The Mountain and the Wall (19 page)

So we left. We flagged down a ride at the Komsomolets Movie Theater and headed to Kirov Street. And at that point I realized that I’d completely forgotten to bring a gift. But it was too late, so I figured that if it came up I’d just give them money or drop hints about a surprise still in the works.

Ira met us wearing an apron. Vadik had gone to the neighbors to borrow a corkscrew. The table was already set, and they’d put out a lot of appetizers. Various people I’d never met began to show up. As it turned out, they were relatives of Ira’s from Piatigorsk. Volodya immediately ducked into a corner and started to leaf through a photo album, but I made a point of mingling. One of the guests from Piatigorsk, who was much older than everyone else, said that my name was very Dagestani. I told him that it had been the name of a great Avar poet from Kakhabroso. Then Ira came out and started pressing me to recite something from Makhmud in Avar. I wasn’t about to play coy, but I announced that I would wait until everyone was there. Meaning, Tonya.

Finally she arrived. You couldn’t call her beautiful, but she has a nice, pretty face. She went out onto the balcony first thing, probably to have a smoke. Later, when we sat down at the table, Tonya sat right across from me and asked, “So, Makhmud, are you going to be gallant and serve me some wine?”

“Don’t forget you already have a suitor—he’s on your right,” said Rustam, sitting down on her right there and then.

That bugged me, but I didn’t say anything, just proposed a toast to Ira and Vadik:

“Today someone mentioned my namesake, the poet Makhmud from Kakhabroso. Maybe some of you here don’t know his story. He was the son of a coal miner who didn’t approve of his son’s poetic inclinations. But Makhmud couldn’t help writing, because he was in love with the beautiful Mui. And she loved him too. But Mui’s people, who were rich and of high birth, refused to let her marry the poor Makhmud.

“Meanwhile his fame thundered across all the towns and villages of Avaria; wherever he went, crowds would gather to hear him. The future last imam of Chechnya and Dagestan, the counterrevolutionary Nazhmudin Gotsinsky, was enraged that Makhmud wouldn’t write poems to order.

“‘Why won’t you write about our spiritual leaders?’ he asked Makhmud.

“‘Because I’m not in love with them,’ answered Makhmud.

“Then Gotsinsky commanded that Makhmud be given a hundred lashes with the knout, and Makhmud went lame in the right foot. After the whipping he was forced to go live in the Transcaucasus, but when he finally came back to his motherland, he was welcomed like royalty, because everyone loved him; they knew his poetry by heart.

“But Mui was already married by then. So they found a new woman for the disconsolate Makhmud, a woman who liked to sing, and he married her, but before long he left her and went away to work in Baku. There he learned that Mui’s husband had died, and the flame of hope was kindled in him. The poet, plotting beforehand with his beloved, planned to abduct her so they could elope, but Mui backed out at the last moment, afraid that her relatives would murder Makhmud in revenge.

“To drown his sorrows, the poet enlisted in the Dagestan cavalry. One day, somewhere in the Carpathian Mountains, he was pursuing an Austrian soldier. The terrified Austrian tried to take shelter in a church, and Makhmud burst inside after him. There he found himself standing in front of Michelangelo’s
Madonna with Child,
and was struck with the Virgin Mary’s likeness to his beloved Mui. ‘I lost my mind,’ he later said, ‘I stood there in front of the painting and couldn’t keep silent. I asked some people there, “Who is that woman on the wall? Why does everyone have her portrait in their house?”’

‘“It’s Mariam, who, though a virgin, gave birth to the Prophet Jesus.”’

“Well, that’s a translation, of course. Anyway, the thunderstruck Makhmud went on to pen a long narrative poem,
Mariam.
Of course he never saw his own Mariam-Mui again, she died while he was away at war.

“Makhmud himself didn’t have long to live. He was felled by jealous rivals, who shot him in the back of the head after the last in a series of brilliant victories at poetry competitions.

“They say that at the exact moment he was shot, Makhmud was reciting a poem about his own death: ‘A mind of gold in a silver skull; I did not suspect that I would die in vain.’ That’s my own translation, by the way. But we are now near the end of my toast. Dear Irina and Vadim, cherish and preserve what was not given to Mui
and Makhmud: keep your dear one at your side…”

While I was pronouncing this long toast, everyone was silent. I think I made an impression. They began to shout: “Makhmud! You need to be the
tamada
at weddings!” And Tonya’s fiery eyes burned into me. I joked, laughed, I was on top of the world, but I also didn’t neglect to drink. Volodya and I managed to down a half-liter of vodka in only thirty minutes.

We went into the next room to dance. I danced with Tonya, then with some little old lady, and then with Tonya again. She was clearly interested. She asked me to recite from Makhmud in Avar. I was already tipsy, but my recitation was brilliant, and everyone applauded. Even Rustam and Volodya were amazed.

Tonya asked about my career plans. I answered that I wanted to go into industry, to work for the greater good of communism, and to eradicate the flaws that so abounded around us. Then, after I told her the story I’ve already described above, about taxi drivers who double as pushers and capitalist landladies making money off other people’s misfortunes, Tonya told me that she sometimes felt like eradicating herself, that that would be even simpler. She often had thoughts of suicide, she said. I scolded her a bit, saying that this was a sign of weakness.

Later, while everyone was dancing, I downed a couple more shots on my way to the john. Had some greens from the hors d’oeuvre table. By that point Volodya could barely talk, and was having trouble keeping vertical.

It was already past nine when the party started to break up. We said our good-byes and left, caught a ride, and came home to my place to keep things going. As if just to spite us, all the stores in the neighborhood were closed.

Makhmud Tagirovich scratched at the yellow wart on his right cheek, put aside the notebook, shook his head, and looked outside onto the balcony. On the street, shouts could be heard, and a siren wailed. Always something. Makhmud sighed, went back into his room, and shut the PVC door tight to keep out the noise. It was quiet. Felt good.

5

Makhmud Tagirovich’s wife worked for a government agency. Here is what her working day was like: she and her colleagues would arrive around ten in the morning. They would chatter, put on their makeup, primp. Eleven was teatime. The women brought in candy and baked goods, and served them to the men.

At noon they went to their desks. The younger employees went online, and the older ones gossiped. At one they prepared for lunch. They got out thermoses of soup, cellophane-wrapped cold cuts, pies, fresh vegetables. They locked the office from inside and set everything out on the table with elaborate care. The entire department ate together; over lunch they discussed the latest news, taking their time. Then they cleared the table, put the lunch things away. Occasionally in the afternoon they would have to take care of some people who stopped by with official business, but for the most part they just sat around talking among themselves. Around five they had tea again, after which they went home for the day.

Farida arrived later than usual, after lunch. It was noisy in the office. No one was at their desk; everyone was upset. At that time of the day Roza always took up her position at the window, got out a bottle of nail polish, and touched up her toenails, but today she looked a bit
disheveled, and was standing in the middle of the room, shouting:

“Let’s try calling him at home again!”

It turned out that none of their superiors had showed up to work. Not the director, not his deputy. Rumor had it that none of the other government offices and agencies were open either. After the Khanmagomedovs’ wedding yesterday, all the decision-makers had disappeared.

Roza was yelling something about how they’d all been shot by the “goddamned beards.”

Faizulla Gadzhievich, a thin, hoarse-voiced man, claimed that that was all nonsense, and kept repeating, over and over, “I’m sure it’s just that they’ve had to call an urgent meeting.”

Zarema Elmurazovna stood with her fists pressed against her quivering, full bosom, exclaiming, “My daughter told me that they loaded everyone on a motorboat and hauled them off to Tyulen Island.”

“But why?” asked Faizulla Gadzhievich.

“So they’ll die of starvation out there!”

An anxious-looking, cow-eyed young man appeared in the doorway: “Has Uncle Alikhan showed up yet?”

“Now where exactly would he come from, Shamil?” lamented Zarema Elmurazovna.

“He might still come. They can’t all have been devoured by the
shaitan,
” mumbled Faizulla Gadzhievich.

Stricken, Farida sank back onto her chair: “So should we just go home, or what?”

“No, let’s have some tea,” proposed Roza.

The young man, which is to say Shamil, declined their invitation and left. The last couple of days had gone by in a kind of strange, blind fog. He had gone from one house to another, from one set of relatives to another. He had helped them haul their belongings around
town, bumped along in stuffy vans, had called at various offices. He had even made a quick run to the airport, only to find it deserted, with its windows blocked with plywood and the entrance locked and dead-bolted. The ticket counters were closed; all the planes had flown off to Moscow, and it was highly unlikely they would ever come back.

His mother spent days in a mute stupor. Then she admitted that someone had been sending threats to her school’s director, and that final exams had been canceled. She started packing for the village.

The Internet had been down for days, and Shamil spent practically every night in front of the TV, mindlessly flipping though the channels. It was impossible to make sense of anything on the news. Some stations simply continued their normal programming, making no mention of the crisis; on others he occasionally heard the dry phrase “Operation Expulsion;” finally he came upon some reports from the Stavropol border. They showed guard towers, armed soldiers, barbed wire, women screaming incoherently, and nothing more.

Shamil clicked over to Channel One for the nth time. A heavily made-up, disingenuous-looking face appeared on the screen, with multicolored curls flowing every which way down her cheeks. The singer Sabina Gadzhieva jerked her neck desperately from side to side, as though she wanted her head to fly off, and jammed a microphone close to her gaping lips, which were generously smeared with wine-colored lipstick. Shamil cursed, glanced out of the room, and felt his way to the veranda. His mother’s voice called to him in the darkness. She seemed to be standing in the doorway to her bedroom, fully dressed. Though it was hard to tell.

“What’s all this about you and Madina?” she asked.

“We have to call it off,” Shamil flapped his hand at her, and offered no further elaboration.

His mother reached out and touched his head gently. Shamil backed away from her and went back to his room. Nothing would surprise him. He grabbed the remote and again went through all the available channels. He came across an explicit, adults-only cartoon, a tedious action movie, and a stultifying women’s talk show. Finally he gave up, turned off the TV, and flopped down on the couch, which had been his father’s.

Dreams came not right away, but in phases. First Shamil heard ragged noises and sounds, then images appeared, lurching before his eyes like a video shot by a drunkard. He was back home in the village, in Ebekh. A crowd had gathered, mostly Shamil’s relatives, on a road that was still damp from a recent rain. They were shouting and laughing, pointing at him.

Then Madina’s mother arrived in a formal fringed scarf; she was still a beautiful woman. She squeezed her way through the crowd, took Shamil by the hand, and led him off down the road. The crowd followed, tiptoeing, whistling greedily, and cracking jokes about Shamil’s boots. Shamil looked down and saw that he was wearing a pair of ridiculous white numbers with metallic clasps.

They passed several houses and then made their way, slipping and sliding through thick, almost impassible mud, to some place that used to be a club. From there, skipping from stone to stone, they passed abandoned houses, decrepit and overrun by weeds. Shamil’s white boots turned black from the mud. Ducking, still gripping Shamil’s hand in hers, Madina’s mother led him through a beautifully chiseled stone arch into a dark passageway. Watery cow manure squelched under his feet. To his right a young bull bellowed, then fell silent.

The crowd had settled down and was now only whispering its jokes, as though sensing the gravity of the moment. “How are they all going to get in here?” wondered Shamil, taking care to step in
his never-to-be mother-in-law’s footsteps. At last, a strip of daylight gleamed through a crack in the wall, and soon they emerged from the dark passage and found themselves on the other side of the abandoned building. It looked out over the edge of a terrifying abyss, with the mother-of-pearl thread of a river glinting far below.

Madina’s mother turned her laughing, youthful face toward him, and gave him a playful slap on the shoulder. The crowd tumbled out through the narrow archway and gradually filled the tiny scrap of land at the edge of the ravine. “We can’t be in Ebekh,” thought Shamil, disoriented. “There’s no ravine there.” The patch of ground at the cliff edge was overgrown with weeds, and the people in the crowd that had gathered there were beating on calfskin drums and laughing. Old Mukhuk was dancing with precise steps, at the head of an entire line of laughing women. “Patti, raise your hand up higher, you look like a sick heron, and Zahra, you’re lurching like a chicken,” he kidded the other dancers.