Bride and Groom by Alisa Ganieva

Author:Alisa Ganieva
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941920602
Publisher: Deep Vellum Publishing
Published: 2018-01-29T05:00:00+00:00

7. NEIGHBOR WOMEN

I laid low for several days. I imagined Timur’s spies lurking behind every corner and at every crossroads. The moment I crossed the threshold, the streets would close in around me, seize me, and deliver me into the hands of my detested tormentor with the blond crew cut. He called several times a day, demanding that I meet him; he shifted to threats, and from there moved on to tender babbling and endearments. He was definitely brewing something ominous.

Aida came to visit me with her two elder sons, whose heads were flattened in the back from so much time in the cradle. She let it slip that Timur had already approached her and asked for advice on how to win me over. Aida claimed to have told him to back off. Obviously, Timur had not gotten the message.

“It’s your own fault, Patya!” Aida chided, rewinding her turban from left to right. “You shouldn’t have corresponded so much with him from Moscow. Why did you even agree to meet him?”

“I didn’t know what he was like!”

“She ‘didn’t know.’ Well, now you do, so it’s time to reap what you sowed. Of course he figured that if you wrote to him and answered his messages, that meant you want to marry him …”

I was desperate to talk things over with Marina, but she was on vacation somewhere in Bulgaria. Would I get to see her? Would I even go back to Moscow at all? Mama had already put her foot down and said no, no Moscow for me, not for all the tea in China. In Moscow, I would completely forget how to make khinkal, I would go stale and shrivel up into an old maid.

“Soon you’ll be twenty-six! No one will take you, even for free!” she would nag.

Papa noticed that I was holed up in my room, and offered to take me to the city:

“You have girlfriends from university there, don’t you? Uma, Masha …”

How had he even remembered their names? I did have friends there, but one of them had gone to the mountains for the summer to drink spring water, wander around alpine meadows, and breathe the thin, wholesome air. Another had rushed off to serve as a volunteer organizer for that very youth forum that Timur was so worked up about. I prayed that he would be whisked away to the forum too, and I would be rid of him. But this was not to be.

When his relentless calls brought no response, Timur sent me a terrifying message:

“You will be mine, come what may!”

I pictured myself kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a car with a sack thrown over my head. It rattled me so much that I went into the front room to sit with Granny and listen to the “magpies,” the neighbor women who had come over to shell a gigantic pile of pumpkin seeds. Why they would be doing that, I didn’t even bother asking. My parents were out. Papa had

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