She’s wearing a gray double-breasted jacket with large, light gray checks and broad shoulders; it was left behind by one of the brand-new residents who’d passed into another world, and it warms her on cold days and protects her from the sun in the heat. Small, unintelligible letters – “Lucien Lelong, Paris” – dance in a circle on the shiny, deep-blue buttons the previous owner had sewn on very tightly with coarse thread. There is a faded lily on a lining that was once turquoise. It’s a good jacket and reminds Zuleikha of the kaftans her father’s guests from faraway Kazan wore when they came to visit.
A rifle, heavy and cold, nestles into her back; it will spring into her hands on its own if necessary, stretch toward the target, and never miss. “You cast a spell on it or something?” the others in the artel ask, half-joking, half-envious. Zuleikha keeps quiet. How can you explain that it’s not a rifle at all but practically a part of her, like her arm or eye? When she rasies the long, straight barrel, resting the butt on her shoulder, squinting at the sight’s opening, she’s merged, fused with the rifle. She feels it tense as it anticipates the shot. She senses the bulky bullets waiting, still, preparing to fly out of the barrel, each one a small, leaden death. She squeezes the trigger lovingly and smoothly, without hurrying.
She’d grasped long ago that if her rifle doesn’t shoot that squirrel or wood grouse, there will be another predator – be it a marten or a fox – that will tear it to pieces the next day. And in another month or year, the predator itself will die from illness or old age, feed the worms, dissolve into the earth, nourish trees with its juices, sprout up on them as fresh needles and baby cones, and then become food for the children of the killed squirrel or the wood grouse that was torn to pieces. Zuleikha hadn’t grasped that on her own. The urman taught her.
Death is everywhere here but death is simple, understandable, and wise, even just in its own way. Leaves and needles fall from the trees and rot in the earth, bushes break under a heavy bear paw and dry out, grass becomes quarry for a deer, just as a deer is quarry for a pack of wolves. Death is tightly, seamlessly interwoven with life, so it’s not scary. Beyond that, life always triumphs in the urman. No matter how terrible the peat fires rage in autumn, no matter how cold and harsh the winter is, no matter how rife the starving predators, Zuleikha knows that spring will come, the trees will burst with young greenery, silken grass will flood land that has been burned to black at one time, and cheery, abundant young will be born to the animals. Because of that, she doesn’t feel cruel when she’s killing. To the contrary: she feels herself part of a big and strong world, like a drop in an evergreen sea.
Not long ago she suddenly recalled the grain buried in the Yulbash cemetery, between her daughters’ graves. And she got to thinking that it hadn’t all been wasted. Some of the grains, if only a few, would have grown shoots through the cracks in the wooden coffin when spring came, and though the rest might have rotted, they’d have become food for the young sprouts. She imagined the tender shoots of the wheat spikes fighting their way between the uneven gravestones, overgrowing, hiding, and swaddling them. That warmed her soul, put her more at ease. Who can say if the spirit of the cemetery is still caring for her daughters?
She still hasn’t figured out if there are spirits in the urman. She has never run into one during her seven years of making the rounds of so many hills, walking through so many ravines, and crossing so many streams. Sometimes it seems, for an instant, that she herself is a spirit …
Zuleikha first checks the snares and traps along paths she’d identified as favored animal routes to her Chishme River: one by a large, half-rotten spruce where, on close inspection, the grass is trampled a little (small animals apparently couldn’t jump over the trunk, so they ran around it), and another near a deep, icy-cold pool as narrow as a crack and concealed in a spruce thicket. She makes the rounds to the snares twice a day, morning and evening, so a captured hare won’t fall into a predator’s clutches. Then she goes upstream, along the Chishme, toward the swampy ravines, to see the ducks’ favorite spots. The trip isn’t brief and she treks on until noon. She walks, perpetually on the lookout (any animal she runs into on the path, in the bushes, or on the spruce branches, could prove to be quarry), and thinks. Zuleikha didn’t think as much during her entire previous life in Yulbash as she does now during one day of hunting. During her years as an unrestricted hunter, she has recalled her entire life and taken it apart, piece by tiny piece. She recently and suddenly grasped that it’s good that fate has cast her here. She’s taking shelter in a cubbyhole in a state-owned infirmary, living among people who aren’t blood relations, speaking a language not native to her, hunting like a man, working enough for three, and she’s doing fine. Not that she’s happy, no. But she’s fine.
Toward midday, when there’s only a half-hour’s walk left to the duck creeks, her thoughts habitually turn to a dangerous topic. She’s tired of forbidding herself to think about it. But if she doesn’t forbid herself, she could hit upon something too scary to imagine. Zuleikha throws her rifle over her other shoulder. Thoughts aren’t a stream and you can’t block them with a dam, so let them flow. She often recalls that day at Round Clearing, seven years ago. How black boots, part of a uniform, sprang from grass strewn with bilberries, how Ignatov sat down in front of her on the ground and stretched a hand toward her headscarf. And she wasn’t afraid of him then but of herself, of how all of her, every bit, had turned to honey instantly just from his gaze, how she’d flowed toward him, blinded, deafened, having forgotten everything, even her son playing nearby. And she’d aimed the rifle not at him but at her fear, at her fear of committing sin with her husband’s murderer. But she didn’t commit sin – the bear had helped.
She left her kitchen job soon after, and Achkenazi’s new helper started taking lunches to the commandant’s office. Ignatov hasn’t sought her out since, and whatever went on between them receded, remaining in the past, as if it never happened. Sometimes she thinks maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just seemed to happen. But then she’ll see in Ignatov’s lowered eyes that it did. She knows by the way something inside her melts and thaws when she looks up at the commandant’s headquarters that it happened. She knows because she thinks about this every day; it happened.
He began drinking soon after, and hard. Zuleikha can’t stand drunks. There it was, she’d thought, her medicine. Seeing the commandant drunk, stupid, and berserk should have immediately snatched away all her unworthy thoughts. It didn’t work. The sight of Ignatov’s red eyes and his face, puffy from alcohol, made her feel pained instead of disgusted.
When yet another batch of new arrivals came, he picked out a slut with short red hair, sharp little breasts, and a firm rear end squeezed into the stretched fabric of a dress that was too tight. And when that same Aglaya began stopping by the commandant’s headquarters at the sight of Ignatov’s lighted cigarette at night, Zuleikha decided that was it: it was finally over. But was it really?
She shoulders her rifle and fires into a gap between shaggy spruce branches. A hazel grouse quivers its wings too late and its colorful body tumbles to the ground.
The day has flown by and has produced some success: a hazel grouse and a brace of ducks are bouncing on Zuleikha’s belt (the hidden spot for ducks didn’t let her down, giving her an emerald-headed drake with dressy white cheeks and a hefty black female), and a hare that got caught in the snare is in the bag on her back. She boldly strides home through the taiga, cracking branches and not hiding, since she’s done hunting. As she crosses the Chishme along the rocks, the bushes explode at the water’s edge and something small and nimble flies out, headlong. A small animal? No, it’s Yuzuf!
Zuleikha flings her arms wide open. Yuzuf’s long, long legs gleam out from under his short, patched pants as he flies toward her and embraces her, pressing his head into her. She lowers her face to the top of her son’s head and inhales his beloved, warm scent.
“I forbade you to wait for me here, ulym. It’s dangerous in the taiga.”
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He just pushes harder into her chest, the nape of his neck dangling like a floppy ear. She could have scolded him more strictly for defying her rule again, but of course she can’t because she herself is glad he’s come so they can have this brief time to walk along the path together, calmly and unhurried, as if there’s an eternity ahead for the two of them, to gently jostle each other, listen to birds, talk, or keep silent. There won’t be more of these solitary moments today. As soon as Zuleikha gets back, she’ll clean the infirmary and Yuzuf will help her by lugging water from the Angara, burning garbage in the yard …
“You’re not hungry?”
“The doctor fed me.”
Yuzuf calls Leibe “the doctor,” as does Zuleikha.
He unclasps his arms, releasing his mother. He’ll be eight soon, and he’s very tall, already taller than her shoulder, so if he keeps growing this fast, she’ll have to lengthen his jacket sleeves again, take apart his pants, and let down the hem. His hair is shaggy – Zuleikha doesn’t shave him bald, as people did in Yulbash, because his hair will keep him warm in winter, like a second hat – his nose is sharp, and his round eyes large. He’s taken after his father in height and build, but it’s immediately obvious his face is hers.
Yuzuf grandly takes her bag, grasping it with his hands, slinging it over his shoulder, and lugging it (he would have gladly carried his mother’s rifle, too, but Zuleikha doesn’t allow that); his fingers, the nails chewed off, are spotted with yellow and blue.
“Playing around in the paints again?”
He’s recently taken to visiting Ikonnikov at the settlement’s clubhouse, to draw. Remnants of plywood scribbled with charcoal and pieces of paper covered with fat pencil lines have started turning up at home. Yuzuf’s clothes are gradually becoming covered with smears and spatters of bright colors. The paints Ikonnikov uses to make his agitational art are durable and don’t yield to the Angara’s cold water, remaining instead to forever brighten Yuzuf’s pants and shirt, sewn from someone’s old dresses, and on the large men’s shoes inherited from some settlement resident or other. Zuleikha doesn’t approve of her son’s pursuits but doesn’t forbid them either, since it’s better that he dirty himself with paints than knock around the taiga alone. Yuzuf senses his mother’s stance and doesn’t talk much about the clubhouse.
“Tell me about Semrug, Mama.”
“I’ve told you a thousand times.”
“Then tell me a thousand and one.”
Zuleikha has shared with her son all the folk tales and legends she heard from her parents when she was a child: about shaggy, long-toed shurales, who tickle tardy forest wayfarers to death; about a certain unkempt water spirit called Su-anasy, who can’t untangle her mane of hair with a golden comb for a good hundred years; about the serpent Yuma, who turns into a beautiful girl by day to tempt young men and drinks their lifeblood at night; about fire-breathing azhdakha dragons that hide in the bottom of wells and devour women who come for water; about silly and greedy giant devs, who steal brides; about the powerful, narrowed-eyed Genghis Khan, who conquered half the world, casting the other half into fear and trepidation; and about his admirer and follower Timur the Lame, who completely destroyed a good hundred cities and built only one in return – the splendid Samarkand – over which huge golden stars shine from a sky eternally blue in any weather … The story of the magical bird Semrug is Yuzuf’s favorite.
“All right, listen,” Zuleikha agrees. “Once upon a time there lived in the world a bird. Not just any bird but a magical bird. Persians and Uzbeks called the bird Simurg, Kazakhs said Samuryk, and Tatars say Semrug.”
“The bird is named the same as our settlement?”
Yuzuf invariably asks that question and Zuleikha invariably answers, “No, ulym. The names are just similar. And this bird lived on top of the highest mountain.”
“Higher than our cliff?”
“A lot higher, Yuzuf. So much higher that wayfarers, whether on foot or on horseback, couldn’t reach its top, no matter how much they climbed. Nobody could see Semrug – not wild animals, nor birds, nor humans. They knew only that his plumage was more beautiful than all the worldly sunrises and sunsets combined. At one time, while flying over the faraway country of China, Semrug dropped one feather, clothing all of China in radiance, so the Chinese themselves turned into skillful picture painters. Semrug was not only splendidly beautiful but his wisdom was as boundless as the ocean.”
“Is the ocean wider than the Angara?”
“Wider, ulym … One time, all the birds on earth flew to a big celebration to revel together and rejoice at life. The festivities were spoiled, though, because the parrots started arguing with the magpies, the peacocks quarreled with the crows, the nightingales with the eagles …”
“What about the hazel grouse?” Yuzuf touches the round little bird head that’s dangling on his mother’s belt and looks like a colorful egg.
“With the ducks,” says Zuleikha, turning the dead drake’s green-tinted black head toward the hazel grouse: the birds’ motionless bills bump, as if they’re pecking each other.
Yuzuf’s laugh rings out melodiously.
“And from that great quarrel there arose in the world such a hullabaloo that all the leaves began falling off the trees and all the animals grew frightened and hid in their burrows. A wise hoopoe flapped his wings for three days, calming all the enraged birds. Finally, they settled down and let him speak.
“‘What is the use in spending our time and energy on factions and feuding,’ he told them. ‘We need to elect a shah bird among us to lead us and bring quarrels to an end with his authority.’ The birds agreed. But here was the question: who should be elected as their head? They began squabbling again and a scuffle nearly broke out, but the wise hoopoe already had a suggestion. ‘Let us fly to Semrug,’ he proposed, ‘and ask him to become our shah. Who, if not he, the most wonderful and most wise on earth, should be our sovereign?’ This speech went down so well that a large brigade of eager birds prepared right then and there to make the trip. The flock soared into the sky and set off for the highest mountain in the world, in search of his illustrious highness, Semrug.”
“A flock as vast and black as a cloud,” Yuzuf adds.
Yuzuf follows along attentively, not allowing even one detail to slip from his favorite story, and Zuleikha must retell it as she learned it from her father, word for word.
“Yes, that’s right,” she corrects herself. “A flock as vast and black as a cloud soared into the sky and set off for the highest mountain in the world, in search of his illustrious highness, Semrug. The birds flew day and night, not pausing to sleep or eat, until the last of their strength was all but gone, and finally they reached the foot of the mountain they had been seeking. There they had to abandon flight, as the path ahead could only be trodden on foot. For it was only through suffering that they could ascend to the top.
“The mountain trail led them first to the Valley of Quests, where birds who were not striving hard enough to reach the goal died. Then they crossed the Valley of Love, where those suffering from unrequited love remained and dropped down, lifeless. In the Valley of Insight, they lost those whose minds were not inquisitive and whose hearts were not open to new things.”
Yuzuf strides alongside Zuleikha, silent and puffing from exertion (the hare in the bag is heavy after feeding well during the summer). “How can the heart open itself to knowledge?” Zuleikha wonders aloud. “The heart is the house of feelings, not of reason.” She trails off for a moment, straightening the birds on her belt, and Yuzuf impatiently urges her on.
“In the treacherous Valley of Indifference … Come on, Mama!”
“In the treacherous Valley of Indifference,” Zuleikha continues, “there fell the most birds of all – those who could not make equal in their hearts grief and gladness, love and hatred, enemies and friends, living and dead.”
This part of the legend is the most incomprehensible to Zuleikha herself. How could anyone treat good
and bad equally? And consider that correct and necessary, too? Yuzuf nods his head almost imperceptibly in time with his strides, as if he understands everything and agrees.
“The rest ended up in the Valley of Unity, where each felt himself to be all, and all felt themselves to be each. The tired birds rejoiced, tasting the sweetness of unity. But it was too soon!”
“It was too soon!” Yuzuf whispers, confirming it.
“In the Valley of Confusion – which was shaken by thunderstorms – night and day, and truth and untruth were muddled. Everything the birds had come to know through such hardship during their long journey was swept away by a hurricane, and emptiness and hopelessness reigned in their souls. The progress they had made seemed useless to them, the life they had already lived, worthless. Many of them fell here, defeated by despair. The thirty most steadfast remained alive. Bleeding, mortally tired, their feathers singed, they crawled to the final vale. And there, in the Valley of Renunciation, all that awaited them was a smooth, unending watery surface, with eternal stillness over it. Beyond, there began the Land of Eternity, to which there was no entry for the living.”
Yuzuf and Zuleikha are striding along a path strewn with crunching evergreen needles and cones. There’s already a blue gap ahead between the trees – it’s the settlement. The closer they are to home, the slower Yuzuf walks; he wants his mother to be able to finish the story. When he sees the walls of the clubhouse, he stops so he can hear the end of the story in silence.
“The birds realized they had reached Semrug’s dwelling place and they felt his approach through the growing gladness in their hearts. Their eyes squinted from the bright light that filled the world and when they opened them, they saw only one other. In that instant, they grasped the essence – that they were all Semrug. Each individually and all of them together.”
Zuleikha Page 37