Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  Then she steams and washes him. When Murtaza goes out into the changing room to cool off, she washes all the laundry. She no longer has the strength to wash herself – her exhaustion has returned, filled her eyelids with heaviness, and clouded her head – but somehow she draws the scrubber along her sides and rinses her hair. All that’s left is to wash the bathhouse floors and then sleep, sleep.

  As a child, she was taught to wash floors on her hands and knees. “Only a lazybones works bending from the waist or crouching,” her mother taught her. Zuleikha doesn’t consider herself a lazybones and now she’s wiping the slippery dark boards, sliding along them like a lizard on her elbows and knees. Her belly and breasts hover right over the floor, her leaden head is bent low and her rear end is raised high. She’s feeling unsteady.

  The steam room is soon washed clean and Zuleikha moves on to the changing room: she hangs the damp rugs on the storage racks that line the wall under the ceiling – let them dry out – gathers the shards of the pottery pitcher and sets to scrubbing the floor.

  Murtaza is still lying on the bench, undressed, wrapped in a white sheet, and resting. Her husband’s gaze always forces Zuleikha to work harder, more diligently, and faster: let him see she’s not a bad wife even if she isn’t tall. And so now she’s gathered the remains of her strength and – sprawled on the floor – is drawing the rag along the already clean boards in a frenzy: back and forth, back and forth, her mussed, wet hair bouncing in time with her uncovered breasts creeping along the floorboards.

  “Zuleikha,” utters Murtaza in a low tone, gazing at his naked wife.

  She straightens up, still kneeling and holding on to the rag, but doesn’t have time to raise her sleepy eyes. Her husband clasps her from behind and throws her, stomach down, onto the bench, brings all the weight of his body upon her, breathing heavily and wheezing as he begins to rub against her, pressing her into the hard boards. He wants to make love to his wife, but his body doesn’t want to; it has forgotten how to obey his desires. Finally, Murtaza stands and begins dressing. “Even my flesh doesn’t want you,” he tells her without looking, and leaves the bathhouse.

  Zuleikha slowly rises from the bench, the same rag still in her hand. She finishes washing the floor. Hangs up the wet sheets and towels. Dresses and trudges home. She lacks the strength to be upset about what happened with Murtaza. The Vampire Hag’s scary prophecy – that’s what she’ll think about, but only tomorrow, tomorrow. When she wakes up.

  The light is already off inside the house. Murtaza isn’t sleeping yet; he’s breathing loudly in his part of the house; the boards of the sleeping bench creak under him.

  Zuleikha gropes her way to her corner, her hand guiding her along the warm, rough side of the stove, then she falls on the trunk without undressing.

  “Zuleikha,” Murtaza calls out to her; this voice is satisfied and affectionate.

  She wants to stand but cannot. Her body spreads on the trunk like a thin pudding.

  “Zuleikha!”

  She crawls down to the floor and kneels in front of the trunk, but can’t tear her head from it.

  “Zuleikha, hurry up, you pathetic hen!”

  She rises slowly and drags herself to her husband’s call, reeling. She crawls onto the sleeping bench.

  Murtaza’s impatient hands pull down her baggy pants (he grunts peevishly: Now that’s a lazybones, hasn’t even undressed yet), lays her on her back, and lifts her smock. His uneven breathing grows closer. Zuleikha senses her husband’s beard, long and still smelling of the bathhouse and frost, covering her face; the recent beating on her back aches under his weight. Murtaza’s body has finally responded to his desires and he hurries to fulfill them, greedily, powerfully, at length, and triumphantly.

  When she’s fulfilling her wifely duty, Zuleikha usually pictures herself as a butter churn inside which a housewife’s strong arms beat butter using a fat, hard pestle. Today, though, there are none of those thoughts, only a heavy blanket of exhaustion. She is distantly aware of her husband’s stifled snorting through a shroud of sleep. The unceasing jolts of his body lull her, like a rhythmically rocking cart …

  Murtaza climbs off his wife, wiping the damp back of his head with his palm and calming his labored breathing; he’s breathing wearily, with satisfaction.

  “Go to your own place, woman,” he says and pushes her unmoving body.

  He doesn’t like her to sleep next to him on the bench.

  Without opening her eyes, Zuleikha’s feet slap off to her trunk, and she doesn’t even notice she’s already sleeping soundly.

  A KNOCK AT THE WINDOW

  Will I die?

  A deep-blue storm drones outside the window. Zuleikha is kneeling and cleaning Murtaza’s kaftan with a bristle brush. The kaftan is the main decoration in the house: quilted felt, covered in velvet, smelling of a strong male, and as huge as its owner. It hangs on a fat copper nail, its magnificent sleeves shimmering, and it graciously allows the frail Zuleikha to grovel at its feet and clean drops of mud from its hem.

  Will I die soon?

  The mud in Kazan is rich and of high quality. Zuleikha hasn’t been there; she’s never once left Yulbash, except to go to the forest or cemetery. She’d like to, though. Murtaza once promised to take her with him some day. She is afraid to remind him, so all she can do is watch silently whenever he is preparing to leave. He’ll tighten the harness on Sandugach, pound the loosened wheels with a heel, and pretend not to notice her.

  So if I die, then I won’t see Kazan?

  Zuleikha narrows her eyes at Murtaza. Now, he’s sitting on the sleeping bench and fixing the horse collar. Fingers with brown nails as hard and strong as the trunks of young oaks nimbly thread a slippery leather strap into the wooden base. He’s just returned from the city but he went to work immediately. A good husband – what can you say.

  Will he marry someone else quickly if I die?

  Murtaza grunts with satisfaction: It’s ready! He puts the collar on his own powerful neck, testing the strength of his handiwork, his thick tendons swelling under the steep wooden curve. Yes, a man like this would marry, and very quickly.

  And what if the Vampire Hag was wrong?

  Zuleikha’s brush swishes. Whoosh-whoosh. Whoosh-whoosh. Shamsia-Firuza. Khalida-Sabida. First and second daughters. Third and fourth. She often runs through those names as if they were prayer beads. The Vampire Hag foretold all four deaths: Zuleikha had simultaneously found out from her mother-in-law about each pregnancy and each newborn’s impending death. Four times she had carried to term both the fruit in her womb and a hope in her heart that this time the Vampire Hag would be wrong. But the old woman turned out to be right every time. Could she really be right now, too?

  Work, Zuleikha, work. What was it Mama used to say? Work drives away sorrow. Oh, Mama, my sorrow doesn’t obey your sayings …

  There’s a knock, the signaling knock, at the window: three quick knocks, two slow. She shudders. Did she imagine it? Then again: three quick knocks, two slow. No, she didn’t imagine it, this can’t be a mistake; it’s the same knock. The brush falls from her hands and rolls along the floor. Zuleikha looks up and meets her husband’s heavy gaze. May Allah protect us, Murtaza, not again?

  He slowly removes the collar from his neck, throws his sheepskin coat on his shoulders, and shoves his feet into his felt boots. The door slams behind him.

  Zuleikha rushes to the window, melts the jagged patterns in the frost on the glass with her fingers, and presses her eye to the little hole. There’s Murtaza opening the gate, fighting the beginnings of the snowstorm. A dark horse thrusts its muzzle out of swirling white flakes and a rider powdered with snow leans from his saddle toward Murtaza, whispers something in his ear, and dissolves into the blizzard again a moment later, as if he’d never been there. Murtaza returns.

  Zuleikha falls to the floor, fumbles for the brush that rolled away, and sticks her nose into the hem of the kaftan. A woman shouldn’t display excessive curiosity, even at a
moment like this. The door lets out a long squeak as fresh, frosty air comes in. Her husband’s lumbering steps slowly float past behind her back. They’re not good steps; they’re slow and tired, somehow doomed.

  Her chest is pressed to the cold floor, her face to the soft kaftan. She’s breathing shallowly and soundlessly. She hears how loudly the fire is crackling in the stove. She pauses, then turns her head slightly. Murtaza is sitting on the sleeping bench in his sheepskin coat and snow-covered, shaggy fur hat; the bushes of his eyebrows have come together at the bridge of his nose, the sparkle of large white snowflakes in them slowly dimming. A wrinkle furrows his brow and his eyes are expressionless, lifeless. And Zuleikha understands: yes, again.

  And Allah, what will happen this time? She squeezes her eyes shut and lowers her forehead, which has instantly broken out in a sweat, to the cold floorboard. She feels moisture there. Snow is melting from Murtaza’s felt boots and streaming across the floor.

  Zuleikha grabs a rag and crawls on her knees, mopping up the water. The top of her head bumps into her husband’s toes, which are as hard as iron. She slaps the rag at the melted snow around his feet, not daring to lift her head. A large, prickly felt boot comes down on her right hand. Zuleikha wants to tear her hand away but the boot presses down on her fingers like a rock. She looks up. Murtaza’s yellow eyes are right next to her. Reflected light from the fire dances in pupils as huge as cherries.

  “I’m not giving it up,” he whispers quietly. “I won’t give up anything this time.”

  Sour breath burns at her face. Zuleikha moves aside. And she feels the other felt boot fall on her left hand. Just so long as he doesn’t crush her fingers; how would she work without fingers?

  “What’s going to happen, Murtaza?” she babbles plaintively. “Did they say? Grain has to be turned in now? Or cattle?”

  “What business is it of yours, woman?” he hisses in response.

  He takes her braids and winds them around his fists. Zuleikha’s eyes are next to his hot mouth. Gobs of spittle glisten in the deep, brown crevices between his teeth.

  “Maybe the new authorities don’t have enough women? They’ve already taken grain and cattle, too. If they want land, they’ll take it away. But women, now that’s a problem.” Murtaza’s spittle is spraying Zuleikha’s face. “The Red commissars don’t have anybody to mate with.”

  His knees are squeezing her head. Oh, how strong her husband’s legs are, even though he’s gone all gray.

  “They ordered all the women be rounded up and turned in to the chairman of the rural council. Whoever disobeys will be assigned to that collective farm place. Forever.”

  Zuleikha finally realizes that her husband’s joking. She just doesn’t know if she should smile in response. She understands from his sharp, heavy breathing that she shouldn’t.

  Murtaza releases Zuleikha’s head. Removes his felt boots from her fingers. Stands and wraps his sheepskin jacket tighter.

  “Hide the food, like always,” he quickly tells her. “We’ll go to the secret storage place in the morning.”

  He takes the horse collar from the sleeping bench and goes out.

  Zuleikha pulls a ring of keys from a nail, grabs a kerosene lamp, and runs into the yard.

  There hasn’t been a warning for a long time now and many people have begun storing their food in the old ways, in cellars and storehouses, instead of hiding it. That turned out not to be a good idea.

  The storehouse is locked and a slippery ball of snow is stuck to the big, paunchy lock. Zuleikha gropes at the keyhole with the key, turns once, twice, and the lock gives unwillingly, opening its mouth.

  The meager kerosene light illuminates the wall’s smooth yellow logs and high ceiling, where a black square gapes – the trapdoor to the hayloft – but it doesn’t reach the darkening corners in the distance. The storehouse is spacious, solid, and built to last, like everything in Murtaza’s household. The walls are hung with tools: vicious sickles and scythes, toothy saws and rakes, heavy planes, axes, and chisels, blunt-faced wooden hammers, sharp pitchforks, and crowbars. There’s also horse tack and harnesses: old and new collars, leather bridles, stirrups that are rusted or gleaming with fresh oil, and horseshoes. Several wooden wheels, a hollowed-out trough, and a copper basin with shiny curves (thank you, Murtaza, for bringing it from the city a couple of years ago). A cracked cradle hangs from the ceiling. There’s a smell of grain hardened by frost, and cold, spicy meat.

  Zuleikha remembers the times when dense, plump-cheeked sacks of grain towered to the ceiling here. Murtaza would walk between them, satisfied, smiling serenely, and tirelessly re-counting them, placing a palm on each sack with a tremble, as if it were a magnificent female body. It’s not like that now.

  She places the kerosene lamp on the floor. There are fewer sacks than fingers on her hands. And each is thin, with flabby, drooping sides. Back in 1919, they’d learned to pour grain from one sack into several, as soon as the food confiscation detachments neared Yulbash. Everything had been unfathomable then and those raiding parties became more and more like wanton spirits with every year that passed: scarier than a demonic alabasty woman, as gluttonous as a giant evil dev, and insatiable, like Zhalmavyz, the huge cannibal woman. It was difficult to hide a tightly stuffed sack, and besides, then all the grain was gone immediately if it was found. It’s a different story if there are several skinny ones: they’re easier to store (each one in a different place) and not so awful to part with. What’s more, Zuleikha could drag the thin sacks around, one at a time, without Murtaza’s help, hiding them herself while he went around to the neighbors to figure out what was happening.

  If not for the snowstorm, many villagers would have made their way into the forest this evening. Each prudent homeowner had a hiding place under the protective cover of fir boughs and crackling fallen branches. Murtaza had one, too. But where could you go in a blizzard? The only hope was for mercy from the heavens. Allah grant that nobody arrive before morning.

  Zuleikha starts hiding the grain and food.

  She buries a couple of sacks right there, in the storehouse; the cellar in the earthen floor by the wall has served them loyally for the last ten years. She’s afraid to store them in the hayloft because many people hide theirs in lofts. She places several precious sacks of seed grain marked with white paint in the false bottom of the steel water tank in the bathhouse.

  Now it’s the horsemeat’s turn. Long horse intestines resembling wrinkly fingers, tightly stuffed with dark red spiced meat, hang in bunches from the ceiling. Oh and do they smell! Zuleikha’s nostrils draw in the sharp, salty aroma of kyzylyk. It’s best to hide this sausage in a place where the smell can’t be picked up. In the summer, it would have been possible to climb up on the roof and lay it in even rows on the little brick ledges inside the chimney; that wouldn’t have done anything to the meat except make it smell more delicious from the smoke. But the roof is covered in ice now so she can’t climb up there without Murtaza. She’ll have to put it in the house, under a floorboard, securely sealed in thick iron boxes, to keep out rats.

  Nuts are next. Hard little hazelnut balls roll and knock inside their shells like a thousand wooden rattles as she lugs the long, narrow sacks from the storehouse into the winter shed and places them in the bottom of the manger then sprinkles them with hay. The cow and horse watch the fuss around their feeders with indifference. The foal peers out from under Sandugach’s belly, squinting curiously at his mistress.

  Zuleikha places the salt, peas, and carrot flour from the cellar on a wide shelf under the outhouse roof and covers it with boards.

  She brings honey in large wooden frames wrapped with thin, sugared rags up to the attic. It is there, under some boards, that she also hides the salted goose and heaps of pastila stiffened from the hard frost.

  The last thing left to hide is five dozen large eggs, shining with gentle whiteness in the depths of a birch bark container, where they’re lying in soft straw.

  Maybe they won�
��t come after all?

  These were wicked guests who made themselves at home in any household, not asking permission to seize the owner’s last food supplies or painstakingly selected seed grain that had been carefully stored for next spring’s planting and was thus even more valuable. And they were also ready to strike, jab with a bayonet, or shoot anyone standing in their way, without a second’s hesitation.

  In her fourteen uneasy years of hiding from these uninvited guests in the house’s women’s quarters, Zuleikha has observed many faces through the curtain’s folds: unshaven and groomed, blackened from the sun and aristocratically pale, with iron-toothed smiles and strict, prim expressions, briskly speaking in Tatar, Russian, and Ukrainian, or keeping sullenly silent about the dreadful truths that were inscribed, in even square letters, on thin sheets of paper worn at the creases that they kept trying to stick under Murtaza’s nose.

  Those faces had many names, each more incomprehensible and frightening than the next: grain monopoly, food confiscation, requisition, tax on foodstuffs, Bolsheviks, food appropriation detachments, Red Army, Soviet power, regional secret police, Komsomol, State Political Administration, communists, authorized this and that …

  Mostly long Russian words with meanings Zuleikha didn’t understand … so to herself she called those people the Red Horde. Her father had told her a lot about the Golden Horde, whose harsh, narrow-eyed emissaries collected tribute for several centuries in this part of the world and took it to their merciless leader Genghis Khan, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The Red Hordesmen collected tribute, too, but Zuleikha didn’t know who received it.

  At first they collected only grain. Then potatoes and meat. And during the Great Famine, in 1921, they began making a clean sweep of everything edible. Poultry. Cattle. And everything they could find in the house. It was back then that Zuleikha learned to divide the grain between several sacks.