Bride and Groom

by Alisa Ganieva

  “How could she do anything?”

  “She invited her brother to come see her; he’s a musician too, he performs in the city, you know him.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Her husband had forbidden Zaripat to have any contact with him. So anyway, the brother comes to see her in the hospital, and she whispers to him, ‘I know I’m dying, grant me one last wish.’”

  “What was the wish?”

  “She wanted to sing! So her brother brings instruments and recording equipment to the hospital room, and sets everything up right there, and sure enough, Zaripat starts to sing! I don’t have the recording, but Maga played it for me. I’ll Bluetooth you the file. Patya-a-a, if you only could hear her sing! Better than when she was healthy! It’s hard to believe she’s at death’s door. It’s like Allah sent strength to her lungs, I’m telling you!”

  The door slammed. Amishka’s mama was home.

  “I’ll pretend I’m asleep,” said our friend anxiously, wiping the salty moisture from her face and turning to face the wall, “or mama will know I’ve been crying again.”

  We comforted her one last time and left her to lie there motionless. Aida and I lingered at the gate, sighing and clucking. We sighed over Zaripat’s sudden illumination.

  We tried without success to remember ugly Sidratka. It’s possible that Amishka had thought her up or had mixed her up with someone else.

  “Well, Allah grant everything works out okay for her, she’s such a fool.” Aida sent up yet another prayer to Allah. “You too, Patya, come on, get married. I’m raising my third child already, and here you are … You won’t find anyone in Moscow, they wasted a whole year sending you there. So, tell me: which of our local guys might appeal to you?”

  “I don’t know,” I murmured. “This guy Timur is writing me, he says he’s from here, but I don’t remember him.”

  “Timur who?” Aida perked up.

  “He’s an activist. He’s in some kind of political group or association.”

  “A-a-a,” Aida nodded her turban. “I know him. He’s quite the speaker, gets all fired up. There’s going to be a meeting in the club in a couple of days. That’s it, Patulya; get yourself dressed up and go to the meeting, absolutely. Not in that dress, though. Find something pretty, how about your blue one with the sparkles? And if the baby goes to sleep, I’ll stop in too, to have a look at you and him.”

  She winked. I already regretted saying anything. Now she’d start jabbering, would tell everyone in the neighborhood about it. And this Timur could very well turn out to be some windbag. But I decided to go to the meeting anyway, even without Aida’s pep talk. If for nothing more than to have something to do.

  We said goodbye, and when I got home my mother met me with predictable excitement:

  “Where were you? Did you go to Aida’s? Magomedov’s wife already called me and told me that you made a real impression on her kids, and that her son really likes you!”

  “Mama, he didn’t say a word the whole time,” I brushed her aside.

  “Again! Picky, picky. Nothing but a prince will do!” Mama was mad. “Soon even the old men won’t look at you! And in three or four years you’ll be barren, like Lyusya!”

  “What’s that all about?”

  But Mama just waved her hand melodramatically in the air and disappeared into the back room. Where the yellow-paged mystery novels awaited her. I took a few moments to think, then went to find Papa or Granny. They were hiding somewhere, like snails, within the plaster-spackled walls of the house.

  4: OUT VISITING

  The Shakhovs lived in a whitewashed six-story apartment building on the central city square, nestled behind a disorderly clutter of shacks and garages. Under a pitted acacia tree, whose branches occasionally dropped little pods rattling with seeds onto the ground, children in bright-colored T-shirts were playing Nine Stones. They had chalked a square on the asphalt, had divided it into parts—as for Tic-Tac-Toe—and were raucously erecting a little tower out of pebbles in the center square. As he walked past the cluster of little players squatting on their haunches, Marat tried to recall the rules, but he could only remember shreds: Rusik-the-Nail is standing by the rubble of a toppled tower aiming a ball at Marat, and Marat is hastily trying to set out the stones in each sector before his opponent can “tag” him.

  Marat and his mother proceeded up a set of neat, gently rising steps through the entryway. Some of the doors had old-fashioned labels nailed to them: PROF. OMAROV G.G., ENGINEER ISAEV M.A. … Marat’s mother, who had put on a long, openwork shawl for the somber occasion—they were calling on the Shakhovs, as they had agreed, to convey their condolences upon the death of their uncle—followed him up the stairs, clutching onto the railings and voicing a never-ending litany of instructions:

  “Remember, the girl’s name is Sabrina, don’t get it mixed up.”

  The door opened and Shakhov’s wife, a withered woman with short hair, appeared. She assessed Marat quickly with her sharp eyes and nodded a greeting, then kissed his mother, who was whispering words of sympathy, and indicated a couple pairs of slippers for them to put on. The walls of the small entryway were lined with wooden shelves, laden with medical reference books; above them hung some black-and-white photographs. From one of them a large bearded man wearing a hat and a natty suit with a boutonniere frowned suspiciously out at Marat. This was Shakhov’s late father, a musical theater director, folk song collector, Don Juan, and great carnivore.

  He had gone on numerous expeditions in quest of unknown melodies, traveling far and wide with phonograph cylinders, audio recording devices, sheaves of notebooks, and bundles of dried mountain sausage. Every day, rumor had it, Shakhov Senior would eat an entire ram’s head, and after a successful premiere he would also down a hefty serving of boiled tripe, which they would prepare for him in a special kitchenette installed in the theater for that purpose. Shakhov Junior vehemently denied these tall tales and claimed that throughout his life his father had suffered from gastritis and that there was no way he could have digested that many rams’ heads, even if he had wanted to.

  “And plus, how could we have gotten hold of so many sheep? We didn’t have that kind of money anyway!”

  It was hard to say whether he was telling the truth. Shakhov had worked at one time in the military industry and had retired with medals for some top-secret heroism; all he could do was talk about the former privileges he’d had and lost. The moment he sat down with Marat at the sparsely set table, he started in complaining about the workers at the torpedo factory who had dismantled and sold everything down to the last bolt.

  “Asses! Embezzlers!” he wailed, rolling his eyes. “Traitors to the motherland!”

  “You’re just asking for trouble, talking like that!” His dried-up wife shrugged wearily as she trudged back and forth from threshold to table.

  Marat’s mother would go along with anything. She added fuel to the fire:

  “You’re so right, they’re just plain criminals! That’s what I tell Aselder all the time. He really wanted to come to see you, but there’s some kind of bedlam going on in the Institute over that damned Khalilbek.”

  “Khalilbek? So you think he’s guilty too?”

  “Absolutely, completely guilty of everything. You don’t think so?” Marat’s mother was getting worked up.

  “What about you?” Shakhov addressed Marat.

  “No, I don’t. The case is too complicated, and the prosecution has its facts wrong. It’s mostly rumors, malicious gossip.”

  “You’re so right, let me shake your hand!” Shakhov squeezed Marat’s palm tightly. “Don’t let those women convict the man prematurely!”

  “Where’s Sabrinochka?” Marat’s mother changed the subject.

  “She’s here, Khadizha,” Shakhov’s wife responded from the kitchen. “She’s in her room studying. Probably didn’t hear you come in. Sabrina! Sabrina!”

  “Enough! Stop calling her,” muttered Shakhov. “She’s not a princess,
she ought to understand that we have guests.”

  The living room also had an array of dark photographs on the walls. Again the theater director, this time in jodhpurs and riding boots, with a silver belt around his ample waist. He stood proudly against a background of seven or eight smiling, tambourine-bearing chorus girls in bright-colored, floor-length scarves.

  Next to that one hung a portrait of Shakhov’s deceased uncle, captured in his younger years astride a muscular black mare. He was a passionate equestrian, an expert on Akhal-Tekes—tall, hardy, long-legged horses with no manes. At the time of the photo, his career had just started to take off, but then everything came crashing down because of one careless phrase.

  Shakhov’s uncle had been twenty; he was with some friends from the stud farms who were descendants of herdsmen from the Atly-Boyun Pass. They had taken the horses to the seashore for a therapeutic dip in the surf. While some guys held the horses, others swam naked, laughing and roughhousing. Uncle nodded downward at his male pride, leered, and blurted out:

  “Stands there erect like Stalin on the tribune!”

  The joke cost Uncle Shakhov ten years in the camps. Construction of the Igarka-Salekhard Railway, frostbite, exhaustion … But he stubbornly returned to life and made it to advanced old age, until, covered with wrinkles, childless, and rail thin—you could count his ribs—he finally died in his sleep from a heart attack. Next to his stout elder brother, the theater director, he had looked like a candle-wick.

  Long-browed Sabrina entered the room reluctantly, with an air of forced civility. Shakhov’s wife was serving turkey with mashed potatoes and fresh vegetables. Everyone sat around the table, and Shakhov resumed his rant:

  “I arrive at the plant, and everything is in a state of neglect. No one there to meet me and show me around. I used to kick open the director’s door with my knee. I had a company car, a Volga with a special banner. Whenever the chauffeur would be stopped for speeding, they’d see my officer’s stripes and immediately salute me, ‘Oh, excuse me sir, have a good trip.’ So what do I care about our local nobodies if I’ve got generals in Moscow bowing down to me? You, Marat, sit up there in your offices and have no idea who is who. By the way, what’s the latest on that big case—the murder of the human rights activist? She must have been poking her nose in the wrong places and gotten into some deep shit. Tell me, is the suspect guilty?”

  “No.”

  “Well you’re a lawyer, you have to say that. But tell me straight.”

  “It’s really complicated. There are a lot of details. All I can say is that it’s going to be tough for the defense, because the masterminds are way up high.”

  “Well with us it’s always like that, shift the blame onto someone else. Let the higher-ups take the rap, right? That’s your logic. Same thing with Khalilbek. They’ve tried to pin everything they can on him. By the way, he and I were practically friends. Him, me, Ivan Petrovich Borisov … A couple of years ago the three of us got in a motorboat and took off full speed out into the open sea to take a look at the eighth shop.”

  Marat recalled the eighth shop of the defense plant: decrepit with age, it towered over the sea three kilometers from the shore, where it stood atop a gigantic reinforced concrete box filled with water, looking just like a great stone duck. In the shop’s heyday, they used to test the torpedoes by releasing them from the shop’s bowels into the depths of the Caspian. And during storms the workers would come up to the surface in freight elevators and take shelter in rooms on the upper level.

  Indeed, from a distance the monster facility’s watch tower, which now served as a perch for raucous cormorants, looked a lot like a duck’s beak poking up out of the water. When he was a boy and had seen it from the shore, Marat had imagined that the duck was about to bend over and peck at the horizon, right at the point where the sea met the sky. The shop had been abandoned after World War II, but Shakhov claimed that until very recently you could still see polished parquet floors, and even the remnants of furniture, in the facility’s cafeteria and the library.

  Marat’s mother tried to engage Shakhov’s wife and Sabrina in conversation. Sabrina sat stiffly, with a grim expression on her face. To judge from the shreds of conversation that Marat was able to catch, they were talking about Uncle Shakhov’s memorial banquet. Marat’s mother prattled:

  “Well, what are guests usually given when they come to pay their respects? Sugar and towels, right? Three kilograms each of sugar and towels. But when you’re grieving, when there’s a tragedy, of course it can be hard to find them for a good price. So I bought some for myself in advance.”

  “How could you, Khadizha!”

  “What’s wrong with it? No one knows when we’re going to die. Here today, gone tomorrow. And Aselder is hopeless when it comes to managing things, he’d buy the wrong gifts, he wouldn’t know how to make arrangements, and he’d bring shame down upon the whole family. He had a son on the side; why bother trying to hide it? Everyone knows. He was a good boy, Adik, lived next door to us. He was walking one night down the road, and along comes our superman Khalilbek in a jeep. Ran over him, killed him.”

  “That’s horrible, horrible!” moaned Shakhov’s wife.

  “Killed him. And a cop got his house. Adik’s wife secretly sold it to a particularly pushy one, on the sly. And then off she goes, before you could blink an eye, to the mountain pasturelands. With both kids. Aselder wasn’t paying attention, and he missed his chance to prevent it. anyway, I bought a couple of sacks of men’s socks just in case, to have them to give guests at my funeral. Towels, too, sets of three. You know: one for your face, one for your hands, and the third for you know where.”

  Mother glanced briefly down at her belly. Sabrina blushed and turned away in disgust.

  “What, you think you had a claim on the boy’s house?” Shakhov’s wife asked primly.

  “What are you talking about? That colonel from the Sixth Department started renovating it immediately. We’ve already forgotten about it.”

  Shakhov, who was enumerating his awards and honors to Marat as he ate, overheard this last sentence and perked up.

  “Hey, was that the same colonel from your town who climbed in through the window to that woman who was a terrorist?”

  “What are you talking about, Papa? She was just a woman in a niqab,” Sabrina corrected him.

  “There’s no such thing as ‘just’ a girl in a niqab around here.” Shakhov struck the table with his fist. “They are all future terrorists. Especially that one. A black widow. She’s already had two husbands killed in the woods.”

  “Wait, the colonel climbed in the window to see a black widow? But why?” Marat looked up from his plate.

  “Well, we don’t know for sure whether he did or not. It’s just something people are blabbing about.”

  “He did, Papa, you know he did,” Sabrina interjected. “He hauled her out to be interrogated, She was in there with her children and girlfriends … He dragged her out, took her to the police department, and there …”

  Sabrina broke off.

  “Raped her,” Shakhov’s wife finished the sentence.

  “Oi, oi, oi,” Shakhov whirled around on his chair. “So now we have human rights activists getting in on the act. Anyway, it has yet to be proven whether he raped her or not. And even if he did, maybe she led him on, to create a scandal. These widows of the forest militants are worse than streetwalkers, they’ll throw themselves at anyone and everyone.”

  “Papa!” Sabrina frowned.

  “What? Everyone is moaning and groaning about police brutality. Meanwhile, our boys in the police are dying heroic deaths to protect us from these criminals in niqabs. It’s all an act. The bearded guys are only pretending to be peaceful Muslims, pure as the driven snow, but look at them! All they can do is loiter around the mosques and complain about the government: ‘Taghut, taghut, taghut …’”

  “What if there’s good reason for it?” Sabrina was still upset.

  “They can alway
s dream up some reason. Like they’re being kidnapped. Or beaten up. Attacked with grenades. Tortured without cause—with no basis whatsoever, just for observing Sharia law. Don’t make me laugh, please.”

  “You’re a lawyer, right?” Suddenly, Sabrina addressed Marat. “So why are you sitting up there in Moscow making money on those high-profile cases, instead of defending the violated rights of your fellow Muslims in your own home town?”

  “Muslims?”

  “The police here beat up people who go to oppositional mosques. It’s happening everywhere in the district. But it’s especially bad in your suburb.”

  “The mosque ‘across the tracks’ is Wahhabi,” Marat parried weakly; the attack had come out of nowhere.

  “What do you mean, Wahhabi? That’s just a word in the news. It’s obvious you live in Moscow. They’re not Wahhabis, they’re truth-seekers. The real bandits are in the government offices. Do you think a single one of them is going to end up in prison? I hope they keep this Khalilbek locked up forever!”

  “Sabrina,” Shakhov’s wife tried to calm her daughter down.

  “By the way, Khalilbek was helping those truth-seekers of yours. He even gave them money for their mosque,” Marat added, with a note of sarcasm.

  “He was playing both sides, yours and ours, he’s a real double-dealer.” Sabrina was unfazed.

  “What are you on about, you pip-squeak?” Shakhov suddenly tuned in to the conversation.

  “Well, youngsters often go astray,” jabbered Marat’s mother, obviously trying to clear the air. “I totally agree about Khalilbek, he’s a sly one. He set up a lottery scam in town, can you imagine? And he wouldn’t let Aselder, who was his associate at one point, sell some really valuable stocks. Others made a killing, and here we are living on nothing.”

  “Mama!” Marat flared up. “Khalilbek is accused of serial murders, of large-scale corruption, and you’re on and on about stocks and casinos!”

  Shakhov sprang up from his chair and started pacing back and forth.