The Mountain and the Wall (12 page)

And now, greeting the fresh steppe dawn, she could not even remember how Nasyr had threatened to kill her; how her former girlfriends had shunned her, turning away when they met on the street; how her father had dressed in mourning and announced that his daughter was dead to him; how her mother had sobbed in silence. Now everything would be different. She had broken away from the age-old mountains and ravines and had strode forth, forward to meet the sea breeze, forward to meet the laughing tractor driver Mukhtar.

Yesterday Marzhana had prepared balloons and banners, and had cleaned the glass of the precious framed portraits of the working people’s leaders. “
Akh,
today I will march in the parade,” Marzhana laughed to herself, “and Mukhtar will embrace me, and Chairman Gadzhi will smile at me!” A new village had come into being on the plain, new homes glittered in the southern sun. Only the most stubborn and lazy people were still clinging to the smoke-blackened pillars of their old
saklyas,
unwilling to part with their gloomy nests above the clouds. Marzhana’s mother and father had closed themselves inside their home and refused come out; Nasyr’s father Ali had greedily clung to his hoarded wealth; the old women had wailed and lamented.

And then the young Komsomol shepherds found a supply of gunpowder somewhere and used it to destroy all of the ancestral towers. The ancient, resilient walls did not give in easily to these firebrands; they refused to fall at first. Then, finally, sending joyful echoes across the cliffs, the stones tumbled in a great landslide down the mountain. The old village was no more. Old man Kebed no longer had anywhere to hide with his quackery and his superstitious books. The malicious gossip at the
godekan
fell silent. The
zurna
no longer played on the town square. Marzhana’s fellow villagers settled into a new life on the broad steppe, where the livestock graze free, where a Pioneer reveille rings across the plain.

In the parade Marzhana walked hand in hand with Mukhtar and Raisa Petrovna; behind them, heaving grouchy sighs to the tune of the “Internationale,” trudged the old men.

“Well, Marzhana,” Chairman Gadzhi patted her on the cheek, “how was the move?”

“It worked out fine, Uncle Gadzhi!” answered Marzhana and pressed closer to the beaming Mukhtar.

“I proved it to myself, and I will prove it to everyone, that rye does not grow on stone,” said the chairman. And his words went deep into Marzhana’s soul, and she would remember them her whole life: not in the mountains, not in the old ways, is happiness to be found, but in the new and joyous morning of freedom.

8

Shamil tossed the book onto the sofa and, after a brief stop in the bathroom, set off on foot to Madina’s. She lived close by, in a nine-story prefab apartment building with a jumble of homemade verandas clinging to the sides, the ones on the upper stories propped atop the ones below. In the dark entryway Shamil nearly overturned an aluminum bucket full of dirty water. Almost all the doors off the stairway were wide open or half-open because of the stifling heat, releasing to the outside world the sounds of talking and shouting, as well as the hum of televisions. One fleshy woman in a fleece robe was swabbing the landing in front of her apartment, and through its open door Shamil caught a glimpse of a long, narrow hallway with shiny gold-streaked wallpaper.

Madina was standing on her threshold. She was wearing a long patterned skirt and a colorful print blouse with sleeves that went all the way down to her wrists.

“Won’t you be hot?” asked Shamil in surprise. Madina was silent, sullen. Her expression betrayed a vague, ominous tension.

“Why so grouchy?” asked Shamil, trying to make light of it.

She slammed the door behind her and started down the stairs.

“What have you heard out on the streets?” Her cork soles tapped down the stairs as she answered his question with one of her own.

“You know, don’t you? Such an
aria-urai
! I stumbled on two different demonstrations going on at the same time.” Shamil had a thought. “Hey, is your phone working?”

“No. They say almost all of the services have been disconnected. Some glitch in the system. Or maybe someone shut them down on purpose.”

They came out into the courtyard, cluttered with garages, but still spacious. A bench nearby was occupied by a number of young people from the building; he greeted them, clasping hands. Then he caught up to Madina and started babbling the first thing that came into his head, just to break the silence:

“Listen, I wanted to come by car, but Magomed took it. It’s all right—I’m thinking of getting an Audi. I can order this one Omargadzhi told me about, from Stavropol, only slightly used.”

Madina was barely listening. She glanced at Shamil only once, to point out the glass door of a bakery to him. A sign over it read
WINDOW TO PARIS.
They entered an empty, cool little room, lined with shelves of cakes and pastries.

“Let’s go to a regular restaurant,” Shamil suggested.

“No,” Madina said bluntly, sitting at a table directly under a humming air conditioner. She frowned, and her hands fiddled with a napkin she had picked up somewhere. A young waitress appeared behind the counter and sauntered lazily over to their table with a menu.

Madina was Shamil’s third cousin. Their great grandparents had been brothers who lived in the large mountain town of Cher, on one of the branches of the Great Silk Road. Cher was divided into quarters, each with several
tukhums,
each of these centered around its own mosque. One
tukhum
was military; another was made up of farmers and herdsmen. There was a
tukhum
of weavers who made cotton textiles and hempen cloth; one
tukhum
comprised merchants and boot makers of Jewish ancestry; and there was a
tukhum
of stonemasons and former slaves, descendants of Georgians who had been taken into captivity long ago. Their great-grandfathers had belonged to the agricultural
tukhum
known as Khikhulal, which was very distinguished,
and which had occupied a place high up the mountain, overlooking a steep precipice.

At one point after the death of their parents, the brothers quarreled. Madina’s great-grandfather Zakir had decided to marry a beautiful girl from a noble family, who was expected to have a substantial dowry. In those days dowries consisted of land—that is, the most valuable commodity in the mountains. But if a girl married into a different free community, khanate, or kingdom, she would receive nothing at all. When he learned that his younger brother’s intended bride would come from another community, and so would not have a dowry, Shamil’s great-grandfather Zapir was livid. He forbade Zakir to appear in his house with his new wife: “You can plow on her forehead,” he raged, “and reap her eyebrows!”

So Zakir took his wife, a horse, and several friends, and set out to conquer an adjoining territory, one with fertile fields and pastures belonging to alien tribes. Numerous raids on settlements there resulted in a formal complaint in court, with all the local authorities and clerics presiding. They presented Zakir with a copy of the Koran and compelled him to swear that the land that he was attempting to occupy, and on which he was now standing, had belonged to his ancestors. “If you can swear to this, then the land is yours,” they declared, smiling craftily.

Everyone was convinced that this would send the alien occupier slinking home with his tail between his legs. But Zakir had planned a clever ruse; beforehand he had gone to his own village of Cher and had smeared his boots with mud from there, so that, upon his return to the enemy village, he would be able to swear, with a clean conscience, that he was indeed standing on the land of his ancestors.

Thus Zapir remained in Cher, and Zakir settled beyond the
next mountain. He named his land Ebekh, which means “nearby, neighboring.”

Shamil was getting annoyed. “What’s the matter with you? Look at me!”

“Why do you keep asking me the same thing?” Madina objected. “There’s nothing wrong with me. Instead tell me what’s going on with you.”

“That’s what I’m doing, Omargadzhi is promising to set me up with a job in the court or maybe Uncle Alikhan will offer me a new job…”

“I didn’t expect that from you,” interjected Madina.

“What?” Shamil was taken aback.

“So you want to work for thieves?”

Shamil said nothing, trying to understand.

“I didn’t think that you would be crawling on your hands and knees to beg to work for thieves.”

Shamil paled. “When did I ever crawl on my hands and knees?”

“I know what you’re hoping for. To be just like Uncle Alikhan. Or Uncle Kurban, who works for the police. To live off the suffering of the
umma,
to cheat your own people. Who do you think you are? Are you even a Muslim?”

Shamil was stunned; he couldn’t muster a reply.

“Why don’t you say something?” Madina was incensed. “It’s because of people like you I can’t live an honest life according to the Prophet’s will. I can’t even dress the way I want. And I’m not talking about our parents—they were brainwashed long ago, but you’re young, you need to do everything you can to resist the
munafiqs
and all those
kufr
keepers.
Subhanallah,
now everything will be different. All the traitors will be punished. Before it’s too late, before your own brothers catch up to you…”

“What do you mean?” Shamil interrupted, flushing. “Have you lost your mind? Who do you think you’re yelling at here? Who’s going to let you put on the veil?”

“The way things are now, wives don’t have to ask their husbands’ permission before they decide to go on jihad. And children don’t have to ask their parents,” continued Madina, sounding more and more as though this performance had been rehearsed in advance.

She looked completely calm again. Shamil jumped out of his seat and clattered the chair back into place.

“Fine, now I know you’ve lost your mind!
Abdal
! Yell at your teachers, if you like, but don’t try that with me,” he rasped, not even able to hear the words coming out of his mouth anymore. “Who do you think you are, anyway, to judge me? I have never stolen so much as a kopeck in my life!”

Shamil cleared his throat and ran out of the bakery, bumping into the back of his chair as he went, and not sparing a look for the waitress, who had come out from behind the counter again. A minute later he realized that this outburst had probably been uncalled for. He should have behaved with more dignity: taken the bitch home and
then
broken off all contact. And of course warned her parents, if they hadn’t figured it out already. With this in mind, he quietly returned to the Window to Paris and peeked in through the shop window. Madina was still sitting at the table. Chuckling to herself. A chill ran down Shamil’s spine, and he slipped away.

First he returned to Madina’s apartment building. He went up to the bench where the neighbors were still sitting, and questioned them in detail about her: how she dressed, where she went; with whom she associated. They warmed to this subject immediately, spitting out sunflower husks as they spoke. It turned out that over the past six
months Madina had stopped hanging out with her old friends in the courtyard; a couple of times someone had dropped her off at home after nine in the evening, and one of the guys on the bench had even seen her out somewhere in a hijab. Shamil was shocked despite himself. He went back out onto the street and walked and walked, suppressing the waves of rage and pain washing over him, trying to get a grip on himself. He decided to go to Nariman’s to work out and burn off some energy.

Dusk crept over the city. People gathered on the street in small, restless clusters. Shamil walked with his eyes down, avoiding the crowds. Occasionally, music could be heard in the shops; TV newscasts hummed in the background; babies cried. At one intersection a large crowd had gathered around a sharp-eyed young guy in a striped shirt. The guy was brandishing a cellphone and shouting:

“There’s not enough to go around! Stay in line,
le
!”

Beyond that point the street had been closed off. Police vehicles were blocking it, and flustered faces under visored caps peered out of their windows. Shamil decided to detour through a bare little square where an old marble statue of some shackled revolutionary gleamed in the setting sun amid a meager planting of dog rose bushes. A small crowd had formed around the statue, men of indeterminate age, many of them potbellied.

A few of the older men stood apart from the others, while a number of the younger attendees were circulating through the crowd, asking an endless stream of questions wherever they went. Two of the potbellied men were holding up a large oil-painted portrait of the red-bearded Imam Shamil in a white Circassian coat.

“The people who want to divide Russia from the Caucasus are spreading panic!” a blond man was shouting, waving his hands in the air.
“It’s all because of the new people who have come into power in Moscow. But we must maintain our friendship!”

Questions from the crowd: “Who’s building the Wall? Why don’t we know anything?”

“Unfortunately, I don’t have any information—all I know for certain is that Russian troops have been withdrawn from Botlikh and Kaspiisk, though that could simply be for maneuvers.”

“It’s all because we, the children of Dagestan, have renounced our Imam!” rasped a man with a huge head. “We haven’t taken to heart the lessons he taught us. There’s not a single monument to Shamil in Dagestan!”