Bride and Groom

by Alisa Ganieva

  The audience giggled.

  “I yell: ‘What the? You about frigging hacked through the bottom!’” His listeners’ warm reception emboldened the deputy. “But Khalilbek just stands there, doesn’t say a word.”

  The audience cackled and clapped, and the deputy blushed with pleasure.

  “That really hurt my feelings, I swear. I figured Khalilbek had gone berserk and tried to drown me. But later I realized why he had done it, and comprehended his great wisdom. The fish collective wrote off the yacht, I mean the boat … as defective, and in the meantime I sprang into action, pulled some strings, and …”

  The audience guffawed, drowning out the deputy’s words. “Nice work, atta boy!” “Saul to you!” “What a badass!” came from all sides.

  At this point I recalled that I had seen Khalilbek once with my own eyes. I’d been eight or so. At that time, Khalilbek had an empty house in our suburb, and he would occasionally order a car to pick him up from the middle of nowhere. Papa would drive out to some steppe village surrounded by abandoned oil towers, or a roadside motel with scorpions rustling within its pitted, sunbaked adobe walls. Mama got on his case for going on these expeditions; she assumed that Khalilbek was involved in criminal gang activity, and that Papa would get caught in the middle and have his head bashed in by some crook’s rifle butt.

  “Don’t you think it’s weird that he sends for you to go out to who knows where, when he has his own regular driver in the city?” She would nag.

  It wasn’t Papa, of course, that she was worried about. Mama was tormented with fears for her precious first-born, my brother, who at that time had not yet fallen into Lyusya’s trap and was still tied to his mother’s apron strings. They could kidnap him for ransom, figuring that his papa could get money from Khalilbek. They could take revenge on him for being the son of one of Khalilbek’s people. There were any number of reasons—Papa’s boss had plenty of enemies.

  Mama wasn’t worried about me. I was too much like Papa, and that irritated her. I even recall one time when, scrubbing me with a loofa in a Soviet enamel bathtub—which Granny had stashed away from ancient times—she exclaimed, almost with loathing: “You even have paws like his!’”

  Anyway, one time Mama was really down in the dumps. She lay flat on her back on her damp bed (the briny soil on which our suburb had grown would sometimes become saturated with swampy water, and the air would rot and fester). She lay there motionless, staring in horror at her wrist. Just under the surface of her fine skin a blue blood vessel throbbed in time with her heartbeat, and she lay in bed observing it, rapt, day and night. She imagined that her pulse was speeding up, beating faster and faster, and that any minute the vessels would suddenly pop, and her heart would stop, and that would be it.

  Infected by mama’s panic, we would summon doctors. They would come, take her blood pressure and listen to her heart, then conclude, with some impatience, that it was all nerves and prescribe herbal sedatives. Mama would complain behind their backs that they were liars and quacks; she would put on her best yellow dress, the one that her favorite seamstress had made, and take to her bed. Then she would summon my brother and make him sit at her bedside, to wait for death to come. One time, frightened by her racing pulse, she even dragged her folding bed out into the bathhouse with the intention of expiring in there, to make it easier when time came to wash her corpse.

  The days dragged on, but mama’s death drew no nearer. People in town started to cast suspicious looks and to come up with various conjectures. When neighbors came to call, Granny complained to them that a shaitan demon had taken root in her daughter-in-law, and was speaking through her. My brother lost his temper, and categorically refused to spend any more time in the bathhouse listening to her bitter tirades about the happiness that had eluded her with the late Magomedov—that same guy with the veterinarian son who had repelled me with his eggplant-shaped nose. It turns out that Magomedov had once courted Mama, but they hadn’t let Mama marry him, considering him an outsider. Frankly, she herself had shown no particular interest in him, but now, on the eve of her imagined demise, she saw the unrealized dream of family life with him as a paradise that had slipped through her grasp. Meanwhile, during the whole drama, Papa simply gave up bathing at home so as to avoid entering the bathhouse, where he would have to contemplate the sight of the figure in yellow, sprawled on the folding bed with its frail wrist raised to its pale nose.

  On one of those days he took me with him on one of his jobs for Khalilbek. He needed to deliver a suitcase to an eatery on the shore simply called the Tavern. Khalilbek, a man of medium height, solidly built, with a round, ordinary face, was there amid a crowd of regulars. He smiled, drew me close, pinched me on the cheek and gave a sigh of admiration:

  “Vakh, just look at that mole on her cheek, a perfect black dot!”

  For some reason that stirred up the Tavern regulars. One after another, they called me over and tousled my hair with their calloused hands. Papa stood with the suitcase next to the boss, keeping his distance, and somewhat taken aback by the men’s interest in me.

  Once I had made the full circle I again found myself between Khalilbek’s knees. He picked up a thick, green glass goblet and handed it to me, saying:

  “All right then, say a toast!”

  “What’s in the glass?” my father was concerned.

  “It’s just wine—specially for children, very weak.”

  Khalilbek looked me up and down with his big observant eyes, and I took his green glass, cast a glance around at everyone, and gulped down the sour brown liquid all at once.

  “Hey, what about the toast?” chortled the men.

  “Let her grow up first, then she’ll give a toast,” Papa answered for me.

  What happened after that has slipped from my memory, but that evening I came down with a fever. This brought Mama’s confinement in the bathhouse to an end. She immediately forgot about her pulse and the palpitations, stopped gazing at the artery in her wrist, and returned to the house, where she started in immediately on Papa:

  “What made you drag the child the devil-knows-where to those drunkards? Tell me, what will become of the children if I’m not around to take care of them?”

  Khalilbek’s wine had a strange effect on me. I got sick but felt no weakness or self-pity, and did not whine and complain. A bright sense of peace came over me, and I realized beyond the shadow of a doubt that nothing really mattered, ultimately. That I wouldn’t make a peep if Mama gave my favorite dolls to Aida, as she had often threatened to do. I imagined myself floating above the world, holding on by a string to a great balloon, and though I loved my parents and Granny, and—at times—even my brother, and ice cream with caramel sauce, still, I knew that I could not take them with me. And I did not want to.

  It was a strange sensation. It’s possible that I filled in the blanks much later. Meanwhile, as I sat there in the concert hall lost in my memories, a government bureaucrat named Ivan Petrovich Borisov had his shining moment on the stage. He grandly listed all the awards and medals that had been bestowed upon the glorious prisoner. Then the imam of one of the feuding local mosques—apparently the traditional one, the one on the Avenue—rose to the podium, where he prayed loudly for Khalilbek’s release. After that, the strains of the nashid sounded forth and several men in skullcaps appeared onstage to sing some traditional religious songs.

  Behind my back Timur consulted with one of the organizers who had run over to where we were in the back rows.

  “Hold on, Patya,” he barked into my ear from behind. “They’re about to call me up onstage. And after that we’ll go somewhere and sit and talk. You’re pretty smart, but you still have a lot to learn. And grow your hair out—it’s too short.”

  Having unburdened himself of everything that needed saying, Timur headed toward the stage, climbing over several rows of seats that had been improvised out of boxes. I decided to take advantage of his absence and slip away. But at this point Aida appeared by my side and g
rabbed me by the elbow:

  “Vai, Patya, he’s so hot!”

  “Who?”

  “What do you mean, ‘who?’ Your Timur, that’s who.”

  “Oh, he’s not mine,” I snapped. “And, anyway, I don’t even like him.”

  At that moment Timur was announced. I couldn’t make out his title—Youth Association Chairman, or Innovation Forum Fellow, or something. He blabbed something tedious and sickening.

  “We, the youth, you know, are honored to be contemporaries of the great Khalilbek …”

  “How can you not like him?” Aida hissed. “He’s going to go far. He’ll be a deputy someday, I guarantee it. You’ll live in the city, spend every day in beauty salons, getting facials and spa treatments …”

  Before she could finish her sentence, someone came up from behind, grabbed us by the shoulders, and pressed us together, laughing. We turned and there was Shakh. Shakh used to hang out with my brother, and often used to tease me, calling me a grasshopper. But Aida disliked him. Once, before her marriage, she had been head over heels in love with him. She lost her appetite, and used to hover secretly outside Shakh’s gate; she’d get all dressed up and just happen to run into him out on the street. But he just toyed with her feelings; either he wouldn’t notice her at all, or else he would all of a sudden seem obsessed with her and keep her on the phone for hours, driving her into a state of euphoric delirium.

  Poor Aida was suspended between heaven and hell, carrot and stick, tenderness and pain. She endured this torment for years, until finally she learned that in addition to countless lovers, some of them decent, if naïve girls, Shakh had maintained serious relationships with at least two women, and that he had absolutely no intention of marrying anyone, because he didn’t believe in pure feelings as such.

  Why he didn’t believe in them, I had no idea, but after five long nights of weeping and moaning, Aida came to her senses and accepted a proposal from a simple man who owned a food shop, and resolved to forget Shakh, the man of her dreams, once and for all.

  “How are you, Aidka? How’s the husband? Kids? And you, Patyulya? Why did you come by yourself? Where’s your brother and his wife?” He bombarded us with questions. Then he nodded toward a well-built, handsome young man standing nearby. “And this is Marat, in case you don’t know him. Marat, this is Patya. By the way, she worked in a courthouse in Moscow, though you’re already back here for good, right? And this is Aida.”

  Marat held his hand out to us in the European manner. His palm was soft and strong at the same time.

  “Are you enjoying yourself here?” he asked, addressing either both of us, or maybe just me, but if so, using the polite form of address.

  “It’s so great! The singers are amazing!” Aida pressed her hands to her chest.

  “Yes, it’s been fun. But I’m leaving!” I added.

  “Leaving? If you’re headed to the Avenue, I can go with you.” Marat suggested.

  I agreed without the slightest hesitation.

  “Of course!”

  Everything inside me rejoiced, and something leapt feverishly in my chest, up and down, up and down again. I got up from the box, hoping to slip out as quickly as possible from the auditorium, together with my new acquaintance.

  “We’re staying!” Shakh declared, sinking onto my newly vacant seat and glancing sideways at Aida.

  “No one gave you permission to sit here!” she cried.

  “What, so you’ve gotten married, had a few kids, now you’re all high and mighty? Queen Margot!” Shakh snickered.

  Aida tossed out some comeback, but I couldn’t make out the words. There was no chance of that, with a song blaring from onstage about a majestic eagle caught by bandits.

  “Shall we go, Patya? We’re friends, right?” Marat smiled. I just nodded and let myself smile back instinctively. We made our way through the crowd of people standing in the back, nodding to acquaintances as we passed; they had lost their inhibitions, and were scanning the room for girls they might potentially hook up with. If Marat hadn’t been next to me, I would have never made it to the exit. How strange, we had lived our whole lives next to each other, and I didn’t remember him at all.

  “Patya!” A shout came from behind. I turned, stood on tiptoe; back where we’d left Aida and Shakh, I saw Timur standing stock still, glaring at me. My heart plummeted to my heels, and I began to push through the crowd of gaping listeners. Marat seemed to have noticed nothing, but he matched my pace, and we made it outside.

  “Let’s take a detour,” I proposed, terrified that Timur would try to pursue us.

  Marat agreed readily, and we started briskly down the empty street that encircled our suburb, where cows stood placidly munching the wheatgrass by the roadside. I turned off my phone, which had begun vibrating furiously, and abandoned myself fully to my conversation with Marat. We interrupted each other, asked questions, told each other about our jobs, shared what we’d heard about the conflict between the mosques and about Khalilbek, talked about the mosquito-infested steppes around the town and the snowy Moscow winters. Marat acted out for me his long search for a private apartment in Moscow—his non-Russian name had scared off all the landlords. And I told him about how my colleagues in the court, except for Marina, of course, had recently begun half-jokingly to vilify the “blackasses” when we crossed paths in the cafeteria. Then someone would without fail announce: “You know Patya is from there too,” and those colleagues who had been stigmatizing our southern lands would cringe and start to justify themselves:

  “Don’t think that I’m some kind of fascist, they’re not all like that.”

  Or:

  “But Patya, you’re different, you’re like a regular Russian. No one would say you’re from Blackassia, so don’t take offense.”

  Marat laughed:

  “No, in my office practically everyone has visited the Caucasus, and they have a positive attitude.”

  “What kind of cases do you work on?”

  The most critical case they were handling was the murder of a human rights activist, a woman, which had been attracting a lot of attention in the press. Marat began to go into the details, but then we reached my house. On the other side of the gate I saw my father. He had his back turned to us and was digging around in the car’s engine, but could turn around at any moment and spot us together. Marat had to leave immediately. He asked for my number. I quietly blurted it out, then flew into the yard, overwhelmed with feelings teeming inside me, feelings I didn’t fully understand.

  “How was the concert, Patimat?” My father looked up from the engine.

  “Boring!”

  “Why would they even go to all that bother! Wait until they let the man out, then go dance and sing,” he muttered under his breath.

  I ducked into my room, flopped down on the bed, and turned on my phone: nineteen missed calls! Before I could even come up with a strategy, Timur called again. Without thinking, I accepted the call.

  “No hide nor hair of you!” he shouted into the phone. “Where did you go? Shakh told me that you split with some guy!”

  “I …”

  “‘I’ this, ‘I’ that … What had we agreed upon?”

  “Nothing. I was in a hurry.”

  “She was ‘in a hurry!’ If you had been in such a hurry, I would have walked you home!”

  “You didn’t need to. Timur, thank you for everything, I had a good time. Not sure what else you want.”

  “Hold on, why the official tone?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Talk normal!”

  “I am talking normal!”

  “What’s with the attitude? Like, who do you think you are? Don’t smart off to me!”

  “I’m being polite …”

  “Don’t interrupt me! When are we, like, going to get together? Who was that dude with you? Where did you go? I was looking for you!”

  “I am leaving for my aunt’s place in the city today, I won’t be able to see you any more.”
/>   “Don’t you lie to me. Like, hey, what’s going on? You double-crossing me?”

  Everything groaned inside me: how had I managed to get myself into this mess?

  “Sorry, Timur, Papa is calling! See you!” I said, and tossed the phone aside.

  When it rang again, I didn’t pick up. My hands were trembling.

  “Patya!” My mother’s voice came from the kitchen.

  “I’m here!”

  “Wandering the streets all day long like a tramp! Get in here, make some filling for the chudu!”

  I slipped out of the sparkly dress, threw on a robe and headed for the kitchen. My heart ached from a strange combination of joy and terror. I wanted to flee our town that minute, to get as far away as I could from Timur. But first, there were onions to fry, and potatoes to boil in their skins and scrub and mash together with dry tvorog bought from a neighbor to roll into balls …

  And then just wait and see.

  6. A CURSE

  Abdullaev Senior and his wife stood greeting their guests on the restaurant’s front porch. Marat’s mother kissed the hostess and plunged into the colorful crowd of familiar faces inside to exchange hugs, whispers, sighs, squeals, and gossip. Marat and his father stayed at the entrance to talk with the men about yesterday’s concert for Khalilbek.

  “If they allowed them to have a concert out here, that means that before you know it, they’ll be having them in the city. And at that point they’ll release our hero,” predicted some.

  “You’ll see, this whole story with the arrest is just a clever move to distract people from the overall mess we’re in,” claimed some know-it-alls.

  “They say that the real Khalilbek is free, and the guy in prison is just a lookalike they’ve put in there,” others whispered.