AZERBAIJAN
On Oilmen Boulevard, Gulnara Guseinova heals people with the smell of flowers. Those who are afflicted with senility are made to sniff laurel leaves. Those with high blood pressure — geraniums. For asthma, rosemary is best. People come to Gulnara with a piece of paper from Professor Gasanov. On it the professor has prescribed the name of a flower and the length of time it should be sniffed. You sniff sitting down, most often for ten minutes. Gulnara sees to it that everybody sniffs that which they are supposed to; that some senile old fellow, for instance, doesn’t start sniffing rosemary. The flowers stand in rows in a glass house that is called the office of phytotherapy, which resembles a greenhouse. Gulnara tells me to sit down and sniff something too. Do I detect the fragrance? I detect nothing. Well, now — that’s because the flower does not smell in and of itself. One has to gently move the stem, and then the flower feels that someone is interested in it. And it begins to release its scent. Flowers do not smell for themselves, only for someone else. To every touch the flower will respond with fragrance — it is naive and frivolous; it wants to please everyone. “Comrades, move the flowers!” Gulnara admonishes the old men sitting in the office, who begin shaking the twigs as if they were brushing ants off them.
I ask Gulnara, who is a student of medicine, if she believes that a flower can cure a man. I don’t mean heal someone psychically, for that has been proven possible, but heal physically — for instance restore elasticity to a calcifying joint. Gulnara smiles. She offers only that people come to her for healing from all over the world. She emphasizes: “Even from America.” Professor Gasanov’s method — this healing with the scent of flowers — is already renowned.
I think that the enchanting thing about this method, for Gulnara, as for me, is its aesthetic aspect, as well as the cheerfulness and kindliness of its wisdom. For what can the professor do with a seventy-year-old man who forgets the date of his birth? He could, of course, place him in a crowded hospital room, with the odor of chloroform and iodine. But what for? Is a twilight fragrant with flowers not more beautiful than one reeking of chloroform? So when someone who must look at his identification card to give his date of birth comes to Gasanov complaining that something is muddying his head, the professor listens to him attentively and then writes down for him on a piece of paper: “Rx: Laurel leaves. Ten minutes a day. For three weeks.” And look, says Gulnara, crowds are pouring in to see the professor. You have to wait months for an appointment.
I am sitting with Gulnara on Oilmen Boulevard, at the edge of the sea. From here Baku rises up gently in stone terraces. The city lies on a bay, has the shape of an amphitheater, and so is completely visible. Gulnara asks if I like Baku. I answer that I do, yes, very much. Its buildings parade one next to another in a great revue of architectural styles and epochs. Everything is here! Pseudo-Gothic and pseudobaroque and post-Moorish and Corbusier’s school and twenties’ constructivism and edifices in the grand style and pretty modern constructions. It is a one-of-a-kind spectacle. Everything is in one place, each style displayed right next to the other, as in the window of the London office of Mr. Cox, Estate Agent, which offers everyone exactly what he desires.
Furthermore, there are several Bakus.
The oldest Baku is the smallest. It is not only tiny, but so tightly packed, so compressed, so cluttered, that when I walk into it I involuntarily take a deep breath to make sure I will have enough air to breathe. If one were to stop here in the middle of the street and stretch out one’s arms, then one could with one hand stroke a child sleeping in a cradle in the apartment on the left and with the other treat oneself to a pear lying on the table in the apartment on the right. One walks single file here, because a couple walking side by side immediately creates a bottleneck. And Baku’s old town has no plan — or maybe it has one, but it is so surrealistic that no normal mind can grasp it. One never knows how to find one’s way out of here. I came with Valery, who was born and raised in Baku; we tried various alternatives, this way, and that way, but nothing worked. We were at the end of our rope when some kids finally saved us.
This part of Baku is called Ichen-Shereh, which means “Inner City.” It is steeped in legend and extolled in many backyard ballads. For residents of the larger Baku, Ichen-Shereh has always been utterly exotic, a place where people speak their own language and live as if under one roof, without secrets. Today Ichen-Shereh is gradually being pulled down; there will be a new neighborhood here.
Around the Inner City stretches Baku proper, large and slightly snobbish. For this large Baku is a city custom-built, built for privateers, for parvenus, for the kings of Baku oil. Baku always made a career of oil. As far back as the tenth century Arab writers refer to Baku as the place from which oil is brought. According to Adjaib ad-Dunia, a twelfth-century Persian treatise, “Baku blazes like a fire all night. They stand a cauldron on the ground and boil water in it.” A Turkish traveler, Eveli Chelebi, describes this boiling in 1666: “There are various barren places in Baku. If a man or a horse should put his foot down there and stand a while, his foot will start to burn. Caravan guides dig up the earth in those places, set kettles in it, and the food starts to boil immediately. Prodigious is God’s wisdom!”
Caravans transported the oil over all of Asia. Marco Polo writes that it was first and foremost an invaluable cure for the skin diseases of camels. And so, in a certain sense, the transportation network of medieval Asia depended on Baku oil. Because of the burning ground, Baku was also the Mecca for Hindu fire worshipers, who journeyed here from India to warm themselves near their flaming gods. Their temple, Ateshga, has been preserved, with four extinguished chimneys.
One hundred years ago the first derrick goes up in Baku. The city’s vertiginous career begins. A Pole came here — an elegant man, I am told, with dash. He hired a droshky and had himself driven around. At a certain moment he took off his top hat and threw it on the ground. He indicated to the astonished driver the place where the hat had fallen. “We are going to drill here,” he said. He was a rich man later. More than two hundred foreign firms exploit Baku oil. “In 1873,” writes Harvey O’Connor,
the first oil spouts in Baku from an automatic shaft. During the next decade Baku grew to the level of the world’s wealthiest city, and Armenian and Tatar oil millionaires started to rival millionaires from Texas. The city became the largest refining center in the world. Russia assumed the position of a great exporter of crude oil, and for a few years would overshadow the United States. The Nobel brothers, who arrived in Baku quite by accident in 1875, built their first refinery here a year later, and in 1878 formed the Nobel Brothers Naphtha Company, which by 1883 already controlled 51 percent of crude oil production. They built the first oil pipeline in the Baku region, brought in drillers from Pennsylvania, and applied the latest scientific advances to the organization of this chaotically developing industry. In the course of a few years the Nobels acquired a fleet of enormous ocean-going steam-powered tankers and smaller river tankers for the transport of oil on the Volga. This was happening at a time when sailing ships still transported oil from America in barrels and cans. The Nobels were to be the exception to the rule which held that whoever lived even a year among the oil magnates in Baku could never again become a civilized man. The “Black City” of Baku became one of the most hideous, crowded, and rough corners of the world. Tatars, Armenians, Persians, and Jews created, together with the Russians, an ethnic mosaic which from time to time exploded in violent massacres. Quite a few oil-rich fields were given as presents by the czar to various court favorites. Speculation was unleashed, fortunes were made from one day to the next. The world had never before seen anything like it, not even in western Pennsylvania. Because there was no way to catch all the streams of gushing crude, the wells were ringed with dikes, creating lakes. Nevertheless entire rivers of crude frequently flowed from the wells straight into the sea.