Two tiers of bunks are crowded with people. Others sit on crates, on heaps of old clothes, and on the floor. There are so many people that there’s nowhere to move to. There’s the sound of loud scratching, of snoring, and low voices. A mother whispers a fairytale to her child. In one corner, they’re murmuring, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on us sinners,” while another voice pleads to Allah for refuge from the devil.
Nobody pays attention to Zuleikha. She makes her way inside, trying not to step on anyone’s arms or legs. After reaching the bunks, she stands, not knowing where to settle because there are backs, stomachs, and heads positioned so close together here it’s as if they’re in several layers. Suddenly someone moves aside (it’s impossible to figure out right away if it’s a man or a woman), freeing up a hand-sized part of the bunk. Zuleikha perches, whispering a grateful thank you into the dark. A person turns a face – there are light curls around a high forehead, and a small, sharp nose – and announces protectively:
“I’ll see you’re issued clean linens and a change of footwear.”
Zuleikha nods readily, agreeing. She can hear from the voice that the person is already advanced in years, respectable. Who knows what sort of ways they have here.
“You don’t know where they’re taking us, do you?” she asks deferentially.
“Come to me tomorrow for an initial exam,” the other continues. “On an empty stomach.”
Zuleikha doesn’t know what an initial exam is but she nods again, just in case. There’s an unpleasant nagging in her stomach as she hasn’t eaten since yesterday. She takes the remainder of the bread from her pocket. Her strange neighbor noisily draws air into his nostrils and turns his head, his eyes boring into the bread. Zuleikha breaks the piece in two and extends half. Her neighbor thrusts his share into his mouth in a flash and swallows, almost without chewing.
“Strictly on an empty stomach!” he mumbles menacingly, his fingers holding back crumbs that threaten to fall from his mouth.
And with those remnants of stale bread, the foundations for an unusual friendship are laid. Zuleikha and Volf Karlovich Leibe will become conversation partners, if peculiar ones. In moments when his flickering consciousness flashes, he will occasionally speak, throwing in unconnected medical terms, recalling and clarifying diagnoses of former patients, and asking professional questions that demand no answers. She will listen gratefully, not understanding even the slightest bit of this blend of arcane Russian and Latin words but feeling an important meaning concealed behind them and rejoicing at her interaction with such a learned man. They keep silent most of the time but that silence doesn’t tire either of them.
Zuleikha’s fellow townspeople from Yulbash are soon settled into the cell, too: the mullah’s wife with the ever-present cat cage in her lap and the morose, black-bearded peasant with his numerous descendants. Convicts from Voronezh who worm their way in with the exiles take away the cat a week later and eat it, and one of the prison officials appropriates the karakul fur coat, forcing the mullah’s wife to affix her signature on a corresponding protocol regarding the surrender of property. She hardly notices the loss: she sobs for days on end, maybe about her husband, maybe about her cat.
Death is everywhere. Zuleikha grasped that back in her childhood. Tremblingly soft chicks covered in the downiest sunny yellow fluff, curly-haired lambs scented with hay and warm milk, the first spring moths, and rosy apples filled with heavy sugary juice – all of them carried within themselves the germ of future dying. All it took was for something to happen – sometimes this was obvious, though sometimes it was accidental, fleeting, and not at all noticeable to the eye – and then the beating of life would stop within the living, ceding its place to disintegration and decay. Chicks struck down by a poultry disease dropped like lifeless lumps of flesh into bright green grass in a yard; lambs skinned during Qurbani displayed their pale red innards; one-day moths poured from the sky, strewing themselves as if they were fresh snow on apples that had already fallen to the ground, their sides spotted with purplish abrasions.
The fate of her own children was confirmation of that, too. Four babies born only to die. Each time Zuleikha brought the little wrinkled face of a daughter to her lips for a kiss after birth, she would peer with hope into half-blind eyes still covered with slightly swollen lids, into tiny nose holes, into the fold of doll-like lips, into barely distinguishable pores on skin still a gentle red, and at sparse shoots of fluff on a small head. She thought she was seeing life. It would later turn out she was seeing death.
She had grown accustomed to that thought, just as an ox grows accustomed to a yoke and a horse to its master’s voice. Some people, like her daughters, were allotted a pinch of life and some got handfuls; others, like her mother-in-law, received immeasurably generous entire sacks and granaries. Death awaits everyone, though, hiding in actual people or walking alongside them, snuggling up to their feet like a cat, settling on clothing like dust, or penetrating the lungs like air. Death is ubiquitous and it is slyer, smarter, and more powerful than a silly life that will always lose a skirmish.
It arrived and took away the powerful Murtaza, who had seemed born to live a hundred years. It will obviously take the proud Vampire Hag away soon, too. Even the grain that she and her husband buried between their daughters’ graves – with the hope of saving it for their new crop – will rot in spring and become death’s quarry, shut away in a cramped wooden crate.
It seems as if Zuleikha’s time has also come. She was prepared to accept death on that memorable night, lying on the sleeping bench alongside the already dead Murtaza, so she is surprised to still be alive. She waited as the Red Hordesmen barged into the house and destroyed her home and hearth. And she waited when they brought her along the snow-covered expanses of her native land, too. And while spending the night in the desecrated mosque, to the sleepy bleating of sheep and the yellow-haired harlot’s shameless shrieks. And now she is waiting again, in a damp and cold stone cell, passing the hours with lengthy reflections like this for the first time in her life.
Will her death take the shape of a young soldier with a long, sharp bayonet? Of some thief who’s been moved into their cell, with a faintly predatory smile, a homemade knife hidden in his boot, and a hankering for her warm sheepskin coat? Or will death come from within, turning into disease, cooling the lungs, appearing on her forehead as hot and sticky sweat, filling her throat with heavy green phlegm, and, finally, squeezing her heart in its icy fist, forbidding it to beat? Zuleikha doesn’t know.
That lack of knowledge is distressing and the long wait excruciating. Sometimes it seems she is already dead. The people around her are emaciated, pale, and spend entire days whispering and quietly weeping: so who are they if not the dead? This place – frigid and crowded, the stone walls wet from damp, deep under the ground, without a single ray of sun – what is it if not a burial vault? Only when Zuleikha makes her way to the latrine, a large, echoing tin bucket in the corner of the cell, and feels her cheeks warm with shame is she convinced that, no, she is still alive. The dead do not know shame.
The Kazan transit prison is a legendary, distinguished place through which numerous bright minds and dark souls have passed. There’s good reason it’s located near Kazan’s kremlin, right up close. From their cells, the luckiest of the arrested can admire the dark blue onion domes of the Blagoveshchensk church, covered in golden stars, and the Storozhev tower’s brownish-green spire inside the trading quarter. The transit prison has been running continuously for a good century and a half, pumping the large country’s blood from west to east like a beautifully healthy heart that knows no fatigue.
In this same cell where Zuleikha is now listening to Professor Leibe’s half-crazed monologue and furtively scraping the first louse out of her armpit, there sat, exactly forty-three years ago, a young student from Imperial Kazan University. The locks of hair on the top of his head were still youthfully disobedient and lush, and his gaze was serious and morose. He had been imprisoned for orga
nizing student gatherings against the government. After ending up in the cell, he initially pounded his angry little fists at a frost-covered door, shouting something daring and foolish. His disobedient blue lips sang “the Marseillaise”. He diligently did gymnastic exercises to try to warm up. Then he would sit on the floor, placing his rolled-up student uniform overcoat – irrevocably ruined by thick prison grime – underneath himself, clasp his knees with arms numbed from the cold, and cry hot, angry tears. The student’s name was Vladimir Ulyanov, later better known as Lenin.
Nothing has changed here since then. First, emperors succeeded one another, then revolutionary leaders, and the transit prison served the authorities with unwavering faithfulness, as good old prisons should. Here they held exiles before sending them for hard labor in Siberia and the Far East, and, later, Kazakhstan. Criminal and political prisoners were usually housed separately, as a precaution against spreading criminal ideas. Customs established over the centuries had begun breaking down in recent times, though.
At the end of 1928, a thin stream of dekulakized people stretched to the capital from the far reaches of what was once Kazan Governate. These deportees needed to be gathered together, loaded into railroad cars, and sent on to destinations according to instructions. It was decided to hold that seemingly not very criminal contingent – which nevertheless still needed to be guarded – here in the transit prison, particularly since dekulakized people were sent along the very same age-old routes as convicts (Kolyma, Yenisei, Zabaikalye, Sakhalin …), often even in neighboring railroad cars on the same trains.
The stream gradually swelled, strengthened, and grew. By the winter of 1930, it had turned into a powerful river that flooded not only the prison itself but all the cellars near the train station, administrative buildings, and nonresidential premises, too. Hungry, furious, and uncomprehending peasants were now everywhere, taking shelter and waiting for their destiny, both hoping for it and simultaneously fearing its rapid onset. This river swept up everything in its path as centuries-old prison traditions broke down (the dekulakized were housed along with criminals and later with political prisoners, too); entire crates of documents (meaning whole villages and cantons) were lost and mixed up, making any sort of registry of those contingents – or, later, determinations of identity – impossible; and officials of various ranks from the regional and transport divisions of the State Political Administration lost their posts.
Zuleikha and those who arrived with her will end up spending an entire month in the transit prison, until the first day of spring, 1930. By that time, the cells were so densely stuffed that the prison chief had a stroke due to his desperate attempts to free himself of the specialized contingent of peasants foisted on him. Through sheer luck, they sent Zuleikha and her traveling companions on their way just before an epidemic of typhus broke out, mowing down more than half the detainees and freeing up the premises in a natural way – to the utmost relief of the boss, who was on his way to recovery at the Shamov Hospital.
February 1930 had yielded a good crop: Ignatov brought four batches of dekulakized peasants to Kazan. He sighed with relief and quiet inner joy each time he watched the kulaks disappear behind the transit prison’s sturdy gates. One more useful thing had been accomplished, one more grain of sand had been tossed on the scales of history. This is how a people shapes its country’s future, one grain at a time, one after another. A future that will certainly become a world victory, an unavoidable triumph of revolution both personally for him, Ignatov, and for millions of his Soviet brothers, people like the imperturbable Denisov, one of the romantic twenty-five thousanders, or the cultured, clever Bakiev.
Constant travels had saved Ignatov from the necessity of having a talk with Ilona. He’d popped in once, briefly (“Work, work …”), and she should be grateful for that. He hadn’t stayed the night. She’d figured out what was what. Anyway, what kind of personal life could you have when there’s so much to do just waiting right around the corner!
Hundreds, thousands of families were floating in endless caravans of sledges along the vast expanses of Red Tataria. A long journey awaited them. Neither they nor their escort guards knew where it led. One thing was clear: it was distant.
Ignatov wasn’t pondering the upcoming fate of those in his charge. His job was simply to deliver them. He’d cut Ilona off when she inquired about where they’d send those tormented bearded peasant men whose sledges had been stretching through the streets of Kazan for days on end. They’ll go where oppressors and exploiters can finally atone for their dark past with honest labor, working themselves into the ground and earning – earning! – the right to a bright future. Period.
Nastasya would never have asked such a thing, though. Nastasya … She was a ripe berry, seeping juice. All of February was as hot as May for Ignatov; just the thought of her warmed him. He wanted to believe, too, that the expeditions to the villages for “dekulakizing” – those trips through quiet, snow-covered forests with songs and jokes, those heated evening arguments with local Party activists at the rural councils with a crackling fire and a couple glasses of home brew, and those overnight stays in old mosques and barns, filled with the heat of Nastasya’s body – would always happen.
And then it comes suddenly, like a saber to the top of the head: “You’re going to accompany a special train.”
What’s that? Why me? What did I do wrong? “I’ll obey, of course, comrade leader, but explain to me, Bakiev, my friend: I’m battling kulakdom here, I’m hardly ever out of the saddle. They – the enemy – don’t know it’s peacetime now. They have pitchforks, axes, and rifles. It’s a genuine warfront! I’m needed here! And you’re sending me off just to sit around on a train …”
Bakiev’s gaze through the gold rings of his pince-nez is unusually severe. “We need reliable people like you, Ignatov, for this job. What makes you think it’s going to be easy? It’s twenty train cars chock-full of human lives. And each is a dyed-in-the-wool kulak, harboring a sense of hurt the size of a pig, if not a cow, toward the authorities. Just you try bringing them halfway across the country and delivering them to their destination without them fighting among themselves and scattering along the way. And then there’s the question – can you do it?”
“What do you mean, can I do it, Bakiev? You know me, don’t you? It’s not a complex matter. You put the meanest guards and the strongest locks on the railroad cars. It’s a bayonet in the eye if someone moves their eyebrows the wrong way.”
“Is that so?” Bakiev squints and now it’s obvious how very much he’s aged in this last half-year. So that’s what a warm office, with its oak desk and sweet tea in lace-like tea-glass holders, does to comrades-in-arms. But Bakiev, like Ignatov, is still only thirty years old.
“They’ll get there, there’s no way out. I know what I’m talking about. Believe me, I’ve seen so many of them in this last year, those oppressors. Just reconsider, Bakiev, my friend. And tell me truly, is it not possible to send someone else? Being a nanny for a train is embarrassing …”
“A nanny? A commandant for a special train is just a nanny in your opinion? And a thousand human heads are just trifles? When will you grow up, Ivan? All you want is to ride a steed with your saber unsheathed, and for the wind to whistle loudly in your ears! And it doesn’t matter where you gallop off to or why!” And (here’s the calm Bakiev for you, too): whack! A fist to the desk.
Ignatov whacks his fist in response. “Now, now! What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? I gallop off wherever the Party orders!”
“And the Party’s ordering you to set the showboating aside, too! To accept, today, the assignment on special train K-2437. Departure’s tomorrow!”
“Yes, sir.”
They catch their breath. Go silent. Light cigarettes.
“Please understand, Bakiev, my friend, that my heart is for the Party. It doesn’t just ache for the Party, it burns for it. Everybody’s heart should burn like that. Because what does our country need us for, anyway, if the
re’s only a candle stub instead of a heart or the gaze loses its fire?”
“I do understand you, Vanya. Please try to understand me, too. Maybe you’ll grasp this later and thank me – because it’s for you, you damned fool, so you …” Bakiev falls silent and vigorously wipes the lenses of his pince-nez with a handkerchief as if he wants to push them out. The glass is creaking. He’s strange today.
“So where are we taking this special train of yours?” Ignatov blows a stream of smoke at the floor.
“To Sverdlovsk for now. You’ll stay in a holding area there and wait for orders. That’s how we send everybody now, until further notice.”
“Yes, sir.” Ignatov’s wondering if he’ll have time before tomorrow to say goodbye to both women. First, certainly, to Nastasya. And later, if there’s enough time, to Ilona, to be done with her for good, to end things.
They shake hands. For some reason, Bakiev suddenly spreads his arms wide and clasps Ignatov to his chest. He certainly is strange today.
“I’ll drop by tomorrow to say goodbye before I leave.”
“There’s no need, Vanya. Consider it said.”
Bakiev attaches the pince-nez to his nose and continues sorting through documents in folders. The papers cover his desk like drifted snow.
Ignatov gets up to leave and turns when he reaches the door. Bakiev is sitting motionless, up to his neck in a paper snowbank. His eyes, magnified by the pince-nez’s bulging lenses, are wearily closed.
Of course he doesn’t make it to Ilona’s. To hell with her.She’ll assume I left on an urgent assignment. He’s gone missing before for a week or two without warning. This time he’ll be away for a month, a month and a half … Exactly how long will he be racing around on the railroad, anyway? Fine, he was ordered to be a commandant, he’ll be a commandant. He’ll eat government-issue chow and get enough sleep; it’s a long trip. He’ll cart away that damned special train if that’s what Bakiev needs so desperately. And then he’ll say, “That’s it, my friend, return me to real work. My soul’s weary. It’s asking for a real task …”
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