Bride and Groom

by Alisa Ganieva

  The wind rose and tore at my scarf. I had to retie it as I ran, knotting it clumsily around my neck. Past strangers’ gates, garages, past towers under construction … dart unrecognized onto the platform, duck into a sun-warmed train car …

  I reached the tracks, breathless, with a stitch in my side. This was about the time the train to the city usually arrived. And from the city I could go on foot straight to the shore. I’d plunge into the sea just the way I was, in my clothes, lifting the pockets so my bag and phone wouldn’t get wet. Better yet, just leave everything on the sand. Jump in and start swimming. It was sure to bring relief—I would feel relief.

  One of the proprietress’s daughters-in-law sat on the porch of At Zarema’s, gnawing sunflower seeds. She followed me with her eyes to the turn, but apparently didn’t recognize me. My phone rang. Someone from home yelled:

  “Where are you? Where?”

  “Leave me alone for a while, I’m all right,” I snapped and turned off the phone. The train was coming, right on cue. Perfect timing. I climbed up into the vestibule between the cars, which reeked of overheated metal. There I took refuge in a corner and waited, with my scarf covering me, for a little old woman to exit onto the platform. The door clattered shut, and finally the train lurched. Our town began to flow backwards. And the sea grew closer and closer, closer and closer.

  By the shore, in the Tavern, the regulars were making their usual racket. Khalilbek poured Marat some sweet wine, clumsily spilling some onto his camouflage T-shirt, and pointed to the great luminary sinking down beyond where the sea met the sky.

  “What does that mean, Pupil?”

  “That the day has ended?”

  “That’s part of it. More precisely?”

  “That everything has converged into a single point?” Marat murmured lazily.

  “You’re right,” nodded Khalilbek, gladdened by his drinking buddy’s quickness of mind.

  The sun indeed had become an orange point, flowing away into the inverted world on the other side of the Earth. The former prisoner reached for a new bottle, blocking the luminary with his head, and Marat’s inebriated eyes blinked. Suddenly he saw before his eyes not the wild shoreline with whitecaps rolling in, but the cramped walls of the dark interrogation room closing in around him and the silhouette of the investigator blocking the lamp with his body. Up to now the electric light had blinded him, and now he felt some relief.

  “Have the militants from the forest been hiding in Adik’s bunker for a long time?”

  The investigator had a bass voice, just like Colonel Gaziev’s.

  “I don’t know about any bunker.” Marat could barely speak; his lips had stuck together and it took him an eternity to open them.

  “Then you’re going to get the shit beaten out of you. How’s that sound?!” The investigator was exhausted from all the beatings and profanity; he issued his threats without any particular fury, and even with a tinge of amusement. “You’ve signed everything. The witness has given her testimony. And if you put up a stink, that’s the last anyone will see of you!”

  With a suppressed groan, Marat shifted his swollen, deadened leg in his ripped trousers. The dark walls of the interrogation room wavered, smearing Marat’s vision, black streamlets trickling onto the floor. The silhouette trembled and lurched in its nimbus of prickly light.

  “Speak, swine! Or we’ll pin something on you that will make your own family disown you!”

  A chorus of voices thundered from all sides, as though an invisible throng of interrogators were lurking in the cupboards:

  “We’ll pin it on you, we’ll pin … we’ll bind you!”

  Marat somehow managed to shift his deadened leg.

  “You are pinned, everyone is pinned down, attached to something,” Khalilbek continued, leaning back in his chair and uncorking the bottle. “The main thing is to detach yourself from everything. And, also, if you look at the sun, and then at yourself, you will become the sun …”

  The soles of his feet burned and stung. Marat’s numb leg lay stretched out before him under the rays. The drunken vision passed. In the distance, parallel to the shore, a female figure glided slowly, knee-deep through the sea, with the hem of her shapeless dress trailing in the water. An old boat bobbed and swayed by the wharf, restless seagulls complained noisily at the oncoming night, and the sound of the surf drowned the voices of the regulars in the café. Yet again something was ending, so as to begin anew in the morning. It dwindled and closed in on itself and converged, and finally, quietly, without a sound, it came to an end. Only the sea remained. And the splashing of the oncoming waters, and the gurgling of the wine. So good, so fine: nothing, nowhere better than here and now. Just this one point, the end.

  AFTERWORD

  Dear reader,

  Thank you for picking up this book and for reading it to the end. I hope that you found it interesting, funny, sad, and at times a little scary. But I will not go into extensive commentaries. The goal of this afterword is to address a quiet but very important subtext of the novel that has to do with Sufism, an esoteric Muslim teaching.

  To distill its essence to an extremely simplified formula, Sufis seek Truth—a quest that allies them with philosophers from every tradition and school of thought throughout history. Truth is the Absolute—that is, God, Allah—that is distributed throughout everything that is. The Sufi’s task, through a long path of self-discovery, asceticism, and absolute obedience to his teacher, is ultimately to arrive at a merging with God. Along the way, for complete knowledge of being, one must renounce all rationality and logic, and be ruled exclusively by one’s heart. There are many psycho-mystical and trance-inducing practices associated with “zikr,” collective invocations of God, that support this path. These invocations in part resemble mantras; they include long repetitions of the same verses from the Qur’an, accompanied by rhythmic swaying of the body, twirling in a circle, and other dances. Indeed, in some ways Sufism resembles Buddhism, in others early Christianity, and yet in others, Kabbalah, or pantheism. Sufism is a tremendously multifaceted belief system, open to the most varied cultural and religious influences.

  The Naqshbandiyah, one of the Sufi’s main brotherhoods, has, since the Middle Ages, had a strong presence in Dagestan, where Bride and Groom takes place. This is one of the only Sufi schools whose followers can participate actively in politics and engage in contact with political authorities. One contemporary Dagestani Sufi teacher was for many years a prominent spiritual teacher and counselor for the scores of pilgrims who would come to him in his remote native village to listen to parables and seek enlightenment. The respect he attained among the people was viewed as a challenge by local politicians and representatives of alternative Islamic groups. A few years ago, this Sufi teacher was assassinated by a female suicide bomber who came to him disguised as a pilgrim. The bomber was a member of the ultra-conservative salafis, a group who loathe Sufism and are opposed to mysticism, allegorical readings of the Qur’an, and the practice of revering teachers, holy places, and so forth. Dagestan, it must be noted, is just one of hundreds of places in the world where these two divergent worldviews have engaged in bloody clashes.

  But to return to the novel: I wanted to structure my heroes’ story not only as a movement of two hearts toward each other, but also as the path of a Sufi to the Absolute. Of course, the parallels here are very free, and I employ a considerable amount of creative license, but the attentive reader who knows Sufi poetry (you may be familiar with Sufi poets such as Rumi and Omar Khayyam), will find here a number of symbols and references. For example, one symbol that recurs throughout the novel is wine. Forbidden to most Muslims, wine signifies Truth to Sufis, and the state of intoxication provides a closeness to God. Accordingly, a drunkard becomes an ecstatic Sufi (recall Marat’s encounter with the drunkard), and the wine seller in the first chapter serves as a spiritual advisor. In Sufism, the sea, to which the heroes arrive at the novel’s finale, signifies Divine Unity. And in order to arrive at this
Unity, one must free oneself from anything individualistic, from all attachments, and from one’s own self. When the Sufi poets spoke of hair, they were speaking of the multitude, which covers the face of Unity (this is what Rinat is referring to in the scene with Patya in Chapter 1). And the point, or dot, another important Sufi symbol that recurs in the novel, refers to the point of origin for the Universe, to which, sooner or later, all shall return. The point signifies Inner Knowledge, and it is also a reference to the Arabic letter ba, which resembles a boat with a point below it (with one exception, all the Suras in the Qur’an begin with this letter). Recall the phrase Khalilbek is quoted using in Chapter 4 when speaking to Shakhov: "It all comes down to a point, comrade Shakhov."

  Khalilbek is a complex figure representing several aspects of Sufism in the many rumors about him that circulate throughout the novel. People associate him with Khidr, or the Green Man, the teacher of the prophet Musa, or Moses (the Green Man is an ancient mythological figure who also appears in many other world cultures, from Europe to the Middle East and India). It is said that he is immortal and can arrive in any form. He is primarily known for three deeds, which at first glance appear evil or senseless, and for which Moses hastened to condemn him in the legend: the destruction of a boat; the murder of a small boy; and unpaid work fortifying a wall in the city where cruel and dishonorable people lived. Later, he justifies his actions to Moses: he disabled the boat, which belonged to poor people, so that the king, who was appropriating all vessels for himself, would not confiscate it; he murdered the boy, because in the future he would have grown into a fearsome tyrant and sadist; and he worked on the wall because there was a treasure buried underneath that, if the wall had collapsed, would have been taken by the dishonorable people of the city. Thus the parallels of Khidr’s actions to Khalilbek’s actions throughout the novel become apparent.

  This character of Khalilbek/Khidr is extremely ambiguous, but the fluid nature of good and evil, the way one flows into the other, is what attracted me to this story. And I was drawn to teachings of Sufis and other orders that the world is an illusion. Things and people are not what they seem. What we consider to be characteristics of our true Self are only labels and conceptions that we apply to ourselves. There is a Sufi parable about a wandering Sufi who brazenly strode into the Khan’s palace and settled down on his cushions to rest. The Khan naturally flew into a rage: “What are you doing in my palace?!” The Sufi answered, “You think that you are the Khan, and that this is your palace. But your ancestors came and went from this place. And you came, and you, too, shall leave. So this is not a palace, but a caravan-serai.”

  In place of a conclusion, I would like to quote from a letter sent to me by one of the novel’s Russian readers, Yana Kunitskaya, a graduate student and specialist in Eastern cultures:

  The Sufi path is a very transparent allegory for the method of knowing God in earthly life: by specific exercises, actions, and his way of life as a whole, the Sufi moves toward God, achieving particular higher levels—“stops”—along the way (makam). The ultimate stop, as a rule, entails dissolving into the substance of the divine—this is what Khalilbek is talking about at the end of the novel. Every Sufi strives for this, believing that the human soul, which initially was part of divine substance, became separated from it, and now must again cleanse itself from everything terrestrial, in order to reunite with it after death. Certain Sufi brotherhoods hold the opinion that this reunion can be attained even during earthly life; hence Granny says "die before your death" and Rinat tells the well-known proverb about the poet who said “I am God.” This reunification and the striving for it are symbolized by such paired images in the novel as the “drop” and the “sea,” and the “luminary” and the “light.” So at the end of the novel, Marat parts with earthy decay in order to reunite with Truth.

  But all of this is incorporated organically into Dagestani reality as it is created in the novel, interweaving so many different traditions together with elements from folklore.

  I must confess that I was surprised to receive this letter, since I could not have counted on reaching a reader who would find all these meanings that I had concealed in the text. The novel is complete even without accounting for these allusions. But you might find it interesting to think back on what you have read from this new angle. The more angles, the better.

  ALISA GANIEVA

  Moscow, Russia

  Summer 2017

  ALISA GANIEVA grew up in Makhachkala, Dagestan and studied at the renowned Maxim Gorky Literature Institute in Moscow. After working as a literary critic, she published her fiction debut, the novella Salam, Dalgat!, under a male pseudonym. Upon receiving the prestigious Debut Prize in 2009, Ganieva finally revealed her true identity at the awards ceremony. In 2012, Ganieva participated in the International Writing Program’s Fall Residency at the University of Iowa. Her debut novel, The Mountain and the Wall, was shortlisted for all of Russia’s major literary awards and has been translated into seven languages, marking the first novel ever published in English by a Dagestani author. In June 2015, Ganieva was listed by The Guardian as one of the most influential young people living in Moscow. Bride and Groom is her second novel, and was shortlisted for the 2015 Russian Booker Prize upon its publication in Russia. Ganieva currently lives in Moscow, where she works as a journalist, critic, and teacher.

  CAROL APOLLONIO is a literary translator and professor of the Practice of Slavic and Eurasian Studies at Duke University. Her most recent translations include German Sadulaev’s The Maya Pill (Dalkey Archive, 2014) and Alisa Ganieva’s debut The Mountain and the Wall (Deep Vellum, 2015). In addition to her work as an accomplished translator, Dr. Apollonio is also a scholar specializing in the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky and Chekhov and on problems of translation. She is the author of the monograph Dostoevsky’s Secrets (2009), has edited volumes and published numerous articles on nineteenth century Russian literature, and has worked as an interpreter for the U.S. government. In 2011, Apollonio was awarded the Russian Ministry of Culture’s Chekhov Medal. She currently serves as President of the North American Dostoevsky Society.

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