He’s ill-tempered, people whisper. They’ve resigned themselves to it.
Some get sick and burn with fever for a long time, coughing incessantly during the nights, keeping the others awake. Leibe gives them curative drinks with repulsively reeking herbs. Ignatov chases them back out to work, though, as soon as the patients’ eyes begin twinkling from feeling better, their foreheads are no longer covered in perspiration, and they can plod independently to the latrine installed in the underground house’s “entrance hall.”
“It’s ungodly,” Izabella says one morning after Ignatov has demanded Konstantin Arnoldovich, who’s still bluish-white from the fever he’s recently endured, go with everyone else to cut wood in a forest seized by ringing hoarfrost. “You’ll kill us.”
“Fewer mouths to feed will make it easier for the rest,” says Ignatov, baring his teeth.
At times Ignatov reads something resembling meek hatred in the eyes of these elderly people exhausted and emaciated by hunger and suffering. If he hadn’t had a revolver, it’s possible they might have even attempted to kill him.
At the beginning of winter, Ignatov’s life grows complicated in a way he didn’t anticipate at all. He doesn’t go very far from camp that day. He inspects work in the clearing, where the exiles are laboring away felling trees and preparing logs that they drag to the camp on a sled, piling big branches into bundles, small kindling into large baskets, and birch bark, pine bark, pine cones, and pine needles into their own baskets – and then he heads off to his own work: hunting. The lumbermen’s voices, the screech of the one-handed saws, and the crack of felling timber are still audible and very close by, but then he hears a sudden rustling and quivering of branches in the juniper bushes. It sounds like a large animal.
Ignatov freezes and slowly, very slowly, reaches for his revolver. His fingers creep along the holster as noiselessly as shadows. The cold weight of the weapon is in Ignatov’s hand.
The bush is still quivering steadily, as if someone’s plucking at it from the other side. A branch crunches under a heavy paw. A bear? That means it’s come to visit. He prepared a pit and bait but it came on its own, uninvited, to feast on little juniper cones.
Shoot now, blindly? He might wound but not kill. The beast could either turn nasty and tear him the hell up, or get frightened and run away so Ignatov can’t catch up. He’ll have to wait until the animal shows its snout. Then he can shoot at a weak spot – its open jaws or an eye – to be absolutely sure.
The quivering in the bush moves closer. The bow-legged animal is walking right into his arms! Ignatov raises his revolver, places his second hand on top and prepares to cock it. He can’t now, though, because the bear would hear. As soon as the bear sticks its nose out, Ignatov will pull the trigger and fire into its snout, the snout!
His throat is dry and he struggles to swallow. When he does, the sound seems deafening. The bush shudders abruptly again and out walks Zuleikha. Ignatov mumbles angrily, then quickly lowers the revolver. For an instant, it’s as if he can’t get enough air.
“And what if I’d shot you down!”
A couple of frightened crows fly from a branch and dart behind the tops of spruce trees. Zuleikha is backing away, her hands covering her dress where it protrudes on her belly, and staring, frightened.
“And so out of consideration for you, we kept you in the kitchen to tend the fire. But here you are, strolling in the woods?”
“I wanted to gather some nuts or berries,” she whispers. “I want so badly to eat.”
“Everybody wants to!” shouts Ignatov. They can probably hear him at the lumbering site.
“It’s not for me.” She continues backing away until she runs into an old birch bursting with torn black spots. “It’s for him.”
She looks down at the dark top of a head that’s peeping out from her chest. Ignatov strides right up to Zuleikha and hovers over her. His breathing is still heavy and loud.
“Obey me,” he says, “without exception. If you’re ordered to stay in the camp, then sit there. If I order you to go for berries, you’ll go. Clear?”
The baby on Zuleikha’s chest suddenly yelps restlessly, stirring and grumbling. A tiny, wrinkled little hand with hook-like fingers appears in the opening of her dress for a moment and then disappears.
“See? It’s ‘Give me milk’ again.” Zuleikha unfastens the buttons on her chest. “Go on, then, go. I need to feed him.”
Ignatov stands, angry and unmoving. The baby is crying, snuffling his little nose and rooting around with his open mouth.
“I said go! It’s a sin to watch.”
Ignatov doesn’t budge; he’s looking straight at her. The baby is bawling, sobbing, as if from bitterness and offense, wrinkling his old man’s face. Zuleikha takes a heavy breast out of the opening of her dress and places a swollen nipple with trembling drops of milk on the end into his wide-open mouth. The crying ceases immediately and the child feeds hungrily, moaning as he quickly stretches and squeezes his taut, bright-pink little cheeks. White milk flows along them, mixing with tears that haven’t yet dried.
Her breast is small, round, and full. Like an apple. Ignatov is watching that breast and he can’t tear himself away. Something hot, large, and slow stirs in his belly. They say a woman’s milk is sweet to the taste. He takes a step back. Sticks his revolver in the holster and fastens it. He walks off into the forest and turns after a couple of steps:
“Go to camp when you finish feeding. Bears want to eat, too.”
He strides away along a path that’s already been trodden between the spruces. He sees before him a small hand diving into the opening of the dress, clasping and reaching a taut, round, milky-white sphere of a breast with light-blue lines of veins and a large, shining, dark pink berry of a nipple that’s burning, quivering with rich milk.
Some joke, half a year without a woman.
And so Ignatov tries not to look at Zuleikha after that. It’s not easy in the crowded underground house. When their eyes happen to meet, he feels that same hot stirring in his belly again and turns away immediately.
Ignatov has selected the best snowshoes for himself. The exiles wove several dozen pairs but these, produced by the gnarled fingers of Granny Yanipa, a taciturn Mari woman with a brown face and small eyes lost amid shaggy eyebrows and deep wrinkles, are the best for walking because they sit nicely on the foot, don’t fall through a thin crust on top of the snow, and don’t let snow through. He’s already been wearing them for three months. The birch cane has worn on the curves and is in shreds. Ignatov wants to order a second pair from her but she’s been sick and hasn’t gotten out of bed for several weeks.
The snowshoes the other peasants make are heavy and clumsy so they’re suitable for short trips to fetch firewood but not for long, fast-moving hunting outings. The Leningraders’ handiwork is so unsightly that it’s difficult to recognize them as snowshoes; they’re reminiscent of either an intricately shaped twig broom or an unsuccessful basket. “It’s an example of Suprematism,” Ikonnikov once said incomprehensibly, scrutinizing the shaggy woven something his hands had just created. The zealous Gorelov had wanted to throw Suprematism out of the house but Ignatov wouldn’t allow it, ordering that it be hung under the ceiling because there was no longer any space on the floor.
Ignatov is stepping, placing his snowshoes on a dense, hard crust of ice. He’s listening to the sound of his feet. The January sky is gray and cold. Dark clouds hang motionless, their inner white linings showing and a pre-dusk sun shining golden through them. It’s time to go back.
He’s returning empty-handed today.
Ignatov has not embraced hunting during his months in the taiga. He can tread quietly, hear keenly, and shoot accurately. He can already distinguish tracks in the snow as if he’s reading dispatches left by the animals. Long and sparse are hares’, larger and heavier are badgers’, and light and sweeping are squirrels’. Sometimes he even senses the animals and he thrusts out his hand holding the revolver, squeez
ing the trigger before his head manages to grasp that it, his prey, is flashing between the bushes. But he hasn’t been able to genuinely come to love hunting. He likes chasing and shooting but in a different way, where there’s an open and comprehensible target. As in a battle, when you see an adversary and fire at him or chase him and hack him with a saber. Everything’s clear and simple. But hunting is complex. Sometimes he imagines forest animals crawling out of their burrows and dens, and skipping along a huge field in even rows without hiding, meandering, or covering their tracks. He’s behind them on a horse. He aims his revolver, shooting one after the other, one after the other. Now that would genuinely be hunting. But this?
Hunting fortune has been harsh for Ignatov, rarely gladdening him with success. Of course the largest prey was the elk. That happened in December, just before the new year. By chance, Ignatov had wandered to the bear pit he’d dug and forgotten about in the autumn and seen that something had landed inside. Dumbfounded by the premonition of sizable prey, he peered in at something large and dark gray that was lying there, tired. Its shaggy long legs with hooves as long as fingers were shaking slightly. Brownish-crimson guts, still lightly steaming, were entwined on the sharpened stake that stuck out over the elk. Ignatov dashed right off for camp. He ran in, panting and wild-eyed, scaring everybody. They gathered the men, grabbed sleds and homemade torches, and quickly went back into the woods. Ignatov was afraid the smell of meat would attract wolves but they encountered only a lynx in the pit. It had already torn at the carcass pretty well and it bared its crooked fangs wickedly, bubbling elk blood at them. Ignatov killed the lynx, too, and they dragged the animals to the underground house and ate for nearly a week. That was how they celebrated New Year’s.
Nothing else has landed in the pit. There has been only small, insubstantial prey since that elk, which seems to have expended Ignatov’s entire allotted share of hunting successes all in one go. There is help, thanks to Lukka. The Angara was already covered with ice in November but the men sawed about a dozen large holes under Lukka’s supervision, so Lukka has been spending days at a time on the ice ever since. He brings back bream that are as broad and flat as dishes and shimmer like copper, spotted green pikes with spiteful bared teeth, and fishes unknown to Ignatov that gleam with pearlescence and have large, rhomboidal fins on their fatty backs.
Lukka has recently fallen ill, though. Many have taken to their beds since New Year and only Ignatov is hanging on. He’s been forced to abandon sending two shifts into the forest for firewood so now only one shift works, only the healthy people, which really means those who are least ill. With misgivings, Ignatov excuses Professor Leibe from his labor duties because someone has to look after the sick. Because of Lukka’s illness, they’ve been forced to feed themselves with stored fish. The dried fish doesn’t last long; they’ve eaten everything they prepared in autumn within a couple of days. Ignatov is now their only hope.
He is striding through the taiga. Spruces float past him, their broad boughs pillowed in snow and bent toward the ground, resting against snowdrifts. Bushes swell like steep white boulders, and golden trunks of pine trees flash with a coating of thick hoarfrost. He goes down to the familiar clearing, where the giant skeleton of a lightning-charred birch tree stands in the corner, and he crosses a frozen stream where mounds of rocks are frosted with drifted snow. The camp is already close and the faint, bittersweet smell of smoke touches his nostrils.
In sunset’s meager light, Ignatov sees tall poles on which two gray skulls bare their teeth between the trees. One skull is large and long, with a bent nose, large, flat chewing teeth, and the sturdy roots of horns growing right out of small, oval eye sockets – the elk. The second skull is small and round like a potato, with a hideous hole of a nose and fanged jaws that are thrust forward and tenaciously lying on top of one another – the lynx. Lukka hung up the skulls to scare off forest spirits. Ignatov had wanted to remove this appalling counterrevolution but gave up and left it after noticing the peasants’ imploring looks. He thought it would be better if the skulls scared off illness. But there they hang, seeing Ignatov off for hunting in the morning, their black eyeholes gawking after him. They greet him in the evening, peering indifferently into his hands. What are you bringing back? Is there something to feed the people? Or has the time come to die?
Ignatov turns away from the skulls’ unblinking gaze, gloomily hurrying past them to the underground house. As he walks, he again counts, out of habit, the tall round drifts – the woodpiles – that cover the clearing like mushrooms. There are fewer of them now than a month ago because the exiles have begun using up the firewood supply. Blizzards sometimes cover the taiga, howling over the house for several days, singing and shrieking in the stovepipe, and sending snow flying over the earth in a dense burst, carpeting the sun overhead. You’d perish in foul weather like that, so there’s no going into the forest. They even go out to the woodpiles on a tether: they grope with their hands in search of the wood, trudge through waist-deep snow, and return to the underground house, pulling a rope with one end tied around their middle and the other to the entrance. Their supplies began melting away faster when illnesses arrived, and even when the weather was good, the exiles couldn’t prepare as much firewood as before.
Ignatov sticks his snowshoes in a drift by the entrance, kneels, and crawls into the house. The outside door, woven from birch switches and reinforced with a mixture of turf and clay, is lying on the ground; it needs to be lifted and squeezed into a slot. Now Ignatov is in the cold “entrance hall.” He goes down the earthen steps, throws back curtains made of bast fiber and elk hide and ducks into the underground house’s crowded space, which is filled with heavy, warm air, the smell of herbs, fish, tree bark, spruce needles, smoke, scorching hot stones, and the sounds of coughing and quiet conversations.
He’s come home.
Somewhere in the depths of the house, listless voices go quiet right away. The uneven light of a splinter lamp burning brightly over a kettle of water illuminates somber faces with distinctly drawn angular cheekbones and wrinkly folds. A dozen eyes stare at Ignatov and his empty hands.
He makes his way to his bunk without looking in their direction. From underneath his homemade pillow of boughs he removes the sack of cartridges, which has been shrinking tremendously over the winter. With the onset of winter, he stopped hiding it in the forest and began keeping it with himself, at the head of his bed. He loads his revolver. Without kicking off boots wound with scraps of lynx hide, he lies down, placing the hand with the revolver under his head. He closes his eyes, continuing to sense the gazes directed at him.
In moments like these he usually feels rising tides of fury and wants to start waving his weapon and shout, “What are you staring at, you bastards?” But today he doesn’t have the strength. An unhurried, somber sort of tiredness has overcome him. He needs to dry out his boots and clothes, and at least drink some hot water to fill the sucking emptiness in his stomach. Right now, thinks Ignatov. Right now, right now.
“Very well, we’ll have some soup du jour, then,” says Izabella. She scoops a spoonful of salt out of a fat sack and drops it in a kettle that’s been bubbling away on the fire. The clear water clouds and turns white as if someone had mixed in milk, then it sputters and clears again a moment later. The salty soup is ready.
Not many people like it. The majority turn toward the wall and don’t even get out of their bunks. Only Konstantin Arnoldovich and Ikonnikov take seats by the pot.
For a long time, Konstantin Arnoldovich scrutinizes the bowl of his spoon, made from a pearlescent shell, then suddenly smiles:
“I feel like I’m on Avenue Foch. Saturday evening, oysters on ice, a glass of Montrachet …”
“The best oysters, though,” chimes in Ikonnikov, sipping his salty soup with gusto, “were to be found on Rue de Vaugirard. You won’t argue with that, will you?”
“My dear Ilya Petrovich! How would you know? You were just a youth then and saw nothing but your ét
udes. It’s surprising you even left your Montmartre!”
“Messieurs, ne vous disputez pas!” Izabella laughs as she knocks her spoon on the edge of the pot, as if she’s flicking off fatty pieces of meat, translucent lemon slices, and small olive rounds that have stuck to it.
Gorelov plops down alongside them, takes a spoon out of his shirt, licks it, and looks ravenously at his companions. The conversation dies down.
Zuleikha buries her face in Yuzuf’s hair. Ignatov came back from hunting empty-handed again. There’s nothing for supper tonight, meaning her milk won’t come in. Lately her milk supply has even been sparse after food.
It began running low in mid-winter. At first she thought it was from the meager food but she understood her milk was ending when they ate their fill of fatty, fragrant elk meat for a whole week in January and her breasts remained as weak and soft as before. She started giving her son meat and fish as a supplement. Potato or bread would have been better, of course, but where could she get that? She’d place a small piece of something in a rag and slip it into a space in his tiny toothless gums. Yuzuf spat it out at first but then he recognized the taste and sucked at it. He didn’t like salty things – he cried – so Zuleikha didn’t give him dried fish. When several completely hungry days came, she tried stewing some aromatic yellow cones that were left on the branches of a bough but that plant food gave her son sticky lumps of emerald green diarrhea and Doctor Leibe scolded her like nothing on earth. She hadn’t even known he could shout so loudly and threateningly.
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