ATTENTION

by Joshua Cohen

  Quba isn’t a one-horse town. It’s a half-horse town. The rear half. Smelly (from car emissions, outlying factories, sewage), hideous. Besides apples, Quba’s also known for its carpets—known for its carpets whose woven wool must inevitably soak up all the smells—and while the few formal stores display their wares flayed in windows, the bazaars roll them up and tie them and lean them against walls like they’re about to be executed by firing squad: carpets like multicolored, arboreally patterned bodies—carpets for use as multicolored, arboreally patterned bodybags.

  The town ends with a river, the Qudiyalçay. I asked U what Qudiyalçay meant and he said, “Qudiyalçay.” He wasn’t in the mood to talk, but then he sensed my disappointment and said, “The name is to do with water.”

  On the other side of the Qudiyalçay was the only town in the world outside of Israel that still has a 100 percent Jewish population: Qırmızı Qəsəbə/Yevreiskaya Sloboda/Krasnaya Sloboda. Jewish/Red Town.

  We stopped at the cemeteries—the new first, the old next. U went to say kaddish at his mother’s grave. The newest graves were set with stones engraved with classy/cheesy full-body portraits: There were guys who’d died in their twenties, dressed in suits straight out of Scarface. “How did they die so young?” I asked, but U didn’t answer. Instead, he pointed to a grave depicting an obese Mountain Jew who’d died, U said, at age thirteen, from diabetes. Another grave featured the portrait of a family who’d died in a plane crash over Siberia. The plane itself was etched into the stone above the family’s group hug. The pilots had been inexperienced or drunk, apparently. Or inexperienced and drunk. The oldest graves were on another hill, crowding the pagoda tomb of Rabbi Gershon ben Reueven, the Admor Gershon, the town’s founding rabbi, supposedly a miracle-working sage but legendary among no other community.

  At my prodding, U roused Yury Naftaliev, the Azerbaijan state deputy for Quba, who kept the keys to the synagogues, yeshiva, and mikveh. Physically, he was as spare and thin as his rhetorical style, strictly facts: About two thousand Jews currently live in Krasnaya Sloboda; the settlement has suffered a 75 percent loss of its yearround population over the last decade, with most going to Baku, Russia, and Israel; Krasnaya Sloboda’s last chief rabbi, Rabbi Davidov, left for Jerusalem; another rabbi, Rabbi Lazar, left for Moscow. I had to tug all this out of him—through U, who turned my English into Gorsky and Russian, and Yury Naftaliev’s Gorsky and Russian into English. How many synagogues are there now? Two. How many before Sovietism? Thirteen. The Gilaki synagogue, named after Gilan Province in Iran, is the winter synagogue, because it’s heated. The Kuzari or Six Cupola synagogue, which has six cupolas, is the summer synagogue, because it’s unheated. But wait—why name one synagogue after an Iranian province, and another after the Khazars? Does this mean the Mountain Jews claim descent from Persia, or from a tribe of shamanistic bartering Tatars who converted? Yury Naftaliev shrugged—“Some do”—and hustled us along. The perverse pleasure this fascistic beadle seemed to be taking in prevailing upon U and me to remove our shoes at every site seemed to have less to do with preserving the preciousness of the rugs, and more to do with power—with cutting an American down to size, on holy ground in holey socks. My feet were cold, and then the rest of me got cold and irritated, not least because the questions I was asking were innocuous—100 percent historico-theological—but still were being rebuffed. Do the Mountain Jews follow the prayer order and pronunciations and Torah cantillations of the Ashkenazim, or the Sephardim, or the Bukharans—or do they, or did they ever, have their own? No comment. Do the Mountain Jews accept the Talmud, like the Krymchaks, or reject it, like the Karaites? No comment. I’d read that the primary Mountain Jew holiday is Tisha B’Av—the ninth day of the month of Av, which commemorates the destruction of both temples—why? Yury Naftaliev just held up his palms as if to say, “Why not?” I decided to pursue an easier, number-based and yes/no line of inquiry: I asked U to ask Yury Naftaliev how many Torahs the community had, but the totalitarian janitor just handed me a prayerbook, printed in 2014 in Israel on what felt like toilet paper. I asked U to ask Yury Naftaliev if he would unlock the ark, but Yury Naftaliev refused, until I dropped 5 manats—and then another 5 manats—into the donation box, and he, with a bitter twist to his mouth, opened the doors and there, inside, was a panoply of Torahs, the scrolls encased in olivewood filigreed with silver and gold and draped with silks. How old was the oldest? Over three hundred years. From where? Iran. Wouldn’t this appear to substantiate the theory that the Mountain Jews came up from Persia under the Safavids? And, while we’re at it, if your winter synagogue that, by the way, doesn’t seem heated, contains an intact Persian Torah scroll over three hundred years old, which would make it one of the oldest intact Persian Torah scrolls in existence, why didn’t you mention that earlier? But Yury Naftaliev was already shutting the ark, locking it, heading outside, and U was on bended knee doing up his laces.

  Yury Naftaliev led us past a former synagogue, now a pharmacy. Yet another former synagogue would be converted into a Mountain Jew museum, he said, but only if they raised 200,000 manats. Restoration was expensive. Exhibits—with interactive computer terminals, because no Azerbaijani museum was complete without interactive computer terminals (which half the time didn’t function)—were expensive. Suddenly, everything became about money, as Yury Naftaliev just continued with the community-chest version of U’s pricing habit: talking about how much it cost to run the mikveh, and how much it cost to run the yeshiva—to buy the desks and chairs and books, to pay for all the meals. About a dozen kids sat in a classroom in the yeshiva, studying the Hebrew alphabet—which was strange. In that it felt staged. Potemkin villagey. Walking into a yeshiva at some random hour on some random weekday at the end of October—two months after the Azerbaijani secular school term started, and a month after the Jewish New Year—and finding a dozen kids just starting to puzzle out the first few letters of the alephbet is like happening to drop by Citi Field on a whim, only to find out it’s Opening Day and there’s a home game v. the Phillies.

  On the wall of the yeshiva was a calendar illustrated with images of Mountain Jewish synagogues, one for each month (it’s amazing they had enough for the year)—the synagogue in Derbent (the photograph taken either before or after it was repaired from its firebombing by Chechen Muslims in 2012), in Makhachkala (the photograph taken either before or after it was repaired from its vandalizing in 2007), in Nalchik (the photograph taken either before or after it was repaired from its vandalizing in 2000; a Chechen Muslim plot to blow up the synagogue was foiled by the Russian FSB in 2002), in Buynaksk (now closed), and in Oğuz (open sporadically). The synagogue of this month, October, was the newest, dedicated in 2013, a glistening white Oriental pile in Grozny. The calendar was published by STMEGI, a Russian acronym for the International Mountain Jewish Charity Fund, a serious philanthropic but also seriously tax-exempt organization, founded by German Zakharyayev, a Quban (b. 1971), now resident in Moscow, who, beyond being another billionaire developer (the Sezar Group), has the singular distinction of having contributed a new Jewish holiday to the calendar, through his successful petitioning of the Israeli government to establish the twenty-sixth of Iyar—which corresponded to May 9, 1945, or Russia’s WWII V-Day—as “The Rescue Day of European Jewry.” I flipped back to spring, and sure enough, the holiday was there. I asked U to ask Yury Naftaliev if I could have the calendar. “No.” I asked U to ask Yury Naftaliev if I could buy the calendar. “No.” How can I buy my own copy, then? “You cannot to.” You’re telling me this is the only copy? “Yes.”

  None of this miserliness was making any sense. Because, as I couldn’t help but notice—as Yury Naftaliev couldn’t help but ignore—cropping up among the old Jewish sites he’d been bringing U and me to, overshadowing all of their carved wood and stained glass and even the six cupolas with their six-pointed stars, was some of the most lavish, most ugly-lavish, new real estate I’d ever been around. I’ll clarify: On t
he Quba side of the Qudiyalçay were chickens, cows, tractors, and hovels—grimness. But on this side, here in Krasnaya Sloboda, were Lamborghinis, Ferraris, and villas that intermarried craven faux-Euro fin-de-frippery with the crassest of Stateside suburban McMansionism. If every Baroque has its Rococo, every Vegas has its Dubai, but this architecture was so outlandish, it verged on the extraterrestrial—there was nowhere to go beyond it. Some of the villas had five floors, some had six, most had turrets, many had elevators. Fountains in the yards, gargoyles, putti. Guardtowers, spiked fences, CCTV cameras. One had a helipad on its roof. Another had a rooftop pool. I asked to be taken to Zakharyayev’s—to ask him if he had another of his calendars lying around—but U hesitated to transmit the request, as if he’d forgotten how to speak Gorsky, or Russian, while, at the same time, Yury Naftaliev frowned, as if he were gradually remembering that he understood English after all. I persisted, and asked where God Nisanov’s house was, where Zarah Iliev’s house was, and snap, just like that, my audience with the officious offseason caretaker of the summer homes—at least of the summer-vacation destination—of some of Russia’s most wealthy and most powerful men was over. Yury Naftaliev, that dignified creep with a hedgehog for a mustache, bum-rushed us into the car, and stalked back to the yeshiva—gone.

  * * *

  —

  LEAVING, U WAS GRITTING his teeth. I was silent but angry, so U jacked his phone into the stereo and cranked the volume on some Israeli Mizrahi snake-charmerish club music, before switching to a Chabad chorus nasal-singing niggunim, Sabbath songs: ayayayayay. We were headed back to Baku, chased by rain. But then U drove off the highway, and, putting cheer in his voice, or just yelling, declared that we were stopping—again. He explained that there was this seaside joint he’d just suddenly recalled, but then—a half hour later, as we were parking in its empty lot—he was getting misty relating how ever since he was a child, “It was always really the most very special [to him].” It was a restaurant, whose theme might’ve been that it was too forlorn to even remember its theme, comprised of clusters of dacha-like dining cabins scattered out on the beach, and as unoccupied as the beach, which backed onto a cement apron with a rusted kiddie carousel and a crumbled dysfunctional zoo, all of whose animals appeared to have escaped except a pair of chimpanzees—a species that was supposed to be intelligent. The two flailed around their cage, howled as if the cold had driven them insane, and quieted only after U slipped them cigarettes. Not to smoke, of course, but to eat. This, according to U, was all the chimps here ever ate: cigarettes. U’s brand was Marlboro Red (ersatz, made in China). A giant waiter stomped up, barely acknowledging us, and we higher primates fell in behind him and were conducted to the cabin farthest from the central pavilion containing the kitchen—a gesture that, like every other Azerbaijani host/guest gesture, seemed simultaneously respectful, insulting, and arbitrary. The cabin was a log affair, with gaps between the logs that let the wind in, and a wall-wide acrylic window to the Caspian. The surf was mean and thrashing. I was shivering, and in response to my asking whether the radiator was working, and whether it was adjustable, U just assured me that it was nicer here in summer. He’d come here, he said, this past summer, with this girl from Baku he was in love with, who worked as a supply liaison for a business that contracted with the U.S. military, which had a presence—a base? refueling rights? U waved off my questions—in Azerbaijan. Every discussion, about every person in U’s life, began and ended with the same two (redundant) facts: what kind of job they had, and what kind of money they made at it. Either they had a bad job or a good job, either they made bad money or good money—there was nothing between, nothing decent.

  Anyway, this girl. Who worked as a supply liaison for some business that did something with, or for, the U.S. military—whatever that was, it was a good job, which made good money. She was beautiful and loved him too. He wanted to marry her, but he couldn’t. “Because she isn’t Jewish?” Yes, he said, but not just that. “What, then?” He couldn’t marry her because he had a bad job, he said, and made bad money. Actually, he corrected himself: Officially, he had no job, and made no money. And “no” was worse than “bad.” He’d brought the girl here for their final date—they both knew it had to be final. She was about to marry another man, who had the same good job and made the same good money with that same vague business—this other man who was also a supply liaison, which U kept repeating as if I was supposed to know what that was, because he so obviously didn’t. I just nodded, as U—recovering from awkwardness—went on to praise this rival, who wasn’t a rival; U was making a martyr of himself, as a way of consoling himself, swearing how happy he was for the groom. For the bride too. But especially for the groom. The waiter returned and just stood there, chair-sized hands on the chair at the head of our table, his concern for us—for anything—as absent as a menu. U ordered dumplings—qatabs. Stuffed dough fried on a convex griddle called a saj. Negotiations ensued, and the varieties that were compromised on were translated to me as Beef, Grass, and Camel. The Beef was beef, the Grass meant greens that might’ve been grass, and the Camel must’ve been diseased and/or geriatric. We finished eating and smoked, and the tea came. The ineluctable tea. If you drink what you’re poured, you have to piss constantly. If you have to piss and your cabin isn’t bathroom-equipped, you have to go outside. I opened the door, which spooked a stray dog that was harassing the chimps. The dog roamed toward me and foamed. I pissed hurriedly on the sand, on the cabin’s steps, my own shoes, and dashed inside.

  10/26

  Shalom chaver, what’s up? I’m just letting you know I’m back in New York, exhausted. How are you? That animal they were selling at the bazaar and you said you were always finding everywhere for free, I just remembered I was wrong, the English name for it isn’t “porcupine,” but “hedgehog.” Different animals. I’m going crusading for a girl for you, don’t worry. Though your chances/the crop certainly will be better in Tel Aviv. When are you going to be there? And Yury Naftaliev, is Naftaliev the patronymic (father’s name) or the surname? And if it’s the patronymic, what’s the surname (last name)? Also what’s his official title, just Head of the Quba Jewish Community?

  Todah me’rosh, Josh

  10/30

  Yo yo, kak dela? What’s going on? I hope you got my last email—did you? Even if you’re busy or depressed or both just type me a line or two? Just so I know to roll doubles for you or else sell Whitehall or Fleet Street or the Water Works or the Electric Company to get you out of jail and passing Go again. Just so I know that all is kosher. I have a few other questions if you wouldn’t mind answering. Nothing too difficult.

  OK ok kol tov, j

  11/4

  Habibi, kak dela? What’s the news? Is everything all right between us? Did you get my two last emails? Doesn’t make sense to me that you wouldn’t, because we were in touch without a hitch in Baku. I’m nervous. So even if you’re hassled as fuck running around a tourgroup of Russian blondes to Fire Temple #9, just take a moment and send up a flare, a smoke signal, whatever. Are you there? Are you angry with me? Are my emails being blocked? Do you/can you use encryption?

  11/14

  Writing you from a different address, after you haven’t responded to any of the emails I sent from Gmail, so maybe my Columbia email will work. Can you Skype? Encryption? Is this Aliyev reading this now? Hey, Dicktator Prez, you reading my friend’s email? You better not have fucked with him. I’m a slightly important American writer, according to several glossy magazines, and The New York Times.

  * * *

  —

  NOTHING. I NEVER GOT a single response—not a word.

  I wrote the Chabad rabbi in Baku, and told him to tell…U to be in touch. I’m not sure whether the Chabadnik passed on the message, but at least I’m sure of this: I did nothing to offend U. I mean, I was just doing my good bad job for good bad money—I didn’t do anything on purpose….

  I just slammed the c
abin door behind me, and sat, panting. U grinned and refilled my tea, and then I let him light me a cigarette and as its sour formaldehyde fur taste came on, he picked up the thread of the girl:

  How beautiful she was, how much they loved each other. How much he wasn’t able to regret anything.

  And then he mentioned his mother dying, and his father—who’d crashed like a wave over his childhood and then retreated.

  How shaming that was—shaming of everyone, and even of the community.

  It was just after his mother was diagnosed with cancer that he was given the chance to restore his honor and name.

  U was telling me something, but I wasn’t sure what—something about his life, about this girl’s life, and about family—what all of that can mean to a Jew not jetting through, a Jew not from America but from the mountains.

  What it was like to be a son, a fatherless son, who had to deal with the patriarchs of Quba.

  He was explaining, not least, our reception there.

  So: There was this man from the community. He was older, like of U’s mother’s generation—a Mountain Jew who might’ve known U’s father, but who never mentioned knowing U’s father, who owned a large commercial bakery at the foot of the Urals in Siberia. It made cakes, it made breads, to ship to groceries—supermarkets—hypermarkets throughout Russia. Don’t think of kerchiefed babas dusted in flour kneading and rolling and waiting for their loaves to rise. Think bulk, preservatives, plastic packaging. Still, this large commercial bakery was one of the smaller things this man owned. He also owned malls and linen and clothing stores and linen and clothing factories, not only in Siberia. But all that U would have to concern himself with was the bakery. This man needed a guy he could trust, one of his own guys, to serve as manager. And despite the hardness that some of his ventures required, this man’s emotions were such that he still wanted to do a young struggling Mountain Jew a favor. If U, who’d had some harsh breaks, hadn’t been calloused by them, why should his benefactor be? Why not share the success? But the way the successful wholesale bread baker and retail linen and clothing manufacturer would explain it to U was that this wasn’t a favor but a mitzvah. Which meant that U had to agree. U was flown to Siberia—to the city of Perm—to manage the bakery. It was a good job, which paid good money. He was given an apartment; the apartment had a flatscreen TV. It had a washer/dryer. It was centrally located and spacious. U spent all his days at the bakery, supervising baking. Keeping the bakers in line. Ordering the baking ingredients. Equipment maintenance. Quality control. But more often than not, he did nothing. The breads and cakes baked themselves. Everyone behaved. At night he went back to the apartment and sat. He sat and did nothing. He had no friends in Perm. No family, of course. The bakery owner was never around. He was flying constantly among all his other properties. U would go weeks without talking to anyone. Without talking personally, he meant, in person. The bakery personnel feared him. He himself was afraid of fraternizing, and of being taken as soft, pliable, doughy. He ached he was so lonely. Phone calls with his mother just exacerbated. Her loneliness increased his, and her cancer was advancing. Russians on the street, taking him for a Chechen, a Muslim, would taunt and threaten him. They’d try to beat him. But more often than not, he’d escape. He considered suicide.