“And here, at the bottom, see this? That’s administrative offices and there’s the Yauza River. Behind it is Sokolniki and the hills further away, that’s Elk Island.”
Ignatov exhales loudly, with a whistle, and shifts his gaze to Gorelov, whose legs are bent at the knees from bewilderment. He’s crouched and his mouth is agape.
Kuznets takes the lamp from Gorelov and illuminates another picture, where there’s a lively, festively lit street and a large windmill with bright, ruby-red sails.
“And this,” he asks, “is it Moscow?”
“Yes, yes, of course. I draw from memory. I’m a professional, my memory is almost photographic.” Ikonnikov’s feet are gradually starting to sense the floor and his insides are returning to their proper places. He turns the painting slightly and the Moulin Rouge flashes in all its red hues, from fiery red to purple. “That’s Sretenka Street, not far from the Kremlin. The red windmill is a symbol of the victory of the revolution – it was built back in 1927 for the tenth anniversary. And that …” He pulls another canvas into the circle of light to show an intersection of the green and gray rays of boulevards and residential blocks, where the Arc de Triomphe towers over the city like an imposing Greek letter pi. “These are the Nikitsky Gates. Right behind Tverskoi Boulevard, off to the left. Lenin spoke there in 1917, remember? Do you happen to have been to Moscow?”
“We’re Leningraders,” Gorelov says quietly and irately, through clenched teeth.
“Leningraders!” Ignatov grabs him by the scruff of his neck but can’t stay on his feet and drops to the floor, carrying Gorelov with him. Part of the scaffolding creaks, sways, and falls, scattering large pieces of debris on them both. Ikonnikov backs away, frightened, looking at the two muttering bodies bumbling around on the floor. Kuznets is laughing so hard he’s pressing his hands against his knees so he won’t fall, shaking his black head, and snorting from deep inside his gut.
Ignatov doesn’t have the strength to stand and he’s the first to crawl out, creeping on his belly.
“Let’s get out of here, Zin,” he mutters. “Gorelov, you fool, all we did was waste our time.” His gaze settles on an empty bathhouse dipper lying on the floor and he examines it in astonishment. “What, there’s nothing to drink?”
The guilty party writhes behind him, and the debris crunches.
“What do you mean, nothing?” Gorelov shouts eagerly. “Just ask Ikonnikov – he must have a supply!”
A supply really does turn up at the clubhouse and it’s not small. They drink right away, using the dippers. Kuznets forgets his squeamishness about local alcohol products and Ignatov’s mouth joyfully senses the sharp berry flavor he’s grown accustomed to. They’re sitting on the floor, scrutinizing spots on the future mural that’s flashing dimly on the ceiling; the spots sway and dance some sort of subtle, intricate tango or foxtrot.
“You’ll make me such agitational art,” Kuznets says, breathing the hot smells of vodka, fried fish, and home brew into Ikonnikov’s ear. “Such art that it makes people shiver! Their spines will tingle! To the very heels of their feet! You got that?”
Ikonnikov nods submissively. How could he not get it?
The tiredness that had been descending upon Ignatov suddenly eases after the home brew. He feels a wave of strong, furious joy rising from somewhere deep inside. He feels like laughing and now everything is funny: the scaffolding spinning in the nearly dark clubhouse, and Ikonnikov’s frightened, sober little face and his pendulous nose, and the hole Gorelov tore in his uniform jacket when he tumbled to the floor, and the sheet around Kuznets’s torso that keeps trying to slide off and bare the chief’s imposing loins. Ignatov jumps to his feet and sways but remains standing. He spreads his arms wide – “I feel so good, Zin!”
Kuznets is already rising, too. He’s regally tucking in the end of his sheet that had come loose so it’s under his holster, and he stomps to the exit, knocking over something heavy (maybe it’s crates, maybe it’s buckets) and booming along the way.
“Forrrrrward!” he shouts. “Hurrah, comrades!”
Revolver taken from holster, door kicked with boot, and out. Ignatov and Gorelov follow.
The sky is already a smoky, pre-dawn blue. The stars are dimming quickly, one after another. Ignatov runs forward, behind his commander’s white back, and feels joy expanding and growing in his body. The ground springs underneath his feet, tossing him up so he flies forward, lightly and swiftly. This always happens during an offensive. Who’s hiding up ahead, waiting in ambush like a coward? White Army? Narrow-eyed Basmachi? For some reason there’s neither a revolver nor a saber in his hand. He picks up a blade that someone has dropped on the ground and waves it. The saber cuts the air with a whistle.
“For the revolution!” he shouts at the top of his lungs. “For the Red Arrrrm—”
Kuznets shoots. The echo slams along the river like thunder, rolling.
In the buildings ahead, faces distorted by fear are peering out of windows. Uh-huh, they’re scared, the sons of bitches!
“The enemy,” screams Kuznets. “I’ll slaughter them all!”
“I’ll slice them up!” Ignatov chimes in and starts hacking everything around.
They burst in, but where? Voices squeal loudly and shrilly, people scatter in all directions. Ignatov slices at something white and soft (the air fills with down, grassy debris, and dust) and at something hard and wooden (the saber in his hand breaks off for some reason but he finds a new one) and at something human and soft (someone screams, swears, howls).
They abruptly end up outside again and there they are up ahead, the enemy, hopping in all directions, escaping as they wail, and running fast – those sons of bitches! – so they can’t catch up. Kuznets shoots after them again, then again and again, and the shouts become more desperate, changing to a screech. Kuznets suddenly falls, either overwhelmed by a treacherous bullet coming from the other side or from simply stumbling.
Ignatov, who’s been running behind Kuznets, trips on his large body, and drops to the ground alongside him, where his face gets stuck in something slimy and viscous (mud?) and his skull cracks, exploding with pain. The joy disappears immediately, evaporating as if it had never been there, and a familiar, loathsome, and gnawing anguish is again sloshing in his chest. He looks at the saber in his hand. It’s not a saber, it’s a stick that he tosses it away. Ignatov wipes his face with his palm and finds sludgy clay. He crawls toward Kuznets’s body, stretched out near him. It’s hard to move because it feels like his body has been replaced with gluey aspic.
“Zin,” whispers Ignatov, the mud crunching distinctly on his teeth, “let me out of here. I can’t stay here any longer, you hear? I can’t.”
Kuznets is snoring, his shaggy chest swelling toward the heavens.
THE SHAH BIRD
Zuleikha opens her eyes. A ray of sun is pushing through shabby cotton curtains, creeping along a reddish curve on a log wall, over a flowered, coarse cotton pillow with the black tips of grouse feathers poking through, and further, toward Yuzuf’s delicate ear, rosy in the shaft of light. She extends her hand and noiselessly pulls at the curtain – her boy still has a long time to sleep. But it’s daybreak, time for her to get up.
She carefully frees her arm out from under his head, lowers her bare feet to a floor that’s cooled during the night, and places a scarf on her pillow so when her son decides to wake up, he’ll stretch, nestle his face into her scent, and sleep a little longer. Without looking, she takes her jacket, bag, and rifle from their nail. She pushes the door – the babbling of birds and the racket of the wind burst in – and noiselessly slips out. In the hallway, she puts on simple leather shoes that Granny Yanipa crafted from elk skin, quickly braids her hair, and then it’s onward, into the urman.
Zuleikha has always been the very first among the camp’s hunting artel – a work group of five – to go out into the taiga. “Your animal is still sleeping, dreaming, but you’re already set for work,” grumbles the red-bearded
Lukka. Sometimes they meet when he’s coming to the settlement after night fishing and she’s leaving to hunt. She doesn’t deny it, she just silently smiles back; she knows her quarry will never escape from her.
She has fond memories of her first bear, the one she killed in 1931 at Round Clearing: if it hadn’t been for that bear, she would never have discovered how accurate an eye and steady a hand she has. All that remains of the bear is a yellowish-gray skull on a pole. She visits it occasionally and strokes it, in thanks.
The settlement’s hunting artel was founded back then, seven years ago. Achkenazi had tried to change Zuleikha’s mind when she decided to leave her job in the kitchen. He had even scolded her: “How will you feed your son?” That evening, she brought him a brace of wood grouse for the evening soup. He accepted the meat and stopped trying to change her mind. They found him another kitchen helper.
In the spring and summer, she comes back from the taiga carrying fat grouse and heavy geese with thick, tough necks. A couple of times she’s been fortunate to take down a roe deer and, once, even a quivering, frightened musk deer. She sets snares to catch hares, and for foxes she sets traps sent by the central office, at the artel’s request. In winter she hunts animals whose thick, glossy fur has already grown in – squirrels, Siberian weasels, and occasionally sables.
In summer, the hunting artel’s capacity goes primarily toward the settlement’s needs: they eat and preserve fowl, baking the feathers and down in the sun for use in pillows and quilts. The only thing they send to the central office are beaver pelts, but those don’t turn up often. The areas around Semruk aren’t for beavers.
Winter is another matter, the most hectic time. Headquarters takes all the fur animals, whether they’re ordinary squirrels and martens or rare sables that sometimes need to be tracked for two or three days. The settlement is paid for the pelts, most often in money transfers, only rarely in hard cash. The majority of the money goes toward the settlement’s budget, with some offset by taxes and other deductions (as well as state taxes, there are settlement fees of five percent added on, plus payments on the settlement’s credits), and the remainder is given to the hunters themselves. Zuleikha has already been earning money this way for seven years.
People say it’s best to hunt with dogs but the settlers aren’t allowed to have them, “as a precaution.” Even rifles are permitted only reluctantly, probably because hunting wouldn’t work out very well at all with just snares and bear spears, but no firearms. All five of Semruk’s guns are registered with the commandant’s office. Strictly speaking, they’re supposed to be given out in late autumn, only for hunting season, and then returned to the commandant in early spring, but Ignatov doesn’t follow the rules as tightly as he should. The hunters supply the settlement with meat in the summer and everyone eats well during those three warm months, making up for the long, hungry winter, which takes away a good quarter (if not an entire third) of Semruk’s population each year, as if winter is licking them away with its tongue. Those who perish are generally newcomers, the ones who arrive toward the beginning of cold weather and don’t have time to adjust to the harsh local climate.
At first they processed the pelts themselves, each on their own, but then they banded together, putting everything in Granny Yanipa’s hands. By that time, there was little use at the logging site for an old woman who was half-blind, but she didn’t need to see to remove membranes and boil the pelts, afterward drying and combing them. And so they count the working group as five and a half people, meaning five hunters plus one half, Yanipa.
Zuleikha is a full-fledged unit of labor for the artel, but another half of her is registered as an aide in the infirmary, so there’s not just one of her but an entire one and a half. Leibe has explained that she needs an official occupation, on paper, for the summer season. The bureaucratic mathematics don’t trouble her; if that’s the way things have to be, fine.
It’s more complicated for other members of the artel: there aren’t many “vacancies” for a hunter who disappears in the taiga for days at a time. Formally registering them for lumbering jobs would mean having to automatically increase a work quota that already takes tremendous effort to fulfill and sometimes isn’t fulfilled anyway. They get around the system however they can: one person might be made a file clerk, another an assistant to the settlement’s bookkeeper. They’re forbidden from joining the staff in the kitchen, lest the team there get too large. The hunters try to work off their half-time jobs at least partially, however and whenever they can, so that the summer assignments aren’t pure deception; this additional burden on them is considered worth it, though, for the opportunity to remain an artel member without restrictions. Back at the central office, Kuznets graciously closes his eyes to these hidden violations (the problem with the hunters is resolved the same way in all the other labor settlements), though he doesn’t miss chances to remind Ignatov that, “Yes, my dear man, I know everything about you and I see through you, as if you were a glass of you know what.”
Zuleikha works off her half honestly. She returns from the taiga before supper, when it’s still light, and goes to the infirmary to scrub, scour, clean, wipe, and boil. She’s also learned to apply dressings, treat wounds, and even poke a long, sharp syringe into skinny male buttocks covered in hair. At first Leibe waved her aside and sent her to bed (“You’re on your last legs, Zuleikha!”) but then he stopped. The infirmary has grown and he can no longer get by without her help. Zuleikha truly is on her last legs but that’s only later, at night, when the floors are clean, the instruments sterilized, the linens boiled, and the patients rebandaged and fed.
As before, Zuleikha and her son are living in the infirmary, with Leibe. Yuzuf’s seizures are gone, and they’d gradually stopped sitting watch at his bedside during the night. Leibe hadn’t turned them out, though. More than anything, he seems glad for their presence in the housing provided by his job. Leibe spends little time in his living quarters, only sleeping there at night.
Living in a small, comfortable room with its own stove is their salvation. Adults as well as children get sick in the freezing common barracks, with the wind blowing through. And so Zuleikha gratefully accepts this gift and works for her happiness every day until she’s exhausted, with a rag and bucket in her hands.
In the beginning, she thought that because she was living under one roof with a man unrelated to her, that meant she was his wife before heaven and people. And was thus obligated to pay back a wifely debt. How could it be otherwise? Every evening after lulling her son to sleep, slipping out of his bed unnoticed, and thoroughly washing, she would sit on the stove bench, her belly chilled until it ached, to wait for the doctor. He would appear after midnight, barely alive from fatigue, hurriedly swallow, without chewing, the food she’d left for him, and collapse in his own bed. “Don’t wait up for me every night, Zuleikha,” he’d scold her, his words slurred from fatigue. “I’m still in a condition to cope with my own meal.” And he’d quickly fall asleep. Zuleikha would sigh with relief and duck behind the curtain, to her son. Then she would sit on the stove bench the next evening, to wait again.
One time, after falling face down on his sleeping bench, as usual, without even taking off his shoes, Leibe suddenly grasped the reason for her night vigils. He abruptly sat up in bed and looked at Zuleikha, who was sitting by the stove, her hair in neat braids and her eyes cast downward.
“Come over here, Zuleikha.”
She walked over to him, her face white, mouth a straight line, and eyes darting along the floor.
“Sit right here with me …”
She sat down on the edge of the bench, not breathing.
“And look at me.”
She slowly looked up at him, as if her eyes were heavy.
“You don’t owe me anything.”
She looked at him, frightened, not understanding.
“Absolutely nothing at all. Hear me?”
She pressed her braids to her lips, not knowing what to do with her e
yes.
“I order you to put out the light immediately and sleep. And don’t wait up for me again. Ever! Is that clear?”
She nodded slightly and suddenly began breathing loudly and wearily.
“If I see you do this again, I’ll send you to the barrack. I’ll keep Yuzuf here but I’ll send you the hell out!”
He didn’t have a chance to finish because Zuleikha had already darted to the kerosene cooker, blown on the flame, and vanished into the darkness. That’s how the question of their relations was conclusively and irreversibly resolved.
Lying in the dark with her eyes wide open and her loudly pounding heart covered with a pelt blanket, Zuleikha agonized and couldn’t go to sleep for a long time. Would she fall into sin by continuing to live under the same roof with the doctor, not as a husband but as a man unrelated to her? What would people say? Would heaven punish her? Heaven kept silent, likely agreeing to the situation. People simply accepted how things were – the aide lived at the infirmary, what of it? She’d arranged things well for herself, been lucky. When Zuleikha couldn’t hold back and shared her doubts with Izabella, Izabella just laughed in response: “What are you talking about, child! Sins are completely different for us here.”
*
Zuleikha is making her way through the forest. The trees ring out in birdsong and the awakening sun beats through spruce branches, their needles blazing with gold. Zuleikha’s leather shoes bound easily along the rocks to cross the river she calls the Chishme and run along a narrow path next to reddish pines, through Round Clearing, past the burned birch, and further, into the thick wilderness of the taiga’s urman, where the animals are the most fattened and delicious.
Surrounded here by blue-green spruces, she must slip noiselessly, barely touch the earth – not trample the grass, not break a branch, not knock down a pine cone – while leaving neither a trace nor a scent. She must dissolve into the cool air, the buzz of mosquitoes, and a ray of sun. Zuleikha knows how because her body is light and obedient, her motions quick and precise; she herself is like a wild animal, like a bird, like the wind as it sweeps between spruce boughs and weaves through juniper bushes and fallen trees.
Zuleikha Page 36