Bride and Groom

by Alisa Ganieva

  Marat stopped short.

  “That’s not what he wrote. People keep lying and getting it mixed up! I saw the placard. It said “I am agnostic.”

  “Really? But that’s completely different!”

  “Of course it is,” Marat confirmed, relieved. “Of course, he shouldn’t have gone out there waving that statement around, but remember what Mashidat Zalova taught us in literature class—he was a victim of his environment. There you have it! The environment chewed him up and swallowed him.”

  Against my will I broke into a grim laugh. I camouflaged it with a fake cough and said, just to say something, anything:

  “Take my parents: they thought he was some kind of clown.”

  “What, you think mine didn’t?” Marat shrugged. “Patya, if we’re being completely honest, his own parents thought the same way. And they disparaged him. He told me about it.”

  “What, you were friends?” I was surprised. “I didn’t think that Rusik had any friends.”

  “Well, not friends, exactly, we spent time together. From the time we were kids. Did you know that at today’s sermon the mullah called Rusik crazy and said he had been demon-possessed?”

  “He just said that straight out?”

  “Yes, can you imagine?” Marat nodded trustfully, intimately, like a close friend.

  As we walked along, I occasionally caught passers-by eyeing us, burning with curiosity. Their glances snagged us like fish on a hook, and released us only when we passed beyond their field of vision. But I did not care. I was proud to be walking with Marat. Before we knew it, we were at the railroad embankment.

  A freight train loaded with crushed stone lumbered past along the tracks dividing our suburb from what was beyond. The air smelled of diesel fuel, the pebbles on the embankment, and the sorrow of others. We stopped by a small adobe building that housed a café called At Zarema’s. Zarema, the proprietor, was an eternally ailing old-looking woman with such a massive jaw that it seemed that the only thing holding it together was the tied-together ends of her scarf. The establishment’s patrons were primarily locals, with an occasional mix of passengers from trains passing through. In the morning they were served by Zarema’s nimble daughters-in-law, and, in the evening, by the proprietress herself, rheumatic and bundled in shawls.

  “Shall we sit here awhile?” Marat suggested. “There’s nowhere else to go in town. And it’s a long way to the city.”

  I immediately agreed—though not without some apprehension that we might run into Papa and the uncle inside. Fortunately there was nothing to worry about; the café only had six or seven small tables, and only one of them was occupied. Several locals were noisily playing dominoes and sipping strong black tea, some of them in light shirts and panama hats, others in T-shirts with tattoos peeping out from under the sleeves.

  “Look at those tattoos. we’re obviously near the prison,” whispered Marat.

  Zarema’s daughter-in-law, who had been dozing in the corner, spotted us together and stirred. From her distant perch she scanned me from head to toe, then shuffled over with a menu and unceremoniously, though with undisguised respect, addressed Marat:

  “Hi, Marat, so glad you stopped in. You with your girl?”

  “As you see,” Marat smiled, and asked me: “What will you have, Patya?”

  We ordered tea and baklava. The waitress shuffled behind a partition, and a few seconds later some scarfed female heads peeked out from there. They wanted to have a look at the girl Marat had brought.

  “They know you so well,” I said, not without irony.

  “My mother is friends with Aunt Zarema,” Marat explained guilelessly. “So they know me. But I wanted to tell you about Rusik. I went to see his family this morning with my father to give my condolences. It wasn’t just us, half the town was there. It’s a terrible loss, their only son, and in such a senseless way. We go there, cross the bridge to his house, and the gate is locked tight.”

  “Why?”

  “People say that if the gate is closed and they are not accepting condolence visits, that means that the family is preparing a blood revenge.”

  “What a nightmare! But against whom?”

  “That’s the problem—essentially everyone is guilty. Alishka, for example, who pushed him. Or Abdullaev. But anyone else could have done it. Your Timur, for example.”

  And Marat looked straight into my eyes. That set me off. I flared up, waving my arms in the air:

  “He’s not ‘my Timur’! I don’t know how to get rid of him! He thinks that just because I exchanged some friendly messages with him—and, by the way, I had no idea he was such an idiot—that means I must like him.”

  “He’s an enviable match: youth committee leader, always up onstage making speeches,” Marat teased.

  “Enough, please!” I moaned. “I already called Shakh to see if he could help me get rid of Timur. But Shakh refused to get involved. He says that Timur is serious about me. He says I should let him go ahead and propose, and then just turn him down.”

  “Shakh?” Marat turned serious again. “Better avoid him. He’ll say anything. He even spread it around that you and Timur are engaged.”

  “That’s not true!” I blushed furiously, yet again.

  But Marat wasn’t about to disagree or to doubt what I said. He just smiled and sat there with his hands calmly folded on his lap, observing me with a smile, as a man would watch his own child at play.

  “What are you looking at?” I completely lost my bearings.

  “I’m happy,” he answered simply. “It makes me happy just to look at you.”

  His words went straight to my heart and gripped it with joy.

  “So, why,” I decided to return to our earlier topic, in the hopes of concealing my emotional state, “why were the gates locked?” But my voice trembled, betrayed me.

  “Rusik’s parents probably suspect and blame everyone. A lot of people, anyway. And they don’t want to see anyone.”

  “Or maybe,” I conjectured, “they’re simply ashamed. Maybe they are so opposed to their late son’s views that his act and his death are a source of shame to them and their whole family.”

  “Now that’s interesting.” Marat’s eyebrows rose in surprise, even admiration.

  We fell silent, first stealing glances at each other, and then, gradually, boldly looking straight into each other’s eyes.

  “Patya, what are you most afraid of?” Marat asked suddenly.

  I thought. Scorpions? Creepy crawlies? My parents’ deaths? Some hideous disfiguring disease? These were all old fears from childhood that I had suppressed long ago. I blurted out the first thing that came into my head:

  “To be stuck in a sealed stone well, somewhere deep underground. Also, pain. Physical pain—that really scares me. What about you?”

  “Recently I’ve started to be afraid of my own arms.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Sometimes I wake up at night, with my arms like this,” he began quietly, crossing his arms across his chest, “and they are really heavy. You know, like steel. And I feel that I can’t lift them and that they are crushing me.

  I stared dumbly at his arms, not knowing what to say. He laughed:

  “Did I scare you? Don’t take it too seriously. It’s just that I’m not getting enough sleep. It’s not a good time for me to be on leave, I’m working on a really hot case right now in Moscow. A human rights worker, a woman, was murdered. The higher-ups are poking sticks in the spokes, trying to get an innocent man convicted. It’s a contract job, and they’re protecting the guy responsible.”

  “Do you know who ordered the murder?” I whispered.

  “Yes. I’ll tell you later,” Marat leaned over to me, and his tea-colored eyes shone close to mine.

  I felt my cheeks flare up again.

  Zarema’s daughter-in-law suddenly appeared beside us, set a porcelain teapot down on the table with a gentle clink, and transferred the baklava and cups from the tray to the table. She ask
ed me:

  “Whose daughter are you?”

  I told her, after a brief internal struggle. My instinct was to snarl and send the inquisitive barbarian flying back to the kitchen behind the screen. After getting the answer, she lingered for a while longer by the table, holding the empty tray and surveying the café from there. The tattooed men sat over their game, laughing uproariously.

  “Bring the check now, please. That’s all, we don’t need anything else,” Marat ordered, casting a disapproving look at the shameless girl’s fat hips.

  She roused herself and sauntered off. Meanwhile, a bearded young man in a skullcap and a long, tightly buttoned-up white shirt entered the café from outside, ducking through the door with a stack of pamphlets under his arm. He noted with disappointment the scarcity of clientele, and scowled in the direction of the guffawing men at the domino table. His glance lingered briefly on Marat, and he made his way hesitantly toward the partition:

  “As-salam, as-salam, as-salam …”

  En masse, Zarema’s daughters-in-law and daughters, a good half of them veiled, sprang to their feet. Showing due respect to the visitor in his role as guardian of morality, they led him to the nearest table. He handed each one of them a pamphlet, settled down comfortably, and babbling something incomprehensible, again surveyed the room.

  “He’s annoyed that there are so few people in here. And none of them suit his needs,” explained Marat, smirking.

  “What needs?”

  “Propaganda. He’s from the mosque on the Avenue. He comes here often, hangs around and hands out religious pamphlets. Announcements. Zarema, harbors him, so to speak, here.”

  The pamphlet guy had indeed made himself at home. Our fat-hipped waitress brought him a small, steaming cup of Turkish coffee and hovered over him in an expectant, reverential pose.

  “A djinn had taken root in him,” the pamphlet guy mumbled, reclining sideways on his chair so we could hear. “If his parents had brought this lost lamb to us in time, everything, subkhanalla, would have been fine. Here, read this: it’s today’s sermon. Our mullah explains everything here.”

  Marat pricked up his ears and stealthily seized the handle of the teaspoon I was holding, as if to say, “Shhh, quiet, just listen.” His index finger brushed mine. Something deep inside me rumbled, like barbells along a wooden floor. And we sat and listened.

  The pamphlet guy sipped his coffee, the men clattered the dominoes—white with black dots—on the rough surface of their table and wiped their mouths with crumpled napkins, and Zarema’s entire female suite read the pamphlets aloud, tripping over the words:

  “The folly of vice … unbelief … trampling of faith in the Almighty … the Prophet, salalau alaikhi vassalam … retribution from on high …”

  The pamphlet guy finished his coffee and used his spoon to scrape into his mouth the grounds of coffee that had adhered to the bottom of the cup. Munching on the grounds with his bad teeth, he stood up, grabbed the remaining pamphlets, and headed over to our table.

  “Assalamu alaikum va rakhmatulai va barakatu.” He extended his hand to Marat.

  Marat greeted him reluctantly and cast an inquisitive look at the unshaven visitor.

  “Take it, brother. Read this, brother,” jabbered the guy indistinctly, handing him a pamphlet.

  “Read what?”

  “About that man who had gone astray, the one possessed by djinns. The iblis whispered in his ear, tempting him to renounce the Lord of the Worlds, and the Lord of the Worlds wreaked justice on him that very day.”

  “Is this about Rusik?” Marat looked the man up and down.

  “Yes, about that scumbag who denied Allah,” blinked the bearded guy.

  “Do you even know the first thing about him?” Marat rose from his seat.

  I cringed. Don’t get in a fight, please … don’t start a scandal. In terror, I pictured it all: the pamphlet guy yelling for help, a gang of thugs in skullcaps rushing over from the Avenue, invading the café; a horde of bearded men without mustaches in short trousers—Wahhabis, in other words—joining them from the other side, crossing the bridge from “across the tracks.” They surround Marat, and he falls dead to the floor, just like Rusik-the-Nail.

  But nothing happened. The guy took a half step back and jabbered in a loud, though now much thinner, voice:

  “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  Zarema’s entourage huddled together and whined:

  “Marat! Vai, Marat!”

  “First, tell you me who you think you are. And what gives you the right to peddle false rumors about Rusik?” Marat was just getting started. “You get the hell out of here and let people drink their tea in peace!”

  The men abandoned their dominoes and strained their ears, trying to decide whose side they were on, and who needed to be thrown out onto the street.

  “He’ll leave, Marat, he’s on his way out, calm down,” the fat-thighed waitress rushed over to our table.

  “Maybe I will,” said the bearded guy, clutching his pamphlets to his chest and retreating toward the door, “but I will let them know in the mosque that an iblis has taken root in you, brother. It must be driven out! Inshallah, we will drive it out!”

  One of the dominoes players, a gray-haired muscle-head, stamped his foot menacingly at the guy:

  “Look, I’ve had just about enough of you! You’re the one who has to be driven out! Scram!”

  The guy flushed scarlet and made his exit. The fat-thighed waitress rushed out after him with her fists pressed to her chest, apologizing profusely. The veiled daughters-in-law by the partition gaped malevolently at me and Marat.

  “Marat, let’s get out of here.” I poked him gently.

  “All right,” he agreed, calming down and tossing a banknote on the table.

  We left, abandoning the uneaten baklava to a fat green fly that had been eyeing it. In the doorway, we crossed paths with the waitress as she came back in, wagging her head mournfully, then we set off down the dusty road toward home.

  We parted at my gate. The early southern evening had already tinted the world black and white. And as I hastened through the yard to Papa, Mama, Granny, Uncle, the aunties, and my cousin, I knew that Marat’s eyes were following me.

  10. A PATCH OF GREEN

  Marat was in the city at his father’s office at the Institute. A meeting was in progress. They were talking, as usual, about Khalilbek.

  “All right, explain to us, Aselder Khanych, how we’re supposed to plan for dissertation defenses now,” nervously asked a thin dry woman in a sheer blue blouse and gaudy filigree bangles. “I mean, people are writing dissertations about the activities of a convict!”

  “That’s exactly what I’m talking about, Irina Nikolaevna …” mumbled Marat’s father.

  Marat had been lured here on an absurd pretext—to help move some boxes—but in fact (and Marat was fully aware of this) his mother was trying to get him together with the latest on the list of potential brides. Namely the young secretary.

  There she sat in a white business suit. An expensive pendant plunged into the alluring neckline of her jacket; she had legs like sturdy columns, curled, fragrant, oiled, and sprayed platinum hair, and full lips on a coarse, crafty face. Looking at this stranger, Marat recalled his walk yesterday along the edge of the steppe, yellow from the sun, with tiny white snails clinging to the bushes like barnacles. Patya’s sincere, bell-like laughter, her slender waist under her belt; the way she had bent over to peel a snail away from the surface of a leaf, and said that it smelled like dried glue … Then she lifted it to Marat’s nose, and he had sensed a subtle, transparent joy and the faint tangy fragrance of a woman’s palms.

  “They haven’t sentenced him yet. We need to wait for the sentence, and then we can decide,” mumbled Aselder.

  “But we can’t wait!” exclaimed Irina Nikolaevna, lifting her bangled red arms. “That could take a month, or a year or even two. And then what? Maybe we can advise the doctoral candidates to change their
topics?”

  “Oh no, that would mean they’d have to rewrite everything; who would do that?” A man in the corner with dandruff-dusted shoulders who seemed to be made out of chewing gum waved his hand. And sneezed with evident enjoyment into a checkered handkerchief, eliciting a chorus of subdued “bless you’s” from the women sitting nearby.

  “Aselder,” said a dark-complexioned woman of forty, well preserved, with brightly painted lips, “could you use your connections to learn what’s going on? None of it makes sense; one day we’re preparing a publication to celebrate our benefactor’s return; the next, we’re cringing and hiding. How long can it go on?”

  “The other departments are laughing at us …” the rubbery man added petulantly.

  “Maybe your son could help!” Irina Nikolaevna nodded in Marat’s direction.

  Marat woke from his trance. “No point in trying. There are lawyers swarming the investigators’ office night and day. They have more rights than I do here, but they can’t get any information either. It’s a dark case … And what, are all your students working on Khalilbek? Isn’t there anything else for them to study?”

  Silence. Then Aselder spoke, wiping his warty face as he did when he got nervous.

  “You know what kind of a man he was, Marat. Like an encyclopedia. He was involved in literally everything …”

  “Why do you say ‘was’?” Irina Nikolaevna jingled her bangles. “Is. And will be. We must not be pessimistic. You saw the demonstration they had for him. And the concerts! Even out in the suburb.”

  “The stories people tell about him!” exclaimed the secretary, out of nowhere.

  Having contributed to the discussion, she exerted some effort and crossed her legs. The precious locket quivered and tapped against her soft bosom.

  “Let them talk. The main thing is that you refrain from recording them in our minutes,” Marat’s father grimaced at her.

  “They say, for example, that’s he’s immortal. That he’s some kind of Khidr.”

  “Cut it out with your Khidr!” The rubbery man frowned and sneezed again into his handkerchief.

  “But hold on, it’s an interesting topic,” objected the dark-complexioned woman. “Mythologization of living contemporaries. Well worth studying. Do the rumors go into any detail?”