He pulls his revolver from the holster and pounds the handle on a bucket standing by the fire: Time to get up, you sons of bitches! Get to work! The loud tinny sound of the alarm carries over the sleepy clearing. Birds go silent in the forest. The shelters shudder and shake as frantically as anthills when the frightened exiles crawl out, pushing each other and looking around wildly.
There you go. He’s not going to spoil anybody by letting them break the rules.
Avdei turns out to be a surprisingly sensible and skilled guy. He builds the underground house as if he’s been doing this his whole life. He sends all the men into the forest to get logs for the framework. He keeps the women with him for digging – without any negotiations, they’ve appointed Zuleikha as ongoing cook and keeper of the fire, until the baby gets stronger. Avdei finds a suitable place and drives in four tall pegs to form the corners of a long rectangle, carefully measuring the distance with string. He uses a stick to draw in the outline. That’s the base.
They neatly cut out the sod and set it aside; it will come in handy. They begin digging, poking around with sticks, rocks, and hands, whatever works for them. Seeing that the job isn’t going well, Avdei proposes they pull blades from a few saws and use them to scrape at the ground. The work starts moving faster as some scrape and poke, while others use kettles to remove the softened earth and throw it away outside. They finish in two days, digging out a pit so deep that the whole of stocky Avdei, including his head, can get fully inside when he goes down there. Not even his shiny bald pate sticks out of the ground. Wielding a homemade plumb line made from stone attached to a string, Avdei painstakingly evens the walls, smoothing in some spots with his hand. Lick it with your tongue, too, Ignatov thinks angrily. He’s been urging, hurrying, and swearing at them, wary of rain that could halt work and flood the pit. The days have been dry and warm thus far, though, so the weather isn’t impeding them.
Cursing the one-handed saws, the men somehow prepare and haul logs to the camp. The stronger ones saw the wood, the weaker ones strip off branches and bark. A couple of days later, everybody’s hands are calloused and covered in red spots from splinters and squiggly scratches, and their backs and shoulders ache unbearably.
They lower logs into the pit and begin lining the walls. They drive in fat logs, horizontally along the perimeter, laying long beams behind them, all the way up to the very ceiling, as a retaining wall. They stuff the wall’s crevices with pieces of spruce so earth won’t sprinkle in.
“Braces, girders, supports, purlins, rafters, joists …” Ikonnikov mutters under his breath, vigorously knocking on the top of a log with a heavy stone to force it into the ground. “But oh, has my vocabulary been enriched.”
“The main thing is the experience,” puffs Konstantin Arnoldovich alongside him, placing spiky spruce branches in the gap between the retaining wall and the earthen wall. “How your practical experience has been enriched, colleague! It’s one thing to paint clouds and fields of wheat on the walls at some cultural center and something else entirely to build a real house. Don’t you find that?”
“A house?” Ikonnikov is looking at half a fat pink worm sticking out of the ground. “Well, I suppose!”
“You are intending to live here,” says Konstantin Arnoldovich, gasping slightly for breath. He wipes his sweaty forehead with his hand and looks up questioningly. Green spruce needles gleam playfully in his narrow beard, which has grown out in a half-year. “Or aren’t you?”
Sinking support poles for the roof’s ridge beam turns out to be a difficult and unexpectedly lengthy task because the soil becomes dense and rocky, and the holes for the posts just don’t want to reach the proper depth. Wary of clouds swooping in from the north, Ignatov demands they continue working and embed the posts in the resulting shallow holes, but Avdei displays an unexpected rigidity.
“I was hired to dig an underground house, not a grave,” he says, tugging his sparse blue-gray beard with his only hand and looking out from under his brow at the commandant. “If you’ve decided to bury us, commissar, then there’s the pit, it’s ready. No need for us to wear ourselves out more here.”
Ignatov backs off. They just manage to dig down to the required depth for the holes, embed the supports, strengthen them with stakes, and reinforce them with stones.
Overhead they lay a long log as a purlin and secure it with rope. On that they place poles as rafters, smoothing them at the joints with stones for stability. For the roof covering they decide to take spruce branches from the shelters, which have already collapsed by this point. They place boughs across the rafters, constantly strewing earth and cementing them with clay that Avdei spent half the day searching for before finally finding what he needs – the clay is thick, black, and dense to the touch.
The arrival of the clay brings out an unusual liveliness among some of the builders. The previously apathetic Ikonnikov suddenly becomes cheerful and excited, and his eyes start glistening. He keeps tilting his head toward Konstantin Arnoldovich, who’s flushed with pleasure, and Ikonnikov shows him something in his hands, then they explode in fits of loud, irrepressible laughter. No matter how he tries, Gorelov can’t determine the reason for their jollity. Each time he sidles up to them, he sees only small clumps of clay in Ikonnikov’s hands.
They place two layers of sod on top of the triangular roof so the first layer has its roots up and the second has its roots down. From front and back, the underground house now resembles a small hill rising out of the ground.
That’s the first night they spend in the half-finished underground house. They sleep poorly, freezing terribly, either from the dampness of the deep-set earthen floor that’s still completely uncovered, or because autumn is approaching so relentlessly with every passing day. In the morning, many are coughing and the Georgian woman with the aristocratic name Leila has come down with a fever. They decide to assemble a stove before finishing construction, and the women are sent down to the riverside to find large stones suitable for the purpose. Leibe asks Ignatov’s permission to go into the forest to collect medicinal herbs and Ignatov squints at the pale professor in his absurd dress uniform, which is torn to shreds in places, and agrees.
A very basic stone stove, with a chimney, rises up in the middle of the underground house. It’s like a magical vessel, an Aladdin’s lamp that fulfills only one wish, albeit the most important, giving warmth. While they’re at it, they fortify the path down to the river with large flat rocks, making it more convenient to go for water. Gorelov now hums a song about stone stairways each time he goes down to the Angara. He always puts his hands in his pockets as he goes, holding his chin high, slightly tilted.
It requires a few more days to lay the floor, construct the bunks, and complete the exposed sides of the house at each end of the roof: one has an entrance burrowing down to the doorway and a vestibule below. They’ve just finished digging small drainage channels along the sloping roof when a persistent rain begins to fall.
In the evening the exiles sit, huddled together in the dark and still rather damp underground house. “In a couple of days it’ll be baking inside and dry out,” Avdei promises. They aren’t warm but it’s not very cold, either. They haven’t managed to eat even once today but a bucket of black grouse meat is already bubbling on the stove. Their faces have darkened in the sun, become weather-beaten, and been covered with blistering mosquito bites. Some have no strength left and are already asleep, their heads laid on a neighbor’s shoulder, while others watch the bucket of soup with a fixed stare. The stove drones and there’s a strong smell of smoke, half-raw meat, and the herbs the professor gathered. All their simple belongings – tools, buckets, tackle, and bundles of clothing – are piled up in the corner. The loud beat of heavy rain carries through thin little windows formed by gaps between the house’s roof and side walls.
“What good fortune that we’re under a roof,” Izabella loudly says. “And have matches and salt and everything else … Thank you, Avdei. You simply saved us.”
Ignatov is lying on his bunk, which was built at some distance from the others, and he’s gloomily thinking about how they haven’t been able to prepare enough firewood. What they have will only last through the night. If the bad weather continues until morning, they’ll be forced to go into the forest in the rain.
The seventh day of their stay on the riverbank is ending.
A son.
She’s given birth to a son for the first time in her life and he’s tiny, completely red, and by all appearances premature. When the professor held out the newborn to her – still wet, slippery, and covered in her own blood – she placed him to herself, under her smock, clasped him to her breast, and pressed her face to the top of a head as soft as bread, and felt the rapid beating of his heart on her lips. The soft spot on the crown of infants’ heads isn’t usually large, only the size of a coin, but it was huge, hot, and greedily pulsating on this child.
She instantly sensed that he was very beautiful, even before she could make out the child’s face in the night darkness. Eyelashes stuck together in clumps of dried mucus, half-blind cloudy little eyes, neat nose holes peering up, the small pleat of a mouth always open partway, wrinkled, flat little clumps of ears, and thread-like fingers without nails stuck together – all that was beautiful, bringing tingling and butterflies to her stomach.
She looked him over more closely at dawn. A large head the size of a man’s fist. Small legs gnarled like a frog’s and slightly fatter than her fingers. A rounded belly like an egg. Thin little bones showing through so much in places that it seemed an incautious touch could break them. His skin was creased, bright-purple with marbled light- and dark-blue blotches of veins, as soft to the touch as a flower petal, and covered in places by wispy dark hairs. He was the most beautiful of all the children she had given birth to. And he was still living.
Zuleikha decided to simply carry him on her chest, on her bare body under her smock. She didn’t sleep the first night. She kept clasping him to herself with all her might and then relaxing her arms, fearing she’d squeeze too hard. She kept opening the edge of her smock a little to let her son breathe fresh air, then closing it when the air seemed much too cold. In the morning she felt as fresh and strong as if there’d been neither childbirth nor sleepless pre-dawn hours. She could have sat like that for another year, warming the tiny little body with her own heat and listening to his weak, barely discernible breathing. In the morning she adjusted herself to carry him by arranging her newborn’s head between breasts swelled with milk, spreading his little body over her belly, and then binding him to herself with a rag. Then she could move around and even do her work while her son was always with her. She kept bending her face to the unfastened buttons on her chest, peering into her slightly opened smock collar and listening. The child was breathing.
She feeds him often, a lot each time. Glory be to Allah that the milk stands so high and taut in her breasts; just watch it doesn’t spurt. Sometimes her breasts fill so much that they harden, pulling at her shoulders. She doesn’t wait then; she hurriedly thrusts a swollen nipple oozing white drops into his mouth, not waiting for the child to wake up; but the baby smacks his lips without opening his sleepy eyes and latches on. When he takes a liking to feeding, he sucks greedily and quickly, moaning, and her breast empties and shrinks, feeling more comfortable for a while.
Zuleikha is glad when the child urinates and she feels something hot and wet on her belly because this person is living, his little body is working. She is even ready to kiss the spot on her dress and the pink squiggle of male flesh between her son’s tiny little legs.
As before, she constantly wants to eat. The forest unexpectedly bestows a lot of fatty meat upon them. When she catches sight of Ignatov’s tall figure at the forest’s edge with a colorful bunch of killed birds in his hand, she restrains herself from shouting, running out to greet him, and kissing his hand. Food has come! Food! She plucks the birds fiercely, in a frenzy; guts them, fighting the saliva gushing in her mouth; flings them in boiling water, then salts, stirs, and casts a spell over the fire to burn hotter, stronger, faster.
Gorelov had wanted to take the food allocation into his own hands here, too, but Ignatov sullenly looked at him and nodded at Zuleikha, saying to let her serve. She pours the prepared soup from the large bucket into kettles that are slightly smaller, and the exiles sit in several circles, grasping scorching hot pieces of poultry in their hands, and tearing it with their teeth, dirtying their smiling faces with fat and soot. After dispensing with the meat, they gulp down broth from the kettles using spoons made from shells attached to sticks. They leave a double portion for Zuleikha and she isn’t embarrassed. She eats it up quickly and gratefully, sensing that the meat now in her gut is already filling her blood with strength and her breasts with milk. She doesn’t like soft bird rumps or thick grouse skin covered on the inside with layers of fat, but she eats them so her milk will be fatty and hearty.
She stops thinking about everything unrelated to her son: about Murtaza, who remains somewhere far behind in her past life (she has forgotten that the newborn is the fruit of his seed); about the Vampire Hag with her scary prophecies; and about her daughters’ graves. She doesn’t think about where Fate has cast her and what will happen tomorrow. Only the present day is important, only this moment, with quiet snuffling on her breast and the heaviness and warmth of her son’s little body on her belly. She has even stopped fearing that one morning she won’t hear weak breathing inside the opening of her smock. She knows that if her son’s life is interrupted, then her heart will instantly stop, too. This knowledge sustains her, filling her with strength and some sort of unfamiliar courage.
She has started praying faster and more infrequently, as if in passing. It is frightening to admit, but a thought that is essentially sinful and horrifying has settled in her head: what if the Almighty has suddenly become so busy with other matters that He’s forgotten about these thirty hungry, raggedy people in the wilderness of Siberia’s urman? What if He turned his stern gaze away from the exiles for a little while and then lost them on the boundless expanses of the taiga? Or (this is possible, too) that they have floated off to such a distant place at the edge of the earth that the All-Powerful’s gaze doesn’t reach because there is no need. This offers Zuleikha the strange and wild hope that perhaps Allah – who has taken four children away from her and is apparently intending to take away the fifth – won’t notice them, that He will overlook them and forget the disappearance of a pitiful handful of creatures worn out from suffering. She can’t forgo praying completely (that would be scary!) but she tries to utter her prayers quietly, whispering, or even only muttering them to herself so as not to attract attention from on high.
Surprisingly, she is content during these days, with some sort of incomprehensible, fragile, and fleeting happiness. Her body freezes at night, suffers from heat and mosquito bites during the day, and her stomach demands food, but her soul sings and her heart beats with one name. Yuzuf.
Kuznets hasn’t come, not one week after the exiles came ashore, not two.
Ignatov goes to the cliff each morning, cursing himself for doing it, but unable to keep away. His hands cling to the rough ledges of boulders edged in coarse, blue-gray lichen as he clambers to the top, rapidly on clear, dry days and cautiously on rainy, cloudy days, constantly slipping on the wet rocks. He’ll stand for a long time, resting his gaze on the edge of the firmament where the river and sky come together and flow into one another. He’ll wait. Then he’ll abruptly turn and go hunting.
There’s no explanation for what’s happening. Maybe there’s been trouble with the launch and it’s vanished in the Angara’s waters, following the Clara? Maybe Kuznets has come down with typhus and is lying delirious on an infirmary bed, pouring out hot sweat. Maybe (and Ignatov likes this version most of all) Kuznets has turned out to be an enemy of Soviet power and has been taken into custody and sentenced. Maybe he’s even been shot?
Sometimes when Ignatov
is on that peak, he’ll think he can discern the dot of the launch in the blue distance. Some evenings, when he’s already lying on his separate bunk in the underground house, he’ll suddenly leap up and run to the shore because he’s distinctly heard the sound of a rattling motor and anxious voices. At those moments, he’s prepared to forgive Kuznets for the endless days of waiting and the hunger and cold of the weeks that have passed, to embrace Kuznets and slap him on the shoulders, saying, “We’d grown tired of waiting for you, brother.” But that exciting instant would pass when the dot on the horizon dispersed, dissolving into the blue of an expanse of sky or water, when the roar of the motor turned into a drake quacking, and the voices became splashing water.
The exiles see his concern and probably guess at the reasons but they don’t ask anything. Only Gorelov, the scoundrel, once asked, conspiratorially narrowing his Kalmyk eyes at Ignatov, “Comrade boss, what do you think, will the launch bring reinforcements of gals? We only have old women in the camp, after all – there’s nobody to have a little stroll to the forest with.” Ignatov didn’t reply and just looked coldly at Gorelov. You, he corrected him mentally, you have only old women. The swine had gobbled down lots of meat and now he wanted broads. As if he had everything else and it pleased or suited him. One time Ignatov heard someone in the forest saying, “It’s time, let’s go home.” That was jarring. Did anyone really, truly consider this crowded, stuffy underground house with its lopsided little stove that looked like a fat-bellied toad to be a home? They’d quickly grown accustomed to it, resigned themselves. Ignatov can’t, though, and he hates Kuznets all the more with each day of waiting. The malice – muffled and confused – would rise in him, and he’d brandish his revolver as he shot at defenseless grouse. There you go! Die, you bastards!
Zuleikha Page 26