with émigrés, artists and writers-and even contemplates love. But freedom brings challenges. Swept along by the forces of history, can Banine keep up? Filled with vivacious wit and a lust for life, this companion to Days in the Caucasus is a paean to bittersweet dreams and the quest for happiness.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
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‘I started to leaf through the book and was soon engrossed… So vividly and wittily does the author reveal to us an utterly unfamiliar world’
Teffi, author of Memories: From Moscow to the Black Sea
‘A delightful memoir of an eventful life set against the helter-skelter of the 20th century… Banine herself shines through as an intelligent and independent spirit, longing for her own self-determination’
Financial Times
‘A romantic and gloriously comic account of a heady and turbulent youth spent on the shores of the Caspian… What commends Days in the Caucasus, quite aside from its rakish narrative, is Banine’s exquisite prose and unremitting eye for comic absurdity even amid the profoundest personal tragedy’
Bryan Karetnyk, Spectator
‘Banine tells her story—first loves, forced marriage, exile and Paris—with wit and warmth. Never one to take anything too seriously, her company—and her memoir—is a delight’
Tatler
‘Every so often a voice emerges from the archive so vivid that it seems impossible that it should ever have been forgotten… Banine’s sensual writing and remarkable ability to conjur the emotions of lost childhood recall Colette… dashingly translated’
Evening Standard
2
Banine in Paris, 1931
3
Contents
Foreword by the Translator
At the opening of Parisian Days, a young passenger waits in trepidation for the Orient Express to pull into the Gare de Lyon. Author Banine is on the threshold of a new life, far from her native Azerbaijan. She writes of her introduction to Paris in the Roaring Twenties, her evolution from ‘Caucasian goose’ into shy fashion model, allowing occasional glimpses of her childhood to give background to the story.
Banine was born in 1905 in the booming oil city of Baku, then part of the Russian Empire. Ummulbanu Asadullayeva, to use her full name, was the granddaughter of peasants who had become fabulously wealthy through oil. In her first memoir, Days in the Caucasus, she described her upbringing by a Baltic German governess and a devoutly Muslim grandmother who swore like a trooper. Banine’s life of long summers in the country house and winters of lessons and avid reading was upended in 1920 when Russian Bolshevik troops entered Baku.
In Paris, Banine finds herself amongst émigrés from all corners of the former empire who fled the Revolution and Civil War. Some, including authors Bunin and Teffi, become her friends. Banine resists Teffi’s calls to write in Russian, though she speaks it fluently, and prefers to write in French, the language of her 8beloved city. As she makes clear in Parisian Days, Banine feels Azerbaijani and Caucasian, not Russian.
Banine uses real names for some members of her family, and pseudonyms for others. In Parisian Days she changes her sister Surayya’s name to Maryam, and calls Surayya’s husband Shamsi, rather than Murad, probably to protect their privacy. In both memoirs Banine uses the name Zuleykha for her sister Kubra. I mention it here as Kubra Asadullayeva enjoyed success as a Cubist painter in France. Most of her work, including portraits of Banine, is thought to be in private collections.
Banine’s first published work was a novel Nami, which came out in Paris in 1942. Nami is set in Baku and Russia during the revolution and Civil War and its eponymous heroine is reminiscent of both Banine and her stepmother Amina. Three years later, Banine’s memoir Days in the Caucasus established her in Parisian literary circles. Parisian Days is the sequel, published by René Julliard in 1947. Banine substantially reworked Parisian Days before republishing it with Gris Banal in 1990. It is this revised version that has been translated here.
The most successful of Banine’s later works was an account of her conversion to Roman Catholicism, I Chose Opium. This too had a sequel, Afterwards, to respond to readers who wanted to know what happened next. Banine translated widely into French, including work by Dostoevsky, Tatyana Tolstaya and the German author Ernst Jünger who became a good friend.
Banine died in Paris in 1992 at the age of eighty-six.
As her father, and even more so her grandfathers, are famous figures in the history of Azerbaijan, the Soviet authorities invited Banine to visit Baku, an invitation she did not take up. ‘I would be lying if I said that I do not regret it now,’ Banine wrote in 91985 in an author’s note accompanying a reissue of Days in the Caucasus. She herself came to public attention in Azerbaijan only in the late 1980s, when the Soviet newspaper Literaturnaya gazeta published an article about her friendship and correspondence with Bunin.
Banine’s work was not published in Azerbaijani until 1992, when Hamlet Qoca’s translation of Days in the Caucasus came out in an abridged version (in which some of the references to sex were omitted).
Wherever Banine used an Azerbaijani, German or Russian expression in Parisian Days, I have preserved those words and added an English version where needed. The footnotes are Banine’s unless otherwise indicated.
The language of Azerbaijan is known as Azerbaijani, Azeri or Azerbaijani Turkish. Banine used the version Azéri, so in the translation I opted for the closest equivalent in English, Azeri.
anne thompson-ahmadova
Arrival in the Promised Land
The Orient Express charges at full throttle towards the Promised Land. The racket is deafening as it is hurled from track to track in a wild dance. Its language of steel speaks to me of freedom and joy while it sweeps me towards the realm of my fantasies, towards the dazzling moment of reunion I longed for during four years of revolution, ruin and terror amid the rubble of an abolished world.
Four years of separation from my closest relatives, who left the Caucasus when it was still free while I remained alone with my father, a minister of the ephemeral independent Republic of Azerbaijan. When the Russians recaptured the Caucasus, he was thrown in prison for the crime of being rich, and at fifteen years of age I was thrown into the prison of a forced marriage. During those deathly years, in the depths of my despair, I took refuge in dreams, constructing entire worlds, imagining the craziest things—incredible happiness, conquests and victories.
At last I am actually experiencing these unique moments in reality, as they usher me into the dawn of a paradise. Rigid from head to toe in almost unbearable anticipation, throat 12dry, chest heavy, my seventeen-year-old heart beating like a demented clock, I watch the march of life through the window. Emotion blinds me to the ugly suburbs passing before my eyes, instead I see dreams, my refuge during those years of cold, of near-starvation, of fear. I would soon achieve conquests and victories and never let them go. One tremendous victory was already mine: attaining the Promised Land. I was almost there, after fleeing first the Caucasus, then Constantinople, where I abandoned my husband in a flurry of false promises. He hoped to join me, while I hoped never to see him again; poor man, like me a victim of History, which crushes us in its path.
*
The canopy of the Gare de Lyon closes over the train, covering it with its shadow. It goes slower and slower until it stops at last, and my heart stops with it; I am about to die. But no; expiring, gasping, trembling, I manage to step down onto the platform without dropping dead, and at last I see them through my tears. There are four of them: my beautiful stepmother Amina, my childhood love; my two sisters Zuleykha and Maryam; and finally my arrogant, unbearable brother-in-law.* I find myself wrapped around each neck in turn and I cry and laugh and feel a happiness that even death could not snatch from me. But I do 13not die, my tears dry, everyone talks and laughs at once, they ask me questions, I answer any old how. Sentimentality overcomes me for a moment, but is checked: my family takes a dim view of mawkishness, inclined as they are towards irony, sometimes brutally so. And my brilliant brother-in-law Shamsi is here, who has a cruel wit; he won’t let us fall into a vat of rose water. He holds a stick and taps it drily, studying me with a mocking gaze that does not bode well: he finds my charchaf—a half-veil worn by Turkish women—my off-the-peg suit from a shop in Constantinople and my air of a provincial goose hilarious. His stick points at my hips, which are luxuriant, and I feel myself accused of a crime. He bursts out:
‘No, really, this is a costume for a show which will be called “Progress and the Odalisque”; a charchaf in Paris, the eyebrows of a Caucasian carter, and that suit! It’s perfect for Tashkent. And that derrière is perfect for Abdul Hamid’s harem! We’ll have to hire a wheelbarrow to carry it.’
Amina and my sisters angrily tell him to leave me alone, but this sets him off all the more.
I don’t want to lose face so I laugh, but I don’t have to try too hard: life is sweet, I am living a fairy tale that cannot be marred by a few discordant details. I am stunned by the bustle of the station, the noise, the movement—and by the emotion that the present happiness, in contrast with the four years of suffering, is wringing from my sensibility. I feel as though I have escaped from an icy cave, full of shadows, and climbed up towards a sunlit meadow.
Already a novelist without knowing it, I notice, despite this inner turmoil, my sisters’ extraordinary make-up. That Zuleykha, the painter, should be outrageous is not such a surprise: she is 14committed to colour, to the artist’s boldness, the creative person’s extravagance. But I am astounded that modest, shy Maryam should sport dusky eyelids, lashes laden with mascara like branches of a fir tree laden with snow, cheeks reminiscent of geraniums in their first bloom, a thick layer of powder and lips the colour of oxblood. I notice and file away, but say nothing, of course.
Zuleykha’s garb also attains the heights of artistic expression: strange objects hang everywhere; a flowerpot-shaped hat is pushed over her eyes; huge earrings brush her neck which is adorned with an exotic necklace. A belt with Aztec designs is placed, not around her waist, but on her hips in accordance with the current laws of fashion. Beneath this fantastical clothing, I find my sister voluble, exuberant, full of life and verve.
We get into a spacious red taxi of a kind no longer with us, alas, which one could get into without bending double and proceeding to collapse onto the back seat like a sack of potatoes. My single suitcase sits next to the driver. The great adventure begins. I AM IN PARIS.
Paris… To grasp the full significance of I AM IN PARIS, one must have believed oneself locked up for ever in a detested city, lost at the edge of the world; one has to have dreamt of Paris for long, dragging years, as I dreamt of it in the heart of my native city, where, paradoxical though it may seem, I truly lived in exile.
For a soul fascinated by this name, Paris is the beacon illuminating paradise; the dream become stone and streets, squares and statues, erected throughout a long and turbulent history. It is the splendour of all fantasies, a world where micro-worlds clash or meld, creating an extraordinary wealth of life.
Deeply unfaithful by nature, I have remained faithful to Paris, despite a half-century of intimacy, of familiarity with 15the attractions and aversions, as in all intimacy—above all, the aversions of habit and monotony.
Dreamers of the whole world, I address you in particular, you who know the virtue and the poison of dreams. Their virtue: they are our opium in the grey monotony of the everyday, our shelter from laws and kings; our granite in the quicksand of the world; our daily brioche when we lack even bread. Their poison: if by a miracle our dreams come true, we feel the cursed ‘is that it?’ Life in its impurity tarnishes their perfection, which exists only in the imagination, and disappointment poisons us; ‘Is that it?’
Now, during the first days of my life in Paris, this was it. Everything was beautiful, young, interesting, amusing, full of promise. Even on arrival, I was enchanted by the ugly, sooty surroundings of the Gare de Lyon, as this was where I took my first steps as a Parisienne. Then it was the marvellous design of the Rue de Rivoli; the even more perfect design of the Place de la Concorde, which brings to mind a rock garden; and the Champs-Élysées, where the driver took us at our request. We drove down the prestigious avenue, which in those days, half a century ago, radiated elegance with nothing to spoil it. There was just one shop—Guerlain—two or three cafes—Le Select, Le Fouquet—two fashion houses and the Hotel Claridge. Though democratization has its virtues, it had yet to disfigure the elegant, snobbish avenue. No loose sweets were on sale, no discount dresses, no plastic shoes, no handmade rugs or bags of peanuts. Cinemas did not entice you every ten paces with their posters and pornographic offerings for all ages, sexes and preferences.
We drove slowly up the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe, which had its greatest triumph over me; we descended 16the Avenue du Bois, or had it already been rechristened Avenue Foch? Without leaving the finer districts we reached La Muette and Rue Louis Boilly, where my parents rented an apartment on the ground floor of a handsome building. We were to stay in these largely residential areas until we had run out of jewellery brought from over there, the sole, slim remains of our oil barons’ fortune, democratized, collectivized, nationalized, volatilized in the revolutionary explosion, which consumed all our privileges in its flames.
As we drove down Avenue du Bois, I recalled for a few moments another ‘boulevard’, the one running along the Caspian where I had strolled for so many years beneath the shade of a few stunted trees, my soul in distress, my spirit elsewhere—in Paris, to be exact. It was thanks to that explosion that I was here at last, and I much preferred to be poor here than rich over there. No, it’s not a case of ‘the grass is always greener’. When just a child, as I have written elsewhere, I mentally ruined my paternal and maternal families to gain the right to marry Ruslan, the handsome gardener with the air of a prince from The Thousand and One Nights. He was one of the twelve near-slaves whose job was to water an estate in the desert. As for our ruination, my wishes had been fully granted. Sadly, it was not the seductive Ruslan’s arms that welcomed me on my wedding night; this good fortune had been granted to Jamil, whom I abhorred.
I could not complain, as the decrees of fate had replaced Ruslan with emigration, where I was certain I would meet Ruslans a thousand times more handsome, a thousand times more seductive and from a slightly more polished social class (after all). Steeped in The Thousand and One Nights, I imagined the future as one of Ali Baba’s caves, where I would find fabulous 17treasure. Only one of all these treasures never occurred to my otherwise fertile imagination: that I would one day become a French writer and be able to write these lines.
*
My father was waiting for us in the entrance. He must have been watching for the taxi.
It was three years to the day, in Batumi, that I had watched him on the deck of a Compagnie Paquet ship as it moved out into the Black Sea towards Constantinople, towards Paris. He was leaving, but I was staying behind, and, worse, staying with my husband, who would take me back to Baku to continue our ridiculous conjugal life. How I suffered. We speak of a ‘broken heart’ and we are right; mine was shattered. Not from seeing my father leave, but from seeing him leave without me. Like Prometheus, I remained bound to an imaginary rock in the Caucasus and no Heracles would save me from my not-so-beloved.
Freedom, comfortable living conditions and, doubtless, the absence of fear had rejuvenated my father. He looked relaxed, was well dressed, and stood tall. I remembered so well his hunched back, his weary air, his prison clothes that by themselves can demean a man, and his poor smile when he saw me through the bars clutching the cooking pot into which my aunt, his sister, had poured the stew made specially for him. I lugged the heavy pot to the distant prison in the cold or fierce heat, but it brought him some comfort in his wretched detention.
That situation, with more than a whiff of melodrama, seemed unreal here. In this elegant apartment, where all was comfort and peace, the prison in the black suburb of Baku—black because 18it is situated in an oil zone—seemed like a nightmare. And in reality, what else was it?
We embraced with what might pass as tenderness between a reticent father and a daughter intimidated by him. The strangely expressive gaze of his black, shining eyes robbed me of any desire to be effusive. Had he ever treated me warmly? Never, I thought, not even when I visited him in prison. There was always a wall between us with no abandon on either side. He had never been really hard towards me, but I was afraid of him nonetheless, and this fear had prevented me from following the man I thought I loved and made me accept another, whom I definitely hated, solely because my father had expressed his wish for this to happen.
It is hard to grasp what the figure of the father once meant in the Islamic world from which we had come. Invested with an authority second only to that of God, he would treat his children like subjects without rights and was free to impose anything on them except death. It is quite possible that in primitive tribes ruled by Islamic law he was accorded this right too.
My father had a remarkable trait that was to become more pronounced with age—liberalism. Was it dictated by intelligence, indifference, or secret inclinations that we can hardly control, are hardly aware of? Nonetheless, this liberalism had allowed us, his daughters, to be brought up in the Western style at a time when this was still frowned upon in Islam. His second wife, my stepmother Amina, was also a beneficiary, but sometimes abused it. And soon he was to give us further proof of his broad-mindedness.
I was infinitely grateful to him for bringing me to Paris alone; perhaps to allow me to divorce later, and to put an end 19to a marriage he had so cruelly forced upon me? How I hoped that this was so. The idea of meeting this husband again, who displeased me in every respect, cast an occasional pall over my happiness at returning to my status as a young girl, at beginning my life again at the point I had lost it four years ago, but this time in an entirely new world, in this legendary Paris for which my soul had longed ‘as a hart longs for flowing streams’.
I accepted the drawbacks in advance: I would give in to Zuleykha’s customary bullying, her ‘you’ll know when you’re my age’, pronounced in a superior tone; I would listen submissively to her advice and that of Amina; I would carry out their orders with military discipline; in short, I was ready to do anything to leave my husband. If necessary, I would even go to bed before the others, as I had during my childhood; Fräulein Anna’s ‘Kinder, schlafen gehen!’ still rang in my ears like a sentence to the galleys. All of this was better than Jamil.
After embracing my father I turned, following an unspoken hierarchy, towards a boy of eight, my half-brother. Having forgotten me during the past four years, he stared at me in astonishment without the least sign of pleasure. Light skin, brown eyes, chestnut hair—with the look of a blonde Aryan he had inherited from his North Caucasian mother, he was out of place among our tribe doomed to black agate and other signs of oriental ancestry. We were Aryan too, and very pure at that, as Persian blood ran in our veins—but we were brown Aryans.
Another rung down in the hierarchy brought me face to face with my brother’s tutor, a short old man, well groomed, with round, bewildered chicken eyes, who walked carefully on legs so bowed that they met only at the feet. 20
Further down the social scale were the cook and the maid who, as expressive French women, gave cries of joy and amazement when they saw me.
‘Oh, mademoiselle is a madame? She’s so young!’
‘Mademoi— madame has such beautiful eyes.’
A stock compliment for want of anything better.
Yes, in those days, the race of Frenchwomen who went into domestic service was not yet extinct. Such service is judged humiliating today, and who would deny that it is thankless work? But is it so much better to type all day for a boss who is often difficult, or to work in a factory? It would appear so, to judge from the evidence. But in those legendary days when Social Security had yet to be set up, there were authentic French ‘bonnes’.
I realize that I shall often have to refer to ‘those days’ as if to a different, bygone era. And with good reason: the changes that have come about in this half-century are so enormous that the world really is transformed. There is no point in enumerating these changes, as there are so many. I’ll note one detail in passing, though: the end of the Rue Louis-Boilly, which today leads to the Boulevard Périphérique, in ‘those days’ overlooked the city fortifications where we were well advised not to venture at night—its inhabitants were rumoured to have a penchant for the most sinister crimes. Nor was it a pleasant stroll to cross the Parc de la Muette once darkness fell, lecherous men popping up like weeds behind every bush. The fear they inspired in us bordered on hysteria. So we lived between two danger zones: the ‘fortifs’ and the lechers’ park.21
*
My Parisian apprenticeship began the very afternoon of my arrival in the privacy of the bedroom that I was to share with Zuleykha. It was just the three of us: Maryam, Zuleykha and me. When Zuleykha marched in she went straight to her nightstand and took out a cigarette holder the length of her forearm. Placing a cigarette in it with aplomb, she lit it and blew out a regal cloud of smoke that hit me in the face, causing a coughing fit. Then she proudly declared: ‘I’m getting married.’
‘Oh!’ I cried, with curiosity and delight.
I considered it good news on two counts: first, because any marriage is inherently an auspicious event and the disaster of mine was merely an accident of the October Revolution—the revolution, always the revolution. Second, at the age of seventeen I found it awkward to have been married for two years while Zuleykha, four years my senior, was still an old maid. It was humiliating, unnatural. This reversal of roles was a breach of Islamic custom, perhaps even of a more widely accepted tradition. So I was very pleased to know that my sister was back on track.
‘Who is he? A Caucasian?’
Paris was teeming with émigrés from every corner of the Russian Empire and our corner, the Caucasus, was well represented.
‘Certainly not, I’ve had enough of Caucasians! He’s Spanish. Catholic, of course.’
This took my breath away. I didn’t know what to say, given the enormity of her choice, which according to our best traditions would lead her straight to hell. Finally, I dared to venture, ‘And Papa?’
‘What about Papa? He won’t eat me! Anyway, I’m of age now. And we’re not in Baku any longer, Islam is a long way away, 22everything is a long way away, everything has changed. Papa? Well, I’m going to talk to him about my José soon.’
I thought I detected a healthy dose of bravado in her confidence, but I also knew she was capable of great bravery, and admired her unreservedly for it, I who was so timorous.
‘I’d never dare,’ said Maryam, who was timorous too.
I supported her with alacrity, ‘Nor would I.’
I knew what I was saying: hadn’t I missed a perhaps model destiny because of this lack of courage, which weighed me down like a yoke? A yoke that prevented me from saying a liberating ‘no’ to my father when he asked me to marry Jamil; that stopped me from leaving with Andrey Massarin, a Christian too, but worse, much worse, a revolutionary and a Bolshevik! I could have run away with him but, paralysed by fear, I gave him up to marry someone else. Fear is my worst enemy, and may have ruined my life. How I hated it, and hate it still.
Sometimes, on the path of life where we grope our way forwards or, alternatively, forge ahead without giving it much thought, we see a treacherous fork appear before us, forcing us to make a choice on which our whole future depends. Left or right? How can we know where happiness lies, where misfortune lurks? Our sole consolation will be to think that our choice was illusory, as it had been predetermined since time immemorial.
Zuleykha found herself before a fork in the road that did not trouble her in the least, because her choice appeared so compelling to her. She knew what she wanted.
‘A Christian,’ I said, ‘a Christian. He knows nothing of Islam. He may hate it. We have always fought, them and us.’
‘Well, we’ve been wrong,’ Zuleykha replied with authority, vigorously flicking the ash from her cigarette. 23
And the ash fell on the millions of Muslim and Christian warriors who had fought from the Hegira onwards; on the crusaders of the eight Crusades, the last of which ended with the death of St Louis at Carthage; on José’s compatriots, led by the very Catholic Ferdinand and Isabella, who drove the Moors out of Spain; on the armies of John of Austria, who destroyed the Turks at Lepanto; on the troops of John Sobieski, king of Poland, and those same Turks laying siege to Vienna—and on others, on many others. Zuleykha’s ash buried them all beneath the same opprobrium and her love for José transformed all these confrontations into idiotic children’s games; and how could one say with certainty that they had not been idiots?
‘And if you are making a mistake in marrying him?’ Maryam asked.
‘I never make mistakes. And you should know, my poor retards, that I have been his mistress for the past six months.’
This astounding news silenced the two retards. We gazed at Zuleykha, eyes round in incredulity, as obligatory virginity on the day of a wedding—for the girl, needless to say—was a dogma one could not even contemplate disobeying, as solid as the Kaaba in Mecca.
‘You’re mad,’ I cried, this time in a fit of righteous indignation. ‘Before marriage!’
Even my cousin Gulnar, so liberally shameless, had kept her virginity for her wedding night. What better authority on dissolute morals could I invoke?
‘My dear,’ Zuleykha replied, belching out smoke like a steam train moving off. Large puffs billowed from her nose and mouth at once. 24
‘My dear, let me repeat—we are in Paris, thanks be to the October Revolution, and all that twaddle has been consigned to the dustbin once and for all.’ After a slight pause she condescended, ‘I’ll take you to his studio soon. You should know that he’s a painter, an accomplished artist. Another reason why madame’ (a nod in Maryam’s direction) ‘has never deigned to meet him.’
‘You know very well… Shamsi…’
Maryam tucked her head between her shoulders. Condemned by nature to self-effacement, she submitted without demur to the dominance of those around her and of circumstance, letting herself be bullied by one and all. Her current position between a tyrannical husband and an imperious sister was torture for her.
‘Yes, Shamsi the Magnificent—what percentage of noble blood does his lineage have?—is shocked at the idea of being related to a Christian, to a painter without fame or fortune—for now.’
She raised her shoulders furiously, and her earrings jingled merrily like little bells.
‘Keep turning your nose up at José, I couldn’t give a damn and I’m marrying him anyway. Look at her, this fine flower of the Azerbaijani aristocracy who dares to look down on an artist. Let me remind you that our grandfather ate the stones on his land, and that was the size of a pocket handkerchief. It was not because of anything he’d done that he saw oil gushing from those stones. And let me remind you too that we’ve had all that oil taken away from us, down to the last drop, and we’ll never get it back, for all the cherished illusions of these moronic émigrés. All we have left are memories and a host of pretensions. Oh, we’ve got sacks full of them, pretensions, we former petroleum princes.’ 25
She was off on a passionate diatribe, full of gall and vitriol, against snobbery, aristocrats true and false, plutocrats in general and Muslims of the whole world. She pilloried wealth, the idleness of those who possess it, superstitions, religions that tear one another apart in the name of a good and merciful God. She certainly loved her José, who inspired her to such fiery oratory. As for me, steeped in four years of revolutionary propaganda, my ears still ringing with slogans such as ‘religion is the opium of the people’, ‘man’s exploitation of man’ and other truths and half-truths, I was beginning to come round to her point of view.
But since I had neither her courage nor her strength, I could not see myself standing up to my father. But during his imprisonment, as though liberated a little by his absence, I had known some moments of courage. Fortified by the ideological ferment in which we swam in Baku, I dared to sport on my lapel an enamel brooch bearing the image of Lenin. My audacity was short-lived; I was told it was indecent for the daughter of an imprisoned father to wear the portrait of another father, that of the revolution, the main instigator of this incarceration and all the evils afflicting our family. I ended up unpinning the image of Lenin from my breast and returning to the old camp. I was not cut from the same cloth as La Pasionaria.
*
Overwhelmed by the rapid succession of intense emotions and impressions that bombarded me throughout that day, one of the most memorable of my life, I couldn’t get to sleep on my first Parisian night. I felt that a sense of frivolity had dominated those hours, with Shamsi’s mocking spirit setting the tone. We 26joked a great deal, we discussed fashions, shopping, the theatre, we gossiped nineteen to the dozen, talking about who had said what, who had slept with whom. The beautiful apartment, my stepmother’s elegance, the tutor and the two servants created an air of ease and comfort that I had forgotten and which made a striking contrast with the general upheaval of the years spent ‘over there’. How to skip between the ruins of one world and the buildings of another? How to talk about outfits when one has nothing to wear? How to take an interest in someone’s lovers when one is trying to get someone else out of prison? The shops were empty, the power went off when one needed it most, ominous rumours poisoned a life already full of real poisons.
Three months earlier I had still been living on another planet, between my Islamic family, jealous of its age-old traditions but already condemned, and the calls of the revolution. For I had heard those calls—a little more courage and I would have gone the other way at the fork in the road.
Here I was in another world, whose charming frivolity brought about a radical change in me after the exhausting seriousness of revolutionary ferment. Here I was experiencing for myself the wonderful diversity of the earth with its surfeit of suffering, pleasure, death and life; I tried to imagine the millions, billions of destinies that intersected on its surface; and as I tried to imagine the unimaginable, I was gripped by an intense desire to live, to burn, to walk through fire, to drink at every spring, poisoned or not.
This fanciful thirst for life plunged me into a fear of growing old which had haunted me off and on for several years. I wasn’t yet twenty but every day, every hour, I was getting older as surely as I was breathing. I saw myself as a mature lady watching for 27the appearance of wrinkles that would dig into my skin with the lightest of touches, at first imperceptible, then with more pressure. My teeth would turn yellow and fall out, my sight would fail, my hair would turn white, I would stop being a woman in the full sense of the word and love would flee from me. And yet love, this sublime, heart-breaking affair, hadn’t it already broken my heart? It had already scarred my short life: love lost with Massarin, love submitted to elsewhere with revulsion and refusal. At the thought of seeing Jamil on some ill-fated day, I sat up straight in bed as though afflicted by an unbearable pain. Then I burst into tears, silent lest I wake Zuleykha, who must be dreaming of José, with whom she knew the happiness of love shared. Did she appreciate the value of her good fortune?
I wept for myself, but also for him, my husband, my involuntary torturer, whom in turn I tortured too, reluctantly. We were both victims—but I am repeating myself. And I resumed my litany: it was neither his fault nor mine, but I could not love him, I could only hate him.
That first night in Paris spent in joy and uncertainty, in great hopes and doubt, still seems to me today to have presaged my entire life.
*
The next day, the radical transformation of my person began. I greeted my stepmother in her bed, where, prettily bedecked, she was taking breakfast. Running her hand through my hair and across my cheeks, she gave a dejected sigh: ‘Oh, it’s all so Baku!’
In her eyes Baku must have represented all that was bad, except for the oil wells which had their uses. But as for the 28rest! She had always disliked and feared this partly oriental city, populated with natives whom she considered—not always wrongly—savages. What could she do among her in-laws, who were wedded to an aggressive traditionalism, narrower than the neck of a bottle? She too was born into a Muslim family, but since her childhood had lived in Moscow where her father was an engineer, where she went to school and saw virtually only Russians, which made her eager to assimilate, where nothing, other than a theoretical religion, distinguished her from a true Russian.
In Azerbaijan and its capital Baku she had found a part of the Russian Empire that had nothing Russian about it. Its pronounced ethnic and religious particularism was bound to displease her. Had she married my father solely out of self-interest? I don’t know. My father cut a fine figure and was handsome in an oriental way. If she had married him for money she had made a mistake, for reasons that everyone now knows but no one foresaw. If emigration had freed her from the Family, it was soon to imprison her in a poverty that would lead to an even more wretched fate, towards a terrible end of life. But no one had an inkling of any of this on that beautiful summer’s day when she took it upon herself to drive out the oriental girl and replace her with a fashionable Parisienne.
She scrutinized me as though judging my possibilities and what she could make of me.
‘You’re so Baku,’ she repeated, and I felt myself at fault, all the more readily since I had never appreciated my physique. It wasn’t to my taste. I was not ‘my type’.
‘Take her straight to the hairdresser’s,’ she said to Zuleykha. My sister dragged me to Rue de Passy where a determined young 29man set to work after a brief consultation with her. Unbelievably dexterous, he let fly at my head, which emerged from his hands rounded, a fringe above my eyes, the image of a revived Joan of Arc, already a little French.
‘Very good,’ Amina said approvingly on my return. ‘That’s already a slight improvement. I’ve got several dresses ready for you, but first put on this corset, and if it pinches you a little at first, too bad…’
‘Pour être belle, il faut souffrir. Beauty requires suffering,’ Zuleykha interjected sententiously in French.
‘That’s true. Your hips and that derrière cannot remain at liberty.’
The corset did not pinch me; it suffocated me, strangled me, oppressed me, made me understand by analogy the Chinese tradition of foot-binding. What to do? We were victims of the obsession of that era’s elegant ladies: reducing the figure to look like a plank of wood, where the slightest protuberance was a matter of scandal. I walked stiffly and with difficulty in that carapace of iron.
They made me abandon my suit, which I had eagerly purchased in Constantinople in order to surprise the Parisian world with my elegance. As anticipated, it did surprise, but not in the desired sense. I struggled to put on the dress that Amina had chosen for me from her wardrobe. Despite their compressed state, my hips resisted. I thought the dress too plain; I would have preferred it embellished with ruffles, lace or at least buttons. It was straight, bare, monastic, and black too. I did not at all like the Joan of Arc staring defiantly back at me in the long mirror.
My Turkish head covering was lying on the chest of drawers. 30
‘That horror!’ Amina cried. ‘Don’t think you’re going to wear it in Paris!’
‘It would be funny to take her to the Dôme got up in that.’
Zuleykha and my stepmother burst out laughing, though the name meant nothing to me.
I didn’t know that the Dôme was a large cafe, the soul of a Montparnasse of which I had only a vague idea, but I felt stabbed to the quick: were my charchaf and I so grotesque that we would make people laugh in that unknown place?
‘And like that too—barefaced,’ Zuleykha went on.
‘Yes, we must teach her to apply make-up.’
They pushed me towards the dressing table, made me sit and let loose on my face: rouge on my cheeks, blue on my eyelids, mascara on my lashes, and then cream and then a huge cloud of powder. Their intentions were good. I knew they wanted to improve my appearance, but was the mask that the mirror showed me still me? I looked like an Easter egg with a funereal touch, thanks to the black fringe. Despair gave me the courage to protest.
‘Provincial!’ cried Zuleykha. ‘You looked as though you’d been through a wringer or a mortal illness. Now your face is alive. You want to look like a little Tolstoyan, but we’re in Paris now.’
‘I look awful.’
‘Provincial, provincial,’ Zuleykha repeated. ‘And she wants to live in Europe.’
Yes, I wanted to live in Europe, even disfigured. That first day I avoided mirrors, glass and polished surfaces.
Visiting that afternoon, Maryam approved of my metamorphosis, which she proclaimed ‘admirable’.
‘You’re someone else completely. But there’s still those eyebrows. Leave them to me.’ 31
She took out of her bag a pair of tweezers, which she was never without. Ever the adversary of abundant follicles, and ours were, God knows, she would pluck them out with furious determination. She even plucked them—a unique procedure as far as I’m aware—from her forearms and her armpits. Every superfluous hair was her personal enemy, whom she had to slay on the spot.
Usually gentle and amenable, she became implacable before my eyebrows. She bent my head back, lent over my forehead and tore out the hairs with remarkable speed and precision. I yelled, my eyes filled with tears, but she continued her work, punctuating it with, ‘There, there, I’ll be finished soon. It will all be over soon.’
I emerged from her clutches, the skin around my eyebrows on fire, oozing a few small drops of blood. Maryam was satisfied, I was crushed. It had been too much for one day.
She lived in a furnished apartment on Rue Massenet, ten minutes’ walk from ours. When they arrived in Paris, Shamsi had rented a sumptuous apartment, but as their funds dwindled they moved to a less sumptuous apartment, and then to a third, much less sumptuous, the one on Rue Massenet. It was the classic émigré process of a gradual descent, if not into hell, at least down the scale of luxury. My parents were on the same path. At the start, when my father was still a minister in a free Azerbaijan and still in possession of his fortune, Amina had rented an extremely luxurious apartment on the Champs-Élysées. When the Bolsheviks occupied Baku and imprisoned my father, she moved to a small private hotel on Rue de la Pompe. Most recently, when everything had turned bad, and the Bolsheviks stubbornly remained in power, she had moved to the apartment 32on Rue Louis-Boilly, still luxurious. It was the last to be so, as it marked the beginning of the end: one more year of respite and the descent would be complete.
A few days after I arrived Zuleykha took me to see José, who lived in a painter’s studio on Rue Jean-Boileau. At that time the street still had an almost rural appearance, with its empty plots and small houses surrounded by gardens. One entered through a porte cochère topped with a sign reading ‘Joinery, Cabinet-Making’ into a courtyard permeated with the scent of sawdust and timber. The grating of saws and planes and the taps of a hammer could be heard from a shed at the back. On the right, a small building leant against the neighbouring house. Here was José’s studio, all in glass. Without bothering to knock—wasn’t she at home, after all?—my sister pushed open the door, which José never locked, and went inside. I followed her, consumed with curiosity and eager to be initiated into an artist’s life of which I had only the vaguest idea, and over which the fear of unknown devilry hovered.
I had a rude shock as I entered a bizarre universe. The disorder was cosmic: bric-a-brac covered in a thick layer of dust, dozens of tubes of paint scattered all over, canvases, dozens of them too, cluttering the floor or propped against furniture or easels, which stood like guillotines in the four corners of the vast studio; other canvases hung on the walls, covering them entirely. A huge drawing board on trestles took up a large part of the free space in the workshop, so manoeuvring between the board, the canvases and the furniture was no easy task. Much later when I visited the flea market, I saw the resemblance to the picturesque jumble of José’s workshop, where a hot water bottle with its neck held together by a substantial quantity of string lay next 33to a marvellous sabre from a Castilian ancestor stuck in a coal scuttle; there were empty bottles scattered among clothes, an alabaster vase with three fading red roses next to a guitar with a string missing, etc. etc. etc. Over everything hung a scent made up of dust, oil paint and coffee, which José had brewed for us.
My future brother-in-law was standing in the middle of this perfect bohemian scene, palette in his left hand, paint brush in his right, dressed in thick corduroy trousers covered in stains and a (clean) white shirt open to reveal a hairy chest. He had the longest head imaginable; a huge, very white, very serene forehead; elongated eyes framed by long, straight lashes like those of a horse. In profile he resembled the Egyptians in ancient frescoes, with his skull, wasp waist and very broad shoulders.
