The Mountain and the Wall (3 page)

Ronald Meyer

Brooklyn, April 2015

PROLOGUE

“Anvar, go get the corkscrew!” yelled Yusup, waving his hand in the air.

Anvar darted into the kitchen and found himself in a cloud of flour. Zumrud stood at the table, shifting a sieve from hand to hand and babbling:

“Can you imagine, Gulya? I’ve known her for over twenty years—we went to school together. She was always so sarcastic, you know, always had some snappy answer. Ten years ago her husband turned religious, so she divorced him—she wasn’t about to change her whole life around on his account. So now I run into her and she goes, ‘I went on the
hajj.
’ I couldn’t believe it. ‘Who with?’ I ask. ‘With my husband,’ she says, meaning her ex.”

“
Ama-a-an
!” drawled Gulya, settling her plump body more comfortably on her chair and adjusting her colorful sweater.

“She’s started praying, keeping
Uraza.
So I go, just joking, ‘Why not marry him again, then, if you’re getting along so well.’ He’s got a new wife and children now, but she can be his second wife this time around.”

“
Vai,
we’ve got one of those second wives living across the hall.” Gulya flapped her hand in that direction. “Or rather, fourth. She’s Russian, a convert to Islam, and now she goes around covered.
Her husband is a big shot at the cement plant. He comes to see her on Fridays, and brings his bodyguard along. Picture this: you open your door in the morning, you’re taking out the trash, or you have some shopping to do, and some hulk is waiting out there on the stairway, twitching at the slightest sound. Then the husband shows up. I’ve never actually seen him in person. But you can tell when he’s coming. She goes outside beforehand and licks up every speck of dirt in the entryway…”

“Anvar, that’s the wrong drawer,” said Zumrud, kneading the dough. “Anyway, Gulya, frankly I don’t like it when they start covering themselves up like that…”

“You know, I’m worried Patya is going to start covering herself,” grumbled Gulya, smoothing her shimmery skirt. She lowered her voice. “So, this distant relative of ours started coming over, a real shady character. He barraged her with instructions about how young ladies should behave. Patya was already keeping
Uraza,
and then one day she comes home in the rain, crying. She goes, ‘I got water in my ears, I’ve violated the fast.’ I really let her have it. ‘So don’t keep
Uraza,
then’ I tell her. ‘And don’t let me catch you in a hijab!’”

“Where are they getting it all?” asked Gulya, scrunching up her shoulders.

Anvar grabbed the corkscrew and ran back into the living room.

They were telling jokes and laughing. Kerim slid a glass over to big-nosed Yusup and said, “This Avar dreams that he got beaten up, so the next day he takes all his buddies to bed with him for protection.”

They poured a round of Kizlyar Kagor wine and clinked glasses. Tall Yusup; bald, bespectacled Kerim; stocky Maga; skinny Anvar…

“So you’re not drinking, Dibir?” asked Yusup, addressing a morose-looking man with a bandaged finger, sitting in silence.

He shook his head.

“It’s
haram.
”

“It’s
haram
to get drunk, I agree, but Kagor isn’t a drink, it’s a song. Just get a whiff of that bouquet, that flavor. It’s medicinal! My mother used to give it to me when I was a boy…small sips, for my heart.”

Dibir seemed about to object, but said nothing and just stared at the side table, where a small metal sculpture of a goat stood.

“I remember,” began Kerim, smacking his lips and adjusting his glasses, which had slid down his nose, “how we used to work in the vineyards during the Soviet days. We’d do a little work, then someone would turn over a bucket and start beating on it like a drum and the rest of us would dance the lezginka. Usman was still in school back then, he hadn’t been expelled yet. He was the biggest drinker of all—he’d get drunk, and then would go around mooching, asking everyone for a ruble.”

“Which Usman?”

“What do you mean, which one?” countered Kerim, gesturing with his fork. “The one who became a holy man, Sheikh Usman. After he got expelled, he worked as a welder for a while, then got into selling fur caps or something like that. And now people go to him for
barakat.
”

“
Vakh
!” Yusup was surprised.

Dibir lifted his square face and fidgeted on his chair. He cleared his throat and asked:

“Are you really an atheist, Kerim?”

Kerim dropped his fork and raised both hands in the air:

“That’s all, I give up, I’m changing the subject! For the record, I used to give the sheikh his ruble…”

Anvar laughed.

“You know, brother, you have just the same
iblis
inside you as
the men hiding in the forest. You’re living under an eternal
vasvas.
And what kind of an example are you setting for those two?” Dibir asked through his teeth, nodding in the direction of Anvar and Maga.

“Example?” Kerim spread his arms wide. “Well, I go out and work, for example, while you’re sitting around praying.”

“Zumrud!” yelled Yusup, anticipating a fight. “Bring some
chudu
!”

Sounds could be heard in the kitchen. Dibir scrutinized Kerim, who had redirected his attention to his eggplants, then whispered “
Bismillah
” and started piling vegetables onto his own plate. The women came in with two steaming platters.

“Let’s go work out,” Maga whispered into Anvar’s ear, twitching his shoulders.

Zumrud saw them in the doorway. “Come back before the food gets cold,” she said.

It was already dark in the little inner courtyard. Nothing could be heard from outside the gate, not the shouts of kids playing, nor the usual music, nor the sounds of men greeting one another and clasping hands.

“It’s so quiet today,” noted Anvar. He sprang up, grabbed the bar with his long arms, and pulled himself up.

“Can you do a flip?” asked Maga.

“Sure, look, I’ll do a flip and then a few giant swings,” said Anvar enthusiastically, and he began swinging his legs from side to side, warming up.

Maga observed his maneuvers with amusement.

“Hey, you’re doing it wrong, let me try.”

“I’m not done yet,” said Anvar, hanging by one hand.

“Listen, brother, show me your fist!” exclaimed Maga.

“All right,” Anvar obeyed, clenching the fist of his free hand.

“Now clench your butthole just like that,
le
!” laughed Maga, shooing Anvar down off the bar.

Then he asked: “So who’s that Dibir guy?”

“Friend of the family.”

“A Sufi, right? All they do is spout
ch’anda
and then ferret out quotes from the Prophet to justify it,” said Maga; after doing a few brisk pull-ups, he sprang down from the bar. “Name’s Bashir, he’s from our village. He took me to this rock, once. Said it’s an
azhdakha
.”

“Which
azhdakha
?”

“I’ll tell you: so there’s this
ustaz
who tells folktales. In our village, he says, there once lived a
chaban,
a shepherd who took care of people’s sheep, and this
azhdakha
started stealing rams from him. Stole one after another. But the shepherd wasn’t about to run and hide. Hey, he says, give me back the rams, or people will think I’m falling down on the job or stealing them myself. The
azhdakha
wouldn’t budge, no way was he going to give them back. So then the
chaban
took an arrow and shot the
azhdakha,
and the arrow hit him in the torso and came out the other side. The
chaban
went and took back the arrow and asked Allah to turn the
azhdakha
to stone.”

“So? It worked? Does the stone look like an
azhdakha,
or something?” asked Anvar, springing back up onto the bar and dangling from it head down.

“There’s a hole that runs straight through it. Other than that, no. Bashir believes it, though, he says that the hole is just like an arrow hole…plus, he says, the head fell off afterward anyhow.”

“What, hasn’t he ever seen any stones in the mountains?” laughed Anvar, still hanging upside down.

“There aren’t that many in that area. I told Bashir it’s
bida, bida.
So then he started calling me
vakh. With
those Sufis everyone who
doesn’t believe them is
vakh.
”

Sounds came from the house; someone was tuning the
pandur.
Maga got out his phone and squatted on his haunches.

“I’m calling this girl I know.”

Anvar tipped his head back, turning his acne-covered face to the sky. The new moon shone faintly overhead, barely illuminating in the darkness the half-finished attic, the lone light fixture by the door, and the clotheslines. A startled bat fluttered upward. Anvar whirled around in a vain attempt to see where it went. Meanwhile, the sounds of the
pandur
inside the house grew louder, sending a folk tune out into the night. Its melody lingered in the air and soon seemed to inflect, in some ineffable way, the entire spirit of the evening. “Interesting,” thought Anvar. “To me it’s obvious, the connection between the night and the music, but the person actually playing the instrument, and the people in there listening, don’t.”

“Have you heard about Rokhel-Meer? It’s an enchanted village. ‘The Mountain of Celebrations!’ Now you see it, now you don’t. They say…Hello? What’s up, how’s it going?” Maga interrupted himself, grimaced into the phone, and turned away from Anvar. “Why not? Hey, talk normal…So call some of your girlfriends, and come on out…What’s the problem?…I know you inside and out, don’t play the nun with me…What do you mean, I’m ‘coming on strong?’ I’m not coming on strong!…You’re the one—you didn’t invite me either…You’re such a…!”

Anvar went inside. Yusup was standing by the table, strumming the
pandur
’s two nylon strings and singing. Kerim chimed in, grimacing and exclaiming, “
Ai
!” “
Ui
!” “Oh, man!” and the like. Gulya was reclining on the sofa, her faced flushed; Dibir, deep in thought, was staring at his bandaged finger. Zumrud sat with her eyes closed
and gave herself over to the flow of the song, silently flicking her thin fingers and sending up gentle puffs of flour.

Zumrud saw herself as a small child in her great-grandmother’s mountain home. Her great-grandmother was ancient; she wore a loose, tunic-like dress, which she tucked loosely into her broad trousers. Her everyday
chokhto,
which draped all the way down her spine, concealed the flat, shaved crown of her head, liberated by right of her advanced age from its decades-long burden of braids. Every day she would go out into the mountains and climb to her meager little plot on the cliffside. In the evening she would come back down, hunched low under a sheaf of hay, her farm tools covered in dirt.

When there was a wedding in the village, Great-Grandmother would sit with the other old women on one of the flat roofs, holding Zumrud on her lap, and they would watch the dancing and listen to the tamada’s jokes. Their black robes made the old women look like nuns, but that was where the resemblance ended. They took snuff or even smoked tobacco, and improvised filthy rhyming couplets to one another. In the evenings they would go out visiting, with their grandchildren hoisted onto their backs like bundles of hay or water pitchers.

Zumrud pictured the neighbor’s house in her mind. On its broad, thick-carpeted veranda a big loud-voiced old woman sat rocking a homemade wooden cradle with a tightly swaddled baby inside. Zumrud recalled reaching inside and touching the cradle’s mattress, noting its strategically placed hole under the baby’s bottom; it was stuffed with fragrant herbs, which crackled inside, and a knife was concealed under where the baby’s head lay…

The song trailed off, and everyone clapped.

“What was it about, Yusup?” asked Gulya, who couldn’t speak Avar.

“The capture of Akhulgo. The storming of Imam Shamil’s citadel.

It goes like this: in 1839 the
miurids
held out for nine weeks resisting the Russian army’s attacks against the supposedly impregnable cliffs of Akhulgo, but the enemy had too many men and too many cannons…So all the mountain women put on Circassian coats and fought side by side with the men, and mothers slaughtered the babies and cast themselves down into the chasm, so as not to fall into the Russians’ hands. And the older children hurled stones at the attackers, and the fortress was taken anyway, but…Brave Shamil didn’t fall into the hands of the
kafirs,
though he turned over his favorite son as a hostage. That’s a rough translation.”

“Back then people had
iman,
not like now,” noted Dibir.

“I loved our old singers,” said Zumrud, tucking unruly locks of hair behind her ears. “Now, you know, all we have is pop, and all the melodies are stolen.”

“Well, I like Sabina Gadzhieva,” objected Gulya.

Zumrud waved her hand in the air dismissively: “Oh I can’t tell them apart. Sabinas, Malvinas…In the old days people at least had real voices, and singers wrote their own lyrics, from the heart…Now who knows what it means.”

“You’re never satisfied, Zumrud!” said Gulya, smiling. “How can you stand living with her, Yusup?”

Yusup laughed. “Well, you can’t keep her locked up at home.”