Kuznets’s face is right beside Ignatov’s. Deep pores are distinctly visible on a large nose with dark blue veins.
“Everything’s good with you. You’re holding eight hundred souls in your fist. Achieving production targets. Fulfilling the plan. The kolkhoz is working and the artels, too. The cucumbers …” He takes a large, bumpy squiggle of a cucumber from the table. “Even these are the tastiest on the Angara. Believe me, I know!” Kuznets pokes the cucumber into a puddle of salt sprinkled on the table and bites it with a crunch, spraying Ignatov with small drops. “You even stopped drinking. Why’d you stop drinking, Ivan?”
Kuznets isn’t shy about showing he’s well informed about life in the settlement and its commandant, knowing far more than Ignatov himself has reported.
“I had enough,” says Ignatov, wiping the spray from his cheeks.
“And you didn’t find a woman.” Kuznets smiles sneakily, shaking the bitten cucumber. “You’ve been living a lonely existence since you banished Glashka.”
Kuznets knows about the brief, long-forgotten little couplings with the redheaded Aglaya, though apparently he doesn’t know about the love with Zuleikha that has abruptly come to an end.
A heavy hand presses at Ignatov’s neck again.
“Is that really what you wanted to talk about?” Ignatov says. “Women?”
“Eh, no!” Kuznets chomps juicily at the cucumber, finishes it, and pokes the end at Ignatov’s forehead. “This is about you, a hero! Vanya, it’s time for you to be promoted from sergeant to lieutenant, junior lieutenant for starters.”
Ignatov swats the cucumber end from his forehead. He looks at Kuznets’s bushy black brows, where a heavy drop of sweat is swelling in a deep wrinkle between them. Kuznets has never once raised the topic of promotion with him.
“Here in the woods it’s all the damn same if you’re a sergeant or a lieutenant.”
“What? You’ve decided to stay here forever or something?” Kuznets smirks slyly and his pupils are sharp and narrow. “You used to want to leave. You took me by the throat.”
“I did.”
“So it’s your choice, and you’re still young. But it’s not fitting for someone a mere step away from becoming a second lieutenant in state security to stagnate as a settlement commandant. Huh?” Kuznets’s palm squeezes the nape of Ignatov’s neck. “I’ve already filled out an appraisal form on you. Years of flawless service, I said, dedication to the motherland’s ideals. I just haven’t sent it yet.”
“I’m not getting this, Zin. You’re holding something back.”
“What’s to understand?” Kuznets licks his lips and his bluish-gray tongue with white bumps flashes for a moment. “War, Vanya. We’re living in fast-moving, chaotic times. It even rings in your ears. Heads are rolling. Stars are rolling, too, and they’re made of red silk, framed in silver. They’re on smart people’s uniform cuffs.”
“It’s only been a couple months since your last …” Ignatov looks sideways at Kuznets’s uniform jacket, which is hanging neatly on the back of a chair. There’s a brand-new dark ruby bar in maroon collar tabs with a raspberry-colored edging, a sign of Kuznets’s recent promotion.
“That’s what I’m telling you, my dear man. It’s that kind of time, when anything’s possible, do you understand me? Anything! Promoted to first lieutenant in half a year, another year to captain. You and I just need something to happen, something big and loud. Did you hear about the uprising at the Pargibsky commandant’s headquarters? About the attempt on the commandant in Staraya Klyukva? They arrested about a hundred, and that’s just the plotters. That’s what we need, for lots of people to be involved. We’ll give the whole affair a clever name …”
“What kind of uprisings and escapes are there now, you fool? Anybody who escaped a long time ago is coming back to the settlements now, to get away from the war, from the army.”
“Exactly, Vanya! They’re all afraid of the fascists. But some people are waiting for the enemy. And, like good hosts, they’re preparing a welcoming ceremony for the occupiers, with bread and salt. That’s who you and I are going to find in the settlement. We’ll discover the plot, reveal it, shoot the organizers under wartime law, and send their lousy accomplices to the camps. All Siberia will find out. It’ll be a lesson to the settlers, as a precaution! An example to other commandants’ headquarters. And you and I” – Kuznets pokes a brownish fingernail at himself, below his Adam’s apple – “we’ll be fixing new collar tabs onto our uniforms.”
He’s breathing deeply, hotly. Sweat’s flowing from his forehead in two glistening streams, along the sides of his nose and further down, into the stiff brushes of his mustache.
“You’re off your head, Zin. You’re prattling on here, you’re smashed.”
“Nobody’ll check. I’ll take the case myself.” His palm on Ignatov’s neck is now a sweaty iron pincer. “You’ll compile the list of suspects yourself. Everybody you’re sick of, who gets in the way, get them out, the dogs. I won’t interfere – you can even put Gorelov on it. Your love for him is well known. We’ll crack them all, don’t worry. It’ll be a crystal-clear case. They’ll write about you and me in textbooks.”
“Hold on. You’re proposing that these are, what, my people?”
“Well, who else’s?” There’s a yellowish tinge in the network of red veins in Kuznets’s dark eyes. “I’m no magician here – I can’t pull a hundred plotters out of a magic hat for you. But you’ve got lots of people. This won’t ruin you. If you feel sorry for the old ones, pick the new ones, the outsiders. They won’t survive here anyway – they’ll drop like flies in the winter.”
Ignatov lowers his gaze to Kuznets’s broad, damp lips.
“Well?” say the lips.
“Take your hand off me, you’ll break my neck.”
The hot, damp palm releases Ignatov’s neck.
“Well?” repeat the lips.
Ignatov takes the flask and splashes the remainder of the alcohol into their empty glasses. He tightens the metal top slowly, with a squeak, and puts the flask back on the table.
“I didn’t think,” he says, “comrade lieutenant, that you’d test me, a former Red Army man. I thought you trusted me, based on our old friendship.”
“Hold on, Ivan! I’m telling you the truth, you hear? I’ve thought it all through, done the calculations. We’ll have the case wrapped up in a month, receive our ranks by summer. Well?”
“Are you acting out this charade for all the commandants or just a chosen few?”
“Stop playing the fool, Ignatov! I’m being human with you, but you –”
“You can report that the political situation in labor settlement Semruk is calm. The commandant turned out to be a morally stable person and did not yield to provocation.”
Ignatov slowly raises his glass, tips it down his throat without clinking, then wipes his mouth dry. Kuznets is breathing heavily, wheezing a little. He pours the alcohol from his glass down his gullet and chomps an onion. He stands, continuing to chew, puts on his jacket, fastens its belt, and pulls his peaked cap over his forehead.
“Fine, commandant,” he says. “That’s what I’ll report. But just you remember” – his large, wet red fist moves in front of Ignatov’s nose – “that I have you right here if anything happens!”
Kuznets’s fist hovers there, his white knuckles big and bumpy. He spits the remainder of the onion on the floor and goes out.
What Kuznets said comes true. The new batch turns out to be in poor health. Their warm southern blood doesn’t withstand the frosty Siberian weather well and many take ill with pneumonia during the very first cold spells. The infirmary, which had already been expanded to twenty beds by that time, can’t hold even half those in need. Leibe wears himself out and has no strength left but can’t save everyone, and the Semruk cemetery increases by fifty graves that winter.
The outsiders bury their kinsmen in varying ways. Greeks knock together thin wooden crosses from stakes and Tatars carve intr
icate crescents from long logs. Both the crosses and the crescents find places at the cemetery, close to one another in crooked, crowded rows, alternating with other markers.
A large article appears in Pravda about a pro-fascist plot that was revealed in the Pit-Gorodok labor settlement on the Angara. As a result of this fairly notorious case, the core of the plotters, numbering twelve people, faced the firing squad and a band of accomplices was sentenced to twenty-five years in the camps for anti-Soviet activity.
Nonetheless, on April 11, 1942, the State Defense Committee of the USSR approves a resolution on drafting labor deportees for military service. Sixty thousand former kulaks and their children are drafted into the Red Army and permitted to defend the motherland. The brand-new Red Army men and members of their families are removed from the rolls of labor exile and issued passports without limitations. A thin stream of those freed from “kulak exile” begins flowing toward the mainland from the labor settlements.
A bright poster appears on the agitational board during the summer – a half-grayed woman in fiery-red clothing standing before a wall of raised bayonets, beckoning with a hand stretched invitingly behind her. She’s summoning to war, summoning the young, the old, even adolescents, everyone who can hold a weapon. She’s summoning them to their death.
Each time Zuleikha walks past the poster, she answers the woman with a long, stubborn gaze that says, I won’t give up my son. The woman resembles Zuleikha – even the gray in her slightly disheveled hair is just the same, in striking strands, and Zuleikha feels awkward because it’s as if she’s talking to herself.
Zuleikha’s ancestors fought the Golden Horde for centuries. It’s unclear how long the war with Germany will go on, and Yuzuf will soon turn twelve. Izabella told Zuleikha that men can be taken into the army from age eighteen. She can count the number of years left until then on her fingers. Will the war manage to end?
Yuzuf has grown quickly during the last year and is now taller than Zuleikha. He works at the bakery, selling bread. Hardly anyone bakes their own now and a line forms at the bakery in the evenings. Zuleikha loves observing her son as he stands behind the tall counter and nimbly serves the customers, handling their jingling yellow and gray coins with ease. He always does the sums in his head, without using the abacus. The store opens after lunch, when the first shift of lumbermen returns from the forest, and that’s just in time for Yuzuf to run over from school.
Yuzuf is praised as a good student. He was accepted into the Young Pioneers for his achievements and a red Pioneer tie like a dragonfly has blazed on his chest ever since. He works like an adult at household chores, chopping firewood, fixing a fence, or repairing a roof. As before, he tries to find free time whenever possible so he can run off to the clubhouse to see Ikonnikov.
Ikonnikov has let himself go badly and grown flabby in recent years – he drinks a lot. The exiles have learned to distill home brew not just from cloudberries but also from bilberries, stone bramble, and even sour rowan berries. Ikonnikov is a particular devotee. They’ve allowed him to remain at the clubhouse, in an artistic artel composed solely of himself. With his help, Semruk supplies Krasnoyarsk not only with lumber, fur, and vegetables but also a very specialized form of product: oil paintings, moreover paintings of very decent quality. Rosy-cheeked lumbermen, busty farmer women, and well-fed, round-cheeked Young Pioneers – alone, in pairs, or in groups – jauntily stride or stand, their thoughtful gazes directed into the cloudless distance. Rural and even urban cultural centers eagerly take his pictures.
Yuzuf has been planning to join the artel after turning sixteen, but for now he’s working on an unrestricted basis. Zuleikha is afraid her son might develop a passion for home brew under Ikonnikov’s unsavory influence. “My example provides the strongest possible deterrent against alcoholism,” Ilya Petrovich calms her after noticing her wary glance one day. And he’s probably right.
Zuleikha has always been jealous of Yuzuf’s attachment to Ikonnikov, but those feelings have subsided over the years. Ilya Petrovich is the only man who looks at Yuzuf with loving, fatherly eyes filled with pride, and for this Zuleikha even forgives the stale smell of alcohol on his breath.
Her son’s relationship with the doctor has broken down, or, rather, faded away: Yuzuf and Leibe exist in the same house but on parallel planes that never intersect. One slips through the internal door to the infirmary after barely forcing himself awake and drinking down a mug of herb tea for breakfast, then returns only after midnight, to sleep a little; the other sees nothing and nobody around him as he rushes off to the clubhouse with a handful of homemade paintbrushes, then goes to school and to the bakery after that. They have no time to interact and nothing to talk about.
The reason this distance had grown between them came out later. Leibe told Zuleikha that he’d once had a serious, adult conversation with Yuzuf, proposing that Yuzuf help at the infirmary and study medicine. Leibe had promised to teach him the basics within a couple of years and, in about another five, everything that graduates of medical schools know. Yuzuf heard him out carefully, thanked him, and politely declined. He would like to work as an artist when he grows up. Although he didn’t show it, Volf Karlovich suffered painfully over this refusal, in spite of its being completely adult and justified.
One time Zuleikha complained to Izabella that after twelve years of living in the same house, her son had gained nothing from such an intelligent and worthy person as the doctor, neither character traits nor noble gestures and behavior, nor a profession so generously offered. Yuzuf and Leibe were different people, very dissimilar, alien to one another. “How can that be, my dear!” smiled Izabella. “What about their eyes? They have the exact same gaze. It’s passionate, even obsessed.”
Zuleikha and Yuzuf still sleep in the same bed. They have difficulty fitting on the crowded sleeping ledge, so her son either places his long, skinny legs on his mother or lets them dangle over the edge. He can’t sleep by himself and won’t drift off unless he takes refuge by her chest, his face stuck in her neck.
Sometimes she seems to dream of someone. She’ll wake up in a sweat, her braids mussed from tossing her head on the pillow. There are vague memories of a flame at a distant lighthouse, glowing red as if it’s scorching hot; the door curtain in a black tent knocking in the wind; and the warmth of someone’s hands on her shoulders. She steadies her breathing and opens her eyes; the hands are her son’s.
She hasn’t been able to forgive herself for that night when Yuzuf ran off into the snowy taiga searching for her. At first she thought her punishment for that was in her son’s illness, in the torments of fever and delirium, and his drawn-out struggle with death in her arms at the infirmary. But she later understood that her true punishment only came after Yuzuf’s recovery, in her own distressing, nagging, and endless thoughts. At times her guilt seems so enormous and monstrous that she’s prepared to accept retribution; she wishes for any, even the most dreadful. From whom, she doesn’t know. There’s nobody here on the edge of the universe who can mete out retribution or pardon. The Almighty’s gaze doesn’t reach the banks of the Angara and there aren’t any spirits to be found in the dense thickets of the Siberian urman. People here are completely on their own, alone with one another.
Yuzuf wakes up when the door squeaks behind his mother. She always leaves for the taiga early, at dawn, after carefully disentangling herself from his arms and slipping soundlessly through the house, afraid of waking him as she prepares to go. He feigns sleep, as a nice gesture for her. He jumps up when her light footsteps fade outside the door. He doesn’t like sleeping by himself.
He tosses off the blanket with his legs and his bare feet slap over to the table, to the breakfast his mother left covered with a coarse cotton towel: a piece of bread and a mug of milk. (Ten bearded goats were recently brought to the settlement and milk remains a treat.) He gulps down the milk and stuffs the bread in his mouth. From a nail on the wall, he grabs the jacket that his mother crafted out of the doctor’s
old dress uniform, patching and darning the holes. Feet in shoes and he’s on his way.
The door slams hard behind him. He suddenly wonders, belatedly, if he’s woken the doctor. He forgot to look to see if he was sleeping in his bed or if he’d gone to the infirmary. It doesn’t matter anyway. Even if he did wake him up, the doctor won’t complain to Yuzuf’s mother. He’s a good person, despite being unbelievably boring.
His feet speed down the steps. Chewing the bread as he runs, Yuzuf’s shoulder pushes the little gate and he races out to the road, past the infirmary and down to the central square, where bright posters gleam on the long agitational board and the fresh golden logs of the newly opened reading hut are shining; he passes small, square one-room houses on Lenin Street and then heads right, along River Street (Semruk’s private sector housing has grown in recent years, filling the entire knoll and even spreading to the foot of the hill, biting a large chunk out of the taiga); from there, along fences, past the bakery with its store, past kolkhoz storehouses, past the turn to the fields, where Konstantin Arnoldovich reigns supreme, cultivating his outlandish, giant melons alongside grain; and to the very end of the settlement, where the clubhouse hides under a canopy of firs.
It’s summer vacation so he doesn’t have to go to school. He can stay here, with Ikonnikov, right up until lunchtime. He just hopes Ikonnikov will be dry today … Yuzuf doesn’t like when Ilya Petrovich knocks back the drink early in the morning. Sometimes the knocking back is light, for invigoration, and Ikonnikov greets his pupil with paint-spotted hands joyfully thrown wide open, laughs a lot, and cracks long, intricate jokes that Yuzuf doesn’t understand. As the sun rises higher over the Angara, the light knocking back becomes heavier. The scent coming from his teacher turns into an unbearably sharp smell, the bottle standing behind crates and boards in the far corner of the club empties, and Ilya Petrovich himself grows sullen and somber toward lunchtime, and soon drops off in a heavy slumber, right there on the crates.
Zuleikha Page 43