The Mountain and the Wall (8 page)

The crowd erupted in delight, and voices called out: “To the Government House! To the Government!” The crowd lurched, heaved, and headed off in the direction of the main square, with the megaphone still roaring in the background. People shouted excitedly in Kumyk and jostled Shamil from behind. He retreated to the tall parapets adjacent to the Caspian Beer Hall and then began to push through the crowd, against its flow, toward the waterfront. Waves of humanity washed over him, pressed him up against a stone pillar, and finally tossed him out onto the steps leading to the embankment.

Lost in thought, Shamil wandered around the withered flowerbeds and blue spruce trees, passing the same corner several times. Then the yellow tank of a kvass stand caught his eye, and he went over to buy a glass.

“What’s all the fuss about?” asked the bored-looking, disheveled salesgirl, nodding in the direction of the Kumyk Theater.

“
Khabary
,” answered Shamil. “There’s a rumor that we’re going to be walled off from Russia. Now the Kumyks are all worked up—they want their native lands returned to them.”

“
Ma
!” exclaimed the salesgirl, raising one plucked brow skeptically.

“It wasn’t enough for those people from the lowlands to destroy the Union,” Shamil heard a raspy voice behind him.

He turned and saw two old men in white Panama hats. The one to whom the voice evidently belonged slowly unfolded a checkered handkerchief and began mopping his sweaty face. The other man shook a wooden backgammon box and ordered two glasses of kvass.

“Our Kumyks,” continued the first man, “want to unite with the Balkhars, but who’s going to let the Balkhars go? The Nogais won’t join with the Kumyks either—first they need to figure out what to do with the land.”

“But
va,
why?” the salesgirl asked, still surprised, as she turned the gleaming gold-colored handle on the tank.

The man finished wiping his face and burst out laughing.

“That’s my question, too: why?”

The second man tucked the backgammon box under his arm, took the two full glasses of kvass, one in each hand, and growled:

“We need a firm hand, like under Stalin, fi-r-r-r-r-m!”

Both of them glanced at Shamil, who was standing to one side with his glass. He hurried away; he had no desire to get into a conversation about the Kumyk and Nogai steppes at this point. He decided to head home, where he could think things over in peace.

4

Asya ran to Khabibula’s, bought a couple of jars of fragrant heavy cream from his wife, then hurried home. From there she set off at last to Aunt Patimat’s to complete her errand and deliver the cream, which would eventually thicken into sour cream. The family considered Patimat, Shamil’s mother, standoffish, but from her childhood Asya had always enjoyed visiting her; she loved the particular smell that came from the copper-banded trunks in her apartment. The jars clinked against each other in the bag as she walked. Her hands began to feel numb, and scraps of meaningless tunes and advertising jingles played raggedly in her head in an endless loop, along with the strange expression “donkey salt.” Asya came to her senses only when a man tiling the roof of someone’s house laughed and shouted down to her:

“Hey, talking to yourself?” He snickered. “Talking to herself!”

Asya realized that she had been saying the phrase aloud, and that “donkey salt” was Avar for thyme, and that her mother had said something about thyme that very morning.

Asya’s mother, Patimat’s cousin, was dark-skinned from birth. Everyone assumed she was descended from an Arab soldier who’d been in one of the armies that had invaded Southern Dagestan. He’d gotten separated from his comrades and so strayed into their mountain town. The town shrank into a small settlement, and the Arab’s blood became diluted through multiple generations of descendants, occasionally bestowing a dark complexion upon women of the house of Arabazul in the Khikhulal
tukhum.
Asya’s father had come from a completely different region and was the exact opposite: he had reddish hair and brightly colored irises that looked like a mosaic-bottomed pool bathed in light.

It was because they were from such different regions and communities
that her parents hadn’t married right away. Asya’s dark-skinned grandmother, her mother’s mother, had grumbled that it would be beneath their
tukhum
to associate itself with
dzhurab
knitters and
chungur
makers, and her mother’s father refused even to hear of it.

“They’re nothing but savages. We’re an educated people here, PhDs everywhere you look!” he would say, waving Asya’s mother away, and would inwardly reproach himself for ever having allowed his daughter to go away to school in the city.

Asya’s father’s family weren’t much pleased about the match themselves, showing their own share of disapproval for this dark-skinned girl from far away. They compiled a comprehensive list of local girls whom they had known from birth and thoroughly vetted in the meantime. Asya’s mother’s family brought her to heel and married her off to a placid and trustworthy man, a dental technician, and Asya’s father submitted to his parents’ wishes and married a hard-working, big-busted girl from his own village.

It ended in scandal. Seven months after the wedding the dental technician showed up at his father-in-law’s place with his aloof, morose wife in tow, complaining that she not only was refusing to share the nuptial bed but wouldn’t even talk with him when they were alone together. The father-in-law—that is, Asya’s grandfather—lost his temper and nearly gave her a thrashing right there in front of everyone, but ultimately got himself under control and convened a family concilium. They threatened, sobbed, begged, trying to force Asya’s mother to love her wedded husband. Asya’s grandmother beat herself on the breast and declared:

“And all on account of this sock-maker, this
chungur
maker! Go on then, go off into the forests with clubs and sticks to hunt wild boar, see how you like that!”

It was true. Asya’s father lived in a forested region where there were still wild boar, antelope, bears, and leopards. Whereas the populated, civilized areas where Asya’s mother lived were bare as a bald man’s head; over the centuries, night and day, winter and summer, all the trees had been chopped down and fed to the people’s ancient and revered domestic hearths.

For his part, Asya’s father had also failed to establish a harmonious domestic life with his hardworking wife, though she was sturdy, healthy, and boisterous as a seagull. She bragged to her girlfriends, cupping one big breast in each hand:

“Take a look at these girls of mine: I can put my husband on one and use the other one to cover him like a blanket!”

And nearly died laughing.

A year after his wedding Asya’s father got a job as an accountant in the city and moved into an apartment there. He left his wife in the village and stopped visiting her. One night during a downpour that flooded the city streets, his abandoned wife’s brothers broke into his apartment and, threatening violence, ordered him to bring his wife immediately to town and to show her the respect she deserved. Asya’s father promised to get back together with his wife, and to do everything they asked, but the next day he installed a big deadbolt on his door and filed for divorce.

From that day on his life was an unending series of torments. His wife’s relatives besieged him constantly. Day after day, her parents, sisters, uncles, aunts, and clan elders showed up at his door, one after another, accusing him of despicable, dishonorable, and shameful behavior. Ultimately his wife found her pride and put a stop to it all. She returned home to her parents and put her former husband out of her mind, permanently.

“He didn’t even give me any children, what good was he?” she would say, and then with renewed ferocity would set to mowing the grass, milking the cows, and setting the tables for guests, of whom there was always an abundance.

Soon they found a more suitable match for her, a second cousin once removed, a practical, muscular man, and over the next ten years she bore for him, one after another, a teeming brood—five lusty boys and two husky girls.

So Asya’s parents were liberated at last from their spouses, and were able to join together in lawful matrimony. Naturally this process brought with it its own strife and scandal. During the formal courtship, Asya’s mother wouldn’t even come out to greet the matchmakers, and practically no one showed up at the wedding.

On the other hand, when children began to enter the world, old offenses were forgotten, and Asya’s paternal grandmother came in person to Makhachkala to dandle the babies and tyrannize the young mother. Asya was a pale, scrawny, awkward child, which brought her no end of trouble both at home and in the neighborhood. When she came to her mother’s village, she didn’t go around visiting like the other girls; she would close herself up in the storeroom and spend hours sorting through the basins and old carpets there, imagining that she was a princess imprisoned in a tower.

Her maternal grandmother said that Asya obviously took after her father’s side of the family, but her paternal grandmother said that Asya took after her mother’s side, and ultimately, after giving her a good scolding for the gray, limp
khinkal
and misshapen
kurze
she made, they left her to her own devices. So she spent her time reading books that she found piled up on the shelves, most of them non-Russian, old, and in tatters. There she found antique collections of sermons,
edifying tracts, and theological poetry by Mukhammedkhadzhi from Kikuni, Khadzhimukhammed from Gigatl, Omargadzhi-Ziiaudin from Miatli, Sirazhudin from Obod, Gazimukhammed from Urib, Ismail from Shulani, Chupalav from Igali. There she found lyric poetry by Magomedbek from Gergebil, Magomed from Chirkey, Kurbana from Inkhelo, Magomed from Tlokh, Chanka from Batlaich, and his disciple the romantic poet Makhmud from Kakhabroso. Asya leafed through these books without understanding even half of the abundant ornate metaphors and exotic analogies they contained.

The margins were cluttered with check marks and notes, some of them just words crammed together without punctuation. Within an eighteen-year period Avar literature had endured a series of shocks: First, in 1920 the Arabic alphabet had been transformed into
adzham,
the new Arabic-based script, and then, ten years later,
adzham
had given way to Latin letters, and the books with Arabic script were destroyed. Eight years after that, Cyrillic replaced the Latin alphabet, with additional symbols to mark guttural sounds, and their vocabulary swelled and multiplied. Before the Dagestanis had time to acclimate to one new writing system, they had to start learning the next. There was such confusion that the new Cyrillic words were written without spaces, like Arabic script, out of pure inertia.

But Asya wasn’t allowed to languish over books for long. She was extracted from her refuge and an attempt was made to force her out into society. This effort failed. Asya lurched like a crane when she tried to dance, flapping her arms wildly in the air. She avoided bright-colored clothes and preferred flat sandals to elegant, spangled high heels. Her hair was chestnut colored and thin, like corn silk, and her arms were skinnier, as her grandmother put it, than intestines. To complicate matters, on one of Asya’s visits to her father’s village she
made a serious misjudgment. One day after lunch she went out onto the main street, where she ran into the village flirt, Chakar, who was carrying a plastic water jug. Chakar gave a friendly whistle, and set down the jug.

“Come on, Asya, join us,” she whispered. “We’re going out. Just put on a scarf.”

“Going out where?” asked Asya. Chakar’s free-and-easy manner disconcerted her.

“Just up the mountain and back with the guys. You’ll be home in an hour. Please say yes—I can’t go with them by myself.”

Asya felt a rush of emotion, flattered that the beautiful Chakar had invited her, happy at the prospect of some unexpected adventure—anything to pull her out of the oppressive monotony of village life—but scared that her grandmother would notice her absence and would tell her father afterward. Chakar was so nice, so sophisticated, so fun-loving, that Asya agreed to join her. She rushed home, rooted around in the chest of drawers, found a gaudy aquamarine-colored headscarf, and threw it on. Grabbing a rusty watering can for appearance’s sake, she ducked into the garden, and from there darted down terraced steps and climbed over fences until she reached the edge of the village, where an old brown jeep was waiting.

Asya got in front next to the driver, and Chakar sat in back, cramped between four big strong guys, giggling and joking in her soft voice. A fragrant breeze blew through the open windows. The rough road looped over ravines and abysses, threaded between huge granite boulders, forded streams, and plunged into wooded thickets, bouncing the jeep up and down as it crossed old ruts and ran over stones.

In the back, Chakar squabbled playfully with the guys, teased the driver, and jabbed Asya from behind with her finger: “I bet you don’t get to ride around like this in the big city, do you, Asya?”

The driver, a big, meaty fellow, inserted a CD of folk songs into the player. The guys in the back snapped their fingers, Chakar shouted “
Vore, vore
!” and the aquamarine scarf quivered and fluttered on Asya’s head. They sped up till they reached where the road turned, wheeled around the curve with squealing tires, and headed up toward the crooked groves of pine and birch and the alpine meadows scattered over the slopes there. Asya began to feel uneasy. She looked back at Chakar, who was squeezed between bulky male shoulders, then turned toward the driver. But everyone was laughing, singing along with the CD, and no one paid any attention to her. All at once her head was in her hands, and she’d burst into tears.