The Mountain and the Wall

by Alisa Ganieva

  “But of course your parents didn’t beat you for wearing the hijab! You weren’t told, ‘Better come home pregnant than in the hijab!’ That’s what it was like for me!”

  They spent their evenings arguing like this and then they would read the hadiths and look after their children, and Madina sensed that, inside her womb, together with iman and the baby who had already begun to stir, faith was taking firm root, a faith in a happiness that was just about to begin.

  2

  “Come on, hurry up!” One of Arip’s sisters shook him awake. “Have you heard what’s going on? They want…”

  There were rumors that the people who had been out at night setting fire to theaters and restaurants had now taken to burning museums as well. Arip jumped up and, cursing at the dead telephone connections, rushed toward the square, where the bronze Lenin still lay on its side, past the boarded-up doors of the boutiques, the tattered and torn flyers about cinderblocks for sale, jumping across gaping manholes and stinking piles of garbage…

  At home Arip’s father lay on his venerable bed, shoving away with his feeble, trembling hands a spoon that his mother was holding out to him. “He’s willing to die from hunger, anything but show how weak he is,” Arip’s sister kept complaining.

  These battles went on constantly, several times a day. Their immense mother would crouch down next to the feeble body, which lay with its muscles clenched up from sheer stubbornness, snorting and cursing. Their father lashed out, refusing to be fed; he would grab the spoon away from his wife, but then immediately drop it onto the floor.

  How on earth had these two gotten married? Studious Murad had spent his younger years and most of his thirties completely submerged in papers, temperature gauges, and calculations. No one in his family believed that he would ever give in and take a wife. Yet the miracle had come to pass, and he had married.

  After the wedding, the new husband plunged into his research with renewed zeal. He would rush off in the morning to the Institute for High Temperatures and would return in the evening disheveled and rejuvenated.

  “Just imagine, Khadizha, we’ve already constructed a building that runs year round on solar energy. Soon the Caspian region and the mountains will be full of photoelectric, thermodynamic, solar-biofuel, solar-wind plants with power output of…”

  And Arip’s father would launch into eloquent soliloquies about heliostats and heat exchangers, about automatic control systems and boiler batteries. His wife Khadizha would listen, rapt, flushed with excitement, as she furiously polished the blackened bottoms of their pots and pans until they gleamed.

  Without waiting for his comely wife’s reactions to his speeches, Murad would run into his study and hunch over his marvelous blueprints, which contained the germs of a magnificent future, enormous palaces saturated with the sun’s light and energy. For hours on end he would pore over a map of Dagestani geothermal deposits, would calculate the number of solar days and the force of the wind, then rush back to the Institute, where other projects of stunning audacity were being developed, projects that would revolutionize agriculture, and even the defense industry.

  While Murat was out developing his radical solar-energy projects, Khadizha was home mopping floors and polishing furniture. She bleached and starched linen, made stuffing, marinated, canned, and baked. Day in and day out, her large red hands chopped, rolled, kneaded, mixed, pressed, cleaned, tied, steamed, and grated, and her belly swelled and subsided, swelled and subsided. Every pregnancy produced a girl, and Khadizha sobbed bitterly. “When am I going to get a boy?”

  Standing by and watching as his apartment, scorched with dreams of the sun and sterilized with Khadizha’s rags, filled with noise, the shouts of Saida, Faida, Naida, Aida, Zabida, and Valida, Murad only smiled and chuckled.

  “Maybe we have enough?” he would ask his wife. But Khadizha, smelling of fried onion and oiled skillets, refused to give up. She needed to give birth to a son.

  And it came to pass. In the wake of Saida, Faida, Naida, Aida, Zabida, and Valida, Arip made his entrance in the world. He also fell into the solar trap. His father took him along on research expeditions and showed him mysterious vaults and gigantic basins illuminated and warmed at night by solar power that had been captured and stored over the course of the day.

  When Murad came home in the evenings, he beheld his fresh and clean daughters, seated docilely in a row over their needlework, and the rooms all spotlessly cleaned and polished. He would go to his study, then burst back out, bug-eyed: “Not again, Khadizha!”

  “What, Murad? It was such a mess in there, just terrible. I tossed out all those old scraps of paper that were stuck in between the pages, and put all the books neatly back on the shelves. If it weren’t for me, your desk would have turned into a worm farm years ago!”

  And Arip’s father would groan and curse, and would start sorting through the books, which his wife had arranged by size and color, trying to find the places he had marked so carefully.

  And then the solar dream popped like a soap bubble. The research was discontinued; the projects were frozen, or they simply vanished into thin air, and Arip’s father turned pale and drooped, as though he had been punctured. His mother, though, began to expand outward, as though compensating for her husband’s increasing incorporeity.

  Every once in a while Murad seemed to jolt back to life. He would begin to scribble articles and appeals, alternatively pleading and demanding, dignified and aggrieved, but to no avail. The installations with their colossal arrays of lights went dark; the great basins, vaults, and marvelous edifices meekly effaced themselves from time and space.

  His mother, to whom fertility had imparted an all-encompassing generosity, became even more confident and energetic after Arip’s birth. She pickled, preserved, and ground with even greater fury, and Faida, Naida, Aida, Zabida, and Valida were easily and comfortably dispensed with, sent off to husbands with ample supplies of plump pillows, table settings, crystal vases, garlic presses, and thick carpets.

  Arip’s mother decided to keep the eldest, Saida, with her at home for companionship. Doomed to eternal spinsterhood, Saida soaked her mother’s feet, prepared veal for her finicky father, whitewashed the ceilings, crocheted fringes on scarves, and tended countless nephews.

  From childhood Arip had been in thrall to numbers. Like his father, he was infected with a utopian dream of the sun, and he contributed grandiose fantasies of his own to his father’s grand plans. By middle school he devoured logic problems whole, was hacking into various networks, and had mastered the principles of analysis and econometrics.

  His father bought his son the latest books on computer science; his mother stuffed him with meat dumplings. Saida smothered him with bitter kisses, which he tried to fend off as best he could, and Faida’s, Naida’s, Aida’s, Zabida’s, and Valida’s husbands teased him, calling him a “little brainiac” and forcing him to do a hundred push-ups at a time.

  Sometimes Arip allowed his mind to wander away from equations, and when he did, he succumbed to the cheap mysticism of numerology, trying to discern the secret digits of his own fate. He divided words up into their individual letters, assigning each one a number based on its order in the alphabet, and then divided and multiplied them in an infinite series of combinations.

  He calculated that the Cyrillic letters in “Dagestan” add up to the number 69, which is a six reversed onto itself. Arip added the two individual digits together and got 15; then he did it again, and came up with 6. Thrilled with this result, he started in on his own name.

  If his mountain tribe ancestors had been able to pronounce Fs, he reasoned, then Arip would have been Arif. “Arif,” divided up into numbers, also yielded the mighty six, signifying equilibrium, harmony, the seal of Solomon, success, the Days of Creation, the hermaphroditic Number of the Universe…

  Shamil dragged Arip out of the world of calculations into the world of street brawls, noisemakers, potatoes baked over a campfire behind the garage, and violent fights t
hat drew blood. The next neighborhood over was under the control of the hulking Seryozha, whom the local kids called Serazh and idolized for his superhuman-seeming strength and courage. Serazh had grand plans to take over Shamil’s and Arip’s neighborhood as well. After a few dreadful melees, which attracted upwards of two hundred spectators among the local boys, a pact was concluded, and Serazh entered into peaceful collaboration with the enemy.

  When they—and their biceps—matured, they started launching various “enterprises” together, offering protection for money, prying rails from abandoned railroad tracks, and even going to mixed dances.

  Meanwhile, Serazh assembled a new gang of working-class Russian kids, whose grandmothers and grandfathers had fled the starving lower Volga region to fertile Dagestan back in the day. He would knock the vodka bottles out of their hands and offer moral instruction: “Take your example from the Dags. They don’t drink, they work out, and all our guys do is hit the booze. There won’t be anyone left bury our old people!”

  Even as he cultivated alliances with Dagestanis, Serazh joined a fascist cell and promoted the idea of healing the Russian nation through imitation of the enemy; in the intervals between political education and physical training he made a decent income writing term papers and theses to order. Then, when Arip went to school in Moscow, Serazh would come, spend the night with him, and the next morning would set out in his homespun Russian shirt with its embroidered side collar to commune with the skinhead brotherhood that haunted the city’s outer reaches.

  It was from Serazh that Arip heard for the first time about the Wall, which, according to a bunch of barely literate, skinhead hoods, would rise up and save Russia. Back then, those stories seemed as though they couldn’t be anything more than wild fantasies cooked up by restless thuglings who had too much time on their hands…Now, though, they had unexpectedly taken on flesh and clarity.

  In Moscow State University’s Department of Mathematics, Arip had to work like crazy to catch up with his classmates, geniuses who could recite pi to the thousandth digit from memory, who knew more about multivariable calculus, topology, and complex variables than about their own family trees. First in the university, and then at work, Arip circulated among savants and lunatics whose whole world was mathematics. He could never have imagined that the world would split in two, would ripple and burst, that the fantasies of Serazh’s gang of morons would actually come to pass, and so quickly.

  The streets of Moscow were filling up with bloodthirsty throngs of teenagers when blond Arip managed to get out of the city to the Dagestan buses and sped off, heading back to the world on the other side of the Wall, where nothing would ever be the same.

  The square was just ahead. Arip made two more turns before realizing that he was too late. Before the entrance of the orphaned museum stood a black pile of shattered ceramic pottery. Men wandered around the square, averting their eyes, and one of them, when Arip asked, said quietly, “They came in the morning, at dawn, with excavators…said that it was idolatry.”

  Arip squatted down in front of this display of pulverized history, and something dull and heavy rose from deep inside him, constricting his throat from below.

  He looked at the fragments of antique plates, ceramic flasks and lanterns, and grain-storage jugs with pictograms in relief, while from the direction of the newly arisen Madzhlis-ul-Shura, a row of olive-skinned emissaries advanced upon him, rattling their weapons.

  “Get away! Get away, brother!” shouted one of the men who had been standing by, observing the scene, and Arip obeyed blindly.

  With malevolent but vacant stares the emissaries watched as Arip walked away. Today the museum vaults and display cases had been plundered. Today the antique weapons and Kaitag embroidered textiles had been looted, along with the carved wooden boxes and carnelian-jet beads, nielloed gilded belts, and silver breastplates; knobbly, gem-encrusted bracelets and earrings with coiled serpents; kukems and dumchi, chokhtos and bronze pins. But the greatest loss were the bronze statuettes, cast millennia ago, of bare-breasted, full-buttocked nude female figures, laughing horsemen with dangling legs, dolls in adoring poses, ancient mountain men in tall turbans like crowns lifting horn goblets in the air, and homunculi, entirely naked, with protruding genitals. It had been decided by the emirs of the vilayat to melt down and recast the shameful figures into sculptures of Arabic script spelling out the name of Allah, in this way reinforcing the power of the one and only God.

  Leaving behind the leering emissaries and morose, shadowy witnesses, Arip headed for the basement cafeteria where he had agreed to meet Shamil. The people on the streets were discussing the ravaged museum treasures. Old women shushed them from the corners; townspeople trudged along with backs hunched, biting their lips, while the triumphant mujahideen, descendants of those same laughing horsemen, rejoiced at the justice that they had wrought.

  On the street that sloped down toward the sea and the ruins of the demolished railroad tracks, a giant bonfire raged, spewing flames to the sky.

  “A fire! Let’s hurry, Magashka, it’s really burning over there!” teenagers yelled, waving their hands wildly in the air.

  In front of the next museum, objects lay in a giant heap—European plaster Madonnas and Graces, American Indians on horseback, Christian saints and Soviet propaganda ceramics depicting sailors, slogans, and banners—and a bonfire raged, devouring paintings of people and animals. They melted and fused in the heat. A Turk holding a hookah and a Virgin Mary ascending to heaven, the eternal bird Gamayun and a woman with a bottle, an Italian girl at the bath, a still life with a hare, mountain tribesmen in raucous celebration on the site of Imam Shamil’s surrender, all of them enveloped in flames, along with soldiers storming Gimry village, Argutinsky’s detachment crossing over the crest of the Caucasus, and the Russian encampment at Gunib…Splinters flew up in the gray, ashy air; oil paint formed bubbles and dripped down flaming canvases like tears.

  “Look! Look there!” yelled the boys.

  “Thugs!” the women said under their breath, spitting in disgust.

  “Better hide your family photos,” anxious fathers whispered to one another.

  Arip walked past the fire without stopping, like a man intoxicated, suppressing the fury that was welling up inside him. Young men in camouflage watched him sullenly: “Le! Why so grouchy? Painting the living human form is haram!”

  Arip’s feet buzzed like loose piano strings, but he walked on, avoiding the staring eyes of the men in camouflage, his face a stony mask.

  3

  The little cellar café, which had by some miracle managed to stay open, hummed and whispered, and the air, stirred by the fan, was thick with sighs. Arip looked at the widened pupils of the people huddled together in a living, quivering cluster, sharing quiet, terrifying news.

  Everything, all the shops, bakeries, hair salons, shoe stores, music venues, and movie theaters, had been closed, their doors nailed shut, their owners intimidated. Amina, who had sold home-baked goods, had been cleaned out by the beards and ruined. She’d started wearing a dark khlamys, and wrinkles had spread over her face overnight. She looked like an old woman.

  The beauty salons had been destroyed; men lay in wait for their proprietresses on the street and dashed foul-smelling swill over them as they passed.

  The café patrons passed rumors back and forth. A group of girls who had for some reason dared to show up on the main square in cami tops had barely managed to escape with their lives from fanatical Arab public-morals militiamen.

  Female singers had either gone into hiding or had fled the country, and those who remained hid themselves behind the niqab and hastily married influential mujahideen. Weddings were celebrated without dancing or music, with no one present except for the religious officials. Two young mujahideen were caught dancing the lezginka, brought to trial, and sentenced to be flogged.

  Glossy magazines with advertisements for wedding salons, videographers, and photographers were destroyed, along with the flyers and
posters announcing concerts that used to be everywhere on the streets. The old Philharmonia concert hall was taken over by the sharia office; cellos and harpsichords went flying out the windows onto the railroad tracks, and the tracks themselves were blown up and lay crumpled on the ground.

  The rumors assaulted Arip’s ears, and he sat down next to Shamil in shock, as the latter shifted back and forth on his chair.

  “Arip, this is Lena, Kusium, Sharapudin Muradovich, this is…”

  The customers in the café exchanged greetings and resumed their arguments. A middle-aged man in a brown jacket whirled his yellow fists in the air and, stammering with the effort, harangued his listeners: “It’s the Islamic crusades, that’s what it is, the east taking over, it’s the end of democracy! We’re going backward, degenerating!”

  “The east isn’t the problem, that’s not the issue,” a balding little man with protruding ears angrily interrupted him.

  “What has the east got to do with it? We ourselves are to blame! And western special agents with all their conspiracies! They’ve done everything they can to incite mutual hatred between the Caucasians and the Russians, to tear the country apart. Bet they’re gloating now!”

  “Don’t make me laugh, Ali!” Kusium, made up and dressed in her finest, rapped on the table and tossed back her lush curls. “Like America needs to cultivate Islamic mujahideen. Think what you’re saying!”

  Yes, Kusium was wearing a fashionable suede skirt and her lips were gleaming, as though there was no chaos on the streets, no kufr, no fetva or gazavat; the cappuccino foam in their cups featured designs of hearts and flowers, as though oil-painted mountain dwellers and soldiers were not going up in flames just outside the door. Arip asked the young woman who owned the café to bring him some spiced tea, and fixed his eyes on his own fidgeting fingers.