The Mountain and the Wall

by Alisa Ganieva

  Farida grumbled under her breath. “I didn’t go to the trouble of getting my son an education so that he could run around delivering bags of garbage.”

  But she couldn’t bring herself to say anything out loud. By then Makhmud Tagirovich had sunk into torpor. He gave up his efforts to establish companies and foundations in support of a Dagestani renaissance, resumed his teaching position, and began putting on weight. He spent a lot of time with Pakhriman and other men his age, discussing politics, sports, and historical events, but never told them about his novel. He hadn’t come up with the ending yet, so he turned back to his poem.

  A few days ago, though, Makhmud Tagirovich got a flash of inspiration: his great epic should culminate in a triumphant encomium in praise of Dagestan. The only thing that united all his heroes, after all, was their love for their native mountains. Once he had made his decision, Makhmud Tagirovich could neither sleep nor eat. He ignored everything around him—his panicked wife, the alarming Wall rumors, the explosions and unrest—and to all the admonitions directed at him about this or that, he responded only by saying: “Everything will be fine, our region is invincible.”

  And so the novel was completed, the manuscript printed out and delivered, and Makhmud Tagirovich strode out to commemorate his great triumph. He would buy some Kizlyar dessert wine, and he and Pakhriman would celebrate together.

  Oddly, several of the wine stores were closed, and the doors of the cognac shop were bolted shut. Makhmud Tagirovich wandered the neighborhood, disoriented. The area had changed in some ineffable way, and everywhere he went, the stores were closed.

  “Excuse me, why isn’t anything open?” he asked a pockmarked, tanned passerby.

  The man grinned in surprise. “Don’t you know? The owners are hiding from the beards!”

  Makhmud Tagirovich, somewhat alarmed, but still in the throes of his creative euphoria, strode on. Then he heard noises nearby, voices and the sound of fists hitting skin. He ran around a corner and came upon the courtyard of a mosque. A crowd of men had gotten into a brawl there and several men in turbans were trying to break it up. Makhmud Tagirovich gave a bewildered smile and started toward them to help, but then he felt a sharp jolt and an unbearable burning in his chest.

  The street tipped sharply downward, and the enormous white sky descended, crowding out consciousness.

  ‡Have you cleaned the courtyard, wench?

  PART III

  1

  Chaos set in. Every day generated new alliances and organizations. They would exist briefly, then disintegrate, join with others, or evolve and develop new profiles and goals. The police, in civilian clothing, went into hiding in their families’ basements. Some, the most visible and high-ranking among them, were ferreted out and killed. Clashes between various groups flared up on the street; on every corner terms of abuse intermingled in a cacophony with appeals to the holy ayats, and on Thursdays, instead of the usual backgammon, Pakhriman drank in solitude.

  At different ends of the various towns and villages, and even in the capital, bodies of murdered prostitutes began to turn up in rented apartments, and the proprietors of certain underground establishments hastily grew beards and swore that they were on the front lines of the struggle against fornication.

  Dark shapes scurried around at night, proclaiming monotheism and setting fire to theaters, concert halls, and restaurants. Monuments and busts lay beneath their pedestals with their ears and noses knocked off.

  Khabibula rushed to his kutan, where his wife Salimat was straining whey from fresh cottage cheese, and told her that Makhachkala’s most prominent monument to Lenin had fallen and crumbled into dust. His lips trembled with emotion, and Salimat did some mental calculations of the potential losses to their farm. The port was almost completely abandoned; on the few scattered ships that hadn’t been evacuated to Astrakhan, the masts creaked forlornly, and the decks crawled with vagabonds and the mentally ill who had strayed out from the city. At night, people in full battle gear broke into houses and dragged away squealing fortune-tellers with gold rings on their fingers, their faces distorted in terror. Their bodies littered the courtyards of the city.

  It wasn’t clear who was in charge. Threatening slogans scrawled across the collapsing fences and walls of abandoned construction sites gave the city an oppressive feel. “Women who do not cover their avrat will be, inshallah, killed!” Many girls, terrified, began wearing hijabs, but even this disguise didn’t always save them. In Aunt Ashura’s courtyard, terrible rumors were going around about the brutal execution of the singer Sabina Gadzhieva.

  According to one version of the story, she had put on dark glasses and draped herself in long scarves, and had tried to slip out of town. But her pursuers chased her down, blocked her car, and hurled cobblestones and bricks at it. Another version had it that she and her lover had been tracked down on the Stavropol border, at which point their car had been blown up with a grenade. Aunt Ashura’s sons swore that all the murders of singers and prostitutes were the work of one gang that was trying to seize the reins of power. There were still other rumors that Sabina had in fact somehow managed to escape.

  The streets clattered and rumbled. Former tradeswomen from the bazaar loaded themselves down with kettles and blankets and sought new places of refuge. Children burned dumpsters and shot bottle rockets, and the republic’s chief emir, a man with a long scar running across his face, occupied a prominent place on the TV screens of Dagestan.

  In universities, in the civil courts and ministries that had been abandoned in the panic, mujahideen who had emerged from their forest hiding places greeted one another with their index fingers, laughing joyfully: “Assalam aleikum.” “Vaaleikum salam.”

  Heavily loaded tractor-trailers left for the south or tried to break through to the north. Marya Vasilyevna bounced up and down in the back of a long-haul trailer, wedged between oaken tables and heavy suitcases, which were covered with stickers left over from the Soviet days and packed full of donated goods. Inside Marya Vasilyevna’s bra, against her soft breasts nestled wads of moist rubles that she had miraculously obtained by selling her apartment, and her thin lips rehearsed lines for an anticipated conversation with the as-yet invisible guardians of the Wall: “In Christ’s name, let me through, I’m one of you, I’ve spent my whole life slaving away for this non-Russian rabble!”

  The school where Marya Vasilyevna and Shamil’s mother worked had been converted into the party headquarters of the Caucasian Emirate. The director and twenty-five of his colleagues, so Aunt Ashura had been told, had been hanged on the main avenue of the city—on old linden trees that had for some unknown reason survived the axe—for being infidels, and especially for not allowing girls in hijabs into class.

  Black Prioras rattled through the towns and villages and cities, scattering leaflets along the dusty asphalt roads. The leaflets hissed out a call to recognize Madjlis-ul-Shura, the emirs and qadis of the great Muslim Emirate. A nasal voice from the television issued loud, intoxicating appeals: “We, mashalla, have expelled the kafirs from our lands, and now the time has come to consolidate our power, to do away with the aiders and abettors of evil, with those who robbed and cheated, who pandered to Moscow! And then, inshallah, the Caucasus will no longer be Dar-al-harb, a war-torn territory: it will become Dar-ul-Salam—a territory of peace! When sharia is established in our land, peace and justice will come to our homes, and the borders, inshallah, will expand to the original boundaries of the Islamic world!”

  “There’s no way that lunatics and murderers can come to power,” Velikhanov kept repeating to his family, waving his yellowish palms in the air. “They’ll have their little celebration, and then we’ll sweep them away!”

  “We who? You stay indoors!” groaned his wife, collapsing on the sofa under the carpet with the portrait of Imam Shamil that hung on the wall.

  Finally, black flags rose and fluttered in the air over the government building. They depicted sabers under the words, in Arabic script, “I t
estify that there is no God but Allah, and I testify that Muhammad is Allah’s Prophet.” Then, according to rumors that were flying around in the mountains, the foothills, and plains, the members of the Dagestan dzhamaat had given a ceremonial welcome to the Chechen chief of jihad. Several thousand young men who had not yet shed blood had sworn loyalty to him, publicly reciting the bay’ah oath of allegiance.

  The qadi of the phantom state emerged from the shadows and established a field tribunal to try people who had rejected the main dogmas of Salafi, who had shown their devotion to this or that incorrect religious school or scholar, or who had introduced pernicious innovations, told harmful allegories, or performed demonic Sufi dances.

  Girls stashed CDs of popular songs deep under their mattresses, and in hushed whispers exchanged terrible stories about a certain Najiba from Leninkent who had been shot by her own cousin, and all because she had refused to cover her hair; and about Marina from Buinaksk who had been sealed in a cement-filled drum for hanging posters of handsome young musicians on her bedroom walls.

  Kamilla couldn’t help gloating, even as she recalled with nostalgia the poignant image of flat-chested Elmira in her sumptuous wedding dress. She suspected that if the Khanmagomedovs hadn’t managed to get away in their helicopter, they would have long ago been rotting in the ground. Though it was impossible to be sure of anything. The editorial boards of the newspapers were lying low, the kiosks had fallen silent, and instead of the former chaos of multiple dailies and weeklies there was only one paper of record, with, on its cover, the ubiquitous shahada, with sabers instead of a masthead and logo.

  The phone and Internet situation was peculiar. The Web would occasionally flicker to life, at which point the smart phones that had been lying dormant in pockets offered peeks out into the world: fitful, intermittent glimpses of a colorful news ribbon, or of social network pages teeming with complaints, appeals, arguments, and counterarguments.

  But having barely stirred into life, virtual reality would again fade from view, sending distraught users back to their radios, where through the jamming they could occasionally catch foreign broadcasts in the various national languages of Dagestan. The voices sounded alternatively jubilant and congratulatory; they shared dreams, conferred blessings, and cursed, in the end completely baffling their listeners.

  The most widespread and effective news medium was word of mouth. Rumors flew, mutating as they went, communicating mysterious tidings about mad cows in Botlikh, or apricots in Gergebil that all had suddenly withered and died, about an uprising in Mamedkala and Magarmkent, and about a counterattack by the mujahideen, who’d routed separatist Southern Dagestan.

  “We have no nations, we have Allah!” proclaimed the chorus of voices on TV. “Chechens and Kabardins, Balkhars and Ingushes, Karachaves and Dagestanis will forget all borders, renounce their individual pre-Islamic dzhakhil customs, and rise up as one united Islamic front under the banner of tawhid!”

  But other rumors circulated as well—about forces that were rallying in the mountains around the Tariqat sheikhs, about a covert plot against the Salafi government, about nationalist fronts preparing a surprise attack, and even about a new movement of militant atheists with a mixed program, not liberal exactly, but not communist either.

  The people wandering the streets of the capital would occasionally stumble upon the city’s own decaying flesh. Water seethed up from under the manhole covers; electric wires arced and frayed, flared up and then went dead. Old women scurried around the streets, hunched under propane tanks, and people searching for food hastened to stand guard at the doorways of depleted stores that stood forlorn, devoid of their stocks.

  The scariest rumors were about sabotage at the hydroelectric stations in the mountains. Destroying the gigantic arch dam of the Chirkeisk Hydroelectric Plant would not only cut off electric power to the entire Emirate, but also would send the white waters of the Sulak River rushing down the mountainside, inundating the Caspian lowlands, and even Makhachkala itself.

  Farida was deep in mourning. Meanwhile, her daughter-in-law, with minimal reflection, shed her brightly colored sweaters, donned a blacker-than-black niqab, hoisted the black flag of the newly fledged Emirate over her sales booth, and stationed her docile husband behind the cash register.

  “These days women are forbidden to go out to work,” she explained to Farida, “so let them think that my husband is running everything.”

  Farida’s sister-in-law, her rich brother’s wife, came running to her in tears, wailing. “Khasan went to divvy up the factory with them so that they wouldn’t close it! First they’ll bankrupt him, and then they’ll kill him!”

  Farida remained silent. She sat with her eyes fixed on the wall, where the man with the yellow wart smiled down from his photo, and pondered the question of rice. She wanted to cook some plov in the iron kettle, but there hadn’t been any food deliveries, and it was impossible to get rice anywhere.

  “Soon they’ll change the money too, and they’ll put the Saudi king on the new bills,” continued her brother’s wife. “And you’ve seen how many Palestinians, Jordanians, and Arabs there are around. Before you know it they’ll only be using Arabic in the schools. In fact there won’t be any schools at all, just madrasas. That’s what Khasan says.”

  Sure enough, olive-skinned foreigners had showed up on the streets, armed to the teeth, and they would go up to women who were out walking by themselves or without veils, and harass them. One of them even became the naib to the Emirate chief, and urged him to intensify reprisals against recalcitrant murtads. Some of the young men who had become enamored of Salafi considered this naib to be the Messiah, the descendent of the Prophet, who would purge Islam of its monstrous admixtures once and for all, and the mujahid veterans had to punch their young comrades in the backs of their heads and admonish them: “Rid your brains of this Shiite plague! Don’t you dare place the naib above the emir, and the Messiah above the Prophet!”

  But this Messiah, calling himself Mahdi, showed up anyway. First in Kumukh, then in Levashi, and then even in Kurush, two thousand five hundred sixty meters above sea level. The story went that, at the height of the fighting, one of the inhabitants of Kurush descended to the new Kurush settlement on the plain. Several villages in the Dokuzparinsk region had been relocated there after their lands had been turned over to Azerbaijan in 1952. After going around with his followers to the households and tukhums of the Kurushets, Ikhirts, Matsints, Smugults, Lekhints, Khiulints, and Fiits, this morose man proclaimed himself to be the famous Mahdi, about whom the hadiths had prophesied.

  “His origin is in the Arabic tribe of Koreishites, like all Kurushets, meaning that he’s the descendent of the Prophet, salallakhu alaikha vassalam,” reasoned his followers. “Plus he was born in 1979, that is, in the 1400th year, khidra, which was predicted by the scholar Badiuzzaman Said Nursi. He is the first true Mahdi, destined to become your ruler and to restore the purity and strength of Islam!”

  Many who were already in the habit of believing fervently in the stories they’d heard of children born with the name of Allah inscribed on their backs, and of beehives on which citations from the Koran appeared spontaneously, put their faith in this one true Mahdi, and began to organize processions in honor of the new Messiah, and to sing hymns to him. His uncle’s house in New Kurush became a destination for pilgrimages, and was adorned with flowers and green cloth, and a gleaming half-moon appeared on the roof.

  When news of Mahdi spread through the Emirate, and gifts and tributes began to pour into New Kurush from neighboring Chechnya, the Madzhlis-ul-Shura deliberative assembly sounded the alarm. The uncle’s house was cordoned off and mined on all four sides, though Mahdi himself managed to abscond southward with all the gifts he’d been given.

  The unrest continued. Posters bearing the inscription “Let us burn everything that is written from left to right!” appeared on the streets of Makhachkala.

  “That’s strange,” mused the people, “since it turns out w
e’d have to burn these posters too!”

  They were right; it didn’t make sense. The government had decided to transliterate all the vilayats into Arabic script, but it was hard to do this all at once. Plus, the mujahideen themselves didn’t know Arabic—nor, in fact, their own disappearing native languages, and were forced to communicate with one another in Russian.

  Nevertheless, not only archives and music collections, but libraries as well, went up in flames. Then, literally the next day, the order was rescinded. The conflagrations ceased, and Russian translations of the Koran were saved. It had been decided that it might be better to proceed gradually.

  After she moved out of her parents’ home to her husband’s, Madina began visiting the wives and widows of the mujahideen. All of them were excited about the unexpected victory and dreamed aloud of a time when nonbelievers would finally be reeducated or just disappear, when the true Emirate would begin, and there would ensue a life of freedom and bounty, as had happened in Saudi Arabia.

  “Our husbands did not die in vain!” a Muslim woman would say, puffed up with pride. “They are all looking down at us from Paradise, rejoicing that we lived to see the blessed day!”

  “Hold your tongue, Zariat,” another would scoff. “When your Usman, may Allah receive his shahada, was killed, you were at home with him, and when the murtad dogs called, you went out to them. They say that you betrayed several of our brothers.”

  “What are you talking about, auzubillah! Who are you to lecture me? My ‘sister,’ who talked to men in chat rooms, knowing that it was forbidden! My sister, who asked them not to murder her brother, a policeman and defender of kufr, who was unwilling to break ties with her dzhakhil parents! They would have kept on pressing you, and you would have left, would have gone back to your infidel family, to your cursed brother! Subhanallah, we opened your eyes and saved you from taking that terrible step! And Usman himself asked me to go outside and to convey his last words to the umma, to tell the story of his courage! While I was being congratulated, do you think I didn’t feel like crying? Of course I did, but I smiled and rejoiced that Usman was in Paradise, and didn’t feel sorry for myself, for that would have been pure selfishness and folly.”