Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  “Understand, woman?” He laughs loudly.

  Zuleikha backs toward the wall, frightened. Murtaza places the oozing sugar on the windowsill and wipes his wet hands on his belly. He admires it and throws his head back, laughing, with the kyzylyk sticking out of his mouth.

  “If they come for the livestock and I’m not here, give it to the cow and horse. Understand?”

  Zuleikha gives the barest of nods, pressing her back against the wall’s bulging logs.

  “Understand?” Murtaza hasn’t heard a response, so grasps her by the braids and jabs her face at the windowsill, where the sugar is drying in a bitter-smelling puddle and looks a lot like a large piece of ice melting slightly in the warmth.

  “Yes, Murtaza! Yes!”

  He lets her go, laughing with satisfaction. Sitting on the floor, he chops off pieces of the kyzylyk with the axe and stuffs them in his mouth.

  “Nothing …” he mutters through his even chomping. “I won’t give it up … I’m strong … Nobody can defeat or break me …”

  So, Allah, this is what fear does to my husband. Zuleikha looks around warily and moves the faceted vial of liquid death as far away as possible. She replaces the floorboard and pushes the trunks over it. As she’s adjusting the folds of the patterned kaplau over the trunks, neatly arranging everything back in its usual place, window glass explodes into smithereens. Something small and heavy flies in from outside, thudding against the floor.

  Zuleikha turns around. The large hole in the window looms like a black star with many points, and slow, shaggy snowflakes float into the room. Small pieces of glass are still dropping off, jangling gently as they land.

  Murtaza is sitting on the floor, his mouth stuffed. Between his spread legs is a stone wrapped in thick white paper. Murtaza unwraps it and continues to chew, stunned. It’s a poster: a gigantic black tractor’s large treads are crushing horrid little people who are scattering in every direction like cockroaches. One of them looks a lot like Murtaza; he’s standing, frightened, and aiming a crooked wooden pitchfork at the tractor’s steel bulk. Heavy, square letters are falling from above: “We’ll destroy the kulak as a class!” Zuleikha can’t read, especially in Russian. She understands, though, that the black tractor is about to run over the tiny Murtaza and his ridiculous pitchfork.

  Murtaza spits a scrap of sausage on the sleeping bench. He wipes his hands and mouth thoroughly with the crumpled poster and flings it into the stove. The tractor and the horrid little people writhe in tongues of orange flame, turning to ash in an instant, then Murtaza grabs the axe and dashes out.

  Almighty, all is at Your will! Zuleikha leans toward the window – it’s webbed in long cracks. Murtaza bursts outside with his tunic open at the chest and his head uncovered. He looks around, using his axe to threaten a blizzard that’s running wild. There’s nobody there – glory be to Allah – otherwise Murtaza might have hacked them down, brought sin upon his soul.

  Zuleikha perches on the sleeping bench and positions her flushed face toward gusts of wind from the broken window. This is no doubt the dirty work of Mansurka-Burdock and his lowlifes from the Party cell. They’ve walked from household to household more than once, agitating people to join the collective farm and arguing with them. They’ve covered Yulbash with posters. They had not yet dared break windows. But now things had come to that. It’s obvious they know something’s afoot. May a devil take them. They’ll have to go to the next village for new glass. Such expenses. And the house will cool down overnight …

  Murtaza still isn’t back. May he not catch cold. Out in a blizzard without his sheepskin coat – it really is as if a demon has possessed him …

  Zuleikha leaps up suddenly. She runs headlong from the house into the hallway. She throws open the door.

  Murtaza and Kyubelek are standing in the middle of the yard, forehead-to-forehead. Murtaza is tenderly stroking the cow’s furry face, which is trustingly nestled against his own. Then he takes the axe from behind his back and slams its butt between Kyubelek’s large, moist eyes framed with long lashes. The cow collapses to the ground with a quiet, deep sigh, and a thick snowy cloud rises around her.

  Zuleikha screams loudly and races down the front steps toward Murtaza. He jabs his fist in her direction without looking. She falls on her back and the steps hit her in the ribs.

  The axe whistles. Something hot spatters Zuleikha’s face. Blood. Murtaza is working quickly and powerfully with the axe, not stopping. The blade enters the warm flesh with an even groan. Air hisses as it leaves Kyubelek’s lungs. Blood gushes out of the vessels with a rumbling gurgle. Solid pink steam cloaks the motionless beef carcass, which Murtaza is quickly breaking into pieces.

  “There’s your requisitions in 1916!” Murtaza chops through the bones as easily as if they were branches. “The food armies in 1918! 1919! 1920! There’s your taking grain for resale! There’s your food tax! There’s your grain surplus! Take! That! If! You! Can!”

  Sandugach is rearing by the door to the cowshed, neighing harrowingly, beating the air with her heavy hooves, and showing the whites of her crazed eyes. The foal is darting around under his mother’s legs.

  Murtaza turns toward the horse. His tunic is red and his chest is steaming heavily in its wide-open collar; the axe in his hand is black with blood. Zuleikha rises up a little on her elbows, pain searing from her ribs. Murtaza steps over the cow’s muzzle, its teeth bared and sharp, its inky-blue tongue hanging out, and heads toward Sandugach.

  “Plow? How are we going to plow?” Zuleikha throws herself on Murtaza’s back. “It’ll be spring soon! We’ll die of hunger!”

  He tries to shake her off, swinging his arms; the axe he clutches in his right hand whistles. Zuleikha sinks her teeth into her husband’s shoulder. He cries out and flings her off, over his shoulder. She flies, the earth and sky changing places again and again. Then something large and hard, with prominent sharp corners, is pushing at her back – is it the front steps? She rolls onto her stomach, half-slides, half-scrambles up the icy steps, and scampers into the house. Her husband stomps after her. Doors slam sharply, like a shepherd’s whip, hitting once, twice.

  Zuleikha runs through the room. Broken window glass clinks under her feet and she leaps on the sleeping bench, squeezes herself into the corner, and covers herself with a pillow. Murtaza is already beside her. Sweat drips from his beard and his eyes bulge. His arm swings. The axe cuts through the pillowcase and pillow cover in an explosion of white feathers. The feathers fill the room, hanging in the air like a cloud.

  Murtaza lets out an extended whoop and tosses the axe to the side, away from Zuleikha. The blade flashes through the air and plunges into the carved window frame.

  Feathers fall from above in a slow, warm blizzard. Breathing heavily, Murtaza wipes off something white that’s stuck to his bald skull. Without looking at Zuleikha, he pulls the axe out of the window frame and walks out. Glass crunches loudly under his heavy steps, like ice-crusted February snow.

  Snowflakes float into the house through the broken window, blending with the floating down. The white swirl inside the house is elegant and festive. Carefully, trying not to cut herself, Zuleikha plugs the hole in the window with the chopped pillow. She sees the scrap of kyzylyk on the sleeping bench and eats it. It’s delicious. Praise be to Allah. Who knows when she’ll be able to eat kyzylyk again? She licks her fatty, salty fingers. She goes outside.

  All the snow by the front steps is the color of juicy wild strawberries mashed with sugar.

  Murtaza is chopping meat in a distant corner, on the wooden block by the bathhouse. She can’t see Sandugach and the foal.

  Zuleikha goes into the cowshed. And there they both are, in their pen. Sandugach is licking her foal with her long, rough tongue. They’re alive! Glory be to Allah. Zuleikha strokes the horse’s warm, velvety muzzle and scratches the foal on its ticklish withers.

  And in the yard, thousands of snowy flakes settle on the red snow, covering it and turning it white once more.


  AN ENCOUNTER

  Murtaza’s secret storage place is in a secure spot. Everything he has thought up and built with his own hands is good and sound enough to last for two lives.

  Today they rise before dawn. They eat a cold breakfast and leave a yard still lit by a translucent moon and the last pre-dawn stars. They reach the place before daybreak. The sky has already turned from black to bright blue; trees covered in white are filled with light and touched by a diamond brilliance.

  There’s a morning quiet in the forest and the crisp snow crunches especially loudly under Murtaza’s felt boots, like the fresh cabbage Zuleikha chops with a hatchet in a wooden vat. Husband and wife make their way through deep, dense snowdrifts higher than their knees. They’re carrying precious cargo on two wooden spades, like stretchers: sacks of grain for planting, carefully wound with rope to the spade shafts. They carry it cautiously, protecting it from sharp branches and rotten stumps. Zuleikha will be in trouble if the burlap tears. In his exhaustion from waiting for the Red Horde, Murtaza has become a complete madman – he would hack her to death, like Kyubelek yesterday, without blinking an eye.

  Up ahead, a clearing is already turning blue between spruce trees touched with rime. The birch trees part, tiny icicles jingling on their cottony branches, and they reveal a broad clearing adorned with a thick cover of snow. There’s the crooked linden tree with the long crevice-like hollow, too, alongside a chilly rowan bush. They’ve arrived.

  There’s a small bird on a linden branch. Its dark blue breast is like a shard of sky and its eyes are like black beads. It looks closely at Zuleikha, chirruping and unafraid.

  “Shamsia!” Zuleikha smiles and stretches a hand wearing a thick fur mitten toward the bird.

  “Stop chattering, woman!” Murtaza flings a handful of snow and the bird darts away. “We came to work.”

  Frightened, Zuleikha grabs a spade.

  They begin shoveling away the deep snow under the linden tree and soon the outline of a small, dark mound begins to show through. Zuleikha tosses off her mittens and quickly clears it, smoothing with hands that redden in the icy air. Under the cold snow is the coldness of stone. Her fingernails scrape snowy crumbs out of the rounded Arabic script, her fingers melting the ice in the shallow dimples of the tashkil over the long wave of letters. Though unable to read, Zuleikha knows what’s carved here: “Shamsia, daughter of Murtaza Valiev.” And the date: “1917.”

  While Murtaza is clearing their eldest daughter’s grave, Zuleikha takes a step to the side, drops to her knees, and gropes under the drifts for yet another gravestone, throwing the snow around with her elbows. Her numbed fingers find the stone themselves, slipping along the iced-up letters: “Firuza, daughter of Murtaza Valiev. 1920.”

  The next gravestone: Sabida. 1924.

  The next: Khalida. 1926.

  “You shirking?” Murtaza has already cleared off the first grave and stands, leaning on the shaft of the spade, his eyes boring into Zuleikha. His irises are yellow and cold, and the whites of his eyes are dark, a clouded ruby color. The wrinkle in the middle of his forehead is moving as if it were alive.

  “I’m saying hello to everyone,” says Zuleikha, looking down guiltily.

  The four slightly tilting gray stones stand in a row, looking at her silently. They’re low, the height of a year-old child.

  “It’d be better to help!” Murtaza grunts and plunges the spade into the frozen earth with all his might.

  “Oh, but wait!” Zuleikha throws herself on Shamsia’s gravestone and presses her forearms to it.

  Murtaza’s breathing is loud and displeased but he’s set the spade aside; he’s waiting.

  “Forgive us, zirat iyase, spirit of the cemetery. We didn’t want to bother you before spring but we had to,” Zuleikha whispers at the rounded patterns of letters. “And forgive us, daughter. I know you aren’t angry. You yourself are glad to help your parents.”

  Zuleikha rises from her knees and nods: Now we can continue. Murtaza gouges at the earth by the grave, attempting to place the spade in a frozen crevice that’s scarcely visible. Zuleikha digs at the ice with a stick. The crevice broadens gradually, growing and giving way, then finally opening up with an extended crack and uncovering a long wooden box, from which there wafts the smell of frozen earth. The sunny yellow grain makes a whooshing sound as Murtaza carefully pours it into the box, and Zuleikha places her hands under its heavy, flowing stream.

  Grain.

  It will sleep here over winter, between Shamsia and Firuza, in a deep wooden coffin. And when the air has begun to smell of spring and the meadows have already been warmed, it will lie down in the earth again, so it can sprout and develop as green shoots on tilled soil.

  It was Murtaza who thought of digging out the secret place in the village cemetery. Zuleikha was initially frightened: isn’t it a sin to disturb the dead? Wouldn’t it be best to ask the mullah’s permission? And wouldn’t the spirit of the cemetery be angry? But she later agreed – let their daughters help with the chores. And their daughters helped meticulously. This was not the first year they had watched over their parents’ supplies until spring.

  The box’s lid bangs shut. Murtaza strews snow on the disturbed grave. Then he winds the empty sacks around the spade handles, tosses them over his shoulder, and heads into the forest.

  Zuleikha sprinkles more snow on the dug-up gravestones, as if she were covering them with a blanket at night. Goodbye, girls. We’ll see you in the spring if the Vampire Hag’s prediction doesn’t come true before then.

  “Murtaza,” Zuleikha calls quietly to him. “If anything happens, put me here, with the girls. To Khalida’s right, that place is free. I don’t need a lot of space, you know that.”

  Her husband doesn’t stop; his tall figure flashes between the birches. Zuleikha quietly murmurs something to the stones in parting and pulls her mittens on her stiff hands.

  There’s chirping again on the linden branch: the nimble, blue-breasted little bird has returned to its place. Zuleikha waves joyfully to it – Shamsia, I knew that was you! – and dashes after her husband.

  The sledge rides along the forest road, not hurrying. Sandugach snorts, urging the foal to keep up. The foal gallops joyfully beside her, sometimes sinking thin legs into snowdrifts on the roadside or poking a hook-nosed muzzle at his mother’s side. The foal has tagged along with them today. And rightly so: let him get used to trips to the forest.

  The sun hasn’t yet reached midday but their work is already done. Glory be to Allah, nobody noticed them. A snowstorm will sweep away their tracks at the cemetery any day and it will be as if nothing happened.

  As always, Zuleikha sits on the sledge facing away from Murtaza. The back of her head senses heavy, gloomy thoughts stirring in his mind. She had hoped her husband would calm down a little after hiding the grain and that the large wrinkle on his forehead, the one that looks as if it was hacked by an axe, would smooth. But no, the wrinkle hasn’t gone away; it’s even deeper now.

  “I’m going into the forest tonight,” he says, speaking to something in front of him, addressing either the collar on Sandugach’s neck or the horse’s tail.

  “What are you talking about?” Zuleikha turns and fixes her mournful gaze on her husband’s stern back. “It’s January …”

  “There’ll be a lot of us. We won’t freeze.”

  Murtaza has never gone into the forest. Other men had, in 1920 and 1924. They huddled in groups, hiding from the new authorities. They either slaughtered livestock or brought it with them. Their wives and children stayed at home to wait and hope their husbands would return. Sometimes they did, though more often they didn’t. The Red Horde shot some; others went missing.

  “Don’t expect me before spring,” Murtaza goes on. “Look after my mother.”

  Zuleikha is watching the rough, spongy sheepskin tightly stretched between her husband’s powerful shoulder blades.

  “I’ll take the horse.” Murtaza makes a kissing noise and
Sandugach obediently quickens her pace. “You can eat the foal.”

  The young one hurries after his mother, amusingly throwing his legs forward, then backward, frolicking.

  “She won’t survive,” Zuleikha says to Murtaza’s back. “Your mother won’t survive, I’m telling you.”

  His back is gloomily silent. Sandugach’s hooves thump into the snow. Magpies mockingly jabber somewhere in the forest. Murtaza takes the shaggy fur hat from his head and rubs his glistening, bumpy scalp; barely visible steam rises from his smooth pink skin.

  The conversation is over. Zuleikha turns. She has never in her life been left on her own. Who will tell her what to do and what not to do? Scold her for poor work? Protect her from the Red Horde? Feed her, too? And what about the Vampire Hag? Did she make a mistake? Will the old woman stay in a house without her beloved son but with her despised daughter-in-law? And Allah, what is this all for?

  The singing overtakes them as suddenly as a gust of wind, replacing the sad squeaking sound of sledge runners with a confident male voice. There it is, beautiful and deep, somewhere far in the woods. The words are Russian, the melody unfamiliar. Zuleikha wants to listen but for some reason Murtaza’s bustling along, urging on Sandugach.

  We won’t rely on other powers,

  No god, no swell, no tsar.

  We’ll claim the freedom that is ours,

  They’ll know whose hands these are.

  Zuleikha’s Russian isn’t bad. She understands that the words in the song are good, about freedom and salvation.

  “Hide the spades,” Murtaza tells her through his teeth.

  Zuleikha hastily wraps the spades in sacks, covering them with her skirts.

  Sandugach is trotting quickly but still not fast enough – she’s been adjusting to the foal’s uneven run. And the voice is coming closer, overtaking them.

  We’ll fight the tyrant and dethrone him,

  These hands of ours must do.

  We’ll break the manacles we owe him