Zuleikha

THIRTY

When viewed from the cliffs, the Angara is plainly visible. The splendid green left shore swells steeply, like risen dough in a vat, and its bright emerald reflection falls into the river’s leaden mirror. The water twists around lazily like a wide piece of heavy fabric before departing for the blueness of the horizon, toward the Yenisei. To where Kuznets’s launch recently departed from.

The right shore, where the exiles have settled, spreads low and obligingly at the water’s edge then boils up into a sprawling knoll, where it grows into hulking hills, and bares its cliffs like fangs. Ignatov is standing on one of those cliffs now, gazing at the taiga below. The camp isn’t visible from here; it’s somewhere below, deep down in the folds of the hill.

Ignatov doesn’t want to see anybody, though. Up until now, he’s been oddly removed from himself, taking in the situation like an onlooker. Who is that standing, clothed, in water up to his waist, brushing away snowflakes stuck to his hair? Is that really him? Who’s giving orders (“Light a fire. Break branches for a shelter. Not one step away from the camp, you bastards!”) then going out into the taiga to hunt? Is that really him? Who’s trudging along animal trails, snapping fallen brush, and creeping up to the cliff along rocks overgrown with moss and dry grass? Is that really him?

Now he sits down on a boulder heated by the sun and squints. He feels the stone’s warmth through the chill of his still-damp clothing. The fragile stubble of lichen pricks his palm. A couple of mosquitoes hover by his ear but the wind blows them aside and their buzzing departs, dissolving far away. Freshness from the large body of water floats into his nostrils along with the tart smell of the taiga: spruces, pines, larches, and various fragrant grasses. And that’s how it is. He, Ivan Ignatov, is here, in Siberia. He drowned more than three hundred enemy souls in the Angara. He’s been left on a knoll as commandant of a handful of half-alive anti-Soviet elements. Without foodstuffs or personnel. With an order to survive and await the arrival of the next barge.

Let’s say he didn’t drown them but attempted to save them. “Attempted” is a word for weaklings, according to Bakiev. A communist doesn’t attempt, he does. But I couldn’t save them, couldn’t! I tried my best, there was nothing else I could do. I myself nearly drowned…

But you didn’t! And they all drowned, so now they’re feeding the fish on the bottom…

Would it really have been better if I’d drowned along with them? And who were they anyway? Kulaks, exploiters, enemies, a burden for the Soviet authorities. They’ll multiply again, like Kuznets says…

You want to assuage your guilt with someone else’s words? And whose words? Kuznets’s, that son of a bitch.

Negative thoughts drive into his brain like nails, splintering it. Ignatov takes off his peaked cap, gathers his hair in his hand and pulls, as if he wants to tear it from his skull. As you were, he orders himself. Busy your hands with work and your feet with walking. Exhaust, expend, and enervate the body, so as not to think. Or at least think about something else.

He looks at the blurry, blue-gray edge of the horizon. That’s where the next barge will come from. When? Soon, Kuznets promised. It took them three days to get here. Kuznets had gotten here faster in his launch, in a day. Let’s say he needs a day for the return trip, a day or two for bureaucratic delays at the office and loading a new barge, then three days to return to Ignatov. A week total.

He’ll have to hold out for a week.

And what if Kuznets is late? That son of a bitch won’t hurry. He might well not even come for a week and a half or two weeks. Toward the end of August, maybe. And snow already came down today. It’s not like summer here at all, just a ripe, cold autumn.

How far had they come from Krasnoyarsk? They’d floated two days along the Yenisei – that’s about three hundred kilometers, if not more – almost an entire day going upstream along the Angara – another hundred kilometers or so. So four hundred in all. Four hundred kilometers of water travel separate him from Kuznets. And a boundless sea of taiga. Every now and then, Ignatov spotted settlements sheltered along the Yenisei’s shores – he kept wondering if they were active or abandoned – but not one on the Angara. There are no people here.

He flicks angrily at a beetle that has crawled out on the blue-gray stone; it flies off into the abyss. Ignatov stands and straightens his uniform tunic, which is still damp at the hem. Why did you get in the water then, you fool? You drenched yourself for nothing. He should have thought it through earlier, on the boat. Grabbed that rapscallion Kuznets by the scruff, by the neck, by the hair and not let him go, not let him go for anything. Let them tie him – Ignatov – up, put him under guard, bring him to Krasnoyarsk with escorts, then reprimand him for overreaching his authority. Somehow that would be better than what he has here now.

“A week,” Ignatov says sternly to the abyss gaping under him, wagging his finger. “I’m waiting exactly a week, no more. So you’d better watch out!”

The abyss is silent.

The black grouse here are pudgy and stupid. Their big, round black eyes gawk at Ignatov under fat, red arched brows and they don’t fly away. He approaches to a distance of several paces and shoots them point-blank. Their soft little bodies explode in fountains of black feathers, their wings shudder belatedly, and their tufted little heads fall into the grass. And their kin are already gaping with curiosity from neighboring trees. What happened there, what? We want to see, too. And so do we. He’s nailed six of them, the number of shells in the cylinder. He binds their little throats together with a piece of string left in his pocket and it turns out to be two hefty bundles. He goes back to the shore.

He had painstakingly noted the route from the camp. You won’t get lost if you don’t go too deeply into the urman – the Angara’s right there, next to you, everywhere – but it’s possible to stray. He thus committed to memory all the markers, whispering to himself under his breath, as if he were unwinding string. Now he’s winding it back into a tight ball as he returns: from the cliff, go down along the rocky path between the boulders – some are pinkish, some are whitish-green from the soft, curly moss – to the clearing that’s bright, almost as if it’s balding; further through sparse pines, walking along huge, flat rocks with smatterings of grass, to a gently sloping descent; through reddish candle-like pines and black brushlike spruces, down, a long way down, to a small, round clearing where a once-huge birch, now burned by lightning, stands, with its legs awkwardly sprawling; from the birch, walk along a cold and burbling brook, descend further toward the Angara; cross the brook at the large boulder that looks like a sleeping bear and go deeper into the forest. He should soon see an opening between the trees – that’s the shore, where the handful of exiles has found shelter.

Ignatov makes his way through the taiga. He strides loudly, crunching. His feet are squelching in his boots because he couldn’t hold on when he was jumping across the brook, on the rocks, and had taken a spill into the water. A heavy bundle of dead birds dangles from each hand. It will be an outstanding dinner. Here you are, citizen enemies, chow down. You’ll feed yourself on grouse all week with me and eat your fill after the hungry road.

He doesn’t even notice when evening falls. A thick brown dusk suddenly settles on the taiga. It has grown sharply colder. Carefree daytime birds have gone silent, and now there are sorrowful, distant night voices calling. All the sounds – the murmur of leaves, the whisper of evergreen needles, the hum of branches in the wind – seem closer and more resonant. Even the crunch of dead wood underfoot has turned to a loud crackling.

Something large, soft, and light-colored scuds past his head with a lively hoot, fanning his face with its wings. Ignatov’s stomach shudders with an unpleasant chill and he holds his breath. An owl, he understands with belated relief; he quickens his pace. Some sort of chirring, high screeches, and urgent snuffling carry from a thicket. There’s a low, velvety roar somewhere far away.

So, where’s the site? It feels like it should appear any minute if he just peers between the trees. Spruce, spruce, spruce… And suddenly the crazy thought flashes that he’ll come out on the familiar shore but nobody will be there. Not one person; they’re dead, every one. What if all of them – green-eyed Zuleikha and the pathetic Leningraders and the bootlicking Gorelov – drowned there, in the middle of the Angara along with the barge? And only he, Ignatov, is left among the living? And only he was abandoned here on the deserted shore?

He breaks into a run. There’s a deafening crack underfoot and then something gets into his eyes, hitting his cheeks. One foot lands in a hole, the other catches a dead branch. He nearly falls but stays on his feet. He runs faster. He thrusts his elbows forward to protect his face from branches. The grouse are suddenly getting heavy and large, as if they’ve been swelling along the way.

Finally there’s an orange flame flickering between the tree trunks. Ignatov bounds forward a couple of times and runs out to the clearing by the river. He’s panting and his heart is pounding, either from fear or from running so fast. And there they are, the people; they haven’t gone anywhere. Some are finishing building a shelter under the branches of a huge, sprawling spruce and others are swarming around the fire. He slows his pace and calms his labored breathing. Without hurrying, he approaches the women crouched by the fire and casually flings the grouse, which are still warm, at their feet.

As the women busy themselves with supper, Ignatov decides to finish up an unpleasant but necessary task. It concerns the shabby gray “Case” folder mottled at the top with muddy-purplish rectangular stamps and seals, which contains within its gaunt depths all the bitter history of their long journey. He needs to cross out all the departed.

He takes the folder and sits by the fire. He imagines flinging it into the flames and it flaring up instantly, flapping its pages as if it were alive, writhing, blackening, and shrinking, dissolving in the hot yellow tongues and disappearing in the black sky as light smoke. Leaving no smell, no trace at all.

He can’t. He’s the commandant here, so he has to keep order. Which means having a precise list on hand with the names of all the camp’s residents. Or is it more correct to call them prisoners? But what kind of prisoners are they if their only guard is a commandant in wet jodhpurs with a single revolver? He decides to stick with what he’s accustomed to. The exiles.

He uses a stick to remove a couple of burning embers from the fire. He waits for them to cool. Then he grasps the end of the longer, sturdier piece – it feels greasy to the touch. He takes a breath and decisively opens the folder. In Ignatov’s gray, tong-like fingers, covered with brownish spots and blotches, are four wrinkled sheets, yellowed by time. The paper is rough in places, where water and snow dropped on it, and the corners are tattered and torn. The fifth sheet, underneath, and in better condition, lists the Leningrad remainders. Some eight hundred names in total, scattered in slightly crooked columns that dance recklessly across the pages. Black pencil lines run just as cheerily, diagonally crossing out more than half the surnames. In the semidarkness by the fire, the sheets are reminiscent of a finely embroidered towel.

He begins with the easiest, the Leningraders. He crossed off a couple of the fifteen or so names long ago, while they were still on the road; the rest won’t need to be because they’re all here. Those “remainders” foisted on him at the beginning of the journey have turned out to be surprisingly hardy. You’d expect that with the social degenerates, Gorelov being the sort who can adapt anywhere, change his colors to any hue, switch sides to whomever he needs, latch on, gnaw through a couple of throats, and survive. But the intelligentsia! Polite to the point of leaving a bitter taste, sometimes cheeky when speaking, but also timid, listless, and submissive in their actions. Pathetic. And alive – unlike many peasants, who hadn’t withstood illness and hunger. So there are your “remainders.” Kuznets was taken in by their pale look, too, and selected them for his launch as the most emaciated, infirm, and incapable of escape. Basically, Leningrad was lucky.

Ignatov’s gaze runs through the surnames, checking them with the faces around him.

Ikonnikov, Ilya Petrovich. There he is, dragging a gnarled, nearly bare spruce branch. (Where’re you carrying that, you blockhead? A branch like that isn’t fit for a shelter. It won’t protect from the rain.) He’s obviously clueless, unaccustomed and unsuited to labor, weak of body, and spineless. Someone like this won’t go on the run or incite rebellion; he’s not dangerous. Gorelov reported that Ikonnikov is a famous artist, drew Lenin for posters. That’s something; he drew revolutionary posters but ended up here. There must be a reason why.

Sumlinsky, Konstantin Arnoldovich. A quiet little old man, good-natured. He’s fussing by one of the shelters, waving his arms around. He’s trying (nice job, Gramps) even though he’s a scholar, either a geographer or an agronomist. Of course there won’t be much use for him but his zeal pleases Ignatov for some reason; it warms his heart. This one’s not dangerous, either.

Brzhostovskaya-Sumlinskaya, Izabella Leopoldovna (her papa bestowed quite the surname and patronymic here!) is his wife. She’s sitting by the fire next to Ignatov, attempting to pluck a bird. Her slender fingers – dry, translucent skin stretched over bones – grasp helplessly at resilient grouse feathers that are apparently extremely stubborn. You’ll croak from hunger before you can deal with it, you old bag. This haughty personage has pretension in every gesture and her tongue is intemperate. Gorelov complained that she berates the authorities, but he can’t communicate the exact words because the criticism’s in French. Sneaky, clever. But this decrepit cobra has nothing beyond cleverness and a sharp tongue. So she’s not dangerous.

Gorelov, Vasily Kuzmich. He’s found himself a long stick and is swinging it as if it were a baton, simultaneously taking command of the building sites for all three shelters. He’s strolling from site to site, poking with his stick, shouting so loudly it makes the ears ring. The rascal appointed himself boss. Everything’s obvious about this one. A most repugnant and loathsome character, the sort Ignatov would have gladly crushed in his normal life. Here, though, he needs to associate with him. On the road, Ignatov constantly summoned the minders from the railroad cars to see him, questioning them about the mood, and Gorelov was the fiercest, most obsequious speaker of all. Whoever’s strongest is the master for this dog. He’ll lick your hand and wag his tail as long as you’re in power and have a revolver, but he’ll bite or even tear out your throat if you ease up for a minute. This one’s dangerous.

And so Ignatov gradually reaches the end of the Leningrad list. Several of them are either school teachers or university instructors, and there’s a print shop worker, a bank employee, a couple of factory engineers or mechanics, a housewife, and a couple of people lacking specific occupations (social parasites, ulcers on the body of society), and goodness knows how a milliner wormed her way into this society. Basically, odds and ends, moth-eaten old folks who’ve been stored away, history’s dust. Other than Gorelov, not one is dangerous.

Now comes the more complex task of sorting out the dekulakized. First find all those alive on the list and mark them, then cross out the rest.

The small Tatar woman, Zuleikha, is kneeling just a few steps from Ignatov, dressing the grouse he shot. He finds her name on the sheet and circles it with the charcoal. The line comes out bold and fat, densely black. Like her brows, he thinks. He scrutinized her face well then, in the water. No, he hadn’t just scrutinized it, he’d memorized it, learned it by rote. He’d kept peering: Is she alive? Breathing? Not too tired? He couldn’t allow her to die. Her life seemed to him to be the only forgiveness for the others, who were destroyed. When he saw her being lifted onto the launch and laid on the deck, he felt such sudden exhaustion he could have died, but only one thing was in his head: I saved her, I saved her, pulled her out, led her, dragged her the whole way. A mean thought flashes: Do you think that will be taken into account? I let three hundred go to the bottom and pulled one out. I’m quite the savior, there’s no denying it…

As you were, Ignatov commands himself, tiredly, already habitually. As you were and back to work.

And so. Avdei Bogar, one-armed. An invalid but works quickly, deftly laying branches on the shelter’s roof, telling the others what to do as he points his finger. Well, now there’s one who’s actually leading the construction! They obey him, nod. Obviously a sensible guy. His eyes are keen and tenacious, and they’re constantly lowered around Ignatov, as if he fears Ignatov will see something in them and figure him out. This one might be dangerous. The others will listen to someone like this even though he only has one arm.

Lukka Chindykov, a red-bearded Chuvash, is pottering around near Bogar. Chindykov is unprepossessing; it’s as if all of him leans and lists to one side, plus he’s desperately ugly. He lost his whole family along the way and is scared to death, haggard, and confused. Even now he’s looking around wildly, as if he doesn’t understand where he is. A broken person, not dangerous.

Musa-hadji Yunusov’s white beard hovers close by. He is as thin and flat as a reed. At the beginning of the journey, there was a blindingly white turban glowing around his head, but then it disappeared somewhere, possibly used as rags. Ignatov smirks as he imagines Yunusov sawing spruce branches in his glowing turban. Yunusov’s face is always bright and detached – he’s thinking already about the eternal, not the earthly. That’s exactly why he’s a hadji. Also not dangerous.

Leila Gabriidze, a plump Georgian woman, short of breath…

As he peers into their faces, Ignatov recalls the names of everyone working in the camp. He finds them on the list, circles them with the charcoal, and counts again. There are twenty-nine people, including the Leningraders. Russians, Tatars, a couple of Chuvash, three Mordvins, a Mari woman, a Ukrainian man, a Georgian woman, and a German man whose mind is gone and has the fanciful and sonorous name Volf Karlovich Leibe. In short, an entire international organization. Ignatov crosses out the rest. As he draws the coal along shabby sheets that look greasy from wear, he tries not to look at the surnames. Toward the end, his fingers are black and almost velvety, leaving bold round marks on the paper.

As soon as the job’s finished, Ignatov jumps up from the log with a start and swiftly walks to the riverside. He wants to wash it off his hands as quickly as possible. He wants to breathe in the cold river air. He wants very much to smoke.

Zuleikha has adjusted to plucking birds with a large sliver of spruce – of course a knife would be better but both knives are in use at the shelter construction site. The work can be done with a suitable piece of wood, though. Her mother was right when she said that head and hands are the most important tools for any work. Zuleikha holds the sliver firmly in her hand and quickly pulls the feathers from the bird’s soft, pliant body, pinching them between the wood and her thumb. First come the long, firm ones, the contour feathers, then the smaller, softer ones. The carcasses haven’t had a chance to cool yet and they pluck nicely, willingly.

Izabella is right beside Zuleikha. The two of them – the pregnant woman and the oldest woman – were assigned the role of fire tenders and cooks. The others are assembling shelters and arranging the camp.

“Zuleikha, my dear, I’m afraid I can’t keep pace with you.” Izabella is watching, bewildered, as the sliver of spruce flashes so quickly in the air it almost dissolves.

“Gather the feathers instead,” says Zuleikha. “They’ll come in handy.”

She’s pleased she can do this work better. It’s good to be useful. Her conscience would bother her if she just sat by the fire and added wood while everyone else was working. But going back and forth between the camp and the spruce forest for branches would have been difficult for Zuleikha as her belly has grown heavier since swimming in the Angara; it’s as if it had swelled with lead. The baby is constantly moving and fidgeting, her own legs are very weak, and her forehead sweats. A couple of times Zuleikha has felt something start to hurt down in her belly – a cramping, aching, and churning – and she’s begun praying to herself, thinking she’s going into labor. But they turned out to be false alarms.

Murtaza’s gift of poisoned sugar flowed off into the Angara. This means she’ll give birth no matter how much she fears the outcome. She will endure if Allah sends her the death of yet another child. The Almighty’s will is sometimes capricious and incomprehensible to the earthly mind. Of all the traveling companions on the deadly barge, she was the only one Providence left among the living. More than that, it sent her husband’s killer, the arrogant and dangerous Red Hordesman Ignatov, to save her. Perhaps Fate wants her to live?

Zuleikha felt a tremendous happiness, the likes of which she’d never experienced, when Ignatov’s distorted face suddenly flashed beside her in a furious whirl of spray after she’d been tossed up from the water’s depths to the surface. She was shuddering from wheezing and coughing, and almost choked. She’d never been that glad to see her husband, may the deceased Murtaza forgive her those thoughts. She’s had time to think about how Ignatov might have swum past, not noticed her, or not wanted to save her; but there he was, already next to her, helping and calming. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he had dragged her under by the braids and drowned her, but he held her, held her firmly, saying something, even joking. When it became obvious she couldn’t swim to shore, he didn’t start cursing and didn’t abandon her. He saved her.

If a savior turns out to be a good person, one should probably kneel before him and shower his hand with kisses. If Murtaza were alive, he would have endowed that person with rich gifts. If the mullah were alive, Zuleikha would have requested that he say a prayer of thanks in her savior’s honor. She has none of those “ifs.” She has only herself and the harsh, unapproachable Ignatov. He’s sitting next to the fire, scrawling something in his papers with charcoal, frowning, and clenching his jaw. Zuleikha simply wants to say thank you, but she doesn’t dare interrupt his thoughts. Soon he exhales, abruptly and angrily, slams the folder shut, and goes off to the riverside.

Zuleikha threads the plucked carcasses on a long stick and they sear over the fire. It’s already completely dark when she sets to cutting the meat into pieces and the exiles settle in around the fire, one by one, to wait for dinner after they’ve finished their work. Their nostrils hungrily inhale the sweetish smell of singed feathers.

They had enough time to build three shelters under a canopy of wide-boughed spruces. The large tree branches served as a beam on which to lay, crosswise, sizable shaggy boughs with slightly thinner branches over them; the same boughs were used for bedding. Someone proposed tossing birch branches and armfuls of grass on the tree needles inside the shelters for softness, but they didn’t have either the energy or the time for that. They prepared firewood for the night, bringing over a mountain of brushwood and fallen dead wood. There was no axe and the large branches had to be sawed. The one-handed saws squealed, bent, jerked, and broke free from unaccustomed hands; it was awkward to work with them but the exiles somehow prevailed and cut up the wood. Before dark, they dragged logs from the thicket and arranged them around the fire. Now they’re all squeezed together on the logs, propping each other up with chilly shoulders and warming themselves, their mouths releasing shaggy clouds of steam. It cools towards evening.

A large bucket on two flat rocks at the center of the fire is sending out steam and waiting for meat. Zuleikha tosses generous pieces of the birds into the bubbling water and the inviting smell of food floats over the fire and flies up into a black velvet sky with stars like large beads.

“Such illumination,” Ikonnikov quietly says, extending work-worn hands with a couple of fresh cuts toward the orange fire. “It’s pure Rembrandt.”

“It’s meat,” Gorelov corrects him, surprisingly kindly, blinking oily eyes that are riveted on the bucket with the soup. “Meat.”

The others are silent. Their sunken eyes gleam in the darkness and their pinched-looking faces, with sharp, angular features, flare in the light of the sparks.

Zuleikha sprinkles half a handful of salt in the bucket and stirs the concoction every now and then with a long stick. It will be a thick soup, hearty. Her stomach is shuddering from the anticipation of food. She hasn’t had meat in half a year and she’s ready to eat the raw meat right now, pulling it out of the boiling broth with her bare hands. It seems as if everyone sitting around the fire is experiencing the same thing. Saliva pours into the mouth, flooding the tongue. The stick knocks against the sides of the bucket. Branches crackle in the fire. A long howl sounds somewhere far away.

“Wolves?” asks one of the city dwellers.

“On the other shore,” answers one of the village dwellers.

Footsteps sound and Ignatov emerges from the darkness. People move, freeing up a spot. They’d felt like they were sitting very close together, but after the commandant comes and takes a seat on the logs, there’s so much space around him it seems like five people must have got up.

Ignatov takes something loose and jingling out of his pocket and tosses it on his palms: cartridges.

“This,” he says, as if he’s continuing a conversation begun long ago, “is for anyone who wants to escape.” Two fingers pick up a round cartridge that’s blazing like gold in the firelight.

He inserts it in the revolver’s cylinder – the cartridge slips in softly, with a gentle sound, like a kiss.

“This” – he raises a second cartridge – “is for anyone who tries to start a counterrevolution.”

The second cartridge enters the cylinder.

“And these” – Ignatov inserts four more – “are for anyone who disobeys my orders.”

He spins the cylinder. The even metal clicking isn’t loud but it can be heard distinctly above the crackling of the fire.

“Is that clear to everyone?”

The soup is gurgling desperately, bubbling over the brim. It needs to be stirred but Zuleikha is afraid to interrupt the commandant’s speech.

“Count yourselves off, one at a time,” commands Ignatov.

“One,” answers Gorelov, as lively as if he’s been waiting only for those words.

“Two,” another chimes in.

“Three.”

“Four.”

Many peasants don’t know how to count and the city dwellers help, counting for them; they lose track, start the count again, and somehow finally manage to do it.

“Citizen chief!” Gorelov leaps from his spot, sticks out his chest, and points his splayed hand at his shaggy head. “A detachment of migrants numbering twenty-nine persons–”

“As you were!” Ignatov makes a face and Gorelov plops back down on the log, offended. “So, a total of twenty-nine heads,” he says, looking around at gaunt, creased faces with prominent cheekbones, hollowed cheeks.

“What do you mean?” says Izabella’s soft voice. “Counting you, citizen chief, it’s thirty.”

Zuleikha looks down quickly, expecting a shout or at least a reprimand. Quiet again hangs over the fire, crackling and hotly snapping with sparks.

Ignatov is still looking at Izabella when Zuleikha dares glance up. Glory be to Allah. It seems to have passed. Zuleikha exhales noiselessly, raises herself up a little, and extends the stick to stir the soup in the bucket. The baby awakens in her belly at that moment and begins tearing her to pieces inside. She wants to shout but it’s as if there’s no air in her chest and her throat is constricted, making it hard to breathe. She sinks to her knees and falls backward. She’s seeing stars.

“Looks like these people are already starting to… reproduce,” says Gorelov, sounding bewildered and somehow very distant.

“Boil some water or something!” comes Ignatov’s anxious voice.

“I think it’s best for the men to leave us.” This is Izabella.

“We’ll freeze to death without the fire. What, you think we’ve never seen a woman give birth…”

And then there are other voices and shouts, but they gradually float away, float far away, merge, and disappear. Or maybe she’s the one floating away, carried upon waves of overwhelming pain? The stars are growing; they come closer, and crackle loudly. Or is that the fire crackling? Yes, yes, it’s the fire. It blazes up and sears the eyes, engulfs her; Zuleikha closes her eyelids tightly and escapes, tumbling into a deep and silent blackness.

CHILDBIRTH

Volf Karlovich Leibe has been living in an egg.

It developed around him on its own over many years, possibly even decades ago, though he’d never troubled himself with counting because time didn’t pass inside the egg so had no meaning.

He remembers when its iridescent top first began shining – it was something like a halo or an umbrella – over his vulnerable bald spot. That happened a short while after the October Coup. Professor Leibe had just walked out onto Voskresenskaya Street, pushing very hard to open one side of a massive, shiny, varnished oak door at Kazan University; the uniformed doorman by the main entrance had already been gone for several weeks, for the first time since the day the educational institution opened in 1804. Through a forest of white columns, Volf Karlovich saw a crowd running. People were screaming and falling, and behind them galloping horsemen were shooting them, point-blank. He didn’t manage to discern if these were newly minted insurgents with red armbands on their sleeves or simply the bandits who had multiplied in Kazan by that time. The people they were firing on were civilians, though: a peasant woman in a checked headscarf with a basket (the basket fell and eggs rolled along the road, breaking into star-shaped yellow blots); a woman in a frivolous lacy turban; a couple of ungainly grammar school students in green uniforms; and some beggar with a dog on a raggedy rope leash (a shot pierced the dog and the beggar kept dragging its shaggy body behind him, not letting go)…

The crowd was already tearing past, shouting incessantly, so Volf Karlovich didn’t manage to duck back under the cover of the university walls. The woman in the turban suddenly cried out and raised her hands theatrically, embracing one of the columns, slowly sliding down it. She was so close that Leibe could have touched her with his hand. He sensed an astringent aroma of perfume blended with the light, slightly bitter smell of sweat. The crowd and the horsemen in pursuit hurtled on, toward the kremlin, but the woman kept sinking slowly downward, leaving a long, glistening red trail on a column that had once been snow-white but was now covered in a web of cracks and speckled with shots.

The professor rushed to her and turned her face upward. He recognized her as a patient he’d recently operated on, gallbladder removal. He hurried to take her pulse, though he knew from her glassy pupils that she was dead. Have mercy, how could she be dead? What about the complex five-hour operation? The sixth cholecystectomy in his life and so successful, no complications. This woman still wanted to have children, certainly boys. And her husband wanted that. After she’d been released from the university clinic, her husband sent a ridiculously large bouquet of lilies as thanks; Leibe had to put them out on the balcony so their scent wouldn’t intoxicate the department. And now here she was herself: lying there, smelling like lilies. And dead.

Volf Karlovich pulled a handkerchief from his breast pocket and started rubbing the long red stain on the column. The stain didn’t wipe off, it only spread under the rough motions of his strong surgeon’s hands. People soon appeared, carried off bodies scattered on the road, and led the professor away. And he kept thinking that the woman had died, granted, and you couldn’t return her to life, but couldn’t this stain at least be wiped away?

As he approached the university the next morning, he wondered if they’d managed to wash it off. It turned out there had been other things to do. The stain gaped on the white column like an open, bleeding wound. The next day, too. And the day after.

He changed his route and started making a big detour so as to approach the university from the other side, by walking via Rybnoryadskaya Street. The stain taunted the professor, though. It was as if it crept around the column and leapt into his eyes, throwing its arms wide open for an embrace no matter how he approached the building. The stain smelled of blood and death, screaming, “I’m still here!”

Leibe attempted to convince the university steward to whitewash the column. The steward just smirked unkindly and shook his head because war isn’t the best time for repairs. Leibe went to the rector and argued that blood on the snow-white face of a cathedral of knowledge profanes the lofty idea of education. Dormidontov half-listened, nodding absentmindedly. The next day, the university’s main entrance was locked and a sign greeted professors and students: “The university is closed temporarily, until further notice.” Volf Karlovich never saw the rector himself again. And the stain remained.

Unable to bear it, one night Leibe went to the closed building with a wet rag and bucket he’d stolen from Grunya and attempted to scrub the column with soap and water. But during the time that had passed, the blood had indelibly eaten into the whitewash. The stain had faded slightly but hadn’t gone away. Utterly enraged, Volf Karlovich hurled the heavy bucket at the column in a fit of desperate powerlessness. The bucket’s sharp rim struck the column’s smooth shaft, knocking out a piece of plaster about the size of a hand and lining its white surface with a sharp-toothed lightning bolt of cracks.

It was at that moment that it appeared for the first time. It started shining gently and iridescently over the professor like a thin hemisphere the size of Grunya’s little bowl for straining tvorog. Bright, lightweight, and exceptionally comfortable-looking, it was only asking to be tried on like a hat. Intrigued, Leibe was not against that. When he permitted himself to extend his neck ever so slightly, the egg sensed that, neared, and lowered itself on the top of his head. A soft warmth spilled from his crown down to his cheeks, chin, and the back of his head, then further, along his neck and over his chest and his legs. And then everything suddenly began to feel piercingly calm and bright for the professor, as if he’d returned to his mother’s womb. As if there weren’t a war, either next to him on the street, in his country, or anywhere else in the world. There was no fear. There wasn’t even sorrow.

The egg was almost transparent, with a touch of light iridescence. Through its shining walls, which reached to chin level, Leibe saw the square in front of the university gleaming with cleanliness under golden sunbeams, leisurely students smiling deferentially at him, and absolutely smooth columns glimmering with unsullied whitewash. There was no bloodstain.

“Mein Gott,” Volf Karlovich whispered from gratitude, and headed home, cautiously carrying the egg on his head.

The egg nearly blew away a couple of times but little by little the professor learned to control it. Each time a gust of wind swooped in, Leibe applied his will and the egg remained on the top of his head by reading his thoughts and obeying his wishes.

It turned out that the egg was extraordinarily intelligent. It let in sounds and images that were pleasant for the professor and tightly blocked everything that might cause him even the slightest anxiety. So life all of a sudden became good.

“You’re in a cheery mood,” panted Grunya as she polished the floors in the hallway with thick wax from her old prerevolutionary supplies.

“It’s spring!” The professor smiled significantly and flirtatiously, holding back from swatting her haunch, which was hoisted up steeply. He had never permitted himself this sort of thing with the servants but now his blood was suddenly racing.

“They knifed another three at the lake, you hear about that? Gracious Lord, all is at Your will,” said Grunya, crossing herself without raising her flushed face, as she focused on floorboards that gleamed with a heavy, oily sheen.

“Yes, yes, a wonderful day,” muttered Leibe, retiring to his office.

Neighbors who’d gone mad from fear, incessant rallies on the streets, endless detachments of servicemen in the city, gunfights, nighttime fires, more frequent murders at Black Lake, Red Guardsmen and Czechs in the White Army giving ground to one another multiple times in the city, riffraff and poverty spilling out of every crevice, and frenzied profiteers who’d occupied the Tatar capital – all this had ceased frightening or annoying Leibe. Because he didn’t see them.

The professor wasn’t perturbed in the slightest when, under a decree from the Council of People’s Commissars that was approved in August 1918 “On the rights of acceptance to institutions of higher learning,” it wasn’t impertinent and haughty students in dandyish green uniform jackets who surged to the university (which was finally re-opened) but rather peasants and workers of both genders who were young and not very young. Most of them had no elementary or secondary education and were, simply put, illiterate. Leibe walked into a lecture hall stuffed full of newly minted students who were loudly blowing their noses and scratching themselves. He shoved his way to the front, stepping on people’s boots, bast shoes, bare feet, baskets of food, bundles, and peaked caps. He stood at the blackboard, smiled meekly, and began speaking of the cyclical changes of the endometrium of the human uterus.

Leibe didn’t raise an eyebrow when a new method of assessment was established in place of traditional individual exams (which the Red student body weren’t unaccustomed to). He obligingly received the confused and blushing representative of a student group who held out a heap of examination papers and mumbled an unintelligible answer to each question, confusing “adenosis” and “atheism,” sincerely attributing “hirsutism” to a little-known offshoot of Christianity, and, with spirited indignation, pushing “menarche” into the same family of words as “monarchy,” something contrary to the representative’s proletarian consciousness. Each time, the professor would nod approval and mark a grade of “satisfactory” in all the exam papers. This “rotational method” assumed one test taker and one collective grade for all.

His colleagues – who had formerly carried the titles of “meritorious,” “ordinary,” and “extraordinary” professors, but were intermingled by this time into one frightened human medley under the general and anonymous name “teaching staff,” without any distinctions in titles or degrees – were astounded at the changes that had occurred in him. Rumors soon began spreading around the university (“Professor Leibe – how shall I put this kindly? – is not quite himself.”). But Professor Leibe’s mental state was the least of the worries for the rectors, who were replacing one another in those years at a truly revolutionary, cavalry speed.

The rectors didn’t concern Professor Leibe, either. Thanks to the egg, he simply didn’t notice them. He met only those he wanted to see at general gatherings that took place every now and then. In the university’s large hall, which glimmered with thousands of candles and a mirror-like parquet floor, friendly rector Dormidontov smiled at him from the presidium’s table as before, bearded philanthropists nodded importantly from their places in the auditorium, and the sovereign emperor squinted, fatherlike, from a claret-colored gilded armchair in the front row, spoiling this deserving educational institute with his fairly frequent visits. Professor Leibe was likely the only one who continued toiling at Imperial Kazan University. All his colleagues had long since moved on to serving at Kazan State University.

And that’s how the egg was.

The professor ended up having to renounce his practice because of the egg. It turned out that the egg and practical medicine were absolutely incompatible. Delivering a lecture or discussing diagnoses was possible even with the shell on his head. But examining a patient certainly required its removal because the professor couldn’t see disease through its thick, merciful walls, instead noting a patient who was extremely well fed and brimming with health.

Leibe initially attempted to engage in a balancing act by taking off the shell for a couple of minutes during an examination then hurriedly putting it back on again, then taking it off again during a follow-up examination. He conducted operations without the egg, but this became genuine torture for him because Volf Karlovich’s psyche, which had become pampered, was wounded by seemingly innocuous remarks made by student observers or those assisting the doctor during the operations. It was in this extraordinary manner that a profession that had previously granted enjoyment and delight unexpectedly became the cause of pain and suffering.

Volf Karlovich quickly sensed that the egg didn’t like this sort of juggling. The egg became lackluster and its shine grew sad and dimmed after yet more rounds at the clinic where it was repeatedly removed from the professor’s head and then replaced. Leibe was even frightened one time after an operation when he noticed hairline fractures on the egg’s smooth surface, but his alarm turned out to be unfounded. He had only to wear the egg without removing it for several days for the fractures to heal. The problem, however, was obvious: the egg was forcing him to make a choice.

The professor chose in favor of the egg. He renounced his practice at the clinic and stopped receiving patients at home. A short while later he left the university department, too, without the slightest regret, since teaching no longer brought as much joy as observing an ideal world through the merciful shell. The grateful egg helped Leibe expunge everything unpleasant from the present as well as the past. His memory was cleared of what was painful and foul, and what had passed became just as bright and cloudless as the present. His own notion was that he remained a respected professor and a practicing surgeon who was successful and in demand. He was of the constant, joyful conviction that he had conducted his latest operation yesterday and would deliver his next lecture tomorrow.

Leibe didn’t notice the changes at his own apartment: loud residents who’d been assigned living quarters and were supplemented by numerous progeny, the disappearance of the greater part of the family silver and furniture, the absence of heating in winter and the switching off of the gas lamps. He lived without leaving his father’s office and he directed the skimpy remnants of his emotional warmth toward his beloved and selfless friend, his one and only faithful companion, the precious egg.

Sometimes he would wake up at night in fear. Had the egg gone away? No, the egg had not gone away. To the contrary, it gradually grew and strengthened, fitting ever more closely on its host and becoming one with him. Walls had grown out of its fairly flat crest – first down to the chest, later to the waist – so now Leibe was more solidly and dependably shut off from the surrounding world. Apparently the egg would soon grow out along the entire length of his body and close up. The professor did not know what would happen after that. Absolute happiness would likely ensue.

From time to time, however, moments did arise that forced Leibe to, well, not to remove the egg, no, but to thrust the tip of his nose out from under the shell for a short while and glance at the true world. Some sort of restless little bell occasionally dinged, high-pitched and alarming, in a little corner of his consciousness. The professor would look around in surprise, thrusting his head out from under the large, dependable egg dome as if he were a turtle that had awakened. What is this? What happened? Most often, the stubborn little bell summoned him to patients. After peering out for an instant, Leibe would see the patient, grow frightened, and immediately pull his head back. But his tenacious brain had already managed to make an initial diagnosis or advance a couple of hypotheses, and then the flywheel of debate would begin to spin. “Stop!” the professor would command himself. And he would try to bury recollections of those moments somewhere in out-of-the-way parts of his memory as quickly as possible. He wished he could have ripped from his head that unbearable little bell that disturbed his peace but he didn’t know where it was located. With time, however, the ringing sounded more rarely and he hoped it would soon abate forever.

The professor and the egg were happy together. Their joint life flowed along, evenly and unhurried, just as inexorably as a billiard ball directed by skilled hands rolls into a pocket. And then, suddenly – the cue’s hard counterblow! – there was the indelicate visit of a young personage in a rapturous state who was, by all appearances, suffering from infertility. This event marked a change in direction for his joint existence with the egg, and Leibe’s life unexpectedly became more varied and full, though no less pleasant. After tiring out a little in his seclusion, the professor enjoyed the changes, observing them through the egg’s solid, transparent walls, which by this time already came to knee level.

The university sent a smart automobile with glistening black finish and chrome handles for him. The interior was stupendously soft and the ride was both smooth and swift.

During the time Leibe was absent from Imperial Kazan University, the building itself had undergone considerable renovations and was nearly unrecognizable. The professor’s experienced eye divined in the harsh new lines of the architecture the remnants of details and contours that were of the past and very dear to his heart: the bend of a formal staircase, a half-removed bas-relief of a two-headed eagle on a wall, the festive patterned layout of a parquet floor, and a crystal chandelier that flashed inside a doorway.

The students who now accompanied him everywhere were unfailingly polite and spoke little. This modest reticence, which was moving to the point of tears, touched him more than anything, because these students were no match for their impertinent, talkative predecessors, who were ready to express their point of view on the tiniest question or enter an argument for the paltriest of reasons. Their businesslike concentration struck him, too. The students hurried along marble stairs and long corridors so energetically, even desperately, that it was as if they were ready to explode from the craving for knowledge that overflowed in them. It turned out that green student uniform jackets had been exchanged for gray jackets with horizontal patches on the chest and broad collar tabs where the students wore distinguishing badges, apparently in accordance with their course of study or achievements. Professors’ uniforms were now gray, too. Nobody, however, reproached Volf Karlovich for his dark blue uniform of the old design, which made him very grateful to the new leadership.

Leibe met the rector that day. A certain Butylkin, whose appearance was rather simple and who was overly direct in conversation but charming, you couldn’t take that away from him. Beyond that, he turned out to be quite a Germanophile, holding lengthy conversations with Leibe about German politics and economics. They became fairly close on that basis and Leibe was sincerely sorry to leave the hospitable walls of his alma mater when duty called him to head up a large military hospital.

They drove him along Voskresenskaya Street to a hospital situated right by the kremlin and the descent toward Black Lake, and the edge of his building flashed through the automobile window on the way. Leibe sighed yet again about his good fortune to have Grunya. She’d look after the apartment while he worked on matters of state importance.

During a lengthy excursion through endless hospital corridors, the quartermaster announced that the hospital entrusted to him had huge, even strategic, significance. “I ask that you not worry, gentleman officer,” Leibe assured him. “I will do everything within my power.” And he kept his promise, taking up residence right away in one of the hospital departments so as not to waste time on trips home, since he would disappear into the operating room for days at a time. He didn’t ask himself who was now fighting whom; that was of little interest to him. His concern was to operate, to pull patients from the deadly abyss and not allow life to abandon weak bodies mangled by gunshots. Volf Karlovich fought on the side of life.

Not one to bear open admiration and flattery, the professor was forced to endure the ecstatic gazes of one of the medical nurses who often watched him with a long, wide-eyed stare – he could clearly see the black pupils dilate in the depths of her green eyes. It’s possible she was in love with him. There would not have been anything unusual in that, since female assistants and nurses often fall in love with surgeons during operations. Lengthy stints alongside one another, practically forehead-to-forehead, and the maximal exertion of physical and mental energies all cause strong, uncontrollable flares of vivid emotions that a young, inexperienced heart can easily take for deep feelings among team members who operate together.

Shortly thereafter, the command decided to transport the hospital to the rear and appoint Leibe the director of the special train. Trembling with emotion and pride, he agreed. Fourteen railroad cars were entrusted to his care. Five of them held the seriously wounded, six had people with wounds of moderate and light severity, one contained an operation room and triage, and one was a pharmacy combined with a utility area. The train’s staff and guards were located in a separate car. Leibe was rarely in his own compartment, sleeping there only in fits and starts, collapsing on a mattress and dropping into a deep slumber. His work required twenty-four hours a day. He was working like the devil. He lived for his work.

The special train hurtled through blazing forests and steppes burned to the ground, and over tempestuous rivers, crossing bridges that smoked and exploded behind it. His face black with soot and his hair disheveled, Leibe raced through the railroad cars like a winged demon, giving commands, scolding negligent male nurses, offering advice to the general practitioners, and cheering up patients. He would pop into the operation room like a whirlwind, like a flash of lightning, and then the doctors would sigh with relief, the orderlies would smile, the patients would stop yelling, and the green-eyed nurse’s timid doe-like eyes would look up at him.

He’d noticed long ago that she was pregnant. The despicable little bell’s offensive ring had called him to the real world one time and, based on the nurse’s appearance, the professor’s experienced eye had picked up special signs of future motherhood that were thus far elusive for the rest. Leibe even announced this to his negligent student, Chernov, who came to visit one time, catching up with the special train to retake a medical school examination. The conversation with Chernov brought Leibe no pleasure since the professor didn’t like students whose eyes showed no readiness to give themselves over to medicine as passionately and selflessly as he himself.

One time, the special train was captured by the enemy army and the professor’s fatherly, work-weary hand blessed several dozen passengers’ escape from captivity to search for their people and deliver a message written in Leibe’s hand requesting the train’s liberation. The operation was successful and the train was soon taken back from the enemy. Leibe even spilled a solitary tear when the liberated train set off to run the rails again, headed toward danger and adventure.

This was when he noticed that during his glorious journey the egg had begun growing at a speed hitherto unprecedented. Its walls had thickened and strengthened so much that they could probably withstand a strong strike. Their transparency had taken on a much stronger iridescent tinge that slightly distorted his peripheral vision, though their luminescence had become bright and powerful. The egg already nearly touched the floor, fully covering Leibe to his toes, so it had become extremely challenging to peer out from underneath it when the little bell called. Each night before bed, the professor thought with a soulful tingle about the morning he would awaken to discover the egg’s walls had joined underneath the soles of his feet.

Meanwhile, the war was picking up speed. At the front, the heroic professor was steeped in deserved glory and then sent on a new assignment, commanding a naval flotilla in the murky yellow waters of eastern seas.

“I am not an admiral, I am merely a professor of medicine,” he said, listlessly resisting and chilled at the presentiment of grandiose assignments, which he simultaneously feared and desired. “I don’t even know how to shoot.”

“Nobody but you can handle it,” the adjutant answered confidently, narrowing his gray eyes in respect and pointing a firm hand at the shining gangway.

A gangway gleaming with a thousand scrubbed cleats soared up to a huge snow-white liner bristling with the steel muzzles of weapons. At the swing of the adjutant’s glove, a brass band of one hundred instruments festively struck up a tune on shore. A chorus of three hundred select dogs joined in with the melody, barking with such feeling and harmony that Leibe’s soul trembled. He made his decision, stepped onto the gangway, and began walking up, to the deafening applause of the crowd remaining on dry land. After climbing up to the liner, he suddenly realized that they needed to shoot from onboard the ship at those very people, the ones making the rapturous ovation.

“Hold on,” he muttered to the adjutant, who followed unceasingly at his heels, “this is happening very hastily, as if everything’s on fire.”

“Soon, professor, soon!” said the adjutant, revealing sugar-like teeth in his smile and ordering, “Fire!”

“Let me catch my breath,” said Leibe, stalling for time and backing away.

“Fire!” insisted the adjutant.

“Your ship’s bells are ringing over there,” he said, attempting to distract the relentless adjutant.

“Fire!” the other shouted as loudly as a donkey at a Sunday bazaar. “Fire and your damned egg will finally close up! Isn’t that what you wanted?”

The ship’s bells truly were ringing, though.

But this isn’t the ship’s bells at all. This is the professor’s little bell. For the first time, Leibe is glad about the ringing, which is usually unwelcome. He crouches. He lifts the egg’s dome slightly and it’s as heavy as a stone. He pokes his head out, leaving the liner, the bad-tempered adjutant, and the people (who continued applauding deafeningly) inside the shell.

He needs to catch his breath for a couple of seconds. His heart is pounding erratically. And it’s cold outside. It’s night and an orange fire is crackling. People are bustling around him.

“They’ve started… reproducing,” mutters one.

“Boil some water or something,” shouts a second.

“I think it’s best for the men to leave us,” says a female voice.

“We’ll freeze to death without the fire,” says a bass voice. “What, you think we’ve never seen a woman give birth…”

The maternity patient is lying with her face tilted up toward the sky, moaning quietly. Moaning in a bad way, Volf Karlovich understands. Weakened. She’ll lose consciousness soon. When childbirth begins, a woman should shout in anger, from the depths of her soul. She could use some smelling salts under her nose right now.

The egg’s heavy, warm dome presses at his spine. It quivers slightly, calling him back inside. Right away, thinks the professor, right away. I’ll just tell them to give her smelling salts and bring her to the clinic immediately.

The maternity patient raises herself slightly on her elbows, turns her face toward the fire with her eyes wide open, as if she’s searching for someone’s gaze, and falls on her back again. Why, it’s that very same nurse from the special train, the green-eyed one, the one in love! How did she end up here in the woods, surrounded by strange people? And Volf Karlovich himself, how did he land here? What nonsense. It’s time, time to return home to the egg.

He’s already begun lifting the bulky edge of the merciful dome to duck inside when he has a sudden thought that her eyes have been searching for him! Leibe freezes with indecision then casts one more glance at the woman after all. And he feels himself beginning to anger.

The maternity patient moans again, very quietly, wheezing slightly. Her feet are scraping along the ground as if they’re looking for something to prop against, and her belly is shuddering sharply – it’s large and overly broad at the bottom so the child is apparently lying sideways. She can’t give birth to that baby on her own.

“What the devil!” Leibe cries out loudly and distinctly. “To a clinic, immediately! What, don’t you realize the full seriousness of the situation?”

A dozen eyes are gawking at him with such surprise that it’s as if he’s speaking a foreign tongue or crowing like a rooster.

“There’s nowhere to go,” says a tall man in a military uniform, uttering each syllable individually, gingerly, and cautiously. He bears a resemblance to the professor’s adjutant from inside the egg. “This is the clinic,” he says.

This is the clinic? Well, this is just…

Leibe stands and looks around, dissatisfied. The forlorn egg remains hanging in the air behind him. In his fit of indignation, the professor doesn’t notice.

And what if this really is the clinic? He’s never once seen a clinic without walls or a ceiling. Where the medical staff are dressed in tatters and so muddle-headed they can’t lay the maternity patient down properly. Where the operating room is lighted by a campfire instead of a bright gas light. He’s spent so much time in the egg, though, that maybe customs have changed outside and people have become barbarous. It doesn’t appear that the high military officer is either joking or misleading him – this is not the time for that. The devil take it – this apparently really is the clinic, no matter how improbable that seemed at first glance.

The egg floats up behind him and affectionately touches his back as if to say, “I’m here, I’m waiting.” The maternity patient mumbles quietly and lets her head drop to one side; a strand of saliva falls from her mouth. That is not good at all. Leibe abruptly pushes away the egg: A little later, I’m busy.

“Why is it dark in the operating room?” he sternly asks the bearded old man in the torn shirt standing next to him.

The people around him are quiet and continue staring at him with astounded eyes. Quite the medical staff. Who the devil knows what they are…

“I asked for light in the operating room!” Volf Karlovich commands, a half a tone louder and harsher.

Some elderly nurse with a high hairstyle hastily flings an armload of spruce branches on the fire. A sheaf of sparks soars up, and it becomes lighter and hotter. At least there’s one sensible worker to be found in this herd of blockheads. The professor hurriedly rolls up the sleeves of his uniform and addresses only the sensible nurse:

“Hands.”

Blinking in astonishment, she presents him with a bucket of warm water from the fire. People help her, lifting the bucket higher and painstakingly pouring water on the hands the professor has placed under it. Leibe frenziedly rubs his hands together. There’s neither soap nor lye; truly only the devil knows what this is.

“Disinfection.”

A murky liquid smelling sharply of alcohol pours out of a large, rounded bottle onto his hands.

“Smelling salts.” He’s reciting things over his shoulder, carefully bathing his hands in the generous, strong-smelling stream. “Bandages, lots of bandages. Cotton wool. Warm and hot water. Scalpels and clamps, sterilized in flame. The maternity patient should be placed with her feet absolutely toward the light. Onlookers must leave the operating room.”

What am I doing here? is the despairing thought rushing around somewhere at the edge of his consciousness. Operating room, maternity patient, bandages – what silliness. The egg is already tired of waiting over there; it’s shining impatiently, even shaking. It’s time, it’s time to go there. But Volf Karlovich is too occupied to listen to all his thoughts. When he’s standing by the operating table, he hears only the patient’s body. And his own hands.

He’s already kneeling by the woman, who’s prostrate on the ground. His fingers are warming, filling with a taut, joyful keenness. His hands do everything on their own, even before he manages to mentally give them orders. They fall on the living, swaying mountain of her belly so that his right hand is on the hard bulge of the fetus’s head, the left on its trembling little feet. Transverse presentation, the devil with it. He’ll need to remove the fetus before the uterus tears. From somewhere the words surface, like a long-forgotten prayer: Do I have the right? I do not have the right not to attempt. Joy, some sort of youthful elation, suddenly grips him. Leibe pants a little and tears at his collar. And right then, like a bucketful of icy water: But I haven’t operated in a long time. How many years, five? Ten? So much time lost, mein Gott…

Left without any attention, the egg is rubbing more insistently against his back. The professor just jerks his shoulder as if to say: Whoever’s there, I beseech you, not now. He casts back a heap of skirts and moves apart the maternity patient’s paper-white legs, which resist weakly. Just as I thought: the uterus is fully open. It’s ready to release the child and its large, dark hole is gaping like a wide-open mouth in the fire’s bright light. The child is writhing inside, though, incapable of turning around and coming out of the maternal womb.

Leibe places his hand in the warm and slippery opening, first two fingers, then his entire hand. The woman moans. He’s putting her on his hand as if she were a puppet. He extends his hand inside the uterus, groping at something delicate, taut, and filled: the amniotic sac. It’s good luck that it’s intact, because that means the fetus is still in the water and still moving around. And now I need…

He feels something poking, demanding and hard, at the base of his neck, between his shoulder blades, along his spine. He casts a sidelong glance over his shoulder: it’s the egg, blast it. He abruptly pushes it away with his shoulder: I told you, later! I need to lance the sac now. He bends his index finger and scratches the surface with a piercing motion. Warm fluid immediately surrounds his hand. It’s thick to the touch, the amniotic water. The sac has burst. Leibe’s fingers touch something velvety, slippery, and moving. The child. It’s time to take it out. So, my dear, where’s your little leg?

Something envelops Volf Karlovich from behind, softly yet strongly. He turns around. The egg, which has lifted its dome over the ground and turned its base toward Leibe, has attached itself to his back like a huge pulsating sucker that wants to imbibe. His hands are occupied so he can’t pick it off himself and toss it further away. He jerks his back and shoulders heavily, as if he’s shaking off a predatory wild animal that’s grasped the nape of his neck. A faint, low-pitched humming floats from the egg; something inside it is shouting, whistling, and whimpering. I have time, thinks Leibe. I have time.

So, where do we have that little foot? His fingers grope at a tiny paw with little splayed digits, four facing in one direction, the fifth facing in the other: it’s a small hand. Your foot, little one, give me your foot!

Leibe feels the egg pulling him in, harder with every second. Its warm, slippery edges envelop his shoulders and neck, settling on the back of his head. All he has to do is manage to pull out the child. When the baby is fully liberated from the mother’s womb, even the most muddle-headed nurses can finish the job by cutting the umbilical cord and seeing that the placenta has been expelled. He needs only to succeed in pulling the child out.

Another paw. All five little digits on this one are facing in the same direction. Bravo, little one! Thank you. Now let’s verify if this is the upper or lower leg. I certainly need the upper one, so you don’t catch your chin on the pubic symphysis when I pull you outside.

The edge of the egg is settling on Leibe’s forehead, creeping toward his eyes, and reaching his brows. He squeezes his eyes shut and works by feel after sensing the egg’s slippery mass engulf his eyes, forcing them shut. You stupid egg, you think my eyes are smarter than my hands?

Leibe’s fingers creep up along the baby’s tiny leg and reach a rounded little belly. Meaning this leg’s the lower one after all. Give me the other leg, little one.

The egg has now fully possessed Leibe’s head, after slipping itself on like a thick stocking. The professor feels warm slime in his mouth and a heavy, rotten smell in his nose; there’s an even chomping sound in his ears coming from the egg’s vibrating walls. He senses its edges creeping toward his neck. It’s decided to suffocate me, he belatedly understands, for betrayal.

His hand has already found the second leg, though. This is the one we need, the upper one. This is the one we’ll pull. Leibe places his thumb along the baby’s thigh and his four fingers around it. And now we’ll pull and pull. Come on, little one, work, turn around so the back of your head faces up. Come out…

The edges of the egg extend to the professor’s Adam’s apple and suddenly tense, filling with strength, and hardening as if they want to rip Leibe’s head from his body. Just a few seconds more…

One baby leg is already outside, tightly clasped in Leibe’s hand. The second is coming out on its own, right into the professor’s other hand. A sharp turn and a downward motion, pulling the baby out to the corners of the shoulder blades. One arm, a second arm. And a small head.

His throat feels tight, his eyes go dark, and some kind of light bulbs flare and extinguish in his brain, one after another. And that’s that, thinks Volf Karlovich, squeezing the baby’s slippery little body in his hands. I made it.

The newborn opens its mouth and screams for the first time, at the very moment the edges of the egg begin quickly and implacably tightening. The baby screams so hard that even the professor can hear it in the egg’s innards, though he’s weakened and half-choked. The scream swells, resounding and filling with strength, and then the egg suddenly bursts on Leibe’s head like an overfilled balloon. Shards of the shell, scraps of membrane, pieces of slime, and heavy spray fly everywhere. Volf Karlovich coughs and wheezes, inhaling air with a whistle. His lungs are breathing again, his eyes see, and his ears hear. After recovering his breath, he looks around, seeking out the remnants of the exploded egg, but there aren’t any.

A bright-pink baby is bellowing in his arms.

Later, Leibe goes down to the Angara. The inky sky to the east is tinged a delicate blue and pale pink. Dawn is near. A black wave splashes as quietly as a whisper. It’s delightfully empty and clear inside his head, and his body is light and young. His ears are like a wild animal’s, discerning the slightest sounds: the murmur of stones under his feet, a fish tail hitting somewhere in the middle of the river, the noise of spruces in the forest, and the high squeak of a bat. And all kinds of smells – a large body of water, wet grass, earth – swarm in his nostrils.

Leibe sits down by the water and bathes his hands. Either his sharpened vision is noticing or he’s imagining thick, dark blood washing from his fingers and going into the opaque water. He rubs his hands hard until they’re icy-white, until the joints crack. There’s a rustling close by, and it’s the commandant, sitting on the rocks next to him.

“So what happened there?” he asks.

“It turned out to be a boy!” Leibe says emphatically, raising a sharp, long finger.

Ignatov exhales with a gasp and pulls his peaked cap over his face.

“Imagine,” says Leibe, speaking cheerfully, quickly, and freely. “Baby Yuzuf! Just think about that, here, in this damned backwood – Zuleikha and Yuzuf. How about that, eh!”

He looks at the commandant’s hat-covered face and grunts, flustered.

“Tell me,” Ignatov says, taking off the hat and pointing his face into the faintest breath of a breeze. “Without you, would she have…? I mean, she wouldn’t…”

A wolverine yelps, muted, on the other shore.

“Do you often think about the ‘what ifs’?” Leibe shakes off his hands and an unseen sprinkle flies from his fingers into water as black as tar.

“No.”

“And that’s the right thing.” Leibe stands and looks at his own hands, so white in the darkness. “There’s only what there is. Only what there is.”

He walks back to the camp. He stops on the slope and turns to say, “We left you some soup. Eat.”

Only the fire sentry is dozing when Ignatov climbs up to the knoll. Everyone else has dispersed to the shelters to sleep. He takes the gray folder from a pile of things and opens it, not even noticing the smell of meat coming from the pot, which is still warm. On an empty corner he writes with the charcoal in large, crooked, slanting letters: “Yuzuf.”

THE FIRST WINTER

Ignatov wakes up an hour later with the thought that they should dig an underground house. Everyone’s still asleep and sounds of snoring and someone’s groans carry from the shelters. Impatient birds expecting daybreak occasionally call out in the thicket and a wave splashes lazily at the shore. Realizing that sleep has left him for good, Ignatov decides to go down to the river to wash.

They’ll get by for a week in the shelters. They won’t just melt away, he convinces himself, sitting on stones at the riverside and furiously wiping his face with icy Angara water. And then when Kuznets comes, they can even put up two-story wooden mansions if they want. Without me!

And if they have to get by for two weeks? Or longer? After all, nature here knows no calendar and winter could even descend in September.

He looks at the Angara’s flawlessly smooth, mirror-like surface breathing with an almost invisible morning fog. A transparent blue sky gleams to the east, waiting for the sun. It will be a hot day, sultry. There’s such quiet that the sound of drops falling from Ignatov’s face are audible. He looks down. A gloomy, unshaven face with black circles under the eyes gazes out of the water. His beard will soon grow out, as the exiles’ have, and they’ll become indistinguishable. Ignatov slaps his palm at his reflection, which shatters into small pieces and disperses in circles.

Ignatov takes his peaked hat, which he’d set aside on the rocks, and puts it on. They’ll start digging an underground house today. They can’t sit around the whole week with nothing to do.

His exacting gaze examines their site as if he’s looking for the first time. The Angara takes a smooth bend at the place where they landed and the shore seems to jut out, forming a broad, gently sloping promontory. The earth by the water is dense and clayey, with lots of large and small rocks mixed in. It spreads low, then flares up into the spacious knoll where they’ve now made their camp. A good place, the proper one. Not right next to the water (where the river’s coolness would chill their shelters) but still close enough to the Angara that it’s not far to run for water. It’s inconvenient, though, since the descent from the knoll is steep and crumbly. Ignatov decides they’ll need to make steps out of rocks.

The knoll itself is so wide that an entire village could fit on it. It faces the river and a dense line of spruce trees borders its back. Jagged spruce tops rise upward, forming a wall; the forest is clambering up the high hill. The cliff from which Ignatov observed his surroundings yesterday protrudes somewhere there, too, up high, but it’s not visible from the shore. Several lanky, broad-boughed spruces are scattered along the knoll, which is covered with bushes and waist-high grass. It’s as if the trees ran out of the forest toward the river but just froze there. The tattered shelters stand like large, green nestled haystacks under three of them. Two shelters are already tipping to one side, their shaggy roofs a little disheveled; but one still stands evenly and tidily. Ignatov notices it’s the shelter that one-armed Avdei built.

The tools and other items Kuznets left are lying in a messy heap by the fire. Kuznets had apparently scraped together everything that was on the boat, either the remains of his own supplies or surplus from someone else’s stockpile of goods. There’s a sizable but depleted box of matches (they need to be used sparingly; being left without fire would be trouble); a sack and a half of salt (they could salt all the animals in the taiga and then all the fish in the Angara on top of that); a scruffy clump of nets all tangled up with hooks, ropes, floats, and wires whose intended uses Ignatov doesn’t understand; a generous armful of thin, flimsy one-handed saws (Kuznets should be forced to saw firewood with those himself!); a couple of sturdy fisherman’s knives and kettles blackened with soot; several buckets and ropes rolled into coils; the half-empty bottle of home brew; and a bulky sack with revolver cartridges. That’s all. Well then, thank you for that. Ignatov pulls his cap a little lower, right down to his eyebrows.

They need a large, spacious underground house that holds everybody. It will be crowded, but it will be warm. And for him to have everyone in sight will make things easier. He’ll appoint Avdei head of building and Gorelov to keep order. The majority of them will be busy with construction and the rest will be sent into the forest once a day to prepare firewood. They’ll always have one person in charge of the fire, not allowing it to go out under any circumstances. Everyone is to work, men and women, with no exceptions for age. Rest strictly during breaks. Unauthorized absences in the forest forbidden. Criticism, complaints, and other troublemaking conversations to be cut short immediately. All violations of procedures will be punished with loss of food privileges. Ignatov himself will go hunting again and bag as many black grouse as he can. He’ll examine the taiga more carefully as he does. He’ll take the sack of cartridges with him – he’s decided to hide it in the forest so none of the exiles get any nasty ideas into their heads.

He pulls his revolver from the holster and pounds the handle on a bucket standing by the fire: Time to get up, you sons of bitches! Get to work! The loud tinny sound of the alarm carries over the sleepy clearing. Birds go silent in the forest. The shelters shudder and shake as frantically as anthills when the frightened exiles crawl out, pushing each other and looking around wildly.

There you go. He’s not going to spoil anybody by letting them break the rules.

Avdei turns out to be a surprisingly sensible and skilled guy. He builds the underground house as if he’s been doing this his whole life. He sends all the men into the forest to get logs for the framework. He keeps the women with him for digging – without any negotiations, they’ve appointed Zuleikha as ongoing cook and keeper of the fire, until the baby gets stronger. Avdei finds a suitable place and drives in four tall pegs to form the corners of a long rectangle, carefully measuring the distance with string. He uses a stick to draw in the outline. That’s the base.

They neatly cut out the sod and set it aside; it will come in handy. They begin digging, poking around with sticks, rocks, and hands, whatever works for them. Seeing that the job isn’t going well, Avdei proposes they pull blades from a few saws and use them to scrape at the ground. The work starts moving faster as some scrape and poke, while others use kettles to remove the softened earth and throw it away outside. They finish in two days, digging out a pit so deep that the whole of stocky Avdei, including his head, can get fully inside when he goes down there. Not even his shiny bald pate sticks out of the ground. Wielding a homemade plumb line made from stone attached to a string, Avdei painstakingly evens the walls, smoothing in some spots with his hand. Lick it with your tongue, too, Ignatov thinks angrily. He’s been urging, hurrying, and swearing at them, wary of rain that could halt work and flood the pit. The days have been dry and warm thus far, though, so the weather isn’t impeding them.

Cursing the one-handed saws, the men somehow prepare and haul logs to the camp. The stronger ones saw the wood, the weaker ones strip off branches and bark. A couple of days later, everybody’s hands are calloused and covered in red spots from splinters and squiggly scratches, and their backs and shoulders ache unbearably.

They lower logs into the pit and begin lining the walls. They drive in fat logs, horizontally along the perimeter, laying long beams behind them, all the way up to the very ceiling, as a retaining wall. They stuff the wall’s crevices with pieces of spruce so earth won’t sprinkle in.

“Braces, girders, supports, purlins, rafters, joists…” Ikonnikov mutters under his breath, vigorously knocking on the top of a log with a heavy stone to force it into the ground. “But oh, has my vocabulary been enriched.”

“The main thing is the experience,” puffs Konstantin Arnoldovich alongside him, placing spiky spruce branches in the gap between the retaining wall and the earthen wall. “How your practical experience has been enriched, colleague! It’s one thing to paint clouds and fields of wheat on the walls at some cultural center and something else entirely to build a real house. Don’t you find that?”

“A house?” Ikonnikov is looking at half a fat pink worm sticking out of the ground. “Well, I suppose!”

“You are intending to live here,” says Konstantin Arnoldovich, gasping slightly for breath. He wipes his sweaty forehead with his hand and looks up questioningly. Green spruce needles gleam playfully in his narrow beard, which has grown out in a half-year. “Or aren’t you?”

Sinking support poles for the roof’s ridge beam turns out to be a difficult and unexpectedly lengthy task because the soil becomes dense and rocky, and the holes for the posts just don’t want to reach the proper depth. Wary of clouds swooping in from the north, Ignatov demands they continue working and embed the posts in the resulting shallow holes, but Avdei displays an unexpected rigidity.

“I was hired to dig an underground house, not a grave,” he says, tugging his sparse blue-gray beard with his only hand and looking out from under his brow at the commandant. “If you’ve decided to bury us, commissar, then there’s the pit, it’s ready. No need for us to wear ourselves out more here.”

Ignatov backs off. They just manage to dig down to the required depth for the holes, embed the supports, strengthen them with stakes, and reinforce them with stones.

Overhead they lay a long log as a purlin and secure it with rope. On that they place poles as rafters, smoothing them at the joints with stones for stability. For the roof covering they decide to take spruce branches from the shelters, which have already collapsed by this point. They place boughs across the rafters, constantly strewing earth and cementing them with clay that Avdei spent half the day searching for before finally finding what he needs – the clay is thick, black, and dense to the touch.

The arrival of the clay brings out an unusual liveliness among some of the builders. The previously apathetic Ikonnikov suddenly becomes cheerful and excited, and his eyes start glistening. He keeps tilting his head toward Konstantin Arnoldovich, who’s flushed with pleasure, and Ikonnikov shows him something in his hands, then they explode in fits of loud, irrepressible laughter. No matter how he tries, Gorelov can’t determine the reason for their jollity. Each time he sidles up to them, he sees only small clumps of clay in Ikonnikov’s hands.

They place two layers of sod on top of the triangular roof so the first layer has its roots up and the second has its roots down. From front and back, the underground house now resembles a small hill rising out of the ground.

That’s the first night they spend in the half-finished underground house. They sleep poorly, freezing terribly, either from the dampness of the deep-set earthen floor that’s still completely uncovered, or because autumn is approaching so relentlessly with every passing day. In the morning, many are coughing and the Georgian woman with the aristocratic name Leila has come down with a fever. They decide to assemble a stove before finishing construction, and the women are sent down to the riverside to find large stones suitable for the purpose. Leibe asks Ignatov’s permission to go into the forest to collect medicinal herbs and Ignatov squints at the pale professor in his absurd dress uniform, which is torn to shreds in places, and agrees.

A very basic stone stove, with a chimney, rises up in the middle of the underground house. It’s like a magical vessel, an Aladdin’s lamp that fulfills only one wish, albeit the most important, giving warmth. While they’re at it, they fortify the path down to the river with large flat rocks, making it more convenient to go for water. Gorelov now hums a song about stone stairways each time he goes down to the Angara. He always puts his hands in his pockets as he goes, holding his chin high, slightly tilted.

It requires a few more days to lay the floor, construct the bunks, and complete the exposed sides of the house at each end of the roof: one has an entrance burrowing down to the doorway and a vestibule below. They’ve just finished digging small drainage channels along the sloping roof when a persistent rain begins to fall.

In the evening the exiles sit, huddled together in the dark and still rather damp underground house. “In a couple of days it’ll be baking inside and dry out,” Avdei promises. They aren’t warm but it’s not very cold, either. They haven’t managed to eat even once today but a bucket of black grouse meat is already bubbling on the stove. Their faces have darkened in the sun, become weather-beaten, and been covered with blistering mosquito bites. Some have no strength left and are already asleep, their heads laid on a neighbor’s shoulder, while others watch the bucket of soup with a fixed stare. The stove drones and there’s a strong smell of smoke, half-raw meat, and the herbs the professor gathered. All their simple belongings – tools, buckets, tackle, and bundles of clothing – are piled up in the corner. The loud beat of heavy rain carries through thin little windows formed by gaps between the house’s roof and side walls.

“What good fortune that we’re under a roof,” Izabella loudly says. “And have matches and salt and everything else… Thank you, Avdei. You simply saved us.”

Ignatov is lying on his bunk, which was built at some distance from the others, and he’s gloomily thinking about how they haven’t been able to prepare enough firewood. What they have will only last through the night. If the bad weather continues until morning, they’ll be forced to go into the forest in the rain.

The seventh day of their stay on the riverbank is ending.

A son.

She’s given birth to a son for the first time in her life and he’s tiny, completely red, and by all appearances premature. When the professor held out the newborn to her – still wet, slippery, and covered in her own blood – she placed him to herself, under her smock, clasped him to her breast, and pressed her face to the top of a head as soft as bread, and felt the rapid beating of his heart on her lips. The soft spot on the crown of infants’ heads isn’t usually large, only the size of a coin, but it was huge, hot, and greedily pulsating on this child.

She instantly sensed that he was very beautiful, even before she could make out the child’s face in the night darkness. Eyelashes stuck together in clumps of dried mucus, half-blind cloudy little eyes, neat nose holes peering up, the small pleat of a mouth always open partway, wrinkled, flat little clumps of ears, and thread-like fingers without nails stuck together – all that was beautiful, bringing tingling and butterflies to her stomach.

She looked him over more closely at dawn. A large head the size of a man’s fist. Small legs gnarled like a frog’s and slightly fatter than her fingers. A rounded belly like an egg. Thin little bones showing through so much in places that it seemed an incautious touch could break them. His skin was creased, bright-purple with marbled light- and dark-blue blotches of veins, as soft to the touch as a flower petal, and covered in places by wispy dark hairs. He was the most beautiful of all the children she had given birth to. And he was still living.

Zuleikha decided to simply carry him on her chest, on her bare body under her smock. She didn’t sleep the first night. She kept clasping him to herself with all her might and then relaxing her arms, fearing she’d squeeze too hard. She kept opening the edge of her smock a little to let her son breathe fresh air, then closing it when the air seemed much too cold. In the morning she felt as fresh and strong as if there’d been neither childbirth nor sleepless pre-dawn hours. She could have sat like that for another year, warming the tiny little body with her own heat and listening to his weak, barely discernible breathing. In the morning she adjusted herself to carry him by arranging her newborn’s head between breasts swelled with milk, spreading his little body over her belly, and then binding him to herself with a rag. Then she could move around and even do her work while her son was always with her. She kept bending her face to the unfastened buttons on her chest, peering into her slightly opened smock collar and listening. The child was breathing.

She feeds him often, a lot each time. Glory be to Allah that the milk stands so high and taut in her breasts; just watch it doesn’t spurt. Sometimes her breasts fill so much that they harden, pulling at her shoulders. She doesn’t wait then; she hurriedly thrusts a swollen nipple oozing white drops into his mouth, not waiting for the child to wake up; but the baby smacks his lips without opening his sleepy eyes and latches on. When he takes a liking to feeding, he sucks greedily and quickly, moaning, and her breast empties and shrinks, feeling more comfortable for a while.

Zuleikha is glad when the child urinates and she feels something hot and wet on her belly because this person is living, his little body is working. She is even ready to kiss the spot on her dress and the pink squiggle of male flesh between her son’s tiny little legs.

As before, she constantly wants to eat. The forest unexpectedly bestows a lot of fatty meat upon them. When she catches sight of Ignatov’s tall figure at the forest’s edge with a colorful bunch of killed birds in his hand, she restrains herself from shouting, running out to greet him, and kissing his hand. Food has come! Food! She plucks the birds fiercely, in a frenzy; guts them, fighting the saliva gushing in her mouth; flings them in boiling water, then salts, stirs, and casts a spell over the fire to burn hotter, stronger, faster.

Gorelov had wanted to take the food allocation into his own hands here, too, but Ignatov sullenly looked at him and nodded at Zuleikha, saying to let her serve. She pours the prepared soup from the large bucket into kettles that are slightly smaller, and the exiles sit in several circles, grasping scorching hot pieces of poultry in their hands, and tearing it with their teeth, dirtying their smiling faces with fat and soot. After dispensing with the meat, they gulp down broth from the kettles using spoons made from shells attached to sticks. They leave a double portion for Zuleikha and she isn’t embarrassed. She eats it up quickly and gratefully, sensing that the meat now in her gut is already filling her blood with strength and her breasts with milk. She doesn’t like soft bird rumps or thick grouse skin covered on the inside with layers of fat, but she eats them so her milk will be fatty and hearty.

She stops thinking about everything unrelated to her son: about Murtaza, who remains somewhere far behind in her past life (she has forgotten that the newborn is the fruit of his seed); about the Vampire Hag with her scary prophecies; and about her daughters’ graves. She doesn’t think about where Fate has cast her and what will happen tomorrow. Only the present day is important, only this moment, with quiet snuffling on her breast and the heaviness and warmth of her son’s little body on her belly. She has even stopped fearing that one morning she won’t hear weak breathing inside the opening of her smock. She knows that if her son’s life is interrupted, then her heart will instantly stop, too. This knowledge sustains her, filling her with strength and some sort of unfamiliar courage.

She has started praying faster and more infrequently, as if in passing. It is frightening to admit, but a thought that is essentially sinful and horrifying has settled in her head: what if the Almighty has suddenly become so busy with other matters that He’s forgotten about these thirty hungry, raggedy people in the wilderness of Siberia’s urman? What if He turned his stern gaze away from the exiles for a little while and then lost them on the boundless expanses of the taiga? Or (this is possible, too) that they have floated off to such a distant place at the edge of the earth that the All-Powerful’s gaze doesn’t reach because there is no need. This offers Zuleikha the strange and wild hope that perhaps Allah – who has taken four children away from her and is apparently intending to take away the fifth – won’t notice them, that He will overlook them and forget the disappearance of a pitiful handful of creatures worn out from suffering. She can’t forgo praying completely (that would be scary!) but she tries to utter her prayers quietly, whispering, or even only muttering them to herself so as not to attract attention from on high.

Surprisingly, she is content during these days, with some sort of incomprehensible, fragile, and fleeting happiness. Her body freezes at night, suffers from heat and mosquito bites during the day, and her stomach demands food, but her soul sings and her heart beats with one name. Yuzuf.

Kuznets hasn’t come, not one week after the exiles came ashore, not two.

Ignatov goes to the cliff each morning, cursing himself for doing it, but unable to keep away. His hands cling to the rough ledges of boulders edged in coarse, blue-gray lichen as he clambers to the top, rapidly on clear, dry days and cautiously on rainy, cloudy days, constantly slipping on the wet rocks. He’ll stand for a long time, resting his gaze on the edge of the firmament where the river and sky come together and flow into one another. He’ll wait. Then he’ll abruptly turn and go hunting.

There’s no explanation for what’s happening. Maybe there’s been trouble with the launch and it’s vanished in the Angara’s waters, following the Clara? Maybe Kuznets has come down with typhus and is lying delirious on an infirmary bed, pouring out hot sweat. Maybe (and Ignatov likes this version most of all) Kuznets has turned out to be an enemy of Soviet power and has been taken into custody and sentenced. Maybe he’s even been shot?

Sometimes when Ignatov is on that peak, he’ll think he can discern the dot of the launch in the blue distance. Some evenings, when he’s already lying on his separate bunk in the underground house, he’ll suddenly leap up and run to the shore because he’s distinctly heard the sound of a rattling motor and anxious voices. At those moments, he’s prepared to forgive Kuznets for the endless days of waiting and the hunger and cold of the weeks that have passed, to embrace Kuznets and slap him on the shoulders, saying, “We’d grown tired of waiting for you, brother.” But that exciting instant would pass when the dot on the horizon dispersed, dissolving into the blue of an expanse of sky or water, when the roar of the motor turned into a drake quacking, and the voices became splashing water.

The exiles see his concern and probably guess at the reasons but they don’t ask anything. Only Gorelov, the scoundrel, once asked, conspiratorially narrowing his Kalmyk eyes at Ignatov, “Comrade boss, what do you think, will the launch bring reinforcements of gals? We only have old women in the camp, after all – there’s nobody to have a little stroll to the forest with.” Ignatov didn’t reply and just looked coldly at Gorelov. You, he corrected him mentally, you have only old women. The swine had gobbled down lots of meat and now he wanted broads. As if he had everything else and it pleased or suited him. One time Ignatov heard someone in the forest saying, “It’s time, let’s go home.” That was jarring. Did anyone really, truly consider this crowded, stuffy underground house with its lopsided little stove that looked like a fat-bellied toad to be a home? They’d quickly grown accustomed to it, resigned themselves. Ignatov can’t, though, and he hates Kuznets all the more with each day of waiting. The malice – muffled and confused – would rise in him, and he’d brandish his revolver as he shot at defenseless grouse. There you go! Die, you bastards!

The taiga birds quickly recognized the predator in Ignatov and a close death in the thundering shots. They have become more careful. They flap their soft black wings in fear and take flight as soon as they hear his footsteps. It has become more difficult to bring back food. The time of easy procurement has ended and the time for genuine hunting has come.

Ignatov has never hunted in his life. I hunted for Denikin’s men, he gloomily jokes to himself as he makes his way through thickets in search of any kind of animal suitable for food. And the Czechs who fought for the White Army, and the Basmachi. But not wild game – there was no need. Now he wanders the forest for entire days, his hand holding a loaded revolver in front of himself, his eyes scanning for edible targets. Chipmunks’ striped little backs blaze between bushes, squirrels streak in tree branches like reddish flashes, mice of various colors dart underfoot, and unfamiliar gray-and-yellow birds with fancy ornate tufts scamper up and down tree trunks. It’s a shame to waste cartridges on such small prey. He needs something larger, heftier, like a deer or five grouse. But his stride is too heavy and loud, so neither Siberian deer nor roe deer nor any other large wild animals cross his path. It chills Ignatov’s heart a little to think he could encounter prey more powerful than himself – a bear or a boar – and he doesn’t know if his small revolver’s bullet could pierce a thick hide. Toward evening, when his eyes are already flickering from constant strain and his feet throb and ache, he usually somehow manages (after missing a few times and wasting about five cartridges) to shoot down a couple of squirrels or some grouse that lost its vigilance. Sometimes he’s lucky. Once he came out by a forest lake hiding among pleat-like hills and shot an entire family of beavers, whose meat turned out to be surprisingly tender and juicy, and another time he shot down a pair of ducks flying over the taiga. But their rations are becoming more meager with each day.

In the evening of the final day of summer, 1930 (Konstantin Arnoldovich is keeping a calendar on the wall of the underground house, sawing out a tiny notch in a log each day, a short one on a weekday, a slightly longer one on weekends, and the longest at the end of the month, so the exiles can keep track) they are in the house discussing the question of foodstuffs after a thin supper of an old, lame, and extraordinarily tough badger.

Ignatov is lying on his bunk with his eyes wearily half-closed. He sees fiery squirrel pelts, finely quivering pine needles, and zigzagging spruce branches among splashes of sunspots that are all breaking and falling away as if they were in a kaleidoscope. He listens in on the exiles’ quiet conversation through his drowsiness.

There are no hunters to be found among them (and even if there had been, Ignatov smirks to himself, they wouldn’t have received firearms) but one fisherman has turned up, the red-bearded Lukka, who’s as puny as an adolescent, all rumpled, worn down like a sliver of soap, and toothless. They ask Lukka if he could catch fish tomorrow and they lay out for him the tackle that Kuznets left behind. Lukka speaks Russian poorly but immediately understands what’s required of him. Without looking at the tangle of tackle and hooks on the floor, he answers in a small voice that crackles like a fire, “I need to look at the river, to listen and speak with it. Then to wait. If it gives, there will be fish. If not, there will be no fish.”

They send the diplomatic Konstantin Arnoldovich to Ignatov’s bunk to negotiate with the commandant and request permission to excuse Lukka from his labor obligations for a couple of days so he could fish. At Ignatov’s instruction, all the exiles have been preparing firewood from morning until night and have had no right whatsoever to be absent.

“Let him,” says Ignatov, not opening his eyes or waiting for Konstantin Arnoldovich to choose his words and state the overall request. “Let him go. I’ll give him two days for those conversations. If he doesn’t bring fish, then he’ll work it all off by sawing wood for me at night.”

The next day, Lukka catches horseflies and assembles fishing rods. He walks along the shore a while and has a talk with the Angara. In the evening he brings to camp a bucket with hefty silver fish bodies that quiver between velvety green burdock leaves. This is very welcome because it’s the first day Ignatov returns from hunting empty-handed.

September greets them with sun, breathing yellow and red on the hills. The sky turns entirely blue, making the earth’s colors look even warmer and cheerier. The days are dry, clear, and crisp, but the nights are already cold and winterishly long.

Gnats come.

There’s no escaping them. The mosquitoes and deerflies that the exiles had previously thought were the taiga’s harsh punishment for invading its territory have disappeared, yielding their place to their smaller brothers. The gnats swoop in like a cloud, like fog, filling the taiga, clearing, shore, and the underground house. They cram in under clothing, into folds of skin, the nose, mouth, ears, hair, and eyes. People eat them up with their food (they turn out to taste sweet, like berries) and inhale them with air. They are the air itself.

A person can run from deerflies and swat mosquitoes. But tiny gnats the size of a grain of sand? People swell from the bites (the gnats leave large, bleeding lesions) and lose their minds from the incessant itching on their bodies. Those with the strength swing their arms and legs or run along the riverbank like madmen – the running blows the midges off their skin – and some bathe arms and legs they’ve scratched raw in the icy Angara water. Yet others smoke themselves in the pungent smoke of a fire, which causes violent coughing and reddens eyes but rescues them a bit from the insects. Work is at a standstill because nobody can even contemplate going for firewood or game in the depths of the forest, where the cloud of midges has come from.

They’ll eat us alive, Ignatov thinks absent-mindedly as he plunges puffy hands covered with bold red dots into transparent and impossibly cold water. His hands go numb, either from the cold or from the bites. He senses someone standing behind him and turns to see Leibe. His lips are swollen and protrude like a camel’s, and his eyes are tiny because of his puffy pink eyelids.

“Pitch,” he says, “we need birch pitch. It’s a well-known insecticide. It’s just that I don’t know the method for preparing this pitch. It’s usually sold in pharmacies, in glass vials, thirty-two kopeks each.”

The peasant men know a method for preparing it. They immediately equip themselves to go for birch bark and strip all the birches near the clearing from top to bottom. They heap the bark in a kettle, cover it with a bucket, and surround it with firewood. They smoke the bark for a long time, right until sunset. The resulting liquid, which is as thick as honey and absolutely black, gets mixed with water and smeared over them from head to toe. They look dark-skinned, with only their eyes and their teeth gleaming white. The venerable Musa-hadji looks most hilarious of all since he had no desire to smear his beard with pitch like the other men, so it glows like a white flag on his glossy face, which resembles a generously polished boot.

The gnats retreat and the exiles are able to get some sleep that night.

For Yuzuf’s tender skin, Leibe suggests that Zuleikha mix the pitch with breast milk. From that day on, the title of “doctor” fastens itself to Leibe in her mind.

After mid-September has passed, Ignatov begins thinking about whether to prepare an expedition to Krasnoyarsk.

The exiles have settled in and made themselves at home during the past month. The underground house – where the stove burns hot and never goes out – has dried from within and thoroughly baked. Following Avdei’s advice, they’ve constructed wood piles in stacks on tall stones around the house: the firewood lies in circles, one circle on top of another, forming high towers. Someone proposed covering their tops with spruce boughs but Avdei forbade it because the firewood would rot.

Each morning, even before sunrise, Ignatov knocks his revolver on the bottom of an empty bucket to raise the camp for work. Grumbling and coughing, the sleepy inmates head out for firewood under Gorelov’s supervision. Ignatov sets a daily quota for wood processing and nobody dares return to camp until it’s fulfilled. One time they tried, complaining of cold, rainy weather. Without saying a word, Ignatov grabbed the bucket with the supper Zuleikha had prepared and flung the contents in the Angara. The quota has been rigorously fulfilled since then, and people crawl into camp worn out, barely alive, and sometimes not until night, but they bring the required quantity of sawed logs and ready kindling. The stacks of firewood are growing like mushrooms around the underground house, but Ignatov thinks there’s never enough, and that they absolutely need more.

“We’re preparing firewood as diligently as if we’re planning to feed ourselves with it all winter,” he heard Izabella say one time. The old witch was hinting that they had no edible supplies whatsoever. And where would those supplies come from if thirty mouths ate up absolutely everything he managed to shoot and Lukka could catch? Ignatov thought a bit and from that day on ordered that Lukka divide the catch in two, half for fish soup, the other half to be dried for future use. People tried to protest against reducing the fish ration – “We’re already living half-starved!” – but no one could really argue with the commandant.

The women have asked several times for permission to be excused to pick berries because when working on firewood, they often encounter bilberry and lingonberry patches in the forest and come upon rowan trees strewn with orange bunches. Konstantin Arnoldovich maintains that cranberries could certainly be found here. Ignatov is adamant that there’s not much satiety to be had from those berries and the working day would be lost. So much firewood could be prepared in that time!

Only Lukka the fisherman and Zuleikha, too, don’t go to prepare wood. Sometimes Leibe asks to be excused to gather herbs and Ignatov lets him go; he’s warmed slightly toward Leibe because of the gnat incident. The others work every day. One time, Ikonnikov started a conversation about how factory workers in backward tsarist Russia were provided with days off even under moribund capitalism but Ignatov quickly cut off that showboating: “You can talk about imperialism with a blizzard this winter.”

Firewood, firewood… The humble sight of scruffy woodpiles gladdens Ignatov immensely. The bundles of dried fish, which are growing little by little, do, too. Zuleikha hangs them outside on sunny days and brings them inside the underground house on rainy days. But clothing is worrisome.

Many of the dekulakized had managed during their travel to keep warm things they’d taken from home and Ignatov has noticed that some even have a pair of felt boots and a reddish shaggy fur hat. But the Leningraders have no winter clothing and their bundles contain mostly useless junk, like thin between-season coats with gleaming round buttons, wrinkled brimmed hats with bright-hued silk linings, iridescent-colored mufflers that are slippery to the touch and have long delicate fringes, and suede and light cotton gloves.

Ignatov, too, has only the clothes he’s wearing: his summer officer’s State Political Administration uniform with a tunic for a shirt, light jodhpurs, and boots. And a peaked cap, of course. And so his alarm grows as he tracks long, inky clouds moving along the horizon. They promise rain and snow. These clouds have appeared recently, floating in from the north and circling the firmament for several days; they’re now covering and obscuring it from all sides, breathing cold air. When the last piece of clear sky dissolves between the shaggy sides of low-hanging clouds, Ignatov realizes Kuznets isn’t coming.

His insides seem to crackle with hoarfrost from that thought, and his head throbs and heats up, filling with rage. Away with the suffering, he orders himself. Away with it. Just think about what can be done.

Should he send out scouts? They really can’t overwinter here. He could send a couple of the most sensible men to Krasnoyarsk (maybe Gorelov and Lukka). Slap together a boat for them and away they go along the motherly Angara and then the fatherly Yenisei, too. But three-quarters of the journey’s four hundred kilometers is upstream, in the cold and rain, and without food supplies. So they wouldn’t make it.

And what if they did make it? What would they report upon arrival? We were dekulakized, they’d say, and exiled to the Angara by Soviet power, but out of the kindness of his heart, our temporary settlement commandant let us come to Krasnoyarsk in a boat for an outing – he’s impatient, don’t you see. He’s waiting for his replacement so he can head home…

His scouts wouldn’t reach Krasnoyarsk. It was as plain as day that they’d run away. Even if Ignatov were to appoint Gorelov as their minder. In fact Gorelov would be the first to propose it. It’s around Ignatov, who has the revolver, that he’s so obedient and zealous. And if something were to go wrong, he’d go into hiding without blinking an eye. He’s a hardened criminal.

Or should Ignatov go on the scouting trip himself, leaving the exiles here? Even worse. He and Kuznets would return to an empty camp: the peasants would all run away and the Leningraders would all die the hell off during that time.

One way is bad, the other’s worse. No matter what happens, he – Ignatov, the commandant – would be to blame. And he’s already gotten into so much trouble, more than enough for three. He’ll have to answer to the fullest extent before the Party and his comrades, for the attrition on the special train and for the escape and for the sunken Clara. No matter how he looks at it, he has to sit here and wait, whether for Kuznets or for the damned devil himself so Ignatov can account for himself with deeds rather than words.

Another thought tosses and turns in the depths of his consciousness and for some reason it makes him uncomfortable: he must save them. He’s often dreamt that he’s drowning in the Angara again, and as he’s being submerged into its cloudy cold waters, there are hundreds of hands stretching toward him from the black depths, with their long white fingers billowing like seaweed, saying, “Save us, save us…” He always wakes up abruptly, sits up on his bunk, and wipes off his damp neck. That same “Save us” then rustles and rolls around in his head all day. And though he is afraid to admit it, it makes him realize that what he wants, desperately wants, is to save these enemies so they will actually live to see a new barge and survive, every last one of them. And he wants that not for them, nor for Kuznets, nor the impending tribunal for the mistakes he made. He wants it for himself. And that’s why he’s uncomfortable.

Ignatov picks up a hefty stick and knocks it on the scaly, reddish pine trunks as he strides back to camp. Then he swings his arm and tosses it into a thicket. He imagines it falling on Kuznets’s head – smack dab on the top – and his soul begins feeling brighter.

The first snow falls that evening and these aren’t the light grains that sprinkled down on them from the sky on the first day of their life on the riverbank, but the real thing – large, shaggy snowflakes. Frost hits during the night, ice glistens like fragile glass at the bottom of a bucket inadvertently left outside, and a thin hoarfrost nips at brush-like spruce boughs.

It’s impossible to observe the exiles leaving in the morning for work without laughing – they put on all the clothes they possess. The peasants wrap themselves in head scarves, pull on fur coats and sheepskin jerkins, and the city people wear once-dandified plaid coats, gloves and mufflers of delicate hues, extremely wrinkled kepis, and hats with broken brims. The heavyset Leila wears a pot-shaped hat embroidered with colored glass beads and burrows her nose in a matted boa that looks as if it’s been plucked. Konstantin Arnoldovich models a pie-shaped hat that’s slightly deformed from having been transported so long and is made of very smooth, extraordinarily fine fur the color of strong coffee with cream. Izabella discovers she’s lost her emerald-colored hat with the feather and this vexes her thoroughly because she has to cover her head using a shawl that already has holes worn in it in several places. They all carry identical one-handed saws in their hands.

One of the peasants has given Ignatov an old leather jacket that’s cracked at the elbows – it was left behind by his son, who escaped from the ill-fated eighth train car. The jacket’s a little narrow in the shoulders and Ignatov’s arms stick out of the sleeves quite a bit, but it warms him. Ignatov – who’s been openly freezing in recent days and had begun placing dried grass and leaves under his shirt in secret – did not refuse the gift.

That same day, while walking as usual through the taiga in search of prey, he has the idea of killing a bear. They could salt the meat and use the hide for clothing. The peasants have promised to handle it by fleshing, pickling, and tanning the hide nicely. An extra fur coat wouldn’t hurt in the winter. And if he comes across a large bear, they can even cut a couple of hats from the hide.

He has to act quickly because the animals could settle in for hibernation. For three days, Ignatov digs a pit in the taiga, until his palms are worn to bloody blisters. The peasant men offer help that he refuses (“Firewood, the firewood, who’s going to saw it?”). He covers the steep walls with smooth poles and pounds a sharpened stake into the middle. He places brushwood and boughs on top, and blankets it with grass. He begins waiting. No bear comes.

Ignatov tosses in bait a couple of times, either a squirrel he’s shot or half a grouse. There’s no bait to be found in the pit in the morning because lynxes or martens have dragged it off, scattering the brushwood Ignatov had placed so carefully. No bear ever visits. Ignatov stops by the pit to check from time to time but then he abandons it. He’s not sorry about his work, though he’s very sorry about the three days spent in vain.

At the end of October, snow falls in the taiga and stays for good. Winter has set in.

It’s decided to work in two shifts. One group leaves in the thick, dark blueness of early morning to saw wood, pulling on all the warm clothes they have in the underground house. They return a half-day later, hastily dry their wet, sweaty clothes, and give them to the second shift. They work until late, until the stars come out.

Ignatov orders those who sit at camp to weave baskets. The evening shift has things easier because people wake up to Ignatov’s never-changing alarm – his revolver on the bucket – and sit down to weave without leaving their bunks. The morning shift, though, works off five hours in the fresh air, comes back, collapses on the bunks from exhaustion, and falls asleep. Ignatov is usually foraging in the taiga during that time. He orders Gorelov to wake up the lie-abeds and deny supper to those who disobey. Supper is the only feeding in the camp, so large, medium, and small baskets soon fill the already crowded underground house. One day, when the exiles cautiously inquire of Ignatov if they might have enough baskets, he replies that they do, then instructs them to weave snowshoes and sleds for wood instead. In answer to their eloquent silence, he shouts, “Winter’s around the corner – how are you planning to go for firewood, you bastards?”

He’s ill-tempered, people whisper. They’ve resigned themselves to it.

Some get sick and burn with fever for a long time, coughing incessantly during the nights, keeping the others awake. Leibe gives them curative drinks with repulsively reeking herbs. Ignatov chases them back out to work, though, as soon as the patients’ eyes begin twinkling from feeling better, their foreheads are no longer covered in perspiration, and they can plod independently to the latrine installed in the underground house’s “entrance hall.”

“It’s ungodly,” Izabella says one morning after Ignatov has demanded Konstantin Arnoldovich, who’s still bluish-white from the fever he’s recently endured, go with everyone else to cut wood in a forest seized by ringing hoarfrost. “You’ll kill us.”

“Fewer mouths to feed will make it easier for the rest,” says Ignatov, baring his teeth.

At times Ignatov reads something resembling meek hatred in the eyes of these elderly people exhausted and emaciated by hunger and suffering. If he hadn’t had a revolver, it’s possible they might have even attempted to kill him.

At the beginning of winter, Ignatov’s life grows complicated in a way he didn’t anticipate at all. He doesn’t go very far from camp that day. He inspects work in the clearing, where the exiles are laboring away felling trees and preparing logs that they drag to the camp on a sled, piling big branches into bundles, small kindling into large baskets, and birch bark, pine bark, pine cones, and pine needles into their own baskets – and then he heads off to his own work: hunting. The lumbermen’s voices, the screech of the one-handed saws, and the crack of felling timber are still audible and very close by, but then he hears a sudden rustling and quivering of branches in the juniper bushes. It sounds like a large animal.

Ignatov freezes and slowly, very slowly, reaches for his revolver. His fingers creep along the holster as noiselessly as shadows. The cold weight of the weapon is in Ignatov’s hand.

The bush is still quivering steadily, as if someone’s plucking at it from the other side. A branch crunches under a heavy paw. A bear? That means it’s come to visit. He prepared a pit and bait but it came on its own, uninvited, to feast on little juniper cones.

Shoot now, blindly? He might wound but not kill. The beast could either turn nasty and tear him the hell up, or get frightened and run away so Ignatov can’t catch up. He’ll have to wait until the animal shows its snout. Then he can shoot at a weak spot – its open jaws or an eye – to be absolutely sure.

The quivering in the bush moves closer. The bow-legged animal is walking right into his arms! Ignatov raises his revolver, places his second hand on top and prepares to cock it. He can’t now, though, because the bear would hear. As soon as the bear sticks its nose out, Ignatov will pull the trigger and fire into its snout, the snout!

His throat is dry and he struggles to swallow. When he does, the sound seems deafening. The bush shudders abruptly again and out walks Zuleikha. Ignatov mumbles angrily, then quickly lowers the revolver. For an instant, it’s as if he can’t get enough air.

“And what if I’d shot you down!”

A couple of frightened crows fly from a branch and dart behind the tops of spruce trees. Zuleikha is backing away, her hands covering her dress where it protrudes on her belly, and staring, frightened.

“And so out of consideration for you, we kept you in the kitchen to tend the fire. But here you are, strolling in the woods?”

“I wanted to gather some nuts or berries,” she whispers. “I want so badly to eat.”

“Everybody wants to!” shouts Ignatov. They can probably hear him at the lumbering site.

“It’s not for me.” She continues backing away until she runs into an old birch bursting with torn black spots. “It’s for him.”

She looks down at the dark top of a head that’s peeping out from her chest. Ignatov strides right up to Zuleikha and hovers over her. His breathing is still heavy and loud.

“Obey me,” he says, “without exception. If you’re ordered to stay in the camp, then sit there. If I order you to go for berries, you’ll go. Clear?”

The baby on Zuleikha’s chest suddenly yelps restlessly, stirring and grumbling. A tiny, wrinkled little hand with hook-like fingers appears in the opening of her dress for a moment and then disappears.

“See? It’s ‘Give me milk’ again.” Zuleikha unfastens the buttons on her chest. “Go on, then, go. I need to feed him.”

Ignatov stands, angry and unmoving. The baby is crying, snuffling his little nose and rooting around with his open mouth.

“I said go! It’s a sin to watch.”

Ignatov doesn’t budge; he’s looking straight at her. The baby is bawling, sobbing, as if from bitterness and offense, wrinkling his old man’s face. Zuleikha takes a heavy breast out of the opening of her dress and places a swollen nipple with trembling drops of milk on the end into his wide-open mouth. The crying ceases immediately and the child feeds hungrily, moaning as he quickly stretches and squeezes his taut, bright-pink little cheeks. White milk flows along them, mixing with tears that haven’t yet dried.

Her breast is small, round, and full. Like an apple. Ignatov is watching that breast and he can’t tear himself away. Something hot, large, and slow stirs in his belly. They say a woman’s milk is sweet to the taste. He takes a step back. Sticks his revolver in the holster and fastens it. He walks off into the forest and turns after a couple of steps:

“Go to camp when you finish feeding. Bears want to eat, too.”

He strides away along a path that’s already been trodden between the spruces. He sees before him a small hand diving into the opening of the dress, clasping and reaching a taut, round, milky-white sphere of a breast with light-blue lines of veins and a large, shining, dark pink berry of a nipple that’s burning, quivering with rich milk.

Some joke, half a year without a woman.

And so Ignatov tries not to look at Zuleikha after that. It’s not easy in the crowded underground house. When their eyes happen to meet, he feels that same hot stirring in his belly again and turns away immediately.

Ignatov has selected the best snowshoes for himself. The exiles wove several dozen pairs but these, produced by the gnarled fingers of Granny Yanipa, a taciturn Mari woman with a brown face and small eyes lost amid shaggy eyebrows and deep wrinkles, are the best for walking because they sit nicely on the foot, don’t fall through a thin crust on top of the snow, and don’t let snow through. He’s already been wearing them for three months. The birch cane has worn on the curves and is in shreds. Ignatov wants to order a second pair from her but she’s been sick and hasn’t gotten out of bed for several weeks.

The snowshoes the other peasants make are heavy and clumsy so they’re suitable for short trips to fetch firewood but not for long, fast-moving hunting outings. The Leningraders’ handiwork is so unsightly that it’s difficult to recognize them as snowshoes; they’re reminiscent of either an intricately shaped twig broom or an unsuccessful basket. “It’s an example of Suprematism,” Ikonnikov once said incomprehensibly, scrutinizing the shaggy woven something his hands had just created. The zealous Gorelov had wanted to throw Suprematism out of the house but Ignatov wouldn’t allow it, ordering that it be hung under the ceiling because there was no longer any space on the floor.

Ignatov is stepping, placing his snowshoes on a dense, hard crust of ice. He’s listening to the sound of his feet. The January sky is gray and cold. Dark clouds hang motionless, their inner white linings showing and a pre-dusk sun shining golden through them. It’s time to go back.

He’s returning empty-handed today.

Ignatov has not embraced hunting during his months in the taiga. He can tread quietly, hear keenly, and shoot accurately. He can already distinguish tracks in the snow as if he’s reading dispatches left by the animals. Long and sparse are hares’, larger and heavier are badgers’, and light and sweeping are squirrels’. Sometimes he even senses the animals and he thrusts out his hand holding the revolver, squeezing the trigger before his head manages to grasp that it, his prey, is flashing between the bushes. But he hasn’t been able to genuinely come to love hunting. He likes chasing and shooting but in a different way, where there’s an open and comprehensible target. As in a battle, when you see an adversary and fire at him or chase him and hack him with a saber. Everything’s clear and simple. But hunting is complex. Sometimes he imagines forest animals crawling out of their burrows and dens, and skipping along a huge field in even rows without hiding, meandering, or covering their tracks. He’s behind them on a horse. He aims his revolver, shooting one after the other, one after the other. Now that would genuinely be hunting. But this?

Hunting fortune has been harsh for Ignatov, rarely gladdening him with success. Of course the largest prey was the elk. That happened in December, just before the new year. By chance, Ignatov had wandered to the bear pit he’d dug and forgotten about in the autumn and seen that something had landed inside. Dumbfounded by the premonition of sizable prey, he peered in at something large and dark gray that was lying there, tired. Its shaggy long legs with hooves as long as fingers were shaking slightly. Brownish-crimson guts, still lightly steaming, were entwined on the sharpened stake that stuck out over the elk. Ignatov dashed right off for camp. He ran in, panting and wild-eyed, scaring everybody. They gathered the men, grabbed sleds and homemade torches, and quickly went back into the woods. Ignatov was afraid the smell of meat would attract wolves but they encountered only a lynx in the pit. It had already torn at the carcass pretty well and it bared its crooked fangs wickedly, bubbling elk blood at them. Ignatov killed the lynx, too, and they dragged the animals to the underground house and ate for nearly a week. That was how they celebrated New Year’s.

Nothing else has landed in the pit. There has been only small, insubstantial prey since that elk, which seems to have expended Ignatov’s entire allotted share of hunting successes all in one go. There is help, thanks to Lukka. The Angara was already covered with ice in November but the men sawed about a dozen large holes under Lukka’s supervision, so Lukka has been spending days at a time on the ice ever since. He brings back bream that are as broad and flat as dishes and shimmer like copper, spotted green pikes with spiteful bared teeth, and fishes unknown to Ignatov that gleam with pearlescence and have large, rhomboidal fins on their fatty backs.

Lukka has recently fallen ill, though. Many have taken to their beds since New Year and only Ignatov is hanging on. He’s been forced to abandon sending two shifts into the forest for firewood so now only one shift works, only the healthy people, which really means those who are least ill. With misgivings, Ignatov excuses Professor Leibe from his labor duties because someone has to look after the sick. Because of Lukka’s illness, they’ve been forced to feed themselves with stored fish. The dried fish doesn’t last long; they’ve eaten everything they prepared in autumn within a couple of days. Ignatov is now their only hope.

He is striding through the taiga. Spruces float past him, their broad boughs pillowed in snow and bent toward the ground, resting against snowdrifts. Bushes swell like steep white boulders, and golden trunks of pine trees flash with a coating of thick hoarfrost. He goes down to the familiar clearing, where the giant skeleton of a lightning-charred birch tree stands in the corner, and he crosses a frozen stream where mounds of rocks are frosted with drifted snow. The camp is already close and the faint, bittersweet smell of smoke touches his nostrils.

In sunset’s meager light, Ignatov sees tall poles on which two gray skulls bare their teeth between the trees. One skull is large and long, with a bent nose, large, flat chewing teeth, and the sturdy roots of horns growing right out of small, oval eye sockets – the elk. The second skull is small and round like a potato, with a hideous hole of a nose and fanged jaws that are thrust forward and tenaciously lying on top of one another – the lynx. Lukka hung up the skulls to scare off forest spirits. Ignatov had wanted to remove this appalling counterrevolution but gave up and left it after noticing the peasants’ imploring looks. He thought it would be better if the skulls scared off illness. But there they hang, seeing Ignatov off for hunting in the morning, their black eyeholes gawking after him. They greet him in the evening, peering indifferently into his hands. What are you bringing back? Is there something to feed the people? Or has the time come to die?

Ignatov turns away from the skulls’ unblinking gaze, gloomily hurrying past them to the underground house. As he walks, he again counts, out of habit, the tall round drifts – the woodpiles – that cover the clearing like mushrooms. There are fewer of them now than a month ago because the exiles have begun using up the firewood supply. Blizzards sometimes cover the taiga, howling over the house for several days, singing and shrieking in the stovepipe, and sending snow flying over the earth in a dense burst, carpeting the sun overhead. You’d perish in foul weather like that, so there’s no going into the forest. They even go out to the woodpiles on a tether: they grope with their hands in search of the wood, trudge through waist-deep snow, and return to the underground house, pulling a rope with one end tied around their middle and the other to the entrance. Their supplies began melting away faster when illnesses arrived, and even when the weather was good, the exiles couldn’t prepare as much firewood as before.

Ignatov sticks his snowshoes in a drift by the entrance, kneels, and crawls into the house. The outside door, woven from birch switches and reinforced with a mixture of turf and clay, is lying on the ground; it needs to be lifted and squeezed into a slot. Now Ignatov is in the cold “entrance hall.” He goes down the earthen steps, throws back curtains made of bast fiber and elk hide and ducks into the underground house’s crowded space, which is filled with heavy, warm air, the smell of herbs, fish, tree bark, spruce needles, smoke, scorching hot stones, and the sounds of coughing and quiet conversations.

He’s come home.

Somewhere in the depths of the house, listless voices go quiet right away. The uneven light of a splinter lamp burning brightly over a kettle of water illuminates somber faces with distinctly drawn angular cheekbones and wrinkly folds. A dozen eyes stare at Ignatov and his empty hands.

He makes his way to his bunk without looking in their direction. From underneath his homemade pillow of boughs he removes the sack of cartridges, which has been shrinking tremendously over the winter. With the onset of winter, he stopped hiding it in the forest and began keeping it with himself, at the head of his bed. He loads his revolver. Without kicking off boots wound with scraps of lynx hide, he lies down, placing the hand with the revolver under his head. He closes his eyes, continuing to sense the gazes directed at him.

In moments like these he usually feels rising tides of fury and wants to start waving his weapon and shout, “What are you staring at, you bastards?” But today he doesn’t have the strength. An unhurried, somber sort of tiredness has overcome him. He needs to dry out his boots and clothes, and at least drink some hot water to fill the sucking emptiness in his stomach. Right now, thinks Ignatov. Right now, right now.

“Very well, we’ll have some soup du jour, then,” says Izabella. She scoops a spoonful of salt out of a fat sack and drops it in a kettle that’s been bubbling away on the fire. The clear water clouds and turns white as if someone had mixed in milk, then it sputters and clears again a moment later. The salty soup is ready.

Not many people like it. The majority turn toward the wall and don’t even get out of their bunks. Only Konstantin Arnoldovich and Ikonnikov take seats by the pot.

For a long time, Konstantin Arnoldovich scrutinizes the bowl of his spoon, made from a pearlescent shell, then suddenly smiles:

“I feel like I’m on Avenue Foch. Saturday evening, oysters on ice, a glass of Montrachet…”

“The best oysters, though,” chimes in Ikonnikov, sipping his salty soup with gusto, “were to be found on Rue de Vaugirard. You won’t argue with that, will you?”

“My dear Ilya Petrovich! How would you know? You were just a youth then and saw nothing but your études. It’s surprising you even left your Montmartre!”

“Messieurs, ne vous disputez pas!” Izabella laughs as she knocks her spoon on the edge of the pot, as if she’s flicking off fatty pieces of meat, translucent lemon slices, and small olive rounds that have stuck to it.

Gorelov plops down alongside them, takes a spoon out of his shirt, licks it, and looks ravenously at his companions. The conversation dies down.

Zuleikha buries her face in Yuzuf’s hair. Ignatov came back from hunting empty-handed again. There’s nothing for supper tonight, meaning her milk won’t come in. Lately her milk supply has even been sparse after food.

It began running low in mid-winter. At first she thought it was from the meager food but she understood her milk was ending when they ate their fill of fatty, fragrant elk meat for a whole week in January and her breasts remained as weak and soft as before. She started giving her son meat and fish as a supplement. Potato or bread would have been better, of course, but where could she get that? She’d place a small piece of something in a rag and slip it into a space in his tiny toothless gums. Yuzuf spat it out at first but then he recognized the taste and sucked at it. He didn’t like salty things – he cried – so Zuleikha didn’t give him dried fish. When several completely hungry days came, she tried stewing some aromatic yellow cones that were left on the branches of a bough but that plant food gave her son sticky lumps of emerald green diarrhea and Doctor Leibe scolded her like nothing on earth. She hadn’t even known he could shout so loudly and threateningly.

Since all the illness, when Ignatov abolished the severe twice-daily outings into the forest, many of the exiles now stay in the house during the day – and so Izabella often relieves Zuleikha at the stove. Zuleikha can lie for a while without moving after she’s lowered her tired gaze to her sleeping son; she listens to his quiet, measured breathing. Yuzuf’s sleeping minutes have become a delight for her but they make the minutes when he wakes up and cries all the harsher and bitterer. Her little boy wants to eat all the time.

She can’t wait for him to start walking. She shuts her eyes and imagines Yuzuf when he’s grown a little: after being bow-legged and skinny, his legs have become sturdy and are padded in resilient baby fat, round pink fingernails have grown out on his small fingers, his head is covered in dense, dark hair, and he stamps through the underground house to greet her. He picks up one little foot after the other and waddles like a duck – he’s walking. Will she live to see that? Will he?

Zuleikha thinks so much about her son that she often forgets about her own groaning stomach and the weakness that sometimes overcomes her. She’s very afraid of getting sick. Who would look after Yuzuf then? Her past life – Yulbash’s open spaces, the threatening Murtaza, the nasty Vampire Hag, the long trip in the railroad car with the smells of hundreds of people – has slipped so far away, remaining behind such sharp turns, that it seems like a half-forgotten dream, a vague recollection. Did all that really happen to her? Her life now is catching the doctor’s calm gaze (“Everything’s fine with Yuzuf, don’t worry, Zuleikha…”), waiting for Ignatov to return from hunting and Lukka from fishing (“Meat! We’re going to eat meat today!”), and curling up on the bunk like a ring around her sleeping son and inhaling, inhaling his delicate smell.

It’s quiet in the underground house. The exiles are already pressed up against one another, sleeping. After eating their fill of salty soup and embracing one another, Konstantin Arnoldovich and Izabella are wheezing a little, Ikonnikov is gently snoring, Gorelov is lost in a heavy, tense slumber, and Ignatov is lying on his separate bunk like a dead man, not moving.

Yuzuf shudders and his little nose moves sleepily – he’s looking for Zuleikha. She’s recently stopped carrying him around and he’s been getting used to living on his own, without maternal warmth and scent surrounding him from all sides. As soon as she ends up alongside him, though, he seeks to press into her like before, worm his way in, and stick all his skin against her. As he does now. After his face has found his mother, he burrows himself in her chest, flattening his nose. He lies calmly for a minute or two then starts fidgeting away and his lips begin smacking. He’s sensed the smell of milk. He’ll wake up now.

And he does. He grunts and moans a little, sobs a couple of times and bursts out in hungry, demanding wailing. Zuleikha shushes her son affectionately and takes him in her arms. Her fingers get tangled in the frayed fasteners on her smock as she hurriedly opens the collar. She takes out a soft, flimsy breast and places it in the baby’s hungry, wide-open mouth. Yuzuf hastily chews the limp nipple and spits – there’s no milk. He cries louder. One person coughs hoarsely in the depths of the bunks and another turns over with a groan, mumbling unintelligibly.

Zuleikha shifts Yuzuf to her other arm and gives him her second breast. He goes silent for a moment, his toothless gums frantically yanking at the second nipple. It hurts so much, she notices with joyful amazement. Could it really be his first tooth? She doesn’t have time to think that through, though, because Yuzuf spits out her breast, which has deceived him with its familiar smell. Now he’s crying loudly, sobbing. His little face instantly floods with blood and his fists twist in the air.

She leaps up and rocks Yuzuf, bending so she doesn’t hit her head on baskets, bunches of feathers, rolls of birch bark, bundles of pine cones, and other junk hanging from the ceiling.

Sometimes he can be successfully rocked, settled down, convinced, and whispered to so he’ll fall asleep without even eating, giving Zuleikha the gift of a few more hours of precious silence. One time, she tried rocking Yuzuf in a cradle, a large basket hanging from the ceiling, but he completely refused to fall asleep by himself. He always wants to be in his mother’s arms.

She presses her lips to his small head, which is very warm and damp from sweat. She mumbles half-forgotten lullabies in his tender little ear and whispers, casting a spell. She rocks him, first gently and evenly, then harder, more abruptly, and swinging more. She puts a homemade fabric pacifier in his tiny mouth but he spits it out and continues screaming. Between lips that are wide open and already covered with a slight nervous blueness she can see his tiny dark pink gums, glistening with spittle and completely smooth: there’s no first tooth on them. Yuzuf is already almost six months old but his teeth haven’t grown in.

Zuleikha jiggles his tense, arched little body. His crying is so shrill and loud that it hurts the ears. People roll over on their bunks, sighing, but continuing to sleep. They’re used to this.

She takes someone’s spoon left from supper and scrapes the bottom of the pot for a couple of drops of salty soup and places that in Yuzuf’s mouth. He makes an offended face, spits, and chokes from crying so hard. His voice is already tired and a little hoarse, and the soft spot on his head pulses frequently and heavily, as if it wants to explode.

Zuleikha’s back aches and she places Yuzuf’s bellowing little body on the bunk and sits beside him. She lowers her head to her knees and plugs her ears, but it’s no quieter because it’s as if her son’s crying has settled in her head. In moments like these, Zuleikha sometimes thinks it would have been easier for Yuzuf if he had departed during childbirth.

Out of the corner of her eye, she notices a slight motion in the middle of the underground house. It’s as if a breeze has wafted, making the long shadows that extend from the stove door give a start, sway, and begin fidgeting. Zuleikha raises her head. The Vampire Hag is sitting right by the stove, on a gnarled wooden block made from a piece of an old pine stump, her elbows leaning into sharp knees set far apart.

Yellow specks of light from the fire tremble on her parchment-like forehead, streaming over hilly cheeks and flowing away into the hollows of her mouth and eye sockets. Her braids hang down toward the earthen floor like gaunt, shaggy ropes. Crescent-shaped earrings of dulled gold swing ever so slightly in her droopy, wrinkled earlobes, splashing light on the dark walls, the bunks, and human bodies sleepily tossing and turning.

The Vampire Hag stirs the remainder of the salty soup for a long time, then taps the spoon thoroughly and places it on the edge of the pot.

“My son never cried that hard,” she calmly says. “Never cried that hard.”

White drops of salty soup flow from the shell spoon and fall back in the pot, plinking. Surprised, Zuleikha wonders how she can hear it through the crying.

Yuzuf is still bellowing and wheezing beside her. A fine spasm runs through his twisted little body and his lips are rapidly turning a rich blue.

Large, hefty drops continue falling from the spoon into the pot. Each is like a hammer striking. They’re no longer plinking but thundering. So loudly they muffle her son’s voice.

Zuleikha walks over to the kettle and takes the spoon. She grasps the handle in her fist and hits the sharp side of the pearlescent shell exactly at the center of the middle finger on her other hand. The small but deep semicircular gash is like a crescent and it spurts out something thick, dark, and ruby red. She returns to the bunk and places her finger in her son’s mouth. She feels his hot gums squeeze right away, biting and seizing at her fingernail. Yuzuf sucks greedily, groaning and gradually calming. His breathing is still rapid and his little hands still shudder from time to time. But now he’s not crying: he’s busily feeding and he grunts every now and then, as he used to when he drank milk. Zuleikha watches the blueness leave his tiny lips, his cheeks grow pink, and his eyes eventually close from exhaustion and satisfaction. Taut red bubbles swell in the corners of his tiny mouth from time to time, bursting and running to his chin in little winding streams.

It’s not painful at all.

She looks up but now there’s nobody at the stove.

Spring arrives suddenly, unexpectedly – it’s loud, booming, and strong-smelling. All morning, rambunctious bird chirps have been bursting through the pieces of rags that stop up the house’s little windows. The chirping is a teasing invitation that finally turns into the heavy, distinct thought that Ignatov has to go hunting.

His eyelids open. His body has lightened of late; it’s as if it lacks bones, though for some reason it’s difficult to carry. It’s even become hard to think. His head is empty, as if it’s flat and made of paper. His thoughts are somehow weightless and fleeting, too, like shadows or smells, so if you don’t seize them, you won’t fully think them through. That’s why this morning’s thoughts are unwieldy, stirring in his skull like a lazy fish, and seeming so important and necessary. He has to get up and go hunting.

He didn’t go anywhere yesterday; he lay on his bunk the whole day, resting. Now the persistent chirruping has woken him, stirred him up, and forced him to hope again. What if he manages to kill one of those birds? He has to get up now and go hunting.

Ignatov throws his feet off the bunk and an icy crust crunches on the floor; the water’s been running for a long time, ever since the snow started melting a little. He finds his revolver at the head of the bed and rummages around in the sack for a long time, groping for a cartridge. It’s the last one. What did Kuznets say when he was leaving? Enough for all the wild beasts in the taiga? It’s ended up not being enough. But that’s funny, so he should laugh, laugh to his heart’s content at what turned out to be Kuznets’s hilarious practical joke, though he somehow lacks the strength. He’ll have a laugh later, when he gets back from hunting. He just can’t let himself forget it, that joke. Ignatov flings the empty sack away, has trouble opening the drum, and inserts the cartridge. Coping with the revolver has also become difficult of late; it’s too heavy. Just like the obsessive thought in his head that he absolutely has to go hunting and bring something back.

He leans his hands against the edge of the bunk and comes to his feet. His head spins and the air disappears from his lungs. Ignatov is standing with his hands propped against a vertical support log and he’s waiting for the walls to stop rocking. He adjusts his vision and breathing, then walks toward the door.

The exiles are lying on the bunks in tight bunches, embracing. They’re not moving. Maybe they’re sleeping. He ordered those on watch to check people in the mornings. If there’s a corpse, bring it outside immediately. They should probably make the checks more frequently, twice a day.

A small mound of tatters stirs weakly by the stove: it’s Gorelov. He spits, occasionally tossing firewood into the stove. He’s on watch today. There’s not much firewood, only enough for a half-day, and that’s all that remains of the magnificent woodpile stacks that were once so tall. They’ve been heating frugally lately, a little at a time, and supplementing the firewood with woven baskets and snowshoes. They’ve burned everything they wove in the autumn, even Ikonnikov’s Suprematism, after cleaning off the soft birch bark, which they pounded, boiled, and drank beforehand. The firewood went quickly even so; it practically melted away. The indifferent thought that flashes is: We’ll freeze to death at night.

Konstantin Arnoldovich’s invention, the sawed calendar, is on the log by the door. Half of August, September, October, November, December, January, and even February were applied by a firm, stubborn hand. In March, the marks became irregular, uneven, and not very noticeable, and by April they completely went missing. It doesn’t matter now since April is probably over.

Ignatov makes his way under the elk hide, which is as rigid as tree bark and has been mercilessly slashed by a knife. They cut leather off many places and boiled it for a long time but couldn’t eat it anyway because it was too tough. They ate both bast curtains, though, and needles from the boughs they’d used to cover their bunks for softness. As well as the medicinal herbs Leibe had prepared.

Ignatov rests the top of his head against the outside door, pushes, and crawls outside: fresh air and the pattering thaw splash through the gap that’s opened up. The clearing is in front of him. It’s spacious and bundled in snow in some spots but already breathing reddish brown earth in others, and there are black circles made of river rocks, the remnants of the foundations for the woodpiles. The forest is quiet and transparent in the distance, with delicately gray trunks of spruces that have frayed over the winter, occasional black-and-white birch trees with branches like thin hair, and the brittle, reddish lace of juniper bushes.

The earth’s thick, fusty fragrance makes his head spin again. Still crouching by the entrance to the house, Ignatov rests and scrutinizes the darkening Angara below through his half-closed eyes. The river frightened them all winter, making its way toward the knoll with its ice standing on end. Then it began glimmering in places, large gray spots appeared, and the river started sparkling in the sun. A few days ago it suddenly thundered, breaking into angular pieces of blindingly white ice that floated away. You tried, but you could not defeat me, Ignatov thought then, observing the rapid, menacing flow of ice chunks along the swelled river. Now it has already calmed, darkened, and eaten up all the ice. It’s as blue and shining as last summer.

Ignatov strides into the taiga to hunt, shuffling his feet in boots that have fallen apart and lost all form, and holding his revolver in his outstretched hand. From their stakes, the skulls bare their teeth behind him – there are his old comrades the elk and the lynx, a couple of toothy wolverines, and a badger with a flat forehead.

And there’s the chirping, up above. Something’s ringing, singing, and murmuring where thin branches swollen with buds and shabby spruce boughs cross. Ignatov looks up as spots of light blue, reddish-brown, and shades of yellow swing, hop, and fly. The birds are so high he can’t discern or reach them. He’ll need to tear off the buds on his way back, though, for supper.

Ignatov slowly pushes forward, into the depths of the forest, holding onto tree trunks and branches as he walks around puddles with motionless black water and snowdrifts that have melted a little on the sides. His feet are leading him somewhere on their own, and he’s submitting to them, walking. He makes his way across a brook that recently thawed and now jangles deafeningly on the rocks. He walks up along gray land with lumps from last year’s pine cones and between pine trunks that burn with reddish fire. The taiga beckons. Soon, soon there will be prey.

He leans his back against a tall old larch, breathing loudly. His chest is heaving and his legs are buckling, folding in half because he’s unaccustomed to walking so much now. And he’s gone a long way. Will he make it back? Ignatov closes his eyes partway and there’s an unbearable ringing in his ears from the babbling birds. Apparently the taiga is deceiving and enticing him, not allowing him to go back.

There’s a sudden rustling beside him. A squirrel is on a branch right next to Ignatov’s face: it’s thin, dirty gray, with scanty white fluff, yellow cheeks, and long scampish tassels for ears. Meat! A shining brown eye darts and – zoom! – it’s up the tree trunk. Ignatov’s shaking hand reaches upward with the revolver but it’s instantly way too heavy to hold. A shabby tail like a miniature broom flashes mockingly up above, teasing as it blends in with brush-like branches, layers of bark, and needly sunbeams, before disappearing. The sky suddenly starts spinning faster and faster, and then everything’s spinning, the treetops, the clouds…

Ignatov shuts his eyes tightly and his head droops. Turn back? The birds call up ahead, chirping and promising. Ignatov walks forward, half-squinting, lowering his gaze, and not looking at the sky gone mad. He stumbles on a pine root and falls. Why hadn’t he figured out before that crawling is easier? He moves ahead on all fours, looking only at the ground.

A delicate little pink back flashes and a pair of curious eyes sparkle very close, between knotty pine roots: a large jay is busily hopping somewhere. So that’s who’s been singing the whole time! That’s who lured him here! Ignatov aims an uncertain hand at the jay. Whoosh! It’s flown away. Ignatov’s gaze follows but quickly looks down after seeing the spinning firmament again.

He suddenly understands he’s been making his way up the cliff this whole time. He hasn’t been here in a long while, since autumn. And there’s only a little further to the top. If only the damned sky would stop spinning for just a second. Ignatov gathers his strength and crawls up.

Even from a distance, he notices there are blindingly green shoots of fresh grass with bright yellow, star-shaped flowers at the very top, on a shred of earth that’s warmed by the sun between some rocks. He contracts his muscles, darts forward like a snake, falls face-first on the grass, tears it with his teeth, and chews. He mumbles from enjoyment as a wonderful fresh taste fills his mouth, spreads through his veins, and rushes to his head like young wine. Happiness! His stomach shudders hard and relentlessly. Poorly chewed emerald greens with little yellow flowers sprinkled in, mixed with mucus and gastric juices, spill out on the grass. Ignatov howls and coughs convulsively, pounding his revolver on the ground. He’s puked it all up, to the last blade of grass. His breathing is labored and his face drops in the grime, into the grass his innards rejected, and he understands. This is the end, he won’t make it home, he has no strength.

He didn’t keep the exiles alive. Didn’t save them.

Exerting himself, he brings the revolver’s cold, heavy body to his face and sticks the long barrel in his mouth: his teeth chatter against the metal and the sharp front sight scratches the roof of his mouth. Bastards, is the last thought that flashes through his mind.

He suddenly feels like the sky has stopped rotating above him. He looks up. In the distance, dark against the bright blue Angara water, is the long brown spot of a barge and a bold black dot alongside it. It’s the launch.

THE SETTLEMENT

Kuznets springs out of the boat. Big, cold splashes of water fall on sturdy boots carefully polished with wax, then skitter away and roll back into the Angara. He walks along the riverbank, unhurried, as his imperious gaze takes in the rocky beach and the knoll hanging over it. Other boats sputter behind him as their bows land against the shore. Oars knock, chains clank, and escort guards’ shouts carry, blending with their charges’ meek voices.

“What the…? Where the hell’re you taking all that? Toss it over by the water, let them sort it out themselves!”

“Stand still, you dogs! Closer together! Straighter!”

“Don’t you cry, Dima, we’re here now, see…”

“Comrade Kuznets! Should we put them in formation or let them stand like this, like rabble?”

“I thought we were going to a real settlement, where there are people, but there’s…”

“The lists, where’re the lists?”

“Count those heads again, Artyukhin! Some mathematician you are…”

The voices abruptly drop off. Kuznets turns his proud profile to the tense quiet that has set in behind his back.

A strange, dark figure is walking down from the knoll, reeling and bobbing oddly, as if it’s dancing on legs that won’t bend well. A person. The person’s wearing dirty, worn-out, and colorless rags, and something’s wound around his formless boots. There’s a threadbare woman’s shawl criss-crossed over his chest, his hair is like a mane, and his beard is scraggly. He’s walking slowly; it requires exertion. Soon they can see his mud-smeared face, along with his bugged, completely wild eyes, and the revolver in his tensely extended hand.

Kuznets narrows a brown eye. Is he imagining, or is it really…?

“Ignatov, it’s you! Holy Mother, he’s alive! I didn’t even think…”

Ignatov trudges along, seeing just one target in front of him: Kuznets’s radiant, round, ugly mug, which looks like it was outlined by a compass, with its dumbfoundedly wide-open slots of well-fed, kindly eyes. The despicable sky is spinning again, pulling Ignatov into its frenzied whirl but he stubbornly plods along, not giving in. The ugly round mug approaches for a long time, a very long time, hurriedly muttering something. Kuznets’s voice is carrying from far away, maybe from the forest, maybe from underwater.

“How’re you doing here, my friend? Where are your feeble buddies? They survive? Well, well, look at you, you devil, huh? Oh, you won’t believe how crazy things got after we left you! They’ve been dumping the kulaks on us by the trainload. There was no time for you, forgive me.”

The ugly mug is finally right alongside him. Ignatov wants to say some final words but they’ve all left his memory. He mumbles and places the shaking revolver to Kuznets’s broad chest. The trigger is heavy and tight, as if it’s taken root. He clenches his teeth and directs all his will, the remainder of his energy, into his index finger. He squeezes the trigger and the revolver dryly clicks.

Kuznets’s mug laughs, its eyes nearly shutting:

“Let bygones be bygones, as they say…”

Ignatov’s dry throat swallows and he squeezes the trigger again. Yet another click.

“Stop being offended, Ignatov,” says Kuznets. He’s laughing hard. “That’s it, your new life is starting. Look at these charges I brought you: you can plow away at the land with them.”

Someone’s hands carefully take the revolver from Ignatov’s bent fingers. Kuznets’s smile blurs and dissolves in the unbearably bright sunlight. The sky takes one final spin and covers Ignatov like a bedspread.

Kuznets’s round, satisfied face is the first thing he sees when he comes to. Ignatov starts moaning, as if from pain and Kuznets slaps him on the arm. “It’s fine, brother,” he’s saying, “you’ll be back to your old self soon. You slept through,” he adds, “two days. You woke up yesterday for a little while, chowed all my officer’s chocolate, then went back to sleep. You really don’t remember anything?” Ignatov shakes his head and raises himself a little on his elbows. He’s lying by a large spruce on some sort of sacks under a tarpaulin. Covered by a sheepskin coat. He’s surrounded by screeching saws, thudding axes, tapping hammers, and salty language.

“Where am I?” he says.

“Same old place,” laughs Kuznets. (Enough laughing, you mustached ass!) He’s sitting on a slab of wood next to Ignatov, scribbling in his map case.

“Where are my people?”

“Your deceased are alive, have no fear. Every last one of them. Hardy, the devils! I’ve never seen such gaunt people. We left them in the underground house for the time being so the wind doesn’t blow them away.”

Ignatov settles on his back again. He could lie like this forever, looking at the evergreen needles lazily stirring above his head, sensing the smell of spruce pitch, and hearing people’s businesslike voices. His hand gropes at the taut sides of the sacks under him.

“What’s this?”

“New provisions.” Kuznets pronounces this as simply as if he were speaking about water or air.

Ignatov turns on his side with a quick motion, ending up on the ground. His weak hands fumble with the ties, pull, and tear toward him, opening one of the bags. There’s fine loose grain inside; it’s sharp and dirty gray, in scrappy silvery husks. He plunges a hand into the sack’s cool depths and takes out a whole handful so a bitter, mealy, and slightly dusty smell touches his nostrils. Oats.

Kuznets is looking at Ignatov in a fatherly way, as if Ignatov were a small son delighted by a new toy. “Even better, take a look around – take a look.”

Ignatov overcomes his weakness, sits next to the sacks – he can’t lie on the grain – and leans his back against a spruce trunk sticky with pitch so he can look around. The camp has been transformed during the days that have passed. The underground house is still in place, with a thin creased ribbon of smoke spiraling out. (“They heated the stove up,” he sighs with relief. “Something to be thankful for.”) And life is simmering away around him. Unfamiliar people – a hundred? more? – are scurrying around, dragging logs that display even, shiny, creamy-yellow saw cuts, waving axes, and pounding hammers. The ground is generously sprinkled with sawdust and woodchips, pieces of bark, and scraps of wood, and the air is so thick with the fragrance of pitch that you could eat it with a spoon. A dozen rank-and-file soldiers, wearing gray and carrying weapons, are right there to oversee, urge on, and shout from time to time. Foundations for three long, broad structures – future barracks – are growing in the middle of the knoll.

A couple of women are stoking a fire and a hearty smell is rising over two buckets boiling on the flame.

Under the spruce where Ignatov and Kuznets are sitting there’s a heap of crates, boxes, sacks, bundles of shovels and pitchforks covered in burlap, large baskets, buckets, and kettles. Yes, it’s a genuine stockpile.

“Outstanding,” is all Ignatov can say. “You’ve really taken charge here…”

“You bet I have!” Kuznets motions significantly with his powerful Roman chin, cleft by a lengthwise dimple. “After all, what was I before? A guarding function. And you? An accompanying function! And now you and I are unquestionably in charge. All this kulakdom is now ours, my friend.”

This is how Ignatov learns that, in 1931, all labor settlements established for habitation and labor-based re-education of the dekulakized were handed over to the Joint State Political Administration and entered into the Gulag system, which had been officially created only a half-year before but was already demonstrating its efficacy. Responsibility for oversight, organization, and the management, regulation, and use of the exiles’ labor had been placed upon this young and successful administration.

“You and I, Ignatov, won’t fall flat on our faces. We’ll go all out. We’ll teach the exploiters about proletariat labor and show them what genuine Soviet life is. We’ll build an infirmary out of logs over there, by the forest. And a dining hall by the barracks, to the side. And the commandant’s headquarters on the hill.” Kuznets looks long and hard at Ignatov.

“When do I go home?” Ignatov is scanning the river and finds only Kuznets’s launch, bobbing at anchor not far from shore; the barge apparently left straight after unloading the people.

“I’m leaving this evening.” Kuznets places his pencil in the hard leather map case, firmly fastening the strap. “I’ve already been sitting too long here with you.”

Ignatov feels his jaws tighten until they slowly and painfully crunch; there’s even an ache in his temples.

“We,” he says a minute later through his teeth. “We’re leaving in the evening.”

“You planning to go far?” Kuznets is calm and peaceable, as if he were discussing whether the two of them should go berry picking.

“Home,” hisses Ignatov. “I’m planning to go home, you grinning bastard.”

“Uh-huh, go on then. This happens to be a very heated time back in your Kazan. Another day, another underground cell uncovered. It’s either ‘wreckers’ or Mensheviks or German spies or English ones, the devil alone knows who they are. Things got rolling as soon as the mayhem started last spring. There are thirty from the Tatar Central Executive Committee already in jail, the crooked bastards. And the Administration’s not without its Judases. They’ve arrested everybody at your State Political Administration, Ignatov. It’s unclear who’s left at work. There was even an article in Pravda called ‘The Tatar Hydra.’”

“You’re lying, you son of a bitch!”

“Then I’ll bring it for you, that newspaper.” Kuznets is imperturbable, even affectionate. “I’ll sit at the library all night if I have to, I don’t mind spending the time. I’ll find it – you can read it yourself.”

You’re lying, Ignatov says over and over to himself, lying, lying. But he already sees Bakiev’s office before his eyes, turned upside down, two soldiers with tense gazes by the door, and a gray silhouette sorting stacks of papers on the desk. Could it really be they hadn’t let Bakiev go back then? Is he the hydra? Stupidity. Nonsense. Gibberish.

“But you wouldn’t make it there anyway,” says Kuznets. “I’ve seen your file. It’s just like a bedtime story – A Thousand and One Nights, it’s called. There’s the overwhelming attrition on the train and an organized escape to the count of around four dozen souls and harboring an important witness from an investigation (and not simply a witness, a kulaker woman, mind you!) and – just think, Ignatov! – giving bribes to a public servant, a train station director. You really outdid yourself. Nobody else could keep pace.”

Ignatov’s hitting the ground with his fist; his eyes are closed. Kuznets is right. Right on all counts.

“So you stay put, my friend. We’ll register you here officially, add you to the rolls. You’ll stay for now and pray behind my broad back, atoning for your sins. In a couple years, when they notice you’re missing, well, there you’ll be – a respected commandant, a big shot fulfilling a plan they could only dream of. The toiler of Siberia! Who’d touch you then?” Kuznets stands, adjusting his belt and the map case on his hip. “Let’s go. I’ll turn the documents over to you, introduce you to people. Give yourself a wash first, though, and change into clean clothes or you’ll frighten the personnel. They’ll take you for a hobgoblin.”

“Why do you need me?” Ignatov asks this wearily, looking up at Kuznets’s powerful frame.

“There aren’t enough people. There’ll be about a hundred settlements around the taiga soon. Who can you leave them with? Who do you trust? And it’s on me if anybody asks. It’s obvious looking at you, Ignatov, that you’re committed right down to the fingernails. That’s why I can calmly turn two hundred souls over to you. You kept your no-hopers alive during the winter – you’ll keep these alive, too.”

“How do you know?” says Ignatov. He slowly rises, leaning his hand into white streaks of sticky pitch on the spruce trunk. “Maybe I’m a hydra?”

His legs are still weak and they shake, but they’re already holding him. He can walk.

“You’re a dense one, Ignatov. A hydra’s got a lot of heads, more than you can count. You could be one baby snake on the hydra’s head but you can’t be the whole hydra, oh no. You should know things like that.”

Kuznets does bring the newspaper. He shows up a month later, in early summer. Ignatov’s window has a good view of Kuznets’s long, black launch with antennas like a rapacious mustache and lamps like bugged eyes when it suddenly takes shape on the dark blue mirror of the water. The commandant’s headquarters are on the knoll’s very highest point so the settlement, the broad ribbon of the shore, and the Angara itself can be surveyed equally well from here.

I won’t go and greet him, thinks Ignatov. He quickly tosses some rusks, sun-dried fish, and a kettle with yesterday’s leftover porridge stuck to the sides on the overturned crate he uses as a table so it’ll look like he’s been eating lunch. Hiding behind the window opening – the frame and glass haven’t been installed yet, but they’ve promised to bring them by mid-summer – he observes as the craft quickly, proprietarily, casts anchor by the shore and spits a small wooden boat into the water.

On shore, a figure runs hastily and intently toward the boat. Pebbles are even flying out from under his feet. Gorelov. In his hurry to show his face to the chief, he’s left the area entrusted to him – construction’s finishing up on the infirmary. He should be slapped with a couple days in an isolation cell for that, the bootlicker. But there’s no lockup in the settlement.

Gorelov darts into the water without taking off his shoes. He catches the boat’s pointy bow and pulls it to shore. He hurriedly says something, his shaggy, dog-like head nodding slightly and his spine bending to one side, then the other. He’s trying to win favor. The chief’s not listening. He jumps ashore, tosses the line to Gorelov, and strides off to the commandant’s headquarters.

Ignatov sits at the table and places a tough little fish with white streaks of salt on a half-crisped, crumbling rusk. He doesn’t have a chance to take a bite before Kuznets abruptly flings the door wide open without knocking. He enters quickly, as if he’s at home. He looks at Ignatov, frozen with the rusk in his hand, and plunks a newspaper folded into quarters on the table in front of him. “Read,” he says, “and I’ll take a look around here on my own – don’t worry about me.” And out he goes.

The newspaper is worn along the edges, badly yellowed, and coming apart at the folds. Ignatov takes it as carefully as if it were a snake and unfolds it. There’s a violet stamp of the Krasnoyarsk Municipal Library in the upper right-hand corner and two ragged holes in the side, as if the newspaper had been torn out of a binder. Ignatov’s heart thumps low and cold in his chest. No, Kuznets hadn’t bluffed about the library.

The front-page feature tells of a speech by Kalinin about heroes of industrialization. Further on, there’s a group letter from female weavers in Paris that calls on female workers in the Soviet Union to envelop the Red Army’s fighters with special love and care, as well as a plea from unemployed people in Germany for the ‘wreckers’ who sabotaged socialist construction in Soviet Siberia to face the firing squad. Ignatov pages through rough, brittle paper that smells of sweetish dust. “Achieve the Five-Year Plan in Four Years!” “Let’s Produce More Steel!” “Exemplary Tending of Sugar Beets!” In the feuilletons are pieces from worker correspondents and worker-peasant correspondents, a poem about a tram…

And then suddenly, huge letters hurry, slanting, across the center spread: “They Sheltered the Hydra.” Unknown and vaguely familiar faces flash from an array of photographs. (Maybe we met in the hallways?) And there’s Bakiev, his face stern and solemn. He’s taken off his glasses so his gaze is a little childlike and dreamy; the Order of the Red Banner is silvery on his chest. This photograph of Bakiev was taken for his Party membership card. The article is long and detailed, with the small type spilling over the double spread. There’s a drawing in the corner of someone’s powerful hand squeezing the neck of an old woman whose insane eyes are bugging out and who has a good dozen snakes instead of hair. Her neck is skinny and flabby, like it’ll snap any minute now, and the snakes are as mean as demons, baring their fangs and attempting to bite the hand that’s caught them.

Ignatov rubs his throat, which is suddenly ticklish and starting to itch.

And so Bakiev sent him on this trip specially. Yes, that’s obvious now. What did he say back then? “It’s for you, you damned fool…” something like that? He wanted to save him, that was it, pull him out of danger, send him far, far away. And Bakiev had been acting strangely around then, downcast, because he knew. He knew but hadn’t fled, sitting in his office, sorting papers, and waiting.

Ignatov takes his head in his hands. Mishka, Mishka… Where are you now?

The half-strangled hydra gawks from the table.

The freshly planed door swings open and Kuznets’s broad smile is in the opening.

“Well, how about that, comrade commandant,” he says. “Nice work! Your dining hall’s a palace. The infirmary, too – you could put everyone in there at once. You’re straightening out these exploiters’ lives. It’s about time to talk about regular workdays now. They’ll need to labor doubly hard to earn a dining hall like that.”

Ignatov smoothes the newspaper with his hand and throws a couple of fish on it.

“Sit down, chief.”

“I thought you’d never offer,” smirks Kuznets. He sits, plunges his hand into the voluminous map case on his hip, and pulls out a long, narrow, transparent bottle.

“They still haven’t brought glasses,” says Ignatov, trying to cut the little fish bodies. They’re as tough as wood on the newspaper. “We’ll have to swig from the bottle.”

Kuznets waves a hand – well, of course! – and uncorks the bottle, inhaling the smell from its thin neck with delight. Ignatov saws at the dense fish fibers and bones using a crooked knife made from a former one-handed saw. It’s right on the scared hydra’s face and the blade keeps clunking at the newspaper, cutting the hydra, slashing and hacking it to shreds.

In June of 1931, the population of the still-unnamed settlement totals one hundred and fifty-six inmates, including the old-timers who survived the first winter. Plus ten guards and the commandant.

They live in three barracks that seem unbelievably spacious and bright after the close quarters in the underground house. Walls of long, even logs have been planed and the doors are hanging on hinges. There’s a promise of iron stoves from the city. Each person has their own – very own! – bunk, though people still line them with boughs and cover themselves with clothing. Women and children have been settled in one building; men are in the other two. The guards share a small log house that’s been added on, kitty-corner, to one of the barracks. The commandant, as chiefs should, lives separately, in the commandant’s headquarters.

They eat in the dining hall (or “the restaurant,” as Konstantin Arnoldovich likes to call it). Food is still cooked over a fire but they’re already savoring taking meals in a civilized manner, sitting under a roof in even rows at festive yellow tables smelling of pine pitch. They eat fish soup (they’ve established a three-person fishing artel, working under Lukka) and game less frequently (Ignatov sometimes allows the guards into the taiga to stretch their legs), and even more rarely they get porridge, rusks, and macaroni brought from the city. The standard serving is small, as if it were a child’s portion, but they have food! Sometimes they come into some sugar and once there were even splendid, nearly rock-hard, plain crackers. They are fed twice a day. Lunch is brought in buckets to the work site in the forest, and they eat supper in the dining hall. They still eat with spoons made from shells. They have dishes and mugs now, but the spoons were forgotten in an oversight. Happiness isn’t about spoons, though!

They’ve built a large, ten-bed infirmary from logs. In the front there’s a waiting area and bunks for the patients (one-tier, at Leibe’s insistence), and in the back there’s a cubbyhole for staff. This is where Leibe has taken up residence. He gave Kuznets a list of two hundred items – medications and instruments – for purchase. Kuznets smirked and on his next visit he brought a dilapidated, flat traveling bag with the red cross half worn off and something clanking and rolling around at the bottom. Maybe not two hundred items but even so.

Under an agreement concluded between the Joint State Political Administration and the government agency overseeing the timber industry, the settlement has been handed over to the agency for timber work. Each morning, to the guards’ brisk shouts, the inmates crawl out for the morning roll call then go into the taiga.

The detested one-handed saws have been relegated to the past and they now work using two-handed saws and axes in teams of three. Two fell the tree and the third lops off the small branches and collects them in bundles; they saw the trunk into lengths (six meters or two meters long, for different construction purposes), and drag them to a sled, to which three workers are harnessed. They bring the sled to the timber landing on the shore, not far from the settlement, where the wood is stacked and tied together.

They return in the evening. Hardly anyone achieves the set daily target for processing logs – and women basically never do, so their rations are often cut. New people complain and the old-timers mostly keep quiet, like Ikonnikov, or joke it off, like Konstantin Arnoldovich. They want relentlessly to eat, and many hurry back into the taiga after supper for nuts, berries (cloud-berries and bilberries in summer, lingonberries and cranberries in autumn) and mushrooms (there are abundant ceps and bent milk-stools near the settlement, sometimes saffron milk caps, too, among the other types of milk cap). They have no aversion to cattails (they boil young shoots, which have a flavor somewhat reminiscent of potato, and dissolve its strong-smelling brownish-yellow pollen in water to drink); and they dig up meaty lily bulbs.

The administration doesn’t object. The guards are cheerful and spirited. They might shoot jays for supper so the soup will be richer or catch one of the settlement women in the bushes for a romp. They are down-to-earth, simple fellows. They’ll beat people for disobedience, and once they shot someone, maybe for planning an escape, maybe for something else. They’re afraid of the commandant (he’s horribly strict), but the forest offers a sense of freedom where they can relax.

They’ve installed an agitational propaganda stand at the center of the settlement and the bright-colored posters, which smell sharply of paint, keep changing. The agitation’s directed at accelerating the process of re-educating the exploiting class.

In short, life is taking shape.

The women ceded a lower bunk to Zuleikha and Yuzuf, one further from the entrance and away from the draft of the constantly opening door. Izabella’s bunk is nearby and Granny Yanipa’s, and several other Leningraders, too: the old-timers have tried to stick together whenever possible. Leila, the Georgian woman, settled on a top bunk, despite her solid age and weight. They had to nail a couple of strong beams on the frame so she can climb up to the second tier, as if on a ladder.

The efficient Zuleikha has been kept in the kitchen. As her supervisor, they’ve appointed Achkenazi, who isn’t yet old, though he’s already as withered as tree bark and stooped enough to be hunched. He’s one of the new people, with a skull that appears very fragile – it was shaved to bareness at one point and is now overgrown with sparse black shoots. He’s taciturn; his eyes are listless, scared, and half-closed; and his chin is lowered, as if he’s exposing the shaved back of his head to anyone who might want to take him by the scruff. Achkenazi was an excellent cook at one time (or so people say). He never cut but “julienned,” didn’t shuck but “peeled,” didn’t fry but “sautéed,” didn’t parboil but “blanched,” and didn’t stew but “simmered.” He calls soup broth “bouillon,” rusks “croutons,” and strips of fish are even “goujons.” He doesn’t converse with Zuleikha other than to exchange brief remarks. He most often uses gestures. She’s slightly afraid of Achkenazi since he’s one of several who’ve landed in the settlement under a commutation of sentences, meaning he should have been sitting in prison or a camp now, along with genuine thieves and murderers. Zuleikha doesn’t know his crime but she tries to fulfill his requests quickly and diligently, without annoying him, just in case. It’s nice to work with him, though, because he knows his craft and treats Zuleikha fairly, not quibbling over anything.

At first he had looked critically at his new assistant’s left hand, wondering if her injuries would impede her work. The ends of all five fingers are slightly mutilated and covered in strange short and crooked scars that look like commas. “It went into the thresher,” she explained to her new supervisor without waiting for his question. He stopped worrying about that after seeing how deftly she handled the game and fish.

The two of them are responsible for all the cooking, with Achkenazi as the “maître,” as Konstantin Arnoldovich puts it, and Zuleikha working alongside him, at his beck and call, washing, peeling, plucking, gutting, dressing, cutting, grating, scraping, and washing again. She carries lunch into the forest, too. A bucket with soup in one hand, a bucket with drinking water in the other and it’s onward, to the first work station then back, to the second station then back, to the third… By the time she’s run to everybody and fed them, it’s time to start supper. She only just makes it to her bunk in the evening, to collapse. And she thinks it’s good fortune that she’s in the kitchen.

Yuzuf grew slowly, if at all, during the winter’s starvation, which Zuleikha doesn’t like to recall. Her son’s hair was then weak and sparse, his skin pale blue, his nails as transparent and brittle as a bee’s wing, and he didn’t have a single tooth. He moved little and then only reluctantly, as if he were conserving his energy; he always observed things sleepily and moodily; and he never learned to sit up. She was grateful he stayed alive. In the summer, though, as soon as the sun showed itself and food appeared, he suddenly started making up for lost time and quickly began growing. Now he eats a lot, almost as much as an adult, and Achkenazi notices Zuleikha giving him extra food, but turns away without saying anything. Yuzuf has started smiling – showing wide, strong, blade-like teeth that have cut through – and babbling. He has learned to sit up and crawl quickly, like a cockroach. The hair on top of his head has darkened and became curly, and his arms and legs have grown out, even taking on a little baby fat. He doesn’t want to stand and walk at all, though. He will soon turn one.

He’s painfully and utterly attached to Zuleikha. She always feels his lively, clinging little hands at her hem when she’s working in the kitchen. He will crawl out from under the table, touch his mother, and crawl back. She knows he’ll look for her while she’s running her errands to the back yard or to the river for water. She hurries back, panting and sweaty from running, and he’ll already be sitting on the threshold and howling, his grubby little fists smearing plentiful tears on his face.

At first, she took him with her when she brought lunch into the taiga. It exhausted her because hauling two full pails and a hefty year-old baby turned out not to be an easy task. Nearly impossible. Not only that, but mosquitoes mercilessly devoured Yuzuf in the thicket and then he wouldn’t fall asleep for a long time, tormented by the bites covering his tender skin.

Only grudgingly did she first leave him in the kitchen for a long stretch. After feeding lunch to everyone from the settlement, she ran back to the kitchen several hours later and flung the door open, her heart pounding. Silence. She dashed in to find her son, and there he was, sleeping under the table, his face puffy, striped white from tears, and burrowed in the rag she usually used to wipe the counter. After that, she started leaving him her headscarf – it was better for him to burrow into that. She has to go around with her head uncovered.

Zuleikha has been doing many things of late that would have seemed shameful and impossible before.

She prays rarely and in haste. She became convinced during the recent starvation that Allah neither saw nor heard them, because if the Almighty had heard even one of the thousand tearful prayers that Zuleikha had dispatched to Him during that harsh winter, he would not have left her and Yuzuf bereft of His kindly care. Which means the supreme gaze doesn’t reach this out-of-the-way place. Living without the constant attention and stern supervision of an all-seeing eye was initially terrifying, as if she’d been orphaned. Then she got used to it and resigned herself. By habit, she sometimes sends hurried little prayers to heavenly heights; it’s like sending postcards from distant, savage places without any real hope they’ll reach the addressee.

She goes into the urman alone and for long periods. That this truly is urman – gloomy and dense, with trees felled by wind – is something she understood on the very first day serving the lumber teams, her belly chilled from fear when she set off running to the felling area along a barely defined trail. She knows that prayers in the urman have no effect so she wastes no time on them, flying between trees like a shadow, not noticing the branches lashing at her face, her jaw clenching and eyes bulging from horror, and thinking all the while of her son waiting for her in the settlement, which means she must return. She remains alive; the urman doesn’t touch her. Soon she grows bolder and begins walking instead of running. She’ll notice a marten that flashes like black lightning in reddish-brown needles or a nimble yellow crossbill hurrying somewhere along a spruce branch or the giant hulk of an elk crowned by a branching bush of horns and solemnly floating between red pine trunks, and she grasped then that the urman is gracious to her, not angry about the intrusion. When she finds several bilberries by an old stump overgrown with shaggy moss, she picks them with gratitude, puts them away in the pocket of her smock for Yuzuf, and calms because the urman has accepted her.

She doesn’t know the local spirits so doesn’t know how to honor them; she just greets them silently when she enters the woods or goes down to the river. That’s all. It’s possible all sorts of forest and river imps can be found here, too, like long-fingered shurale rascals, darting around the forest’s thickets in search of travelers who’ve lost their way, or loathsome alabasty, who crawl out from under the earth at the smell of human flesh, and su-anasy, those shaggy water-dwellers known to grab people and drag them down to the riverbed. Zuleikha encounters none of them in the urman, so either spirits don’t live in these remote parts of the universe or they’re quieter and more submissive than their kin in Yulbash’s forests. One could try to feed them so they’ll let themselves be known, make an appearance, and then take you under their protection. But Zuleikha can’t even contemplate giving a piece of food – be it leftover porridge, boiled fish skin, or soft grouse gristle – to some imp instead of her son.

She’s stopped her daily commemorations of her husband, mother-in-law, and daughters. She doesn’t have the strength because she gives whatever’s left to Yuzuf and it seems silly and unwise to spend valuable minutes of her life remembering the dead. It’s better to give her time to the small living being who waits greedily all day for his mother’s affection or smile.

She works side by side for days at a time with a man who isn’t her kin. Her shoulders often bump into Achkenazi and their hands even touch – their working space in the dining hall is cramped.

Everything her mother once taught her – what was considered correct and necessary in her half-forgotten life in her husband’s house, and what seemed to constitute Zuleikha’s essence, foundation, and substance – is being taken apart and destroyed. Rules are being broken, laws are turning into their own opposites. New rules are arising and new laws are being revealed in exchange.

No abyss is opening up beneath her feet, avenging lightning isn’t flying from the heavens, and wild beasts from the urman aren’t capturing her in their sticky webs. People don’t notice those transgressions, either. They don’t see them because they have other concerns.

Zuleikha also brings dinner to the commandant’s headquarters every evening.

Inmates and guards eat supper together in the dining hall, workers at their tables, guards at their own separate table. Ignatov always eats alone in his own quarters. He rarely eats lunch, which is a meager snack of a couple of rusks or a piece of bread, but he asks that a hearty hot supper be brought to him.

After reheating leftovers of the lunch soup in a small kettle and tossing the fattiest, largest pieces of fish or the thickest porridge, from the bottom of the pot, into a large bowl, Zuleikha places all that on a wide board and carries it up the knoll from the dining hall, to a neat little house, the only one in the settlement with glass windows. The path upward is long and takes time, and Zuleikha walks along it slowly, carefully placing her feet and gathering her courage. She doesn’t know what’s happening. No, she knows. She knows what’s happening. There’s no point in hiding it from herself.

At first it seemed Ignatov didn’t notice her at all. She would enter after timidly knocking and hurriedly place the food on the table without hearing a word in response and she felt how stuffy and dense the air was there, as if it were water instead of air. After she’d ducked back out the door, she’d fly down the path, relieved and breathing deeply, understanding she’d been holding her breath in the commandant’s headquarters for some reason, as if she truly had been underwater. The commandant would stand by the window that whole time, facing outside, or lie on his bed with his eyes covered. Not only did he never look, he never once raised an eyebrow.

One time, though, he suddenly stared at her. She felt that gaze without looking up. “Is everything all right?” she asked. “Is the food salted enough?” Ignatov didn’t answer, he just looked. She slipped out and took a breath. As she walked down the path, she sensed that gaze on her neck, in the place where the hair starts to grow. She’s started wearing a headscarf to go to Ignatov’s. And he’s started looking at her. Now the air isn’t even water, it’s becoming honey. Zuleikha is in that honey, gliding, tensing all her muscles and stretching her sinews, but everything’s moving slowly, like in a dream. Try as she might, she cannot possibly move any faster; she wouldn’t be able to even if there was a fire. She walks out the door, tired, as if she’s been chopping firewood, and she needs something to drink.

She knows what’s happening because Murtaza had looked at her that way many years ago, when the youthful Zuleikha had just come into his house as his wife. Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze.

If only she didn’t have to go to Ignatov’s, then she could stay out of his sight. But how could she get out of it? She couldn’t send Achkenazi to him with plates. And so she goes, slowly climbing up the path, opening the heavy door, inhaling deeply, and then ducking into the thick, viscous honey. She senses herself, all of her, gradually turning to honey. Her hands, which place the pot on the table and seem to flow along it, her feet, which stride along the floor and seem to stick to it, and her head, which wants to drive her right out of this place but softens, fusing and melting under her very, very tightly tied headscarf.

Her husband’s killer is looking at her with her husband’s gaze and she’s turning to honey. This is agonizing, unbearable, and horrendously shameful. It’s as if all her past and present shame has merged, absorbing everything she hasn’t felt shameful enough about during this mad year: the many nights spent side by side with unknown people, unknown men, in the darkness of dungeons and the crowdedness of the railroad car; her pregnancy, borne in front of others from the first months until the end; and giving birth around people. In order to somehow escape that shame and overcome the improper thoughts, Zuleikha often imagines a large black tent made of thick, crudely dressed sheepskins and resembling Bashkir yurts. The tent covers Ignatov and the commandant’s headquarters like a solid lid, and when the door curtain is drawn at the entrance, everything carnal, shameful, and ugly remains there, inside. Zuleikha leaps on a large Argamak horse, digs him sharply with her bare heels, and speeds away without looking back.

It’s already dark when Konstantin Arnoldovich comes to the commandant’s headquarters; the hushed settlement is sleeping after supper. He scratches meekly at the door for a long time and then, after not receiving an answer, he takes small, shuffling steps around the building, and finally peers in a window. There he encounters the commandant’s stern face, with the bold reddish spark of a hand-rolled cigarette in his teeth. Ignatov’s sitting on the windowsill, smoking.

“Well, Sumlinsky?”

“Comrade commandant,” says Konstantin Arnoldovich, pronouncing the vowels with special care, letting them fully develop in his mouth, so they come out long and smooth. “Comrade commandant, we have a matter to take up with you.”

“Well?”

Konstantin Arnoldovich steals closer and wraps his soiled, completely buttonless little jacket around his chest.

“Our settlement doesn’t have a name.”

“Doesn’t have a what?” Ignatov doesn’t immediately understand.

“A name. A title, if you like. There’s a settlement but there’s no title. We’ve living in a populated spot that’s unnamed and unplotted on the map. Maybe it’ll cease to exist tomorrow but today – today! – it exists. And we exist in it, too. And we want our home to have a name.”

“And you don’t want plumbing and hot water?”

“No, we don’t want plumbing.” Konstantin Arnoldovich sighs, serious. “A name requires no material expenditures. The settlement will be given a name sooner or later. And so we… hmm… as its very first residents, would like to exercise the right to name it.”

Ignatov inhales. The orange cuff on the tip of his hand-rolled cigarette flares and Sumlinsky’s sharp cheekbones catch fire for a second and then dissolve back into the darkness so only his eyes glisten. He lost his pince-nez in the forest back in the autumn and has had to get by without; his eyes have seemed overly piercing, even impertinent, since they’ve been deprived of their customary gold frame.

“So what do you want to call… all of this?”

Konstantin Arnoldovich grins, flustered, and nods his head for some reason.

He finally utters it, solemnly: “Vila.”

“What?”

“It’s an acronym,” says Sumlinsky, whose speech suddenly becomes hurried. “You see, it’s an abbreviation formed by joining initial letters. We took four names: Volf, Ivan, Lukka, and Avdei. It works out V, I, L, A, Vila. It’s all very simple!”

Ignatov knows three of them but Ivan? There’s no Ivan at all among the old-timers, Ignatov remembers that for sure. He releases smoke into the darkness, where Konstantin Arnoldovich’s anxious breathing is audible.

“The four people who saved our lives that winter – it’s worth naming the settlement after them, don’t you think?”

A hefty fish splashes loudly somewhere on the Angara.

“There’s one other thing…” Konstantin Arnoldovich takes a step toward the window, pressing his intertwined hands to his chest. “They don’t know we want to, hmm, immortalize them. Neither Volf Karlovich nor Avdei and Lukka. But now you know.”

How did the exiles find out his name is Ivan? Nobody calls him anything but “comrade commandant,” only the overstepping Gorelov sometimes says “comrade Ignatov.” And what is this? A labor settlement carrying his name? Damn it all to hell… Ignatov crushes the cigarette butt against a flat stone on the windowsill and flings it into the darkness.

“No,” he says.

“We’re proposing a completely different official explanation!” Konstantin Arnoldovich bobs up toward the window and his wizened little paws catch at the frame. “We understand. Don’t think we don’t. We’ll state that we’re naming the settlement in honor of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: Vi-la!”

He giggles, satisfied, rubbing his hands together.

“No,” repeats Ignatov. “No villas and mansions here.”

“Excellent!” For some reason, Sumlinsky, the “remainder,” is as cheerful as if he’s received approval. “We thought as much, that you wouldn’t agree! So we prepared a reserve option – hmm, something more clandestine.”

“Go get some sleep, Sumlinsky,” says Ignatov, taking hold of the open window.

“Sem’ Ruk, named after your seven hands!” Konstantin Arnoldovich blurts into the closing window. “Because there are seven hands among the four of you. Let’s name the settlement that way – nobody will ever guess it, you hear me? And the name resonates. It’s possibly even unique.”

The window slams with a crash. Through a layer of glass, a skinny figure with drooping shoulders takes small steps down the path to the settlement.

It was as if Sumlinsky had known something in advance. A couple of weeks later, during another round of visits to his holdings, Kuznets says to Ignatov in passing:

“We want to give your settlement a name, commandant. You’ll now be Angara Twelve. That’s what we’ll put on the map.”

“It already has a name,” objects Ignatov, surprising even himself. “There wasn’t anything to do in the underground house during the winter and people thought it up.”

“Well? Why’d you keep quiet?”

“Who was I to tell? And you didn’t ask.”

“So how are you now to be named and extolled?” Kuznets’s gaze is attentive and persistent.

“Sem’ Ruk,” is Ignatov’s delayed response.

“Tricky. Did a priest fit you out with that name by any chance?”

“What?”

“You’re a nut! That name reeks of religious prejudice, that’s what. Of six-winged seraphs and the like.”

“You’re a fool, Kuznets, even if you’re my chief.” They’d recently switched to using first names, but when they argued they lashed each other with surnames, as before. “My contingent is entirely Tatars and Mordvins and Chuvash who’ve likely gone their whole lives without ever seeing a priest, not to mention a seraph.”

“To hell with you.” Kuznets waves his arm. “Sem’ Ruk it is!”

And so the name Konstantin Arnoldovich thought up survives, and zips through all the paperwork and the chain of command. Among the complete and extremely long list of newly formed populated spots – by that time there are already a good hundred in the Eastern Siberian territory – their name falls to the chairman of the Irkutsk Oblast Committee of the Party for approval. An empty-headed woman in the typing pool who’s hugely upset that she hadn’t been able to buy more longed-for lisle stockings at three rubles a pair from a greedy profiteer the day before, makes a mistake in the name, writing it all as one word and making it look like yet another bureaucratic neologism. The lists are approved. The typesetter at the printing house doesn’t see the mistake and so a no less sonorous, albeit slightly altered name for the settlement – Semruk, for “Sevenhands” – is entered into all the directories and maps.

It happens the first time in late June. Zuleikha doesn’t realize anything at the time. She’s just carried two buckets full of water into the kitchen and is dragging them to the worktable where Achkenazi is bent over like a fishhook and already practicing his magic on pearlescent fish fanned out on the table.

Yuzuf, who’s been crouching by the door waiting for his mother, darts toward her like a wild animal, but then suddenly collapses on the floor and lies motionless, as if he’s been shot. Zuleikha rushes over, grabs him, and shakes him. His face is white, his lips are gray-blue with an inky tinge, and he’s not breathing. “To the infirmary, fast!” says Achkenazi. Zuleikha picks up his motionless little body, which has cooled in an instant, and flies off.

Leibe has been examining some old man whose skin has begun peeling off in layers, like pine bark, from exhaustion. Zuleikha places her son on the table right between the old man and the doctor, catches hold of Leibe and howls, unable to explain anything. He examines the little boy, listens, frowns, and gives him a shot of some sort of sharp-smelling medicine from a glass syringe as long and thin as a finger.

“It’s just as well that they brought all this last month,” he says, “both the medicines and the syringes.”

Yuzuf comes to a minute later, sleepy, and his little eyes blink. Zuleikha’s still howling; she can’t calm down at all.

“All right, that’s enough, now…” Leibe catches his breath, unbuttons his collar, and drinks half a mug of water. “And if anything happens again, come straight to me.”

Zuleikha carries Yuzuf back to the kitchen. As she walks through the settlement, everything rocks around her, and she’s clutching her son to herself; she just can’t hug him enough. She starts cleaning fish and her eyes are constantly drawn under the table, where sleepy Yuzuf has crawled. She crouches down every minute to check that everything’s all right, that he hasn’t fallen again. He’s curled into a ball and gone to sleep. Zuleikha leans over him and listens. Is he breathing? “I’d let you go home today, Zuleikha, but the administration might not like that,” Achkenazi tells her, as if apologizing. That’s the longest sentence he’s ever said to her.

The problem repeats several weeks later, this time in the evening, as Zuleikha is putting Yuzuf to bed. She again brings him to the doctor, who gives another injection.

She stops sleeping at night. How can you fall asleep if that can happen at night, too? She lies alongside her son, listening to his breathing, guarding him. Her periods away from Yuzuf, when she takes lunch to the workers at the logging sites, have become torture. Zuleikha runs along the path with full buckets, worrying, wondering if it’s happening again. Or will in a minute? Or two? Achkenazi doesn’t look up from the cutting board so he wouldn’t notice. And Yuzuf’s constantly resting under the table. She comes back in a lather every time, her heart exploding from the running, and then she throws herself under the table. Is he alive? She’s begun handling her kitchen tasks poorly. She’s afraid Achkenazi will complain and they’ll banish her from the kitchen, for general assignment work. But Achkenazi turns out to be a person with heart and puts up with it.

It happens again one night in August. Zuleikha’s open eyes are gazing into the darkness, and she’s listening to Yuzuf’s breathing. It’s as if she’s rocking on waves: inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale, up-down, up-down. The exhaustion of the past weeks is dragging her by the feet, down into a heavy, heavy sleep. It feels sweet and cozy to close her eyes for a moment and give up resistance. The water’s rocking and persuading her and then Ignatov’s face is suddenly alongside her, calm and affectionate. Give me your hand, he says. Come on, you’ll drown in the honey. Lo and behold, everything around her is yellow, as if it’s made of gold. She sticks out the tip of her tongue and it truly is honey. It wakes her up. Her mouth is thick with saliva and she can taste sweetness. The sounds – her neighbors’ breathing and snoring and nocturnal stirrings – are all far away, not with her. It’s quiet and serene next to her.

Yuzuf isn’t breathing.

She shakes him. No, he’s not breathing. Barefoot, with her braids undone, she rushes him to the infirmary. The moon in the sky is as round as a coin, the wind is whipping off the Angara, and there are pine cones, sticks, rocks, and soil underfoot, but she doesn’t notice anything. She pounds on the front window first, almost knocking out the newly installed glass, but there’s nobody there. After coming to her senses, she runs around to the back of the building, to the living quarters.

Disheveled from sleep, Leibe runs to her in just his drawers, which are threadbare and almost transparent. He lights the kerosene lamp and puts the boy on his own bed. Yuzuf’s hands, forehead, and the tip of his nose are already ice cold. After the injection, he begins breathing, groaning, and crying. He calms in his mother’s arms then falls back to sleep. And Zuleikha’s own arms are shuddering hard, not in a good way; she nearly drops the child.

“Lay your son here,” Leibe whispers to her. “And calm down.”

She places Yuzuf on the doctor’s pillow, a shaggy fur hat turned inside out. Her legs buckle, not supporting her. She positions herself so her knees are on the freshly planed floorboards, her torso’s on the bed, and her face is by her son’s warmed-up little fingers.

“It worked out fine this time, too,” says Leibe, extending a mug of water to her. “It’s good you noticed. If it had been another few minutes…”

Zuleikha grabs the doctor’s wrinkled hand, sprinkled with brown spots, and stretches to reach it with her lips. Water splashes from the mug to the floor.

“Stop that immediately!” He angrily tears his hand away. “You should take a drink!”

She takes the mug. Her teeth chatter loudly against the tin; she doesn’t want to wake Yuzuf so she sets the water aside to drink more later.

“Doctor,” whispers Zuleikha, without rising from her knees (she surprises herself: are these her lips speaking?), “let us live in the infirmary for a while, me and Yuzuf. I couldn’t bear it if anything happened to him. Don’t send us away, let us stay. Save him. And I’ll do everything for you. I’ll launder, tidy up, and pick berries. And I can help with patients if you need. Just so Yuzuf will be here at night, closer to you.”

“Live here as long as you want,” shrugs the doctor. “If the commandant’s not against it.”

A half-hour later, Zuleikha has dragged her simple belongings to the infirmary and Yuzuf hasn’t even had a chance to wake up – he’s slept calmly through the whole night, all the way until morning, on the doctor’s furry pillow.

Leibe goes to the commandant himself rather than waiting for questions. “Here’s how it is,” he reports. “The patient requires care in the infirmary. This situation will not affect Zuleikha Valieva’s capacity for labor in any way.” Ignatov looks at him sullenly and unkindly, but doesn’t object.

Zuleikha and Yuzuf are allotted a bunk walled off by a curtain. After the stuffiness of the communal barracks, the strong-smelling air at the infirmary – with carbolic acid, alcohol, juniper, lingonberry leaves, St. John’s wort, and Labrador tea – seems clean and fresh. In the mornings, Zuleikha runs off to the dining hall with Yuzuf under her arm. In the evenings, she hurries back and cleans the infirmary rather than taking her usual outings into the forest for bent milk-stool mushrooms or cattails. She washes the floors, walls, tables, benches, windows, and bunks (even those that are empty), battling unsanitary conditions. Then she makes her way into the residential half, where she scrubs the floorboards and the large stove made of stones, and scours the front steps. She washes all the doctor’s clothes in the Angara. She learns to boil bandages and basic medical instruments in a kettle.

“Don’t strain yourself, I beg of you!” Leibe tells her, raising his long withered hands toward the low ceiling. “You should get some sleep!”

They take turns watching over Yuzuf’s bedside, half the night each. Leibe maintains that he’s already sleeping an elderly person’s short hours, making nightwatch duty easy for him. If he had been anyone else, Zuleikha would not have been able to go to sleep, but she trusts the doctor. She goes to bed and drops into the blackness of sleep, without thoughts and without dreams.

The doctor himself suggests she bring Yuzuf back to the infirmary from the dining hall during her afternoon absences at the logging sites, and Zuleikha gratefully agrees.

When a lemon-yellow man with a constant violent cough and black circles under his eyes is admitted to the infirmary, Leibe orders that they move into the residential quarters, with him. Zuleikha hesitates at first – what will people say? – but when she meets the doctor’s stern gaze, she hurriedly brings her son into the back of the infirmary, behind a solid door.

That happens in late summer. The second year of the exiles’ stay in the settlement is beginning.

Zuleikha places a kettle with bandages inside the hot stove. She always launders and rinses the bandages in the running water of the Angara; her hands feel wooden after that, aching, making it all the more pleasant to hold them against the hot side of the stove, sensing the flow of blood into her hands and feeling the skin on her fingertips again. The fire crackles under the base of the blackened kettle, greedily eating the rest of a log that’s been tossed in. Zuleikha will have time to run out to the yard for firewood while the water comes to a boil – the bandages aren’t supposed to boil for long but she likes to keep them in until they’re white.

Yuzuf is frolicking on the floor, crawling and playing with clay toys that Ikonnikov sculpted. First he’d made a round-bellied baby doll resembling a fat spindle with plump lips that look like they’ve been turned inside out; then came a pompous tufted bird with shaggy legs and funny wings not designed for flight; and finally there came a sturdy, hefty fish with insolently bugged eyes and a stubborn lower jaw. The toys are good since they’re neither too large nor overly small, each fitting comfortably into a child’s small hand, nor heavy, and – most important – each one has a living gaze. In addition, they have the extraordinarily convenient benefit in that the legs, wings, and fins that Yuzuf breaks off have a habit of growing back after Ikonnikov drops in at the infirmary while going about his errands.

While Yuzuf’s enjoying knocking together the fragile clay foreheads of eternal rivals – the bird and the fish – Zuleikha rushes to go out to the yard so her son won’t notice she’s gone. The door opens on its own a moment before Zuleikha has a chance to touch it. A tall, dark silhouette stands in the opening, coming through rays of sun that beat at Zuleikha’s face. A wide, floor-length dress flaps in the wind and a crooked staff sternly bangs at the threshold.

The Vampire Hag.

She strides into the house. Her nose leads her, its broad nostrils twitching, inhaling air.

“It smells of something,” she says.

Zuleikha jumps away, her back screening Yuzuf, who’s playing on the floor. He’s crawling, babbling something under his breath, ramming the little hand that’s tightly squeezing the fish at the bird, who’s rapidly retreating under the enemy onslaught. He doesn’t notice a thing. Zuleikha’s mother-in-law walks about, sniffing loudly and using her stick to toss things that fall in her path. It’s as if she clearly sees them. An overturned chair crashes, an empty bucket rolls and clanks, and empty little clay dishes fly from the table to the floor.

“It smells!” she repeats, loudly and insistently.

There are strong smells of scorching-hot stove stones and boiling bandages in the house, and weaker smells of smoke, seasoned firewood, and fresh wood. The faintest smells of carbolic acid and alcohol hover, and a spicy, flowery aroma comes from fat bunches of herbs hanging under the ceiling.

The old woman is coming toward her. Zuleikha sees her flat, white eye sockets, coated with a bluish film like the skin of a freshly cleaned fish and covered with a thick network of knotty red blood vessels. Her soft and very sparse hair the color of dust is parted at the exact middle of her forehead in a neat path, and wound into long, thin braids.

The Vampire Hag breathes hard and her nostrils make a snuffling sound. The tip of her stick reaches for the hem of Zuleikha’s dress and lifts it, baring pale, naked legs that seem to gleam in the duskiness of the house. Zuleikha made her baggy pants into diapers long ago, back last autumn. The old woman smirks so the corner of her mouth creeps upward and sinks into the large folds of her wrinkles.

“I found what smells,” she says. “It’s fekhishe, the smell of whore.”

Nobody had ever called Zuleikha that. A horrid, suffocating heat rises from her chest, over her neck, cheeks, and forehead, to the very top of her head.

“Yes,” the Vampire Hag repeats louder. “The smell of a whore who thinks at night about the Russian man Ivan, murderer of my Murtaza…”

Zuleikha shakes her head, squeezing her eyes shut. There was no denying it.

“…and is living with a German man, the infidel Volf!”

“I need to raise my son,” Zuleikha whispers through her dried throat, “to put him on his feet. He’s already over a year old but doesn’t walk. He can’t even stand. And that’s your grandson.”

She steps to the side, revealing her son sitting on the floor for the Vampire Hag, as if she truly could see him. Yuzuf keeps playing – the fish and the bird are united in his persistent little hands and jointly attacking the poor doll, who already lacks an arm.

The Vampire Hag squeamishly pulls her walking stick away from Zuleikha, as if she’s been dirtied by muck.

“You forgot about sharia law and human law. I used to tell Murtaza, ‘That woman’s unfit, unclean in both body and thought –’”

“Murtaza died. I have the right to marry a second time!”

“And before the eyes of all the people, she’s spending the night under the same roof as a man who’s not her husband! Who is she after that? A whore is who!” The old woman loudly and juicily spits under her feet.

“I’ll become the doctor’s lawful wife!”

“Fekhishe! Whore! Whore!” The Vampire Hag shakes her head slightly and the bulky flourishes of her earrings jingle softly in her fleshy earlobes.

“I swear!” Zuleikha’s head sinks into her shoulders and she quickly lifts a hand, defending herself.

When she lowers her hand, there’s no longer anyone beside her. Yuzuf is peacefully frolicking, enjoying knocking his clay toys together. The wood in the stove crackles as it burns; water is burbling loudly, spilling out of the kettle, and hissing on scorching-hot coals. Zuleikha sits down on the floor alongside her son, buries her face in her hands, and whimpers quietly, like a puppy.

On the last day of summer, white clouds are floating like apple blossoms, and the Angara is dark, a deep blue verging on black that rises from its depths on particularly warm and sunny days. There’s a light, dry autumn warmth.

Zuleikha is striding along a forest path. Yuzuf is on her back, wrapped in a shawl, and she has a basket in one hand and a staff in the other. Reddish tree needles and the first fallen leaves, fragile and already tinged with a sickly yellowness, crunch underfoot. She is grateful to Achkenazi for letting her go into the taiga today to pick berries for compote. It’s already darkening early in the evenings, so she can’t go after dinner. This is an excuse devised by the maître, since they could have gotten by without compote today – it’s not a holiday and the chief isn’t expected to arrive. But Achkenazi felt sorry for her so decided to give her a day off. He sees she’s not herself lately, isn’t sleeping much, and works enough for three.

Zuleikha is afraid to go too far away from the settlement – just in case something happens with Yuzuf – so she walks to a familiar stand of bilberry plants in the pine forest. She steps on large, flat rocks to cross a brook that roars resoundingly (she thinks of it as the Chishme), then strides further along it, to the base of the large cliff where there sprawls a broad, light clearing, which she’s privately named “Round Clearing.” There’s a patch of plentiful berries hidden here, guarded by a huge old birch scorched by lightning and a detachment of red-trunked pines. Large, beady bilberries grow so plentifully, like stars in the sky on a clear night, that you can just sit and gather them. The berries are heavy and purple and they look like they’re covered with light-blue velvet; touch one and a dark trace remains on its round side. They’re juicy, sweet, and honeyed, too. Zuleikha has plenty to eat herself and feeds Yuzuf. He’s smiling and his teeth shine with the berries’ ink. This is delicious, and joyful, too, because he has his mother’s attention for so long without her leaving.

“That’s all, ulym,” says Zuleikha, wiping smudges of sticky red juice from his chin. “We’ve played enough. I need to get to work.”

She spreads the shawl in the shade of the pines and sits Yuzuf on it. She tosses a scarf on her hair so her head doesn’t get too hot. Then she starts crawling around like a snail, picking berries. The basket is large and deep, and she can fill it if she puts in the effort.

Yuzuf is babbling something, telling stories to the flowers. Although he hasn’t yet learned to talk, not a single word, he goos and gahs away at the flowers in his own language, while examining them. This scared Zuleikha at first because she wondered if he’d grow up to be an imbecile. Her son’s eyes are smart and thoughtful, though, so she’s decided that maybe a time will come when he begins speaking. If he remains mute, fine, she’ll love him that way, too. She’ll feed and raise him. Just so long as he stands and starts walking.

She reaches for heavy berries languishing in the sun, her fingers moving apart thin, wiry bilberry shoots among round, green petal-like leaves. Suddenly there are boots in the bright, shiny greenery. They’re black, new, and have been rubbed to a thick, mirror-like shine with wax polish; they’re right next to her so she could just reach her hand out and touch them. Zuleikha slowly looks up and sees broad gray breeches growing out of tall narrow boot tops, the hem of a brown shirt, a reddish belt tautly tightened at the waist. And two hands, one holding a long hunting rifle with a burnished barrel. Higher are two chest pockets with flaps, and sitting between them at a slant is a thin strap for a holster. Even higher, buttons that shine in the sun prop up a high, tightly fastened collar. Raspberry-red collar tabs, broadly sweeping shoulders. And somewhere in the distant heights, under the dome of the sky, is a face framed by the halo of a peaked cap, with a fiery-red cap band and dark blue crown.

Ignatov’s looking at her.

Pine needles softly stir overhead, moaning a little in the light breeze. The chirr of grasshoppers is loud, heavy, and deafening in the grass. Honeybees are buzzing in the clearing and hefty bumblebees rumble around, flying from flower to flower.

Ignatov leans his rifle against a bright-red tree trunk that looks filled with sunlight, takes off his peaked cap, and drops it in the grass. He unfastens the top button of his shirt, then the second and third. He removes his belt, the buckle on his chest, and the buckle at his waist. Rips his shirt off over his head.

Zuleikha crawls backward a little, still on her hands and knees. Dry autumn grasses sway around her; the ripe seeds inside them turn them into rattles.

He takes a step toward her and crouches down, his face rapidly descending from the sky until it stops very, very close to hers. He extends a hand and his large, long palm completes its seemingly endless journey by touching her chin. When his fingers pull the knot of her headscarf, the tightly tied fabric easily gives way, separating, flowing along her cheeks, and baring her head. Ignatov takes the ends of her braids in both hands and pulls. Zuleikha’s hands catch at the braids and she pulls them to herself, not giving them up. He slowly runs his fingers through her hair and the braids slacken, unplaiting.

“I wait for you, every night,” he says.

He has a dry smell, of warmth and tobacco.

“Well, don’t.”

If only she could take his fingers from her hair, but there’s no way; they’re persistent. And hot, like they were around her fist clenching the loose grains back in the forest in Yulbash.

“But you’re a woman. You need a man.”

His face is smooth; the wrinkles are as thin as hairs. There’s a faint red mark on his forehead, from his peaked cap.

“I have a man. I found one.”

His eyes are bright gray with green in their depths and the pupils are broad and black.

“Who?”

His breath is pure, like a child’s.

“A lawful husband. I married yesterday, the doctor.”

“You’re lying.”

His face is on hers. Zuleikha squeezes her eyes shut, presses her feet into something, pushes away, and rolls along the ground. She leaps up, grabs the rifle leaning against the tree, and points it at Ignatov.

“He’s my husband, before people and heaven,” she says and motions with the rifle barrel to go away. “And I’m his wife.”

“Lower it, you fool,” he answers from the grass. “It’ll fire.”

“A faithful wife!”

“Lower the barrel, I’m telling you.”

“And don’t you follow me into the urman again!”

Zuleikha squints and clumsily takes aim at Ignatov. The thin black end of the barrel trembles, wandering from side to side. Ignatov groans as he lowers his back into the tall grass.

“You’re a fool, what a fool…”

She finally manages to catch the disobediently quivering tip of the front sight in the notch of the back sight. She guides the barrel slowly, looking through the back sight, and the world seems different and more distinct, vivid, and bulging. The grass is lusher and greener over the spot where Ignatov is lying on his back. The butterflies circling the clearing and the dragonflies sitting on spikes of grass are larger and prettier, and Zuleikha even discerns web-like lines on their transparent wings and iridescent spheres in their tiny bulging eyes. The back of Yuzuf’s head is further away. Blood vessels form a marble-like pattern on the petals of his little pink ears and a heavy drop of sweat slowly rolls out from under his dark, curly hair to his white neck. Even further is a shaggy brown triangle. A bear’s snout.

A huge, glossy bear is standing at the edge of the clearing, gazing lazily, sideways, at Yuzuf. Its damp round nose shakes every now and then and its two lower fangs shine in its half-open jaw like splayed fingers.

“Ivan, how do I shoot?”

It’s as if her throat has filled with sand.

“Decided to exterminate me?” Ignatov’s angry face rises from the grass. He turns and sees the bear.

“Raise the hammer first,” he whispers.

Her wet fingers slide along the cold, sticky metal. Where is it, that hammer? The bear growls, not loudly, first examining the baby sitting in front of it, then Zuleikha and Ignatov, who are frozen at a distance. Yuzuf is watching the animal, rapt.

Zuleikha pulls the hammer toward herself and there’s a loud click. The bear growls louder and stands on its hind legs, growing into a powerful, shaggy hulk. They can now see a sunken and light-colored belly with uneven gray dappling, a barrel-like chest that juts forward, and the crooked sickles of claws on long front paws that nearly reach the ground. The beast bares its teeth and a shiny black and pink tongue flashes between yellowed fangs. Yuzuf screeches with joy and stands, too.

Zuleikha squeezes the trigger and a shot bangs. The butt of the rifle strikes her hard and painfully in the shoulder, throwing her backward. Gunpowder sharply hits her nose. Her son’s short, frightened shriek is like a bird call.

The bear takes a step toward Yuzuf. A second. A third. Then it collapses to the ground, parting the grass on both sides in broad, green waves. The shaggy carcass continues shuddering for a time, like a huge piece of brown aspic, before going still. Yuzuf turns his puzzled face toward his mother then back toward the beast.

“There, there.” Ignatov places his hands on her fingers, which have turned to stone on the rifle butt, and unhooks them one by one. “Now that was good… good…”

He finally releases the rifle and sets it aside. Zuleikha doesn’t notice because she’s watching as Yuzuf toddles over to the dead bear, wobbling a little on his slightly crooked little legs. His first step, second, third…

A shining bear eye clouds over with a murky film and a thick gray foam flows out from behind yellowed fangs. Yuzuf walks over, loudly slaps his little hand on the bear’s bumpy forehead, grabs at its hairy ears and pulls, then turns toward his mother and jubilantly laughs, firmly standing on both feet.

A GOOD MAN

“Leave.” Ignatov slows his rapid breathing and rolls on his back; there’s a tired emptiness in his body.

“Something happen, Vanya?” Aglaya adjusts her rumpled dress and sits on the bed.

“Leave.”

She looks at him a little longer as her slender fingers run through the fasteners on her stockings (the creamy skin of a magnificent thigh flashes among dark woolen folds). Did they come undone? No, there wasn’t time. She stands. The soft soles of her feet noiselessly tread over to a tin washbasin, where a crooked sliver of mirror has taken refuge between the logs.

“You’re going crazy, Vanya,” she says, primping short red ringlets that barely cover her ears. “More and more every day.”

Without getting out of bed, Ignatov gropes on the floor for her heavy shoe, a man’s shoe with a thick sole and squared toe. He hurls it, hitting her in the back, right, as it happens, on the spot where the dark little delicacy of a beauty mark sits on a round shoulder blade that looks like marble under threadbare cotton. Aglaya cries out and steps backward.

“I told you to leave!” He hurls the other shoe.

“You really are a madman!” Aglaya hastily gathers up her shoes and scampers out the door.

Ignatov stretches an arm under the bed and pulls out a long, narrow-necked bottle. There’s still something cloudy and yellowish splashing like oil at the bottom – not much, though, no more than a finger or two.

“Where…?” he tiredly asks the ceiling, as if he’s repeating it for the tenth time. “Gorelov, you dog… where are you?”

Tangled in a balled-up blanket, rumpled pillows, and his own feet, he falls out of bed. He has trouble rising and holds the walls as he trudges to the door, which he opens wide. A mean, cold wind hits him in the face; the summer of 1938 happens to be cool. Semruk is sprawled below. In the middle are three broad, long barracks that take up almost all the settlement’s area, and a couple of dozen outbuildings that cluster around them, forming the semblance of a crooked little street. A small cook in a white apron hits a gong with a ladle, and the harsh, quavering sounds fly along the knoll, rolling further, beyond the Angara and into the taiga. Small figures hurry from every corner of Semruk to the dining hall for supper.

Standing on the front steps in just his underclothes and shaking the empty bottle, Ignatov screams into the evening settlement from the heights of the commandant’s headquarters:

“Where are you? I’ll kill you, Gorelov! Where are you?”

Gorelov is already running out from behind a corner. He’s out of breath and lugging a second bottle, pressed carefully against his chest, where something viscous and gray with an orange tinge gurgles heavily inside, bubbling from being shaken.

“There!” he says, panting with his mouth open, like a dog. He places his burden on the front steps. “It’s made from cloudberries, nice and fresh.”

Reeling, Ignatov bends, drops the empty bottle, lifts the full one, and goes inside, miraculously not stumbling on the threshold.

“My master’s dissertation, back in Munich in 1906, was devoted to ideas about the nourishment and cultivation of cereal crops. I saw my work as mostly theoretical, having strategic rather than concrete practical importance. I never imagined for a moment that I would one day cultivate that same wheat myself!” Konstantin Arnoldovich Sumlinsky shakes the brownish flatbread he’s clutching in a withered hand with broken fingernails. “Moreover, to eat bread prepared from it!”

There’s a quick, even clatter of metal spoons all around them. The exiles are eating supper, sitting at long wooden tables that their elbows and hands have buffed to a pleasant, almost homey smoothness over the years. Two hundred mouths hurriedly chew, wasting no time on unnecessary words. They’d expanded the dining hall several years ago, adding on a second log building that’s longer and broader than the first, but four hundred people still won’t fit, so Semruk’s residents now eat in two shifts, taking turns.

The guards’ table, which is spacious and spread with a clean checked tablecloth once a week, remains in its previous spot, not far from the serving area. They eat there watchfully, without hurrying, enjoying the simple but thoroughly decent flavor of the food that’s served. It’s here – at one end, not taking much space, and prepared to leap right up when summoned – that Gorelov gulps down his thin soup. None of the guards remember when and under whose permission he’d started eating with them, but they tolerate him and don’t send him away. He’s sitting there so there must be a reason.

“And you consider all this,” says Ikonnikov, waving around a worn metal spoon whose handle is a spiral twist and whose sides look like they’ve been bitten, “reasonable payment for the opportunity to, as you stated it, cultivate wheat?”

Ikonnikov gulps angrily from his bowl. He chews and removes a thin, crooked fish bone from his mouth using fingers stained with ultramarine and cobalt.

“No, not at all, nothing of the kind!” Konstantin Arnoldovich fidgets on the bench, squashing the bread in his small hand. “Now you, Ilya Petrovich, what truly important thing did you create when you were at liberty? Twenty-three busts with mustaches?”

“Twenty-four,” Izabella corrects him, neatly tilting her bowl away from herself and spooning out the last remaining brownish leaves in cloudy gray broth.

“And you would have sculpted that many more!” Konstantin Arnoldovich’s hand hammers threateningly at the table.

Gorelov rises at the guards’ table and surveys the dining hall, looking concerned about the noise.

Izabella slaps her husband’s hand affectionately.

“And here” – Sumlinsky can’t calm down so he’s speaking quickly and loudly – “you’re Raphael! Michelangelo! You’re not painting a clubhouse, it’s the Sistine Chapel. Do you yourself realize that?”

“By the way, Ilya Petrovich, my dear fellow!” Izabella is firmly and significantly squeezing her husband’s hand. “You promised to show us–”

The gong – made from a large tin plate that hangs by the dining-hall entrance – suddenly groans, swings, and quivers from a strong strike. A revolver is vigorously pounding it. People exchange glances, set their spoons aside, rise from the tables with their heads down, as usual; some pull the caps off the tops of their heads. The commandant bursts in, wearing wrinkled, mud-spotted breeches he’s somehow pulled over his drawers, and a dirty under-shirt tautly caught up in uneven suspenders. A lock of brown hair, slightly touched with white, hangs over his eyebrows and his sharp cheekbones wear a brush of uneven stubble.

“Get up!” the commandant booms. He seems to reel slightly from his own shout. “To work! You think I’m going to spoil you?”

Gorelov hastily wipes off his hands on his brown minder’s uniform jacket, gets up from the table, and hurries to Ignatov.

“They’ve already finished their work, comrade commandant!” Gorelov’s standing at attention, with his chest bulging and his short-fingered hands stretched at his sides.

Ignatov casts a muddled glance at two hundred bent heads and two hundred dishes of unfinished thin soup on the tables.

“You’re gobbling it down, you sons of bitches,” he bitterly concludes.

“Yes, sir, comrade commandant!” Gorelov answers, with such resonance and passion it makes the ears ring.

“Insatiable vermin.” Ignatov’s voice is quiet and tired. “You feed and feed them… When will you ever get enough…”

“They worked up an appetite, comrade commandant! Striving to meet their daily quotas. Fulfilling the plan!”

“Ah, the plan…” Ignatov’s brows gently rise along his wrinkled forehead. “And so?”

“They exceeded their quotas, comrade commandant! By an entire ten cubic meters!”

“Good.” Ignatov is walking through the rows, peering into sullen faces with lips pressed together, eyes lowered, and cheekbones tense. “Very good.”

His unsteady hand slaps the sunken scoliotic chest of a skinny, stooped man with a closely shaven head and large ears that stick out like a child’s. Ignatov takes a bowl from the table – clumps of something grayish-green splash around in it – and puts it on the man’s head, like a hat.

“We must abide by the plan!” From his warrior-like height, Ignatov bends toward the skinny man, looks confidingly into eyes narrowed from fear, and whispers into ears with thin soup trickling into them. “We won’t get anywhere without the plan!” He shakes his head with grief and knocks the bowl with his revolver. The sound is muted and dulled, unlike the gong.

Greens mixed with fish heads are sliding down the skinny man’s face. Ignatov nods with satisfaction and threatens everyone else with the barrel of his gun, as if it were an index finger telling them to watch out. He turns and slowly goes to the exit. Finally, he swipes his revolver at the gong. Now that sounds better!

After Ignatov’s footsteps have faded, the exiles sit down one at a time, silently take their spoons, and continue eating. Vibrations from the gong hang in the air, creeping into their ears. Still standing, the skinny man pulls the dish from his head, breathing shallowly and wiping his dirty face with his sleeve; someone warily touches him on the shoulder.

“Here,” says Achkenazi, sullen as usual. He holds out another dish, filled to the brim with soup that’s thick, obviously from the very bottom of the kettle. “Take it, Zaseka. I’m giving you seconds.”

“Our commandant’s essentially a decent person,” says Konstantin Arnoldovich, leaning across the table toward Ikonnikov. “He’s moral in his own way. He has his own principles – even if he’s not fully aware of them – as well as an undeniable inclination for justice–”

“A good man,” Izabella cuts him off. “It’s just he’s very troubled.”

The faces started appearing to him in 1932. For some reason it was before falling asleep that he remembered the first time he’d seen Zuleikha, sitting like a sack on the large sledge, wrapped in a thick headscarf and an oversized sheepskin coat. Then her husband’s face suddenly flashed, with bushy brows gathered in a lump on his forehead, a nose with wide and fat nostrils, and a chin like a split hoof. Ignatov saw him as clearly as a photograph. He placed no significance on it and fell asleep, but then Murtaza up and appeared in Ignatov’s dream, looking at him silently. Ignatov woke up from that gaze and rolled on his other side, irritated, and then he dreamt of the husband again. He wouldn’t leave.

It had gone on from there. The dead began coming at night and watching him. Each time he looked at yet another guest, Ignatov excruciatingly recollected the where, the when, and the how. He would wake up from the pressure of each memory, which would remain fresh, even after turning the pillow over for the tenth time so the cold side was on his cheek. That one was near Shemordan, winter of 1930; that one was in Varzob Gorge, near Dushanbe, in 1922; that one was on the Sviyaga River, in 1920.

He’d killed many in gunfights and battles without seeing their faces, but they came and watched him, too. He recognized them in some strange way that’s only possible in dreams, by the turn of a neck, the shape of the back of a head, slouched shoulders, or a saber’s stroke. He recalled them all, from the very first, in 1918. They were toughened, dangerous, out-and-out enemies to a man: Denikinites, Czechs in the White Army, Basmachi, and kulaks. He reassured himself that not one was to be pitied. If he were to meet them, he would kill them again without hesitation. He reassured himself but he’s almost stopped sleeping.

Those strange, silent dreams – where faces long-forgotten and completely unfamiliar look at him wordlessly and impassively, not asking for anything and not wishing to tell him anything – are more agonizing than the nightmare about the sinking Clara, a dream that Ignatov has stopped having in recent years for some reason. His long-term, insomniac tiredness doesn’t help, nor does the warmth of a female body beside him. Sometimes home brew helps.

And so Ignatov is glad of Kuznets’s unexpected arrival. It’s much more pleasant to drink with him than alone or with Gorelov, who’s growing more insolent – and more brazenly so – with every passing year.

Ignatov’s standing on the front steps of the commandant’s headquarters when he throws his arms wide open and shouts, “He’s here!” after seeing the chief’s long black launch beyond a hill.

“Huh, so you were expecting me, my good man,” Kuznets smirks as he jumps ashore, accurately assessing the strength of the stale alcohol on Ignatov’s breath and the circles under eyes as black as coal.

Kuznets shows up for regular inspections every month or two, and after the formality of taking a walk around Semruk and the logging sites, they head to the commandant’s headquarters to sit for a while. They sit thoroughly, sometimes for two or three days. Gorelov doesn’t participate, though he does provide ample assistance. He himself will bring food from the dining hall. Under Gorelov’s personal supervision, Achkenazi takes from his pantries sun-dried bream and preserved lingonberries stored away for the occasion, and braises herbs and game procured in the forest in short order; fruit puddings and drinks are also served “for a sweet and pleasant start to the day.” In addition, Gorelov will command bathhouse preparations, ensuring the fire is stoked and bundles of leaves readied (the bathhouse was built the previous year beyond a river bend some distance from the settlement and they take turns bathing: men one Sunday, women the next); and he will make the women scour Kuznets’s launch, moored at the tiny wooden berth, until it sparkles.

By all appearances, their get-together can be expected to be genial this time. Gorelov sweats profusely as he drags Kuznets’s case up from the shore and it’s as heavy as if it were stone, with something clinking and gurgling inside, sounding muffled and expensive. Kuznets is wary of the local home brew so usually brings his own drink with him, something he has purchased.

They take a walk along the shore and inspect the timber landing by the river, which is swarming with people and filled with high piles of logs as tall as a person. They go inside the freshly constructed log building that will be a school; classes are set to begin in September. They admire the uprooting of stumps on new land for crops. Their experiments with cultivating grains have been successful and it’s been decided to use another piece of the taiga as a field. They look at each other with relief: Well, so, is it time to sit for a while? And they go.

Their conversations at the table turn out to be warm, even heartfelt. Ignatov knows Kuznets is taking detailed mental notes of everything he says, whether sober, tipsy, or passing out from drunken intoxication, but Ignatov isn’t afraid of that because he has nothing to hide. All his sins are as prominently on display as Kuznets’s mustache. There’s even something attractive about that, some special joy that smacks of vengeance – drinking with a person from whom you have no secrets and can no longer keep secrets, but who might himself have secrets. So let Kuznets tense up, keep himself in check, and hold his tongue, afraid of letting something slip. He, Ignatov, sits down at the table with ease and joy, as if he’s offering up his own bared soul for show.

“Where’s this from?” Kuznets takes a small yellow turnip the size of a child’s fist, with a long and fluffy green tail like a comet, from a table set with dishes, bowls, cups, and kettles of various sizes.

“Well, I have this… agronomist here,” says Ignatov, gulping impatiently as he pours crisp-sounding Moscow vodka into glasses with sharp, gleaming facets.

They usually drink from mugs but Kuznets brought glasses with him this time; he apparently wants to sit for a while in good taste, the urban way. A lush green label the color of young conifer needles on the bottle’s round side promises pure fifty-percent enjoyment, guaranteed by the USSR’s Glavspirtprom trademark. They finally clink glasses. The turnip is sharp and juicy, with a hint of gentle bitterness, so it turns out to be just the thing with the vodka.

“Let’s consider our meeting open,” says Kuznets. He eats his turnip whole, leaves and all, and waves his fat fingers over the glasses, gesturing as if to say: Come on, hurry up with the second now. “Here you go, Vanya, first item: kulak growth, damn it to hell.”

Kulak growth is what the authorities have begun calling the rapid accumulation of wealth among exiled peasants. After being sent thousands of kilometers from their native homes, they’re the ones who’ve recovered six or eight years after the blow, adapting somewhat in alien places and contriving, even there, to earn an extra kopek, set it aside, and use it later to buy up personal inventory and even cattle. In brief, the peasantry that lost absolutely everything is kulakizing all over again, and of course that’s completely intolerable. And thus a wise decision was made at the highest levels of government to stop the growth immediately, punish those guilty, and organize the kulaks (who practiced their ineradicable individualism so craftily even in exile) into collective farms. A wave of punitive actions for permitting so much rekulakization had already swept through the ranks of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, adding to the relentless flow of repressions during 1937 and 1938.

They tackle the first question on the agenda quickly. The bottle doesn’t even have a chance to empty, for what is there to yammer about anyway when everything’s clear? Forbid private construction (in Semruk, a few especially nimble people have already finished building themselves small, solid houses, moved out of the barracks, and started families) and hold a general meeting with an explanatory discussion, cautioning against kulakization.

“Oh, yes, we will hold one,” Ignatov promises the green label, picking at its fancy edge with his fingernail. “Oh, will we caution…”

Their session’s second item for discussion flows organically from the first: organizing a local collective enterprise.

Back in January of 1932, the USSR’s Council of Labor and Defense issued a resolution “On seeds for special migrants,” under which labor settlements were to be regularly supplied with grain seeds so they could independently produce their own bread and cereals. Seeds have been provided to Semruk, too. There’s oats, barley, wheat, and, for some reason, even warmth-loving hemp, which doesn’t have enough time to mature in the meager Siberian sun. Sumlinsky has taken on agronomist responsibilities and has been handling the job fairly well. Ever since receiving Ignatov’s cautious permission, he has had the audacity to order additional seed resources from the central office over the last two years (the insolent man even indicated specific sorts!), and thus turnip made its appearance at the settlement, along with carrots, bulb onions, and radishes. Sumlinsky has been obsessed for two years with the idea of growing melons but Ignatov, fearing ridicule, has forbidden him from including melon seeds in the order. Their harvests cannot be considered abundant, though they should be worth the working hours invested. They eat their own bread at the settlement and occasionally vegetables, too. It’s true the grain they prepare doesn’t last the winter, but they’re now readying another field where Sumlinsky intends to grow autumn-seeded crops.

The second bottle has emptied; ten of Kuznets’s expensive cigarettes have been smoked; all the turnips and radishes, which were as small as peas and awfully sour to the taste, as well as the supper that Gorelov brought (flaky fried fish in breadcrumbs, still sizzling with smoked pork fat) have been eaten; and the kerosene lamp is already burning lemon-yellow through the thick blue-gray smoke: but the question still isn’t closed. Kuznets wants the Semruk collective farm to supply products not only to the settlement but also to the “mainland.”

“What am I going to supply you with?” Ignatov shakes a pale green scallion with feathery, white-tinged leaves in front of Kuznets’s raspberry-colored face. “These vegetables are only enough for one meal for the settlement. The wheat barely matures! We work for a year and eat for a month! Four hundred mouths!”

“Then try harder!” Kuznets tears the onion from Ignatov’s fingers, stuffs it in his broad maw, and grinds it with his teeth. “What do you think, my dear man? That we’re establishing a collective farm so it’s just your own kisser chowing on turnip? You’ve got four hundred pairs of hands! Be ever so kind! Labor along and share with the state!”

They send for Sumlinsky. He runs up, disheveled from sleep and wearing a jacket he’s tossed on to cover his underclothes. They splash something into a mug for him but Konstantin Arnoldovich refuses to drink and just stands by the table, frightened, with his cheeks wrinkled and his hair sticking up. After grasping the essence of the question, he grows pensive, furrows his brow, and smoothes his long, sparse beard, which has taken on an utterly goat-like look over the years.

“Why not supply?” he says. “We can supply, too.”

Ignatov slams his hands on the table out of annoyance. Here I am protecting these fools and then they go sticking their necks in the noose on their own. After the hand gesture, he lowers his head to the table, too; all the talking has worn him out. Kuznets is roaring with laughter: Nice job, old man. I love people like you!

“But,” adds Sumlinsky, “there’s a series of necessary conditions.”

And so he counts on his pointy fingers. “No fewer than fifteen people as workers in the collective farm, the sturdiest and handiest men, and they have to be on a permanent basis, not like now, as volunteers and with other assignments on their days off: that’s first. The seed stock has to be in strict accordance with the preliminary order I personally compiled. And I need the right to refuse rotten or spoiled grain if that’s what’s supplied under the guise of seed stock, like in 1934. That’s the second thing. Bring new metal tools for uprooting trees because the wooden ones are torture. Sometimes we work with rocks, like primitive people, but we need pickaxes, crowbars, spades, hoes, and pitchforks of all sizes. I’ll compile a list. That’s third. Agricultural tools are another matter. A lot of these are needed, too. I’ll specify those in a list in a separate section so nobody’s confused: that’s fourth. Definitely beasts of burden, five or more oxen – we can’t plow without them; they could come toward next spring, toward the beginning of sowing: that’s fifth. Now fertilizers…”

As Kuznets listens, his neck, which is already crimson, is gradually turning purple, too. Kuznets can’t contain himself by the time all the fingers on one of Sumlinsky’s hands have been used and he’s moving on to the next.

“Who are you anyway,” he hisses, “you bastard, setting conditions for me, Zinovy Kuznets?”

Konstantin Arnoldovich lowers his hands and wilts.

“Probably nobody,” he says. “But at one time I was head of the applied botany department at the Institute of Experimental Agronomy – there is such a place in Leningrad. And a very long time ago – one might say in a previous life – I was a member of the scientific committee at the Ministry of Arable Farming and State Property. That was back in Petersburg.”

“I’ll set the conditions for you; you won’t do it for me, you minister of arable farming. When I give the order, you’ll improve the collective farm on your own, without the sturdiest and handiest men and without oxen, too. You’ll plow the land with your own rod, not some tools.”

“You can give an order to me,” Sumlinsky says to the floor, “but you can hardly give an order to the grain.”

Ignatov tears his heavy, unwieldy head off the table.

“Let’s have a drink, Zin. And that one” – Ignatov’s dulled gaze has trouble fumbling around for Konstantin Arnoldovich’s frail figure, which seems to be soaring over the floor in the dense cigarette smoke – “toss him out of here. Let him put it all in writing.”

Kuznets is breathing loudly; he throws a parsley leaf in his mouth and rolls it along his teeth.

“Let’s drink,” says Ignatov, pounding his hand on the table and not calming down. “Drink! Drink!”

“Let’s,” Kuznets finally agrees, raising his glass and staring straight at the pale Sumlinsky. “To the future collective farm. To it blossoming like a magnificent socialist flower and as soon as possible. Fine, minister, I accept your conditions. But if you let me down…”

They clink glasses. As they’re drinking, Sumlinsky vanishes outside without a sound. And that’s how the seeds of the Semruk collective farm were sown and the second agenda item for the day was closed; midnight has already rolled past by this time.

The third item is so serious they head off to the bathhouse for discussions. They bring the vodka with them and chill it in a bucket of icy-cold Angara water. This point is called “informant and agent work,” which Ignatov has set up outrageously badly. The situation must be rectified. Moreover, immediately.

“Who am I supposed to recruit as agents, anyway – the bears?” Ignatov listlessly resists as Kuznets whacks his back with a splendid bundle of birch leaves that’s been conscientiously soaked three times in boiling water.

“It can even be elks and wolverines,” grunts Kuznets, the thick pearlescent air wavering around his powerful torso like a live cloud. “Just be ready to hand over five informants, that’s what I need.”

When Ignatov was in charge of the special train, he regularly called in the minders from each car for a conversation. But it was one thing to talk and listen, and another thing entirely to note down observations and send them to central office, understanding that when your paper was placed in the person’s individual file it would remain there for a long time, likely forever, outliving both the person himself and his observer.

They lash themselves to the bone and run down to the Angara – naked, they don’t get dressed – to take a dip. They shout in the icy water, scaring away all the nocturnal fish in the vicinity, splash around, and scurry back to the bathhouse to warm up.

“Understand, Zin, brother,” says Ignatov, trying pitifully to pour vodka into small wooden dippers (they forgot to bring the glasses from the commandant’s headquarters and are too lazy to run back for them), “this agent… agent business… makes me sick…”

Kuznets gulps from the dipper, chasing the drink with a dark brown birch leaf that’s stuck to Ignatov’s forehead, then spits out the leaf stem.

“Look, Vanya, here’s what you have to do.”

He kicks the door and night coolness blows in from outside; a creamy-yellow half-moon is dangling in the dark blue sky. Kuznets whistles briefly, like a master calling a pet dog. Gorelov’s concerned face appears in the doorway a minute later.

“The women,” he reports, “are already sitting at the commandant’s headquarters, waiting on the front steps. One’s dark-complexioned, the other’s light, like last time. If they need to be brought over here for you, just say…”

Kuznets’s finger beckons to Gorelov, who cautiously makes his way into the crowded little bathhouse, which is filled with the smells of smoke, white-hot stones, birch leaves, vodka, and sturdy male bodies. He averts his eyes from the delicate parts of the naked chiefs’ bodies, looking only at bright-red faces covered with glistening sweat.

“What’s your…?” Kuznets is snapping his fingers in the air.

“Gorelov!”

“Gorelov, why’re you cooling your heels here in the settlement instead of working off your term in a camp? The camp’s crying out for you, pouring bitter tears.”

“I’m not a felon.” Gorelov’s bristling like a wild animal, backing away toward the door. “I’m just not part of a social class…”

“You’re lucky, you dog.” Kuznets smiles. He splashes some vodka in a dipper and extends it to Gorelov, who nods with cautious thanks and drinks, his sharp Adam’s apple measuring the swallows like a piston. “I’d have put you in as a felon. Anyway, fine, don’t be a scaredy-cat. You’re better off telling me who’s breeding anti-Soviet ideas here in Semruk.”

Gorelov sneers and squints out from behind the ladle with distrust, wondering if he’s being tested.

“There’s a lot.”

“Ah!” Kuznets meaningfully lifts a tensed finger. “And can you write them all down?”

“I’ve learned to read and write.”

“And might there be people who could help you, fill you in on details – the who, what, and where? The things you yourself might not have seen?”

“I’ll find them, you can be sure I will.” Half of Gorelov’s mouth grins as if he still can’t believe the leaders are appealing to him with such an important request.

“Good!” Kuznets waves his hand like a king. “Go, you’re dismissed for now.”

And he looks victoriously at Ignatov, who’s collapsed by the wall: So what do you think of that? A lightning-fast recruitment in two steps, even just one and a half.

“I can do it right now! Right now!” Gorelov’s bursting with concealed knowledge that he absolutely wants to report, in its entirety, to chiefs who look on him favorably at this anxious moment. “I can show you the main one! He’s not sleeping yet – he’s painting up his anti-Soviet stuff, that turncoat. I know it!”

“Who?” Ignatov’s heavy gaze comes out from under his puffy eyelids and bores into Gorelov.

“Ikonnikov! They say he has done ‘quite something’ at the clubhouse!”

“Well, if it’s quite something, then go on, show us.” Kuznets stands. Reeling a bit, he ties a white sheet around his muscular purple torso. He takes on an immediate resemblance to an ancient Roman patrician in the hot springs at Caracalla.

They built the clubhouse five years ago when there was an order from on high requiring labor settlements to establish domestic as well as agitational and cultural elements of life for the re-educated peasantry. Ignatov would have been more eager to put his workforce into expanding the infirmary or storage space, but an order is an order so they built it.

In all honesty, the building came out botched. The tall, rectangular log frame building could hold two hundred people at most, and only standing. They initially held general gatherings there, but with Semruk’s rapid population growth, the gatherings were moved outside to the square, by the agitational board, meaning the clubhouse was empty most of the time. Ignatov proposed using the building as a school instead, or at least a storehouse, but Kuznets was adamant that the clubhouse exist in the settlement as its own entity. In other labor settlements, interest groups met in clubhouses: the Union of the Militant Godless, the Down with Illiteracy Society, and even Automobile Roads, a group focused on the development of automobilism and road improvements. It wouldn’t hurt to bring clubs of this sort to Semruk. No way in holy hell, thought Ignatov, picturing red-bearded Lukka diligently listening to a paper about a month-long campaign to fight roadlessness in Turkestan or Granny Yanipa in the ranks of the godless demonstrators. It’s better if they’re felling trees.

They’d recently decided to decorate the clubhouse with agitational art. More importance has been placed on agitational work of late, though until now it’s been limited to just supplying bright posters wound in tight rolls. Watching the settlement’s residents from the posters are curly-haired collective-farm women driving steel tractors with one hand while insistently and meaningfully pointing somewhere with the other (Konstantin Arnoldovich just sighed dreamily, running a finger along the carefully traced side of a jagged tractor wheel and explaining its mechanics in simple terms to peasants who’d never seen an iron horse). Others show well-fed male and female figures directing their inspired profiles toward an infant with splotchy red cheeks and chubby little hands waving in support of its own “joyful and happy childhood” (1938 was significant for Semruk in terms of demography because the birth rate exceeded the death rate that year for the first time since the settlement’s founding, apparently thanks in part to the powerful agitational influence of the poster). There are also red-hot Komsomol members striding along giant long-fingered hands that have been raised toward them in hope (under a special Gulag circular from 1932, it was forbidden to organize Young Pioneer squads from children of special migrants, but a reversal of policy in 1936 allowed this, and even declared it highly desirable, with the recommendation that future members of the Komsomol organization be diligently cultivated from those newly converted Young Pioneers). For some reason, a packet of posters from the Moscow Zoological Garden (“Entry fee only twenty kopeks!”) was sent from the central office along with three posters advertising squirrel coats from Soyuzmekhtorg for the ladies, although nobody considered hanging those on the board.

Then came a sudden order to use agitational art – the lusher and heartier the better – to beautify places for leisure activity. The clubhouse was the only such place in Semruk. And so a decision was made to decorate it. Ignatov wanted to limit decorations to standard posters and a couple of street banners with full-throated inscriptions, but then Kuznets remembered something. Isn’t there an artist here, one of the “remainders,” somebody well known? Let him sweat a little and portray something a bit more original. Kuznets knew that inspectors from Moscow, who were sure to descend upon them one day, would duly appreciate the fact that places for public cultural uses existed in this out-of-the-way Siberian settlement, and not only that but that a creative approach had been taken to the complex matter of agitational art.

Kuznets himself brought canvases, paints, and a small canister of turpentine from Krasnoyarsk. As Ikonnikov ran fingers coarsened by tree felling and shaking with excitement over the treasures that had fallen to him – Neapolitan yellow, cadmium, and Indian paints; ochres light and dark; mars, sienna, and umber; cinnabar, chrome, and Veronese green – he had a fit of creative inspiration and unexpectedly proposed that they start a mural for the ceiling.

Kuznets narrowed his eyes balefully. “Like in a church?”

“No, like in a subway station!” said Ikonnikov.

So a mural it was. They brought plywood and covered the ceiling. More medicine or fishing gear would have been better than this indulgence, brooded Ignatov, observing the pensive Ikonnikov as he wandered among scaffolding standing in rows in the clubhouse’s empty space and incessantly grumbled to helpers who were nailing thin sheets of plywood to the log ceiling “too roughly.” They didn’t understand how you could hit “more softly” and “more gently” with a hammer, and they cast suspicious sideways glances at the eccentric artist and exchanged significant looks among themselves.

Ikonnikov was anguishing. He was weary from a surge of emotions that blended inspiration, pining, long-forgotten youthful elation, despair, and some sort of aching tenderness for a mural that had not yet been created nor even fully visualized. Only a week before, when he was finishing sawing the eleventh pine trunk for the day or harnessing himself into rope to drag logs to the timber landing, he couldn’t have possibly imagined he’d be standing like this with his face raised toward the ceiling, toward a boundless space on which faces and cities and countries and times and all human life, from its very origin to spectral future horizons, were already glimmering for him and beginning to show themselves on the yellow plywood.

“Agitational art should be simple and understandable,” Ignatov declared. “And without any of your tricks, so watch out.”

During a week of creative torment, Ikonnikov’s face thinned and his pendulous nose sharpened, lending their master a resemblance to a large and sullen bird; his eyes flared with a rather wild fire. He primed the plywood day and night, lying under the ceiling on wooden scaffolding and only occasionally taking breaks to sleep and eat. With the commandant’s permission, he slept at the clubhouse, too. He completely stopped drinking the home brew that some of the exiles had learned to make from berries; Ikonnikov was known to imbibe. He used up his monthly supply of candles in five days; working at night was somehow jollier and more wicked. Finally, he began on the mural.

Ignatov, who’d initially made daily stops at the clubhouse to inspect the creative process, was surprised to realize that agitational art was no quick matter. A month after work began, the ceiling had only been ruled into some kind of little squares, streaked with incomprehensible lines, and partially covered with colored dots whose intended use was unclear.

“Will it be ready soon?” Ignatov asked Ikonnikov, with a sense of doom.

“I’ll try to have it done by the November holidays,” Ikonnikov promised.

It was the height of spring. Out of annoyance, Ignatov gave up and stopped going to check. He’d heard that Ikonnikov was using his free time away from agitational art to indulge himself by painting his own pictures on canvases that had ended up at his disposal. Ignatov hadn’t placed any particular meaning on that, but it turned out he should have.

They pound on the door so hard that the scaffolding shakes and shudders under Ikonnikov.

“Coming!” He speeds down the rungs in a hurry, his feet missing slats from nervousness.

He forgets his candle above, so now it’s burning right under the ceiling, illuminating someone’s large, half-drawn hand with long Raphaelesque fingers and casting angular black shadows in all directions as its light catches scaffolding that towers high and threateningly, a homemade easel Ikonnikov had crafted from beams, and Ilya Petrovich himself, who’s scrambling to the door. He finally gropes at the bolt and unlocks it, just as the door swings open from a powerful blow, nearly flying off its hinges.

“Greet your visitors, it’s a search!” booms out of the dark blue night.

Gorelov rolls into the clubhouse holding a kerosene lamp in his extended hand and obligingly giving light for someone behind him. Two others enter, dressed so strangely and with such crimson faces that Ikonnikov doesn’t recognize them at first. Commandant Ignatov is wearing underclothes he’s pulled on haphazardly and he’s barefoot, with wet, tousled hair and a couple of birch leaves stuck to his forehead. Alongside him is Kuznets, the chief from the central office, but the only ordinary clothing he’s wearing is boots pulled onto bare legs covered with woolly black hair; his body is wound in a damp white sheet, over which he’s donned a reddish officer’s holster for some reason. Both men are carrying large wooden dippers that they click together zealously from time to time. They’re drunk, Ikonnikov understands, thoroughly smashed.

“Well?” Kuznets inquires with a threatening playfulness, lightly scratching at dark, tightly curled thickets of hair on a chest as broad as a sail. “What do you have here? Show me!”

Gorelov darts among the scaffolding like a mouse, making shadows from the lamp rush along the walls like a jumbled round dance.

“I can smell it,” he mutters. “I smell it, it has to be here.” Then there’s a sudden, triumphant, “Found it!”

Ignatov and Kuznets force their way toward his voice, entangling themselves in intersecting planks and knocking down some boards and tools.

In a yellow patch of kerosene light, several canvases stand haphazardly by the wall and on the windowsill. There are narrow, cobbled little streets with large, yellow crystal-like streetlights and café tables huddled together on crowded sidewalks; three-story buildings of bakeries and greengroceries wound in ivy and flowers, their first stories dressed up in awnings as if they were purple skirts; festive palaces with roofs covered in a noble emerald patina; and a river shackled to sand-gray embankments and steel bridges.

As Gorelov draws the lamp right up to one of the pictures, he sniffs at hardened, thick, glistening daubs of paint and digs at them with a fingernail.

“There it is,” he whispers, “absolutely pure, out-and-out anti-Soviet activity! Realest you’ll ever see!”

On the canvas is a long, narrow triangle, a tower of lacy metal set against a backdrop of malachite-green hills flowing toward the horizon.

“Hmm?” Kuznets’s face nears the tower and his overbearing gaze runs from the top of the tower’s head to its short-legged base, then back. One must admit that the look of this structure really is completely bourgeois.

“You’re dead meat!” Gorelov explodes, grabbing Ikonnikov by the jacket. “We excused him from work and didn’t spare the paints. There’s a whole container just of turpentine! And he’s doing this? Off to the logging site tomorrow! You’ll give me fifty percent over the quota, you louse!”

“As you were!” Ignatov swings broadly and whacks Gorelov in the chest with a dipper, as if asking him to hold it. Straining, he focuses his gaze on the canvas then shifts it to Ikonnikov, who’s skulking in the shadows. “What is it?” He asks this sternly, poking a calloused finger at the picture.

Ikonnikov looks at Ignatov’s hard fingernail that’s pinning the top of the Eiffel Tower to a transparent, dark blue Paris sky.

“That…” He feels his legs weaken, go numb, and scatter like sand as his insides sink down somewhere close to the ground. “That’s Moscow.”

Three pairs of eyes addled by alcohol fix their gaze on him.

“Moscow,” he repeats, throat dry. “The building of the People’s Commissariat of Heavy Industry.”

Eyes skip back to the canvas, attempting to discern some sort of inscription or placard on the tower’s wrought-iron veins.

“And here, at the bottom, see this? That’s administrative offices and there’s the Yauza River. Behind it is Sokolniki and the hills further away, that’s Elk Island.”

Ignatov exhales loudly, with a whistle, and shifts his gaze to Gorelov, whose legs are bent at the knees from bewilderment. He’s crouched and his mouth is agape.

Kuznets takes the lamp from Gorelov and illuminates another picture, where there’s a lively, festively lit street and a large windmill with bright, ruby-red sails.

“And this,” he asks, “is it Moscow?”

“Yes, yes, of course. I draw from memory. I’m a professional, my memory is almost photographic.” Ikonnikov’s feet are gradually starting to sense the floor and his insides are returning to their proper places. He turns the painting slightly and the Moulin Rouge flashes in all its red hues, from fiery red to purple. “That’s Sretenka Street, not far from the Kremlin. The red windmill is a symbol of the victory of the revolution – it was built back in 1927 for the tenth anniversary. And that…” He pulls another canvas into the circle of light to show an intersection of the green and gray rays of boulevards and residential blocks, where the Arc de Triomphe towers over the city like an imposing Greek letter pi. “These are the Nikitsky Gates. Right behind Tverskoi Boulevard, off to the left. Lenin spoke there in 1917, remember? Do you happen to have been to Moscow?”

“We’re Leningraders,” Gorelov says quietly and irately, through clenched teeth.

“Leningraders!” Ignatov grabs him by the scruff of his neck but can’t stay on his feet and drops to the floor, carrying Gorelov with him. Part of the scaffolding creaks, sways, and falls, scattering large pieces of debris on them both. Ikonnikov backs away, frightened, looking at the two muttering bodies bumbling around on the floor. Kuznets is laughing so hard he’s pressing his hands against his knees so he won’t fall, shaking his black head, and snorting from deep inside his gut.

Ignatov doesn’t have the strength to stand and he’s the first to crawl out, creeping on his belly.

“Let’s get out of here, Zin,” he mutters. “Gorelov, you fool, all we did was waste our time.” His gaze settles on an empty bathhouse dipper lying on the floor and he examines it in astonishment. “What, there’s nothing to drink?”

The guilty party writhes behind him, and the debris crunches.

“What do you mean, nothing?” Gorelov shouts eagerly. “Just ask Ikonnikov – he must have a supply!”

A supply really does turn up at the clubhouse and it’s not small. They drink right away, using the dippers. Kuznets forgets his squeamishness about local alcohol products and Ignatov’s mouth joyfully senses the sharp berry flavor he’s grown accustomed to. They’re sitting on the floor, scrutinizing spots on the future mural that’s flashing dimly on the ceiling; the spots sway and dance some sort of subtle, intricate tango or foxtrot.

“You’ll make me such agitational art,” Kuznets says, breathing the hot smells of vodka, fried fish, and home brew into Ikonnikov’s ear. “Such art that it makes people shiver! Their spines will tingle! To the very heels of their feet! You got that?”

Ikonnikov nods submissively. How could he not get it?

The tiredness that had been descending upon Ignatov suddenly eases after the home brew. He feels a wave of strong, furious joy rising from somewhere deep inside. He feels like laughing and now everything is funny: the scaffolding spinning in the nearly dark clubhouse, and Ikonnikov’s frightened, sober little face and his pendulous nose, and the hole Gorelov tore in his uniform jacket when he tumbled to the floor, and the sheet around Kuznets’s torso that keeps trying to slide off and bare the chief’s imposing loins. Ignatov jumps to his feet and sways but remains standing. He spreads his arms wide – “I feel so good, Zin!”

Kuznets is already rising, too. He’s regally tucking in the end of his sheet that had come loose so it’s under his holster, and he stomps to the exit, knocking over something heavy (maybe it’s crates, maybe it’s buckets) and booming along the way.

“Forrrrrward!” he shouts. “Hurrah, comrades!”

Revolver taken from holster, door kicked with boot, and out. Ignatov and Gorelov follow.

The sky is already a smoky, pre-dawn blue. The stars are dimming quickly, one after another. Ignatov runs forward, behind his commander’s white back, and feels joy expanding and growing in his body. The ground springs underneath his feet, tossing him up so he flies forward, lightly and swiftly. This always happens during an offensive. Who’s hiding up ahead, waiting in ambush like a coward? White Army? Narrow-eyed Basmachi? For some reason there’s neither a revolver nor a saber in his hand. He picks up a blade that someone has dropped on the ground and waves it. The saber cuts the air with a whistle.

“For the revolution!” he shouts at the top of his lungs. “For the Red Arrrrm—”

Kuznets shoots. The echo slams along the river like thunder, rolling.

In the buildings ahead, faces distorted by fear are peering out of windows. Uh-huh, they’re scared, the sons of bitches!

“The enemy,” screams Kuznets. “I’ll slaughter them all!”

“I’ll slice them up!” Ignatov chimes in and starts hacking everything around.

They burst in, but where? Voices squeal loudly and shrilly, people scatter in all directions. Ignatov slices at something white and soft (the air fills with down, grassy debris, and dust) and at something hard and wooden (the saber in his hand breaks off for some reason but he finds a new one) and at something human and soft (someone screams, swears, howls).

They abruptly end up outside again and there they are up ahead, the enemy, hopping in all directions, escaping as they wail, and running fast – those sons of bitches! – so they can’t catch up. Kuznets shoots after them again, then again and again, and the shouts become more desperate, changing to a screech. Kuznets suddenly falls, either overwhelmed by a treacherous bullet coming from the other side or from simply stumbling.

Ignatov, who’s been running behind Kuznets, trips on his large body, and drops to the ground alongside him, where his face gets stuck in something slimy and viscous (mud?) and his skull cracks, exploding with pain. The joy disappears immediately, evaporating as if it had never been there, and a familiar, loathsome, and gnawing anguish is again sloshing in his chest. He looks at the saber in his hand. It’s not a saber, it’s a stick that he tosses it away. Ignatov wipes his face with his palm and finds sludgy clay. He crawls toward Kuznets’s body, stretched out near him. It’s hard to move because it feels like his body has been replaced with gluey aspic.

“Zin,” whispers Ignatov, the mud crunching distinctly on his teeth, “let me out of here. I can’t stay here any longer, you hear? I can’t.”

Kuznets is snoring, his shaggy chest swelling toward the heavens.

THE SHAH BIRD

Zuleikha opens her eyes. A ray of sun is pushing through shabby cotton curtains, creeping along a reddish curve on a log wall, over a flowered, coarse cotton pillow with the black tips of grouse feathers poking through, and further, toward Yuzuf’s delicate ear, rosy in the shaft of light. She extends her hand and noiselessly pulls at the curtain – her boy still has a long time to sleep. But it’s daybreak, time for her to get up.

She carefully frees her arm out from under his head, lowers her bare feet to a floor that’s cooled during the night, and places a scarf on her pillow so when her son decides to wake up, he’ll stretch, nestle his face into her scent, and sleep a little longer. Without looking, she takes her jacket, bag, and rifle from their nail. She pushes the door – the babbling of birds and the racket of the wind burst in – and noiselessly slips out. In the hallway, she puts on simple leather shoes that Granny Yanipa crafted from elk skin, quickly braids her hair, and then it’s onward, into the urman.

Zuleikha has always been the very first among the camp’s hunting artel – a work group of five – to go out into the taiga. “Your animal is still sleeping, dreaming, but you’re already set for work,” grumbles the red-bearded Lukka. Sometimes they meet when he’s coming to the settlement after night fishing and she’s leaving to hunt. She doesn’t deny it, she just silently smiles back; she knows her quarry will never escape from her.

She has fond memories of her first bear, the one she killed in 1931 at Round Clearing: if it hadn’t been for that bear, she would never have discovered how accurate an eye and steady a hand she has. All that remains of the bear is a yellowish-gray skull on a pole. She visits it occasionally and strokes it, in thanks.

The settlement’s hunting artel was founded back then, seven years ago. Achkenazi had tried to change Zuleikha’s mind when she decided to leave her job in the kitchen. He had even scolded her: “How will you feed your son?” That evening, she brought him a brace of wood grouse for the evening soup. He accepted the meat and stopped trying to change her mind. They found him another kitchen helper.

In the spring and summer, she comes back from the taiga carrying fat grouse and heavy geese with thick, tough necks. A couple of times she’s been fortunate to take down a roe deer and, once, even a quivering, frightened musk deer. She sets snares to catch hares, and for foxes she sets traps sent by the central office, at the artel’s request. In winter she hunts animals whose thick, glossy fur has already grown in – squirrels, Siberian weasels, and occasionally sables.

In summer, the hunting artel’s capacity goes primarily toward the settlement’s needs: they eat and preserve fowl, baking the feathers and down in the sun for use in pillows and quilts. The only thing they send to the central office are beaver pelts, but those don’t turn up often. The areas around Semruk aren’t for beavers.

Winter is another matter, the most hectic time. Headquarters takes all the fur animals, whether they’re ordinary squirrels and martens or rare sables that sometimes need to be tracked for two or three days. The settlement is paid for the pelts, most often in money transfers, only rarely in hard cash. The majority of the money goes toward the settlement’s budget, with some offset by taxes and other deductions (as well as state taxes, there are settlement fees of five percent added on, plus payments on the settlement’s credits), and the remainder is given to the hunters themselves. Zuleikha has already been earning money this way for seven years.

People say it’s best to hunt with dogs but the settlers aren’t allowed to have them, “as a precaution.” Even rifles are permitted only reluctantly, probably because hunting wouldn’t work out very well at all with just snares and bear spears, but no firearms. All five of Semruk’s guns are registered with the commandant’s office. Strictly speaking, they’re supposed to be given out in late autumn, only for hunting season, and then returned to the commandant in early spring, but Ignatov doesn’t follow the rules as tightly as he should. The hunters supply the settlement with meat in the summer and everyone eats well during those three warm months, making up for the long, hungry winter, which takes away a good quarter (if not an entire third) of Semruk’s population each year, as if winter is licking them away with its tongue. Those who perish are generally newcomers, the ones who arrive toward the beginning of cold weather and don’t have time to adjust to the harsh local climate.

At first they processed the pelts themselves, each on their own, but then they banded together, putting everything in Granny Yanipa’s hands. By that time, there was little use at the logging site for an old woman who was half-blind, but she didn’t need to see to remove membranes and boil the pelts, afterward drying and combing them. And so they count the working group as five and a half people, meaning five hunters plus one half, Yanipa.

Zuleikha is a full-fledged unit of labor for the artel, but another half of her is registered as an aide in the infirmary, so there’s not just one of her but an entire one and a half. Leibe has explained that she needs an official occupation, on paper, for the summer season. The bureaucratic mathematics don’t trouble her; if that’s the way things have to be, fine.

It’s more complicated for other members of the artel: there aren’t many “vacancies” for a hunter who disappears in the taiga for days at a time. Formally registering them for lumbering jobs would mean having to automatically increase a work quota that already takes tremendous effort to fulfill and sometimes isn’t fulfilled anyway. They get around the system however they can: one person might be made a file clerk, another an assistant to the settlement’s bookkeeper. They’re forbidden from joining the staff in the kitchen, lest the team there get too large. The hunters try to work off their half-time jobs at least partially, however and whenever they can, so that the summer assignments aren’t pure deception; this additional burden on them is considered worth it, though, for the opportunity to remain an artel member without restrictions. Back at the central office, Kuznets graciously closes his eyes to these hidden violations (the problem with the hunters is resolved the same way in all the other labor settlements), though he doesn’t miss chances to remind Ignatov that, “Yes, my dear man, I know everything about you and I see through you, as if you were a glass of you know what.”

Zuleikha works off her half honestly. She returns from the taiga before supper, when it’s still light, and goes to the infirmary to scrub, scour, clean, wipe, and boil. She’s also learned to apply dressings, treat wounds, and even poke a long, sharp syringe into skinny male buttocks covered in hair. At first Leibe waved her aside and sent her to bed (“You’re on your last legs, Zuleikha!”) but then he stopped. The infirmary has grown and he can no longer get by without her help. Zuleikha truly is on her last legs but that’s only later, at night, when the floors are clean, the instruments sterilized, the linens boiled, and the patients rebandaged and fed.

As before, Zuleikha and her son are living in the infirmary, with Leibe. Yuzuf’s seizures are gone, and they’d gradually stopped sitting watch at his bedside during the night. Leibe hadn’t turned them out, though. More than anything, he seems glad for their presence in the housing provided by his job. Leibe spends little time in his living quarters, only sleeping there at night.

Living in a small, comfortable room with its own stove is their salvation. Adults as well as children get sick in the freezing common barracks, with the wind blowing through. And so Zuleikha gratefully accepts this gift and works for her happiness every day until she’s exhausted, with a rag and bucket in her hands.

In the beginning, she thought that because she was living under one roof with a man unrelated to her, that meant she was his wife before heaven and people. And was thus obligated to pay back a wifely debt. How could it be otherwise? Every evening after lulling her son to sleep, slipping out of his bed unnoticed, and thoroughly washing, she would sit on the stove bench, her belly chilled until it ached, to wait for the doctor. He would appear after midnight, barely alive from fatigue, hurriedly swallow, without chewing, the food she’d left for him, and collapse in his own bed. “Don’t wait up for me every night, Zuleikha,” he’d scold her, his words slurred from fatigue. “I’m still in a condition to cope with my own meal.” And he’d quickly fall asleep. Zuleikha would sigh with relief and duck behind the curtain, to her son. Then she would sit on the stove bench the next evening, to wait again.

One time, after falling face down on his sleeping bench, as usual, without even taking off his shoes, Leibe suddenly grasped the reason for her night vigils. He abruptly sat up in bed and looked at Zuleikha, who was sitting by the stove, her hair in neat braids and her eyes cast downward.

“Come over here, Zuleikha.”

She walked over to him, her face white, mouth a straight line, and eyes darting along the floor.

“Sit right here with me…”

She sat down on the edge of the bench, not breathing.

“And look at me.”

She slowly looked up at him, as if her eyes were heavy.

“You don’t owe me anything.”

She looked at him, frightened, not understanding.

“Absolutely nothing at all. Hear me?”

She pressed her braids to her lips, not knowing what to do with her eyes.

“I order you to put out the light immediately and sleep. And don’t wait up for me again. Ever! Is that clear?”

She nodded slightly and suddenly began breathing loudly and wearily.

“If I see you do this again, I’ll send you to the barrack. I’ll keep Yuzuf here but I’ll send you the hell out!”

He didn’t have a chance to finish because Zuleikha had already darted to the kerosene cooker, blown on the flame, and vanished into the darkness. That’s how the question of their relations was conclusively and irreversibly resolved.

Lying in the dark with her eyes wide open and her loudly pounding heart covered with a pelt blanket, Zuleikha agonized and couldn’t go to sleep for a long time. Would she fall into sin by continuing to live under the same roof with the doctor, not as a husband but as a man unrelated to her? What would people say? Would heaven punish her? Heaven kept silent, likely agreeing to the situation. People simply accepted how things were – the aide lived at the infirmary, what of it? She’d arranged things well for herself, been lucky. When Zuleikha couldn’t hold back and shared her doubts with Izabella, Izabella just laughed in response: “What are you talking about, child! Sins are completely different for us here.”

Zuleikha is making her way through the forest. The trees ring out in birdsong and the awakening sun beats through spruce branches, their needles blazing with gold. Zuleikha’s leather shoes bound easily along the rocks to cross the river she calls the Chishme and run along a narrow path next to reddish pines, through Round Clearing, past the burned birch, and further, into the thick wilderness of the taiga’s urman, where the animals are the most fattened and delicious.

Surrounded here by blue-green spruces, she must slip noiselessly, barely touch the earth – not trample the grass, not break a branch, not knock down a pine cone – while leaving neither a trace nor a scent. She must dissolve into the cool air, the buzz of mosquitoes, and a ray of sun. Zuleikha knows how because her body is light and obedient, her motions quick and precise; she herself is like a wild animal, like a bird, like the wind as it sweeps between spruce boughs and weaves through juniper bushes and fallen trees.

She’s wearing a gray double-breasted jacket with large, light gray checks and broad shoulders; it was left behind by one of the brand-new residents who’d passed into another world, and it warms her on cold days and protects her from the sun in the heat. Small, unintelligible letters – “Lucien Lelong, Paris” – dance in a circle on the shiny, deep-blue buttons the previous owner had sewn on very tightly with coarse thread. There is a faded lily on a lining that was once turquoise. It’s a good jacket and reminds Zuleikha of the kaftans her father’s guests from faraway Kazan wore when they came to visit.

A rifle, heavy and cold, nestles into her back; it will spring into her hands on its own if necessary, stretch toward the target, and never miss. “You cast a spell on it or something?” the others in the artel ask, half-joking, half-envious. Zuleikha keeps quiet. How can you explain that it’s not a rifle at all but practically a part of her, like her arm or eye? When she rasies the long, straight barrel, resting the butt on her shoulder, squinting at the sight’s opening, she’s merged, fused with the rifle. She feels it tense as it anticipates the shot. She senses the bulky bullets waiting, still, preparing to fly out of the barrel, each one a small, leaden death. She squeezes the trigger lovingly and smoothly, without hurrying.

She’d grasped long ago that if her rifle doesn’t shoot that squirrel or wood grouse, there will be another predator – be it a marten or a fox – that will tear it to pieces the next day. And in another month or year, the predator itself will die from illness or old age, feed the worms, dissolve into the earth, nourish trees with its juices, sprout up on them as fresh needles and baby cones, and then become food for the children of the killed squirrel or the wood grouse that was torn to pieces. Zuleikha hadn’t grasped that on her own. The urman taught her.

Death is everywhere here but death is simple, understandable, and wise, even just in its own way. Leaves and needles fall from the trees and rot in the earth, bushes break under a heavy bear paw and dry out, grass becomes quarry for a deer, just as a deer is quarry for a pack of wolves. Death is tightly, seamlessly interwoven with life, so it’s not scary. Beyond that, life always triumphs in the urman. No matter how terrible the peat fires rage in autumn, no matter how cold and harsh the winter is, no matter how rife the starving predators, Zuleikha knows that spring will come, the trees will burst with young greenery, silken grass will flood land that has been burned to black at one time, and cheery, abundant young will be born to the animals. Because of that, she doesn’t feel cruel when she’s killing. To the contrary: she feels herself part of a big and strong world, like a drop in an evergreen sea.

Not long ago she suddenly recalled the grain buried in the Yulbash cemetery, between her daughters’ graves. And she got to thinking that it hadn’t all been wasted. Some of the grains, if only a few, would have grown shoots through the cracks in the wooden coffin when spring came, and though the rest might have rotted, they’d have become food for the young sprouts. She imagined the tender shoots of the wheat spikes fighting their way between the uneven gravestones, overgrowing, hiding, and swaddling them. That warmed her soul, put her more at ease. Who can say if the spirit of the cemetery is still caring for her daughters?

She still hasn’t figured out if there are spirits in the urman. She has never run into one during her seven years of making the rounds of so many hills, walking through so many ravines, and crossing so many streams. Sometimes it seems, for an instant, that she herself is a spirit…

Zuleikha first checks the snares and traps along paths she’d identified as favored animal routes to her Chishme River: one by a large, half-rotten spruce where, on close inspection, the grass is trampled a little (small animals apparently couldn’t jump over the trunk, so they ran around it), and another near a deep, icy-cold pool as narrow as a crack and concealed in a spruce thicket. She makes the rounds to the snares twice a day, morning and evening, so a captured hare won’t fall into a predator’s clutches. Then she goes upstream, along the Chishme, toward the swampy ravines, to see the ducks’ favorite spots. The trip isn’t brief and she treks on until noon. She walks, perpetually on the lookout (any animal she runs into on the path, in the bushes, or on the spruce branches, could prove to be quarry), and thinks. Zuleikha didn’t think as much during her entire previous life in Yulbash as she does now during one day of hunting. During her years as an unrestricted hunter, she has recalled her entire life and taken it apart, piece by tiny piece. She recently and suddenly grasped that it’s good that fate has cast her here. She’s taking shelter in a cubbyhole in a state-owned infirmary, living among people who aren’t blood relations, speaking a language not native to her, hunting like a man, working enough for three, and she’s doing fine. Not that she’s happy, no. But she’s fine.

Toward midday, when there’s only a half-hour’s walk left to the duck creeks, her thoughts habitually turn to a dangerous topic. She’s tired of forbidding herself to think about it. But if she doesn’t forbid herself, she could hit upon something too scary to imagine. Zuleikha throws her rifle over her other shoulder. Thoughts aren’t a stream and you can’t block them with a dam, so let them flow. She often recalls that day at Round Clearing, seven years ago. How black boots, part of a uniform, sprang from grass strewn with bilberries, how Ignatov sat down in front of her on the ground and stretched a hand toward her headscarf. And she wasn’t afraid of him then but of herself, of how all of her, every bit, had turned to honey instantly just from his gaze, how she’d flowed toward him, blinded, deafened, having forgotten everything, even her son playing nearby. And she’d aimed the rifle not at him but at her fear, at her fear of committing sin with her husband’s murderer. But she didn’t commit sin – the bear had helped.

She left her kitchen job soon after, and Achkenazi’s new helper started taking lunches to the commandant’s office. Ignatov hasn’t sought her out since, and whatever went on between them receded, remaining in the past, as if it never happened. Sometimes she thinks maybe it didn’t. Maybe it just seemed to happen. But then she’ll see in Ignatov’s lowered eyes that it did. She knows by the way something inside her melts and thaws when she looks up at the commandant’s headquarters that it happened. She knows because she thinks about this every day; it happened.

He began drinking soon after, and hard. Zuleikha can’t stand drunks. There it was, she’d thought, her medicine. Seeing the commandant drunk, stupid, and berserk should have immediately snatched away all her unworthy thoughts. It didn’t work. The sight of Ignatov’s red eyes and his face, puffy from alcohol, made her feel pained instead of disgusted.

When yet another batch of new arrivals came, he picked out a slut with short red hair, sharp little breasts, and a firm rear end squeezed into the stretched fabric of a dress that was too tight. And when that same Aglaya began stopping by the commandant’s headquarters at the sight of Ignatov’s lighted cigarette at night, Zuleikha decided that was it: it was finally over. But was it really?

She shoulders her rifle and fires into a gap between shaggy spruce branches. A hazel grouse quivers its wings too late and its colorful body tumbles to the ground.

The day has flown by and has produced some success: a hazel grouse and a brace of ducks are bouncing on Zuleikha’s belt (the hidden spot for ducks didn’t let her down, giving her an emerald-headed drake with dressy white cheeks and a hefty black female), and a hare that got caught in the snare is in the bag on her back. She boldly strides home through the taiga, cracking branches and not hiding, since she’s done hunting. As she crosses the Chishme along the rocks, the bushes explode at the water’s edge and something small and nimble flies out, headlong. A small animal? No, it’s Yuzuf!

Zuleikha flings her arms wide open. Yuzuf’s long, long legs gleam out from under his short, patched pants as he flies toward her and embraces her, pressing his head into her. She lowers her face to the top of her son’s head and inhales his beloved, warm scent.

“I forbade you to wait for me here, ulym. It’s dangerous in the taiga.”

He just pushes harder into her chest, the nape of his neck dangling like a floppy ear. She could have scolded him more strictly for defying her rule again, but of course she can’t because she herself is glad he’s come so they can have this brief time to walk along the path together, calmly and unhurried, as if there’s an eternity ahead for the two of them, to gently jostle each other, listen to birds, talk, or keep silent. There won’t be more of these solitary moments today. As soon as Zuleikha gets back, she’ll clean the infirmary and Yuzuf will help her by lugging water from the Angara, burning garbage in the yard…

“You’re not hungry?”

“The doctor fed me.”

Yuzuf calls Leibe “the doctor,” as does Zuleikha.

He unclasps his arms, releasing his mother. He’ll be eight soon, and he’s very tall, already taller than her shoulder, so if he keeps growing this fast, she’ll have to lengthen his jacket sleeves again, take apart his pants, and let down the hem. His hair is shaggy – Zuleikha doesn’t shave him bald, as people did in Yulbash, because his hair will keep him warm in winter, like a second hat – his nose is sharp, and his round eyes large. He’s taken after his father in height and build, but it’s immediately obvious his face is hers.

Yuzuf grandly takes her bag, grasping it with his hands, slinging it over his shoulder, and lugging it (he would have gladly carried his mother’s rifle, too, but Zuleikha doesn’t allow that); his fingers, the nails chewed off, are spotted with yellow and blue.

“Playing around in the paints again?”

He’s recently taken to visiting Ikonnikov at the settlement’s clubhouse, to draw. Remnants of plywood scribbled with charcoal and pieces of paper covered with fat pencil lines have started turning up at home. Yuzuf’s clothes are gradually becoming covered with smears and spatters of bright colors. The paints Ikonnikov uses to make his agitational art are durable and don’t yield to the Angara’s cold water, remaining instead to forever brighten Yuzuf’s pants and shirt, sewn from someone’s old dresses, and on the large men’s shoes inherited from some settlement resident or other. Zuleikha doesn’t approve of her son’s pursuits but doesn’t forbid them either, since it’s better that he dirty himself with paints than knock around the taiga alone. Yuzuf senses his mother’s stance and doesn’t talk much about the clubhouse.

“Tell me about Semrug, Mama.”

“I’ve told you a thousand times.”

“Then tell me a thousand and one.”

Zuleikha has shared with her son all the folk tales and legends she heard from her parents when she was a child: about shaggy, long-toed shurales, who tickle tardy forest wayfarers to death; about a certain unkempt water spirit called Su-anasy, who can’t untangle her mane of hair with a golden comb for a good hundred years; about the serpent Yuma, who turns into a beautiful girl by day to tempt young men and drinks their lifeblood at night; about fire-breathing azhdakha dragons that hide in the bottom of wells and devour women who come for water; about silly and greedy giant devs, who steal brides; about the powerful, narrowed-eyed Genghis Khan, who conquered half the world, casting the other half into fear and trepidation; and about his admirer and follower Timur the Lame, who completely destroyed a good hundred cities and built only one in return – the splendid Samarkand – over which huge golden stars shine from a sky eternally blue in any weather… The story of the magical bird Semrug is Yuzuf’s favorite.

“All right, listen,” Zuleikha agrees. “Once upon a time there lived in the world a bird. Not just any bird but a magical bird. Persians and Uzbeks called the bird Simurg, Kazakhs said Samuryk, and Tatars say Semrug.”

“The bird is named the same as our settlement?”

Yuzuf invariably asks that question and Zuleikha invariably answers, “No, ulym. The names are just similar. And this bird lived on top of the highest mountain.”

“Higher than our cliff?”

“A lot higher, Yuzuf. So much higher that wayfarers, whether on foot or on horseback, couldn’t reach its top, no matter how much they climbed. Nobody could see Semrug – not wild animals, nor birds, nor humans. They knew only that his plumage was more beautiful than all the worldly sunrises and sunsets combined. At one time, while flying over the faraway country of China, Semrug dropped one feather, clothing all of China in radiance, so the Chinese themselves turned into skillful picture painters. Semrug was not only splendidly beautiful but his wisdom was as boundless as the ocean.”

“Is the ocean wider than the Angara?”

“Wider, ulym… One time, all the birds on earth flew to a big celebration to revel together and rejoice at life. The festivities were spoiled, though, because the parrots started arguing with the magpies, the peacocks quarreled with the crows, the nightingales with the eagles…”

“What about the hazel grouse?” Yuzuf touches the round little bird head that’s dangling on his mother’s belt and looks like a colorful egg.

“With the ducks,” says Zuleikha, turning the dead drake’s green-tinted black head toward the hazel grouse: the birds’ motionless bills bump, as if they’re pecking each other.

Yuzuf’s laugh rings out melodiously.

“And from that great quarrel there arose in the world such a hullabaloo that all the leaves began falling off the trees and all the animals grew frightened and hid in their burrows. A wise hoopoe flapped his wings for three days, calming all the enraged birds. Finally, they settled down and let him speak.

“‘What is the use in spending our time and energy on factions and feuding,’ he told them. ‘We need to elect a shah bird among us to lead us and bring quarrels to an end with his authority.’ The birds agreed. But here was the question: who should be elected as their head? They began squabbling again and a scuffle nearly broke out, but the wise hoopoe already had a suggestion. ‘Let us fly to Semrug,’ he proposed, ‘and ask him to become our shah. Who, if not he, the most wonderful and most wise on earth, should be our sovereign?’ This speech went down so well that a large brigade of eager birds prepared right then and there to make the trip. The flock soared into the sky and set off for the highest mountain in the world, in search of his illustrious highness, Semrug.”

“A flock as vast and black as a cloud,” Yuzuf adds.

Yuzuf follows along attentively, not allowing even one detail to slip from his favorite story, and Zuleikha must retell it as she learned it from her father, word for word.

“Yes, that’s right,” she corrects herself. “A flock as vast and black as a cloud soared into the sky and set off for the highest mountain in the world, in search of his illustrious highness, Semrug. The birds flew day and night, not pausing to sleep or eat, until the last of their strength was all but gone, and finally they reached the foot of the mountain they had been seeking. There they had to abandon flight, as the path ahead could only be trodden on foot. For it was only through suffering that they could ascend to the top.

“The mountain trail led them first to the Valley of Quests, where birds who were not striving hard enough to reach the goal died. Then they crossed the Valley of Love, where those suffering from unrequited love remained and dropped down, lifeless. In the Valley of Insight, they lost those whose minds were not inquisitive and whose hearts were not open to new things.”

Yuzuf strides alongside Zuleikha, silent and puffing from exertion (the hare in the bag is heavy after feeding well during the summer). “How can the heart open itself to knowledge?” Zuleikha wonders aloud. “The heart is the house of feelings, not of reason.” She trails off for a moment, straightening the birds on her belt, and Yuzuf impatiently urges her on.

“In the treacherous Valley of Indifference… Come on, Mama!”

“In the treacherous Valley of Indifference,” Zuleikha continues, “there fell the most birds of all – those who could not make equal in their hearts grief and gladness, love and hatred, enemies and friends, living and dead.”

This part of the legend is the most incomprehensible to Zuleikha herself. How could anyone treat good and bad equally? And consider that correct and necessary, too? Yuzuf nods his head almost imperceptibly in time with his strides, as if he understands everything and agrees.

“The rest ended up in the Valley of Unity, where each felt himself to be all, and all felt themselves to be each. The tired birds rejoiced, tasting the sweetness of unity. But it was too soon!”

“It was too soon!” Yuzuf whispers, confirming it.

“In the Valley of Confusion – which was shaken by thunderstorms – night and day, and truth and untruth were muddled. Everything the birds had come to know through such hardship during their long journey was swept away by a hurricane, and emptiness and hopelessness reigned in their souls. The progress they had made seemed useless to them, the life they had already lived, worthless. Many of them fell here, defeated by despair. The thirty most steadfast remained alive. Bleeding, mortally tired, their feathers singed, they crawled to the final vale. And there, in the Valley of Renunciation, all that awaited them was a smooth, unending watery surface, with eternal stillness over it. Beyond, there began the Land of Eternity, to which there was no entry for the living.”

Yuzuf and Zuleikha are striding along a path strewn with crunching evergreen needles and cones. There’s already a blue gap ahead between the trees – it’s the settlement. The closer they are to home, the slower Yuzuf walks; he wants his mother to be able to finish the story. When he sees the walls of the clubhouse, he stops so he can hear the end of the story in silence.

“The birds realized they had reached Semrug’s dwelling place and they felt his approach through the growing gladness in their hearts. Their eyes squinted from the bright light that filled the world and when they opened them, they saw only one other. In that instant, they grasped the essence – that they were all Semrug. Each individually and all of them together.”

“Each individually and all of them together,” Yuzuf repeats. He sniffles and strides into the settlement.

After his mother goes to the infirmary to scrub the floors, Yuzuf makes his way to the kitchen to give today’s birds to Achkenazi. The dead hazel grouse and the drake and the hen duck have come a long way in his hands without even knowing it: not just through a small taiga settlement – from a rickety log-house infirmary to a little kitchen smelling of fish guts and millet porridge. No. They’ve flown over red deserts and blue oceans, over black forests and fields spiked with wheaten gold, to the foot of a mountain chain at the edge of the world, then further, on foot this time, without using their wings (the hazel grouse quickly picking up its short, shaggy little legs, and the drake and hen duck, somehow or other, quacking any which way and waddling heavily on their broad, webbed feet), through seven wide and treacherous valleys, to the abode of the storybook shah bird. They don’t have time to learn the essence of the matter and behold in one another the illustrious image of Semrug, though, because when Achkenazi sees out the window that the little boy is playing with the birds, he takes them away and gives Yuzuf a light, friendly cuff. The door to the kitchen slams shut with a bang and a huge feather tinged with emerald remains in the air, to soar.

THE FOUR ANGELS

The world is enormous and vivid. It begins at a pearl-gray, wooden threshold – ornately eaten away by a beetle – in the house that Yuzuf and his mother share with the doctor. It extends through a broad yard flooded with waves of lush grass: where cracked wood blocks rise like islands with axes and knives crookedly sticking out of them, a woodpile climbs like a steep cliff, a crooked fence stretches like a broad mountain ridge, and laundry drying in the wind flutters like multicolored sails. It flows around the house, and toward the squeaky infirmary door, behind which there’s a kingdom of hidden floors his mother scrubs until they’re yellow, cool white sheets, intricate instruments gleaming with an unbelievable shine, and bitter medicinal aromas.

From the infirmary, the world spreads further along a well-trodden path to the rest of the settlement: three very long log-built black barracks dominate; the agitational stand stretches broad wings where resounding slogans blaze on glossy posters; in the mysterious building with the kitchen something is constantly rustling and sizzling, shrouded in the smells of food; the gloomy commandant’s headquarters gazes from the top of the hill like an unassailable bastion; and shining bright in the distance between blue spruces there stands the clubhouse, where Ilya Ikonnikov makes magic day and night with strong-smelling paints.

Yuzuf’s world ends here because his mother has forbidden him to go further, into the taiga. He tries not to upset her so obeys. Some evenings, though, the wait for her to return from hunting becomes unbearable, so he hurries off, his eyes squinting from fear, past the clubhouse, past the crooked poles with cracked skulls (elks, deer, boars, lynxes, badgers, and even one bear), some baring long fangs, onward, following a barely noticeable little path toward the ringing Chishme, so he can hide under a trembling rowan bush and look out for his mother’s slight figure flashing among reddish pine trunks.

The Angara is another border of this world. Yuzuf loves sitting on the shore and peering into its ever-changing depths. The heavy, cold water hides within itself every shade of dark blue and gray, just as the urman hides every shade of green and the fire in the stove holds red and yellow.

The world is so large you could pant after running from one border to another, and it’s so vivid that Yuzuf sometimes can’t get enough air. It makes him squint, too, as if the light were blinding him.

Somewhere far away, beyond the mighty backs of the hills, there’s another world where his mother and the other settlement dwellers lived before coming to Semruk. In Yulbash, his mother told him, there were as many as a hundred houses – not ten and not twenty – and each was the size of the infirmary. It’s hard to imagine such a giant settlement. It’s probably even harder to live there because if you went out for a walk, later you’d be in the middle of a hundred houses, so how could you find your own? Strange, scary creatures that Yuzuf knows only through his mother’s stories wandered the streets of Yulbash: cows trudged sedately accompanied by the rumble and boom of little tin bells tied to their necks (these beasts vaguely resembled elks but had fat, bent horns and long tails like whips); nasty, loud-voiced goats darted around (about the size of a musk deer but shaggy, their horns curving to their backs and their beards sweeping the ground); and mean-tempered dogs bared their teeth from under fences (these were tame wolves who would lick their master’s hands and rip at a stranger’s throat). Each time Yuzuf hears his mother’s stories about her native land, he feels a chill in his belly and senses tremendous relief inside that she’d known to move from Yulbash to peaceable, cozy Semruk before it was too late!

From what he can gather, mysterious Leningrad, which Izabella keeps calling Petersburg and Ilya Petrovich calls Petrograd, is smaller than Yulbash – nobody ever marveled about the number of houses there. On the other hand, the buildings are all made of stone. And not just the buildings, either, but the streets, embankments, and bridges – everything, in fact, is made of granite and marble. Yuzuf pities the poor Leningraders who are forced to take shelter in cold, damp stone dwellings. He imagines Izabella and Konstantin Arnoldovich shuddering, their teeth chattering, as they crawl down from stone bunks on foggy Leningrad mornings, huddling together and going outside the stone barrack to the stone-covered shore of the narrow little Neva River, which is smaller than the Angara but larger than the Chishme. Attempting to warm up, they wander along the shore among crowded bunches of marble lions (large, shaggy lynxes with magnificent manes), granite sphinxes (lions with human heads), and bronze statues (huge dolls as tall as a person, similar to those Ilya Petrovich sometimes molds out of clay), past the barrack called the Hermitage, as green as grass and tall as a powerful spruce, past the yellow barrack called the Admiralty, whose roof is decorated with a long and even needle (like a young pine tree) with a sailing ship at its point, past the gray barrack called the Stock Exchange, and past the fat, red, log-like Rostral Columns on whose tops there burns a pale fire that gives no warmth. A dim sun peeks through clouds that keep sprinkling a fine, slanting rain.

It’s good fortune that these cold and terrifying worlds of Yulbash and Leningrad are far from Yuzuf. They lie in roughly the same parts of the world as the shah bird Semrug, crafty and beautiful women called peri, fire-breathing azhdakha dragons, and the gluttonous giantess, Zhalmavyz.

Not long ago, Yuzuf saw a miracle. It happened one evening in early summer, just before supper, when Achkenazi asked him to take a dish of oatmeal stew to Ikonnikov. Since starting work on his agitational art, Ikonnikov often preferred to eat in his workplace, not taking a break from production. Yuzuf was rather afraid of the sullen artist, but he obediently took the dish from the cook and trudged off with it to the clubhouse. Diligently carrying the steaming bowl in both hands, Yuzuf pushed the door with his back, squeezed through the gap, shifted from one foot to the other in the darkness of the entrance, and finally ended up inside the clubhouse, which the light of the sunset was brightly illuminating.

The hot dish burned Yuzuf’s fingers and the very delicious smell of oats boiled soft was in his nose; the oatmeal even seemed to be made with meat broth and have some fat. He needed to complete his assignment quickly and go back to the kitchen for his own portion.

The artist’s stooped back was right by the window. Yuzuf was sniffling but Ikonnikov didn’t hear; he was standing somehow crookedly, as if he were leaning forward. Yuzuf approached closer and peered over his shoulder. In front of Ikonnikov, on a lopsided triangular little house that was somehow slapped together from beams (an easel, Ilya Petrovich would explain later) was a small square of canvas that was a hand and a half wide and just as tall. On the canvas was Leningrad, where a street as wide as the Angara flowed along an austere stone expanse between metal fences and houses that were silvery in the dawn haze, and then flew over the Neva as a lace-like green bridge and disappeared on the other shore; church cupolas were concealed in greenery like flower buds and occasional people hurrying somewhere. A wave was hitting against the embankment’s gray granite, and long-winged birds hovered over the river. There was a smell of fresh foliage, wet stones, and a large body of water. A shrieking “Ee! Ee!” was distinctly audible but Yuzuf didn’t understand if that was an Angara seagull shrieking outside the window or a Leningrad seagull on the canvas. This wasn’t a painting; it was a window into Leningrad. A miracle.

His fingers were suddenly burning unbearably. The dish banged onto the floor, the spoon bounced away and rolled, clinking, and the oats spattered everywhere. Yuzuf stood, his hands extended, fingertips scalded, his mouth wide open from fear, and his chilled heart beating in his belly. Rivulets of oat stew streamed along his bare knees and large shoes, tied with string at his ankles, then flowed through the floorboards to the ground beneath.

“Huh?” Ikonnikov took his brush from the canvas and turned around. His eyes were stern, his brows shaggy, and his pendulous profile menacing.

Yuzuf’s heart – completely panic-stricken from horror – jumped into his throat. He scampered away and clattered through the door.

At the dining hall, Achkenazi later ladled out a full adult portion for Yuzuf (“Eat, helper!”), but the stew wouldn’t go down his throat. Yuzuf attempted to sneak the dish outside and take it to the clubhouse, but the ubiquitous and grumpy Gorelov blocked his path and pulled painfully at his ear. “Where’re you headed, you louse? That’s not allowed!” He had to eat the whole thing, choking down the small, carefully boiled oats and not sensing the taste. If they’d served bread, Yuzuf would have been able to hide it behind his shirt and take it out, but there wasn’t any bread that day.

A couple of hours later – after biting his fingernails and lashing a switch at all the nettles behind the infirmary – Yuzuf went to the clubhouse to face up to what he’d done. He was ready, so let the mean artist scold or punish him.

It was already darkening. The door squeaked louder and the shadows on the clubhouse’s log walls were longer and more intricate. A yellow kerosene lamp burned in the window and the finished painting was drying on the easel. Ikonnikov himself wasn’t there.

Yuzuf took the lamp and walked right up to the canvas. Warm light streamed along the bold, gooey brushstrokes and delicate strands of various colors blended and swirled in each, none repeating – everything breathed and flowed in iridescent hues. Yuzuf gently touched the Neva with the tip of a burned finger. A small, round indentation remained on the river and a cool, dark blue spot on his finger.

“And so what do you see?” Ikonnikov had entered unnoticed and was standing in the doorway, observing.

Yuzuf shuddered and hurriedly placed the kerosene lamp in its place. Nabbed! And he couldn’t escape: Ikonnikov was right by the door and would catch him.

“I’m asking you: what do you see in the painting?”

“A river,” Yuzuf forced out, then corrected himself right away. “The Neva.”

“Well? What else?”

“Stone houses.”

“And?”

“An embankment. People. Trees. Seagulls. The dawn.”

“And?”

And? Yuzuf looked despondently at the canvas. There was nothing else there.

“Fine then, go,” said Ikonnikov. “I took the dishes to the kitchen myself.”

“My supper, I wanted to give it to you… Gorelov didn’t let me…”

“Go on, now.”

Ikonnikov took a brush and neatly smoothed the mark Yuzuf’s finger had left on the waves. His eyes were warming, as if they’d been heated by the sun rising over the Neva.

“I also see it’s not cold in Leningrad,” Yuzuf said from the door.

Ikonnikov didn’t turn.

It became a habit after that: first Yuzuf brought Ilya Petrovich’s lunches and suppers, then he began stopping in for no reason, to hang around the clubhouse for days at a time. He washed out brushes, scraped palettes, and even just sat, observing Ikonnikov at work.

Ikonnikov spent a large portion of his time high up, under the ceiling. Lying on the scaffolding, he would often stab the point of a homemade brush at the plywood, mumbling something under his breath. Sometimes he came down the steps, craned his neck, and ran around in circles to inspect his labors from the entrance, from the window, and from the center of the room. An excruciated expression would appear on his face, and his large, bony hands would scratch each other incessantly. After those inspections, Ilya Petrovich either grabbed a painting knife and frantically scraped off a piece of the mural (in moments like those, Yuzuf would sit quietly, taking refuge in the corner behind the easel) or purred with satisfaction and continued painting. Yuzuf didn’t have to hide then and could climb up the scaffolding to examine the painting more closely and even ask a question or two.

Ikonnikov came down in the evenings. Stretched his numbed arms and legs, packed his wooden pipe with strong-smelling grassy dust, and smoked. Placed a clean canvas or piece of plywood on the easel. Yuzuf would hold his breath. There it was, it was starting.

Ilya Petrovich’s fat brush first made several long, sweeping strokes, cutting the future painting’s expanse into sections, then thickly covered the resulting pieces in various colors. The canvas now resembled an incomprehensible and untidy kaleidoscope, a rubbish heap. With careful touches of a thin brush, that disorderly accumulation of shapes suddenly acquired proportion and meaning so that vivid, distinct images that had initially hardly shown through now revealed themselves. This was “the window” swinging open.

Little boys in large black caps and torn trousers fished on the embankment of the River Seine, which was unknown to Yuzuf; half-naked female swimmers basked in the sun on the pearly stones of the Côte d’Azur; a sailboat sped along the big Neva, straight for the Vasilevsky Island spit; and bronze Graces spun in a round dance along the tree-lined paths at the deserted Oranienbaum. The places where those windows swung open dazzled Yuzuf. He would sit for hours, mesmerized, peering at the intertwined brush strokes, attentively listening to them, and sniffing. The distant world lying beyond the hills of the taiga was not so cold and forlorn after all. It smelled sharply of oil paint, but through that strong scent one could clearly sense the aroma of spring grass and warm stones and the wind and rotting leaves and freshly caught fish.

One time when Ilya Petrovich asked him what he would like to see in the next painting, Yuzuf responded without pondering. A cow. Ikonnikov coughed, tugged a bit at his long nose, and slapped his brush at the plywood a couple of times. A fat and affectionate creature with large eyes gazed at Yuzuf. It was soft to the touch and had horns like yellow commas over the top of its curly head. It was not scary.

Then Yuzuf requested a goat. Slap, slap! Alongside the cow there appeared a goat’s sharp snout with a funny little beard and white stubs of horns sticking out.

“A dog,” Yuzuf ordered. A dog appeared, panting after running, its pink tongue cheerily hanging out.

Yuzuf went silent. He had nothing else to wish for.

From that day on, Ilya Petrovich painted for Yuzuf. Churches and embankments, bridges and palaces were set aside. The time had come for toys, fruits and vegetables, clothing and shoes, household objects, and zoo animals.

Apple, lemon, watermelon, melon, and guavasteen. Potato, black radish, corn, eggplant, and tomato. There were various hats: this one’s called a top hat; that one’s a sombrero; and here’s a collapsible hat. There were gloves: men wear leather ones and only in autumn but women wear them year-round, lacy white ones to the theater and for visiting, mittens without fingers in cool weather, and fur ones in winter.

The world surged so much and so rapidly from worn canvases and fragments of plywood that it threatened to deluge Yuzuf. At night he dreamt of cats in splendid tutus and giraffes carrying tattered primers in yellow leather satchels; seals greedily munched at ice creams in strange cones; and striped tigers smashed at a large leather ball with their blunt muzzles. They were all woven from light, raised strokes and were thus a bit rough and angular, reflecting hundreds of delicious, strong-smelling specks of light when they were moved. Yuzuf would wake up excited, his head heavy, his ears burning, and the end of his nose cold, feeling as if the colors and images he had absorbed were overflowing his skull and bursting from inside. They needed to be released back out.

Later, he couldn’t remember exactly what he had drawn first. It somehow happened on its own when he began scratching scribbles on the floor with a pencil stub that was lying around. This brought him relief – his head cooled and felt lighter. The scribbles gradually crept toward the window, taking over the windowsill and part of a wall. One morning, he discovered a clean piece of plywood and a brush on the easel, as if they’d been prepared by someone and forgotten. He looked up and saw Ikonnikov lying under the ceiling, as usual, his nose in his agitational art, paying no attention to Yuzuf. He cautiously took the brush, poked at the palette, and drew it along the plywood, leaving a thick orange comet. And then another one. And another. That was the day he began painting with oils.

“Quelle date sommes-nous aujourd’hui?”

“Le premier juillet mille neuf cent trente-huit, madame.”

“Qu’est-ce que tu faisais aujourd’hui?”

“Je dessinais, madame.”

“Et encore?”

“Je dessinais seulement, madame.”

Yuzuf and Izabella are walking along the shore. He’s kicking pebbles with the toe of his shoe and they’re landing in the Angara with a plop; as always during lessons, Izabella is pacing sedately alongside him and one of the hands behind her back is holding a long birch switch.

“Tu dessinais quoi, Yuzuf?”

“A station and trains, lots of trains.” They haven’t gone over these words yet, so he answers in Russian. “First Ilya Petrovich drew them himself, then I did, after him.”

She stops, looks intently at him, and sketches on the ground with the switch: “Gare.”

“Gare means station,” she says.

Izabella always pronounces new words so calmly and distinctly that they etch themselves in Yuzuf’s memory. The slightly crooked letters traced on the damp earth stay right in front of him, even after the waves wash them away. Gare is train station. Billet is ticket. Quai is platform. Chemin is road. La destination is where you’re going. Voyageur is traveler. Partir is to leave. Revenir is to return. There are lots of new words today and he’ll need to memorize them before the next lesson.

“Here’s a saying for you about this topic,” says Izabella. “Partir, c’est mourir un peu. ‘To leave is to die a little.’”

Yuzuf already knows a lot of French sayings that are spirited and apt, about love and war, kings and sailors, sheep and fried eggs. But this one seems sad, as if it’s not French at all.

“Isn’t there a happier one?”

“Sorry, yes – I meant to give you a different one. How about this: Pour atteindre son but il ne faut qu’aller. ‘To get to one’s goal, one must get going.’”

Beautiful words. Yuzuf crouches and draws a finger along letters that are already half-dissolved in the waves that have lapped at the shore: “partir,” “revenir.” He wants to draw a tired person who’s wandering stubbornly, who’s been gnawing at his own lip, and is firmly squeezing a staff in his hand. He’s going somewhere far away, maybe to his destination or maybe back home. Izabella ruffles the front of Yuzuf’s hair and walks away from the shore, unexpectedly finishing the lesson earlier than usual.

Shortly thereafter, Volf Karlovich suspects that an interest in medicine has awakened in Yuzuf. He’d previously been indifferent to what was happening in the infirmary during the day and only ran there in the evenings because he needed to help his mother clean, but Yuzuf has suddenly begun frequenting the examination room, stealing in quietly behind Leibe, perching himself in the corner, sniffling and staring with huge eyes like his mother’s.

By this time, the infirmary has already expanded to two buildings stuffed with bunks, and Leibe has finally divided the space into male and female sections, separating out a tiny isolation ward for patients with infectious diseases, too. The examination room is located in its old spot by the window not far from the entrance and partitioned from the main room, initially by a curtain made of bast matting, now by a durable wooden screen. There’s a chair, a pine trestle bed for examining patients, and homemade shelves with instruments all laid out in a strict order. A table was added not long ago, too, and it immediately became Leibe’s favorite place. Now he sits at it when he’s maintaining his patient registry log; he had previously needed to settle himself sideways on the windowsill.

The huge gray ledger’s appearance alone instills patients’ deep respect. Their respect turns to awe when Volf Karlovich leafs through the thick, stiff, brownish pages, written all over in his tiny floating hand. Semruk’s peasants deferentially call him “our doc.”

Leibe always receives patients. There are no infirmary office hours, weekends, or holidays. If something happens during the night, people knock on the window and the sleepy Leibe hurries to the examining room, pulling on the white lab coat that has recently appeared for him; Kuznets brought it in gratitude for strictly confidential treatment of a disease in his male parts. Volf Karlovich treats everything: typhus, dysentery, scurvy, venereal diseases, and horrible pellagra, which strips skin from patients’ bodies while they’re alive. He pulls teeth, cuts off feet and hands maimed at the logging site, repairs hernias, delivers babies, and performs abortions (not in secret at first, but more covertly after the resolution of 1936). There’s only one diagnosis he can’t deal with, the one most commonly encountered: severe malnutrition. It’s a diagnosis he’s forbidden to make, which he thus notes in the ledger with a vague “cardiovascular inefficiency.”

And here’s the seven-year-old Yuzuf, who’s tall but also as skinny as a pole, big-boned, and as long-legged as a compass, too. Volf Karlovich tries to feed him extra: grateful patients bring the doc a sack of berries or a handful of nuts or some fresh nettles for soup or dandelion root (which Leibe has long grown accustomed to brewing instead of coffee). But what’s the use? Yuzuf’s young body is growing and his arms and legs have remained as scrawny as before, like sticks.

One particular day, the boy is sitting quietly by the wooden screen, not stirring, as usual. He’s looking, unblinking, at the patient, a stooped old man with wrinkled, large-pored skin like dried orange peel. The man has disrobed to his underpants, displaying for Leibe knobbly joints like large lumps and fingers deformed by arthritis that look as if they’ve been broken. Leibe prescribes bilberries, stone bramble, and rowan berries to the old man, in any form and at maximum quantities, plus a glass of home brew for serious pain. What other options were there? Home brew, a time-tested painkiller, has to be used in many cases.

Then Leibe turns to Yuzuf:

“So, are you interested? This is arthritis, a disease of the bones and joints. Did you know, young man, that there are more than two hundred bones in the human body and each of them can become inflamed, change its contour or size, get infected…”

Yuzuf begins touching his own knees, ankles, and ribs; his entranced gaze doesn’t budge from the doctor.

“Right here,” says the doctor, taking Yuzuf by a skinny wrist, “is the ulna, which goes up to the elbow. And the one above, the humerus, going up to the shoulder. Then there’s the clavicula, costae…”

A sudden warmth rises to Leibe’s cheeks: for a moment he felt he was back at the university rostrum, in the crosshairs of hundreds of young, attentive eyes. Recovering from his self-consciousness, he continues his story. That evening he hurries off to the commandant to ask for several agitational posters “for the ideological decoration of places offering medical service to the population.” He returns to the infirmary after his request has been fulfilled and nervously spreads out on the table pictures of hale and hearty muscular athletes of both genders who proudly carry scarlet banners greeting the country’s leadership. Volf Karlovich toils over them all night, muttering in both Latin and German, and tracing his pencil along well-fed, tanned bodies unthreatened by either malnutrition or pellagra. The anatomical diagrams are ready in the morning. The athletes are still parading with flags but they’re also displaying for the world exactly four hundred and six bones – long, short, flat, and irregular – two hundred and three each.

Yuzuf appreciates the doctor’s work. His lips move diligently as he memorizes the tricky names in a week, searching on his own body along the way, which seems destined for this type of study, since he can touch many of the bones through his skin – from the sharp little os nasale to the barely perceptible os coccygis.

Volf Karlovich prepares a second set of educational materials in which the athletes’ trained bodies obediently demonstrate the musculoskeletal system: the sculpted vastus lateralis and gastrocnemius, the threateningly bulging pectoralis major. And Yuzuf memorizes all those quickly, too.

Inspired by his pedagogical success, Leibe proposes moving on to the structure of the internal organs, but Yuzuf unexpectedly refuses and asks permission to put the leftover posters to use as drawing paper. The disheartened Leibe agrees and Yuzuf relocates from the examination room to the wards to draw patients lying on bunks. To Volf Karlovich’s bitter disappointment, Yuzuf’s sudden fervent interest in medicine has ebbed and soon he’s disappearing again for days at a time at the clubhouse with Ikonnikov. The athletes, finely chopped into muscles and bones, and written on with Latin terms, remain hanging up in the infirmary, immeasurably strengthening the Semruk doc’s status, which is already colossal.

Ikonnikov has been painting his agitational art for exactly half a year. He has invited both Sumlinskys to the clubhouse for a “private view” before turning it over to the chiefs, who are out of patience. “Finally!” rejoices Izabella. “I haven’t been out in society for ages.”

The private view is imminent: tonight, under cover of darkness. Ikonnikov, who has become extremely emaciated of late and whose bloodshot eyes are surrounded by dark circles, has spent all day taking apart the scaffolding himself, leaving only one ladder by the wall. He locks the door, lies on his back on the floor, and begins waiting for his guests.

He lies and looks at the mural in dusky half-darkness. An orange square of light from the window creeps first along the floor, then along the wall, and later disappears entirely. Darkness comes. The lines on the ceiling disperse and dissolve in the dense night air but Ikonnikov sees them just as distinctly as during the afternoon, so he doesn’t light the lamp.

He’ll present the agitational art tomorrow. Kuznets will come, grope it with his predatory little eyes, estimate if there’s enough of an ideological message – meaning he’ll consider whether to leave it at the club or tear it the hell off to be burned and send the artist out of peaceable Semruk life, to the camps, or far beyond. Gorelov will tag along. He’ll sniff around hungrily, looking for anything he might find fault in, and he’ll surely find something. They’ll part tomorrow. He’ll leave behind this mural, a couple dozen city scenes (he’s grown bolder, hanging them on the club’s walls after the memorable night visit from the chiefs), a heap of leftover plywood scraps with pictures for Yuzuf, homemade brushes, palettes, painting knives made from the blades of one-handed saws, half-empty tubes of paints, and rags. He’ll leave behind nocturnal vigils, the smell of linseed oil and turpentine, conversations with little Yuzuf, spots of paint on his fingers, all his thoughts, and his very own self. And welcome back to the logging site: We’d grown tired waiting for you, citizen Ikonnikov.

There’s a heavy bottle hidden beyond a pile of junk in the corner. Open it? No, not now. It would be too bad to miss this moment.

Someone cautiously scratches at the door; it’s the Sumlinskys. Ikonnikov lights the kerosene lamp and goes to greet his guests. Konstantin Arnoldovich is wearing a new jacket (the clothing problem in Semruk has been resolved in a simple way because the dying leave their wardrobes to the living as an inheritance) and Izabella, whose hair is carefully styled, is leaning on her husband’s arm.

“Bonsoir,” she says sedately.

Then she cries out because Gare Saint-Lazare is looking at her from a rough, poorly planed pine wall. Next to it is Sacré-Cœur. The Tuileries. La Conciergerie. Izabella walks slowly along the wall, her long shadow floating beside her.

“Bella.” Konstantin Arnoldovich is standing by the opposite wall, arms down at his sides, and not moving. “Look, it’s Vasilevsky Island, the Sixth Line.”

Izabella slowly turns her face and walks right up to the small, rectangular canvas.

“That’s the Eighth Line,” Ikonnikov says, bringing the lamp closer.

“The Sixth, Ilya Petrovich, my dear fellow, the Sixth.” Izabella stretches her hand toward yellow and gray buildings with intricate little balconies, but she’s not touching them, she’s stroking the air. “We lived here, a little further, right in this building.” Her finger goes outside the border of the canvas, creeps along the log and pokes at the wiry oakum.

Leningrad takes up two walls of the clubhouse; Paris, Provence, and seascapes have two others; and the rest of the world takes shelter in the corners, meagerly represented by a couple of small panoramas and everyday sketches. The Sumlinskys move from Vasilevsky Island to Île de la Cité, from Quai Branly to Petersburg’s English Embankment, from Alexander the Third Bridge to Troitsky Bridge, from Bank Bridge to Pont au Change, along Canal Saint-Martin to the Lebyazhy Canal and then, further, past the Mikhailovsky Theater to the Neva…

“I’m never leaving here,” Izabella finally says. “Ilya Petrovich, I’ll live here as an apprentice, I’ll mix paints for you or wash the floors.”

“We haven’t been mixing paints for a long time. They’re sold prepared, in tubes. And this is my last day here. I’ll turn in the agitational art tomorrow and it will be finita la commedia.”

The Sumlinskys suddenly remember the mural – they still haven’t taken a look at it! “Where is it, maestro? Show us.”

Ikonnikov turns the wick in the kerosene lamp as far as possible – the flame flies up under the glass bell in a long, bright strip, flooding the space with yellow light – and he lifts it toward the ceiling.

There’s a firmament of transparent dark blue where clouds float as lightly as feathers. Four people are growing out of the ceiling’s four corners, stretching their arms upward, as if they’re trying to reach something in the center. Under their feet, somewhere far below, there are fields undulating with dark golden rye and strewn with tractors like little black boxes, forests that look like grass and have kernel-like dirigibles soaring over them, cities bristling with factory smokestacks like matchsticks, and crowded demonstrations with banners like little red snakes. That entire tempestuous and densely populated world spreads in a narrow ribbon around the edges of the ceiling, like an intricate, florid frame inside which the four main characters soar after having pushed themselves away.

A golden-haired doctor in a starched white lab coat, an athletic warrior with a rifle on his back, an agronomist with a bundle of wheat and a surveying instrument on his shoulder, and a mother with a baby in her arms – they’re young and strong, and their faces are open, brave, and extraordinarily tense, showing one single aspiration: to reach a goal. But what goal? The center of the ceiling is empty.

“They’re reaching for what doesn’t exist, right?”

“No, Bella.” Konstantin Arnoldovich places a thin hand at his lower lip and tugs at his sparse little beard. “They’re reaching for one another.”

“But, Ilya Petrovich,” Izabella suddenly remembers, “where’s the actual agitational part?”

“It will come,” he grins. “I still have one detail left to paint. As it happens, I’ll have time to do that during the night.”

After the Sumlinskys leave, he pulls the scaffolding ladder out to the center of the room, sits on the lower step, and squeezes a thick squiggle of blood-red cadmium on the palette with a pensive smile.

Creeaaak! The door swings wide open, letting Gorelov’s stocky figure over the threshold. He was spying, the dog.

“Breaking rules, are we?” he hisses. “Leading a nocturnal life? Hosting guests?”

He’s in no rush as he swaggers into the clubhouse. Sniffling loudly, his eyes roam the ceiling, the ladder, and Ikonnikov’s motionless figure sitting on it. Gorelov stops in front of him, pressing his hands to his hips and pensively moving his heavy lower jaw.

“Come on, report to the minder, son-of-a-bitch citizen Ikonnikov. Tell me what you and the Sumlinskys were whispering about.”

“We were discussing the agitational art,” says Ikonnikov, raising his eyes to the ceiling. “The sum total of ideas placed in it, its sufficiency for concrete agitational and educational goals, and the potential subjective particularities of how certain individuals at our inhabited locality will perceive it.”

“You’re lying…” Gorelov brings his face closer; his eyes are like wide-open slots. “Fine, you puffed-up dauber, just wait till you end up at the logging site with me, then we’ll have a chat. Or are you thinking you might talk your way into staying here? Go on paintering away instead of doing honest labor?”

By all indications, Gorelov has somehow found out that Ikonnikov recently wrote a petition to the commandant, proposing to organize an artel of art producers in Semruk. That dispatch contained a detailed description of the type of production this artel could create (“high quality oil paintings with patriotic and agitational content, all possible topics, including historical”), who could be the consumers of their production (“cultural and community centers, village reading rooms, libraries, cinemas, and other places for the cultural entertainment and enlightenment of the working masses”), as well as an approximate calculation of income from the activity. The sum turned out to be impressive. Ignatov has chosen to resolve the matter after receipt of the agitational art at the clubhouse.

Ikonnikov keeps silent, rustling at his palette. Gorelov abruptly grabs the brush from him and pokes it under his ribs with a stealthy motion, as if it were a knife. For a moment it seems as if the sharp handle has speared his skin. Ikonnikov rasps hoarsely, seizes the brush, and attempts to deflect it from himself, but Gorelov has a firm grasp, as if he’s caught the edge of a rib with a steel hook.

“Well, you might get to loaf around in an artel for a while.” Gorelov’s hot, sour breath is in Ikonnikov’s ear. “But it’s proven artists, not rebels like you, who paint pictures for the Soviet people in this country.”

“Stalin… Twenty-four busts…” Ikonnikov is wriggling on the ladder like a pinned moth.

“You want to be an artist, then you need to prove you’re worthy! Choose, you bastard. You’re either with us or you’re at the logging site tomorrow.”

“What… do you want?” The brush has been driven into either his lung or his diaphragm and is ready to pierce; it’s impossible to breathe.

“I repeat: what were you whispering about with the Sumlinskys?”

“About Leningrad!”

Gorelov takes a step back. Ikonnikov collapses to the floor, wheezing as he draws in air, and coughing incessantly.

“There you go!” Gorelov looks at the brush in his hands with disgust, breaks it on his knee, and tosses it into the darkness; the pieces bounce along the floorboards, rolling into various corners. “You’ll write down everything, who said what, what you were all laughing about, any bad-mouthing…” He straightens his belt, which has slipped to the side, and pulls down his uniform jacket. “And you’ll bring it to me tomorrow. If you do it before the chiefs come to inspect your agitational art, you’ll have your artel. If you don’t, then sharpen your saw. I’ll see to it you’re assigned to my shift. That’s all, you son of a bitch, dismissed.”

Gorelov’s boots thud toward the exit and he disappears out the door. Ikonnikov crawls to the corner, still on his knees. He tosses around empty crates, scraps of plywood, and rags, and finds the hidden bottle. He tears the stopper out with his teeth and takes a couple of long, gurgling swallows. Shuffling uncertainly in the darkness, he returns to the ladder. He takes the kerosene lamp and palette, and crawls up under the ceiling. He sits on the upper step for a couple of minutes, observing the boundless dark blue expanse with transparent, fluffy clouds stretching across it. He scoops a generous amount of cadmium from the palette and smears it on the ceiling – an enormous, thick crimson blotch explodes on the firmament.

As soon as Kuznets arrives, he goes straight to the clubhouse to look at the agitational art. After stepping into the middle of the room and drilling his eyes into the ceiling, he stands, eyebrows moving and getting a feel for things. Ignatov is next to him. Gorelov trails along with them, too, and he’s milling around by the door, casting shifty glances at the chief. Ikonnikov himself is on hand, holding up the wall. He’s listless and downcast; he never did go to sleep last night, and his hand keeps grasping at his side, under the ribs, as if his stomach is seizing up. When the silence drags on, he decides to defuse the situation a little.

“Allow me,” he says. “As the artist, I’d like to say a few words about the concept… I mean about the main idea.”

The chiefs are silent, breathing loudly.

“This agitational art represents an allegory, a cumulative image of Soviet society.” Ikonnikov raises his hand, in turn, to each of the figures soaring in the sky. “The protector of our fatherland stands for our valorous armed forces. The mother with the baby is for all Soviet women. The red agronomist – a peasant engaged in farming – embodies working the land and the prosperity of our country that flows from it, and the doctor represents protecting the population from illnesses, along with all Soviet scientific thought.”

Kuznets is rocking from heel to toe and back again, and his boots squeak from the strain.

“The army and the civilian population, science and agriculture are directed, in a unified impetus, toward the red banner, a symbol of revolution.”

In the center of the ceiling, where yesterday the tall sky had been shining dark blue, there hovers a giant crimson streamer resembling a magic carpet. It’s so large that it seems it will fall any minute, covering all the little people standing under it with their heads craned upward. The weighty inscription, “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” is emblazoned in thick gold and flows along its folds. It’s as if the four figures in the mural’s corners have immediately shrunk in size; they’re now devoutly extending their arms in a set direction, toward the banner.

It came out beautifully, Ignatov thinks with surprise as he scrutinizes the inspired faces of the people soaring above them. It’s truthful, in a genuine way. Nice work, artist. You didn’t betray us.

He takes half a year daubing out those small people then does the flag in one night, Gorelov laments to himself.He was loafing, the snake.

“Well,” Kuznets finally utters. “It makes a striking impression. I commend you. An artel can be entrusted to a master like this.”

And he whacks Ikonnikov’s slumped shoulder so Ikonnikov barely stays on his feet.

The chiefs leave but Ilya Petrovich stays in the club. He sits down on the ladder, lowers his head into hands smudged with paint, and sits that way for a long time. When he finally lifts his face, there’s an unfamiliar breath of redness and heat from the ceiling – it’s the banner.

Of course those are angels. Yuzuf’s mother has told him about them – about fereshte: they soar high up in the sky, feed on sunlight, and sometimes stand behind people’s shoulders, unseen, and defend them when they’re in trouble, though they rarely show themselves, only to announce something very important.

Yuzuf has even asked Ilya Petrovich if he’s drawn angels on the ceiling. Ilya Petrovich started smiling. “I might just have done that,” he said.

One time, shortly before the mural was finished and when Ikonnikov wasn’t at the clubhouse, Yuzuf had climbed the scaffolding and carefully studied the mural up close. At first he lay there a long time, looking at the golden-haired doctor, who was looking at Yuzuf. The doctor’s eyes were bright, a sharp dark blue, and his hair as luxurious as a sheep’s. He looks like our doctor, Yuzuf decided, only he’s young and doesn’t have a bald spot.

Then he looked at the agronomist. This one was even younger, just a youth, and he was dreamy and tender, with velvety cheeks and a rapturous gaze. He didn’t resemble anyone; there were no faces that joyful in Semruk.

The warrior was another matter: his eyes were stern and stubborn, and his mouth was a straight line so he looked exactly like the commandant. It was surprising how people and angels could look alike.

The woman with the child was green-eyed, with dark braids twisted on the back of her head, and the child in her arms was tiny and half-blind. Yuzuf didn’t know children were that small when they were born. He wondered if an angel’s child would be an angel, too, when it grew up. He didn’t have time to think that through because Ikonnikov had come in.

“So,” Ikonnikov asked, “did you examine it? And who are they, do you think?”

Yuzuf came down from the scaffolding and dusted himself off very seriously.

“Of course, they’re angels,” he said, “the most ordinary ones. Anybody can see that. What, you think I’m a little boy or something and don’t understand things like that?”

THE BLACK TENT

A huge log, about one and a half cubic meters, crashes from the riverside timber landing into the water, its cut yellow end spinning. People are already running over to it, pressing their hands into it and pushing it away from shore. They lead it deeper, until the water’s up to their necks, and release it where the Angara itself will catch the log and carry it off. Log drivers standing in boats and holding long pike poles will straighten the logs’ course, gathering them closer together, toward the center. Metal hooks at the ends of their pikes catch logs that stray from the flock, returning them to the channel. The long caravan of floating timber will stretch down toward the mouth of the Angara, toward the anchorage point, with the log drivers following. Barges are already there by a log boom, and people are waiting to fish out the logs, transfer them across the Yenisei, and pull them toward Maklakovo, to the lumber mill.

Workers from Semruk float the loose timber when the Angara is at its lowest levels and has calmed – it’s dangerous in high water and the timber would be damaged. Some roll the logs into the water, where another group rounds them up for the log drivers – the most reliable and tested – to take to Maklakovo.

They’d begun work today even before daybreak and the Angara is already teeming with the dark spines of logs; it’s as if there’s a school of giant fish jostling in the river. When the sun reaches its zenith, the log rollers are almost as wet (from sweat) as the rear crew, who wade around in the water pushing the logs; the first group of log drivers has already disappeared behind a bend in the river, heading toward the Yenisei.

“Lunch break!”

People sink to the ground. Some look at the remaining piles, others watch the spines of logs rattling along the river in the distance, or gaze at the clear July sky. Spoons clink and the reeking smell of homemade tobacco wafts around. From this part of the riverbank, there’s a good view of the Semruk pier in the distance, where Kuznets is boarding his gleaming brown launch, barely staying on his feet thanks to a bad hangover. A half-dressed Ignatov clings to him, reeling, shouting, and waving his arms as if he’s making a demand or wants to ask for something, but Gorelov holds the commandant, allowing Kuznets to break loose and jump on the launch. “I can’t… ! Let me go!… I can’t be here any longer!” carries Ignatov’s desperate wail.

“Sons of bitches,” one of the log rollers quietly says, with hatred.

The uproar they created back on that autumn night in Semruk – firing on live people – has been nicknamed Walpurgis Night. Fortunately, there were only injuries and nobody was killed.

The launch finally breaks away from the dock, coughs, picks up steam, and heads toward the bend in the river, carefully skirting the accumulated logs. Gorelov releases the commandant, then throws his hands in the air as if in apology and presses them to his chest. Ignatov isn’t listening. He jumps into a small boat that’s bobbing at a berth and rows after Kuznets’s launch. The boat is just a small rowboat, so it flies quickly along the waves and the current carries it into the channel, pulling it into the tail end of a heavy flotilla of logs.

“He’ll get caught the hell up,” say dispassionate voices in the crowd. “Be crushed to pieces.”

People look up from their dishes. Some peer and half-stand to have a better look while others continue gulping indifferently. The loud, terrifying cracking of logs can be heard at a distance.

Ignatov notices the danger too late. He’s pulling the oars with all his might but can no longer row away and the boat smashes into a shiny jumble of moving logs in the middle of the river. He tries to push off one of them with an oar but the oar immediately snaps. A couple of seconds later, Ignatov appears to be crouching and shrinking in height, and then neither he nor the boat is visible. His brown hair flashes just once more among the frothy logs, and that’s all.

“Die, you bastard,” utters Zaseka, a frail little man wearing ragged overalls.

Someone suddenly darts away from the onlookers and rushes headlong toward the river, pushing a boat prepared for the log drivers into the water and jumping in. He goes after the caravan, desperately working a pole to drive the boat toward the churning porridge of logs and froth. It’s Lukka. People watch from the knoll as he’s flung from side to side, kneeling on half-bent legs, mashing at the Angara with the pole. He’s rapidly carried downstream but manages to steer the boat a bit to the side, edging and pushing his way stubbornly between the logs to where Ignatov’s wet head last flashed. He suddenly tosses the pole into the boat and bends toward the water.

“Has he found him?”

And now everyone has dropped their dishes, spoons, and unfinished hand-rolled cigarettes, and is dashing toward the river, crowding, making a racket, and running into the water. Several boats spring out into the Angara, tearing along the shore, downstream with the current, preparing to meet them, and help them out of the wooden jumble. People fling ropes, extend their pikes, yell…

“Come on, come on!” Gorelov shouts as hard as he can, his boots sloshing in water up to his ankles, and desperately waving at the tiny red-haired figure in the middle of the Angara.

Lukka catches his pike pole on one of the lines that’s been tossed and then they somehow haul Ignatov’s boat to shore and raise it to the Semruk pier. It’s crushed like a little paper boat and already half-filled with water that’s a rich red – Ignatov’s lying on the bottom, wheezing large, bloody bubbles and his legs are as awkwardly twisted as a puppet’s.

He comes to during the night, as if he’s been struck. He sits up in bed. Where am I?

A taut gauze cap is stretched over his forehead, his right arm is immobilized against his shoulder, and his left leg feels like a dead weight. The pillows around him are dim white in the dull moonlight; people are breathing loudly. Ah, yes, the infirmary. It seems like he’s already been here a long time, several days, maybe even weeks. He wakes up each night, regains consciousness – this is agonizing and takes a long time – and remembers; then he limply leans back and falls asleep again. Faces flash: Leibe, Gorelov, and other patients. Sometimes a spoon materializes in his mouth and he obediently swallows either cool water or a warm and liquidy stew that flows slowly down his throat. The same kind of thoughts – liquidy and viscous – splash listlessly in his head, too.

But everything’s different today because his head is clear; everything inside it is in good order, quick, and precise, and his body is unexpectedly strong. Ignatov’s healthy hand grasps at the strings digging into his chin and he pulls to unknot them, tearing the gauze over his head and throwing off the little cap. He peels off a couple of wads of cotton stuck to the top of his head and a light breeze from the vent window gently flutters at his shaved skull, caressing his skin. He’s free!

He leans into the edge of the bed, wanting to lower his feet to the floor. His right foot somehow obeys him and creeps out from under the blanket but the second has become unliftable and shoots with sharp pain. He throws off the blanket and sees his leg is tightly wound in gauze, like a swaddled infant, and half his foot is gone.

He breathes deeply and rapidly, gazing at his bandaged foot, then turns away. He notices a freshly planed crutch leaning against the bed. There weren’t crutches in Semruk until now. Meaning they’d crafted it themselves. For him? He grabs it and launches it into the darkness with all his might. There’s a crash and the clang of some vials; one of the patients raises himself up, grumbles, and drops his head to the pillow again. Quiet returns.

Ignatov sits and listens to his own breathing. Then he stands up with a start (his ribs burn his torso) and hops on one foot to where the crutch flew – there it is, lying by the wall. He bends and picks it up. The crutch smells strongly of pine pitch and it’s sturdy so it didn’t break into smithereens. The hand grips are wound with rags for softness, and there’s a heel from someone’s boot nailed to the bottom so it won’t thud too much. It was made sensibly, to last. (Thank you for that, at least.) Ignatov inserts the crutch under his arm and hobbles toward the door. There’s a sound of shuffling feet behind him. The sleepy doctor, rubbing his eyes, has come out of the living quarters because of the noise.

“Where are you going?” he clucks behind Ignatov. “You have a traumatic brain injury! And what about the stitches? The broken bones? Your foot!”

Ignatov thumps the crutch at the infirmary door, which swings open with a crash, and walks out into the night.

The commandant lives in his own home from that day on. Leibe comes up once a day to examine him and Zuleikha changes his bandages in the evenings.

She arrives and, gazing at the floor, goes to place the basin of hot water on the table, setting it alongside rolls of bandages she laundered and thoroughly boiled the day before. Ignatov is already sitting up in bed, watching. Has he been waiting?

She begins with his head. The doctor has strictly forbidden the commandant to remove the dressing from his head and Ignatov submitted after making a bit of noise; they are no longer winding a little cap on him but making a simple circular dressing instead. Zuleikha places her palms on the warm back of his head, which is overgrown in thick brown stubble with sparks of gray, then unwinds a long bandage, runs a hot damp rag along his pale skin and around fresh, zigzagging burgundy-colored stitches, and wipes it dry. She swabs the stitches with home brew that smells very bitter, then winds a clean bandage over them.

Now it’s time for the arm. Groaning from the effort, she somehow removes an uncooperative shirt from Ignatov’s large, warm body; he doesn’t help, not even with his healthy arm. She sees that his huge bruises are gradually changing color, lightening, and fading. Pale, flawless skin has appeared under them. She remembers Murtaza’s curly-haired belly and hairy shoulders, and his powerful trunk, like a tree’s, unembraceably broad in the shoulders and just as bulky at the waist. Everything is different for Ignatov, who has sharp shoulders pointing in opposite directions and a long torso that’s narrow at the waist. She removes the bandage, bathes the heavy, supple arm, which is stitched substantially in two places (he winces from pain, tolerating it), and all the bruises and abrasions on his chest, ribs, and back. There’s a conspicuous deep old scar under his shoulder blade and she averts her eyes at the sight of it, as if she’s peeked at a secret not intended for her. Dry rag. Home brew. New dressing. Put the shirt back on.

She treats his foot last. She places the basin on the floor by the bed and kneels. She separates the stump from the gauze and bathes it, feeling Ignatov’s heavy gaze on the top of her head. He holds his breath and groans, probably agonizing from fury rather than pain. She remembers washing Murtaza’s feet, if you could call them that: they were fat, broad hooves with the toes splayed in various directions. The black soles of his feet, coarsened from walking on soil, flaked and shed skin in her hands, like tree bark. Ignatov’s feet are long and slender with soles that are dry, smooth, and hard. His toes are probably handsome, too. Zuleikha doesn’t know this; she hasn’t seen his healthy foot.

She knows the rest of his body; she’s memorized it.

Wash thoroughly, wipe, swab, bandage.

Ignatov sits silently the whole time, his face turned to her. It’s as if he’s tracing her scent. She also thinks there’s an unbearable smell of honey. The hot water, the bandages, and even the home brew smell of honey. So does Ignatov’s body. And hair.

She tells herself not to raise her eyes from the floor. Not to touch more than necessary. Not to turn her head. To ball up the soiled gauze, wipe up the floor after herself, and get out, get out of there, launder the dressing rags in the icy Angara water, cool the hands, cheeks, and forehead; clench the jaw, squeeze the eyes shut, summon up in the mind’s eye a black tent that covers the commandant’s headquarters like a densely woven rug, and gallop away at breakneck speed, escape from him on a fast Argamak; heat water again tomorrow and go back up the path, to where Ignatov is already waiting for her, sitting on his tidied bed.

And that’s how they live for the whole remainder of the summer, until autumn.

In September, the doctor allows the dressings to be removed. By then, the sutures have already healed up and lightened. Today she’ll go to the commandant’s for the last time, to remove the bandages from his arm and head. They’ll still leave the dressing on the stump but Ignatov can change it himself now that he has two healthy arms.

She arrives at sunset, as usual. Pressing the heavy, hot basin to her belly, she knocks her foot lightly at the door, which gives way and opens. Zuleikha enters and unburdens herself of the steaming basin, setting it on the table. Ignatov isn’t in bed, though; he’s standing by the windowsill, with his back leaning against the window, and he’s looking right at her from the altitude of his warrior-like height.

“I came to take off your dressings,” Zuleikha says to the basin on the table.

“Then take them off.”

Zuleikha approaches Ignatov. He’s very tall, probably taller than Murtaza. His head, wrapped in a white bandage like a turban, is just under the ceiling.

“I can’t reach.”

“You’ll reach.”

She stands on tiptoe and stretches upward, tipping her head back to see. Her fingers grope for the familiar bristly back of his head and unwind the dressing. It’s hot in the commandant’s headquarters, as if it’s being heated.

“Your fingers are ice cold,” says Ignatov.

His face is very close. She silently unwinds the bandage. After she’s finally managed that, she lets her arms down, walks off to the table, and exhales. She submerges a hand with a piece of clean gauze into scalding water in the basin and walks over to Ignatov again, carrying the scrap of fabric, which is dripping hot water and steaming white.

“But I can’t see anything.”

“Then work by feel.”

She raises the fabric, applies it to the stubbly top of his head, and leads it down the steep back. Hot drops of water flow down her arm, wetting her smock sleeves. Her hands truly are cold, though, despite the hot water.

Ignatov is wearing a shirt over his bandaged arm but has only slipped his healthy arm into a sleeve. He usually removes his belt before Zuleikha’s arrival but today he hasn’t. She fumbles for a long time, agonizing, as she handles the tight brass fastener, and the belt finally clangs, muffled, on the floor. She’s angry and doesn’t pick it up; then she abruptly pulls up the thin fabric of his shirt, stripping it from his large, motionless body.

“You’ll break the other arm,” Ignatov says without smiling. “Stay this time,” he adds without a pause.

As Zuleikha furiously and quickly unwinds the endless long bandages, she feels her hands quickly warm from fury, heating and melting as a heavy, honeyed smell cloaks her, flooding her. Ignatov’s arm is already free of bandages. He cautiously moves his fingers. He lifts a hand and places it on her neck.

“Stay,” he repeats.

She breaks away, picks all the rags off the floor, and grabs the basin. She runs to the door, stumbling and spattering water.

“What about washing the sutures?” he shouts after her.

Zuleikha turns toward him and splashes hot water from the basin at his hairless white chest.

Zuleikha can’t fall asleep that night. She lies, listening to the darkness with her son’s even breathing at her shoulder, the doctor’s light snoring in the corner, and the rumble of the wind in the stove. It’s hot and stuffy.

She stands, greedily swallowing water from a dipper, then tosses a jacket on her shoulders and slips out of the house. It’s a clear night, the stars are out, and the moon is like a lantern. A milky-white steam floats from her mouth.

She goes down to the Angara and looks at the moon’s oily-yellow path, which is dabbled across the waves; she listens to froth murmuring by the shore and a distant yelping across the river. She braids her hair tighter, throws it on her back, and splashes her face with cold water. It’s time to go home.

Along the way she notices a bright red dot on the hill by the commandant’s headquarters. It’s Ignatov smoking. The dot gets bigger, swells with light, and then diminishes, paling. It blinks like a lighthouse. And Zuleikha answers its call.

Ignatov notices her from far away. He stops smoking and the red dot between his fingers goes out for an interminably long time. She stops at the front steps, looks at Ignatov sitting on the stairs, and takes her braids in her hands to unplait one, then the other. His hand suddenly jerks because the cigarette has burned down and scorched his fingers. He stands and goes up into the house, leaning on the crutch.

The open door squeaks as it swings on its hinges. Zuleikha climbs the stairs. She stands. Then she extends a hand, draws aside a heavy curtain that’s soft to the touch and smells sharply of sheep hides, and steps inside the black tent.

Time turns inside out within the black tent. It doesn’t flow straight but sideways, slanting. Zuleikha swims in it like a fish, like a wave, either dissolving fully or appearing again within the boundaries of her own body. Sometimes after closing the squeaking door of the commandant’s headquarters behind her, she’ll discover a few moments later that morning has come. Other times, after placing her hand on Ignatov’s broad back and pressing her face to the base of his neck, she senses an infinitely long flow of minutes measured by occasional ringing drops that fall into a bucket from the tip of a spout on the tin washstand. There’s an eternity between the first drop and the second.

There’s no place for recollections and fears in the black tent – its bulky animal hides reliably protect Zuleikha from the past and future. There is only today, only now. That “now” is so teeming and palpable that Zuleikha’s eyes mist over.

“Say something, don’t be silent,” Ignatov has asked her, his face nearing hers.

She looks into his clear gray eyes and draws a finger along his even forehead striped with fine wrinkles, along his steep and smooth cheekbone, along his cheek and chin.

“So beautiful,” she murmurs.

“Is that really the sort of thing you should say to a man…?”

She seems not to have slept that autumn. She puts her son to bed, kisses the warm top of his head, and then quickly leaves the infirmary and climbs the path where the little red flame persistently summons her each night. They don’t close their eyes; there are never enough hours in those nights. In the morning she comes to see her sleeping son, then she goes hunting, and in the evening there’s the infirmary to clean. Zuleikha has no time to sleep. And she doesn’t want to anyway. Her strength hasn’t diminished, it’s increased and overflowed. She doesn’t walk, she flies; she doesn’t hunt, she simply takes her dues from the taiga; and for entire days she awaits the nights.

She’s not ashamed. Everything she was taught and learned by rote as a child has left her, gone away. What’s new and has come in exchange has washed away the fears, just as a flood from melting snow washes away last year’s twigs and decayed leaves.

“A wife is the tilled soil where her husband sows the seeds of his descendants,” is what her mother taught her before sending her off to Murtaza’s home. “The plowman comes to till when he desires and tills while he has the strength. It does not befit the land to defy its tiller.” And she did not defy – she gritted her teeth, held her breath, and tolerated it, living that way for so many years, not knowing it could be otherwise. Now she knows.

Her son senses something and has become pensive and reserved when he peers into her eyes. He takes a long time to go to sleep, tossing and turning, constantly waking up, and not letting his mother go. He’s also maturing rapidly and growing more serious.

Yuzuf started school that autumn. There are eighteen children in Semruk and all are gathered into one classroom and seated in two rows: older and younger. They study together. There are only five textbooks (all about arithmetic) for the entire school, but what books they are! They’re hot off the presses, still crackling at the bindings and smelling deliciously of printer’s ink. A certain Kislitsyn handles the teaching duties. He’s from the latest batch of newcomers, maybe an academician, maybe some former official from the People’s Commissariat of Education. Izabella had already taught Yuzuf to read so when he saw the author’s surname on a textbook cover – which says “Y.Z. Kislitsyn” – he walked up to Yakov Zavyalovich, bewildered, and asked, “Do you have the same surname?”

“Yes,” the teacher cheerlessly smirked, “one might say I have the exact same name.” Zuleikha is glad her son is busy at school during the day, since he’s fed and cared for. When he helps her with cleaning in the evenings, she asks if he likes school. “Yes,” he answers, “a lot.” “Well, good, it’s important to learn to count and write.”

It tortures her that she no longer gives all her warmth to her Yuzuf, that her nighttime kisses are more ardent and plentiful than the evening ones for her son, that he could wake up at night in bed alone and be afraid, and that she now has a secret from him. So she hugs Yuzuf harder and longer, smothers him with kisses, and showers him with caresses. Sometimes he breaks loose from his mother’s arms when they grip him too tightly and looks out at her guiltily from under his brow. Is she offended? His mother just responds with a broad, happy smile.

People in the settlement evidently suspect something. Zuleikha hasn’t given any thought to what they would say as she doesn’t interact much with people, and then only with the old-timers, and she disappears into the forest for days at a time anyway. If not for Gorelov, she wouldn’t have found out that people had noticed her relationship with Ignatov.

One morning, he catches Zuleikha on her way to the taiga. By this time, he has been living in his own small, squat log cabin for a couple of years (Gorelov was the first to put up a privately owned house, and settled in well, fencing it in and putting glass in the windows), and he’s made an earthen bench at the front of the house, where he loves to relax, watching the settlement’s residents pass by.

Zuleikha is walking through still-sleepy Semruk on a dark-gray autumn morning and Gorelov is already sitting by his little house, smoking every now and then. He has obviously risen this early on her account and has been sitting waiting for her.

“Well, hello there, hunting artel! Going to the taiga to hunt down your daily quota?”

“That’s right.”

“Here, have a seat, let’s have a chat. There’s something we need to talk about.”

“I don’t have time to hang around, my prey’s waiting. So go on, just say it.”

Gorelov rises from the bench – under the uniform jacket draped over his shoulders is a dirty, striped sailor jersey and legs like crooked matches dressed in close-fitting drawers and boots. He slowly walks around Zuleikha with his loose gait, examining her as if he’s seeing her for the first time.

“Not so bad,” he says quietly, as if to himself. “Ignatov chose a woman for himself, a fine one. Nice job. I hadn’t spotted that right away.”

“You need something?” Zuleikha feels blood pounding in her face.

“Nothing from you, sugar. You just keep having your love affairs. Just come and see me every now and then, won’t you, to have a chat about the commandant. Our man’s a hothead. The chief instructed me to look after him. And you, hunting artel, you should take care not to have a falling out with the chief if you want to keep doing your artel thing instead of rotting at the logging site.”

Gorelov’s drilling his narrow, slightly flattened eyes into her and she sees their color distinctly for the first time. They’re impenetrably black.

Aglaya runs out of the house wearing an old sheepskin coat over a beige lace slip and shoes on bare feet, and her red curls are corkscrewed in all directions. She’s bringing Gorelov a quilted jacket. She tosses it on his shoulders and wraps it proprietarily over his chest: See that you don’t freeze! She looks jealously at both of them and runs off, back into the house. Aglaya has been living with Gorelov for a year now, not hiding it, instead proudly showing off their relationship to the settlement at every convenient occasion.

Zuleikha adjusts the rifle on her shoulder and walks away.

“So can I expect you to stop by then?” Gorelov yells after her.

“No!” She’s striding quickly, almost running.

“Watch out you don’t regret it! You have a son! Remember him?”

She spins around and gives Gorelov a long, close look. Then turns abruptly and her narrow back soon dissolves between the trees.

A couple of days later, Gorelov is walking through the woods. He loves taking walks during the workday. Instructions have been handed out, the shift is sweating away at their labor, and cubic meter after cubic meter of pitch-scented lumber is toppling to the ground with a crash and being placed in stacks, so now he can step away and breathe more freely, especially since his head’s already ringing from the screeching saws.

He walks slowly through the autumn taiga, slashing with a small switch and knocking down ruby-red rosehips. It really was the right thing to appoint him for agent work. Kuznets has a good head on his shoulders and discerned Gorelov’s wasted talent immediately. Within a month of their memorable discussion in the bathhouse, Gorelov had not only got that smug dauber Ikonnikov scribbling short notes composed in fancy language, but the accountant from the office began scratching away at detailed essays for him in his neat schoolchild’s hand. There was also the little assistant cook at the dining hall, sweating from tension, who passed on brief phrases that Achkenazi said to him during lunch preparation; and various other people who hadn’t been taught reading and writing were dropping by Gorelov’s house in the evenings to whisper a little and talk about life. Everybody’s covered: loggers, office clerks, and even the dining hall and the clubhouse. The only failure is with the commandant.

Gorelov hacks the switch as hard as he can at the sharp top of an anthill. It roils with agitated ants. Of course nobody’s ordered him to look after Ignatov; that’s simply become an interest for him. Would it work out, though? Something has gnawed long and pleasantly in his belly at the thought that the woman who’d been lying under the commandant about an hour before, still warm with his heat and still smelling of his scent, would tell him – the mangy, hardened criminal Gorelov – what the commandant had been saying. This is why it’s all the sweeter to sleep with Aglaya. It makes Gorelov glow inside, nice and hot, to imagine Ignatov stroking her heavy curls shot with reddish gold, running a hand along her rounded back with the dark beauty mark on a shoulder blade, and burying his face in her soft white neck. All that is now his, Gorelov’s.

If Zuleikha tells the commandant about their recent conversation, Gorelov will see to it she pays. But he’s certain she’ll keep quiet out of fear for her son.

He flings the switch and sits under a gnarled pine tree. A slight breeze is barely breathing on his face. Saws squeak and workers’ shouts ring out somewhere in the distance. That’s good.

There’s a slight rustling close by. It’s a dark squirrel already dressed in fluffy gray for winter and it’s scratching along the ground, pricking up its sharp little ears. Gorelov slowly reaches into his jacket pocket, pulls out a cigarette butt he stashed away in the morning, presses it in his fingertips, and clicks his tongue: Here, have some. The animal approaches, extending its slim snout forward and twitching its shiny little nose. Carefully, so as not to frighten it, Gorelov hides his other hand behind his back and gropes among the pine roots for a hefty rock, grasping it comfortably in his fist.

The squirrel is already beside him, its hazel eyes glistening and its wrinkled little black fingers stretching toward the palm of Gorelov’s toughened hand. He presses the rock harder behind his back and holds his breath. Closer, sweetie, come on.

Then a shot booms and the squirrel is suddenly lying motionless on variegated brown tree needles with a dark red spot instead of an eye socket. For an instant, Gorelov thinks the shot grazed him. There’s nothing to breathe. He’s frantically inhaling, having difficulty swallowing, and his throat feels twisted, as if a vise were pressing it. As before, he senses the crumbly softness of the cigarette butt in one hand and the cold hardness of the stone in the other. Is he in one piece?

There’s a sound of lightly snapping branches at the edge of the clearing, then a small, thin figure slips out from behind rowan bushes that have already shed half their leaves, and comes closer. Gorelov feels a large, cold drop roll along the back of his head, down his neck, behind his shirt collar, and along his spine.

Zuleikha slings her rifle on her back as she comes right up to Gorelov. She crouches, with her knees spread apart like a man, picks up the lifeless lump, puts its little head in a loop of rope, and hangs it on her belt. She looks straight down on Gorelov from above, then turns around and goes into the forest.

After the light, nearly silent crunch of her footsteps has quieted in the thicket, Gorelov sticks the cigarette butt pressed between his fingertips into his mouth, fumbles in his pockets with a shaking hand, finds a match, and frantically strikes it on the sole of his boot. The match breaks, he flings it away, and spits out the cigarette butt.

She’s a viper. Who would have thought? She looks so quiet. He leans his back against a rough pine trunk, exhales deeply, and closes his eyes. Well, screw it. Forget the commandant. Who cares?

Snow comes late, toward the end of October, and changes autumn to winter in a day. The animals already have their winter coats and are dressed in splendid fur. The season has begun but for the first time Zuleikha isn’t glad of it. She doesn’t have the strength to tear herself away from Ignatov’s warm chest, slip out from under his heavy arm, and run off into the cold, dark blue morning. Leaving the commandant’s headquarters is like cutting ties that bind. Before, there had been some joy in her skis gliding rapidly over the snow, in the frosty wind hitting her face, and in fluffy pelts flashing in the crown of a pine tree. But now the short winter days drag on like years. She waits them out, overcoming them like an illness. She hurries back when the sun reddens slightly as if it’s sunset, the air thickens, and the shadows fill with violet. She goes to the infirmary but her eyes are already hurrying toward the hill, toward the high front steps where a small, hot flame flares, filled with impatience.

That night Ignatov says:

“Come live with me.”

She lifts her face from his body and finds his eyes in the darkness.

“Bring the little boy and come.”

She lays her head back without saying anything.

Snow is piling up early the next morning. The storm is blowing so hard and thick that it beats at the door, the windows are plastered in white, and the chimney howls like a pack of wolves. The lumbermen never go out into the taiga in blizzards like this; the hunters don’t go out, either.

Zuleikha touches Ignatov’s temple with a finger:

“At least, just this once, I can stay and look at you for longer.”

If she could, she would happily look at him all day.

“What’s to look at?” he says, covering her face with his own. “I’m afraid you’ll have to keep looking some other time…”

When she finally tears her head from the pillow, having fallen back into a deep slumber, the storm has died down and everything is absolutely still outside – no human voices, no knocking of axes, no dining-hall gong – as if the place were a ghost town. A dull yellow light’s trickling through the half-covered windows. Ignatov is still asleep, settled on his back. She straightens a blanket that has slid off him.

There’s a cautious crunch of footsteps around the house – someone’s walking in the snow along the walls. Is that dog Gorelov sniffing around again? A dark silhouette flashes in the little window. Zuleikha drops noiselessly from the bed, tosses a sheepskin coat over her bare shoulders, and slips outside. There they are, tracks – dark blue and deep, as if they’ve been scooped out with a ladle – running around the commandant’s headquarters.

“The dirty dog,” Zuleikha utters loudly and walks around the corner.

A large figure wearing long clothing is standing by the back window, leaning forward, and pressing their nose to the snow-powdered glass. The collar of a long-haired dog fur coat is raised, and a pointy-tipped fur cap towers over their head like the top of a minaret.

The Vampire Hag.

“You old crone.” Zuleikha walks right up to her mother-in-law; she could reach out and touch her with her hand. “You’ve come to drink my blood again?”

The Vampire Hag pulls her pale face back from the glass as if she’s heard and turns toward Zuleikha. Her forehead, eye sockets, and cheeks are all plastered in white snow, as if it were chalk, and that snow isn’t melting. Only the nostrils on the white mask move – black holes taking in air – and her purple lips quiver, too.

“Go,” Zuleikha says angrily and clearly. “Get away!”

The mask opens the hollow of its mouth, breathes out thick, raggedy steam, and hisses, barely audibly.

“He will punish…” she says and a gnarled finger with a long, bent nail rises toward the sky. “He will punish you for everything…”

“Get out of here!” Zuleikha is shouting; her body is consumed by the full force of her anger. The roots of her hair are heating up and her heart is beating so it pushes at her ribs. “Don’t you dare come to me again! This is my life and you can’t order me around anymore! Out! Out!”

Her mother-in-law turns her back and hurriedly hobbles toward the forest, leaning on her tall, gnarled walking stick. Her huge, heavy felt boots squeak deafeningly on the snow and the long, thin strands of her white braids swing behind her back, in time with her steps.

“Witch!” Zuleikha hurls snow after her. “You died long ago! And your son, too!”

The Vampire Hag lifts a bony finger again as she walks, shaking it threateningly and pointing upward without turning around. Her figure diminishes and the squeaking of her steps fades behind brownish, brush-like spruces. Zuleikha looks up at the copper moon burning solemnly on the stern dark blue-and-black horizon. The moon is completely round, like a freshly minted coin. Night? Already? So that’s why it’s so quiet around her…

Yuzuf! Has he gone to bed? Did he fall asleep alone? She dashes to the infirmary, stumbling as she runs, her felt boots scooping up snow. Yuzuf isn’t in bed, and his boots, sheepskin coat, and skis aren’t there, either. Her son must have broken the rule again, today of all days – he probably thought she went hunting like always and went to meet her, and hasn’t returned.

Zuleikha grabs her skis. She returns to the commandant’s headquarters and makes her way inside, trying not to creak the door. She removes Ignatov’s heavy rifle from its nail, takes a hefty cartridge clip out of the nightstand, and shoves it in her pocket, then thinks and takes another. She casts a glance at the peacefully sleeping Ignatov and slips out.

Two thin streaks from Yuzuf’s skis wind along the rich blue snow. She races after him, recognizing his route. From the clubhouse at the edge of the settlement, Yuzuf went up toward the frozen Chishme, then skirted along the shore to the crossing at Bear Rock, where he usually lies in wait for her under the rowan bush. He marked time there for a while because there are lots of overlapping tracks in every direction. Her little boy froze by the forest brook, waiting for his mother as she was giving herself to her lover in a rumpled bed soaked in hot sweat.

The tracks lead further, into the urman. Yuzuf obviously went to find her when she hadn’t turned up. Zuleikha dashes after him. Trees decorated in white tower around her, interfering; black shadows and yellowish-blue stripes of snow painted with moonlight flash in her eyes. Further, further. Deeper into the urman, deeper.

“Yuzuf!” she shouts into a thicket. A large shelf of snow falls from a high branch, crashing to the ground. “Ulym! My son!”

Yuzuf’s ski tracks are growing fainter under drifts of snow. They appear again for a while then disappear, and soon they’re gone completely. Where to now?

“Yuzuf!”

Zuleikha races ahead and little clouds of snow puff up from under her skis.

“Yuzuf!”

The inky-black tops of spruce trees are dancing on the dark blue firmament and bold sparkling stars glisten between them.

“Yuzuf!”

The urman is silent.

There it is, retribution for an impious life outside marriage with an infidel, with her husband’s killer. For preferring him to her own faith, her own husband, and her own son. The Vampire Hag was right. Heaven has punished Zuleikha.

Sinking into the snowdrifts, she forces her way through crackling, thorny juniper bushes. She creeps over fallen birch trunks covered in slippery rime and struggles to make out the path through a spiky spruce thicket. Her ski suddenly catches a branch and Zuleikha flies forward, tumbling down some sort of steep hillock, churning up snow, and snapping her skis. The hard, prickly coldness pounds at her face, getting into her eyes, ears, and mouth. Her hands flail at the snow as she somehow makes her way out of the drift. She sees a piece of a broken ski in front of her. Not her ski but her son’s.

“Yuzuuuuf!”

She’s no longer shouting, she’s howling. And someone in front of her is howling in response. Up to her waist in snow, with the splintered remnants of her skis tangled in low bushes, she makes her way to a small clearing that’s tightly bordered on all sides by trees.

There, in a crowded, uneven ring clustered around a tall, old spruce with a tilting top, sits a sharp-nosed gray pack, looking intently upward. It’s winter and the wolves are lean; their skin stretches over their ribs and their spines look bristly. They notice Zuleikha, turn their snouts for a moment, and growl but don’t leave their spot. One suddenly leaps high, as if he’s been tossed, and snaps his teeth at the sharp top of the spruce where there’s a small, dark, motionless spot.

Zuleikha walks straight at the wolves, striding almost mechanically and loading the rifle along the way. Several animals stand and slowly scatter to greet her. They surround her, quivering their lips, showing their fangs, and jerking their tails. One of them, with transparent yellow eyes and a torn ear, breaks away and is the first to jump.

She shoots. Then again and again. She loads as quickly as she breathes, then again and again. She inserts the second clip, then again and again.

Yelping, harrowing squeals, whimpers, and wheezes. One of the wolves attempts to run away and hide in the woods but she doesn’t allow it. One lies with a broken spine, jerking its paws, and she fires point-blank, finishing it off. She’s shot all the cartridges, every last one. A half-dozen wolf carcasses lie around the spruce, on snow that glistens black with blood; there’s a smell of gunpowder, burned flesh, and singed fur; gashed intestines steam. It’s quiet. Zuleikha walks over the bodies, toward the crooked spruce.

“Yuzuf! Ulym!” she rasps.

From the treetop, a small body with the inanimate face of a doll, frosty brows and lashes, and eyes squeezed tightly shut falls straight into her outstretched arms.

Yuzuf lies delirious for four days. Zuleikha kneels beside his bed the whole time, holding his burning hand. She sleeps right there, her head resting against his shoulder.

Leibe attempts to move her to the next bed but she won’t allow it. He gives up and just draws a curtain dividing Yuzuf’s spot from the rest of the ward. Leibe has decided to put them here in the infirmary rather than at home, so he can always keep an eye on them.

Achkenazi himself brings food. He watches Zuleikha kneeling motionless by her son’s bed, carefully places a dish on the windowsill, and removes the previous one, the food untouched.

Izabella stops by and firmly strokes Zuleikha’s back for a long time but Zuleikha doesn’t notice. Konstantin Arnoldovich comes a couple of times and attempts to draw Zuleikha into conversation. He tells her something about melon seeds they’ve sent him from the mainland after all, about agricultural helpers who will arrive any day, about the oxen and cows promised for the spring, for plowing (“I’ll learn how to plow – just imagine me behind a plow, Zuleikha!”) but no conversations come about.

Ikonnikov comes only once. He finds a place to kneel next to her and extends a shaking hand smudged with paints toward Yuzuf’s shoulder. Zuleikha pushes his hand away and throws herself on her son, covering him with her body. “I won’t give him up!” she snarls. “I won’t give him up to anyone!” Leibe leads Ikonnikov away and doesn’t allow him back in the infirmary.

Ignatov comes every day. Zuleikha doesn’t notice him. It’s as if she doesn’t see him, and when he begins speaking with her, it’s as if she doesn’t hear. He stands behind her for a long time then leaves. On the fourth day, Ignatov is there when Yuzuf’s little body begins cooling, releasing a generous, sticky sweat, and losing its crimson tinge. Ignatov sits down on the next bed, places his crutch beside him, lowers his face in his hands, and freezes, maybe dozing, maybe thinking. He sits for a long time.

“Leave, Ivan,” Zuleikha says, suddenly calm and not turning away from her son’s bed. “I’m not coming to see you anymore.”

“Then I’ll come here,” he says, lifting his head. “I’ve been punished. Don’t you see?” She strokes Yuzuf along his nearly closed eyelids and along cheekbones that have grown prominent.

“By whom?”

She walks up to Ignatov, shoves the crutch in his hands and pulls him up, raising him from the bed. He yields and stands. Zuleikha was small before, not reaching his shoulder, but now she’s absolutely tiny, as if she’s shrunk.

“Whoever it is, I’ve been punished.” Her weak arms push him toward the door. “And that’s all there is to it. That’s all.”

Ignatov bends, grips her shoulders, and shakes her, searching for her gaze. He finally finds it but Zuleikha’s eyes are frozen, as if they’re dead. He carefully releases her, takes his crutch, and slowly thuds toward the door.

She turns to her son after the thudding has faded outside. Yuzuf is sitting in bed. He’s pale, the skin is tight on his face, and his eyes are huge, set in purple circles.

“Mama,” he says in an even, quiet voice. “I had dreams, lots of dreams. Everything that Ilya Petrovich painted – Leningrad and Paris. What do you think, can I go there someday?”

Zuleikha leans her back against the wall and looks at her son without tearing her gaze away. He’s looking out the window, where large flakes of heavy snow are falling hard, without stopping.