The Mountain and the Wall

by Alisa Ganieva

  “The Gazalovs started planting before everyone else!”

  “Yes, and they’ve already had to pay a penalty for it—one sheep.”

  “And Itin’s wife had to pay two measures of rye for doing her laundry in the common spring…”

  Khandulai throws on her sheepskin coat and leaves the oven with her friends, heading for home. The walls on all sides are tall and thick—no one can get close to the village. Under her scarf the chokhto flows down her back, and huge silver spirals dangle on either side, and each one has a bird in it, or twinned saplings, or two horses mirroring each other, and such long, heavy earrings that her lobes can’t hold them, they need to be sewed to her chokhto with string.

  At the edge of the winter village the bachelors feast around bonfires. They live in the fortress, whose walls are ornamented with spiraled labyrinths, sacred lines, and pictures of horsemen at full gallop. From the fortress building underground passageways run all the way to the guard towers. They live there without women and call themselves the Union of the Unmarried. They engage in swordfights and in battles with or without spears; they engage in hand-to-hand combat, they build up their muscles, shoot arrows from their bows and drink wine. Among those bachelors is the daredevil Kebed, who has long been in love with Khandulai…

  “Look what it’s come to, lines like under the Communists.”

  “Le, get a move on!”

  The human chain winds round and round the booth.

  …in love with Khandulai. It happened during the last spring celebration—on the Red Day holiday. When burning hoops were rolled down from the roofs, and bonfires were lit on the flat rooftops, and the men jumped across them, chanting, “Into the fire, illness! Into me, strength!” Or maybe it was later, at the beginning of summer, when the young dzhigits and girls put on their best holiday clothes, tuned their chungurs and pandurs, packed food, and went out into the mountains at night with torches.

  They danced the whole way, illuminating the path as they went, laughing and singing songs, led by the most energetic and playful of their number. At dawn they arrived at the meadow, and there they danced amid the fresh blossoms, gathering bouquets and weaving flower wreaths. They collected edible greens for pies, competed in races as well as the long and high jumps, and climbed the cliffs. And there it was that Kebed was pierced to the marrow by the white-skinned, fleet-footed Khandulai, whose sharp wit eclipsed even that of their merry, flower-draped conductor.

  In the evening they came back to the village and gave their flowers to the old people who had come out to greet them; they organized dances on the village square, and again Kebed could not tear his eyes from Khandulai’s face. Did he suspect that Khandulai from the upper quarter would refuse him just like the others? That Kebed, dashing though he might have been, was too simple for her, his clan too meager and poor? Kebed’s mother came back to her son empty-handed, and Kebed’s soul darkened with injured pride.

  “There’s no slave blood in me!” he said to his mother. “My ancestors served no one. They had the right to bear arms! I may not be rich, but I’m a free uzden; how dare this haughty she-wolf insult me!”

  And mounting his steed, he headed out to the lowlands with his friends to make war upon the neighbors who had dared defy him.

  Ultimately the elders had enough of Khandulai’s willfulness. They gave her a piece of ox hide and ordered her to choose a husband right then and there. Khandulai came out to the village square, went up to the tall, handsome Surakat, and struck him on the shoulders with the ox hide. Surakat stood and realized that there was no escape. They began to make preparations for the wedding.

  The courting, the wedding ceremony—during which the groom was made to stand on one foot on an unsheathed saber blade laid flat on the ground—and the celebration that followed, which went on for many days, with all manner of delicacies, competitions, processions, ritual songs, and costumes…it all spun around Khandulai like a multicolored whirlwind. She herself spent practically the whole time in a special room with her girlfriends, sitting on a big sack stuffed with grains and covered with a sheepskin.

  Her mother dressed her in a special wedding dress, with a purple forehead cloth over the headdress, and with coins, spangles, chains, and river pearls sewed on, arranged in triangles, swastikas, animals, sunbeams, and circles, signifying all of Creation. Sukarat feasted in a separate room with his friends, whose task it was to guard him vigilantly from potential playful kidnapping attempts. Kebed drained goblet after goblet and pretended to be celebrating along with everyone else.

  At last, on the third day of the wedding, Khandulai was taken to her uncle’s home, and at midnight her new husband stole in. They were left alone in the house, but pranksters went up onto the roof to make noise and shout back and forth, and joking and laughter could be heard from outside the closed door. Surakat’s friends were spying on the couple, following the course of this first nuptial encounter.

  Khandulai was more than prepared to get through her wedding night: the battle began at midnight and continued for several hours. The new bride had enough strength to prevent her husband from cutting her woolen girdle with his dagger, and she managed to hold out till morning. Surakat had been made weak by the wine he’d drunk, and his new wife resisted his efforts—to pin down her strong white arms, to gain his prize—with such ferocity and violence that ultimately she wore him down.

  Hearing the sounds of the battle, his friends guffawed and egged him on: “Come on, Surakat, come on! How can such a dzhigit fail to saddle his mare?”

  Come daybreak, the defeated Surakat collapsed on the floor, his wife’s innocence intact. His friends took a roof roller and, still merry, stood it vertically on the rooftop.

  When the villagers saw the roller poking up on the newlyweds’ roof, they chorused: “Victory goes to the wife!”

  “She could have given in, that’s the done thing, she didn’t have to disgrace that fine young man,” frowned the widow Khurizada, inserting some snuff into her nostrils.

  “When will it be our turn? The goddamned beards!”

  “Shhh, quiet! Shhhhh!”

  “They’ve already renamed the city, you know. We’re now living in Shamilkala.”

  “Shh, quiet! Shhhh!”

  Shamil shifted his feet and leafed ahead a bit:

  Many years have passed since Khandulai married Surakat, and since Kebed killed him. Years and years since the Council exiled Kebed from the village and turned him into a forest abrek! And poor Makhmud still can’t get to the denouement. Let us turn away from the villagers and take up the story of my father.

  My father used to call me over and ask: “Tell me, Makhmud, what is small and big at the same time?”

  “I don’t know, Father,” I would answer.

  “Dagestan,” my father explained. “Just think how small it is, and yet how many peoples and customs, languages and arts, animals and plants, coexist here. In tiny Dagestan you can see sand hills and tropical brushwood, eternal glaciers and mineral springs, arid plains and fertile alpine meadows, sea expanses and mountain canyons so deep you could fall for half a day and still not reach the bottom! We Dagestanis, all of us, are very different, but we are alike in our honesty, hospitality, our need for justice. Remember that you are Dagestani, my son, and don’t exchange that honor for any worldly gold!”

  Poets used to come visit my father. They told of their songs, how they’d made people sad or happy, had reconciled sworn enemies, sparked the hot flame of love in young hearts. I vividly recall one epic poem about a mountain, a mountain of celebrations; its name is Rokhel-Meer.

  “Is that a legal document? Some kind of petition?”

  A man waiting in the line behind Shamil was peering curiously over his shoulder at the manuscript.

  “Where do we take legal papers these days, anyway? To sharia court?”

  “I don’t know—this isn’t anything official,” Shamil said, and mechanically flipped back several pages:

  Khandulai’s waist thicken
ed and, as was the custom, she concealed her condition from everyone. But her belly swelled and became huge, like a gigantic pumpkin, and prevented her from taking out livestock and helping with the harvest.

  Recently she had been avoiding visiting her parents, and when evening fell, she would press a piece of bread and some cheese to her chest.

  “What’s Surakat’s Khandulai got in there, anyway?” Khurizada asked the women gathered at the spring. “I’ve never seen a belly like that in my entire life.”

  “She should have given birth long ago, but she’s still dragging it out,” the mountain women wagged their heads.

  Finally her time came, and brave Surakat’s aunt, red-handed, droopy-chested Zaza, the village midwife, rushed lickety-split along the November streets. The men had abandoned the house. There, on soft bedding that had been spread for her on the floor, writhed Khandulai, her teeth chattering.

  “Open all the trunks!” commanded Zaza. “Tie a rope to the roof beam and make a loop at the end. Let her hold onto the loop, poor thing. Grab on, Khandulai, pull yourself up, now release. Pull, then release. Come on! Where do you think you’re going, Bakhu? You can’t come in, there’s a woman in labor in here! Quick, tear Bakhu’s dress!”

  Zaza kneaded Khandulai’s gigantic, swollen, naked belly with her red fingers, issuing and repeating commands: “Sprinkle grain around the bed!”

  Khandulai’s mother-in-law hastily cut a lock of hair from the crown of Khandulai’s head and ignited it, whispering spells, sending a cloud of smoke over her daughter-in-law. Surakat’s sister scurried around the bed sprinkling grains of wheat from a wooden measuring cup; the jaws of the intricately carved trunks and chests on the shelves gaped open, inviting Khandulai’s loins to do the same…But the fruit would not come.

  “Well, sister,” Zaza commanded the suffering woman’s mother-in-law, “sprinkle salt on the hearth! Let the sparks scorch the eyes of the mother of the iblis, make her flee to her cave!”

  The mother-in-law tossed a handful of salt into the fire, salt which the villagers themselves had collected nearby, and at that exact moment Khandulai emitted a terrible cry and her loins spewed forth, one after another, three infants, all of them female.

  The midwife gasped.

  “Vababai, vadadai! Triplets, and not a single son! Surakat will be so upset!”

  They immediately set aside the umbilical cords to be dried and made into a decoction to give the newborns later when they suffered illness or insomnia. They filled a basin with salt water, and tossed in some burning coals, a set of metal tongs, and three silver rings, and washed the babies in it. Khandulai’s sister-in-law rushed to Surakat with the news.

  Soon guests came to see the newborns, and along with them Khandulai’s mother, bearing a marvelous cerated birch-wood cradle with a charm to protect the babies.

  “Who would have thought that we’d need three cradles!” She shook her head, contemplating the babies with amazement and joy.

  An aunt brought a second cradle, and a third was delivered by the new mother’s grandmother, who, having treated herself to some sweets, ensconced herself upon a three-legged stool and set to swaddling the infants. She tucked her great-grandchildren into the cradles on crackling mattresses embroidered in a crisscross pattern, and with a pair of sharp scissors underneath each one. She lifted them across a kettle full of watery kasha, black as night and steeped with sprouted barley grains, and then sang a lullaby over the cradles:

  Lai-lai-dalalai,

  May your brothers be many,

  Your parents be proud,

  May your clan respect you,

  Love and protect you;

  May Beched bless you with health

  And shower you with wealth!

  Lai-lai-dalalai…

  They named the first girl Khorol-En, which means Ear of the Fields; the second—Marian, in honor of the crucified Isa’s mother; and the third—Abida, Arabic for “She Who Worships.”

  And from that day on the women of the village started bringing their sick children to Khandulai.

  “You gave birth to triplets,” they would say, “You have magic powers. Bathe my sick child and cure him…”

  The line weaved on and on. The queue wavered but did not break.

  “It’s only a temporary shortage. Soon there’ll be work for everyone. I heard that they’re printing new money, colored green for Islam.”

  “Dollars, you mean?”

  The line tittered and chattered quietly. Shamil flipped ahead again:

  …and though they begged Khandulai to marry Surakat’s brother after Surakat was murdered by the scraggy outlaw Kebed, she dug in her heels.

  “How can you, where’s your conscience?” her mother asked. “You have three daughters. Who’s going to feed them? Who is going to defend their honor when they grow up?”

  “There are enough men in the tukhum to defend my girls,” Khandulai would say, adjusting her pendants proudly.

  Meanwhile the girls grew. When Khandulai sat down to work on her felt rug pad, Khorol-En, Marian, and Abida would sit in a little row with needle and thread and mend clothes. Khandulai would tell them about the gods who lived at the peak of Rokhel-Meer, about their terraced fields and houses, their bows and arrows, their toothpicks.

  “Don’t forget to leave three spools of thread for Gamalkar,” Khandulai would say, rhythmically working the rug press. “Or he’ll come take you to live with him.”

  “What’s he look like?” asked Khorol-En.

  “He has no arms or legs, and he goes around with a leather bag full of wool,” answered Khandulai.

  “Let him take Marian,” frowned Abida, who was always in a bad mood.

  “No, let him take Abida,” whimpered blonde Marian.

  “Let him take them both,” laughed black-eyed Khorol-En. “When we were having apricot compote with oatmeal today, Abida and Marian didn’t share any with father’s spirit.”

  “We forgot to.”

  “How could you forget?” Khandulai shook her head. “If you don’t share with your late father’s spirit, he will turn into a Hungry Ghost and will show up here in the village. He will be very, very angry and will take revenge on us for not sharing with him.”

  “Will the Ghost look like Papa?”

  “No, he would be enormous, as tall as the sky, and black as soot.”

  “Khandulai’s father-in-law, overhearing her stories one day, flew off the handle: “What is the matter with these women? Haven’t our scholars taught them that there is one god, Allah?”

  “Have you forgotten how you yourself used to sacrifice goats to Saint George?” mumbled Khandulai’s mother-in-law. And she told Khandulai about the time she had run into Untul Ebel in a distant village.

  “Vai-vai,” her sister-in-law’s mouth fell open. “Untul Ebel! Is it true that she’s as tall as a tree, and has holes in her face where her cheeks should be?”

  “And she has a really, really long nose and you can’t see her eyes under her red hair?” Khandulai joined in.

  “Not at all! She didn’t look like a woman, she appeared to me in the form of a baby, completely naked. This baby is walking along, and its skin is as coarse as bark. The baby is groaning—I hear this groaning sound, and it’s at night, so I say, ‘Run up the mountain, down along the river, cross over onto the land. I will give you oil to rub on the cracks in your hands and feet!’ I gather up some old things that are lying around: worn-out trousers and old shirts, work shirts, I take them and leave them out behind the garden; let Untel Ebel pick them up there…Oh, oh, my poor Surakat!”

  One summer Khandulai went to collect ice in a cave where the walls were frozen even in July. When she started to chip at them, the elders ordered the entrance closed off with a big boulder.

  “May the ears of grain multiply in your field!” exclaimed Khandulai. “Why have you locked me up in here?”

  “Give us a name! Anyone—widower or handsome young man, whoever you want!”

  “Why should I ge
t married?” Khandulai stood her ground. “I’ve already got three daughters!”

  “Just give us a name!”

  “But why?”

  “A name!”

  And they kept her locked up in the icy cave until Khandulai was chilled to the bone and finally shouted to the people outside:

  “Chantilav!”

  “Chantilav? Do we have a Chantilav living in the village?” the elders asked skeptically.

  “There’s this loner named Chantilav, a chanka who lives on the outskirts. A conspirator who was exiled from the neighboring khanate. He has kunaks from Mesedil tukhum, in the middle quarter of the village. They have accepted him here.”

  They sent some boys to inform Chantilav that he’d been selected to marry Khandulai. And so she acquired her second husband. After a whispered consultation with the mullah, she moved to a different part of the village, leaving her daughters in the home of her first husband…

  Shamil skipped ahead:

  The outcast Kebed, whose hair had grown wild and matted, heard that the haughty girl who had rejected him was again living with a man, and he came up with a devious plan…

  Shamil skipped several more pages:

  Trembling all over, bloodied, Chantilav fell onto his mighty chest.

  “How can it be?” they asked later in the godekan. “Chantilav gathered and armed a group of his friends, crept back to his native village, and overthrew his half-brother, and after all that, what happens? Some stinking outlaw lies in wait and sticks a knife into him!”

  Khandulai, who had grown up in a free society where an assembly was called to discuss every last little thing and no one paid tribute to anyone, now found herself the absolute ruler of an alien khanate. Envious people, old dignitaries, and Chantilav’s former comrades-in-arms all sharpened their daggers against her, and her Turkish bodyguards demanded incredible fees.

  “If the child I am bearing under my heart is a boy, then there will be an heir and I am saved,” thought she at night in the palace. “But if not?”

  So then Khandulai decided to appeal for help to the cursed murderer, her rejected suitor Kebed…