Zuleikha

ONE DAY

Zuleikha opens her eyes. It’s as dark as a cellar. Geese sigh sleepily behind a thin curtain. A month-old foal smacks his lips, searching for his mother’s udder. A January blizzard moans, muffled, outside the window by the head of the bed. Thanks to Murtaza, though, no draft comes through the cracks. He sealed up the windows before the cold weather set in. Murtaza is a good master of the house. And a good husband. His snoring booms and rumbles in the men’s quarters. Sleep soundly: the deepest sleep is just before dawn.

It’s time. All-powerful Allah, may what has been envisioned be fulfilled. May nobody awaken.

Zuleikha noiselessly lowers one bare foot then the other to the floor, leans against the stove, and stands. The stove went out during the night, its warmth is gone, and the cold floor burns the soles of her feet. She can’t put on shoes. She wouldn’t be able to make her way silently in her little felt boots; some floorboard or other would surely creak. Fine, Zuleikha will manage. Holding the rough side of the stove with her hand, she feels her way out of the women’s quarters. It’s narrow and cramped in here but she remembers every corner, every little shelf: for half her life she’s been slipping back and forth like a pendulum, carrying full, hot bowls from the big kettle to the men’s quarters, then empty, cold bowls back from the men’s quarters.

How many years has she been married? Fifteen of her thirty? Is that half? It’s probably even more than that. She’ll have to ask Murtaza when he’s in a good mood – let him count it.

Don’t stumble on the rug. Don’t hit a bare foot on the trunk with the metal trim, to the right, by the wall. Step over the squeaky board where the stove curves. Scurry soundlessly behind the printed cotton curtain separating the women’s quarters of the log house from the men’s… It’s not far to the door now.

Murtaza’s snores are closer. Sleep, sleep, for Allah’s sake. A wife shouldn’t hide anything from her husband, but sometimes she must, there’s no helping it.

The main thing now is not to wake the animals. They usually sleep in the winter shed but Murtaza orders the birds and young animals to be brought inside during cold snaps. The geese aren’t stirring but the foal taps his hoof and shakes his head; he’s awake, the imp. He’s sharp: he’ll be a good horse. Zuleikha stretches her hand through the curtain and touches his velvety muzzle: Calm down, you know me. His nostrils snuffle gratefully into her palm, recognizing her. Zuleikha wipes her damp fingers on her night-shirt and lightly pushes the door with her shoulder. Thick and padded with felt for the winter, the door gives way heavily, and a frosty, biting cloud flies in through the crack. She takes a big step over the high threshold so as not to jinx anything – treading on it now and disturbing the evil spirits would be all she needs – and then she’s in the entrance hall. She closes the door and leans her back against it.

Glory be to Allah, part of the journey has been made.

It’s as cold in the hallway as outside, nipping at Zuleikha’s skin so her nightshirt doesn’t warm her. Streams of icy air beat at the soles of her feet through cracks in the floor. This isn’t what troubles her, though.

What troubles her is behind the door opposite.

Ubyrly Karchyk – the Vampire Hag. That’s what Zuleikha calls her, to herself. She thanks the Almighty that they don’t live in the same house as her mother-in-law. Murtaza’s home is spacious, two houses connected by a common entrance hall. On the day forty-five-year-old Murtaza brought fifteen-year-old Zuleikha into the house, the Vampire Hag – her face a picture of martyred grief – dragged her own numerous trunks, bundles, and dishes into the guest house, and occupied the whole place. “Don’t touch!” she shouted menacingly at her son when he tried to help her move. Then she didn’t speak to him for two months. That same year, she quickly and hopelessly began to go blind, and then, shortly thereafter, to lose her hearing. A couple of years later, she was as blind and deaf as a rock. She now talks constantly and can’t be stopped.

Nobody knows how old she really is. She herself insists she’s a hundred. Murtaza sat down to count recently, and he sat for a long time before announcing: “Mama’s right, she truly is around a hundred.” He was a late child and is already almost an old man himself.

The Vampire Hag usually wakes up before everyone else and carries her carefully guarded treasure to the entrance hall: an elegant milky-white porcelain chamber pot with a fanciful lid and delicate blue cornflowers on the side. Murtaza brought it back from Kazan as a gift at one time or other. Zuleikha is supposed to jump at her mother-in-law’s call, then empty and carefully wash out the precious vessel first thing, before she stokes the fire in the stove, makes the dough, and takes the cow out to the herd. Woe unto Zuleikha if she sleeps through the morning wake-up call. It’s happened twice in fifteen years and she doesn’t allow herself to recall the consequences.

For now, it’s quiet behind the door. Go on, Zuleikha, you pitiful hen, hurry up. It was the Vampire Hag who first called her zhebegyan tavyk – pitiful hen. Zuleikha started calling herself this after a while, too, without even noticing.

She steals into the depths of the hallway, toward the attic staircase. She gropes at the smooth banister. The steps are steep; the frozen boards occasionally groan just enough to be heard. Scents of chilly wood, frozen dust, dried herbs, and a barely noticeable aroma of salted goose waft down from above. Zuleikha goes up: the blizzard’s din is closer, and the wind pounds at the roof and howls at the corners.

She decides to go on all fours across the attic because were she to walk, the boards would creak right over the sleeping Murtaza’s head. If she crawls, though, she can scurry through. She weighs so little that Murtaza can lift her with one hand, as if she were a young ram. She pulls her nightshirt to her chest so it won’t get all dusty, twists it, takes the end in her teeth, and gropes her way between boxes, crates, and wooden tools, cautiously crawling over the crossbeams. Her forehead knocks into the wall. Finally.

She raises herself up a little and peers out of the small attic window. She can hardly make out the houses of her native Yulbash, all drifted in snow, through the dark, gray gloom just before morning. Murtaza once counted, reaching a total of more than a hundred and twenty homesteads. A large village, that’s for sure. A village road smoothly curves and flows off toward the horizon, like a river. Windows are already lighting in some houses. Quickly, Zuleikha.

She stands and reaches up. Something heavy and smooth, with large bumps, settles into her hands: salted goose. Her stomach jolts, growling in demand. No, she can’t take the goose. She lets go of the bird and searches further. Here! Hanging to the left of the attic window are large, heavy sheets of paste that have hardened in the cold but give off a slight fruity smell. Apple pastila. The confection was painstakingly cooked in the oven, neatly rolled out on wide boards, and dried with care on the roof, soaking up hot August sun and cool September winds. You can bite off a tiny bit and dissolve it for a long time, rolling the rough, sour little piece along the roof of your mouth, or you can cram a lot in, chewing and chewing the resilient wad and spitting occasional seeds into your palm. Your mouth waters right away.

Zuleikha tears a couple of sheets of pastila from the string, rolls them up tightly, and sticks them under her arm. She runs a hand over the rest. There’s still a lot, quite a lot, left. Murtaza shouldn’t figure anything out.

And now to go back.

She kneels and crawls toward the stairs. The rolled-up pastila prevents her from moving quickly. She truly is a pitiful hen now: she hadn’t even thought to bring any kind of bag with her. Zuleikha goes down the stairs slowly, walking on the edges of her curled-up feet because the soles are so numb she can’t feel them. When she reaches the last step, the door on the Vampire Hag’s side swings open noisily and a shadowy silhouette appears in the black opening. A heavy walking stick knocks at the floor.

“Anybody there?” the Vampire Hag’s deep, masculine voice asks the darkness.

Zuleikha goes still. Her heart pounds and her stomach shrinks into an icy ball. She wasn’t fast enough. The pastila is thawing, softening under her arm.

The Vampire Hag takes a step forward. In fifteen years of blindness, she has learned the house by heart, so she moves around here freely and confidently.

Zuleikha flies up a couple of stairs, her elbow squeezing the softened pastila to her body more firmly.

The old woman turns her chin in one direction then another. She doesn’t hear or see a thing but she senses something, the old witch. Yes, a Vampire Hag. Her walking stick knocks loudly, closer and closer. Oh, she’ll wake up Murtaza!

Zuleikha jumps a few steps higher, presses against the banister, and licks her chapped lips.

The white silhouette stops at the foot of the stairs. The old woman’s sniffing is audible as she noisily draws air through her nostrils. Zuleikha brings her palms to her face. Yes, they smell of goose and apples. The Vampire Hag makes a sudden, deft lunge forward and swings, beating at the stairs with her long walking stick, as if she’s hacking them in half with a sword. The end of the stick whistles somewhere very close and smashes into a board, half a toe’s length from the bare sole of Zuleikha’s foot. Feeling faint from fright, Zuleikha flops on the steps like dough. If the old witch strikes once more… The Vampire Hag mumbles something unintelligible and pulls the walking stick toward herself. The chamber pot clinks dully in the dark.

“Zuleikha!” The Vampire Hag’s shout blares toward her son’s quarters.

Mornings usually start like this in their home.

Zuleikha forces herself to swallow. Has she really escaped notice? Carefully placing her feet, Zuleikha creeps down the steps. She bides her time for a couple of moments.

“Zuleikhaaa!”

Now it’s time. Her mother-in-law doesn’t like to say it a third time. Zuleikha bounds over to the Vampire Hag, “Right here, right here, Mama!” and she takes from her hands a heavy pot covered with a warm, sticky moistness, just as she does every day.

“You turned up, you pitiful hen,” her mother-in-law grumbles. “All you know how to do is sleep, you lazybones.”

Murtaza has probably already woken up from the noise and may come out to the hallway. Zuleikha presses the rolled-up pastila more tightly under her arm (she can’t lose it outside!), gropes with her feet at someone’s felt boots on the floor, and races out. The storm beats at her chest and takes her in its solid fist, trying to knock her down. Zuleikha’s nightshirt rises like a bell. The front steps have turned into a snowdrift overnight and Zuleikha walks down, feeling carefully for the steps with her feet. She trudges to the outhouse, sinking in almost to her knees. She fights the wind to open the door. She hurls the contents of the chamber pot into the icy hole. When she comes back inside, the Vampire Hag has already gone to her part of the house.

Murtaza drowsily greets Zuleikha at the threshold with a kerosene lamp in his hand. His bushy eyebrows are knitted toward the bridge of his nose, and his cheeks, still creased from sleep, have wrinkles so deep they might have been carved with a knife.

“You lost your mind, woman? Out in a blizzard, undressed?”

“I just took Mama’s pot out and back.”

“You want to lie around sick half the winter again? So the whole household’s on me?”

“What do you mean, Murtaza? I didn’t get cold at all. Look!” Zuleikha holds out her bright-red palms, firmly pressing her elbows to her waist; the pastila bulges under her arm. Is it visible under her shirt? The fabric got wet in the snow and is clinging to her.

But Murtaza’s angry and isn’t even looking at her. He spits off to the side, stroking his shaved skull and combing his splayed fingers through his scruffy beard.

“Get us some food. And be ready to leave after you clear the yard. We’re going for firewood.”

Zuleikha gives a low nod and scurries behind the curtain.

She did it! She really did it – yes, she, Zuleikha, yes, she, the pitiful hen! And there they are, the spoils: two crumpled, twisted, clumped-up pieces of the most delicious pastila. Will she be able to deliver it today? And where should she hide these riches? The Vampire Hag roots around in their things when they’re out so she can’t leave it in the house. She’ll have to bring it with her. Of course that’s dangerous. But Allah seems to be on her side today, so she should be lucky.

Zuleikha tightly rolls the pastila into a long band and winds it around her waist. She lowers her nightshirt over it and puts on a smock and baggy wide pants. She braids her hair and throws on a scarf.

The dense gloom outside is thinning by the head of her bed, diluted by the overcast winter morning’s feeble light. Zuleikha pulls back the curtains – anything’s better than working in the dark. The kerosene lamp standing on the corner of the stove casts a little slanted light on the women’s quarters but the economizing Murtaza has turned the wick so low the flame is barely visible. Never mind; she could do all this blindfolded.

A new day is beginning.

By noon, the morning snowstorm has subsided and the sun is peering out of a sky that has turned bright blue. They set off for firewood.

Zuleikha is sitting at the rear of the sledge, her back to Murtaza, watching the houses of Yulbash grow distant. Green, yellow, deep blue, they’re looking out from under the snowbanks like brightly colored mushrooms. Tall white candles of smoke melt away in the celestial blueness. Snow crunches loudly and deliciously under the runners. Sandugach, perky in the frosty cold, occasionally snorts and shakes her mane. The old sheepskin under Zuleikha warms her. The precious band around her belly is warm and heats her, too. If only she can manage to deliver it today.

Her arms and back ache. A lot of snow piled up during the night and Zuleikha spent a long time sinking her shovel into the snowbanks to clear broad paths in the yard, from the front steps to the large storehouse, to the small storehouse, to the privy, to the winter shed, and to the back yard. After all that work, it’s nice to sit and do nothing on the rhythmically swaying sledge, to sit so comfortably, bundled up in a strong-smelling sheepskin coat, to stick her numbed hands into her sleeves, rest her chin on her chest, and close her eyes…

“Wake up, woman, we’re there.”

Gigantic trees surround the sledge. White pillows of snow on spruce boughs and sprawling heads of pine trees. Rime on birch branches as fine and long as a woman’s hair. Powerful walls of snowdrifts. Silence for many versts around.

Murtaza binds laced snowshoes to his felt boots, jumps down from the sledge, flings his rifle on his back, and tucks a large axe into his belt. He takes his poles in his hands and doesn’t look back as he confidently tramps a path into the thicket. Zuleikha is right behind him.

The forest near Yulbash is good, bountiful. In the summer it feeds the villagers with large wild strawberries and sweet-beaded raspberries; there are pungent mushrooms in autumn. There is a lot of game. The Chishme flows from the forest’s depths, usually gentle, shallow, and filled with swift fish and sluggish crayfish, but it’s rapid, grumbling, and swollen with meltwater and mud in the spring. During the Great Famine, it was these alone – the forest and the river – that saved people. And Allah’s mercy, too, of course.

Murtaza has gone a long way today, almost to the end of the forest road. This road was built in the old days and leads through to the far border of the light part of the forest. It then extends into Last Clearing, which is surrounded by nine crooked pines, and breaks off. There is no further road. The forest ends and there begins the urman: dense evergreen woods, thickets broken by storms, and the abode of wild animals, forest spirits, and all kinds of evil. Centuries-old black spruce trees with sharp, spear-like tops grow so thickly in the urman that a horse cannot go through. And there are no pale-colored trees – red pines, speckled birch, or gray oak – whatsoever.

People say it’s possible to go to the lands of the Mari people by walking through the urman, away from the sun for many days in a row. But what person in his right mind would decide to undertake such a journey? The villagers didn’t even dare cross the border of Last Clearing during the time of the Great Famine. They nibbled at tree bark, ground acorns from the oaks, and dug up mouse burrows in search of grain, but they did not venture into the urman. The few who did were never seen again.

Zuleikha stops for a moment and places a large basket on the ground. She looks around anxiously – Murtaza really shouldn’t have gone this far.

“Is it much further, Murtaza? I can’t see Sandugach through the trees anymore.”

Her husband doesn’t answer; he’s up to his waist on the untrodden path, forging his way ahead, pushing his long poles into snowdrifts, and trampling brittle snow with his broad snowshoes. Small clouds of frosty steam puff up over his head. He finally stops near a tall, straight birch with a magnificent growth of chaga and approvingly slaps its trunk: This one.

First they trample down the snow around the tree. Then Murtaza tosses off his sheepskin coat, grabs the curved axe handle very firmly, points the axe at the gap between trees (we’ll fell it there), and begins chopping.

The blade glints in the sun and enters the side of the birch with a short, resonant chakh sound. “Akh! Akh!” answers the echo. The axe chops at the thick bark, intricately engraved all over with black ridges, then pierces the pale-pink woody pulp. Wood chips spatter like tears. An echo fills the forest.

It can be heard in the urman, too, Zuleikha thinks, uneasy. She’s standing waist-deep in snow a little further away, clasping the basket, and watching Murtaza chop. He raises the axe high, pulling it back slightly, supplely bends his torso, and smoothly swings the blade into the white chip-filled crevice on the side of the tree. He’s a strong man, large. And he works ably. She was given a good husband; complaining would be a sin. She herself is small, barely coming up to Murtaza’s shoulder.

Soon the birch begins shuddering more and groaning louder. The axe wound in its trunk resembles a mouth wide open in a silent scream. Murtaza tosses the axe, shakes the twigs from his shoulders, and nods at Zuleikha: Help me. Together they press their shoulders into the rough tree trunk and push, harder and harder. There’s a sharp cracking noise and the birch collapses to the ground with a loud groan of farewell, raising a cloud of snowy dust into the air.

Husband straddles the conquered tree and lops off its fat branches. Wife snaps off the thin branches and collects them in the basket, along with smaller kindling. They work silently for a long time. Zuleikha’s lower back aches; exhaustion weighs on her shoulders. Her hands are freezing despite her mittens.

“Murtaza, is it true that in her youth your mother went into the urman for several days and came back all in one piece?” Zuleikha straightens her back and bends at the waist, resting. “The holy man’s wife told me about it, and she heard it from her granny.”

He doesn’t answer; he’s measuring the axe against a gnarled, crooked branch sticking out from the trunk.

“I’d die of fear if I ended up there. My legs would probably stop working right away. I’d be lying on the ground, my eyes shut tight, and praying nonstop, as long as my tongue would move.”

Murtaza strikes hard and the branch springs off to the side, humming and quivering.

“But they say prayers don’t work in the urman. It’s all the same – you die whether you pray or not. What do you think?” Zuleikha lowers her voice. “Are there places on earth that Allah’s gaze doesn’t reach?”

Murtaza draws his arms far back and drives the axe deeply into a log. The sound rings in the cold air. He takes off his shaggy fur hat, wipes his reddened, blazing, bare skull with his hand, and spits on the ground, savoring it.

He sets to work again.

The basket is soon full. It can’t be lifted so it can only be dragged away. The birch has been stripped of branches and chopped into several logs. Long branches lie in neat bundles in the snowdrifts around them.

They haven’t noticed darkness is falling. When Zuleikha looks up at the sky, the sun is already hidden behind ragged shreds of cloud. A gust swoops in; the drifting snow whistles and swirls.

“Let’s go home, Murtaza; it’s getting stormy again.”

Her husband doesn’t answer as he continues winding rope around fat bunches of firewood. When the last bundle is ready, the storm is already starting to howl between the trees like a wolf, drawn-out and mean.

He points a fur mitten at the logs: Let’s move those first. There are four logs with the stubs of their former branches, each longer than Zuleikha. Grunting, Murtaza heaves one end of the fattest log from the ground. Zuleikha takes the other end. She can’t manage to lift it immediately and dawdles for a while, adjusting her position.

“Come on, woman!” Murtaza cries out impatiently.

Finally, she’s done it. She’s embracing the log with both arms, pressing her chest into the pink-tinged whiteness of fresh wood that’s bristling with long, sharp chips. They’re moving toward the sledge. They walk slowly. Her arms shake. I cannot drop it, Almighty, I cannot drop it. If it fell on her foot, she’d be a cripple for the rest of her life. It’s getting hot and there are warm little streams running down her back and belly. The precious band under her breasts is soaked through – the pastila will taste of salt. That doesn’t matter, she just needs to take it today…

Sandugach is standing obediently in the same place, lazily shifting from hoof to hoof. There aren’t many wolves this winter; Allah is perfect, so Murtaza isn’t worried about leaving the horse alone for a long time.

Once they’ve dragged the log onto the sledge, Zuleikha falls alongside it, tossing off her mittens and loosening the shawl around her neck. It hurts to breathe; it’s as if she’s run through the entire village without stopping.

Murtaza strides back to the firewood without saying a word. Zuleikha crawls down from the sledge and trails along behind him. They drag over the remaining logs. Then the bundles of fat branches. Then the thin branches.

Once the firewood has been stacked on the sledge, a heavy winter dusk is already covering the forest. Only Zuleikha’s basket remains by the freshly hewn birch stump.

“Fetch the kindling,” Murtaza tells her and starts securing the logs.

The wind has begun blowing in earnest, angrily whipping up clouds of snow and sweeping away the tracks they’ve trampled. Zuleikha clasps her mittens to her chest and rushes along the disappearing path into the forest’s darkness.

By the time she reaches the familiar stump, the basket has already been covered with snow. Zuleikha snaps a branch from a bush and starts wandering around, poking at the snowdrift with the switch. She’ll be in for it if she loses the basket. Murtaza will scold her and then cool down; but the Vampire Hag – she’ll quarrel to her heart’s content, ooze venom, and remind Zuleikha about that basket till the very day she dies.

And there it is, the dear thing, lying there! Zuleikha pulls the heavy basket out from under a layer of drifted snow and exhales, relieved. She can return. But which way? The blizzard dances fiercely around her. White streams of snow are rushing up and down in the air, cloaking Zuleikha, swaddling and entangling her. The sky sags between the sharp tops of the spruces, like a huge piece of gray cotton wool. The trees around her are merging into the darkness and now all resemble one another, like shadows.

There’s no path.

“Murtaza!” shouts Zuleikha, as snow pelts her mouth. “Murtazaaa!”

The blizzard sings, peals, and whistles in response.

Her body is weakening and her legs are growing limp, as if they’re made of snow, too. Zuleikha sinks to the stump with her back to the wind, holding the basket with one hand and gripping the collar of her sheepskin coat with the other. She can’t leave this spot or she’ll lose her way. It’s best to wait here. Could Murtaza leave her in the forest? Now that would make the Vampire Hag happy. And what about the pastila she’d got hold of? Could that really have been for nothing?

“Murtazaaa!”

A large, dark figure in a shaggy fur hat emerges from a swirl of snow. Firmly grasping his wife by the sleeve, Murtaza pulls her through the snowstorm behind him.

He won’t allow her to sit on the sledge: there’s a lot of firewood and the horse won’t make it. And so they walk, Murtaza up front, leading Sandugach by the bridle, and Zuleikha following, holding the back of the sledge, feebly lifting her unsteady feet. Her felt boots are crammed with snow but she doesn’t have the strength to quickly shake them out. She needs to keep stride with the sledge. Plod along, left, right, left, right… Well, come on, Zuleikha, you pathetic hen. You know you’re done for if you fall behind. Murtaza won’t notice. You’ll freeze to death in the forest.

Even so, what a good person he is to have come back for her. He could have left her there in the thicket. Who’s to care if she lives or not? He could have said she lost her way in the forest, he couldn’t find her, and a day later nobody would even remember her.

It turns out she can stride along with her eyes closed, too. That’s even better because her legs are working but her eyes are resting. The main thing is to keep a firm hold of the sledge.

Snow is beating painfully at her face, getting inside her nose and mouth. Zuleikha raises her head and shakes it off. She’s lying on the ground and the back of the sledge is disappearing ahead of her; the white whirling blizzard is all around. She stands, catches up to the sledge, and grasps it tightly. She decides not to close her eyes until they reach their house.

It’s already dark when they arrive in the yard. They unload the firewood by the woodpile for Murtaza to split tomorrow, unharness Sandugach, and cover the sledge.

The windowpanes on the Vampire Hag’s side are dark and coated with thick frost but Zuleikha knows her mother-in-law senses their arrival. She’s standing by the window now, alert to the movements of the floorboards. She’s waiting for their jolt when the front door slams, after which they’ll tremble pliantly under the master’s heavy footsteps. Murtaza will undress, wash after the trip, and go to his mother’s quarters. He calls this “our little evening chat.” What can you talk about with a deaf old lady? Zuleikha doesn’t understand. But these chats are long, sometimes lasting for hours. Murtaza is calm and tranquil when he returns from his mother’s house; he might even smile or joke a little.

His evening meeting plays into Zuleikha’s hands today. As soon as her husband puts on a clean shirt and goes to see the Vampire Hag, Zuleikha throws her sheepskin coat – which hasn’t even dried – on her shoulders and runs out of the house.

The blizzard is covering Yulbash with heavy, coarse snow. Zuleikha trudges down the street, bending low into the wind and leaning forward as if she’s praying. Small windows of houses lit with the cozy yellow light of kerosene lamps barely peek out in the darkness.

And there’s the edge of town. Here, under the fence of the last house is the home of the basu kapka iyase: the edge-of-town spirit. Zuleikha hasn’t seen him herself but people say he’s very angry, peevish. And how could he be otherwise? That’s his line of work – sitting with his nose toward a field and his tail toward Yulbash, chasing evil spirits away from the village, not allowing them beyond the edge of town. He’s the intermediary for helping villagers who have requests for the forest spirits. It’s serious work so he has no time for merriment.

Zuleikha opens up her sheepskin coat and feels around in the folds of her smock for a long time, unwinding the damp band at her waist.

“I’m sorry to disturb you so often,” she says into the blizzard. “If you could just help me once again? Please don’t refuse me.”

It’s no easy matter to please a spirit. You have to know what each spirit likes. For example, the bichura living in the entrance hall isn’t picky. If you set out a couple of unwashed dishes with leftover porridge or soup, she’ll lick them off during the night and be satisfied. The bathhouse bichura is more finicky: give her nuts and seeds. The cowshed spirit loves foods made from flour, and the gate spirit prefers ground eggshell. But the edge-of-town spirit likes sweets. That’s what Mama taught Zuleikha.

Zuleikha brought candy the first time she came to ask the basu kapka iyase for a favor, which was to request that the zirat iyase – the cemetery spirit – look after her daughters’ graves, cover them warmly with snow, and chase away evil, mischievous forest spirits. She later took nuts in honey, crumbly light pastries, and dried berries. Now, she’s bringing pastila for the first time. Will he like it?

She pulls apart the stuck-together sheets of pastila and tosses each one in front of her. The wind catches them and carries them away into the field, where it will twirl and swirl them for some time, bringing them to the basu kapka iyase’s lair.

Not one sheet returns to Zuleikha, so the edge-of-town spirit has accepted the treat. This means he will grant her request by having a talk with the cemetery spirit and convincing him. Her daughters will lie in warmth and calm, right up till spring. Zuleikha has been rather afraid of speaking directly with the cemetery spirit. After all, she’s a simple woman, not a wisewoman.

She thanks the basu kapka iyase – she bows low into the darkness – and quickly hurries home before Murtaza leaves the Vampire Hag’s. Her husband is still at his mother’s when she runs into the entrance hall. She thanks the Almighty – she fans her face with her hands – for He truly is on Zuleikha’s side today.

Exhaustion immediately envelops her in the warmth. Her hands and feet are like lead and her head is like cotton. Her body demands one thing: rest. She quickly rekindles the stove, which has cooled since morning. Sets a place for Murtaza at the wide sleeping bench, tossing some food on it. Runs to the winter shed and rekindles the stove there, too. Feeds the animals, cleans up after them. Brings the foal to Sandugach for an evening feed. Milks Kyubelek, strains the milk. Takes her husband’s pillows down from the high storage shelf and plumps them (Murtaza likes sleeping on high pillows). Finally, she can go to her area behind the stove.

Usually it’s children who sleep on trunks; grown women are entitled to the small part of the sleeping bench that’s separated from the men’s quarters by a drape. But the fifteen-year-old Zuleikha was so short when she came into Murtaza’s home that the Vampire Hag said on the very first day, boring into her daughter-in-law with eyes that were then still bright, yellow-tinged hazel, “This shorty won’t even fall off a trunk.” And so they settled Zuleikha on a large, old pressed-tin trunk covered with shiny protruding nails. She hadn’t grown since then, so there’d been no need to resettle her elsewhere. And Murtaza occupied the whole sleeping bench.

Zuleikha spreads her mattress and blanket on the trunk, pulls her smock over her head, and begins unplaiting her braids. Her fingers aren’t minding her and her head falls to her chest. She hears the door slam through her drowsiness; Murtaza’s coming back.

“You here, woman?” he asks from the men’s quarters. “Light the stove in the bathhouse. Mama wants to bathe.”

Zuleikha buries her face in her hands. The bathhouse takes a long time. And bathing the Vampire Hag… Where will she find the strength? If only there were a couple more moments to sit just like this, without moving. Then the strength would come. And then she would stand. And light it.

“Got it into your head you’d sleep? You sleep in the wagon, sleep at home. Mama’s right, you’re a lazybones!”

Zuleikha leaps up.

Murtaza is standing in front of her trunk. He has in his hand a kerosene lamp with a flickering flame inside; his broad chin, with a deep dimple in the middle, is tense with anger. Her husband’s trembling shadow covers half the stove.

“I’m running, I’m running, Murtaza,” she says, her voice hoarse.

And she runs.

First clear a path to the bathhouse in the snow; she hadn’t cleared it in the morning because she didn’t know she’d have to light the stove. Then draw water from the well, twenty buckets of it because the Vampire Hag likes to splash around. Light the stove. Strew some nuts for the bichura behind the bench so it doesn’t play tricks, like putting out the stove, letting in fumes, or impeding the steaming. Wash the floors. Soak the bundles of birch leaves. Bring dried herbs from the attic – bur-marigold for washing female and male private places, mint for delicious steam – and brew them. Lay out a clean rug in the entrance. Bring clean underclothes for the Vampire Hag, Murtaza, and herself. Don’t forget pillows and a pitcher with cold drinking water.

Murtaza put the bathhouse in the corner of the yard, behind the storehouse and shed. He built the stove according to the latest methods, fussing for a long time with designs in a magazine brought from Kazan, soundlessly moving his lips and drawing a broad fingernail over the yellowed pages. He laid bricks for several days, constantly referring to the drawings. He ordered a steel tank, to its specifications, at the Kazan factory of the Prussian manufacturer, Diese, and installed it on the exact protruding ledge that was designated, then smoothly attached it with clay. A stove like this both heated the bathhouse and warmed water quickly, you just had to add the logs in a timely manner – it’s not just a stove, it’s a lovely sight. The mullah himself came to have a look and then ordered the exact same thing for his own home.

As Zuleikha deals with the tasks, her exhaustion burrows somewhere deep, conceals itself – maybe in the back of her head, maybe in her spine – and rolls itself into a ball. It will crawl out soon, cover her like a dense wave, knock her from her feet, and drown her. But that will be later. For now, the bathhouse has heated up and the Vampire Hag can be called to bathe.

Murtaza can enter his mother’s quarters without knocking, but Zuleikha is supposed to stamp her feet loudly on the floor in front of her door for a long time so the old woman will be ready for her arrival. If the Vampire Hag is awake, she feels the floorboards trembling and the harsh gaze of her blind eye sockets greets her daughter-in-law. If she’s sleeping, Zuleikha needs to leave immediately and come back later.

“Maybe she went to sleep,” Zuleikha hopes, diligently stamping by the entrance to her mother-in-law’s house. She pushes the door and sticks her head through the crack.

Three large kerosene lamps in decorative metal holders brightly illuminate the spacious room – the Vampire Hag always lights them before Murtaza’s evening arrival. The floors have been scraped with a thin blade and rubbed with river sand so they shine like honey (Zuleikha wore all the skin off her fingers shining it during the summer); snow-white lace on the windows is starched so crisply it could cut you; and hanging on the walls are smart, long, red and green embroidered towels and an oval mirror so huge that Zuleikha can see her full reflection in it, from head to toe. A tall grandfather clock gleams with amber varnish, its brass pendulum slowly and relentlessly ticking away the time. A yellow flame crackles in a tall stove covered with glazed tiles. Murtaza has stoked it himself; Zuleikha isn’t allowed to touch it. A cobweb-thin silk valance on the beams under the ceiling borders the room like an expensive frame.

The old woman sits enthroned in the corner of honor, the tur, drowning in heaps of plumped pillows on a mighty bed with an ornate cast-iron headboard. Her feet rest on the floor in soft milk-colored felt boots embroidered with colorful braiding. Her head – which is wrapped in a long white scarf all the way to her shaggy eyebrows – stands straight and steady on her droopy neck. Her narrow eye openings are set atop high, broad cheekbones and look triangular, thanks to eyelids that sag crookedly on each side.

“A person could die waiting for you to heat the bathhouse,” her mother-in-law calmly says.

Her mouth is sunken and wrinkled, like an old goose rump; she has almost no teeth but speaks distinctly and intelligibly.

As if you’ll die, thinks Zuleikha, creeping into the room. You’ll even be saying nasty things about me at my funeral.

“But don’t get your hopes up: I’m planning to live a long time,” the old woman continues. She sets aside her jasper prayer beads and gropes around for a walking stick darkened with age. “Murtaza and I will outlive you all. We have strong roots and grow from a good tree.”

“Now she’ll talk about my rotten root,” sighs Zuleikha, doomed, as she brings the old woman a fur cap, felt boots, and a long, robe-like dog-hair coat.

“Not like you, so thin-blooded.” The old woman extends a bony foot in front of her; Zuleikha carefully removes the soft, almost downy felt boot and puts on a tall, rigid felt boot. “You didn’t end up with either height or a face. Of course maybe there was honey smeared between your legs in your youth but then again that spot didn’t exactly flourish, now, did it? You only brought girls into the world and not one of them survived.”

Zuleikha pulls too hard at the second boot and the old woman cries out from pain.

“Easy there, little girl! I speak the truth and you know it yourself. Your family line is ending, wasting away, you thin-boned thing. And that’s how it should be: a rotten root should rot and a healthy one should live.”

The Vampire Hag leans on her walking stick, rises from the bed, and immediately stands an entire head taller than Zuleikha. She cranes her broad chin, which resembles a hoof, and directs the gaze of her white eyes at the ceiling:

“The Almighty sent me a dream about that just now.”

Zuleikha throws the robe-like coat on the Vampire Hag’s shoulders, puts on the fur cap, and wraps her neck with a soft shawl.

All-powerful Allah, another dream! Her mother-in-law rarely dreamt, but the dreams that came to her turned out to be prophetic. They were strange and sometimes ghastly visions filled with hints and innuendo, where what was to come was reflected indistinctly, distorted as if by a hazy, warped mirror. Even the Vampire Hag herself was not always able to interpret their meaning. A couple of weeks or months later, the mystery would come to light, when something would happen, usually bad and rarely good, but always important, repeating with twisted precision a picture from a dream that was already half-forgotten.

The old witch was never wrong. In 1915, right after her son’s wedding, Murtaza appeared to her, trudging among red flowers. They were unable to unravel the dream but there was soon a fire in the household; the storehouse and old bathhouse burned to the ground and so the answer to the riddle was found. One night a couple of months later, the old woman saw a mountain of yellow skulls with large horns and predicted an epidemic of foot-and-mouth disease that would go on to mow down all the cattle in Yulbash. The dreams came for the next ten years, all sorrowful and frightening: children’s shirts desolately floating along the river, cradles split in half, chickens drowning in blood… During that time, Zuleikha gave birth to and immediately buried four daughters. A vision of the Great Famine in 1921 was scary, too. Air as black as soot appeared to her mother-in-law and people were swimming in it as if it were water, slowly dissolving, gradually losing their arms, legs, and heads.

“Are we going to sweat here much longer?” The old woman impatiently knocks her walking stick and is first to head for the door. “You want to make me sweat before going outside so I catch cold?”

Zuleikha hurriedly turns down the wicks on the kerosene lamps and rushes after her.

The Vampire Hag stops on the front steps; she doesn’t go outside alone. Zuleikha catches her mother-in-law by the elbow – the Vampire Hag jabs her long, gnarled fingers painfully into Zuleikha’s arm – and leads her to the bathhouse. They walk slowly, carefully placing their feet in the loose snow: the blizzard hasn’t subsided and the path is partially covered again.

“It must have been you that cleared the snow in the yard, wasn’t it?” the Vampire Hag smirks with half her mouth, standing in the entryway, allowing her snow-covered coat to be taken off. “It shows.”

She shakes her head, throws her cap on the floor (Zuleikha quickly dips to pick it up), fumbles for the door, and goes into the changing room by herself.

It smells of steamed birch leaves, bur-marigold, and fresh damp wood. The Vampire Hag sits down on the wide, long bench by the wall and freezes in silence: she’s permitting herself to be undressed. Zuleikha first takes off her white headscarf embroidered with large, heavy beads. Then a roomy velvet vest with a patterned clasp on the stomach. Beads: a coral strand, pearl strand, glass strand, and a hefty necklace that has darkened over time. A thick outer smock. A thin inner smock. Felt boots. Baggy wide pants; one pair, a second. Downy socks. Woolen socks. Cotton socks. Zuleikha wants to pull the heavy crescent earrings from her mother-in-law’s fat, creased earlobes but she screams, “Don’t touch! You might lose something… Or say you lost it…” Zuleikha decides not to touch the rings of dulled yellow metal on the old woman’s misshapen, wrinkled fingers.

When her clothing is neatly laid out in a strict, set order, taking up the entire bench from wall to wall, Zuleikha’s mother-in-law carefully feels all the objects, pursing her lips in dissatisfaction, straightening and smoothing out some items. Zuleikha quickly throws her own things in the laundry basket by the entrance and leads the old woman into the steam room.

As soon as they open the door they’re enveloped in hot air and the aromas of white-hot stones and steamed bast fiber. Moisture begins streaming down their faces and backs.

“You were too lazy to heat it properly, it’s barely warm,” the old woman says through her teeth, scratching her sides. She climbs up on the highest steaming shelf, lies with her face toward the ceiling, and closes her eyes – so she’ll be soaking wet.

Zuleikha takes a seat by the basins she prepared and begins kneading at the dampened bundles of birch leaves.

“You’re kneading them badly,” says the Vampire Hag, continuing to grumble. “I might not see, but I know it’s bad. You’re running them back and forth in the basin like you’re stirring soup with a spoon, but you have to knead it like it’s dough. What made Murtaza pick you anyway? So careless of him. Honey between the legs isn’t going to satisfy a man his whole life.”

Zuleikha gets onto her knees to work the leaves. Her body starts feeling hot right away, and her face and chest grow wet.

“That’s better,” a raspy voice carries from above. “You wanted to hit me with unsoftened bundles of leaves, you good-for-nothing. But I won’t allow you to disrespect me. Or my Murtaza, either. I won’t allow it. Allah granted me this long life to defend him from you. Who else but me will stand up for my little boy? You don’t love him, don’t honor him, you only pretend. You’re a cold, soulless faker, that’s who you are. I feel it, oh, how I feel it.”

Not a word more about the dream, though. The mean old woman will wear her down all evening. She knows Zuleikha is desperate to hear about it. She’s torturing Zuleikha.

Zuleikha takes two bundles of leaves trickling with greenish water and goes up to the Vampire Hag on the steaming shelf. Her head enters a dense layer of baking air under the ceiling and begins to throb. Her vision blurs as grains of color flash and float before her eyes.

There she is up close, the Vampire Hag, stretched out from wall to wall, almost like a landscape where odd hillocks of hundred-year-old flesh and thick landslides of skin seem to have been dropped between protruding bones. Meandering streams of glistening sweat flow along that entire uneven valley, where indented gullies and magnificent rises alternate.

The Vampire Hag needs to be beaten with leaf bundles in both hands, beginning at the belly. First Zuleikha carefully draws a bundle of leaves along her skin as preparation, then begins thrashing the Vampire Hag with each bundle in turn. Red spots appear immediately on the old woman’s body; black birch leaves fly off everywhere.

“And you don’t know how to beat me, either. How many years have I been teaching you?” The Vampire Hag raises her voice to outshout the long, lashing swats. “Harder! Go on, go on, you pitiful hen! Warm my old bones! Hit meaner, you good-for-nothing! Get your thin blood moving, so it thickens! How do you love your husband at night if you’re that weak, huh? Murtaza will leave, leave for another woman who will beat and love him harder! Even I can strike harder. Beat me better or I’ll hit you! Grab you by the hair and show you how to do it! I’m not Murtaza, I won’t let you off! Where’s your strength, you hen? You’re not dead yet! Or are you?” The old woman is shouting at the top of her lungs by now and her face lifts toward the ceiling, distorted by fury.

Zuleikha swings with all her might, striking with the bundles of leaves as if they were an axe, at a body that glimmers in the wafting steam. The birch switches shriek as they split the air and the old woman shudders heavily; broad crimson streaks run across her belly and chest, where blood is swelling into dark grains.

“Finally,” the Vampire Hag exhales hoarsely, throwing her head back on the bench.

Zuleikha’s vision darkens and she climbs down the steps from the steaming shelf to the slippery, cool floor. Her breathing is rapid and her hands are shaking.

“Make it steam more and then get to my back,” the Vampire Hag commands calmly.

Glory be to Allah, the old woman likes to wash on the lower level. She sits in a huge wooden basin filled to the brim with water, carefully lowers the long, flat bags of breasts that hang to her bellybutton into the basin, and begins graciously extending her arms and legs one at a time to Zuleikha, who rubs them with a steamed bast scrubber, washing balls of grime to the floor.

Now it’s time for the hair. Her wispy gray braids, which fall down to her hips, need to be unplaited, lathered, and rinsed out without grazing the large, hanging crescent earrings or spilling water into unseeing eyes.

After rinsing in several pails of cold water, the Vampire Hag is ready. Zuleikha leads her out to the changing room and begins wiping her dry with towels, wondering if the old woman will reveal the mysterious dream to her. Zuleikha has no doubt she already told her son everything today.

But then the Vampire Hag extends a gnarled finger and pokes Zuleikha hard in the side. Zuleikha yelps and steps away. The old woman pokes again. And then a third time and a fourth. What’s wrong with her? Did she steam too long? Zuleikha jumps aside, toward the wall.

Her mother-in-law calms down a few moments later. She holds out a demanding hand in a habitual gesture, impatiently motioning with her fingers, into which Zuleikha places a pitcher of drinking water she readied in advance. The old woman takes greedy mouthfuls and the drops run down the deep folds at the corners of her mouth to her chin. Then she swings and forcefully hurls the pitcher into the wall. The pottery clangs loudly, smashing to pieces, and a dark water spot creeps down the logs.

Zuleikha’s lips move in a brief, soundless prayer. All-powerful Allah, what’s happened to the Vampire Hag today? She’s so worked up. Could she be going soft in the head due to her age? Zuleikha waits a bit. Then she cautiously approaches and continues dressing her mother-in-law.

“You’re silent,” the old woman utters in condemnation, allowing herself to be dressed in a clean undershirt and baggy wide pants. “You’re always silent, mute. If I had to live with someone who was silent all the time, I’d kill them.”

Zuleikha stops.

“You could never do anything like that,” she continues. “You can’t hit or kill or learn to love. Your fury’s sleeping deep inside and won’t ever wake up now, and what’s life without fury? No, you’ll never really live. In short, you’re a hen and your life is hennish.” The Vampire Hag leans back toward the wall with a blissful sigh. “My life, though, has been real. I’m already both blind and deaf but I’m still living, and I like that. But you’re not living. That’s why I don’t pity you.”

Zuleikha stands and listens, pressing the old woman’s felt boots to her chest.

“You’ll die soon: it was in my dream. Murtaza and I will stay in the house, but three fiery angels will fly here for you and bring you straight to Hell. I saw everything as it is: how they pick you up and how they hurl you into a carriage and how they carry you over the precipice. I’m standing on the front steps, watching. And you’re silent even then, just mooing like Kyubelek, your green eyes wide open, gawking at me like an insane woman. The angels roar with laughter, holding you firmly under the arms. Thwack of a whip and the earth opens wide, smoke and sparks coming up through the crack. Thwack and you’ve all flown off, disappearing into the smoke…”

Zuleikha’s legs are weakening and her hands release the felt boots. She leans against the wall, slowly sinking down onto a thin rug that gives little protection from the cold floor.

“Maybe that won’t come true soon,” says the Vampire Hag, yawning broadly and deliciously. “You know yourself that some dreams are fulfilled quickly, others months later so that I’m already starting to forget them…”

Zuleikha seems to have lost control over her hands, but she somehow dresses the old woman. The Vampire Hag notices her fumbling and smirks unkindly. Then she sits on the bench and leans resolutely into her walking stick.

“I’m not leaving the bathhouse with you today. Maybe you don’t have your wits about you after what you’ve heard. Who knows what will come into your head. And I still have a long time left to live. So call Murtaza; let him lead me home and put me to bed.”

After wrapping her sheepskin coat more firmly around her sweaty, bare body, Zuleikha trudges to the house and leads her husband back. He runs into the changing room without his hat, not shaking off the snow stuck to his felt boots.

“What happened, Eni?” He runs up to his mother and grasps her hands.

“I can’t…” The Vampire Hag’s weakened voice suddenly stirs and she drops her head to her son’s chest. “I can’t… no more…”

“What? What is it?” Murtaza drops to his knees and begins feeling her head, neck, and shoulders.

Her hands shaking, the old woman somehow unfastens the ties on the front of her smock and pulls at the collar opening. A crimson spot with large black grains of clotted blood is darkening on a light triangle of skin in the gap. A bruise stretches from the opening in her undershirt down toward her belly.

“Why…?” The Vampire Hag curves her mouth as if it were a sharply angled yoke for carrying pails and two large, glistening tears roll from her eyes before disappearing somewhere in the finely quivering wrinkles on her cheeks. She presses herself against her son, shaking soundlessly. “I didn’t do anything to her…”

This brings Murtaza to his feet.

“You!” He growls indistinctly, drilling his eyes into Zuleikha and groping at the wall next to him.

There are bunches of dried herbs and bundles of bast scrubbers under his hand – he pulls them off and flings them away. A heavy broom handle finally settles in his palm. He grasps it firmly and raises it threateningly.

“I didn’t beat her!” says Zuleikha in a stifled whisper, jumping away toward the window. “I never, not once, laid a finger on her! She asked me herself–”

“Murtaza, ulym, don’t beat her, have pity,” sounds the Vampire Hag’s trembling voice in the corner. “She didn’t pity me, but for her, please–”

Murtaza hurls the broom. The handle strikes Zuleikha on the shoulder, hurting; her sheepskin coat falls to the floor. She drops the felt boots herself and darts into the steam room. The door shuts behind her with a bang and the bolt clatters; her husband is locking her inside.

Pressing her hot face to the small steamed-up window, Zuleikha peers through a dancing shroud of snow as her husband and mother-in-law float to the house like two tall shadows. As the windows on the Vampire Hag’s side light up and then go dark. As Murtaza strides heavily back to the bathhouse.

Zuleikha grabs a large dipper and scoops water from the basin on the stove; fluffy puffs of steam rise from the basin.

The bolt clatters again and Murtaza is standing in the doorway in just his underclothes; he’s holding the same broom in his hand. He takes a step forward and closes the door behind him.

Hurl boiling water at him! Right now, don’t wait!

Zuleikha is breathing rapidly and holding the dipper in front of herself in outstretched hands as she steps away and presses her back to the wall; her shoulder blades sense a sharp bulge in the logs.

Murtaza takes another step and knocks the dipper from Zuleikha’s hands with the broom handle. He lurches toward her, throwing her to the lower steaming shelf. Zuleikha’s knees strike it hard and she sprawls on the shelf.

“Lie still, woman,” he says.

And he begins beating her.

A broom on the back isn’t painful. It’s almost like a bundle of birch leaves. Zuleikha lies still, as her husband ordered, but she shudders and scratches the shelf with her nails at each strike so he doesn’t beat her long. He cools off quickly. She was given a good husband after all.

Then she steams and washes him. When Murtaza goes out into the changing room to cool off, she washes all the laundry. She no longer has the strength to wash herself – her exhaustion has returned, filled her eyelids with heaviness, and clouded her head – but somehow she draws the scrubber along her sides and rinses her hair. All that’s left is to wash the bathhouse floors and then sleep, sleep.

As a child, she was taught to wash floors on her hands and knees. “Only a lazybones works bending from the waist or crouching,” her mother taught her. Zuleikha doesn’t consider herself a lazybones and now she’s wiping the slippery dark boards, sliding along them like a lizard on her elbows and knees. Her belly and breasts hover right over the floor, her leaden head is bent low and her rear end is raised high. She’s feeling unsteady.

The steam room is soon washed clean and Zuleikha moves on to the changing room: she hangs the damp rugs on the storage racks that line the wall under the ceiling – let them dry out – gathers the shards of the pottery pitcher and sets to scrubbing the floor.

Murtaza is still lying on the bench, undressed, wrapped in a white sheet, and resting. Her husband’s gaze always forces Zuleikha to work harder, more diligently, and faster: let him see she’s not a bad wife even if she isn’t tall. And so now she’s gathered the remains of her strength and – sprawled on the floor – is drawing the rag along the already clean boards in a frenzy: back and forth, back and forth, her mussed, wet hair bouncing in time with her uncovered breasts creeping along the floorboards.

“Zuleikha,” utters Murtaza in a low tone, gazing at his naked wife.

She straightens up, still kneeling and holding on to the rag, but doesn’t have time to raise her sleepy eyes. Her husband clasps her from behind and throws her, stomach down, onto the bench, brings all the weight of his body upon her, breathing heavily and wheezing as he begins to rub against her, pressing her into the hard boards. He wants to make love to his wife, but his body doesn’t want to; it has forgotten how to obey his desires. Finally, Murtaza stands and begins dressing. “Even my flesh doesn’t want you,” he tells her without looking, and leaves the bathhouse.

Zuleikha slowly rises from the bench, the same rag still in her hand. She finishes washing the floor. Hangs up the wet sheets and towels. Dresses and trudges home. She lacks the strength to be upset about what happened with Murtaza. The Vampire Hag’s scary prophecy – that’s what she’ll think about, but only tomorrow, tomorrow. When she wakes up.

The light is already off inside the house. Murtaza isn’t sleeping yet; he’s breathing loudly in his part of the house; the boards of the sleeping bench creak under him.

Zuleikha gropes her way to her corner, her hand guiding her along the warm, rough side of the stove, then she falls on the trunk without undressing.

“Zuleikha,” Murtaza calls out to her; this voice is satisfied and affectionate.

She wants to stand but cannot. Her body spreads on the trunk like a thin pudding.

“Zuleikha!”

She crawls down to the floor and kneels in front of the trunk, but can’t tear her head from it.

“Zuleikha, hurry up, you pathetic hen!”

She rises slowly and drags herself to her husband’s call, reeling. She crawls onto the sleeping bench.

Murtaza’s impatient hands pull down her baggy pants (he grunts peevishly: Now that’s a lazybones, hasn’t even undressed yet), lays her on her back, and lifts her smock. His uneven breathing grows closer. Zuleikha senses her husband’s beard, long and still smelling of the bathhouse and frost, covering her face; the recent beating on her back aches under his weight. Murtaza’s body has finally responded to his desires and he hurries to fulfill them, greedily, powerfully, at length, and triumphantly.

When she’s fulfilling her wifely duty, Zuleikha usually pictures herself as a butter churn inside which a housewife’s strong arms beat butter using a fat, hard pestle. Today, though, there are none of those thoughts, only a heavy blanket of exhaustion. She is distantly aware of her husband’s stifled snorting through a shroud of sleep. The unceasing jolts of his body lull her, like a rhythmically rocking cart…

Murtaza climbs off his wife, wiping the damp back of his head with his palm and calming his labored breathing; he’s breathing wearily, with satisfaction.

“Go to your own place, woman,” he says and pushes her unmoving body.

He doesn’t like her to sleep next to him on the bench.

Without opening her eyes, Zuleikha’s feet slap off to her trunk, and she doesn’t even notice she’s already sleeping soundly.

A KNOCK AT THE WINDOW

Will I die?

A deep-blue storm drones outside the window. Zuleikha is kneeling and cleaning Murtaza’s kaftan with a bristle brush. The kaftan is the main decoration in the house: quilted felt, covered in velvet, smelling of a strong male, and as huge as its owner. It hangs on a fat copper nail, its magnificent sleeves shimmering, and it graciously allows the frail Zuleikha to grovel at its feet and clean drops of mud from its hem.

Will I die soon?

The mud in Kazan is rich and of high quality. Zuleikha hasn’t been there; she’s never once left Yulbash, except to go to the forest or cemetery. She’d like to, though. Murtaza once promised to take her with him some day. She is afraid to remind him, so all she can do is watch silently whenever he is preparing to leave. He’ll tighten the harness on Sandugach, pound the loosened wheels with a heel, and pretend not to notice her.

So if I die, then I won’t see Kazan?

Zuleikha narrows her eyes at Murtaza. Now, he’s sitting on the sleeping bench and fixing the horse collar. Fingers with brown nails as hard and strong as the trunks of young oaks nimbly thread a slippery leather strap into the wooden base. He’s just returned from the city but he went to work immediately. A good husband – what can you say.

Will he marry someone else quickly if I die?

Murtaza grunts with satisfaction: It’s ready! He puts the collar on his own powerful neck, testing the strength of his handiwork, his thick tendons swelling under the steep wooden curve. Yes, a man like this would marry, and very quickly.

And what if the Vampire Hag was wrong?

Zuleikha’s brush swishes. Whoosh-whoosh. Whoosh-whoosh. Shamsia-Firuza. Khalida-Sabida. First and second daughters. Third and fourth. She often runs through those names as if they were prayer beads. The Vampire Hag foretold all four deaths: Zuleikha had simultaneously found out from her mother-in-law about each pregnancy and each newborn’s impending death. Four times she had carried to term both the fruit in her womb and a hope in her heart that this time the Vampire Hag would be wrong. But the old woman turned out to be right every time. Could she really be right now, too?

Work, Zuleikha, work. What was it Mama used to say? Work drives away sorrow. Oh, Mama, my sorrow doesn’t obey your sayings…

There’s a knock, the signaling knock, at the window: three quick knocks, two slow. She shudders. Did she imagine it? Then again: three quick knocks, two slow. No, she didn’t imagine it, this can’t be a mistake; it’s the same knock. The brush falls from her hands and rolls along the floor. Zuleikha looks up and meets her husband’s heavy gaze. May Allah protect us, Murtaza, not again?

He slowly removes the collar from his neck, throws his sheepskin coat on his shoulders, and shoves his feet into his felt boots. The door slams behind him.

Zuleikha rushes to the window, melts the jagged patterns in the frost on the glass with her fingers, and presses her eye to the little hole. There’s Murtaza opening the gate, fighting the beginnings of the snowstorm. A dark horse thrusts its muzzle out of swirling white flakes and a rider powdered with snow leans from his saddle toward Murtaza, whispers something in his ear, and dissolves into the blizzard again a moment later, as if he’d never been there. Murtaza returns.

Zuleikha falls to the floor, fumbles for the brush that rolled away, and sticks her nose into the hem of the kaftan. A woman shouldn’t display excessive curiosity, even at a moment like this. The door lets out a long squeak as fresh, frosty air comes in. Her husband’s lumbering steps slowly float past behind her back. They’re not good steps; they’re slow and tired, somehow doomed.

Her chest is pressed to the cold floor, her face to the soft kaftan. She’s breathing shallowly and soundlessly. She hears how loudly the fire is crackling in the stove. She pauses, then turns her head slightly. Murtaza is sitting on the sleeping bench in his sheepskin coat and snow-covered, shaggy fur hat; the bushes of his eyebrows have come together at the bridge of his nose, the sparkle of large white snowflakes in them slowly dimming. A wrinkle furrows his brow and his eyes are expressionless, lifeless. And Zuleikha understands: yes, again.

And Allah, what will happen this time? She squeezes her eyes shut and lowers her forehead, which has instantly broken out in a sweat, to the cold floorboard. She feels moisture there. Snow is melting from Murtaza’s felt boots and streaming across the floor.

Zuleikha grabs a rag and crawls on her knees, mopping up the water. The top of her head bumps into her husband’s toes, which are as hard as iron. She slaps the rag at the melted snow around his feet, not daring to lift her head. A large, prickly felt boot comes down on her right hand. Zuleikha wants to tear her hand away but the boot presses down on her fingers like a rock. She looks up. Murtaza’s yellow eyes are right next to her. Reflected light from the fire dances in pupils as huge as cherries.

“I’m not giving it up,” he whispers quietly. “I won’t give up anything this time.”

Sour breath burns at her face. Zuleikha moves aside. And she feels the other felt boot fall on her left hand. Just so long as he doesn’t crush her fingers; how would she work without fingers?

“What’s going to happen, Murtaza?” she babbles plaintively. “Did they say? Grain has to be turned in now? Or cattle?”

“What business is it of yours, woman?” he hisses in response.

He takes her braids and winds them around his fists. Zuleikha’s eyes are next to his hot mouth. Gobs of spittle glisten in the deep, brown crevices between his teeth.

“Maybe the new authorities don’t have enough women? They’ve already taken grain and cattle, too. If they want land, they’ll take it away. But women, now that’s a problem.” Murtaza’s spittle is spraying Zuleikha’s face. “The Red commissars don’t have anybody to mate with.”

His knees are squeezing her head. Oh, how strong her husband’s legs are, even though he’s gone all gray.

“They ordered all the women be rounded up and turned in to the chairman of the rural council. Whoever disobeys will be assigned to that collective farm place. Forever.”

Zuleikha finally realizes that her husband’s joking. She just doesn’t know if she should smile in response. She understands from his sharp, heavy breathing that she shouldn’t.

Murtaza releases Zuleikha’s head. Removes his felt boots from her fingers. Stands and wraps his sheepskin jacket tighter.

“Hide the food, like always,” he quickly tells her. “We’ll go to the secret storage place in the morning.”

He takes the horse collar from the sleeping bench and goes out.

Zuleikha pulls a ring of keys from a nail, grabs a kerosene lamp, and runs into the yard.

There hasn’t been a warning for a long time now and many people have begun storing their food in the old ways, in cellars and storehouses, instead of hiding it. That turned out not to be a good idea.

The storehouse is locked and a slippery ball of snow is stuck to the big, paunchy lock. Zuleikha gropes at the keyhole with the key, turns once, twice, and the lock gives unwillingly, opening its mouth.

The meager kerosene light illuminates the wall’s smooth yellow logs and high ceiling, where a black square gapes – the trapdoor to the hayloft – but it doesn’t reach the darkening corners in the distance. The storehouse is spacious, solid, and built to last, like everything in Murtaza’s household. The walls are hung with tools: vicious sickles and scythes, toothy saws and rakes, heavy planes, axes, and chisels, blunt-faced wooden hammers, sharp pitchforks, and crowbars. There’s also horse tack and harnesses: old and new collars, leather bridles, stirrups that are rusted or gleaming with fresh oil, and horseshoes. Several wooden wheels, a hollowed-out trough, and a copper basin with shiny curves (thank you, Murtaza, for bringing it from the city a couple of years ago). A cracked cradle hangs from the ceiling. There’s a smell of grain hardened by frost, and cold, spicy meat.

Zuleikha remembers the times when dense, plump-cheeked sacks of grain towered to the ceiling here. Murtaza would walk between them, satisfied, smiling serenely, and tirelessly re-counting them, placing a palm on each sack with a tremble, as if it were a magnificent female body. It’s not like that now.

She places the kerosene lamp on the floor. There are fewer sacks than fingers on her hands. And each is thin, with flabby, drooping sides. Back in 1919, they’d learned to pour grain from one sack into several, as soon as the food confiscation detachments neared Yulbash. Everything had been unfathomable then and those raiding parties became more and more like wanton spirits with every year that passed: scarier than a demonic alabasty woman, as gluttonous as a giant evil dev, and insatiable, like Zhalmavyz, the huge cannibal woman. It was difficult to hide a tightly stuffed sack, and besides, then all the grain was gone immediately if it was found. It’s a different story if there are several skinny ones: they’re easier to store (each one in a different place) and not so awful to part with. What’s more, Zuleikha could drag the thin sacks around, one at a time, without Murtaza’s help, hiding them herself while he went around to the neighbors to figure out what was happening.

If not for the snowstorm, many villagers would have made their way into the forest this evening. Each prudent homeowner had a hiding place under the protective cover of fir boughs and crackling fallen branches. Murtaza had one, too. But where could you go in a blizzard? The only hope was for mercy from the heavens. Allah grant that nobody arrive before morning.

Zuleikha starts hiding the grain and food.

She buries a couple of sacks right there, in the storehouse; the cellar in the earthen floor by the wall has served them loyally for the last ten years. She’s afraid to store them in the hayloft because many people hide theirs in lofts. She places several precious sacks of seed grain marked with white paint in the false bottom of the steel water tank in the bathhouse.

Now it’s the horsemeat’s turn. Long horse intestines resembling wrinkly fingers, tightly stuffed with dark red spiced meat, hang in bunches from the ceiling. Oh and do they smell! Zuleikha’s nostrils draw in the sharp, salty aroma of kyzylyk. It’s best to hide this sausage in a place where the smell can’t be picked up. In the summer, it would have been possible to climb up on the roof and lay it in even rows on the little brick ledges inside the chimney; that wouldn’t have done anything to the meat except make it smell more delicious from the smoke. But the roof is covered in ice now so she can’t climb up there without Murtaza. She’ll have to put it in the house, under a floorboard, securely sealed in thick iron boxes, to keep out rats.

Nuts are next. Hard little hazelnut balls roll and knock inside their shells like a thousand wooden rattles as she lugs the long, narrow sacks from the storehouse into the winter shed and places them in the bottom of the manger then sprinkles them with hay. The cow and horse watch the fuss around their feeders with indifference. The foal peers out from under Sandugach’s belly, squinting curiously at his mistress.

Zuleikha places the salt, peas, and carrot flour from the cellar on a wide shelf under the outhouse roof and covers it with boards.

She brings honey in large wooden frames wrapped with thin, sugared rags up to the attic. It is there, under some boards, that she also hides the salted goose and heaps of pastila stiffened from the hard frost.

The last thing left to hide is five dozen large eggs, shining with gentle whiteness in the depths of a birch bark container, where they’re lying in soft straw.

Maybe they won’t come after all?

These were wicked guests who made themselves at home in any household, not asking permission to seize the owner’s last food supplies or painstakingly selected seed grain that had been carefully stored for next spring’s planting and was thus even more valuable. And they were also ready to strike, jab with a bayonet, or shoot anyone standing in their way, without a second’s hesitation.

In her fourteen uneasy years of hiding from these uninvited guests in the house’s women’s quarters, Zuleikha has observed many faces through the curtain’s folds: unshaven and groomed, blackened from the sun and aristocratically pale, with iron-toothed smiles and strict, prim expressions, briskly speaking in Tatar, Russian, and Ukrainian, or keeping sullenly silent about the dreadful truths that were inscribed, in even square letters, on thin sheets of paper worn at the creases that they kept trying to stick under Murtaza’s nose.

Those faces had many names, each more incomprehensible and frightening than the next: grain monopoly, food confiscation, requisition, tax on foodstuffs, Bolsheviks, food appropriation detachments, Red Army, Soviet power, regional secret police, Komsomol, State Political Administration, communists, authorized this and that…

Mostly long Russian words with meanings Zuleikha didn’t understand… so to herself she called those people the Red Horde. Her father had told her a lot about the Golden Horde, whose harsh, narrow-eyed emissaries collected tribute for several centuries in this part of the world and took it to their merciless leader Genghis Khan, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The Red Hordesmen collected tribute, too, but Zuleikha didn’t know who received it.

At first they collected only grain. Then potatoes and meat. And during the Great Famine, in 1921, they began making a clean sweep of everything edible. Poultry. Cattle. And everything they could find in the house. It was back then that Zuleikha learned to divide the grain between several sacks.

They hadn’t made an appearance in a long time now; Yulbash had calmed. During that period that had the peculiar name “New Economic Policy,” peasants were allowed to cultivate the land without worry and were even permitted to hire wage laborers. After listing so scarily, it seemed that life was leveling out again. Then last year Soviet power unexpectedly took on an appearance that was familiar to all the villagers and so wasn’t frightening: former wage laborer Mansur Shigabutdinov became the head of the rural council. He wasn’t born locally – he dragged his aging mother and the bachelor living with her after him, from the next canton, long ago. Malicious gossips joke that he hasn’t ever in his life had the honor of saving up bride-money for a good fiancée. They call him Mansurka-Burdock behind his back. Mansurka persuaded several people to join his own Party cell and meets with them in the evenings to discuss things. He organizes gatherings and enthusiastically summons villagers into an association with the scarily named kolkhoz, but hardly anyone listens to him on that collective farm: only those as needy as he is go to the gatherings.

But now it has happened again, the signaling knock at night, like the nervous beating of an unhealthy heart. Zuleikha looks out the window. Lights are burning in the neighboring houses, so Yulbash isn’t sleeping; it’s preparing for the arrival of uninvited guests.

So where should she hide those eggs? They’ll crack in the cold, so she can’t put them in the attic, the hallway, or the bathhouse. They need to be concealed in warmth. They can’t go in the men’s quarters because the Red Hordesmen will turn everything upside down there; that had already happened more than once. In the women’s quarters? Those tyrants won’t be shy; they’ll search everything there, too. Maybe with the Vampire Hag? The unbidden guests had often faltered under the old woman’s stern, unseeing gaze, so searches in her mother-in-law’s house were usually short and rushed.

Zuleikha carefully grasps the bulky birch container and darts out to the hallway. There’s no time to mill around by the door asking permission to enter so she opens it and glances in. The Vampire Hag is sleeping, snoring loudly, her cleft chin directed at the ceiling, where light is cast in blossoms of whimsical flowers: the kerosene lamps are burning in case Murtaza gets the urge to look in on his mother this evening. Zuleikha steps over a fat log at the threshold and scampers into the area behind the stove.

And what a nice stove it is! It’s as huge as a house, covered in smooth, almost glassy, decorative tiles (even on the women’s side) with two deep kettles that are never used: one’s for preparing food, the other’s for boiling water. If only Zuleikha had kettles like this. She’s been struggling along her whole life with just one. She places the container on a ledge and removes the lid from a kettle. Now she’ll pile the eggs inside, sprinkle them with straw, and bolt back to her own house. Nobody will even notice…

The door opens with a squeak as Zuleikha piles on the last egg. Someone’s stepping heavily over the threshold; the floor-boards groan from the strain. Murtaza! Her hand cramps from the unexpectedness, the shell crunches very quietly, and the cold, slippery liquid slowly oozes through her fingers. Her heart turns into the same kind of thick goo as the egg that burst in her hand and it’s flowing along her ribs, to somewhere below, toward the chill in her belly.

Should she leave now? And admit she intruded into her mother-in-law’s quarters without permission? Confess to the broken egg?

“Eni.” She can hear Murtaza’s low voice.

The old woman’s snore is stifled and stops right away. The bedsprings make an extended moan – the Vampire Hag is raising her large body as if she’s heard her son’s call.

“My darling,” she says quietly, in a hoarse, half-awake voice. “Is that you?”

Hanging in the long silence are the sounds of the old woman’s body cumbersomely settling and Murtaza’s heavy sigh.

Without breathing, Zuleikha carefully uses the rim of the kettle to wipe the slippery egg from her hand. Hugging the stove and pausing after every movement, she takes several soundless steps to the side, leaning her cheek against the warm tiles and pulling back the folds of the curtain with her index finger. Now she sees them, mother and son, through the gap in the curtain. The Vampire Hag is sitting very straight on the bed as always, with her feet on the floor, but Murtaza is kneeling and his gleaming head is pressed into his mother’s belly, arms firmly clasping her large body. Zuleikha has never seen Murtaza genuflecting. He would not forgive her if she were to come out now.

“Ulym,” says the Vampire Hag, breaking the silence, “I sense something’s happened.”

“Yes, Eni. Something’s happened,” says Murtaza, not tearing his face from his mother’s belly, muffling his voice. “And it’s been going on for a long time. If you only knew what’s been happening here…”

“Tell your old mother everything, Murtaza, my boy. Even if I can’t hear or see, I feel everything and can console you.” The Vampire Hag is patting her son’s back, just as people stroke overexcited stallions after races to calm them.

“How are we supposed to live, Eni? To live!” Murtaza rubs his forehead against his mother’s knees, as if burying it deeper. “They keep robbing, robbing, robbing. They’re seizing everything. When you’ve nothing left, and the only thing to do is to join the forefathers, they let you catch your breath. And when things begin to recover and you lift your head a little, they’re robbing you again. My strength is gone and my heart has no patience!”

“Life is a complex road, ulym. Complex and long. Sometimes you want to sit down at the side of the road and stretch your legs, just let everything roll on past even if it’s to the netherworld itself; but sit down and stretch, that’s allowed! It’s why you came to me. Sit with me for a while, rest, take a breath.” The old woman is speaking slowly, drawing out her words, as if she’s singing or reading a prayer to the beat of the pendulum in the grandfather clock. “You’ll find the strength to stand later and get on your way. For now, though, I sense that you’re tired, sweetheart, you’re very tired.”

“There were whispers today that something’s afoot again. I don’t know if I can even face getting out of bed tomorrow. People are thinking that they’re either going to start taking away land or cattle or both at the same time. The seed grain’s hidden but what’s the use if they take the land? Where would I sow it, the potato patch? I’ll die first. I’ll sink my teeth in and fight and I won’t give it up! Let them register us as kulaks, I won’t give it up! It’s mine!” He pounds his fist on the bed frame, and its high metallic voice sings plaintively in response.

“I know you’ll think of something. You’ll sit now, talk with me, and think of something. You’re strong, Murtaza, my boy. Strong and smart, like I was.” The old woman’s voice is warming, sounding younger. “Oooh, I was something… When your father caught sight of me, he drooled all the way to his belt and forgot to wipe it up, that’s how much he wanted to mount me. Men like you, real men, are like rams. When you see someone who’s a little stronger than yourselves, you immediately want to start butting heads, trampling, and winning. What fools!”

She smiles and the web of wrinkles on her face trembles, playing in the gentle kerosene light. Murtaza is breathing more evenly, more calmly.

“I used to say to him: ‘You need to watch yourself biting into this apple, you skinny-legged thing. You’ll break off your teeth!’ And he says to me, ‘I have lots of teeth.’ And I tell him, ‘Life’s long, you might not have enough, be careful!’ Not a chance, I only excited the stud…” The Vampire Hag’s laugh is muffled, as if she’s coughing.

“That summer when we were playing kyz-kuu, and all the boys were chasing after the girls, Shakirzyan only came after me, like a dog after a bitch in heat. I had the most beautiful pinafore in Yulbash for kyz-kuu: black velvet with beaded flowers that I embroidered all winter! And on my bosom” – the old woman presses a lumpy, long-fingered hand to her hollow chest – “a two-strand necklace. My father had given me his own three-year-old Argamak horse. I jump in the saddle and the necklace starts jingling, gently and invitingly – the fellows only see me. Oh, my, my… Shakirzyan keeps galloping and galloping, and it’s making his horse lather, and he’s red himself from fury but he can’t catch me.

“And as soon as I see the grove of nut trees in the distance, I hold the Argamak back a little, as if I’m giving way. And your father’s glad because he’s been chasing like a madman, so he thinks he’s about to catch up. And right at the grove, away I go, I bring my heels together and the Argamak is off like an arrow, and Shakirzyan just gets dust in his face. He’s sneezing but I’ve already turned around in the grove and taken a whip out of my boot. It’s my turn now! The whip is strong and braided and I’ve purposely tied a knot at the end to make it hurt more. So I’ll catch up to him, as usually happens, and give him a thorough lashing: You couldn’t reach the girl, so you’ll pay for it, here you go! I had a good laugh, a good yell – after all, he didn’t catch me once, not one single time!”

The Vampire Hag wipes little teardrops away from the corners of her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Oh and I let him have it that summer! He reminded me of that for the rest of his life: he’d beat me hard, a lot, and with a whip, too. He’d tie a knot on it about the size of a fist and whack with it like it was a club while I’m laughing in his face: ‘What,’ I say, ‘you’re copying me? Think up something of your own. Don’t you have the brains?’ He’s madder, whipping harder, even panting and holding his heart, but he couldn’t ever break me like that. Well, and where is he now? Feeding the worms for half a century. And I’ve lived two of his lives and begun a third. Strength comes from above.”

The Vampire Hag covers her white eye sockets.

“You’re like me, ulym, my heart. You have my blood in your veins. My bones under your flesh.” She’s stroking the gray stubble on her son’s shaven head. “And the strength in you is mine: mean and undefeatable.”

“Eni, Eni…” Murtaza is squeezing his mother’s body tightly, grasping, as a wrestler embraces an opponent or a lover embraces the body of a woman he desires.

“Even the first time I looked at you – your little red body, wrinkled fingers, eyes still blind – I understood immediately that you were mine. Nobody else’s, just mine. I birthed ten for my husband but the last one for myself. There’s a reason the umbilical cord was as thick as an arm. Your grandmother could barely saw it with a knife. ‘Your little son,’ she said, ‘doesn’t want to be torn away from you.’ And you really didn’t want that: you stuck yourself to my breast, you grabbed at it like a tick. And you didn’t tear yourself away: you drank me for three years, like a calf. All that’s left of my breasts is sacks. And you slept with me. You were already huge and heavy, and you’d sprawl out on the sleeping bench like a star and your little hand went to my breast so it wouldn’t get away from you. You didn’t even let Shakirzyan near me – you screamed bloody murder. And he’d curse something awful, he was so jealous. But what would he have fed you during the famine if I hadn’t had milk in my breast then?”

“Eni, Eni…” Murtaza repeats, muffled.

“It was a scary time. You’re already three, you want to eat like an adult. You suck a breast dry – how much of that liquid milk is there? Not nearly enough food for you! And you’re kneading at it like mad, tearing with your teeth, I want more, more. But it’s already empty. Give me some bread, you ask. What do you mean, bread? By the end of the summer, we’d eaten all the straw off the roof, all the locusts in the area had been caught, and that weed, orache, was a real delicacy. Anyway, where could you find it – orache? People went crazy, reeling around the woods like forest spirits, ripping bark off trees with their teeth. Shakirzyan went to the city to earn money in the spring and I was alone with you four. At least you got the breast – the older ones got nothing…”

Murtaza mumbles something unintelligible, pressing himself to his mother. The Vampire Hag takes his head in her hands, lifts it, and her unseeing eyes look sternly into her son’s face.

“Don’t you dare even think about that, do you hear? I’ve told you a thousand times and I’ll tell you the thousand and first: I didn’t kill them. They died on their own. From hunger.”

He’s silent, just breathing loudly, with a whistle.

“It’s true I didn’t give them milk. I saved everything in me, to the last drop, for you. At first they tried to fight: they wanted to take the breast away from you by force. They were stronger than you. But I was stronger than them. And I wouldn’t let them harm you. Then their strength was gone and you grew stronger. And they died. All of them. There was nothing else.”

The Vampire Hag presses a hand against her chin, scrunching up the wrinkles on her face; her other hand, shaking slightly, covers her eyes. Reflections of the kerosene lamps flash dimly among her gold rings.

“And do you hear, ulym? We did not eat them. We buried them. Ourselves, without the mullah, at night. You were just small and forgot everything. No, they don’t have graves – my tongue’s tired from explaining to you that everybody was buried that summer without graves. Cannibals went around to the cemeteries in herds and as soon as they’d see a fresh grave, they’d dig it up and eat the deceased. So believe me – finally believe me – half a century later. The people who spread those foul rumors about you and me already became earth long ago themselves. But you and I are alive. There’s obviously a reason Allah sends us mercy like this, isn’t there?”

“Eni, Eni.” Murtaza grasps her raised hand and begins kissing it.

“So there you go.” The Vampire Hag leans toward her son, hovering over him. Two skinny white braids fall on top of Murtaza’s back, reaching to the floor. “You’re the strongest, Murtaza. Nobody can defeat or break you. And you yourself know that’s what yesterday’s dream was about. If anyone’s fated to leave this house or this world, it’s not you. Your small-toothed wife couldn’t bear you a son and will soon disappear into the netherworld. But you’re so young you could continue your family line. You’ll have a son yet. Don’t be afraid of anything. You and I will stay in this house, sweetheart, and we’ll live a long time yet. You because you’re young. And me because I can’t leave you on your own.”

The slow, unrelenting beat of the squeaky mechanical heart in the huge grandfather clock is becoming distinctly audible.

“Thank you, Eni.” Murtaza rises heavily from his knees. “I’m going.”

He strokes his mother’s face and hair. He helps her into bed, plumps the pillows, and covers her with a blanket. He kisses both arms on the wrist, then the elbow. He turns down the wick and it darkens. The door slams behind him.

The old woman soon starts wheezing drowsily, sailing back off to an illusory dreamland on a luxuriant bed of airy feather mattresses and blankets.

Zuleikha presses her eggshell-covered hand to her chest, soundlessly steals toward the door, and slips outside.

Murtaza is crouched by the stove, gloomily splitting kindling. The flame’s yellow reflections dart along the axe blade, up and down, up and down. Waddling like a duck, Zuleikha walks back and forth over the floorboards concealing their secret food supplies – do they squeak too much?

“Stop.” Her husband’s voice is hoarse, as if it’s snapped.

Frightened, Zuleikha leans against the trunks stacked up by the window, hastily straightening the lace kaplau with her hand (only guests and her husband, of course, are allowed to sit on these coverlets). Oh, but he’s mean today, irritable; it’s as if he’s been possessed by a demon. He went to see his mother but didn’t calm down. He’s waiting for the Red Horde. He’s afraid.

“After fourteen years they’ll have learned all our hiding places by heart.” Murtaza’s axe cuts easily through the wood. “They’ll take the whole house apart if they want, one log at a time, and find what they need.”

The mountain of white slivers is growing around Murtaza. Why does he need so much kindling? They wouldn’t use that much in a week.

“All we can do is guess: will they take the cow or the horse?” Murtaza finally swings and drives the axe into a chunk of wood with all his might.

“It’ll be time to plow soon,” Zuleikha sighs meekly. “It would be better if they took the cow.”

“The cow?” Murtaza lurches back immediately, as if he’s burned himself.

His breathing is rough and rapid, and it whistles. Like a bull before it rushes a rival.

Without rising from his knees, Murtaza flings himself toward Zuleikha. She recoils in fear. May Allah protect us… Murtaza’s powerful shoulder easily moves the trunks aside. He picks up the groaning floorboard with his fingernails. He plunges his arm into a black hole that’s breathing damp cold and removes a flat metal box. The lid, chilled from the frosty air, clinks dully. Murtaza hurriedly stuffs a long squiggle of horsemeat sausage into his mouth and chews, frenzied.

“I won’t give it up,” he murmurs, his mouth full. “I’m not giving up anything this time. I’m strong.”

The aroma of horsemeat floats through the room. Zuleikha feels her mouth swell with sweet spittle. She hasn’t eaten kyzylyk since last year. She takes a fresh round loaf of bread from the stove ledge and extends it to Murtaza: Eat it with bread. He shakes his head. His jaws are working quickly and powerfully, like millstones. She can hear the tough horse sinews scraping under his sturdy teeth. Glistening strands of spittle fall from Murtaza’s open lips to the collar of his shirt.

Without taking the sausage from his mouth, Murtaza’s hand fumbles around in the corners of the box. He pulls out a loaf of sugar that gleams a soft white in the duskiness then hits it with all his might using the butt of the axe – a large piece splits off and gleams, sparkling with blue where it broke – then he sticks his hand in one of the trunks and finds a faceted glass vial: it’s rat poison he brought from Kazan last year. He pours liquid from the vial on the piece of sugar.

“Understand, woman?” He laughs loudly.

Zuleikha backs toward the wall, frightened. Murtaza places the oozing sugar on the windowsill and wipes his wet hands on his belly. He admires it and throws his head back, laughing, with the kyzylyk sticking out of his mouth.

“If they come for the livestock and I’m not here, give it to the cow and horse. Understand?”

Zuleikha gives the barest of nods, pressing her back against the wall’s bulging logs.

“Understand?” Murtaza hasn’t heard a response, so grasps her by the braids and jabs her face at the windowsill, where the sugar is drying in a bitter-smelling puddle and looks a lot like a large piece of ice melting slightly in the warmth.

“Yes, Murtaza! Yes!”

He lets her go, laughing with satisfaction. Sitting on the floor, he chops off pieces of the kyzylyk with the axe and stuffs them in his mouth.

“Nothing…” he mutters through his even chomping. “I won’t give it up… I’m strong… Nobody can defeat or break me…”

So, Allah, this is what fear does to my husband. Zuleikha looks around warily and moves the faceted vial of liquid death as far away as possible. She replaces the floorboard and pushes the trunks over it. As she’s adjusting the folds of the patterned kaplau over the trunks, neatly arranging everything back in its usual place, window glass explodes into smithereens. Something small and heavy flies in from outside, thudding against the floor.

Zuleikha turns around. The large hole in the window looms like a black star with many points, and slow, shaggy snowflakes float into the room. Small pieces of glass are still dropping off, jangling gently as they land.

Murtaza is sitting on the floor, his mouth stuffed. Between his spread legs is a stone wrapped in thick white paper. Murtaza unwraps it and continues to chew, stunned. It’s a poster: a gigantic black tractor’s large treads are crushing horrid little people who are scattering in every direction like cockroaches. One of them looks a lot like Murtaza; he’s standing, frightened, and aiming a crooked wooden pitchfork at the tractor’s steel bulk. Heavy, square letters are falling from above: “We’ll destroy the kulak as a class!” Zuleikha can’t read, especially in Russian. She understands, though, that the black tractor is about to run over the tiny Murtaza and his ridiculous pitchfork.

Murtaza spits a scrap of sausage on the sleeping bench. He wipes his hands and mouth thoroughly with the crumpled poster and flings it into the stove. The tractor and the horrid little people writhe in tongues of orange flame, turning to ash in an instant, then Murtaza grabs the axe and dashes out.

Almighty, all is at Your will! Zuleikha leans toward the window – it’s webbed in long cracks. Murtaza bursts outside with his tunic open at the chest and his head uncovered. He looks around, using his axe to threaten a blizzard that’s running wild. There’s nobody there – glory be to Allah – otherwise Murtaza might have hacked them down, brought sin upon his soul.

Zuleikha perches on the sleeping bench and positions her flushed face toward gusts of wind from the broken window. This is no doubt the dirty work of Mansurka-Burdock and his lowlifes from the Party cell. They’ve walked from household to household more than once, agitating people to join the collective farm and arguing with them. They’ve covered Yulbash with posters. They had not yet dared break windows. But now things had come to that. It’s obvious they know something’s afoot. May a devil take them. They’ll have to go to the next village for new glass. Such expenses. And the house will cool down overnight…

Murtaza still isn’t back. May he not catch cold. Out in a blizzard without his sheepskin coat – it really is as if a demon has possessed him…

Zuleikha leaps up suddenly. She runs headlong from the house into the hallway. She throws open the door.

Murtaza and Kyubelek are standing in the middle of the yard, forehead-to-forehead. Murtaza is tenderly stroking the cow’s furry face, which is trustingly nestled against his own. Then he takes the axe from behind his back and slams its butt between Kyubelek’s large, moist eyes framed with long lashes. The cow collapses to the ground with a quiet, deep sigh, and a thick snowy cloud rises around her.

Zuleikha screams loudly and races down the front steps toward Murtaza. He jabs his fist in her direction without looking. She falls on her back and the steps hit her in the ribs.

The axe whistles. Something hot spatters Zuleikha’s face. Blood. Murtaza is working quickly and powerfully with the axe, not stopping. The blade enters the warm flesh with an even groan. Air hisses as it leaves Kyubelek’s lungs. Blood gushes out of the vessels with a rumbling gurgle. Solid pink steam cloaks the motionless beef carcass, which Murtaza is quickly breaking into pieces.

“There’s your requisitions in 1916!” Murtaza chops through the bones as easily as if they were branches. “The food armies in 1918! 1919! 1920! There’s your taking grain for resale! There’s your food tax! There’s your grain surplus! Take! That! If! You! Can!”

Sandugach is rearing by the door to the cowshed, neighing harrowingly, beating the air with her heavy hooves, and showing the whites of her crazed eyes. The foal is darting around under his mother’s legs.

Murtaza turns toward the horse. His tunic is red and his chest is steaming heavily in its wide-open collar; the axe in his hand is black with blood. Zuleikha rises up a little on her elbows, pain searing from her ribs. Murtaza steps over the cow’s muzzle, its teeth bared and sharp, its inky-blue tongue hanging out, and heads toward Sandugach.

“Plow? How are we going to plow?” Zuleikha throws herself on Murtaza’s back. “It’ll be spring soon! We’ll die of hunger!”

He tries to shake her off, swinging his arms; the axe he clutches in his right hand whistles. Zuleikha sinks her teeth into her husband’s shoulder. He cries out and flings her off, over his shoulder. She flies, the earth and sky changing places again and again. Then something large and hard, with prominent sharp corners, is pushing at her back – is it the front steps? She rolls onto her stomach, half-slides, half-scrambles up the icy steps, and scampers into the house. Her husband stomps after her. Doors slam sharply, like a shepherd’s whip, hitting once, twice.

Zuleikha runs through the room. Broken window glass clinks under her feet and she leaps on the sleeping bench, squeezes herself into the corner, and covers herself with a pillow. Murtaza is already beside her. Sweat drips from his beard and his eyes bulge. His arm swings. The axe cuts through the pillowcase and pillow cover in an explosion of white feathers. The feathers fill the room, hanging in the air like a cloud.

Murtaza lets out an extended whoop and tosses the axe to the side, away from Zuleikha. The blade flashes through the air and plunges into the carved window frame.

Feathers fall from above in a slow, warm blizzard. Breathing heavily, Murtaza wipes off something white that’s stuck to his bald skull. Without looking at Zuleikha, he pulls the axe out of the window frame and walks out. Glass crunches loudly under his heavy steps, like ice-crusted February snow.

Snowflakes float into the house through the broken window, blending with the floating down. The white swirl inside the house is elegant and festive. Carefully, trying not to cut herself, Zuleikha plugs the hole in the window with the chopped pillow. She sees the scrap of kyzylyk on the sleeping bench and eats it. It’s delicious. Praise be to Allah. Who knows when she’ll be able to eat kyzylyk again? She licks her fatty, salty fingers. She goes outside.

All the snow by the front steps is the color of juicy wild strawberries mashed with sugar.

Murtaza is chopping meat in a distant corner, on the wooden block by the bathhouse. She can’t see Sandugach and the foal.

Zuleikha goes into the cowshed. And there they both are, in their pen. Sandugach is licking her foal with her long, rough tongue. They’re alive! Glory be to Allah. Zuleikha strokes the horse’s warm, velvety muzzle and scratches the foal on its ticklish withers.

And in the yard, thousands of snowy flakes settle on the red snow, covering it and turning it white once more.

AN ENCOUNTER

Murtaza’s secret storage place is in a secure spot. Everything he has thought up and built with his own hands is good and sound enough to last for two lives.

Today they rise before dawn. They eat a cold breakfast and leave a yard still lit by a translucent moon and the last pre-dawn stars. They reach the place before daybreak. The sky has already turned from black to bright blue; trees covered in white are filled with light and touched by a diamond brilliance.

There’s a morning quiet in the forest and the crisp snow crunches especially loudly under Murtaza’s felt boots, like the fresh cabbage Zuleikha chops with a hatchet in a wooden vat. Husband and wife make their way through deep, dense snowdrifts higher than their knees. They’re carrying precious cargo on two wooden spades, like stretchers: sacks of grain for planting, carefully wound with rope to the spade shafts. They carry it cautiously, protecting it from sharp branches and rotten stumps. Zuleikha will be in trouble if the burlap tears. In his exhaustion from waiting for the Red Horde, Murtaza has become a complete madman – he would hack her to death, like Kyubelek yesterday, without blinking an eye.

Up ahead, a clearing is already turning blue between spruce trees touched with rime. The birch trees part, tiny icicles jingling on their cottony branches, and they reveal a broad clearing adorned with a thick cover of snow. There’s the crooked linden tree with the long crevice-like hollow, too, alongside a chilly rowan bush. They’ve arrived.

There’s a small bird on a linden branch. Its dark blue breast is like a shard of sky and its eyes are like black beads. It looks closely at Zuleikha, chirruping and unafraid.

“Shamsia!” Zuleikha smiles and stretches a hand wearing a thick fur mitten toward the bird.

“Stop chattering, woman!” Murtaza flings a handful of snow and the bird darts away. “We came to work.”

Frightened, Zuleikha grabs a spade.

They begin shoveling away the deep snow under the linden tree and soon the outline of a small, dark mound begins to show through. Zuleikha tosses off her mittens and quickly clears it, smoothing with hands that redden in the icy air. Under the cold snow is the coldness of stone. Her fingernails scrape snowy crumbs out of the rounded Arabic script, her fingers melting the ice in the shallow dimples of the tashkil over the long wave of letters. Though unable to read, Zuleikha knows what’s carved here: “Shamsia, daughter of Murtaza Valiev.” And the date: “1917.”

While Murtaza is clearing their eldest daughter’s grave, Zuleikha takes a step to the side, drops to her knees, and gropes under the drifts for yet another gravestone, throwing the snow around with her elbows. Her numbed fingers find the stone themselves, slipping along the iced-up letters: “Firuza, daughter of Murtaza Valiev. 1920.”

The next gravestone: Sabida. 1924.

The next: Khalida. 1926.

“You shirking?” Murtaza has already cleared off the first grave and stands, leaning on the shaft of the spade, his eyes boring into Zuleikha. His irises are yellow and cold, and the whites of his eyes are dark, a clouded ruby color. The wrinkle in the middle of his forehead is moving as if it were alive.

“I’m saying hello to everyone,” says Zuleikha, looking down guiltily.

The four slightly tilting gray stones stand in a row, looking at her silently. They’re low, the height of a year-old child.

“It’d be better to help!” Murtaza grunts and plunges the spade into the frozen earth with all his might.

“Oh, but wait!” Zuleikha throws herself on Shamsia’s gravestone and presses her forearms to it.

Murtaza’s breathing is loud and displeased but he’s set the spade aside; he’s waiting.

“Forgive us, zirat iyase, spirit of the cemetery. We didn’t want to bother you before spring but we had to,” Zuleikha whispers at the rounded patterns of letters. “And forgive us, daughter. I know you aren’t angry. You yourself are glad to help your parents.”

Zuleikha rises from her knees and nods: Now we can continue. Murtaza gouges at the earth by the grave, attempting to place the spade in a frozen crevice that’s scarcely visible. Zuleikha digs at the ice with a stick. The crevice broadens gradually, growing and giving way, then finally opening up with an extended crack and uncovering a long wooden box, from which there wafts the smell of frozen earth. The sunny yellow grain makes a whooshing sound as Murtaza carefully pours it into the box, and Zuleikha places her hands under its heavy, flowing stream.

Grain.

It will sleep here over winter, between Shamsia and Firuza, in a deep wooden coffin. And when the air has begun to smell of spring and the meadows have already been warmed, it will lie down in the earth again, so it can sprout and develop as green shoots on tilled soil.

It was Murtaza who thought of digging out the secret place in the village cemetery. Zuleikha was initially frightened: isn’t it a sin to disturb the dead? Wouldn’t it be best to ask the mullah’s permission? And wouldn’t the spirit of the cemetery be angry? But she later agreed – let their daughters help with the chores. And their daughters helped meticulously. This was not the first year they had watched over their parents’ supplies until spring.

The box’s lid bangs shut. Murtaza strews snow on the disturbed grave. Then he winds the empty sacks around the spade handles, tosses them over his shoulder, and heads into the forest.

Zuleikha sprinkles more snow on the dug-up gravestones, as if she were covering them with a blanket at night. Goodbye, girls. We’ll see you in the spring if the Vampire Hag’s prediction doesn’t come true before then.

“Murtaza,” Zuleikha calls quietly to him. “If anything happens, put me here, with the girls. To Khalida’s right, that place is free. I don’t need a lot of space, you know that.”

Her husband doesn’t stop; his tall figure flashes between the birches. Zuleikha quietly murmurs something to the stones in parting and pulls her mittens on her stiff hands.

There’s chirping again on the linden branch: the nimble, blue-breasted little bird has returned to its place. Zuleikha waves joyfully to it – Shamsia, I knew that was you! – and dashes after her husband.

The sledge rides along the forest road, not hurrying. Sandugach snorts, urging the foal to keep up. The foal gallops joyfully beside her, sometimes sinking thin legs into snowdrifts on the roadside or poking a hook-nosed muzzle at his mother’s side. The foal has tagged along with them today. And rightly so: let him get used to trips to the forest.

The sun hasn’t yet reached midday but their work is already done. Glory be to Allah, nobody noticed them. A snowstorm will sweep away their tracks at the cemetery any day and it will be as if nothing happened.

As always, Zuleikha sits on the sledge facing away from Murtaza. The back of her head senses heavy, gloomy thoughts stirring in his mind. She had hoped her husband would calm down a little after hiding the grain and that the large wrinkle on his forehead, the one that looks as if it was hacked by an axe, would smooth. But no, the wrinkle hasn’t gone away; it’s even deeper now.

“I’m going into the forest tonight,” he says, speaking to something in front of him, addressing either the collar on Sandugach’s neck or the horse’s tail.

“What are you talking about?” Zuleikha turns and fixes her mournful gaze on her husband’s stern back. “It’s January…”

“There’ll be a lot of us. We won’t freeze.”

Murtaza has never gone into the forest. Other men had, in 1920 and 1924. They huddled in groups, hiding from the new authorities. They either slaughtered livestock or brought it with them. Their wives and children stayed at home to wait and hope their husbands would return. Sometimes they did, though more often they didn’t. The Red Horde shot some; others went missing.

“Don’t expect me before spring,” Murtaza goes on. “Look after my mother.”

Zuleikha is watching the rough, spongy sheepskin tightly stretched between her husband’s powerful shoulder blades.

“I’ll take the horse.” Murtaza makes a kissing noise and Sandugach obediently quickens her pace. “You can eat the foal.”

The young one hurries after his mother, amusingly throwing his legs forward, then backward, frolicking.

“She won’t survive,” Zuleikha says to Murtaza’s back. “Your mother won’t survive, I’m telling you.”

His back is gloomily silent. Sandugach’s hooves thump into the snow. Magpies mockingly jabber somewhere in the forest. Murtaza takes the shaggy fur hat from his head and rubs his glistening, bumpy scalp; barely visible steam rises from his smooth pink skin.

The conversation is over. Zuleikha turns. She has never in her life been left on her own. Who will tell her what to do and what not to do? Scold her for poor work? Protect her from the Red Horde? Feed her, too? And what about the Vampire Hag? Did she make a mistake? Will the old woman stay in a house without her beloved son but with her despised daughter-in-law? And Allah, what is this all for?

The singing overtakes them as suddenly as a gust of wind, replacing the sad squeaking sound of sledge runners with a confident male voice. There it is, beautiful and deep, somewhere far in the woods. The words are Russian, the melody unfamiliar. Zuleikha wants to listen but for some reason Murtaza’s bustling along, urging on Sandugach.

Zuleikha’s Russian isn’t bad. She understands that the words in the song are good, about freedom and salvation.

“Hide the spades,” Murtaza tells her through his teeth.

Zuleikha hastily wraps the spades in sacks, covering them with her skirts.

Sandugach is trotting quickly but still not fast enough – she’s been adjusting to the foal’s uneven run. And the voice is coming closer, overtaking them.

The song of a working person, Zuleikha decides, a blacksmith or smelter. It’s already clear this person is riding behind them along the forest road and will soon catch up to them, out from the trees. How old is he? Probably young: there’s a lot of strength, a lot of hope, in his voice.

In the distance, dark silhouettes are flickering swiftly between the trees. Now a small cavalry detachment appears on the road, too. At the front is a man with an easy, straight posture, and it’s clear from afar that he’s neither a blacksmith nor a smelter but a warrior. When he rides closer, the broad green stripes on his gray military overcoat become visible; on his head there’s a pointed, coarse hat with a reddish-brown star. A Red Hordesman. He’s the one singing.

Allah endowed Zuleikha with excellent vision. In the bright sunlight, she discerns the Red Hordesman’s face, which is uncommonly smooth for a man: it’s really like a girl’s, with neither mustache nor beard. His eyes seem dark under the brim, and his even white teeth look like they’re made of sugar.

The Red Hordesman is already very close. When he squints from the sun, crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes run under the long, coarse fabric earflaps of his pointy hat. He’s shameless, openly smiling at Zuleikha. She lowers her eyes as a married woman should and buries her chin deeper in her shawl.

“Hey, boss, is it far to Yulbash?” the Red Hordesman asks, riding right up to the sledge and not taking his eyes off Zuleikha. She senses the hot, salty smell of his horse.

Murtaza doesn’t turn; he keeps urging on Sandugach.

“Gone deaf or something?” The rider presses his horse’s sides lightly with his heels and overtakes the sledge in two bounds.

Murtaza suddenly slaps Sandugach’s back with the reins. She leaps abruptly forward, knocking her chest into the soldier’s horse, so that it neighs with alarm, stumbles off the road, catches its back legs in a snowdrift on the roadside, and flounders in the snow.

“Or gone blind?” The Red Hordesman’s voice is ringing with rage.

“The little man’s scared. He’s hurrying home to hide under Mama’s skirts.” The cavalry detachment has caught up to the sledge, and a swarthy little man, whose upper lip is raised in amusement, revealing a bright gold tooth, brashly eyes the sledge. “They’re a nervous bunch!”

How many of them are there, anyway? No more than you could count on all your fingers. The men are solid, sturdy. Some are in military overcoats, some just in sheepskin coats pulled in at the waist with a broad reddish belt. Each has a rifle on his back. The bayonets glisten in the sun; it’s dazzling.

And one’s a woman. Lips like bilberries, cheeks like apples. She sits squarely in the saddle, head raised high, bosom pushed forward, allowing herself to be admired. Even under the sheepskin it’s obvious that chest would be enough for three. A picture of wholesomeness.

The horse that was forced off the road finally makes its way back and its rider grabs Sandugach by the bridle. The sledge stops and Murtaza tosses aside the reins. He hides his sullen expression and doesn’t look at the cavalrymen.

“Well?” the soldier asks, threatening.

“Oh, they don’t speak a word of Russian here, comrade Ignatov,” calls out an elderly soldier with a long scar across half his face. The scar is white and very even, like a stretched rope. From a saber, Zuleikha guesses.

“Not a word. So then…” Ignatov attentively examines the horse, the colt hiding under her belly, and Murtaza himself.

Murtaza is silent. His shaggy fur hat is pulled over his forehead, screening his eyes. Curly little clouds of dense steam float out of his whitened nostrils, covering his mustache with a raggedy frost.

“Well, you are a gloomy one, brother,” utters Ignatov, pensive.

“His wife gave him a talking-to!” The swarthy soldier with the gleaming gold tooth winks at Zuleikha, first with one eye, then the other. The whites of his eyes are as murky as the liquid in oatmeal and his pupils are small nuggets. The members of the detachment laugh. “Tatar women, oh, but they are harsh! You won’t get away with anything! Isn’t that right, Green Eyes?”

Her father called her Green Eyes when she was a child. That was a long time ago. Zuleikha no longer thinks about the color of her eyes.

The detachment laughs louder. Ten pairs of audacious and mocking eyes scrutinize her intently. She uses the edge of her shawl to cover her cheeks, which are burning.

“They’re harsh but not especially pretty,” the busty cavalry-woman adds lazily, turning away.

“How could they compare to you, Nastasya!” whoop the Red Hordesmen.

Zuleikha hears how hoarse and labored her husband’s breathing is behind her back.

“As you were!” Ignatov resumes scrutinizing Murtaza. “So where’d you go so bright and early, boss? And with your wife, too. I see you weren’t chopping up any wood. What’d you lose in the forest? Come on, don’t look away. I see you understand everything.”

The horses stamp their hooves and snort loudly in the quiet. Zuleikha senses but doesn’t see that the furrow on Murtaza’s forehead is deepening, cutting into his skull, and the dimple in his chin is trembling, like a bobber over a fish caught on a hook.

“They were digging mushrooms out from under the snow,” says the soldier with the gold tooth, lifting Zuleikha’s skirt a little with his bayonet; the spades’ blades peer out from under sacks. “But they didn’t gather much!” He picks up one of the sacks with the point of his bayonet and shakes it in the air.

The brigade’s snickering swells into waves of laughter. A few large yellow grains fall from the sack to Zuleikha’s skirt and the laughter ends abruptly, as if it had been cut by a knife.

Looking down at her hem, Zuleikha takes off a mitten and hurriedly collects the grains in her fist. The cavalrymen circle the sledge, silently surrounding it. Murtaza slowly moves his hand toward the axe tucked in his sash.

Ignatov tosses his reins to a cavalryman who’s ridden over, and jumps to the ground. He walks up to Zuleikha, takes her fist in both hands, and forces it open. Up close, it’s obvious his eyes aren’t dark at all but bright gray, like river water. Beautiful eyes. And his fingers are dry and unexpectedly hot. And very strong. Zuleikha’s fist yields, unclenching. On her palm are long, smooth grains that gleam in the sun like honey. Quality wheat seed.

“Mushrooms, then,” Ignatov says softly. “So maybe, you kulak louse, you were out digging in the forest for some other reason?”

After sitting like a statue, Murtaza suddenly turns sharply toward the sledge and looks Ignatov in the eye with hatred. His stifled breathing gurgles in his gullet, and his chin shakes. Ignatov unfastens the holster on his belt, reaches for a black revolver with a long, hungry barrel, points it at Murtaza, and cocks it.

“I won’t give it up!” Murtaza wheezes. “I won’t give up anything this time!”

He swings the axe. Rifles click all at once. Ignatov presses the trigger. A shot blasts and the echo spreads through the forest. Sandugach neighs with fright. Magpies drop from the spruce trees and hurry off into a thicket, screeching loudly. Murtaza’s body collapses onto the sledge, his feet toward the horse, face down. The sledge shudders heavily.

The rifles stare at Zuleikha, the black barrels gleaming under the needles of their bayonets. A blue puff of smoke rises from the revolver. There’s a bitter smell of gunpowder.

Ignatov, stunned, is looking at the body prone on the sledge. He wipes his upper lip with the hand that’s holding the revolver and stows the weapon in his holster. He takes the axe that fell from its owner’s hand and swings, plunging it into the back of the sledge, just a finger’s length from Murtaza’s head. Then he leaps into his saddle, digs his heels into the horse, and speeds off down the road, full tilt, without looking back. Snow sprays out from under the horse’s hooves like dust.

“Comrade Ignatov,” the soldier with the gold tooth shouts after him. “What about the woman?”

Ignatov only waves: Leave her!

“So much for the mushroom picking, Green Eyes,” the soldier says, pushing out a broad lip in conclusion.

The cavalrymen hurry off behind their commander. The detachment flows around the sledge like waves around an island. Sheepskin coats with fleecy collars, shaggy fur hats, gray overcoats, and the red stripes on their trousers float past, speeding after the horseman in the pointy-topped cavalry hat. The clatter of hooves soon fades in the distance. Zuleikha is left by herself, in the middle of the forest’s stillness.

She sits motionless with her arms folded on her knees and her small fist squeezing the wheat grains. Murtaza’s powerful body is sprawled out on the sledge, freely stretching his arms and legs, head comfortably turned on its side, long beard spread out along the boards. He’s sleeping, just as he always does on his bench, taking up the entire space. There’s not even enough room for small Zuleikha to fit alongside him.

The wind plucks at the treetops. Pine trees creak somewhere in the forest. A couple of hours later, the foal is hungry and finds his mother’s teat with his lips and suckles milk. Sandugach inclines her head, contented.

An unhurried sun drifts along the horizon then slowly sinks into large snow clouds wafting in from the east. Evening is falling. Snow pelts down from the sky.

Without receiving her master’s usual shout and slap on the rump with the reins, Sandugach takes a timid step forward. Then a second and a third. The sledge begins to move, creaking loudly. The horse strides along the road to Yulbash, and the happy, sated foal skips alongside. The reins lie on the empty driver’s spot. Zuleikha is sitting on the sledge, her back to the horse, her unseeing gaze looking at the forest that remains behind.

On the road, where the sledge stood all day, is a deep-red spot about the size of a small round loaf of bread. Snow falls on the spot, quickly covering it.

Later, no matter how hard she tries, Zuleikha cannot remember how she got home. How she left the horse in the yard, still harnessed, and grasped Murtaza under the arms and dragged him inside the house. How heavy her husband’s huge, unwieldy body was, how loudly his heels knocked against the front steps.

She fluffed his pillow nice and high, just how he loves it, undressed him, and laid him on the sleeping bench. Lay down alongside him herself. They lay like that a long time, all night. The wood Murtaza had thrown in the stove that morning had burned down long ago and the logs of the cooling house crackled resonantly from the cold. The window that was broken yesterday had already burst and shattered with a flat, glassy jangle, and a mean wind mixed with prickly grains of snow whipped through the square window’s bare frame. And still they lay there, shoulder to shoulder, their wide-open eyes looking at the ceiling, which was first dark, then thickly flooded with white moonlight, then dark again. For the first time, Murtaza didn’t send her off to the women’s quarters. That was utterly surprising. A feeling of immense surprise would be the only thing from that night that remained in Zuleikha’s memory.

After the edge of the sky has turned alarmingly scarlet, foretelling a chilly dawn, there’s a knock at the gate. The knock is loud, angry, and insistent. A tired master of the house knocks meanly and relentlessly like that when returning home and discovering someone has locked his house from the inside.

Zuleikha hears the noise – it’s far away and indistinct, as if it’s coming through the feather mattress. But she doesn’t have the strength to stop staring at the ceiling. Let Murtaza get up and open it. It’s not a woman’s job to open doors at night.

The bolt on the gate clanks, letting in uninvited guests. The yard fills with voices and the neighing of horses. Several tall silhouettes float through a yard that’s still dark. The door in the entrance hall – the door into the house – bangs.

“Well, now, this is cold! Did everybody here die or something?”

“Get the stove going! We’ll freeze, damn it.”

The clatter of hobnail boots on frozen boards. Floorboards squeaking loudly, alarmingly. The clang of the stove damper. The scratch of a match and the sharp smell of sulfur. The crackle of a fire flaring in the stove.

“Where are the people who live here?”

“We’ll find them, don’t fret. Have a look around for now.”

The wick in the lamp flickers as it flares up: crooked black shadows dance along the walls and a soft, warm light is already beginning to fill the house. A broad-nosed face ruined by large pockmarks leans over Zuleikha. It’s Mansurka-Burdock, chairman of the rural council. He’s holding a kerosene lamp right next to his face, making the round pox scars seem as deep as if they’d been hollowed out by a spoon. He’s looking purposefully at Zuleikha. He shifts his gaze to Murtaza’s thinned face, scrutinizes the black clotted hole on his chest, perplexed, and whistles, at a loss.

“Zuleikha, we came to see your husband…”

An ornate little frozen cloud blossoms by Mansurka’s mouth. He speaks Russian with a heavy accent but briskly, coherently. Better than Zuleikha. Mansurka’s become adept at chatting with the Red Hordesmen.

“Get up, we need to talk.”

Zuleikha doesn’t know if this is real or a dream. If it’s a dream, why does the light hurt her eyes so much? If it’s real, why are the sounds and smells carrying from so far away, as if from the basement?

“Zuleikha!” Mansurka is shaking her by the shoulder, first lightly, then harder. “Get up, woman!” he shouts loudly and angrily, finally in Tatar.

Her body responds to the familiar words like a horse to a slap of the reins. Zuleikha slowly lowers her feet to the floor and sits up on the sleeping bench.

“There you go.” Mansurka switches back to Russian, satisfied. “Ready, comrade representative!”

Ignatov is standing in the center of the house, his hands tucked into his belt and boots placed far apart. Without glancing at Zuleikha, he takes a wrinkled sheet of paper and a pencil from his rigid leather map case. He looks around, annoyed.

“What is this anyway? How many houses have I seen without a table or bench? How am I supposed to write a report?”

The chairman hurriedly thuds his palm on the lid of the top trunk by the window:

“You can do it here.”

Ignatov somehow settles in on the trunk; the linen kaplau wrinkles up under his large body and slips to the floor. He breathes on his hands to warm them, licks the pencil’s point, and scratches it along the paper.

“They haven’t yet cultivated socialist life,” Mansurka mutters in an apologetic tone, holding on to the trunks, which are attempting to slide in various directions. “Heathens, what can you expect from them?”

There’s a sudden crash of smashing pots and the ringing of copper basins falling in the women’s quarters. The hens are clucking in a frenzy. Someone’s tangled in the folds of the curtain, swearing loudly and colorfully. The soldier with the gold tooth springs out from behind the curtains in a cloud of feathers and down. He has one hen under each arm, loudly squawking in alarm.

“Well, how about that! Green Eyes!” he says joyfully when he sees Zuleikha. “May I?” Without stopping or releasing the fluttering chickens from his armpits, he neatly pulls the lacy web of kaplau out from under Ignatov’s feet with a magician’s quick motion. “I’ll take these trunks a little later.” He finally backs toward the door under Ignatov’s angry gaze and disappears, leaving a swirl of feathers behind him.

Ignatov finishes writing and places the pencil on the completed report with a thud:

“She can sign it.”

The sheet of paper on the trunk is white, like a folded, embroidered towel.

“What is this?” Zuleikha slowly shifts her gaze to Mansurka. “What’s it for?”

“How many times have I said that you have to call me comrade chairman! Is that clear?” Mansurka menacingly raises his chin, which shows through his reddish beard. “You teach them a new life, but they just don’t… Look, we’re evicting you.” He glances around, dissatisfied, at the bed where Murtaza’s powerful body lies, dark. “Just you. As a kulak element of the first category. Active counterrevolutionary. The Party meeting ratified it.” Mansurka’s short finger pokes at the paper on the trunk. “And we’re requisitioning your property to use for the rural council.”

“Don’t confuse me with newfangled words. Just tell me, comrade Mansurka, what’s going on?”

“That’s for you to tell me! Why isn’t your Murtaza’s property collectivized yet? Are you going against state power, as individual peasant farmers? I’ve tried convincing you so much my tongue’s going to fall out. Why isn’t your cow at the collective farm?”

“There is no cow.”

“What about the horse?” Mansurka nods at the window: Sandugach is outside, still harnessed and standing in the yard with the foal circling her legs. “Two horses.”

“But they’re ours.”

“Ours,” he mimics her. “And the flour mill?”

“How can you have a household without one? Remember how many times you yourself borrowed ours?”

“That’s just the thing.” His already-narrow eyes squint. “Leasing equipment used for labor. A sure sign of the dyed-in-the-wool, deep-rooted, irredeemable kulak!” He squeezes his small hand into a mean, wiry fist.

“Pardon me, excuse me…” says the soldier with the gold tooth, who’s returned and is now pulling a stack of pillows in embroidered cases out from under Murtaza’s head, which thuds against the bench. He strips curtains from the windows and embroidered towels from the walls and carries a huge heap of linens, pillows, and quilts out of the house in his outstretched arms. Unable to see anything in front of him, he kicks open the creaking front door.

“Careful, Prokopenko, you’re not in your own house!” Mansurka snaps after him. He tenderly strokes the wall of bulging logs and the carved patterns on the window frame, where he fingers the deep notch from the axe and clicks his tongue in distress. “Sign it, Zuleikha; don’t drag it out,” he sighs amiably and sincerely, unable to tear his loving gaze from the smooth, fat logs generously caulked with stringy, high-quality oakum.

Prokopenko’s head pokes through the doorway again, his eyes gleaming with excitement:

“Comrade Ignatov, the cow, there’s… only the meat’s left. Should we take it?”

“Add it to the inventory,” Ignatov says gloomily and rises from the trunk. “Are we going to be here a long time working on political education?”

“What’s with you, Zuleikha?” Mansurka arches his thin eyebrows reproachfully toward the bridge of his nose. “These comrades came all the way from Kazan to get you. And you’re delaying them.”

“I won’t sign it.” She utters this to the floor. “I’m not going anywhere.”

Ignatov walks over to the window, raps his knuckles on the glass, and nods to someone outside. The floorboards groan under his boots, squeaking for a long time. He’s standing on the sausage and doesn’t know it, thinks Zuleikha.

A soldier bursts into the house. Zuleikha recognizes him: his face is dark red and his scar is completely white after standing in the cold for so long.

“Five minutes for her to gather her things, Slavutsky.” Ignatov motions his chin at Zuleikha.

The indefatigable Prokopenko is examining the bare, seemingly unlived-in house one last time, as if he’s searching for some unnoticed loot. Finally he catches the blade of his bayonet on a tapestry embroidered with a saying from the Koran that hangs high over the entrance – he tries to take it down. The ornate interlacing of Arabic letters pulls and wrinkles under the steel blade.

“That’s what they have instead of icons,” Slavutsky tells Prokopenko quietly in passing.

“Planning to pray?” Ignatov looks intently at Prokopenko, his nostrils quivering in disgust, and then goes out.

“There you go. And you were saying they’re heathens.” Prokopenko sniffs at Mansurka and hurries after the commander.

The tattered tapestry remains hanging in its place. The mullah once explained the meaning of it, saying to Zuleikha: “No soul can ever die except by Allah’s leave and at a time appointed.”

“You’ll leave anyway, even if you don’t sign it,” Mansurka-Burdock tells Zuleikha.

And he points significantly at Slavutsky, the soldier with the scar. He’s strolling through the house, examining and prodding the exposed beams of the storage shelves under the ceiling with his bayonet.

Zuleikha falls to her knees next to the sleeping bench, pressing her forehead to Murtaza’s cold, hard hand. My husband – given by the Almighty, to direct, feed, and protect me – what should I do?

“We’ll bury Murtaza properly, according to Soviet custom,” the chairman soothes her, lovingly stroking the rough, carefully whitened sides of the stove. “Despite everything, he was a good master of the house…”

A steel blade touches Zuleikha: Prokopenko has come up behind her and is lightly tapping her shoulder with his bayonet. She shakes her head: I’m not going. Strong hands suddenly scoop her up and lift her in the air. Zuleikha jerks her arms and legs like a fussy baby in an adult’s arms, her baggy pants flashing under her skirts, but Slavutsky holds her firmly, until it hurts.

“Don’t touch me!” Zuleikha screams out from under the ceiling. “It’s a sin!”

“Are you going on your own? Or do we have to carry you out?” Mansurka’s concerned voice asks from somewhere below.

“On my own.”

Slavutsky cautiously releases Zuleikha. Her feet land on the floor.

“Allah will punish you,” she tells Mansurka. “He’ll punish all of you.”

And she begins gathering her things.

“Dress warmly,” Mansurka advises her, tossing wood in the stove and stoking the fire with the poker, as if he owned it. “So as not to catch cold.”

Her things are soon tied in a bundle. Zuleikha winds a shawl snugly around her head and draws her sheepskin coat tightly closed. From a stove shelf she takes the remainder of a loaf of bread wrapped in a rag, and puts it in one pocket. In the other she places the poisoned sugar from the windowsill. A tiny dead carcass remains lying by the window; a little mouse had a treat during the night.

She’s ready for the journey.

She stops near the door and casts a glance at the ravaged house. Bare walls, uncovered windows, a couple of trampled embroidered towels on the dirty floor. Murtaza is lying on the sleeping bench, his pointy beard thrust toward the ceiling. He’s not looking at Zuleikha. My husband, forgive me. I am not leaving you of my own will.

There’s a loud sound of fabric ripping – Mansurka is tearing down the curtain dividing the men’s quarters from the women’s, then he brushes off his hands, satisfied. The smashed pots, gutted trunks, and remainders of kitchen goods brazenly reveal themselves to the gaze of anyone entering. So disgraceful.

Blushing from the unbearable shame, Zuleikha looks down and runs out to the hallway.

Dawn glows in the sky.

A huge pile of household goods towers in the middle of the yard: trunks, baskets, dishes, tools… Panting from exertion, Prokopenko drags a heavy, hollowed-out cradle from the storehouse.

“Comrade Ignatov! Have a look, should we take this?”

“You fool.”

“I thought it should be entered on the inventory…” says Prokopenko, offended, and then he hurls the cradle on the very top of the pile anyway since he’s made up his mind. “Sweet mother of mine, do they have a lot of stuff!”

“Even so, everything belongs to the kolkhoz now.” Mansurka picks up a basket that fell off the pile and neatly places it back.

“Uh-huh. Ours. The people’s.” Prokopenko smiles broadly and secretly stuffs a small linen kaplau in his pocket.

Zuleikha walks down the front steps and sits on the sledge, her back to the horse, out of habit. Sandugach, who stood too long during the night, tosses back her head.

“Zuleikhaaa!” A low, hoarse voice suddenly sounds from inside the house.

Everyone turns toward the door.

“The deceased has come to life,” Prokopenko whispers loudly in the silence and surreptitiously crosses himself, as he backs toward the storehouse.

“Zuleikhaaa!” carries again from the house.

Ignatov raises his revolver. The cradle tumbles from the pile and crashes to the ground, splitting into pieces with a crack. The door flings open with an extended scrape and the Vampire Hag stands in the opening. Her long nightgown flutters and her lips quiver angrily. Her round, white eye sockets dig into the guests; her walking stick is in one hand, her chamber pot in the other.

“Where the devil are you, you pathetic hen?”

“Damn it,” says Prokopenko, catching his breath. “I almost went gray.”

“Look, she’s alive, the old witch.” Mansurka wipes perspiration from his forehead with his hand.

“And who might that be?” Ignatov stuffs the revolver back in the holster.

“His mother.” Mansurka scrutinizes the old woman and whistles in admiration. “She’s at least a hundred.”

“How come she’s not on the list?”

“Who could have known that she’s still–”

“Zuleikhaaa! You’ll get it in the end, Murtaza will show you!” The Vampire Hag jerks her chin up furiously and shakes her walking stick. She hurls the contents of the chamber pot in front of her with a sweeping motion. The little cornflowers on the milky porcelain flash. The cloudy liquid flies like a precise gob of spit and a large dark spot creeps along Ignatov’s overcoat.

Slavutsky swings his rifle up but Ignatov flaps his arm: As you were! Mansurka hurriedly opens the gate and Ignatov, his expression souring, jumps on his horse and rides out of the yard.

“Should we take her?” Prokopenko shouts after Ignatov.

“All we need in the caravan of sledges is the living dead,” he says, already in the road.

“Why are you sitting there?” Prokopenko leaps onto his horse and looks impatiently at Zuleikha. “Let’s go!”

Puzzled, Zuleikha looks around, moves into the driver’s place, and takes the heavy reins in her hands. She turns to her mother-in-law.

“My Murtaza will have your hide!” the Vampire Hag croaks from the front steps, the wind fluttering the wispy strands of her white braids. “Zuleikhaaa!”

Sandugach sets off, the foal following. Zuleikha drives out of the yard.

Prokopenko rides out last. He raises his head and sees ice-covered yellow skulls on a section of the gate: a horse bares long, sparse teeth; a bull’s black eye sockets stare stubbornly; and a sheep bends his wavy horns as if they’re snakes.

“No, they’re heathens after all,” he decides and hurries after the others.

“My Murtaza will kill you! Kill you! Zuleikhaaa!” carries after them.

Mansurka-Burdock smirks. He closes the gate from the outside, gently patting the sturdy, solid sections with his hand (hmm, those latches will need to be stronger!) and hurries home to get some sleep. Fifteen households in just one night is no joke. He doesn’t yet know that two men are waiting to ambush him by his house. They’ll push him against the fence, breathe hotly in his face, and disappear, and he’ll remain a motionless little sack hanging on the boards, pierced by two crooked sickles, his dumbfounded glassy eyes agog at the morning sky.

Zuleikha’s sledge merges into a long caravan of others being dekulakized. Their procession flows along Yulbash’s main street, toward the edge of town. There are cavalry soldiers with rifles lining the road. Among them is the busty Nastasya, with the magnificent cheeks, the one Zuleikha saw in the forest that morning.

“So, comrade Ignatov,” she shouts teasingly, glancing at Zuleikha, “is it easier to dekulakize women or something?”

Ignatov pays no attention and nudges his horse forward at a trot.

The gate of her husband’s house is growing distant, shrinking, and dissolving into the darkness of the street. Zuleikha cranes her neck and looks, looks at it, unable to turn away.

“Zuleikhaaa!” carries from the gate.

In windows along both sides of the street are the ashen faces of neighbors, their eyes wide open.

And there’s the edge of town.

They’ve left Yulbash.

“Zuleikhaaa!” rings out a barely audible voice.

The convoy of sledges rides up a hill. The smattering of Yulbash houses darkens in the distance.

“Zuleikhaaa!” the wind howls in her ears. “Zuleikhaaa!”

She turns her head to face forward. From the top of the hill, the plain that sprawls below seems like a giant white tablecloth along which the hand of the Almighty has scattered trees like beads and roads like ribbons. Their caravan is a thin silk thread stretching beyond the horizon, over which a scarlet sun is solemnly rising.