The Mountain and the Wall

by Alisa Ganieva

  “They’ve knocked Lenin down! That’s the problem—it’s punishment. Under the Soviets we had friendship of the peoples…”

  The man in brown again interrupted the bloated communist: “I remember that so-called friendship of the peoples! I’m here to tell you, enlightened Islam is a thing of the past, what we have now is hordes of primitive sectarians. You know what they do with Nakshiband sheikhs when they get their hands on them?”

  The man whispered something, grimacing. Lena dropped a teaspoon.

  “Still, you have to understand, we shouldn’t be too pessimistic,” wheezed Sharapudin Muradovich. “Our republic is the center of ancient civilizations, the cradle of the very first democratic societies. The oldest production economy, metallurgy, the location of the first cultivated agricultural crops! We can’t just lose it all in one go. They’ll shoot for awhile, then they’ll calm down.”

  The fan was blowing in Sharapudin Muradovich’s ear, and his hair waved in the air like soldiers surrendering.

  “And all because of the federal authorities,” said Shamil quietly. “Because of the Special Forces. They made a nice living on our corpses, and then they abandoned us, like, ‘Now you can rot in hell.’”

  “What do you mean?” asked Lena.

  “They were paid twenty thousand for each hour of special ops. So they dragged out for days what they could have dealt with in a matter of minutes. They set up an entire convoy of armored vehicles to deal with just three Wahhabi Kalashnikovs.”

  “We know that already,” Lena waved her hands in the air.

  “And who died?” continued Shamil. “Ordinary cops, Dagestanis. They unleashed a war here, brother against brother…”

  “We’ve known that for a long time,” declared the little man with the big ears. “But why did they stop? Why did they give up such a profitable spot? They could have stayed and kept on feeding their faces…”

  “I know why,” said Arip, “it’s just a tactic. The fascists have taken over there. So now they feel they have the right to send planes in here to bomb us. To them we’re just a nest of bandits.”

  “But not everyone is a bandit. There are even some decent Salafis!” whined Kusium.

  “So there are,” agreed Lena. “My neighbor has a business. The men from the woods demanded money, they threatened him, and then he went to one of their bosses and asked him to step in. And he did, defended him from his own men. And that’s just one example.”

  “Where I live, there were hardly any of those fundamentalists. We lived peacefully together, no one ever complained!” Sharapudin Muradovich interjected. “But in other places they’ve been following their own law for a long time.”

  “In Unstukul they’ve had all the state officials dancing to their tune for years,” Shamil confirmed.

  “Your sister’s husband,” Sharapudin Muradovich addressed Shamil, “started an opposition movement up there in the village, have you heard? He’s publishing a newspaper, with the support of the local Sufis. He has Sheikh Gazi-Abbas’s blessing.”

  “In Russian?” asked Lena.

  “It’s bilingual,” answered Shamil and lowered his eyes.

  It was true. His brother-in-law had been extremely active in Cher. Out there, power changed hands practically every day, and the hostility between the lower and upper mosques was on the verge of tearing the tukhums apart, with the two warring sides poised to claim whatever shreds remained.

  Patimat, Shamil’s mother, had supposedly gotten into a feud with the family of her cousin once removed, who had taken the side of the Salafis, and had broken with them. Meanwhile the cousin had broken with his own parents and divorced his headstrong and perhaps overly clever wife, who had been unreceptive to his moralizing.

  So the cousin’s wife had broken off ties with her elder brother, who had renounced his former government career, and had turned over his waterfront estate, built on bribes he’d collected during his years of service, to the vilayat authorities.

  Meanwhile, his colleague, a ministry official and a recognized poetess, had composed a long ode, “To the great emir, warrior of Allah, the All-merciful and All-charitable,” which the emir, strange as it may seem, had accepted with great pleasure.

  “By the way, on the subject of odes,” said one of the customers. “Did you know that Makhmud Tagirovich Tagirov wrote a novel before he died? It’s pretty interesting. Very relevant to our times. ’Course it’s not perfect, the prose limps a little, but when I read it, it really gave me a feeling, something I can’t explain…”

  “What’s it about?” asked Lena, with some enthusiasm. “Where can I get a copy?”

  Shamil looked at Lena and thought about Madina. About the expensive gifts he and Uncle Alikhan had taken her, about his mother’s plans to decorate the cornices in the apartment before the wedding, about his aunts rushing to reserve the banquet hall. Over the last few days his only dream had been to ferret out the odious Otsok, insolent, obnoxious Otsok, who had seduced the impressionable girl with distorted interpretations of the suras. Otsok, who had taken on the name of Al-Jabbar, must have known that Madina was engaged. He had known and had come sniffing around anyway!

  That morning Shamil again had gone to the deceiver’s home and had learned that she’d moved out, and that her disgraced parents, after their daughter had appealed to them on their behalf, had been presented formally to the new authorities, and were even receiving a special ration of meat, grains, and vegetables.

  Old ties continued to fray; people’s demeanor and behavior changed with restless rapidity. In a personal effort to postpone the collapse of his world, Shamil sought out forbidden DVDs of non-Muslim films, intensified his workout schedule, and went around visiting his relatives. They fought their anxiety and remained steeped in everyday routines and cares: changing diapers, counting money, repairing their homes. Despairing of ever making sense of it all, Shamil then took to visiting long-forgotten girlfriends.

  The first was named Djeiran. He’d first noticed her one winter day, windy and slushy like all winter days in Makhachkala, standing outside the downtown department store with her girlfriends. She was wearing a modest skirt and a silvery jacket with a fake fur collar, and shiny, beaded, spike-heeled boots. Still, her white teeth, dimples, and mischievous, laughing eyes gave her a playful look.

  Shamil went up to her and wouldn’t leave until Djeiran, laughing and flashing her dimples, gave him her phone number. That evening he called the number and some hoarse old man’s voice answered the phone; his new acquaintance had obviously just given him some random numbers. He already knew where she went to university, though, and, sure enough, he tracked her down after class one cold, windy day:

  “You think you fooled me? See, I found you anyway.”

  Djeiran just fluttered her eyelashes and showed her big white teeth. That was how their semi-secret encounters began. He went out walking with her in a park, along the paths overgrown with honey locusts and white acacias, walked her home afterward, and barraged her with silly poems he found on the Internet:

  Sleep, little bunny, sleep, mousie dear;

  Sweet dreams, my little baby bear.

  We’ll be together up in heaven,

  I will see you there.

  Djeiran gradually yielded. She moved to the city from her village and rented an apartment with two of her classmates. Every month her parents sent money for her living expenses, and the new-fledged student spent hours in front of the mirror fixing her smooth black hair. So spring passed, and when Djeiran’s summer session began, Shamil saw her looking thoughtful for the first time. Her dimples disappeared and her pupils darkened like two overripe plums. He gave her the money to pass a test, and then the next one too. Then he paid for her final exams.

  “Too bad we’re from different ethnicities and can’t get married,” sighed Djeiran slyly, giving Shamil a chance to prove her wrong.

  “If it weren’t for that, I’d have proposed long ago,” lied Shamil, stroking her big pink palm, and immediatel
y changed the subject.

  At the end of the term he took her to an empty apartment that belonged to one of his friends and helped her shed her modest skirt. She didn’t resist, only giggled into his shoulder: “Don’t, Shamil! Shamil, stop it!”

  Afterward they had coffee in the kitchen, and she planned their future life together.

  “You need to start teaching me Arabic,” she said with a naïve smile.

  They kept seeing each other for several years, though Shamil didn’t exactly avoid the company of other women during that time—nice-looking, more mature, and less inhibited women.

  At one point Djeiran found out about one of them. She bit her lip, then burst out laughing, like a child. “Like she has a chance! You’re only sleeping with her, but I’m the one you love!”

  Shamil concurred.

  One day Djeiran told him that her family had started looking for a husband for her, and gave him an inquiring look.

  “You’ll have to get married. Just don’t forget me,” said Shamil.

  And Djeiran cried.

  On the day of her wedding he managed to sneak into the banquet hall and even participated in the ceremonial dance around the bride. While the guests were trying to figure out who this dancing stranger was, and which side of the family he represented, Shamil showered the already deflowered bride with the fresh banknotes that he’d gotten at work from Uncle Alikhan. She flushed scarlet and looked down at the floor.

  A few months later he met Djeiran on her way to the market. She recognized him and blushed, but then turned immediately and crossed the street. Shamil followed her, noticing the new fullness in her belly, all the way to the market stalls, and within an hour they were lying on a bed in a hotel room, next to a bag of potatoes she had bought.

  “What did you tell your husband?” asked Shamil, when it was over.

  “I said that I was injured in gym class on the vaulting horse.”

  “Did he believe you?”

  “No,” answered Djeiran and flashed her dimples. “But he pretended to. Who needs trouble? But now he’s really jealous, he won’t let me leave my hair down…”

  They got together a few more times, and then Djeiran disappeared. So now, when he went up to her house and stood in front of her balcony with its laundry neatly pinned to a clothesline, the woman who eventually came out onto the balcony was someone he didn’t know, and didn’t look at all like Djeiran. She was in a hijab.

  Next was Marina. She was a young, sassy woman who worked as a masseuse. She lived in the same house with Uncle Alikhan—the uncle who had now disappeared—and was friends with his wife. Uncle Alikhan had asked Marina to treat his ailing back, in a neighborly way, and took her with him on his trips with his family to the seashore. After a while they started to go alone, just the two of them. Their romance began during the month of Ramadan. Toward evening he would tuck her into his Ferrari and take her to Kaspiisk. There they would wait impatiently until the sun went down, then, as the last rays melted away, their lips would meet and they would surrender to the inevitable.

  After each tryst Uncle Alikhan would give Marina a significant amount of cash, but soon she rebelled: “Leave your wife, or I’ll tell her everything!”

  At that point Uncle Alikhan turned the hazardous masseuse over to his nephew. Shamil accepted the burden with pleasure and savored Marina’s art to the fullest. Later, right when her energy was getting to be too much for him, she conveniently decided to marry an old widower and complied with the man’s request that she take the veil.

  Shamil went up to the widower’s cement-plastered house and knocked on Marina’s window, using their private code. He didn’t recognize her at first. A black wart had sprouted on her tender cheek, and she wore no lipstick. Her chestnut hair was tightly covered with a scarf.

  “Is your husband home?” asked Shamil.

  “I have a different husband now. The last one died. And you’d better not tangle with my new one. And keep your distance from me too, while you’re at it.”

  “All right,” said Shamil. “What are you getting all worked up for, Marinka?”

  “I’m not Marinka now, I’m Marzhanat.”

  Shamil frowned.

  “And if you call me Marinka,” continued the metamorphosed masseuse, “I will inform on you to the sharia court. They’ll scoop your guts out while you watch.”

  Whereupon Marina-Marzhanat made her exit, slamming the wrought-iron gate behind her.

  “Shamil, will you let me read it later?” asked Lena, bringing his thoughts back to the present day, in the cellar cafeteria.

  “Give you what?”

  “Makhmud Tagirovich’s novel. They say you have it.”

  “I didn’t take it for myself. I’m going to give it to my brother-in-law—maybe he’ll publish an excerpt in his newspaper,” said Shamil.

  When they got outside, Arip told him, “Remember, Shamil, how you asked me about that village in the mountains where we fell asleep? And I said that I didn’t remember?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I do now.”

  4

  The bread line snaking around the brick booth swayed, shifted, and settled. Despite the heat, the women had wrapped themselves in long shawls, just to be safe. The men stood grumbling. Shamil was last in line, a hundred back, itching with impatience. The folder with white cord ties that he had been given in the café kept slipping out of his hands. He fumbled with it for a few minutes, then opened it up and leafed through the pages of Makhmud Tagirovich’s thick manuscript.

  Your Makhmud, dear readers, is not a bookish man, and so he will start by following the promptings of his simple heart. I had intended to begin with the founding of the village, but Khandulai grabbed me by the hand and demanded that I start with her.

  “Page twenty, and he’s finally getting to the beginning,” thought Shamil.

  From her earliest childhood Khandulai, sturdy and round-cheeked, raised on the finest grains, meat, and milk, was always in a hurry. Springing down the terraced rooftops, with metal rings flashing on the temples of her colorful chokhto, she skipped along the streets of the village doing errands for her mother; she whirled down the stone stairways to the women’s quarters, where bronze basins clanged against each other, and where twisted metal jewelry languished in intricately carved wooden chests; she sped like a bullet into the dark barn, whose thick walls kept out the sun; she climbed, slipping and sliding, into wooden granaries, dashed outside the village to the two-story awnings of the communal barns and haylofts…

  Years passed, and Khandulai did not marry, though abundant, rich farmland was to be given as her dowry, and her skin was as white as a partridge. Mothers of young sons came to her house to chat, and when they departed, they would leave ten loaves of bread. But the next time they came the loaves would be returned to them, unsliced.

  “Time devours all pride,” said the old women enigmatically when they gathered at the village’s oven, casting sidelong glances at Khandulai.

  All the women of the quarter would take their grain, flour, and fuel to the communal oven to gossip. They covered all imaginable topics, everything they heard when they were out and about. Loudest of all was the widow Khurizada, who was a regular at all the bazaars in the district.

  “They say that in Tsudakhar,” whispered she, browning wheat flour in a pan. “No one will marry a girl unless she has copper dinnerware. And in Burkikhan a bride howls and sobs like a madwoman all the way to her new house, so loudly that they can hear her in the next village! And in Mugi, picture this, the groom’s mother pours warm oil over her new daughter-in-law so that it stains her clothes. And the Gimrin grooms have to gather enough firewood for the whole winter for their fiancées. And in Urkarakh a whole day goes by before the bride has taken even five steps to her future husband’s house; she’ll take one step forward, stop and dance, then will take a step back, and dance again! And the Laks, if it’s raining and flooding, they’ll catch a frog and dress it in men’s pants to make the rain stop.” />
  Khurizada had no end of stories. About the Andiits’ burkas, the Balkhars’ clay dishes, the Kubachi silver bracelets. The singing competitions in Kuba and Derbent. About the Tsovkra-dwellers, who walked on cables stretched across bottomless abysses. And about the unions that free societies formed against powerful khans, shamkhals, nutsals, and utsmis.

  Much did Khandulai learn at the communal oven. About the origins of each tukhum, and why Tsob thundered across the sky. And so many love songs, so many poems did she hear from the women.

  “At last the Gergebils and Kudalins wreaked their revenge on those Kulibs,” said Khurizada. “They taught those bandits and plunderers from the high road a lesson!”

  “What do you mean taught them a lesson? The Kulibs capture everyone with weapons who gets anywhere close to their homes and toss them straight into their turbulent Kara Koisu!”

  “Here’s what happened. The Gergebils and Kudalins come to the Kulibs and they say: ‘You attacked us, but we want peace. You’re invited to a banquet!’ The Kulibs are glad, but they are afraid to let the strangers near. ‘Tell you what,’ they say, ‘let’s have a feast outside our village. But come unarmed.’ So the Gergebils and Kudalins come with just belts on, no daggers—but they’ve hidden their daggers in the wine ewers. At the height of the feast one of them says, ‘The grain is ripe, time for the harvest!’ And they slaughter all the Kulibs with their daggers!”

  “Vakh, vakh, vakh…”

  That’s the kind of thing they talked about at the oven. But mostly they discussed domestic matters and their work: which fields to irrigate when; the varieties of hard wheat and white barley; the maintenance and seeding of the terraces; the coming of the thaw.