DISAPPEARING TO REAPPEAR AGAIN

But his eyes are sad - this is what you think when you look at this man.  All is well - he has a job he loves, he is doing well financially, he lives in a country, South Africa, which is comfortable enough, but something is wrong.  Nostalgia and homesickness drive him back to his roots again and again:  although he has never lived here for a long time, he does feel the call of the blood.  His destiny has almost always forced him to leave everything behind and depart, without having enough time to take root.  First he went from Azerbaijan to Siberia, then back to Azerbaijan, but then he had to go to Armenia and then return from Armenia back to Azerbaijan.  What is this?  Tragic coincidence or, on the contrary, a lucky break?

Only three Azerbaijanis live in South Africa at present.  And it so happens that Azer Mirzoyev is one of them - like the joke about the probability of three people finding themselves on an uninhabited island.  However, there is nothing strange about this.  It was God's will that Azer Mirzoyev became a citizen of the world, and he became one.  And, as often happens, Azerbaijanis who become citizens of the world are almost always very prominent persons.  They often win international recognition, but they never forget where they are from, saying proudly:  "I am Azerbaijani, I am from Azerbaijan."

We learned about Azer Mirzoyev, a choreographer, ballet master, coach to the South African national teams in gymnastics, acrobatics, tumbling and figure skating, by sheer accident, when he once again visited Baku, a city he visits regularly, once every three years.  And it is very good that we have learned about him because Azer, a man of great modesty, does not advertise his work.  He says that he just does his job but, at the same time, comical and touching though this might seem, he dresses his young South African students in tracksuits with Azerbaijani flags.  And wherever he works, wherever he is invited, the first thing he does is hoist the flag of the country where he was born in the most visible place.  Azerbaijani music is often played during international sports tournaments and championships:  Mirzoyev's South African teams perform their programmes to its accompaniment.  Azer chooses the music for the sportsmen.  Announcements are made before every performance by the gymnasts, figure skaters or ballet dancers - everyone trained by our compatriot - about where the music comes from and its composer.  But this was not always the case.  To achieve this, Azer had to die and be reborn, to disappear and reappear.  We asked him to tell us about his difficult life.  He did not want to.  But then, phrase by phrase, one glass of sugarless tea after another - our conversation developed smoothly.

-Please tell us how it happened that when you were still young, you had to leave your motherland and work in Yerevan for several years.

-I was born and raised in Sumqayit, and I always liked sports.  First I did gymnastics at the Mahdi Huseyinzada stadium; I attended a ballet class and won a prize at a festival of amateur arts.  Then I graduated from secondary school and, in 1973, joined the Baku Choreography School to become a ballet dancer; also, in 1974, I became a trainee at the Axundov Azerbaijan Opera and Ballet Theatre, I danced at the Musical Comedy Theatre and in the Dance Troupe of Azerbaijan.  It is interesting that back then, the Choreography School was not popular among ethnic Azerbaijanis, and most students were Russian.  In my class, I was the only ethnic Azerbaijani.  But I never managed to graduate.  I was very surprised that of all the students in our class, I was the only one to be drafted for military service - they did not defer the draft until graduation, although dancers were entitled to deferment and they did grant it to other guys.  Dancers, as men of art, were usually exempt from conscription because in the two years of service they could lose their professional skills and break down physically.  However, I was drafted in 1977 and went to a construction battalion in Siberia.  I was a plasterer and painter.  There were fist fights almost every day.  After one of these fights, in which they broke my nose, the chief of staff took an interest in me and was surprised to learn that I was a ballet dancer and played the bass guitar, saxophone and percussion.  He asked me:  "What are you doing here and how did you find yourself here if you are a professional ballet dancer?"  After that, he phoned the army dance troupe and I was transferred there.  So I served in the military and danced.  I travelled all over Siberia with the troupe.

When I was demobilized, my first impulse was to go back to my school:  I had another two years of study to do.  To be honest, I intended to continue my studies in Georgia or Tajikistan, but my plans did not work out.  In 1979, I went to Yerevan.  It was difficult for me there:  I did not know anyone, I did not speak the language, but there was nothing I could do; I resumed my studies.  The director of the school gave me a room in a student dormitory and even found me a job in sports:  I became the senior choreographer of the Armenian acrobatics and figure skating teams at the Olympic Reserves sports school.  I liked my work very much and I started to work really hard.  But of course, everyone pointed their fingers at me because I was the only Azerbaijani at the school.  To many Armenians, this was my only "shortcoming," as they often told me jokingly.  Of course, there were cases when they would make things difficult for me, although it was the Soviet era and the notorious events had not yet taken place (the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict - ed.).  I soon graduated, in 1981.

While I worked in Yerevan, I tried to be proactive.  I wanted to better myself as a professional:  I attended figure skating courses by the legendary ballet master Lyudmila Alekseyevna Pakhomova, Honorary Master of Sports of the USSR.  I passed exams in the choreographic development programme, and she would always give me high grades.  I wanted to develop as a professional and gave my imagination free rein.  When I returned from Pakhomova, I was offered a job as manager of a dance troupe at the Armenian State Concerts Agency.  And then came the year 1988 and I became embroiled in a maelstrom of fast-paced and tragic events, from which, incidentally, figure skating saved me.

-You did not leave Yerevan in time?

-I did not leave immediately.  It was 1988.  I came to Baku several times and then returned.  I had to find a job.  During one visit, Miri Vahabov, Honorary Coach of Azerbaijan, invited me to a youth sports school (BANO).  He was the head there.  But I had to finish my work, exchange my 2-room apartment in Yerevan for an apartment in Baku.  Azerbaijanis were already being expelled from Armenia.  I knew the actors of the Yerevan Azerbaijani Theatre.  Soon they were forced to leave, and the theatre was closed down, together with the Azerbaijani-language radio.  Some of the people in Yerevan were against this, but many people became ardent chauvinists.  The city reminded me of a volcano which could erupt at any moment.  In 1988, there was an earthquake in the Armenian town of Spitak.  I kept coming to Baku and going back.  The earthquake seemed to put everything in perspective and the conflict subsided:  the Communist movement regained its grip on schools and institutes.  People were called to Communist assemblies to condemn the surge in the nationalist movement.  Things seemed to have settled down, and I began to think that I would not have to leave.

But my hopes were thwarted.  In May 1989, the chauvinist movements gained even greater momentum and the conflict resumed.  I went back to Baku again - the rail service was still open.  I was told to stay here, but I do not know what made me go back again.  After spending three months in Baku, I went to Yerevan again in September 1989.  It was all mixed up.  The year 1990 began and, totally unaware, I found myself at the centre of developments.

I went to the figure skating school one day.  I changed as usual in the changing room and suddenly the school director dashed in and told me to run out of a different door as quickly as possible - five men, armed to the teeth, had come for me.  They told the director that a Turk (this is what Armenian nationalists call Azerbaijanis when they are hostile - ed.) was there and that he had to give him up now; the director told them that I had not arrived yet.  Some time later they left, and I walked out through the main entrance as usual, because it was humiliating for me to jump through a window on the third floor and escape, as the director had suggested.  I decided that whatever happened would happen.  Two of my colleagues walked out with me to "cover" me by speaking Armenian aloud.  By that time, I spoke Armenian fluently.  They dissuaded me from going to my apartment and took me to a friend, who was also a coach.  We had been friends for many years.  He sheltered me at his apartment, hoping that the nationalists would forget about me and stop looking for me.  There were very good, intelligent people who did not support the conflict.  But they were a minority.  Some time later, I decided to go to my apartment to collect my documents.  I walked in and sat there literally for 5 minutes, knowing that I would never come back...  And the doorbell rang.  I thought that my friend had come and I opened the door.  And saw about 20 people in the staircase with daggers, guns and pistols.

They asked me:  "Are you an Azeri?"  I said:  "Yes, I am."  "Are you an Aderbeyjani?" - with an accent.  I said:  "Yes."  And someone hit me on the head.  I fell, blood gushed from my head and covered my eyes.  Then the crowd started to kick me in the ribs, kidneys and face.  I felt that they had broken my ribs and I had difficulty breathing.  Then they tied me up, put a sack over my head and dragged me away.  I could not see anything, but I heard that almost all the neighbours had walked out into the street, and it was clear that a large crowd had gathered.  Everyone was saying that a spy had been caught, although all these people knew me very well - I had lived there for many years by then.  It suddenly occurred to me that they had given me away, told those cutthroats that I had returned to my apartment.  Later I found out that the neighbours were saying all sorts of things about me - that I had drugs at home, that I was a spy, that I was armed.

They threw me into a car.  We drove for a long time.  When we finally arrived, they pushed me out -- every movement was very painful.  They dragged me somewhere because I could not walk and dumped me in a room which I understood was a cellar.  It was very damp.  I could hear conversations above.  Someone said that I was to be killed, other said that I should be exchanged for someone.  The third said that I was to be exchanged for three people.  The fourth proposed that I should be shot dead and then exchanged as a dead body.  Next day, they came, put me in a chair and blindfolded me.  They started to beat me cruelly and interrogate me in the Armenian language.  They wanted to know where the weapons and narcotics were, whom I worked for and who had covered me all that time.  They beat me for a very long time.  They knocked all my teeth out.  They broke several ribs again.  I told them that they could kill me, but I would not be able to tell them where the weapons and drugs were because I simply never had them.  They replied:  "We know why you do not want to confess.  You want to become an Azerbaijani hero.  Do you want that?  We can organize that for you.  We will exchange just your body."  I told them that I could not tell them anything anyway because I was just an ordinary person.

-But how did you survive?

-I was scared initially, but then I got accustomed to the thought that I would die soon, and I suddenly felt indifferent.  This continued for three days.  At night, some person came and started to interrogate me.  After looking at my face, he started to look at me in a strange manner.  It turned out that his niece was my trainee in figure skating and had won first place in a tournament in Odessa.  The family of that girl knew me well, especially her father.  The man asked me who I was.  I told him who I was.  He phoned his older brother and asked about me, and he confirmed my identity.  Then he loaded his pistol, put it to my head and said that I was to take his test and if my reply was wrong, he would fire.  For all that time I was blindfolded, and when they removed it from my eyes, I saw a respectable-looking man in a suit and tie.  He asked me:  "Who won the all-Union children's competition in 1985?  What was the boy's name?"  Apparently he wanted to confuse me.  I said that it was not a boy, but a girl, named Marina.  I told him her name, her address and her father's name.  I even told him how the furniture was arranged in her apartment.  He did not say anything at first, and then said that her father was his older brother, and that Marina was his niece.  Incidentally, that girl eventually became an international-class figure skating referee.

Then, when he untied my hands, that man said that I was born under a lucky star and had he not recognized me, I would probably have been killed.  Later he walked out and started to talk to the cutthroats.  The gist of the conversation was that I was to be released immediately.  They argued for a long time.  The cutthroats wanted to hang me or shoot me if he would take me away.  At some point, I even started to doubt that they would release me.  But he told me:  "This man is my brother's friend, if you do anything to him, I will cut your throat myself."  In short, they finally took me out of the room, blindfolded me, put me in a car and asked me where to take me.  I told them to take me to my friend, a doctor, the husband of a figure skater whom I used to train.  I would always go to him when I had bronchitis: in 1988-1989, it was dangerous for ethnic Azerbaijanis to visit doctors officially.  He used to visit me and treat me at home.

We phoned the doctor and agreed to meet somewhere on the outskirts of Yerevan.  They took me there and put me on the asphalt because I could not stand.  The doctor and three of his brothers arrived.  He took me to his apartment - it was dangerous for me to appear at the hospital in that shape.  In May, I bid farewell to the doctor who treated me and at whose apartment I lived for three months.  His family - the doctor himself, his wife, two children and two of his brothers - took me to Tbilisi by train at the risk of their own lives.  The border guards would not have let me cross the border with my passport which read that I was an ethnic Azerbaijani.  So I went as the husband of the figure skater, and her real husband left the compartment during the border check.  I climbed to the upper bunk when the check was performed, and she showed them passports and said that I was her husband, that I was drunk and asleep.  Luckily, they did not wake me up, so we all crossed the border.  In Tbilisi we parted, and I came to Baku.

The first thing I did when I came back was visit Adil Huseyinzada, Honorary Coach of Azerbaijan and winner of many different USSR titles and prizes in acrobatics, whom I used to help in training his sportsmen.  When he opened the door and saw me, he was only able to say that everyone in Baku had already buried me.  It turned out that, he had met Armenians during the USSR championship in Rostov and asked about me.  They told him that they did not know anything about me, only that armed people had come and taken me away.  So this was how I was born again.  My medical treatment continued for a short time in Baku, but it was too late.  The ribs healed in the wrong way and were warped, and I can feel pain in my left side to this day.  I needed surgery back then, but I had no means of paying for it, and the situation was wrong for medical treatment.  No one knows what would have happened had I gone to some surgeon in Yerevan.  But what can you do?  Other Azerbaijanis went through worse things in Armenia.  When I arrived in Baku, I was told many stories, so I was actually lucky.

-Did you find a job in Baku quickly?

-Initially I settled in Baku without having anything - no apartment, no registration; it was very difficult.  All doors were closed to me.  Miri Vahabov helped me.  He invited me to BANO to work as a choreographer of acrobatics after he had put in a good word for me at the ministry.  He treated me as if I was his own son.  Back then, there was a skating arena at the sports and exhibition centre in Baku, which is now named after Heydar Aliyev.  I was in my element again and started a figure skating group.  Everyone was surprised that I could train both individual skaters and couples.  That was the beginning of figure skating in Azerbaijan, one might say.  But my trainees were not to become true skaters.  I had some 30 people, boys and girls, in training.  But the dissolution of the USSR resulted in the closure of the arena by its director.

-How come you went to South Africa?

-In 1992, I was invited to work as a choreographer for the South African national gymnastics team.  This is how it happened.  In those difficult times, the situation for Azerbaijani sports was bleak.  There was very little work.  I did not know what to do or where to go.  Soon, one of my acquaintances, a master of sports, went to Israel.  But in that country, the situation for sports was not the best, and he decided to go to South Africa, where they needed sports specialists.  One year after his departure, he wrote to a mutual friend, Adi, that one of the local sports clubs in South Africa needed masters of sports and we could go there and start doing the work we liked best.  We accepted the offer and went, both Adil and I.  In the same period, Chinese, Belarusian, Ukrainian and Romanian specialists were also invited to that club.  However, the club was eventually closed - it was too big, and because I did not want to work for someone for my whole life - the club was owned by a Portuguese man - I decided to create my own foundation, AKA, the Acrobatic Jumping Academy.  In addition, I opened my own ballet group.  From then on, I have trained children in South Africa who want to do acrobatic vaults, ballet or figure skating.  And I am very proud that my trainee, Greta Olifant, was the first black girl in South Africa to become junior world champion in acrobatic vaulting.  She was the first for whom the South African flag was hoisted in competitions in that discipline.  But I literally found that girl on the street, she was an orphan.  And in 2001, in a competition in Poland, people from my club were the fourth best in the world in acrobatic vaulting.  Sportsmen from South Africa seldom achieve international success in sports, which is why the president of the International Acrobatics Federation sent me a special letter of thanks for the achievements of my trainees.  These sportsmen were the first from the African continent to perform at such a high level.  Before that, there was nothing like this.

-What language do you speak with your trainees?

-English or local.

-There are two more Azerbaijanis in South Africa, one of them is Adil Huseyinzada.  What do you do to promote Azerbaijan and Azerbaijani culture in that country?

-I miss my country - after all, I have never managed to live there.  My kids wear the tracksuits of the Azerbaijani national team and the Azerbaijani flag flies above their heads in my club.  Everywhere I work, the first thing I do is hoist the Azerbaijani national flag.  My Azerbaijani name is propaganda for Azerbaijan.  In sports, I represent the Republic of South Africa, but I am an Azerbaijani and everyone knows this.  I was invited to work in the USA, in the state of Idaho:  the local figure skating school wanted a coach.  I worked in the states of Oregon and in Salt Lake City, Utah for some time.  I worked in Los Angeles and staged figure skating shows.  I often take part in competitions as an internationally certified referee.  And everywhere I go or work, I say that I am from Azerbaijan.  I tell people about our country, our people, traditions and customs.  And of course, I tell them about the Karabakh conflict.  This time, I will take books with me about Azerbaijan and about the Karabakh conflict.  I will ask professional interpreters to translate them into English and then I will publish them as books.  It might seem childish to you, but I hang Azerbaijani flags in the capital of South Africa, Pretoria, on almost all the flag poles on which the national flags of the world are hoisted.  I give 10 dollars to night guards - and that is a lot of money there - to hoist the Azerbaijani flag.  I did the same when the football world cup was under way in South Africa.  Flag poles were erected around the Loftus Versfeld Stadium, where several games were played.  As always, I asked the guard to hoist the Azerbaijani flag, and while the World Cup was under way, our flag flew on the flag pole.  I know a tailor there who sews the flags for me.

-Tell us please, as a specialist, what has to be done to develop figure skating in Azerbaijan?

-Our skaters are all ethnic Russians.  And only one girl is an ethnic Azerbaijani.  Figure skating schools must be created in Azerbaijan, children should attend, and they have to be trained well there, so that eventually Azerbaijani names represent Azerbaijan in international figure skating competitions.  My figure skaters in South Africa and acrobats perform in local tournaments to the accompaniment of Azerbaijani music.  Our figure skaters should also dance to our music.  I am trying to speak to the coaches of figure skaters who perform for Azerbaijan, but I have not seen any results yet.  Once, about two years ago in Los Angeles, I heard the Azerbaijani balaban.  A Canadian figure skater danced to the music and his coach was Armenian, and he had chosen Azerbaijani music by Alixan Samadov.  I cannot mistake him for anyone else because every morning, as I go to work, I listen to his music.  When the training ended, I went with that guy to the changing room.  I asked him if he knew what music he was listening to.  He said that yes, he did, it was Armenian music from the Armenian movie "What the River Cries Over".  I told him that he was misinformed and that I could show a CD to him.  I told him that it smelled of an international scandal.  Back then, I was unable to speak to his Armenian coach - he was on a business trip, but I asked the skater to pass my words on to the coach.  Later it turned out that the Canadian sportsman changed his music - he had to change many things in his programme too.  There were many cases of this sort.  Incidentally, a US figure skater, Olympic Champion Sarah Hughes, skated to Azerbaijani music by composer Arif Malikov.  That was in 2002, during the Salt Lake City Olympics.  Why, then, do the figure skaters who compete for Azerbaijan not dance to our music?

-Would you come back if you were invited to Azerbaijan?

-Of course I would, with great pleasure.  But it seems that no one is going to do that (smiles).  Although the late Huseyin Aliyev, President of the Azerbaijani Figure Skating Federation, did want to meet me during the world figure skating championship in Moscow in 2005.  My friend, Georgian Figure Skating Federation President Irakli Japaridze, had told him about me.  He said that a man was working in South Africa, and that many could raise Azerbaijani figure skating from scratch.  Before I was to fly to Moscow, Irakli phoned me and said that Huseyin Aliyev wanted to meet me and talk things over.  The president of the Azerbaijani federation was to arrive in Moscow the day after our arrival, and Irakli and I were to meet him at his hotel room.  On the first day, we went to his room, but no one answered.  We were surprised because we had an arrangement.  Next morning, before the competition, it was announced at the TsSKA arena where the tournament was held, that Huseyin Aliyev, president of the Azerbaijani Figure Skating Federation, had died in his hotel room of a heart attack.  So, the conversation never happened.  I do not know, maybe Huseyin Aliyev wanted to speak to me about work, but it was not to be.