She arrives at sunset, as usual. Pressing the heavy, hot basin to her belly, she knocks her foot lightly at the door, which gives way and opens. Zuleikha enters and unburdens herself of the steaming basin, setting it on the table. Ignatov isn’t in bed, though; he’s standing by the windowsill, with his back leaning against the window, and he’s looking right at her from the altitude of his warrior-like height.
“I came to take off your dressings,” Zuleikha says to the basin on the table.
“Then take them off.”
Zuleikha approaches Ignatov. He’s very tall, probably taller than Murtaza. His head, wrapped in a white bandage like a turban, is just under the ceiling.
“I can’t reach.”
“You’ll reach.”
She stands on tiptoe and stretches upward, tipping her head back to see. Her fingers grope for the familiar bristly back of his head and unwind the dressing. It’s hot in the commandant’s headquarters, as if it’s being heated.
“Your fingers are ice cold,” says Ignatov.
His face is very close. She silently unwinds the bandage. After she’s finally managed that, she lets her arms down, walks off to the table, and exhales. She submerges a hand with a piece of clean gauze into scalding water in the basin and walks over to Ignatov again, carrying the scrap of fabric, which is dripping hot water and steaming white.
“But I can’t see anything.”
“Then work by feel.”
She raises the fabric, applies it to the stubbly top of his head, and leads it down the steep back. Hot drops of water flow down her arm, wetting her smock sleeves. Her hands truly are cold, though, despite the hot water.
Ignatov is wearing a shirt over his bandaged arm but has only slipped his healthy arm into a sleeve. He usually removes his belt before Zuleikha’s arrival but today he hasn’t. She fumbles for a long time, agonizing, as she handles the tight brass fastener, and the belt finally clangs, muffled, on the floor. She’s angry and doesn’t pick it up; then she abruptly pulls up the thin fabric of his shirt, stripping it from his large, motionless body.
“You’ll break the other arm,” Ignatov says without smiling. “Stay this time,” he adds without a pause.
As Zuleikha furiously and quickly unwinds the endless long bandages, she feels her hands quickly warm from fury, heating and melting as a heavy, honeyed smell cloaks her, flooding her. Ignatov’s arm is already free of bandages. He cautiously moves his fingers. He lifts a hand and places it on her neck.
“Stay,” he repeats.
She breaks away, picks all the rags off the floor, and grabs the basin. She runs to the door, stumbling and spattering water.
“What about washing the sutures?” he shouts after her.
Zuleikha turns toward him and splashes hot water from the basin at his hairless white chest.
Zuleikha can’t fall asleep that night. She lies, listening to the darkness with her son’s even breathing at her shoulder, the doctor’s light snoring in the corner, and the rumble of the wind in the stove. It’s hot and stuffy.
She stands, greedily swallowing water from a dipper, then tosses a jacket on her shoulders and slips out of the house. It’s a clear night, the stars are out, and the moon is like a lantern. A milky-white steam floats from her mouth.
She goes down to the Angara and looks at the moon’s oily-yellow path, which is dabbled across the waves; she listens to froth murmuring by the shore and a distant yelping across the river. She braids her hair tighter, throws it on her back, and splashes her face with cold water. It’s time to go home.
Along the way she notices a bright red dot on the hill by the commandant’s headquarters. It’s Ignatov smoking. The dot gets bigger, swells with light, and then diminishes, paling. It blinks like a lighthouse. And Zuleikha answers its call.
Ignatov notices her from far away. He stops smoking and the red dot between his fingers goes out for an interminably long time. She stops at the front steps, looks at Ignatov sitting on the stairs, and takes her braids in her hands to unplait one, then the other. His hand suddenly jerks because the cigarette has burned down and scorched his fingers. He stands and goes up into the house, leaning on the crutch.
The open door squeaks as it swings on its hinges. Zuleikha climbs the stairs. She stands. Then she extends a hand, draws aside a heavy curtain that’s soft to the touch and smells sharply of sheep hides, and steps inside the black tent.
Time turns inside out within the black tent. It doesn’t flow straight but sideways, slanting. Zuleikha swims in it like a fish, like a wave, either dissolving fully or appearing again within the boundaries of her own body. Sometimes after closing the squeaking door of the commandant’s headquarters behind her, she’ll discover a few moments later that morning has come. Other times, after placing her hand on Ignatov’s broad back and pressing her face to the base of his neck, she senses an infinitely long flow of minutes measured by occasional ringing drops that fall into a bucket from the tip of a spout on the tin washstand. There’s an eternity between the first drop and the second.
There’s no place for recollections and fears in the black tent – its bulky animal hides reliably protect Zuleikha from the past and future. There is only today, only now. That “now” is so teeming and palpable that Zuleikha’s eyes mist over.
“Say something, don’t be silent,” Ignatov has asked her, his face nearing hers.
She looks into his clear gray eyes and draws a finger along his even forehead striped with fine wrinkles, along his steep and smooth cheekbone, along his cheek and chin.
“So beautiful,” she murmurs.
“Is that really the sort of thing you should say to a man … ?”
She seems not to have slept that autumn. She puts her son to bed, kisses the warm top of his head, and then quickly leaves the infirmary and climbs the path where the little red flame persistently summons her each night. They don’t close their eyes; there are never enough hours in those nights. In the morning she comes to see her sleeping son, then she goes hunting, and in the evening there’s the infirmary to clean. Zuleikha has no time to sleep. And she doesn’t want to anyway. Her strength hasn’t diminished, it’s increased and overflowed. She doesn’t walk, she flies; she doesn’t hunt, she simply takes her dues from the taiga; and for entire days she awaits the nights.
She’s not ashamed. Everything she was taught and learned by rote as a child has left her, gone away. What’s new and has come in exchange has washed away the fears, just as a flood from melting snow washes away last year’s twigs and decayed leaves.
“A wife is the tilled soil where her husband sows the seeds of his descendants,” is what her mother taught her before sending her off to Murtaza’s home. “The plowman comes to till when he desires and tills while he has the strength. It does not befit the land to defy its tiller.” And she did not defy – she gritted her teeth, held her breath, and tolerated it, living that way for so many years, not knowing it could be otherwise. Now she knows.
Her son senses something and has become pensive and reserved when he peers into her eyes. He takes a long time to go to sleep, tossing and turning, constantly waking up, and not letting his mother go. He’s also maturing rapidly and growing more serious.
Yuzuf started school that autumn. There are eighteen children in Semruk and all are gathered into one classroom and seated in two rows: older and younger. They study together. There are only five textbooks (all about arithmetic) for the entire school, but what books they are! They’re hot off the presses, still crackling at the bindings and smelling deliciously of printer’s ink. A certain Kislitsyn handles the teaching duties. He’s from the latest batch of newcomers, maybe an academician, maybe some former official from the People’s Commissariat of Education. Izabella had already taught Yuzuf to read so when he saw the author’s surname on a textbook cover – which says “Y.Z. Kislitsyn” – he walked up to Yakov Zavyalovich, bewildered, and asked, “Do you have the same surname?”
“Yes,” the teacher cheerlessly smi
rked, “one might say I have the exact same name.” Zuleikha is glad her son is busy at school during the day, since he’s fed and cared for. When he helps her with cleaning in the evenings, she asks if he likes school. “Yes,” he answers, “a lot.” “Well, good, it’s important to learn to count and write.”
It tortures her that she no longer gives all her warmth to her Yuzuf, that her nighttime kisses are more ardent and plentiful than the evening ones for her son, that he could wake up at night in bed alone and be afraid, and that she now has a secret from him. So she hugs Yuzuf harder and longer, smothers him with kisses, and showers him with caresses. Sometimes he breaks loose from his mother’s arms when they grip him too tightly and looks out at her guiltily from under his brow. Is she offended? His mother just responds with a broad, happy smile.
People in the settlement evidently suspect something. Zuleikha hasn’t given any thought to what they would say as she doesn’t interact much with people, and then only with the old-timers, and she disappears into the forest for days at a time anyway. If not for Gorelov, she wouldn’t have found out that people had noticed her relationship with Ignatov.
One morning, he catches Zuleikha on her way to the taiga. By this time, he has been living in his own small, squat log cabin for a couple of years (Gorelov was the first to put up a privately owned house, and settled in well, fencing it in and putting glass in the windows), and he’s made an earthen bench at the front of the house, where he loves to relax, watching the settlement’s residents pass by.
Zuleikha is walking through still-sleepy Semruk on a dark-gray autumn morning and Gorelov is already sitting by his little house, smoking every now and then. He has obviously risen this early on her account and has been sitting waiting for her.
“Well, hello there, hunting artel! Going to the taiga to hunt down your daily quota?”
“That’s right.”
“Here, have a seat, let’s have a chat. There’s something we need to talk about.”
“I don’t have time to hang around, my prey’s waiting. So go on, just say it.”
Gorelov rises from the bench – under the uniform jacket draped over his shoulders is a dirty, striped sailor jersey and legs like crooked matches dressed in close-fitting drawers and boots. He slowly walks around Zuleikha with his loose gait, examining her as if he’s seeing her for the first time.
“Not so bad,” he says quietly, as if to himself. “Ignatov chose a woman for himself, a fine one. Nice job. I hadn’t spotted that right away.”
“You need something?” Zuleikha feels blood pounding in her face.
“Nothing from you, sugar. You just keep having your love affairs. Just come and see me every now and then, won’t you, to have a chat about the commandant. Our man’s a hothead. The chief instructed me to look after him. And you, hunting artel, you should take care not to have a falling out with the chief if you want to keep doing your artel thing instead of rotting at the logging site.”
Gorelov’s drilling his narrow, slightly flattened eyes into her and she sees their color distinctly for the first time. They’re impenetrably black.
Aglaya runs out of the house wearing an old sheepskin coat over a beige lace slip and shoes on bare feet, and her red curls are corkscrewed in all directions. She’s bringing Gorelov a quilted jacket. She tosses it on his shoulders and wraps it proprietarily over his chest: See that you don’t freeze! She looks jealously at both of them and runs off, back into the house. Aglaya has been living with Gorelov for a year now, not hiding it, instead proudly showing off their relationship to the settlement at every convenient occasion.
Zuleikha adjusts the rifle on her shoulder and walks away.
“So can I expect you to stop by then?” Gorelov yells after her.
“No!” She’s striding quickly, almost running.
“Watch out you don’t regret it! You have a son! Remember him?”
She spins around and gives Gorelov a long, close look. Then turns abruptly and her narrow back soon dissolves between the trees.
A couple of days later, Gorelov is walking through the woods. He loves taking walks during the workday. Instructions have been handed out, the shift is sweating away at their labor, and cubic meter after cubic meter of pitch-scented lumber is toppling to the ground with a crash and being placed in stacks, so now he can step away and breathe more freely, especially since his head’s already ringing from the screeching saws.
He walks slowly through the autumn taiga, slashing with a small switch and knocking down ruby-red rosehips. It really was the right thing to appoint him for agent work. Kuznets has a good head on his shoulders and discerned Gorelov’s wasted talent immediately. Within a month of their memorable discussion in the bathhouse, Gorelov had not only got that smug dauber Ikonnikov scribbling short notes composed in fancy language, but the accountant from the office began scratching away at detailed essays for him in his neat schoolchild’s hand. There was also the little assistant cook at the dining hall, sweating from tension, who passed on brief phrases that Achkenazi said to him during lunch preparation; and various other people who hadn’t been taught reading and writing were dropping by Gorelov’s house in the evenings to whisper a little and talk about life. Everybody’s covered: loggers, office clerks, and even the dining hall and the clubhouse. The only failure is with the commandant.
Gorelov hacks the switch as hard as he can at the sharp top of an anthill. It roils with agitated ants. Of course nobody’s ordered him to look after Ignatov; that’s simply become an interest for him. Would it work out, though? Something has gnawed long and pleasantly in his belly at the thought that the woman who’d been lying under the commandant about an hour before, still warm with his heat and still smelling of his scent, would tell him – the mangy, hardened criminal Gorelov – what the commandant had been saying. This is why it’s all the sweeter to sleep with Aglaya. It makes Gorelov glow inside, nice and hot, to imagine Ignatov stroking her heavy curls shot with reddish gold, running a hand along her rounded back with the dark beauty mark on a shoulder blade, and burying his face in her soft white neck. All that is now his, Gorelov’s.
If Zuleikha tells the commandant about their recent conversation, Gorelov will see to it she pays. But he’s certain she’ll keep quiet out of fear for her son.
He flings the switch and sits under a gnarled pine tree. A slight breeze is barely breathing on his face. Saws squeak and workers’ shouts ring out somewhere in the distance. That’s good.
There’s a slight rustling close by. It’s a dark squirrel already dressed in fluffy gray for winter and it’s scratching along the ground, pricking up its sharp little ears. Gorelov slowly reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a cigarette butt he stashed away in the morning, presses it in his fingertips, and clicks his tongue: Here, have some. The animal approaches, extending its slim snout forward and twitching its shiny little nose. Carefully, so as not to frighten it, Gorelov hides his other hand behind his back and gropes among the pine roots for a hefty rock, grasping it comfortably in his fist.
The squirrel is already beside him, its hazel eyes glistening and its wrinkled little black fingers stretching toward the palm of Gorelov’s toughened hand. He presses the rock harder behind his back and holds his breath. Closer, sweetie, come on.
Then a shot booms and the squirrel is suddenly lying motionless on variegated brown tree needles with a dark red spot instead of an eye socket. For an instant, Gorelov thinks the shot grazed him. There’s nothing to breathe. He’s frantically inhaling, having difficulty swallowing, and his throat feels twisted, as if a vise were pressing it. As before, he senses the crumbly softness of the cigarette butt in one hand and the cold hardness of the stone in the other. Is he in one piece?
There’s a sound of lightly snapping branches at the edge of the clearing, then a small, thin figure slips out from behind rowan bushes that have already shed half their leaves, and comes closer. Gorelov feels a large, cold drop roll along the back of his head, down his neck, behind his shirt
collar, and along his spine.
Zuleikha slings her rifle on her back as she comes right up to Gorelov. She crouches, with her knees spread apart like a man, picks up the lifeless lump, puts its little head in a loop of rope, and hangs it on her belt. She looks straight down on Gorelov from above, then turns around and goes into the forest.
After the light, nearly silent crunch of her footsteps has quieted in the thicket, Gorelov sticks the cigarette butt pressed between his fingertips into his mouth, fumbles in his pockets with a shaking hand, finds a match, and frantically strikes it on the sole of his boot. The match breaks, he flings it away, and spits out the cigarette butt.
She’s a viper. Who would have thought? She looks so quiet. He leans his back against a rough pine trunk, exhales deeply, and closes his eyes. Well, screw it. Forget the commandant. Who cares?
Snow comes late, toward the end of October, and changes autumn to winter in a day. The animals already have their winter coats and are dressed in splendid fur. The season has begun but for the first time Zuleikha isn’t glad of it. She doesn’t have the strength to tear herself away from Ignatov’s warm chest, slip out from under his heavy arm, and run off into the cold, dark blue morning. Leaving the commandant’s headquarters is like cutting ties that bind. Before, there had been some joy in her skis gliding rapidly over the snow, in the frosty wind hitting her face, and in fluffy pelts flashing in the crown of a pine tree. But now the short winter days drag on like years. She waits them out, overcoming them like an illness. She hurries back when the sun reddens slightly as if it’s sunset, the air thickens, and the shadows fill with violet. She goes to the infirmary but her eyes are already hurrying toward the hill, toward the high front steps where a small, hot flame flares, filled with impatience.
That night Ignatov says:
“Come live with me.”
She lifts her face from his body and finds his eyes in the darkness.
“Bring the little boy and come.”
She lays her head back without saying anything.
Zuleikha Page 41