Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  Kuznets waves a hand – well, of course! – and uncorks the bottle, inhaling the smell from its thin neck with delight. Ignatov saws at the dense fish fibers and bones using a crooked knife made from a former one-handed saw. It’s right on the scared hydra’s face and the blade keeps clunking at the newspaper, cutting the hydra, slashing and hacking it to shreds.

  In June of 1931, the population of the still-unnamed settlement totals one hundred and fifty-six inmates, including the old-timers who survived the first winter. Plus ten guards and the commandant.

  They live in three barracks that seem unbelievably spacious and bright after the close quarters in the underground house. Walls of long, even logs have been planed and the doors are hanging on hinges. There’s a promise of iron stoves from the city. Each person has their own – very own! – bunk, though people still line them with boughs and cover themselves with clothing. Women and children have been settled in one building; men are in the other two. The guards share a small log house that’s been added on, kitty-corner, to one of the barracks. The commandant, as chiefs should, lives separately, in the commandant’s headquarters.

  They eat in the dining hall (or “the restaurant,” as Konstantin Arnoldovich likes to call it). Food is still cooked over a fire but they’re already savoring taking meals in a civilized manner, sitting under a roof in even rows at festive yellow tables smelling of pine pitch. They eat fish soup (they’ve established a three-person fishing artel, working under Lukka) and game less frequently (Ignatov sometimes allows the guards into the taiga to stretch their legs), and even more rarely they get porridge, rusks, and macaroni brought from the city. The standard serving is small, as if it were a child’s portion, but they have food! Sometimes they come into some sugar and once there were even splendid, nearly rock-hard, plain crackers. They are fed twice a day. Lunch is brought in buckets to the work site in the forest, and they eat supper in the dining hall. They still eat with spoons made from shells. They have dishes and mugs now, but the spoons were forgotten in an oversight. Happiness isn’t about spoons, though!

  They’ve built a large, ten-bed infirmary from logs. In the front there’s a waiting area and bunks for the patients (one-tier, at Leibe’s insistence), and in the back there’s a cubbyhole for staff. This is where Leibe has taken up residence. He gave Kuznets a list of two hundred items – medications and instruments – for purchase. Kuznets smirked and on his next visit he brought a dilapidated, flat traveling bag with the red cross half worn off and something clanking and rolling around at the bottom. Maybe not two hundred items but even so.

  Under an agreement concluded between the Joint State Political Administration and the government agency overseeing the timber industry, the settlement has been handed over to the agency for timber work. Each morning, to the guards’ brisk shouts, the inmates crawl out for the morning roll call then go into the taiga.

  The detested one-handed saws have been relegated to the past and they now work using two-handed saws and axes in teams of three. Two fell the tree and the third lops off the small branches and collects them in bundles; they saw the trunk into lengths (six meters or two meters long, for different construction purposes), and drag them to a sled, to which three workers are harnessed. They bring the sled to the timber landing on the shore, not far from the settlement, where the wood is stacked and tied together.

  They return in the evening. Hardly anyone achieves the set daily target for processing logs – and women basically never do, so their rations are often cut. New people complain and the old-timers mostly keep quiet, like Ikonnikov, or joke it off, like Konstantin Arnoldovich. They want relentlessly to eat, and many hurry back into the taiga after supper for nuts, berries (cloud-berries and bilberries in summer, lingonberries and cranberries in autumn) and mushrooms (there are abundant ceps and bent milk-stools near the settlement, sometimes saffron milk caps, too, among the other types of milk cap). They have no aversion to cattails (they boil young shoots, which have a flavor somewhat reminiscent of potato, and dissolve its strong-smelling brownish-yellow pollen in water to drink); and they dig up meaty lily bulbs.

  The administration doesn’t object. The guards are cheerful and spirited. They might shoot jays for supper so the soup will be richer or catch one of the settlement women in the bushes for a romp. They are down-to-earth, simple fellows. They’ll beat people for disobedience, and once they shot someone, maybe for planning an escape, maybe for something else. They’re afraid of the commandant (he’s horribly strict), but the forest offers a sense of freedom where they can relax.

  They’ve installed an agitational propaganda stand at the center of the settlement and the bright-colored posters, which smell sharply of paint, keep changing. The agitation’s directed at accelerating the process of re-educating the exploiting class.

  In short, life is taking shape.

  The women ceded a lower bunk to Zuleikha and Yuzuf, one further from the entrance and away from the draft of the constantly opening door. Izabella’s bunk is nearby and Granny Yanipa’s, and several other Leningraders, too: the old-timers have tried to stick together whenever possible. Leila, the Georgian woman, settled on a top bunk, despite her solid age and weight. They had to nail a couple of strong beams on the frame so she can climb up to the second tier, as if on a ladder.

  The efficient Zuleikha has been kept in the kitchen. As her supervisor, they’ve appointed Achkenazi, who isn’t yet old, though he’s already as withered as tree bark and stooped enough to be hunched. He’s one of the new people, with a skull that appears very fragile – it was shaved to bareness at one point and is now overgrown with sparse black shoots. He’s taciturn; his eyes are listless, scared, and half-closed; and his chin is lowered, as if he’s exposing the shaved back of his head to anyone who might want to take him by the scruff. Achkenazi was an excellent cook at one time (or so people say). He never cut but “julienned,” didn’t shuck but “peeled,” didn’t fry but “sautéed,” didn’t parboil but “blanched,” and didn’t stew but “simmered.” He calls soup broth “bouillon,” rusks “croutons,” and strips of fish are even “goujons.” He doesn’t converse with Zuleikha other than to exchange brief remarks. He most often uses gestures. She’s slightly afraid of Achkenazi since he’s one of several who’ve landed in the settlement under a commutation of sentences, meaning he should have been sitting in prison or a camp now, along with genuine thieves and murderers. Zuleikha doesn’t know his crime but she tries to fulfill his requests quickly and diligently, without annoying him, just in case. It’s nice to work with him, though, because he knows his craft and treats Zuleikha fairly, not quibbling over anything.

  At first he had looked critically at his new assistant’s left hand, wondering if her injuries would impede her work. The ends of all five fingers are slightly mutilated and covered in strange short and crooked scars that look like commas. “It went into the thresher,” she explained to her new supervisor without waiting for his question. He stopped worrying about that after seeing how deftly she handled the game and fish.

  The two of them are responsible for all the cooking, with Achkenazi as the “maître,” as Konstantin Arnoldovich puts it, and Zuleikha working alongside him, at his beck and call, washing, peeling, plucking, gutting, dressing, cutting, grating, scraping, and washing again. She carries lunch into the forest, too. A bucket with soup in one hand, a bucket with drinking water in the other and it’s onward, to the first work station then back, to the second station then back, to the third … By the time she’s run to everybody and fed them, it’s time to start supper. She only just makes it to her bunk in the evening, to collapse. And she thinks it’s good fortune that she’s in the kitchen.

  Yuzuf grew slowly, if at all, during the winter’s starvation, which Zuleikha doesn’t like to recall. Her son’s hair was then weak and sparse, his skin pale blue, his nails as transparent and brittle as a bee’s wing, and he didn’t have a single tooth. He moved little and then only reluctantly, as if he were conserving his energy; h
e always observed things sleepily and moodily; and he never learned to sit up. She was grateful he stayed alive. In the summer, though, as soon as the sun showed itself and food appeared, he suddenly started making up for lost time and quickly began growing. Now he eats a lot, almost as much as an adult, and Achkenazi notices Zuleikha giving him extra food, but turns away without saying anything. Yuzuf has started smiling – showing wide, strong, blade-like teeth that have cut through – and babbling. He has learned to sit up and crawl quickly, like a cockroach. The hair on top of his head has darkened and became curly, and his arms and legs have grown out, even taking on a little baby fat. He doesn’t want to stand and walk at all, though. He will soon turn one.

  He’s painfully and utterly attached to Zuleikha. She always feels his lively, clinging little hands at her hem when she’s working in the kitchen. He will crawl out from under the table, touch his mother, and crawl back. She knows he’ll look for her while she’s running her errands to the back yard or to the river for water. She hurries back, panting and sweaty from running, and he’ll already be sitting on the threshold and howling, his grubby little fists smearing plentiful tears on his face.

  At first, she took him with her when she brought lunch into the taiga. It exhausted her because hauling two full pails and a hefty year-old baby turned out not to be an easy task. Nearly impossible. Not only that, but mosquitoes mercilessly devoured Yuzuf in the thicket and then he wouldn’t fall asleep for a long time, tormented by the bites covering his tender skin.

  Only grudgingly did she first leave him in the kitchen for a long stretch. After feeding lunch to everyone from the settlement, she ran back to the kitchen several hours later and flung the door open, her heart pounding. Silence. She dashed in to find her son, and there he was, sleeping under the table, his face puffy, striped white from tears, and burrowed in the rag she usually used to wipe the counter. After that, she started leaving him her headscarf – it was better for him to burrow into that. She has to go around with her head uncovered.

  Zuleikha has been doing many things of late that would have seemed shameful and impossible before.

  She prays rarely and in haste. She became convinced during the recent starvation that Allah neither saw nor heard them, because if the Almighty had heard even one of the thousand tearful prayers that Zuleikha had dispatched to Him during that harsh winter, he would not have left her and Yuzuf bereft of His kindly care. Which means the supreme gaze doesn’t reach this out-of-the-way place. Living without the constant attention and stern supervision of an all-seeing eye was initially terrifying, as if she’d been orphaned. Then she got used to it and resigned herself. By habit, she sometimes sends hurried little prayers to heavenly heights; it’s like sending postcards from distant, savage places without any real hope they’ll reach the addressee.

  She goes into the urman alone and for long periods. That this truly is urman – gloomy and dense, with trees felled by wind – is something she understood on the very first day serving the lumber teams, her belly chilled from fear when she set off running to the felling area along a barely defined trail. She knows that prayers in the urman have no effect so she wastes no time on them, flying between trees like a shadow, not noticing the branches lashing at her face, her jaw clenching and eyes bulging from horror, and thinking all the while of her son waiting for her in the settlement, which means she must return. She remains alive; the urman doesn’t touch her. Soon she grows bolder and begins walking instead of running. She’ll notice a marten that flashes like black lightning in reddish-brown needles or a nimble yellow crossbill hurrying somewhere along a spruce branch or the giant hulk of an elk crowned by a branching bush of horns and solemnly floating between red pine trunks, and she grasped then that the urman is gracious to her, not angry about the intrusion. When she finds several bilberries by an old stump overgrown with shaggy moss, she picks them with gratitude, puts them away in the pocket of her smock for Yuzuf, and calms because the urman has accepted her.

  She doesn’t know the local spirits so doesn’t know how to honor them; she just greets them silently when she enters the woods or goes down to the river. That’s all. It’s possible all sorts of forest and river imps can be found here, too, like long-fingered shurale rascals, darting around the forest’s thickets in search of travelers who’ve lost their way, or loathsome alabasty, who crawl out from under the earth at the smell of human flesh, and su-anasy, those shaggy water-dwellers known to grab people and drag them down to the riverbed. Zuleikha encounters none of them in the urman, so either spirits don’t live in these remote parts of the universe or they’re quieter and more submissive than their kin in Yulbash’s forests. One could try to feed them so they’ll let themselves be known, make an appearance, and then take you under their protection. But Zuleikha can’t even contemplate giving a piece of food – be it leftover porridge, boiled fish skin, or soft grouse gristle – to some imp instead of her son.

  She’s stopped her daily commemorations of her husband, mother-in-law, and daughters. She doesn’t have the strength because she gives whatever’s left to Yuzuf and it seems silly and unwise to spend valuable minutes of her life remembering the dead. It’s better to give her time to the small living being who waits greedily all day for his mother’s affection or smile.

  She works side by side for days at a time with a man who isn’t her kin. Her shoulders often bump into Achkenazi and their hands even touch – their working space in the dining hall is cramped.

  Everything her mother once taught her – what was considered correct and necessary in her half-forgotten life in her husband’s house, and what seemed to constitute Zuleikha’s essence, foundation, and substance – is being taken apart and destroyed. Rules are being broken, laws are turning into their own opposites. New rules are arising and new laws are being revealed in exchange.

  No abyss is opening up beneath her feet, avenging lightning isn’t flying from the heavens, and wild beasts from the urman aren’t capturing her in their sticky webs. People don’t notice those transgressions, either. They don’t see them because they have other concerns.

  Zuleikha also brings dinner to the commandant’s headquarters every evening.

  Inmates and guards eat supper together in the dining hall, workers at their tables, guards at their own separate table. Ignatov always eats alone in his own quarters. He rarely eats lunch, which is a meager snack of a couple of rusks or a piece of bread, but he asks that a hearty hot supper be brought to him.

  After reheating leftovers of the lunch soup in a small kettle and tossing the fattiest, largest pieces of fish or the thickest porridge, from the bottom of the pot, into a large bowl, Zuleikha places all that on a wide board and carries it up the knoll from the dining hall, to a neat little house, the only one in the settlement with glass windows. The path upward is long and takes time, and Zuleikha walks along it slowly, carefully placing her feet and gathering her courage. She doesn’t know what’s happening. No, she knows. She knows what’s happening. There’s no point in hiding it from herself.

  At first it seemed Ignatov didn’t notice her at all. She would enter after timidly knocking and hurriedly place the food on the table without hearing a word in response and she felt how stuffy and dense the air was there, as if it were water instead of air. After she’d ducked back out the door, she’d fly down the path, relieved and breathing deeply, understanding she’d been holding her breath in the commandant’s headquarters for some reason, as if she truly had been underwater. The commandant would stand by the window that whole time, facing outside, or lie on his bed with his eyes covered. Not only did he never look, he never once raised an eyebrow.

  One time, though, he suddenly stared at her. She felt that gaze without looking up. “Is everything all right?” she asked. “Is the food salted enough?” Ignatov didn’t answer, he just looked. She slipped out and took a breath. As she walked down the path, she sensed that gaze on her neck, in the place where the hair starts to grow. She’s started wearing a headscarf to g
o to Ignatov’s. And he’s started looking at her. Now the air isn’t even water, it’s becoming honey. Zuleikha is in that honey, gliding, tensing all her muscles and stretching her sinews, but everything’s moving slowly, like in a dream. Try as she might, she cannot possibly move any faster; she wouldn’t be able to even if there was a fire. She walks out the door, tired, as if she’s been chopping firewood, and she needs something to drink.

  She knows what’s happening because Murtaza had looked at her that way many years ago, when the youthful Zuleikha had just come into his house as his wife. Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze.

  If only she didn’t have to go to Ignatov’s, then she could stay out of his sight. But how could she get out of it? She couldn’t send Achkenazi to him with plates. And so she goes, slowly climbing up the path, opening the heavy door, inhaling deeply, and then ducking into the thick, viscous honey. She senses herself, all of her, gradually turning to honey. Her hands, which place the pot on the table and seem to flow along it, her feet, which stride along the floor and seem to stick to it, and her head, which wants to drive her right out of this place but softens, fusing and melting under her very, very tightly tied headscarf.

  Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze and she’s turning to honey. This is agonizing, unbearable, and horrendously shameful. It’s as if all her past and present shame has merged, absorbing everything she hasn’t felt shameful enough about during this mad year: the many nights spent side by side with unknown people, unknown men, in the darkness of dungeons and the crowdedness of the railroad car; her pregnancy, borne in front of others from the first months until the end; and giving birth around people. In order to somehow escape that shame and overcome the improper thoughts, Zuleikha often imagines a large black tent made of thick, crudely dressed sheepskins and resembling Bashkir yurts. The tent covers Ignatov and the commandant’s headquarters like a solid lid, and when the door curtain is drawn at the entrance, everything carnal, shameful, and ugly remains there, inside. Zuleikha leaps on a large Argamak horse, digs him sharply with her bare heels, and speeds away without looking back.