Days like this

One day, on the way back to C-bad...

Rarely a day goes by without you wondering what you’re doing here. And sometimes, Azerbaijan will answer with moments that justify simply everything.

Little did I know this past Sunday would be an entire series of those moments – dream-like and vivid. On its clear morning I pressed dark footprints into fresh, fleecy snow, and then boarded a Baku-bound marshrutka with two other PCVs. Ostensibly, I was traveling back to Cəlilabad. In actuality, my fate was being put into higher hands that be – and dozens of kind strangers.

Taxi drivers had been jostling like vultures and a leering shopkeeper had overcharged for a bottle of water. We were a little – let’s say – dehydrated, very tired, and highly unwashed. An edge of tension had crept into my mood, as it always seems to when I’m in unfamiliar Azeri towns, and I was unsure whether the next rude, ignorant comment from a rude, ignorant passerby would incite me to a verbal retort or an inspired crotch kick. (So far, dear readers, I’ve never gotten physical – though the harassment is the mightiest test of patience I’ve had in my life so far.) I decided to cope by napping on the ride.

When I woke up, we had pulled into a gas station, the marshrutka driver and his two stoic friends were standing at the open door, and a broken ridge of snowy mountains stood silent in the distance.

“Kafe, kafe, çay?” the driver inquired. He gestured. We followed. An island of broken Azeri amid the soft hubbub of chatter, we sat in the gas station, and were provided milky instant coffee in chipped mugs. The three men stared at us, asked what we were (“Teachers, English.”), laughed, and asked where we were going. We told them our route: the spiderwebbing junctions we’d have to thread later by taxi and marshrutka to get back south.

“No,” the driver said in response to our plan. He said he’d take us to Ələt, and from there, we could catch the bus to Salyan. Buses went all the time through Ələt.

Reassured, we stretched our legs, wondered at the mountains, and then boarded the marshrutka again. A catnap later, we rolled to a halt on the road’s shoulder, at junction in the highway.

Here, the bus driver hopped out, unloaded our bags, and pointed at the intersecting road.

Catch the bus over there, he said. Then the marshrutka drove off, and it was only lumpy, brown plains with remote foothills, a blue highway sign, two roads of sweeping asphalt, the occasional dark shape of a vehicle, increasing in size as it approached – life-size for a moment before it rapidly dwindled in the distance as it rushed on its way – and us.

Oh, right - we're in Azerbaijan.

At this exact moment, we all looked at each other and started to laugh.

“When I get down here, I’m going to remember days like this,” Rick said. “Let’s walk.”

That pretty much summed up what we did. We walked, and walked, and attempted to hail down a miraculous and sudden bus that had a sign proclaiming it was Cəlilabad-bound. But it whizzed by – which was just as well. If it had stopped, it would have been too easy, too perfect. The dream-like state would have ended there.

Eventually a truck pulled over to the shoulder of the road, and a man was checking his engine. We ran up, asked where he was going – and he was going in the direction we were. Could we? He didn’t even look at us; he just waved for us to get in. We creatively folded our bags and ourselves into a densely packed arrangement in the front seat with him, and drove.

“He’s shifting in between my legs,” Rick said, whose knees straddled the gear shift.

A strong sun swept a glaring white shine off the road, and soon enough we stopped at a tea house. We weren’t yet at our destination, but the driver inexplicably told us to go.

So we deposited ourselves onto the road again, brushed off the gazes of loitering curious Azeris, and kept walking.

When we finally stopped to turn and see if we could hail down another taxi, we saw another marshrutka bound for Cəlilabad. Waving it down proved fruitless; the driver X’ed his arms through the windshield to indicate they had no space. As if an all-knowing cosmic force had teasingly shook its head somewhere, it whizzed by. But the car behind it slowed, pulled over, and a man and a woman in the front seats told us to get in.

We got in and started talking. They were two Bakuvians, driving down to Astara to visit relatives. The man worked at a bank (incidentally, the bank we all had accounts with), and turned up Michael Jackson’s “Black or White” on the stereo; the woman asked us what were were doing out in the rayons of Azerbaijan, when we slowed to a halt for the third time that day and a rubbery stench filled the car.

The man told Rick to get out of the car with him. The woman turned around from the front seat.

“The tire needs to be changed,” she said as if it was the most obvious fact in the world. For half an hour the Minnesotan, the woman, and I sat in the car, talking and giggling as the tire-changing commenced – an operation that passed with infinite unconcern. Finding he was in need of a nut fastener, the man merely flagged down a passing car and four Azeri men clambered out, provided the required nut fastener and, of course, smoked and idled.

The rest passed in a blur of fitful Azeri conversation and Michael Jackson tunes. We set Rick down in Salyan, and then rode with the Bakuvians all the way to Celilabad, where fading afternoon sunlight was blazing a subdued pre-sunset over the distant, clouded mountaintops. We got out, and tried to offer the man and woman a paltry sum as compensation. The woman looked at us incredulously.

“They want to pay,” she told the man. He looked up from the trunk, where he was taking out our bags, and made the curt sound that Azeris make when expressing gentle admonition, a combination between a cluck and a teeth suck. They refused the money, told us to call them when we visited Baku next, and drove away, the woman’s pale hand waving through the window.

Days just like this, Azerbaijan.

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