A Village Fest

The village began coming up in telltale wormholes straightaway, in February. First, an irksome slogan appeared on the square with a sickening portrait of the commander-in-chief; then, dirty symbols of death began flitting past—in black-and-orange stripes, like cannibalistic caterpillars. Our protagonist, Akhmedov, pretended to go on living as before; he studied the faces of the villagers to try and discern secret despair, suppressed anger, and horror hidden in cowardice. Yet the faces showed only emptiness and the acquiescence of hired criminals.

The village had turned into a slave market, a trading hub of live meat and dead conscience; it lived recklessly, loudly, and with festive abandon. The mountains he had so loved since childhood met him in the mornings without their former grandeur, and it seemed they no longer towered up but lolled around in pillows of cloud, like raped and insulted prostitutes who were already old hands at the brothel. On the gray, rocky ridge behind the administration building, for the whole village to see, another symbol of death three times the height of a man jutted out and sullied the beauty of the sweeping vistas: the semi-swastika Z.

Masses of tourists trudged by. Excursions from central Russia trickled into the village museum, and there was Akhmedov. Despite occasional funerals featuring dead young soldiers, the village buzzed with laughter and merriment. That day, too, they were expecting a celebrity arrival from Moscow. Akhmedov, the director of the museum, was therefore summoned to the administration and ordered to prepare a patriotic speech.

“We will honor our soldiers who have returned from the denazification mission,” pronounced Yakhya Yakhyayevich, uttering the D-word with a guttural cough. “Concoct a momentous little address for us, brother: about the historical connections, our ancestors, and the struggle against neo-fascism; you know, short and sweet. We’re to be assigned funds for the indigenous peoples’ festival, so this is a rehearsal, you see. It’s crucial we show we’ve got grit.”

“It needn’t be me. I mean . . . I . . . I’m not much of an orator,” Akhmedov stammered, but Yakhya Yakhyayevich resolutely turned away toward the patchily painted wall that sported an icon of the commander-in-chief—from back when he was young and not puffy. No, he would hear no objections.

That was a week before the celebration, and Akhmedov had spent the whole week as if in a pestilential haze. So far, he had managed to stay out of things. Whenever there were questions, he replied that he was old and not on social media, and therefore did not take part in any flash mobs to the glory of cruise missiles, and that the tremor in his hands did not allow him to wave flags at public events in the name of the expansion of the empire. He had thought of calling in sick that day, but he was summoned to the school in the morning because of his teenage nephew, who had come from a small village beyond the mountain pass to complete his certificate.

“He’s shameless!” the teacher shouted. “We have good education and teamwork here, but your Ibrahim is growing up a terrorist.”

Akhmedov’s bowels trembled, and he yelled back.

“What’s he done wrong? Nothing!”

His nephew sat at a desk in the empty classroom with his shaved head lowered. It was flat at the back from lying in a wooden crib.

“I said I don’t want to march at the fest today,” he muttered softly.

“See? He’s undermining our good work!”

“We were told to carry a portrait of Imam Shamil. I don’t give a flip.”

“Why not?” Akhmedov wondered. “He’s our national hero.”

“Then why are they chucking him in with this diabolical bazaar in Ukraine? He stood for freedom—so we wouldn’t be conquered. And now it’s us who are blitzing and bombing . . . ”

“See what I mean?” the teacher winced. “I’m not going to the top yet because they’ll call in state security straightaway.”

Akhmedov felt a churning inside him that went cold again. He waved his arms and spoke ardently, but without understanding what he said. He had to keep his nephew out of this; he would call him a fool, promise to give him a belting, and deal with him himself. But suddenly his nephew jumped up and spoke in a rasping, breaking bass:

“And this singer . . . he sings in leather shorts. I don’t want to bow to him and march in front of him. Mahomed doesn’t want to either, or Ilyas. He’s a devil, not a star.”

“We’ll deal with you later,” the teacher moaned. “That’s traitorous stuff. You provoke the class. If your uncle weren’t director of the museum you’d be under interrogation by now, sonny!”

Akhmedov flailed his arms, explained, justified—all in a flurry—and escorted his nephew out of the classroom.

“He’s to be well away from the fest today! And then we’ll show him!” the teacher repeated, red in the face.

Akhmedov ran out of the school in anger, almost despair. His nephew, waiting for him at the exit, had felt the heat and wanted things to simmer down, yet soon he went on again about how absurd the endless fanfares and celebrations were, where he was expected to stand with other children. Akhmedov grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him wildly, in rage:

“Do you want to share the fate of my son? Is that what you want?” he shouted in their native Avar.

But then he realized there were people about and someone was probably watching them from the terraced gardens and porches clustered around; he waved to the boy not to dally and strode off home.

His brooding nephew hopped along after him over the crumbling stones of the streets, muttering his many objections. Muffled old women descended in the opposite direction with their hands behind their backs, attracted by the cooing noises from the square. The sound system was being tested and occasional balloons burst.

Akhmedov’s wife was out; she had probably gone to return the milk separator to the neighbor. He ordered his nephew to stay in his room, then he locked himself in another and paced from wall to wall with agitation. The teacher’s threats caused him physical pain. An old pang raised its head and crawled along the arteries to his heart, gnashing its maw. Akhmedov went to the bookshelf and took his son’s photograph—a young face cut by the black band of mourning.

Five years earlier, his son had just finished school and, since he did not reach the college admission score, he had remained in the village to work as a hired builder. Akhmedov reproached himself many times that if he had traveled to the capital and slipped the dean the customary amount, his son would have been accepted at the faculty and grief would have been avoided. But five years before, Akhmedov took a stance and avoided such fuss, and early one September morning his son set off for the neighboring village, where a stone layer was needed.

About three hours later, he called his mother to say he had snacked on the khinkal dumpling and cheese he took on the trip and was almost at the highway; and then he disappeared. After dinner, people from around the area went out in search of him, and soon they found Akhmedov’s son in the bushes, riddled with bullets and forever cold. He was in strange clothes and a huge, oversized coat, and an old machine gun lay next to him. The police officers who arrived at the scene immediately surrounded the body and dragged it off to the station for investigation.

A fight ensued for the body. A heated crowd of villagers and relatives joined Akhmedov and his wife to demand that the boy be handed over for burial before sunset. The police resisted, gave confused accounts of events, and ultimately produced an official statement claiming that Akhmedov’s son was a militant who had been hiding in the forests and carrying out sabotage for months, including an arson attack on the TV tower. They claimed he was armed to the teeth and had opened fire on the police, who had been conducting a reconnaissance operation in the mountains.

All this seemed like a nightmare and utter nonsense. Dozens of people knew Akhmedov’s son—he lived in sight of everyone, loved football and computers, and dreamed of enrolling in university. It was blatantly obvious that the police shot the boy by mistake, and then, in an attempt to conceal the crime, planted one of their machine guns on the boy and dressed him up absurdly. One sharp-sighted eyewitness even spotted an inventory number on the machine gun.

Everyone’s nerves were at fraying point that evening. The police locked the gates, but the crowd demolished them and enraged women even managed to storm the building and carry the body out. Then men in different uniforms caught up with the procession, fired salvoes into the air, and Akhmedov’s dead son was soon in the grips of the government hydra again, to disappear forever in its dark labyrinths, to remain branded, calumniated, mutilated, and buried far from his relatives, under a number, in an unmarked grave, like an accursed terrorist. Every night, Akhmedov remembered the grimace of surprise on his white young face and his arm with the broad, hard-working hand that hung down from the stretcher.

For five years, he and his wife went from one government institution to another, seeking recognition of the mistake, and at times the hope of justice glimmered and grew. No one believed Akhmedov’s son was guilty, and the police continued to blather, now claiming he was shot dead when their colleagues—whom they adamantly refused to name—returned fire in self-defense, now backing down and declaring that no reconnaissance operation had been carried out that day and no one could say who had killed the unfortunate boy. And who knows, maybe they would even give permission for him to be reburied in a humane way, in his native village. But just as permission was about to be given, the war that was not allowed to be called a war broke out. The commander-in-chief ordered his ragtag army to invade the neighboring country and raze its cities in a hail of rockets, and the mustached, fat metropolitan chief, who was in charge of his son’s case, told Akhmedov:

“Do you know how many people the cops shoot in America? And they go scot-free. Here, any trifle and you get hauled up by the scruff of the neck. This is going no further. Such are the times—we need to be watchful. Our country is surrounded by enemies, and here you are undermining it with your petty petitions. We need to stand together now, not sue each other. It’s the times we live in . . . All the more because you’re director of the village museum. Responsibility lies with you.”

Akhmedov felt the threat in those words and could see the museum being taken away from him, and the case would still not be resolved. He prepared to wait until the war was over, but it dragged on, drawing all of those involved into an unknown abyss. Several young men from their mountainous region had disappeared without a trace—no funeral, none of the payments promised by the state.

“She’s crying,” his wife told him after a condolence visit to her third cousin, whose beloved first-born was among the missing. “‘How many more of our boys have to die? No one asks where they go, and what they die for,’ she says.”

Festivities were necessary to find some shred of meaning in this whole senseless butchery, in the vile atrocities and omnipresent lies. Meaning was found in the distant past, in mothballed slogans from the Second World War, in the exhumed specter of Nazism, which they were taught to believe in with the same awe as they learned in mosque to believe in fables from the time of the prophet.

“Fascists at every turn”; “If we hadn’t attacked, they would have”; “secret American laboratories”; “there are no civilian victims, it’s all staged”—these phrases became mantras, talisman tales that saved the minds of millions from the terrible truth. And Akhmedov had to go up to the black microphone that day and repeat those tales in his own words. To concoct a spiel about the historical connections and their glorious ancestors, as Yakhya Yakhyayevich ordered. The wardrobe door creaked, and he looked for a suitable shirt. Burgundy was too pretentious, checkered indecorous. He chose a white one, slightly yellowed at the elbows. He had worn it to the last court session for his son’s case.

When Akhmedov went back onto the street, he felt a heavy weight moving slowly in his right eye. It bounced upward with every step, hitting blood vessels and capillaries. By the time he reached the square he was completely exhausted, and nothing resembling a festive speech had formed in his mind. There was a bustle already, and he tossed habitual “salaams” to a few people and even laughed at the odd joke, but he did all this mechanically, while inside, in his aorta that was abundantly coated with dangerous plaque, there huddled a small and caustic sense of shame—for his laughter, timidity, insignificance, and confusion, and for his resignation to this savage reality, which had bent him into an ignominious and slavish pose.

“They say he’s coming up the switchback now, he’ll be here soon,” chirruped the clerk of the village bank, who they sometimes played shesh-besh with in the evenings.

Akhmedov did not immediately realize that this was the same singer, a celebrity who it seems often went on stage in skimpy shorts and eyeliner. His image in no way suited the belligerent mood of the event or the local patriarchal ways, but his fame redeemed everything. The square brimmed with people.

Sure enough, a few minutes later the cortege appeared—a white Mercedes pulled up behind the traffic police car after viewing the village, and the guest of honor darted out, fully clad, in trousers and a pinkish shirt unbuttoned at the top. Zurnas blew, a drum beat, and a chain of dancing mountain women in cheap synthetic dresses supposed to depict national costumes formed a ring around the radiant singer. Colorful bunches of wildflowers sailed into the throng and Russian tricolors flew.

The singer grinned with his white teeth as he bashfully parodied the movements of the Lezgian dancers. He was happy with the mission entrusted to him, the inebriating mountain air, and the rapture of the natives. The head of the administration with his entourage waddled swiftly toward the guest to place a large sheep’s-wool hat on his head and present him an ornamental dagger. A roar of applause went up, mixed with cries of One of us! and women’s laughter. The officials began their speeches, and Akhmedov, not listening, fitfully gleaned words for his impending address. The weight in his eye grew heavier.

“Zaripat Musaevna is first, then our veteran of the special operation, and then you,” Yakhya Yakhyayevich told him, creeping up from behind. Sweat streamed down Akhmedov’s red cheeks.

Zaripat Musaevna was the school principal. She spoke confidently, loudly, and with a fanatical twang. Her long, shining shawl boasted a decorative fringe.

“I tell the kids at morning assembly: our grandfathers won a victory for us, and now it’s our turn. As our president said, we are all different nationalities, but we are all Russians. Together we are a force. I am proud that our children know who they are. They are warriors of a huge country, which is fighting alone against global fascism, against the insidious designs of NATO, against the destruction of the brotherhood of Slavic peoples . . . ”

Children in military uniforms, including the youngest elementary school students, were lined up at the back of the platform like life-size puppets, trembling as they held flags and portraits of dead soldiers from the region. Black-and-white photographs from the forties alternated with modern ones in color. A black-and-orange banner blared the numerals “1945–2022.” Old tsarist cannons, which had been standing there almost since Shamil’s capture, gleamed on either side of the banner in the blazing sun.

Akhmedov shielded his eyes, rummaging in his memory for seemly historical parallels—his museum, the village’s past, today’s camarilla. But it just did not jell.

High above the slate roofs of the village, where a fast river ran through a rock-cluttered bed, there once nestled the former village, now in ruins. It was besieged for almost three months, with 4,000 Dagestanis surrounded by an Imperial Russian army of 15,000. The defenders left almost no descendants because all of them were killed by cannonballs and bayonets or died of disease and hunger. Only Shamil, wounded in the leg, escaped with one of his wives. When the victors approached the towers and entered the village, the women who were still alive grabbed the children and flung themselves from the cliffs so as not to fall into the hands of the enemy. The ravines stank of corpses and the river ran red with blood.

Since then, no one had lived on the site of the burnt village. A garrison was built on the site of the current one, which gradually expanded and took in inhabitants of the surrounding small villages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Akhmedov’s grandfather, the owner of a rare herd of horses, also moved here. The horses were confiscated, of course, and his grandfather perished in Siberia. All he left behind was a fine silver dagger belt and a few books written in Arabic script, which miraculously survived destruction. Akhmedov donated the family relics to the museum.

“How are things? All set for the speech?” a stocky, broad-shouldered villager with black birch gum in his teeth tapped him on the shoulder. It was Nabi from the sports committee, who supervised the freestyle wrestling club. When Akhmedov’s son disappeared, Nabi was the instigator and main wrangler with the police, and since then Akhmedov had warmed to him. But when the occupation of the neighboring country began, Nabi suddenly became a keen supporter of this mad danse macabre; he was so eager to advance on Kyiv that Akhmedov could not help asking why he had not enlisted and gone to fight. “If only I were younger!” Nabi grunted and avoided a straight answer. After being appointed to the sports committee, he soon acquired a piece of forest in a nature reserve and became complaisant and as soft as butter.

“My cousin’s son disappointed me,” Nabi continued through a new burst of applause—the officials were presented the veteran of the special operation.

“What happened?”

“He refused to go to war. He and two hundred others, they say. All from our republic.”

“Were they set free?”

“Certainly not! They’re being kept in a shed without food or water until they see sense. They’re lucky—they should be turfed into jail! Likewise, my cousin says to her son: ‘Why are you disgracing me? You coward! Go, and don’t come back,’”

“They don’t want to kill?”

“I don’t know why they’re so chicken,” Nabi grimaced. “They just don’t like the uniform. There are no bulletproof vests, apparently, and no boots—only an assortment of sizes and broken ones. They complained at the beginning, and they froze whenever it was cold. Like women, basically. I also say: just let them try and come back!”

“They went there for the money, didn’t they?” Akhmedov felt the urge to ask.

“Huh? Where’d you get that from?” Nabi snorted, glancing at him sharply and even with a certain alarm. He shook his head as if he could not believe his ears, then waved and hurried off to greet a person who had just arrived.

Akhmedov now drifted closer to the microphone. Smells of cheap women’s perfume mingled with those of burnt sugar—they were sure to be selling cotton candy somewhere in the crowd. His head was still empty, his temples rang and burned, and a ball of unknown murk gathered in his chest. A bemedaled soldier with a symbol of death on his lapel waited at the microphone, shifting from one foot to another. An ugly scar stretched across half of his face.

“His jaw fell out when the tank exploded,” a woman said at back of the crowd. “He picked it up, put it back on his face, and kept fighting.”

“Wow, what a hero . . . ”

“All his comrades were killed, and he alone survived. His mother had no word from him for two months and was afraid he wouldn’t be coming back.”

“O Allah, may this war end soon.”

Akhmedov closed his eyes and hoped it would make him feel better. Noises multiplied and seethed in his ears. An invisible tormentor thrust pliers into his graying head and began to twist and jerk, searching for a nerve to seize. The young veteran’s voice came to him in broken waves:

“Thanks to God, I returned . . . Inshallah, we shall continue to defend our Motherland . . . Our filial duty . . . The forces of neo-Nazism. . .”

I must send a lad to bring me an Analgin, Akhmedov thought and opened his eyes wide. Spirals of color swirled before them. The square was in a festive mood. The veteran looked small and ugly, almost frightened. Another came to mind, ninety years old, who had lived on the outskirts of the village. Once a year, on May 9, he was dressed up in a ceremonial jacket with medals and exhibited on the square as an idol to be honored with bouquets.

He fell into frailty a few years earlier and his impoverished daughter applied to the administration for a wheelchair so that he could move around the house a bit and go out into the garden for fresh air, but despite all efforts a wheelchair was never found, so the veteran farewelled life from the captivity of a sagging sofa. Shortly before his death, administration staff finally got round to paying him an unannounced visit. They brought a loaf of bread and a bag of short-grain rice. Photographs from the occasion soon adorned all the region’s official websites—ladies in mink coats at the bed of the dying liberator.

“We were there to help the civilians,” the veteran spoke. “Why? Because who else would, apart from us? An old lady lay on the ground, and I helped her to her feet . . . ”

His voice was replaced by another, hoarser one, and the name Akhmedov rang out. He realized they were calling him and he needed to go to the microphone right now; he had to appear before the whole village against the background of the children at attention in army caps, against the backdrop of the glowing orange symbol of death on the mountain ridge, and to merge with the shroud of darkness that covered them all. Electricity coursed through Akhmedov’s calves; they trembled, and the pads of his fingers clung stickily to his wet palm. He headed for the microphone with a slight sway.

The famous singer emerged from behind the loudspeakers, surrounded by his entourage; he had been able to partake in the gifts of the village during the speeches. His hit song was coming up and his smile vanished in the woolen curls of his new hat. The sight of the singer made Akhmedov feel a hundred times hotter, his head ached inexorably like in a vise; his intoxicated gaze slid over the heads of the multitude and snagged on a portrait of Imam Shamil. A toad began to squirm in his throat.

“Up this way, please,” the host from the district administration beckoned him.

Akhmedov grasped the microphone with one hand, fixed his troubled gaze on the crowd, made a nondescript sound, then doubled over and vomited loudly and relentlessly. There were gasps of fright, and after a hasty moment the song started.