The Mountain and the Wall (11 page)

Shamil glanced inside the front cover, where there was a stamp from the village school; he noticed the year of publication, which coincidentally was the year of his birth. Something about the number drew him in, and instead of putting the book back on the shelf, he took it to the sofa and opened it at random, close to the beginning.

7

The village rooster crowed hoarsely, greeting the spring. Snow still showed white on the distant peaks, but in the village gardens the lilac was already in bloom, enveloping the winding streets in an intoxicating fragrance.

Marzhana and her girlfriends were coming home from school.

How cheered you would be, reader, at the sight of this merry bouquet of girls, and, most of all, at our Marzhana! A fresh satin pinafore stretched across her ripe young breasts; her long pitch-black braids thumped merrily against her supple legs as she walked; her Komsomol badge gleamed ardently in the spring sunshine! Like fleet-footed chamois, the girls scampered from one stone to the next, from one terrace to the next, and threaded their way through the village’s narrow, winding alleyways with their schoolbooks pressed to their chests. They laughed and exchanged happy glances as they went. So many hopes, so many dreams blazed in the girls’ shining eyes!

“
Oi
!” said Marzhana. “There goes Kalimat!”

And she nodded toward a pale, haggard figure trudging along, bent almost double under the weight of her water jug.

“
Akh, akh,
” sighed the girls. “It’s her. Ever since she dropped
out and got married, pretty much everything has gone wrong. Poor Kalimat! She spends all her time hauling water and firewood, or sitting locked up at home!”

“Hi, Kalimat,’ Marzhana greeted her compassionately. “How are things?”

“Fine,” answered the unfortunate Kalimat, mournfully.

“Is your husband treating you badly? Do you regret dropping out?”

“What else could I do?” answered Kalimat. “My parents told me to, so I got married.”

“Kalimat, why do you go around in those long scarfs and
chokhto
? Just tie on a cotton kerchief, or, even better, let your braids wave free in the breeze!”

“I can’t,” sighed Kalimat and plodded onward on her dreary way to her dismal home.

Silent and gloomy was the village. Its huts cringed together like starving children. Darkest despotism, cruelty, and misfortune wafted from its old towers, ancient mosques and
madrasas.
Only with difficulty did the sun’s rays penetrate the fissures in the stone doorways, feeling their way along the village’s zigzagging rises and slopes. But youth shone through the girls’ eyelashes. Instead of shapeless silk dresses and baggy
shalwar
trousers, instead of
chokhto
left over from the old regime, they sported short school dresses, and instead of soft leather
chuviaks,
chic factory-made shoes glistened on their feet.

Now Marzhana was home. She said good-bye to her friends and flitted into the
saklya.
Her mother pounced.

“Where have you been? Your father has been asking about
you all afternoon. He wants to arrange a marriage for you to Nasyr.”

Tears glistened in Marzhana’s blue eyes.

Shamil flipped through several pages, glanced at his wristwatch, and resumed his reading.

How long had the mountains gone without rain! Driver Mukhtar slammed his tractor’s door with a confident thud and looked down the cascade of narrow terraces to the foothills, so far down that the mountain river’s meager channel could barely be seen between the banks. The stream’s gentle curving bends reminded him somehow of Marzhana…

Shamil skipped several paragraphs.

A crowd of men, having donned black burkas, set off in a ramshackle procession around the village, brandishing the sacred rags that the first Islamic missionaries had supposedly been wearing when they arrived in the village. In the lead walked the elders; next came the younger men; in the rear trotted the boys, who had been taught to chant the prayers obediently and keep their heads bowed. Nasyr’s father Ali chanted the verses with great energy, jutting his shaggy reddish beard forward. This was the same pious Ali who, they said, had secreted away who knows how many
sahks
of flour from the kolkhoz!

“What’s going on here?” shouted Gadzhi, the kolkhoz
chairman. “Back to work, everyone! Reprimands for one and all! There’s no rain; what’s the point of asking Allah for it?”

But the villagers had lost all sense of reason. After noon only a few dozen people were left in the village. The women had abandoned their plows, shut the unmilked cows in their barns, and rushed to the top of the craggy cliff, which loomed above the fleeting clouds.

“Mama, don’t go, you’ll be ashamed later,” said Marzhana to her mother, fiddling with her silky braid.

“There’s no rain, Marzhana! I’m going into the mountains with the women,” answered her mother. “We’re going to pray. That’s always helped in the past!”

“How can it be!” sobbed Marzhana, blinking back the tears that glistened in her long eyelashes. “First you say I have to marry Nasyr, then you bring shame upon the entire village with your prayers. Papa is out walking around waving some rag in the air, the men are planning to spend the whole night chanting prayers, and you’re off to the mountain! That’s not what the Soviet regime had in mind when they liberated you!”

“Silence! Enough, you brat!” snapped Marzhana’s mother. “The chairman’s put ideas into your head! He’s corrupting the youth! You clean up in here, I’m in a hurry.”

The women, including the elderly ones, gathered in a tight crowd and headed off toward the top of one of the escarpments, which they considered to be holy. And while the men appealed to their Allah, the women flattered their older, pagan deities, whose names are now nearly forgotten in Dagestan, and pleaded with them for rain.

“Mukhtar, this madness must stop! Nothing is getting done!
I’m going to dock them the entire week if they’re not careful!” exclaimed the chairman, a fine figure of a man, as he measured the planked floor of the bright kolkhoz office with his canvas tarpaulin boots.

“Yes of course, Gadzhi, let’s disperse the crowd! I’ll persuade the young shepherds not to listen to their elders! We have no rain, but that’s no tragedy. Comrade Lysenko in Moscow says that soon they’re going to have new varieties of barley that can be planted anywhere—here, or even above the Arctic Circle!”

Raisa Petrovna came running from the school.

“Comrades, the old men have even dragged the children out of class to pray! How can that be?”

“Calm yourself, Raisa Petrovna,’ strong-shouldered Mukhtar reassured her. ‘I’ll take care of it.”

He put on his jacket and strode forth.

“What a fine young man!” clucked the chairman.

“Yes, someone like that would be a perfect fiancé for Marzhana,” mused Raisa Petrovna. “Oi, there will be no happiness for her with Nasyr.”

Shamil skipped another fifty pages.

The men of the mountain village piled into the community center and took their seats, ready to hear what the chairman had to say. The old men’s watery eyes looked around suspiciously. They squinted malevolently at the red poster hanging above the stage, whose bold letters issued a summons to the mountain people: “Onto the plains, with property
and livestock!” Next to the poster stood a crowd of children in scarlet Pioneer neckerchiefs, a regiment of future workers arrayed against the inert, dying hulk of the past. In their hands glittered garlands of electric lights; their faces were illuminated with innocent joy. The mountains, too, were illuminated, and without a single prayer or silly all-night vigil! Next to them Raisa Petrovna stood proudly in a crepe de chine dress. When she saw Marzhana making her way forward from the back rows, Raisa Petrovna waved to her.

“Comrades,” Chairman Gadzhi stepped forward with his hands folded behind his back. “This is no ordinary gathering. We are here to discuss a most urgent matter. For centuries you have lived on these barren mountaintops without the slightest glimpse of the bright world beyond. At any moment a light could flash from the signal tower, and you would grab a bundle of dry mountain
kolbasa,
or, if you couldn’t afford
kolbasa,
a bag of coarse-grained flour, and off you would gallop on a sortie. For centuries your homes have been built all clustered tightly together for protection like feudal fortresses and your wives have been poised to abandon the hearth at any minute and to take the attacking enemy by hook or by crook. Your forefathers lived on war alone, engaged in constant clashes with their neighbors or with tsarist occupiers. All day long they clung to the
godekan,
in a state of continual alert. Now we live in the indestructible and free Land of the Soviets! No longer do we clutch with desperate hands onto the embrasures and narrow ledges of these dark cliffs. No longer are we dependent on the word of some mullah or capricious cleric! No longer are we oppressed by khans and
shamkhals
. We have thrown off the
fetters of millennial
adats
that stifled us! Just look around you, look at our youth! Our young shepherds and kolkhoz workers are dressed in bright shirts and modern trousers; they no longer have to carry sharpened daggers, to be ready at any moment to wreak revenge in blood. Look at these young pioneers!”

“Get to the point, Chairman!” shouted Nasyr, smirking cockily at his confederates.

“Here’s the point. We have a great joy to share with you, comrades! Our torments have ended! Recall how, not so long ago, we used to haul earth by the jugful to the terraces of our meager fields. Recall the desolation of the winter, when the snows closed us off from the world, and the shepherds descended to their winter pastures. Am I wrong?”

“You’re right!” exclaimed the beautiful Raisa Petvrovna.

“And now we can say good-bye to all that! The Kutan lands have already been prepared for us; we can be on the road by tomorrow.”

“On the road where?” Old Kebed, leaning on his knotty cane, frowned.

“To the plains!” the chairman exclaimed joyfully.

“To the plains!” laughed Raisa Petrovna.

But the hall was silent. The faces of the villagers expressed dull obstinacy, nothing more. Only cheerful Mukhtar stirred in his seat, and Marzhana gazed dreamily at the ceiling. Would they really go? Would it really come to pass that instead of the many-tiered stone village, blending into the surrounding mountainside, instead of narrow covered passageways and blind alleyways of stone, she would see broad streets
lined with spacious brick houses with sharp-peaked roofs, and would breathe in the fresh fragrance of a new, free life? Would it really come to pass! How she had dreamed of this day! She gazed at Mukhtar with eyes aflame.

“No, we cannot abandon our homes and our land,” answered Kebed.

“We will not abandon them under any circumstances,” voices rose on all sides. Loudest of all was the voice of Ali, Nasyr’s red-bearded father. “You mean to destroy us! All the people who moved from here onto the plains died of malaria!”

“Let Gadzhi Muradovich speak! Give Gadzhi Muradovich the floor!” begged Raisa Petrovna.

At last the room fell silent and everyone looked at the bald chairman, who stood with his plump fingers pressed firmly onto the polished tabletop.

“All of you, everyone here, has been duped,” he said sternly, swallowing the endings of his words. “Where did you get this unverified information? Instead of spreading panic among the people, you need to sort things out with the ringleaders, the slanderers and plotters. And you, Ali, don’t try to change the subject; we know that you still have rams that you have not turned in. Turn them over to the kolkhoz by tomorrow, or we will take them from you by force!”

“But I was planning to invite you over and serve you those rams,” Ali objected, smirking, “at my son’s wedding. He’s marrying Osman’s daughter, Marzhana.”

Everyone looked at Marzhana. The girl’s lips quivered, and she dashed out of the club. Raisa Petrovna rushed out after her.

“Don’t run away, Marzhana! Don’t go!” shouted the young teacher. They ran until they could run no more; finally they stopped, breathless, at the spring.

“
Akh,
Raisa Petrovna!” exclaimed Marzhana, and she burst out sobbing on her teacher’s shoulder. The black and chestnut plaits intertwined like streams from two waterfalls.

“I know that you love Mukhtar,” said Raisa Petrovna, stroking her student on the back. “You don’t have to marry Nasyr if you don’t want to.”

“I don’t!” whispered Marzhana. “I’ll jump off the bridge before I marry him.”

“Good for you,” Raisa Petrovna praised her. “I can see how disrespectfully the men here treat you; I can see how hard it is for you women in the mountains, how you have to haul water on your own backs. Don’t repeat poor Kalimat’s mistake; learn to stand up for yourself…”

Shamil sighed, glanced again at his watch, and flipped to the last pages:

The great bulging red sun rose on the horizon; the summer air filled with the chirping of birds. Marzhana leaned joyfully out of the window and gathered in the first hints of the new morning. Behind her now was her hard life in the dismal mountains; behind, too, crude Nasyr with his idle, insolent sneer; behind her now, the gossip of the village, the disapproval of her relatives. Ah, how shrilly they had laughed as they shouted to one another from the rooftops: “Osman’s daughter has been seen with Mukhtar.” So what if she had? Marzhana had sought him out on her own initiative. She
herself had lain down in the mown grass next to the tractor and announced: “It is not the mullah who will join us in marriage, but he who is dearer than any mullah, dearer than any father.” And she had showed the stunned Mukhtar a postcard with a photo of Lenin on it, smiling benevolently out at them.