Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  I’m hurrying, Mama, I’m hurrying …

  Zuleikha opens her eyes. The exiles are sleeping all around her, in a thick duskiness weakly diluted by the flickering kerosene light. The fire crackles in the stove; the sheep in their nook bleat briefly, sleepily, from time to time. The officers on duty are dozing sweetly, leaning against the wall, their heads hanging on their slumping shoulders.

  Ugh, it was only a dream.

  And then there’s a sudden loud rustling, very close by. Intermittent whispering – male or female? – heated, quick, muddled, and mixed with loud rapid breaths. The darkness is quivering, turbulent, and breathing in the same place the shameless woman settled in on the armload of straw. It’s moving, at first slowly, then faster, sharper, and more energetically. This is no longer darkness: it’s two bodies, swathed in shadow. Something is shuddering, wheezing, and exhaling, deeply and for a long time. And then a muffled female laugh. “Hold on, you madman, I’m completely exhausted.” The voice is familiar – it’s her, the harlot with the magnificent cheeks. Zuleikha thinks she sees yellow hair scattering in the darkness like a heavy sheaf. The woman is breathing with her mouth wide open, with relief, and loudly, as if she’s not afraid of being heard. She bends her head on someone’s chest and they both go still and quiet.

  Zuleikha strains to see, attempting to view the man’s face. And she discerns two eyes gazing out of the darkness: he’s been looking at her long and hard. It’s Ignatov.

  “Salakhatdin!” A heartrending shriek suddenly rings out in the depths of the mosque. “My husband!”

  The kerosene lamp flares abruptly. People leap up and look around, a half-awake child cries, and the cat mews under someone’s inadvertent boot.

  “Salakhatdin!” the mullah’s wife keeps shouting.

  Cursing, Ignatov frees himself from the net of Nastasya’s mermaid-like hair, hastily fastens his belt, and pulls on his boots as he walks. He runs to where the exiles are already densely bunched.

  People let him through. The mullah is lying on the floor with his gray head directed toward the prayer niche and his long legs stretched out from under his curly fur coat. His enormous wife is kneeling alongside him and sobbing, her forehead on the floor. The mullah’s open eyes are frozen and looking upward; his skin is stretched over his cheekbones and the wrinkles running from his nose to his chin have formed his lips into a pale, dry smile. Ignatov looks up. There’s a fluid blue light in the narrow windows. Morning.

  “Everybody get ready,” he says to the frozen faces around him. “We’re leaving.”

  And he walks toward the door.

  Nastasya’s gaze follows him. She’s sitting on the armload of straw and plaiting her loose hair into a thick wheaten braid.

  They get ready quickly. It is decided to leave the mullah’s body in the canton for burial. At Ignatov’s insistence, the mullah’s wife, puffy with tears, tosses the fur coat on herself. Children help catch the cat, which has hidden behind the stove from fear, and put it back in its cage.

  Outside, Zuleikha is already sitting in her driver’s place, holding the reins at the ready – they’re waiting for a command to leave – when Prokopenko looks around, runs over, and quickly throws something heavy, white, and shaggy onto the sledge. A lamb. He covers it with burlap and presses a crooked finger to his lips: Shh …

  “Let’s go!” rings out loudly over the whole yard. The horses snort, the escorts shout to one another, and the sledges pull out of the yard like a school of large, slow fish.

  Chairman Denisov stands by the gate, smiling and seeing them off.

  “Well,” Ignatov says to him amiably, firmly shaking a hand as hard as the sole of a shoe, “stand firm, brother!”

  “Listen, Ignatov,” says the flustered Denisov, lowering his voice and furrowing his brows a little. “What would you think about raising the red flag over the mosque?”

  Ignatov scrutinizes the minaret’s tall tower. Its sharp top is nestled into the sky, with a dark tin squiggle of a crescent on it.

  “It would be visible from far away,” he replies approvingly. “Beautiful!”

  “All the same, it’s a cult building. It could look like some sort of … mishmash.”

  “There’s a mishmash inside your head,” says Ignatov, slapping his impatient prancing horse on the neck. “This is a genuine shed for the kolkhoz. Understand that, shock worker?”

  Denisov smiles and waves his hand – how could he not understand!

  Ignatov lets the last sledge go ahead of him, casts a glance over the emptied yard and gallops after the caravan, spraying crisp morning snow out from under his horse’s hooves.

  When the village is far behind them, Zuleikha turns around. A red flag is already waving like a small, hot flame over the slender candle of the mosque.

  Rural council chairman Denisov will work another half-year in the village. By spring, he will have organized the kolkhoz and, through earnest work, greatly raised the rate of collectivization in the settlement entrusted to him.

  He will battle religion with all his soul, in the Baltic fleet manner. During the holy month of Ramadan, he will organize agitational processions around the mosque, personally speak as an opponent to three clergymen in the public debate “Is religiosity needed in Soviet society?” and gather up all village Korans for burning.

  The crowning achievement of his career in the small town will be obtaining a Kommunar tractor for his kolkhoz. It will be the envy of all the canton’s neighboring villages, which, as yet, lack vehicles. The tractor will be the most valued and most guarded object in Denisov’s enterprise.

  He will propose innovative initiatives and rename the pagan holiday Sabantuy – “Holiday of the Plow” – which is celebrated in small Tatar towns during late spring, to “Traktortuy.” The initiative will receive support from the center and a delegation from the Central Executive Committee in Kazan will come to the celebration, along with a landing force of newspaper correspondents. The holiday, however, will be ruined by the disrepair of the tractor itself. It will later become clear that an old local woman, the wife of a holy man, decided from good intentions to win over the tractor’s spirit and secretly fed the motor an uncertain quantity of eggs and bread, causing the breakdown. The correspondents and the dissatisfied comrades from the Central Executive Committee will leave for Kazan with nothing and Denisov’s career will begin a rapid decline.

  He will be recalled from the village and sent home. Upon returning to Leningrad, he will find that his room in a communal apartment has been occupied by multiplying neighbors. During a desperate and drawn-out struggle with the building managers for living space, he will take to the bottle and be evicted from a dormitory a couple of years later, for drunkenness. During passportization in 1933, Denisov will be exiled from Leningrad as a person lacking an official residence permit and simply as a binging drunkard, sent first beyond the hundred-and-first kilometer, then to Ust’-Tsil’ma, and then, finally, to somewhere near Dushkachan, where his trail will be lost forever amid the rounded hills of the Baikal region.

  COFFEE

  Who doesn’t love coffee in little china cups?

  Volf Karlovich Leibe hides his face under a blanket and continues to feel the warm touch of a sunbeam on his forehead. He’ll have to get up in a few moments. His work won’t wait.

  Soon Grunya will burst noisily into his office carrying a tray with a tiny steaming cup in her dutifully extended hands. First thing in the morning, it’s just coffee and a small piece of chocolate, no food, which causes heavy thoughts and limbs. He himself will get up and throw open the drapes with a broad motion, allowing sunlight to flood the room. Grunya will cast a fastidious gaze at the dark blue dress uniform hanging at the ready and carefully remove a nonexistent dust speck from a sleeve – her bashful worship of his uniformed professorial vestments is growing all the stronger with the years. And a new day will unfurl: lectures, examinations, thousands of excited student faces …

  Volf Karlovich sends the blanket to the f
loor with an energetic sweep, his toes fumbling at the smooth, cool leather of his slippers. The drapes fly off to the side with a swish, revealing a view familiar since childhood. This oriel window with three tall panes is like a huge living triptych where for so many years bushy old linden trees have been turning green, blossoming, dropping leaves, and after a covering of frost, blooming again, reflected in the mirror of Black Lake.

  The panes are now covered with a delicate frosty mural. His German-born father would cast a majestic morning gaze through the window, as if saying an amiable hello to the winter month he called “Januar.”

  This used to be his father’s office and little Volf wasn’t allowed in here. He used to steal in, though, hide out behind the curtains, flatten his nose against the cold glass, and admire the lake.

  Now he himself works here. He even prefers sleeping right here, on the firm sofa by his father’s ancient writing desk. A quill pen and paper are ready on the desk – good thoughts have a habit of soaring at night. He has already forgotten when he last slept in the bedroom. That was probably back before the renovations began.

  Grunya’s supervising the renovations, just as she has supervised everything that’s taken place in the old professorial apartment. Large, noisy, with a braid that winds around her head and is as thick as an arm (her arms are as thick as a leg, too), Grunya’s heavy soldier’s tread entered this home for duty twenty years ago and Volf Karlovich instantly capitulated, handing over the reins of his paltry household with a submissive joy so he could plunge headfirst into the intoxicating world of the mysteries of the human body.

  Volf Karlovich Leibe was a surgeon and a third-generation professor at Kazan University. His practice was extensive and people waited months for operations. Each time he raised the scalpel over a patient’s soft, pale body, he sensed a cool trepidation in the very pit of his stomach: Do I have the right? The knife touched the skin and that chill changed to a warmth that spread to his limbs: I do not have the right not to attempt. And he attempted, conducting a mental dialogue with the cutaneous covering, muscle, and connective tissue through which he made his way to his goal, greeting the internal organs respectfully and whispering to blood vessels. He conversed with his patients’ bodies using a scalpel. And bodies responded to him. He told nobody about his dialogues: from an outsider’s perspective, this might appear to resemble mental illness.

  Volf Karlovich had a second secret, too, which was that the mysteries of human birth excited him to an extreme, making his fingertips itch.

  In his naive youth, intoxicated by the lectures of legendary Professor Phenomenov, he even wanted to stay and work in the department of obstetrics and female diseases. His father talked him out of it: “Deliver babies for peasant women your whole life?” Young Volf resigned himself to his father’s opinion and went into the noble department of surgery.

  After becoming a surgeon and dissecting in the anatomical theater the unclaimed bodies of paupers and prostitutes that had been delivered from the police station as cadavers, he would sometimes discover a small fetus in a female womb. Each of these findings brought him to a state of vague excitement. A ridiculous thought would flash: What if this tiny little beast with the wrinkly face and caricature-like small extremities is actually alive?

  “Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae,” said the inscription over the round building housing the university’s anatomical theater: “This place is where death delights in helping life.” And so it was. Unborn babies in the bellies of young women knifed from jealousy or accidentally murdered in bandits’ gunfights thirsted to reveal their little secrets to Volf Karlovich: their thin voices constantly swarmed in his head, whispering, muttering, and sometimes shouting.

  And he surrendered. He performed his first hysterotomy at the age of twenty-five, in 1900, the turn of the century. He already had several dozen incisions of the womb to his credit by that time, and this new operation – the cesarean section – was not especially complex for him. There was a special feeling afterward, though, since it was one thing to cut a slippery bloody slab from a tumor in the patient’s womb and fling it in a basin, and something completely different to remove a live, quivering baby.

  The operation went brilliantly. Then another and another. The renown of the young surgeon, “a natural,” took wing in the Kazan province. And that was how he lived, working in clinical surgery for his father and in gynecology (a bit embarrassed about that and not advertising it) for himself.

  When, by the way, did he last operate? Volf Karlovich begins pondering. It seems as if it wasn’t long ago at all, but it’s challenging to remember the exact date or reason for the operation. Teaching takes so much time and energy that some events fade from memory. He’ll have to ask Grunya.

  Volf Karlovich takes a watering can from the windowsill and waters his palm plant. This is the only thing Grunya isn’t allowed to do in the home. Watering is a special ritual because it soothes the professor. The huge tree with glossy, fleshy leaves standing in a wooden tub on the floor is his exact contemporary. On the day he was born, fifty-five years ago, his father planted a pip in the tub and forgot it. A month later he was amazed to discover a stubborn, stubby sprout. The palm grew and gradually transformed into a tall, powerful tree, though it’s true it has never once bloomed. The day it blossoms will be a holiday for Volf Karlovich.

  The door opens wide with a cracking sound and Grunya bursts into the room as noisily and relentlessly as a locomotive flying along the rails. “Good morning,” utter her plump lips, touched with bright lipstick. That means the morning truly is good. Just like the day ahead.

  The smell of buckwheat groats with onion fills the room.

  Grunya places a silver tray with a small china cup at the edge of the table.

  “Please ask the workmen to begin this bedlam of theirs a little later,” Volf Karlovich says with an imploring smile, standing next to the palm. “I want to work in quiet for a while.”

  Grunya nods silently, her head piled high with thick, interwoven braids like a ship’s ropes.

  “And when …” Volf Karlovich attentively fingers the smooth, cool leaves, “… when will this endless renovation end?”

  “Soon,” mutters Grunya in a low voice, heading for the door. “There’s not much longer to wait.”

  “And also, Grunya …”

  She stops by the door and turns.

  “Can you recall? When did I last operate? Somehow it’s slipped my mind.”

  Grunya furrows her low brow.

  “Why do you need to know?”

  Volf Karlovich shrinks under her threatening gaze.

  “I feel uncomfortable when I can’t remember such a simple fact of my biography.”

  “I’ll go remember it,” says Grunya dryly, nodding decisively, as if she were butting the air in front of herself, and leaves.

  Clinking dishes, excited female voices, and children’s crying carry through the slightly open door.

  “But I asked for quiet!” says Volf Karlovich, placing his hand to his forehead like a martyr.

  Grunya goes to the kitchen to fetch breakfast for herself and Stepan.

  Three huge windows without curtains. Clothes lines divide the space into two uneven triangles. Six tables that seem to dance along the walls. Six kerosene cookers on the tables. Six large-bellied cabinets. All told, there are seven rooms in the apartment but Volf Karlovich doesn’t have his own table. Meaning he doesn’t have a kerosene cooker, either.

  Women who’ve been passionately discussing something go quiet and disperse to their own corners when they see Grunya. The sizzling of someone’s eggs in a frying pan becomes distinctly audible. Grunya’s hand grabs at the clothes line and carefully shifts the hanging sheets, pushing them back into an accordion.

  “I’ve told you not to take up my half,” she says to the ceiling.

  “But you don’t do laundry today,” says one of the women, hands on hips, sleeves rolled up.

  Grunya silently unties the apron aro
und her waist and hangs it on the freed-up clothes line: Now there’s laundry! Then she opens the sideboard, takes out bread, and locks it again with a key. She picks up a pan of porridge from her kerosene cooker and heads for the door. The women gaze after her. Water bubbles in a basin with boiling laundry. Milk sizzles as it boils over.

  It’s dark in the hallway; the gas lamps haven’t been working for ten years now. Cabinets and trunks block a once-wide hallway so you can’t get through. There it is, communal life: darkness, overcrowding, and the smell of fried onions. Things were very different before.

  Grunya pushes a door with her mighty rear end and enters her room.

  “What took so long?” Stepan is at the table in just an undershirt, using a screwdriver to tinker with a large padlock. Spots of shiny black oil cover his hands.

  “He’s trying to recall when he last operated.” Grunya places the pan on the table and pensively scrutinizes the tablecloth’s pattern.

  Stepan sets down the screwdriver and picks up the lock. Click! The shackle greedily latches shut. He takes the key lying beside it, inserts it, rotates it with a smooth mechanical sound, and the lock opens obediently.

  “It’s ready.” His smile bares smoke-stained teeth dancing crookedly in his mouth.

  “He wants to recall when he last operated,” Grunya repeats, louder. “But what if he wants to recall something else?”

  “You think it’s that simple? He wants to recall something and then he does? He hasn’t remembered for ten years, and then he wants to, so there you go?” Stepan wipes his hands on his under-shirt, breaks off some bread, and starts chewing.

  “How should I know?” Grunya takes a ladle and hurls a gob of thick, steaming porridge on a dish.

  “When did you send the letter?” Stepan eats the steaming buckwheat with a large spoon, not burning himself.

  “It’s been about a month already.”

  “That means they’ll come soon. There’s not much longer to wait. They’re just regular people working there; they need time to look into things.” Stepan reaches his little finger into the depths of his upper jaw for a grain that’s stuck, then wipes his finger on the tablecloth. “It’s our job not to miss them. And there you go!” He stands, shakes the heavy lock in the air, and hangs it on a nail by the door. “They’ll shut the room off and you’ll scoot right over to put a lock over the little paper seal they stick on the door. If anybody asks, say the building manager ordered it.”