My Fabulous Baku Fortune

Abstract

Alt 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, 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,