The Mountain and the Wall

by Alisa Ganieva

  Here Shamil’s thoughts became confused. He remembered the conversations he had heard over the local forges. Mirza and the other Kubachi artisans talked about the ongoing attempts to privatize the local craftsmen’s guild; about the mercenary mindset of the young, who had begun turning out masses of primitive trinkets; about the decline of their intricate and esoteric craft. But Shamil’s brother-in-law wanted an uplifting article, so Shamil decided to skip the moaning and gnashing of teeth.

  For the ninth of May celebration of the Soviet victory over Hitler, the village went all out. They put on their grandfathers’ jackets, studded with medals, and took up their Russian flags as well as the red flags from their museums. The young villagers draped their cars in colorful scarves, then paraded around the village, honking loudly. In the lead rode a motorcyclist, followed by an old military jeep with some young guys sitting in the open cab, firing their guns into the air; after them came a noisy, colorful parade of cars, with passengers leaning out of the windows.

  They made twenty or so circuits around the village, then dismounted at Magara, the central marketplace, where again they fired off their automatics and danced the Akushinskaya. Then they visited the memorial pillar with its list of villagers who had given their lives in the Great Patriotic War, and again fired their guns. Afterward everyone gathered for a picnic on a green mountain slope outside the village.

  The women came in their scarves and sweeping velvet and brocade dresses embroidered and decorated with coins. Shamil couldn’t understand the goldsmiths’ speeches, and the women’s long, white, gold-embroidered kaz scarves were strange and exotic to him. A drummer and accordion player performed while people danced in pairs, one hand pressed to their chests or necks and the other bent behind their backs. The men drank continually but didn’t get drunk. They spoke in Kubach, now and then switching to Russian for Shamil’s sake. Mirza threw his arm around Shamil’s shoulders and shouted “Derkhab!” Toward evening a fog rolled in and they all made their way home in a procession down the rough unpaved road, passing newly constructed buildings with all their windows and doorframes painted the same shade of blue.

  In the village the festivities continued. At Mirza’s house they ate local dumplings. They told Shamil about the last wedding that had been held in the village, when the kids had worn costumes and terrifying masks and had run amok, as local custom prescribed, carrying utensils out of people’s houses and hiding them, making obscene gestures, and playing practical jokes on the wedding guests. Then the conversation turned to the subject of the jewelers’ craft. How the people in the village had begun to make “antiques.”

  “You take an oil lamp,” said Mirza, “and bury it in the earth for two years. It’ll come out looking like an antique. Our master craftsmen could fake anything you wanted: Imperial medals, an eighteenth-century Persian vase. You could take it to the Hermitage and they’d believe you. Then you’d show them our craftsmen’s brand and they’d laugh. ‘Kubachi jokes,’ they’ll say.”

  Then they retold their grandfathers’ stories about how Kubachi antiques were sold abroad before the Revolution. The ancient walls of the village were inset with a multitude of stones with interesting relief designs: fantastical, mythological figures, birds and animals and battles and scenes from everyday life, all encrusted with pewter and semiprecious stones. On moonlit nights, enterprising tradesman would pry stones out of the walls and bury them in some secluded place. They’d wait a couple of years, then send them to buyers abroad. Entire buildings had been dismantled in this way.

  The conversation at Mirza’s was accompanied by frequent cries of “Derkhab!” Many crystal shot glasses were emptied before they finally called it a night. Shamil lay in bed and let his mind wander. He and Uncle Alikhan would get their jobs on the committee back. Shamil would finish the renovations on the apartment and would finally marry Madina. Maybe he would buy her that huge silver ring that he had seen in one of the workshops today. Shamil’s head sank heavily to one side and he fell asleep.

  …waking in Makhachkala, in an alley near the shore. Cement dust rose in a column above the street, blinding him; there was a buzzing in his ears. Up ahead a man was running, showing the rubber soles of his shoes. Shamil ran after him, slipping on plastic bags scattered on the ground. Rounding the turn, he saw several more people running. On a rooftop someone was shouting hoarsely, “Tokhta! Tokhta!” Behind them something heavy lumbered across the roof, sending tiles crashing to the ground, but the people ran on, seeking shelter from whatever it was making that terrible roar. Shamil rounded one last corner, then heard nothing more.

  …sitting up abruptly in bed and looking through the small, uncurtained window in Mirza’s parlor. Lightning streaked across the night sky. Shamil got up cautiously and crept into the next room, where huge bronze plates hung on the walls. They swayed slightly, sending out a barely audible ringing. Shamil stood still for a minute, then went back into the parlor and sat down on the carpet. Intermittent flashes of lightning illuminated the copper, porcelain, ceramic, and brass bowls, saucers, and cups on the wall. Enormous three-legged wedding kettles made by local craftsmen lined the other wall: on the shelves stood human-shaped muchalas with lids like shaggy Caucasian wool hats, nuknus flour vessels, and other whimsical containers. On the floor between the carved hearth and the carpet, Shamil could see stone mosaic tiles with limestone caulking. Tomorrow he was leaving for the city; he needed to get some sleep. He scratched himself behind the ear and went back to bed.

  2

  The next day around noon Shamil went to the paper’s editorial office. His brother-in-law—his elder sister’s husband—met him in the sunlit corridor, looking anxious. They went straight to the conference room, a narrow hall filled with some forty people, all of them trying to out-shout one another. Shamil didn’t immediately recognize the people sitting around the oval conference table, which was equipped with microphones. These were members of the editorial board, representatives of the business and academic worlds, and a couple of deputies from the National Assembly. At first nothing could be made out in all the commotion. A man in a beige jacket with a mass of unruly hair falling over his forehead was yelling:

  “Not a single government agency has confirmed this information! Not a single one!”

  A young man with a protruding lower lip was waving his hands in the air and looking around at the people sitting beside and behind him.

  “What do you mean, not a single one? Just look at the Internet! I got a call today from Mineralnye Vody—they’re building a concrete wall up there!”

  Shamil looked around for his brother-in-law, but he was already making his way to the table, shouting stubbornly:

  “Let Sharapudin Muradovich speak! Give Sharapudin Muradovich the floor!”

  At last the room fell silent and everyone looked at a bald man who stood with his plump fingers pressed firmly onto the polished tabletop.

  “All of you, every one in this room, is being duped—it’s pure provocation!” he began, swallowing the endings of his words. “Listen to me, Where did this unverified information come from? Instead of sowing panic in the population, we need to—hear me?—need to deal with the ringleaders, the liars and conspirators who are spreading these rumors. Give me a crack at them, I’ll tear their heads off with my bare hands!”

  “Sharapudin Muradovich, what do you mean, ‘unverified?’” A solidly built bleach-blonde demanded from the corner.

  The bald man frowned, then turned toward her, lifting his hands from the table and waving them in the air: “Where are you getting this nonsense! Listen to me! The information I have is absolutely reliable. I’m on the phone with Moscow every minute! The Caucasus is Russia’s primary defense in the struggle against terrorism, it’s a buffer, hear me? A wellspring of democracy! What wall? You really believe that Internet-schminternet?”

  Shamil leaned against the conference-room wall, which was warm in spite of the air conditioning. It felt as though the vague sense of apprehension that had been
bothering him recently was beginning to crystalize. The contours of this mythological wall, rising inexorably on the border with the purpose of isolating the Caucasus from Russia, began to take on a frightening clarity in his imagination.

  “If that’s the way it is, then it’s our own fault,” said a thin man with birthmarks on his face, gesticulating wildly. “We didn’t say a word when they started bringing in Salafi literature by the truckload. When they murdered our politicians, everyone knew who was responsible, and no one said a word! I’m telling you, not a word! And if the police can go around breaking the law…”

  “What do the police have to do with it?” A stout man in a blue police shirt asked, leaping to his feat. “What kind of khapur-chapur is that? Why change the subject? When have the police ever broken the law?”

  “I’m not about to go down the list,” the skinny man tried to backtrack, gesturing grandly at the policeman.

  “And where are you getting this garbage?”

  “It’s in the papers.”

  “So everything you read in the papers is true?”

  The man in the beige jacket swept his mop of hair back from his forehead and raised his palms in an effort to calm things down.

  “Friends, friends, let us have sabur. I’ve already told you that no one in Moscow has confirmed the rumors…”

  “They haven’t, but ordinary people have,” the young man butted in, poking his lower lip out even more.

  “Even if it is true,” continued the man in beige, his palms still raised in the air, “our friendship with Russia will continue. They keep saying that we’re a subsidized region. But look, so long as we don’t have to pay any taxes, we can always feed ourselves. We have oil and gas, and there’s copper in the south. We’re a transport hub between Europe and Asia, we have a seaport that’s open year round, pipelines, hydroelectric plants, heavy industry, wineries, fisheries. We’re the country’s number-one producer of cheese and vegetables. Not to mention the resorts: balneo—…balneotherapeutic and mud spas, beaches, mountain resorts—whatever you want, we have. Handmade carpets, lumber, ceramics by the truckload! No other republic comes close, not a single one!”

  “Shamil Magomedov has just come back from Kubachi, where he was interviewing the craftsmen there,” interjected Shamil’s brother-in-law.

  “There you go!” The man in beige said triumphantly. “How are our artists doing up there?”

  “They used to make arms, real ones, but now they’ve started mass-producing souvenirs. Soon there won’t be anything left of any value,” answered Shamil without smiling.

  “On the other hand, they’ll get their goods onto the international market and establish trade relations.” The man in beige cleared his throat. “And what about the wine industry? We produce ninety percent of the cognac in Russia—the Kremlin’s entire stock of alcohol is made up of Dagestani spirits!”

  “This is no time to be talking about booze,” boomed a stone-faced man in a skullcap.

  “Let me finish,” the man in beige shook his forelock.

  But the stone-faced man, his focus on something in the empty air above everyone’s heads, continued: “The way you’re talking now, we’re supposedly going to become big oil magnates. But what makes umma is not oil, but faith. Maybe things here will get like they are in Chechnya: if you take a second wife, you get a one-room apartment, and if you take a third, then you get a two-room apartment. But the way things are here now, everyone condemns you for taking a second wife, and meanwhile they spend all their time at the saunas, astauperulla. If Moscow turns away from the Muslims of Dagestan, then what they’ll do is close ranks around tariqat, the pathway to Allah. The people who are ruining Islam need to be told, in the words of one wise sheikh, ‘Leave the forest to the wild beasts and come and join the people.’ Those who have strayed need to be brought to the true faith, may the Prophet have mercy on them, salallakhu alaikha vassalam. Schoolchildren need to be set on the path of true knowledge. But instead they’re being taught that human beings descended from the apes. What normal man would believe that? The almighty Allah began Creation with the human race, with Adam, aleikhi salam, made him out of red, white, and black clay. From his left rib Khava was created, and from them originated all life on earth. All the prophets, beginning with Adam, have brought us Islam—that is, tawhid, monotheism. And Allah accepts no other religion but this one. The Russians will leave, and there will come fitna, a time of troubles. Some who have strayed from the path call it gazavat, but they haven’t a clue what gazavat really is. May Allah protect us from those who cause trouble for its own sake. The main thing is to teach our neighbors what’s right, every single day. If you yourself perform dua, but your neighbor drinks, you must teach him. Otherwise in the next world he will tell the angel, ‘Do not take me down to hell, take my friend, who failed to teach me.’ And you will have to answer for the sins of your neighbor.”

  “What on earth are you talking about?” The bleach-blonde in the corner sprang up from her seat. “We’ve been betrayed, the trap has snapped shut on us—you can do whatever you want, but what do we have to be glad about?”

  “Khadizha, get a hold of yourself,” Shamil’s brother-in-law tried to rein her in.

  But she went on: “People say they aren’t going to let anyone out, but my brother in Rostov has a wife and children, how is he supposed to get back home to them? You don’t have anything to worry about,” she said, addressing the stout policeman, “they’ll airlift you to Turkey in a helicopter, but what about the rest of us?”

  “Why pick on me? And what does Turkey have to do with anything?” he retorted. “Know your place, woman! Look at her, popping up like a shaitan, foaming at the mouth…”

  “What are you afraid of?” the man in beige shouted to her.

  “Those women in veils!”

  The stone-faced man blinked his right eye: “It’s because of those rabble-rousers discrediting Islam…”

  “But they say that the ones discrediting Islam are you and the entire Muslim Spiritual Administration,” the young man with the lip jumped in again.

  Everyone went back to shouting at once.

  Shamil went out into the hot corridor and flexed his shoulders, as though trying to shrug off what he had been hearing. Then he got out his phone and poked at the buttons. Uncle Alikhan didn’t answer. He then tried his friend Arip, who worked in Moscow, but no luck there either. From the conference hall Shamil could still hear a chaos of voices, with Sharapudin Muradovich’s hoarse bass the loudest of them all.

  Shamil hesitated for a moment, then stepped outside. Everything still looked the same as ever. He took in the narrow intersection where cumbersome transport taxi-vans were beeping stridently, then at some girls, chattering and laughing, who were clustered around the entrance to an ugly glass-fronted building featuring a multitude of fashion posters and shop signs, then at a bread-seller’s stall, with a head wrapped in a scarf poking out. The head shouted something to a gaggle of barelegged boys who were running in the direction of a wooden fence covered with ads that had been built around an abandoned construction site. Cheerful shrieks could be heard from behind the fence; a huge puddle had formed in the excavation pit, and enterprising neighborhood kids had turned it into an improvised swimming pool and were splashing around. Across the street from the editorial office stood a row of brightly colored private cottages and crooked white huts, on one of which someone had scrawled a note in charcoal: FLOUR FOR SALE.

  Shamil turned the corner and went up to a table under a canopy where a woman sat limply, half-stupefied by the hot sun, selling kvass. He bought a big plastic glassful for a few ten-ruble coins, and walked over to a sun-scorched flower bed. Nearby stood a faded acacia tree, casting a meager shadow on the multicolored sidewalk slabs.

  He sat down under the acacia on a bench covered with graffiti scrawled in black marker, sipped his kvass and stared thoughtfully at the street. In spite of the heat, a lot of people were outside, and the scene was alive with sound. Mus
ic blared from the little coffee shops and mixed with the buzzing of a chainsaw, the excited shouts of passersby, and the chirping of locusts. Shamil tried dialing Uncle Alikhan again, again with no success. “What am I so scared of?” he asked himself, straightening up in his seat.

  He didn’t want to go back to the editorial office, especially since he figured he would be getting a regular job soon. Omargadzhi had told him that he would see what he could find out about a good position for him that might be opening up in the courthouse. Shamil gulped down the rest of his kvass, crushed the plastic cup, and looked around for a trash can. Failing to find one, he left the cup on the bench. He had to see Omargadzhi right away. He stood up and started off in the direction of the waterfront, where a number of lawyers’ offices clustered in old, moldy-smelling wooden courtyards.

  Turning down one of the streets there, Shamil ran into Khabibula. Khabibula gave a little hop for joy, jiggling his big barrel-shaped belly, beamed, baring rows of gold teeth, and started babbling: “Salam, Shamil! Where are you headed? I’ve just gotten back from the kutan, I brought back milk, cottage cheese, and some other stuff. Vallakh, I didn’t want to go, wanted to send Marat, but I had no choice. Look at the shape my shoes are in!” he said, gesturing at his tattered sandals. “I’m going to sell the milk and cheese and then I’ll buy some shoes, a brand-new pair. Salimat will yell at me, but is it my fault? I tore them today, walking around the city. They’re replacing the pipes on our street, there’s mud everywhere, and sharp stones…Why not come along with me, my friend—where are you headed in such a hurry?”