Seeing a group of men and women on the square holding big posters with photographs on them, Shamil thought, "Not again," and decided not to stick around. But something held him back; this was different from the usual demonstrations. There were more posters than before, and the people holding them seemed more aggressive. An unruly crowd had gathered around the poster-bearers, everyone was nodding, waving their hands, yelling. The women, practically all of them veiled, were holding photographs of naively smiling young men and shouting: "Bring back our brother!" or "Bring back our son!" There wasn't a single policeman in sight, which was especially strange.
"Straight at us! So Nazhib jumps one way, and I jump the other.
As Shamil listened to the scraps of stories and the coughs of the onlookers, a strange sense of boredom came over him, and yet wouldn't let him leave. He walked between the groups, looking into the flushed faces of the yelling women, at the high chain-link fence in front of the moribund government building, at his own polished shoes, at the empty faces on all the posters.
Then he noticed Velikhanov, his former colleague from the committee and an old friend of the family, a tall man with graying temples. Velikhanov was explaining something insistently to a few old men in short straw hats who looked a lot like the ones Shamil had encountered in the seaside park after the Kumyk demonstration.
Shamil turned away for a moment and caught sight of Madina's beige hijab. She was standing half turned away from him, as though taking refuge among the shoulders of her new girlfriends. Some bearded guy was standing to her right and shouting.
"What's he yelling about?" asked Shamil.
Then he pictured Velikhanov's sons. The first was named Peak, in honor of Ismoil Somoni Peak, which had been renamed Communism Peak under the Soviets; the second was named Mig, maybe to sound good together with his brother's name, or maybe in honor of the Mig jet fighter. Mig Velikhanov later worked at the torpedo production facility in Kaspiisk, had helped develop submarine weapons, and most recently, as far as Shamil could tell, was continuing his work in Petersburg. Gentle, kindhearted Peak had spent his whole life working at the Derbent cognac distillery and had never married.
Shamil brought himself back to the present day and dully surveyed the restless heads of the crowd until his glance snagged on a couple of his cousins. They were happy to see him, and the three of them launched into an animated conversation. They were all on edge, ready for something to happen, though they had no idea what. They talked excitedly for a half hour or so, then Shamil suggested that they go see Aunt Ashura, who lived nearby. For some reason they thought that there, in her small, one-story house behind its wooden gate, everything would become clear.
Her yard was bustling with activity as usual. Chubby Khabibula was adjusting something on the dairy separator; Aunt Ashura's sons, who already had families of their own, were in the barn, tossing their babies up and down in the air — there were always a lot of children running around here — and talking with the women as they worked.
They ladled out some kharcho for Shamil and his cousins, showed them the new exterior doors that they had just installed, and argued about what they should do with the old ones. Someone suggested they sand and paint them and use them for repairs in the addition. Aunt Ashura, on the other hand, was leaning toward keeping them in the barn for the time being, and then giving them to one of their Kutan relatives, maybe Khabibula. Aunt Ashura's younger son stubbornly insisted that they just throw the doors away.
The moment they started talking about "the former Otsok" and about what Madina had done, Aunt Ashura lost all sense of restraint and began to grumble and rant…She couldn't understand Madina's parents' attitude; they were pandering to their daughter, maybe were even in cahoots with her. This Al-Jabbar guy had been providing food to the militants hiding in the woods, and had been spreading some particularly nasty gossip about Sheikh Gazi-Abbas. Madina would meet a miserable end, she said — like an accursed serpent.
"What a nightmare," said the listeners, then went back to their routines. Aunt Ashura's son, smiling, hauled some mechanical contraption out of the shed and started lubricating it. The daughters got into a spat about apricots, about where in the country they ripened soonest, about which ones were cultivated in one settlement and which in another.
"Salam aleikum!" someone called to him from the sidewalk.
A disheveled, unshaven man staggered up to him. He looked about fifty, though it was hard to tell.
"Vaaleikum salam," answered Shamil, with a grin.
"Got a couple of rubles on you, brother?" asked the man, slurring.
"To create a bright, good, eternal future," the man said, enunciating with difficulty.
Shamil scooped up whatever change was in his pocket and dropped it into the drunk's dirty, calloused palm.
"Barkala," mumbled the man. "Call me Vitalik. And think, up there in the Kremlin, they're just sitting around, those…" Vitalik cursed.
Shamil made a fist and shook it in the air in a joking sign of solidarity, and then hurried on his way.
ALISA GANIEVA, born in 1985, grew up in Makhachkala, Dagestan.
and Groom, was published in Russia in spring 2015.
author of the monograph Dostoevsky's Secrets (2009).