The Mountain and the Wall (23 page)

Shamil looked around. New people had come in and were sitting behind them, listening.

“How much longer are we going to sit around for this?” he whispered to Arip.

“Give it another minute,” answered Arip, who was listening intently to the dispute. “Maybe they’ll explain what is going on…”

“Don’t you see, it’s just dueling quotations…” Shamil began to argue, but people started hissing at him, and he let it drop.

“You must hold to the path and understanding of
As-Salaf-As-Salih,
and then people will have more
iman,
there’ll be more justice, life will get better…you’ll feel it yourselves,” continued the bearded man in the checkered shirt. “What’s most important now is that the faction of
iblis
is collapsing, all those people clogging up the government offices, people willing to sell their eternal salvation for fifteen thousand rubles a month. Believe me, punishment awaits these
munafiq
s beyond the grave, so don’t allow yourselves to be intoxicated by this worldliness…”

“By saying such things you yourselves are sowing
fitna,
discord among the Dagestanis, you’re encouraging slaughter of the youth…” the man in the turban interrupted.

“We’re not the ones causing all the trouble, it’s those Sufi snitches, aiding the
kafir
s and other foes of Islam. As if you didn’t know who’s pushing our youth into jihad! I’m no supporter of such slaughter, I am for gradual reforms and for keeping to the true religion. But I also understand the men hiding in the forests. If a single good, observant man tries to struggle against police corruption and inefficiency—those guardians
of kufr
—what happens to this just man? He gets fired! He ends up without a job, so out he goes into the forests like the rest. Even the police are going into the forests! But now it will stop,
inshallah,
the
kafirs
have come to recognize their ideological defeat, they’ve panicked and have closed themselves off from us…”

“I’m leaving,” said Shamil and began to make his way carefully to the exit. Arip came out after him.

“What’s the matter, Shoma?” he asked, taking off his skullcap and giving it back to the attendant.

“They’re just harping on the same old thing. I’ve had it up to here.” Shamil slashed the side of his hand across his neck.

“Maybe there’ll be some real change? We could have a new state,
one that’ll care about truth, justice, and morality more than cash…”

“You really believe that?”

“Well at least we’ll be free of all that mindless propaganda, those vapid TV serials, degenerate reality shows, and the action movies with their piles of corpses. Maybe our brains will finally get purified.”

“Arip, the brainwashing will go on as always, just in a different way. Now when you go to the beach you’ll have to wear long pants, even in the water. Now there won’t be music or dancing at weddings! You of all people ought to know better. Don’t go around talking bullshit!” Shamil fumed.

“Calm down, will you,” Arip retreated. “I was joking, just messing with you.”

“Let me tell you, I’m sick and tired of that kind of joke,” Shamil shot back. He spread his arms wide and stretched, glad to be back out in the open air.

They went on their way, but Arip and Shamil hadn’t gotten very far before they heard noises under the willows in the courtyard behind them.

Someone shouted, “So now who’s acting like a swine?”

They ran back. The men in the mosque had poured out into the yard. In the crowd a man of forty in a green embroidered skullcap was yelling at a strapping, red-cheeked, unshaven youth in a cheap T-shirt with a picture of an upraised index finger on the front.

“Don’t you try to teach me about
shirk,
I know perfectly well what
shirk
is!” His words shot out like bullets. “Who do you think you are,
astauperulla,
accusing us of polytheism! Take a look at yourselves, you
haram
mongers!”

“Heathens!
Kafirs
! For sale to the highest bidder!” the kid shot back. His friends hooted approvingly. “Traitors to the faith! You dance around like monkeys now, but you’ll burn in hell with the
murtads
and
dzhakhils
! How much did they pay you?”

“
Astauperulla,
here’s the lost sheep bleating about money! How much did the businessmen pay
you
? Go ahead, tell us! And who slipped those flash drives to them? Who’s threatening to blow up the cellphone tower? Who’s out there terrorizing the shop owners? You think it’s us? You
Wahhabi
asses!” spat the man in the skullcap.

The crowd jerked and swayed; the young guy and his friends lurched at their adversary, elbowing their way through the crowd. Someone’s jacket flapped open and slapped Shamil across the chest, and somewhere a man howled: “Stop it! Le-e-e!”

The mullah rushed out and appealed for calm, but no one heard him, they were already lashing out right and left with their fists, not caring whom they hit. A couple of shots rang out behind Shamil’s ear, and the brawlers scattered. As he made his way out of the tangle of human flesh, Shamil noticed a plump body lying at the side of the street.

He turned toward the crowd and shouted, “Hey, stop! You hit someone!”

Arip gave up trying to pull an enraged guy with a beard off a thin, fidgety fellow holding a string of beads, and ran over to the prone body at Shamil’s feet.

“The police won’t come, they’re hiding inside,” muttered the man who’d been yelling at the kid in the finger shirt. He’d lost his skullcap in the brawl and was clutching at his cheek.

The body on the road lay with fleshy arms spread wide, motionless eyes rolled back, and a blank smile. A yellow wart was visible on the deceased’s plump cheek.

10

The moment Makhmud Tagirovich finished his poem, he took it straight to an editor he knew…though the poem itself was less important to him than the thick manuscript, printed on an inkjet printer and tucked into an old folder with white cord ties: this was the novel that Makhmud had begun long ago, about the lives of the mountain peoples before the October Revolution.

Freed from his burden, the proud author strode briskly along the ravaged, deserted streets thinking about how the editor, and then all of Dagestan, would react to the gift he had bestowed upon them. He had begun the narrative back during his student years, jotting down accounts of his escapades in cheap notebooks with their state-decreed prices printed on their cardboard covers. Years ago, however, his labors had been cut short by his scrawny, malicious stepmother:

“Haha, Makhmud, so you want to become a poet like your father? Times have changed! Write or don’t, no one cares, you’re not going to get a car out of it. There are plenty of others out there besides you,” she hissed, having stumbled upon his heap of muddled pages.

“It’s not poetry, it’s about our homeland,” said Makhmud, wondering what any of this had to do with a car.

But the evil seed had been planted. Makhmud Tagirovich set aside his literary labors and, not knowing what to do with himself, took up drinking again. And every once in a while his stepmother would whisper to her husband, as he sat engrossed in the newspapers, “Your Makhmud will come to a bad end, he doesn’t know the first thing about life! Since he doesn’t have to earn a living, he’s decided he’s a writer out of sheer boredom…”

But Makhmud Tagirovich had already forgotten about his plan to
write a prose paean to his native land, and instead became infected with the perestroika bacillus. He lost his faith in a bright future and neatly tore out of his diaries the pages that contained naïve slogans and praise for the Party.

Instead of an ardent desire to serve mankind, Makhmud Tagirovich came up with a new goal: to rebuild and reform the country through perestroika. He read articles on the subject in national and local newspapers and journals, taking meticulous notes. He spent sleepless nights writing letters in longhand on lined notebook pages, and in the morning sent them to editorial offices, dense passages of text punctuated by exclamation points and question marks. He wrote, and he waited for the time when the malodorous weeds of falsehood would be uprooted from Soviet life, and when the flowers of justice would bloom at last.

His early marriage to the daughter of the cannery director and the birth of his son again aroused the passion for writing in him: a sense of his new grandeur and responsibility as the helmsman and provider for a family. In this new iteration his novel was no longer simply a reconstruction of life before the Soviets, but a family saga with dozens of characters, whose names, features, and actions slithered away through Makhmud Tagirovich’s hands like lizards. Introducing some character, he would take up his or her entire family history and, against the author’s own will, would find himself making lateral leaps over to brothers, sisters, and cousins. From there it was a mere skip and a jump to third cousins, cousins twice and thrice removed, and beyond. All connected by a single umbilical cord. The manuscript expanded and swelled from one month to the next.

Meanwhile, the times were uncertain. His father, who had entered doddering old age, quailed and grumbled about glasnost, which
frightened him; Makhmud’s stepmother and his wife Farida were going loopy over imported goods; his half-brother, now a teenager, ran around to various house concerts, where intellectuals, drunks, and the offspring of the elite would gather to listen to rock music; while his son cycled through various unsavory illnesses and soiled his diapers.

Finally the moment came. Price controls were released, speculators flooded the streets, and all bank accounts were rendered unto dust. Makhmud Tagirovich’s father, having lost all of the wealth he had accumulated during his years in the ministry and in retirement, was felled by a stroke. His stepmother collected all of the ebony cigarette holders, precious ivory-handled Dagestani daggers, gold-embossed pistols, silver trays and tea sets, gold-encrusted wooden canes and pipes, thick-piled carpets, and ceramic pitchers—basically, all the things that grateful subordinates had bestowed upon her husband over the years—and in no time sold the whole lot to an American who was passing through. She used the money to buy her son-by-blood a house of his own with a big garden.

Her son graduated with an economics degree and plunged head over heels into the free market. He rushed around carrying big wads of cash and vouchers, drumming up business. He bought things, then sold them, talked himself hoarse making deals, stepped on people’s toes, went to Moscow on long business trips, and hid in his own garden from the people who were out to get him. In the process he messily but inexorably accumulated a fortune.

Makhmud Tagirovich, who by then was teaching Dagestani history in one of the city’s universities, followed his half-brother’s example and hurled himself into the fray. He established open stock societies, created fictitious accounts under the names of his entire extended family, closed deals, went around telling everyone about his hopes and dreams,
and inevitably, lost money. Farida tormented him with accusations: her husband was ruined yet again, and meanwhile word had it that his brother’s storeroom was completely overgrown with “greenery.”

Farida suffered from both sides. Her own brother had privatized the cannery inherited from their father, taking a majority stake, which sent Farida into an abyss of abject spite.

Basically, the world was coming apart at the seams. Other people were raking in money hand over fist, but Makhmud Tagirovich lost out wherever he went; every enterprise ended in failure. He retreated into his study and puttered around with his novel. At one point he tried to establish a Dagestani historical research society, but was unable to pay the rent. Late one winter night a gang of masked strangers showed up on his doorstep, dragged him out of his house, shook him by his plump shoulders, beat him on the back of the head with a boathook, stuffed him into a culvert, and just left him there.

They found Makhmud Tagirovich in the morning, frozen to the bone but still clinging to his presence of mind. His brother later used his special contacts to ferret out the culprits, and took revenge in some covert way that he wouldn’t talk about. And Farida had to reconcile herself to the fact that after Makhmud Tagirovich’s night in the culvert, he was unable to father any more children.

Several times she thought of running home to her mother, but each time her imagination depicted the scene in horrible detail: her sister-in-law, draped in sables, pursing her lips in contempt and pity for her, a hapless divorcée. So Farida stayed.

His novel took on new twists and turns, but Makhmud Tagirovich could never manage to get the ending right: he couldn’t marshal all his characters and herd them into his triumphant culminating scene.
And at home it was one thing after another. His son’s teachers were demanding money and gifts, and Farida was constantly feuding with Makhmud Tagirovich’s stepmother.

“That she-reptile’s son has five buildings in Pervukha, Makhmud,” she would whine in the evenings, “but she insists on living with us, and she won’t even sign over your father’s apartment!”

Ultimately Farida won out, and the stepmother was banished. But her place was filled in due time by their son’s young wife, a woman with an inflexible character and an enterprising spirit. She opened up a storefront where she sold cheap Turkish clothing, and Makhmud Tagirovich’s son took on the role of courier, errand boy, and shop assistant.

Farida grumbled under her breath. “I didn’t go to the trouble of getting my son an education so that he could run around delivering bags of garbage.”