Bride and Groom

by Alisa Ganieva

  “Cross her off immediately.”

  “What do you mean, ‘Cross her off?’ She’s one of us, from right here in town, a sensible girl.”

  “She wears a headscarf.”

  “Not a hijab though! I myself can’t stand the ones who cover up, but what’s wrong with a scarf? It’s cute.”

  “And she prays. Don’t make me even think about it.”

  “So, did Rusik turn you against girls who pray? Your father prays, doesn’t he? And, inshallah, he’ll go on the hajj.”

  “Mama!”

  “All right, all right, I’ll cross her off.”

  “Khadizha!” A woman’s voice was hard in the yard. “Are you home?”

  Marat’s mother started, tucked the paper and Sabrina’s photo into her pocket, and called back brightly:

  “Is it you, Zarema? I’m here, come on in.”

  Marat got up and headed off to the bathroom before the guest came in.

  3: POOR SINNER

  I flew home from Moscow, and before I even crossed the threshold my mother started in on me:

  “Patya, you completely let yourself go in Moscow. Why did I send you to your brother? So he could fix your cat brain! And instead you’ve gone off the deep end. Must be Lyusya’s influence.”

  As it turned out, my brother had told Mama about my night at the dacha. Now, that whole night, from beginning to end, seemed strange and improbable, out of another world. I couldn’t believe that I had actually lain on an old sofa like a mummy next to a man who was basically a stranger to me, listening to demented nonsense about knives and poets. And that wasn’t the half of it. Thin peacock Yuri had slipped away with the girl in the fancy skirt, who turned out to be a successful designer, and who, as she put it, was making straight for the heart of life. She was so overcome with passion that by the morning after the revelry at the dacha she had installed herself firmly in Yuri’s Moscow apartment and had set to work scrubbing his filthy bachelor floors with her bare hands. Marina couldn’t restrain her laughter as she recounted this juicy bit of gossip.

  Incidentally, she herself had gotten involved in a scandal. She’d squabbled with the half-baked boys in jackets, calling them slackers and an abscess on the body of the motherland. Orthodox believer Kichin had supported her and at one point had insulted their masculinity. The balding guy with the rattail who had spent the whole evening upholding freedom and humanistic values had hurled himself at Kichin, calling him a piece of shit and a heathen. A full-scale brawl ensued, complete with the smashing of goblets. Artur had crawled under the kitchen table and sobbed like a madman, for some reason that remains unclear. Basically, the dacha visit left a mass of disturbing thoughts in my mind. Back home, it was dusty and hot. I’d barely managed to change my clothes from the trip before I was put to work. I had to go out into the sunlit yard and beat the dust out of the pillows, and clean the carpets with reeking kerosene. Mama always loaded me up with housework when I came back from somewhere, making up for lost time.

  As usual, Papa was fiddling with the milk separator in silence. All-powerful Khalilbek, for whom he had worked as a mechanic, was now locked up in a prison located on the outskirts of town, where it stood intimidating the local kids. Papa couldn’t bring himself to accept it. He had always been proud that Khalilbek trusted him and would even engage him in conversation now and then. When Khalilbek had run over that fool Adik in his jeep, Papa had testified as a witness, since he had occasionally repaired the ill-fated vehicle and knew it well. The defendant was speedily exonerated, and Papa had received a bonus.

  Having kerosened the carpets, I sat on the sofa beside my sleeping Granny and listened to the ticking of the clock. Papa had disappeared somewhere. Mama had holed up in the bedroom with a stack of tattered mystery novels. The women in the neighborhood thought she was lazy. She rarely tore herself away from her unpretentious reading matter, complained constantly of headaches, and started a conversation with Papa only when forced by necessity.

  At one point Mama had been instilled with the conviction that she was of good breeding: her great-grandfather had been the region’s first surveyor; her father had been in charge of a printing office; and all her distant relatives had been hacked to pieces in famous battles. The names of these ancestors were extolled in folk songs, where they assaulted the ears like the squealing and scraping of metal being crushed. As she herself said, she had not wanted to marry Papa, and was even embarrassed about him. When she was particularly upset, and Papa was out of earshot, Mama would blurt with inexpressible bitterness the phrase “sheepherder’s spawn!” and her pale lips would form a tight, disgusted line. Papa was hurt by this condescension of hers, based on some fabricated sense of superiority, and he felt bad when his wife was ashamed to invite her former girlfriends over to visit, but he forgave her, out of generosity or possibly inertia.

  Now Mama had a new set of adversities to complain about: the harpy Lyusya who had stolen her beloved son, and my prolonged unmarried state. I suspected that when she decided to send me to Moscow, Mama had been hoping for a miracle. My unwanted presence would drive barren Lyusya away, and I would finally find a worthy husband in the big city. But her plan failed on both fronts, and she fell into a state of melancholy. Her only succor was a damp gauze poultice on her forehead and her pile of tattered, damp-paged mystery novels.

  Granny lay sleeping with a white scarf placed over her eyes and a string of amber beads clutched in her right hand. My papa was her son. To this day she kept his old pacifier in a heavy trunk in the back room; it looked like a little top hat, pink like pig’s skin, with a rounded top. The same trunk held a pile of mildewed fabrics, sprinkled with laurel leaves, which had once been precious, but now were of no use to anyone. Granny assured me that this was my dowry.

  She had not reached decrepit old age, but the world in which she dwelt had absolutely nothing in common with ours. In her world people still lived in mountaintop castles with flat roofs, divided up the fields and the harvest strictly according to ancient rules, and sent their sons to the villages of conquered neighbors to feast at their expense; after murders they demanded a vow of purging from forty men and exacted fines measured in units of grain, copper kettles, bulls, and sheep. These reminiscences descended into some infinite depth of the ages, and it was impossible to believe that she had ever personally been a part of that strange life.

  Granny was originally from a mountainside village, which was a part of an alliance made up of twenty-five villages that had lived from ancient times according to a single code of law. A river flowed and gurgled in the valley below the mountain, and Granny’s stories often featured a great bridge that had been built there by the locals. All of the men in the alliance had to guard the bridge in turns. Granny’s uncle once refused his turn at this important duty, and he had had to pay for his stubbornness with a shawl. Judging from Granny’s upraised eyebrows when she told the tale, shawls had been immensely valuable at the time.

  Setting fire to the bridge was an infinitely more egregious crime. The arsonist would be exiled from the community, and there were no limits to what could be done with the outcast and his property. At one point there had been a miller in the community who had decided on his own initiative to move away with his entire family—this had happened more recently, during the Soviet period. Based on the local laws, the mill and all the associated property belonged to the mountainside community, and the man left with nothing.

  In Granny’s stories, there were town criers who clambered up to the top of the minarets and announced the times of the planting and the harvest, and whoever dared to go out on his own into the field and sow or harvest before the proper time would be punished. Even something as minor as a bunch of grapes plucked prematurely would elicit punishment, and villagers who had been unable to restrain themselves were subjected to cruel mockery and strict fines. One time, a special patrol had come across some grape pits in Granny’s neighbors’ yard a few days before the collective harvest, a time which was usually accomp
anied by jokes, revelry, and charity gifts of fruit to the poor, mutalims, newcomers, and other people who did not themselves keep a vineyard. For their violation of the ban, the neighbors had a cow confiscated, and the chief grape-eating culprit had his face smeared with tar and was paraded around the village on a donkey.

  “Why so strict? Why not let you go out into your own fields whenever you wanted to?” I would pester Granny with questions.

  “What would that have been like?” she would exclaim in her native language. “If the villagers ignored the orders of the people in charge, then the whole union would have fallen apart.”

  My favorite story was about fornicators. A murderer would be forgiven only when he had caught the culprits alone together, in the act. But when the enraged avenger caught and killed only the man or only the woman separately, he had to pay a fine of thirty cows to the heirs of the fallen victims, his finest bull to the villagers, and a payment to the entire alliance. All of this was enforced within a term of three days from the moment of the crime.

  Granny admittedly reluctantly that once in her girlhood she had spotted a pair of adulterers in one of the village’s meadows and had promptly informed the guilty woman’s husband. The husband rushed out to the scene and caught the lovers in the act, and killed them both on the spot. He suffered no legal consequences. Within a couple of years he had taken on a new better half, Granny herself, who by then had entered adolescence.

  I managed to shake out of her, bit by bit, everything that her old-woman’s memory had retained from the events of her wedding week. Granny’s father and brothers disappeared on the day of the wedding, and didn’t come back until the very end of the celebrations, as though they sensed the awkwardness and inappropriateness of the occasion. The entertainment included, in addition to musicians and singers, a jester in a goat’s mask, tightrope dancers and mummers, and people dressed in various costumes. The jester did all kinds of things! He put on women’s clothes and poked out his belly so he looked pregnant, and then he made gestures imitating the bridegroom and made jokes at the guests’ expense.

  Following custom, on the eve of the wedding Granny went to spend the night at her guardian’s house, and the groom went to the house of his best man, who had been chosen for this purpose long ago, at the groom’s birth. On the morning of the wedding day, the couple was led in a procession with a zurna and tambourine from the homes of their hosts to the groom’s parents’ home. The best man walked with a long cane, the village youths carried the groom on their shoulders, and Granny herself marched proudly, draped in silver pendants, with a fine scarf veiling her face, with grains of wheat, flour, and white rice raining down on her from the sloped rooftops.

  At the threshold, immediately after the newlyweds’ dance, the mountainside villagers began dancing the Lezginka. Inside the groom’s home, the bride was led to a special chamber, where she was seated on a sack of flour. She spent the whole day sitting there until evening, when it was time to go back to her guardian’s house. The groom dined with his groomsmen in a different room, gathering in front of a broad tray laden with nine delicacies prescribed by ritual and a board arrayed with fruits. The tray, according to Granny, was called the “groom’s ear,” and I pictured it as a kind of round antenna, raised skyward in a prayer for prosperity.

  After noon, Granny’s wedding, which had already been celebrated in four households—those of the groom, the bride (with none of her menfolk present), and two temporary guardians—migrated to yet another abode. One of the guests had managed to kidnap the groom from right under the nose of his suite, which had let down its guard. They were fined for their negligence, and the wedding moved on to the home of the triumphant kidnapper, who was declared to be the groom’s brother. The revelry went on for six days. On the third day Granny showed her face; on the fourth, she went to the spring for water with a silver pitcher, in that same procession, which stopped periodically along the way to dance.

  Another time, she told me that there had been a sixth house, a secret one, designated for the freshly minted couple’s nocturnal rendezvous. The bride’s guardian took her to this secret house, which belonged to one of Granny’s relatives, leading her along arched alleyways under the cover of darkness, hiding from torch-waving young men who were prowling the streets in quest of the newlyweds. The best man led the groom to the house in a similarly covert way.

  “And in fact they did sleuth us out,” said Granny with a sly smile. “They let a rooster in through the window, tossed kittens down the stovepipe, threw stones; they dismantled the roof in their attempts follow the progress of our struggle.”

  “What do you mean, struggle?”

  “It’s required by tradition. I cursed your grandfather with the most outrageous insults; the walls shook, but it didn’t slow him down. We broke furniture, and shattered ten or twelve clay mugs.”

  “What for?”

  “What do you mean, what for? To convince the evil spirits that we did not get along, so that they would leave us in peace. And anyway, any decent bride will put up a strong resistance. There was even a special stick hidden away in a corner for me to give him a good thrashing. He lashed out, bellowed at the top of his voice that he was in love with someone else, and that he had been forced to marry me. But I gave as good as I got, I yelled that my life with him would be pure hell. The young people sitting on the porch listened and roared with laughter.”

  “How could you say those things?”

  “What, you think we were fighting for real? Of course not! That was how it was done. On the other side of the mountain, the next village over, newlyweds spent the entire wedding week trying to strangle each other and pouring buckets of water over each other. They say it was hilarious, a scream. Whereas in our village you’d whack each other two or three times with a stick, raise a ruckus in the room, and that would be it.”

  I had a sudden thought—what would it have been like to live in that long-lost time? I wouldn’t have put up with any of it; I wouldn’t have sat on the flour sack, I wouldn’t have brought the pitcher of water … I was already slumping down on the sofa next to Granny, about to follow her and her big white scarf into a daydream, when my mother emerged from her bedroom, grimacing and massaging her forehead with her big fingers, and in a voice too sweet to be innocent, ordered me to put on my pleated dress.

  I was being sent forth to meet the children of Magomed, who used to live in our village, and had made his fortune in some shenanigans involving vouchers, and was subsequently shot for it in the years of trouble that followed.

  His widow, who had stayed in touch with my mother by phone even after she moved to the city, cherished the dream of bringing me together with her daughter, and especially with her son, a veterinarian. At least that’s what I deduced from what my mother said.

  “Such a decent, fine young man,” she chanted her usual mantras, leading me into the room and digging around in the wardrobe. “A veterinarian …”

  The solid-colored pleated dress emerged into the light. It looked terrible on me, and its multitude of agonizingly fine folds brought on a feeling of profound gloom, but Mama had had it made specially by a seamstress she knew, and was mortally insulted when I had showed no interest in her gift. This time I didn’t put up a fight and meekly agreed to the dress, and the stupid meeting, anything, just to get to the city. I’d been away long enough that our tedious town infested with cows oppressed my eyes and ears.

  On the way to the transit van I ran into a former classmate of mine, Aida. She was standing at her gate wearing a scarf tied like a turban and a bright yellow velour housecoat and holding a metal basin.

  “Vai, Patya! Welcome! How’s everything in Moscow?” she laughed, nearly dropping her basin. “Where are you headed?”

  I told her that I was on my way to the city.

  “Not engaged yet?”

  Of course. What else was there to ask about? Aida already had three kids. A few years of married life had added some pounds on her, filled her out, and pas
ted an eternal, contented smile on her face.

  “Listen,” she lowered her voice into a whisper, “When you get back, be sure to come see me; Amishka’s fiancé broke up with her. We need to go try and comfort her.”

  “What do you mean?” I gasped.

  After this news, my upcoming encounter with the veterinarian stuck in my throat like a bone. I could hardly wait to come back and learn all the details of Amishka’s misfortune. The whole way to the city I fumed about Mama’s enterprise, about Magomedov’s children, about my stupid dress.

  The Magomedov siblings were waiting for me in the city center, in a new coffee shop. Outside on the street, cars squealed their brakes as they rounded the corners, kicking up dust, honking and blaring loud music. The women selling kvas shouted back and forth with the van drivers, people argued with each other under the coffee shop canopies, workers were up on the rooftops doing some kind of repair work, loiterers clustered in groups on the sidewalks, scrutinizing passersby, and girls, dressed to the nines, teetered by on spike heels.

  A wedding salon on every block. European designer boutiques, shops for Islamic wedding fashions, crinolines, trains, smoky-colored shawls, fur boas, exclusive collections … Posters advertising “Matchmaking Halls for Rent,” covers of the latest issues of countless wedding magazines on display: advice from a former tamada, confessions of newlywed movie stars, advertisements of new beauty salons offering special procedures for brides, silk threads, revitalization, intimate laser depilation. Weddings, weddings, weddings. As though there was nothing else to do. I walked briskly a couple of blocks and ducked into the cool air of a coffee shop.