He doesn’t answer. He takes a hefty pendant-like gold watch from his right pocket and clicks the cover. A sheaf of fiery sparks falls on his tanned face. The melody of “Oh du lieber Augustin” thrums plaintively inside. He anxiously scrutinizes the watch face then slams the cover shut.
“You waiting for someone?” Aglaya takes a timid step forward.
Gorelov finally meets her gaze. She’s aged and grown unattractive; her face is pockmarked, her cheeks slightly droopy, as if they’ve deflated, and her hands are wrinkled, with broken nails. She’s not saucy Aglaya now; she’s jaded Glashka.
“How come you didn’t stop by the house?” Glashka takes another step. “We haven’t seen each other in four years.”
Gorelov takes a cigarette case (a blue-tinged silver eagle is spreading its wings on snow-white enamel) from his left pocket and slowly lights a long, thin cigarette. He releases spicy, dark gray smoke into her face.
“Listen here, you slut,” he says calmly, all businesslike. “What happened, happened. It’s over. My home’s in another place now. I’ll send for you if I want to screw around. Till then, get lost. About face, march!”
Glashka’s face twitches and collapses into one big, wrinkled grimace. She shrugs her shoulders, turns around, and trudges away, her gaping eyes brimming with large tears that don’t roll away. Even so, she looks back, craning her neck like a chicken.
“On the double!” commands Gorelov. “Faster!”
She quickens the pace of her small steps as she goes down the street.
“And don’t you dare speak to me in informal terms, you floozy!”
Gorelov’s booming shout behind Glashka urges her on. She trips over her own feet, raising dust on the road as she falls. Gorelov blots his sweaty neck with a white handkerchief and turns around.
“You’ve become vicious …” says a quiet voice not too far away.
It’s the commandant.
He’s standing at the slope that descends from the commandant’s headquarters, uniform jacket tossed on his shoulders and a fat, knotty stick in his hand. His hair, once thick and fully brown, is now dappled and lightweight, and his eyes seem to have been absorbed into his face, though his cheekbones have leapt outward. Furrowed wrinkles have settled evenly along his forehead, as if a pencil outlined them.
Gorelov looks at the river and doesn’t answer.
“Why aren’t you talking? You don’t recognize me or something?” The commandant walks closer, leaning on his stick and limping heavily, swaying.
“Of course, how could I not recognize you?”
“You’ve toughened.” Ignatov whistles as he circles Gorelov and examines the green shoulder boards with light cornflower-blue edging on his jacket. “Lieutenant? Since when do they accept former convicts into the officer ranks?”
“Don’t you shove my past in my face! I was fighting while you were sitting on your backside by the stove.”
“I heard how you fought. As a driver for a field kitchen, and a procurement officer in the rear.”
“And what of it! My rights have been reinstated and I don’t have to do what you say anymore.” Gorelov stuffs his paw into an inside pocket and takes out a dark burgundy rectangle with a row of dingy yellow letters on it – a passport – and waves it in the air, then opens it and shoves it under the commandant’s nose as if to say, You seen one of these?
“Everybody has to do what I say here,” says Ignatov, walking right up to Gorelov and placing the knotty end of his stick on the shiny nose of Gorelov’s boot. “And since last year we’ve had a ban on hiring free workers. So you roll on out of here on the very next boat.”
Gorelov kicks the stick, which falls to the ground with a thud. The commandant reels and drops his jacket in the dust.
“I’m just as familiar with Order 248, bis 3, dated January 8, 1945, as you are, Ignatov.” Gorelov’s boot steps on Ignatov’s jacket. “And so let me ask you: why aren’t you following it?”
Ignatov awkwardly places his foot to the side and bends to the ground for his jacket, where he freezes.
“Why is it that free workers are bumming around the settlement in droves,” Gorelov whispers damply above Ignatov’s ear, “but the inmates are running off to the city? You let people get out of hand, commandant, oh, but you did.” Gorelov finally takes his foot off the jacket. “Boat, you say? Fine, I’ll go greet it.”
He stamps a boot to shake off the dust that floated onto it, slightly dulling its mirror-like shine, takes his fiery orange suitcase off the ground, and waddles back to the pier. People crowded at the edge of the square scatter.
Zuleikha ties everything she can consider her own into bundles: summer and winter clothes, a couple of changes of bed linen, blankets, pillows, dishes, kitchen utensils, and small things dear to her heart, like several napkins she embroidered and Yuzuf’s old clay toys, like the doll with irrevocably broken-off limbs and the fish without fins or tail. She leaves the cast-iron pots for boiling bandages (they’ll come in handy for the next doctor) as well as the wall clock that ticks loudly and has a slightly crooked inscription burned by a red-hot awl: “To the dear doctor from the residents of Semruk, on your 70th birthday.” That wasn’t given to her so it’s not hers to take.
Leibe hadn’t taken it, either. He didn’t take anything with him: he just left in the clothes he was wearing and carrying a half-empty, worn traveling bag on which the outline of a once-red cross could just be divined.
They’d parted quietly, silently. She’d stood in the middle of the house, her hands lowered to her apron, not knowing what to do or say. Volf Karlovich had walked over to her, stood alongside her, taken her hand, and bent his dry lips to it. Zuleikha saw that the fluffy silver halo around his bald spot had become much sparser and that the skin on his delicate pink and once-shiny skull was now all speckled with large gray and brown spots.
Yuzuf went to the pier to see Leibe off but Zuleikha stayed at home. She’d begun gathering her things right away. They’d proposed that she live in the infirmary when the new doctor arrived, too, and promised to wall off part of the house and register her as a full-time nurse, but she’d refused, deciding to move back to the barracks.
They aren’t barracks at all now. They’re called dormitories and they’ve installed lots of partitions to divide them into small rooms. No more than six or eight people are housed in them, and although the bunks are two-tiered, as before, they now have real mattresses, blankets, and pillows, and some people even have colorful cross-stitched bedspreads. Those living in the dormitories are either new residents (very few have been brought in recently) or people who’ve been held back from setting up their own homes and households, either by their own ineptitude or laziness. It scares Zuleikha that separation from Yuzuf is imminent – he’ll turn sixteen this summer so he’s been assigned his own bed and space in the male dormitory.
He’s already been working in the art artel for four years. The artel’s products have the same subjects: field laborers, lumber industry shockworkers, active workers on the kolkhoz front, Komsomol members and Young Pioneers, and sometimes gymnasts. The buyers had noted that the style of the Semruk artwork had changed rather abruptly several years ago but they attached no significance to that since, as before, the rural people depicted are round-faced, the gymnasts peppy, and the children smiling. The fruits of the artel’s labor continue to be in demand.
Yuzuf paints for himself at night, in his free time. Zuleikha struggles to understand these paintings of his, with their sharp lines, mad colors, and hodgepodge of strange, sometimes frightening images. She likes the lumbermen and Young Pioneers much more. He hasn’t painted her once.
She doesn’t speak much with Yuzuf. Zuleikha senses that he misses talking with Izabella (she died in 1943, right after news that the blockade was lifted in Leningrad) and Konstantin Arnoldovich (who outlived his wife by only a year). She sees that he still pines for Ilya Petrovich, who vanished after leaving for the front. There’s been no news from him whatsoever. Yeste
rday it even seemed that Yuzuf was very upset about Leibe’s departure, though their relationship had never gotten back on track.
She can’t replace anyone for him but she feels like he needs her even more than before. After losing people dear to him, he’s been directing all the ardor of his young heart toward his mother. He wants to talk, ask questions and receive answers, argue, discuss, interrupt, attack, defend himself, and quarrel – and all she can do is keep silent, listen, and pat him on the head. But this makes him angry and he runs off. Then he’ll return a while later, downcast, guilty, and affectionate. He’ll embrace her, squeezing until her bones crack (he’s a head taller and strong for his age) and again she says nothing; she just pats him on the head. That’s how they live.
The little flame on the front steps of the commandant’s headquarters has stopped summoning her at night. Ignatov probably smokes inside now.
Yuzuf didn’t steal the boat – it had been promised to him. When red-haired Lukka was still alive, Yuzuf had often helped him repair it. They’d plugged gaps with bast fiber and old rags, covered it with gooey pitch, soaked and dried it, and applied more pitch. In return, the old man took Yuzuf with him night fishing – he himself angled and Yuzuf sat alongside, watching and learning. The Angara at night was quiet and taciturn, completely different. The firmament, spotted with constellations, was reflected in the water’s black mirror, and the boat floated between the two starry domes, along the exact middle of the world, rocked by gently splashing waves. In the morning, Yuzuf would attempt to paint from memory what he had seen at night but he never liked what came out.
Lukka had said, “The boat will be yours when I die, my boy.” He died in the spring. While the others were still in Lukka’s tiny, empty house on the night of their old comrade’s funeral meal, Yuzuf went to the shore, released the boat on the water, and led it beyond the far bend in the river, where he hid it in bushes under the cliff, tightly tied to the fat roots of a gigantic elm. He flooded the boat as Lukka had taught him, so it wouldn’t crack.
He needs the boat. He’s planning an escape.
Sometimes news items and even entire articles about prisoners’ escapes from jails and camps appear in newspapers on the agitational board. They all end the same, with the fugitives being captured and punished harshly.
Yuzuf knows he won’t be caught.
Of course it would be best to escape in the summer. Go down the Angara to the Yenisei, and then it’s a stone’s throw to Maklakovo. From there, hitchhike to Krasnoyarsk, go west by train, through the Urals and through Moscow, to Leningrad. Straight to University Embankment, to the long, severe building with columns the color of dusty ochre and two stern sphinxes of pink granite by the entrance, to the Academy of the Arts, the famous “Repinka,” Ikonnikov’s alma mater. As it happens, he’ll make it in time for entrance exams. He’s decided to bring a couple of his paintings with him (some of the ones Ilya Petrovich would have liked) and a folder of pencil sketches.
Yuzuf knows they’ll definitely admit him.
He could live at the institute, in any tiny room, even a caretaker’s quarters, even a storeroom, even a doghouse. He could earn his lodging as a caretaker. But he has something stored away, in case of emergency. In a hiding place carefully guarded from his mother’s gaze there lies a thick, snow-white sheet folded in quarters, where there are several brief lines written in Konstantin Arnoldovich’s floating calligraphic hand. Sumlinsky appeals to some “Olenka,” sending her distant greetings and requesting in the name of youth to shelter a young lad, bearer of the letter. Above is an address whose magical words take the breath away, beaming like an inviting lighthouse: “Fontanka River Embankment.” Unsigned. “She’ll understand,” Konstantin Arnoldovich had said when he handed Yuzuf the letter. That was a month before his death.
Yuzuf has no money for the trip. They’ve told him that if he’s lucky, he’ll be able to make it there by riding a month or a month and a half in freight cars.
Yuzuf knows he’ll be lucky.
He doesn’t have documents, either: all the birth certificates of the exiles’ children are kept in the safe at the commandant’s headquarters. Yuzuf will turn sixteen soon, but he won’t be issued a passport, since the majority of Semruk residents still live without them. They don’t need them. But this doesn’t matter. The main thing is to reach Leningrad, race off to the Neva, burst into the building under the approving gaze of the sphinxes’ slanting eyes, fly up the stairs to the admission committee’s room, and spread his work on the table: “Here I am, all of me: judge for yourself! Roi ou rien.” Who needs a passport?
He’s been thinking about escape for a long time. A couple of months before, something happened that served like a well-dampened lash, whipping up all his ideas and wishes, subordinating them to this one passion. Freedom.
That day, Mitrich, the old office worker who fulfilled a whole slew of various responsibilities in Semruk – secretary, clerk, and archivist, as well as mailman – called out to Yuzuf on the street.
“Letter for you,” he said, smiling with surprise and affection. He rummaged around for an unbearably long time in a large canvas drawstring bag for carrying newspapers, fished out a dirty white paper triangle soiled by fingers and finely frayed on the folds. “Let’s see, how long did this take from the front?” he said as his hands twirled the odd-looking letter, which was blotched with round postmarks. “A year, no less.”
He finally handed it over. He stood alongside Yuzuf, watching attentively instead of going away; his brows even tensed and bristled. Yuzuf had no desire to open it in front of him, though, so he thanked Mitrich and ran off into the taiga, to the cliff, far away from everybody. He thought his heart would leap out as he was running. The letter was on fire in his hands, burning his fingers.
He flew between the boulders and sat on a pink rock. He swallowed and opened his sweaty hands.
Krasnoyarsk Krai. Northern Yenisei Region. Labor Settlement Semruk on the Angara. Yuzuf Valiev.
Yuzuf unfolded the letter carefully so as not to tear it. There were no words in it but at the center of the sheet was the candle of the Eiffel Tower (pencil, ink) and in the corner was a small inscription: “Field of Mars, June 1945” (the censor had blotted out “Paris” in black but left “Field of Mars” and the date). Nothing else.
He somehow folded it back up, though his fingers had suddenly gone numb and unresponsive, and stuffed the letter inside his jacket. He sat for a long time, gazing at the leadenness of the Angara, which the brownish-gray taiga squeezed at the edges and the skillet-like sky flattened from above.
And that’s when he decided he’d definitely run away. He knows he’ll do it. And he would run away now, even today, but one thing holds him back: his mother. After leaving the hunting artel, she became somehow tired, broken, and aged quickly, irrevocably. She’s been completely lost, like a child, since the doctor left, and her huge eyes look at Yuzuf in fear. He can’t leave her like that. But he also can’t stay here any longer.
Ikonnikov’s letter is hidden in the same secret spot as Konstantin Arnoldovich’s. Sometimes it seems like his heart doesn’t beat in his chest but in there, in that cold, dark crevice where two letters from two close friends lie tightly pressed against one another.
Yuzuf doesn’t know what to do about his mother; she’s probably the only obstacle to leaving he can’t see a way round.
And so that’s that: things are packed, bundles are tied. Zuleikha and Yuzuf are moving into the dormitory in the morning and they’ll sleep apart tomorrow. Now, on this clear Sunday afternoon, she can finally sit and say goodbye to this quiet, empty building. Zuleikha walks around the house checking that she hasn’t forgotten anything. She peers behind a door, behind the stove, on shelves, benches, and windowsills.
One floorboard squeaks underfoot; it’s the far one, by the window. At one time, maybe a hundred years ago or maybe in her sleep, she and Murtaza had hidden food items from the Red Hordesmen under a board like this. Zuleikha steps on it a
gain and the long, high-pitched squeak sounds like someone’s voice. She sits down, inserts her fingers in a crevice and pulls, smiling to herself as the wood gives, easily lifting a little. A black rectangle of darkness under the floorboard breathes of the cold, damp earth. She slips her hand in, gropes around, and pulls out a light little parcel wrapped in a rag. She unties the strings and folds back old fabric and pieces of birch bark. Inside are two sheets of paper that don’t look alike: one’s snow white, the other’s dirty yellow, and they’re stuck together because they’ve grown into one another, from lying here so long. Zuleikha unsticks and unfolds them. She can’t read the first message and doesn’t know what outlandish building is depicted on the second. She understands only that Yuzuf hid them and that it is his secret, something so huge he couldn’t share it with his mother, or that he was protecting her for a while from whatever they contained. She stares at beads of small letters with long tails that seem to twist in the wind and the tower’s thin skeleton, which vaguely reminds her of a minaret; the words and the drawing scream of something, of summoning somewhere.
She feels it shoving her in the chest: her son has decided to flee.
Zuleikha sits on the floor for a few more minutes, pressing the fist with the crumpled letters to her chest, then she stands and runs to the clubhouse. She doesn’t remember running; it seems like she’s flown in an instant, in one leap. She tears the door open. Yuzuf is inside, at an easel, as always.
“Mama, why are you barefoot?”
“You! You …” Gasping for breath, she hurls the balled-up letters at him as if they were cannonballs.
He bends, picks them up, slowly smoothes them on his chest, and puts them away in his pocket. He doesn’t look up and his face is hardened, white. Zuleikha understands this is how things really are, that her son has decided to flee. To leave her. Abandon her.
She shouts something, throws herself against the walls, and thrashes her arms around; canvas crackles under her fists, frames break, and something falls and rolls along the floor. She herself falls, too. She coils up, huddles, and twists like a snake, burrowing into herself, wailing at something inside her. Abandoned, abandoned … She understands she’s not wailing at herself but at Yuzuf, who’s attached to her from all sides. His body, his hands, and his distorted, wet face are around her. They’re lying on the floor in a ball, tightly interlocked.
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