Ignatov strides quickly along the tracks, holding a dim lantern with a candle in his extended hand. The small Tatar woman from car eight is running behind him, stepping lightly, almost silently. A guard is last, clattering along the ties.
Ignatov is well aware that they’ll make him answer for this. What had they said to him that morning in the office? “We’ll figure it out upon your return.” It’s clear they want him to finish his job first so they can tear him apart later. Well, go ahead, figure it out. But he won’t hold back. He’ll tell them everything, how they starve people along the way and how people reel, wandering and lost, at small stations. They’ve been underway three months and have barely crawled across the Urals. That’s simply unheard of. They would have gotten there faster on foot. Attrition during that time was about fifty heads. It’s too bad, even though they’re kulaks: they’re manpower after all – they could do honest work felling trees or building something. A whole lot more use than rotting away along the railroad tracks. And another fifty people today, whoosh …
No, he’ll answer for the escape – that was his fault, he’s not denying it. Didn’t keep his eyes peeled. Even the minder in that railroad car, someone so hardened (“Do not worry, citizen chief, the people in this car are a quiet, dense-headed lot and rotten intelligentsia – what would happen to them?”), had been duped. Even so, if you reasoned things out, if they’d been brought to their destination earlier, there wouldn’t have been any escape at all. Don’t think for a second I’m absolving myself of any guilt, he imagines telling them, but I do ask that you consider the reasons for what occurred. During three months of traveling, anyone at all will have nasty thoughts and time will be found to realize those thoughts. So there it is, brothers.
And if they ask why he removed a witness from the investigation? That small woman with the vibrant name, Zuleikha? What can I say? Something like a tin can is in Ignatov’s path and it’s satisfying to take a run-up and kick it. The can flies ahead, clinking and echoing along the rails.
They’re already in the holding yard. It’s not easy to find their train in the dark among so many other trains and rectangular carcasses of freight cars, the long reddish boxes of the cattle cars from which there’s sometimes either quiet talking or singing. Ignatov keeps raising his dim lantern, reading the numbers on the cars. Three long, dancing shadows keep growing, soaring up the sides of the train cars and then falling to the ground, spreading along the rails.
Behind him the frightened guard shouts, “Hey, what’re you doing?” Ignatov turns around. The small Tatar woman is standing sideways holding her belly, her body twisted, her head tilted back. And then she begins slowly sinking to the ground. The guard pokes his rifle uselessly in her direction: “Stop! Stop, I’m telling you!” She falls, collapsing as effortlessly and neatly as if she’s folded herself in half.
Ignatov crouches beside her. Her hands are ice-cold. Her eyes are closed and the shadows from her lashes cover half her face. The guard is still standing, uselessly aiming his rifle at her.
“Put the rifle away, you oaf, and keep quiet,” says Ignatov.
The guard flings the weapon over his shoulder.
“Starvation or something?” he asks.
“Pick her up,” Ignatov orders the guard. “No matter what this is, there’s no use guarding her until she comes to.”
The guard attempts to lift her a little but he grasps her awkwardly and her head falls back on a tie with a thud. Ignatov curses – what a clod! – and picks her up himself.
“Toss her arm around my neck,” he orders.
They walk further. The guard is now running up ahead, lighting the way. Ignatov carries her small body. She’s so light! How is it possible … ? Zuleikha comes to little by little, clasping him around the neck so he feels her cold fingers on his cheek.
They send for a doctor right away (Ignatov doesn’t want to wait until morning), rousting him out of bed and driving him to the station. Groaning, he climbs into the train car, clumsily hoisting up his stout legs; he’s still young, only a little older than Ignatov. Zuleikha has fully come to and he examines her in the light of a kerosene lamp, wearily chewing at his sagging lower lip and tugging at a long lock of sparse hair that’s been combed over early baldness.
“Heart’s fine,” he says indifferently. “Lungs, too. Skin healthy.”
“And so … ?” Ignatov is standing right there, in the railroad car, leaning his back against the closed door and smoking.
Ten pairs of eyes – the ten exiles remaining after the escape – are looking down at him from their bunks; nobody else has yet been assigned to car number eight because other things have been happening.
“You can calm down, comrade,” the doctor yawns sleepily and he places his rudimentary instruments in his gaunt doctor’s bag. “It’s not typhus. Not scabies. Not dysentery. We’re not going to put the whole train in quarantine.”
Ignatov nods with relief and flings his cigarette butt into the cold stove. They’d stopped issuing coal for heating at the end of April after deciding it was enough; this isn’t a sanatorium, and it’s warm anyway.
“The cause of fainting could be anything at all,” the doctor drones on, as if he’s talking to himself while he heads toward the door. “Oxygen starvation, malnutrition – among other things. Or simply bad blood vessels.”
“Or pregnancy,” rings out loudly and distinctly from the depths of the bunks.
The puzzled doctor turns around and raises the kerosene lamp a little. Several gloomy faces overgrown with dirty beards are gazing at him, the whites of their eyes gleaming. So many of them have passed through his hands in recent months, they’ve all blended into one tired, dark image. One of the faces in the car, though, seems to remind him of someone or even be vaguely familiar. So familiar that the doctor raises the lamp to it. Closer, even closer. The nose is a sharp beak, the teasing eyes are like pieces of ice, there’s a steep arc of a massive, high forehead with a tangled coil of glistening silver hair around it. No, it can’t be. What is this?
“Professor!” says the doctor, exhaling. “Is that you?”
“She won’t allow you to check the tension of the mammary glands and the Montgomery tubercles,” Leibe utters in the clear, authoritative voice of a lecturer in a large auditorium. “Be so good as to at least investigate the condition of the salivary glands and facial pigmentation.”
The doctor is staring at the professor; he just can’t look away.
“Professor Leibe! How did you … ?”
“Try a deep palpation of the abdomen, too,” continues Leibe. “My diagnosis would be eighteen weeks.”
When he’s done speaking, Leibe bores a long, unblinking gaze into the doctor, who wipes his damp upper lip and sits back down on the bunk next to the frightened Zuleikha. He feels her lower jaw.
“Exhale,” he quietly orders.
She shakes her head, breathing loudly and rapidly, without stopping.
“Zuleikha, my dear,” says Izabella, sitting down alongside Zuleikha and taking her hand. “The doctor’s asking.”
“I said exhale,” the doctor repeats angrily.
Zuleikha exhales and holds her breath. The doctor swallows and lays his palms on her belly. He looks significantly at the professor.
“I’m palpating an enlargement of the uterus.”
Leibe laughs loudly and triumphantly, his teeth flashing in the darkness:
“I’ll grade you unsatisfactory, Chernov. And I did warn you in the first year that you would not be a good diagnostician!”
Zuleikha mumbles, uncomprehending, not knowing what she’s supposed to do now.
“Tell the patient to breathe,” says Leibe. Content and still chuckling, he reclines on the bunk.
Zuleikha inhales convulsively.
“Professor, how did you … ?” In an attempt to find Leibe’s face, the doctor thrusts the lamp into the dark bunk, where Leibe is hiding.
“You may receive your grade book at the dean’s office, Chernov,” answers Leibe,
wrapping himself up cocoon-like in someone’s sheepskin jacket and rolling closer and closer to the wall. “I have no time for consultations right now.”
“Volf Karlovich,” insists the doctor, sweeping the lamp’s light around the bunk, “after all, we’ve … After all you did for –”
“I don’t have time, Chernov.” The voice only just carries from the depths. “I don’t have time.”
The doctor’s lamp illuminates a rustling mountain of rags by the far wall. The mountain soon stops moving.
Zuleikha whimpers quietly, like a dog, biting the edge of her headscarf and gazing upward, staring. Izabella sits next to her and strokes Zuleikha’s hands, which are clasped in fists and lying lengthways alongside her body.
Chernov shakes his head slightly as if he’s shedding a hallucination, clasps his doctor’s bag to his chest, and leaves the railroad car. He jumps down to the ground, leaning against Ignatov’s proffered arm, and notices Ignatov’s eyes are stern and tense.
“I assure you again, comrade commandant, this is nothing bad,” utters the slightly annoyed doctor. What tender commandants there are now! “What do we have here?”
He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes Ignatov’s cheek. On it are four long, dark streaks that look like marks made by a small hand.
*
Pregnant? Yes, she wanted to eat all the time but of course they weren’t fed. Yes, her belly had gotten a little heavier recently but she’d thought it was from aging. And the red days had stopped coming, though she thought that was from worry. But that she was pregnant? Oh, that Murtaza, he’s cheated death. He’s been in the grave a long time but his seed is alive, growing in her belly. It’s already halfway grown.
Another girl? Of course, what else could it be? What was it the Vampire Hag said? You only bring girls into the world. No, that’s not what she said. You only bring girls into the world and they don’t survive.
And will this one really die, too? … Well, of course. This one will leave her as well, after having barely been born. Her bright infant’s redness won’t even have a chance to leave her tender skin, her tiny little eyes won’t have a chance to fill with meaning, and her mouth won’t have a chance to smile for the first time.
Zuleikha looks at the black ceiling. Thoughts flow as the wheels knock. A warm May night is rushing past on the other side of the plank wall. The light, half-empty railroad car rocks wildly, like a cradle. Everybody’s already asleep, including the kind Izabella, who’d stroked her hand half the night, and the eccentric professor, whose bright, joyful eyes had looked at her for so long. If only she could fall asleep, too.
Was it permissible for her to request Allah to allow her child to at least stand on its own two feet? That the child at least take its first steps before leaving this world? Or was that too great an impudence? There’s nobody with her to ask for advice: not Murtaza, not the mullah. Almighty, give me some hints yourself: am I allowed to ask this of You? I won’t ask for anything else, I wouldn’t dare. Only this.
And there’s this thought, out of nowhere: What if the All-powerful hears and permits your child to take its first step? What would it be to lose the child then? Might it be better for it to be right away, before getting used to the child and taking a liking to it? She remembers how she grieved over her first daughter, who was granted one whole month of life. And then less for the second, who departed after a couple of weeks. And even less for the third, who didn’t survive seven days. The fourth, who departed right away, at birth, was seen off with dry eyes.
Shamsia-Firuza, the wheels clack. Khalida-Sabida. And again: Shamsia-Firuza, Khalida-Sabida.
So wouldn’t that be better? Right away? Her mama would have said that thoughts like that were sinful. That everything is Allah’s will, and it’s not for us to judge what and when is better … Oh well, it’s not as if I’m going to chop off my head – which goes on thinking and thinking, filling with thoughts, like a net fills with fish.
But maybe no baby will be born. That happens, the women at the well used to whisper. The child will live a while in the belly, grow a little, and then tear itself out of its set place before its time and flow from the womb so all that’s left is a clump of blood on the pants.
And the Vampire Hag isn’t with her, so there’s nobody to predict the outcome. Is it even good to know beforehand, anyway? But then the expectation is agonizing. And what about not knowing? That’s agonizing, too, the way she’s feeling now, not knowing.
She’s tired, tired of agonizing. Tired of agonizing because of hunger, tired of persuading and exhorting her insatiable insides. Of her stomach in agony from bad food. Of cold at night. Of aching in her bones in the morning, of lice, of frequent queasiness. Tired of the pain and deaths around her. Of fear that it will grow even worse. And – scariest of all – of perpetual shame.
There is constant shame when she feels the heavy smell of an unwashed body coming from herself, when the soldiers indifferently slide their eyes along her uncovered head and braids during their daily inspections, when she squats behind the latrine’s cloth divider for all to see, when she presses against the sleeping professor at night to try and warm up. She nearly burned up with shame when the unfamiliar doctor’s puffy, indifferent fingers touched her last night. And she’d begun wailing when he announced her pregnancy for all to hear. This was so shameful, shameful, shameful. She would have to bear the disgrace in front of everybody. For the first time in her life, she cannot conceal her secret behind the tall fence of her husband’s house. In her relentlessly displayed belly she will nurture a child who will leave her as soon as it is born.
And Allah, when will my journey end? Could You break it with a supreme gesture? Zuleikha presses her face into her short fur coat, which she has placed under her head instead of a pillow. Her forehead comes up against something hard and sharp. She turns the pocket inside out and finds a small, almost rock-hard lump. The sugar. The sugar Murtaza gave her. She’d already managed to forget about it but there it is, it hasn’t gone anywhere and the large white crystals shine, their edges sparkling, giving off a complex aroma that’s just as strong as it was last winter. Zuleikha has been carrying a longed-for death in her pocket for many weeks, likely so she could discover it at this bitter moment. What is this if not the answer to her ardent prayer?
Zuleikha brings the sugar to her face. Should she bite it a little at a time or attempt to dissolve the whole piece at once? Would the poison take effect instantly or after a short while? Would she suffer? Does it even matter?
“Sugar? Mein Gott, where is it from?”
The professor’s joyful, surprised eyes are right beside her. He’s woken up and is propped on his elbow, looking at Zuleikha. His halo of curls seems silvery in the moonlight. Zuleikha doesn’t answer; she squeezes the sugar in her fist and its hard, sharp edges dig into her palm.
“Eat it, certainly eat it!” Leibe whispers, excited. “Just don’t think of showing anybody, especially Gorelov – he’d take it away.” He places a finger to his lips. “And I, well … I wanted, you know … to inquire …” The professor looks sideways at her belly, squints, and hesitates, finally daring to ask, “How is he feeling?”
“Who?”
“The child, naturally.”
“It’s a she, a girl. My line is ending. I can only give birth to girls.”
“Who told you that?” The indignant Leibe sits up abruptly and nearly hits the top of his head against the ceiling. He hems and haws loudly, intently considering Zuleikha’s belly: at first he’s displeased, then he’s uncertain, and, finally, he’s delighted. “Don’t believe it!” he cries, satisfied, his laughter trilling and hand waving. “Don’t believe it!”
The wheels are clattering loudly, muting the conversation. Shamsia-Firuza, Khalida-Sabida.
“Do you think the heart’s already beating?”
“What a question!” The professor chokes with indignation. “It has been for two months now.”
Groaning like an old man, h
e awkwardly turns around on the bunk. He bends, bringing his ear toward her belly, as if he wants to hear the ardent heartbeat hidden inside, but he doesn’t allow himself to touch it with his cheek. Zuleikha places her palm on his silver curls and presses the professor’s head to her belly. And the shame retreats. An unfamiliar man is touching her body with his face, and sensing her smell, but she doesn’t feel shame. She wants only to know what’s in there, inside her.
Leibe listens attentively for a long time with his eyes closed. Then he lifts his head: his face is soft and dreamy, and he silently nods to her that everything is good.
“Eat the sugar,” he reminds her, settling into his spot. “Eat it right now.”
He soon falls asleep, his hands placed under his head and his smiling face raised to the ceiling as if he’s admiring the stars.
Zuleikha puts the sugar back in her coat pocket. She’s much calmer now that her own death – which is sweet, smells complex, and has taken on the familiar appearance of a lump of ordinary sugar – has been found and is lying next to her. She can take it at any time, whenever she wishes, and she gives thanks to Allah, who heard and answered her prayers.
The train crosses a river dappled by moonlight and spanned by a long, lace-like iron bridge that amplifies the clatter of wheels: here it is, here it is, here it is …
They still have a long way to go and won’t reach the place until early August.
Yelan, Yushala, Tugulym …
From Tyumen, the train is sent east, toward Tobolsk. Then they rethink, turn the train around, and begin driving south.
Vagai, Karasul, Ishim …
New passengers will be settled into the eighth car. Gorelov will remain the minder and will nag and chasten everyone more than before, both fearing another escape and to win back his wavering authority.
Mangut, Omsk …
Zuleikha’s belly will swell quickly. The child will begin to stir near Mangut and soon after Omsk, Zuleikha will feel a tiny little foot with a round, bulging heel under her tautly pulled skin for the first time.
Kalachinsk, Barabinsk, Kargat …
Zuleikha Page 18