The Mountain and the Wall (25 page)

“These days women are forbidden to go out to work,” she explained to Farida, “so let them think that my husband is running everything.”

Farida’s sister-in-law, her rich brother’s wife, came running to her in tears, wailing. “Khasan went to divvy up the factory with them
so that they wouldn’t close it! First they’ll bankrupt him, and then they’ll kill him!”

Farida remained silent. She sat with her eyes fixed on the wall, where the man with the yellow wart smiled down from his photo, and pondered the question of rice. She wanted to cook some
plov
in the iron kettle, but there hadn’t been any food deliveries, and it was impossible to get rice anywhere.

“Soon they’ll change the money too, and they’ll put the Saudi king on the new bills,” continued her brother’s wife. “And you’ve seen how many Palestinians, Jordanians, and Arabs there are around. Before you know it they’ll only be using Arabic in the schools. In fact there won’t be any schools at all, just
madrasas.
That’s what Khasan says.”

Sure enough, olive-skinned foreigners had showed up on the streets, armed to the teeth, and they would go up to women who were out walking by themselves or without veils, and harass them. One of them even became the
naib
to the Emirate chief, and urged him to intensify reprisals against recalcitrant
murtads.
Some of the young men who had become enamored
of Salafi
considered this
naib
to be the Messiah, the descendent of the Prophet, who would purge Islam of its monstrous admixtures once and for all, and the
mujahid
veterans had to punch their young comrades in the backs of their heads and admonish them: “Rid your brains of this Shiite plague! Don’t you dare place the
naib
above the emir, and the Messiah above the Prophet!”

But this Messiah, calling himself Mahdi, showed up anyway. First in Kumukh, then in Levashi, and then even in Kurush, two thousand five hundred sixty meters above sea level. The story went that, at the height of the fighting, one of the inhabitants of Kurush descended to the new Kurush settlement on the plain. Several villages in the Dokuzparinsk region had been relocated there after their lands had
been turned over to Azerbaijan in 1952. After going around with his followers to the households and
tukhums
of the Kurushets, Ikhirts, Matsints, Smugults, Lekhints, Khiulints, and Fiits, this morose man proclaimed himself to be the famous Mahdi, about whom the hadiths had prophesied.

“His origin is in the Arabic tribe of Koreishites, like all Kurushets, meaning that he’s the descendent of the Prophet,
salallakhu alaikha vassalam,
” reasoned his followers. “Plus he was born in 1979, that is, in the 1400
^th
year,
khidra,
which was predicted by the scholar Badiuzzaman Said Nursi. He is the first true
Mahdi,
destined to become your ruler and to restore the purity and strength of Islam!”

Many who were already in the habit of believing fervently in the stories they’d heard of children born with the name of Allah inscribed on their backs, and of beehives on which citations from the Koran appeared spontaneously, put their faith in this one true Mahdi, and began to organize processions in honor of the new Messiah, and to sing hymns to him. His uncle’s house in New Kurush became a destination for pilgrimages, and was adorned with flowers and green cloth, and a gleaming half-moon appeared on the roof.

When news of Mahdi spread through the Emirate, and gifts and tributes began to pour into New Kurush from neighboring Chechnya, the Madzhlis-ul-Shura deliberative assembly sounded the alarm. The uncle’s house was cordoned off and mined on all four sides, though Mahdi himself managed to abscond southward with all the gifts he’d been given.

The unrest continued. Posters bearing the inscription “Let us burn everything that is written from left to right!” appeared on the streets of Makhachkala.

“That’s strange,” mused the people, “since it turns out we’d have to burn these posters too!”

They were right; it didn’t make sense. The government had decided to transliterate all the
vilayats
into Arabic script, but it was hard to do this all at once. Plus, the
mujahideen
themselves didn’t know Arabic—nor, in fact, their own disappearing native languages, and were forced to communicate with one another in Russian.

Nevertheless, not only archives and music collections, but libraries as well, went up in flames. Then, literally the next day, the order was rescinded. The conflagrations ceased, and Russian translations of the Koran were saved. It had been decided that it might be better to proceed gradually.

After she moved out of her parents’ home to her husband’s, Madina began visiting the wives and widows of the
mujahideen
. All of them were excited about the unexpected victory and dreamed aloud of a time when nonbelievers would finally be reeducated or just disappear, when the true Emirate would begin, and there would ensue a life of freedom and bounty, as had happened in Saudi Arabia.

“Our husbands did not die in vain!” a Muslim woman would say, puffed up with pride. “They are all looking down at us from Paradise, rejoicing that we lived to see the blessed day!”

“Hold your tongue, Zariat,” another would scoff. “When your Usman, may Allah receive his
shahada,
was killed, you were at home with him, and when the
murtad
dogs called, you went out to them. They say that you betrayed several of our brothers.”

“What are you talking about,
auzubillah
! Who are you to lecture me? My ‘sister,’ who talked to men in chat rooms, knowing that it was forbidden! My sister, who asked them not to murder her brother, a policeman and defender of
kufr,
who was unwilling to break ties with her
dzhakhil
parents! They would have kept on pressing you, and you would have left, would have gone back to your infidel family, to your cursed brother!
Subhanallah,
we opened your eyes and saved you
from taking that terrible step! And Usman himself asked me to go outside and to convey his last words to the
umma,
to tell the story of his courage! While I was being congratulated, do you think I didn’t feel like crying? Of course I did, but I smiled and rejoiced that Usman was in Paradise, and didn’t feel sorry for myself, for that would have been pure selfishness and folly.”

“But of course your parents didn’t beat you for wearing the hijab! You weren’t told, ‘Better come home pregnant than in the hijab!’ That’s what it was like for me!”

They spent their evenings arguing like this and then they would read the hadiths and look after their children, and Madina sensed that, inside her womb, together with
iman
and the baby who had already begun to stir, faith was taking firm root, a faith in a happiness that was just about to begin.

2

“Come on, hurry up!” One of Arip’s sisters shook him awake. “Have you heard what’s going on? They want…”

There were rumors that the people who had been out at night setting fire to theaters and restaurants had now taken to burning museums as well. Arip jumped up and, cursing at the dead telephone connections, rushed toward the square, where the bronze Lenin still lay on its side, past the boarded-up doors of the boutiques, the tattered and torn flyers about cinderblocks for sale, jumping across gaping manholes and stinking piles of garbage…

At home Arip’s father lay on his venerable bed, shoving away with his feeble, trembling hands a spoon that his mother was holding out to him.
“He’s willing to die from hunger, anything but show how weak he is,” Arip’s sister kept complaining.

These battles went on constantly, several times a day. Their immense mother would crouch down next to the feeble body, which lay with its muscles clenched up from sheer stubbornness, snorting and cursing. Their father lashed out, refusing to be fed; he would grab the spoon away from his wife, but then immediately drop it onto the floor.

How on earth had these two gotten married? Studious Murad had spent his younger years and most of his thirties completely submerged in papers, temperature gauges, and calculations. No one in his family believed that he would ever give in and take a wife. Yet the miracle had come to pass, and he had married.

After the wedding, the new husband plunged into his research with renewed zeal. He would rush off in the morning to the Institute for High Temperatures and would return in the evening disheveled and rejuvenated.

“Just imagine, Khadizha, we’ve already constructed a building that runs year round on solar energy. Soon the Caspian region and the mountains will be full of photoelectric, thermodynamic, solar-biofuel, solar-wind plants with power output of…”

And Arip’s father would launch into eloquent soliloquies about heliostats and heat exchangers, about automatic control systems and boiler batteries. His wife Khadizha would listen, rapt, flushed with excitement, as she furiously polished the blackened bottoms of their pots and pans until they gleamed.

Without waiting for his comely wife’s reactions to his speeches, Murad would run into his study and hunch over his marvelous blueprints, which contained the germs of a magnificent future, enormous palaces saturated with the sun’s light and energy. For hours on end
he would pore over a map of Dagestani geothermal deposits, would calculate the number of solar days and the force of the wind, then rush back to the Institute, where other projects of stunning audacity were being developed, projects that would revolutionize agriculture, and even the defense industry.

While Murat was out developing his radical solar-energy projects, Khadizha was home mopping floors and polishing furniture. She bleached and starched linen, made stuffing, marinated, canned, and baked. Day in and day out, her large red hands chopped, rolled, kneaded, mixed, pressed, cleaned, tied, steamed, and grated, and her belly swelled and subsided, swelled and subsided. Every pregnancy produced a girl, and Khadizha sobbed bitterly. “When am I going to get a boy?”

Standing by and watching as his apartment, scorched with dreams of the sun and sterilized with Khadizha’s rags, filled with noise, the shouts of Saida, Faida, Naida, Aida, Zabida, and Valida, Murad only smiled and chuckled.

“Maybe we have enough?” he would ask his wife. But Khadizha, smelling of fried onion and oiled skillets, refused to give up. She needed to give birth to a son.

And it came to pass. In the wake of Saida, Faida, Naida, Aida, Zabida, and Valida, Arip made his entrance in the world. He also fell into the solar trap. His father took him along on research expeditions and showed him mysterious vaults and gigantic basins illuminated and warmed at night by solar power that had been captured and stored over the course of the day.

When Murad came home in the evenings, he beheld his fresh and clean daughters, seated docilely in a row over their needlework, and the rooms all spotlessly cleaned and polished. He would go to his study, then burst back out, bug-eyed: “Not again, Khadizha!”

“What, Murad? It was such a mess in there, just terrible. I tossed out all those old scraps of paper that were stuck in between the pages, and put all the books neatly back on the shelves. If it weren’t for me, your desk would have turned into a worm farm years ago!”

And Arip’s father would groan and curse, and would start sorting through the books, which his wife had arranged by size and color, trying to find the places he had marked so carefully.

And then the solar dream popped like a soap bubble. The research was discontinued; the projects were frozen, or they simply vanished into thin air, and Arip’s father turned pale and drooped, as though he had been punctured. His mother, though, began to expand outward, as though compensating for her husband’s increasing incorporeity.

Every once in a while Murad seemed to jolt back to life. He would begin to scribble articles and appeals, alternatively pleading and demanding, dignified and aggrieved, but to no avail. The installations with their colossal arrays of lights went dark; the great basins, vaults, and marvelous edifices meekly effaced themselves from time and space.

His mother, to whom fertility had imparted an all-encompassing generosity, became even more confident and energetic after Arip’s birth. She pickled, preserved, and ground with even greater fury, and Faida, Naida, Aida, Zabida, and Valida were easily and comfortably dispensed with, sent off to husbands with ample supplies of plump pillows, table settings, crystal vases, garlic presses, and thick carpets.

Arip’s mother decided to keep the eldest, Saida, with her at home for companionship. Doomed to eternal spinsterhood, Saida soaked her mother’s feet, prepared veal for her finicky father, whitewashed the ceilings, crocheted fringes on scarves, and tended countless nephews.

From childhood Arip had been in thrall to numbers. Like his father, he was infected with a utopian dream of the sun, and he contributed
grandiose fantasies of his own to his father’s grand plans. By middle school he devoured logic problems whole, was hacking into various networks, and had mastered the principles of analysis and econometrics.

His father bought his son the latest books on computer science; his mother stuffed him with meat dumplings. Saida smothered him with bitter kisses, which he tried to fend off as best he could, and Faida’s, Naida’s, Aida’s, Zabida’s, and Valida’s husbands teased him, calling him a “little brainiac” and forcing him to do a hundred push-ups at a time.

Sometimes Arip allowed his mind to wander away from equations, and when he did, he succumbed to the cheap mysticism of numerology, trying to discern the secret digits of his own fate. He divided words up into their individual letters, assigning each one a number based on its order in the alphabet, and then divided and multiplied them in an infinite series of combinations.