“Careful, Prokopenko, you’re not in your own house!” Mansurka snaps after him. He tenderly strokes the wall of bulging logs and the carved patterns on the window frame, where he fingers the deep notch from the axe and clicks his tongue in distress. “Sign it, Zuleikha; don’t drag it out,” he sighs amiably and sincerely, unable to tear his loving gaze from the smooth, fat logs generously caulked with stringy, high-quality oakum.
Prokopenko’s head pokes through the doorway again, his eyes gleaming with excitement:
“Comrade Ignatov, the cow, there’s … only the meat’s left. Should we take it?”
“Add it to the inventory,” Ignatov says gloomily and rises from the trunk. “Are we going to be here a long time working on political education?”
“What’s with you, Zuleikha?” Mansurka arches his thin eyebrows reproachfully toward the bridge of his nose. “These comrades came all the way from Kazan to get you. And you’re delaying them.”
“I won’t sign it.” She utters this to the floor. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Ignatov walks over to the window, raps his knuckles on the glass, and nods to someone outside. The floorboards groan under his boots, squeaking for a long time. He’s standing on the sausage and doesn’t know it, thinks Zuleikha.
A soldier bursts into the house. Zuleikha recognizes him: his face is dark red and his scar is completely white after standing in the cold for so long.
“Five minutes for her to gather her things, Slavutsky.” Ignatov motions his chin at Zuleikha.
The indefatigable Prokopenko is examining the bare, seemingly unlived-in house one last time, as if he’s searching for some unnoticed loot. Finally he catches the blade of his bayonet on a tapestry embroidered with a saying from the Koran that hangs high over the entrance – he tries to take it down. The ornate interlacing of Arabic letters pulls and wrinkles under the steel blade.
“That’s what they have instead of icons,” Slavutsky tells Prokopenko quietly in passing.
“Planning to pray?” Ignatov looks intently at Prokopenko, his nostrils quivering in disgust, and then goes out.
“There you go. And you were saying they’re heathens.” Prokopenko sniffs at Mansurka and hurries after the commander.
The tattered tapestry remains hanging in its place. The mullah once explained the meaning of it, saying to Zuleikha: “No soul can ever die except by Allah’s leave and at a time appointed.”
“You’ll leave anyway, even if you don’t sign it,” Mansurka-Burdock tells Zuleikha.
And he points significantly at Slavutsky, the soldier with the scar. He’s strolling through the house, examining and prodding the exposed beams of the storage shelves under the ceiling with his bayonet.
Zuleikha falls to her knees next to the sleeping bench, pressing her forehead to Murtaza’s cold, hard hand. My husband – given by the Almighty, to direct, feed, and protect me – what should I do?
“We’ll bury Murtaza properly, according to Soviet custom,” the chairman soothes her, lovingly stroking the rough, carefully whitened sides of the stove. “Despite everything, he was a good master of the house …”
A steel blade touches Zuleikha: Prokopenko has come up behind her and is lightly tapping her shoulder with his bayonet. She shakes her head: I’m not going. Strong hands suddenly scoop her up and lift her in the air. Zuleikha jerks her arms and legs like a fussy baby in an adult’s arms, her baggy pants flashing under her skirts, but Slavutsky holds her firmly, until it hurts.
“Don’t touch me!” Zuleikha screams out from under the ceiling. “It’s a sin!”
“Are you going on your own? Or do we have to carry you out?” Mansurka’s concerned voice asks from somewhere below.
“On my own.”
Slavutsky cautiously releases Zuleikha. Her feet land on the floor.
“Allah will punish you,” she tells Mansurka. “He’ll punish all of you.”
And she begins gathering her things.
“Dress warmly,” Mansurka advises her, tossing wood in the stove and stoking the fire with the poker, as if he owned it. “So as not to catch cold.”
Her things are soon tied in a bundle. Zuleikha winds a shawl snugly around her head and draws her sheepskin coat tightly closed. From a stove shelf she takes the remainder of a loaf of bread wrapped in a rag, and puts it in one pocket. In the other she places the poisoned sugar from the windowsill. A tiny dead carcass remains lying by the window; a little mouse had a treat during the night.
She’s ready for the journey.
She stops near the door and casts a glance at the ravaged house. Bare walls, uncovered windows, a couple of trampled embroidered towels on the dirty floor. Murtaza is lying on the sleeping bench, his pointy beard thrust toward the ceiling. He’s not looking at Zuleikha. My husband, forgive me. I am not leaving you of my own will.
There’s a loud sound of fabric ripping – Mansurka is tearing down the curtain dividing the men’s quarters from the women’s, then he brushes off his hands, satisfied. The smashed pots, gutted trunks, and remainders of kitchen goods brazenly reveal themselves to the gaze of anyone entering. So disgraceful.
Blushing from the unbearable shame, Zuleikha looks down and runs out to the hallway.
Dawn glows in the sky.
A huge pile of household goods towers in the middle of the yard: trunks, baskets, dishes, tools … Panting from exertion, Prokopenko drags a heavy, hollowed-out cradle from the storehouse.
“Comrade Ignatov! Have a look, should we take this?”
“You fool.”
“I thought it should be entered on the inventory …” says Prokopenko, offended, and then he hurls the cradle on the very top of the pile anyway since he’s made up his mind. “Sweet mother of mine, do they have a lot of stuff!”
“Even so, everything belongs to the kolkhoz now.” Mansurka picks up a basket that fell off the pile and neatly places it back.
“Uh-huh. Ours. The people’s.” Prokopenko smiles broadly and secretly stuffs a small linen kaplau in his pocket.
Zuleikha walks down the front steps and sits on the sledge, her back to the horse, out of habit. Sandugach, who stood too long during the night, tosses back her head.
“Zuleikhaaa!” A low, hoarse voice suddenly sounds from inside the house.
Everyone turns toward the door.
“The deceased has come to life,” Prokopenko whispers loudly in the silence and surreptitiously crosses himself, as he backs toward the storehouse.
“Zuleikhaaa!” carries again from the house.
Ignatov raises his revolver. The cradle tumbles from the pile and crashes to the ground, splitting into pieces with a crack. The door flings open with an extended scrape and the Vampire Hag stands in the opening. Her long nightgown flutters and her lips quiver angrily. Her round, white eye sockets dig into the guests; her walking stick is in one hand, her chamber pot in the other.
“Where the devil are you, you pathetic hen?”
“Damn it,” says Prokopenko, catching his breath. “I almost went gray.”
“Look, she’s alive, the old witch.” Mansurka wipes perspiration from his forehead with his hand.
“And who might that be?” Ignatov stuffs the revolver back in the holster.
“His mother.” Mansurka scrutinizes the old woman and whistles in admiration. “She’s at least a hundred.”
“How come she’s not on the list?”
“Who could have known that she’s still –”
“Zuleikhaaa! You’ll get it in the end, Murtaza will show you!” The Vampire Hag jerks her chin up furiously and shakes her walking stick. She hurls the contents of the chamber pot in front of her with a sweeping motion. The little cornflowers on the milky porcelain flash. The cloudy liquid flies like a precise gob of spit and a large dark spot creeps along Ignatov’s overcoat.
Slavutsky swings his rifle up but Ignatov flaps his arm: As you were! Mansurka hurriedly opens the gate and Ignatov, his expression souring, jumps on his horse and rides
out of the yard.
“Should we take her?” Prokopenko shouts after Ignatov.
“All we need in the caravan of sledges is the living dead,” he says, already in the road.
“Why are you sitting there?” Prokopenko leaps onto his horse and looks impatiently at Zuleikha. “Let’s go!”
Puzzled, Zuleikha looks around, moves into the driver’s place, and takes the heavy reins in her hands. She turns to her mother-in-law.
“My Murtaza will have your hide!” the Vampire Hag croaks from the front steps, the wind fluttering the wispy strands of her white braids. “Zuleikhaaa!”
Sandugach sets off, the foal following. Zuleikha drives out of the yard.
Prokopenko rides out last. He raises his head and sees ice-covered yellow skulls on a section of the gate: a horse bares long, sparse teeth; a bull’s black eye sockets stare stubbornly; and a sheep bends his wavy horns as if they’re snakes.
“No, they’re heathens after all,” he decides and hurries after the others.
“My Murtaza will kill you! Kill you! Zuleikhaaa!” carries after them.
Mansurka-Burdock smirks. He closes the gate from the outside, gently patting the sturdy, solid sections with his hand (hmm, those latches will need to be stronger!) and hurries home to get some sleep. Fifteen households in just one night is no joke. He doesn’t yet know that two men are waiting to ambush him by his house. They’ll push him against the fence, breathe hotly in his face, and disappear, and he’ll remain a motionless little sack hanging on the boards, pierced by two crooked sickles, his dumbfounded glassy eyes agog at the morning sky.
Zuleikha’s sledge merges into a long caravan of others being dekulakized. Their procession flows along Yulbash’s main street, toward the edge of town. There are cavalry soldiers with rifles lining the road. Among them is the busty Nastasya, with the magnificent cheeks, the one Zuleikha saw in the forest that morning.
“So, comrade Ignatov,” she shouts teasingly, glancing at Zuleikha, “is it easier to dekulakize women or something?”
Ignatov pays no attention and nudges his horse forward at a trot.
The gate of her husband’s house is growing distant, shrinking, and dissolving into the darkness of the street. Zuleikha cranes her neck and looks, looks at it, unable to turn away.
“Zuleikhaaa!” carries from the gate.
In windows along both sides of the street are the ashen faces of neighbors, their eyes wide open.
And there’s the edge of town.
They’ve left Yulbash.
“Zuleikhaaa!” rings out a barely audible voice.
The convoy of sledges rides up a hill. The smattering of Yulbash houses darkens in the distance.
“Zuleikhaaa!” the wind howls in her ears. “Zuleikhaaa!”
She turns her head to face forward. From the top of the hill, the plain that sprawls below seems like a giant white tablecloth along which the hand of the Almighty has scattered trees like beads and roads like ribbons. Their caravan is a thin silk thread stretching beyond the horizon, over which a scarlet sun is solemnly rising.
PART TWO
WHERE TO?
TAKING THE ROAD
She’s a good-looking woman.
Ignatov is riding at the head of the caravan. At times he stops to let the detachment pass by, looking intently at everyone: the gloomy kulaks on sledges as well as his own fine troops, all reddened from the cold. Then he overtakes them again because he likes to be the first to forge ahead, with only a broad, inviting open space and the wind in front of him.
He’s trying not to watch that woman, so she won’t think he’s up to something. But how could you not watch when her curves just gallop right into your eyes like that? She’s sitting there like she’s on a throne, not a horse. She rocks in the saddle with each stride, her lower back arching sharply and her chest thrust forward, tightly covered in a white sheepskin coat, as if she’s nodding and repeating to him: Yes, comrade Ignatov, yes, Vanya, yes, yes …
He rises partway in his stirrups, meticulously examining the caravan flowing past him from under the visor of his hand, as if he’s protecting his eyes from the sun. In reality, he’s screening his gaze, which keeps disobediently attaching itself to Nastasya.
The sledges sail on, creaking loudly along the snow. Horses snort from time to time and little clouds of steam rise like intricate flowers above their frost-covered snouts.
A man with a mussed black beard and a ferocious appearance is nervously and angrily driving a mare. Behind him are his wife – wrapped in a shawl to the brows and with a sack of an infant in each arm – and a motley little flock of children. “I’ll kill you,” he’d shouted when they came to his house; he’d rushed at Ignatov with a pitchfork. He thought better of things and cooled down after they’d aimed their rifles at his wife and children. No, you can’t take on Ignatov with a pitchfork.
An elderly mullah ineptly holds the reins, his woolen gloves turned inside out. It’s evident he’s never taken anything heavier than a book in his hands in his whole life. The springy curls of his expensive karakul fur coat shine in the sun. You won’t keep a fur like that the whole way, thinks Ignatov indifferently. It’ll be taken away, either at a distribution point or somewhere else along the road. There’s no reason to dress up anyway. You’re not going to a wedding … The mullah’s wife is sitting in the back, in a bulky, despondent heap. In her arms is an elegant cage wrapped in a horse blanket. She brought her beloved cat with her. A fool.
It’s disconcerting for Ignatov to look at the next sledge. It would appear that, well, he’d killed a man, leaving his wife without a husband. That had happened more than once already. It was the man’s own fault: he’d rushed at Ignatov with an axe, like a madman. All they’d wanted in the beginning was to ask the way. But a repugnant sort of feeling gnaws at Ignatov’s guts; it won’t leave him alone. Pity? That woman is painfully small and thin. And her face is pale and delicate, as if it were paper. It’s clear she won’t survive the road. She might have made it with her husband, but like this … Ignatov has as good as killed her as well as her husband.
He’s begun pitying kulaks. That’s what he’s come to.
The small woman looks up as she rides past. And, oh, mother of mine, are those eyes of hers green! His horse is pawing at the ground, dancing in place. Ignatov turns in his saddle to have a better look but the sledge has already gone by. There’s a black welt on its back, left yesterday when Ignatov hacked it hard with an axe.
As he looks at that mark, the back of his head is already sensing the approach of a large, shaggy chestnut horse and Nastasya’s magnificent bust, bending toward its mane, breaking out of her clothes, and shouting to the whole plain with each motion: Yes, Vanya, yes, yes, yes …
Nastasya first caught his eye back during training.
The new recruits usually gathered in the morning in the courtyard right under his window. For two days they listened to rousing political speeches and practiced with rifles; then on the third day a certificate was shoved at them and off they went on a job, special assignments under the command of a State Political Administration colleague. There would already be a new batch in the yard the next morning. Lots of volunteers came – they all wanted to be involved in a just cause. Women turned up, too, though for some reason more women signed up for the militia. And rightly so – the State Political Administration was man’s work, serious.
Take Nastasya, for example. All the training in the courtyard had come to a standstill when she arrived. The recruits’ eyes bugged out at the sight of her, their necks twisted like dead chickens’, and they only half-listened to the instructors. Even the instructor wore himself out, sweating all over as he explained the structure of a rifle to her – Ignatov had seen all this from his office. Somehow they trained the detachment, sent them to work, and breathed a sigh of relief. But the memory of the beautiful woman had remained in his belly like a sweet chill.
Ignatov hadn’t gone to see Ilona that evening. She was a sassy kin
d of girl, she wasn’t too young (not broken by life yet, not proud), nor too old (still pleasant to look at), and her body had turned out well (there was something to hold on to), plus she hung on his every word, couldn’t gaze at him enough, and her room in the communal apartment was large, twelve square meters. This was basically too much of a good thing. She’d even told him, “Ivan, come live with me, it’s a good idea!” But it turned out to be too much.
Tossing and turning on his hard dormitory bed, he heard his roommates snoring and reflected on life. Wasn’t it caddish to lust over a new girl while the old one was still hoping, most likely plumping the pillows as she waited for him? No, he decided, it wasn’t caddish. People experience a burning for something: that’s what feelings are about. And if those feelings are gone, what’s the point in clinging to the embers?
Ignatov had never been a womanizer. He was an impressive, strapping man driven by political ideology and it was usually the women who looked at him, trying to catch his fancy. But he was in no hurry to get to know them better and feel an attachment, too. This was embarrassing to admit, but he could count the number of those women in his life on the fingers of one hand. Somehow, he’d had other things to do. He’d enlisted in the Red Army in 1918 and that got him started: first there was the Civil War, then hacking at the Basmachi in Central Asia. He’d probably still be swinging a sword in the mountains if not for Bakiev. Bakiev had already become someone important in Kazan by that time: he’d transformed from lanky, redheaded Mishka into staid Tokhtamysh Muradovich with a respectable shaved head and a gold pince-nez in his breast pocket. It was he who’d returned Ignatov to his native Tataria. “Come back, Vanya,” he’d said, “I desperately need my own people and can’t do it without you.” He knew, the sneak, how to get you. Ignatov bought into it and came rushing home to help out a friend.
That’s how he started working at the Kazan State Political Administration. It didn’t exactly turn out to be interesting (paperwork, meetings, etc.) but there was no use sighing over that now. He soon met a typist from the office on Bolshaya Prolomnaya Street. She had plump, sloping shoulders and the doleful name Ilona. Only now, at a full thirty years of age, had he learned for the first time about the joy of long-term contact with one person; he’d been dropping in on Ilona for four whole months. It wasn’t that he was in love with her, no. It was nice to be with her, tranquil – there was that. But as for love …
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