“I’m going to see Omargadzhi, to ask him about a job.”
“Which Omargadzhi? K’Iurbanizul Omargadzhi?” Khabibula chuckled gleefully, wiping his wrinkled mouth as he walked. “He came to see me at the tenth kutan: I beat him at chess twenty times! Twenty! When he sees me now, he takes off running…”
“Have you heard the rumors, Khabibula?” asked Shamil, slowing down and trying to match his steps to his companion’s short stride.
“What rumors? Oh, you must mean about Mesedu’s roof tiles being blown down in Shamkhal? Sure I have. Salimat told me. She should have asked me to install the tiles—if she had, nothing would have happened. I really put them up to stay, just ask Magomed. But Zapir, Paizulla’s son, she asked him to do it. That’s why…”
“No, not about Mesedu,” Shamil waved his hand. “It’s something else. They say we’re being walled off from Russia. Border troops, you name it. Like the Berlin Wall.”
They stopped at a crossroads, jammed with honking cars. Faces poked out of the car windows, frowning, and arms waved wildly in the air. Young pedestrians crowded on the curbs, photographing the traffic with their cellphones. Khabibula gestured toward his ears to show that he couldn’t hear anything above the traffic noise.
“Le, where are they all going?” he asked, perking up at the sight. “Just look at them!”
“Must be road work up ahead.”
“Come on, my friend,” Khabibula proposed again. “I’ll give you some cottage cheese…What’s this about a wall?”
“Supposedly they’re building a wall in the north, to cut us off,” repeated Shamil, reluctantly.
“Ai, astauperulla,” laughed Khabibula, “Forget about that khapur-chapur of yours! What are you talking about? Have you been visiting the newspaper? It’s those journalists of yours making it all up. Here’s our turn.”
He waved his plump hand toward a long, cluttered street, littered with private shops.
“I can’t, but look, don’t take it the wrong way—I’ll come by later, Khabibula,” Shamil smiled. “I swear—but not right now.”
“When can you? I have to go back to the kutan,” his companion answered briskly and straightened his cheap shirt over his big belly.
“Maybe tomorrow,” Shamil promised vaguely, looking back at the honking cars.
“I’ll be expecting you!” cried Khabibula with a smile, giving him his hand. “See you then, my friend.”
And off he went, limping and shuffling lightly in his tattered sandals. Shamil turned back in the other direction and followed the crowd.
“Le, what’s going on there?” he asked a young man who was running past.
“Some kind of demonstration, I think,” the man said hastily, glancing sideways at Shamil as he ran, then immediately dissolved into the mob. The Dagestani national anthem buzzed in Shamil’s pocket, and he eagerly pressed his phone to his ear.
“Salam aleikum, Uncle Alikhan!”
“Vaaleikum salam, Shamil.” His uncle’s voice was hollow and hesitant. “I saw your calls, but couldn’t answer, there’s a meeting going on here in the Ministry. Have you already heard about it, about the wall?”
“Yes, they were talking about it at the paper.”
“They say it’s true…” Uncle Alikhan breathed heavily into the phone. “We’ll be making a decision…The separatists are gathering there to talk about it too, looks like.”
“At the Kumyk Theater?” asked Shamil, watching the young people flowing in a smooth stream into the square, heading toward the theater, a semicircular building with an elaborate façade.
“I’m not sure. Where are you right now?”
“I’m here too.”
“You shouldn’t be standing around there—anyway, we don’t really know yet ourselves, we’re trying to figure it out. Farid from the government, the one who…”
His uncle’s voice cut out. Realizing that he’d lost the connection, Shamil put the phone back in his pocket and took a look around.
3
People flowed in from the side streets, and their bright T-shirts painted the square in a blurred, ever-changing play of color. Shamil stood on tiptoe and saw a group of people clustered around the theater entrance, where a man stood with a megaphone. He was speaking in Kumyk, and it was impossible to make out what he was saying. Shamil wedged himself through the crowd. Gradually he began to catch individual words. The crowd exclaimed approvingly:
“Tiuz! Tiuz!”
Then a man with a mustache took the megaphone and began to speak.
“Aziz yoldashlar! We’ve been hearing rumors that there’s going to be a new government. What’s going on? Why? Those khakims have closed themselves off in the government and decided, without consulting us, that the Kumyks are peaceful, the Kumyks will put up with anything, they can be removed from power without any fuss…”
The crowd buzzed.
“How were things before? The Avars and Dargins had the most powerful positions in the Republic’s government, and they gave us the third place. And we always agreed to that. And now what? They want to change everything! Here in our homeland we always lived together with the Russians like this…” The man with the mustache clasped his palms tightly together. “…in peace! And then the others came down from the mountains and what happened? The Russians left…”
Indistinct shouts were heard from the front rows. All Shamil could make out was the word “Wall.”
The man with the mustache shook his head: “I don’t know a thing! Nothing at all! They’re not telling us anything! One day I hear ‘There’s a Wall,’ the next day, ‘There’s no Wall.’ All I know is that everything is all mixed up.” The man rubbed his palms together. “They want to divide everything up themselves, and keep the people out of it.”
The crowd again moaned and stirred. Another man took the megaphone. He was draped in a green cloth with a slogan stamped on it, “Tenglik,” in huge black letters.
“They’re trying to force us into secondary roles! But who was the first to make peace with Russia? The Kumyks. Who suffered most of all during the Civil War? The Kumyks. Who gave more sons to the Great Patriotic War than anyone else? The Kumyks. Who revolutionized agriculture? The Kumyks. And what do we have now? They took our ancestral lands. We’ve lost nearly all our arable land! Do you see Kumyks at the bazaars? Not a single one! Do you see our traditional crafts anywhere? Nowhere! We’ve closed our eyes to it until now, because we’re a wise people. But we can’t put up with it anymore. I’m telling you, it’s time…”
The square filled with sound, including, for some reason, shouts of “Allahu akbar!”
“It is time to liberate the plains from the usurpers, it is time to unite with our Turkic brothers,” roared the speaker. “Long live the Kumyk republic!”
Shamil looked around. The square fell silent for a moment, then came back to life, chanting “Kumykstan! Kumykstan!”
Meanwhile a neatly dressed man with a round white beard mounted the steps to the theater entrance. He waited for the shouting to die down, gave the crowd some unintelligible greeting, then began to speak in a resonant, confident voice, glancing down now and then at some notes on a piece of paper.
“You were saying just now that Moscow gave us land, and that the Tarkov chiefs, our leaders in the past, had a good relationship with Moscow…But let us remind ourselves what that means. What exactly is Moscow—who are the Rus? The Rus are Varangians, and the Varangians are Turkic Kipchaks—they wouldn’t have a language or a culture if it wasn’t for us! It was the Turks, together with Attila, who brought literacy, metalworking, and the plow to Scandinavia. It was the Turks who gave Rus the alphabet. Cyril and Methodius were our own blood brothers, who converted the ancient Turkic runic alphabet into European letters and who devised the Glagolitic script, which had forty sounds—the exact number our language needs. And Christianity? The Patriarchal seat of the Eastern Church was located in Derbent as far back as the fourth century, and it was there that the Turkic clergy ordained the
Georgian, Albanian, Syrian, Coptic, and Byzantine priests! In the Middle Ages, Desht-i-Kipchak was the biggest country in the entire area of what is now Russia. The Russian ruling elite and nobility were Turks who spoke their native language. Take the word bathhouse—banya—know what that is? It’s bu-ana!—our steam room. The Turks reigned for centuries in Kiev, till the Slavs swarmed over the city wearing animal skins, and the ancient state fell to ruin. Now our kurgans have been destroyed, our steppe plowed over, our cemeteries defiled. But we will not lose hope! We will take up the blue and yellow Khazar flag, will add the green of Islam, and make a new banner for the free Kipchak Steppe!”
The crowd erupted in delight, and voices called out: “To the Government House! To the Government!” The crowd lurched, heaved, and headed off in the direction of the main square, with the megaphone still roaring in the background. People shouted excitedly in Kumyk and jostled Shamil from behind. He retreated to the tall parapets adjacent to the Caspian Beer Hall and then began to push through the crowd, against its flow, toward the waterfront. Waves of humanity washed over him, pressed him up against a stone pillar, and finally tossed him out onto the steps leading to the embankment.
Lost in thought, Shamil wandered around the withered flowerbeds and blue spruce trees, passing the same corner several times. Then the yellow tank of a kvass stand caught his eye, and he went over to buy a glass.
“What’s all the fuss about?” asked the bored-looking, disheveled salesgirl, nodding in the direction of the Kumyk Theater.
“Khabary,” answered Shamil. “There’s a rumor that we’re going to be walled off from Russia. Now the Kumyks are all worked up—they want their native lands returned to them.”
“Ma!” exclaimed the salesgirl, raising one plucked brow skeptically.
“It wasn’t enough for those people from the lowlands to destroy the Union,” Shamil heard a raspy voice behind him.
He turned and saw two old men in white Panama hats. The one to whom the voice evidently belonged slowly unfolded a checkered handkerchief and began mopping his sweaty face. The other man shook a wooden backgammon box and ordered two glasses of kvass.
“Our Kumyks,” continued the first man, “want to unite with the Balkhars, but who’s going to let the Balkhars go? The Nogais won’t join with the Kumyks either—first they need to figure out what to do with the land.”
“But va, why?” the salesgirl asked, still surprised, as she turned the gleaming gold-colored handle on the tank.
The man finished wiping his face and burst out laughing.
“That’s my question, too: why?”
The second man tucked the backgammon box under his arm, took the two full glasses of kvass, one in each hand, and growled:
“We need a firm hand, like under Stalin, fi-r-r-r-r-m!”
Both of them glanced at Shamil, who was standing to one side with his glass. He hurried away; he had no desire to get into a conversation about the Kumyk and Nogai steppes at this point. He decided to head home, where he could think things over in peace.
4
Asya ran to Khabibula’s, bought a couple of jars of fragrant heavy cream from his wife, then hurried home. From there she set off at last to Aunt Patimat’s to complete her errand and deliver the cream, which would eventually thicken into sour cream. The family considered Patimat, Shamil’s mother, standoffish, but from her childhood Asya had always enjoyed visiting her; she loved the particular smell that came from the copper-banded trunks in her apartment. The jars clinked against each other in the bag as she walked. Her hands began to feel numb, and scraps of meaningless tunes and advertising jingles played raggedly in her head in an endless loop, along with the strange expression “donkey salt.” Asya came to her senses only when a man tiling the roof of someone’s house laughed and shouted down to her:
“Hey, talking to yourself?” He snickered. “Talking to herself!”
Asya realized that she had been saying the phrase aloud, and that “donkey salt” was Avar for thyme, and that her mother had said something about thyme that very morning.
Asya’s mother, Patimat’s cousin, was dark-skinned from birth. Everyone assumed she was descended from an Arab soldier who’d been in one of the armies that had invaded Southern Dagestan. He’d gotten separated from his comrades and so strayed into their mountain town. The town shrank into a small settlement, and the Arab’s blood became diluted through multiple generations of descendants, occasionally bestowing a dark complexion upon women of the house of Arabazul in the Khikhulal tukhum. Asya’s father had come from a completely different region and was the exact opposite: he had reddish hair and brightly colored irises that looked like a mosaic-bottomed pool bathed in light.
It was because they were from such different regions and communities that her parents hadn’t married right away. Asya’s dark-skinned grandmother, her mother’s mother, had grumbled that it would be beneath their tukhum to associate itself with dzhurab knitters and chungur makers, and her mother’s father refused even to hear of it.
“They’re nothing but savages. We’re an educated people here, PhDs everywhere you look!” he would say, waving Asya’s mother away, and would inwardly reproach himself for ever having allowed his daughter to go away to school in the city.
Asya’s father’s family weren’t much pleased about the match themselves, showing their own share of disapproval for this dark-skinned girl from far away. They compiled a comprehensive list of local girls whom they had known from birth and thoroughly vetted in the meantime. Asya’s mother’s family brought her to heel and married her off to a placid and trustworthy man, a dental technician, and Asya’s father submitted to his parents’ wishes and married a hard-working, big-busted girl from his own village.
It ended in scandal. Seven months after the wedding the dental technician showed up at his father-in-law’s place with his aloof, morose wife in tow, complaining that she not only was refusing to share the nuptial bed but wouldn’t even talk with him when they were alone together. The father-in-law—that is, Asya’s grandfather—lost his temper and nearly gave her a thrashing right there in front of everyone, but ultimately got himself under control and convened a family concilium. They threatened, sobbed, begged, trying to force Asya’s mother to love her wedded husband. Asya’s grandmother beat herself on the breast and declared:
“And all on account of this sock-maker, this chungur maker! Go on then, go off into the forests with clubs and sticks to hunt wild boar, see how you like that!”
It was true. Asya’s father lived in a forested region where there were still wild boar, antelope, bears, and leopards. Whereas the populated, civilized areas where Asya’s mother lived were bare as a bald man’s head; over the centuries, night and day, winter and summer, all the trees had been chopped down and fed to the people’s ancient and revered domestic hearths.
For his part, Asya’s father had also failed to establish a harmonious domestic life with his hardworking wife, though she was sturdy, healthy, and boisterous as a seagull. She bragged to her girlfriends, cupping one big breast in each hand:
“Take a look at these girls of mine: I can put my husband on one and use the other one to cover him like a blanket!”
And nearly died laughing.
A year after his wedding Asya’s father got a job as an accountant in the city and moved into an apartment there. He left his wife in the village and stopped visiting her. One night during a downpour that flooded the city streets, his abandoned wife’s brothers broke into his apartment and, threatening violence, ordered him to bring his wife immediately to town and to show her the respect she deserved. Asya’s father promised to get back together with his wife, and to do everything they asked, but the next day he installed a big deadbolt on his door and filed for divorce.
From that day on his life was an unending series of torments. His wife’s relatives besieged him constantly. Day after day, her parents, sisters, uncles, aunts, and clan elders showed up at his door, one after another, accusing him of de
spicable, dishonorable, and shameful behavior. Ultimately his wife found her pride and put a stop to it all. She returned home to her parents and put her former husband out of her mind, permanently.
“He didn’t even give me any children, what good was he?” she would say, and then with renewed ferocity would set to mowing the grass, milking the cows, and setting the tables for guests, of whom there was always an abundance.
Soon they found a more suitable match for her, a second cousin once removed, a practical, muscular man, and over the next ten years she bore for him, one after another, a teeming brood—five lusty boys and two husky girls.
So Asya’s parents were liberated at last from their spouses, and were able to join together in lawful matrimony. Naturally this process brought with it its own strife and scandal. During the formal courtship, Asya’s mother wouldn’t even come out to greet the matchmakers, and practically no one showed up at the wedding.
On the other hand, when children began to enter the world, old offenses were forgotten, and Asya’s paternal grandmother came in person to Makhachkala to dandle the babies and tyrannize the young mother. Asya was a pale, scrawny, awkward child, which brought her no end of trouble both at home and in the neighborhood. When she came to her mother’s village, she didn’t go around visiting like the other girls; she would close herself up in the storeroom and spend hours sorting through the basins and old carpets there, imagining that she was a princess imprisoned in a tower.
The Mountain and the Wall Page 5
