Zuleikha

TAKING THE ROAD

She’s a good-looking woman.

Ignatov is riding at the head of the caravan. At times he stops to let the detachment pass by, looking intently at everyone: the gloomy kulaks on sledges as well as his own fine troops, all reddened from the cold. Then he overtakes them again because he likes to be the first to forge ahead, with only a broad, inviting open space and the wind in front of him.

He’s trying not to watch that woman, so she won’t think he’s up to something. But how could you not watch when her curves just gallop right into your eyes like that? She’s sitting there like she’s on a throne, not a horse. She rocks in the saddle with each stride, her lower back arching sharply and her chest thrust forward, tightly covered in a white sheepskin coat, as if she’s nodding and repeating to him: Yes, comrade Ignatov, yes, Vanya, yes, yes…

He rises partway in his stirrups, meticulously examining the caravan flowing past him from under the visor of his hand, as if he’s protecting his eyes from the sun. In reality, he’s screening his gaze, which keeps disobediently attaching itself to Nastasya.

The sledges sail on, creaking loudly along the snow. Horses snort from time to time and little clouds of steam rise like intricate flowers above their frost-covered snouts.

A man with a mussed black beard and a ferocious appearance is nervously and angrily driving a mare. Behind him are his wife – wrapped in a shawl to the brows and with a sack of an infant in each arm – and a motley little flock of children. “I’ll kill you,” he’d shouted when they came to his house; he’d rushed at Ignatov with a pitchfork. He thought better of things and cooled down after they’d aimed their rifles at his wife and children. No, you can’t take on Ignatov with a pitchfork.

An elderly mullah ineptly holds the reins, his woolen gloves turned inside out. It’s evident he’s never taken anything heavier than a book in his hands in his whole life. The springy curls of his expensive karakul fur coat shine in the sun. You won’t keep a fur like that the whole way, thinks Ignatov indifferently. It’ll be taken away, either at a distribution point or somewhere else along the road. There’s no reason to dress up anyway. You’re not going to a wedding… The mullah’s wife is sitting in the back, in a bulky, despondent heap. In her arms is an elegant cage wrapped in a horse blanket. She brought her beloved cat with her. A fool.

It’s disconcerting for Ignatov to look at the next sledge. It would appear that, well, he’d killed a man, leaving his wife without a husband. That had happened more than once already. It was the man’s own fault: he’d rushed at Ignatov with an axe, like a madman. All they’d wanted in the beginning was to ask the way. But a repugnant sort of feeling gnaws at Ignatov’s guts; it won’t leave him alone. Pity? That woman is painfully small and thin. And her face is pale and delicate, as if it were paper. It’s clear she won’t survive the road. She might have made it with her husband, but like this… Ignatov has as good as killed her as well as her husband.

He’s begun pitying kulaks. That’s what he’s come to.

The small woman looks up as she rides past. And, oh, mother of mine, are those eyes of hers green! His horse is pawing at the ground, dancing in place. Ignatov turns in his saddle to have a better look but the sledge has already gone by. There’s a black welt on its back, left yesterday when Ignatov hacked it hard with an axe.

As he looks at that mark, the back of his head is already sensing the approach of a large, shaggy chestnut horse and Nastasya’s magnificent bust, bending toward its mane, breaking out of her clothes, and shouting to the whole plain with each motion: Yes, Vanya, yes, yes, yes…

Nastasya first caught his eye back during training.

The new recruits usually gathered in the morning in the courtyard right under his window. For two days they listened to rousing political speeches and practiced with rifles; then on the third day a certificate was shoved at them and off they went on a job, special assignments under the command of a State Political Administration colleague. There would already be a new batch in the yard the next morning. Lots of volunteers came – they all wanted to be involved in a just cause. Women turned up, too, though for some reason more women signed up for the militia. And rightly so – the State Political Administration was man’s work, serious.

Take Nastasya, for example. All the training in the courtyard had come to a standstill when she arrived. The recruits’ eyes bugged out at the sight of her, their necks twisted like dead chickens’, and they only half-listened to the instructors. Even the instructor wore himself out, sweating all over as he explained the structure of a rifle to her – Ignatov had seen all this from his office. Somehow they trained the detachment, sent them to work, and breathed a sigh of relief. But the memory of the beautiful woman had remained in his belly like a sweet chill.

Ignatov hadn’t gone to see Ilona that evening. She was a sassy kind of girl, she wasn’t too young (not broken by life yet, not proud), nor too old (still pleasant to look at), and her body had turned out well (there was something to hold on to), plus she hung on his every word, couldn’t gaze at him enough, and her room in the communal apartment was large, twelve square meters. This was basically too much of a good thing. She’d even told him, “Ivan, come live with me, it’s a good idea!” But it turned out to be too much.

Tossing and turning on his hard dormitory bed, he heard his roommates snoring and reflected on life. Wasn’t it caddish to lust over a new girl while the old one was still hoping, most likely plumping the pillows as she waited for him? No, he decided, it wasn’t caddish. People experience a burning for something: that’s what feelings are about. And if those feelings are gone, what’s the point in clinging to the embers?

Ignatov had never been a womanizer. He was an impressive, strapping man driven by political ideology and it was usually the women who looked at him, trying to catch his fancy. But he was in no hurry to get to know them better and feel an attachment, too. This was embarrassing to admit, but he could count the number of those women in his life on the fingers of one hand. Somehow, he’d had other things to do. He’d enlisted in the Red Army in 1918 and that got him started: first there was the Civil War, then hacking at the Basmachi in Central Asia. He’d probably still be swinging a sword in the mountains if not for Bakiev. Bakiev had already become someone important in Kazan by that time: he’d transformed from lanky, redheaded Mishka into staid Tokhtamysh Muradovich with a respectable shaved head and a gold pince-nez in his breast pocket. It was he who’d returned Ignatov to his native Tataria. “Come back, Vanya,” he’d said, “I desperately need my own people and can’t do it without you.” He knew, the sneak, how to get you. Ignatov bought into it and came rushing home to help out a friend.

That’s how he started working at the Kazan State Political Administration. It didn’t exactly turn out to be interesting (paperwork, meetings, etc.) but there was no use sighing over that now. He soon met a typist from the office on Bolshaya Prolomnaya Street. She had plump, sloping shoulders and the doleful name Ilona. Only now, at a full thirty years of age, had he learned for the first time about the joy of long-term contact with one person; he’d been dropping in on Ilona for four whole months. It wasn’t that he was in love with her, no. It was nice to be with her, tranquil – there was that. But as for love…

Ignatov didn’t understand how it was possible to love a woman. One could love great things: revolution, party, one’s country. But a woman? Anyway, how could the very same word express one’s relationship with such different entities, as if you were placing the Revolution and some woman on two pans of a scale. It ends up being silly. Even Nastasya – as alluring and winsome as she was – was still a woman. He could be with her for a night or two, half a year at most, to amuse the man in him, and that would be it, enough. What kind of love was that? Only feelings, a bonfire of emotions. It’s nice while it burns but when it dies down, you blow away the ash and live on. And so Ignatov didn’t use the word love when he spoke; he didn’t want to defile it.

Bakiev summoned Ignatov abruptly one morning. “Vanya, my friend,” he said, “the real assignment you’ve been waiting for is here. You’re going to a village to fight enemies of the Revolution – there are still a lot left there.” Ignatov’s heart went still from joy: on a horse again, in battle again! They gave him a couple of Red Army men as subordinates and a detachment of recruits. And she – she, the adored one, in a white sheepskin coat and on a chestnut horse – was among them. Fate, for certain, was bringing them together.

He dropped in on Ilona before leaving, parting with her coolly. She immediately burst into tears when she saw the coldness in his eyes: “You don’t love me, Ivan?” He got so angry his teeth even clenched. “Loving is for mothers and children!” he said and left immediately. “I’ll wait for you, Ivan, do you hear? I’ll wait!” she called after him, as he went. In short, she put on a show.

Nastasya’s another matter. This one wouldn’t wring her hands and sigh. This one knows why men need women and women need men.

There she is, riding by: smiling broadly, unashamed, looking him straight in the eye. Her sharp little teeth pull a mitten off her plump hand and she ruffles the horse’s mane with her tender fingers, running her hand through the strands. Patting him.

Ignatov feels sudden hot shivers running from the back of his head, past the nape of his neck, and flowing down his spine. He averts his gaze, frowning; it’s not fitting for a Red Army man to think about women on the job. She’s not going anywhere. And he spurs his horse, galloping to the front of the caravan.

They’ve been riding for a long time. Along boundless hills that were once Kazan Governate and are now Red Tataria, they see the tail ends of other caravans stretching just as slowly and inexorably toward the capital – white-stoned Kazan. The rear of their own caravan is probably looming in front of someone else, but Ignatov doesn’t know because he doesn’t like looking back. Every now and then they ride through villages where the people bring bread from their houses, thrusting it into the hands of the dekulakized, sitting dejectedly on sledges. Ignatov doesn’t forbid this: let them. They’ll eat up less state-issued chow in Kazan.

Yet another hill has been left behind but Ignatov has already quit counting them; he’s lost track. And then, in the monotonous scrape of sledge runners, he hears Prokopenko’s sudden loud shout, “Comrade Ignatov, come here!”

Ignatov turns. The caravan’s even ribbon is torn in the middle. The forward part continues moving slowly ahead but the rear part is standing still. The dark figures of cavalrymen bustle around at the gap, waving their arms, their horses prancing nervously.

Ignatov rides closer. There it is, the reason: the sledge with the tiny woman with the big green eyes. The harnessed horse is standing, head down, and the foal has settled in by her belly, hurriedly sucking on a maternal udder, groaning from time to time; it had gotten hungry. The road is only wide enough for one sledge, so those behind can’t ride past.

“The mare’s on strike,” complains Prokopenko, at a loss, his black brows knitted. “I’ve already tried all kinds of things with her…”

He earnestly tugs the horse by the bridle but she shakes her mane and snorts – she doesn’t want to go on.

“We have to wait until she’s done feeding,” the woman in the sledge quietly says.

The reins lie on her knees.

“Women wait for their husbands to come home,” Ignatov snaps. “We have to move.”

He jumps to the ground. From his overcoat pocket he takes bread crusts sprinkled with pebbles of coarse gray salt that he’d saved for his own horse. He thrusts them at the stubborn beast, who smacks her glistening black lips and eats. There now, watch it… He strokes her long muzzle, which is prickly with stiff gray hairs.

“A caress works on a horse, too,” says Nastasya, who’s ridden up and is smiling broadly, gathering the semicircles of her cheeks into dimples.

Ignatov tugs at the bridle: Come on, sweetie. The horse finishes chewing the last crust and obstinately lowers her head to the ground: I’m not moving.

“You won’t budge her,” chimes in the taciturn Slavutsky, pensively rubbing the long thread of the scar on his face. “She won’t go till she’s ready.”

“She won’t go. That means…” Ignatov tugs harder, then sharply jerks the bridle.

The horse neighs plaintively, showing her crooked yellow teeth and pawing at the ground. The foal hurriedly sucks at the udder, looking sideways at Ignatov with eyes like dark plums. Ignatov swings his arm and beats the mare’s flank with the back of his hand: Move it! The horse neighs louder, shakes her head, and stands. To the flank, again. Move it, I’m telling you! Move it! To hell with you, you damned demon! The horses standing nearby are agitated, adding their wary voices and rearing.

“She won’t go,” Slavutsky stubbornly repeats. “Even if you beat her to death. She’s a mother, that’s all there is to it.”

He’s harping on it, that officer ass. He came over to the Red Army ten years ago and his way of thinking still isn’t theirs, isn’t Soviet.

“We’ll have to give in to the mare, won’t we, comrade Ignatov?” Nastasya raises her brow, stroking her horse’s neck, calming him.

Ignatov grabs the foal’s flank from behind and tugs, attempting to tear him from the udder. The foal’s legs twitch like locusts and he slips under his mother’s belly, to the other side. Ignatov topples backward into a snowbank; the foal continues feeding. Nastasya laughs melodiously, her breasts pressing against her horse’s shaggy mane. Slavutsky turns away, flustered.

Cursing, Ignatov rises to his feet and brushes the snow from his hat, overcoat, and breeches. He flaps his arm at the sledges that have gone ahead:

“Stop! Stop!”

And now the cavalrymen are galloping to catch up with the front of the detachment: Stop! Rest until further command!

Ignatov takes off his pointy hat, wipes his reddened face, and casts angry glances at Zuleikha.

“Even your mares are counterrevolutionaries!”

The caravan rests, waiting for the month-and-a-half-old foal to drink enough of his mother’s milk.

After a lush, dark blue evening has fallen on the fields, there’s still a half-day of travel left to Kazan. They have to spend the night in a neighboring canton.

Denisov, the local chairman of the rural council, a stocky guy with the sturdy gait of an experienced sailor, welcomes them cordially, even warmly.

“We’ll arrange a hotel for you, highest class! The Astoria! Well, no, all right, we’ll do better, the Angleterre!” he promises, his smile generously baring large teeth.

Sheep are bleating deafeningly now, pushing, jumping on each other, shaking their floppy ears, and kicking their thin black legs. With his arms spread wide, Denisov drives them all into a pen behind a long cotton curtain that divides the enormous room into two halves. The last nimble little lamb is still racing around, drumming its little hooves sharply on the wooden floor. The chairman finally grabs it by its curly scruff and flings it in with the others; satisfied, he looks around, kicks smelly sheep pellets with his boot, and hospitably throws his arms open so the stripes of a sailor’s jersey flash in the gap at his collar:

“So, what was I telling you about this hotel?”

Ignatov cranes his neck and looks around. Bright light from a kerosene lamp illuminates a high wooden ceiling. Long narrow windows circle the round cupola. There are shallow waves of half-erased Arabic inscriptions on dark, pitch-covered walls. Inside cavernous niches gleam bright squares, the vestiges of recently removed tapestries with quotations from the Koran.

At first Ignatov doesn’t want to spend the night in a former mosque – blast it, this hotbed of obscurantism. But then he gets to thinking – actually, why not? Denisov’s a smart fellow. He’s got things figured out. Why let the building stand idle for no reason?

“There’s room for everyone,” the chairman continues boastfully, drawing the colorful curtain across. “Sheep in the women’s half, people in the men’s. It’s a relic, of course. But it’s convenient, that’s a fact! At first we wanted to take out the curtain but then decided to leave it. You can count on us having guests here each and every night.”

The mosque was recently transferred to the collective farm. Even the sharp smell of sheep manure can’t stifle its distinct aroma, maybe of old rugs, maybe of dusty books still remaining in the corners.

The shivering deportees are bunched by the entrance, scared and gawking at the curtain, behind which the sheep continue to bellow and push.

“Find a place to settle in, dekulakized citizens,” says Denisov as he opens the stove door and throws in a few logs. “In the beginning, my collective farm women were afraid of going into the men’s side, too,” he whispers conspiratorially to Ignatov. “A sin, they said. But then it was fine – they got used to it.”

The mullah in the karakul coat is the first to enter the mosque. He walks up to the high prayer niche and kneels. Several men follow him. As before, the women crowd at the threshold.

“Lady citizens,” the chairman shouts cheerfully from the stove, the fire’s golden sparkles gleaming in his dark pupils. “Those sheep, they’re not afraid. Follow their example.”

Raucous bleating carries from behind the curtain in response.

The mullah rises from his knees. He turns toward the exiles and signals welcomingly with his hands. People enter timidly, scattering along the walls.

Prokopenko, who’s crouched by a heap of junk in the corner, has unearthed a book and is picking at its pretty fabric cover decorated with metallic patterns – he’s drawn to learning.

“I ask you not to take the books,” says the chairman. “They’re awfully good for starting fires.”

“We won’t touch anything,” says Ignatov, looking sternly at Prokopenko, who tosses the book back on the pile, shrugging his shoulder indifferently. He doesn’t want it so terribly much anyway.

“Now listen, comrade representative,” Denisov says, turning to Ignatov. “Your little soldiers won’t be stealing a lamb for dinner, will they? I have a shortfall in the morning whenever there’s a dekulakized caravan. We’ve lost half the flock already, just in January! That’s a fact.”

“Collective farm goods? How could we!”

“Well, fine…” Denisov smiles and jokingly threatens Ignatov with a strong, gnarled finger covered in black calloused spots. “Because you can’t keep an eye on it all the time…”

Ignatov slaps Denisov on the shoulder to calm him: Simmer down, comrade! How about that: a former Petersburg sailor (Baltic fleet!) and Leningrad laborer (a shock worker!), he’s now one of the twenty-five thousand who’s followed the Party’s call to improve the Soviet countryside (a romantic!). In short, by all accounts Denisov’s one of us, Ignatov thinks, and yet he still regards his own pretty poorly.

Nastasya is walking through the mosque with a leisurely, lazy stride, scrutinizing the deportees huddled in the corners. She pulls her shaggy fur hat from her head and her heavy, wheaten braid cascades down her back toward her feet. The women gasp (in a mosque, in front of men, in front of a live mullah, with her head uncovered!) and press their hands to the children’s eyes. Nastasya approaches the heated stove and throws her sheepskin coat on it. The pleats on her uniform tunic are like tight musical strings that pull away from her high-set bosom under a wide belt that’s so tightly caught at her waist that it seems it will burst with a twang at any minute.

“We’ll put the children here,” says Ignatov, not looking at her. Am I showing pity again? he thinks meanly. Then he reassures himself – they’re still children even if they’re kulak children.

“Fine, I’ll freeze,” Nastasya cheerfully sighs and picks up her coat.

“Let me arrange some straw for you, you gorgeous thing.” Denisov winks at her.

Jostling, and with stifled shouts, the youngsters somehow settle around the wide stove, some on top of it, others beside it. The mothers lie down on the floor around it in a broad, solid ring. The rest seek out spots for themselves along the walls, on the rags lying in the corner, and on the debris of bookshelves and benches.

Zuleikha finds a half-burned scrap of rug and settles on it, leaning her back against the wall. The thoughts in her head are still as heavy and unwieldy as bread dough. Her eyes see but as if through a screen. Her ears hear but as if from afar. Her body moves and breathes but as if it’s not her own.

She’s been thinking all day about how the Vampire Hag’s prediction has come true. But in such a scary way! Three fiery angels – the three Red Hordesmen – had taken her away from her husband’s household in a carriage but the old woman stayed in the house with her adored son. What the Vampire Hag had been so joyful about and wanted so much had come about. Would Mansurka figure out to bury Murtaza alongside his daughters? And the Vampire Hag? Zuleikha had no doubt the old woman wouldn’t last long after her son’s death. All-powerful Allah, everything is at your will.

She’s sitting in a mosque for the first time in her life and in the main half at that – the men’s half – not far from the prayer niche. It’s obvious that the Almighty’s will is in this, too.

Husbands allowed women into the mosque reluctantly, only for big holidays, at Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. Murtaza would steam himself thoroughly in the bathhouse every Friday and hurry off – ruddy, with his beard carefully combed – to Yulbash’s mosque for Friday prayers, after placing a green velvet embroidered skullcap on his head, which he’d shaved to a rosy sheen. The women’s part of the mosque, which was in the corner behind a thick curtain, was usually empty on Fridays. The mullah instructed the husbands to convey the content of the Friday conversations to their wives, who’d stayed to look after their households, so they’d become stronger in the true faith and not lose their bearings. Murtaza obediently fulfilled the instruction. After coming home and settling in on the sleeping bench, he would wait until the low rumbling of the flour mill or the clinking of dishes quieted in the women’s quarters, then he’d say his usual “I was at the mosque. I saw the mullah,” through the curtain. Zuleikha waited for Murtaza to say that every Friday because it meant far more than the individual words. It meant that everything in this world has its routine and the way of things is unshakable.

Tomorrow is Friday. Murtaza will not go to the mosque tomorrow.

Zuleikha looks around for the mullah. He’s continuing to pray, sitting facing the prayer niche.

“Officers on duty to their posts,” commands Ignatov. “Others to sleep.”

“And if someone doesn’t feel like sleeping, comrade Ignatov?” The full-bosomed woman who shamelessly bared her head in the house of worship has found herself an armload of straw and is standing, embracing it.

“Wake-up will be at dawn,” Ignatov responds curtly and Zuleikha is somehow pleased that the commander is so strict with the shameless woman.

Nastasya sighs loudly and tosses the armload of straw on the floor near Zuleikha.

The officers on duty arrange themselves on an overturned bookcase by the entrance, their rifles gleaming brightly in the half-darkness. “Rise at dawn, awake till dawn, a sailor’s guard is never down!” The chairman salutes them in parting, wishing the sheep and travelers a good night. Ignatov gives a sign and the kerosene lamp’s little orange flame shrinks so only the very end of the wick smolders, barely noticeable in the dark.

Zuleikha gropes in her pocket for bread, breaks off a piece, and chews.

“Where are you taking us, commissar?” the mullah’s deep-toned, singsong voice rings out in the dark.

“Where the Party’s sending you, that’s where I’m taking you,” Ignatov responds just as loudly.

“So where is your Party sending us?”

“Ask the all-knowing Allah, let him whisper it in your ear.”

“Not everyone will last the journey. You’re taking us to our death, commissar.”

“Well then, you must try to survive. Or ask Allah for a quick death, so you don’t suffer.”

The anxious deportees whisper among themselves:

“Where? Where?”

“It couldn’t be Siberia?”

“But where else would it be? Exile is always there.”

“Is that far?”

“The mullah said we might not last the journey.”

“Allah! If only we can make it!”

“Yes. If we make it, we might survive–”

Rifles clank, reverberating, as the officers on duty load them before bed. Murmuring voices go quiet. The stove’s warmth creeps through the mosque; eyelids fill with sleepiness and shut. As Zuleikha is drifting off, she sees that the mullah’s wife has let her beloved gray cat out of the cage and is feeding it from her hand, shedding large tears on its soft, striped back. “Zuleikhaaa!” The Vampire Hag’s voice can be heard from far away, as if it’s coming from underground. “Zuleikhaaa!”

I’m hurrying, Mama, I’m hurrying…

Zuleikha opens her eyes. The exiles are sleeping all around her, in a thick duskiness weakly diluted by the flickering kerosene light. The fire crackles in the stove; the sheep in their nook bleat briefly, sleepily, from time to time. The officers on duty are dozing sweetly, leaning against the wall, their heads hanging on their slumping shoulders.

Ugh, it was only a dream.

And then there’s a sudden loud rustling, very close by. Intermittent whispering – male or female? – heated, quick, muddled, and mixed with loud rapid breaths. The darkness is quivering, turbulent, and breathing in the same place the shameless woman settled in on the armload of straw. It’s moving, at first slowly, then faster, sharper, and more energetically. This is no longer darkness: it’s two bodies, swathed in shadow. Something is shuddering, wheezing, and exhaling, deeply and for a long time. And then a muffled female laugh. “Hold on, you madman, I’m completely exhausted.” The voice is familiar – it’s her, the harlot with the magnificent cheeks. Zuleikha thinks she sees yellow hair scattering in the darkness like a heavy sheaf. The woman is breathing with her mouth wide open, with relief, and loudly, as if she’s not afraid of being heard. She bends her head on someone’s chest and they both go still and quiet.

Zuleikha strains to see, attempting to view the man’s face. And she discerns two eyes gazing out of the darkness: he’s been looking at her long and hard. It’s Ignatov.

“Salakhatdin!” A heartrending shriek suddenly rings out in the depths of the mosque. “My husband!”

The kerosene lamp flares abruptly. People leap up and look around, a half-awake child cries, and the cat mews under someone’s inadvertent boot.

“Salakhatdin!” the mullah’s wife keeps shouting.

Cursing, Ignatov frees himself from the net of Nastasya’s mermaid-like hair, hastily fastens his belt, and pulls on his boots as he walks. He runs to where the exiles are already densely bunched.

People let him through. The mullah is lying on the floor with his gray head directed toward the prayer niche and his long legs stretched out from under his curly fur coat. His enormous wife is kneeling alongside him and sobbing, her forehead on the floor. The mullah’s open eyes are frozen and looking upward; his skin is stretched over his cheekbones and the wrinkles running from his nose to his chin have formed his lips into a pale, dry smile. Ignatov looks up. There’s a fluid blue light in the narrow windows. Morning.

“Everybody get ready,” he says to the frozen faces around him. “We’re leaving.”

And he walks toward the door.

Nastasya’s gaze follows him. She’s sitting on the armload of straw and plaiting her loose hair into a thick wheaten braid.

They get ready quickly. It is decided to leave the mullah’s body in the canton for burial. At Ignatov’s insistence, the mullah’s wife, puffy with tears, tosses the fur coat on herself. Children help catch the cat, which has hidden behind the stove from fear, and put it back in its cage.

Outside, Zuleikha is already sitting in her driver’s place, holding the reins at the ready – they’re waiting for a command to leave – when Prokopenko looks around, runs over, and quickly throws something heavy, white, and shaggy onto the sledge. A lamb. He covers it with burlap and presses a crooked finger to his lips: Shh…

“Let’s go!” rings out loudly over the whole yard. The horses snort, the escorts shout to one another, and the sledges pull out of the yard like a school of large, slow fish.

Chairman Denisov stands by the gate, smiling and seeing them off.

“Well,” Ignatov says to him amiably, firmly shaking a hand as hard as the sole of a shoe, “stand firm, brother!”

“Listen, Ignatov,” says the flustered Denisov, lowering his voice and furrowing his brows a little. “What would you think about raising the red flag over the mosque?”

Ignatov scrutinizes the minaret’s tall tower. Its sharp top is nestled into the sky, with a dark tin squiggle of a crescent on it.

“It would be visible from far away,” he replies approvingly. “Beautiful!”

“All the same, it’s a cult building. It could look like some sort of… mishmash.”

“There’s a mishmash inside your head,” says Ignatov, slapping his impatient prancing horse on the neck. “This is a genuine shed for the kolkhoz. Understand that, shock worker?”

Denisov smiles and waves his hand – how could he not understand!

Ignatov lets the last sledge go ahead of him, casts a glance over the emptied yard and gallops after the caravan, spraying crisp morning snow out from under his horse’s hooves.

When the village is far behind them, Zuleikha turns around. A red flag is already waving like a small, hot flame over the slender candle of the mosque.

Rural council chairman Denisov will work another half-year in the village. By spring, he will have organized the kolkhoz and, through earnest work, greatly raised the rate of collectivization in the settlement entrusted to him.

He will battle religion with all his soul, in the Baltic fleet manner. During the holy month of Ramadan, he will organize agitational processions around the mosque, personally speak as an opponent to three clergymen in the public debate “Is religiosity needed in Soviet society?” and gather up all village Korans for burning.

The crowning achievement of his career in the small town will be obtaining a Kommunar tractor for his kolkhoz. It will be the envy of all the canton’s neighboring villages, which, as yet, lack vehicles. The tractor will be the most valued and most guarded object in Denisov’s enterprise.

He will propose innovative initiatives and rename the pagan holiday Sabantuy – “Holiday of the Plow” – which is celebrated in small Tatar towns during late spring, to “Traktortuy.” The initiative will receive support from the center and a delegation from the Central Executive Committee in Kazan will come to the celebration, along with a landing force of newspaper correspondents. The holiday, however, will be ruined by the disrepair of the tractor itself. It will later become clear that an old local woman, the wife of a holy man, decided from good intentions to win over the tractor’s spirit and secretly fed the motor an uncertain quantity of eggs and bread, causing the breakdown. The correspondents and the dissatisfied comrades from the Central Executive Committee will leave for Kazan with nothing and Denisov’s career will begin a rapid decline.

He will be recalled from the village and sent home. Upon returning to Leningrad, he will find that his room in a communal apartment has been occupied by multiplying neighbors. During a desperate and drawn-out struggle with the building managers for living space, he will take to the bottle and be evicted from a dormitory a couple of years later, for drunkenness. During passportization in 1933, Denisov will be exiled from Leningrad as a person lacking an official residence permit and simply as a binging drunkard, sent first beyond the hundred-and-first kilometer, then to Ust’-Tsil’ma, and then, finally, to somewhere near Dushkachan, where his trail will be lost forever amid the rounded hills of the Baikal region.

COFFEE

Who doesn’t love coffee in little china cups?

Volf Karlovich Leibe hides his face under a blanket and continues to feel the warm touch of a sunbeam on his forehead. He’ll have to get up in a few moments. His work won’t wait.

Soon Grunya will burst noisily into his office carrying a tray with a tiny steaming cup in her dutifully extended hands. First thing in the morning, it’s just coffee and a small piece of chocolate, no food, which causes heavy thoughts and limbs. He himself will get up and throw open the drapes with a broad motion, allowing sunlight to flood the room. Grunya will cast a fastidious gaze at the dark blue dress uniform hanging at the ready and carefully remove a nonexistent dust speck from a sleeve – her bashful worship of his uniformed professorial vestments is growing all the stronger with the years. And a new day will unfurl: lectures, examinations, thousands of excited student faces…

Volf Karlovich sends the blanket to the floor with an energetic sweep, his toes fumbling at the smooth, cool leather of his slippers. The drapes fly off to the side with a swish, revealing a view familiar since childhood. This oriel window with three tall panes is like a huge living triptych where for so many years bushy old linden trees have been turning green, blossoming, dropping leaves, and after a covering of frost, blooming again, reflected in the mirror of Black Lake.

The panes are now covered with a delicate frosty mural. His German-born father would cast a majestic morning gaze through the window, as if saying an amiable hello to the winter month he called “Januar.”

This used to be his father’s office and little Volf wasn’t allowed in here. He used to steal in, though, hide out behind the curtains, flatten his nose against the cold glass, and admire the lake.

Now he himself works here. He even prefers sleeping right here, on the firm sofa by his father’s ancient writing desk. A quill pen and paper are ready on the desk – good thoughts have a habit of soaring at night. He has already forgotten when he last slept in the bedroom. That was probably back before the renovations began.

Grunya’s supervising the renovations, just as she has supervised everything that’s taken place in the old professorial apartment. Large, noisy, with a braid that winds around her head and is as thick as an arm (her arms are as thick as a leg, too), Grunya’s heavy soldier’s tread entered this home for duty twenty years ago and Volf Karlovich instantly capitulated, handing over the reins of his paltry household with a submissive joy so he could plunge headfirst into the intoxicating world of the mysteries of the human body.

Volf Karlovich Leibe was a surgeon and a third-generation professor at Kazan University. His practice was extensive and people waited months for operations. Each time he raised the scalpel over a patient’s soft, pale body, he sensed a cool trepidation in the very pit of his stomach: Do I have the right? The knife touched the skin and that chill changed to a warmth that spread to his limbs: I do not have the right not to attempt. And he attempted, conducting a mental dialogue with the cutaneous covering, muscle, and connective tissue through which he made his way to his goal, greeting the internal organs respectfully and whispering to blood vessels. He conversed with his patients’ bodies using a scalpel. And bodies responded to him. He told nobody about his dialogues: from an outsider’s perspective, this might appear to resemble mental illness.

Volf Karlovich had a second secret, too, which was that the mysteries of human birth excited him to an extreme, making his fingertips itch.

In his naive youth, intoxicated by the lectures of legendary Professor Phenomenov, he even wanted to stay and work in the department of obstetrics and female diseases. His father talked him out of it: “Deliver babies for peasant women your whole life?” Young Volf resigned himself to his father’s opinion and went into the noble department of surgery.

After becoming a surgeon and dissecting in the anatomical theater the unclaimed bodies of paupers and prostitutes that had been delivered from the police station as cadavers, he would sometimes discover a small fetus in a female womb. Each of these findings brought him to a state of vague excitement. A ridiculous thought would flash: What if this tiny little beast with the wrinkly face and caricature-like small extremities is actually alive?

“Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae,” said the inscription over the round building housing the university’s anatomical theater: “This place is where death delights in helping life.” And so it was. Unborn babies in the bellies of young women knifed from jealousy or accidentally murdered in bandits’ gunfights thirsted to reveal their little secrets to Volf Karlovich: their thin voices constantly swarmed in his head, whispering, muttering, and sometimes shouting.

And he surrendered. He performed his first hysterotomy at the age of twenty-five, in 1900, the turn of the century. He already had several dozen incisions of the womb to his credit by that time, and this new operation – the cesarean section – was not especially complex for him. There was a special feeling afterward, though, since it was one thing to cut a slippery bloody slab from a tumor in the patient’s womb and fling it in a basin, and something completely different to remove a live, quivering baby.

The operation went brilliantly. Then another and another. The renown of the young surgeon, “a natural,” took wing in the Kazan province. And that was how he lived, working in clinical surgery for his father and in gynecology (a bit embarrassed about that and not advertising it) for himself.

When, by the way, did he last operate? Volf Karlovich begins pondering. It seems as if it wasn’t long ago at all, but it’s challenging to remember the exact date or reason for the operation. Teaching takes so much time and energy that some events fade from memory. He’ll have to ask Grunya.

Volf Karlovich takes a watering can from the windowsill and waters his palm plant. This is the only thing Grunya isn’t allowed to do in the home. Watering is a special ritual because it soothes the professor. The huge tree with glossy, fleshy leaves standing in a wooden tub on the floor is his exact contemporary. On the day he was born, fifty-five years ago, his father planted a pip in the tub and forgot it. A month later he was amazed to discover a stubborn, stubby sprout. The palm grew and gradually transformed into a tall, powerful tree, though it’s true it has never once bloomed. The day it blossoms will be a holiday for Volf Karlovich.

The door opens wide with a cracking sound and Grunya bursts into the room as noisily and relentlessly as a locomotive flying along the rails. “Good morning,” utter her plump lips, touched with bright lipstick. That means the morning truly is good. Just like the day ahead.

The smell of buckwheat groats with onion fills the room.

Grunya places a silver tray with a small china cup at the edge of the table.

“Please ask the workmen to begin this bedlam of theirs a little later,” Volf Karlovich says with an imploring smile, standing next to the palm. “I want to work in quiet for a while.”

Grunya nods silently, her head piled high with thick, interwoven braids like a ship’s ropes.

“And when…” Volf Karlovich attentively fingers the smooth, cool leaves, “…when will this endless renovation end?”

“Soon,” mutters Grunya in a low voice, heading for the door. “There’s not much longer to wait.”

“And also, Grunya…”

She stops by the door and turns.

“Can you recall? When did I last operate? Somehow it’s slipped my mind.”

Grunya furrows her low brow.

“Why do you need to know?”

Volf Karlovich shrinks under her threatening gaze.

“I feel uncomfortable when I can’t remember such a simple fact of my biography.”

“I’ll go remember it,” says Grunya dryly, nodding decisively, as if she were butting the air in front of herself, and leaves.

Clinking dishes, excited female voices, and children’s crying carry through the slightly open door.

“But I asked for quiet!” says Volf Karlovich, placing his hand to his forehead like a martyr.

Grunya goes to the kitchen to fetch breakfast for herself and Stepan.

Three huge windows without curtains. Clothes lines divide the space into two uneven triangles. Six tables that seem to dance along the walls. Six kerosene cookers on the tables. Six large-bellied cabinets. All told, there are seven rooms in the apartment but Volf Karlovich doesn’t have his own table. Meaning he doesn’t have a kerosene cooker, either.

Women who’ve been passionately discussing something go quiet and disperse to their own corners when they see Grunya. The sizzling of someone’s eggs in a frying pan becomes distinctly audible. Grunya’s hand grabs at the clothes line and carefully shifts the hanging sheets, pushing them back into an accordion.

“I’ve told you not to take up my half,” she says to the ceiling.

“But you don’t do laundry today,” says one of the women, hands on hips, sleeves rolled up.

Grunya silently unties the apron around her waist and hangs it on the freed-up clothes line: Now there’s laundry! Then she opens the sideboard, takes out bread, and locks it again with a key. She picks up a pan of porridge from her kerosene cooker and heads for the door. The women gaze after her. Water bubbles in a basin with boiling laundry. Milk sizzles as it boils over.

It’s dark in the hallway; the gas lamps haven’t been working for ten years now. Cabinets and trunks block a once-wide hallway so you can’t get through. There it is, communal life: darkness, overcrowding, and the smell of fried onions. Things were very different before.

Grunya pushes a door with her mighty rear end and enters her room.

“What took so long?” Stepan is at the table in just an undershirt, using a screwdriver to tinker with a large padlock. Spots of shiny black oil cover his hands.

“He’s trying to recall when he last operated.” Grunya places the pan on the table and pensively scrutinizes the tablecloth’s pattern.

Stepan sets down the screwdriver and picks up the lock. Click! The shackle greedily latches shut. He takes the key lying beside it, inserts it, rotates it with a smooth mechanical sound, and the lock opens obediently.

“It’s ready.” His smile bares smoke-stained teeth dancing crookedly in his mouth.

“He wants to recall when he last operated,” Grunya repeats, louder. “But what if he wants to recall something else?”

“You think it’s that simple? He wants to recall something and then he does? He hasn’t remembered for ten years, and then he wants to, so there you go?” Stepan wipes his hands on his under-shirt, breaks off some bread, and starts chewing.

“How should I know?” Grunya takes a ladle and hurls a gob of thick, steaming porridge on a dish.

“When did you send the letter?” Stepan eats the steaming buckwheat with a large spoon, not burning himself.

“It’s been about a month already.”

“That means they’ll come soon. There’s not much longer to wait. They’re just regular people working there; they need time to look into things.” Stepan reaches his little finger into the depths of his upper jaw for a grain that’s stuck, then wipes his finger on the tablecloth. “It’s our job not to miss them. And there you go!” He stands, shakes the heavy lock in the air, and hangs it on a nail by the door. “They’ll shut the room off and you’ll scoot right over to put a lock over the little paper seal they stick on the door. If anybody asks, say the building manager ordered it.”

Sitting on a stool, Grunya moves her head a little, in agreement.

“The building manager, he won’t change his mind?” She’s looking out from under her brow, watching as Stepan sits back down at the table and resumes working his spoon; his muscles are rolling along his shoulders like mounds.

“Don’t you be worrying.” Stepan smiles broadly and there are dark spots of buckwheat in the grooves between his teeth. “Don’t you be worrying ’bout nothing – I’ll take care of it! Soon you’ll be drinking your coffee in mister professor’s room from mister professor’s cups.”

Her fleshy lips tremble in a flustered smile, then open up a little again, alarmed:

“Even so, I feel sorry for him. He was quite a person…”

Stepan licks his spoon thoroughly. He walks up behind Grunya and places his sinewy hands on her round shoulders. Her marvelous bosom quivers under thin, faded cotton and slowly rises in a deep breath, like yeast dough on a stove.

“What’s to feel sorry about?” Stepan mouths this, whispering in Grunya’s ear. “He was, then he ended.”

There’s a strong male odor coming from Stepan, blended with the smell of buckwheat and machine oil. Grunya tightens her fingers on her knees, creasing the fabric of her dress.

“You earned it. Over twenty years, you deserve it. Here you are, still fetching him his food, his drinks, doing his washing. For free, mind you. So what if you used to work for him for real. And so what if he was a big fish. Your professor, he’d’ve died a long time ago if it wasn’t for you. So he should be thanking you he’s still alive.”

Stepan’s hands grip Grunya’s shoulders. The clock on the wall ticks audibly.

“But you and me, maybe we’ll be expanding later, too. Even when he’s gone, what’re we going to do – spend our lives huddled in two measly rooms?”

She closes her eyes and presses her ear to his rough, hairy hand. His fingers move toward the base of her neck, then further, toward the opening in her dress.

“Now then, Grushenka,” he whispers quietly, “now then, my little apple…”

The bell by the front door squawks shrilly. One ring is for the professor. The last time anyone came to see him was five or six years ago, some skinny old man passing through from Moscow to Siberia who invited the professor to teach in Tomsk, though Leibe turned him down.

Grunya leaps up. Her eyes meet Stepan’s tense gaze and she presses a hand to her mouth: Could it be them? Stepan motions angrily with his chin: Open it up. What are you standing there for? She runs into the hallway, putting the unfastened buttons on her dress collar back through their holes along the way. She feels Stepan’s heavy gaze behind her, beating at the back of her head from the doorway. She rattles the locks and chains for a long time, then her fingers finally cope with her nervousness. Grunya exhales with a gasp and reaches to open the heavy front door.

Ilona’s standing, shifting from one little heel to another and lowering her hat brim slightly over her eyes. Shameful, my God, how shameful…

A mountain of a woman opens the door. She’s breathing deeply and menacingly, like a dragon. She’s silent and her beady eyes are looking at Ilona.

“I’m here to see Professor Leibe,” Ilona says, exhaling feebly.

The mountain of a woman jabs her chin at the air, indicating a white door in the dimly lit hallway behind her. She doesn’t move from her place, though: she stands, blocking the way. Ilona presses a flat little purse to her chest like a shield and edges into the apartment, feeling faint from the thick smell of onions and porridge issuing from this woman. She wants to duck behind the white door but the menacing keeper of the threshold cuts off her passage with an arm. “I’ll announce you,” her deep voice says with loathing before she goes into the room. Ilona is left by herself in the stuffy brown dusk of the hallway.

A bright rectangle – the entrance to the kitchen – is somewhere far ahead and from it carry the smells of laundry and lunch and the sounds of the hum of female voices, children’s laughter, and a jingling bicycle bell. Along the hallway, barely discernible in the darkness, are tall doors to rooms; their white paint has partially flaked off, like fish scales. Ilona thinks someone’s hiding behind them and observing. She darts off with grateful relief when the professor’s door finally swings open and the portly woman’s deep voice invites her to enter.

Volf Karlovich Leibe, prof. med. in gyn., luminary!: that’s the note Ilona discovered in her mother’s diary when she went through her things after the funeral. The word “luminary” was underlined twice. Blushing from speculation about why her mother required a “prof. med. in gyn.,” she put away the notebook, which had disintegrated into sheets, in an upper storage cabinet. She only remembered it several years later when she was tossing and turning in bed, sleepless as usual. The bed was cooling after Ivan had left and she was agonizing over guesses as to why, after reaching the age of twenty-five, she had never once… And how could she find the right words to say that while maintaining decorum?

Her girlfriends were living the full lives of Young Communist League members by falling in love, acquiring suitors – Komsomol or Party members, or shock workers at the very least – finding new ones, marrying and divorcing, and losing count of abortions. Some had even given birth to tiny pink children who screeched in horrendous voices.

Ilona had observed all those maelstroms and tangles of female fates from the sidelines, during breaks from pounding on the keyboard of a good old-fashioned Underwood, behind whose cumbersome bulk she cleverly and unobtrusively hid from life in a small office.

She’d had few suitors and nobody had asked her to marry them. No, it wasn’t really “few.” Of course there were suitors. And they gave her womanly happiness, in the ways and amounts they could. She thirstily drank every drop of that happiness. But she hadn’t become pregnant (what a scary word!). Her womb was a bottomless vessel that accepted everything that fell into it but lacked the power to give anything back to this world. Policeman Fedorchuk, a charming, brawny fellow, was swarthy, curly-haired, dark-eyed, and irrevocably married; bookkeeper Zeldovich was prematurely bald and gray, and loved to sleep nestled into her chest; the chemistry student with the funny surname Obida had traces of eternal hypochondria on his face… They had all floated through her iron bed with the shiny knobs on the headboard – and through her life, too – without leaving a trace. And that hadn’t concerned her a bit.

Then, suddenly, there was Ivan. Vanya.

What errant wind had blown that tall, broad-shouldered looker with the arrogant gaze and upright posture into her dusty life, so reliably protected by a typewriter? Ilona latched on to him tenaciously, with all the strength of her pale fingers worn out from constant battles with the keyboard. She laughed loudly at the cinema with her head thrown back high; she blazed with shame when she put on her mother’s chiffon blouse, transparent in the bright light, for an evening stroll; she tried to be passionate and tireless at night; she sewed two buttons on his uniform tunic; and she even mastered her grandmother’s recipe for preparing thick Sunday pancakes.

In the heat of a recent argument, he’d thrown some enigmatic words about love for children in her face, as if he’d lashed her cheek. Could this stern military man with the cold gray eyes really want familial coziness and children?

Her mother’s photograph on the bureau looked at her implacably: Don’t give in! Ilona searched for the castoff notebook in the dusty abyss of the upper storage cabinet and after her trembling fingers found the sought-after address in the folds of its yellowed pages, she headed for “prof. med. in gyn.” Vanya wants children; she’ll bear them for him. If she can, of course.

The luminary could have closed his practice, changed his address, or, yes, simply grown old and died in the years that had passed. But – what enormous, improbable luck! – he still lived here, guarded by that chained-up dog, the mountain-like woman with the gaze of a hungry she-bear.

And so now Ilona is standing in the middle of the room, timidly looking downward, and the rather eccentric professor is hurrying to greet her. The hems of his quilted satin robe are fluttering and his shaggy curls form a semicircle – a halo, it occurs to her! – around a high, shining forehead that flows to the back of a head that’s just as smooth. His lips press her hand, which flushes instantly with heat, since nobody has ever kissed Ilona’s fingers, not even the extraordinarily affectionate policeman Fedorchuk, and this is so unceremonious, in the presence of others.

“Thank you, Grunya,” the professor says in a singsong voice.

The disappointed she-bear woman releases air from her voluminous chest, slowly turns around, and carries her bulky body out of the room.

The professor courteously points a withered hand at a chair with curved wooden legs and varnished armrests that are reminiscent of éclairs at the Gorzin bakery. Ilona, who still hasn’t dared raise eyelashes heavy with mascara, perches herself on the edge of a seat upholstered in flowered satin. Something small and sharp pierces the very top of her leg. A nail? She decides to tolerate it and not let on.

“Forgive my shabby appearance,” Leibe’s voice babbles. “I usually receive patients after lunch. But since you’re already here – which I am glad about, sincerely glad! – let us speak now about your, ahem, question.”

Shameful, oh God, how shameful… Ilona swallows a gob of saliva and looks up. The luminary is settling in comfortably behind a large desk, placing his arms on the desktop’s light-gray velvet.

“I am listening with the utmost attention.”

The professor’s delicate-blue eyes are kindly. A hollow on his chest, with slender ribs radiating from it like sunbeams, shows out from under his wide-open robe. Ilona looks down. A luminary is permitted a lot, even possessing oddities and receiving patients while looking this outlandish.

“Hmm?” Leibe encourages her.

“I need to have a child,” she exhales. “No matter what it takes.”

The professor takes a silver spoon from a tray that’s standing on the desk and pensively rattles it a bit in an elegant coffee cup of thin, milk-white porcelain with smoothly curving sides and a flirty little handle. The jingling comes out sounding unexpectedly muted and cheap: dzin-dzin… dzin-dzin…

“How long have you wanted this?”

“I haven’t wanted it for so long… But I could have long ago… I mean, purely theoretically… or, rather, practically, too…” Ilona is thoroughly muddled and rests her chin against the ironed ruches on her collar. “Seven years.”

“And so over the course of seven years you have had relations with men but have not once been pregnant. Is that what you wanted to say?”

Ilona sinks her head deeper into her shoulders: Yes, exactly that. The upholstery nail on the chair is puncturing her leg hard, persistently. Ilona’s afraid to fidget: what if her dress tears?

“Well, for starters, you’ll need to be examined and fill out a medical questionnaire. After that it will be clear if I can help you. Or at least attempt to help.”

“I’m ready for an examination,” Ilona whispers to the ruches on her collar.

“But I’m not ready, my dear girl!” laughs the professor. “Where do you wish for me to receive you, on this desk? Yes, I run my practice at home but my apartment is undergoing renovations now. Horrible, never-ending renovations! The dining room, living room, bedroom, library, examination room, and waiting room are all occupied by unbearable workmen who ceaselessly make noise for days on end. They impede my thought, work, and life, after all. All I can do is steal some calm hours at night, when they stop their endless bothersomeness. I’m forced to work by lamplight, in my own home. Like a mouse!” He nods at a sheet of paper lying in front of him. “Fortunately, this nightmare will end soon. Grunya promised there’s not much longer at all to wait.”

“Grunya?” Ilona simply cannot grasp what’s happening. Is the luminary refusing to help?

The nail is stuck impossibly deep in her body. It’s as if she’s threaded on a skewer.

“Grunya knows everything,” the professor says, taking his cup from the table, drawing it to his mouth, and smacking his lips in anticipation. “She’s my guardian angel, I’d be lost without her. Ask her when this bedlam will end – maybe in a week or in a month – and come then.”

Ilona looks up, completely worn out from shame and incomprehension.

“I can’t wait, professor.”

“Then” – he waves his cup in the air, dismayed – “come see me at the clinic. I receive patients there on Thursdays… or maybe Fridays… Clarify that with Grunya.”

Ilona leaps up from the chair (from the nail, really) and falls to her knees in front of the professor’s desk.

“Don’t refuse me, professor! Help me! You’re my last hope!”

“No, no,” Leibe abruptly shouts, in an unexpectedly high-pitched voice. “I don’t know anything! Grunya knows! Go see Grunya!”

“Only you can save me! You’re a genius! A luminary!”

Ilona crawls up to the table on her knees and drops her arched hands on the desktop. A light-gray swirl rises out from under her hands and it’s becoming obvious that the covering under the layer of dust has a rich green color. Dust blankets everything: the desktop, inkstand, open ink bottle with a dried pool of ink at its depths, a virginally white sheet of paper, and a pen with a broken nib that’s lying on it.

Recoiling from fear, the professor places his coffee cup in front of himself as if for protection. The cup has a wide crack and is absolutely empty.

“Forgive me, in the name of God,” says Ilona, slowly crawling away.

The sun is beating through dirty splotches on the three-paned window, filling the fluffy, curly halo around the professor’s bald spot with a vivid golden hue. He places his cup on the tray and slows his rapid breathing. Then he makes his way out from behind the desk, all the while glancing warily at Ilona from time to time, and picks up a large tin watering can. Streams of water pour from its holey spout into a large wooden tub from which there protrudes a dry, gnarled stick bristling with the debris of dried-out branches. It’s the skeleton of a long-dead tree.

“Forgive me, for God’s sake, forgive me,” Ilona whispers, standing and brushing off her dress. “Forgive me, forgive me…”

“Nice, isn’t it?” The flustered professor smiles and draws a finger with a long, broken nail along the tree’s wrinkly trunk. He leans back, admiring. His flat hands caress nonexistent leaves.

“Good day,” says Ilona, backing toward the door.

“I’ll be expecting you at the clinic.” Leibe nods in parting, not shifting his gaze from the palm tree.

The door opens a second before Ilona pushes it. Grunya’s gigantic body is in the opening, offering coat and hat. Ilona realizes she’s been eavesdropping.

“Is it true that Professor Leibe receives patients at the clinic on Thursdays?” she asks in the dark hallway.

“Volf Karlovich hasn’t left his room for ten years now,” answers Grunya.

A genius.

Volf Karlovich shakes his head. It’s embarrassing for him whenever he hears rapturous epithets like that from patients and students.

A luminary.

Come now! A little boy standing at the ocean’s shore, that’s how he perceives his relationship to science. And he’s not ashamed to admit that from a rostrum, gazing into his students’ wide-open eyes.

Only you can save me.

Alas, that’s not true, either. The patient’s body saves itself on its own. The doctor only helps, directing the body’s strengths to take the proper course, sometimes removing something extra, unnecessary, and obsolete. The doctor and patient travel the road to recovery hand in hand, but the primary part – which is always the deciding factor – is played by the patient, with his will for life and the strengths of his body. Advanced students who’ve already become familiar with the secrets of pharmaceuticals and have a couple of elementary surgical operations behind them sometimes dare argue with him about that. Sweet fledglings standing on their own two feet…

Isn’t it time to go to the university? The ecstatic damsel’s visit disrupted the routine of his usual life and Volf Karlovich feels lost and confused. What time is his first lecture today? That depends on what day of the week it is.

What day is it, anyway?

Leibe looks at the clock but the hands are frozen, motionless, on its face.

He takes his professorial dress uniform from the back of his chair and realizes it’s his father’s old robe. So where’s the dress uniform? The one with dense fabric of deep blue and a row of buttons, each with a stern two-headed eagle spreading its wings? The same one with the narrow snow-white enamel insignia shining on the chest, the badge of a Kazan University professor? The same one Grunya blows the dust motes from every morning? That’s right, she took it out for cleaning.

Volf Karlovich takes a step toward the door. The smooth handle falls complacently into his palm. He tugs at it for a long time, as if he’s amiably shaking the door’s brass hand, then he pulls down sharply and strides into the black abyss that’s opened up in the hallway.

Grunya is assiduously rubbing the side of a pot with a soapy rag and the white suds bubble in the thick kerosene soot, blackening. After Stepan’s arrival, a desire has awakened in her to scour the kitchen utensils to an unbearable, mirror-like cleanliness, so in her powerful hands the professor’s basins and skillets have begun sparkling with a hitherto unprecedented gleam that hurts the eye.

Her back senses the neighboring women’s unfriendly gazes nestling between her shoulder blades. Let them look, the wretches. They dislike her so much in the communal apartment because she conducts herself as if she were the apartment’s proprietress. But why shouldn’t she? She is the proprietress. Every wall here, every floorboard, every baseboard, every flourish on the white carved wooden doors knows her hands, which have swept, cleaned, washed, and polished them hundreds of times.

When more residents were assigned housing in the professor’s apartment back in 1921, she’d staunchly held the line, carefully selected the most valuable items, and moved them into her own room (lunch and tea services, silver cutlery, heavy candleholders, velvet drapes – what, was she supposed to leave them for these half-literate bumpkins?). She occupied the best table in the kitchen and the largest cabinet in the hallway, in addition to an upper storage cabinet, too. And then one dark autumn evening she took a dully gleaming silver ink set as huge as a pillow, as hefty as a rock, and bearing the personalized inscription “To V.K. Leibe, professor of medical sciences, with the deepest respect of G.F. Dormidontov, rector, Imperial Kazan University,” to the building manager, with no regrets since it was obvious to any fool that you had to be friendly with building managers.

And she began waiting.

By this time, the professor was already shattered by the changes that had taken place in the country. He’d had a rough time during the war between the Bolsheviks and the Czechs fighting for the White Army, he’d fallen out of favor with the new rectors at the university (they changed fairly often during the first years of the Civil War), and his practice at the clinic had been closed. Then one morning Volf Karlovich didn’t leave his room. Nobody noticed his absence. Only Grunya – when bringing a cup of the herbal slop that the professor had become accustomed to drinking for breakfast in the mornings instead of his usual coffee – quietly gasped when she looked into joyful blue eyes unclouded by further earthly sorrows. At first she was scared. Then she realized what had happened – there it was, she’d waited it out. She would be the apartment’s proprietress.

She tolerated the residents, as if they were bedbugs. She simply didn’t know how to poison them. Stepan, who had come into her life a couple of months ago, knew. He decided to begin with the easiest: the professor.

Grunya didn’t question his plans for long. She was already sick to death of taking care of the half-crazed former proprietor. And she was desperate to be Stepan’s little pussycat, lamb, or bunny, and occasionally (forgive me, O Lord, I do sin, I repent…) even his little vixen.

And so the letter was written and dropped in the postbox. Grunya sweated profusely, like a horse, during Stepan’s dictation, tracing out long and tricky words whose meanings she didn’t understand: was bourgeois written with ou or oo? Was German written with e or i? Did spy end in y or i? Is there one r or two in counterrevolution? Is it one word or two? If Stepan is right, they will arrive soon to free up the professorial office with its trio of lovely windows looking out on an ancient park, floors smelling of wax, and heavy walnut furniture. Free it up for Grunya, who’s already been awaiting her turn for happiness for ten long years. And even then – what was it Stepan said that morning? – they weren’t going to spend the rest of their lives huddled in the two little rooms.

Grunya rinses the pot in a basin. It’s suddenly become very quiet in the kitchen. The other women don’t usually converse in her presence; they only exchange glances. But now the silence behind Grunya’s back is thick and unusually heavy. Someone’s soup gurgles, as if it’s choking from agony.

Grunya turns around.

Professor Leibe is standing in the communal kitchen.

A little neighbor girl, who’s always getting underfoot on her ailing tricycle, thrums the bell from fear – ding! – and asks, in the quiet, “Mama, who’s that?”

The women have gone still: one with a ladle, another with an iron, yet another with a rag in her hands. Wide eyes stare at Leibe. But he’s looking only at Grunya.

“Where’s my professorial dress uniform?” he asks in a voice high-pitched with agitation.

Her hand squeezes the rag and soapsuds trickle between her fingers, dripping resonantly into the basin.

“Where’s my professorial uniform? I’m asking you, Grunya.”

“Let’s go have a look in your room, professor,” she says in a voice that suddenly sounds strained. “Let’s go to your room.”

“I’ve already looked there,” Leibe persists. “Give me my uniform at once. I’m late.”

The neighbor women’s eyes, huge from curiosity, probe the professor’s frail figure and shift their gaze to Grunya, then back.

Can it really be that he forgot for ten years, until now? Right now, when they should arrive any day? So Grunya will not be drinking coffee from the professor’s cups, after all – oh no, she will not. And will Stepan want her like this, with one teeny little room in a communal anthill? Grunya’s fat fingers, covered with white suds bursting in the air, turn cold.

“So are you going to give me my uniform?”

In the crosshairs of the neighbors’ attentive eyes, she climbs on a stool and pulls a huge plywood suitcase from the overhead storage cabinet. She rummages around in it and removes from the bottom a wrinkled uniform that’s lace-like from moth holes and white from dust in places.

Leibe laughs joyously and puts it on, stroking it affectionately. The stitching on the sleeve crackles, coming undone and baring zigzags of threads. A blackened button tears off and bounces along the floor, jingling into a corner somewhere.

“I just knew you’d taken it to be cleaned,” the professor says, smiling with satisfaction as he straightens the worn insignia on his chest and turns around.

“Where are you going?” The presentiment of catastrophe dumbfounds Grunya.

“To the university, for a lecture,” he says. He shrugs his shoulders with surprise and leaves, his backless slippers thudding.

“He could have put on shoes,” says one of the neighbor women, finally regaining the ability to speak. “He’ll catch cold.”

Fortunately, Volf Karlovich doesn’t have the chance to catch cold. They take him exactly one minute later, right there, outside the building, as half the apartment’s residents stare out the windows at their strange neighbor’s entrance into the world. He’s just beginning to run down the steps – his feet flying on their own, lightly, as if he were a young man – when other feet, wearing polished black boots, are already running up those very same steps to greet him.

“Volf Karlovich Leibe?” they ask.

“Yes!” he answers, delighted. “You’re here for me? From the university?”

“We are,” they reassure him. “Let’s go to the car.”

“Since when did they start sending such luxurious automobiles for professors?” gushes Volf Karlovich as he settles into the back seat and feels the car’s silky leather interior with childlike curiosity.

People in uniform sit on each side of him, pressing their firm shoulders against him. Leibe smiles and keeps going out of his way to shake hands. The door of the black Ford slams shut and the professor jauntily and cheerily waves a hand to the chauffeur: Let’s go!

The Black Maria carrying away Volf Karlovich has hardly disappeared around a bend in the road, spraying snow out from under its wheels in parting, when a big, heavy padlock clasps its jaws on the door of the professor’s former office. Shoving into his pocket a round, dark bottle that has long been at the ready, Stepan heads off to see the building manager. With a tsarina’s gaze, Grunya surveys the neighbors crowded by the closed door – they want to profit from the professor’s furniture, the jackals! – and Grunya goes to her room without saying a thing.

They won’t take Professor Leibe far, just straight to the State Political Administration’s regional headquarters. For a couple of weeks, investigator Butylkin will work on cracking the German spy who’s posing so successfully as a half-wit, but he’ll give up in the end, deciding to send Leibe to the psychiatric clinic at Arsk Field: they can figure out for themselves if he’s reaping anything or truly just a nut. They’ll be too late, though.

In the middle of February 1930, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic will approve the decree “On the liquidation of kulaks as a class in Tataria.” A week later, it will be determined during an operational meeting at the CEC that the pace for collectivization and dekulakization in the republic is horrifyingly low.

And somehow, of its own accord, without the knowledge of the Party leaders and upper ranks of the State Political Administration, it will work out that certain guests of the regional State Political Administration who aren’t especially necessary for investigative purposes will be turned into kulaks. Their cases will be misplaced, gather dust on shelves and safes, and burn in fires. And they themselves will be transferred from solitary confinement and pretrial detention to dungeons in a transit prison crowded with the dekulakized. By mid-March, Red Tataria will already be in third place in the country for its pace of collectivization.

Volf Karlovich Leibe will land in the legendary transit prison building, too. He won’t be the slightest bit surprised; he’ll likely even be glad since he’d started to miss people during his ten years of seclusion. Only one question will trouble him slightly: is all well with Grunya?

Grunya’s life will take a favorable turn. She’ll drink coffee from the professor’s cups in the mornings. True, the cups themselves will turn out to be extraordinarily inconvenient: they’re small and fragile, just trouble. A year later, Stepan will free up another room for them, and two years later, the regional arm of the Joint State Political Administration will move to Black Lake, into the building next door. Stepan will think a little and then he’ll start work there. His career will come together and very soon they won’t need to free up the next room using their well-established means because they’re allocated luxurious living space of their very own on Pochtamtskaya Street.

Grunya will grow bored after becoming the rightful proprietress of a large and empty new apartment, since there’s nobody to battle and Stepan works day and night. And so when, at the age of forty-six, she discovers her pregnancy, Grunya will decide to carry the child to term. She will pass away during labor and the doctors from the university clinic will just throw up their hands in distress. It was too tough a case.

KAZAN

A shaggy snout bares its yellowed teeth and wails, shaking its inside-out lips. Zuleikha squeezes the reins tighter. May Allah protect me, what is this hellish monster?

“A camel!” cries someone behind her. “A real one!”

The outlandish beast swings its master, who’s sitting between the humps and wearing a colorful quilted robe, side to side as it floats past. A sharp smell of spices trails after them.

The sledges are traveling along a central street. The caravan has formed and straightened out so the vehicles are riding close together past buildings of brick and stone, painted light blue, pink, and white, like huge carved jewel boxes. Lots of little turrets tower over the roofs; there are weathervanes blossoming with tin flowers and roof tiles glistening like colorful fish scales under spots of snow. Decorative flourishes creep along pediments and tickle the heels of half-naked men and women (what shame this is, Allah!) who bear heavy cornices on their muscular shoulders. Railings curl like iron lace.

Kazan.

Young ladies in little boots with heels (how do they not fall off those!), servicemen in mouse-colored military overcoats like Ignatov’s, public servants chilled to the bone in patched coats, middle-aged women wearing huge felt boots and selling little pies (the smell, the wonderful smell…), portly nannies with children swathed in shawls on wooden sledges… In their hands are folders, briefcases, tubes, reticules, bouquets, and cakes…

The wind tears a pile of sheet music from the hands of a skinny young man wearing glasses, hurling it into the sorrowful face of a cow that a frail peasant is leading past on a rope.

The hulk of a tractor for agitational propaganda rolls along, its heavy wheels rumbling as it tows a large, cracked bell, around which winds a snake-like red cotton banner: “We will reforge church bells into tractors!”

Dirty slush on the road explodes into a crooked fountain under the hooves of a cavalry detachment rushing past, and under the wheels of shiny black automobiles tearing along toward it, driving in the opposite direction.

A fiery red tram flies along with a deafening clang; its brass handles blaze and there are faces clustered in its glassless windows. A small pack of waifs flit away from a gateway and hang on the handrail with frenzied shrieks. The furious conductor curses and waves his fists; a policeman is already running, cutting across the road, and blowing his whistle.

Zuleikha squints. A lot of buildings, a lot of people. All loud, vivid, fast, and strong-smelling. This is understandable since it’s the capital. Kazan is generously throwing its treasures into the stunned exiles’ eyes before they’ve had a chance to recover.

The red-and-white spire of the Church of Saint Varvara is solemn, the aperture of its bell tower window forlornly empty, and there’s an inscription painted in yellow above the entrance: “Greetings to the workers of the First Tram Depot!” There’s the governor-general’s former home, as well decorated as a torte and now housing the tuberculosis hospital. The ice on Black Lake rings with children’s laughter. The columns of Kazan University, each as thick as a century-old oak, are a delicate white.

The city’s kremlin has sharp little towers like heads of sugar. Instead of a clock, there’s a large, stern face – with wise, narrowed eyes under falconine brows and a mustache like a broad wave – gazing out at Zuleikha from a round opening on Spassky Tower. Who is it? He doesn’t resemble the Christian god, whom Zuleikha once saw in a picture that the mullah had shown her.

Then there’s an unexpected shout: “We’ve arrived!” How could that be? Where had they arrived? Zuleikha looks around, confused. In front of her is a squat, dirty white building with tiny squares of windows that form a chain along one side and a tall stone wall around it, three times her height.

“Down you go, Green Eyes!” says Prokopenko, puckering his cheeks in a smile and winking, his gaze probing for the lamb under the burlap in the sledge: Is it in one piece?

Zuleikha squeezes her bundle tightly and jumps to the ground. Bayonets already bristle to greet her; a live corridor of young junior soldiers leads to a small open metal door. In there, then.

Prokopenko takes Sandugach by the bridle and the horse neighs shrilly, jerking under an unknown hand. Zuleikha drops her bundle and rushes to the horse, pressing her face into her dear muzzle.

“Not allowed!” is the anxious cry behind her and something sharp, a bayonet blade, presses at her back.

“Come on, now,” says Prokopenko’s smiling voice. “Let her say goodbye. Why begrudge that?”

“I’ll count to three!” utters the stern, anxious voice. “One!”

Sandugach smells of healthy sweat, hay, the shed, and milk – of home. She exhales joyfully as she nestles against her mistress and the warm dampness of her delicate nostrils settles on Zuleikha’s cheek. Zuleikha sticks her hand in her pocket and removes the poisoned sugar. The large, heavy lump weighs on her palm like a stone. Murtaza used foresight on everything: he’s already headed off to his forefathers, but his thoughts are still directing his loyal wife.

“Two!”

Zuleikha opens her sweaty palm and raises it to Sandugach’s face. The horse nods gratefully and joyfully. The foal jumps out from under her legs. Pushing its mother away and greedily stretching its long neck, it snuffles and smacks its outstretched lips, hurrying to take the treat.

“Three!” The bayonet is driving in, painfully, between her shoulder blades.

Zuleikha clenches her fingers and lowers her hand with the sugar into her pocket. She takes the broken-off chunk of bread from her other pocket and sticks it instead into the trusting outstretched lips of Sandugach and the foal.

Forgive me, Murtaza, for not fulfilling your order. I couldn’t. I disobeyed you for the first time in my life.

Ignatov’s dissatisfied voice is already behind her. “What’s going on? Why the delay?”

Zuleikha takes her bundle from the ground and ducks through the open door.

For a long time, she takes small steps through a bare, ice-coated courtyard, then along a narrow corridor, following an ungainly young soldier who’s striding forward, his soot-blackened kerosene lamp illuminating lumpy stone walls trickling with moisture. Another’s hobnail boots thud behind her. Zuleikha draws her shoulders together from the chill. Even the cold here is particular – it’s frigid, damp, and clinging. Voices carry from behind heavy doors that have tiny windows with crosses in their gratings: Russian, Tatar, Mari, and Chuvash speech; songs, cursing, a child’s crying…

“Could use some water, boss! Need to drink…”

“…I must ask you – no, I demand an attorney! A Soviet court should…”

“I want a woman, commander. Bring that one to me, huh?”

“…I beg you, the telephone number is 2-35. Just say you’re calling on behalf of Pavlusha Semyonych…”

“I’ve remembered! I’ve remembered everything! Send for Investigator Ivashov! And tell him Sidorchuk will sign the confession…”

“…and you will burn in the fires of Gehenna until the end of time…”

“…I’m begging you! Aspirin! The child has a fever…”

“On Deribasovskaya Street they’ve opened a new bar. It’s loud with beer, and there, my dear, is where the jailbirds are…”

“…Let me go, sons of bitches! Bastards! Scum! Ahhhh!”

A door creaks heavily and swings open. The young soldier nods: In here. Zuleikha steps into an inky darkness that breathes with the smell of bodies long unwashed; the cold metal door nudges her forward. A lock clicks outside. She listens to many mouths breathing as she waits for her eyes to grow accustomed to the dark. A dull light trickles from a window with bars and Zuleikha begins to discern silhouettes.

Two tiers of bunks are crowded with people. Others sit on crates, on heaps of old clothes, and on the floor. There are so many people that there’s nowhere to move to. There’s the sound of loud scratching, of snoring, and low voices. A mother whispers a fairytale to her child. In one corner, they’re murmuring, “Lord Jesus, have mercy on us sinners,” while another voice pleads to Allah for refuge from the devil.

Nobody pays attention to Zuleikha. She makes her way inside, trying not to step on anyone’s arms or legs. After reaching the bunks, she stands, not knowing where to settle because there are backs, stomachs, and heads positioned so close together here it’s as if they’re in several layers. Suddenly someone moves aside (it’s impossible to figure out right away if it’s a man or a woman), freeing up a hand-sized part of the bunk. Zuleikha perches, whispering a grateful thank you into the dark. A person turns a face – there are light curls around a high forehead, and a small, sharp nose – and announces protectively:

“I’ll see you’re issued clean linens and a change of footwear.”

Zuleikha nods readily, agreeing. She can hear from the voice that the person is already advanced in years, respectable. Who knows what sort of ways they have here.

“You don’t know where they’re taking us, do you?” she asks deferentially.

“Come to me tomorrow for an initial exam,” the other continues. “On an empty stomach.”

Zuleikha doesn’t know what an initial exam is but she nods again, just in case. There’s an unpleasant nagging in her stomach as she hasn’t eaten since yesterday. She takes the remainder of the bread from her pocket. Her strange neighbor noisily draws air into his nostrils and turns his head, his eyes boring into the bread. Zuleikha breaks the piece in two and extends half. Her neighbor thrusts his share into his mouth in a flash and swallows, almost without chewing.

“Strictly on an empty stomach!” he mumbles menacingly, his fingers holding back crumbs that threaten to fall from his mouth.

And with those remnants of stale bread, the foundations for an unusual friendship are laid. Zuleikha and Volf Karlovich Leibe will become conversation partners, if peculiar ones. In moments when his flickering consciousness flashes, he will occasionally speak, throwing in unconnected medical terms, recalling and clarifying diagnoses of former patients, and asking professional questions that demand no answers. She will listen gratefully, not understanding even the slightest bit of this blend of arcane Russian and Latin words but feeling an important meaning concealed behind them and rejoicing at her interaction with such a learned man. They keep silent most of the time but that silence doesn’t tire either of them.

Zuleikha’s fellow townspeople from Yulbash are soon settled into the cell, too: the mullah’s wife with the ever-present cat cage in her lap and the morose, black-bearded peasant with his numerous descendants. Convicts from Voronezh who worm their way in with the exiles take away the cat a week later and eat it, and one of the prison officials appropriates the karakul fur coat, forcing the mullah’s wife to affix her signature on a corresponding protocol regarding the surrender of property. She hardly notices the loss: she sobs for days on end, maybe about her husband, maybe about her cat.

Death is everywhere. Zuleikha grasped that back in her childhood. Tremblingly soft chicks covered in the downiest sunny yellow fluff, curly-haired lambs scented with hay and warm milk, the first spring moths, and rosy apples filled with heavy sugary juice – all of them carried within themselves the germ of future dying. All it took was for something to happen – sometimes this was obvious, though sometimes it was accidental, fleeting, and not at all noticeable to the eye – and then the beating of life would stop within the living, ceding its place to disintegration and decay. Chicks struck down by a poultry disease dropped like lifeless lumps of flesh into bright green grass in a yard; lambs skinned during Qurbani displayed their pale red innards; one-day moths poured from the sky, strewing themselves as if they were fresh snow on apples that had already fallen to the ground, their sides spotted with purplish abrasions.

The fate of her own children was confirmation of that, too. Four babies born only to die. Each time Zuleikha brought the little wrinkled face of a daughter to her lips for a kiss after birth, she would peer with hope into half-blind eyes still covered with slightly swollen lids, into tiny nose holes, into the fold of doll-like lips, into barely distinguishable pores on skin still a gentle red, and at sparse shoots of fluff on a small head. She thought she was seeing life. It would later turn out she was seeing death.

She had grown accustomed to that thought, just as an ox grows accustomed to a yoke and a horse to its master’s voice. Some people, like her daughters, were allotted a pinch of life and some got handfuls; others, like her mother-in-law, received immeasurably generous entire sacks and granaries. Death awaits everyone, though, hiding in actual people or walking alongside them, snuggling up to their feet like a cat, settling on clothing like dust, or penetrating the lungs like air. Death is ubiquitous and it is slyer, smarter, and more powerful than a silly life that will always lose a skirmish.

It arrived and took away the powerful Murtaza, who had seemed born to live a hundred years. It will obviously take the proud Vampire Hag away soon, too. Even the grain that she and her husband buried between their daughters’ graves – with the hope of saving it for their new crop – will rot in spring and become death’s quarry, shut away in a cramped wooden crate.

It seems as if Zuleikha’s time has also come. She was prepared to accept death on that memorable night, lying on the sleeping bench alongside the already dead Murtaza, so she is surprised to still be alive. She waited as the Red Hordesmen barged into the house and destroyed her home and hearth. And she waited when they brought her along the snow-covered expanses of her native land, too. And while spending the night in the desecrated mosque, to the sleepy bleating of sheep and the yellow-haired harlot’s shameless shrieks. And now she is waiting again, in a damp and cold stone cell, passing the hours with lengthy reflections like this for the first time in her life.

Will her death take the shape of a young soldier with a long, sharp bayonet? Of some thief who’s been moved into their cell, with a faintly predatory smile, a homemade knife hidden in his boot, and a hankering for her warm sheepskin coat? Or will death come from within, turning into disease, cooling the lungs, appearing on her forehead as hot and sticky sweat, filling her throat with heavy green phlegm, and, finally, squeezing her heart in its icy fist, forbidding it to beat? Zuleikha doesn’t know.

That lack of knowledge is distressing and the long wait excruciating. Sometimes it seems she is already dead. The people around her are emaciated, pale, and spend entire days whispering and quietly weeping: so who are they if not the dead? This place – frigid and crowded, the stone walls wet from damp, deep under the ground, without a single ray of sun – what is it if not a burial vault? Only when Zuleikha makes her way to the latrine, a large, echoing tin bucket in the corner of the cell, and feels her cheeks warm with shame is she convinced that, no, she is still alive. The dead do not know shame.

The Kazan transit prison is a legendary, distinguished place through which numerous bright minds and dark souls have passed. There’s good reason it’s located near Kazan’s kremlin, right up close. From their cells, the luckiest of the arrested can admire the dark blue onion domes of the Blagoveshchensk church, covered in golden stars, and the Storozhev tower’s brownish-green spire inside the trading quarter. The transit prison has been running continuously for a good century and a half, pumping the large country’s blood from west to east like a beautifully healthy heart that knows no fatigue.

In this same cell where Zuleikha is now listening to Professor Leibe’s half-crazed monologue and furtively scraping the first louse out of her armpit, there sat, exactly forty-three years ago, a young student from Imperial Kazan University. The locks of hair on the top of his head were still youthfully disobedient and lush, and his gaze was serious and morose. He had been imprisoned for organizing student gatherings against the government. After ending up in the cell, he initially pounded his angry little fists at a frost-covered door, shouting something daring and foolish. His disobedient blue lips sang “the Marseillaise”. He diligently did gymnastic exercises to try to warm up. Then he would sit on the floor, placing his rolled-up student uniform overcoat – irrevocably ruined by thick prison grime – underneath himself, clasp his knees with arms numbed from the cold, and cry hot, angry tears. The student’s name was Vladimir Ulyanov, later better known as Lenin.

Nothing has changed here since then. First, emperors succeeded one another, then revolutionary leaders, and the transit prison served the authorities with unwavering faithfulness, as good old prisons should. Here they held exiles before sending them for hard labor in Siberia and the Far East, and, later, Kazakhstan. Criminal and political prisoners were usually housed separately, as a precaution against spreading criminal ideas. Customs established over the centuries had begun breaking down in recent times, though.

At the end of 1928, a thin stream of dekulakized people stretched to the capital from the far reaches of what was once Kazan Governate. These deportees needed to be gathered together, loaded into railroad cars, and sent on to destinations according to instructions. It was decided to hold that seemingly not very criminal contingent – which nevertheless still needed to be guarded – here in the transit prison, particularly since dekulakized people were sent along the very same age-old routes as convicts (Kolyma, Yenisei, Zabaikalye, Sakhalin…), often even in neighboring railroad cars on the same trains.

The stream gradually swelled, strengthened, and grew. By the winter of 1930, it had turned into a powerful river that flooded not only the prison itself but all the cellars near the train station, administrative buildings, and nonresidential premises, too. Hungry, furious, and uncomprehending peasants were now everywhere, taking shelter and waiting for their destiny, both hoping for it and simultaneously fearing its rapid onset. This river swept up everything in its path as centuries-old prison traditions broke down (the dekulakized were housed along with criminals and later with political prisoners, too); entire crates of documents (meaning whole villages and cantons) were lost and mixed up, making any sort of registry of those contingents – or, later, determinations of identity – impossible; and officials of various ranks from the regional and transport divisions of the State Political Administration lost their posts.

Zuleikha and those who arrived with her will end up spending an entire month in the transit prison, until the first day of spring, 1930. By that time, the cells were so densely stuffed that the prison chief had a stroke due to his desperate attempts to free himself of the specialized contingent of peasants foisted on him. Through sheer luck, they sent Zuleikha and her traveling companions on their way just before an epidemic of typhus broke out, mowing down more than half the detainees and freeing up the premises in a natural way – to the utmost relief of the boss, who was on his way to recovery at the Shamov Hospital.

February 1930 had yielded a good crop: Ignatov brought four batches of dekulakized peasants to Kazan. He sighed with relief and quiet inner joy each time he watched the kulaks disappear behind the transit prison’s sturdy gates. One more useful thing had been accomplished, one more grain of sand had been tossed on the scales of history. This is how a people shapes its country’s future, one grain at a time, one after another. A future that will certainly become a world victory, an unavoidable triumph of revolution both personally for him, Ignatov, and for millions of his Soviet brothers, people like the imperturbable Denisov, one of the romantic twenty-five thousanders, or the cultured, clever Bakiev.

Constant travels had saved Ignatov from the necessity of having a talk with Ilona. He’d popped in once, briefly (“Work, work…”), and she should be grateful for that. He hadn’t stayed the night. She’d figured out what was what. Anyway, what kind of personal life could you have when there’s so much to do just waiting right around the corner!

Hundreds, thousands of families were floating in endless caravans of sledges along the vast expanses of Red Tataria. A long journey awaited them. Neither they nor their escort guards knew where it led. One thing was clear: it was distant.

Ignatov wasn’t pondering the upcoming fate of those in his charge. His job was simply to deliver them. He’d cut Ilona off when she inquired about where they’d send those tormented bearded peasant men whose sledges had been stretching through the streets of Kazan for days on end. They’ll go where oppressors and exploiters can finally atone for their dark past with honest labor, working themselves into the ground and earning – earning! – the right to a bright future. Period.

Nastasya would never have asked such a thing, though. Nastasya… She was a ripe berry, seeping juice. All of February was as hot as May for Ignatov; just the thought of her warmed him. He wanted to believe, too, that the expeditions to the villages for “dekulakizing” – those trips through quiet, snow-covered forests with songs and jokes, those heated evening arguments with local Party activists at the rural councils with a crackling fire and a couple glasses of home brew, and those overnight stays in old mosques and barns, filled with the heat of Nastasya’s body – would always happen.

And then it comes suddenly, like a saber to the top of the head: “You’re going to accompany a special train.”

What’s that? Why me? What did I do wrong? “I’ll obey, of course, comrade leader, but explain to me, Bakiev, my friend: I’m battling kulakdom here, I’m hardly ever out of the saddle. They – the enemy – don’t know it’s peacetime now. They have pitchforks, axes, and rifles. It’s a genuine warfront! I’m needed here! And you’re sending me off just to sit around on a train…”

Bakiev’s gaze through the gold rings of his pince-nez is unusually severe. “We need reliable people like you, Ignatov, for this job. What makes you think it’s going to be easy? It’s twenty train cars chock-full of human lives. And each is a dyed-in-the-wool kulak, harboring a sense of hurt the size of a pig, if not a cow, toward the authorities. Just you try bringing them halfway across the country and delivering them to their destination without them fighting among themselves and scattering along the way. And then there’s the question – can you do it?”

“What do you mean, can I do it, Bakiev? You know me, don’t you? It’s not a complex matter. You put the meanest guards and the strongest locks on the railroad cars. It’s a bayonet in the eye if someone moves their eyebrows the wrong way.”

“Is that so?” Bakiev squints and now it’s obvious how very much he’s aged in this last half-year. So that’s what a warm office, with its oak desk and sweet tea in lace-like tea-glass holders, does to comrades-in-arms. But Bakiev, like Ignatov, is still only thirty years old.

“They’ll get there, there’s no way out. I know what I’m talking about. Believe me, I’ve seen so many of them in this last year, those oppressors. Just reconsider, Bakiev, my friend. And tell me truly, is it not possible to send someone else? Being a nanny for a train is embarrassing…”

“A nanny? A commandant for a special train is just a nanny in your opinion? And a thousand human heads are just trifles? When will you grow up, Ivan? All you want is to ride a steed with your saber unsheathed, and for the wind to whistle loudly in your ears! And it doesn’t matter where you gallop off to or why!” And (here’s the calm Bakiev for you, too): whack! A fist to the desk.

Ignatov whacks his fist in response. “Now, now! What do you mean, it doesn’t matter? I gallop off wherever the Party orders!”

“And the Party’s ordering you to set the showboating aside, too! To accept, today, the assignment on special train K-2437. Departure’s tomorrow!”

“Yes, sir.”

They catch their breath. Go silent. Light cigarettes.

“Please understand, Bakiev, my friend, that my heart is for the Party. It doesn’t just ache for the Party, it burns for it. Everybody’s heart should burn like that. Because what does our country need us for, anyway, if there’s only a candle stub instead of a heart or the gaze loses its fire?”

“I do understand you, Vanya. Please try to understand me, too. Maybe you’ll grasp this later and thank me – because it’s for you, you damned fool, so you…” Bakiev falls silent and vigorously wipes the lenses of his pince-nez with a handkerchief as if he wants to push them out. The glass is creaking. He’s strange today.

“So where are we taking this special train of yours?” Ignatov blows a stream of smoke at the floor.

“To Sverdlovsk for now. You’ll stay in a holding area there and wait for orders. That’s how we send everybody now, until further notice.”

“Yes, sir.” Ignatov’s wondering if he’ll have time before tomorrow to say goodbye to both women. First, certainly, to Nastasya. And later, if there’s enough time, to Ilona, to be done with her for good, to end things.

They shake hands. For some reason, Bakiev suddenly spreads his arms wide and clasps Ignatov to his chest. He certainly is strange today.

“I’ll drop by tomorrow to say goodbye before I leave.”

“There’s no need, Vanya. Consider it said.”

Bakiev attaches the pince-nez to his nose and continues sorting through documents in folders. The papers cover his desk like drifted snow.

Ignatov gets up to leave and turns when he reaches the door. Bakiev is sitting motionless, up to his neck in a paper snowbank. His eyes, magnified by the pince-nez’s bulging lenses, are wearily closed.

Of course he doesn’t make it to Ilona’s. To hell with her.She’ll assume I left on an urgent assignment. He’s gone missing before for a week or two without warning. This time he’ll be away for a month, a month and a half… Exactly how long will he be racing around on the railroad, anyway? Fine, he was ordered to be a commandant, he’ll be a commandant. He’ll eat government-issue chow and get enough sleep; it’s a long trip. He’ll cart away that damned special train if that’s what Bakiev needs so desperately. And then he’ll say, “That’s it, my friend, return me to real work. My soul’s weary. It’s asking for a real task…”

Ignatov’s running to the train station early on the morning of the first day of spring in 1930, gulping the biting, frosty air. The trams aren’t operating yet and it would be a shame to spend an entire five-kopek coin on a cab. It’s a long way from the women’s dormitory where Nastasya lives, so he had to get up early, before the factory whistles.

A mug rumbles in his suitcase, hitting against its plywood sides. His boots crunch on the hard-packed path along the banks of the Bulak, which is long and pierces Kazan like an arrow. The slumbering city is lighting its first lamps and releasing occasional sleepy pedestrians onto the streets. The hoarse voices of half-awake dogs yelp; the first tram pulses somewhere in the distance.

Candle-like minarets – the Yunusov, Apanaev, and Galeev mosques – float, dissolving into the dark-blue morning mist. Denisov did well to come up with that idea back then, raising the red banner like a revolutionary at the former village mosque. Why hadn’t they reached that point yet here in the capital? The Kazan minarets stick out like useless shafts poking meaningless holes at the sky.

Ignatov turns toward the bazaar. The kremlin’s paper-white teeth flare up on the hill. Five-pointed stars shine on the triangular towers like little golden beams. Now that’s genuine beauty, correct beauty – ours.

The station building is like an embossed gingerbread cookie: chocolaty-red, adorned with pilasters and windows, festooned with emblems and decorative urns, strewn with spangles of tiling, and studded with spires and weathervanes. Ignatov winces: the Kazan train station is Russia’s gateway to Siberia, but it looks like a cultural center or some kind of museum. In a word, ugh.

The square in front of the station is already chaotic with people, the crush of carts, and the porters’ brisk cursing. Ignatov slows from a run to a walk and calms his breathing; it’s not fitting for the commandant of a special train to puff like a steam engine himself. He sternly inspects the cursing porters along the way and they grow quiet, too, when they cast sideways glances at his gray military overcoat with the red insignia on his left sleeve. Well, that’s better now.

Ignatov pushes a station door that’s as tall and heavy as a wardrobe. The smell of human sweat, bread, polished weaponry, gunpowder, sheepskin, unwashed hair, machine oil, soldiers’ boots, homeless dogs, turpentine, wood, and medications hits his nose. The air’s so thick you could cut it with a knife. It resounds with shouting, barking, neighing, clanging, bleating, and crashing. A steam engine whistles piercingly outside, drowning out all other sounds for a moment. It’s not morning here. There’s no time of day here. It’s perpetual bedlam. Ignatov wedges his way into the crowd, elbowing and stretching his neck in search of the right office.

“Behind me! Don’t spread out! Stay together! Together, damnit!” A group of recruits in civilian clothing, wearing red armbands and with rifles at the ready, is leading a dozen scared, narrow-eyed peasants dressed in summer clothes – colorful robes and embroidered skullcaps – who are looking all around. The detachment’s leader is shouting himself hoarse, yelling out commands, then he quietly hisses through his teeth, “You are trouble, you Uzbek sheep…”

“In your places! Everybody stay in your places! I’ll shoot anyone who tries to escape on the spot!” bellows a slim soldier on the other side, waving his revolver around and attempting to stop several peasant women on his own. It seems they’d been sitting submissively on their bundles but had suddenly jumped up one after the other and started wailing and jabbering away, maybe in Mari, maybe in Chuvash, when they caught sight of other peasants.

“Step aside!” yell the porters, ramming the stirring crowd with unwieldy carts loaded with rocking mountains of crates containing sharp-smelling oranges and roasted beef. “Provisions for express number two! Step aside!”

Ignatov looks around with the advantage of his imposing height – seeing over the tops of shaggy fur caps, headscarves, fur hats with earflaps, embroidered skullcaps, brimmed hats, and pea coats – to find the door he needs: the office of the head of the Kazan transportation hub. The door slams loudly and incessantly, letting streams of people in and out. The train station’s heart is beating. Swearing and excusing himself, stepping on people’s feet and suitcases, Ignatov makes his way inside and grasps a tall, rickety wooden desk with his hands. Petitioners just like Ignatov push at him from both sides.

Ignatov takes documents from his suitcase: he has a brand-new gray folder that still crackles deliciously at its folds and carries the austere inscription “Case” and the painstakingly formed figures “K-2437.” Inside there are a couple of thin sheets with the names of the dekulakized typed in small print, a little over eight hundred people in total. He holds it out to a small man with infinitely tired red eyes, who doesn’t notice the folder in the midst of the constant shouting and trilling from a telephone.

“Yes, yes!” the little man yells hoarsely into the receiver. “Dispatch the Taishet train! There’s congestion on number seventeen already! Dispatch Chita, too, to the same hounds of hell!”

“Is number ten to Orenburg?” The question carries over heads, from somewhere outside.

“You still here? What do you mean, Orenburg? It’s to Tashkent, to the goddamned hounds of hell, you son of a bitch,” the official barks in response.

Ignatov leans across the desk and jabs the folder like a sword, right at the green uniform. Barely glancing at it, the official detaches a wrinkled sheet of paper from a heap of documents on the desk, with the slanted inscription “Leningrad – remainders” written in purple ink, and shoves it at Ignatov.

“Take these people, too. Sign.”

“But where–” Ignatov doesn’t manage to finish as the telephone explodes in another shrill ring and the official grabs the receiver as if he wants to chew it up.

“What do you mean, a railroad car isn’t expandable?” He’s spitting saliva into the holes of the receiver. “It was stated: ‘Load sixty per car’! The bunks are wide, people will move over a little!”

Ignatov grabs the official by the lapels:

“But where am I going to put more people? What ‘Leningrad remainders’? My train’s already at breaking point.”

“At breaking point?” The official is losing his temper and his voice is becoming surprisingly similar to the telephone’s trill. “You call fifty heads per train car breaking point? So you don’t want sixty like the Samarkand train? Or seventy like the Chita train? And soon it’ll be ninety per car! They’ll ride standing, like horses! Now that’s really the breaking point!” He grabs a stack of disintegrating fat folders from the table and hurls them back down. “There are eight thousand just dekulakized! And they all need to be sent within the week! How about that? And there are new ones every day, every damn day. Soon we’ll be putting them on the rails. And you don’t want to take an extra dozen mouths to feed?”

“Fine.” Ignatov gives in, gloomily scrawling on the transfer slip with a pencil. “Give me your… Leningrad remainders.”

“Don’t you worry,” the official suddenly says quietly, blowing feverishly on the bottom of a large official stamp before imprinting “Kazan Hub” in bold blue ink on the folder. “They’ll be scattered to the goddamned hounds of hell in a few weeks. You’ll be traveling light.”

And he enters the date: “1 March 1930.”

Ignatov decides to drop in on Bakiev before his departure, anyway. He senses anxiety when he enters the building on Vozdvizhenskaya Street. Everything appears to be business as usual: a thorough young soldier is checking passes at the entrance, office doors are slamming, secretaries are clattering up and down marble stairs. But there’s something in the air.

What?

Ignatov slows his pace. There it is, in the young lady from their division who’s running past with eyes as frightened and red as a rabbit’s under thick mascara-coated lashes. There it is, in several unknown soldiers straining hard as they drag heavy boxes with documents. And it’s there in someone’s cautious sidelong glance from behind a column.

Has something happened? Bakiev probably knows.

Without stopping at his own office, Ignatov hurries to Bakiev’s office on the third floor. A long, thin corridor leads there, lined with narrow rectangular doors where the flourishes of brass handles glimmer dimly. It’s usually crowded and smoke-filled here. Now all the doors are tightly closed, as if they’re locked.

Something has definitely happened.

Ignatov strides along parquet that’s come loose and turned dark gray over time; the marred boards squeak shrilly under his boots. He notices one of the door handles slowly dip down and noiselessly go still, then return to its position again, as if someone inside wanted to go out but thought better of it.

What the hell…?

The door to Bakiev’s office is wide open. Standing beside it are two unfamiliar soldiers with rifles. They look closely at Ignatov, unblinking.

Was it really something to do with Bakiev?

That can’t be.

It can’t be, but something has happened.

Ignatov lowers his gaze. Don’t stop. His feet carry him past the office. The soldiers step back reluctantly, letting him pass. Out of the corner of his eye he notices, in the depths of the office, several overturned chairs on a floor littered with papers, the wide-open mouth of a safe, and a dark gray silhouette by the window, absorbed in reading documents.

Don’t look. Don’t speed up. There’s an exit to the back stairs at the end of the corridor. Use that to go down and get out of here. To the train station! Ignatov strides along the corridor.

“Hey!” rings out a shout behind him.

He stops and turns around. The dark gray silhouette has come out of the office and is watching Ignatov.

“You here to see Bakiev?”

“No, sir.”

“What department are you from?”

“The fifth.” Ignatov doesn’t know why he lies.

Would he really run if he had to? From his own? After all, they’d shoot him like a dog. Why run if you’re not guilty of anything? They’d sort it out and let him go. But what if they didn’t? So should he run anyway?

The silhouette silently goes back into the office. The soldiers turn away. Ignatov opens the door to the back stairs and slips down the steps to the first floor. He leaves the building without looking at anyone. He strides to the train station with his head uncovered but not feeling the cold.

Shame rolls over Ignatov like a hot wave, melting his ears. What were you afraid of, you fool? Your own comrades, doing their job honestly? It’s a mistake about Bakiev, he tells himself. Definitely a horrendous, unbelievable, ludicrous mistake. Possibly because of someone’s slander. Or maybe just a misprint, an absurd mishap. It happens, surnames get mixed up and they take the wrong person. Out of negligence.

Then why are you running away like a coward, like the lowest rat? Why don’t you go back to the ransacked office and shout in the dark gray man’s face: “Bakiev isn’t guilty of anything! I’ll vouch for him!”?

Ignatov stops and squeezes his pointy cavalry hat in his hand. And leave the special train without a commandant? It departs in an hour. They can slap you with desertion for failure to appear at the site of service. And that’s summary execution. He knows because he himself has enforced sentences like this. He pulls his hat down on his head and hurries to the train station.

Everybody knows Mishka Bakiev is a clever person, a Party member, and a revolutionary. He’s our man, to his last drop of blood, to his last breath, Ignatov thinks. They’ll sort this out and let him go for sure. It just can’t be that they wouldn’t release him. Let him go and apologize in front of the entire collective. And punish those to blame.

For sure.

UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE

“Zuleikha Valieva!”

“I’m here!”

In Zuleikha’s whole life, she’s never uttered the word “I” as many times as she has during this month in prison. Modesty is a virtue so it doesn’t befit a decent woman to say “I” a lot without reason. The Tatar language is even constructed so you could live your whole life without once saying “I.” No matter what tense you use to speak about yourself, the verb will go into the necessary form and the ending will change, making the use of that vain little word superfluous. It’s not like that in Russian, where everybody goes out of their way to put in “I” and “me” and then “I” again.

A soldier by the entrance yells out surnames loudly, painstakingly. Zuleikha’s seeing him for the first time. Is he new?

“Volf Lee…? Lei…? Lei-be?”

“How many times have I asked for medical personnel to call me by my first name and patronymic!”

Volf Karlovich has repeated this phrase, word for word, every day at roll call. The other escort guards have already learned it by heart but this one peers into the darkness with surprise. And then, suddenly:

“To the exit! With your things!”

Zuleikha jolts as if she’s been struck by a whip. She presses her little bundle to her chest.

The human mass around her stirs, surges, gapes, and extends hands. “Where? Where are they being sent? And us? Where are we going?”

“The rest are to remain in place!”

Volf Karlovich rises with dignity, brushes himself off, and lets Zuleikha go first. They make their way to the exit, stepping over bodies, heads, sacks, suitcases, arms, parcels, and swaddled infants. The unfamiliar soldier also calls the mullah’s widow and the morose peasant’s family, with the innumerable children, and leads them out of the cell.

After so many days of darkness, light from a kerosene lamp seems as bright as a sliver of sun. After the cell’s stuffy air, the cold air in the corridor intoxicates. Legs tired from constant sitting have slackened and plod falteringly along, but the body is glad to be moving. How long had they stayed in the dungeons? Neighbors confirmed it was several weeks; they’d kept track with the daily roll calls.

They walk along the corridor with escort guards to the front and back. The guards sometimes stop and call for more people from other cells. When they leave the prison, there are already so many they can’t be counted. Villagers, Zuleikha understands as she walks and examines the faces and clothes of her traveling companions. Some of them have fresh, even rosy, faces and were brought in recently. Others, though – like the people from her town – can barely stand. The mullah’s widow has aged and grayed but she’s stubbornly pulling the cat’s empty cage behind her. The peasant’s wife has withered to yellowness and is, as before, clasping two swaddled babies to herself like bundles.

“Finally!” Leibe’s joyful whisper quivers right by her ear. “They’re transferring the infirmary to the rearguard!”

Zuleikha nods. To the rearguard, fine, to the rearguard. She’s seeing Leibe in the light for the first time. His facial features are as graceful as a youth’s, his curly gray hair is bright and silvery, and even his wrinkles are delicate and intelligent. Long, weeks-old stubble covers his cheeks, lending him an air of nobility, and he’s not nearly as old as it seemed in the beginning, probably younger than Murtaza. He’s just dressed oddly, like a pauper, in an ancient, very shabby and moth-eaten blue dress uniform that’s torn in many places, and he’s wearing house slippers without backs on his rag-wrapped feet.

“Bunch closer together! Forward, at a jogtrot – march!” commands the soldier out in front, throwing open the door to the outside.

Daylight hits the face like a shovel. Eyes explode with redness and instantly squint to blink. Zuleikha grabs at a wobbling wall and leans against it. The wall wants to throw Zuleikha off and she finds herself sinking to the floor. She is roused by a shout:

“Stand up! Everybody stand, you bastards! You want to go back to the cell?”

She’s lying on a dirty stone floor by the dungeon exit. Outside the crooked open doorway is a painfully deep-blue March sky and the large, flat dish of the prison yard covered in mirror-like blotches of puddles. Several people are lying there beside her, groaning and pressing their hands to their eyes. Some are leaning against the wall, others are crouching, kneeling, and mumbling…

“I said forward! At a jogtrot! March!”

One by one, with their eyes narrowed like moles, people find their way outside. Reeling from the fresh air and holding on to one another, they crowd into a loose, limping bunch that keeps falling apart along the way as they lurch along Tashayak Street toward the train station at an uneven jogtrot. Brisk escort guards surround them on all sides. Their rifles are horizontal in their hands, in complete accordance with paragraph seven, instruction 122 bis four (dated February 17, 1930) on “The procedure for escorting former kulaks, criminals, and other anti-Soviet elements.”

Their eyes quickly grow accustomed to the daylight and Zuleikha looks around. There are trains like giant snakes, with dozens of railroad cars, to her left and right. Underfoot are endless ribbons of train track and rib-like ties, along which stride the hurrying exiles’ worn shoes, felt boots soaked from clinging snow, and mud-smeared boots. There’s a strong smell of fuel oil. A whistle sounds ahead; it’s a train drawing closer. “Let it through!” is the command from up ahead.

The escort guards stop and point their bayonets: Get off the tracks. A huge steam engine breathing hot raggedy fumes is already hurtling toward them, cutting through the air with its fire-red fender. The flywheels are like millstones gone mad. There’s crashing and clanging; it’s frightening. Zuleikha is seeing a train for the first time in her life. Daubs of white paint on the side flash “Forward to happiness!” in uneven letters, heavy air whips at their faces; and then the steam engine speeds away, pulling behind it a long chain of rumbling railroad cars.

A lanky lad of around twelve – one of the sons of the peasant man with many children – unexpectedly takes off. He jumps, catches a handrail, dangles like a kitten on a string, and rides away with the train. An escort guard shoulders his rifle. The crash of the shot merges with the whistle of the engine and a cloud of thick, patchy steam shrouds the train. The din of the train recedes just as quickly as it had arrived. The steam disperses and a small body is left lying on the tracks, lost in a sheepskin coat of the wrong size.

The mother can only silently open her mouth before her arms droop like rope. The bundles of her babies nearly fall to the ground. Zuleikha grabs one, the peasant man grabs the other. The older children huddle against their father’s legs in fright.

“We’re moving along. We’re not loitering!”

Steel fingers of bayonets point at the track. One of them touches the woman on the shoulder: You were ordered to move forward! The peasant man takes his wife by the shoulders. She doesn’t resist and her head is twisted back like a dead hen’s, her gaze fixed on her son’s small body sprawled between the rails. Still not closing her mouth, she obediently walks away with everyone, placing her feet on the ties. She walks for a long time.

Then she lets out a guttural scream and thrashes in her husband’s firm grasp, swinging her arms and legs to no avail; she wants to go back. But another train is already flying toward them, roaring, and her scream is drowned out by a powerful iron chorus of flywheels, pistons, hammers, railroad cars, rails, wheels.

Zuleikha hugs the soft, warm bundle in her arms. This baby that doesn’t belong to her is pink like a doll, with chubby cheeks, a tiny button nose, and delicate fluff instead of eyebrows. Snuffling in its sleep. Only two months since it was born, no more. Not one of Zuleikha’s daughters lived to this age.

The exiles flow along the tracks in a long, wide stream. Another stream, smaller and made up of cold people under-dressed for the weather, is running toward them from the train station. And diagonally across the rails there rapidly strides a lone figure wearing a sharp-pointed hat and carrying a gray folder in his hand. They all gather by a large railroad car that was knocked together from crooked, poorly planed boards painted reddish orange.

“Stop!” the man with the folder quietly says.

Zuleikha recognizes him. It’s Red Hordesman Ignatov, Murtaza’s killer.

The convoy’s leader is already hurrying toward him, whispering something in his ear, and pointing at the peasant’s wife, who continues to wail. Ignatov listens, nodding from time to time and gloomily looking around at the crowd that’s clustered before him. His gaze meets Zuleikha’s. Does he recognize her? Or does it only seem so?

“Listen to me carefully!” he finally says. “I’m your commandant…”

She doesn’t know what a commandant is. And he said “your.” Does this mean they’ll be together a long time?

“…and I’m taking you, dekulakized citizens, and you, former people citizens, to a new life…”

Former people? Zuleikha doesn’t understand: former people are dead people. She looks around at the handful of people who’ve just joined them. Pale, tired faces. They’re shivering, huddling close to one another and dressed for autumn, wearing frivolous woolen coats and silly thin shoes. A cracked pince-nez’s frame gleams gold and an absurd ladies’ hat with a veil shines like a bright emerald spot so it’s immediately obvious that they’re city people. But not dead, no.

“…a life that may be difficult and filled with deprivations and ordeals but also with honest labor that benefits our fervently beloved motherland–”

“But where to? Where are you taking us, commander?” someone from the crowd insolently interrupts.

Ignatov shoots glances at their faces, seeking out the obnoxious one. He doesn’t find him.

“You’ll find out when you get there,” he says over their heads, with authority. “Well, then…”

“And if I don’t get there?” a daring voice rings out again, challenging.

Ignatov takes a breath. Then he pulls a pencil stub out of his shirt and thoroughly wets it with saliva.

“What’s the surname of the one killed while escaping?” he asks loudly.

After hearing the answer, he opens the folder and crosses one name off the list.

“Already, one won’t get there.” He raises the folder and waves it around in the air. “Does everybody see?”

A bold, crooked line on a sheet tattered by a typewriter floats over the crowd.

Ignatov clears his throat.

“You drank the blood of the laboring peasantry for a long while. The moment has come to atone for your guilt and prove your right to a life in this complex present time of ours as well as in a wonderful bright future that will come about very, very soon, no doubt about it…”

He uses words that are difficult and unfamiliar to Zuleikha. She understands little, other than Ignatov’s promise that everything will end well.

“My task is to transport you – unharmed and in one piece – to that new life. Your task is to help me with that. Any questions?”

“Yes!” one of the bunch of “formers” hurries to say, in an apologetic tone. He’s a stooped man with sorrowful eyes; the skin underneath them sags like sacks, like melted wax, and Zuleikha realizes he’s a drunk. “If you please. Will food be provided during the travel? You must understand that for so many weeks we’ve already–”

“And so, food…” utters Ignatov forebodingly, walking right up to the stooped man, whose trembling nostrils instantly turn ashen. “Be thankful that you haven’t been shot! That the Soviet authorities continue thinking about you, taking care of you! That you’ll go in heated railroad cars with your loved ones!”

“Thank you,” the frightened man babbles to the green patches on Ignatov’s chest. “Thank you.”

“You’re going there to be liberated from the fetters of the old world, toward new freedom, one might say!” Ignatov continues thundering, striding along the ragged line of people, whose heads are shrinking into their shoulders. “And all you’re thinking about is how to stuff your belly! You’ll have… hazel grouse in champagne sauce and chocolate-covered fruit!”

He waves abruptly to the escort guard by the railroad car: Let’s go! The other guard draws open the door, which squeals as it slides to the side so the car reveals its rectangular black maw.

“Welcome to the Grand Hotel!” smirks the guard.

“With the greatest pleasure, citizen chief!” A nimble little man with dog-like mannerisms and a persistent gaze is the first to leap up into the railroad car, throwing a foot full force into the high opening – and revealing the fraying edges of his baggy trousers – and then disappearing inside.

A dangerous person, from prison, guesses Zuleikha. You need to stay far away from him.

And now it’s the exiles elbowing one another as they climb into the carriage to find places. The peasant men grunt, take a bounding run-up, and their feet push off, springing up. The peasant women groan, lifting their felt boots into masses of skirts, somehow clambering up, and pulling small, squealing children after them.

“And what about those who aren’t able to do this like monkeys? Will you carry them in your arms?” a calm voice asks amid the clamor.

It’s a stately lady with a high hairdo – a twisted tower of half-gray hair – and that bright-green hat with the veil. She’s standing with her mighty arms raised, as if she’s inviting someone to take her in their arms. A woman like that can’t be lifted, decides Zuleikha. She’s too heavy.

Ignatov stares right at the lady, who doesn’t avert her gaze and just lifts a thin eyebrow: And so? The old man with the cracked pince-nez tugs at her shoulder, frightened, but she obstinately brushes off his hand. Ignatov motions with his chin and a guard drags a thick board out of the clamps on the railroad car door and places it like a gangway from the railroad car to the ground. The lady heads into the car, graciously nodding her hat in Ignatov’s direction. Her large feet in laced shoes tread decisively and relentlessly; the board bends and shakes.

“Votre Grand Hôtel m’impressionne, mon ami,” she tells the guard, and he freezes, bewildered at hearing unfamiliar speech.

Zuleikha cautiously follows, carrying the bundle of her things in one arm and a sleeping child in the other. And how could this be, Allah, to contradict a man, a military man at that, and the chief at that. An old woman but brave. Or maybe she’s brave because she’s old? But going up on the board truly is easier.

The door squeals as it slides along its runners behind her. It’s dark again, like in the cell. The heavy clang of one bolt, then a second. And that’s it: one heated cattle car, numbered KO 310048 – freight capacity twenty tons, designed for up to forty humans or ten horses – is fully loaded with fifty-two deportees and ready for departure. Exceeding the planned load by twelve heads can be considered insignificant because, as the head of the transport hub in Kazan wisely noted that morning, soon they’ll be going with ninety per car, standing like horses.

By the time Zuleikha has helped the unfortunate peasant and his wife, who’s numb from grief, to settle in by putting the bundles with the infants to bed on the bunks as comfortably as possible – she was very sorry to tear herself away from that warm parcel, with its sweet baby smell – and found space for the restless older children, all the places have been taken and there’s no squeezing in because everyone’s packed the two-tiered bunks so closely. As before, Leibe helps out. He leans over from somewhere and pulls her up toward the ceiling by the hand, into the thick darkness of the second tier.

“I must ask you to observe your assigned place in the ward,” he grumbles.

Zuleikha gratefully agrees as she feels her way to squeeze in between the professor and a wall that’s cold as a rock. She bows her head slightly so she doesn’t hit it on the frost-covered ceiling. She pulls the shawl from her head and lays it between her leg and Leibe’s bony hip; it’s sinful to sit so close to an unrelated man. It’s even shameful for the forefathers three generations away, as her mother would have reproachfully said. Yes, Mama, I know. But your rules were only good for the old life. And we have – what was it Ignatov said? – a new life. Oh, what a life we have now.

The prison man with dog-like mannerisms pulls out a match that’s hidden deep in an inconspicuous crevice in the wall. He strikes it on the sole of his shoe and bends over a pot-bellied iron stove. It clatters with coal and then there’s a hot fire in it, crackling, flaring up, and flooding the car with a warm, quivering light.

Zuleikha looks around and sees plank walls, plank floor, and plank ceiling. In the center of the car – like a warm heart – is the crooked little stove, part of it rusted in patterns. Along the sides are bunks darkened with time and worn to a dull brownish shine by hundreds of arms and legs.

“Why so glum, you lot?” rasps the prison man, flashing his big, gray teeth. “Take it easy, I’ll be your minder. I won’t let anyone harm you: I’m an honest vagabond. Everybody knows Gorelov.”

Gorelov’s hair is long and shaggy, like a woman’s. Heavy, greasy locks keep falling over his face, turning his gaze wild and brutish. He walks along the bunks with a loose gait that’s almost like a dance, and he peers into gloomy faces.

“It’d be curtains for you without a minder here, my dear people. It’s a long way to ride.” And then he’s singing loudly, drawing out syllables: “Hush dogs, there’s no jumping trains! The screws will beat you for our pains…”

“How would you know, anyway?” The stooped drunk with the sorrowful eyes (“Ikonnikov, Ilya Petrovich, artist,” as he would later introduce himself to his neighbors) has sat down next to the little cast-iron stove, which is already white-hot, to warm his cold hands. “Maybe they’ll give us a lift as far as the Urals and throw us off.”

Gorelov walks up to the little stove. He tosses an assessing glance at Ikonnikov’s hunched figure, wearing a coat like a sack and scarf around his neck like a noose. Gorelov takes off a dirty shoe that’s falling apart at the seams and extends it: Hold this. He unwinds his foot wrap for a long time then finally takes out a cigarette butt hidden between his toes. He places it in his mouth, lovingly twists the foot wrap back on, and puts on his shoe. He lights the cigarette butt from the stove and exhales smoke in Ikonnikov’s face.

“How I know,” he says, continuing the conversation as if nothing happened, “is that I’m an old hand. I’ve done two hitches, pal. I’ve done Sakhalin time and been pounded into Solovki grime.”

Ikonnikov coughs and turns away from the smoke. Gorelov stands and scowls threateningly all around the silenced railroad car, challenging anyone to doubt him.

“This isn’t freedom of the free. Procedures need to be observed,” he says didactically. “But I’ll be looking after you so nobody does anything foolish.”

Gorelov catches a louse behind his ear with an abrupt twitch, crushes it on his fingernail, and flings it into the stove.

“The bulls have got you by the horn,” he sings, taking up a new tune, his broad grin revealing a large, gleaming gold crown. “You’ve had it boys, now take your turn. You’ll soon be sorry you were born. You’re going where there’s no return…” He’s standing in the center of the car, hands in his pockets, his shoulders thrust back like wings. “Or is there someone here who can’t wait and is just burning for the eternal ‘no return’?”

Wary faces watch silently from the bunks. Gorelov takes a step behind the stove and knocks a wooden lid aside with his foot. Looking around belligerently, he unfastens his pants and releases a loud, taut stream into an open hole in the floor. Several women gasp, and stare at the long arc glistening in the firelight, entranced and unblinking. Their husbands tug at their sleeves and they look down, covering their children’s eyes.

Zuleikha comes to her senses and turns away, too. The sound of it rings in her ears, making her face warm in shame. So that’s the latrine? And what are women to do? In the cell, they went to a pail when necessary, though it was dark there. But here…

Gorelov smiles victoriously, flicking off the drops and in no hurry to tuck his manhood back into his pants.

“Herpes genitales, if I’m not mistaken,” says Leibe. The professor’s voice rings out beside Zuleikha as he looks pensively at Gorelov’s bared flesh. “Three parts essential oil of lavender, one part sulfur. Rub it on three times a day. And no sexual contact until full recovery.” He nods decisively, in firm agreement with himself, and then turns away indifferently.

Gorelov’s face shifts and he hastily crams his wrinkled member back in his pants and leaps over to Leibe, scrambling up to the second tier like a monkey.

“Take care of that mug of yours, buster,” he hisses into the vacant face, rubbing his fingertips on Leibe’s dress uniform as if it were a napkin. “And thank your lucky stars that I’m the minder here. Otherwise you might get your bell rung–” Gorelov lets out a yell: he’s stabbed his finger on the small badge crookedly pinned to the lapel of Leibe’s uniform.

The railroad car abruptly begins moving, with a rumble.

“We’re on our way! We’re on our way!” The bunks boil over with excited whispers.

The hardened criminal casts a malevolent glance at Leibe and returns to his place.

Beside Zuleikha – right under the roof – there’s a small window, the size of the one on the stove, and it’s lined with even metal bars coated with velvety gray frost. On the other side of the grating she sees the central railway platform and the huge red station building with the lacy letters “Kazan” solemnly floating by. People are hurrying somewhere, surrounded by gleaming bayonet blades. A pair of horses neigh under militiamen. Women selling food bellow about snacks.

“We’re headed for Siberia, not Moscow,” someone notes.

“And where did you want them to send us? The Black Sea?”

The steam engine whistles long and loud, hurting the ears. A thick cloud of milky steam shrouds everything, creeping into eyes and mouths. When it dissipates, black skeletons of trees are already flying outside the window, silhouetted against white fields.

Zuleikha presses a finger to the grating: the frost on it is melting. The frost on the ceiling is beginning to drip, too, warmed by the stove and human breath.

They make themselves at home quickly. It doesn’t involve much since they have few things and very little space. The peasants are bunched at one end of the railroad car, the Leningrad “formers” at the other. Zuleikha and the professor have ended up in the “city” half.

They introduce themselves. The tall lady in the green hat bears a name befitting her stature: Izabella. She has a long patronymic, too, and a puzzling double surname that Zuleikha doesn’t remember. Izabella arranges her gray hair into a tall style each morning. Sometimes she recites poems that are intelligent, incomprehensible, and very beautiful, in Russian and occasionally, surprisingly, in French, which rumbles like the train wheels. She never recites the same poem twice. The railroad car listens. Zuleikha doesn’t understand how so many varied, complex, and very long lines can fit inside one head, and a female one besides. Izabella’s face remains calm and majestic, even when she’s catching lice under her arms or parading toward the latrine, which they’ve screened off with a piece of fabric.

Her husband, Konstantin Arnoldovich Sumlinsky, is a withered old man with a sparse, triangular gray beard; he mostly stays silent. He wakes early in the morning and takes up his place by the crack in the door to wait for the first rays of sunlight, under which he places his only book, open, to read. He smiles at some pages with an approving nod, wags a finger at others as he shakes his small head in distress, and even argues with others. When he reaches the last page, he slams the book shut, pensively looks at the cover, with its picture of a small, gray grain of wheat, and opens it up again. Sometimes he and his wife speak at length in a whisper, but Zuleikha doesn’t understand a single phrase, even though the conversation is in Russian, since they use such difficult words. He’s a strange person and Zuleikha is rather afraid of him.

She takes a disliking to the stooped Ikonnikov. Everything about him – the wrinkled blue-gray bags under his eyes, the fine trembling of his long fingers, his small fidgeting motions, and even how he loudly and lengthily swallows with his large, sharp Adam’s apple – indicates he’s a drunkard. Mama always said a drunk person was worse than a beast.

Zuleikha likes Gorelov least of all, though. Nobody likes him. The car’s minder holds everyone firmly by the throat. He always divides up the food himself, measuring out slimy porridge and herring soup with his own chipped mug, cutting bread with a coarse, stretched string, and mercilessly thrashing people’s outstretched fingers with a spoon: Don’t get ahead of the minder. He even pours out the drinking water from a half-rusty bucket covered with a crust of ice. He takes double portions for himself, for his labor. The peasant men look at him askance, keeping quiet. Gorelov is the first to leap from the bunks when the door opens for the daily inspection and the imperturbable Ignatov, his gaze severe and arrogant, enters the car surrounded by soldiers. The minder stands at attention in front of the commandant, poking a tense hand at his own forehead and loudly and diligently reporting that no incidents have taken place. Ignatov listens reluctantly, his body half-turned, and for some reason Zuleikha likes that he twitches his thin nostrils ever so slightly as he does. Sometimes Gorelov is summoned to the commandant’s car; he returns quiet, mysterious, and even dreamy – maybe they fed him there.

They always want to eat. The belly groans, demanding. It clenches like a fist, then straightens and swells. Food is meager on their journey and it inflames rather than consoles the innards. Zuleikha remembers her mother’s tales of the insatiable mythical giantess, Zhalmavyz, who eats everything that comes her way. And Zuleikha herself has become just the same. As voracious as a locust. As greedy as a turkey hen. She hadn’t even known such hunger could exist. Her vision darkens from it; that’s how bad things are. The bolt on the railroad car only needs to jingle a bit and her stomach immediately starts growling and churning: Are they bringing something to eat? Most often it turns out that no, it’s just another inspection or a head count or a train station doctor undertaking a hurried, embarrassing examination.

Things are easier when they’re moving. Zuleikha watches another life fly by in the tiny rectangular grated window – sparse little forests, small villages sliding from knolls, wrinkled ribbons of brooks, steppes resembling tablecloths, and the brush-like forest – and forgets about hunger. But she remembers it again during stops.

Sometimes she catches her neighbor’s attentive gaze upon her. Leibe watches – intently, for a long time, and unblinking – as she painstakingly licks her shallow bowl squeaky clean. And then he’ll suddenly give her his half-eaten chunk of bread or the remaining porridge in his dish. Zuleikha refused at first, but then she stopped. Now she just thanks him and accepts, and listens, listens to his endless muddled speeches that might be stories of medical practice or scraps of diagnoses. She soon notices that the book lover, the sullen Konstantin Arnoldovich, seems to want to join in their strange discussions, too. He needn’t bother, she thinks possessively. The professor isn’t about to start sharing his food with that bookworm, too!

She hasn’t been able to discover if this train car has its own iyase, its own house spirit. It ought to; how could it not, since people are living here? Then again, how would it feed itself? There aren’t even dead lice here – some people eat them themselves, others burn them in the stove – never mind breadcrumbs. She listens for it at night: the sounds of clattering or creaking under a house spirit’s shaggy paws. No, there’s nothing, it’s quiet. The train car is soulless, dead.

It’s very cold in the railroad car and they’re given little coal. Candles are issued occasionally for two cloudy-glassed lamps and then it’s bright for a short while.

Vestiges of their predecessors are scattered all around the train car, like greetings from the past. While investigating all the crevices and knotholes in the planks, Gorelov discovered an entire cigarette during the first half-hour of their journey. They wiped a layer of rusty dirt off the stove and read an impassioned inscription scratched with a nail that said, “Burn the scum!” The bunks are mottled with messages containing the names of loved ones, dates, oaths promising to not forget and not forgive, poems, dedications, threats, prayers, raunchy profanity, a delicate female profile, quotes from the Bible, Arabic squiggles… The children from the large peasant family found a small cream-colored shoe while playing under the bunks, set on an elegant heel with a thin leather sole; it was for a girl of around five or six. Gorelov wanted to pull out the silk laces (anything could come in handy) but was too late because Ikonnikov, who was usually reserved, abruptly flung the shoe into the stove. A horrible smell of singed leather lingered in the car for a long while after.

Their route is long. It seems unending. The names of cities, settlements, and stations string together, one after another, like beads on a thread.

Kenderi, Vysokaya Gora, Biryuli, Arsk…

Sometimes their train races swiftly along the railroad through wind and blizzards, sometimes it lazily drags its way along sidings and branch lines, searching for a holding area, and sometimes it stands motionless in that same holding area for weeks, covered with drifted snow, its wheels freezing to the rails.

Shemordan, Kukmor, Kizner…

Sometimes at small stations a second special train running close by will flash in the crevices of the railroad car door.

“Laish!” shout the peasants, who are usually quiet. “Mamadysh! Sviyazhsk, Shupashkar!”

“We’re from Lipetsk!” flies out in response.

“Voronezh! Taganrog! Shakhty!”

“From near Arzamas!”

“From Syzran!”

“We’re from Vologda!”

Sarkuz, Mozhga, Pychaz…

One time after standing in a holding area yet again, the train unexpectedly sets off in the opposite direction: Pychaz, Mozhga, Sarkuz… The peasants laugh from joy, praying incessantly: “We’re going home, heaven be praised, home!” They ride for almost a day. Then they come to their senses as they begin heading east again to Sarkuz, Mozhga, Pychaz…

“Nobody needs us,” Ikonnikov says then. “They’re knocking us around like…”

He falls silent.

“Yes, yes,” says Izabella, cheering him. “You’re absolutely right, like shit on a shoe. Just like it!”

And they roll on.

Agryz, Bugrysh, Sarapul…

The children begin dying first. All the children of the unfortunate peasant who had so many ran off to the other side, one after another, as if they were playing tag – first the babies (both at once, on the same day) then the older ones. His wife went after that; by then, she wasn’t distinguishing the boundary between this world and the other very clearly. The peasant man pounded his head against the carriage wall that day; he wanted to crack open his skull. They dragged him away, tied him up, and held him until he calmed down.

Yanaul, Rabak, Turun…

They bury the dead along the tracks in one common pit. They dig it themselves using wooden shovels, with the escort guards’ rifles aimed at them. Sometimes they don’t have enough time to finish digging graves or cover the corpses properly with crushed stone before the order “To the train!” booms. The bodies are left to lie in the open, with the hope that kind people will turn up on the next special train and scatter something over them. They themselves always scatter something when their train stands by open graves like that.

Bisert, Chebota, Revda…

Ignatov never gets used to the tea-glass holder. He drinks hot water from a good old aluminum mug and lets that thing – fat around the middle, with even steel lacework gleaming on its gut and a daringly smooth handle – just stand on the table. The faceted glass in the holder trembles invitingly when they’re in motion, sometimes bouncing: it’s reminding him of its existence. But it seems silly, shameful, and simply impossible to drink from such a ridiculous object. After Sarapul, Ignatov gives it to the escort guards in the next compartment so they can amuse themselves with it. He wants to give them a disgustingly soft striped mattress with an unusually smooth cover (was it silk or something?) but then thinks better of it; they’d ruin the goods, the clods. He rolls it up and somehow stuffs it on the high shelf under the ceiling. He sleeps better on a wooden bench; it’s what he’s used to.

There’s a lot he doesn’t like in the commandant’s compartment. There’s the lackey-like, soundless, and subservient sliding of the door (right-left, right-left…) and the foppish scalloped curtains with thin, barely noticeable stripes (let’s assume bare windows are no good, but why the frills?) and the flawlessly clean, large mirror over the voluminous funnel-like tank that holds water for hand washing (he only looks when necessary, in the morning, while shaving). There’s so much happening all around him! But there are lacy things and tea-glass holders here…

Serving as the train’s leader is not the easy job he thought it would be. They’ve already been traveling for two months. Which would be fine if they were actually moving, but more often they’re just waiting. They’re constantly on edge, like people in an asylum, because they’re either urgently pressing ahead (“You out of your mind or what, commandant? Look, everything’s backed up! Hand over your papers and push off, push off now and free up track five for me!”) or holding their horses, waiting in a siding again for a week (“There weren’t any orders with your name on them, comrade. You’ve been told to wait, so wait. And don’t come see me every hour! We’ll find you ourselves if anything comes up…”).

He loves those moments when the train gathers speed with a deep, ferocious rumble, rattling along the rails as if it were quivering with anticipation. He wants very much to yank the window down, stick his head outside, and put his face into the wind. He has difficulty enduring long days of painful anticipation at small stations in out-of-the-way places denoted on the map in italics.

Like now, gazing through a cloudy pane of glass covered in thick dust. Immobile black fields with small white spots (remnants of snow) spread outside. Ignatov testily taps his fingers on the varnished tabletop.

There were fifteen deaths during one eight-day stretch of idle time.

He’d noticed long ago that people die during the waits. Either the loud knocking of the wheels urges on tired hearts or the swaying of a railroad car calms them. But fact is fact: there’s hardly an idle time when a couple of surnames aren’t crossed out in the gray “Case” folder.

Eleven old people, four children.

When you’re carrying nearly a thousand souls, there’s nothing surprising in a few dying, right? The elderly from old age, some from illnesses. But children, too? Yes, that’s right, from weakness. It can’t be helped; it’s the road.

“Comrade commandant?” Polipyev, the supply manager, puts his head inside the door with a coy knock. “So, lunch? Shall I bring it?”

And then the aroma of thoroughly cooked barley flavored with a touch of salted pork fat floats into the compartment. Crystals of salt sparkle on the long, pearly grains. There’s a thick slice of spongy bread on the side.

Ignatov takes the plate from the tray. Polipyev stands meekly, arms at his sides. He used to attempt to help the commandant by spreading a linen napkin evenly on the table and placing the plate nicely in the center, setting the silverware properly (spoon with knife, to the right; fork to the left) and then the salt and pepper… But this isn’t a commandant, he’s a beast: “If I see those knickknacks one more time…” Well, be my guest if you want to chow without etiquette. Gulp your porridge down with just a spoon.

“Comrade Ignatov,” says Polipyev, lifting the empty tray in front of his chest like a shield, “what’re we going to do with the lamb?”

Ignatov looks up with a heavy, silent gaze.

“April’s almost here, I’m afraid it won’t keep. The ice box is good, of course, but you can’t reason with the weather.” Polipyev lowers his voice conspiratorially. “Maybe we should use it all? I could make any number of things out of it – country cabbage soup and navy-style macaroni. Even consommé with profiteroles… So, soup, main course, and jellied meat from the bones: we’ll eat for a week. Why have we just been eating barley since we set out from Kazan? Your fighters are looking at me with daggers in their eyes. They’ve promised to eat me if I don’t give them meat.”

“They won’t eat you without an order.” Ignatov bites off some bread and takes the spoon in his hand, chewing menacingly. “If the lamb spoils, though, then absolutely I’ll see to it that they eat you.”

Polipyev displays a vague smirk that could be a smile or an acknowledgement of understanding, plus submissive agreement.

“And you!” Ignatov pokes his spoon at Polipyev’s chest. “Can you tell me how much longer we’ll be traveling? A week? A month? Half a year? What am I going to feed you – you personally! – if we eat everything up now?”

“Well, what of it. Let it stay in the ice box, then,” sighs Polipyev and disappears outside the door.

Ignatov throws his spoon.

Lamb!

Canned meat and condensed milk and butter. The refrigerator in the commandant’s railroad car is stuffed with provisions. All these riches are intended for staff: escort personnel, the two stokers, and the engine driver. Well, and the commandant himself, of course. According to the plan, the deportees were to be fed at stations. And this was written in black and white in the special instruction for agencies of the transport division of the State Political Administration: “Throughout the special train’s itinerary, provide uninterrupted supply of hot water to those evicted and organize feeding sites at stations serving hot food at least once every two days.” Well, where are they, those feeding sites?

Ignatov realized at the very first station that this was going to be a problem. Special trains with dekulakized people stretched all along the railway, one after the other, and some were stuck for a long time on the track between stations, awaiting instructions. “Where will I find you all those provisions?” the station chief gently asked Ignatov. “Be grateful I’m giving you hot water.” Ignatov expressed gratitude that hot water was offered so meticulously.

But there’s not enough food for the deportees. Ignatov is glad when he manages to scare up porridge: wheat, oat, barley, occasionally spelt or broken grain. It’s porridge when it can’t be thinned very much. They thin soups mercilessly, for example, several times, sometimes even with icy water. Ignatov has tried arguing with the station officials about this, but it’s no use – they even make accusations. “What, do you pity them or something?” they’ll ask. “I’m responsible for them!” he’ll snap. “Who am I going to hand over at our destination point?” “And where is your destination point?” they say, waving him off.

And truly, where is it? He doesn’t know. Apparently nobody knows. At yet another station, after waiting a week or even two in a holding yard, Ignatov would receive the invariable instruction: “Proceed to point such and such, and wait until further notice.” He proceeds. Arrives. Hurries to the station chief to report. And again waits until further notice.

He calms himself because he isn’t the only one. He’s met other, more experienced commandants at stations and they’ve spoken a little. Yes, they say, we’re also going along until further notice. Yes, people are dying in the railroad cars. Yes, a lot. There’s always this sort of natural attrition, and nobody will question that. The main thing is for you to guard them strictly, so there are no emergencies.

And it would have all been all right if not for the daily rounds… He suddenly realized he was beginning to recognize faces. Each time he sat in his compartment, plunging his spoon into hot, fluffy porridge, he would remember someone, either the emaciated, white-headed adolescent albino with the trusting pink eyes from the third car, or the fat, freckled woman from the sixth with the large scarlet birthmark on her cheek (“Boss man, share at least something, I’m wasting away, I am…”), or the small woman with the pale face and the green eyes half the size of her face from the eighth.

That same thought comes right now: all these people had hot water for lunch today. They’re not people, he corrects himself. Enemies. The enemies had hot water for lunch and this makes the porridge seem flavorless.

He recalls being a three-year-old lad, sitting on the windowsill of their basement window in the evenings, watching for his mother’s square shoes among the feet running along the street. His mother came home after dark. Averting her eyes, she would give him plain hot water to drink and put him to bed.

Fool. Weakling. Crybaby. Bakiev would have ridiculed him, and rightfully so.

He stands and carries his untouched dish off to the kitchen compartment, to Polipyev. Let him choke down his own barley.

That same evening, faint with a disagreeable premonition, Polipyev gives all the lamb from the icebox in the commandant’s railroad car to the deputy chief of the local train station. Dark red with the finest white marbling, the meat disappears into a voluminous wicker basket and floats out of Polipyev’s life forever, just as five or more kilos of butter and a dozen cans of the nicest condensed milk departed the refrigerator earlier. The handover takes place late in the evening, in darkness, on the verbal instruction of the special train’s commandant but without delivery documents and receipts, throwing the cautious Polipyev into a state of vague alarm.

A half-hour later, a vat of millet porridge is brought to the train for the deportees. This is completely unexpected and so serendipitous (people hadn’t been fed for two days now) that it couldn’t be a simple coincidence.

“So that’s how it is,” Polipyev reflects spitefully, observing from his compartment window as large yellow pieces of clumped porridge are tossed into buckets (one bucket per car) with a measuring ladle. “Our menacing beast of a commandant’s turned out to be just another run-of-the-mill briber.”

That thought fills the supply manager with a calm satisfaction that’s all the greater because he’s nevertheless managed to conceal a couple of pieces of wonderful lamb. Polipyev decides to add them to the monotonous barley the next day without the commandant’s knowledge. Ignatov has been eating poorly of late and is unlikely to identify the taste of meat in porridge that has already come to be hated.

On their last day standing near Sverdlovsk, there’s a small incident in the eighth carriage. The special train has been kept there for nearly a week. There’s a dark valley, marked in places by remnants of slushy snow but already touched with fresh green shoots, that’s visible through an opening in the door about the width of the palm of a hand. (On the move and during stops, the door is permitted to be opened a little, but when entering populated areas it is supposed to be locked with two bolts.) The green is intensifying with each passing day, growing brighter, and filling the horizon.

Fooled by the train’s prolonged standstill, a small red-breasted bird has decided to build its nest under the railroad car’s roof, not far from Zuleikha’s little window. Businesslike, it has fetched twigs and fluff, tirelessly stuffing them under the roof and chirping with excitement.

“If we stand here this long again, she’ll have a chance to lay her eggs,” Konstantin Arnoldovich says, without tearing himself away from his book.

“What eggs? We’ll scoff it down right now!” Gorelov swallows and makes his way closer to the window, wiggling his fingers in a predatory manner and mulling over how best to bag his prey.

“Let’s admire it a little longer,” says Ikonnikov, drawing his squinting eyes closer to the window.

A sudden crashing blow, and dust, sand, and sawdust shower down. The little bird cheeps with fright and darts into the sky. It’s Zuleikha who struck the railroad car’s ceiling with a long, sturdy board she pulled out of the iron clamps on the door. She gazes after the little bird, returns the board to its place, and brushes off her hands.

Gorelov falls on the bunks with a disappointed wail – “What the hell are you doing, you fool Tatar woman!” That’s it, lunch is gone. It flew away. Ikonnikov looks at Zuleikha with interest for what seems to be the first time during the journey.

“If she loses her nest, she won’t lay eggs,” she says curtly. “She’ll be looking for her lost nest all summer.”

She climbs back up on the bunk. She notices that a board on the ceiling has come detached from the blow and a narrow crevice has formed, revealing a streak of sky. And that’s very nice because she can’t look out the window all the time.

The train will begin moving in the evening. It will cross the Ural mountain range that night. Zuleikha will watch the stars twinkling through the crevice in the ceiling and think, So, Allah, is there still long to ride?

Where-where? the wheels will clatter. Where-where? Where-where? And they’ll answer themselves: There-there. There-there. There-there.

ESCAPE

“Sons of bitches! Everybody–” says a crazed, half-strangled voice from somewhere below.

Zuleikha is hanging out of the bunk, peering into the darkness. What’s down there? Through the loud, rhythmical noise of the wheels come sounds of struggle, stifled grunting, and fisticuffs, which are alternately muffled, as if striking something soft, and resonant, as if striking something hard. In a narrow, slanting slice of moonlight shining through the window there are several bodies swarming by the cast-iron stove.

“I’ll let you stinking bitches have it!” another stifled shout changes to grunting.

It sounds like their minder’s voice. And yes, there he is, Gorelov, lying on the floor, hands tied behind his back, mouth bound by a rag, and wriggling like a little worm. Above him a couple of strapping peasants are pummeling him ferociously and enjoying it. He jerks violently, bending like a yoke, and throws them both off, but then he hits his head on a corner of the stove and goes quiet.

The railroad car isn’t sleeping. The peasant men and women are matter-of-factly exchanging remarks and meaningful glances on the bunks, nodding that he had it coming. Some help tie the motionless minder more firmly, others bustle around, gathering their things.

The man who once had many children but is now a solitary peasant pulls the fat heavy board out of the iron clamps on the door. He approaches Zuleikha’s bunk, gets into position, and strikes the end of the board on the same spot she hit that morning, scaring away the red-breasted bird.

“What are you doing, brother?” says Zuleikha, scared.

Not responding, he hits the ceiling again and again. He strikes in time with the clacking of the wheels so it can’t be heard. The crevice widens overhead, gaping, and now there’s a broad starry tongue of sky visible through the hole, rather than a narrow strip. The peasant extends the board to Zuleikha – here, hold this! – and leaps up on the bunk. He kneels and thrusts his wiry shoulders into the ceiling, which is already yielding. Something cracks and creaks, and a fresh breeze bursts through the gap, hitting Zuleikha in the face. The peasant pulls himself up with his arms and disappears above.

“Garrrmmmph!” Gorelov has come to and writhes on the floor, his eyes boring into Zuleikha.

The peasant man’s face hangs over the star-strewn hole in the ceiling. He’s smiling for the first time in several months.

“Well?” he says to those crowded below. And he extends a long, bony arm.

One after the other, the exiles grasp that hand, leap on Zuleikha’s bunk, and push their way through the hole in the ceiling. Peasant men, women, and adolescents disappear above, quickly and nimbly. One fat woman gets stuck in the narrow opening, but the people below are in a hurry and those awaiting their turn press and push, and she somehow climbs through, tearing her dress and body, leaving threads and pieces of fabric on the sharp, rough wood.

Gorelov grunts and growls frightfully, his body beating against the iron stove.

“And you, sister?” The voice is just above her ear. The peasant is looking through the hole at Zuleikha, raising his brow in encouragement.

Escape? Leave the carriage where she’s already spent so many long weeks? And a bunk that’s heated from her warmth and smells of her body? Leave the sweet, good-natured professor and the kind Izabella? Disobey the strict Ignatov, the stern soldiers with rifles, and the angry station bosses? Disobey her own fate?

She shakes her head. No, I won’t go, may Allah protect me.

“But you’re strong, you can do it!” The peasant man extends an insistent hand.

Doubtful, she looks for a long time at the broad hand with dark, bumpy calluses. She finally lowers her head for no.

“Well, suit yourself.”

Muffled footsteps knock on the ceiling. Outside the little window they can see long shadows quickly falling from the roof, flying down below the railroad embankment, and floating into the forest in a black flock. And that’s that.

Zuleikha looks around and sees the railroad car has emptied out. Nearly all the peasants left, other than a few lone women and a couple of feeble old people, who having given their parting son or grandson a long and tight embrace, now sit on the bunk, their unmoving, sunken eyes looking at the hole in the ceiling where they recently disappeared.

The majority of the Leningrad “formers” have stayed; only a couple of young female students flitted off. Izabella is sitting on the bunk, firmly squeezing her husband’s hand. A smiling Ikonnikov is dreamily looking at the sparkling stars in the ceiling’s torn opening, for some reason whispering, “Thank you, thank you.” Professor Leibe, who’s been sitting alongside Zuleikha the whole time, leans back, sighing with relief.

“Freedom is similar to happiness,” he purrs under his breath, “harmful for some, useful for others.”

“Goethe?” Konstantin Arnoldovich comes to life on the neighboring bunk.

“Novalis,” says Ikonnikov, joining in.

“No, forgive me, but I’m certain it’s Goethe!”

“I won’t forgive you. It’s definitely Novalis.”

Gorelov wriggles on the floor, groaning. Nobody has thought to untie him yet.

Zuleikha suddenly realizes she’s still holding the board in her hands; she tosses it to the floor. A golden scattering of stars quivers in the splintered gap in the ceiling.

The country where Zuleikha lives is very large. Very large and red, like bull’s blood. Zuleikha is standing in front of a huge map that covers an entire wall, where a giant scarlet blot resembling a pregnant slug has sprawled – it’s the Soviet Union. She has already seen this slug once before, on an agitational propaganda poster in Yulbash. Mansurka-Burdock had also explained: “Here it is,” he’d said. “Our motherland is immense. It stretches from ocean to ocean.” Zuleikha hadn’t understood then where those “oceans” were, but she remembered the slug, which was awfully funny, with a beard and a hilarious hook-like paw out front. And now, on this high wall, it truly seems immense because even two people, let alone one Zuleikha, couldn’t stretch their arms across it. Along its bilberry-red body there wriggle dark blue veins of rivers (is her dear Chishme among them?), and cities and villages are black dots, like beauty marks (who could show her where Yulbash is?). Zuleikha reaches her fingers toward the shiny surface of the map but doesn’t have time to touch. Ignatov’s stern voice lashes like a whip:

“Is it true you helped them escape?”

Zuleikha jerks her finger away from the map. Ignatov is standing by a window wide open to the night, looking out, and smoking. Yellow light from a kerosene lamp on the table illuminates the fabric of his uniform tunic, which is stretched taut between his shoulders under the cross of his tight belts.

“Don’t deny it,” he goes on. “People saw.”

The night is warm and velvety outside the window. She keeps silent.

“Why did you stay?”

It would seem that Gorelov, that malicious soul, had gone out of his way to report the matter, venting his fury. Nobody had untied him, after all, and he’d lain about, wrapped up like a sacrificial lamb all night, until they reached Pyshma. Everything was discovered in the afternoon, during the stop in Pyshma. Ignatov came into their car for inspection and his face twitched and blanched when he saw the hole in the ceiling, then everyone started running in and shouting, their feet stamping. Gorelov was taken – under guard! – in one direction and the others were taken – under guard! – in the other. The hole in the ceiling was quickly boarded up but the escapees… well, just go and find them. And of course they weren’t fed today because there was too much going on. In the evening they took Leibe from the railroad car first, then Izabella, Konstantin Arnoldovich, and somebody else. They were taken away and then brought back. Interrogation, said Ikonnikov. And Izabella asked him: “My dear Ilya Petrovich, is that really called interrogation?” And she was laughing very cheerfully.

It was during the night that they shook Zuleikha awake and brought her here. It’s a large room where the skeleton of a once-beautiful chandelier is suspended like a huge bronze spider from a ceiling that rises into dark heights; where walls that were once covered with tinted whitewash have now been reduced to dark-brownish bricks; where a couple of mismatched black chairs have cracked varnish on their sharply bent backs; where a large, carved table in the center is burned on one side and has a stack of books in place of one leg; and where, over an austere cube of a safe in the corner, there hangs a portrait of the same wise, mustached man Zuleikha saw on the clock tower of the Kazan kremlin. Zuleikha is glad to see him – his squinting eyes look at her in a warm, fatherly way, as though they’re calming and protecting her from Ignatov, who’s angry in the extreme.

Ignatov turns to Zuleikha. His eyes are blacker than black, and it’s as if the skin is pulled tightly over each bone of his face.

“So what’s the meaning of this silence? We have an escape, about four dozen souls bolted from the train, and you’re playing dumb?”

A tiny reddish flame – a hand-rolled cigarette – breathes in his fingers. He approaches the table and forcefully stubs it out in a small wooden dish filled with cigarette butts. The bowl clunks, tumbles, and falls to the floor; cigarette butts fly everywhere. “Damn it,” Ignatov grumbles and starts gathering them up. Zuleikha hurries and crouches beside him. It’s unheard of that a man would pick trash off the floor in a woman’s presence while she watches!

The cigarette butts are cold and small, like worms. They’re crumbling with ash and there’s a smell of stale smoke. And Ignatov smells of warmth.

“You could be facing the camps, you fool,” he says, his voice right beside her. “Or the ultimate punishment. Do you know what the ultimate punishment is?”

Zuleikha looks up. It’s completely dark here under the table and Ignatov’s pupils are as black as coal in the whites of his eyes.

“I don’t understand Russian well,” she finally says.

Harsh, hot fingers clench her chin.

“You’re lying!” hisses Ignatov. “You understand everything, you just don’t want to say anything. Well, talk! Did they make an arrangement to run away together? Where did they want to go? Talk!”

Her chin hurts.

“I don’t know anything. I saw the same as the others saw. I heard the same as the others heard.”

Ignatov’s face, with its black holes for eyes, comes right up to her ear and his breath is on her cheek.

“Oh, what a stubborn Tatar woman. Zuleikha, that’s your name, isn’t it?”

She turns her face toward him.

“It’s too bad I didn’t go with them. Now I’m sorry I didn’t.”

The door creaks open.

“Guard!” calls out the rattled voice of the chief of security operations at Pyshma. “Where did they get to?”

The thudding of the guard’s feet is hurried and frightened, like the sound of potatoes scattering from a pail. Ignatov’s fingers release her chin and her skin burns as if it’s been scorched. He rises from under the table and straightens his uniform:

“Yes, we’re here, don’t fret.”

Zuleikha rises after him, placing the dish with the cigarette butts on the table. Her hands are as black as if she’s been rubbing coal.

A young, pimply escort guard holding his rifle horizontally sighs with relief. He looks at Zuleikha and bursts out laughing: there are long dark streaks extending along her cheeks and chin. Ash. He wipes the grin off his face when he meets the Pyshma chief’s stern gaze, then he backs toward the exit and closes the door behind him. Ignatov turns to Zuleikha and starts cackling, too, flustered.

“So, did you interrogate her?” asks the chief.

He’s short and sturdy. His hands are as big as shovels, though, as if he’d stolen them from someone else. Ignatov is silent; he wipes the ash from his hands.

“I see you interrogated her,” smiles the chief, glancing mockingly at Zuleikha’s streaked face.

He takes a white sheet of paper from the table and scrutinizes both blank sides.

“And wrote up a report,” he continues good-naturedly, crumpling the paper in his hands. “I told you, Ignatov, that interrogation is not a simple thing. An art, one might say. Experience is needed here. Mastery! Sure, he says, I know a thing or two about this!”

Either the paper happens to be very crisp or the chief’s hands are firm because the sheet crunches loudly and lushly in his hands, like fresh snow.

“How about this.” He rolls the paper into a firm little ball. “Leave her with me and I’ll have a talk with her. You do the paperwork transferring her over to us for investigation.”

Ignatov takes his officer’s cap from the edge of the table, puts it on, and slowly walks toward the door. Zuleikha’s gaze follows him, puzzled: What is this? Why?

The chief swings wide and hurls the paper pellet into a wire wastebasket by the door. He sits down at the desk and opens the top drawer. Without looking, he goes through the familiar motion of taking out a stack of paper, pens, and an ink well. Whistling something cheery, he clasps his hands together and stretches his long, strong fingers with a crack.

Ignatov stops at the door and looks at the ball of paper bouncing at the bottom of the wastebasket. He turns.

“She doesn’t know where they went,” he says.

“Is that what she whispered to you here under the table?” The chief shoots a glance at Ignatov across the room.

“She won’t help you, comrade. She has nothing to say.” Ignatov comes back into the room.

The chief leans back and the chair creaks long and strained, as if it’s about to collapse, and he scrutinizes Zuleikha and Ignatov closely, as if he’s seeing them for the first time. He continues stretching his fingers.

“Well, I never! You think that’s very clever! You’re offending me, Ignatov. Everybody talks to me. Even the mute.”

“I’m taking her back.”

“How about that!” The chief finally unclasps his hands and slaps them loudly on the table. “He lets an entire train car slip, comes to his senses half a day later, and I’m supposed to look into it? Find them in the taiga, catch them? They went in all directions long ago, to villages and small stations. And I’m supposed to run like hell, panting and sweating, and then file a report about why I didn’t catch them! Then he even takes away my first witness, too. That’s how it is, is it?”

“My job is to transport people. Yours is to catch them.”

“So why are you transporting them so badly, Ignatov? You killed half of them along the way. You closed your eyes to an organized escape. And now you don’t want to help the investigation and are taking away an abettor. You think you’ll come out of this with clean hands?”

“I’ll answer for my mistakes myself if they ask. Just not to you.”

Ignatov nods to Zuleikha: Let’s go! She shifts her gaze to the reddened chief.

“They’ll ask, Ignatov, they’ll ask!” he’s already shouting. “And very soon! I won’t even begin to cover for you. I’ll tell them how you were protecting a kulak broad!”

Ignatov adjusts his peaked cap, turns on his heels, and goes out of the room. Zuleikha takes frightened little steps behind him. She casts a final glance into the room as she’s leaving. The huge red slug is crawling imperturbably along the wall and the wise, mustached man is smiling tenderly after them.

Ignatov strides quickly along the tracks, holding a dim lantern with a candle in his extended hand. The small Tatar woman from car eight is running behind him, stepping lightly, almost silently. A guard is last, clattering along the ties.

Ignatov is well aware that they’ll make him answer for this. What had they said to him that morning in the office? “We’ll figure it out upon your return.” It’s clear they want him to finish his job first so they can tear him apart later. Well, go ahead, figure it out. But he won’t hold back. He’ll tell them everything, how they starve people along the way and how people reel, wandering and lost, at small stations. They’ve been underway three months and have barely crawled across the Urals. That’s simply unheard of. They would have gotten there faster on foot. Attrition during that time was about fifty heads. It’s too bad, even though they’re kulaks: they’re manpower after all – they could do honest work felling trees or building something. A whole lot more use than rotting away along the railroad tracks. And another fifty people today, whoosh…

No, he’ll answer for the escape – that was his fault, he’s not denying it. Didn’t keep his eyes peeled. Even the minder in that railroad car, someone so hardened (“Do not worry, citizen chief, the people in this car are a quiet, dense-headed lot and rotten intelligentsia – what would happen to them?”), had been duped. Even so, if you reasoned things out, if they’d been brought to their destination earlier, there wouldn’t have been any escape at all. Don’t think for a second I’m absolving myself of any guilt, he imagines telling them, but I do ask that you consider the reasons for what occurred. During three months of traveling, anyone at all will have nasty thoughts and time will be found to realize those thoughts. So there it is, brothers.

And if they ask why he removed a witness from the investigation? That small woman with the vibrant name, Zuleikha? What can I say? Something like a tin can is in Ignatov’s path and it’s satisfying to take a run-up and kick it. The can flies ahead, clinking and echoing along the rails.

They’re already in the holding yard. It’s not easy to find their train in the dark among so many other trains and rectangular carcasses of freight cars, the long reddish boxes of the cattle cars from which there’s sometimes either quiet talking or singing. Ignatov keeps raising his dim lantern, reading the numbers on the cars. Three long, dancing shadows keep growing, soaring up the sides of the train cars and then falling to the ground, spreading along the rails.

Behind him the frightened guard shouts, “Hey, what’re you doing?” Ignatov turns around. The small Tatar woman is standing sideways holding her belly, her body twisted, her head tilted back. And then she begins slowly sinking to the ground. The guard pokes his rifle uselessly in her direction: “Stop! Stop, I’m telling you!” She falls, collapsing as effortlessly and neatly as if she’s folded herself in half.

Ignatov crouches beside her. Her hands are ice-cold. Her eyes are closed and the shadows from her lashes cover half her face. The guard is still standing, uselessly aiming his rifle at her.

“Put the rifle away, you oaf, and keep quiet,” says Ignatov.

The guard flings the weapon over his shoulder.

“Starvation or something?” he asks.

“Pick her up,” Ignatov orders the guard. “No matter what this is, there’s no use guarding her until she comes to.”

The guard attempts to lift her a little but he grasps her awkwardly and her head falls back on a tie with a thud. Ignatov curses – what a clod! – and picks her up himself.

“Toss her arm around my neck,” he orders.

They walk further. The guard is now running up ahead, lighting the way. Ignatov carries her small body. She’s so light! How is it possible…? Zuleikha comes to little by little, clasping him around the neck so he feels her cold fingers on his cheek.

They send for a doctor right away (Ignatov doesn’t want to wait until morning), rousting him out of bed and driving him to the station. Groaning, he climbs into the train car, clumsily hoisting up his stout legs; he’s still young, only a little older than Ignatov. Zuleikha has fully come to and he examines her in the light of a kerosene lamp, wearily chewing at his sagging lower lip and tugging at a long lock of sparse hair that’s been combed over early baldness.

“Heart’s fine,” he says indifferently. “Lungs, too. Skin healthy.”

“And so…?” Ignatov is standing right there, in the railroad car, leaning his back against the closed door and smoking.

Ten pairs of eyes – the ten exiles remaining after the escape – are looking down at him from their bunks; nobody else has yet been assigned to car number eight because other things have been happening.

“You can calm down, comrade,” the doctor yawns sleepily and he places his rudimentary instruments in his gaunt doctor’s bag. “It’s not typhus. Not scabies. Not dysentery. We’re not going to put the whole train in quarantine.”

Ignatov nods with relief and flings his cigarette butt into the cold stove. They’d stopped issuing coal for heating at the end of April after deciding it was enough; this isn’t a sanatorium, and it’s warm anyway.

“The cause of fainting could be anything at all,” the doctor drones on, as if he’s talking to himself while he heads toward the door. “Oxygen starvation, malnutrition – among other things. Or simply bad blood vessels.”

“Or pregnancy,” rings out loudly and distinctly from the depths of the bunks.

The puzzled doctor turns around and raises the kerosene lamp a little. Several gloomy faces overgrown with dirty beards are gazing at him, the whites of their eyes gleaming. So many of them have passed through his hands in recent months, they’ve all blended into one tired, dark image. One of the faces in the car, though, seems to remind him of someone or even be vaguely familiar. So familiar that the doctor raises the lamp to it. Closer, even closer. The nose is a sharp beak, the teasing eyes are like pieces of ice, there’s a steep arc of a massive, high forehead with a tangled coil of glistening silver hair around it. No, it can’t be. What is this?

“Professor!” says the doctor, exhaling. “Is that you?”

“She won’t allow you to check the tension of the mammary glands and the Montgomery tubercles,” Leibe utters in the clear, authoritative voice of a lecturer in a large auditorium. “Be so good as to at least investigate the condition of the salivary glands and facial pigmentation.”

The doctor is staring at the professor; he just can’t look away.

“Professor Leibe! How did you…?”

“Try a deep palpation of the abdomen, too,” continues Leibe. “My diagnosis would be eighteen weeks.”

When he’s done speaking, Leibe bores a long, unblinking gaze into the doctor, who wipes his damp upper lip and sits back down on the bunk next to the frightened Zuleikha. He feels her lower jaw.

“Exhale,” he quietly orders.

She shakes her head, breathing loudly and rapidly, without stopping.

“Zuleikha, my dear,” says Izabella, sitting down alongside Zuleikha and taking her hand. “The doctor’s asking.”

“I said exhale,” the doctor repeats angrily.

Zuleikha exhales and holds her breath. The doctor swallows and lays his palms on her belly. He looks significantly at the professor.

“I’m palpating an enlargement of the uterus.”

Leibe laughs loudly and triumphantly, his teeth flashing in the darkness:

“I’ll grade you unsatisfactory, Chernov. And I did warn you in the first year that you would not be a good diagnostician!”

Zuleikha mumbles, uncomprehending, not knowing what she’s supposed to do now.

“Tell the patient to breathe,” says Leibe. Content and still chuckling, he reclines on the bunk.

Zuleikha inhales convulsively.

“Professor, how did you…?” In an attempt to find Leibe’s face, the doctor thrusts the lamp into the dark bunk, where Leibe is hiding.

“You may receive your grade book at the dean’s office, Chernov,” answers Leibe, wrapping himself up cocoon-like in someone’s sheepskin jacket and rolling closer and closer to the wall. “I have no time for consultations right now.”

“Volf Karlovich,” insists the doctor, sweeping the lamp’s light around the bunk, “after all, we’ve… After all you did for–”

“I don’t have time, Chernov.” The voice only just carries from the depths. “I don’t have time.”

The doctor’s lamp illuminates a rustling mountain of rags by the far wall. The mountain soon stops moving.

Zuleikha whimpers quietly, like a dog, biting the edge of her headscarf and gazing upward, staring. Izabella sits next to her and strokes Zuleikha’s hands, which are clasped in fists and lying lengthways alongside her body.

Chernov shakes his head slightly as if he’s shedding a hallucination, clasps his doctor’s bag to his chest, and leaves the railroad car. He jumps down to the ground, leaning against Ignatov’s proffered arm, and notices Ignatov’s eyes are stern and tense.

“I assure you again, comrade commandant, this is nothing bad,” utters the slightly annoyed doctor. What tender commandants there are now! “What do we have here?”

He takes a handkerchief from his pocket and wipes Ignatov’s cheek. On it are four long, dark streaks that look like marks made by a small hand.

Pregnant? Yes, she wanted to eat all the time but of course they weren’t fed. Yes, her belly had gotten a little heavier recently but she’d thought it was from aging. And the red days had stopped coming, though she thought that was from worry. But that she was pregnant? Oh, that Murtaza, he’s cheated death. He’s been in the grave a long time but his seed is alive, growing in her belly. It’s already halfway grown.

Another girl? Of course, what else could it be? What was it the Vampire Hag said? You only bring girls into the world. No, that’s not what she said. You only bring girls into the world and they don’t survive.

And will this one really die, too?… Well, of course. This one will leave her as well, after having barely been born. Her bright infant’s redness won’t even have a chance to leave her tender skin, her tiny little eyes won’t have a chance to fill with meaning, and her mouth won’t have a chance to smile for the first time.

Zuleikha looks at the black ceiling. Thoughts flow as the wheels knock. A warm May night is rushing past on the other side of the plank wall. The light, half-empty railroad car rocks wildly, like a cradle. Everybody’s already asleep, including the kind Izabella, who’d stroked her hand half the night, and the eccentric professor, whose bright, joyful eyes had looked at her for so long. If only she could fall asleep, too.

Was it permissible for her to request Allah to allow her child to at least stand on its own two feet? That the child at least take its first steps before leaving this world? Or was that too great an impudence? There’s nobody with her to ask for advice: not Murtaza, not the mullah. Almighty, give me some hints yourself: am I allowed to ask this of You? I won’t ask for anything else, I wouldn’t dare. Only this.

And there’s this thought, out of nowhere: What if the All-powerful hears and permits your child to take its first step? What would it be to lose the child then? Might it be better for it to be right away, before getting used to the child and taking a liking to it? She remembers how she grieved over her first daughter, who was granted one whole month of life. And then less for the second, who departed after a couple of weeks. And even less for the third, who didn’t survive seven days. The fourth, who departed right away, at birth, was seen off with dry eyes.

Shamsia-Firuza, the wheels clack. Khalida-Sabida. And again: Shamsia-Firuza, Khalida-Sabida.

So wouldn’t that be better? Right away? Her mama would have said that thoughts like that were sinful. That everything is Allah’s will, and it’s not for us to judge what and when is better… Oh well, it’s not as if I’m going to chop off my head – which goes on thinking and thinking, filling with thoughts, like a net fills with fish.

But maybe no baby will be born. That happens, the women at the well used to whisper. The child will live a while in the belly, grow a little, and then tear itself out of its set place before its time and flow from the womb so all that’s left is a clump of blood on the pants.

And the Vampire Hag isn’t with her, so there’s nobody to predict the outcome. Is it even good to know beforehand, anyway? But then the expectation is agonizing. And what about not knowing? That’s agonizing, too, the way she’s feeling now, not knowing.

She’s tired, tired of agonizing. Tired of agonizing because of hunger, tired of persuading and exhorting her insatiable insides. Of her stomach in agony from bad food. Of cold at night. Of aching in her bones in the morning, of lice, of frequent queasiness. Tired of the pain and deaths around her. Of fear that it will grow even worse. And – scariest of all – of perpetual shame.

There is constant shame when she feels the heavy smell of an unwashed body coming from herself, when the soldiers indifferently slide their eyes along her uncovered head and braids during their daily inspections, when she squats behind the latrine’s cloth divider for all to see, when she presses against the sleeping professor at night to try and warm up. She nearly burned up with shame when the unfamiliar doctor’s puffy, indifferent fingers touched her last night. And she’d begun wailing when he announced her pregnancy for all to hear. This was so shameful, shameful, shameful. She would have to bear the disgrace in front of everybody. For the first time in her life, she cannot conceal her secret behind the tall fence of her husband’s house. In her relentlessly displayed belly she will nurture a child who will leave her as soon as it is born.

And Allah, when will my journey end? Could You break it with a supreme gesture? Zuleikha presses her face into her short fur coat, which she has placed under her head instead of a pillow. Her forehead comes up against something hard and sharp. She turns the pocket inside out and finds a small, almost rock-hard lump. The sugar. The sugar Murtaza gave her. She’d already managed to forget about it but there it is, it hasn’t gone anywhere and the large white crystals shine, their edges sparkling, giving off a complex aroma that’s just as strong as it was last winter. Zuleikha has been carrying a longed-for death in her pocket for many weeks, likely so she could discover it at this bitter moment. What is this if not the answer to her ardent prayer?

Zuleikha brings the sugar to her face. Should she bite it a little at a time or attempt to dissolve the whole piece at once? Would the poison take effect instantly or after a short while? Would she suffer? Does it even matter?

“Sugar? Mein Gott, where is it from?”

The professor’s joyful, surprised eyes are right beside her. He’s woken up and is propped on his elbow, looking at Zuleikha. His halo of curls seems silvery in the moonlight. Zuleikha doesn’t answer; she squeezes the sugar in her fist and its hard, sharp edges dig into her palm.

“Eat it, certainly eat it!” Leibe whispers, excited. “Just don’t think of showing anybody, especially Gorelov – he’d take it away.” He places a finger to his lips. “And I, well… I wanted, you know… to inquire…” The professor looks sideways at her belly, squints, and hesitates, finally daring to ask, “How is he feeling?”

“Who?”

“The child, naturally.”

“It’s a she, a girl. My line is ending. I can only give birth to girls.”

“Who told you that?” The indignant Leibe sits up abruptly and nearly hits the top of his head against the ceiling. He hems and haws loudly, intently considering Zuleikha’s belly: at first he’s displeased, then he’s uncertain, and, finally, he’s delighted. “Don’t believe it!” he cries, satisfied, his laughter trilling and hand waving. “Don’t believe it!”

The wheels are clattering loudly, muting the conversation. Shamsia-Firuza, Khalida-Sabida.

“Do you think the heart’s already beating?”

“What a question!” The professor chokes with indignation. “It has been for two months now.”

Groaning like an old man, he awkwardly turns around on the bunk. He bends, bringing his ear toward her belly, as if he wants to hear the ardent heartbeat hidden inside, but he doesn’t allow himself to touch it with his cheek. Zuleikha places her palm on his silver curls and presses the professor’s head to her belly. And the shame retreats. An unfamiliar man is touching her body with his face, and sensing her smell, but she doesn’t feel shame. She wants only to know what’s in there, inside her.

Leibe listens attentively for a long time with his eyes closed. Then he lifts his head: his face is soft and dreamy, and he silently nods to her that everything is good.

“Eat the sugar,” he reminds her, settling into his spot. “Eat it right now.”

He soon falls asleep, his hands placed under his head and his smiling face raised to the ceiling as if he’s admiring the stars.

Zuleikha puts the sugar back in her coat pocket. She’s much calmer now that her own death – which is sweet, smells complex, and has taken on the familiar appearance of a lump of ordinary sugar – has been found and is lying next to her. She can take it at any time, whenever she wishes, and she gives thanks to Allah, who heard and answered her prayers.

The train crosses a river dappled by moonlight and spanned by a long, lace-like iron bridge that amplifies the clatter of wheels: here it is, here it is, here it is…

They still have a long way to go and won’t reach the place until early August.

Yelan, Yushala, Tugulym…

From Tyumen, the train is sent east, toward Tobolsk. Then they rethink, turn the train around, and begin driving south.

Vagai, Karasul, Ishim…

New passengers will be settled into the eighth car. Gorelov will remain the minder and will nag and chasten everyone more than before, both fearing another escape and to win back his wavering authority.

Mangut, Omsk…

Zuleikha’s belly will swell quickly. The child will begin to stir near Mangut and soon after Omsk, Zuleikha will feel a tiny little foot with a round, bulging heel under her tautly pulled skin for the first time.

Kalachinsk, Barabinsk, Kargat…

In July, the food situation will improve since not many trains come this far into Siberia, so it will be easier for Ignatov to scare up provisions. And bread will appear once again in the exiles’ rations.

Chulym, Novosibirsk…

But people will die even more frequently as malnutrition and sheer exhaustion from the long trip manifest themselves. Typhus will break out in half the cars, taking away around fifty lives.

Yurga, Anzhero-Sudzhensk, Mariinsk…

In total, during the six months of travel, attrition will amount to three hundred and ninety-eight heads. Not counting escapees, of course.

Tisul, Kashtan, Bogotol, Achinsk…

As they approach Krasnoyarsk, Ignatov will use a pencil stub to cross out yet more names in the gray “Case” folder. He will realize that he sees faces rather than lines and letters when he glances at the surnames typed closely together.

Nobody knows it’s their last day riding on the train. The wheels thunder and a wicked August sun is heating up the car through the window. Ikonnikov is entertaining Izabella. This is one of those rare moments when something pierces his usual gloominess, something fresh, some sort of boyish mischief, and he becomes quick, lively, even playful. Zuleikha almost likes him in this mood. She doesn’t understand even a fraction of the jokes that make Izabella laugh so heartily and the reticent Konstantin Arnoldovich snort a little bit, but she tries not to miss those moments because it’s nice to be among cheerful, smiling people. She’s quiet and reserved, and the “formers” don’t avoid her.

Lying on Ikonnikov’s open palm is a thin piece of bread he stashed away that morning.

“More!” he says, impatiently wiggling his fingers.

His eyes are tightly blindfolded with someone’s shirt; he’s like a child playing hide-and-seek. Izabella places another piece on the artist’s palm.

“More!” he demands. “Come now, don’t stint on art!”

Konstantin Arnoldovich gives up his piece. Ikonnikov mumbles with satisfaction and begins mashing the bread in his long fingers.

Zuleikha watches with disapproval and sorrow. She wouldn’t give up her piece for anything. It would be different if there were a purpose, but this is just an indulgence. And the crumbs are scattering on the floor so they can’t be picked up.

The bread is softening in Ikonnikov’s flexible fingers. He’s kneading it into a pliant gray mass, mashing, mashing, and – there you go – gradually turning it into… a toy? Someone’s head! Izabella and Konstantin Arnoldovich don’t look away, observing as bushy, arched eyebrows take shape under a mane of hair, an aquiline profile develops, a luxuriant mustache turns up, and a bulging chin swells…

“Mon Dieu,” Izabella says solemnly.

“Unbelievable,” whispers Konstantin Arnoldovich. “It’s simply unbelievable…”

“Well?” Ikonnikov cries victoriously and tears the blindfold from his eyes.

In his hand is a small, absolutely living head: its gaze is penetrating and intent, and there’s a wise half-smile on its lips.

“I received the Order of the Red Banner of Labor not long ago,” sighs Ikonnikov. “Nineteen heads in bronze. Seven in marble. Two in malachite.”

“And one in bread,” adds Konstantin Arnoldovich.

Zuleikha stares at the bready bust and knows she’s seen this intelligent face before somewhere, with its stern yet kind, fatherly gaze. A good person, and the artist molded it skillfully. It’s a pity about the bread, though.

Ikonnikov holds the bust out to her.

“You’re always giving me all your bread,” she says, shaking her head.

“Not you, dear,” says Izabella, her eyes indicating Zuleikha’s protruding belly. “Him.”

“Her,” Zuleikha corrects her. “It’s a girl.”

She takes the bready head and hungrily bites off half, right at the mustache. Konstantin Arnoldovich breaks into a sudden, shrill whistle and turns around. Behind him, Gorelov’s eyes are flashing with curiosity and his nostrils are anxiously twitching. He’s obviously desperate to listen in on the conversation – he’s been completely brutal since the memorable escape, sniffing out, unearthing, and searching everything, so he can report to Ignatov – but he’s missed this.

“Gorelov, you ignorant soul!” Konstantin Arnoldovich’s sharp, narrow little shoulders screen Zuleikha, who’s still chewing. “Are you aware that our Ilya Petrovich created the scenery for the Mariinsky Theater’s ballet The Bolshevik?”

“We don’t go wagging our tails around at the ballet. And you’re not very likely to now, either.”

Gorelov’s hand angrily snatches at Konstantin Arnoldovich’s frail arm, pushing him aside: Here, let’s have a look. It turns out there’s nothing to see, though, just a pregnant peasant woman chewing with a stuffed mouth and picking crumbs out of her palm with her lips. But there was something here, there was, his gut feels it… Disappointed, Gorelov exhales through his nostrils and casts a glance out the window. Floating past are the tall, gray buildings of yet another station with large letters on their brick face.

“Krasnoyarsk,” someone reads aloud.

Apparently they’ll stand for another couple of weeks, no less. It really truly is as if they’re riding to the edge of the earth. The din of the wheels fades. Outside is the overwrought barking of dogs. What is this for? The railroad car door slides open with a drawn-out wail and a loud, sharp voice shouts a command over the barking: “Exit!”

“What?”

“How…?”

“Is that for us?”

“We’re already there?”

“It can’t be…”

“It can, Bella, it can…”

“Gather your things, your things! Faster, Ilya Petrovich – what are you doing, anyway?”

“Professor, help Zuleikha…”

“I’ve never been to Krasnoyarsk…”

“What do you think, will they leave us here or take us further?”

“Where did my book go?”

“Maybe they’re just transferring us to another train?”

The uneasy crowd pours out of the train car down a board that’s thrown from the car to the ground as a gangway. Zuleikha is last to go, grasping at her bundle of things with one hand and at her large belly, which faces sharply up, with the other. In the bustle of gathering their belongings, nobody notices that Izabella’s emerald-colored hat remains lying under the bunks: it’s fairly worn but still bright, its iridescent peacock feathers shining.

They are met by a lot of soldiers and every other one has a large dog that’s quivering with tension and barking hoarsely. The barking is so loud it’s impossible to talk.

Holding his ever-present “Case” folder under his arm, Ignatov observes from a distance as the exiles leave the train. The folder has faded during the long months of the trip, and its government-issued cover is now obscured by dark blue scars from stamps and seals, violet dates, signatures, penciled additions, and squiggles. A distinguished folder, decorated with honors. He will now hand it over – along with the deportees – to some local official. No doubt he’ll still dream of the folder at night and it will throw its maw open, hurling its rudimentary insides in his face: a couple of thin, worn little sheets with dense columns of surnames, four hundred of which have been boldly crossed out with uneven pencil lines. That’s fine; he’ll dream of it for a couple of nights and then stop. Out of sight, out of mind.

How loudly they bark, those dogs…

“You’re greeting them as if they’re criminals being transferred,” Ignatov says to the soldier who’s come running over.

“We greet everybody that way,” he responds with pride. “With music. Welcome to Siberia, as they say!”

He smiles cordially. And the teeth in his mouth are metal, each and every one of them.

THE BARGE

Zinovy Kuznets, senior employee for special assignments at the Krasnoyarsk office of the State Political Administration, outright refuses to accept Ignatov’s charges.

“Here’s a barge for you,” he says. “And there’s the Yenisei River. Take them.”

“It’s in my orders, in black and white – ‘hand over to the authority of the local office of the State Political Administration.’” Ignatov is seething.

“Wake up! Read one line higher: ‘deliver to point of destination.’ First ‘deliver’ and then later ‘hand over.’ Well then, deliver, don’t shirk. Take command of the barge and sail up to the Angara. We’ll meet there in two days and I’ll accept your sorry lot.”

“So where is it, your point of destination? In the taiga? In some godforsaken place? I was only assigned to look after them on the railroad! I brought them halfway across the country. Six months squandered on the rails! And you don’t want to accept them in your own city. That’s not our way, not the Soviet way.”

“Want to, don’t want to… The only thing I’ve wanted since winter is a good night’s sleep!” Kuznets spits thickly and loudly by his feet, and looks off somewhere to the side, but his eyes truly are dazed and red. “You think because you’re sensitive and pretty you’re the only one in Siberia who should get a break? I receive a dozen barge loads every week, sometimes two. Where should I find escorts for all of them? So look here, Ignatov, as your superior officer, I order you to go aboard and deliver the entrusted cargo in the quantity of – you yourself know how many heads – to the place where the future labor settlement will be founded.”

“I’m not yet under your direction!”

“Well, consider yourself under it as of now. Or do you need a little piece of stamped paper? I’ll obtain it quickly, don’t think I won’t. Just don’t hold it against me later, my dear man…” Kuznets raises his reddish eyes, the black pupils like little needles, at Ignatov.

Ignatov slaps his hands on his knees: I’m done for! He takes off his peaked cap and wipes his sweat-soaked forehead. This might be Siberia but the heat is hellish.

They’re standing on a steep, high riverbank and can see everything from here. The dark blue cupola of the sky is reflected in the river’s broad mirror, which breathes with a slight ripple. The Yenisei’s water is dark, heavy, and lazy. The green left bank rears up in the distance. Bony berths stick out of a lopsided pier like fingers. There’s a stir by the pier as people swarm, dogs bark fervently, escort guards shout, and bayonets gleam in the sun. Exiles are being loaded onto a low, wide barge.

Kuznets takes an ivory cigarette case out of his jacket.

“Here, this one’s better.”

Ignatov initially refuses, then grudgingly accepts one. Kuznets’s cigarettes are good, expensive.

“You lost a lot along the way – four hundred heads. Did you starve them or–”

“If they’d been fed better, I’d have brought more!”

It’s too bad he’s lit the cigarette. The aromatic smoke is stuck in his throat; it’s not pleasing.

“And wasn’t there an escape on your train?” Kuznets winks unexpectedly, hiding a smirk in the flourishes of his rounded black mustache. “And he wants to teach me what’s the Soviet way and what’s not…”

Ignatov flings his unfinished cigarette into the river.

“Well, now you understand,” Kuznets concludes in a superior tone. “Fine, don’t get steamed up. There’re lots of kulaks here, no harm done. They’ll dig the land there, plant wheat.” He nods at a long chain of soldiers carrying armloads of shovels, saws, and axes wrapped in old rags, plus crates bristling with other tools. “There’s a large, natural stock of them, you can see it yourself. You won’t even be able to blink before they multiply.”

Lots of tools are being loaded on the barge, and there’s even a couple of sturdy utility carts with wooden wheels. (In the taiga? Are they going to harness elk to it? Ignatov wonders cheerlessly.) Equipment, sacks with provisions, bunches of kettles – everything’s being piled on the flat roof, wrapped in tarpaulins, and tied with ropes. They’re working in unison, the way they always do. The escort guards up on the roof hold their rifles horizontally. You can’t miss from there if anything happens. One waves his arms, commanding. The others walk around, occasionally glancing down from on high at the deportees swarming beneath them. They’re driving people somewhere below. They crawl along the gangway like ants and disappear, disappear into the bowels of the hold. The dogs’ agitated barking carries after them from the shore. They’re raging, the bastards. Are they fed human flesh or something?

“What, you can’t wait to go back?” Kuznets notices Ignatov’s gloomy gaze. “Yes, our life’s harsh here. But don’t you worry – you’ll deliver your people and I’ll let you go home to your wife’s warm side.”

“I’m not married,” Ignatov tells him coldly.

During loading, it turns out that the exiles won’t all fit on the barge. They’ve packed more than three hundred into the hold – so tightly they can scarcely breathe – and this violates all the guidance and regulations by greatly exceeding the allowable limit (the barge has settled low and heavy in the water), though several dozen are left outside even so.

Kuznets has suggested they transport the oldest and frailest on deck – the old ones, he says, won’t jump overboard – but Ignatov won’t budge on this, not for anything. One escape is enough for him. That Kuznets is a son of a bitch after all. Of course he knew one barge wouldn’t be enough. Did he hope they’d all fit? Or that Ignatov, from inexperience or pity, would agree to take people in the open air?

A second barge has already arrived at the pier and attached its blunt snout of a bow to a berth; it will take the second batch. Criminals, explains Kuznets. Judging from all the dogs barking, the convicts are already close by – they’ve been somewhere on the high shore waiting for Ignatov’s barge to cast off.

“You fall asleep or what!” the official on the pier rasps at Ignatov. “Go on, out! You’ve created a line here, you Trotskyite…”

“Up yours,” Ignatov snarls at him. “And yours, too.” (That’s for Kuznets.) “Do what you want but I’m not taking people in the open air. I’m the one responsible for them after all.”

“Screw it,” says Kuznets, waving him away. “Give me the excess, for the launch. And take the barge away right now – get it out of my sight.”

For the excess, they select the weakest, most tired, and unlikeliest to escape. Kuznets himself points a finger, taking many of the Leningrad remainders and several gray-haired peasants. They’re rounded up into Kuznets’s roomy launch, into a hold for storing fish. Kuznets is supposed to leave the next night, follow Ignatov’s barge, and catch up to it somewhere around the mouth of the Angara. In addition, he’s demanding Ignatov assign someone very reliable to watch over the group and report any trouble. They have three days’ journey ahead and who knows what might happen. Ignatov smirks and gives him Gorelov.

“I’ll take people, yes, I will,” Kuznets declares, “but I’m not shouldering your responsibility, Ignatov. You’ll be accountable for them during the trip, remember that.”

Coward.

Kuznets takes the “Case” folder anyway, just for now, “to have a read.” Ignatov feels relieved when he passes it into Kuznets’s sun-browned hands. It takes a load off his mind.

They finally head out. The motorized barge moves off along the channel like a large black cucumber, cutting the Yenisei in two. It creeps heavily and slowly under its excessive weight. The motor wheezes and sputters, belching thick smoke from its large-striped stack again and again. High waves extend in both directions like straight white mustaches.

The barge’s name is Clara. The long, neat letters were painstakingly traced out on its rounded bow at one time, but the paint flaked off and was eaten away by rust long ago, so now it’s barely visible on Clara’s dark brown side. More recently, someone decided to give her a surname and painted an unprepossessing, slightly leaning “Zetkin” below. But those letters have peeled off, too, almost erased by the waves.

First of all, Ignatov checks the doors of the huge hold in which his batch of people has been housed; the hold extends the entire length of the barge, and there are doors at the bow and stern. The doors in the bow are useless so were boarded up long ago, meaning that passengers – exiles and political prisoners shipped on the barge before 1917 and then exiles and criminals who are transported now – are loaded in and out only through the stern. Which is proper because fewer doors mean fewer anxieties. Ignatov feels the fat boards, digs his fingernail at the half-rusted clamps fastening them, and tugs at the metal girders that crisscross them. Sealed off well, solidly. You couldn’t knock it out from inside, no matter how you tried. He puts a watchman there, just in case.

The sharp, strong smell of male urine assaults his nose when he comes to the doors at the stern. That smell hovers everywhere on the barge, surrounding it like a cloud, but is especially acrid and cutting here, by the doors: it comes from the hold. It blends many generations of political and criminal prisoners. It’s a sort of final memory of them, a monument not made by human hands. Many of these people no longer exist: they’ve perished, but their smell remains.

There are two watchmen, not just one, by the doors at the stern. The opening of the square doorway is covered from the inside by a strong wrought-iron grate: the fat rods are sunk into the walls and hold the grate right up against them – it can’t be loosened or knocked out. On the outside are metal doors closed with a wide bolt the thickness of a hand. Thought out practically. You could keep bears here, to say nothing of people weakened from long months of travel.

“And this, why isn’t it locked?” Ignatov notices a half-open padlock in the bolt of one door.

“There was no order,” a watchmen exhausted from the heat lazily answers. “They say it doesn’t open well, needs to be repaired.”

Utter sloppiness. Ignatov takes the lock in his hands. The key’s sticking out of the keyhole and he turns it in one direction, then the other; the key clicks obediently when it turns. He hangs the lock on the door and closes it. Now everything’s in good order and a mouse couldn’t slip through. He pockets the key.

The people in the hold come to life and pound their fists when they hear voices.

“Chief!” carries, muffled, from behind the doors or maybe from under the boards of the deck. “Chief, we’re roasting!”

“There’s nothing to breathe!”

“If you opened the doors, we could at least take a little breath!”

“We’re already baked!”

Ignatov pulls at the collar of his uniform tunic. It truly is hot; it makes you want to dive right into the Yenisei.

“Don’t open the doors,” he tells the watchmen. “But you can open the little windows.”

A small row of low, tightly closed ventilation hatches stretches the length of the deck. The watchman kicks the little doors with the toe of his boot and they open, one after another. Sighs, sobs, and curses carry from the hatches.

“Were they given water?”

“There was no order,” the watchman shrugs.

“Water every hour.”

The last thing he needs is for someone to die of thirst on the final day.

Ignatov can now be more attentive as he gets his bearings. He continues his rounds. Towering over the deck are two squat wooden crew quarters held down by a flat roof. There are guards inside the quarters; provisions are kept there. On the roof is equipment, a couple of upside-down boats, and coils of rope. A few watchmen are wandering on the roof – their deep-blue shadows sway on the waves along the side of the barge and the merciless creak of boards is audible overhead. Everything creaks here: the deck (the boards gape with crevices that move underfoot as if they’re alive), the walls of the crew quarters (which have been eaten away by beetles, to dust in some places, and blackened from rot in others), and dried-out gangways. A low hum comes from railings, red from thin, rusty scabs on paint that was once white. It’s scary to lean against those. They leave a thick, dark red mark on your hand if you touch them.

“My grandfather sailed on this one,” says a barefoot sailor as he runs ahead of Ignatov.

“Your grandfather, well, that makes sense,” says Ignatov, shaking his head.

The closer to the engine room, the stronger the vibration under their feet. The engine room’s crooked door is wide open and the machinery inside lets out a monotonous metallic clanging and a blaze of heat. Somewhere below, in darkness that breathes out jets of flame, two blackened stokers are singing, their white eyeballs and bared teeth flashing angrily. “The sea stretches so wide…”

The motor is loud but it’s also strained and uneven, as though short of breath.

“Do you have a mechanic here?” Ignatov calls to the barefoot sailor.

“No need.” The sailor smiles. “My grandfather told me the Clara has a mind of her own. No mechanic can convince her if she stops.”

Well, there you go. That’s that, then. Quite the tub.

When Ignatov hears that the pregnant peasant woman in the hold has taken a turn for the worse, he allows her to be brought up on deck. He comes over and has a look as one of the guards leads Zuleikha, yellowish and pale, into fresh air and sits her down in the shadow of the crew quarters. Her face has narrowed over the months. It seems as if her eyebrows and lashes have thickened and darkened, and her eyes are rimmed with thick blue paint. These eyes are all that’s left on her face.

But what do you know – she survived. The fat redheaded battleaxe from car number six with the big scarlet birthmark on her cheek died way back at Shchuchye Lake, unable to sustain life force even with her solid body. The mullah’s stout wife, the cat lover, didn’t withstand the journey, either, and departed near Vagai. But this one’s alive. Not only that, she’s carrying a child. What is her soul holding onto?

Why hadn’t he left her with the investigator back in Pyshma? Ignatov couldn’t answer that question for himself. Most likely for the same reason he’d scuttled down the back stairs to avoid the unfamiliar official left in charge at Bakiev’s office. His heart had faltered and raced ahead of his brain so he’d gone and done something stupid. If he’d cooled off and thought things through… well, it wouldn’t have resulted in him running or removing that woman from the investigation. What did she have to do with him, anyway? That’s right, nothing. Ignatov couldn’t even recall her husband’s face, no matter how he tried. He got angry at himself every time – why torment himself? Life isn’t long enough to recall all the peasant men who’ve come at him with axes and pitchforks. An entire division of them have already taken up residence in his head as it is. The folder is called “Case K-2437” and it contains several hundred souls. Damn, he’d like to toss all those faces out of his memory but it doesn’t happen. Fine, he’ll take them to the Angara, hand them over to Kuznets, and basta, the end. They’ll be forgotten; with time they’ll definitely be forgotten.

“Stand watch over her, comrade Ignatov?” The guard nods at Zuleikha. Her belly’s a mountain in front of her and she’s holding it with both hands, arranging herself more comfortably, breathing heavily.

Ignatov waves a hand, letting the guard go. Where’s someone like her going? He suddenly remembers carrying her in his arms, how light and slender she was, as if she weren’t a woman but a girl. Nastasya’s another matter, with a body that’s fleshy, supple, and rolls around in your hands, undulating, so you want to squeeze, knead, and smooth it. Ilona’s body is different, too; it’s soft, languid, and pliant, but a woman’s body all the same. This one’s just air, though. And why, he might ask, was he so scared he sent for a doctor during the night? It’s clear why: he was afraid she’d breathe her last, that’s why. He felt sorry for her.

All the same, she’ll die in the settlement. Taiga, midges, work… she won’t make it, no. Her strength is waning, you can see it in her eyes. Ignatov has recently realized that he can tell from their eyes who still has strength and whose strength is running out. Sometimes he guesses when doing his rounds: this one will be a stiff soon, the eyes are completely cold and dead; this man will still live a while, this woman, too. He guesses right, by the way. Basically, he’s turned into a fortune teller. An awful thought, ugh. That’s what a long trip does to a person…

Zuleikha turns around and raises her exhausted eyes to Ignatov. It’s as if she’s looked into his soul. And those green eyes have already made their mark on his heart.

“Don’t you dare give birth on my watch,” he says sternly and walks toward the bow of the barge.

He’ll hand her over to Kuznets; let her give birth then.

And so they leave Zuleikha on deck. She sits there all day, leaning her back against the wall of the crew quarters and gazing at ridges of green hills floating past in an uneven stubble of pines and spruces. The forests are dense here, dark. And they’re not just any forests but the urman. The watchman brings Zuleikha’s bundle of things up from the hold and she covers up for the night with her winter sheepskin coat. It’s August but the nights are cool and nippy.

Carrying the baby is difficult. Zuleikha’s belly has become large and cumbersome, and her legs are unwieldy, like iron. The baby is growing into someone restless, sometimes spinning like a spindle, sometimes kicking with all its might, sometimes leaning its little paws into her belly. The child apparently resembles its elder sister, Shamsia, who was also a naughty girl and a fidget. Or maybe the baby’s just hungry. Zuleikha herself has lost a lot of weight over these past months, like during the time of the Great Famine in 1921. Even her fingers are thinner, weakened, and stretched with translucent skin. And so it follows that the baby can’t be getting enough food, either.

She often looks at her belly with the fabric of her smock tightly stretched over it and imagines the tiny girl inside wrinkling a nose the size of the nail on a pinkie and opening her little mouth. Then her breasts fill with milk, growing heavy, like male flesh before a romantic meeting; two dark, round spots the size of a tenke coin show through on the fabric. The baby’s only seven months old but the milk has already come in. This happened once before, when she was expecting Sabida.

Zuleikha attempts to forbid herself from thinking about her daughters but it doesn’t work. Shamsia-Firuza, Khalida-Sabida, the water splashes against the side. Shamsia! – a gull in the sky screeches heartrendingly. Firuza! – a second one answers. Khalida! Sabida! – the others join in.

She’s tired of fighting that. And tired of starving. And tired of always traveling somewhere. The imperious black-mustached Red Hordesman had kept Leibe, Izabella, Konstantin Arnoldovich, the hard-to-love yet familiar Ilya Petrovich Ikonnikov, and even the horrid Gorelov all back somewhere on the pier. It is doubtful Zuleikha will see them again. They have already been consigned to the past and turned into spectral recollections, like Murtaza or the Vampire Hag. She is so tired of losing people close to her. And living in fear of parting, in constant expectation of a quick death for the child, of her own death. She is tired of living in general.

Her only joy and comfort lies in her pocket. Zuleikha gratefully remembers the moment her death appeared to her in the railroad car, to the rhythmic clacking of wheels. It was lying on her palm, as a heavy lump of sugar with sharp edges, and it has been with her ever since, like a loyal friend or dedicated mother. In her roughest moments, Zuleikha would grope at the folds of her clothes for that cherished lump and feel relief. Apparently, this truly was her very own death, hers alone, sent from above through a supreme gesture. While all around her people were dying from illness or hunger, others losing their minds, their deaths didn’t touch her: they felt distant, passing her by. Those who had died on other trains and couldn’t be buried in time lay along the railroad and saw their fellow travelers off with frozen gazes. Others who’d heard about the daring escape carried out near Pyshma and wanted to repeat it had been caught and executed on the spot, by the train cars. But Zuleikha was still living. That meant this very death had been predestined for her; it’s small, sweet, and smells – subtly and appealingly – of something bitter. Maybe it’s too bad she didn’t eat the sugar back on the train; she could have brought her suffering to an end long ago. I’ll eat it as soon as things become completely unbearable, she’d decided. It would be better to do it, of course, before the child is born, so they can pass away together, never parting.

Zuleikha opens her eyes. All the objects around her seem to ripple and float in dawn’s light-pink mist. A sturdy, white-breasted gull is sitting on a railing, the glistening amber buttons of its unblinking eyes watching. Behind the gull, vague outlines of distant shores show through the cottony morning fog that’s formed. The motor is silent; the barge drifts noiselessly downstream with the current. Small waves splash tenderly against the side. And then there’s a familiar voice at the bow: “Go ahead!”

The gull spreads its wings, rustling almost soundlessly, and dissolves into the fog. Zuleikha looks out from behind the wall of the crew quarters. She sees Ignatov at the bow, bare to the waist. A sailor is splashing river water on him from a bucket. Ignatov laughs and shakes his wet head so spray flies everywhere. His hands rub his ears, his sharp ribs, and shoulders bulging with muscles. He has a nice smile after all. It’s white, like sugar. And there’s a deep scar on his back, under one shoulder blade.

They toil their way down the Yenisei for a day and don’t enter the Angara until the following morning. The day turns out hot and sweaty again as they chug upstream; they feel sleepy in the afternoon. Ignatov sits on a tightly coiled bundle of rope, leaning his back against the wooden covering of the crew quarters. Out from under the bill of the peaked cap that’s pulled down over his eyebrows, he can see the spines of hills tinged bluish-green and the stony cheeks of precipices. Thin ripples of sunlight burn hot on the water, like fiery fish scales.

Now, at last, there can’t be much longer. He’s already counting the minutes until he sees the distant red dot of a flag on a boat; until he hands people over to Kuznets, counting heads so they don’t torture themselves with lists (or have to look at their faces – why do that yet again?); until this is out of his hands so he can breathe freely and calmly for the first time in half a year. That’s it, Kuznets, you’re in charge now. May those bearded faces haunt your nights now. I’ve had enough. I’d like work that’s a little simpler and more understandable. If they’re enemies, then cut them right down, mercilessly; but look after them if they’re friends. For enemies to be looked after and fed and pitied and doctored… well, spare me. And then it will be home, home! Get enough sleep on the train and go straight to Bakiev from the train station to report, and then to Nastasya in the evening – to Nastasya, sweet, dear, and passionate. He wasn’t overly concerned that she might have found someone else during this half-year. That one would disappear, just like he’d shown up. Anyway, he, Ignatov, would figure things out quickly. He’d have to find time for Ilona, too, to stop by, since things hadn’t ended nicely.

The barefoot sailor is tinkering nearby, repairing a rotten gangway covered with black spots of mildew.

“You been on the Angara before?” he asks.

It’s so hot Ignatov feels too lazy to answer. Dozing to the monotonous plopping of waterwheels is sweet and languorous. You were right, Bakiev, my friend, Ignatov admits to himself.Oh, this business of nannying a train turned out to be far from simple…

“My grandfather told me there’s nothing on earth prettier than the Angara,” says the sailor, not giving up. “Or more treacherous, either.”

Ignatov barely raises an eyebrow in response… He’ll admit to witnessing the search in Bakiev’s office, too. He’ll tell Bakiev he didn’t doubt for a second that they’d release him soon, that’s why he left then. They’ll laugh about that together and slap each other on the shoulders.

Flattered by the merest attention given by a commander from another place, the sailor abandons what he’s doing and turns to Ignatov, continuing to drive his point home: “The Angara, she’s like… a mother for some, a sister or stepmother. And for others, she’s a downright grave.”

Ignatov rests his chin on his chest. He’ll need a gift for Nastasya, for the long wait. Some kind of headscarf, maybe – or what is it women like, anyway? His head falls to his shoulder; the light rocking lulls him, puts him to sleep.

“My grandfather, he drowned here himself,” says the sailor, winding up his story. “Uh-huh. Didn’t help that he could swim like a pike.”

Lightning cuts the sky open lengthwise, along the whole horizon. Violet clouds rub up against one another, breathing blackness. There’s a low, rumbling peal of thunder but no rain.

The storm seems to have sprung up spontaneously, in an instant. A gust of wind knocks the hat from Ignatov’s head. He wakes, darts after it, and lo and behold – sweet mother! – it’s already all around: the horizon’s rocking, waves are hurling foam, gulls are darting in the air like arrows, and the sailors are rushing around like cats with their tails on fire. You can’t hear the screams over the wind.

“Comrade commander!” A watchman has appeared next to him and is shouting into his ear. “Over there…”

He points a finger at the stern, the dolt, unsure what to say. Ignatov heads toward the stern. The metal door is shaking from being pounded.

“Open it!” they wail inside. “Open it!”

“A rebellion?” says Ignatov with a nervous start. “You want to organize a revolution for me, you bastards?”

He yanks his revolver from its holster. The watchmen are aiming their rifles at the doors.

“Sons of bitches!” carries from the hold. “We’ll drown, open up! You drowning us on purpose? Sons of bitches! Sons of bitches! There’s water in here! Water! Aaaah!”

“You’re playing tricks,” hisses Ignatov. “You won’t fool me. Go on, back, you lowlifes! I’ll shoot!”

The barge’s horn is low and booming, and reverberates across the water. What’s going on? Why are you honking, you devils? Ignatov races to the wheelhouse but it’s hard to run because the deck is jumping under his feet, the boards are cracking, and there’s spray in his face.

There’s nobody in the wheelhouse. The ship’s wheel is spinning like crazy.

“What is this?” Ignatov shouts in the face of a sailor running past him.

“We’re going down!” the other yells back. “Can’t you see?”

Going down? How can that be? So the ones in the hold weren’t lying?

A crate of tools slides off the tilting roof with a loud crash – it cracks but doesn’t spill. Whistling and spinning, it sweeps along the deck past Ignatov and disappears into the water. And then suddenly, falling like rain, like hail, are handles, crowbars, and shovels… Axe blades gleam past (Ignatov just manages to press against the wall – they would have hacked him as they flew!), scythes screech, pitchforks scatter overboard with a thin groan, and nails jingle along the wood. Carts leap into the water, their wheels turning. An entire stockpile of goods is flying, flying, into the Angara, toward all the demons in hell.

The deck is keeling, keeling. The horizon suddenly tips, one end rearing into the sky. The barge’s stern settles, its blunt snout raised into the air.

“Jump!” carries from the bow. “Go! You’ll be dragged down!”

Over there, several sailors and stokers are springing into the Angara, as fast as frogs.

What’s that about? Jump? What about the people in the hold? Ignatov gropes in his pocket for the key and takes it out. He races toward the stern. The watchmen are thudding unsteadily toward him.

“Halt!” shouts Ignatov.

A wall of wind silences him and his shout can’t be heard.

The escort guards hurl their rifles in the water, jump after them, and disappear in the waves. They’ve abandoned their post, the dogs! The final watchman tears a red-and-white life ring from a nail, tosses it in the Angara, lets out a harrowing wail, crosses himself, and plops into the water below.

The deck jerks desperately and Ignatov falls and grabs at some kind of clamp. The key flies out of his hand, drumming along the boards. Ignatov throws his chest on it before it slides away. There it is, the dear thing! He puts it in his mouth: Now I won’t let it go. He continues crawling toward the stern, hanging on with his hands.

Something above him sighs loudly, then slaps violently, booming. Ignatov looks up and sees the tarpaulin is beating at the roof like a giant sail and the ropes are flung up toward the sky, like hands in prayer.

To the hold, to the hold, Ignatov! Let those kulaks out. Let everybody out, and the hell with it! What, did you bring them all this way for nothing?

Through the space between the crew quarters, he notices the pregnant woman on the other side of the deck. She’s gripping a railing with her hands and gawking at Ignatov. She’s too far away; he can’t reach.

“Jump,” he cries at her, pulling the key from his mouth and attempting to yell over the wind. “Jump into the water, you fool! You’ll be dragged under!”

A large wave hangs over the side of the barge and crashes flat on the deck. After flowing back, there’s neither woman, nor railing. Only broken, rusted stubs sticking out.

Crawl further, Ignatov, further! That was one woman. You need to let many go.

As he crawls up to the door of the hold, he notices water gushing into the open ventilation hatches. Someone’s fingers are stretching into the gaps, attempting to catch hold but a wave washes them back inside.

The deck under Ignatov wails with hundreds of voices.

His chest shudders from blows to the boards – someone’s attempting to knock them out.

Groans drift up from below.

Thunder claps. Rain falls in thick sheets and sloshes on the deck. Ignatov crawls toward the door but everything around him is suddenly becoming loose and slippery from the rain. Now, now, you sons of bitches, I’ll let you out, don’t wail.

The moment he seizes one of the door handles, something cracks loudly and ominously, and the barge begins submerging into the water.

Ignatov manages to keep his fingers clenched, holding onto the handle and not dropping the key. The only thing he can’t manage is to take a deeper breath. Water is pouring into his ears, nose, and eyes. Ignatov is descending into the Angara – Clara is dragging him down with her.

Where are you, you damned keyhole? He pokes with the key, looking for the hole in the lock. Chk-chk! He found it, put the key in! But it won’t turn. It’s jammed. He’s desperately turning the key in the lock but the Clara is revolving slowly, plunging deeper.

Come on, Ignatov, come on! Water makes his hair billow, stings his eyes, and gets in his mouth.

There! It turned! He pulls the door. It opens slowly, as if in a dream.

There’s the grate behind it. Damn! Dozens of hands stretch through it, reaching toward Ignatov, seizing at the bars, and shaking them. Water is pouring into the hold through the grate, swiftly, relentlessly.

The door handle slips out of his fingers. Ignatov wants to catch it and reaches out, his muscles straining, but the force of the water hurls him aside. He sees wide-open eyes and wide-open mouths through a green layer of water behind the grate.

“A-a-a-a-a-h!” are their low, scared cries, and thousands of large bubbles surround Ignatov, sliding along his body, licking his chest, neck, and face.

In each bubble, an “A-a-a-a-a-h.”

Dozens of hands reach, reach toward him through the grate, wiggling their fingers. They sway like a huge sheaf of grain. They’re going deeper, deeper. Vanishing into the dark.

The water twists and tosses Ignatov in various directions, finally hurling him out, up to the surface.

“Aaaah!” he howls at the low sky, where shaggy clouds are billowing. “Aaaaaaah!”

Rain lashes at his open mouth.

“Ee! Ee!” answer the gulls.

Zuleikha is carried off somewhere below, through layers of water. Her eyes grow heavy as its thick greenness dissolves into them, darkening her view. A blizzard of bubbles spirals around her, beating at her face.

She’s clenching her teeth: Stay still, don’t breathe.

A faint light dances, flashing, sometimes below, sometimes to her side. It dwindles. Large, dark silhouettes are swimming in the distance – maybe they’re above, maybe below. Wreckage? People? Fish?

She presses her arms to her chest and pulls up her legs. Her braids are knotted around her neck.

All-powerful Allah, all is at Your will.

She is spun, somersaulted, and hurled side-first into something hard.

Allah heard your prayers and decided to cut short your life’s journey, so that you vanish without a trace in the waters of the Angara.

In the name of God, the Lord of mercy…

Water begins flooding her mouth. It’s a little bitter and her teeth crunch on sand.

Thanks be to God, Lord of heaven and earth…

Maybe she swallowed that water or maybe she breathed it. Her body has begun twitching, dancing.

Amen… Amen…

Her body jerks once more and goes still. Her arms hang like whips and her legs slacken. Her braids stretch upward, swaying slowly, like water plants. Zuleikha is sinking, her face down, her braids up. Lower, even lower, to the very bottom. The soles of her feet drop into soft silt, raising a lazy, murky black cloud around her. Ankles. Knees. Belly.

The child wakes up sharply, abruptly. Beating with its little feet, a second time, a third. Squirming with its little hands, turning its head and fidgeting. Zuleikha’s belly quivers from the small heels pounding inside.

Zuleikha’s legs shudder in response. Again. And again. They push off from the bottom. Tighten and slacken. Her arms tighten and slacken, too.

She kicks toward the surface. From an agitated and swaying silty cloud toward a distant light ripple. Up, higher and higher, through the malachite layers.

She thrashes harder with her arms and legs, and rises faster. Some sort of cool, buoyant current catches and carries her up.

A blinding wall of white light hits her eyes. Zuleikha batters the water with her arms, shouts, and coughs. There’s a sharp pain in her throat, from her nose to her very innards. Wind bites at her face and she hears gulls shrieking and waves pounding her ears. She catches sight of a shred of vivid blue sky. Could she really have swum up?

Water roils around her, buffeting, slipping through her fingers. There’s nothing to grasp. Zuleikha doesn’t know how to swim. Her feet are pulling her downward again. Is she really going back to the bottom? The horizon keels and ducks as her head goes under. Allah –

Hands pull her up by the braids.

“Lie on the water!” says a familiar voice next to her. “Belly on top!”

Ignatov!

Zuleikha attempts to wriggle free, to catch onto him with her hands, and at least grasp hold of something.

“You’ll drown us both!” Ignatov pushes away but doesn’t let go of her braids. “Lie back, you fool!”

She coughs and wails; she can barely hear. But she’s trying and she turns over so her belly’s on top and she’s lying on the water. Her belly rises above the surface like an island. Waves whip her face, as does rain falling from above.

“Legs and arms extended, make a star with them! A star! Do what I tell you!” Ignatov’s face is right next to her but she can’t figure out where. “There you go! Good job, you fool.”

Zuleikha extends her arms and legs and rocks like a jellyfish. She has an unbearable urge to cough but holds back. She’s breathing loudly, convulsively. If only she could get enough air to breathe, if only there were enough.

“I’m holding you,” says the voice next to her. “I’m holding your braids.”

The baby has calmed in her belly and isn’t bothering her. The waves are subsiding little by little, too, diminishing. The lightning is creeping away beyond the horizon, and a small wedge of blue sky is widening and growing. The clouds are dispersing in various directions.

“Are you here?” Zuleikha is afraid to turn her head; she doesn’t want to gulp down water.

“I’m here,” says the voice next to her. “How could I get away from you now?”

At first Ignatov wants to swim to shore but Zuleikha can’t. And so they toss around in the channel, drifting with the current. They’re fished out a couple of hours later, chilled through, their lips inky-blue. Kuznets’s nimble launch had come tearing along to meet the Clara but had found only her survivors. Other than Zuleikha and Ignatov, just a handful of sailors have been saved. Including the barefoot one – the one who kept talking about his grandfather. Apparently his time had not yet come.

When all of them – weakened and shaking from the cold – have been safely settled on the deck of the launch and ordered to remove and hand over their wet clothes for drying, Zuleikha shoves her hand in her pocket for the sugar. She pulls out only a handful of white sludge. She straightens her fingers and the goop immediately drains through them. She puts her hand over the side and the milky white drops flow off into the Angara.

The home brew glugs cheerfully as it’s poured from a tall, round green bottle into a crooked tin mug. Ignatov’s standing in the middle of the crew quarters, naked but for the burlap sacking he’s holding to his chest with his hand; there are still bits of river plants in his wet hair. He’s gazing evenly, unblinking, at that steady, cloudy stream. He grabs the mug without waiting for the last drops to fall from the bottle’s mouth and tips it into his gullet. Alcohol burns his larynx, plops into his stomach, and spreads to his head in a slow, warm wave. Green sparks instantly explode before his eyes. Home-brewed liquor’s strong, it’s good. He exhales slowly and quietly, and looks up at Kuznets. Kuznets’s eyes are mean, like a dog’s, and his mouth is a straight line.

“She was rusty, like” – Ignatov squeezes the burlap in his fists, kneading at it – “like…”

Kuznets takes the mug from Ignatov’s hands and refills it.

“I can’t!”

“Drink!”

The tin rim clinks against Ignatov’s strong teeth: he’s grasping at the mug and drinking. The home brew pours in as easily and smoothly as if it were oil. The green sparks in front of his eyes fuse, flow, and beckon. So what now? Get soused, completely blotto? He’s never once in his life been genuinely drunk, blacking out, falling down. Feeling regret, Ignatov takes the empty mug from his mouth and breathes out. His eyelids grow heavy, closing.

“Now, you listen.” Kuznets’s voice is stern and clipped. “I have no obligation to relieve you of your poor goners.”

“Huh?” Ignatov has trouble lifting his eyelids. Kuznets flickers, warps, and doubles. There are already four, not just two, mean, unblinking eyes driving into Ignatov.

“I’ll drop off everybody that’s left at the location.”

“Wh-where?”

“Somewhere! We’ll find a suitable place.”

“Erm…”

Ignatov’s looking through dirty window glass. Out there, on a distant shore, the pointed tops of endless spruce trees extend beyond the horizon and rock in the wind.

“Hold on a minute…” Ignatov turns back to Kuznets. He can’t manage to catch his gaze at all – he has too many eyes, the angry devil. “In the taiga? Without equip… equipment?”

“It’s an order,” Kuznets say flintily.

The burlap nearly slips from Ignatov’s chest and he catches at it, wrapping himself up again.

“They’ll croak,” he says quietly.

Now they can hear the loud rattling of the boat’s motor.

“You have to understand that we need that settlement!” Kuznets, who’d divided in two, finally merges into one.

“You want to put a dot on the map?” Ignatov takes the bottle by its narrow neck to splash something into the empty mug for himself. “Conquering the shores of the great Angara? And the people? The hell with them? New ones will be born?”

Kuznets grabs the bottle’s thick middle but Ignatov won’t give it back.

“Quiet!” Kuznets pulls it toward himself. “Who sank the barge?”

“It was a leaky barge! Leaky, as leaky as a rotten old stump!”

“Were your railroad cars leaky, too? Half the people scattered along the way, half escaped… Or maybe it’s your hands that are leaky, Ignatov? Or your head?”

“But I brought them all the way across the country!” Ignatov groans and attempts to pull Kuznets’s tenacious fingers from the slippery glass. “I dragged them along the rails for half a year to deliver them to you, you ass. And now you want to send them right off to the taiga? To feed the wolves?”

“No, my dear man, you’re going to feed the wolves,” Kuznets hisses right into his ear, his hot breath enveloping Ignatov. “Because you’re staying with them. As the commandant.”

The bottle slides away, remaining in Kuznets’s big paws. Kuznets sputters, steadies his breathing, and wipes his drenched forehead.

“Temporarily, of course,” he says, not looking at Ignatov as he pours home brew into the mug for him with evil generosity. “What, you want me to fuss around with your invalids? A couple dozen old people? Who shoved them in the hold? Me? Wasn’t that you? If you’d brought them in the open, on the deck, you and I wouldn’t be having this conversation right now. But you cooked up this mess so you’re going to eat it. You’ll sit with them a week and guard them until I bring a new batch and a permanent commandant.”

After a loud thud, the bottle’s standing back on the table. “What’re you doing, Kuznets?” Ignatov’s voice is husky, as if he has a cold.

The burlap falls to the floor and Ignatov is left in his birthday suit. Kuznets casts him a stern gaze:

“That’s an order, special assignments employee Ignatov.”

He hurls the familiar gray “Case” folder on the table and leaves. Ignatov grabs the mug with both hands and pours home brew into himself. Its coolness streams down his chin, neck, and bare chest.

“Matches. Salt. Fishing tackle.”

Kuznets crouches as he opens each of the sacks and parcels that lie on the rocks, poking a firm finger into them. Ignatov’s standing alongside him, teetering slightly. He’s wearing a uniform that’s still half-damp and wrinkled (it’s clear they’ve wrung it out hard and flapped it in the wind), and his holster is attached crookedly, but he doesn’t notice. Kuznets’s voice reaches him from a distance, as if from the other shore. Green sparks are still floating before his eyes, blocking out a distant horizon of boundless hills jagged with spruce trees, the dark gray Angara water, the launch rocking in it, and the wooden rowboat by the shore, where a couple of soldiers are waiting.

“Saws. Knives. Kettles.” Kuznets looks at Ignatov’s sleepy face with its drooping eyelids. “I’m telling you, you’re going to boil up fish soup.”

Some sort of recollection weakly stirs in his memory.

“And grouse!” Ignatov raises a shaking finger. “And grouse in champagne sauce, is that possible?”

“It’s possible.” Kuznets stands up and brushes off his knees. “Sorry, but I’m not leaving provisions. You’ll somehow take care of that yourselves. There’s ammunition” – he kicks a small, taut sack and something clinks heavily inside – “enough for all the wild beasts in the taiga. Well, and your wretched people, too, if they don’t obey. And this” – he takes a heavy, nearly full bottle from one soldier’s hands – “is for you. So you’re not sad at night.”

Ignatov recognizes it right away. He smiles, takes it, and embraces the cool glass; the liquid splashes promisingly inside: Thank you, brother. Kuznets slides the gray “Case” folder between Ignatov and the bottle.

“Well, commandant,” he says, “stay strong. I’ll send assistance soon.”

Ignatov stoops and neatly, slowly, places the bottle on the rocks, so as not to spill the treasure. The folder falls next to it.

“W-wait…” His tongue is tied, as if it’s not his own. “I wanted to ask you about, to ask…”

He straightens up and looks around, but Kuznets is gone. There are just two oars gleaming in the distance. The rowboat is headed toward the launch.

“Where are you going?” Ignatov whispers in surprise. “Kuznets, where are you going?”

They’re already lifting the boat onto the launch. Ignatov takes an unsteady step and his foot clangs against something: long, thin one-handed saws lying on wet burlap. Are these really saws? They’re going to saw lumber with these flimsy things?

“Where are you going, Kuznets?” Ignatov raises a hand, waves, and takes a couple of steps along the shore.

The launch lets out a high, sustained whistle in parting. The motor sneezes and barks, then chugs evenly, and the launch turns around.

“Where are you going?” Ignatov yells, continuing to run in pursuit. “Where? Wait!”

The launch leaves, shrinking.

“Wait!” Ignatov runs into the water. “Where?”

His fingers grope wildly for the holster and tear out the revolver. A cold wave splashes into his boots. Ignatov is trudging in water up to his knees, then to his waist.

“Where’ve you taken us, you son of a bitch? Where?”

“Air… air… air…” responds the echo, flying along the Angara in pursuit of the dark blue dot of the launch. But it’s already dissolving on the horizon.

“Where? WHERE? WHERE?”

Ignatov squeezes the trigger. The shot crashes, loud and booming.

Someone behind him is sobbing, frightened. The exiles are standing on the shore, huddled together and clutching lean bundles with their things, their faces gaunt, dark. Ignatov can feel their fearful eyes boring into him – the huge eyes of pregnant Zuleikha, the peasants’ gloomy stare, the lost gaze of the Leningrad remainders, and Gorelov’s crazed glare.

He helplessly slaps the water with his revolver and looks up at the sky. Something small and white is floating toward him from a black cloud. Snow.