Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  “I’ll set the conditions for you; you won’t do it for me, you minister of arable farming. When I give the order, you’ll improve the collective farm on your own, without the sturdiest and handiest men and without oxen, too. You’ll plow the land with your own rod, not some tools.”

  “You can give an order to me,” Sumlinsky says to the floor, “but you can hardly give an order to the grain.”

  Ignatov tears his heavy, unwieldy head off the table.

  “Let’s have a drink, Zin. And that one” – Ignatov’s dulled gaze has trouble fumbling around for Konstantin Arnoldovich’s frail figure, which seems to be soaring over the floor in the dense cigarette smoke – “toss him out of here. Let him put it all in writing.”

  Kuznets is breathing loudly; he throws a parsley leaf in his mouth and rolls it along his teeth.

  “Let’s drink,” says Ignatov, pounding his hand on the table and not calming down. “Drink! Drink!”

  “Let’s,” Kuznets finally agrees, raising his glass and staring straight at the pale Sumlinsky. “To the future collective farm. To it blossoming like a magnificent socialist flower and as soon as possible. Fine, minister, I accept your conditions. But if you let me down …”

  They clink glasses. As they’re drinking, Sumlinsky vanishes outside without a sound. And that’s how the seeds of the Semruk collective farm were sown and the second agenda item for the day was closed; midnight has already rolled past by this time.

  The third item is so serious they head off to the bathhouse for discussions. They bring the vodka with them and chill it in a bucket of icy-cold Angara water. This point is called “informant and agent work,” which Ignatov has set up outrageously badly. The situation must be rectified. Moreover, immediately.

  “Who am I supposed to recruit as agents, anyway – the bears?” Ignatov listlessly resists as Kuznets whacks his back with a splendid bundle of birch leaves that’s been conscientiously soaked three times in boiling water.

  “It can even be elks and wolverines,” grunts Kuznets, the thick pearlescent air wavering around his powerful torso like a live cloud. “Just be ready to hand over five informants, that’s what I need.”

  When Ignatov was in charge of the special train, he regularly called in the minders from each car for a conversation. But it was one thing to talk and listen, and another thing entirely to note down observations and send them to central office, understanding that when your paper was placed in the person’s individual file it would remain there for a long time, likely forever, outliving both the person himself and his observer.

  They lash themselves to the bone and run down to the Angara – naked, they don’t get dressed – to take a dip. They shout in the icy water, scaring away all the nocturnal fish in the vicinity, splash around, and scurry back to the bathhouse to warm up.

  “Understand, Zin, brother,” says Ignatov, trying pitifully to pour vodka into small wooden dippers (they forgot to bring the glasses from the commandant’s headquarters and are too lazy to run back for them), “this agent … agent business … makes me sick …”

  Kuznets gulps from the dipper, chasing the drink with a dark brown birch leaf that’s stuck to Ignatov’s forehead, then spits out the leaf stem.

  “Look, Vanya, here’s what you have to do.”

  He kicks the door and night coolness blows in from outside; a creamy-yellow half-moon is dangling in the dark blue sky. Kuznets whistles briefly, like a master calling a pet dog. Gorelov’s concerned face appears in the doorway a minute later.

  “The women,” he reports, “are already sitting at the commandant’s headquarters, waiting on the front steps. One’s dark-complexioned, the other’s light, like last time. If they need to be brought over here for you, just say …”

  Kuznets’s finger beckons to Gorelov, who cautiously makes his way into the crowded little bathhouse, which is filled with the smells of smoke, white-hot stones, birch leaves, vodka, and sturdy male bodies. He averts his eyes from the delicate parts of the naked chiefs’ bodies, looking only at bright-red faces covered with glistening sweat.

  “What’s your … ?” Kuznets is snapping his fingers in the air.

  “Gorelov!”

  “Gorelov, why’re you cooling your heels here in the settlement instead of working off your term in a camp? The camp’s crying out for you, pouring bitter tears.”

  “I’m not a felon.” Gorelov’s bristling like a wild animal, backing away toward the door. “I’m just not part of a social class …”

  “You’re lucky, you dog.” Kuznets smiles. He splashes some vodka in a dipper and extends it to Gorelov, who nods with cautious thanks and drinks, his sharp Adam’s apple measuring the swallows like a piston. “I’d have put you in as a felon. Anyway, fine, don’t be a scaredy-cat. You’re better off telling me who’s breeding anti-Soviet ideas here in Semruk.”

  Gorelov sneers and squints out from behind the ladle with distrust, wondering if he’s being tested.

  “There’s a lot.”

  “Ah!” Kuznets meaningfully lifts a tensed finger. “And can you write them all down?”

  “I’ve learned to read and write.”

  “And might there be people who could help you, fill you in on details – the who, what, and where? The things you yourself might not have seen?”

  “I’ll find them, you can be sure I will.” Half of Gorelov’s mouth grins as if he still can’t believe the leaders are appealing to him with such an important request.

  “Good!” Kuznets waves his hand like a king. “Go, you’re dismissed for now.”

  And he looks victoriously at Ignatov, who’s collapsed by the wall: So what do you think of that? A lightning-fast recruitment in two steps, even just one and a half.

  “I can do it right now! Right now!” Gorelov’s bursting with concealed knowledge that he absolutely wants to report, in its entirety, to chiefs who look on him favorably at this anxious moment. “I can show you the main one! He’s not sleeping yet – he’s painting up his anti-Soviet stuff, that turncoat. I know it!”

  “Who?” Ignatov’s heavy gaze comes out from under his puffy eyelids and bores into Gorelov.

  “Ikonnikov! They say he has done ‘quite something’ at the clubhouse!”

  “Well, if it’s quite something, then go on, show us.” Kuznets stands. Reeling a bit, he ties a white sheet around his muscular purple torso. He takes on an immediate resemblance to an ancient Roman patrician in the hot springs at Caracalla.

  They built the clubhouse five years ago when there was an order from on high requiring labor settlements to establish domestic as well as agitational and cultural elements of life for the re-educated peasantry. Ignatov would have been more eager to put his workforce into expanding the infirmary or storage space, but an order is an order so they built it.

  In all honesty, the building came out botched. The tall, rectangular log frame building could hold two hundred people at most, and only standing. They initially held general gatherings there, but with Semruk’s rapid population growth, the gatherings were moved outside to the square, by the agitational board, meaning the clubhouse was empty most of the time. Ignatov proposed using the building as a school instead, or at least a storehouse, but Kuznets was adamant that the clubhouse exist in the settlement as its own entity. In other labor settlements, interest groups met in clubhouses: the Union of the Militant Godless, the Down with Illiteracy Society, and even Automobile Roads, a group focused on the development of automobilism and road improvements. It wouldn’t hurt to bring clubs of this sort to Semruk. No way in holy hell, thought Ignatov, picturing red-bearded Lukka diligently listening to a paper about a month-long campaign to fight roadlessness in Turkestan or Granny Yanipa in the ranks of the godless demonstrators. It’s better if they’re felling trees.

  They’d recently decided to decorate the clubhouse with agitational art. More importance has been placed on agitational work of late, though until now it’s been limited to just supplying bright posters wound in tight roll
s. Watching the settlement’s residents from the posters are curly-haired collective-farm women driving steel tractors with one hand while insistently and meaningfully pointing somewhere with the other (Konstantin Arnoldovich just sighed dreamily, running a finger along the carefully traced side of a jagged tractor wheel and explaining its mechanics in simple terms to peasants who’d never seen an iron horse). Others show well-fed male and female figures directing their inspired profiles toward an infant with splotchy red cheeks and chubby little hands waving in support of its own “joyful and happy childhood” (1938 was significant for Semruk in terms of demography because the birth rate exceeded the death rate that year for the first time since the settlement’s founding, apparently thanks in part to the powerful agitational influence of the poster). There are also red-hot Komsomol members striding along giant long-fingered hands that have been raised toward them in hope (under a special Gulag circular from 1932, it was forbidden to organize Young Pioneer squads from children of special migrants, but a reversal of policy in 1936 allowed this, and even declared it highly desirable, with the recommendation that future members of the Komsomol organization be diligently cultivated from those newly converted Young Pioneers). For some reason, a packet of posters from the Moscow Zoological Garden (“Entry fee only twenty kopeks!”) was sent from the central office along with three posters advertising squirrel coats from Soyuzmekhtorg for the ladies, although nobody considered hanging those on the board.

  Then came a sudden order to use agitational art – the lusher and heartier the better – to beautify places for leisure activity. The clubhouse was the only such place in Semruk. And so a decision was made to decorate it. Ignatov wanted to limit decorations to standard posters and a couple of street banners with full-throated inscriptions, but then Kuznets remembered something. Isn’t there an artist here, one of the “remainders,” somebody well known? Let him sweat a little and portray something a bit more original. Kuznets knew that inspectors from Moscow, who were sure to descend upon them one day, would duly appreciate the fact that places for public cultural uses existed in this out-of-the-way Siberian settlement, and not only that but that a creative approach had been taken to the complex matter of agitational art.

  Kuznets himself brought canvases, paints, and a small canister of turpentine from Krasnoyarsk. As Ikonnikov ran fingers coarsened by tree felling and shaking with excitement over the treasures that had fallen to him – Neapolitan yellow, cadmium, and Indian paints; ochres light and dark; mars, sienna, and umber; cinnabar, chrome, and Veronese green – he had a fit of creative inspiration and unexpectedly proposed that they start a mural for the ceiling.

  Kuznets narrowed his eyes balefully. “Like in a church?”

  “No, like in a subway station!” said Ikonnikov.

  So a mural it was. They brought plywood and covered the ceiling. More medicine or fishing gear would have been better than this indulgence, brooded Ignatov, observing the pensive Ikonnikov as he wandered among scaffolding standing in rows in the clubhouse’s empty space and incessantly grumbled to helpers who were nailing thin sheets of plywood to the log ceiling “too roughly.” They didn’t understand how you could hit “more softly” and “more gently” with a hammer, and they cast suspicious sideways glances at the eccentric artist and exchanged significant looks among themselves.

  Ikonnikov was anguishing. He was weary from a surge of emotions that blended inspiration, pining, long-forgotten youthful elation, despair, and some sort of aching tenderness for a mural that had not yet been created nor even fully visualized. Only a week before, when he was finishing sawing the eleventh pine trunk for the day or harnessing himself into rope to drag logs to the timber landing, he couldn’t have possibly imagined he’d be standing like this with his face raised toward the ceiling, toward a boundless space on which faces and cities and countries and times and all human life, from its very origin to spectral future horizons, were already glimmering for him and beginning to show themselves on the yellow plywood.

  “Agitational art should be simple and understandable,” Ignatov declared. “And without any of your tricks, so watch out.”

  During a week of creative torment, Ikonnikov’s face thinned and his pendulous nose sharpened, lending their master a resemblance to a large and sullen bird; his eyes flared with a rather wild fire. He primed the plywood day and night, lying under the ceiling on wooden scaffolding and only occasionally taking breaks to sleep and eat. With the commandant’s permission, he slept at the clubhouse, too. He completely stopped drinking the home brew that some of the exiles had learned to make from berries; Ikonnikov was known to imbibe. He used up his monthly supply of candles in five days; working at night was somehow jollier and more wicked. Finally, he began on the mural.

  Ignatov, who’d initially made daily stops at the clubhouse to inspect the creative process, was surprised to realize that agitational art was no quick matter. A month after work began, the ceiling had only been ruled into some kind of little squares, streaked with incomprehensible lines, and partially covered with colored dots whose intended use was unclear.

  “Will it be ready soon?” Ignatov asked Ikonnikov, with a sense of doom.

  “I’ll try to have it done by the November holidays,” Ikonnikov promised.

  It was the height of spring. Out of annoyance, Ignatov gave up and stopped going to check. He’d heard that Ikonnikov was using his free time away from agitational art to indulge himself by painting his own pictures on canvases that had ended up at his disposal. Ignatov hadn’t placed any particular meaning on that, but it turned out he should have.

  They pound on the door so hard that the scaffolding shakes and shudders under Ikonnikov.

  “Coming!” He speeds down the rungs in a hurry, his feet missing slats from nervousness.

  He forgets his candle above, so now it’s burning right under the ceiling, illuminating someone’s large, half-drawn hand with long Raphaelesque fingers and casting angular black shadows in all directions as its light catches scaffolding that towers high and threateningly, a homemade easel Ikonnikov had crafted from beams, and Ilya Petrovich himself, who’s scrambling to the door. He finally gropes at the bolt and unlocks it, just as the door swings open from a powerful blow, nearly flying off its hinges.

  “Greet your visitors, it’s a search!” booms out of the dark blue night.

  Gorelov rolls into the clubhouse holding a kerosene lamp in his extended hand and obligingly giving light for someone behind him. Two others enter, dressed so strangely and with such crimson faces that Ikonnikov doesn’t recognize them at first. Commandant Ignatov is wearing underclothes he’s pulled on haphazardly and he’s barefoot, with wet, tousled hair and a couple of birch leaves stuck to his forehead. Alongside him is Kuznets, the chief from the central office, but the only ordinary clothing he’s wearing is boots pulled onto bare legs covered with woolly black hair; his body is wound in a damp white sheet, over which he’s donned a reddish officer’s holster for some reason. Both men are carrying large wooden dippers that they click together zealously from time to time. They’re drunk, Ikonnikov understands, thoroughly smashed.

  “Well?” Kuznets inquires with a threatening playfulness, lightly scratching at dark, tightly curled thickets of hair on a chest as broad as a sail. “What do you have here? Show me!”

  Gorelov darts among the scaffolding like a mouse, making shadows from the lamp rush along the walls like a jumbled round dance.

  “I can smell it,” he mutters. “I smell it, it has to be here.” Then there’s a sudden, triumphant, “Found it!”

  Ignatov and Kuznets force their way toward his voice, entangling themselves in intersecting planks and knocking down some boards and tools.

  In a yellow patch of kerosene light, several canvases stand haphazardly by the wall and on the windowsill. There are narrow, cobbled little streets with large, yellow crystal-like streetlights and café tables huddled together on crowded sidewalks; three-story buildings of bakeries and greengroceries wound i
n ivy and flowers, their first stories dressed up in awnings as if they were purple skirts; festive palaces with roofs covered in a noble emerald patina; and a river shackled to sand-gray embankments and steel bridges.

  As Gorelov draws the lamp right up to one of the pictures, he sniffs at hardened, thick, glistening daubs of paint and digs at them with a fingernail.

  “There it is,” he whispers, “absolutely pure, out-and-out anti-Soviet activity! Realest you’ll ever see!”

  On the canvas is a long, narrow triangle, a tower of lacy metal set against a backdrop of malachite-green hills flowing toward the horizon.

  “Hmm?” Kuznets’s face nears the tower and his overbearing gaze runs from the top of the tower’s head to its short-legged base, then back. One must admit that the look of this structure really is completely bourgeois.

  “You’re dead meat!” Gorelov explodes, grabbing Ikonnikov by the jacket. “We excused him from work and didn’t spare the paints. There’s a whole container just of turpentine! And he’s doing this? Off to the logging site tomorrow! You’ll give me fifty percent over the quota, you louse!”

  “As you were!” Ignatov swings broadly and whacks Gorelov in the chest with a dipper, as if asking him to hold it. Straining, he focuses his gaze on the canvas then shifts it to Ikonnikov, who’s skulking in the shadows. “What is it?” He asks this sternly, poking a calloused finger at the picture.

  Ikonnikov looks at Ignatov’s hard fingernail that’s pinning the top of the Eiffel Tower to a transparent, dark blue Paris sky.

  “That …” He feels his legs weaken, go numb, and scatter like sand as his insides sink down somewhere close to the ground. “That’s Moscow.”

  Three pairs of eyes addled by alcohol fix their gaze on him.

  “Moscow,” he repeats, throat dry. “The building of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry.”

  Eyes skip back to the canvas, attempting to discern some sort of inscription or placard on the tower’s wrought-iron veins.