Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  The taiga birds quickly recognized the predator in Ignatov and a close death in the thundering shots. They have become more careful. They flap their soft black wings in fear and take flight as soon as they hear his footsteps. It has become more difficult to bring back food. The time of easy procurement has ended and the time for genuine hunting has come.

  Ignatov has never hunted in his life. I hunted for Denikin’s men, he gloomily jokes to himself as he makes his way through thickets in search of any kind of animal suitable for food. And the Czechs who fought for the White Army, and the Basmachi. But not wild game – there was no need. Now he wanders the forest for entire days, his hand holding a loaded revolver in front of himself, his eyes scanning for edible targets. Chipmunks’ striped little backs blaze between bushes, squirrels streak in tree branches like reddish flashes, mice of various colors dart underfoot, and unfamiliar gray-and-yellow birds with fancy ornate tufts scamper up and down tree trunks. It’s a shame to waste cartridges on such small prey. He needs something larger, heftier, like a deer or five grouse. But his stride is too heavy and loud, so neither Siberian deer nor roe deer nor any other large wild animals cross his path. It chills Ignatov’s heart a little to think he could encounter prey more powerful than himself – a bear or a boar – and he doesn’t know if his small revolver’s bullet could pierce a thick hide. Toward evening, when his eyes are already flickering from constant strain and his feet throb and ache, he usually somehow manages (after missing a few times and wasting about five cartridges) to shoot down a couple of squirrels or some grouse that lost its vigilance. Sometimes he’s lucky. Once he came out by a forest lake hiding among pleat-like hills and shot an entire family of beavers, whose meat turned out to be surprisingly tender and juicy, and another time he shot down a pair of ducks flying over the taiga. But their rations are becoming more meager with each day.

  In the evening of the final day of summer, 1930 (Konstantin Arnoldovich is keeping a calendar on the wall of the underground house, sawing out a tiny notch in a log each day, a short one on a weekday, a slightly longer one on weekends, and the longest at the end of the month, so the exiles can keep track) they are in the house discussing the question of foodstuffs after a thin supper of an old, lame, and extraordinarily tough badger.

  Ignatov is lying on his bunk with his eyes wearily half-closed. He sees fiery squirrel pelts, finely quivering pine needles, and zigzagging spruce branches among splashes of sunspots that are all breaking and falling away as if they were in a kaleidoscope. He listens in on the exiles’ quiet conversation through his drowsiness.

  There are no hunters to be found among them (and even if there had been, Ignatov smirks to himself, they wouldn’t have received firearms) but one fisherman has turned up, the red-bearded Lukka, who’s as puny as an adolescent, all rumpled, worn down like a sliver of soap, and toothless. They ask Lukka if he could catch fish tomorrow and they lay out for him the tackle that Kuznets left behind. Lukka speaks Russian poorly but immediately understands what’s required of him. Without looking at the tangle of tackle and hooks on the floor, he answers in a small voice that crackles like a fire, “I need to look at the river, to listen and speak with it. Then to wait. If it gives, there will be fish. If not, there will be no fish.”

  They send the diplomatic Konstantin Arnoldovich to Ignatov’s bunk to negotiate with the commandant and request permission to excuse Lukka from his labor obligations for a couple of days so he could fish. At Ignatov’s instruction, all the exiles have been preparing firewood from morning until night and have had no right whatsoever to be absent.

  “Let him,” says Ignatov, not opening his eyes or waiting for Konstantin Arnoldovich to choose his words and state the overall request. “Let him go. I’ll give him two days for those conversations. If he doesn’t bring fish, then he’ll work it all off by sawing wood for me at night.”

  The next day, Lukka catches horseflies and assembles fishing rods. He walks along the shore a while and has a talk with the Angara. In the evening he brings to camp a bucket with hefty silver fish bodies that quiver between velvety green burdock leaves. This is very welcome because it’s the first day Ignatov returns from hunting empty-handed.

  September greets them with sun, breathing yellow and red on the hills. The sky turns entirely blue, making the earth’s colors look even warmer and cheerier. The days are dry, clear, and crisp, but the nights are already cold and winterishly long.

  Gnats come.

  There’s no escaping them. The mosquitoes and deerflies that the exiles had previously thought were the taiga’s harsh punishment for invading its territory have disappeared, yielding their place to their smaller brothers. The gnats swoop in like a cloud, like fog, filling the taiga, clearing, shore, and the underground house. They cram in under clothing, into folds of skin, the nose, mouth, ears, hair, and eyes. People eat them up with their food (they turn out to taste sweet, like berries) and inhale them with air. They are the air itself.

  A person can run from deerflies and swat mosquitoes. But tiny gnats the size of a grain of sand? People swell from the bites (the gnats leave large, bleeding lesions) and lose their minds from the incessant itching on their bodies. Those with the strength swing their arms and legs or run along the riverbank like madmen – the running blows the midges off their skin – and some bathe arms and legs they’ve scratched raw in the icy Angara water. Yet others smoke themselves in the pungent smoke of a fire, which causes violent coughing and reddens eyes but rescues them a bit from the insects. Work is at a standstill because nobody can even contemplate going for firewood or game in the depths of the forest, where the cloud of midges has come from.

  They’ll eat us alive, Ignatov thinks absent-mindedly as he plunges puffy hands covered with bold red dots into transparent and impossibly cold water. His hands go numb, either from the cold or from the bites. He senses someone standing behind him and turns to see Leibe. His lips are swollen and protrude like a camel’s, and his eyes are tiny because of his puffy pink eyelids.

  “Pitch,” he says, “we need birch pitch. It’s a well-known insecticide. It’s just that I don’t know the method for preparing this pitch. It’s usually sold in pharmacies, in glass vials, thirty-two kopeks each.”

  The peasant men know a method for preparing it. They immediately equip themselves to go for birch bark and strip all the birches near the clearing from top to bottom. They heap the bark in a kettle, cover it with a bucket, and surround it with firewood. They smoke the bark for a long time, right until sunset. The resulting liquid, which is as thick as honey and absolutely black, gets mixed with water and smeared over them from head to toe. They look dark-skinned, with only their eyes and their teeth gleaming white. The venerable Musa-hadji looks most hilarious of all since he had no desire to smear his beard with pitch like the other men, so it glows like a white flag on his glossy face, which resembles a generously polished boot.

  The gnats retreat and the exiles are able to get some sleep that night.

  For Yuzuf’s tender skin, Leibe suggests that Zuleikha mix the pitch with breast milk. From that day on, the title of “doctor” fastens itself to Leibe in her mind.

  After mid-September has passed, Ignatov begins thinking about whether to prepare an expedition to Krasnoyarsk.

  The exiles have settled in and made themselves at home during the past month. The underground house – where the stove burns hot and never goes out – has dried from within and thoroughly baked. Following Avdei’s advice, they’ve constructed wood piles in stacks on tall stones around the house: the firewood lies in circles, one circle on top of another, forming high towers. Someone proposed covering their tops with spruce boughs but Avdei forbade it because the firewood would rot.

  Each morning, even before sunrise, Ignatov knocks his revolver on the bottom of an empty bucket to raise the camp for work. Grumbling and coughing, the sleepy inmates head out for firewood under Gorelov’s supervision. Ignatov sets a daily quota for wood processing and nobody dares return to camp
until it’s fulfilled. One time they tried, complaining of cold, rainy weather. Without saying a word, Ignatov grabbed the bucket with the supper Zuleikha had prepared and flung the contents in the Angara. The quota has been rigorously fulfilled since then, and people crawl into camp worn out, barely alive, and sometimes not until night, but they bring the required quantity of sawed logs and ready kindling. The stacks of firewood are growing like mushrooms around the underground house, but Ignatov thinks there’s never enough, and that they absolutely need more.

  “We’re preparing firewood as diligently as if we’re planning to feed ourselves with it all winter,” he heard Izabella say one time. The old witch was hinting that they had no edible supplies whatsoever. And where would those supplies come from if thirty mouths ate up absolutely everything he managed to shoot and Lukka could catch? Ignatov thought a bit and from that day on ordered that Lukka divide the catch in two, half for fish soup, the other half to be dried for future use. People tried to protest against reducing the fish ration – “We’re already living half-starved!” – but no one could really argue with the commandant.

  The women have asked several times for permission to be excused to pick berries because when working on firewood, they often encounter bilberry and lingonberry patches in the forest and come upon rowan trees strewn with orange bunches. Konstantin Arnoldovich maintains that cranberries could certainly be found here. Ignatov is adamant that there’s not much satiety to be had from those berries and the working day would be lost. So much firewood could be prepared in that time!

  Only Lukka the fisherman and Zuleikha, too, don’t go to prepare wood. Sometimes Leibe asks to be excused to gather herbs and Ignatov lets him go; he’s warmed slightly toward Leibe because of the gnat incident. The others work every day. One time, Ikonnikov started a conversation about how factory workers in backward tsarist Russia were provided with days off even under moribund capitalism but Ignatov quickly cut off that showboating: “You can talk about imperialism with a blizzard this winter.”

  Firewood, firewood … The humble sight of scruffy woodpiles gladdens Ignatov immensely. The bundles of dried fish, which are growing little by little, do, too. Zuleikha hangs them outside on sunny days and brings them inside the underground house on rainy days. But clothing is worrisome.

  Many of the dekulakized had managed during their travel to keep warm things they’d taken from home and Ignatov has noticed that some even have a pair of felt boots and a reddish shaggy fur hat. But the Leningraders have no winter clothing and their bundles contain mostly useless junk, like thin between-season coats with gleaming round buttons, wrinkled brimmed hats with bright-hued silk linings, iridescent-colored mufflers that are slippery to the touch and have long delicate fringes, and suede and light cotton gloves.

  Ignatov, too, has only the clothes he’s wearing: his summer officer’s State Political Administration uniform with a tunic for a shirt, light jodhpurs, and boots. And a peaked cap, of course. And so his alarm grows as he tracks long, inky clouds moving along the horizon. They promise rain and snow. These clouds have appeared recently, floating in from the north and circling the firmament for several days; they’re now covering and obscuring it from all sides, breathing cold air. When the last piece of clear sky dissolves between the shaggy sides of low-hanging clouds, Ignatov realizes Kuznets isn’t coming.

  His insides seem to crackle with hoarfrost from that thought, and his head throbs and heats up, filling with rage. Away with the suffering, he orders himself. Away with it. Just think about what can be done.

  Should he send out scouts? They really can’t overwinter here. He could send a couple of the most sensible men to Krasnoyarsk (maybe Gorelov and Lukka). Slap together a boat for them and away they go along the motherly Angara and then the fatherly Yenisei, too. But three-quarters of the journey’s four hundred kilometers is upstream, in the cold and rain, and without food supplies. So they wouldn’t make it.

  And what if they did make it? What would they report upon arrival? We were dekulakized, they’d say, and exiled to the Angara by Soviet power, but out of the kindness of his heart, our temporary settlement commandant let us come to Krasnoyarsk in a boat for an outing – he’s impatient, don’t you see. He’s waiting for his replacement so he can head home …

  His scouts wouldn’t reach Krasnoyarsk. It was as plain as day that they’d run away. Even if Ignatov were to appoint Gorelov as their minder. In fact Gorelov would be the first to propose it. It’s around Ignatov, who has the revolver, that he’s so obedient and zealous. And if something were to go wrong, he’d go into hiding without blinking an eye. He’s a hardened criminal.

  Or should Ignatov go on the scouting trip himself, leaving the exiles here? Even worse. He and Kuznets would return to an empty camp: the peasants would all run away and the Leningraders would all die the hell off during that time.

  One way is bad, the other’s worse. No matter what happens, he – Ignatov, the commandant – would be to blame. And he’s already gotten into so much trouble, more than enough for three. He’ll have to answer to the fullest extent before the Party and his comrades, for the attrition on the special train and for the escape and for the sunken Clara. No matter how he looks at it, he has to sit here and wait, whether for Kuznets or for the damned devil himself so Ignatov can account for himself with deeds rather than words.

  Another thought tosses and turns in the depths of his consciousness and for some reason it makes him uncomfortable: he must save them. He’s often dreamt that he’s drowning in the Angara again, and as he’s being submerged into its cloudy cold waters, there are hundreds of hands stretching toward him from the black depths, with their long white fingers billowing like seaweed, saying, “Save us, save us …” He always wakes up abruptly, sits up on his bunk, and wipes off his damp neck. That same “Save us” then rustles and rolls around in his head all day. And though he is afraid to admit it, it makes him realize that what he wants, desperately wants, is to save these enemies so they will actually live to see a new barge and survive, every last one of them. And he wants that not for them, nor for Kuznets, nor the impending tribunal for the mistakes he made. He wants it for himself. And that’s why he’s uncomfortable.

  Ignatov picks up a hefty stick and knocks it on the scaly, reddish pine trunks as he strides back to camp. Then he swings his arm and tosses it into a thicket. He imagines it falling on Kuznets’s head – smack dab on the top – and his soul begins feeling brighter.

  The first snow falls that evening and these aren’t the light grains that sprinkled down on them from the sky on the first day of their life on the riverbank, but the real thing – large, shaggy snowflakes. Frost hits during the night, ice glistens like fragile glass at the bottom of a bucket inadvertently left outside, and a thin hoarfrost nips at brush-like spruce boughs.

  It’s impossible to observe the exiles leaving in the morning for work without laughing – they put on all the clothes they possess. The peasants wrap themselves in head scarves, pull on fur coats and sheepskin jerkins, and the city people wear once-dandified plaid coats, gloves and mufflers of delicate hues, extremely wrinkled kepis, and hats with broken brims. The heavyset Leila wears a pot-shaped hat embroidered with colored glass beads and burrows her nose in a matted boa that looks as if it’s been plucked. Konstantin Arnoldovich models a pie-shaped hat that’s slightly deformed from having been transported so long and is made of very smooth, extraordinarily fine fur the color of strong coffee with cream. Izabella discovers she’s lost her emerald-colored hat with the feather and this vexes her thoroughly because she has to cover her head using a shawl that already has holes worn in it in several places. They all carry identical one-handed saws in their hands.

  One of the peasants has given Ignatov an old leather jacket that’s cracked at the elbows – it was left behind by his son, who escaped from the ill-fated eighth train car. The jacket’s a little narrow in the shoulders and Ignatov’s arms stick out of the sleeves quite a bit, but it warms him. Ignatov –
who’s been openly freezing in recent days and had begun placing dried grass and leaves under his shirt in secret – did not refuse the gift.

  That same day, while walking as usual through the taiga in search of prey, he has the idea of killing a bear. They could salt the meat and use the hide for clothing. The peasants have promised to handle it by fleshing, pickling, and tanning the hide nicely. An extra fur coat wouldn’t hurt in the winter. And if he comes across a large bear, they can even cut a couple of hats from the hide.

  He has to act quickly because the animals could settle in for hibernation. For three days, Ignatov digs a pit in the taiga, until his palms are worn to bloody blisters. The peasant men offer help that he refuses (“Firewood, the firewood, who’s going to saw it?”). He covers the steep walls with smooth poles and pounds a sharpened stake into the middle. He places brushwood and boughs on top, and blankets it with grass. He begins waiting. No bear comes.

  Ignatov tosses in bait a couple of times, either a squirrel he’s shot or half a grouse. There’s no bait to be found in the pit in the morning because lynxes or martens have dragged it off, scattering the brushwood Ignatov had placed so carefully. No bear ever visits. Ignatov stops by the pit to check from time to time but then he abandons it. He’s not sorry about his work, though he’s very sorry about the three days spent in vain.

  At the end of October, snow falls in the taiga and stays for good. Winter has set in.

  It’s decided to work in two shifts. One group leaves in the thick, dark blueness of early morning to saw wood, pulling on all the warm clothes they have in the underground house. They return a half-day later, hastily dry their wet, sweaty clothes, and give them to the second shift. They work until late, until the stars come out.

  Ignatov orders those who sit at camp to weave baskets. The evening shift has things easier because people wake up to Ignatov’s never-changing alarm – his revolver on the bucket – and sit down to weave without leaving their bunks. The morning shift, though, works off five hours in the fresh air, comes back, collapses on the bunks from exhaustion, and falls asleep. Ignatov is usually foraging in the taiga during that time. He orders Gorelov to wake up the lie-abeds and deny supper to those who disobey. Supper is the only feeding in the camp, so large, medium, and small baskets soon fill the already crowded underground house. One day, when the exiles cautiously inquire of Ignatov if they might have enough baskets, he replies that they do, then instructs them to weave snowshoes and sleds for wood instead. In answer to their eloquent silence, he shouts, “Winter’s around the corner – how are you planning to go for firewood, you bastards?”