“It smells!” she repeats, loudly and insistently.
There are strong smells of scorching-hot stove stones and boiling bandages in the house, and weaker smells of smoke, seasoned firewood, and fresh wood. The faintest smells of carbolic acid and alcohol hover, and a spicy, flowery aroma comes from fat bunches of herbs hanging under the ceiling.
The old woman is coming toward her. Zuleikha sees her flat, white eye sockets, coated with a bluish film like the skin of a freshly cleaned fish and covered with a thick network of knotty red blood vessels. Her soft and very sparse hair the color of dust is parted at the exact middle of her forehead in a neat path, and wound into long, thin braids.
The Vampire Hag breathes hard and her nostrils make a snuffling sound. The tip of her stick reaches for the hem of Zuleikha’s dress and lifts it, baring pale, naked legs that seem to gleam in the duskiness of the house. Zuleikha made her baggy pants into diapers long ago, back last autumn. The old woman smirks so the corner of her mouth creeps upward and sinks into the large folds of her wrinkles.
“I found what smells,” she says. “It’s fekhishe, the smell of whore.”
Nobody had ever called Zuleikha that. A horrid, suffocating heat rises from her chest, over her neck, cheeks, and forehead, to the very top of her head.
“Yes,” the Vampire Hag repeats louder. “The smell of a whore who thinks at night about the Russian man Ivan, murderer of my Murtaza …”
Zuleikha shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. There was no denying it.
“… and is living with a German man, the infidel Volf!”
“I need to raise my son,” Zuleikha whispers through her dried throat, “to put him on his feet. He’s already over a year old but doesn’t walk. He can’t even stand. And that’s your grandson.”
She steps to the side, revealing her son sitting on the floor for the Vampire Hag, as if she truly could see him. Yuzuf keeps playing – the fish and the bird are united in his persistent little hands and jointly attacking the poor doll, who already lacks an arm.
The Vampire Hag squeamishly pulls her walking stick away from Zuleikha, as if she’s been dirtied by muck.
“You forgot about sharia law and human law. I used to tell Murtaza, ‘That woman’s unfit, unclean in both body and thought –’”
“Murtaza died. I have the right to marry a second time!”
“And before the eyes of all the people, she’s spending the night under the same roof as a man who’s not her husband! Who is she after that? A whore is who!” The old woman loudly and juicily spits under her feet.
“I’ll become the doctor’s lawful wife!”
“Fekhishe! Whore! Whore!” The Vampire Hag shakes her head slightly and the bulky flourishes of her earrings jingle softly in her fleshy earlobes.
“I swear!” Zuleikha’s head sinks into her shoulders and she quickly lifts a hand, defending herself.
When she lowers her hand, there’s no longer anyone beside her. Yuzuf is peacefully frolicking, enjoying knocking his clay toys together. The wood in the stove crackles as it burns; water is burbling loudly, spilling out of the kettle, and hissing on scorching-hot coals. Zuleikha sits down on the floor alongside her son, buries her face in her hands, and whimpers quietly, like a puppy.
On the last day of summer, white clouds are floating like apple blossoms, and the Angara is dark, a deep blue verging on black that rises from its depths on particularly warm and sunny days. There’s a light, dry autumn warmth.
Zuleikha is striding along a forest path. Yuzuf is on her back, wrapped in a shawl, and she has a basket in one hand and a staff in the other. Reddish tree needles and the first fallen leaves, fragile and already tinged with a sickly yellowness, crunch underfoot. She is grateful to Achkenazi for letting her go into the taiga today to pick berries for compote. It’s already darkening early in the evenings, so she can’t go after dinner. This is an excuse devised by the maître, since they could have gotten by without compote today – it’s not a holiday and the chief isn’t expected to arrive. But Achkenazi felt sorry for her so decided to give her a day off. He sees she’s not herself lately, isn’t sleeping much, and works enough for three.
Zuleikha is afraid to go too far away from the settlement – just in case something happens with Yuzuf – so she walks to a familiar stand of bilberry plants in the pine forest. She steps on large, flat rocks to cross a brook that roars resoundingly (she thinks of it as the Chishme), then strides further along it, to the base of the large cliff where there sprawls a broad, light clearing, which she’s privately named “Round Clearing.” There’s a patch of plentiful berries hidden here, guarded by a huge old birch scorched by lightning and a detachment of red-trunked pines. Large, beady bilberries grow so plentifully, like stars in the sky on a clear night, that you can just sit and gather them. The berries are heavy and purple and they look like they’re covered with light-blue velvet; touch one and a dark trace remains on its round side. They’re juicy, sweet, and honeyed, too. Zuleikha has plenty to eat herself and feeds Yuzuf. He’s smiling and his teeth shine with the berries’ ink. This is delicious, and joyful, too, because he has his mother’s attention for so long without her leaving.
“That’s all, ulym,” says Zuleikha, wiping smudges of sticky red juice from his chin. “We’ve played enough. I need to get to work.”
She spreads the shawl in the shade of the pines and sits Yuzuf on it. She tosses a scarf on her hair so her head doesn’t get too hot. Then she starts crawling around like a snail, picking berries. The basket is large and deep, and she can fill it if she puts in the effort.
Yuzuf is babbling something, telling stories to the flowers. Although he hasn’t yet learned to talk, not a single word, he goos and gahs away at the flowers in his own language, while examining them. This scared Zuleikha at first because she wondered if he’d grow up to be an imbecile. Her son’s eyes are smart and thoughtful, though, so she’s decided that maybe a time will come when he begins speaking. If he remains mute, fine, she’ll love him that way, too. She’ll feed and raise him. Just so long as he stands and starts walking.
She reaches for heavy berries languishing in the sun, her fingers moving apart thin, wiry bilberry shoots among round, green petal-like leaves. Suddenly there are boots in the bright, shiny greenery. They’re black, new, and have been rubbed to a thick, mirror-like shine with wax polish; they’re right next to her so she could just reach her hand out and touch them. Zuleikha slowly looks up and sees broad gray breeches growing out of tall narrow boot tops, the hem of a brown shirt, a reddish belt tautly tightened at the waist. And two hands, one holding a long hunting rifle with a burnished barrel. Higher are two chest pockets with flaps, and sitting between them at a slant is a thin strap for a holster. Even higher, buttons that shine in the sun prop up a high, tightly fastened collar. Raspberry-red collar tabs, broadly sweeping shoulders. And somewhere in the distant heights, under the dome of the sky, is a face framed by the halo of a peaked cap, with a fiery-red cap band and dark blue crown.
Ignatov’s looking at her.
Pine needles softly stir overhead, moaning a little in the light breeze. The chirr of grasshoppers is loud, heavy, and deafening in the grass. Honeybees are buzzing in the clearing and hefty bumblebees rumble around, flying from flower to flower.
Ignatov leans his rifle against a bright-red tree trunk that looks filled with sunlight, takes off his peaked cap, and drops it in the grass. He unfastens the top button of his shirt, then the second and third. He removes his belt, the buckle on his chest, and the buckle at his waist. Rips his shirt off over his head.
Zuleikha crawls backward a little, still on her hands and knees. Dry autumn grasses sway around her; the ripe seeds inside them turn them into rattles.
He takes a step toward her and crouches down, his face rapidly descending from the sky until it stops very, very close to hers. He extends a hand and his large, long palm completes its seemingly endless journey by touching her chin. When his fingers pull the knot
of her headscarf, the tightly tied fabric easily gives way, separating, flowing along her cheeks, and baring her head. Ignatov takes the ends of her braids in both hands and pulls. Zuleikha’s hands catch at the braids and she pulls them to herself, not giving them up. He slowly runs his fingers through her hair and the braids slacken, unplaiting.
“I wait for you, every night,” he says.
He has a dry smell, of warmth and tobacco.
“Well, don’t.”
If only she could take his fingers from her hair, but there’s no way; they’re persistent. And hot, like they were around her fist clenching the loose grains back in the forest in Yulbash.
“But you’re a woman. You need a man.”
His face is smooth; the wrinkles are as thin as hairs. There’s a faint red mark on his forehead, from his peaked cap.
“I have a man. I found one.”
His eyes are bright gray with green in their depths and the pupils are broad and black.
“Who?”
His breath is pure, like a child’s.
“A lawful husband. I married yesterday, the doctor.”
“You’re lying.”
His face is on hers. Zuleikha squeezes her eyes shut, presses her feet into something, pushes away, and rolls along the ground. She leaps up, grabs the rifle leaning against the tree, and points it at Ignatov.
“He’s my husband, before people and heaven,” she says and motions with the rifle barrel to go away. “And I’m his wife.”
“Lower it, you fool,” he answers from the grass. “It’ll fire.”
“A faithful wife!”
“Lower the barrel, I’m telling you.”
“And don’t you follow me into the urman again!”
Zuleikha squints and clumsily takes aim at Ignatov. The thin black end of the barrel trembles, wandering from side to side. Ignatov groans as he lowers his back into the tall grass.
“You’re a fool, what a fool …”
She finally manages to catch the disobediently quivering tip of the front sight in the notch of the back sight. She guides the barrel slowly, looking through the back sight, and the world seems different and more distinct, vivid, and bulging. The grass is lusher and greener over the spot where Ignatov is lying on his back. The butterflies circling the clearing and the dragonflies sitting on spikes of grass are larger and prettier, and Zuleikha even discerns web-like lines on their transparent wings and iridescent spheres in their tiny bulging eyes. The back of Yuzuf’s head is further away. Blood vessels form a marble-like pattern on the petals of his little pink ears and a heavy drop of sweat slowly rolls out from under his dark, curly hair to his white neck. Even further is a shaggy brown triangle. A bear’s snout.
A huge, glossy bear is standing at the edge of the clearing, gazing lazily, sideways, at Yuzuf. Its damp round nose shakes every now and then and its two lower fangs shine in its half-open jaw like splayed fingers.
“Ivan, how do I shoot?”
It’s as if her throat has filled with sand.
“Decided to exterminate me?” Ignatov’s angry face rises from the grass. He turns and sees the bear.
“Raise the hammer first,” he whispers.
Her wet fingers slide along the cold, sticky metal. Where is it, that hammer? The bear growls, not loudly, first examining the baby sitting in front of it, then Zuleikha and Ignatov, who are frozen at a distance. Yuzuf is watching the animal, rapt.
Zuleikha pulls the hammer toward herself and there’s a loud click. The bear growls louder and stands on its hind legs, growing into a powerful, shaggy hulk. They can now see a sunken and light-colored belly with uneven gray dappling, a barrel-like chest that juts forward, and the crooked sickles of claws on long front paws that nearly reach the ground. The beast bares its teeth and a shiny black and pink tongue flashes between yellowed fangs. Yuzuf screeches with joy and stands, too.
Zuleikha squeezes the trigger and a shot bangs. The butt of the rifle strikes her hard and painfully in the shoulder, throwing her backward. Gunpowder sharply hits her nose. Her son’s short, frightened shriek is like a bird call.
The bear takes a step toward Yuzuf. A second. A third. Then it collapses to the ground, parting the grass on both sides in broad, green waves. The shaggy carcass continues shuddering for a time, like a huge piece of brown aspic, before going still. Yuzuf turns his puzzled face toward his mother then back toward the beast.
“There, there.” Ignatov places his hands on her fingers, which have turned to stone on the rifle butt, and unhooks them one by one. “Now that was good … good …”
He finally releases the rifle and sets it aside. Zuleikha doesn’t notice because she’s watching as Yuzuf toddles over to the dead bear, wobbling a little on his slightly crooked little legs. His first step, second, third …
A shining bear eye clouds over with a murky film and a thick gray foam flows out from behind yellowed fangs. Yuzuf walks over, loudly slaps his little hand on the bear’s bumpy forehead, grabs at its hairy ears and pulls, then turns toward his mother and jubilantly laughs, firmly standing on both feet.
A GOOD MAN
“Leave.” Ignatov slows his rapid breathing and rolls on his back; there’s a tired emptiness in his body.
“Something happen, Vanya?” Aglaya adjusts her rumpled dress and sits on the bed.
“Leave.”
She looks at him a little longer as her slender fingers run through the fasteners on her stockings (the creamy skin of a magnificent thigh flashes among dark woolen folds). Did they come undone? No, there wasn’t time. She stands. The soft soles of her feet noiselessly tread over to a tin washbasin, where a crooked sliver of mirror has taken refuge between the logs.
“You’re going crazy, Vanya,” she says, primping short red ringlets that barely cover her ears. “More and more every day.”
Without getting out of bed, Ignatov gropes on the floor for her heavy shoe, a man’s shoe with a thick sole and squared toe. He hurls it, hitting her in the back, right, as it happens, on the spot where the dark little delicacy of a beauty mark sits on a round shoulder blade that looks like marble under threadbare cotton. Aglaya cries out and steps backward.
“I told you to leave!” He hurls the other shoe.
“You really are a madman!” Aglaya hastily gathers up her shoes and scampers out the door.
Ignatov stretches an arm under the bed and pulls out a long, narrow-necked bottle. There’s still something cloudy and yellowish splashing like oil at the bottom – not much, though, no more than a finger or two.
“Where … ?” he tiredly asks the ceiling, as if he’s repeating it for the tenth time. “Gorelov, you dog … where are you?”
Tangled in a balled-up blanket, rumpled pillows, and his own feet, he falls out of bed. He has trouble rising and holds the walls as he trudges to the door, which he opens wide. A mean, cold wind hits him in the face; the summer of 1938 happens to be cool. Semruk is sprawled below. In the middle are three broad, long barracks that take up almost all the settlement’s area, and a couple of dozen outbuildings that cluster around them, forming the semblance of a crooked little street. A small cook in a white apron hits a gong with a ladle, and the harsh, quavering sounds fly along the knoll, rolling further, beyond the Angara and into the taiga. Small figures hurry from every corner of Semruk to the dining hall for supper.
Standing on the front steps in just his underclothes and shaking the empty bottle, Ignatov screams into the evening settlement from the heights of the commandant’s headquarters:
“Where are you? I’ll kill you, Gorelov! Where are you?”
Gorelov is already running out from behind a corner. He’s out of breath and lugging a second bottle, pressed carefully against his chest, where something viscous and gray with an orange tinge gurgles heavily inside, bubbling from being shaken.
“There!” he says, panting with his mouth open, like a dog. He places his burden on the front steps. “It’s made from cloudberries, nice and fresh.”
Re
eling, Ignatov bends, drops the empty bottle, lifts the full one, and goes inside, miraculously not stumbling on the threshold.
*
“My master’s dissertation, back in Munich in 1906, was devoted to ideas about the nourishment and cultivation of cereal crops. I saw my work as mostly theoretical, having strategic rather than concrete practical importance. I never imagined for a moment that I would one day cultivate that same wheat myself!” Konstantin Arnoldovich Sumlinsky shakes the brownish flatbread he’s clutching in a withered hand with broken fingernails. “Moreover, to eat bread prepared from it!”
There’s a quick, even clatter of metal spoons all around them. The exiles are eating supper, sitting at long wooden tables that their elbows and hands have buffed to a pleasant, almost homey smoothness over the years. Two hundred mouths hurriedly chew, wasting no time on unnecessary words. They’d expanded the dining hall several years ago, adding on a second log building that’s longer and broader than the first, but four hundred people still won’t fit, so Semruk’s residents now eat in two shifts, taking turns.
The guards’ table, which is spacious and spread with a clean checked tablecloth once a week, remains in its previous spot, not far from the serving area. They eat there watchfully, without hurrying, enjoying the simple but thoroughly decent flavor of the food that’s served. It’s here – at one end, not taking much space, and prepared to leap right up when summoned – that Gorelov gulps down his thin soup. None of the guards remember when and under whose permission he’d started eating with them, but they tolerate him and don’t send him away. He’s sitting there so there must be a reason.
“And you consider all this,” says Ikonnikov, waving around a worn metal spoon whose handle is a spiral twist and whose sides look like they’ve been bitten, “reasonable payment for the opportunity to, as you stated it, cultivate wheat?”
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