My fabulous Baku fortune

At first, at least, it was not an every time occurrence, one or two of my visits might pass without the topic coming up, but pretty soon even the lapses felt like missed beats in a persisting rhythm. My mother and I would go out to lunch, or we would stroll up Riverside Drive, or, later, we would be sitting in a doctor's waiting room, and we would end up talking about Baku--she carried forward on the gusts of enthusiasm for her pre-Revolutionary childhood there, me trailing along and trying to hold my deflating cynicism in check. We were, in fact, resuming a conversation begun long ago, but which had abruptly collapsed--my doing, not hers. Baku was always a big deal in the Kahan family, but also a big sore spot for me, and I had kept the topic at arm's length for years. Now there was no stopping my mother. Once she was diagnosed with advanced stage melanoma, she took it as her right to talk to me about whatever she wanted to.

Given this new license, my mother found events that jogged her memory all around her, carried in the common air. After seeing a TV report on an oil spill off the California coast, she told me, "The Baku harbor always had oil in it. Not from a spill, just naturally. One night when I was five, my grandfather took me to the harbor as a special treat. The Caspian was on fire, really on fire. Some English lords and their ladies were passing through Baku, and to make a spectacle for these grand visitors the governor-general had torches dropped from a barge. The sea burst into flames. I thought it was some kind of magic trick."

We were sitting in a Columbus Avenue cafe that my mother liked. Before my father's death, she had not been much for going out, but in the decade since she often preferred out to in, to fill up the emptiness, she would remark with chilling matter-of-factness. I acknowledged her Baku anecdote with a nod. I had heard it before, and my mother's linking it to events in California did not make it any more novel. The attitude behind the anecdote, as behind each of my mother's Baku anecdotes, was utterly familiar, unchanging over the years--one of remembered well-being, of an enveloping comfort. I didn't have to be told that the evening by the harbor ended with a carriage ride, fine china cups and saucers, hot chocolate served up by a nanny.

I had driven in from Connecticut, having called in sick to the fancy private school where I taught history to fifteen- and sixteen-year-olds--my real contact with affluence, I sometimes reminded myself, quite apart from the one I knew via my mother's telling about it. The job had its rewards, its pleasures. Each year one or two of my students detached themselves from the general scrimmage with its unstoppable buzz about the next blow-out party and what-car-does-your-daddy-drive? and became passionately curious about history. The Sacco and Vanzetti case was a special draw; I'm not sure why, though a taste for the exotic probably had something to do with it. The students' conversion was usually so sudden, so out-of-step, it was if their brains had been rebuilt while they slept. Some days, it seemed to me reason enough to be a teacher.

And some days, it didn't. The job had its full quota of anxiety and irritations, most prominently the school's director--the "headmaster," as he denominated himself. Our many disputes about teaching style were beginning to shade over into something personal, and I had just about concluded that his latest memo was proof of an intense dislike. I wanted to hear my mother's opinion, or at least to express mine to a sympathetic listener. But she was full speed ahead on the Baku track.

She said, "There was a floating bathhouse in the harbor. When it opened, that was a big event, everybody took it as a sign that Baku was finally becoming civilized, Europeanized. Of course, they couldn't resist putting some kind of gold leaf on the roof, making it look very vulgar. One day, Uncle Aron didn't come home for dinner. Everyone thought he had been kidnapped, those things happened. It turned out he had gone to the bathhouse and fallen asleep for four hours."

She rubbed at her thigh, a tic she had developed after an operation two years before. At the time, when the surgeon had cheerfully proclaimed that he had rooted out all the cancer, my mother's gesture seemed no more than a reflex checking of the scar left by the scalpel. Now it was hard not to think that she was tracing the route of the killer cells that had escaped from some cancer cell holding pen, angrier than ever for being once forestalled.

Not Baku again, I told myself, not that same worked-over ground with its booby traps and paths leading off to nowhere. But she was sick, and she was my mother--I owed her. She wanted to talk about Baku; I could at least keep the conversation going.

"I never thought of Baku as Europeanized at all," I said, trying to keep the old exasperation out of my voice. "Dusty streets and oil derricks, and that's all."