The Mountain and the Wall (22 page)

“Why did they leave in such a rush?”

“How should I know? Supposedly some guy named Khalilbek took them there.”

“Khalilbek, Khalilbek,” thought Shamil. “Sounds familiar.”

Kamilla went over and lingered in the doorway of her apartment. She seemed to be in no hurry to say good-bye.

“Shamil, you said that you’re going to get a car soon?”

“I was planning to buy one. What, you want to go for a spin?”

Kamilla laughed: “You could take me and my friend to the beach.”

They heard steps behind them. Someone was coming up the stairs. Kamilla cast a worried glance down the stairwell. It wasn’t her mother. She relaxed.

“Well then?” she playfully tapped the toe of her right shoe on the cement floor.

“No problem,” answered Shamil, beaming. “Are you going to invite me in for tea?”

Kamilla made a show of being offended: “Some nerve. First take me to the shore, and then we’ll talk about tea.”

The footsteps died away, but a moment later there was a rustling sound from below. Shamil, who had already sidled closer to Kamilla, glanced down the stairwell and was surprised to see Asya.

“Asya, what are you doing here?” he called down.

She briskly climbed the stairs, stopped in front of them, and held out a blue plastic bag.

“Your mother forgot this this over at our place. We still have some of your stuff too.”

“What stuff?” snorted Shamil, looking into the bag.

“You can see next time you come over,” answered Asya, and she ran down the stairs without looking back.

“Who’s that girl?” asked Kamilla disdainfully, with an insinuating look.

“Just a cousin,” Shamil said dismissively, and reached playfully toward Kamilla’s perfumed hair to give it a tug. She turned away, lightly opened the imitation-leather upholstered door to her place, and, grinning broadly, waved him away.

“My phone’s not working, I’ll come over later and ring your bell,” said Shamil, imagining what her skin might feel like.

At home he opened the bag and found some brightly colored, neatly folded pieces of cloth with a couple of large sheets of paper inside, folded in half. On the front was written in an unsteady hand, “To Shamil from Asya. Secret.”

Shamil felt a combination of curiosity and distaste. “What, a love letter?” he wondered. He didn’t like that they were related. It complicated matters, would prevent him from taking full advantage of the situation.

He paced around the apartment, opened some kitchen cupboards, then returned to the letter. He read it in one sitting:

TO SHAMIL FROM ASYA. SECRET.

I think we should run away to Georgia right away. If there’s a Wall up north, if they’ve disbanded the patrols, that means the border
troops to the south also won’t put up much of a fight. We can go to Kidero, my brother has friends there, and from there we can cross the mountain using local guides. Believe me, it will be a lot more interesting with me than with Madina.

You’ll ask, “Why Georgia?” And I’ll answer, “Because if Russia has closed itself off from us, that means that no one will be expecting us to show up there.” Things here are just going to get worse and worse, though my brother says that we need to take things into our own hands, to join up with the Chechens, the Adygs, to start the factories and canneries goings again…Haha.

When he got to the “haha,” Shamil couldn’t help but smile. He tossed the letter aside, went into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and got out a bottle of sparkling, ice-cold water. He drank straight from the bottle, splashing some on the floor. Then he wiped his lips with his hands, put Asya out of his mind, and started to get ready for the gym.

9

Shamil had gotten no more than five steps out of his building when he heard someone shout his name. He turned and saw a young man, tanned, with thin cheekbones like a woman’s and a mop of red-blond hair. It was Arip. They embraced and clapped each other on the back. Arip snorted. “We’re in deep trouble, brother. I barely made it back yesterday—I got no signal, my parents are all upset. The bus was stuffy and hot, and it stank. They held us up for two hours at the border, by the Wall.”

“What’s going on there?” Shamil was burning with curiosity.

“The window was filthy, I couldn’t see very well. They made us
stay on the bus. Looked sort of like hills. And towers, barbed wire. The bus was completely packed. There was this one guy, an engineer, he was sitting next to me, he’d planned to fly in, but there weren’t any flights. Now, he says, the idiots are going to be overjoyed, they’ve closed off the Dags and their kind. What they don’t understand, he says, is that they’re really just trying to hide from themselves.”

“What’s it like in Moscow?”

“Anyone with any brains is scared, Shamil, and fools are celebrating. They think that they’ve solved all their problems, that by stopping the subsidies they’re saving money. But have we ever seen any of those subsidies here? My village did everything on its own, installed plumbing, built a gym—and they did it at their own expense, with their own hands. All they got from the central government was excuses, and not a single kopeck…”

They came out onto an intersection. The wind hurled dust into their faces, whirled plastic bags up off the street in little tornados, and moaned through the cracks of the apartment buildings around them. As if on cue, with a squeal of brakes, a police sedan rounded the corner, and several men in half-unbuttoned uniform shirts leaped out. Tearing off their caps as they ran, they plunged into the jungle of houses by the street. Their car sat orphaned on the curb with its four doors hanging open. Shamil and Arip silently continued on their way, heading toward the city center.

The streets were strangely empty; the only person they saw was a small boy who darted past, his face smeared with ice cream. Arip, who was able to multiply three-digit numbers in his head; Arip, a champion athlete in the traditional sport of stone-throwing; Arip, who could recite by heart endless one-liners from Soviet films; he seemed overwhelmed now, depressed.

“So are we going hiking this year?” Shamil’s question was out of place; he just wanted to change the subject.

“What? Where?” asked Arip indifferently.

“We were planning on a trip, remember? Before you went away to university. We can wander around, do some climbing, visit abandoned mountain villages…we could even go rafting on the Andiika. Or did you lose interest in all that while you were in Moscow? Hey, remember that time we fell asleep on that mountain?”

“What mountain?”

“You don’t remember? We dreamed about a village, both of us had the same dream. This strange man served us
khinkal.
”

“News to me…”

They came upon a little mosque, nestled under some willow trees. Men in skullcaps had gathered around the fountain for ritual washing.

“That’s strange, it’s not time to pray,” said Shamil.

“
Le,
let’s see what’s going on.”

“I was on my way to the gym, actually. It’s no big deal, maybe this mosque has its own way of doing things…”

One of the men in the yard noticed their hesitation. He came over and invited them in.

Shamil hesitated, Arip insisted, and ultimately they accepted. They were given something to put on their heads, took off their shoes, and entered a small room. The floor was spread with carpets and the space was divided up with cupolas and elaborately decorated columns, which gave it the sense of being a grander room than it actually was. Two men sat on carpets next to the
mikhrab,
arguing quietly. One of them was in full ritual garb, a shirt with a tall collar and something like a turban; the other, who had a semicircular, close-trimmed black beard, wore an ordinary checkered shirt. Between them on the floor
several books lay open, some with ornamental ligatured Arabic script, others in Cyrillic.

The listeners sat on the carpets, some cross-legged, others reclining on the floor. Shamil and Arip found a place in back, close to the door.

“The hadith of the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
given by the Imam Muslim, says that it is prayer,
namaz,
that distinguishes man from
kafir.
He who does not perform
namaz,
though he may consider himself a Muslim, is an apostate,” said the man with the clipped beard.

“Wait, wait, give me a chance to respond,” the man in the turban interrupted gently. “He who does not perform the
namaz
is close to renunciation of faith. Close to renunciation, but no more. According to the words of the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
spoken by Imam Akhmad ibn Khanbal, he who does not perform the
namaz
five times a day, if he is forgiven by Allah, will not enter paradise among the first. If Allah does not forgive him, then first he will be punished in hell and only then afterward will he be admitted to heaven. As for true nonbelievers, Allah will never forgive them, according to
ayat
thirty-four from the
sura
‘Muhammad.’ From this it can be concluded that those who do not perform
namaz
are not nonbelievers; they are only close to apostasy.”

“That’s not at all what Imam Akhmad said!”

“You are referring to an earlier opinion, which he later renounced. He who recognizes the need to pray, but does not pray, is a sinner, but only he who denies that need is an infidel.”

“All right. Let me ask you a question: why do you Sufis say that twitching your finger while during the reading of the
Tashshakhud
is a sign of
Wahhabism
?”

“Because this business of twitching one’s finger is simply for show.”

“That’s what the late Khanafites believed, and in this they were
even contradicting their own
mazkhab,
but the messenger of Allah said: ‘Verily, the index finger in prayer acts more powerfully against the
shaitan
than iron.’ Some believe that you should move your finger, others say that you must not. Both of these views are correct,
inshallah
!”

“In the hadiths of Imam Muslim the word
ishara
is used, which means ‘to indicate, to give a sign,’ but not ‘to twitch.’”

“No, you can also define
ishar
as ‘twitch’ or ‘move.’”

The crowd rumbled. The bearded man continued: “So you’re defending those who don’t perform the
namaz,
but you’re getting all worked up about something as simple as finger twitching! Don’t you realize that the first thing the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
commanded, is
tawhid,
monotheism, the second is
namaz,
third comes fasting, and then the
hajj,
and on down? You are justifying those who do not perform
namaz,
while accusing those who are opposed to innovations like
Mavlid
of not loving the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam
…that is, you are recommending
takfir
for them. How can that be?”

“
Mavlid
is a painful issue for us in Dagestan. And we truly do not understand those who have so little love for the Prophet that they do not celebrate on the day of his birth, who do not praise Allah on any and every joyful occasion in their lives!”

“The only argument that any of you can make in favor of
Mavlid
is that it’s good and joyful and supposedly filled with love for the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam.
But if it’s so good, then why is it that no one ever observed
Mavlid
during his own time, nor during the days of his followers, nor of the famous Imam scholars? We can hardly have achieved a higher knowledge of sharia than the generation of the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
but
Mavlid
came into being much later, two hundred years after the death of the Imam Shafii. The first
Mavlid
was held by the Fatimids, who, in the words of Khafiz ibn
Kasir, Allah have mercy on him, entered into a conspiracy with the Crusaders, took money from them, and were notorious for all sorts of treachery! So it is indeed a dangerous innovation!”

“You want to justify your own lack of love for the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
in any way you like,” retorted the man in the turban. “You even believe that his parents are in hell, that his relatives were ordinary people, and so forth. Yet, if you truly loved the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
then you would go to the
ziarat.
”

“Going to the
ziarat
and bowing down to graves is polytheism, and the first and most important rule that the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
commanded us to obey is
tawhid.
But here you are openly spreading idolatry, exalting your sheikhs like gods. And I won’t even bring up the kissing of hands!”

“According to the authentic hadiths of the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
based on the example of the righteous men who were his companions, the kissing of hands among scholars and parents is permitted by sharia. Ibn Abidin said that there is no prohibition against kissing the hands of
alims
and devout people to receive
barakat.
It is
sunna.
Abu Daud quotes the words of
Umma Aban,
who said that the delegation of Abdulkais kissed the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
on both hand and foot…”