It’s already dark when Konstantin Arnoldovich comes to the commandant’s headquarters; the hushed settlement is sleeping after supper. He scratches meekly at the door for a long time and then, after not receiving an answer, he takes small, shuffling steps around the building, and finally peers in a window. There he encounters the commandant’s stern face, with the bold reddish spark of a hand-rolled cigarette in his teeth. Ignatov’s sitting on the windowsill, smoking.
“Well, Sumlinsky?”
“Comrade commandant,” says Konstantin Arnoldovich, pronouncing the vowels with special care, letting them fully develop in his mouth, so they come out long and smooth. “Comrade commandant, we have a matter to take up with you.”
“Well?”
Konstantin Arnoldovich steals closer and wraps his soiled, completely buttonless little jacket around his chest.
“Our settlement doesn’t have a name.”
“Doesn’t have a what?” Ignatov doesn’t immediately understand.
“A name. A title, if you like. There’s a settlement but there’s no title. We’ve living in a populated spot that’s unnamed and unplotted on the map. Maybe it’ll cease to exist tomorrow but today – today! – it exists. And we exist in it, too. And we want our home to have a name.”
“And you don’t want plumbing and hot water?”
“No, we don’t want plumbing.” Konstantin Arnoldovich sighs, serious. “A name requires no material expenditures. The settlement will be given a name sooner or later. And so we … hmm … as its very first residents, would like to exercise the right to name it.”
Ignatov inhales. The orange cuff on the tip of his hand-rolled cigarette flares and Sumlinsky’s sharp cheekbones catch fire for a second and then dissolve back into the darkness so only his eyes glisten. He lost his pince-nez in the forest back in the autumn and has had to get by without; his eyes have seemed overly piercing, even impertinent, since they’ve been deprived of their customary gold frame.
“So what do you want to call … all of this?”
Konstantin Arnoldovich grins, flustered, and nods his head for some reason.
He finally utters it, solemnly: “Vila.”
“What?”
“It’s an acronym,” says Sumlinsky, whose speech suddenly becomes hurried. “You see, it’s an abbreviation formed by joining initial letters. We took four names: Volf, Ivan, Lukka, and Avdei. It works out V, I, L, A, Vila. It’s all very simple!”
Ignatov knows three of them but Ivan? There’s no Ivan at all among the old-timers, Ignatov remembers that for sure. He releases smoke into the darkness, where Konstantin Arnoldovich’s anxious breathing is audible.
“The four people who saved our lives that winter – it’s worth naming the settlement after them, don’t you think?”
A hefty fish splashes loudly somewhere on the Angara.
“There’s one other thing …” Konstantin Arnoldovich takes a step toward the window, pressing his intertwined hands to his chest. “They don’t know we want to, hmm, immortalize them. Neither Volf Karlovich nor Avdei and Lukka. But now you know.”
How did the exiles find out his name is Ivan? Nobody calls him anything but “comrade commandant,” only the overstepping Gorelov sometimes says “comrade Ignatov.” And what is this? A labor settlement carrying his name? Damn it all to hell … Ignatov crushes the cigarette butt against a flat stone on the windowsill and flings it into the darkness.
“No,” he says.
“We’re proposing a completely different official explanation!” Konstantin Arnoldovich bobs up toward the window and his wizened little paws catch at the frame. “We understand. Don’t think we don’t. We’ll state that we’re naming the settlement in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Vi-la!”
He giggles, satisfied, rubbing his hands together.
“No,” repeats Ignatov. “No villas and mansions here.”
“Excellent!” For some reason, Sumlinsky, the “remainder,” is as cheerful as if he’s received approval. “We thought as much, that you wouldn’t agree! So we prepared a reserve option – hmm, something more clandestine.”
“Go get some sleep, Sumlinsky,” says Ignatov, taking hold of the open window.
“Sem’ Ruk, named after your seven hands!” Konstantin Arnoldovich blurts into the closing window. “Because there are seven hands among the four of you. Let’s name the settlement that way – nobody will ever guess it, you hear me? And the name resonates. It’s possibly even unique.”
The window slams with a crash. Through a layer of glass, a skinny figure with drooping shoulders takes small steps down the path to the settlement.
It was as if Sumlinsky had known something in advance. A couple of weeks later, during another round of visits to his holdings, Kuznets says to Ignatov in passing:
“We want to give your settlement a name, commandant. You’ll now be Angara Twelve. That’s what we’ll put on the map.”
“It already has a name,” objects Ignatov, surprising even himself. “There wasn’t anything to do in the underground house during the winter and people thought it up.”
“Well? Why’d you keep quiet?”
“Who was I to tell? And you didn’t ask.”
“So how are you now to be named and extolled?” Kuznets’s gaze is attentive and persistent.
“Sem’ Ruk,” is Ignatov’s delayed response.
“Tricky. Did a priest fit you out with that name by any chance?”
“What?”
“You’re a nut! That name reeks of religious prejudice, that’s what. Of six-winged seraphs and the like.”
“You’re a fool, Kuznets, even if you’re my chief.” They’d recently switched to using first names, but when they argued they lashed each other with surnames, as before. “My contingent is entirely Tatars and Mordvins and Chuvash who’ve likely gone their whole lives without ever seeing a priest, not to mention a seraph.”
“To hell with you.” Kuznets waves his arm. “Sem’ Ruk it is!”
And so the name Konstantin Arnoldovich thought up survives, and zips through all the paperwork and the chain of command. Among the complete and extremely long list of newly formed populated spots – by that time there are already a good hundred in the Eastern Siberian territory – their name falls to the chairman of the Irkutsk Oblast Committee of the Party for approval. An empty-headed woman in the typing pool who’s hugely upset that she hadn’t been able to buy more longed-for lisle stockings at three rubles a pair from a greedy profiteer the day before, makes a mistake in the name, writing it all as one word and making it look like yet another bureaucratic neologism. The lists are approved. The typesetter at the printing house doesn’t see the mistake and so a no less sonorous, albeit slightly altered name for the settlement – Semruk, for “Sevenhands” – is entered into all the directories and maps.
It happens the first time in late June. Zuleikha doesn’t realize anything at the time. She’s just carried two buckets full of water into the kitchen and is dragging them to the worktable where Achkenazi is bent over like a fishhook and already practicing his magic on pearlescent fish fanned out on the table.
Yuzuf, who’s been crouching by the door waiting for his mother, darts toward her like a wild animal, but then suddenly collapses on the floor and lies motionless, as if he’s been shot. Zuleikha rushes over, grabs him, and shakes him. His face is white, his lips are gray-blue with an inky tinge, and he’s not breathing. “To the infirmary, fast!” says Achkenazi. Zuleikha picks up his motionless little body, which has cooled in an instant, and flies off.
Leibe has been examining some old man whose skin has begun peeling off in layers, like pine bark, from exhaustion. Zuleikha places her son on the table right between the old man and the doctor, catches hold of Leibe and howls, unable to explain anything. He examines the little boy, listens, frowns, and gives him a shot of some sort of sharp-smelling medicine from a glass syringe as long and thin as a finger.
“It’s just as well that they brought all this l
ast month,” he says, “both the medicines and the syringes.”
Yuzuf comes to a minute later, sleepy, and his little eyes blink. Zuleikha’s still howling; she can’t calm down at all.
“All right, that’s enough, now …” Leibe catches his breath, unbuttons his collar, and drinks half a mug of water. “And if anything happens again, come straight to me.”
Zuleikha carries Yuzuf back to the kitchen. As she walks through the settlement, everything rocks around her, and she’s clutching her son to herself; she just can’t hug him enough. She starts cleaning fish and her eyes are constantly drawn under the table, where sleepy Yuzuf has crawled. She crouches down every minute to check that everything’s all right, that he hasn’t fallen again. He’s curled into a ball and gone to sleep. Zuleikha leans over him and listens. Is he breathing? “I’d let you go home today, Zuleikha, but the administration might not like that,” Achkenazi tells her, as if apologizing. That’s the longest sentence he’s ever said to her.
The problem repeats several weeks later, this time in the evening, as Zuleikha is putting Yuzuf to bed. She again brings him to the doctor, who gives another injection.
She stops sleeping at night. How can you fall asleep if that can happen at night, too? She lies alongside her son, listening to his breathing, guarding him. Her periods away from Yuzuf, when she takes lunch to the workers at the logging sites, have become torture. Zuleikha runs along the path with full buckets, worrying, wondering if it’s happening again. Or will in a minute? Or two? Achkenazi doesn’t look up from the cutting board so he wouldn’t notice. And Yuzuf’s constantly resting under the table. She comes back in a lather every time, her heart exploding from the running, and then she throws herself under the table. Is he alive? She’s begun handling her kitchen tasks poorly. She’s afraid Achkenazi will complain and they’ll banish her from the kitchen, for general assignment work. But Achkenazi turns out to be a person with heart and puts up with it.
It happens again one night in August. Zuleikha’s open eyes are gazing into the darkness, and she’s listening to Yuzuf’s breathing. It’s as if she’s rocking on waves: inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale, up-down, up-down. The exhaustion of the past weeks is dragging her by the feet, down into a heavy, heavy sleep. It feels sweet and cozy to close her eyes for a moment and give up resistance. The water’s rocking and persuading her and then Ignatov’s face is suddenly alongside her, calm and affectionate. Give me your hand, he says. Come on, you’ll drown in the honey. Lo and behold, everything around her is yellow, as if it’s made of gold. She sticks out the tip of her tongue and it truly is honey. It wakes her up. Her mouth is thick with saliva and she can taste sweetness. The sounds – her neighbors’ breathing and snoring and nocturnal stirrings – are all far away, not with her. It’s quiet and serene next to her.
Yuzuf isn’t breathing.
She shakes him. No, he’s not breathing. Barefoot, with her braids undone, she rushes him to the infirmary. The moon in the sky is as round as a coin, the wind is whipping off the Angara, and there are pine cones, sticks, rocks, and soil underfoot, but she doesn’t notice anything. She pounds on the front window first, almost knocking out the newly installed glass, but there’s nobody there. After coming to her senses, she runs around to the back of the building, to the living quarters.
Disheveled from sleep, Leibe runs to her in just his drawers, which are threadbare and almost transparent. He lights the kerosene lamp and puts the boy on his own bed. Yuzuf’s hands, forehead, and the tip of his nose are already ice cold. After the injection, he begins breathing, groaning, and crying. He calms in his mother’s arms then falls back to sleep. And Zuleikha’s own arms are shuddering hard, not in a good way; she nearly drops the child.
“Lay your son here,” Leibe whispers to her. “And calm down.”
She places Yuzuf on the doctor’s pillow, a shaggy fur hat turned inside out. Her legs buckle, not supporting her. She positions herself so her knees are on the freshly planed floorboards, her torso’s on the bed, and her face is by her son’s warmed-up little fingers.
“It worked out fine this time, too,” says Leibe, extending a mug of water to her. “It’s good you noticed. If it had been another few minutes …”
Zuleikha grabs the doctor’s wrinkled hand, sprinkled with brown spots, and stretches to reach it with her lips. Water splashes from the mug to the floor.
“Stop that immediately!” He angrily tears his hand away. “You should take a drink!”
She takes the mug. Her teeth chatter loudly against the tin; she doesn’t want to wake Yuzuf so she sets the water aside to drink more later.
“Doctor,” whispers Zuleikha, without rising from her knees (she surprises herself: are these her lips speaking?), “let us live in the infirmary for a while, me and Yuzuf. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him. Don’t send us away, let us stay. Save him. And I’ll do everything for you. I’ll launder, tidy up, and pick berries. And I can help with patients if you need. Just so Yuzuf will be here at night, closer to you.”
“Live here as long as you want,” shrugs the doctor. “If the commandant’s not against it.”
A half-hour later, Zuleikha has dragged her simple belongings to the infirmary and Yuzuf hasn’t even had a chance to wake up – he’s slept calmly through the whole night, all the way until morning, on the doctor’s furry pillow.
Leibe goes to the commandant himself rather than waiting for questions. “Here’s how it is,” he reports. “The patient requires care in the infirmary. This situation will not affect Zuleikha Valieva’s capacity for labor in any way.” Ignatov looks at him sullenly and unkindly, but doesn’t object.
Zuleikha and Yuzuf are allotted a bunk walled off by a curtain. After the stuffiness of the communal barracks, the strong-smelling air at the infirmary – with carbolic acid, alcohol, juniper, lingonberry leaves, St. John’s wort, and Labrador tea – seems clean and fresh. In the mornings, Zuleikha runs off to the dining hall with Yuzuf under her arm. In the evenings, she hurries back and cleans the infirmary rather than taking her usual outings into the forest for bent milk-stool mushrooms or cattails. She washes the floors, walls, tables, benches, windows, and bunks (even those that are empty), battling unsanitary conditions. Then she makes her way into the residential half, where she scrubs the floorboards and the large stove made of stones, and scours the front steps. She washes all the doctor’s clothes in the Angara. She learns to boil bandages and basic medical instruments in a kettle.
“Don’t strain yourself, I beg of you!” Leibe tells her, raising his long withered hands toward the low ceiling. “You should get some sleep!”
They take turns watching over Yuzuf’s bedside, half the night each. Leibe maintains that he’s already sleeping an elderly person’s short hours, making nightwatch duty easy for him. If he had been anyone else, Zuleikha would not have been able to go to sleep, but she trusts the doctor. She goes to bed and drops into the blackness of sleep, without thoughts and without dreams.
The doctor himself suggests she bring Yuzuf back to the infirmary from the dining hall during her afternoon absences at the logging sites, and Zuleikha gratefully agrees.
When a lemon-yellow man with a constant violent cough and black circles under his eyes is admitted to the infirmary, Leibe orders that they move into the residential quarters, with him. Zuleikha hesitates at first – what will people say? – but when she meets the doctor’s stern gaze, she hurriedly brings her son into the back of the infirmary, behind a solid door.
That happens in late summer. The second year of the exiles’ stay in the settlement is beginning.
Zuleikha places a kettle with bandages inside the hot stove. She always launders and rinses the bandages in the running water of the Angara; her hands feel wooden after that, aching, making it all the more pleasant to hold them against the hot side of the stove, sensing the flow of blood into her hands and feeling the skin on her fingertips again. The fire crackles under the base of the blackened kettle, greedily eatin
g the rest of a log that’s been tossed in. Zuleikha will have time to run out to the yard for firewood while the water comes to a boil – the bandages aren’t supposed to boil for long but she likes to keep them in until they’re white.
Yuzuf is frolicking on the floor, crawling and playing with clay toys that Ikonnikov sculpted. First he’d made a round-bellied baby doll resembling a fat spindle with plump lips that look like they’ve been turned inside out; then came a pompous tufted bird with shaggy legs and funny wings not designed for flight; and finally there came a sturdy, hefty fish with insolently bugged eyes and a stubborn lower jaw. The toys are good since they’re neither too large nor overly small, each fitting comfortably into a child’s small hand, nor heavy, and – most important – each one has a living gaze. In addition, they have the extraordinarily convenient benefit in that the legs, wings, and fins that Yuzuf breaks off have a habit of growing back after Ikonnikov drops in at the infirmary while going about his errands.
While Yuzuf’s enjoying knocking together the fragile clay foreheads of eternal rivals – the bird and the fish – Zuleikha rushes to go out to the yard so her son won’t notice she’s gone. The door opens on its own a moment before Zuleikha has a chance to touch it. A tall, dark silhouette stands in the opening, coming through rays of sun that beat at Zuleikha’s face. A wide, floor-length dress flaps in the wind and a crooked staff sternly bangs at the threshold.
The Vampire Hag.
She strides into the house. Her nose leads her, its broad nostrils twitching, inhaling air.
“It smells of something,” she says.
Zuleikha jumps away, her back screening Yuzuf, who’s playing on the floor. He’s crawling, babbling something under his breath, ramming the little hand that’s tightly squeezing the fish at the bird, who’s rapidly retreating under the enemy onslaught. He doesn’t notice a thing. Zuleikha’s mother-in-law walks about, sniffing loudly and using her stick to toss things that fall in her path. It’s as if she clearly sees them. An overturned chair crashes, an empty bucket rolls and clanks, and empty little clay dishes fly from the table to the floor.
Zuleikha Page 32