By the Caspian Sea

The Caspian, where sturgeon come from

It is after midnight, and hours after the start of the curfew (in theory, at least, this is a country at war). But if you stand on your hotel balcony and look out over the vast Soviet panorama of concrete and dust for long you will still see the occasional car racing along the seafront. The sudden noise is startling. You swing your head to follow its headlights until it disappears into the Black Town, and all that is left is the ghostly sound of panic, rattling and revving.

And then there’s just you and the night, and the occasional burst of meaningless gunfire somewhere far away (or perhaps the bangs are backfiring cars). The square in front of you is enormous. The hot air is scented with exhaust fumes, but sometimes you think there might also be hints of jasmine and roses in it. The fountains don’t work, but the sky is cloudless and swooning with stars, the main street behind you is called Nightingale Avenue, and the sea on your right, beyond the luscious garden promenade, is murmuring love songs in a language you don’t understand.

The coast of Armenia

I had made it to the south at last. It was 1993, the spring after I’d got married. I was waiting for the coup that seemed certain to happen here one day soon. I was talking to presidents and ministers and oil magnates every day. And I was in love. I stood on the balcony by myself every night, and listened to the Caspian Sea.

Most people in Azerbaijan didn’t feel they had much to celebrate. Their country had become independent in 1991, and it had so much oil waiting to be extracted from its seabed that it would one day be very rich. But first the Azerbaijanis had to win the war they were losing, and that seemed impossible. That was why a coup was likely.

The war was an indescribable mess. Literally indescribable: it was all but impossible to put into words who was fighting whom. At its simplest, Azerbaijan’s enemy was a vague army of ethnic Armenian irregulars in the north-western province of Nagorno-Karabakh, who were citizens of Azerbaijan but now wanted their region to be independent. They had kicked out the local Azerbaijani population before advancing out of their hill zone. They now held something like a fifth of Azerbaijan.

Armenians and Azerbaijanis hated each other. But in principle, at least, Azerbaijan’s enemy was not Armenia, the country next door, (though in practice so many Armenian soldiers fought against the Azerbaijani forces on weekends and holidays that they might as well have been at war). In principle, at least, the Karabakh Armenians did not want their province to become part of Armenia (though in practice all the Karabakh Armenians felt part of Armenia already).

Because there was no enemy state, the war could not be called a war and the refugees who ran for their lives when they saw burning or heard guns firing and knew the Armenians were coming had no right to the name refugees. They had not had to cross an international border to reach safety. As far as the outside world was concerned, this was just a spot of local bother, and those whose lives were swallowed up in it were known only, dismissively, as the displaced.

There was no formal reason for Azerbaijan to blockade roads and railways into Armenia, stopping energy supplies getting through and leaving the neighbouring country without energy and in almost perpetual darkness. But the Azerbaijanis did it anyway, because they felt sure that the penniless rebels in Karabakh could only be winning the war because they were getting secret aid from Armenia; and the penniless government in Armenia could only be helping the rebels against Azerbaijan because it was getting secret aid from Russia.

Azerbaijan: all that glitters is oil

Azerbaijan’s existing oil income was all going on losing the war. The new president was a nationalist, and his reputation depended on beating the Armenians, so his plan was to let western companies in to extract the new oil from his sea and foot the bill for winning the war. The oil men were waiting for the contract. The army was waiting for the funds. But the president was a new-style democrat too, which meant he was an anxious, skinny, touchy ex-dissident who had spent half his life in prison and didn’t know how to run a country or take decisions; and the Russians who had once run things here didn’t want westerners to get their hands on the oil.

So the oil men sat in their offices and bars and waited, and the army chiefs sat in their offices and camps and waited, and nothing happened. (The president gave me an interview in a giant hall filled with brand-new gilt furniture, some still in its wrapping; we perched on it timidly, like interlopers, and for form’s sake he insisted on having my Russian questions, which he understood perfectly well, translated into Azeri; when it came to answering, he had nothing to say).

For now, while I went through the motions of gathering material about the future of the oil business, and the future of Azerbaijan, there was nothing much to do but wait for him to make up his mind, and listen to the whispering of the waters. But one day soon something would have to give: the deal would get signed, or the president kicked out.

The Caspian lies beyond the Caucasus mountain range, which the ancients knew as the end of all the earth, and it does not obey the same laws as more familiar seas.

It does not empty out into a bigger ocean. It is not very salty. It has no white-capped breakers, and no tides. And its surface looks as iridescent as a soap bubble or a puddle of petrol. The Caspian glitters magically with oil.

Oil oozes spontaneously out of the ground along the seashore. If you leave town for a seaside picnic, you’ll find murky, dirty, reedy sand, drenched in sweaty darkness. At night, when the bubbles of marsh gas catch alight, you are haunted by will-o’-the-wisps. There are places where the night is lit up by tall columns of burning gas.

Before they were Muslims, the Azerbaijanis who live along this stretch of the Caspian coast were fire-worshippers. So were the Persians to the south of the sea in what is now Iran. There’s a Zoroastrian temple outside Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. It’s made-up history: a corny Soviet take on an 18th-century experiment by visiting Indian Parsees in reviving Azerbaijan’s antique Zoroastrian past. But it does remind you how many people in this part of the world worshipped fire, for many centuries, and why.

Romantics call the Caspian Sea’s oil, as well as its fish eggs, black gold. The first oil boom in the 19th century turned a Persian walled citadel, a poem in pale sandstone, into a boastful boomtown of curlicues and overblown opera houses and caviar banquets. Local people became urban. Now, in plastic shoes and too-big trousers hitched up by plastic belts, they live in their thousands on the flatlands and suburbs along the seashore.

The Caspian: tides of fortune

In the sea itself is a human settlement called Oily Rocks, a strange second city composed of 200 kilometres of oil drills, walkways and bridges suspended over the waves. This huge man-made cobweb was proof that the Baku bosses could be relied on to triumph over the natural world. Before the international oil firms moved in with their floating rigs and modern equipment, thousands of oilmen were ferried out from land to work here for one-week shifts. They had wooden bungalows, buses, piers, a dispensary for the sick, a cinema and a café. There was even a bar, even though it served no alcohol.

Onshore, there is a rust belt of acres of industrially developed oilfields on the fringes of the desert. Towers reach into the sky. They look like the skeletal steeples of temples to dark gods: fire, power, money. If you look too long, you get sand and grit in your eyes (there’s a wind; Baku means wind in Persian, and sometimes the city is swept by gale-force winds called khazri).

Working people live beyond the Black Town, in little houses and big apartment blocks scattered along tracks that barely amount to more than a few tyre marks in the sand. The smaller machines that were used to extract oil a century or more ago, called nodding donkeys, have survived in some of those places. Their cranks still move up and down, braying rustily. On some, you can still read British manufacturers’ names.

The workers’ houses were built in booms, and left behind as one forgotten tide of fortune or another receded. There have been more booms than anyone remembers (no one said oil was stable). There’s so much oil that people’s houses sometimes flood with it. They hide upstairs in their bedrooms. But they shrug and come back down when the darkness recedes.

You can swim and sail in the sea off Baku, though it’s healthier to avoid the polluted waters touching the Baku promenade. There’s a picnic spot not far from town, where Soviet planners in the 1970s built tables and chairs and parasols out of brightly painted metal, and bolted them together, and sank them into a concrete bed on the beach. But it’s not much used any more. The tables and chairs and parasols are half submerged. The sea has risen several feet since those days.

“No one knows why the sea is rising,” said Suleyman, the taxi driver who had been with me since my first day in town, who lived in a little house beyond the Black Town, whose parlour had been flooded with oil. “People say it rises for thirty years, then falls like a tide. But I don’t know. I reckon They’ve done something bad to it, and that’s why it’s slowly flooding us. I used to swim in it as a kid, but I’d never let my kids in there now. I don’t trust it. I don’t trust Them.”

Perhaps it is the sea’s mysterious behaviour that makes everything else here a little unreliable too. Legend has it that the squat 12th century Maiden’s Tower in the old fortress was built for a princess whose father fell incestuously in love with her. “I will be yours if you build me a tower to our love,” she promised. But she was lying; she had secretly resolved to die rather than be so dishonoured. As soon as the tower, called Kyz-kalasy in Azeri, was finished, the legend says, she ran up to the roof to admire the view -- and threw herself down into the sea below.

Today the sea is two or three hundred yards away. All that surrounds the tower nowadays is wind and pale walls, the sandy courtyards, domed bathhouses, wrought-iron balconies, spiral staircases and vines of the fortress, named Icheri-Shekher; and the foreign oilmen in check shirts, pacing through town. The truth has shifted shape.

The Taste of Dreams: an obsession with Russia and caviar is published by Review Books and can be bought here.