Zuleikha

by Guzel Yakhina

  “Each individually and all of them together,” Yuzuf repeats. He sniffles and strides into the settlement.

  After his mother goes to the infirmary to scrub the floors, Yuzuf makes his way to the kitchen to give today’s birds to Achkenazi. The dead hazel grouse and the drake and the hen duck have come a long way in his hands without even knowing it: not just through a small taiga settlement – from a rickety log-house infirmary to a little kitchen smelling of fish guts and millet porridge. No. They’ve flown over red deserts and blue oceans, over black forests and fields spiked with wheaten gold, to the foot of a mountain chain at the edge of the world, then further, on foot this time, without using their wings (the hazel grouse quickly picking up its short, shaggy little legs, and the drake and hen duck, somehow or other, quacking any which way and waddling heavily on their broad, webbed feet), through seven wide and treacherous valleys, to the abode of the storybook shah bird. They don’t have time to learn the essence of the matter and behold in one another the illustrious image of Semrug, though, because when Achkenazi sees out the window that the little boy is playing with the birds, he takes them away and gives Yuzuf a light, friendly cuff. The door to the kitchen slams shut with a bang and a huge feather tinged with emerald remains in the air, to soar.

  THE FOUR ANGELS

  The world is enormous and vivid. It begins at a pearl-gray, wooden threshold – ornately eaten away by a beetle – in the house that Yuzuf and his mother share with the doctor. It extends through a broad yard flooded with waves of lush grass: where cracked wood blocks rise like islands with axes and knives crookedly sticking out of them, a woodpile climbs like a steep cliff, a crooked fence stretches like a broad mountain ridge, and laundry drying in the wind flutters like multicolored sails. It flows around the house, and toward the squeaky infirmary door, behind which there’s a kingdom of hidden floors his mother scrubs until they’re yellow, cool white sheets, intricate instruments gleaming with an unbelievable shine, and bitter medicinal aromas.

  From the infirmary, the world spreads further along a well-trodden path to the rest of the settlement: three very long log-built black barracks dominate; the agitational stand stretches broad wings where resounding slogans blaze on glossy posters; in the mysterious building with the kitchen something is constantly rustling and sizzling, shrouded in the smells of food; the gloomy commandant’s headquarters gazes from the top of the hill like an unassailable bastion; and shining bright in the distance between blue spruces there stands the clubhouse, where Ilya Ikonnikov makes magic day and night with strong-smelling paints.

  Yuzuf’s world ends here because his mother has forbidden him to go further, into the taiga. He tries not to upset her so obeys. Some evenings, though, the wait for her to return from hunting becomes unbearable, so he hurries off, his eyes squinting from fear, past the clubhouse, past the crooked poles with cracked skulls (elks, deer, boars, lynxes, badgers, and even one bear), some baring long fangs, onward, following a barely noticeable little path toward the ringing Chishme, so he can hide under a trembling rowan bush and look out for his mother’s slight figure flashing among reddish pine trunks.

  The Angara is another border of this world. Yuzuf loves sitting on the shore and peering into its ever-changing depths. The heavy, cold water hides within itself every shade of dark blue and gray, just as the urman hides every shade of green and the fire in the stove holds red and yellow.

  The world is so large you could pant after running from one border to another, and it’s so vivid that Yuzuf sometimes can’t get enough air. It makes him squint, too, as if the light were blinding him.

  Somewhere far away, beyond the mighty backs of the hills, there’s another world where his mother and the other settlement dwellers lived before coming to Semruk. In Yulbash, his mother told him, there were as many as a hundred houses – not ten and not twenty – and each was the size of the infirmary. It’s hard to imagine such a giant settlement. It’s probably even harder to live there because if you went out for a walk, later you’d be in the middle of a hundred houses, so how could you find your own? Strange, scary creatures that Yuzuf knows only through his mother’s stories wandered the streets of Yulbash: cows trudged sedately accompanied by the rumble and boom of little tin bells tied to their necks (these beasts vaguely resembled elks but had fat, bent horns and long tails like whips); nasty, loud-voiced goats darted around (about the size of a musk deer but shaggy, their horns curving to their backs and their beards sweeping the ground); and mean-tempered dogs bared their teeth from under fences (these were tame wolves who would lick their master’s hands and rip at a stranger’s throat). Each time Yuzuf hears his mother’s stories about her native land, he feels a chill in his belly and senses tremendous relief inside that she’d known to move from Yulbash to peaceable, cozy Semruk before it was too late!

  From what he can gather, mysterious Leningrad, which Izabella keeps calling Petersburg and Ilya Petrovich calls Petrograd, is smaller than Yulbash – nobody ever marveled about the number of houses there. On the other hand, the buildings are all made of stone. And not just the buildings, either, but the streets, embankments, and bridges – everything, in fact, is made of granite and marble. Yuzuf pities the poor Leningraders who are forced to take shelter in cold, damp stone dwellings. He imagines Izabella and Konstantin Arnoldovich shuddering, their teeth chattering, as they crawl down from stone bunks on foggy Leningrad mornings, huddling together and going outside the stone barrack to the stone-covered shore of the narrow little Neva River, which is smaller than the Angara but larger than the Chishme. Attempting to warm up, they wander along the shore among crowded bunches of marble lions (large, shaggy lynxes with magnificent manes), granite sphinxes (lions with human heads), and bronze statues (huge dolls as tall as a person, similar to those Ilya Petrovich sometimes molds out of clay), past the barrack called the Hermitage, as green as grass and tall as a powerful spruce, past the yellow barrack called the Admiralty, whose roof is decorated with a long and even needle (like a young pine tree) with a sailing ship at its point, past the gray barrack called the Stock Exchange, and past the fat, red, log-like Rostral Columns on whose tops there burns a pale fire that gives no warmth. A dim sun peeks through clouds that keep sprinkling a fine, slanting rain.

  It’s good fortune that these cold and terrifying worlds of Yulbash and Leningrad are far from Yuzuf. They lie in roughly the same parts of the world as the shah bird Semrug, crafty and beautiful women called peri, fire-breathing azhdakha dragons, and the gluttonous giantess, Zhalmavyz.

  Not long ago, Yuzuf saw a miracle. It happened one evening in early summer, just before supper, when Achkenazi asked him to take a dish of oatmeal stew to Ikonnikov. Since starting work on his agitational art, Ikonnikov often preferred to eat in his workplace, not taking a break from production. Yuzuf was rather afraid of the sullen artist, but he obediently took the dish from the cook and trudged off with it to the clubhouse. Diligently carrying the steaming bowl in both hands, Yuzuf pushed the door with his back, squeezed through the gap, shifted from one foot to the other in the darkness of the entrance, and finally ended up inside the clubhouse, which the light of the sunset was brightly illuminating.

  The hot dish burned Yuzuf’s fingers and the very delicious smell of oats boiled soft was in his nose; the oatmeal even seemed to be made with meat broth and have some fat. He needed to complete his assignment quickly and go back to the kitchen for his own portion.

  The artist’s stooped back was right by the window. Yuzuf was sniffling but Ikonnikov didn’t hear; he was standing somehow crookedly, as if he were leaning forward. Yuzuf approached closer and peered over his shoulder. In front of Ikonnikov, on a lopsided triangular little house that was somehow slapped together from beams (an easel, Ilya Petrovich would explain later) was a small square of canvas that was a hand and a half wide and just as tall. On the canvas was Leningrad, where a street as wide as the Angara flowed along an austere stone expanse between metal fences and houses that were silvery in the dawn
haze, and then flew over the Neva as a lace-like green bridge and disappeared on the other shore; church cupolas were concealed in greenery like flower buds and occasional people hurrying somewhere. A wave was hitting against the embankment’s gray granite, and long-winged birds hovered over the river. There was a smell of fresh foliage, wet stones, and a large body of water. A shrieking “Ee! Ee!” was distinctly audible but Yuzuf didn’t understand if that was an Angara seagull shrieking outside the window or a Leningrad seagull on the canvas. This wasn’t a painting; it was a window into Leningrad. A miracle.

  His fingers were suddenly burning unbearably. The dish banged onto the floor, the spoon bounced away and rolled, clinking, and the oats spattered everywhere. Yuzuf stood, his hands extended, fingertips scalded, his mouth wide open from fear, and his chilled heart beating in his belly. Rivulets of oat stew streamed along his bare knees and large shoes, tied with string at his ankles, then flowed through the floorboards to the ground beneath.

  “Huh?” Ikonnikov took his brush from the canvas and turned around. His eyes were stern, his brows shaggy, and his pendulous profile menacing.

  Yuzuf’s heart – completely panic-stricken from horror – jumped into his throat. He scampered away and clattered through the door.

  At the dining hall, Achkenazi later ladled out a full adult portion for Yuzuf (“Eat, helper!”), but the stew wouldn’t go down his throat. Yuzuf attempted to sneak the dish outside and take it to the clubhouse, but the ubiquitous and grumpy Gorelov blocked his path and pulled painfully at his ear. “Where’re you headed, you louse? That’s not allowed!” He had to eat the whole thing, choking down the small, carefully boiled oats and not sensing the taste. If they’d served bread, Yuzuf would have been able to hide it behind his shirt and take it out, but there wasn’t any bread that day.

  A couple of hours later – after biting his fingernails and lashing a switch at all the nettles behind the infirmary – Yuzuf went to the clubhouse to face up to what he’d done. He was ready, so let the mean artist scold or punish him.

  It was already darkening. The door squeaked louder and the shadows on the clubhouse’s log walls were longer and more intricate. A yellow kerosene lamp burned in the window and the finished painting was drying on the easel. Ikonnikov himself wasn’t there.

  Yuzuf took the lamp and walked right up to the canvas. Warm light streamed along the bold, gooey brushstrokes and delicate strands of various colors blended and swirled in each, none repeating – everything breathed and flowed in iridescent hues. Yuzuf gently touched the Neva with the tip of a burned finger. A small, round indentation remained on the river and a cool, dark blue spot on his finger.

  “And so what do you see?” Ikonnikov had entered unnoticed and was standing in the doorway, observing.

  Yuzuf shuddered and hurriedly placed the kerosene lamp in its place. Nabbed! And he couldn’t escape: Ikonnikov was right by the door and would catch him.

  “I’m asking you: what do you see in the painting?”

  “A river,” Yuzuf forced out, then corrected himself right away. “The Neva.”

  “Well? What else?”

  “Stone houses.”

  “And?”

  “An embankment. People. Trees. Seagulls. The dawn.”

  “And?”

  And? Yuzuf looked despondently at the canvas. There was nothing else there.

  “Fine then, go,” said Ikonnikov. “I took the dishes to the kitchen myself.”

  “My supper, I wanted to give it to you … Gorelov didn’t let me …”

  “Go on, now.”

  Ikonnikov took a brush and neatly smoothed the mark Yuzuf’s finger had left on the waves. His eyes were warming, as if they’d been heated by the sun rising over the Neva.

  “I also see it’s not cold in Leningrad,” Yuzuf said from the door.

  Ikonnikov didn’t turn.

  It became a habit after that: first Yuzuf brought Ilya Petrovich’s lunches and suppers, then he began stopping in for no reason, to hang around the clubhouse for days at a time. He washed out brushes, scraped palettes, and even just sat, observing Ikonnikov at work.

  Ikonnikov spent a large portion of his time high up, under the ceiling. Lying on the scaffolding, he would often stab the point of a homemade brush at the plywood, mumbling something under his breath. Sometimes he came down the steps, craned his neck, and ran around in circles to inspect his labors from the entrance, from the window, and from the center of the room. An excruciated expression would appear on his face, and his large, bony hands would scratch each other incessantly. After those inspections, Ilya Petrovich either grabbed a painting knife and frantically scraped off a piece of the mural (in moments like those, Yuzuf would sit quietly, taking refuge in the corner behind the easel) or purred with satisfaction and continued painting. Yuzuf didn’t have to hide then and could climb up the scaffolding to examine the painting more closely and even ask a question or two.

  Ikonnikov came down in the evenings. Stretched his numbed arms and legs, packed his wooden pipe with strong-smelling grassy dust, and smoked. Placed a clean canvas or piece of plywood on the easel. Yuzuf would hold his breath. There it was, it was starting.

  Ilya Petrovich’s fat brush first made several long, sweeping strokes, cutting the future painting’s expanse into sections, then thickly covered the resulting pieces in various colors. The canvas now resembled an incomprehensible and untidy kaleidoscope, a rubbish heap. With careful touches of a thin brush, that disorderly accumulation of shapes suddenly acquired proportion and meaning so that vivid, distinct images that had initially hardly shown through now revealed themselves. This was “the window” swinging open.

  Little boys in large black caps and torn trousers fished on the embankment of the River Seine, which was unknown to Yuzuf; half-naked female swimmers basked in the sun on the pearly stones of the Côte d’Azur; a sailboat sped along the big Neva, straight for the Vasilevsky Island spit; and bronze Graces spun in a round dance along the tree-lined paths at the deserted Oranienbaum. The places where those windows swung open dazzled Yuzuf. He would sit for hours, mesmerized, peering at the intertwined brush strokes, attentively listening to them, and sniffing. The distant world lying beyond the hills of the taiga was not so cold and forlorn after all. It smelled sharply of oil paint, but through that strong scent one could clearly sense the aroma of spring grass and warm stones and the wind and rotting leaves and freshly caught fish.

  One time when Ilya Petrovich asked him what he would like to see in the next painting, Yuzuf responded without pondering. A cow. Ikonnikov coughed, tugged a bit at his long nose, and slapped his brush at the plywood a couple of times. A fat and affectionate creature with large eyes gazed at Yuzuf. It was soft to the touch and had horns like yellow commas over the top of its curly head. It was not scary.

  Then Yuzuf requested a goat. Slap, slap! Alongside the cow there appeared a goat’s sharp snout with a funny little beard and white stubs of horns sticking out.

  “A dog,” Yuzuf ordered. A dog appeared, panting after running, its pink tongue cheerily hanging out.

  Yuzuf went silent. He had nothing else to wish for.

  From that day on, Ilya Petrovich painted for Yuzuf. Churches and embankments, bridges and palaces were set aside. The time had come for toys, fruits and vegetables, clothing and shoes, household objects, and zoo animals.

  Apple, lemon, watermelon, melon, and guavasteen. Potato, black radish, corn, eggplant, and tomato. There were various hats: this one’s called a top hat; that one’s a sombrero; and here’s a collapsible hat. There were gloves: men wear leather ones and only in autumn but women wear them year-round, lacy white ones to the theater and for visiting, mittens without fingers in cool weather, and fur ones in winter.

  The world surged so much and so rapidly from worn canvases and fragments of plywood that it threatened to deluge Yuzuf. At night he dreamt of cats in splendid tutus and giraffes carrying tattered primers in yellow leather satchels; seals greedily munched at ice creams
in strange cones; and striped tigers smashed at a large leather ball with their blunt muzzles. They were all woven from light, raised strokes and were thus a bit rough and angular, reflecting hundreds of delicious, strong-smelling specks of light when they were moved. Yuzuf would wake up excited, his head heavy, his ears burning, and the end of his nose cold, feeling as if the colors and images he had absorbed were overflowing his skull and bursting from inside. They needed to be released back out.

  Later, he couldn’t remember exactly what he had drawn first. It somehow happened on its own when he began scratching scribbles on the floor with a pencil stub that was lying around. This brought him relief – his head cooled and felt lighter. The scribbles gradually crept toward the window, taking over the windowsill and part of a wall. One morning, he discovered a clean piece of plywood and a brush on the easel, as if they’d been prepared by someone and forgotten. He looked up and saw Ikonnikov lying under the ceiling, as usual, his nose in his agitational art, paying no attention to Yuzuf. He cautiously took the brush, poked at the palette, and drew it along the plywood, leaving a thick orange comet. And then another one. And another. That was the day he began painting with oils.

  “Quelle date sommes-nous aujourd’hui?”

  “Le premier juillet mille neuf cent trente-huit, madame.”

  “Qu’est-ce que tu faisais aujourd’hui?”

  “Je dessinais, madame.”

  “Et encore?”

  “Je dessinais seulement, madame.”

  Yuzuf and Izabella are walking along the shore. He’s kicking pebbles with the toe of his shoe and they’re landing in the Angara with a plop; as always during lessons, Izabella is pacing sedately alongside him and one of the hands behind her back is holding a long birch switch.

  “Tu dessinais quoi, Yuzuf?”

  “A station and trains, lots of trains.” They haven’t gone over these words yet, so he answers in Russian. “First Ilya Petrovich drew them himself, then I did, after him.”