Bride and Groom

by Alisa Ganieva

  “Or Adik from our town?”

  “Patimat, you’re not being rational. You’re judging on matters you don’t understand,” Granny admonished me sternly.

  “People can never explain Khidr’s actions when they witness them. They are bewildered, and they criticize him. Because they cannot see the essence. And then later it turns out that Khidr was right.”

  “How can it be right to kill someone?”

  Neither Granny nor the neighbors could come up with an answer, and so they resumed their collective task, genially busying themselves over the basins of shelled seeds.

  “Patya, go make some tea!” commanded the older neighbor.

  I obediently went to the kitchen, turned on the electric samovar, and got out the broadleaf green tea, cloves, black peppercorns, little bags of dried marjoram and mint, sage, thyme, bay leaf, and a jar of caraway. Scald the inside of a teapot with hot water, add just a pinch or a couple of pieces of each herb, pour boiling water over the mixture, then set it on a distributor over a low flame …

  Why didn’t Marat call? Had that loathsome Timur driven him away? I thought about it day and night, slipping into dreams and fantasies about how we’d met so unexpectedly, imagining confessions of love and other sentimental scenes. The more naïve the pictures in my mind, the easier it was to endure the uncertainty of the present.

  One of the neighbors—the one who had spread the news about Abdullaev’s broken engagement—came into the kitchen and started in on me: “Well, Patya, how are things with you in general?”

  “Fine, thank you.”

  “What’s keeping you from getting married?”

  “Well …”

  “Look, Elmira waited until she turned twenty-eight and now she can’t get pregnant.”

  “Not everybody can.”

  “No one can, if they wait too long! Look at the ecology! For some it’s a problem with the ovaries, for others it’s the cervix—they simply can’t carry a baby to term.”

  I said nothing, hoping that if I didn’t react, the neighbor would give up. But she persevered. She inspected Mama’s kitchen utensils, the towel hooks, the glass canisters of whole grains, and the Balkhar clay figurines on the shelves. Then she sat down, crossed her legs, and stared at my shaggy head.

  “Where did you get that haircut? In Moscow?”

  “Yes …”

  “Why did you do it? Is it the fashion?”

  “I don’t know. That’s just the way they cut it, that’s all.”

  “So how do you dry it? Do you use a hair-dryer or do you towel-dry it?”

  “Just air dry. It dries fast.”

  “Of course it does,” the neighbor nodded. “It’s so thin—not much to speak of, is it?”

  Then she got up and watched over my shoulder as I took the teapot off the distributor and got out the tea glasses.

  “You brewed it with herbs, right? My mother-in-law doesn’t like it that way. She gets mad if I use herbs …”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “But sometimes I do it for my husband. There’s a mixture you can make just for men, to keep them from slipping off the path and make sure they love only their wives.”

  “How does that work?”

  “When you get married, I’ll tell you. I know a lot of formulas. Even Liuda came to see me, the one whose daughter was dumped by her fiancé.”

  “Amishka’s mama?”

  “Yes. She asked for something really strong that could calm her daughter down.”

  “Did it work?”

  “They sent her to the mountains. There’s some distant relative up there who is willing to marry her. Rumors from here don’t always make it all the way up there.”

  “What rumors?”

  “You know yourself. That Amishka is not a virgin.”

  I sighed audibly. I was sick and tired of the neighbor’s jabbering. I was ready to fly out onto the street this very minute, even if it sent me straight into Timur’s clutches.

  “Do you wear pants outside, too?” continued the neighbor, changing the subject.

  “Not here, not yet.”

  “You shouldn’t, not here in town. People won’t understand. You should at least untuck your T-shirt over them or something.”

  She leaned her elbows languidly on the windowsill and gazed out the window at the bathhouse, where Mama had holed up that time:

  “Hmm, what’s going to happen with that poor girl now?”

  I asked, “What poor girl?”

  “I’m thinking of Abdullaev’s bride. What mother would marry her son to her after all those curses?”

  “Well, if someone is afraid, he can take her to a fortune-teller, or whoever you take people to in cases like this.”

  “We do have one here in town, Elmiuraz.”

  “So let them take her to him.” I picked up the tray with the glasses of fragrant tea and a bowl of figs and carried it out into the front room.

  There they were still discussing Khalilbek’s miracles.

  “The red commander has a dairy farm, you know,” the silver-toothed neighbor was saying.

  “The red commander?” I asked, distributing the tea glasses around the table.

  “Patya, have you been on another planet? The red commander is the father of those red-heads: Farid, Gamid, Saigid.”

  “Oh, of course.”

  “Anyway, something was wrong over there on the farm. The cows weren’t giving enough milk—there wasn’t enough for sour cream, cheese, or whey. It had been that way for almost a whole year, they were in danger of losing everything. And right then Khalilbek shows up in town, holding some twig, and he’s walking past the farm. He sees the commander and starts talking with him, pats the cows a little—and that’s all it took. They immediately started giving milk.”

  “Oh, come on!”

  “I swear by my tooth!”

  I pictured the neighbor’s calloused hands reaching into her mouth and extracting the tooth, and giggled.

  “What are you laughing about, Patimat! Like a donkey in heat!” Granny silenced me.

  The neighbor women abandoned their pumpkin seeds and settled down around the table. The butterfly continued to doze on the windowpane.

  “Plus, Khalilbek cured Khadizha. That was a long time ago,” began the one who had pestered me in the kitchen.

  “Khadizha?”

  “Aselder’s wife. They also have a son Marat, a handsome guy who’s a lawyer in Moscow. He went to law school with Shakh. You know, Firuza’s son, Shakh.”

  My palms started to sweat. Marat! They’re talking about him! I scraped my chair on the floor.

  “How did he do that?”

  “What do you mean, how? At that time Khalilbek had some dealings with Aselder, but then they had a falling out. Adik, the one who was run over, turned out to be his son.”

  “Whose son?”

  “Aselder’s! Illegitimate. So, anyway, Khadizha had these horrible headaches, she said it felt like she was growing a horn in her forehead. She tossed and turned, and couldn’t get any sleep. She moaned with pain all day long. Then one day Khalilbek dropped in informally for khinkal. “What’s the matter, Khadizha?” he says. He took a teaspoon, dipped it in some tea, and laid it against her forehead, like this!”

  The neighbor woman took a teaspoon, dipped it in her glass of hot tea and laid it, bowl side down, on my forehead. It burned my skin and I gave a little yelp.

  “That’s exactly what he did to her,” laughed the neighbor.

  “Did her headaches really stop?” chirped everyone all together.

  “It was like he removed it with his hand, like magic! Khadizha said so herself. But now she’s denying it!”

  “Oh, she’s a temperamental one …”

  Our gate squeaked, and a child’s voice was heard from the yard:

  “Is Patya home?”

  I ran out to see who was asking for me. The brown-haired neighbor girl stood on our porch, a little disheveled, in bright blue stockings.

  “Pa
tya, someone’s asking for you!”

  “Who is it?”

  “Aida. She says come out right now. She’s outside.”

  “Why doesn’t she come in?”

  “Come out and ask her yourself.”

  And off she ran. I looked out the gate, but no one was there. Just the neighbor girl’s cheap skirt fluttering as she ran around the corner.

  “Aida!” I called, trying to get a better look. “Are you here?”

  And immediately found myself face to face with Timur. He had obviously been lurking behind a post, waiting for me to come out.

  “Patya!”

  “What are you doing here?” I hit the gate with my fist.

  “Whoa, slow down there! Quiet! Why, like, so mad? You didn’t pick up the phone!”

  “I didn’t want to!”

  “Hey, what’s with the attitude?”

  “I asked you to leave me alone.”

  “Hold on, like is that any way to do things? You wrote to me for months, since winter.”

  “I made you no promises. Just shot the breeze, because you’re from back home.”

  I wanted someone to appear and save me from Timur. Take him away, seal his mouth with clay, tie him up, roll him up into a ball, and tuck him away in their pocket. But at the same time I was terrified: what if the person who showed up was Marat? He would see me with Timur, and would naturally deduce that we were a couple. No, no, I had to deal with this myself.

  “Listen,” Timur huffed, flexing his strong shoulders. “That’s no way to do things. We need to go over this normally, to, like, explain the reasons. What’s the problem? What I said about Darwin, was that it?”

  “Timur, what difference does it make?”

  “It makes a difference to me. We’ll, like, talk, I’ll lay it out, how and why, the whole scoop. But don’t brush off people who are smarter than you, who know more stuff.”

  “Wait, so you’re ‘smarter people?’”

  “You’re a real spitfire, aren’t you! Your papa home?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you lying?”

  “You can see his car’s not here. What do you need my papa for?”

  “I’d tell him how things are, that you and I have been together all this time.”

  “We aren’t together any more,” I was close to tears. But there was no getting through to Timur.

  “What’s the matter? I told you about the house, it’ll, like, be built soon. If you want to live in city, we can rent something there, I work in the Youth Committee, I’ve got, like, tons of money.”

  “What do you need me for, Timur? There was that girl at your meeting, she’s much better for you.”

  “What girl? Oh, Diana, you mean … But she’s divorced, she’s got a kid, a little girl.”

  “What makes me any better? I have no desire to grow my hair out or discuss Darwin with you. And I don’t pray. That’s not happening.”

  “I won’t put pressure on you. You’ll come around on your own. No one is going to force you,” he flexed his sculpted biceps and glanced at his watch.

  “They’re about to call the azan, I gotta go. So cut the sass, you hear me? Act normal, and things will be normal.”

  Having shared this tedious aphorism, Timur gave me a playful wink. I could hear the neighbor women laughing inside, and suddenly realized that one of them could come out any minute and see me at the gate with Timur.

  “That’s it, I’m going back in,” I snapped, terrified at the mere idea.

  “Go on. I’ll be coming to see your father in any case.”

  From the Avenue came the sound of the mullah’s hoarse voice chanting the azan. Evidently, the mullah—the Abdullaevs’ relative—had caught cold.

  “It’s the afternoon prayer,” Timur said, with an air of importance. “I’m off to pray. And you go put on a skirt.”

  He nodded toward my light-colored pants, turned, and strode off, to my profound relief. I lingered at the gate, listening to the air, which was filled with the chirring of grasshoppers. Across the street, off to one side, a house stood vacant. It had belonged to the late Mashidat Zalova, our literature teacher. She had been six feet tall, an old maid, polyglot, and passionate bibliophile. Her father had traced his ancestors to khans who had been in favor with the Russian tsar; his forefathers had worn generals’ epaulets. He himself had been an engineer and had designed a gigantic hydroelectric plant in one of the mountain canyons. In the nineteen-thirties someone had informed on him, and he’d been falsely accused for providing secret data to capitalist spies; he had been tortured mercilessly. They kept him awake in a basement cell and made him stand in icy water up to his knees. The unfortunate prisoner ultimately collapsed into the water and drowned, but through it all he had remained steadfast and had refused to confess and repent.

  As for Mashidat Zalova, she had been assigned to our school after graduating from the Institute. As the daughter of an enemy of the people, she could not be allowed to work in city schools, but our out-of-the-way suburb was no problem. Rumor had it that she had been wooed by Adik’s widowed grandfather, an architect and veteran of the Great Patriotic War. He had been persistent in his attempts but she had foresworn family life and closed herself in with her dusty tomes and folios. When I was in school, I used to go to the old woman’s place to get rare books. Every book’s flyleaf bore the calligraphic inscription: FROM THE LIBRARY OF M.Z. ZALOVA, along with the year and place the book was acquired. The margins teemed with exclamation marks, check marks, and commentaries: “So true!” “Sic!” “Completely unoriginal,” etc. She was buried in the local cemetery near the prison.

  Next to Mashidat Zalova’s empty house lived a childless deaf couple—Gagarin and Supia. They communicated with each other through gestures, punctuating them with strange, non-human sounds. The neighborhood kids tormented them constantly, especially Gagarin, who was easily provoked. Sometimes I used to join in. We would scramble over the low fence into their garden, climb the stubby apple trees and grab handfuls of the sour green fruit, then flee the enraged, incoherently howling owner. Gagarin sometimes managed to whack one of us kids over the head with a wooden stick, but we were usually able to escape without any casualties. We would drive him into a frenzy by sticking out our tongues and making faces at him. And despite Gagarin’s deafness, we would yell a cruel ditty at the top of our voices:

  Gagarin’s rocket tries to fly,

  It’s a ripped-up paper sack.

  Shoot it up into the sky,

  It somersaults and tumbles back

  Falling to the ground,

  Mooing as it tumbles down:

  “Moo moo moo, moo, moo moo:

  I don’t trust any of you!”

  Now Gagarin spent every day in the garden making strange-looking wooden chairs with weird, knotty backs. On Saturdays, his wife would take them to the city to sell at the bazaar. Next door to the deaf couple was a complex of lean-tos and outbuildings clustered around a cobblestoned inner courtyard, where Mukhtar’s big family dwelt. The whole family—sons, daughters-in-law, and children—zealously observed all the religious dictates. The women and the girls over the age of seven wrapped themselves completely in hijabs, concealing from view even their sharp little chins; the men attended the sermons at the unofficial mosque on the other side of the tracks. This led to periodic conflicts with the neighbors, especially with the school director, who had even been beaten up once by Mukhtar’s sons. Our neighbors and Granny suspected Mukhtar and his family of all kinds of deviltry, and when they met on the street they would spit on the pavement in their wake.

  “Why do they hide their chins!” the women would gripe. “Why do they wear those black rags, like they’re in mourning? That’s not how we do things around here.”

  At first Mukhtar and his whole family were treated as pariahs, but with time the number of strictly observant believers grew and grew. The conflict between the two mosques intensified, and I got tired of hearing about their endless squabbles and disputes. Kha
lilbek’s role in all of this remained unclear. Some insisted that he gave money to the congregation “across the tracks;” others scoffed indignantly:

  “Come on, how can you possibly claim Khalilbek is a Salafi? It’s ridiculous!”

  It was not surprising that both sides had gone to the city to the demonstration for Khalilbek. At any rate, not a sound could be heard from Mukhtar’s yard.

  I stood a while longer, thinking, then went back into the house, to the chattering neighbor women and Granny, who was always eager to hear the latest gossip. The white butterfly that had been on the windowpane was nowhere to be seen. It had fluttered away, leaving just a tiny smudge on the pane.

  I resumed my place with the others and set to cleaning pumpkin seeds. Suddenly, I knew what to do: “I’ll call Shakh,” I thought, “and ask him to protect me from that dastardly Timur. If only out of friendship with my brother, Shakh won’t refuse.” The thought gave me some relief. And Marat’s silence tore just slightly less at my heart.

  8. FORTUNE TELLING AND A DEAD MAN

  Marat’s mother started in on his father at the crack of dawn. She had decided to drag Marat to Elmiuraz the fortune-teller.

  “He can tell us if Marat will be married on the thirteenth or if we’ll lose our reservation for the banquet hall.”

  “What does the banquet hall have to do with anything, Khadizha? You’re an educated woman, what’s this about some Elmiuraz quack?” Marat’s father groaned.

  “Fiddle-de-dee,” his mother retorted. “You obviously don’t care if your son gets married or not!”

  “What I care about is for you not to make a fool of yourself, like some bird-brain. What if my friends find out? Aselder’s a scholar, does research. He’s planning to go on the hajj, and meanwhile his wife is running around to fortune-tellers.”

  “He’s not a fortune-teller, he’s a psychic. Marat! Get a move on!” she raged.

  “Come on, Marat, aren’t you ashamed? Who are you going to listen to?” his father snapped.

  Marat looked at them both and laughed.

  “Papa, I couldn’t care less about this Elmiuraz and his hocus pocus! I’m going for Mama’s sake. It’ll make her feel better.”

  “Good boy,” his mother clucked. “Hurry up, let’s go before your father eats us alive with all his learning.”