The Mountain and the Wall

by Alisa Ganieva

  “There’s no rain, Marzhana! I’m going into the mountains with the women,” answered her mother. “We’re going to pray. That’s always helped in the past!”

  “How can it be!” sobbed Marzhana, blinking back the tears that glistened in her long eyelashes. “First you say I have to marry Nasyr, then you bring shame upon the entire village with your prayers. Papa is out walking around waving some rag in the air, the men are planning to spend the whole night chanting prayers, and you’re off to the mountain! That’s not what the Soviet regime had in mind when they liberated you!”

  “Silence! Enough, you brat!” snapped Marzhana’s mother. “The chairman’s put ideas into your head! He’s corrupting the youth! You clean up in here, I’m in a hurry.”

  The women, including the elderly ones, gathered in a tight crowd and headed off toward the top of one of the escarpments, which they considered to be holy. And while the men appealed to their Allah, the women flattered their older, pagan deities, whose names are now nearly forgotten in Dagestan, and pleaded with them for rain.

  “Mukhtar, this madness must stop! Nothing is getting done! I’m going to dock them the entire week if they’re not careful!” exclaimed the chairman, a fine figure of a man, as he measured the planked floor of the bright kolkhoz office with his canvas tarpaulin boots.

  “Yes of course, Gadzhi, let’s disperse the crowd! I’ll persuade the young shepherds not to listen to their elders! We have no rain, but that’s no tragedy. Comrade Lysenko in Moscow says that soon they’re going to have new varieties of barley that can be planted anywhere—here, or even above the Arctic Circle!”

  Raisa Petrovna came running from the school.

  “Comrades, the old men have even dragged the children out of class to pray! How can that be?”

  “Calm yourself, Raisa Petrovna,’ strong-shouldered Mukhtar reassured her. ‘I’ll take care of it.”

  He put on his jacket and strode forth.

  “What a fine young man!” clucked the chairman.

  “Yes, someone like that would be a perfect fiancé for Marzhana,” mused Raisa Petrovna. “Oi, there will be no happiness for her with Nasyr.”

  Shamil skipped another fifty pages.

  The men of the mountain village piled into the community center and took their seats, ready to hear what the chairman had to say. The old men’s watery eyes looked around suspiciously. They squinted malevolently at the red poster hanging above the stage, whose bold letters issued a summons to the mountain people: “Onto the plains, with property and livestock!” Next to the poster stood a crowd of children in scarlet Pioneer neckerchiefs, a regiment of future workers arrayed against the inert, dying hulk of the past. In their hands glittered garlands of electric lights; their faces were illuminated with innocent joy. The mountains, too, were illuminated, and without a single prayer or silly all-night vigil! Next to them Raisa Petrovna stood proudly in a crepe de chine dress. When she saw Marzhana making her way forward from the back rows, Raisa Petrovna waved to her.

  “Comrades,” Chairman Gadzhi stepped forward with his hands folded behind his back. “This is no ordinary gathering. We are here to discuss a most urgent matter. For centuries you have lived on these barren mountaintops without the slightest glimpse of the bright world beyond. At any moment a light could flash from the signal tower, and you would grab a bundle of dry mountain kolbasa, or, if you couldn’t afford kolbasa, a bag of coarse-grained flour, and off you would gallop on a sortie. For centuries your homes have been built all clustered tightly together for protection like feudal fortresses and your wives have been poised to abandon the hearth at any minute and to take the attacking enemy by hook or by crook. Your forefathers lived on war alone, engaged in constant clashes with their neighbors or with tsarist occupiers. All day long they clung to the godekan, in a state of continual alert. Now we live in the indestructible and free Land of the Soviets! No longer do we clutch with desperate hands onto the embrasures and narrow ledges of these dark cliffs. No longer are we dependent on the word of some mullah or capricious cleric! No longer are we oppressed by khans and shamkhals. We have thrown off the fetters of millennial adats that stifled us! Just look around you, look at our youth! Our young shepherds and kolkhoz workers are dressed in bright shirts and modern trousers; they no longer have to carry sharpened daggers, to be ready at any moment to wreak revenge in blood. Look at these young pioneers!”

  “Get to the point, Chairman!” shouted Nasyr, smirking cockily at his confederates.

  “Here’s the point. We have a great joy to share with you, comrades! Our torments have ended! Recall how, not so long ago, we used to haul earth by the jugful to the terraces of our meager fields. Recall the desolation of the winter, when the snows closed us off from the world, and the shepherds descended to their winter pastures. Am I wrong?”

  “You’re right!” exclaimed the beautiful Raisa Petvrovna.

  “And now we can say good-bye to all that! The Kutan lands have already been prepared for us; we can be on the road by tomorrow.”

  “On the road where?” Old Kebed, leaning on his knotty cane, frowned.

  “To the plains!” the chairman exclaimed joyfully.

  “To the plains!” laughed Raisa Petrovna.

  But the hall was silent. The faces of the villagers expressed dull obstinacy, nothing more. Only cheerful Mukhtar stirred in his seat, and Marzhana gazed dreamily at the ceiling. Would they really go? Would it really come to pass that instead of the many-tiered stone village, blending into the surrounding mountainside, instead of narrow covered passageways and blind alleyways of stone, she would see broad streets lined with spacious brick houses with sharp-peaked roofs, and would breathe in the fresh fragrance of a new, free life? Would it really come to pass! How she had dreamed of this day! She gazed at Mukhtar with eyes aflame.

  “No, we cannot abandon our homes and our land,” answered Kebed.

  “We will not abandon them under any circumstances,” voices rose on all sides. Loudest of all was the voice of Ali, Nasyr’s red-bearded father. “You mean to destroy us! All the people who moved from here onto the plains died of malaria!”

  “Let Gadzhi Muradovich speak! Give Gadzhi Muradovich the floor!” begged Raisa Petrovna.

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

  “All of you, everyone here, has been duped,” he said sternly, swallowing the endings of his words. “Where did you get this unverified information? Instead of spreading panic among the people, you need to sort things out with the ringleaders, the slanderers and plotters. And you, Ali, don’t try to change the subject; we know that you still have rams that you have not turned in. Turn them over to the kolkhoz by tomorrow, or we will take them from you by force!”

  “But I was planning to invite you over and serve you those rams,” Ali objected, smirking, “at my son’s wedding. He’s marrying Osman’s daughter, Marzhana.”

  Everyone looked at Marzhana. The girl’s lips quivered, and she dashed out of the club. Raisa Petrovna rushed out after her.

  “Don’t run away, Marzhana! Don’t go!” shouted the young teacher. They ran until they could run no more; finally they stopped, breathless, at the spring.

  “Akh, Raisa Petrovna!” exclaimed Marzhana, and she burst out sobbing on her teacher’s shoulder. The black and chestnut plaits intertwined like streams from two waterfalls.

  “I know that you love Mukhtar,” said Raisa Petrovna, stroking her student on the back. “You don’t have to marry Nasyr if you don’t want to.”

  “I don’t!” whispered Marzhana. “I’ll jump off the bridge before I marry him.”

  “Good for you,” Raisa Petrovna praised her. “I can see how disrespectfully the men here treat you; I can see how hard it is for you women in the mountains, how you have to haul water on your own backs. Don’t repeat poor Kalimat’s mistake; learn to stand up for yourself…”

  Shamil sighed, glan
ced again at his watch, and flipped to the last pages:

  The great bulging red sun rose on the horizon; the summer air filled with the chirping of birds. Marzhana leaned joyfully out of the window and gathered in the first hints of the new morning. Behind her now was her hard life in the dismal mountains; behind, too, crude Nasyr with his idle, insolent sneer; behind her now, the gossip of the village, the disapproval of her relatives. Ah, how shrilly they had laughed as they shouted to one another from the rooftops: “Osman’s daughter has been seen with Mukhtar.” So what if she had? Marzhana had sought him out on her own initiative. She herself had lain down in the mown grass next to the tractor and announced: “It is not the mullah who will join us in marriage, but he who is dearer than any mullah, dearer than any father.” And she had showed the stunned Mukhtar a postcard with a photo of Lenin on it, smiling benevolently out at them.

  And now, greeting the fresh steppe dawn, she could not even remember how Nasyr had threatened to kill her; how her former girlfriends had shunned her, turning away when they met on the street; how her father had dressed in mourning and announced that his daughter was dead to him; how her mother had sobbed in silence. Now everything would be different. She had broken away from the age-old mountains and ravines and had strode forth, forward to meet the sea breeze, forward to meet the laughing tractor driver Mukhtar.

  Yesterday Marzhana had prepared balloons and banners, and had cleaned the glass of the precious framed portraits of the working people’s leaders. “Akh, today I will march in the parade,” Marzhana laughed to herself, “and Mukhtar will embrace me, and Chairman Gadzhi will smile at me!” A new village had come into being on the plain, new homes glittered in the southern sun. Only the most stubborn and lazy people were still clinging to the smoke-blackened pillars of their old saklyas, unwilling to part with their gloomy nests above the clouds. Marzhana’s mother and father had closed themselves inside their home and refused come out; Nasyr’s father Ali had greedily clung to his hoarded wealth; the old women had wailed and lamented.

  And then the young Komsomol shepherds found a supply of gunpowder somewhere and used it to destroy all of the ancestral towers. The ancient, resilient walls did not give in easily to these firebrands; they refused to fall at first. Then, finally, sending joyful echoes across the cliffs, the stones tumbled in a great landslide down the mountain. The old village was no more. Old man Kebed no longer had anywhere to hide with his quackery and his superstitious books. The malicious gossip at the godekan fell silent. The zurna no longer played on the town square. Marzhana’s fellow villagers settled into a new life on the broad steppe, where the livestock graze free, where a Pioneer reveille rings across the plain.

  In the parade Marzhana walked hand in hand with Mukhtar and Raisa Petrovna; behind them, heaving grouchy sighs to the tune of the “Internationale,” trudged the old men.

  “Well, Marzhana,” Chairman Gadzhi patted her on the cheek, “how was the move?”

  “It worked out fine, Uncle Gadzhi!” answered Marzhana and pressed closer to the beaming Mukhtar.

  “I proved it to myself, and I will prove it to everyone, that rye does not grow on stone,” said the chairman. And his words went deep into Marzhana’s soul, and she would remember them her whole life: not in the mountains, not in the old ways, is happiness to be found, but in the new and joyous morning of freedom.

  8

  Shamil tossed the book onto the sofa and, after a brief stop in the bathroom, set off on foot to Madina’s. She lived close by, in a nine-story prefab apartment building with a jumble of homemade verandas clinging to the sides, the ones on the upper stories propped atop the ones below. In the dark entryway Shamil nearly overturned an aluminum bucket full of dirty water. Almost all the doors off the stairway were wide open or half-open because of the stifling heat, releasing to the outside world the sounds of talking and shouting, as well as the hum of televisions. One fleshy woman in a fleece robe was swabbing the landing in front of her apartment, and through its open door Shamil caught a glimpse of a long, narrow hallway with shiny gold-streaked wallpaper.

  Madina was standing on her threshold. She was wearing a long patterned skirt and a colorful print blouse with sleeves that went all the way down to her wrists.

  “Won’t you be hot?” asked Shamil in surprise. Madina was silent, sullen. Her expression betrayed a vague, ominous tension.

  “Why so grouchy?” asked Shamil, trying to make light of it.

  She slammed the door behind her and started down the stairs.

  “What have you heard out on the streets?” Her cork soles tapped down the stairs as she answered his question with one of her own.

  “You know, don’t you? Such an aria-urai! I stumbled on two different demonstrations going on at the same time.” Shamil had a thought. “Hey, is your phone working?”

  “No. They say almost all of the services have been disconnected. Some glitch in the system. Or maybe someone shut them down on purpose.”

  They came out into the courtyard, cluttered with garages, but still spacious. A bench nearby was occupied by a number of young people from the building; he greeted them, clasping hands. Then he caught up to Madina and started babbling the first thing that came into his head, just to break the silence:

  “Listen, I wanted to come by car, but Magomed took it. It’s all right—I’m thinking of getting an Audi. I can order this one Omargadzhi told me about, from Stavropol, only slightly used.”

  Madina was barely listening. She glanced at Shamil only once, to point out the glass door of a bakery to him. A sign over it read WINDOW TO PARIS. They entered an empty, cool little room, lined with shelves of cakes and pastries.

  “Let’s go to a regular restaurant,” Shamil suggested.

  “No,” Madina said bluntly, sitting at a table directly under a humming air conditioner. She frowned, and her hands fiddled with a napkin she had picked up somewhere. A young waitress appeared behind the counter and sauntered lazily over to their table with a menu.

  Madina was Shamil’s third cousin. Their great grandparents had been brothers who lived in the large mountain town of Cher, on one of the branches of the Great Silk Road. Cher was divided into quarters, each with several tukhums, each of these centered around its own mosque. One tukhum was military; another was made up of farmers and herdsmen. There was a tukhum of weavers who made cotton textiles and hempen cloth; one tukhum comprised merchants and boot makers of Jewish ancestry; and there was a tukhum of stonemasons and former slaves, descendants of Georgians who had been taken into captivity long ago. Their great-grandfathers had belonged to the agricultural tukhum known as Khikhulal, which was very distinguished, and which had occupied a place high up the mountain, overlooking a steep precipice.

  At one point after the death of their parents, the brothers quarreled. Madina’s great-grandfather Zakir had decided to marry a beautiful girl from a noble family, who was expected to have a substantial dowry. In those days dowries consisted of land—that is, the most valuable commodity in the mountains. But if a girl married into a different free community, khanate, or kingdom, she would receive nothing at all. When he learned that his younger brother’s intended bride would come from another community, and so would not have a dowry, Shamil’s great-grandfather Zapir was livid. He forbade Zakir to appear in his house with his new wife: “You can plow on her forehead,” he raged, “and reap her eyebrows!”

  So Zakir took his wife, a horse, and several friends, and set out to conquer an adjoining territory, one with fertile fields and pastures belonging to alien tribes. Numerous raids on settlements there resulted in a formal complaint in court, with all the local authorities and clerics presiding. They presented Zakir with a copy of the Koran and compelled him to swear that the land that he was attempting to occupy, and on which he was now standing, had belonged to his ancestors. “If you can swear to this, then the land is yours,” they declared, smiling craftily.

  Everyone was convinced that this would send the alien occupier slinking home
with his tail between his legs. But Zakir had planned a clever ruse; beforehand he had gone to his own village of Cher and had smeared his boots with mud from there, so that, upon his return to the enemy village, he would be able to swear, with a clean conscience, that he was indeed standing on the land of his ancestors.

  Thus Zapir remained in Cher, and Zakir settled beyond the next mountain. He named his land Ebekh, which means “nearby, neighboring.”

  Shamil was getting annoyed. “What’s the matter with you? Look at me!”

  “Why do you keep asking me the same thing?” Madina objected. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Instead tell me what’s going on with you.”

  “That’s what I’m doing, Omargadzhi is promising to set me up with a job in the court or maybe Uncle Alikhan will offer me a new job…”

  “I didn’t expect that from you,” interjected Madina.

  “What?” Shamil was taken aback.

  “So you want to work for thieves?”

  Shamil said nothing, trying to understand.

  “I didn’t think that you would be crawling on your hands and knees to beg to work for thieves.”

  Shamil paled. “When did I ever crawl on my hands and knees?”

  “I know what you’re hoping for. To be just like Uncle Alikhan. Or Uncle Kurban, who works for the police. To live off the suffering of the umma, to cheat your own people. Who do you think you are? Are you even a Muslim?”

  Shamil was stunned; he couldn’t muster a reply.

  “Why don’t you say something?” Madina was incensed. “It’s because of people like you I can’t live an honest life according to the Prophet’s will. I can’t even dress the way I want. And I’m not talking about our parents—they were brainwashed long ago, but you’re young, you need to do everything you can to resist the munafiqs and all those kufr keepers. Subhanallah, now everything will be different. All the traitors will be punished. Before it’s too late, before your own brothers catch up to you…”