The Mountain and the Wall (18 page)

          
And fearing that you’ll hear the cry:

          
“
Azbar bak’ararbi, yasai?
”
‡

The heroine then runs to the
godekan
to look for her father, and ultimately finds him. (Makhmud Tagirovich skipped ahead a few pages:)

          
The brow’s sharp wrinkle comes in sight

          
The shoelaces, the lofty gaze,

          
The trouser leg, and what a fright:

          
The craggy profile of his face,

          
The prickly stubble on his cheeks,

          
His mouth’s abyss, the words he speaks,

          
The mop of locks with which he’s crowned,

          
Behold, behold, your father’s found.

          
The people were alarmed by talk,

          
Of toppled mansions, riots, coups,

          
Of evil, kolkhozes—strange news;

          
The men locked shoulders, set to walk;

          
Axes in hand, the boughs they chopped,

          
And Marlboros from fingers dropped.

          
The dusty trucks roared as they sped;

          
Women made spindles wind, unwind

          
Great strands of endless flaxen thread,

          
When all around was dark and blind.

          
The truck dripped gas, a hulking brute;

          
Its honk shattered the air, fell mute.

          
Its lights shone in the darkened night

          
Like wolves’ eyes gleaming at the sight,

          
As they roam on the wooded slopes.

          
And then Volgas and jeeps appeared,

          
And from inside them strangers peered.

          
The people stirred and felt new hopes.

          
The dignitaries sought to meet

          
The locals, shake their hands, and greet.

Makhmud Tagirovich was somewhat disturbed that his wife’s childhood, which had unfolded in the ’60s, had unexpectedly become overgrown with regalia from the post-perestroika period. But he cast aside his doubts and chalked it up to poetic license. Anyway, a candidate for deputy comes to campaign in the village. That kind of thing was still happening in the ’90s. In the poem, the description of political disputes was weak, but Makhmud Tagirovich was quite proud of the rhymes that he had come up with at the end of the stanza: “The cow, a roan, went mincing past, and left a gift upon the path.” The poet followed that up with some lyrical passages:

          
But off the noisy cohort rushed,

          
As Grandpa stood and watched and waved;

          
And to the escort loudly gushed

          
And like a moonstruck child behaved.

          
Up mountain slopes, you and your dad

          
After the mule, the hike you had;

          
How you and he enjoyed those times,

          
Makhmud Tagirovich’s rhymes,

          
The house’s whimsical casement,

          
The drowsy zigzags on it carved,

          
Ravines below, arches above;

          
The clouds, a graying regiment;

          
Under the cow a future bull

          
He drinks and drinks until he’s full.

          
In the garden stones were knocked

          
To call the swarm back to the hive;

          
Two gaudy, valiant roosters squawked,

          
Engaged in fierce mad feathered strife.

          
As one must fall so fell the foe,

          
The bloodied loser brought down low,

          
Amusing idlers gathered round.

          
Above, along the paths are bound

          
The mountain girls, to beg the sky;

          
For a rich harvest supplicate,

          
Summon their gods, and tell their fate,

          
A pagan chant they sing and cry.

          
The men their sacred din intone

          
And “God is one” in chorus drone.

But then Makhmud Tagirovich’s reading was interrupted by the crackle of shots being fired, followed by the sound of automobiles honking. The poet pushed through the bushes, scratching his hands on their branches along the way, and peered out onto the street. Two schoolchildren with satchels were looking out from behind an electric pole, and in front of them on the pavement a man in a police uniform lay dead. A crowd was gathering. Gawkers emerged from their cars, waving cellphones, and within minutes a dense traffic jam had formed.

The poetic mood was ruined. Makhmud Tagirovich stowed the notebook in his briefcase, felt around on his head for the missing hat, and strode off in the opposite direction. He tried to eradicate the scene with the dead policeman from his mind, and to direct his thoughts to his upcoming conversation with Pakhriman, the Lak.

The two friends got together for lunch at Pakhriman’s on Thursdays.
They would eat
kurze
with sorrel, or
chudu
with cottage cheese, would play backgammon and would get into passionate arguments. During their last conversation Pakhriman had been trying to convince him that the Surkhay-khan who had defeated Nader Shah in 1741 was a Lak, and Makhmud Tagirovich had gotten upset. Citing an Arabic epic poem for evidence, he’d insisted that Surkhay-khan had been a Turkish agent, and that his wife had been in Nader Shah’s harem. The argument almost led to blows, but at the decisive moment Pakhriman’s wife had brought in a bottle of Kizlyar Madeira, and the evening ended peacefully.

But Mahmud Tagirovich realized that it was still a long time until Thursday, and he turned into his yard. His house stood behind a tangle of grapevines facing one of the main streets. Makhmud Tagirovich climbed the old wooden stairs, got out his keychain with its charm in the shape of two mountain ridges, and opened the door. With a thrill of terror he realized that his wife was still home.

“Makhmud!” she called from inside.

“Yes, Farida,” he replied, again reaching up to his unhatted head.

“Makhmud,” she whined, coming out of the living room and wrapping her feather-light golden shawl around her, “Marat is having more trouble at the university. You work there, why can’t you do anything for your own grandson?”

“What can I…” he began.

“What can you do?” his wife spread her hands wide. “Allah sees that you haven’t lifted a finger to help either your son or your grandsons! Take Abdullaev, you must have seen how much he did; he set his children up for life! And Omarov? His wife wears five kilograms of gold on each hand!”

She sank onto an armchair and buried her face in her hands.

“Farida…” Makhmud Tagirovich tried again.

“And look at your brother.” She heaved in her chair. “He’s ten years younger than you, he doesn’t have your education, and he’s going to be factory director. You need to take a page from his book.”

“I have a good job.” Makhmud Tagirovich was starting to get angry.

“And what’s it gotten you? Everyone there thinks you’re an idiot, I’ll tell you straight out,” Farida said, vicious now. “Normal people make money and they help their relatives out. You’ve had so many opportunities, and I’ve given you such good advice, but do you ever listen?”

“Farida, what’s all this
ai-ui
?” Makhmud Tagirovich was squirming.

“I haven’t even gotten started.” His wife continued, wagging her finger. “I’ve got plenty more to say. What are you up to, going to Pakhriman’s again?”

“I go where I want to,” sniffed Makhmud Tagirovich.

“So go, have a good time, do your scribbling while your wife toils away,” she said, glancing at his briefcase and gathering up her purse.

Taking advantage of the pause, Makhmud Tagirovich ducked into his room and lurked there until he heard the door slam.

4

Makhmud Tagirovich liked to remind his grandchildren that his own grandfather, who came from a family of Khunzakh khans, had in his childhood by some miracle escaped death at the hands of Imam Shamil. He was taken prisoner, ransomed, and after undergoing a multitude of adventures and peregrinations, had ended up in Petersburg high society, where he had even served as an officer guarding the imperial quarters. Makhmud Tagirovich’s uncles, and there were eight
of them, had perished in various distant parts of the crumbling empire, and beyond its borders as well.

One of them had given his life on the battlefield in the Russo-Japanese War, another during the First World War, and another at the hands of hostile Bolsheviks during the Civil War, but all of them had earned medals for valor in battle. Makhmud Tagirovich’s father was the youngest, so they spirited him away to a distant Khunzakh village. There he stayed until 1931, when he left to enroll in the newly opened Makhachkala Pedagogical Institute. Though he was expelled shortly thereafter for being the son of a White general.

Returning to his quiet village, he spent his youth copying out the Koran and working on translations, until one day, overcome by a wave of Red Romanticism, he hammered out a poem of repentance, in Avar, in which he renounced his unfortunate past.

In mannered lines, abounding in Arabisms, the poet elaborately recounted the sad fates of the simple Khunzakh people, who had bent their backs for centuries on end under the yoke of the treacherous khans and their plotting wives. A recurrent figure in the poem was a famous epic hero from free Gidatl who had led the khan’s young sons with him into the fire.

The poem was well received; it circulated widely, and Makhmud Tagirovich’s father was summoned to Khunzakh and given a position there as a schoolteacher. Within two years he had managed to become the son-in-law of the collective farm’s chief agronomist. Shortly thereafter he was named director of the school, and then, after serving in the Great Patriotic War, joined the Ministry of Education in Makhachkala. By that point Makhmud Tagirovich’s father had left his poetic endeavors behind him.

Makhmud Tagirovich himself was a late baby; by the time he was
born his three elder sisters were already in high school. He grew up in a private apartment in the city, with local celebrities always visiting, including poets in
kirza
boots bearing
pandurs.
Before long his father became bored with his mother, who yielded her place to various enchantresses from the nomenklatura. When Makhmud Tagirovich was eight, his mother died in Khunzakh under mysterious circumstances after celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Soviet Socialist Republic of Dagestan. It was said that she had eaten too much greasy meat with
khinkal,
had washed them down with ice water, and had died from a swollen intestine.

Within a year Makhmud was blessed with a stepmother, the daughter of the Oblast Committee Secretary, and his sixty-year-old father came into possession of a personal car and, soon afterward, a new baby. Left to his own devices, Makhmud Tagirovich quickly developed a taste for alcohol and for writing in his diary. He stocked up on notebooks in which he copied down quotations from Marx, Engels, Saint-Simon, Gorky, and Gamzatov, as well as jotting observations from his own life experience.

Alone now in the house, he took a stack of these notebooks out of the cupboard, picked one of the thicker ones, opened it to the middle and began to read greedily:

16
MAY
1980

For some reason I woke up today not in my bedroom, but in the living room. I recalled that last night after seeing my parents off to Czechoslovakia, I immediately called Rustam and Volodya and invited them over. Rustam arrived first with some dry wine and a bottle of vodka, and I got out some cognac. We needed to warm up before our expedition to Irka’s and Vadik’s, who
celebrated their three-year anniversary (of living together) the day before yesterday.

Turns out, Tonya had also been invited to the party; I’d met her in April on the trip to Baku. Rustam started in immediately on how he’d hooked up with her while his plump little Nadya was away in Saratov. “Tonya isn’t my type, though,” he told me. “Tonya is for guys like you, Makhmud. Intellectual conversations give me a stomach ache.”

I was flattered by Rustam’s allusion to my intellectual superiority, though at the same time I felt guilty about being so vain. We had almost finished the booze by the time Volodya showed up. He was feeling blue. I proposed taking the tape recorder and some cassettes and going directly to Irka’s and Vadik’s.