For some reason the boys saw the shoemaker, who presided there in his booth like a sentry, as something like the personification of evil, a detested fiend who deserved the most ruthless punishment. They used to climb up onto the booth from behind, two or three at a time, and seek out a familiar crack in the roof. Giggling wildly, they would insert the nozzle of a plastic pitcher that they’d stolen from a public toilet, and pour water down onto the villain’s head. Some of the miscreants preferred to bombard the old man with scraps of paper they’d set on fire, shoving them through the same unfortunate crack. The shoemaker would rush out brandishing his hammer. Cursing and jabbering in his dialect, he would jump up and down, attempting futilely to grab the delinquents by their heels.
It was great fun, especially when the boys would make a run for it. One of them would mouth off at the old man to distract him, while the others would spring down from the roof and take to their heels, sputtering and choking with laughter. The infuriated victim could never get a good enough look at them to identify them later, though one time he did manage to grab hold of Rusik’s hat; he tucked it tightly under his arm and, waving his fist with a big cobbler’s nail sticking out of it, howled bloody murder:
“I nail bash you noggin!”
Rusik begged him for his hat, but the shoemaker just kept on yelling:
“Nail, noggin! Nail, noggin!”
Marat couldn’t recall what happened next, but the nickname took root once and for all, just like a real nail.
“Rusik, salam!” He thwacked the little table with his palm.
Rusik turned, and the somber wrinkle on his forehead gently dissipated. Exclamations and handshakes ensued. It turned out that he was teaching at the Kizlyar branch of the university; he had just finished exams, and was headed home. Marat immediately forgot which subject Rusik was teaching—something having to do with economics. He was eager to hear the latest news from home.
“So Rusik, tell me, did they manage to lock Khalilbek up? Is he serving time?”
“Sure is! Right outside town, in our own prison!”
“Are you kidding me? No way!”
“We can’t believe it either. No one can. Everyone’s afraid, they’re expecting him to be released at any moment. People are sending collective letters of support, just in case.”
Yes, Khalilbek was omnipotent, omnipresent, and more. He had no official position, but somehow controlled the entire real estate market in our hometown and in the big city, as well as all the government officials of every rank and role. He was everywhere at once, in every imaginable office; he authored and published books on public improvements and on the secrets of worldwide success, ruled over bureaucrats, hobnobbed—so it was said—with bandits, looked after sick children and babies in hospitals he endowed, and turned the heads of pop singers and entertainers. The dark rumors that swirled around him only added to his stature and vigor. Without Khalilbek’s approval no one would take a step in the district, buy land, or organize a conference. He had a finger in every pie and knew the details of the most minor matters; at the same time, he was behind all major shifts in power, missing persons cases, and fateful decisions.
At one time Marat’s father had known Khalilbek personally, but an unpleasant incident—accident, actually—had put an end to their association. Marat had had a neighbor, Adik. He was a timid kid whom the neighborhood boys bullied and abused constantly, swearing at him and calling his mother a whore. Adik lived with his grandfather. No one knew who his father was, and his mother, fleeing gossip, had roamed Russia far and wide before finally returning home, mortally ill. Adik was by then already close to graduation. He was terribly ashamed of his mother, but by all indications had forgiven her. When she died from tuberculosis shortly after her return, he was beside himself with grief.
When Adik was little, the neighborhood boys used to beat him up constantly. As his neighbor, Marat occasionally found himself called upon to protect him from the blows. Which meant that Adik followed him around like a shadow, for his own protection. Marat’s parents also took Adik in, welcomed him into their home, and fed and cared for him.
Adik’s grandfather, who had raised him, died just before his mother. Word was, he had built the very prison where Khalilbek was currently serving time. He had been an architect and a passionate scholar of Arabic culture who kept rare medieval manuscripts, not only Ajam texts, but other, more esoteric documents, a thousand years old, written on locally produced paper in the ancient alphabet of Caucasian Albania. For this dubious attraction to the pre-revolutionary past he had paid with his position in the construction administration and had been exiled from the city to our town. The manuscripts were confiscated and turned over to the Soviet archives, and subsequently were either destroyed or mislaid.
Marat had only a faint memory of Adik’s grandfather; he recalled his suspenders, and once had caught a glimpse of an orthopedic corset under his shirt, a memento from the Battle of Stalingrad. The former architect was reclusive, and there really wasn’t anyone in the area for him to talk to. The people in town were nothing special, manual workers who had been forcibly resettled from the inaccessible mountains and who had dissolved into the swampy steppe. No cake here, just drippings from the roasting pan.
But Adik stood out vividly in Marat’s memory. After graduation, the boy hadn’t pursued a higher education; he started working as a carpenter in town. Early on, he married a taciturn, big-bosomed girl his age whom Marat’s mother had chosen for him. Marat was constantly lending him money, and Adik would mumble in his timid, quiet voice that he would pay him back, but of course he never did. Then Marat moved to Moscow and took a job as an associate in a law office. Occasionally, on trips back home, he would help Adik protect himself from various people in town who had set sights on his little house and were trying to smoke him out of there any way they could.
Things reached the breaking point one summer when, on one of his trips home from Moscow, Marat discovered that Adik—who, though he’d started a family, was still quite young—had mysteriously come into an impressive amount of money. Adik claimed that he had opened up a music kiosk in the city, but this story was beyond pathetic, especially since the money had been enough for a black Lada Priora with the kind of license plate everyone craved, but could not afford. Adik tooled idly around the Avenue in the car, as though to spite all those boys who had tormented and teased him during his childhood. He met Marat in a neatly pressed shirt and led him into the kitchen, where with great ceremony he produced a wad of rubles from a tin can labeled, in red, RICE.
“Paid back with interest!”
Marat refused to take it at first, but Adik took offense and nearly lost his temper, so he gave in. Adik had undertaken a completely unnecessary and hasty construction project in his yard. He claimed that he was building a guesthouse, though he and his wife never had anyone over. They led a quiet, secretive life; even their small children—who were very close in age—never seemed to cry. But then Khalilbek showed up in town, where he had a mansion, vacant and locked up, just around the corner from Marat’s house. No one knew what had provoked him to get behind the wheel and speed out here alone late one night without his driver and bodyguards. Or how it happened that Adik had ended up under his wheels at that godforsaken hour. Of course, everything had been hushed up. Marat’s father had tried to figure out what happened, but he was no match for Khalilbek. Adik was laid to rest, and that was that.
After the funeral, though, something unexpected came to light. Someone whispered to Marat that Adik had been, in fact, his half-brother—that the man who knocked up this wanton, tubercular woman was his own father. Stranger still, his mother not only knew about it, but even defended his father. She said that you could understand Aselder; he dreamed of children, but she had been unable to give him any after Marat. She had loved Adik as though he were her own child, and after his death, she couldn’t stop talking about him, mourned him, and cried over him almost every day. She wanted to take in the children, but Adik’s
wife had vanished with them immediately after the forty-day mourning period. They had gone away to the kutan.
Generally speaking, Marat’s family had personal accounts to settle with Khalilbek. Rusik couldn’t follow all the nuances. After questioning Marat about Moscow and the law office, his morose mood returned. Scratching his stubbly chin, he stared out the window at the vast wastelands flying past.
Suddenly, he snorted: “To hell with this Khalilbek guy. I have something else to worry about. Our local muttonheads. You know that I live ‘across the tracks,’ and over there they have … it’s like an oppositional mosque. They’re on me every day, like, ‘Why aren’t you with us?’ But I don’t go to the other mosque either, the one on the Avenue. I work all day, every day, either at class in Kizlyar, or in the city at the committee. I ride my bike there, and that sets them off too. ‘Why do you go by bike? Why don’t you wear a suit?’ And at home it’s on and on about ‘When are you going to get married? When are you going to get married?’ Not to mention, of course, they want me to marry one of our girls, to keep it in our nationality. And word just got out around town that that I go to tango lessons. Ooooh, everywhere I go people whisper and point …”
“So move away already!”
“Easy for you to say. You think they’ll let me out of their clutches that easily? The only son, little sisters … my parents have dug in their heels.”
“Stop whining, then.”
Marat smirked. The guy was known for his eccentricities. He held the locals in contempt, didn’t go to the mosque, conducted romances with divorced artsy types in the city, and had a fancy way of talking, with no local accent, like a proper Russian. He would get caught up in various obsessions, like collecting old maps, or numismatics, or winter swims in the sea, as though to set himself apart and to provoke everyone around him. But he would quickly abandon each new fad and lock himself in at home, where he’d mope around for days. Neither his biking to work in the city (thirty kilometers, one way, on a dirt road) nor the tango lessons surprised Marat. He questioned him about the matchmaking:
“So, have they found you a bride?”
“They’re constantly dredging up some new girl and forcing her on me,” Rusik grimaced, “like at the zoo.”
“I’m actually on my way to getting married too.”
“You, married? Who’s the lucky girl?”
“Don’t know yet. I have to come up with someone pretty soon. The date’s been set, the banquet hall reserved. The only thing missing is the bride.” Marat briefed Rusik hastily, rolling yesterday’s bread crumbs into little balls on the table.
People passed up and down the aisle with towels and toothbrushes, corn puffs and cell phones, laughing and calling out to one another, and clattering tea glasses in their metalwork holders.
“Are you shitting me?” blurted Rusik.
“Ask my folks. Every summer when I come, it’s a huge battle, and I barely escape. This time they went ahead and reserved a banquet hall. If I don’t find someone to marry, the money goes down the tubes. The hall is nothing fancy, and it’s off the beaten track, the best ones get snapped up a year in advance. But it will hold a thousand guests. My father even sold a car to get cash for the deposit. I’m also trying to save up. See? Here I am in economy class.” Marat gave a nervous laugh.
“I wouldn’t have expected it of you, Marat! How did you let yourself get roped into that?”
“Actually I’m not opposed. Let them get me married. I’ve had enough of living on my own.”
Rusik stared dumbfounded at his friend for several seconds, then flicked his hair, frowned, and climbed up onto the upper bunk. Marat got up and stretched, then picked up the tea glasses and took them, clinking in their holders, to the hot water urn—the “Titan,” as the conductors called it. The heat in the car was oppressive. Fat tradeswomen roamed the aisles with huge checkered plastic luggage bags, hawking leopard-print chiffon scarfs to the female passengers. The customers fingered the cloth and consulted one another, rustling their money.
“Vatsok, time for tea?” shouted Marat’s fellow-traveler from overhead, flashing his yellow heels on his way down.
“Brilliant deduction, bro,” laughed Marat.
When Marat came back with the tea, Rusik sat up and leaned his elbows on the table. They stirred in the sugar.
“What’s all this trouble in town between the mosques? Some kind of brawl?” Marat scratched himself lazily and settled down on his bunk.
“Brawls, you mean. You know how it is there. There was one mosque, and they selected an imam.”
“And?”
“And then some misunderstandings arose between the tukhum that built the mosque and the new imam. Supposedly over the question of free will, but no one knows the real reason.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Look. The people of that tukhum believe that only Allah performs all actions, even those that human beings would seem to be responsible for. In other words, everything is predestined from above and none of us have any free will.”
“The imam disagreed?”
“The imam taught that Allah learns about human actions only after they are completed. And there was something else, too, about the created nature of the Qur’an. Something like, the meaning is eternal, but the words that express it are created and not eternal.”
“So that’s what they fought over?”
Rusik snorted:
“At first the imam’s opponents made a point of shunning the mosque, and they started intimidating people, saying that the imam was a Wahhabi. That happened several years ago, and it’s not such a big deal any more, but at the time it was like being convicted and sentenced. Though if you get into the actual theology of it, he’s not a Wahhabi at all, rather something like a Qadariyah. Or, what do they call it, a Mutazilite. It doesn’t really matter. Anyway, they brought together athletes from the whole district, including some world champions and even an Olympic gold medalist. They called in the riot police and incited a knockdown, drag-out fight right inside the mosque, according to the victims.”
“I heard about that, but why the riot police?”
“To trap the guys and get them on their official records. Of course they removed the imam. Then his adherents quit the mosque and started their own, a new one, ‘across the tracks.’ Rumor has it the money came from Khalilbek. Later, though, they forced out the imam.”
“From the new mosque too?”
“Yeah, when push came to shove, the mosque across the tracks really had become Wahhabi. He didn’t see eye-to-eye with the congregation.”
“So what was the last fight about? Was there a reason for it?”
“Just internal squabbles. A guy from the mosque on the Avenue got into a spat with someone from ‘across the tracks.’ That’s where the whole thing started—right in front of me, after the evening prayer. I had had an argument with my father, he’d been nagging me about getting married, and I’d gone out for a walk. I’m standing there and people are pouring out of the mosque.”
“‘Across the tracks?’”
“Yeah. Meanwhile, a mob gathered on the other side of the tracks, it had to be five hundred people. Right, I think, things are going to get ugly now. I’m standing there watching, and someone yells ‘Allahu Akhbar,’ and they rush at each other from both sides and start throwing stones. Shooting their guns in the air, shouting … I run over along with some other onlookers to try to calm things down, to separate them. Right then a dozen or so cops drive up in Ural military trucks. My neighbor said later that the cops were in on it, in cahoots with the guys from the Avenue. But I’m sick and tired of it all. More than you know!”
“Rusik, take it easy, they won’t touch you.”
“What do you mean, they won’t? Last week my neighbor, the same one, comes running over and he’s freaking out, like, ‘Mirzik’s been kidnapped! They kidnapped him! He called in the evening on his way home, he said was going to pick up some bread, and would be home in ten minutes—and that
’s the last we heard from him!’”
“Oh, I know Mirzik!”
“Everyone knows him! Bearded guy, has two wives. So anyway, Mirzik goes missing, and sure enough, the usual story: the traffic police try to stop a suspicious-looking car entering the city, the driver opens fire, and they return fire and kill him. Turns out it was Mirzik.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“My neighbor goes on and on about how it’s not true, it was a set-up. That’s what they always say, but who’s to know what really happened? Anyway, so now they want to make him into some kind of saint. He goes, ‘Write an article about Mirzik, that’s something you can do.’ I try to explain: ‘I’ve never written an article in my life, I’m just a college teacher.’ But they just lost it. Blah, blah, blah, what a fine man he was. And, oh, I’ve got to put something in about the strawberry cake.”
“What’s with the cake?”
“Well, my neighbor’s wife, she’s about to have a baby. And she starts craving strawberry cake, so she writes about it in some social media group she’s in. And Mirzik’s wife reads about it and tells Mirzik. They’re out in the car on their way somewhere. And supposedly Mirzik pulls a U-ey right then and there, and heads straight to the bakery to get her just what she wants.”
“An angel, not a man.”
“That’s not the word for it. Now they’re after me because I refused to write the article. There’s other stuff, too, it’s built up. My tango lessons …”
Marat brushed him off:
“Just cave, Rusik, do what they say!” he joked.
“The only thing that saved me was that I had ghost-written dissertations for Khalilbek’s people to sign. They all knew about it and didn’t lay a hand on me—they were afraid of Khalilbek. But now he’s in prison …”
Outside the window, they passed a canal lined with weeping willows and piles of garbage. Cows chewed their cud in silhouette.
“We’re almost there,” noted Marat.
Bride and Groom Page 3