The Mountain and the Wall (26 page)

He calculated that the Cyrillic letters in “Dagestan” add up to the number 69, which is a six reversed onto itself. Arip added the two individual digits together and got 15; then he did it again, and came up with 6. Thrilled with this result, he started in on his own name.

If his mountain tribe ancestors had been able to pronounce Fs, he reasoned, then Arip would have been Arif. “Arif,” divided up into numbers, also yielded the mighty six, signifying equilibrium, harmony, the seal of Solomon, success, the Days of Creation, the hermaphroditic Number of the Universe…

Shamil dragged Arip out of the world of calculations into the world of street brawls, noisemakers, potatoes baked over a campfire behind the garage, and violent fights that drew blood. The next neighborhood over was under the control of the hulking Seryozha, whom the local kids called Serazh and idolized for his superhuman-seeming strength and courage. Serazh had grand plans to take over Shamil’s and Arip’s
neighborhood as well. After a few dreadful melees, which attracted upwards of two hundred spectators among the local boys, a pact was concluded, and Serazh entered into peaceful collaboration with the enemy.

When they—and their biceps—matured, they started launching various “enterprises” together, offering protection for money, prying rails from abandoned railroad tracks, and even going to mixed dances.

Meanwhile, Serazh assembled a new gang of working-class Russian kids, whose grandmothers and grandfathers had fled the starving lower Volga region to fertile Dagestan back in the day. He would knock the vodka bottles out of their hands and offer moral instruction: “Take your example from the Dags. They don’t drink, they work out, and all our guys do is hit the booze. There won’t be anyone left bury our old people!”

Even as he cultivated alliances with Dagestanis, Serazh joined a fascist cell and promoted the idea of healing the Russian nation through imitation of the enemy; in the intervals between political education and physical training he made a decent income writing term papers and theses to order. Then, when Arip went to school in Moscow, Serazh would come, spend the night with him, and the next morning would set out in his homespun Russian shirt with its embroidered side collar to commune with the skinhead brotherhood that haunted the city’s outer reaches.

It was from Serazh that Arip heard for the first time about the Wall, which, according to a bunch of barely literate, skinhead hoods, would rise up and save Russia. Back then, those stories seemed as though they couldn’t be anything more than wild fantasies cooked up by restless thuglings who had too much time on their hands…Now, though, they had unexpectedly taken on flesh and clarity.

In Moscow State University’s Department of Mathematics, Arip had to work like crazy to catch up with his classmates, geniuses who could recite pi to the thousandth digit from memory, who knew more
about multivariable calculus, topology, and complex variables than about their own family trees. First in the university, and then at work, Arip circulated among savants and lunatics whose whole world was mathematics. He could never have imagined that the world would split in two, would ripple and burst, that the fantasies of Serazh’s gang of morons would actually come to pass, and so quickly.

The streets of Moscow were filling up with bloodthirsty throngs of teenagers when blond Arip managed to get out of the city to the Dagestan buses and sped off, heading back to the world on the other side of the Wall, where nothing would ever be the same.

The square was just ahead. Arip made two more turns before realizing that he was too late. Before the entrance of the orphaned museum stood a black pile of shattered ceramic pottery. Men wandered around the square, averting their eyes, and one of them, when Arip asked, said quietly, “They came in the morning, at dawn, with excavators…said that it was idolatry.”

Arip squatted down in front of this display of pulverized history, and something dull and heavy rose from deep inside him, constricting his throat from below.

He looked at the fragments of antique plates, ceramic flasks and lanterns, and grain-storage jugs with pictograms in relief, while from the direction of the newly arisen Madzhlis-ul-Shura, a row of olive-skinned emissaries advanced upon him, rattling their weapons.

“Get away! Get away, brother!” shouted one of the men who had been standing by, observing the scene, and Arip obeyed blindly.

With malevolent but vacant stares the emissaries watched as Arip walked away. Today the museum vaults and display cases had been plundered. Today the antique weapons and Kaitag embroidered textiles
had been looted, along with the carved wooden boxes and carnelian-jet beads, nielloed gilded belts, and silver breastplates; knobbly, gem-encrusted bracelets and earrings with coiled serpents;
kukems
and
dumchi, chokhtos
and bronze pins. But the greatest loss were the bronze statuettes, cast millennia ago, of bare-breasted, full-buttocked nude female figures, laughing horsemen with dangling legs, dolls in adoring poses, ancient mountain men in tall turbans like crowns lifting horn goblets in the air, and homunculi, entirely naked, with protruding genitals. It had been decided by the emirs of the
vilayat
to melt down and recast the shameful figures into sculptures of Arabic script spelling out the name of Allah, in this way reinforcing the power of the one and only God.

Leaving behind the leering emissaries and morose, shadowy witnesses, Arip headed for the basement cafeteria where he had agreed to meet Shamil. The people on the streets were discussing the ravaged museum treasures. Old women shushed them from the corners; townspeople trudged along with backs hunched, biting their lips, while the triumphant
mujahideen,
descendants of those same laughing horsemen, rejoiced at the justice that they had wrought.

On the street that sloped down toward the sea and the ruins of the demolished railroad tracks, a giant bonfire raged, spewing flames to the sky.

“A fire! Let’s hurry, Magashka, it’s really burning over there!” teenagers yelled, waving their hands wildly in the air.

In front of the next museum, objects lay in a giant heap—European plaster Madonnas and Graces, American Indians on horseback, Christian saints and Soviet propaganda ceramics depicting sailors, slogans, and banners—and a bonfire raged, devouring paintings of people and animals. They melted and fused in the heat. A Turk holding a hookah and a Virgin Mary ascending to heaven, the eternal bird Gamayun and a woman with a bottle, an Italian girl at the bath, a still life with
a hare, mountain tribesmen in raucous celebration on the site of Imam Shamil’s surrender, all of them enveloped in flames, along with soldiers storming Gimry village, Argutinsky’s detachment crossing over the crest of the Caucasus, and the Russian encampment at Gunib…Splinters flew up in the gray, ashy air; oil paint formed bubbles and dripped down flaming canvases like tears.

“Look! Look there!” yelled the boys.

“Thugs!” the women said under their breath, spitting in disgust.

“Better hide your family photos,” anxious fathers whispered to one another.

Arip walked past the fire without stopping, like a man intoxicated, suppressing the fury that was welling up inside him. Young men in camouflage watched him sullenly: “
Le
! Why so grouchy? Painting the living human form is
haram
!”

Arip’s feet buzzed like loose piano strings, but he walked on, avoiding the staring eyes of the men in camouflage, his face a stony mask.

3

The little cellar café, which had by some miracle managed to stay open, hummed and whispered, and the air, stirred by the fan, was thick with sighs. Arip looked at the widened pupils of the people huddled together in a living, quivering cluster, sharing quiet, terrifying news.

Everything, all the shops, bakeries, hair salons, shoe stores, music venues, and movie theaters, had been closed, their doors nailed shut, their owners intimidated. Amina, who had sold home-baked goods, had been cleaned out by the beards and ruined. She’d started wearing a dark
khlamys,
and wrinkles had spread over her face overnight.
She looked like an old woman.

The beauty salons had been destroyed; men lay in wait for their proprietresses on the street and dashed foul-smelling swill over them as they passed.

The café patrons passed rumors back and forth. A group of girls who had for some reason dared to show up on the main square in cami tops had barely managed to escape with their lives from fanatical Arab public-morals militiamen.

Female singers had either gone into hiding or had fled the country, and those who remained hid themselves behind the niqab and hastily married influential
mujahideen.
Weddings were celebrated without dancing or music, with no one present except for the religious officials. Two young
mujahideen
were caught dancing the lezginka, brought to trial, and sentenced to be flogged.

Glossy magazines with advertisements for wedding salons, videographers, and photographers were destroyed, along with the flyers and posters announcing concerts that used to be everywhere on the streets. The old Philharmonia concert hall was taken over by the sharia office; cellos and harpsichords went flying out the windows onto the railroad tracks, and the tracks themselves were blown up and lay crumpled on the ground.

The rumors assaulted Arip’s ears, and he sat down next to Shamil in shock, as the latter shifted back and forth on his chair.

“Arip, this is Lena, Kusium, Sharapudin Muradovich, this is…”

The customers in the café exchanged greetings and resumed their arguments. A middle-aged man in a brown jacket whirled his yellow fists in the air and, stammering with the effort, harangued his listeners: “It’s the Islamic crusades, that’s what it is, the east taking over, it’s the end of democracy! We’re going backward, degenerating!”

“The east isn’t the problem, that’s not the issue,” a balding little man with protruding ears angrily interrupted him.

“What has the east got to do with it? We ourselves are to blame! And western special agents with all their conspiracies! They’ve done everything they can to incite mutual hatred between the Caucasians and the Russians, to tear the country apart. Bet they’re gloating now!”

“Don’t make me laugh, Ali!” Kusium, made up and dressed in her finest, rapped on the table and tossed back her lush curls. “Like America needs to cultivate Islamic
mujahideen.
Think what you’re saying!”

Yes, Kusium was wearing a fashionable suede skirt and her lips were gleaming, as though there was no chaos on the streets, no
kufr,
no
fetva
or
gazavat
; the cappuccino foam in their cups featured designs of hearts and flowers, as though oil-painted mountain dwellers and soldiers were not going up in flames just outside the door. Arip asked the young woman who owned the café to bring him some spiced tea, and fixed his eyes on his own fidgeting fingers.

“They’ve knocked Lenin down! That’s the problem—it’s punishment. Under the Soviets we had friendship of the peoples…”

The man in brown again interrupted the bloated communist: “I remember that so-called friendship of the peoples! I’m here to tell you, enlightened Islam is a thing of the past, what we have now is hordes of primitive sectarians. You know what they do with Nakshiband sheikhs when they get their hands on them?”

The man whispered something, grimacing. Lena dropped a teaspoon.

“Still, you have to understand, we shouldn’t be too pessimistic,” wheezed Sharapudin Muradovich. “Our republic is the center of ancient civilizations, the cradle of the very first democratic societies. The oldest production economy, metallurgy, the location of the first cultivated agricultural crops! We can’t just lose it all in one go.
They’ll shoot for awhile, then they’ll calm down.”

The fan was blowing in Sharapudin Muradovich’s ear, and his hair waved in the air like soldiers surrendering.

“And all because of the federal authorities,” said Shamil quietly. “Because of the Special Forces. They made a nice living on our corpses, and then they abandoned us, like, ‘Now you can rot in hell.’”

“What do you mean?” asked Lena.

“They were paid twenty thousand for each hour of special ops. So they dragged out for days what they could have dealt with in a matter of minutes. They set up an entire convoy of armored vehicles to deal with just three
Wahhabi
Kalashnikovs.”

“We know that already,” Lena waved her hands in the air.

“And who died?” continued Shamil. “Ordinary cops, Dagestanis. They unleashed a war here, brother against brother…”

“We’ve known that for a long time,” declared the little man with the big ears. “But why did they stop? Why did they give up such a profitable spot? They could have stayed and kept on feeding their faces…”

“I know why,” said Arip, “it’s just a tactic. The fascists have taken over there. So now they feel they have the right to send planes in here to bomb us. To them we’re just a nest of bandits.”

“But not everyone is a bandit. There are even some decent
Salafis
!” whined Kusium.

“So there are,” agreed Lena. “My neighbor has a business. The men from the woods demanded money, they threatened him, and then he went to one of their bosses and asked him to step in. And he did, defended him from his own men. And that’s just one example.”

“Where I live, there were hardly any of those fundamentalists. We lived peacefully together, no one ever complained!” Sharapudin Muradovich interjected. “But in other places they’ve been following
their own law for a long time.”