Bride and Groom

by Alisa Ganieva

  PRAISE FOR The Mountain And The Wall

  “Alisa Ganieva has aimed to write in clear-eyed fashion about her homeland, a region that has been racked by violence fueled by criminal and clan elements and an Islamic insurgency.”

  —CELIA WREN, The Washington Post

  “A brilliant book.”

  —ANTHONY MARRA, author of A Constellation of Vital Phenomena

  “Ganieva weaves a lovely and intricate tapestry for her reader of the various factors that might influence Caucasian identity—in no way disconnected from those that allow the borrowed fundamentalism to fill the power vacuum in the novel.”

  —LINDSAY SEMEL, Asymptote

  “[The Mountain and the Wall] reminds us why reading world literature can be so compelling. . . It is a mass disaster novel as viewed through the eyes of young adults who mostly just want the freedom to dance, listen to music, and engage in courtship behavior, however clumsy.”

  —ROB VOLLMAR, World Literature Today (Editor’s Pick)

  “The land, seen in its beauty and the depths of the past, is the beating heart of Ganieva’s novel. The Mountain and the Wall asks us to love and understand Dagestan, and the ask is compelling.”

  —PT SMITH, Full Stop

  “Vivid, timely, gripping, and really quite magical, [The Mountain and the Wall] cements Ganieva’s position as one of the most exciting young voices in Russian fiction.”

  —Staff Pick, Foyles Bookstore in London

  “At its heart, Ganieva’s compelling story is a universal one of a young man trying to make sense of this crazy world, while making money, sustaining friendships, protecting his family, and falling in love.”

  —JOSH COOK, Porter Square Books

  “Complex in a nineteenth-century, great-multi-plot-Russian-novel way; [The Mountain and the Wall is] compelling in its topical exploration of Islamic fundamentalism and annexation by or expulsion from the Russia Federation, depending on that nation’s shifting whims.”

  —GENEVIEVE ARLIE, M—Dash

  “A refreshing and witty voice.”

  —MORITZ SCHEPER, Die Zeit

  ALSO AVAILABLE IN ENGLISH BY ALISA GANIEVA

  The Mountain and the Wall

  translated by Carol Apollonio

  Deep Vellum Publishing

  3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

  deepvellum.org · @deepvellum

  Deep Vellum Publishing is a 501c3

  nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013.

  The Russian Original edition was published under the title “Жених и невеста”

  by AST, Moscow

  © Alisa Ganieva 2015

  © Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin 2015

  English translation copyright © 2018 by Carol Apollonio

  ISBN: 978-1-941920-60-2 (ebook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2017938735

  —

  Издание осуществлено при участии Программы поддержки переводов русской литературы TRANSCRIPT Фонда Михаила Прохорова.

  —

  The publication of this book was made possible with the support of the Mikhail Prokhorov Foundation’s Transcript program to support the translation of Russian literature.

  Cover design & typesetting by Anna Zylicz • annazylicz.com

  Text set in Bembo, a typeface modeled on typefaces cut by Francesco Griffo for Aldo Manuzio’s printing of De Aetna in 1495 in Venice.

  Distributed by Consortium Book Sales & Distribution.

  Table of Contents

  —

  A Drink with a Stranger

  A List of Brides

  Poor Sinner

  Out Visiting

  A Concert to Remember

  A Curse

  Neighbor Women

  Fortune-Telling and a Dead Man

  At Zarema’s

  A Patch of Green

  Hand and Heart

  A Chat with a Drunkard

  Wedding

  Afterword

  Author/Translator Biographies

  1. A DRINK WITH A STRANGER

  Completely soaked, the three of us dashed into a half-empty train car and plopped down onto a tattered bench. Artur couldn’t stop laughing:

  “You’re out of your minds! A mandatory political meeting in the twenty-first century!”

  Rain drummed on the train-car windows. We were on our way to a dacha to see some of Marina’s bohemian friends. Marina was my co-worker in a Moscow city courthouse, where we spent our days in the basement, binding and copying documents. The salary was pathetic. Our fingers throbbed, and caustic ink stained our palms. But for whatever reason we viewed this pointless torment as some kind of major step up the ladder of success.

  Marina’s friend Artur enjoyed listening to our tales of toil in the halls of justice. He was already acting cocky, though he didn’t seem to have started drinking yet. He probed us for details, guffawed, and slapped his thighs in delight.

  “No way! You’re kidding me!”

  “Really, Arturchik, I’m not making it up,” flirted Marina, playing along. “Starting this week, we have to show up to work half an hour early for the departmental briefing so the whole team can discuss the latest news. We need to build solidarity against the enemy.”

  “What enemy?”

  “‘A treacherous foe who bares his rotten maw,’” Marina recited, “‘and dreams of breaking our bonds.’”

  “You mean our spiritual bonds?”

  “Duh, Arturchik.”

  The train doors squealed open and admitted a disheveled-looking man in rubber boots with an accordion. He was playing a plaintive song with a vaguely familiar melody. I was about to lean over and ask Marina if she knew what it was, but, ashamed of my ignorance, I gave up on the idea and just wriggled my foot.

  “So, have you been in Moscow long, Patya?” Arturchik asked, raising his voice over the sounds of the accordion.

  “A year!” I shouted into his ear, leaning across Marina. “My older brother suggested that I come and work in Moscow for a while.”

  There was no need to go into the details—that I’d been invited for just a year, and now the year was over, and at this point it was looking as though I’d have to go back home to my town, an outlying suburb near the city.

  The melody, its title still a mystery, floated down the aisle and wafted into the next car; the city outside the windows rushed past, bouncing and splashing in the June rain, unwilling to release us. It was chilly for summertime, and Marina was bundled up in her sweater. For some reason she had undertaken to share gratuitous details about me with Artur:

  “Bear in mind, Patya is not going to drink any of your Sambuca. She doesn’t drink. That’s how it is in her country … Islam. Right, Patya?”

  Marina just couldn’t get it through her head that I’m not a foreigner and that I personally do not observe any such prohibition. But I decided to let her go on.

  “And don’t even think of hitting on her,” continued Marina, “it’ll drive away all her Dagestani suitors.”

  “You have a lot of suitors?” Artur squirmed in delight.

  “Not a single one!” I objected.

  Marina was thinking of a few losers I’d gone out with. One guy had stumbled across me in a social network group and had started bombarding me with quotes from pop psychology and self-help books. He’d made himself out to be a seasoned intellectual. When I learned that the know-it-all was from near my hometown, I felt a spark of interest and agreed to meet him.

  What a mistake that had been! My beau turned out to be a tall lughead with nasty little eyes. The moment I saw him, I wanted to turn and run, but he spotted me from a distance and waved a rolled-up copy
of Money magazine in my direction. Obviously he’d recognized me from my photo.

  He started in right in. “What’s your trade?”

  “I don’t have one. I’m not in business,” I parried.

  We had already taken a few steps down the street before he reacted:

  “As Gilbert Chesterton put it, ‘Unless a man is in part a humorist, he is only in part a man.’”

  It was kind of funny that he was talking in quotes. Must spend days on end memorizing them from some thick anthology.

  “Do you read Money?” I nodded toward the magazine. Just to have something to say.

  “No, I make it.” He emitted an edifying smirk, reveling in his little joke.

  Then, undermining the image he’d created of himself, he stopped in front of a cheap fast-food joint, packed to the gills with people.

  “My treat!”

  There ensued a painful forty minutes in line at the cash register, followed by more agony at a shared table with a gang of teenage skateboarders. Lughead continued to smother me with aphorisms, scan me periodically with his baby blues, and scrape his paper coffee cup against the sugar grains scattered on the tabletop. He wanted me to know about all the girls back home who were supposedly so desperate to marry him that they came up with all kinds of lies, claiming that he wouldn’t stop calling them. The girls’ parents would get upset and rush over to complain to his family, along the lines of: “Your lover boy has driven our daughter completely nuts with all those calls, so now let him do the right thing and make it official.” But Lughead here, he wasn’t born yesterday, you won’t catch him that easily. True, he would let down his guard now and then and give the girls grounds for hope, but, as Winston Churchill supposedly said, a fool is a man who has never made a mistake.

  At the end of the meal he made a regal gesture and, with an air of solicitous condescension, announced an excursion to the shopping center where I would help him pick out a new pair of pants. The idea was, I was being initiated into some kind of sacramental rite. I sprang up, mumbling that I would not be joining him, and that anyway I had to rush off to a meeting at work. Though what was the chance of that? I took off without looking back. He called later, texted me a few times: “How do you like me?” and then, before I could answer, “You’re a strange one. Downright creepy,” and then, “How’s business?” until he finally fizzled out.

  I’d barely managed to recover from this stupid episode when my brother—a.k.a. housemate—summoned me. He announced that his boss in the chemical plant where he works, who’s from our hometown, wanted to introduce me to his grandson or nephew or somebody. It was a little weird, but of course I had no objection.

  A car came to pick me up at the courthouse after work. There was a chauffeur, and my brother’s boss settled into the back seat next to me. He was a sprightly older man who looked sixty or so, but in fact was over eighty. He looked me up and down with his crafty eyes, interrogated me about my job, and then launched into an inspired chronicle of his own career, punctuated by occasional giggles. You would have thought that what he managed was not a mere department in a chemical plant, but an enchanted forest brimming with unicorns.

  He took me to a restaurant, where he treated me to delicacies fit for a queen (tongue gratin, creamed veal with cognac, sturgeon in pita, that sort of thing). Halfway through, the old man decided to bare his soul:

  “In my whole entire eighty-three years, I have never been in love.”

  Now that was interesting.

  “Not once? But you have a wife, grandchildren, even!”

  “So?” He gave a roguish wink. “The only reason I got married was because when my mama wanted to get me to start a family, she began to remove her head scarf. Of course you understand what a disgrace it is for one of us mountain people if his mother bares her head in his presence.” I wasn’t completely following, but he went on: “I gave in. Got married. And boy did I put my wife through hell! Couldn’t give up the ladies! I used to really get around, even before her.”

  Then he graced me with a tale from his youth, when he’d flown fighters in some international conflict between the Arabs and the Jews. The Soviets supposedly had no official role in the operation, and had mobilized pilots from the national republics of the USSR in an effort to conceal their involvement. The idea was that the pilots would communicate by two-way radio in their native languages, which would give foreign intelligence agents the impression that they were Arabs.

  “But how did you understand one another?” It was so lame, I couldn’t believe it. “None of the other pilots would have understood when you spoke Lak, for example. And if everyone was talking Russian, then what was the point of the whole thing anyway?”

  But the old man didn’t hear me; he was down memory lane. Back on the military base there had been this girl Masha who’d worked in the cafeteria, a classic Russian beauty. Masha had a fiancé, some local guy, but all it took was a single waltz with this geezer of mine, who at the time was quite a dashing young pilot, and she completely forgot her beau. She followed him around, trying every way she could to intoxicate him with her beauty, but he would not give in.

  “Just before my tour was up, the last night, Masha came to me and laid herself down—now I can talk about it calmly—she laid herself down on my bed, completely naked, and begged me to take her innocence. But for me that was a sacred principle: I never despoiled virgins. When she realized that this was the last time she would see me, she wept and all but went down on her knees, begging me to give her this gift to remember me by. The next morning I sent her forth from my room with her innocence intact.

  “But that was so hurtful!” I cried. “To reject someone like that is a terrible insult.”

  “Actually, she said so herself, later.”

  “What, you saw her again?”

  “Twenty-seven years later in the Moscow metro. I’m in one of the metro cars, and this overweight stranger is sitting opposite me, a woman beaten down by life. She sits there staring at me, crying. Tears just pouring down her cheeks. The train stops and she gets up. It’s my stop too. We start off in the same direction, one behind the other. We get on the escalator, she’s one step up, I’m down one, right behind her. And she turns and embraces me without a word. And we rode like that all the way to the top.

  “So that was Masha?”

  “It was. Compared to me she’d changed a lot. We went into a coffee shop and talked and talked. She told me that when she’d started dating her future husband, he had hated me—until he discovered on their wedding night that she was a virgin. He’d been sure, like everyone else, that I’d slept with her. So after that he respected me for preserving his bride’s honor. He had only good things to say about me. But Masha’s life did not go too well. She never experienced love or joy—all she did was work, work, work, morning to night, managing the household. Her husband drank. And if only the poor girl had had that one night, if I’d given in that time, who knows, maybe she would have had a happier life.”

  While I sat there listening to the old man and eating, it occurred to me that he was obviously exaggerating. Just showing off. Which is pretty strange, considering his role of grandfather and matchmaker. Speaking of which, where was this grandson or nephew of his? But no one showed up.

  “How old are you?” asked the man, out of the blue.

  “Twenty-five.”

  “Sorry to hear that. What a shame.” His face changed, and he looked down at his plate. “I wanted to introduce you to my grandson, but you’re older than he is.”

  I experienced a sharp pang of indignation, maybe at the tactless old man, or maybe at my brother, who’d neglected to clarify this detail in advance.

  “Anyway, my grandson has been living with his girlfriend for a long time. That bothers me, so I decided to take action. But unfortunately you are a whole two years older than he is. A little long in the tooth for a bride.”

  When I told my brother about it the next day, he started in on me himself:

  “He�
��s absolutely right! Before you know it, no one will even take a second look at you!”

  “Stop talking like your mama.” Lyusya had to get in her two cents’ worth.

  Lyusya is my brother’s wife. She’s Russian, which drives my parents nuts. They had stalled and delayed before the wedding, and didn’t sent out invitations until the last minute, on the chance that their son might bail. Mama feels that nothing good can come from a woman who is not one of us. That her beloved son will be abandoned, deceived, eviscerated, and drained of his lifeblood.

  To top it off, Lyusya couldn’t get pregnant. She and my brother went to all kinds of doctors, who insisted that both spouses were perfectly fine, but still, Lyusya remained barren. Papa’s mother, my Granny, who had called from back home to ask about it, concluded that the Lord above needed to be appeased somehow, that if she went to a sheik and got a sabab, then maybe he would deign … My brother just laughed.

  The train braked at our destination, a station with one lone platform by a damp little forest. It had stopped raining. We descended onto a footpath and tried to figure out which way to go next. Under a tree nearby, a man of fifty or so stood scrutinizing us. Except for a green raincoat, there was nothing particularly memorable about him. Marina spotted him and called out:

  “Excuse me, can you tell us how to get to the dacha cooperative?”

  “The dachas? Sure,” he answered good-naturedly, wading over to us through the tall wet grass. “Go straight down this path, then turn left when you get to the turnstile, before the fence turn again, this time to the right. Got it?”

  “Straight, left, right,” Artur rattled it off.

  “Want to buy some wine? My own recipe, I make it myself.”

  An old net bag appeared out of nowhere, and the man extracted from it a large bottle with a homemade label showing the letter X, the rest indecipherable.

  “No. Thank you, of course, but we don’t accept wine from strangers,” snapped Marina.

  “Why not?” Artur objected. Let’s buy it, I’ll pay.”