The Mountain and the Wall Read online

  “You know, I’m worried Patya is going to start covering herself,” grumbled Gulya, smoothing her shimmery skirt. She lowered her voice. “So, this distant relative of ours started coming over, a real shady character. He barraged her with instructions about how young ladies should behave. Patya was already keeping Uraza, and then one day she comes home in the rain, crying. She goes, ‘I got water in my ears, I’ve violated the fast.’ I really let her have it. ‘So don’t keep Uraza, then’ I tell her. ‘And don’t let me catch you in a hijab!’”

  “Where are they getting it all?” asked Gulya, scrunching up her shoulders.

  Anvar grabbed the corkscrew and ran back into the living room.

  They were telling jokes and laughing. Kerim slid a glass over to big-nosed Yusup and said, “This Avar dreams that he got beaten up, so the next day he takes all his buddies to bed with him for protection.”

  They poured a round of Kizlyar Kagor wine and clinked glasses. Tall Yusup; bald, bespectacled Kerim; stocky Maga; skinny Anvar…

  “So you’re not drinking, Dibir?” asked Yusup, addressing a morose-looking man with a bandaged finger, sitting in silence.

  He shook his head.

  “It’s haram.”

  “It’s haram to get drunk, I agree, but Kagor isn’t a drink, it’s a song. Just get a whiff of that bouquet, that flavor. It’s medicinal! My mother used to give it to me when I was a boy…small sips, for my heart.”

  Dibir seemed about to object, but said nothing and just stared at the side table, where a small metal sculpture of a goat stood.

  “I remember,” began Kerim, smacking his lips and adjusting his glasses, which had slid down his nose, “how we used to work in the vineyards during the Soviet days. We’d do a little work, then someone would turn over a bucket and start beating on it like a drum and the rest of us would dance the lezginka. Usman was still in school back then, he hadn’t been expelled yet. He was the biggest drinker of all—he’d get drunk, and then would go around mooching, asking everyone for a ruble.”

  “Which Usman?”

  “What do you mean, which one?” countered Kerim, gesturing with his fork. “The one who became a holy man, Sheikh Usman. After he got expelled, he worked as a welder for a while, then got into selling fur caps or something like that. And now people go to him for barakat.”

  “Vakh!” Yusup was surprised.

  Dibir lifted his square face and fidgeted on his chair. He cleared his throat and asked:

  “Are you really an atheist, Kerim?”

  Kerim dropped his fork and raised both hands in the air:

  “That’s all, I give up, I’m changing the subject! For the record, I used to give the sheikh his ruble…”

  Anvar laughed.

  “You know, brother, you have just the same iblis inside you as the men hiding in the forest. You’re living under an eternal vasvas. And what kind of an example are you setting for those two?” Dibir asked through his teeth, nodding in the direction of Anvar and Maga.

  “Example?” Kerim spread his arms wide. “Well, I go out and work, for example, while you’re sitting around praying.”

  “Zumrud!” yelled Yusup, anticipating a fight. “Bring some chudu!”

  Sounds could be heard in the kitchen. Dibir scrutinized Kerim, who had redirected his attention to his eggplants, then whispered “Bismillah” and started piling vegetables onto his own plate. The women came in with two steaming platters.

  “Let’s go work out,” Maga whispered into Anvar’s ear, twitching his shoulders.

  Zumrud saw them in the doorway. “Come back before the food gets cold,” she said.

  It was already dark in the little inner courtyard. Nothing could be heard from outside the gate, not the shouts of kids playing, nor the usual music, nor the sounds of men greeting one another and clasping hands.

  “It’s so quiet today,” noted Anvar. He sprang up, grabbed the bar with his long arms, and pulled himself up.

  “Can you do a flip?” asked Maga.

  “Sure, look, I’ll do a flip and then a few giant swings,” said Anvar enthusiastically, and he began swinging his legs from side to side, warming up.

  Maga observed his maneuvers with amusement.

  “Hey, you’re doing it wrong, let me try.”

  “I’m not done yet,” said Anvar, hanging by one hand.

  “Listen, brother, show me your fist!” exclaimed Maga.

  “All right,” Anvar obeyed, clenching the fist of his free hand.

  “Now clench your butthole just like that, le!” laughed Maga, shooing Anvar down off the bar.

  Then he asked: “So who’s that Dibir guy?”

  “Friend of the family.”

  “A Sufi, right? All they do is spout ch’anda and then ferret out quotes from the Prophet to justify it,” said Maga; after doing a few brisk pull-ups, he sprang down from the bar. “Name’s Bashir, he’s from our village. He took me to this rock, once. Said it’s an azhdakha.”

  “Which azhdakha?”

  “I’ll tell you: so there’s this ustaz who tells folktales. In our village, he says, there once lived a chaban, a shepherd who took care of people’s sheep, and this azhdakha started stealing rams from him. Stole one after another. But the shepherd wasn’t about to run and hide. Hey, he says, give me back the rams, or people will think I’m falling down on the job or stealing them myself. The azhdakha wouldn’t budge, no way was he going to give them back. So then the chaban took an arrow and shot the azhdakha, and the arrow hit him in the torso and came out the other side. The chaban went and took back the arrow and asked Allah to turn the azhdakha to stone.”

  “So? It worked? Does the stone look like an azhdakha, or something?” asked Anvar, springing back up onto the bar and dangling from it head down.

  “There’s a hole that runs straight through it. Other than that, no. Bashir believes it, though, he says that the hole is just like an arrow hole…plus, he says, the head fell off afterward anyhow.”

  “What, hasn’t he ever seen any stones in the mountains?” laughed Anvar, still hanging upside down.

  “There aren’t that many in that area. I told Bashir it’s bida, bida. So then he started calling me vakh. With those Sufis everyone who doesn’t believe them is vakh.”

  Sounds came from the house; someone was tuning the pandur. Maga got out his phone and squatted on his haunches.

  “I’m calling this girl I know.”

  Anvar tipped his head back, turning his acne-covered face to the sky. The new moon shone faintly overhead, barely illuminating in the darkness the half-finished attic, the lone light fixture by the door, and the clotheslines. A startled bat fluttered upward. Anvar whirled around in a vain attempt to see where it went. Meanwhile, the sounds of the pandur inside the house grew louder, sending a folk tune out into the night. Its melody lingered in the air and soon seemed to inflect, in some ineffable way, the entire spirit of the evening. “Interesting,” thought Anvar. “To me it’s obvious, the connection between the night and the music, but the person actually playing the instrument, and the people in there listening, don’t.”

  “Have you heard about Rokhel-Meer? It’s an enchanted village. ‘The Mountain of Celebrations!’ Now you see it, now you don’t. They say…Hello? What’s up, how’s it going?” Maga interrupted himself, grimaced into the phone, and turned away from Anvar. “Why not? Hey, talk normal…So call some of your girlfriends, and come on out…What’s the problem?…I know you inside and out, don’t play the nun with me…What do you mean, I’m ‘coming on strong?’ I’m not coming on strong!…You’re the one—you didn’t invite me either…You’re such a…!”

  Anvar went inside. Yusup was standing by the table, strumming the pandur’s two nylon strings and singing. Kerim chimed in, grimacing and exclaiming, “Ai!” “Ui!” “Oh, man!” and the like. Gulya was reclining on the sofa, her faced flushed; Dibir, deep in thought, was staring at his bandaged finger. Zumrud sat with her eyes closed and gave herself over to the flow of the so
ng, silently flicking her thin fingers and sending up gentle puffs of flour.

  Zumrud saw herself as a small child in her great-grandmother’s mountain home. Her great-grandmother was ancient; she wore a loose, tunic-like dress, which she tucked loosely into her broad trousers. Her everyday chokhto, which draped all the way down her spine, concealed the flat, shaved crown of her head, liberated by right of her advanced age from its decades-long burden of braids. Every day she would go out into the mountains and climb to her meager little plot on the cliffside. In the evening she would come back down, hunched low under a sheaf of hay, her farm tools covered in dirt.

  When there was a wedding in the village, Great-Grandmother would sit with the other old women on one of the flat roofs, holding Zumrud on her lap, and they would watch the dancing and listen to the tamada’s jokes. Their black robes made the old women look like nuns, but that was where the resemblance ended. They took snuff or even smoked tobacco, and improvised filthy rhyming couplets to one another. In the evenings they would go out visiting, with their grandchildren hoisted onto their backs like bundles of hay or water pitchers.

  Zumrud pictured the neighbor’s house in her mind. On its broad, thick-carpeted veranda a big loud-voiced old woman sat rocking a homemade wooden cradle with a tightly swaddled baby inside. Zumrud recalled reaching inside and touching the cradle’s mattress, noting its strategically placed hole under the baby’s bottom; it was stuffed with fragrant herbs, which crackled inside, and a knife was concealed under where the baby’s head lay…

  The song trailed off, and everyone clapped.

  “What was it about, Yusup?” asked Gulya, who couldn’t speak Avar.

  “The capture of Akhulgo. The storming of Imam Shamil’s citadel.

  It goes like this: in 1839 the miurids held out for nine weeks resisting the Russian army’s attacks against the supposedly impregnable cliffs of Akhulgo, but the enemy had too many men and too many cannons…So all the mountain women put on Circassian coats and fought side by side with the men, and mothers slaughtered the babies and cast themselves down into the chasm, so as not to fall into the Russians’ hands. And the older children hurled stones at the attackers, and the fortress was taken anyway, but…Brave Shamil didn’t fall into the hands of the kafirs, though he turned over his favorite son as a hostage. That’s a rough translation.”

  “Back then people had iman, not like now,” noted Dibir.

  “I loved our old singers,” said Zumrud, tucking unruly locks of hair behind her ears. “Now, you know, all we have is pop, and all the melodies are stolen.”

  “Well, I like Sabina Gadzhieva,” objected Gulya.

  Zumrud waved her hand in the air dismissively: “Oh I can’t tell them apart. Sabinas, Malvinas…In the old days people at least had real voices, and singers wrote their own lyrics, from the heart…Now who knows what it means.”

  “You’re never satisfied, Zumrud!” said Gulya, smiling. “How can you stand living with her, Yusup?”

  Yusup laughed. “Well, you can’t keep her locked up at home.”

  “You shouldn’t need to,” said Dibir. “A woman herself should understand that it’s not something Allah is forcing upon her—her calling is to take care of her family, so let her stay home and do the right thing of her own free will.”

  “Dibir, go preach to your own wife,” snapped Zumrud, only partly in jest. “I’ve had enough of these zealots. You can’t walk down the street without someone shoving leaflets into your hands—they’re even there when you get on the bus, forcing their bulletins on you.”

  “What bulletins?”

  “Yours, Islamic ones,” said Kerim. “Yeah, I’m sick and tired of those hawkers. And you can’t get rid of them. One time we were sitting in a club, just hanging out and listening to music, nothing special. And all of a sudden this guy shows up. All in white, wearing a green skullcap, and holding a bundle of religious bulletins. Rustam explains to him man to man that his presence isn’t really required. So he leaves, or so it seemed. But within an hour he’s back. Must have forgotten that he’d already tried us.”

  “You should have taken one and read it! Might have done you some good!” said Dibir.

  Kerim snickered. “It does me good to work out, too, though I haven’t done it for a while now…but look, the hows and whens of namaz prayer just right aren’t really high on my list of priorities. If you ask me it’s all khapur-chapur.”

  “Here you are making jokes, but you won’t feel like joking around on Judgment Day,” Dibir objected. “You think you’re so smart, but it’s not enough to study the material sciences. You need to look after your soul as well.”

  Zumrud went over to the window and opened it. For some reason, the neighborhood was dark; there were no lights on anywhere. It was strangely quiet for that time of evening. Then, suddenly, the sound of barking. Everyone shifted in their seats. Zumrud looked around and saw Abdul-Malik in the doorway. He was in a police uniform and there was a stranger with him, a man of around forty with a mustache. Behind them in the darkness stood Maga.

  “A-a-assalamu alaikum!” said Yusup cheerfully, standing up to greet the guests.

  Kerim raised his glass.

  “Well, as they say, here’s to the Motherland, here’s to Stalin! Sakhl-i.”

  The others joined in the toast, clinking their glasses and exclaiming “Sakhl’i!”

  “So how are things at the front?” asked Kerim, watching Abdul-Malik serve himself the chudu that Zumrud had warmed up for the guests.

  Abdul-Malik stiffened, then answered quietly: “May Allah punish those with blood on their hands.”

  “Vallakh, may it be so,” repeated Gulya mournfully.

  “They think they’re so righteous and that we’re just filthy murtads. And it’s absolutely the other way around. Who are the ones sneaking around like jackals, anyway? Shooting people in the back? Mazhid was flagging down a car, and the guys inside opened fire and that was that. And then they came to Dzhamal’s house and called to him by name, and when he showed his face they shot him, point blank. They blew up Kurbanov’s car. And when Salakh Akhmedov was murdered, his own son was in on the plot. And how about all the cops they’ve killed? We really made them pay for it in Gubden…I’ve just come from there.”

  “I got a call from one of my friends in Gubden,” Kerim broke in. “He says that you didn’t make much of a dent at all. Just a lot of noise, as usual. While you were storming the building, a whole bunch of people were standing around outside, watching, and the local Wahhabis were right there in the crowd. And everyone there knew they were there. After the operation they sat there in the ruins, rehashing the details.”

  “What do you mean by that?” scowled Abdul-Malik.

  “What I mean is that you knew who those guys were just the same as everyone else, and you didn’t make a move. And now you act all surprised.”

  “We didn’t have an order—we can’t take anyone without orders. We can’t do anything on our own initiative. We’re supposed to wait for troops from Moscow,” answered Abdul-Malik.

  “That’s bullshit,” said Maga. But no one heard.

  “Let the man have his dinner in peace,” said Zumrud. “In the meantime I want to make a toast. Here’s to me and Gulya still being able to sit here and make toasts!”

  Everyone chuckled awkwardly.

  Through the clinking of glasses a new sound was heard, something metallic. Anvar, who had dozed off, looked up and saw that the chandelier was trembling. Then silence. Kerim was also looking up at the chandelier; he remembered the great Makhachkala earthquake. He had been just a child then; it all seemed like some great, romantic adventure. It had been exciting to sleep in a tent, to kill time gossiping with Rashid and Tolik, to rush around the town in his baggy Soviet underwear.

  Later, when he was a student, Tolik had had gotten interested in minerals, and one autumn Kerim had taken him to his village in the mountains, where there was a big limestone-dolomite ridge. Tolik got on a donkey and rode up to th
e ridge with a local boy as a guide, inspiring snide commentary at the godekan, where the locals sat around for days on end warming themselves under old burkas. When Tolik gathered two bags of mushrooms in the low mountain forest and hung them out to dry on Kerim’s veranda, people came over specially to view the strange sight. They didn’t eat mushrooms themselves; they thought they were all poisonous.

  “I have something to talk to you about, Yusup,” said Abdul-Malik, wiping his lips with a napkin. “Nurik here is my nephew, and…”

  He nodded in the direction of the taciturn man with the mustache; Yusup went over and sat down next to them.

  “It’s not a secret, really,” began Abdul-Malik in a low voice, fidgeting and lowering his eyes. “It’s about Kizilyurt. They’re holding elections there for the Oblast Assembly, and they won’t register Nurik. They keep coming up with some phony pretext. We have all his papers in order. Yesterday Nurik went to the Board of Elections with his dzhamaat, and security wouldn’t let them through. A couple of them made it inside somehow, but the officials there ripped up their papers and kicked them back out…A real nightmare, believe me. Our guys lost patience and before you know it things got out of control and people started shooting. One of my cousins was hit in the shoulder, and another one’s in the hospital. So then the younger guys decided to set some buildings on fire, and the others barely managed to restrain them. You know our tukhum isn’t just going to stand by and allow such disrespect.”

  “Vakh, but where was the director at that point?”

  “It was his own guards that did it.”

  “But why?”

  “He’s got a grudge against me. His nephew was murdered and left in his car, and then his car was blown up by a grenade, and he claims that it was our guys who did it.”

  Abdul-Malik looked around at the others. The women had gone off somewhere, but Kerim, Dibir, Anvar, and Maga were in the corner arguing about something, jabbing their fingers at the goat sculpture.