Saltwater

In his dreams, he had forgotten the scent of the Caspian Sea. Was it salty, or not? Graham second-guessed his answer—but today, that didn’t matter. Gripping the cold silver rail that divided the Boulevard from the water, he breathed in, not bothering to catalog the sensation. The sea was blue and green and oily rainbow-black. If he wanted, he could climb down and touch it.

Finally.

His hand twitched toward the cell phone in his pocket.

But then the wind swirled hair over his eyes and he swiped it back, turning, and looked down the Boulevard to where it faded into a mass of glittering new architecture in the distance.

He started here, walking. Here was the only option, really—he wanted to start by the sea, first of all, and second, from the Boulevard you could get anywhere, if you wanted. He could hear the voices of taxi drivers on the breeze. There was no plan, and so far no map, either. Only himself, his gray tennis shoes that marked him a foreigner, and the cell phone in his pocket.

Actually, he could see locals wearing tennis shoes, too. Graham still stood out. You always did, somehow, when you weren’t a local. Many of the shoes he saw were clean like new; in solid colors; fashionable. He saw a gold pair. His were scuffed and worn from jogging back home—well, back elsewhere. Wherever he currently wasn’t.

He might as well have been wearing a backpack and carrying a camera.

The ice cream vendor took one look and overcharged him, but—distracted by the enormous cartoon ice cream cones plastered across the walls of the stand—Graham didn’t protest. Conversation was hard enough, anyway. Conjugations still came easily after all this time, but each word had to be individually plucked out of the vocabulary list scrolling through his head.

Maybe he was a tourist.

His phone buzzed, sending a shiver up his back. What time was it? Still morning—the whole day still stretched ahead of him. He glanced at the notification, saw it wasn’t from Lara, and put the phone away.

One day.

It was all he had, spare minutes scrounged out of his schedule and collected until this one short detour on a business trip to Dubai evolved from a dream into a plan. He hadn’t been able to visit his childhood home in years, first because of school and then because of pandemic shutdowns, but here he was at last.

The skyline was busier than he remembered.

His parents used to work for an oil company; when he was twelve, they relocated out of Baku, Azerbaijan. They had emptied their seventh-floor apartment and recommended his babysitter to a young British couple and called their driver to take them to the airport one last time, and they had never come back.

Some days, Baku was all Graham thought about. Other days, his courage failed when he tried to say its name. When he and Lara started dating, it took him three weeks to mention it at all.

Lara—who was expecting him to call her, who might be waiting on him that very minute.

But no, she would be asleep right now. It was, what, coming up on four in the morning back in Illinois? He could hold off and savor the view awhile.

As he walked, he studied the silhouettes of buildings up ahead that curved and twisted at unlikely angles. The taxi driver who’d taken him to his hotel had made a point of driving past the Flame Towers, gesturing with pride at the LED screens that lit the three towers with fire in the darkness. Qesheng, the man had said. Beautiful, yes? You agree? Ele qesheng!

Graham wished he could show that much confidence in a city—any city, really.

He did like all the new buildings, tall and bright and often irregularly shaped. Baku was the capital of a young nation, and it would make a name for itself any way it could. He admired that, and the architecture. This city was changing, rebuilding.

Then a cloud of cigarette smoke passed by him, and he had the urge to laugh. Some things changed, but some things didn’t. The old driver used to smoke—their car always smelled of it—and his parents would complain as they spun window cranks to get fresh air, but to Graham it became tradition. He took a deep breath, stifled a cough, and changed direction.

To this day, cigarettes made him think of home. He’d never dared to try them himself, which he supposed his lungs appreciated. Still—that smell… Maybe some things really didn’t change.

He headed for the Old City.

After only a handful of unintentional detours, he reached the main wall through a park with more grass in it than he recalled. The wall was blocky and brown and ancient as ever; in his memory, it towered over its surroundings, but now that wasn’t actually the case. Maybe it never had been. Most things had seemed taller when he was twelve.

Passing through the gate with a river of strangers, he found himself on a cobbled street with souvenir vendors lining either side. There were patterned scarves, Azerbaijani carpets (miniature and full size), and elaborate magnets of little figures in traditional clothes dancing, dancing, their smiles wide. Graham paused by a display of “I Heart Baku” T-shirts. The gray-haired owner of the stand grinned at him—he had two gold teeth, which reminded Graham yet again of the old driver—and began to lay out an array of vibrant traditional hats, swearing that no better prices existed in the city. Realizing that the man would continue to produce hats in increasingly flamboyant colors until interrupted, Graham stumbled through his thanks and backed away. He did not buy anything.

Instead, he followed the cobbled walking street around a few corners, emerging onto a smoother path and abruptly finding himself at the foot of his destination: the Maiden’s Tower.

Someone had told him once that the Maiden’s Tower was shaped like a rolled carpet on its side, but Graham thought that description pushed the limits of analogy. The main tower was cylindrical and tapered slightly as it rose, and there was a vaguely rectangular formation protruding from its side—almost like the edge of a carpet coming unrolled, maybe. Mostly it looked like an old brown tower.

Graham approached the door at the bottom, paid admission, and stepped inside, sparing a passing glance for the first floor before he headed up the slim spiral staircase. He wasn’t really here for the museum, but he paused by several lighted displays as he continued up through the next few floors. So much history, claimed and paraded before all who cared to see. What would that be like—having such a history to claim?

His chest ached a little.

When he reached the top floor, the spiral staircase ended. The only alternate path was a set of ancient steps going into the wall and up, each one steep and uneven, the ceiling above them so low he had to bend over. These stairs were a relic of times before; the rest of the building’s interior had been redone for the museum, but this section they left alone.

He climbed up, emerging onto the roof of the tower a little breathless. There were a few other people here too, posing against the backdrop of a city skyline that sprawled out forever on all sides except where the sea blanked out the horizon.

Graham shoved his hands into his pockets and walked to the edge of the tower. Here, a clear glass barrier added several feet of height to the low stone wall that circled the roof. Looking past the faint glimmer of his reflection in the glass, he studied the juxtaposition of old and new structures that filled his view, blocky Soviet apartment buildings just a few streets over from silvery-blue skyscrapers.

His phone vibrated. Graham jerked his hand out of his pocket, but the buzz of the notification seemed to linger on his skin. What time was it? Was he going to call Lara?

No, it was still too early to think about that. Probably, someone from the company wanted to get ahold of him; they could wait.

His mind drifted to a legend his Azerbaijani babysitter had once told him about the Maiden’s Tower.

A long time ago, a shah arranged for his daughter to be married, and everything about the match was quickly settled. The princess, however, didn’t consent to the marriage. Unsatisfied or desperate or both, she would not follow through with her father’s plans, and when he refused to change his mind, she ascended the tower and threw herself into the sea.

Thus the landmark’s name.

Graham’s decision to date Lara had been voluntary—and he was more than content to descend this tower by way of the stairs—but, ruminating on how his father had arranged his career in the family company before he even got out of college, he thought he could imagine just a little of the princess’s feelings.

He remembered his eight-year-old self pointing out that leaping from the tower all the way into the sea would require wings, as the two weren’t exactly adjacent. Twenty-four-year-old Graham just closed his eyes and drew in a long breath, feeling the sun on his face and wondering if flying was the problem all along.

He stayed on top of the tower for a long time, alone with the view.

Eventually, the nagging sense that his call with Lara was getting closer reminded him of one more place he wanted to visit. Unsure of the directions to this next landmark, Graham found himself a taxi—one of the purple London-style ones that made occasional appearances on downtown roads—and asked for the Shehidler Khiyabani.

Martyr’s Alley.

Soon enough, the taxi deposited him on a wide walking street lined with manicured bushes, right between two poles that framed this end of the path. On one, the tricolor Azerbaijani flag fluttered in the ever-present Baku wind; on the other, a wide bowl housed a dancing flame.

Of course—in his excitement to see the Caspian Sea, Graham had forgotten Azerbaijan’s other name: the Land of Fire. Ironic that he would overlook the one thing about this country his parents never did. The nation’s abundant oil deposits were the cause of some eternally burning natural gas fires, but they were also the reason Graham’s family had moved here in the first place.

He nodded to the flame as he walked past.

A couple of minutes later, he climbed a few stairs and found himself at the memorial he’d come to see. All the way down to the end of the path, there was a wall of white marble on his right. Evenly spaced along the ground in front of it were smooth rectangles of black marble—tombstones—overlooked by matching black plaques. Each plaque bore an image of the deceased along with their name, birthday, and death date. Bright red flowers rested on some of the tombstones.

The hill rising on the other side of the wall was a cemetery for Azerbaijani heroes, but this solemn row of shining marble highlighted a few. Toward the end of the line, he knew, lay men who’d fought in the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict with neighboring Armenia, but most of these tombstones honored a different national grief.

He read the plaques as he went by. Each person’s name, their father’s name, their birthday—he saw years like 1939, 1956, 1970—and then the one thing they all shared: death date. 20.01.1990.

January 20th, 1990.

They called it Black January, a night when Azerbaijan was still part of the USSR, when Soviet armed forces rolled into Baku with tanks to quell unrest but left innocent civilians dead and dying in the streets instead.

Graham hadn’t been alive back then, but he followed enough Azerbaijani news to see a little about the annual commemorations of the massacre. He knew that the death toll that night had been well over one hundred; some sources said the injured had numbered up to eight hundred.

He stopped by a tombstone with a blank plaque, except for the date, 20.01.1990, and the single word Namelum.

Unknown.

Some of the bodies had never been identified. Where the image of the deceased would go, Graham saw only his own reflection staring back from the polished stone.

What would it be like, to die for his homeland?

To have a homeland to die for?

He shivered and kept walking.

Martyr’s Alley ended on a broad overlook with a tall, narrow dome in the middle. Inside the dome, at the center of an eight-pointed metal star, burned another eternal flame. He walked past the fire to the edge of the overlook, where he rested his elbows on the sand-brown wall and looked out to the Caspian Sea. He missed living next to the sea; missed cresting a hill and seeing that hazy blue line in the distance where water turned to sky. He missed having a place in the world. Even if the only identity that place offered him was foreigner, he preferred it to having nothing at all.

His phone went off.

Graham pulled it out of his pocket and squinted at the screen, which looked almost black in the afternoon sun. But yes—this time, it was Lara’s FaceTime call.

He swiped to answer her.

“Hey!” she sang, the glimmer of a sunrise seeping through a window behind her. Lara’s early-morning exuberance always mystified him.

He half-smiled. “Good morning.”

“How’s your day going? Where are you right now? Can you show me what you’re looking at?”

What was there to say? “It’s been—good. I’m visiting a national monument.” He shifted his gaze from the phone to the cityscape where it faded into the horizon, then flipped the camera so she could see the Caspian Sea.

Lara admired it delightedly for a moment, and then he switched the camera back to himself. “Uh, I think that’s all I’m going to show you today.”

She paused. “All right. You sure it’s going okay?”

“Yeah, yeah. I just—maybe you can come with me next time instead. You’ll be able to see better, anyway.”

“Sure!”

Graham looked back at the screen and smiled. They talked for a few more minutes, then said their goodbyes—he using the Azeri phrase, sagh ol, just for the fun of it—and hung up.

He put his phone away and let out a breath. Then, he inhaled slowly, noting the faintly salty scent of the Caspian borne on the breeze.