The Wrong Sea

He had not expected the Caspian Sea to smell like this. Like oil and salt and something vegetal, something green and rotting at the edges. The guidebook said nothing about the smell. The guidebook had a photograph of turquoise water and white sand and a woman in a sundress looking at the horizon, and none of these things were present. The water was grey-brown. The sand was grey-brown. There was no woman in a sundress. There was a man selling sunflower seeds from a plastic bucket, and a concrete breakwater with rebar poking out of it like bones from a fracture. Tomas sat on the breakwater and ate sunflower seeds and considered the possibility that he had made a mistake. The mistake, if it was one, had begun in a bar in Tbilisi six days ago, when a Georgian named Dato had spread a map on the table and pointed at the Caspian coast of Azerbaijan and said, "There. Beautiful. You must go." Dato had been drinking. Tomas had also been drinking. The map was stained with wine and did not have a scale. These were not ideal conditions for travel planning. But Dato had been persuasive, and Tomas was twenty-three and traveling alone for the first time in his life, and at twenty-three the difference between a good idea and a bad idea is mostly a question of timing. He had taken a night train from Tbilisi to Baku. The train was Soviet-era and moved at a speed that suggested it was not fully committed to arriving. The compartment smelled of tea and carpet and the particular human warmth of four strangers sleeping in a space designed for two. His bunkmate was an Azerbaijani businessman who sold plumbing supplies and who, upon learning that Tomas was Czech, said: "Ah! Kafka!" and then fell asleep. Baku was extraordinary. This he had not expected either, but in the opposite direction. A city of stone and glass, old walls and new towers, oil money and ancient tea houses. He walked the old city for two days, ate plov in a restaurant where the owner seated him personally and brought dishes he hadn't ordered and would not accept payment for, and stood on the promenade at dusk watching the Caspian turn colours that the guidebook photograph had probably been trying to capture and had failed. Then he had gone to the beach. The beach was forty minutes north of the city by marshrutka, a form of public transportation that operated on principles Tomas associated more with natural selection than with scheduling. The marshrutka left when it was full. It stopped when someone shouted. It achieved speeds that its structural integrity did not support. He arrived. He looked at the grey-brown water and the grey-brown sand and the man with the sunflower seeds and thought about Dato, who was probably still in Tbilisi, probably still drinking wine, probably still recommending places he had either never been to or had been to and remembered differently than they were. Tomas ate sunflower seeds and watched the water. It was not beautiful. It was not turquoise. It was the Caspian Sea, which was not technically a sea but a lake, the largest lake in the world, a body of water that could not decide what it was and had been argued about by geographers for centuries, and which sat here, between five countries, being grey-brown and smelling of oil and salt and something green. He took off his shoes and waded in. The water was warm. Warmer than he expected. His feet sank into sand that was softer than it looked. A wave came in, small, barely a wave, more of a suggestion. The Caspian was not dramatic. It did not crash. It did not roar. It nudged. He stood in the water up to his knees and looked out at the horizon, where the grey-brown water met the grey-brown sky, and there was nothing there — no boats, no land, no woman in a sundress, just the flat, warm, not-quite-sea stretching out toward Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan or wherever the water ended up. It was, he realized, exactly the right place to be. Not because it was beautiful. Because it was specific. Because it was this and not something else. Because Dato had told him to come here and Dato had been wrong about the beauty and right about the going, because sometimes you need to see the grey-brown water and the man with the sunflower seeds and the rebar sticking out of the concrete to understand that travel is not about finding what the guidebook promised. It is about standing in a place you didn't expect, in water that's warmer than it should be, realizing that you're here and that here is enough. He waded back to shore. He bought more sunflower seeds. He sat on the breakwater until the light changed, and then he took the marshrutka back to Baku, which was beautiful, and which he appreciated more for having spent an afternoon somewhere that wasn't.