The Mountain and the Wall Read Free Page B

azhdakha, or something?” asked Anvar, springing back up onto the bar and dangling from it head down.
    “There’s a hole that runs straight through it. Other than that, no. Bashir believes it, though, he says that the hole is just like an arrow hole…plus, he says, the head fell off afterward anyhow.”
    “What, hasn’t he ever seen any stones in the mountains?” laughed Anvar, still hanging upside down.
    “There aren’t that many in that area. I told Bashir it’s bida, bida. So then he started calling me vakh. With those Sufis everyone whodoesn’t believe them is vakh. ”
    Sounds came from the house; someone was tuning the pandur. Maga got out his phone and squatted on his haunches.
    “I’m calling this girl I know.”
    Anvar tipped his head back, turning his acne-covered face to the sky. The new moon shone faintly overhead, barely illuminating in the darkness the half-finished attic, the lone light fixture by the door, and the clotheslines. A startled bat fluttered upward. Anvar whirled around in a vain attempt to see where it went. Meanwhile, the sounds of the pandur inside the house grew louder, sending a folk tune out into the night. Its melody lingered in the air and soon seemed to inflect, in some ineffable way, the entire spirit of the evening. “Interesting,” thought Anvar. “To me it’s obvious, the connection between the night and the music, but the person actually playing the instrument, and the people in there listening, don’t.”
    “Have you heard about Rokhel-Meer? It’s an enchanted village. ‘The Mountain of Celebrations!’ Now you see it, now you don’t. They say…Hello? What’s up, how’s it going?” Maga interrupted himself, grimaced into the phone, and turned away from Anvar. “Why not? Hey, talk normal…So call some of your girlfriends, and come on out…What’s the problem?…I know you inside and out, don’t play the nun with me…What do you mean, I’m ‘coming on strong?’ I’m not coming on strong!…You’re the one—you didn’t invite me either…You’re such a…!”
    Anvar went inside. Yusup was standing by the table, strumming the pandur ’s two nylon strings and singing. Kerim chimed in, grimacing and exclaiming, “ Ai !” “ Ui !” “Oh, man!” and the like. Gulya was reclining on the sofa, her faced flushed; Dibir, deep in thought, was staring at his bandaged finger. Zumrud sat with her eyes closedand gave herself over to the flow of the song, silently flicking her thin fingers and sending up gentle puffs of flour.
    Zumrud saw herself as a small child in her great-grandmother’s mountain home. Her great-grandmother was ancient; she wore a loose, tunic-like dress, which she tucked loosely into her broad trousers. Her everyday chokhto, which draped all the way down her spine, concealed the flat, shaved crown of her head, liberated by right of her advanced age from its decades-long burden of braids. Every day she would go out into the mountains and climb to her meager little plot on the cliffside. In the evening she would come back down, hunched low under a sheaf of hay, her farm tools covered in dirt.
    When there was a wedding in the village, Great-Grandmother would sit with the other old women on one of the flat roofs, holding Zumrud on her lap, and they would watch the dancing and listen to the tamada’s jokes. Their black robes made the old women look like nuns, but that was where the resemblance ended. They took snuff or even smoked tobacco, and improvised filthy rhyming couplets to one another. In the evenings they would go out visiting, with their grandchildren hoisted onto their backs like bundles of hay or water pitchers.
    Zumrud pictured the neighbor’s house in her mind. On its broad, thick-carpeted veranda a big loud-voiced old woman sat rocking a homemade wooden cradle with a tightly swaddled baby inside. Zumrud recalled reaching inside and touching the cradle’s mattress, noting its strategically placed hole under the baby’s