The Mountain and the Wall

by Alisa Ganieva

  As Shamil listened to the scraps of stories and the coughs of the onlookers, a strange sense of boredom came over him, and yet wouldn’t let him leave. He walked between the groups, looking into the flushed faces of the yelling women, at the high chain-link fence in front of the moribund government building, at his own polished shoes, at the empty faces on all the posters.

  Then he noticed Velikhanov, his former colleague from the committee and an old friend of the family, a tall man with graying temples. Velikhanov was explaining something insistently to a few old men in short straw hats who looked a lot like the ones Shamil had encountered in the seaside park after the Kumyk demonstration.

  “Hey, Shamil, I’ve just been going over everything for these guys. Look what’s happening over here!” drawled Velikhanov, shaking Shamil’s hand. “I’ve always said that we need to take more advantage of young people. Remember that rally we organized in Mashuk? Vakh, so many people, it was great! We sang the national anthem, organized competitions, Tutkin himself came! This here is nothing, by comparison.”

  The old men grumbled.

  “Shamil! It’s a total breakdown in logic! And all because they wouldn’t let Alikhan and me organize any educational activities back when the time was right. And we already had this plan to invite guys here from other regions, to take them up into the mountains, to the reservoirs and waterfalls, to show them our trades, our traditional arts, our circuses, carpets…” Velikhanov lost his train of thought. “What else? Shamil?”

  Shamil smiled. “Yes, sure, we could’ve taken them up there…”

  “But no! All of those so-called journalists! Look at them over there, circling like vultures with their cameras. Just getting in the way! A handful of hired stooges show up—” He nodded toward the random groups of shouting people. “—and they’re already putting it on TV: ‘People are being kidnapped and murdered here, right on the streets! People are being murdered right in front of our eyes!’ The press can’t find anything better to cover! Let them come to my village, I’ll show them what they should be putting on TV. There’s a guy in my village who makes inlaid furniture with his own hands. Or look, they can film my mother, see how she spends her days. Why is it that they’re only interested in slobbering over filthy stories like this?”

  “Who is it that’s walling us off, anyway?” asked one of the old men. “Who’s destroying the country?”

  “So called ‘journalists,’ like them!” Velikhanov shot back angrily, jabbing his index finger into the stuffy air. “The crooks!”

  Shamil turned away for a moment and caught sight of Madina’s beige hijab. She was standing half turned away from him, as though taking refuge among the shoulders of her new girlfriends. Some bearded guy was standing to her right and shouting.

  “What’s he yelling about?” asked Shamil.

  “Why waste your time with them?” snorted Velikhanov. “They’re all suffering and oppressed, they’re being dragged around various dark cellars by the police, they’re not being allowed to pray, they’re being maimed by hot irons, their chests are being branded with crosses, their beards are being plucked out with tweezers, you name it!”

  The bearded man was indeed yelling something to that effect, but all Shamil could make out were fragments: “Alhamdulillah, praise be to Allah, the infidels have retreated…The cowardly murtads…without a functioning government…freedom of the Caucasian Emirate…everyone opposed to filth, injustice, moneygrubbing, everyone…Allahu akbar…soon those in hiding will no longer have to hide—now, inshallah, people will no longer be persecuted for their religion…”

  At some point while Shamil was listening, Velikhanov and the old men vanished into the crowd. Shamil’s head was filled with memories. Here he is, a little boy in his cotton underwear on the shore with his father and Velikhanov, untangling fishing nets. Velikhanov is putting worms on hooks. They are alone on the salty shore. Tethered to an iron stake, slippery boats bobble on the water. Velikhanov is telling some joke that Shamil doesn’t understand; his father laughs, baring his silver crowns. Shamil reaches with his white palm for the jar of worms…

  Then he pictured Velikhanov’s sons. The first was named Peak, in honor of Ismoil Somoni Peak, which had been renamed Communism Peak under the Soviets; the second was named Mig, maybe to sound good together with his brother’s name, or maybe in honor of the Mig jet fighter. Mig Velikhanov later worked at the torpedo production facility in Kaspiisk, had helped develop submarine weapons, and most recently, as far as Shamil could tell, was continuing his work in Petersburg. Gentle, kindhearted Peak had spent his whole life working at the Derbent cognac distillery and had never married.

  Shamil brought himself back to the present day and dully surveyed the restless heads of the crowd until his glance snagged on a couple of his cousins. They were happy to see him, and the three of them launched into an animated conversation. They were all on edge, ready for something to happen, though they had no idea what. They talked excitedly for a half hour or so, then Shamil suggested that they go see Aunt Ashura, who lived nearby. For some reason they thought that there, in her small, one-story house behind its wooden gate, everything would become clear.

  Her yard was bustling with activity as usual. Chubby Khabibula was adjusting something on the dairy separator; Aunt Ashura’s sons, who already had families of their own, were in the barn, tossing their babies up and down in the air—there were always a lot of children running around here—and talking with the women as they worked.

  They ladled out some kharcho for Shamil and his cousins, showed them the new exterior doors that they had just installed, and argued about what they should do with the old ones. Someone suggested they sand and paint them and use them for repairs in the addition. Aunt Ashura, on the other hand, was leaning toward keeping them in the barn for the time being, and then giving them to one of their Kutan relatives, maybe Khabibula. Aunt Ashura’s younger son stubbornly insisted that they just throw the doors away.

  Someone asked Shamil about his mother. Uninhibited, sharp-tongued Aunt Ashura placed her hands on her hips and snorted when she heard that Patimat had gone back to the village, as if to say, how can that be, here her son’s in trouble, and what does Patya do? Instead of heading for the hills as though nothing’s wrong, she should have been giving Madina’s family an earful. The Zakir branch of the family were always up to something like this…

  Turned out not everyone there knew that Madina had become a devout Muslim and secretly gotten married. They were indignant when it all came out. Aunt Ashura’s son let slip that Madina’s husband was a distant relative of theirs named Otsok in honor of a distant ancestor. Recently Otsok had taken a more traditional Islamic name, Al-Jabbar, which means “redemptive force.”

  The moment they started talking about “the former Otsok” and about what Madina had done, Aunt Ashura lost all sense of restraint and began to grumble and rant…She couldn’t understand Madina’s parents’ attitude; they were pandering to their daughter, maybe were even in cahoots with her. This Al-Jabbar guy had been providing food to the militants hiding in the woods, and had been spreading some particularly nasty gossip about Sheikh Gazi-Abbas. Madina would meet a miserable end, she said—like an accursed serpent.

  Aunt Ashura’s daughter, sucking on a caramel, put aside her glass of tea and brought up the instructive example of her neighbor’s daughter, who had died last year after some kind of special operation against insurgents:

  “He was talking with her on the phone while she was sitting right there in a building under siege. He told her that Allah wouldn’t forgive her for abandoning her children like a dog. He asked her to reconsider, to come outside. But she just bombarded him with quotes from the Koran. Ultimately he told her she wouldn’t be alive for long in any case, and after her death he wouldn’t even open the gate for mourners, much less let them into the house, and he wouldn’t recite a single sura in her memory. And he didn’t. She died, and they didn’t receive any guests or read a single prayer. As thoug
h she had never existed.”

  “What a nightmare,” said the listeners, then went back to their routines. Aunt Ashura’s son, smiling, hauled some mechanical contraption out of the shed and started lubricating it. The daughters got into a spat about apricots, about where in the country they ripened soonest, about which ones were cultivated in one settlement and which in another.

  Shamil left Aunt Ashura’s yard in a brighter mood. He decided to go home on foot. He walked faster than usual, thinking about his friend Arip, who would be back from Moscow any day now. The trains were unpredictable, but Arip usually came by bus anyway. Shamil decided to take a cold shower, then go work out. After that he’d go to a café with his friends…

  “Salam aleikum!” someone called to him from the sidewalk.

  A disheveled, unshaven man staggered up to him. He looked about fifty, though it was hard to tell.

  “Vaaleikum salam,” answered Shamil, with a grin.

  “Got a couple of rubles on you, brother?” asked the man, slurring.

  “To dry out?”

  “To create a bright, good, eternal future,” the man said, enunciating with difficulty.

  Shamil scooped up whatever change was in his pocket and dropped it into the drunk’s dirty, calloused palm.

  “Barkala,” mumbled the man. “Call me Vitalik. And think, up there in the Kremlin, they’re just sitting around, those…” Vitalik cursed.

  Shamil made a fist and shook it in the air in a joking sign of solidarity, and then hurried on his way.

  8

  On the landing of their floor, which reeked of chlorine and wet rags, Shamil ran into Kamilla. She looked into his eyes and smiled, primping her curled hair.

  “What’s the news, Kamilla?” he asked, stealing a look at her breasts.

  “Well, I went to the Khanmagomedovs’ wedding,” she announced with some pride. “They brought out new food every half hour.”

  Shamil started. “Listen,” he said, “they say that our khakims were there. Where did they go afterward?”

  Kamilla shrugged.

  “Most likely to someone’s villa at the shore—they’re probably still there now.”

  “Why did they leave in such a rush?”

  “How should I know? Supposedly some guy named Khalilbek took them there.”

  “Khalilbek, Khalilbek,” thought Shamil. “Sounds familiar.”

  Kamilla went over and lingered in the doorway of her apartment. She seemed to be in no hurry to say good-bye.

  “Shamil, you said that you’re going to get a car soon?”

  “I was planning to buy one. What, you want to go for a spin?”

  Kamilla laughed: “You could take me and my friend to the beach.”

  They heard steps behind them. Someone was coming up the stairs. Kamilla cast a worried glance down the stairwell. It wasn’t her mother. She relaxed.

  “Well then?” she playfully tapped the toe of her right shoe on the cement floor.

  “No problem,” answered Shamil, beaming. “Are you going to invite me in for tea?”

  Kamilla made a show of being offended: “Some nerve. First take me to the shore, and then we’ll talk about tea.”

  The footsteps died away, but a moment later there was a rustling sound from below. Shamil, who had already sidled closer to Kamilla, glanced down the stairwell and was surprised to see Asya.

  “Asya, what are you doing here?” he called down.

  She briskly climbed the stairs, stopped in front of them, and held out a blue plastic bag.

  “Your mother forgot this this over at our place. We still have some of your stuff too.”

  “What stuff?” snorted Shamil, looking into the bag.

  “You can see next time you come over,” answered Asya, and she ran down the stairs without looking back.

  “Who’s that girl?” asked Kamilla disdainfully, with an insinuating look.

  “Just a cousin,” Shamil said dismissively, and reached playfully toward Kamilla’s perfumed hair to give it a tug. She turned away, lightly opened the imitation-leather upholstered door to her place, and, grinning broadly, waved him away.

  “My phone’s not working, I’ll come over later and ring your bell,” said Shamil, imagining what her skin might feel like.

  At home he opened the bag and found some brightly colored, neatly folded pieces of cloth with a couple of large sheets of paper inside, folded in half. On the front was written in an unsteady hand, “To Shamil from Asya. Secret.”

  Shamil felt a combination of curiosity and distaste. “What, a love letter?” he wondered. He didn’t like that they were related. It complicated matters, would prevent him from taking full advantage of the situation.

  He paced around the apartment, opened some kitchen cupboards, then returned to the letter. He read it in one sitting:

  TO SHAMIL FROM ASYA. SECRET.

  I think we should run away to Georgia right away. If there’s a Wall up north, if they’ve disbanded the patrols, that means the border troops to the south also won’t put up much of a fight. We can go to Kidero, my brother has friends there, and from there we can cross the mountain using local guides. Believe me, it will be a lot more interesting with me than with Madina.

  You’ll ask, “Why Georgia?” And I’ll answer, “Because if Russia has closed itself off from us, that means that no one will be expecting us to show up there.” Things here are just going to get worse and worse, though my brother says that we need to take things into our own hands, to join up with the Chechens, the Adygs, to start the factories and canneries goings again…Haha.

  When he got to the “haha,” Shamil couldn’t help but smile. He tossed the letter aside, went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and got out a bottle of sparkling, ice-cold water. He drank straight from the bottle, splashing some on the floor. Then he wiped his lips with his hands, put Asya out of his mind, and started to get ready for the gym.

  9

  Shamil had gotten no more than five steps out of his building when he heard someone shout his name. He turned and saw a young man, tanned, with thin cheekbones like a woman’s and a mop of red-blond hair. It was Arip. They embraced and clapped each other on the back. Arip snorted. “We’re in deep trouble, brother. I barely made it back yesterday—I got no signal, my parents are all upset. The bus was stuffy and hot, and it stank. They held us up for two hours at the border, by the Wall.”

  “What’s going on there?” Shamil was burning with curiosity.

  “The window was filthy, I couldn’t see very well. They made us stay on the bus. Looked sort of like hills. And towers, barbed wire. The bus was completely packed. There was this one guy, an engineer, he was sitting next to me, he’d planned to fly in, but there weren’t any flights. Now, he says, the idiots are going to be overjoyed, they’ve closed off the Dags and their kind. What they don’t understand, he says, is that they’re really just trying to hide from themselves.”

  “What’s it like in Moscow?”

  “Anyone with any brains is scared, Shamil, and fools are celebrating. They think that they’ve solved all their problems, that by stopping the subsidies they’re saving money. But have we ever seen any of those subsidies here? My village did everything on its own, installed plumbing, built a gym—and they did it at their own expense, with their own hands. All they got from the central government was excuses, and not a single kopeck…”

  They came out onto an intersection. The wind hurled dust into their faces, whirled plastic bags up off the street in little tornados, and moaned through the cracks of the apartment buildings around them. As if on cue, with a squeal of brakes, a police sedan rounded the corner, and several men in half-unbuttoned uniform shirts leaped out. Tearing off their caps as they ran, they plunged into the jungle of houses by the street. Their car sat orphaned on the curb with its four doors hanging open. Shamil and Arip silently continued on their way, heading toward the city center.

  The streets were strangely empty; the only person they saw was a small boy
who darted past, his face smeared with ice cream. Arip, who was able to multiply three-digit numbers in his head; Arip, a champion athlete in the traditional sport of stone-throwing; Arip, who could recite by heart endless one-liners from Soviet films; he seemed overwhelmed now, depressed.

  “So are we going hiking this year?” Shamil’s question was out of place; he just wanted to change the subject.

  “What? Where?” asked Arip indifferently.

  “We were planning on a trip, remember? Before you went away to university. We can wander around, do some climbing, visit abandoned mountain villages…we could even go rafting on the Andiika. Or did you lose interest in all that while you were in Moscow? Hey, remember that time we fell asleep on that mountain?”

  “What mountain?”

  “You don’t remember? We dreamed about a village, both of us had the same dream. This strange man served us khinkal.”

  “News to me…”

  They came upon a little mosque, nestled under some willow trees. Men in skullcaps had gathered around the fountain for ritual washing.

  “That’s strange, it’s not time to pray,” said Shamil.

  “Le, let’s see what’s going on.”

  “I was on my way to the gym, actually. It’s no big deal, maybe this mosque has its own way of doing things…”

  One of the men in the yard noticed their hesitation. He came over and invited them in.

  Shamil hesitated, Arip insisted, and ultimately they accepted. They were given something to put on their heads, took off their shoes, and entered a small room. The floor was spread with carpets and the space was divided up with cupolas and elaborately decorated columns, which gave it the sense of being a grander room than it actually was. Two men sat on carpets next to the mikhrab, arguing quietly. One of them was in full ritual garb, a shirt with a tall collar and something like a turban; the other, who had a semicircular, close-trimmed black beard, wore an ordinary checkered shirt. Between them on the floor several books lay open, some with ornamental ligatured Arabic script, others in Cyrillic.