“Where?” she whimpers into Yuzuf’s chest. “Where are you going? Alone, without documents … They’ll catch you …”
“They won’t catch me, Mama.”
“They’ll put you in jail …” She clings to him as if she were drowning.
“They won’t put me in jail.”
“What about me?”
Yuzuf keeps silent and embraces her so it hurts.
“I won’t survive.” Zuleikha tries to catch his gaze. “I’ll die without you, Yuzuf. I’ll die as soon as you take the first step.”
She feels his damp breath on her neck.
“I’ll die,” Zuleikha stubbornly repeats. “I’ll die, die, die!”
He mumbles, moves away from her, and detaches himself from her. He pushes away her grasping hands and scrambles out of her embrace.
“Yuzuf!” Zuleikha rushes after him.
Her outstretched fingers slide through the dark hair at the back of his head like a comb, down his neck, leaving red scratches, and catches at the collar of his shirt so that Yuzuf runs out of the clubhouse with it torn.
“You’re no son to me!” Zuleikha wails after him. “No son!”
Her eyes don’t see, her ears don’t hear.
Abandoned. Abandoned.
She stands and trudges away, reeling. The wind is in her face, carrying the mewling of seagulls and the sounds of the forest. Underfoot: soil, grass, rocks, and roots.
Abandoned. Abandoned.
The world is flowing, streaming, before her gaze. There are no forms or lines, only colors that float past. And then there’s a distinct figure, tall and dark, amidst the flow. A head proudly set on broad masculine shoulders, long arms almost to the knees, a dress beating in the wind. You’re here, too, you old witch.
Zuleikha wants to push her away. She raises her hand to do so but for some reason she falls on the Vampire Hag’s chest instead, embracing a powerful body that smells of either tree bark or fresh earth. She buries her face in something warm, solid, muscular, and alive, feeling strong hands on her spine, the back of her head, around her, everywhere. Tears rise in her throat, winding around her gullet like a rope, and Zuleikha cries long and sweet after burying herself in her mother-in-law’s bosom. The tears flow so generously and swiftly that it seems they’re not coming from her eyes but from somewhere at the bottom of her heart, urged on by its rapid and resilient beating. Minutes or maybe hours later, after purging herself of every tear she’s kept inside over the years, she calms and comes to her senses. Her breathing is still fast and her chest is still heaving convulsively, but a tired, long-awaited relief is already flowing through her body.
“Tell me, Mama,” she whispers, either to her mother-in-law’s bony shoulder or to the wrinkles at the base of her neck. She doesn’t force open her eyes or unclasp her arms; it’s as if she’s afraid to let go. “Those stories about you going out into the urman when you were young – I always wanted to ask, why did you do it?”
“That was a long time ago. I was a stupid girl … I was looking for death, for deliverance from unhappy love.” The old woman’s broad, firm bosom rises and falls in a long, powerful sigh. “I went into the urman but it wasn’t there, that death.”
Zuleikha backs away in surprise so she can look her mother-in-law in the eye. The old woman’s face is dark brown, with large, twisting wrinkles. And it’s not a face at all: it’s tree bark. Zuleikha has a gnarled old larch in her embrace. The tree trunk is bumpy and immense, with streaks of silvery pitch, roots like knots, and long sprawling branches that look upward, piercing the sky’s blueness; the first gleams of spring foliage tremble on its branches with a light emerald radiance. Zuleikha wipes away pieces of bark and needles that have stuck to her cheeks and trudges back to the settlement from the taiga.
Ignatov has known for a long time that he’ll be discharged. Kuznets has cooled greatly toward him since the 1942 incident with the plot that never happened. He rarely comes by, sending his fine fellows for inspections instead. He and Ignatov have never again sat for a bit. Kuznets himself is flying high, at colonel altitudes. He thinks it unnecessary to hide his hostility, so Ignatov’s personal case file has already been enriched with two official reprimands. A third means inevitable dismissal from his position.
Ignatov, who’s now a senior lieutenant, recently turned forty-six. (The promotion wasn’t the result of valiant service, just a planned restructuring within the hierarchy of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, shifting the line of ranks.) He’s spent sixteen of those years in Semruk. He’s not old yet, but he’s already half-gray and limping. His face is sad and his disposition is gloomy. He’s lonely.
Gorelov’s excessively obnoxious appearance on the morning boat can mean only one thing: that Ignatov is being discharged. He couldn’t wait, the dog, and had rushed over before everybody else so he could delight in his own power and drink it down leisurely, savoring it. Ignatov’s discharge might even come today.
He takes his brown uniform jacket from the chair and starts swishing a brush over the thin wool. So, you bastards, I might as well be all dressed up to get fired. Ignatov has often worn civilian clothes in recent years so his uniform looks almost new and cleans easily and quickly. Jacket, breeches, peaked cap – everything is dandyish, bright and fresh, flaunting itself on a nail pounded right into the middle of the wall. Ignatov places his wax-polished boots underneath and the picture takes on an appearance of finality. It’s as if someone let the air out of Ignatov himself and hung him up for all to see: Here he is, our commandant, feast your eyes on him.
The scariest thing is that he doesn’t want to leave. How has he come to be so attached to this harsh and inhospitable land over the years? To this dangerous river, treacherous in its perpetual inconstancy and possessing thousands of shades of color and smell? To this boundless urman that flows beyond the horizon? To this cold sky that gives snow in the summer and sun in the winter? Damn it, even to these people, who are often unwelcoming, coarse, ugly, poorly dressed, missing home, and sometimes wretched, strange, and incomprehensible. Highly varied.
Ignatov has imagined going home: being jostled in a third-class railway car, watching as monotonous landscapes change through a dingy little window, and then, dazed from the long journey, stepping out on the Kazan platform and walking along deserted evening streets. But where to? Who will he go see? Mishka Bakiev is no longer in his life; the fleeting crushes of his youth – Ilona and Nastasya – married long ago; and his former subordinates – Prokopenko, Slavutsky, and the rest of the group – have forgotten him. Kazan is no longer in his life. But Semruk is.
Ignatov starts packing his things. What is there to pack, anyway? He’s wearing his set of civilian clothing. You can’t roll up the view out a window and put it in your suitcase. There’s nothing else to take since he has no household equipment, never acquired any. Or even a suitcase – he doesn’t have one of those, either. He’ll leave here empty-handed, just as he arrived. It’s the same in his soul: empty, as if everything has been extracted.
He decides to go through his papers so he has something to do with his hands. Mishka Bakiev was going through papers back then, too, as he prepared his exit. The time has now come for Ignatov to do the same. He opens the large, steel safe. All of Semruk is stored here, on five high, strong shelves in the deep, cool innards. There are children and adults, old-timers and brand-new residents, the living and the dead, their personal and work lives, hopes, crimes, unhappinesses, successes, punishments, births and deaths, illnesses, production targets, and performance figures. All of that is lying stamped and threaded together, neatly sorted, distributed into piles, folders, and boxes, carefully tied with string, pressed by paperclips, and smelling of absorbed iron and ink. Ignatov looks through the passports (they’ve been issued to several exiles but there was an order to store the documents at the commandant’s headquarters, as a precaution), children’s birth certificates (he himself has written them out, every last one), photographs, lists of new arr
ivals, statements, denunciations, recommendations, petitions, letters seized by the censor and not reaching the addressees, all now buried here for the foreseeable future in personal files …
People, people, people – hundreds of figures stand before him. He’s the one who greeted them here, on the edge of the earth. Sent them off into the taiga, exhausted them with excessive work quotas, squeezed the economic plan out of them with an iron hand, scoffed at, frightened, and handed them over for punishment. He built homes for them, fed them, scared up foodstuffs and medicines for them, and protected them from the authorities at the central office. He kept them afloat. As they did him.
Something dark and flat is lying in a corner on the lower shelf. Ignatov kneels, reaches in, and pulls it out. It’s the “Case” file. Once gray, it’s now brownish and covered in faded stamps. He opens it without rising from his knees. Thin sheets smelling of papery dust have been scribbled on with pencil and coal. Several names are boldly circled. There’s a crooked inscription in the corner of one page: “Yuzuf.” A couple of dark-reddish spruce needles are stuck to the sheets.
Someone knocks at the door. The thought belatedly flashes into his mind that, oh, he doesn’t have time to change his clothes. They’ve showed up fast. He hastily rises from his knees, flings the folder in the safe, and closes the door. He stands in the middle of the room, hands behind his back.
“Come in,” he says clearly.
The door opens. It’s Zuleikha.
She slowly walks into the house. She’s pale and thinner, and there’s a headscarf wound down to her eyebrows. She stops and her teary eyes, the lids puffy and reddened, look up at him, then down again. The sound of the wind and the nearly inaudible drone of spruce trees in the taiga rushes through the open window. They stand silently for a moment.
“Are you here for a specific reason?” he finally asks.
Zuleikha nods. Over time, her skin has become yellowish and waxen instead of white, and thin, fine wrinkles have settled on her cheeks in many places, but her eyelashes have remained just as thick.
“Let my son go, Ivan. He needs to leave.”
“Where?”
“He wants to go to school. In the city. This isn’t a life for him here, with us.”
Ignatov clenches his fingers in a fist behind his back.
“Without a passport? Even if he had one, there’d be a note in the tenth box all the same, so who would take him, the son of a kulak?”
She looks even smaller when she lowers her head more, as if she wants to scrutinize something below her, under her feet.
“Let him go, Ivan. I know you can. I’ve never asked you for anything.”
“Whereas I asked so much!” He turns around and walks off toward the window, positioning his face toward the breeze. “So much I lost count …”
The bed squeaks plaintively for a long time. Zuleikha has sat down on the edge, with her hands squeezed between her knees. Her head is lowered all the way to her chest and only the top is visible.
“Take what you asked for, Ivan. If you haven’t changed your mind.”
“That’s not what I wanted, Zuleikha.” Ignatov is looking at the Angara’s gray breadth, covered in fine frothy ripples. “It’s not like that.”
“Nor for me. But my son, it’s not his fault …”
A familiar brown rectangle emerges from the bend in the river. It’s Kuznets’s launch. How about that – he’s making the visit himself. So it’s definitely to discharge him.
“Go, Zuleikha,” says Ignatov, observing the boat’s rapid approach to the shore.
He buttons his jacket on his chest; he’s decided not to change into his uniform since it would infer too much honor. He combs his hand through his thinning hair. Zuleikha is no longer in the room when he turns around.
Kuznets understands everything as soon as he enters and sees the stern Ignatov by the window and his cleaned-up uniform on the nail.
“You were expecting me,” he says.
Kuznets isn’t wasting his words so he opens his map case, puts the document on the table, and sets a bottle of the white stuff next to it. It’s a flat bottle with a bright label, obviously trophy vodka. It’s as if Ignatov doesn’t see the bottle. He takes the document, though, and scans through it: Relieved of post occupied … stripped of title as someone who’s discredited himself during his time working in the administrative organs … become unworthy of said rank of senior lieutenant … transferred to the reserves for ineptitude …
“Where are the glasses here, anyway?” Kuznets is forcefully twisting the screw-top (they do know how to seal a bottle, those imperialists!) as his gaze roves the room.
Ignatov’s cold fingers fold the paper and pocket it.
“You’re driving me out of the commandant job, fine!” he says. “But from the administration as a whole? What for?”
Giving up on the glasses, Kuznets tosses the cap to the floor and holds the bottle out to Ignatov. Receiving no answer, he tilts it toward his own mouth: the liquid slides out as cleanly as a blade. After drinking up a good third of it, he grunts, mumbles, and shakes his balding head.
“We don’t need you, Vanya. Not here, not anywhere else.”
The son of a bitch.
Ignatov looks for an instant at Kuznets’s flushed and flaccid face, at his gray old-man’s mustache drooping over his lip, and the pudgy fold under his square chin that hangs over his collar tabs. Now, if only … using that same bottle to the skull, then his fist to the well-fed mug and the ample paunch … But there’s none of the usual cold malice in Ignatov’s heart, no rage, no desperation. He’s empty.
“I have nowhere to go from here, Zin.”
“Then stay,” Kuznets simply says. “There’s a ban on free workers but we’ll find something for you – work can be found in the forest. There are empty houses – settle in one, live there. You’ll find yourself a woman for your old age.”
“This means Gorelov’s taking my place?”
Kuznets swigs from the bottle again, running his hand from his throat, over his gullet, down his powerful chest to his belly, as if it’s accompanying the liquid. He exhales loudly and pungently, then nods:
“He’s a familiar person here, won’t let me down.”
“He’ll let them all rot the hell away.” Ignatov looks pensively out the window.
“He’ll improve standards of discipline!” Kuznets raises a fleshy finger and his shining eye looks askance. “He won’t touch you, don’t worry. I’ll keep track of that, for old time’s sake.” He pours the rest of the vodka into his mouth, places the bottle on the table with a thud, and stands, overturning the chair behind him. “All right, Ignatov, five minutes to pack. You’ll turn the commandant’s headquarters over to Gorelov.” And Kuznets walks to the door without saying goodbye.
Through the window, Ignatov can see Gorelov waiting by the front steps. Has he been eavesdropping, the dog? He catches Kuznets, who’s unwieldy from vodka, and leads him down along the path, solicitously holding him at his spreading waist.
Ignatov opens the safe and takes a birth certificate out of the packet: “Yuzuf Valiev. Year of birth: 1930.” He tosses it into the stove’s cold, black hole and strikes a match; a small, hot flame quickly overcomes the paper. After thinking for a second, he tosses in the old “Case” folder, too.
As the smoldering corners of the papers slowly rise and disappear into the orange flame with a crackle, he takes a blank birth certificate form, dips a pen in ink, and traces out: “Iosif Ignatov. Year of birth: 1930. Mother: Zuleikha Valieva, peasant. Father: Ivan Ignatov, Red Army man.”
He stamps the birth certificate and puts it in his pocket. He places the key to the commandant’s headquarters on the table. And leaves.
The immaculately clean uniform remains hanging on the nail and a sunbeam warms itself on the peaked cap’s scarlet band. Long-forgotten names writhe in the stove, blending, bonding, and burning into black cinders. They smolder, turn to light smoke, and float out the chimney pipe.
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*
Zuleikha opens her eyes. The sun is beating down, blinding her and cutting her head to pieces. The vague outline of trees all around her are quivering in a sparkling dance of sunbeams.
“Are you feeling unwell?” Yuzuf is leaning toward her, looking at her face. “Do you not want me to go?”
Her son’s eyes are enormous and a thick green: they’re her eyes. Zuleikha’s own eyes are looking at her from her son’s face. She shakes her head and pulls him further into the forest.
At first she’d felt lost when Ignatov came, his face hardened as if he were all frozen, to bring Yuzuf’s birth certificate, which was still crisp and smelling sharply of new paper and fresh ink.
“He should leave as soon as possible,” he said. “Right away. Now.”
Zuleikha bustled around, rushing to gather things, some sort of food.
“There’s no time.” Ignatov placed a hand on her shoulder. “He should go as he is, empty-handed.”
In the right breast pocket of a jacket with mismatched buttons and worn to weightlessness, Yuzuf placed the two letters from the hiding place; in the left pocket was the new birth certificate and a fat packet of wrinkled banknotes of various colors, also from Ignatov. Zuleikha had never seen so much money in her life. And that was all Yuzuf took with him.
She didn’t even have a chance to say thank you to Ignatov, who left quickly, vanished. So she ran with her son into the taiga, to the cliff where Lukka’s old boat was hidden, down roundabout paths along back yards with neat, square garden beds; past the small clubhouse, thickly grown with moss and seeming to have contracted and settled with time; and past the broad swathes of kolkhoz fields already sprinkled with their first timid green shoots.
Zuleikha Page 46