Parisian Days

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 dry, 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.[1] 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 not 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 committed 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 the 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 the 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 treasure. 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 it 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 to 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.

[1] In Parisian Days and Days in the Caucasus, Banine uses real names for some members of her family, and pseudonyms for others. For reasons that she does not explain, she calls her sister Kubra ‘Maryam’ in Parisian Days, but ‘Surayya’ in Days in the Caucasus; and while Maryam’s husband is called ‘Shamsi’ here, he was ‘Murad’ in the earlier book. [Translator’s note.]