The Mountain and the Wall (13 page)

“Not a single one!”

“It’s idolatry!” came a voice from the crowd. “It’s forbidden in the hadiths!”

“In what hadiths?” the big-headed man spoke up again. “You’re making it up!
Khapur-chapur
!”

A new voice came from the crowd gathered around the statue: “The hadiths have nothing to do with it!” A gray-haired, heavy-jawed man appeared from behind the dusk-grayed backs of the men, jabbering breathlessly: “That Imam Shamil of yours burned entire villages alive for not submitting to his will! He spared no one—not the old men, whom he murdered indiscriminately, and not the women either, if they refused to live by sharia law! His own allies from the mountains turned him over to the Russians because he tormented the people! That Imam of yours was worse than any
vakh
! Why did you bring his portrait out here, why are you working up the crowd? Especially with all the rumors going around…”

People hissed. Several onlookers who had been standing at the portrait went over to the gray-haired, big-jawed speaker.

“You see? Because of people like him, the Imam died in a foreign land!” exclaimed the square-headed man, pointing his finger at the one with gray hair. The crowd seethed, and the potbellied man shouted:

“Imam Shamil was no
vakh,
he was a Tariq sheikh and military commander—he was a friend of Kunt-Khadzhi! Under him everyone in Dagestan was literate, many even went on to higher education, and it was all thanks to the Imam, it was all because of him! He brought the people together. Don’t you know there used to be a monument to him in Azerbaijan?”

“The Azeris took it down!” the large-headed man exclaimed hoarsely, with great emotion. “The Zakatal, Belokansk, Kakh regions of Azerbaijan are a part of our ancient Avar lands, but they’re turning our brothers there into Azeris. Television, the newspapers, everything is only in Azeri, and all the political positions are held by Azeris. Whereas under Imam Shamil the Avars were united, together like a fist, see…”

“They were not united!” the gray-haired man shouted again, this time from the other side of the crowd, far from the statue. “His own Avar people betrayed him!”

“That’s enough!” repeated the blond guy, turning first one way, then another. “Enough!”

Shamil continued on his way and soon came to the stadium. He walked a short distance along the adobe wall, then ducked into a nondescript doorway and descended a flight of stairs into a stuffy basement gym. Laughter came from below. Two men were wrestling by the workout machines. Nariman stood in red shorts with his back to the entrance, wiping his bare torso with a white rag and offering a loud, running commentary on the fight. When they saw Shamil, all three of them stopped what they were doing and greeted him enthusiastically.

“
Le,
Shamil, let’s see your biceps—making any progress?” Arsen
frowned and looked over at the sleeves of Shamil’s T-shirt.

“Another centimeter!”

“Let’s check!” Arsen bounded over.

“Hey, forget it, not now,” Shamil waved him away and sat down on one of the leather benches. “What did you work on today?”

“We did some pull-ups,” answered Nariman, “That’s all. Why didn’t you come to the mixed fight today?”

“Today was such a mess, I didn’t have time.”

“Nariman really clobbered Karim in mixed,” Arsen began, breathless. “He pinned him for five points! Take a look! Gadzhik, come over here, let’s show him!”

He waved to Gadzhik, who had already positioned himself on the weight bench. Gadzhik sprang over and they started wrestling again.

Nariman stood admiring them. “Mike Tyson, I’m telling you! Arsenchik, you’re just like Tyson!”

“Where is everyone?” asked Shamil, glancing around the gym.

“Someone blew up a store down the street—they went out to take a look.”

“The one that was selling vodka?”

“Yes, Salman’s, that’s the one. Are you going to work out?”

Shamil scratched his head. “I didn’t bring a change of clothes.”

“There’s no one here—just take off your shirt.”

“Look, see what I did with my leg?” shouted little Arsen, crawling on his knees along the floor and seizing his opponent.

“
Le,
you wild Indian, you’re doing it wrong!” shouted Nariman, and joined in the fray.

Shamil pulled off his T-shirt and went over to the combined weight bench…

9

As he lay looking up at the whitewashed gym ceiling, Shamil recalled something strange that had happened to him a few years ago. He couldn’t say now exactly at what point the catamarans with the tourists had disappeared from view—whether it had been at the mouth of the Ansandiril-Tlar, beyond the turn of the turbulent Gakko, at the Dzhurmut rapids, in the shallows and overflows of the Motmota, or in the “black holes” of the Kila. But he did know that it had been at one of the places where these tributaries flow into the foaming Andiika. Shamil and his friend Arip, who was now living in Moscow, had been hiking. They had started off following the path of the river. The tourists had sped away in their four-man rafts, oars churning the water.

The grassy banks rushed along the swift-flowing Koisu, clothing themselves in hornbeam and pine, detouring into gloomy gorges, plunging into canyons of dizzying depth, disappearing under houses perched on pilings over the river, with Akhvakh and Chamalal women peering inquisitively out their windows.

Evergreen rhododendrons whispered tales of the Caucasian island’s subtropical past, when it had been surrounded on all sides by an ancient sea; of the climate’s sudden change; of the mountains’ majestic birth; of the tiny people who had taken shelter in their folds, artifacts themselves, endemic, like the flora that surrounded them.

Who were they, these peoples who settled the mountains ten, a hundred, five hundred thousand years ago? Who had dwelt in the riverside settlement of Velikent; who had sculpted ceramic vessels at the Chokhsk anchorage, hunted bezoar goats and inscribed calendars onto the cliffsides? Fragrant medicinal plants with their roots clinging to the steep scree teased the nostrils with strange odors, bitter and
sweet at the same time. The horizon vanished beyond the semicircular arches of the mountains, echoing their feminine curves.

Arip stopped by the pockmarked walls of an eight-story signal tower that rose above the channel of the raging river, and waved to Shamil:

“Where there’s one tower, there’s bound to be another one nearby.”

Shamil made his way over to him, trampling the coarse stalks of chicory in bloom under his sneakers, then tipped his head back and looked up. Silhouettes of elemental stone loomed above the rocky peak of the next mountain.

“What village is that?” asked Shamil, pointing up.

“It’s just the way the cliffs crumbled. There’s no village up there,” answered Arip, though without much conviction.

“Let’s check,” suggested Shamil, and they started climbing the slope.

Within minutes they were both convinced that they had only imagined the signs of civilization, but some force drew them higher and higher, above the churning river, up toward the cone-shaped stone peaks. Shamil climbed, bracing himself with his palms against the warm earth, overgrown with melliferous vegetation, sensing with his entire body the invisible trembling of the air, fraught with the buzzing of honeybees and the fluttering of brightly colored butterflies.

“How long have we been climbing?” asked Shamil.

“Forty minutes,” answered Arip.

“Impossible—we’ve been at it at least two hours!” Shamil flopped down on the grass.

Arip sat next to him and looked over at the thickly forested slope of the mountain opposite them. Far below, the river gurgled invisibly. They were almost at the crest. Beyond they could see what looked like ruins, blending in with the craggy precipice.

“We’re almost there,” Arip noted, with relief. “You were right.”

“We’ll be there in no time—let’s just take a short rest here and then we can go the rest of the way,” said Shamil, letting his eyelids droop. A feeling of drowsiness, which he had begun to feel at the beginning of the climb, now spread through his entire body, leaving his limbs limp. He tried feebly to resist, then succumbed, giving himself over to sweet sleep.

Arip lay back on his back and also surrendered to the clinging drowsiness. Across his stomach, flashing its iridescent blue-green torso, scurried a huge beetle. Arip tried to lift his hand to brush it off, but sleep preempted the gesture.

Before long, in a matter of minutes, they were awake again.

“There’s the path, do you see it?” Arip said, pointing. “How could we have missed it?”

They got back up and began climbing toward the structure, which peeked out from just beyond the crest. Soon they realized that what from below had appeared to be ruins was actually a solid, fortified wall looming over the abyss. The path approached from the side and led into a narrow arched passageway between the façades of two residential towers, which had been constructed of neatly matched rough stones assembled without mortar. On the brown polished surface of the towers’ sides large petroglyphs spiraled in double loops.

Arip and Shamil exchanged rapt glances and followed the path up a covered street. The village’s buildings clustered together in the traditional way, linked by stone bridges; their flat roofs doubled as courtyards, and the houses, which on one side appeared to be modestly immured in the mountain, but from the other had mutated magically into hulking five-story monsters.

They came out onto a square with an ornate structure built over
a spring, which by all appearances served as a
godekan.
There wasn’t a soul around; the cascade of dwellings, each resting on the one below, gave no sign of human habitation. Still, there was an unmistakable smell of hearths and cooking smoke. From above, mighty timber-framed windows with disks and spirals carved into their shutters looked down on them. Many of the buildings had wooden double doors that were also adorned with spirals, crosses, triangles, and stars.

“Why don’t we just have a look in one of the houses?” proposed Shamil, but Arip didn’t reply.

Then, in a dark archway ahead, they saw a tall, nondescript man of around fifty wearing a light-colored homespun shirt belted with a silver strap over wide trousers. There was nothing at all unusual about him save for the leather bag that he was holding. The bag was open at the top, and was packed tightly to the brim with wool. The stranger smiled and greeted them in the traditional Avar way, with a rhetorical question, which might be translated as “Are you ready?”

Arip and Shamil went up to the man and shook hands with him. They were eager to learn the name of the village and to find out where everyone had gone. The man gave a knowing smile and answered their questions with proverbs: “He who took the path did not return—but he who took the road, did.” “A dog who has once eaten a bone in Keleb will not stay in Gidatl.” Shamil couldn’t make sense of anything else he said; his dialect was saturated with archaisms. Besides, his mouth hardly moved as he spoke; he didn’t address them so much as mumble quietly and rapidly to himself. In his pronunciation the village’s name sounded like “Rokhel-Meer,” the Mountain of Celebrations.

The Rokhel-Meerite must have given them his name, but if so, he had garbled it along with everything else, and it was awkward to ask
him to repeat it. The man led them to his house, which was marked with petroglyphs like all the others. In the spacious, dark interior, Shamil could make out a wooden structural wall with a long bench running along it, carved with elaborate geometrical designs. Tinned copper, clay, wooden, and metal vessels were arranged on the walls, as in a museum, and fragrant bunches of dried herbs, sheep’s tail, and dry-cured meat hung on poles attached to the ceiling.

After some hesitation the guests accepted their host’s invitation to sit on a large oaken bench in front of a hearth in the floor in the center of the room. Over the hearth a soot-blackened brass kettle hung on a chain, swaying slightly. The mysterious man said that his wife was away, and served his guests himself. He took a carved wooden ladle out of a cupboard and scooped servings of bouillon into bowls for them. Then he brought out some meat with garlic sauce and
khinkal
that his wife had prepared before she left, and set the dishes directly on the floor before them.

Shamil looked around the room, seeking a table, with no success. Arip seemed surprised as well, and at a loss as to how to proceed. He slipped one of the dumplings onto a wooden fork, looked closely at their host, and again began to pelt him with questions. But the man still only answered in riddles: “The tongue has no bones, but breaks many bones.” After the meal, Shamil began to doze off, and the man suggested that they take a nap before meeting the rest of the villagers, who were expected to return by dawn. Meanwhile dusk was setting in; by the time the three of them had settled themselves on bedding laid out on the floor, a crisp, thick darkness had turned the room completely black. Shamil heard the sound of cows lowing in their sheds, and thought, “They’re back from pasture, but there’s no one here to milk them…”

Then his thoughts became jumbled inside his head, and he fell asleep again, for the second time that day.

When he woke, he saw that he was lying on the buzzing, sunny mountainside, the same place where he and Arip had fallen asleep, just below the settlement.