Saffron, cardamom, a pinch of vanilla.

          The air smells of spices, hands slide across the table. Kamalya rolls out the phyllo dough, the seventh batch of the morning. Outside her window the sun shines, children clamor in the yard, their high-pitched voices reaching the kitchen through the open window. In her mind, Kamalya goes over the names of her customers: Elnur, Firuz, Sabina. Just the three of them, not much to remember. In reality, there are many more: small families who order from Kamalya only rarely, for the Nowruz holiday. Still, only these three names matter now. Kamalya always knows exactly who matters.

          Lemon, water, a handful of almonds to sprinkle on top, a thin layer of dough, chopped nuts, a new layer of dough—twelve in total. No room for mistakes. When all is ready, Kamalya cuts the baklava diagonally, in one direction then the other, into diamond-shaped pieces.

          ...oil the surface, one piece at a time. Before putting it in the oven, focus on the first of the three names and hold onto it until the dough begins to turn pink, then golden, and come to life...

Elnur hated his life. Well, he didn’t exactly hate it (Elnur detested such words), but his life didn’t bring him any joy. Ever. It seemed like he just didn’t have any luck. Take this stupid car he was stuck in as he drove home through Baku’s heavy traffic. The car was supposed to be pretty new but was already acting up. As if he needed a vehicle repair to add to his other expenses. “Don’t you dare, you piece of shit,” Elnur railed at the car as if it were alive. “You ungrateful bitch, trash.”

          He didn’t know when everything had gone to hell. His childhood had been ordinary: he was the eldest son of three in a family with an apartment in the city center and a decent average income. Yes, it was a little cramped for five people, and mom was the only breadwinner, while dad used to lie on the couch all day long and complain. Apparently, everyone owed him something: a good job, a better apartment, maybe even a more attractive wife. “Everyone” being mom’s brothers. That’s just how things were. Local flavor, so to say. So, life wasn’t particularly comfortable or particularly exciting, but it was normal, like everyone else’s.

          Elnur wasn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but he was no idiot. After finishing high school, he moved to Russia where his mom’s brother lived (and was, in fact, quite well-off). This uncle welcomed his beloved sister’s son with open arms. Elnur started college, even tried to do some real studying, but as time passed he just couldn’t fight off the crushing waves of boredom that rolled over him every few days. The first time he felt some relief was when he tried “dollies.” An older guy was selling the little pills on the street: pink round things, not too expensive. After a couple of months, the guy invited Elnur to go into business with him. Elnur agreed and a year went by quickly. He was convinced that no one suspected a thing; after all, he had been very careful and had rarely brought any drugs home, just once a week, to relax on his own in the bathroom… Well, he got caught. Bad luck.

          Miraculously, Elnur didn’t land in jail, didn’t even get expelled. His uncle was furious, of course, but the uncle’s words carried weight in town, so Elnur managed to escape the worst. Somehow, in some sort of a haze, he still managed to write and defend his thesis, and then he returned to Azerbaijan. For the next two years, he tried to win back his parents’ trust. It wasn’t easy. They were disappointed in him, they rejected him, and that hurt. He still couldn’t fully grasp what he’d been feeling back then: probably, guilt. Anxiety, perhaps. Or was it despair? He had obligations, obligations to everyone, always owing something, always explaining himself, justifying his actions; he couldn’t even run away. An empty, miserable life. 

          Then came a string of strange years: different jobs, sometimes even stable and respectable ones, a constant mental unease, huge fights with his mother, pictures of potential brides she kept showing him, none to his liking, different women with faces that left no trace in his memory. An eternal sense of guilt, the desire to support his parents and a complete inability to do so. Again, despair.

          His cousin, the daughter of that same uncle, got into a PhD program in Paris a couple of years later and came to Baku for the summer. Elnur paid a visit to congratulate her. All went well until, over a fourth cup of tea, he suddenly blurted out: “If I were a Russian or some other foreigner, I would move away too. They are all so free. Maybe then I wouldn’t have felt such a burden of responsibility all the time. I would have lived the life I wanted.”

          The cousin gave him a very strange look, full of almost palpable contempt. But she remained polite.

          Multiple times Elnur had tried to move out of his parents’ apartment. He would find himself an apartment to rent, bargain the price down, and then, suddenly, have a change of heart right as he was about to sign the lease; each time it dawned on him that he would need to completely rebuild his life, manage the household himself, cook, wash and clean on his own. Each time he stopped at the very last minute. More and more often he thought: maybe I should get married.

          At first he’d really liked Nazrin, who was sharp-tongued, stylish, able to stand up for herself. Besides, she came from a well-established Bakuvian family. Admittedly, she had some quirks: for example, when his sister-in-law gave Nazrin a fake Chanel bag as a gift on their engagement day, Nazrin smiled at her adoringly, then threw the bag into a trash bin the moment she left. “Who does she think I am, some tramp?!” Back then Elnur found this amusing: you’d better not mess with this lady.

          They were engaged for a year. In that year Elnur realized he was not in love. Quite the opposite. But breaking off the engagement would have been stupid: it meant fighting, returning the ring and dowry, spoiling relations with his new almost-relatives and living in his hellhole of a home again... Elnur brushed the idea off. He’d have to stick it out. That was what everyone did.

          Before the pandemic, he’d somehow managed to get through each day: he left home early, stayed late at work, and spent most evenings with his friends. He drank a lot, came home, collapsed into bed without seeing anyone, and then repeated it all the next day. But when they were cooped up at home during Covid, he nearly lost it. Everything about Nazrin seemed to annoy him: the way she walked and the way she talked, the smell of her perfume, her food, her endless bitching. Even their three-year-old son put him off, though not in any serious way. And when his wife got fed up, took the child and moved to her father’s house, Elnur felt so relieved. He was sure she would return, there was no way around it, but at least he could have a break.

          Instead, Elnur got even more depressed: he lost one of his two jobs, and it became even harder to pay the mortgage. Some easy money he’d come by a couple of months back evaporated in a bad investment. It was good that few people knew this. Meanwhile, Nazrin had complained about him to the rest of her family, so for the next few weeks he’d been dragged to meetings with the family where they tried to set him on the “right” path. Someone mentioned divorce, but that was where Elnur drew the line: what nonsense. They had a child. He would suffer through this crap somehow, right? And so would she. Princess.

          Somehow, they reconciled. Nazrin came home, another year flew by and it was a hard one: the pandemic, the Second Karabakh War. But now it was the middle of March again, the holiday of rejuvenation, Nowruz Bayram. Life seemed a little lighter.

          Elnur hit the steering wheel with his fist: “Ungrateful bitch.”

          The apartment was empty, but a WhatsApp message popped up on his phone: Nazrin and their son were already at his parents’ place. Right, they had planned to celebrate Nowruz together, how could he forget? A second WhatsApp message: she’d forgotten the last batch of made-to-order baklava at home, could he grab it on his way? It was on the kitchen table.

          All day long, the stupid bitch does absolutely nothing, Elnur brooded as he walked to the kitchen. “And now she can’t even throw together a khoncha, she orders it.”

          He really had to hurry. His parents lived in midtown, and he would have to drive through heavy traffic on his way there, again. Instead, Elnur sat down at the table. He opened the box, took out one of the fragrant pink baklavas baked by someone he didn’t know and, without a thought, put it in his mouth.

          He didn’t know what was happening to him in that moment. Even later, he would never admit to anyone that it had all happened to him there and then. There, while he was sitting at the kitchen table all alone, with fingers sticky from honey and his head full of sweet, painful fog. There, while he kept looking at the wall and not crying, but wailing like a beaten street dog. There, when for a very long time, probably for an hour, he wasn’t able to form a single thought, or move, or blink, despite his wife’s persistent phone calls. He could only breathe. Slowly, drop by drop, despair drained from his body. Perhaps all the despair built over a lifetime.

          When he’d managed to pull himself together, he got up and went to celebrate Nowruz. On his way to his family, he didn’t try to explain to himself what had happened.

          Explanations could wait.

          A week later, Elnur put his son to bed and whispered something warm in his ear, the words that he himself had never heard as a kid. When the child fell asleep, he went to his bedroom, where Nazrin was on the phone with a friend. Elnur came closer and hugged her from behind, hugged her tighter than he had in the past two years. In the mirror, Elnur saw his wife cut off her conversation mid-sentence, lay down the phone, and watch him with a silent question in her beautifully lined brown eyes. There and then, Elnur mustered his strength, gathered all the courage that he had never had before, and, finally, told the truth:

          “I don’t love you.”

          He didn’t look away as he told her: “Forgive me.”

Kamalya takes the tray out of the oven, sets the baklava on the counter to cool, and starts to strain the warm saffron syrup. She separates the dry red threads from one another; puts the extras aside. While her hands are moving, Kamalya sings in a language that nobody else would recognize; she sings beautifully, draws out the words, savors them. A little while later she takes a slim penknife from a kitchen drawer and slashes her left wrist with a quick, sharp movement. Kamalya raises her hand over the pot of saffron syrup. A few drops of blood fall into the hot liquid. She runs her tongue over her lacerated wrist knowing that the wound will heal in a few seconds. No one will suspect a thing.

          Back when people better understood what Nowruz stood for, Kamalya and her sisters and brothers had no blood, no hands, no wrists. All these layers of human illusion accumulated much later, when new laws arrived in the land, and the space of their natural habitat was filled with  foreign spirits, summoned by the foreign prayers. It was not an easy time for Kamalya’s people. But, as time passed, it became clear that they would always have a place in the land. Especially on the days of Nowruz.

          Kamalya laughs softly and pours the red syrup over the baklava.

Tears poured down Sabina’s face. These words loomed over her like letters on a TV screen: “Tears poured down.” So that even her suffering became somewhat theatrical. Sabina had always seen the world in color, even the letters of the alphabet: “a” was red for her, “b” was brown, and so on. She saw how whole phrases flew off people’s lips, froze in the air, shone bright, took on the color of the very first syllable, or of the middle one, or the last, though that was rare. The whole thing was impossible to explain. At first, Sabina was convinced that this happened to everyone, until she realized that adults lied to her clumsily and only pretended to understand her so as not to hurt her feelings. That’s why, by the age of eight, she’d stopped explaining herself and begun to draw.

          She drew with marker pens on paper, chalk on asphalt, pencils, watercolors, with everything she could get her hands on in her remote southern village, which had the only stationery store in the district. A lot of stuff had to be pre-ordered, and some things she still couldn’t get: they were simply too expensive. And anyway, all the good art teachers lived in the city, and the best ones lived in the capital, Baku, where she and her family went every spring, to visit relatives on Nowruz Bayram. But Sabina didn’t lose heart. In the world of colors, there was no room for melancholy.

          A large oak forest grew by their house, not far from the sea and its rocky beach. Sabina often went there with the neighbor girls: she wasn’t allowed to go alone. In the forest, away from the watchful eyes of adults, the girls ran around, danced, played hide-and-seek, and, of course, swapped secrets. Sabina, too, joined in those games—it wasn’t that they didn’t interest her, she just got distracted. Colors overwhelmed her: gray and yellow from the mushrooms on the trees; yellowish, deep brown from the tree bark; gold and green from the dry leaves under her feet... “Too bad I can’t paint it,” she thought. “I can’t paint anything I see, not really.”

          From time to time her older brother, Firuz, joined her for a forest walk. One time Sabina got angry: “I can’t paint, I don’t know how!” She even stamped her foot. Her brother, who usually paid little attention to her, looked up from his cell phone and said: “Just look it up on YouTube, you dummy, you can find anything there.” A couple weeks later, he even got her a used but perfectly good smartphone.

          The best gift of her life.

          Then Sabina was in tenth grade, time to choose which colleges to apply to, if any. But she couldn’t make up her mind. Her parents insisted that she go to teacher’s college, or at least study medicine, so she could stay close to her family. Besides, these were very decent occupations, if not the most appropriate for a woman. But Sabina didn’t want to teach or save lives. The weight of her indecision, which dragged on for months, pressed harder with each passing day on her temples and shoulders.

          So, when her cousin, during their next visit to Baku, secretly dragged her to see an upstairs neighbor, allegedly a “falchi”or psychic, Sabina went along with it. While the neighbor disinterestedly laid out Tarot cards for her cousin and answered questions about undying teenage love, Sabina found it hard to breathe—so many colors lived in this woman! A whirlwind of rainbows, somehow compressed to a single point. When it was Sabina’s turn to find out her future, the neighbor put the cards aside and wordlessly pulled Sabina by the chin out of her stupor. She drew her closer and said, after a pause: “Never paint me. Ever. But paint everything else. That is the sole purpose of your life.”

          And somehow it didn’t sound like a curse.

          Before leaving, Sabina and her cousin were treated to tea and sweets: dried apricots, nuts, pastries, and khoncha—so tasty, who could refuse?

          But even years later, Sabina remembered how afraid she was to try the warm, fragrant, blood-red baklava.

Kamalya laughs softly: yes, that girl could see. A peculiar gift: the ability to see more than others, inhibited by the complete inability to share this vision. By not knowing how.

          Sometimes, Kamalya thinks lazily, humans need a little fire in their veins. A few drops of the ruby fluid of spirits who have lived for millenia and are eager to share it.

          Kamalya puts the finished baklava in the gift boxes and ties them with long blue ribbons. Then, with a lightning-fast movement, she slices each ribbon with her fingernail, turning one elegant ribbon into two, turning one name into another, turning female into male...

Feeling so much anger seemed almost unmanly. The Icheri Sheher apartment Sabina had run away to was easier to reach by car, but Firuz was so nervous that he almost collided with several other cars on his way there. After the third near-miss, he realized it was wiser to continue on foot. He parked the car at a nearby supermarket. It was a stone’s throw to the Maiden’s Tower, the center of the Old City, and the building he was looking for was nearby, too. That was good. To be honest, Firuz rarely visited the area: it was hard to get to from the residential district of ​​Yasamal, where he had moved from his native village two years before. And there was no reason to visit Icheri Sheher, especially during lockdown.

          A year earlier, when his sister had come to stay with him to study art at the city’s best university, he’d been slightly annoyed: he’d gotten used to living alone and enjoyed his freedom, and then Sabina had latched onto him like a tick. “Let me live with you, otherwise our parents will never let me move here,” she’d pleaded. She was right. And it was some kind of miracle that she’d gotten accepted into the program, so he took pity on her. He himself couldn’t have done it: those books of hers, the paintings, her imagination—not his thing. Still, he was so proud of her, even if he never really showed it. He wouldn’t want it to go to her head.

          But soon it became clear that they wouldn’t be able to get along in the same house: she always wanted to have fun, go to cafes and restaurants, take late night walks with her friends after class, meet people in person despite the lockdown. All of this made him incredibly angry: what would their mutual friends say if they ran into his sister late in the evening, God-knows-where and with God-knows-who? Sure, this was the capital, but they were not city people. They were from the village! There’d always be a neighbor to spread rumors. You had to keep up appearances.

          But his sister didn’t understand this. They fought every day, and every day Sabina looked a little unhappier, a little grimmer. Somber. Until one evening when he returned and saw that her room was empty, her things gone. Before he could start panicking Firuz got a Facebook message from her: she had gone to stay with a girlfriend. Everything was fine, he didn’t need to come looking for her, but they could meet sometime in the city to talk.

          He yelled at her in a voice message, yelled like never before in his life. He said all kinds of things unpleasant to listen back to. Although, maybe it was for the best that Sabina had gotten frightened and stopped responding... She shouldn’t think this was a joke.

          Through friends of friends, he quickly found out exactly where his sister had moved  and who she was staying with: one of her rich classmates who owned an apartment in Icheri Sheher. Those goddamn daddy’s girls.

          Firuz had no trouble locating the building but he slowed as he approached it. The low front door was painted in warm reds and beige. The handle was covered in a local ornamental pattern that looked freshly painted. Firuz glanced at the door, then at the handle. Something like sadness came over him; but he quickly brushed it off.

          Now what? Firuz shifted from foot to foot. He had been driven here by emotion, but frankly he had no plan. How would he get inside? He couldn’t simply knock on the door. If Sabina was home, she would immediately recognize his voice and make a scene for all the neighbors to enjoy. No, there had to be a better way...

          He was in luck. Before he could think of anything, the door flew open and Sabina and her friend, a thin girl with a short, boyish haircut, appeared in the doorway. Both girls froze when they saw Firuz. They squealed in unison and rushed back into the house. But Firuz shoved his foot in the door and leapt inside. Still squealing, the girls ran into a back room and shut the door in his face. Firuz punched its wooden surface. He could have knocked it down if he’d wanted to. “Come out, you idiot! Now.” He wasn’t going to leave, so what was she hoping for?

          Sabina’s friend (Aysel? Aygul?) yelled that she’d call the police. Firuz barked something very rude. He didn’t usually speak to women that way, but who did this little tramp think she was? She’d caused enough problems as it was.

          Besides, Firuz was not afraid of the police. He knew he’d be able to come to an agreement with them. Well, unless this girl’s father was some big-shot official. But he probably wasn’t.

          As a warning, Firuz kicked the door a few more times and knocked small souvenirs from the nearby bookshelves. They fell to the floor, breaking with a dramatic crash. Behind the door, Sabina began to sob.

          Still seething with anger, he sat down at the kitchen table. From the kitchen, connected to the corridor by an arched doorway, he had a clear view to the back room, so there was no need to rush. Sitting there like a fool for about ten minutes, Firuz allowed himself to notice the unusual interior of the house. It was one of those old houses in Icheri Sheher that you sometimes saw in movies: low wooden ceilings, narrow corridors, a creaky staircase in the middle of the kitchen that led straight to the roof. What caught him off guard wasn’t the toy-like layout but the numerous paintings on the walls.

          Back in his home, Sabina had never put her work on display. She had stacked the finished canvases in the corner of her room. Sometimes Firuz went in, held up new drawings, looked at them closely and thought to himself, with a slight feeling of displeasure, that he understood nothing. It was all right, though. In the real world, no one needed artists.Why not let Sabina indulge herself while she still had time?

          That’s what he’d thought.

          But here, Firuz saw his sister’s hand everywhere. He saw it in the paintings that were too colorful for such an old house, in the walls that had been freshly painted, even in the floor: Firuz looked down and saw beneath his feet a pattern of almond shapes with curlicues. The pattern was fresh, faint, clearly unfinished.

          “Silly girl,” Firuz thought again. He was very tired.

          There were two full plates on the small kitchen table: one with dried fruit, another with sprouted wheat (look at that! these two were preparing in earnest for Nowruz). Next to them was an open box with freshly baked baklava and sun-shaped gogals. Firuz immediately recognized the plain box: their aunt’s neighbor sold pastries for next to nothing and Sabina had ordered them ahead before she sold out. Firuz took a piece of baklava from the box and popped it into his mouth. While he was chewing, his gaze continued to wander over his sister’s paintings until finally settling upon a small one above the sideboard. There was something about it... Firuz wiped his fingers with a napkin and went over to get a better look. The painting had clearly just been done. He saw a table, with an oil lamp on it, and a watermelon half with bright red flesh. Not an appetizing and untouched watermelon, but cut up and half eaten, as if pecked by birds. There were two forks on top of the watermelon and, on either side of the table, the silhouettes of two children were discernible: of a boy, a bit larger, and a girl with painted fingernails.

          So that’s how she saw it…

          Firuz took a deep breath. He too remembered those evenings. In their village, the electricity went out every few hours, so their parents would light oil lamps in the evening. The lamps made the hot air even stuffier than usual, but there was no way around it. Twilight fell early even in July. In the summer, Sabina and Firuz often played Mortal Kombat on their console. Of course, the electricity always cut out at the most vital moment, right before they reached the last levels. So much wasted time and effort! Enraged, Firuz and his sister would come down to the kitchen to chase the fury away with food. If they came upon a watermelon, they would dig into it violently with forks, without even cutting it into pieces first. They would take out all their righteous, bitter anger on the soft, juicy, red flesh of the watermelon. Sometimes the electricity would come back after a few minutes, but Firuz knew that it wasn’t for real and stopped his sister when she jumped up from her seat, overjoyed: “Sit back down and eat the damn watermelon. The lights’ll go out again in a second.”

          He was always right.

          Firuz looked at the picture for quite a while. The taste of the watermelon filled his mouth, overpowering the honeyed sweetness of the pastry he’d just eaten. And on the tip of his tongue there was a bitterness, as though, after the dessert, he’d swallowed something disgusting. Then he stepped out of the kitchen, approached the door to the back room, and listened carefully. Sabina wasn’t crying anymore, but he could hear her muffled voice. He hesitated for a bit, then knocked slowly on the wood with his knuckles. “All right then,” he said loudly when the talking stopped. He paused, making a decision, though not quite knowing how he’d come to it. “Okay, I’ll speak to our parents. But don’t call them yourself, understand? Don’t say anything or you’ll blow it. I need to talk to them first.” He tried to bring the anger back into his voice, but it didn’t really work. “On Nizami Street... by the McDonald’s. Tomorrow. At five. Come, we’ll talk there.” He stayed still and added softly: “Don’t be scared.”

          There was no reply.

          Before leaving, Firuz lingered, searching his pockets, and put several bills on the kitchen table. He’d be dead before he let his sister live off some strange girl.

          He walked back to his car slowly, prolonging every step. He was thinking, weighing his options. By the time he got there he had almost decided what to tell their parents: with all the quarantines and lockdown, he and Sabina just couldn’t live together in a tiny apartment. She’d had some problems, girl stuff—he’d felt uncomfortable… so he’d arranged for her to move in with her friend himself... Of course he’d made sure that the girl was from a good family.

          This story was silly, but believable. He knew his family would buy it. He just needed to talk it over with Sabina so they’d be on the same page. And get to know her neighbors. They shouldn’t think they could spread rumors about the girls just because they lived alone. Firuz knew how people were... the same everywhere.

          But Sabina isn’t the same everywhere, Firuz thought as he got behind the wheel. There, with her friends, she was clearly a different person than with him. But even far away from him, free, his sister had needed to paint something that would remind her of him. And he... he finally realized what she wanted to say with that art of hers.

Kamalya steps out onto the balcony and glances over the yard. Shadows fall and children are already lighting bonfires, bigger ones for the fun of it and smaller ones for the ritual. Gradually, the residents of nearby buildings gather by the bonfires. In a little while, the bravest ones will start jumping over the flames and chanting: “My burden, my woes, all to the fire!”

          A smile touches Kamalya’s lips. She’s certain the fire will hear some of these people today.

          The fire loves those who are daring.

          Kamalya sees people as sparks, all those who live in her land. Century after century it remains the same. Her brothers and sisters in other parts of the land say there are places where beings are as fluid as water, light as air, soft as earth, but Kamalya just shrugs: very well, then. Nowruz brings the elements together. And anyway, there’s nothing in the world more powerful, more daring than fire. That’s why Kamalya stays, why she chose the human name that means “perfection” for herself—to remind herself why she must never leave.

          Kamalya can feel that this year’s Nowruz is different from others. But she can’t yet figure out why. What’s important now is that her latest gifts have left her easily, as they should have. They’ll take care of the rest.

          They always do.

          “Kama-a!” yells one of the boys from the yard. The crowd gives way to an eight-year-old girl with a swarthy complexion. At first, she doesn’t even flinch, ignoring the cheering cries of her friends and family, then finally she musters her courage, tosses her head, and dashes to the nearest bonfire. Kamalya sees how the girl’s spark trembles within her, how her tiny heart beats recklessly. “My burden, my woes…”

          “...all to the fire!” Kamalya whispers along with her.

          And she watches the spark turn into flame.