The Mountain and the Wall by Alisa Ganieva Page A

they had laughed as they shouted to one another from the rooftops: “Osman’s daughter has been seen with Mukhtar.” So what if she had? Marzhana had sought him out on her own initiative. Sheherself had lain down in the mown grass next to the tractor and announced: “It is not the mullah who will join us in marriage, but he who is dearer than any mullah, dearer than any father.” And she had showed the stunned Mukhtar a postcard with a photo of Lenin on it, smiling benevolently out at them.
    And now, greeting the fresh steppe dawn, she could not even remember how Nasyr had threatened to kill her; how her former girlfriends had shunned her, turning away when they met on the street; how her father had dressed in mourning and announced that his daughter was dead to him; how her mother had sobbed in silence. Now everything would be different. She had broken away from the age-old mountains and ravines and had strode forth, forward to meet the sea breeze, forward to meet the laughing tractor driver Mukhtar.
    Yesterday Marzhana had prepared balloons and banners, and had cleaned the glass of the precious framed portraits of the working people’s leaders. “ Akh, today I will march in the parade,” Marzhana laughed to herself, “and Mukhtar will embrace me, and Chairman Gadzhi will smile at me!” A new village had come into being on the plain, new homes glittered in the southern sun. Only the most stubborn and lazy people were still clinging to the smoke-blackened pillars of their old saklyas, unwilling to part with their gloomy nests above the clouds. Marzhana’s mother and father had closed themselves inside their home and refused come out; Nasyr’s father Ali had greedily clung to his hoarded wealth; the old women had wailed and lamented.
    And then the young Komsomol shepherds found a supply of gunpowder somewhere and used it to destroy all of the ancestral towers. The ancient, resilient walls did not give in easily to these firebrands; they refused to fall at first. Then, finally, sending joyful echoes across the cliffs, the stones tumbled in a great landslide down the mountain. The old village was no more. Old man Kebed no longer had anywhere to hide with his quackery and his superstitious books. The malicious gossip at the godekan fell silent. The zurna no longer played on the town square. Marzhana’s fellow villagers settled into a new life on the broad steppe, where the livestock graze free, where a Pioneer reveille rings across the plain.
    In the parade Marzhana walked hand in hand with Mukhtar and Raisa Petrovna; behind them, heaving grouchy sighs to the tune of the “Internationale,” trudged the old men.
    “Well, Marzhana,” Chairman Gadzhi patted her on the cheek, “how was the move?”
    “It worked out fine, Uncle Gadzhi!” answered Marzhana and pressed closer to the beaming Mukhtar.
    “I proved it to myself, and I will prove it to everyone, that rye does not grow on stone,” said the chairman. And his words went deep into Marzhana’s soul, and she would remember them her whole life: not in the mountains, not in the old ways, is happiness to be found, but in the new and joyous morning of freedom.
    8
    Shamil tossed the book onto the sofa and, after a brief stop in the bathroom, set off on foot to Madina’s. She lived close by, in a nine-story prefab apartment building with a jumble of homemade verandas clinging to the sides, the ones on the upper stories propped atop the ones below. In the dark entryway Shamil nearly overturned an aluminum bucket full of dirty water. Almost all the doors off the stairway were wide open or half-open because of the stifling heat, releasing to the outside world the sounds of talking and shouting, as well as the hum of televisions. One fleshy woman in a fleece robe was swabbing the landing in front of her apartment, and through its open door Shamil caught a glimpse of a long, narrow hallway with shiny gold-streaked wallpaper.
    Madina was standing on her threshold. She