Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  Zuleikha has adjusted to plucking birds with a large sliver of spruce – of course a knife would be better but both knives are in use at the shelter construction site. The work can be done with a suitable piece of wood, though. Her mother was right when she said that head and hands are the most important tools for any work. Zuleikha holds the sliver firmly in her hand and quickly pulls the feathers from the bird’s soft, pliant body, pinching them between the wood and her thumb. First come the long, firm ones, the contour feathers, then the smaller, softer ones. The carcasses haven’t had a chance to cool yet and they pluck nicely, willingly.

  Izabella is right beside Zuleikha. The two of them – the pregnant woman and the oldest woman – were assigned the role of fire tenders and cooks. The others are assembling shelters and arranging the camp.

  “Zuleikha, my dear, I’m afraid I can’t keep pace with you.” Izabella is watching, bewildered, as the sliver of spruce flashes so quickly in the air it almost dissolves.

  “Gather the feathers instead,” says Zuleikha. “They’ll come in handy.”

  She’s pleased she can do this work better. It’s good to be useful. Her conscience would bother her if she just sat by the fire and added wood while everyone else was working. But going back and forth between the camp and the spruce forest for branches would have been difficult for Zuleikha as her belly has grown heavier since swimming in the Angara; it’s as if it had swelled with lead. The baby is constantly moving and fidgeting, her own legs are very weak, and her forehead sweats. A couple of times Zuleikha has felt something start to hurt down in her belly – a cramping, aching, and churning – and she’s begun praying to herself, thinking she’s going into labor. But they turned out to be false alarms.

  Murtaza’s gift of poisoned sugar flowed off into the Angara. This means she’ll give birth no matter how much she fears the outcome. She will endure if Allah sends her the death of yet another child. The Almighty’s will is sometimes capricious and incomprehensible to the earthly mind. Of all the traveling companions on the deadly barge, she was the only one Providence left among the living. More than that, it sent her husband’s killer, the arrogant and dangerous Red Hordesman Ignatov, to save her. Perhaps Fate wants her to live?

  Zuleikha felt a tremendous happiness, the likes of which she’d never experienced, when Ignatov’s distorted face suddenly flashed beside her in a furious whirl of spray after she’d been tossed up from the water’s depths to the surface. She was shuddering from wheezing and coughing, and almost choked. She’d never been that glad to see her husband, may the deceased Murtaza forgive her those thoughts. She’s had time to think about how Ignatov might have swum past, not noticed her, or not wanted to save her; but there he was, already next to her, helping and calming. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had dragged her under by the braids and drowned her, but he held her, held her firmly, saying something, even joking. When it became obvious she couldn’t swim to shore, he didn’t start cursing and didn’t abandon her. He saved her.

  If a savior turns out to be a good person, one should probably kneel before him and shower his hand with kisses. If Murtaza were alive, he would have endowed that person with rich gifts. If the mullah were alive, Zuleikha would have requested that he say a prayer of thanks in her savior’s honor. She has none of those “ifs.” She has only herself and the harsh, unapproachable Ignatov. He’s sitting next to the fire, scrawling something in his papers with charcoal, frowning, and clenching his jaw. Zuleikha simply wants to say thank you, but she doesn’t dare interrupt his thoughts. Soon he exhales, abruptly and angrily, slams the folder shut, and goes off to the riverside.

  Zuleikha threads the plucked carcasses on a long stick and they sear over the fire. It’s already completely dark when she sets to cutting the meat into pieces and the exiles settle in around the fire, one by one, to wait for dinner after they’ve finished their work. Their nostrils hungrily inhale the sweetish smell of singed feathers.

  They had enough time to build three shelters under a canopy of wide-boughed spruces. The large tree branches served as a beam on which to lay, crosswise, sizable shaggy boughs with slightly thinner branches over them; the same boughs were used for bedding. Someone proposed tossing birch branches and armfuls of grass on the tree needles inside the shelters for softness, but they didn’t have either the energy or the time for that. They prepared firewood for the night, bringing over a mountain of brushwood and fallen dead wood. There was no axe and the large branches had to be sawed. The one-handed saws squealed, bent, jerked, and broke free from unaccustomed hands; it was awkward to work with them but the exiles somehow prevailed and cut up the wood. Before dark, they dragged logs from the thicket and arranged them around the fire. Now they’re all squeezed together on the logs, propping each other up with chilly shoulders and warming themselves, their mouths releasing shaggy clouds of steam. It cools towards evening.

  A large bucket on two flat rocks at the center of the fire is sending out steam and waiting for meat. Zuleikha tosses generous pieces of the birds into the bubbling water and the inviting smell of food floats over the fire and flies up into a black velvet sky with stars like large beads.

  “Such illumination,” Ikonnikov quietly says, extending work-worn hands with a couple of fresh cuts toward the orange fire. “It’s pure Rembrandt.”

  “It’s meat,” Gorelov corrects him, surprisingly kindly, blinking oily eyes that are riveted on the bucket with the soup. “Meat.”

  The others are silent. Their sunken eyes gleam in the darkness and their pinched-looking faces, with sharp, angular features, flare in the light of the sparks.

  Zuleikha sprinkles half a handful of salt in the bucket and stirs the concoction every now and then with a long stick. It will be a thick soup, hearty. Her stomach is shuddering from the anticipation of food. She hasn’t had meat in half a year and she’s ready to eat the raw meat right now, pulling it out of the boiling broth with her bare hands. It seems as if everyone sitting around the fire is experiencing the same thing. Saliva pours into the mouth, flooding the tongue. The stick knocks against the sides of the bucket. Branches crackle in the fire. A long howl sounds somewhere far away.

  “Wolves?” asks one of the city dwellers.

  “On the other shore,” answers one of the village dwellers.

  Footsteps sound and Ignatov emerges from the darkness. People move, freeing up a spot. They’d felt like they were sitting very close together, but after the commandant comes and takes a seat on the logs, there’s so much space around him it seems like five people must have got up.

  Ignatov takes something loose and jingling out of his pocket and tosses it on his palms: cartridges.

  “This,” he says, as if he’s continuing a conversation begun long ago, “is for anyone who wants to escape.” Two fingers pick up a round cartridge that’s blazing like gold in the firelight.

  He inserts it in the revolver’s cylinder – the cartridge slips in softly, with a gentle sound, like a kiss.

  “This” – he raises a second cartridge – “is for anyone who tries to start a counterrevolution.”

  The second cartridge enters the cylinder.

  “And these” – Ignatov inserts four more – “are for anyone who disobeys my orders.”

  He spins the cylinder. The even metal clicking isn’t loud but it can be heard distinctly above the crackling of the fire.

  “Is that clear to everyone?”

  The soup is gurgling desperately, bubbling over the brim. It needs to be stirred but Zuleikha is afraid to interrupt the commandant’s speech.

  “Count yourselves off, one at a time,” commands Ignatov.

  “One,” answers Gorelov, as lively as if he’s been waiting only for those words.

  “Two,” another chimes in.

  “Three.”

  “Four.”

  Many peasants don’t know how to count and the city dwellers help, counting for them; they lose track, start the count again, and somehow finally manage to do it.<
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  “Citizen chief!” Gorelov leaps from his spot, sticks out his chest, and points his splayed hand at his shaggy head. “A detachment of migrants numbering twenty-nine persons –”

  “As you were!” Ignatov makes a face and Gorelov plops back down on the log, offended. “So, a total of twenty-nine heads,” he says, looking around at gaunt, creased faces with prominent cheekbones, hollowed cheeks.

  “What do you mean?” says Izabella’s soft voice. “Counting you, citizen chief, it’s thirty.”

  Zuleikha looks down quickly, expecting a shout or at least a reprimand. Quiet again hangs over the fire, crackling and hotly snapping with sparks.

  Ignatov is still looking at Izabella when Zuleikha dares glance up. Glory be to Allah. It seems to have passed. Zuleikha exhales noiselessly, raises herself up a little, and extends the stick to stir the soup in the bucket. The baby awakens in her belly at that moment and begins tearing her to pieces inside. She wants to shout but it’s as if there’s no air in her chest and her throat is constricted, making it hard to breathe. She sinks to her knees and falls backward. She’s seeing stars.

  “Looks like these people are already starting to … reproduce,” says Gorelov, sounding bewildered and somehow very distant.

  “Boil some water or something!” comes Ignatov’s anxious voice.

  “I think it’s best for the men to leave us.” This is Izabella.

  “We’ll freeze to death without the fire. What, you think we’ve never seen a woman give birth …”

  And then there are other voices and shouts, but they gradually float away, float far away, merge, and disappear. Or maybe she’s the one floating away, carried upon waves of overwhelming pain? The stars are growing; they come closer, and crackle loudly. Or is that the fire crackling? Yes, yes, it’s the fire. It blazes up and sears the eyes, engulfs her; Zuleikha closes her eyelids tightly and escapes, tumbling into a deep and silent blackness.

  CHILDBIRTH

  Volf Karlovich Leibe has been living in an egg.

  It developed around him on its own over many years, possibly even decades ago, though he’d never troubled himself with counting because time didn’t pass inside the egg so had no meaning.

  He remembers when its iridescent top first began shining – it was something like a halo or an umbrella – over his vulnerable bald spot. That happened a short while after the October Coup. Professor Leibe had just walked out onto Voskresenskaya Street, pushing very hard to open one side of a massive, shiny, varnished oak door at Kazan University; the uniformed doorman by the main entrance had already been gone for several weeks, for the first time since the day the educational institution opened in 1804. Through a forest of white columns, Volf Karlovich saw a crowd running. People were screaming and falling, and behind them galloping horsemen were shooting them, point-blank. He didn’t manage to discern if these were newly minted insurgents with red armbands on their sleeves or simply the bandits who had multiplied in Kazan by that time. The people they were firing on were civilians, though: a peasant woman in a checked headscarf with a basket (the basket fell and eggs rolled along the road, breaking into star-shaped yellow blots); a woman in a frivolous lacy turban; a couple of ungainly grammar school students in green uniforms; and some beggar with a dog on a raggedy rope leash (a shot pierced the dog and the beggar kept dragging its shaggy body behind him, not letting go) …

  The crowd was already tearing past, shouting incessantly, so Volf Karlovich didn’t manage to duck back under the cover of the university walls. The woman in the turban suddenly cried out and raised her hands theatrically, embracing one of the columns, slowly sliding down it. She was so close that Leibe could have touched her with his hand. He sensed an astringent aroma of perfume blended with the light, slightly bitter smell of sweat. The crowd and the horsemen in pursuit hurtled on, toward the kremlin, but the woman kept sinking slowly downward, leaving a long, glistening red trail on a column that had once been snow-white but was now covered in a web of cracks and speckled with shots.

  The professor rushed to her and turned her face upward. He recognized her as a patient he’d recently operated on, gallbladder removal. He hurried to take her pulse, though he knew from her glassy pupils that she was dead. Have mercy, how could she be dead? What about the complex five-hour operation? The sixth cholecystectomy in his life and so successful, no complications. This woman still wanted to have children, certainly boys. And her husband wanted that. After she’d been released from the university clinic, her husband sent a ridiculously large bouquet of lilies as thanks; Leibe had to put them out on the balcony so their scent wouldn’t intoxicate the department. And now here she was herself: lying there, smelling like lilies. And dead.

  Volf Karlovich pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and started rubbing the long red stain on the column. The stain didn’t wipe off, it only spread under the rough motions of his strong surgeon’s hands. People soon appeared, carried off bodies scattered on the road, and led the professor away. And he kept thinking that the woman had died, granted, and you couldn’t return her to life, but couldn’t this stain at least be wiped away?

  As he approached the university the next morning, he wondered if they’d managed to wash it off. It turned out there had been other things to do. The stain gaped on the white column like an open, bleeding wound. The next day, too. And the day after.

  He changed his route and started making a big detour so as to approach the university from the other side, by walking via Rybnoryadskaya Street. The stain taunted the professor, though. It was as if it crept around the column and leapt into his eyes, throwing its arms wide open for an embrace no matter how he approached the building. The stain smelled of blood and death, screaming, “I’m still here!”

  Leibe attempted to convince the university steward to whitewash the column. The steward just smirked unkindly and shook his head because war isn’t the best time for repairs. Leibe went to the rector and argued that blood on the snow-white face of a cathedral of knowledge profanes the lofty idea of education. Dormidontov half-listened, nodding absentmindedly. The next day, the university’s main entrance was locked and a sign greeted professors and students: “The university is closed temporarily, until further notice.” Volf Karlovich never saw the rector himself again. And the stain remained.

  Unable to bear it, one night Leibe went to the closed building with a wet rag and bucket he’d stolen from Grunya and attempted to scrub the column with soap and water. But during the time that had passed, the blood had indelibly eaten into the whitewash. The stain had faded slightly but hadn’t gone away. Utterly enraged, Volf Karlovich hurled the heavy bucket at the column in a fit of desperate powerlessness. The bucket’s sharp rim struck the column’s smooth shaft, knocking out a piece of plaster about the size of a hand and lining its white surface with a sharp-toothed lightning bolt of cracks.

  It was at that moment that it appeared for the first time. It started shining gently and iridescently over the professor like a thin hemisphere the size of Grunya’s little bowl for straining tvorog. Bright, lightweight, and exceptionally comfortable-looking, it was only asking to be tried on like a hat. Intrigued, Leibe was not against that. When he permitted himself to extend his neck ever so slightly, the egg sensed that, neared, and lowered itself on the top of his head. A soft warmth spilled from his crown down to his cheeks, chin, and the back of his head, then further, along his neck and over his chest and his legs. And then everything suddenly began to feel piercingly calm and bright for the professor, as if he’d returned to his mother’s womb. As if there weren’t a war, either next to him on the street, in his country, or anywhere else in the world. There was no fear. There wasn’t even sorrow.

  The egg was almost transparent, with a touch of light iridescence. Through its shining walls, which reached to chin level, Leibe saw the square in front of the university gleaming with cleanliness under golden sunbeams, leisurely students smiling deferentially at him, and absolutely smooth columns glimmering with unsull
ied whitewash. There was no bloodstain.

  “Mein Gott,” Volf Karlovich whispered from gratitude, and headed home, cautiously carrying the egg on his head.

  The egg nearly blew away a couple of times but little by little the professor learned to control it. Each time a gust of wind swooped in, Leibe applied his will and the egg remained on the top of his head by reading his thoughts and obeying his wishes.

  It turned out that the egg was extraordinarily intelligent. It let in sounds and images that were pleasant for the professor and tightly blocked everything that might cause him even the slightest anxiety. So life all of a sudden became good.

  “You’re in a cheery mood,” panted Grunya as she polished the floors in the hallway with thick wax from her old prerevolutionary supplies.

  “It’s spring!” The professor smiled significantly and flirtatiously, holding back from swatting her haunch, which was hoisted up steeply. He had never permitted himself this sort of thing with the servants but now his blood was suddenly racing.

  “They knifed another three at the lake, you hear about that? Gracious Lord, all is at Your will,” said Grunya, crossing herself without raising her flushed face, as she focused on floorboards that gleamed with a heavy, oily sheen.

  “Yes, yes, a wonderful day,” muttered Leibe, retiring to his office.

  Neighbors who’d gone mad from fear, incessant rallies on the streets, endless detachments of servicemen in the city, gunfights, nighttime fires, more frequent murders at Black Lake, Red Guardsmen and Czechs in the White Army giving ground to one another multiple times in the city, riffraff and poverty spilling out of every crevice, and frenzied profiteers who’d occupied the Tatar capital – all this had ceased frightening or annoying Leibe. Because he didn’t see them.

  The professor wasn’t perturbed in the slightest when, under a decree from the Council of People’s Commissars that was approved in August 1918 “On the rights of acceptance to institutions of higher learning,” it wasn’t impertinent and haughty students in dandyish green uniform jackets who surged to the university (which was finally re-opened) but rather peasants and workers of both genders who were young and not very young. Most of them had no elementary or secondary education and were, simply put, illiterate. Leibe walked into a lecture hall stuffed full of newly minted students who were loudly blowing their noses and scratching themselves. He shoved his way to the front, stepping on people’s boots, bast shoes, bare feet, baskets of food, bundles, and peaked caps. He stood at the blackboard, smiled meekly, and began speaking of the cyclical changes of the endometrium of the human uterus.