Zuleikha

THE WAR

The war comes to Semruk like a reverberation of a distant echo. It doesn’t seem to exist, though people say it does. They unexpectedly begin to receive a regular newspaper delivery – once a month, in one big, thick packet – bursting with headlines: “We’ll Close Ranks…” “We’ll Rout…” “We’ll Defeat…” The newspapers themselves gradually get thinner, but the war makes them grow meaner, fiercer, and more reckless. They’re now hung on the agitational board, where Semruk residents often stand in the evenings, reading with their heads together. Then they turn toward the Angara, watch seagulls circling in the clear sky, and quietly exchange remarks. It’s strange to think that somewhere far away there are enemy planes cutting through the firmament instead of birds.

Kuznets, who was recently promoted to the position of lieutenant of state security, organizes rallies during his rare visits. He tells of fronts where the Red Army battles valorously and of the successes it has achieved; people listen, keeping quiet. It’s hard to believe what he says, though it’s also impossible not to believe it.

Not one person left Semruk during the first months of the war. In the labor settlements, the commandants’ headquarters maintain registries of reserve corps for the rear guard who’ve reached draft age, but the lists have no practical use. Inmates aren’t allowed near weapons, which means they’re not allowed near army service, either, where the danger of their unifying in organized groups grows exponentially. The question of drafting them isn’t even posed in 1941 since it’s obvious that after reaching the front, enemies of the people would immediately desert to the fascists’ side and begin fighting against their motherland.

And so the war goes on, but it goes on far away, passing them by.

Then the war unexpectedly does what the government has so feared and hasn’t wanted: it opens, slightly, the heavy curtain separating Semruk from the world. During long years of fighting for survival on a tiny island-like patch in the depths of the taiga, deprived of ties to the “mainland,” and devoting their lives exclusively to fulfilling an economic plan, the exiles suddenly see themselves as part of a giant, heavily populated country. The names of distant cities – Minsk, Brest, Vilnius, Riga, Kiev, Vinnitsa, Lvov, Vitebsk, Kishinev, and Novgorod – sound from the low stage of the Semruk clubhouse, like a song floating from the pages of a geography textbook or a fairytale heard in distant childhood. It’s frightening because the enemy has captured all those cities. And there’s simultaneously a sweet ache from the thought that these cities exist at all. The very fact of those names being uttered by Kuznets’s broad, fleshy lips confirms that those cities have been there, growing, developing, planting greenery, modernizing, and living all this time. Kuznets’s lips used to just repeat, over and over, information about the plan, the five-year plan, indicators, quotas, the labor front… But now there’s Kerch, Alupka, Dzhankoi, Bakhchisarai, Yevpatoria, Odessa, Simferopol, Yalta…

“I’d almost forgotten there’s a place somewhere on earth called Bakhchisarai,” Konstantin Arnoldovich whispers, leaning toward Ikonnikov’s ear.

“I lived there two months and could sketch you the Fountain of Tears from memory. I was trying back then to capture the streamage of water along the marble,” says Ikonnikov.

“Streamage is an incorrect word, Ilya Petrovich. It doesn’t exist.”

“How can it not exist if I captured it?”

They learn about the blockade of Leningrad from Kuznets in October, after a month-long delay. They don’t even begin to discuss it with one another because there’s nothing to say.

In the spring of 1942, Kuznets makes a sudden appearance out of nowhere, as always. He’s brought with him a barge packed with emaciated people who have dark-olive skin and distinct profiles: Crimean Greeks and Tatars. “Ivan Sergeevich,” he says, “these outsiders are to be taken into your charge. And provide security measures. After all, they’re a socially dangerous element in large numbers and of excellent high quality.” He laughs.

Non-natives were being deported from southern territories in case the region should be overrun with occupiers and minority nations, giving such people the opportunity to desert to the enemy. This measure was, as they said, a precaution.

Well, Greeks are Greeks. Even if they’re Eskimos with papooses, they’re no strangers to Ignatov. Out of curiosity, he once counted up all the nationalities residing in Semruk and came to nineteen. This means there are two more now. They send these dark-skinned people to empty barracks to throw down their things. And then to the taiga. There’s still half a workday ahead, socially dangerous citizens. Ignatov entrusts the outsiders to Gorelov, who’s good at knocking sense into novices.

Kuznets and Ignatov retire to the commandant’s headquarters, as is their established habit. Ignatov isn’t drinking much of late but he’s with Kuznets, so how could he not sit a while and indulge the chief?

“You and I need to talk, Vanya,” says Kuznets, pouring strong-smelling alcohol into cloudy faceted glasses.

Ignatov wipes crumbs from the table with his palm, takes out what’s left of last night’s dinner – cucumbers, carrot, onion, all sorts of greens, and bread – then pulls the window curtains. Kuznets is talking in broad circles, though, and is in no hurry to get to the point, so first they drink to the future victory over fascism, then to comrade Stalin, to the valorous Red Army, and to the courageous home front (“A good home front, my dear man, is half the victory!”).

“So what was it you wanted to talk about, Zin?” says Ignatov, remembering what Kuznets said. His head is already growing heavy, as usual, filling with big, unwieldy thoughts, and his body is lightening, as if it will fly away any minute.

“Ah,” smiles Kuznets, placing a powerful brown hand on the nape of Ignatov’s neck and pulling him toward himself. “You haven’t forgotten.”

Their foreheads meet over the table and their front locks of hair touch.

“I look at you, Vanya,” says Kuznets, directing a dulled brownish eye at Ignatov, “and I just never tire of it.”

Kuznets’s face is right beside Ignatov’s. Deep pores are distinctly visible on a large nose with dark blue veins.

“Everything’s good with you. You’re holding eight hundred souls in your fist. Achieving production targets. Fulfilling the plan. The kolkhoz is working and the artels, too. The cucumbers…” He takes a large, bumpy squiggle of a cucumber from the table. “Even these are the tastiest on the Angara. Believe me, I know!” Kuznets pokes the cucumber into a puddle of salt sprinkled on the table and bites it with a crunch, spraying Ignatov with small drops. “You even stopped drinking. Why’d you stop drinking, Ivan?”

Kuznets isn’t shy about showing he’s well informed about life in the settlement and its commandant, knowing far more than Ignatov himself has reported.

“I had enough,” says Ignatov, wiping the spray from his cheeks.

“And you didn’t find a woman.” Kuznets smiles sneakily, shaking the bitten cucumber. “You’ve been living a lonely existence since you banished Glashka.”

Kuznets knows about the brief, long-forgotten little couplings with the redheaded Aglaya, though apparently he doesn’t know about the love with Zuleikha that has abruptly come to an end.

A heavy hand presses at Ignatov’s neck again.

“Is that really what you wanted to talk about?” Ignatov says. “Women?”

“Eh, no!” Kuznets chomps juicily at the cucumber, finishes it, and pokes the end at Ignatov’s forehead. “This is about you, a hero! Vanya, it’s time for you to be promoted from sergeant to lieutenant, junior lieutenant for starters.”

Ignatov swats the cucumber end from his forehead. He looks at Kuznets’s bushy black brows, where a heavy drop of sweat is swelling in a deep wrinkle between them. Kuznets has never once raised the topic of promotion with him.

“Here in the woods it’s all the damn same if you’re a sergeant or a lieutenant.”

“What? You’ve decided to stay here forever or something?” Kuznets smirks slyly and his pupils are sharp and narrow. “You used to want to leave. You took me by the throat.”

“I did.”

“So it’s your choice, and you’re still young. But it’s not fitting for someone a mere step away from becoming a second lieutenant in state security to stagnate as a settlement commandant. Huh?” Kuznets’s palm squeezes the nape of Ignatov’s neck. “I’ve already filled out an appraisal form on you. Years of flawless service, I said, dedication to the motherland’s ideals. I just haven’t sent it yet.”

“I’m not getting this, Zin. You’re holding something back.”

“What’s to understand?” Kuznets licks his lips and his bluish-gray tongue with white bumps flashes for a moment. “War, Vanya. We’re living in fast-moving, chaotic times. It even rings in your ears. Heads are rolling. Stars are rolling, too, and they’re made of red silk, framed in silver. They’re on smart people’s uniform cuffs.”

“It’s only been a couple months since your last…” Ignatov looks sideways at Kuznets’s uniform jacket, which is hanging neatly on the back of a chair. There’s a brand-new dark ruby bar in maroon collar tabs with a raspberry-colored edging, a sign of Kuznets’s recent promotion.

“That’s what I’m telling you, my dear man. It’s that kind of time, when anything’s possible, do you understand me? Anything! Promoted to first lieutenant in half a year, another year to captain. You and I just need something to happen, something big and loud. Did you hear about the uprising at the Pargibsky commandant’s headquarters? About the attempt on the commandant in Staraya Klyukva? They arrested about a hundred, and that’s just the plotters. That’s what we need, for lots of people to be involved. We’ll give the whole affair a clever name…”

“What kind of uprisings and escapes are there now, you fool? Anybody who escaped a long time ago is coming back to the settlements now, to get away from the war, from the army.”

“Exactly, Vanya! They’re all afraid of the fascists. But some people are waiting for the enemy. And, like good hosts, they’re preparing a welcoming ceremony for the occupiers, with bread and salt. That’s who you and I are going to find in the settlement. We’ll discover the plot, reveal it, shoot the organizers under wartime law, and send their lousy accomplices to the camps. All Siberia will find out. It’ll be a lesson to the settlers, as a precaution! An example to other commandants’ headquarters. And you and I” – Kuznets pokes a brownish fingernail at himself, below his Adam’s apple – “we’ll be fixing new collar tabs onto our uniforms.”

He’s breathing deeply, hotly. Sweat’s flowing from his forehead in two glistening streams, along the sides of his nose and further down, into the stiff brushes of his mustache.

“You’re off your head, Zin. You’re prattling on here, you’re smashed.”

“Nobody’ll check. I’ll take the case myself.” His palm on Ignatov’s neck is now a sweaty iron pincer. “You’ll compile the list of suspects yourself. Everybody you’re sick of, who gets in the way, get them out, the dogs. I won’t interfere – you can even put Gorelov on it. Your love for him is well known. We’ll crack them all, don’t worry. It’ll be a crystal-clear case. They’ll write about you and me in textbooks.”

“Hold on. You’re proposing that these are, what, my people?”

“Well, who else’s?” There’s a yellowish tinge in the network of red veins in Kuznets’s dark eyes. “I’m no magician here – I can’t pull a hundred plotters out of a magic hat for you. But you’ve got lots of people. This won’t ruin you. If you feel sorry for the old ones, pick the new ones, the outsiders. They won’t survive here anyway – they’ll drop like flies in the winter.”

Ignatov lowers his gaze to Kuznets’s broad, damp lips.

“Well?” say the lips.

“Take your hand off me, you’ll break my neck.”

The hot, damp palm releases Ignatov’s neck.

“Well?” repeat the lips.

Ignatov takes the flask and splashes the remainder of the alcohol into their empty glasses. He tightens the metal top slowly, with a squeak, and puts the flask back on the table.

“I didn’t think,” he says, “comrade lieutenant, that you’d test me, a former Red Army man. I thought you trusted me, based on our old friendship.”

“Hold on, Ivan! I’m telling you the truth, you hear? I’ve thought it all through, done the calculations. We’ll have the case wrapped up in a month, receive our ranks by summer. Well?”

“Are you acting out this charade for all the commandants or just a chosen few?”

“Stop playing the fool, Ignatov! I’m being human with you, but you–”

“You can report that the political situation in labor settlement Semruk is calm. The commandant turned out to be a morally stable person and did not yield to provocation.”

Ignatov slowly raises his glass, tips it down his throat without clinking, then wipes his mouth dry. Kuznets is breathing heavily, wheezing a little. He pours the alcohol from his glass down his gullet and chomps an onion. He stands, continuing to chew, puts on his jacket, fastens its belt, and pulls his peaked cap over his forehead.

“Fine, commandant,” he says. “That’s what I’ll report. But just you remember” – his large, wet red fist moves in front of Ignatov’s nose – “that I have you right here if anything happens!”

Kuznets’s fist hovers there, his white knuckles big and bumpy. He spits the remainder of the onion on the floor and goes out.

What Kuznets said comes true. The new batch turns out to be in poor health. Their warm southern blood doesn’t withstand the frosty Siberian weather well and many take ill with pneumonia during the very first cold spells. The infirmary, which had already been expanded to twenty beds by that time, can’t hold even half those in need. Leibe wears himself out and has no strength left but can’t save everyone, and the Semruk cemetery increases by fifty graves that winter.

The outsiders bury their kinsmen in varying ways. Greeks knock together thin wooden crosses from stakes and Tatars carve intricate crescents from long logs. Both the crosses and the crescents find places at the cemetery, close to one another in crooked, crowded rows, alternating with other markers.

A large article appears in Pravda about a pro-fascist plot that was revealed in the Pit-Gorodok labor settlement on the Angara. As a result of this fairly notorious case, the core of the plotters, numbering twelve people, faced the firing squad and a band of accomplices was sentenced to twenty-five years in the camps for anti-Soviet activity.

Nonetheless, on April 11, 1942, the State Defense Committee of the USSR approves a resolution on drafting labor deportees for military service. Sixty thousand former kulaks and their children are drafted into the Red Army and permitted to defend the motherland. The brand-new Red Army men and members of their families are removed from the rolls of labor exile and issued passports without limitations. A thin stream of those freed from “kulak exile” begins flowing toward the mainland from the labor settlements.

A bright poster appears on the agitational board during the summer – a half-grayed woman in fiery-red clothing standing before a wall of raised bayonets, beckoning with a hand stretched invitingly behind her. She’s summoning to war, summoning the young, the old, even adolescents, everyone who can hold a weapon. She’s summoning them to their death.

Each time Zuleikha walks past the poster, she answers the woman with a long, stubborn gaze that says, I won’t give up my son. The woman resembles Zuleikha – even the gray in her slightly disheveled hair is just the same, in striking strands, and Zuleikha feels awkward because it’s as if she’s talking to herself.

Zuleikha’s ancestors fought the Golden Horde for centuries. It’s unclear how long the war with Germany will go on, and Yuzuf will soon turn twelve. Izabella told Zuleikha that men can be taken into the army from age eighteen. She can count the number of years left until then on her fingers. Will the war manage to end?

Yuzuf has grown quickly during the last year and is now taller than Zuleikha. He works at the bakery, selling bread. Hardly anyone bakes their own now and a line forms at the bakery in the evenings. Zuleikha loves observing her son as he stands behind the tall counter and nimbly serves the customers, handling their jingling yellow and gray coins with ease. He always does the sums in his head, without using the abacus. The store opens after lunch, when the first shift of lumbermen returns from the forest, and that’s just in time for Yuzuf to run over from school.

Yuzuf is praised as a good student. He was accepted into the Young Pioneers for his achievements and a red Pioneer tie like a dragonfly has blazed on his chest ever since. He works like an adult at household chores, chopping firewood, fixing a fence, or repairing a roof. As before, he tries to find free time whenever possible so he can run off to the clubhouse to see Ikonnikov.

Ikonnikov has let himself go badly and grown flabby in recent years – he drinks a lot. The exiles have learned to distill home brew not just from cloudberries but also from bilberries, stone bramble, and even sour rowan berries. Ikonnikov is a particular devotee. They’ve allowed him to remain at the clubhouse, in an artistic artel composed solely of himself. With his help, Semruk supplies Krasnoyarsk not only with lumber, fur, and vegetables but also a very specialized form of product: oil paintings, moreover paintings of very decent quality. Rosy-cheeked lumbermen, busty farmer women, and well-fed, round-cheeked Young Pioneers – alone, in pairs, or in groups – jauntily stride or stand, their thoughtful gazes directed into the cloudless distance. Rural and even urban cultural centers eagerly take his pictures.

Yuzuf has been planning to join the artel after turning sixteen, but for now he’s working on an unrestricted basis. Zuleikha is afraid her son might develop a passion for home brew under Ikonnikov’s unsavory influence. “My example provides the strongest possible deterrent against alcoholism,” Ilya Petrovich calms her after noticing her wary glance one day. And he’s probably right.

Zuleikha has always been jealous of Yuzuf’s attachment to Ikonnikov, but those feelings have subsided over the years. Ilya Petrovich is the only man who looks at Yuzuf with loving, fatherly eyes filled with pride, and for this Zuleikha even forgives the stale smell of alcohol on his breath.

Her son’s relationship with the doctor has broken down, or, rather, faded away: Yuzuf and Leibe exist in the same house but on parallel planes that never intersect. One slips through the internal door to the infirmary after barely forcing himself awake and drinking down a mug of herb tea for breakfast, then returns only after midnight, to sleep a little; the other sees nothing and nobody around him as he rushes off to the clubhouse with a handful of homemade paintbrushes, then goes to school and to the bakery after that. They have no time to interact and nothing to talk about.

The reason this distance had grown between them came out later. Leibe told Zuleikha that he’d once had a serious, adult conversation with Yuzuf, proposing that Yuzuf help at the infirmary and study medicine. Leibe had promised to teach him the basics within a couple of years and, in about another five, everything that graduates of medical schools know. Yuzuf heard him out carefully, thanked him, and politely declined. He would like to work as an artist when he grows up. Although he didn’t show it, Volf Karlovich suffered painfully over this refusal, in spite of its being completely adult and justified.

One time Zuleikha complained to Izabella that after twelve years of living in the same house, her son had gained nothing from such an intelligent and worthy person as the doctor, neither character traits nor noble gestures and behavior, nor a profession so generously offered. Yuzuf and Leibe were different people, very dissimilar, alien to one another. “How can that be, my dear!” smiled Izabella. “What about their eyes? They have the exact same gaze. It’s passionate, even obsessed.”

Zuleikha and Yuzuf still sleep in the same bed. They have difficulty fitting on the crowded sleeping ledge, so her son either places his long, skinny legs on his mother or lets them dangle over the edge. He can’t sleep by himself and won’t drift off unless he takes refuge by her chest, his face stuck in her neck.

Sometimes she seems to dream of someone. She’ll wake up in a sweat, her braids mussed from tossing her head on the pillow. There are vague memories of a flame at a distant lighthouse, glowing red as if it’s scorching hot; the door curtain in a black tent knocking in the wind; and the warmth of someone’s hands on her shoulders. She steadies her breathing and opens her eyes; the hands are her son’s.

She hasn’t been able to forgive herself for that night when Yuzuf ran off into the snowy taiga searching for her. At first she thought her punishment for that was in her son’s illness, in the torments of fever and delirium, and his drawn-out struggle with death in her arms at the infirmary. But she later understood that her true punishment only came after Yuzuf’s recovery, in her own distressing, nagging, and endless thoughts. At times her guilt seems so enormous and monstrous that she’s prepared to accept retribution; she wishes for any, even the most dreadful. From whom, she doesn’t know. There’s nobody here on the edge of the universe who can mete out retribution or pardon. The Almighty’s gaze doesn’t reach the banks of the Angara and there aren’t any spirits to be found in the dense thickets of the Siberian urman. People here are completely on their own, alone with one another.

Yuzuf wakes up when the door squeaks behind his mother. She always leaves for the taiga early, at dawn, after carefully disentangling herself from his arms and slipping soundlessly through the house, afraid of waking him as she prepares to go. He feigns sleep, as a nice gesture for her. He jumps up when her light footsteps fade outside the door. He doesn’t like sleeping by himself.

He tosses off the blanket with his legs and his bare feet slap over to the table, to the breakfast his mother left covered with a coarse cotton towel: a piece of bread and a mug of milk. (Ten bearded goats were recently brought to the settlement and milk remains a treat.) He gulps down the milk and stuffs the bread in his mouth. From a nail on the wall, he grabs the jacket that his mother crafted out of the doctor’s old dress uniform, patching and darning the holes. Feet in shoes and he’s on his way.

The door slams hard behind him. He suddenly wonders, belatedly, if he’s woken the doctor. He forgot to look to see if he was sleeping in his bed or if he’d gone to the infirmary. It doesn’t matter anyway. Even if he did wake him up, the doctor won’t complain to Yuzuf’s mother. He’s a good person, despite being unbelievably boring.

His feet speed down the steps. Chewing the bread as he runs, Yuzuf’s shoulder pushes the little gate and he races out to the road, past the infirmary and down to the central square, where bright posters gleam on the long agitational board and the fresh golden logs of the newly opened reading hut are shining; he passes small, square one-room houses on Lenin Street and then heads right, along River Street (Semruk’s private sector housing has grown in recent years, filling the entire knoll and even spreading to the foot of the hill, biting a large chunk out of the taiga); from there, along fences, past the bakery with its store, past kolkhoz storehouses, past the turn to the fields, where Konstantin Arnoldovich reigns supreme, cultivating his outlandish, giant melons alongside grain; and to the very end of the settlement, where the clubhouse hides under a canopy of firs.

It’s summer vacation so he doesn’t have to go to school. He can stay here, with Ikonnikov, right up until lunchtime. He just hopes Ikonnikov will be dry today… Yuzuf doesn’t like when Ilya Petrovich knocks back the drink early in the morning. Sometimes the knocking back is light, for invigoration, and Ikonnikov greets his pupil with paint-spotted hands joyfully thrown wide open, laughs a lot, and cracks long, intricate jokes that Yuzuf doesn’t understand. As the sun rises higher over the Angara, the light knocking back becomes heavier. The scent coming from his teacher turns into an unbearably sharp smell, the bottle standing behind crates and boards in the far corner of the club empties, and Ilya Petrovich himself grows sullen and somber toward lunchtime, and soon drops off in a heavy slumber, right there on the crates.

It’s better when he doesn’t drink until the evening. On a sober morning, Ikonnikov isn’t as cheerful and talkative – he sighs, slouches, and mills around his homemade easel a lot, endlessly scuffing his brushes at the palette – but for all that, something appears in his eyes that Yuzuf is prepared to watch for hours. Once he even wanted to draw his teacher at work, but Ikonnikov wouldn’t allow it.

Yuzuf’s shoes thud on the floorboards when he bursts into the clubhouse. Oh, he should have knocked, since it’s early and Ilya Petrovich could still be sleeping. But Ikonnikov’s dressed in a white shirt, a buttoned-up jacket, dark gray in color (maybe from dirt, maybe from time), and polished shoes. He’s standing by the wall and pounding at a nail, hammering it evenly.

“Here, help,” he says without turning.

Yuzuf runs over and hands him a picture that’s on the floor. Ikonnikov hangs it on the pounded nail.

“Like so,” he says, examining the room with a fastidious gaze, and repeats, “Just right. Like so!”

The canvases that had previously decorated all four of the walls have been gathered on one. Montmartre and Nevsky Prospect, Prechistenka Street and Semruk’s Lenin Street, the beaches of Viareggio and the Yalta embankments, the Seine, the Yauza, the Angara, and even Pyatiletka, the best kolkhoz goat, are all clustered together, touching each other in places and covering an entire wall. The other three walls are empty; glistening nail heads gawk forlornly.

Yuzuf looks at Ilya Petrovich. Is he drunk? No, he’s completely sober.

Ikonnikov takes a fat bundle of homemade brushes from the windowsill – thin are squirrel, thicker are fox, the biggest are badger – winds them with string, and sets them back down with a thud.

“That’s for you. I don’t need them any longer.”

“Are they sending you away?”

“No.” Ikonnikov smiles; under his eyes, bulging bags like preserved apples gather in large and small folds. “I’m leaving on my own. Can you imagine? On my own!”

Yuzuf doesn’t believe it. A person can’t go away anywhere on his own, everybody knows that. Or can he?

“Where to?”

Ilya Petrovich takes a long cotton scarf that’s worn to translucence in places and winds it round his thin neck.

“Wherever it turns out.”

How can someone leave without knowing where they’re going? A cold thought suddenly comes, like a vivid spark:

“To the war?”

Ikonnikov doesn’t answer. He slaps at his pockets, takes out the key to the clubhouse, and places it in Yuzuf’s palm.

“I won’t need this anymore, either,” he says, taking Yuzuf by the shoulders and looking him in the eye. “I’m leaving the artel to you.”

“But I’m still just a kid.” Yuzuf swallows hard. “A minor.”

“The commandant’s not against it. He needs good sales figures. The artel’s a whole production entity! It would be too bad to lose it. So you manage things here, please.”

Ilya Petrovich walks along the walls, touching the glistening nail heads with his fingertip.

“There’s still a lot of work to be done, isn’t there?”

Yuzuf rushes to his teacher and embraces him, burying his face in the smell of paints, turpentine, dusty canvas, coarse tobacco, and yesterday’s alcohol.

“Why are you going?”

Ikonnikov pats Yuzuf’s back.

“I always dreamt of seeing distant countries. When I was a child I wanted to be a sailor and travel the world.” Ilya Petrovich’s eyes are slyly narrowed, gleaming right next to Yuzuf. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll write to you from Paris itself. Deal?”

Yuzuf hates when people talk to him as if he were little. He moves away, wipes his eyes, and keeps silent. Ikonnikov picks up a thin knapsack from the floor and slings it over his shoulder. They walk together to the shore.

Despite the early hour, a whole delegation has gathered to see Ikonnikov off. Izabella is there. She has wizened and thinned in recent years, and her facial features show more clearly through withered skin that seems as carefully curried and scraped as leather. Konstantin Arnoldovich is with her. He has changed little over the years, though his frame is wirier, his face darker, and his hair lighter. Doctor Leibe is there, away from the infirmary for a short while. The commandant is drifting around at a distance, leaning on his stick, and half-facing the rest.

The morning is gray and cold. The wind carries slate-colored clouds over the Angara and tears at the exiles’ clothing. “So are we going or not, citizens?” a chilly sailor drearily inquires yet again. He’s standing in water up to his knees, holding the bow of a small, peeling boat that’s rocking on the waves. His bare feet are bluish-gray from the cold and he’s wearing a quilted jacket with a dirty mesh singlet peering out from under it. A gloomy Gorelov is sitting in the boat, his red nose turned away from the shore and his ears deeply sunken into his shoulders; he’s embracing a bulging duffel bag. Aglaya, who’s been living with him for three years now, had tagged along to the shore to see him off (“I’m practically your wife, Vasya, don’t you see?”) but he chased her away, afraid she’d cry on him.

“I asked Gorelov to keep an eye on you.” Izabella winds the unending scarf a little more snugly on Ikonnikov’s neck and fondly tucks the ends into the grubby collar of his jacket.

“I’m afraid it’s up to me to look after him.” Ilya Petrovich is peppy, even cheerful. “He was so scared when he got his draft notice.”

“Not everybody’s a hero like you.” Izabella looks into his eyes and shakes her head in distress. “Do you yourself even understand why you are?”

Ikonnikov smiles in response and narrows his eyes like a child. Ikonnikov is nearly fifty. Unlike Gorelov, who’s been called up for army service in accordance with his age and eligibility (absence of violations and punishments during time spent at the settlement, labor success, loyalty to the administration, overall degree of re-education), Ilya Petrovich has called himself up to the front as a volunteer. His application was evaluated for a long time, then evaluated again, and finally, astonished at Ikonnikov’s action, the authorities agreed to take him.

“Well…” Konstantin Arnoldovich extends a very withered hand that’s entangled in gnarled, ropy veins. “Well…”

“Who are you going to argue with now?” Ilya Petrovich shakes Sumlinsky’s hand for a moment before suddenly withdrawing it and embracing him.

They slap each other on the back cautiously, as if they’re women afraid of causing pain, then quickly back away, averting their flustered faces.

“Take care of yourself,” says Leibe, taking Ikonnikov by the elbow.

“Enough of this parting!” says the commandant’s harsh, annoyed voice. “You’re done.”

Ilya Petrovich gives Yuzuf’s hair a strong, hurried ruffle and winks. He turns to Ignatov and nods at him. He walks with a hunched and shuffling gait to the boat and gets in awkwardly, nearly dropping his bag into the water. He sits down alongside Gorelov and raises his large hand, and when he waves to those seeing him off, it becomes obvious how much his arms stick out of his too-short sleeves. The scarf around his neck has unwound again and is beating in the wind.

“Mon Dieu,” says Izabella, pressing her long fingers to her chin. “Mon Dieu.”

The sailor pushes the boat into deeper water and jumps in. A couple of seconds later, the motor wheezes then roars, musters its voice, and finally lets out a harrowing wail. The little boat turns around and leaves, cutting through foam that pulses on the waves. Konstantin Arnoldovich and Izabella, along with Leibe, watch it go. Yuzuf runs along the shore and waves his arms. Ignatov walks away without looking back.

The triangle of the boat shrinks and dwindles. Something long and light-colored (the scarf?) breaks away from it and flies over the waves like a seagull, before falling into the Angara.

“The first two of us to leave for the mainland,” Konstantin Arnoldovich utters quietly, as an aside, as if he’s not addressing anyone.

“The first of many?” asks Leibe, also as an aside.

Izabella gathers her narrow mouth into tight folds, throws back her completely white hair, and silently leaves the shore.

YUZUF AND ZULEIKHA

On a clear May day in 1946, the nimble little dark blue launch that delivers the weekly mail and printed materials to Semruk is carrying three passengers. Nobody greets them at the shore so there’s nobody there to be surprised that one of them is a rather dandyish military man wearing a stiffly ironed uniform and lavishly sprayed with cologne. Vasily Gorelov, in the flesh.

He jumps decisively, even jauntily, out of the launch and strides broadly and rapidly along the wooden pier, which moans underneath his ferociously squeaky and shiny boots as if in pain. The smooth sides of the small pigskin suitcase in his hand keeps blazing a fiery orange, as though it’s absorbed all the sunlight into itself.

The two other passengers, apparently a grandfather and grandson, climb timidly out of the launch and walk slowly behind him, looking around, confused. They scrutinize the smooth under-sides of overturned boats glimmering in the sun, the broad flags of fishing nets lazily fluttering in the wind, the sturdy stairway that runs up steeply from the shore, and houses of various colors sprinkled on the high knoll.

“Comrade,” the unnerved grandfather calls to Gorelov, “we want to see the local healer. Know how to find him?”

Gorelov turns around, looks the old man over with a stern gaze, as a policeman looks over a prank-playing little boy, and mumbles, “They’ve let this place go, you know…” A juicy tutting comes through his clenched teeth and he walks ashore without answering the question. The old man sighs, takes his grandson by the hand, and trudges after Gorelov.

It’s Sunday so it’s noisy in the settlement and people are out and about. Fresh curtains breathe with the breeze in wide-open windows and small front-yard gardens are white with jasmine. A group of boisterous lads chase a ball and whack it into a detachment of strutting gray geese whose leader hisses, snakes its long neck along the ground, and flings itself forward. A couple of shaggy dogs quickly fly out from under a gate, barking deafeningly and scaring away the geese. There are smells of smoke, the bathhouse, freshly planed wood, milk, and bliny. A gramophone’s cooing somewhere, hoarsely but tenderly, about love that’s true, friendship everlasting, and dreams fulfilled.

The old man and the little boy occasionally stop to ask the way – from an old woman leaning out a window and beating pillows, and a guy with an athletic torso who’s carrying a couple of little kids on bare shoulders that glisten with sweat. They finally reach a large, unprepossessing structure that stands at a distance. It’s made up of three buildings of various colors that have been added onto one another: in the center is the oldest one, already dark from time; the one to the right is a little lighter in color and more spacious; and the one to the left is completely new, honey-yellow, and still smelling tartly of pine. “Infirmary,” announces an inscription above in green paint.

The grandfather meekly knocks and enters without waiting for an answer. It’s cool and quiet in this spacious building with scrubbed floors, where identical white pillowcases shine softly on empty beds, stern instruments flash metallically on a neatly tidied table, and the breeze rustles at a large ledger that’s lying next to the instruments, its browned pages covered in small handwriting.

“Anybody here?”

There’s nobody. The grandfather goes outside and slowly circles the building, his grandson following with small steps. And there’s the back yard with a tiny gate, a meager woodpile, a broad and utterly dried-out block of wood with a half-rusted axe driven into it, and a couple of faded rags flapping on the clothes lines.

“Good afternoon,” the old man says, carefully opening the door a little.

After detecting the sound of motion, he steps inside and peers into the darkness of the room. A small, aging woman is placing things on a large checked headscarf with a long fringe. She has a pale face covered in fine flourishes of wrinkles, tired eyes under steeply arched brows, and broad white streaks in her long, black braids.

“Excuse me, ma’am,” says the man. He pulls off his floppy cap and nods low, with dignity. “Does the famous healer live here?”

“He lived here” – Zuleikha is stacking linens and clothes together – “up until yesterday.”

“He met his maker?”

“They hired him in town, down in Maklakovo.” Her tiny, unexpectedly strong hands tie up the bundle. “Apparently there was nobody to run the regional hospital there.”

“Oh no, how ’bout that…” The grandfather shakes his beard in disappointment, places a hand on the boy’s head, and clasps him against himself. “It took a week to get here. My grandson needs treatment.”

“They promised to send someone new in the next few days. Stay, you can live here for now while you wait.”

The flow of callers for the famous healer has grown each year. Zuleikha has gotten used to patients’ relatives staying at the infirmary.

“It’s him we need to see. We’ll go to him. Listen, ma’am…” The grandfather lowers his voice. “The doctor himself, he’s not overly strict? What do you think, will he see us? Won’t chase us out? That’s the town, after all, a proper hospital.”

“He won’t chase you out.” Zuleikha gazes at him for a long time. “And if you want to run off, he won’t let you go until the treatment’s done.”

“I heard, I heard…” The old man immediately breaks into a smile. He sighs with joy and relief as he hurries to the door, pulling on his cap. “Are you his wife?”

“No,” she says, becoming pensive, her fingers tugging at the knots on the headscarf. “I just helped with housekeeping. And now I’m to move out, too.”

The grandfather nods understandingly and hurries out after hastily saying goodbye, pushing his grandson before him. They nearly run back through the settlement to rush for the mail boat, which hasn’t cast off yet. The drawling, caressing sounds of an accordion drift after them through a wide-open window, along with sweet words about the prime of youth, never-ending joy, and inseparable love.

The grandfather and his grandson reach Maklakovo two days later, find the regional hospital and, in it, a small, lively person with a silvery halo of hair around his smooth skull. Another two days later, he operates on the boy and keeps him in the hospital for a month, for observation.

When the treatment is coming to an end, the grandfather begins pressing the nurse about how best to show gratitude to the famous healer, with money or some sort of gift. “He won’t take money,” she announces authoritatively, “but that coffee, now there’s a safe bet. He’s always swilling it down.”

Shaking his head distrustfully in a local food shop, the old man exchanges all the yellow coins sewn into the hem of his shirt for a sack of strange, oily beans with a sharp smell. He brings it to the hospital, petrified that he’s bought the wrong thing. To the old man’s tremendous relief, however, the healer accepts the tribute and smiles gratefully, his nostrils reveling in the bitter aroma coming from the sack. Who doesn’t love good coffee?

Gorelov doesn’t hurry as he walks through Semruk, right down the middle of Tsentralnaya Street, in his gleaming boots. He carries his puffed-up chest with dignity, and a round yellow medal casts a reflection on his brownish uniform jacket. His right hand holds the little suitcase a short distance away from his body, as if he’s exhibiting it for the hens and chicks running past, while his left hand keeps touching his smoothly shaven temple, using a cautious circular motion to smooth the short hair under his dark blue service cap’s raspberry-colored band.

Curtains in the windows on Tsentralnaya are trembling as if they’re alive and surprised faces flash behind them. People come out of their houses and talk among themselves, their gazes following the new arrival. Acting as if he hasn’t noticed the stir his appearance has caused, Gorelov parades leisurely to the main square, where the political information board, once small, sprawls lengthwise. It now looks like a long fence.

He places the little suitcase neatly on the ground. He watches Zaseka’s thin, scoliotic back as he pastes up a fresh sheet of Soviet Siberia, which flutters in the breeze. The sheet settles over a poster that’s faded and brown from rain and snow, where there’s a black-browed major leading a buxom white-toothed peasant woman in a dance, straight toward the joyful inscription, “Their happiness was restored!”

“You’re putting it up crooked, you clod,” Gorelov lazily says through clenched teeth, turning his calm, maybe even slightly sleepy, face toward the Angara.

“It looks perfectly straight to me,” says Zaseka, not turning around as his thin fingers carefully smooth the newspaper’s upper edge and small drops of white paste come out from under it. “How about that?”

A rough hand grabs him by the nape of the neck and thrusts his face into the sheet, which smells sharply of typographical ink.

“Is that how you talk to a security officer, you scum?” Gorelov whispers softly in Zaseka’s ear.

Zaseka’s scared, hare-like eyes look to the side.

“Comrade Gorelov…” he wheezes in surprise.

“What kind of comrade am I to you, you louse? Well?”

“Citizen – Citizen Gorelov…”

The iron grip weakens on Zaseka’s neck and releases him.

“As I said, you’re putting it up crooked,” says Gorelov, painstakingly straightening the newspaper, which is now creased from Zaseka’s bony head. “Get outta here, you useless dolt.”

Gorelov brushes off his hands and watches Zaseka clumsily smear paste on his cheeks and bolt down the street, where curious people immediately surround him. Then Gorelov places one boot on the suitcase, leans an elbow into his raised knee and freezes, directing his gaze at the Angara stretching below.

A female figure moves away from the crowd. Aglaya slowly walks toward Gorelov, pressing the ends of her faded headscarf to her chin, and stops a few steps away, undecided about approaching closer.

“Vasya, is that you?”

He doesn’t answer. He takes a hefty pendant-like gold watch from his right pocket and clicks the cover. A sheaf of fiery sparks falls on his tanned face. The melody of “Oh du lieber Augustin” thrums plaintively inside. He anxiously scrutinizes the watch face then slams the cover shut.

“You waiting for someone?” Aglaya takes a timid step forward.

Gorelov finally meets her gaze. She’s aged and grown unattractive; her face is pockmarked, her cheeks slightly droopy, as if they’ve deflated, and her hands are wrinkled, with broken nails. She’s not saucy Aglaya now; she’s jaded Glashka.

“How come you didn’t stop by the house?” Glashka takes another step. “We haven’t seen each other in four years.”

Gorelov takes a cigarette case (a blue-tinged silver eagle is spreading its wings on snow-white enamel) from his left pocket and slowly lights a long, thin cigarette. He releases spicy, dark gray smoke into her face.

“Listen here, you slut,” he says calmly, all businesslike. “What happened, happened. It’s over. My home’s in another place now. I’ll send for you if I want to screw around. Till then, get lost. About face, march!”

Glashka’s face twitches and collapses into one big, wrinkled grimace. She shrugs her shoulders, turns around, and trudges away, her gaping eyes brimming with large tears that don’t roll away. Even so, she looks back, craning her neck like a chicken.

“On the double!” commands Gorelov. “Faster!”

She quickens the pace of her small steps as she goes down the street.

“And don’t you dare speak to me in informal terms, you floozy!”

Gorelov’s booming shout behind Glashka urges her on. She trips over her own feet, raising dust on the road as she falls. Gorelov blots his sweaty neck with a white handkerchief and turns around.

“You’ve become vicious…” says a quiet voice not too far away.

It’s the commandant.

He’s standing at the slope that descends from the commandant’s headquarters, uniform jacket tossed on his shoulders and a fat, knotty stick in his hand. His hair, once thick and fully brown, is now dappled and lightweight, and his eyes seem to have been absorbed into his face, though his cheekbones have leapt outward. Furrowed wrinkles have settled evenly along his forehead, as if a pencil outlined them.

Gorelov looks at the river and doesn’t answer.

“Why aren’t you talking? You don’t recognize me or something?” The commandant walks closer, leaning on his stick and limping heavily, swaying.

“Of course, how could I not recognize you?”

“You’ve toughened.” Ignatov whistles as he circles Gorelov and examines the green shoulder boards with light cornflower-blue edging on his jacket. “Lieutenant? Since when do they accept former convicts into the officer ranks?”

“Don’t you shove my past in my face! I was fighting while you were sitting on your backside by the stove.”

“I heard how you fought. As a driver for a field kitchen, and a procurement officer in the rear.”

“And what of it! My rights have been reinstated and I don’t have to do what you say anymore.” Gorelov stuffs his paw into an inside pocket and takes out a dark burgundy rectangle with a row of dingy yellow letters on it – a passport – and waves it in the air, then opens it and shoves it under the commandant’s nose as if to say, You seen one of these?

“Everybody has to do what I say here,” says Ignatov, walking right up to Gorelov and placing the knotty end of his stick on the shiny nose of Gorelov’s boot. “And since last year we’ve had a ban on hiring free workers. So you roll on out of here on the very next boat.”

Gorelov kicks the stick, which falls to the ground with a thud. The commandant reels and drops his jacket in the dust.

“I’m just as familiar with Order 248, bis 3, dated January 8, 1945, as you are, Ignatov.” Gorelov’s boot steps on Ignatov’s jacket. “And so let me ask you: why aren’t you following it?”

Ignatov awkwardly places his foot to the side and bends to the ground for his jacket, where he freezes.

“Why is it that free workers are bumming around the settlement in droves,” Gorelov whispers damply above Ignatov’s ear, “but the inmates are running off to the city? You let people get out of hand, commandant, oh, but you did.” Gorelov finally takes his foot off the jacket. “Boat, you say? Fine, I’ll go greet it.”

He stamps a boot to shake off the dust that floated onto it, slightly dulling its mirror-like shine, takes his fiery orange suitcase off the ground, and waddles back to the pier. People crowded at the edge of the square scatter.

Zuleikha ties everything she can consider her own into bundles: summer and winter clothes, a couple of changes of bed linen, blankets, pillows, dishes, kitchen utensils, and small things dear to her heart, like several napkins she embroidered and Yuzuf’s old clay toys, like the doll with irrevocably broken-off limbs and the fish without fins or tail. She leaves the cast-iron pots for boiling bandages (they’ll come in handy for the next doctor) as well as the wall clock that ticks loudly and has a slightly crooked inscription burned by a red-hot awl: “To the dear doctor from the residents of Semruk, on your 70th birthday.” That wasn’t given to her so it’s not hers to take.

Leibe hadn’t taken it, either. He didn’t take anything with him: he just left in the clothes he was wearing and carrying a half-empty, worn traveling bag on which the outline of a once-red cross could just be divined.

They’d parted quietly, silently. She’d stood in the middle of the house, her hands lowered to her apron, not knowing what to do or say. Volf Karlovich had walked over to her, stood alongside her, taken her hand, and bent his dry lips to it. Zuleikha saw that the fluffy silver halo around his bald spot had become much sparser and that the skin on his delicate pink and once-shiny skull was now all speckled with large gray and brown spots.

Yuzuf went to the pier to see Leibe off but Zuleikha stayed at home. She’d begun gathering her things right away. They’d proposed that she live in the infirmary when the new doctor arrived, too, and promised to wall off part of the house and register her as a full-time nurse, but she’d refused, deciding to move back to the barracks.

They aren’t barracks at all now. They’re called dormitories and they’ve installed lots of partitions to divide them into small rooms. No more than six or eight people are housed in them, and although the bunks are two-tiered, as before, they now have real mattresses, blankets, and pillows, and some people even have colorful cross-stitched bedspreads. Those living in the dormitories are either new residents (very few have been brought in recently) or people who’ve been held back from setting up their own homes and households, either by their own ineptitude or laziness. It scares Zuleikha that separation from Yuzuf is imminent – he’ll turn sixteen this summer so he’s been assigned his own bed and space in the male dormitory.

He’s already been working in the art artel for four years. The artel’s products have the same subjects: field laborers, lumber industry shockworkers, active workers on the kolkhoz front, Komsomol members and Young Pioneers, and sometimes gymnasts. The buyers had noted that the style of the Semruk artwork had changed rather abruptly several years ago but they attached no significance to that since, as before, the rural people depicted are round-faced, the gymnasts peppy, and the children smiling. The fruits of the artel’s labor continue to be in demand.

Yuzuf paints for himself at night, in his free time. Zuleikha struggles to understand these paintings of his, with their sharp lines, mad colors, and hodgepodge of strange, sometimes frightening images. She likes the lumbermen and Young Pioneers much more. He hasn’t painted her once.

She doesn’t speak much with Yuzuf. Zuleikha senses that he misses talking with Izabella (she died in 1943, right after news that the blockade was lifted in Leningrad) and Konstantin Arnoldovich (who outlived his wife by only a year). She sees that he still pines for Ilya Petrovich, who vanished after leaving for the front. There’s been no news from him whatsoever. Yesterday it even seemed that Yuzuf was very upset about Leibe’s departure, though their relationship had never gotten back on track.

She can’t replace anyone for him but she feels like he needs her even more than before. After losing people dear to him, he’s been directing all the ardor of his young heart toward his mother. He wants to talk, ask questions and receive answers, argue, discuss, interrupt, attack, defend himself, and quarrel – and all she can do is keep silent, listen, and pat him on the head. But this makes him angry and he runs off. Then he’ll return a while later, downcast, guilty, and affectionate. He’ll embrace her, squeezing until her bones crack (he’s a head taller and strong for his age) and again she says nothing; she just pats him on the head. That’s how they live.

The little flame on the front steps of the commandant’s headquarters has stopped summoning her at night. Ignatov probably smokes inside now.

Yuzuf didn’t steal the boat – it had been promised to him. When red-haired Lukka was still alive, Yuzuf had often helped him repair it. They’d plugged gaps with bast fiber and old rags, covered it with gooey pitch, soaked and dried it, and applied more pitch. In return, the old man took Yuzuf with him night fishing – he himself angled and Yuzuf sat alongside, watching and learning. The Angara at night was quiet and taciturn, completely different. The firmament, spotted with constellations, was reflected in the water’s black mirror, and the boat floated between the two starry domes, along the exact middle of the world, rocked by gently splashing waves. In the morning, Yuzuf would attempt to paint from memory what he had seen at night but he never liked what came out.

Lukka had said, “The boat will be yours when I die, my boy.” He died in the spring. While the others were still in Lukka’s tiny, empty house on the night of their old comrade’s funeral meal, Yuzuf went to the shore, released the boat on the water, and led it beyond the far bend in the river, where he hid it in bushes under the cliff, tightly tied to the fat roots of a gigantic elm. He flooded the boat as Lukka had taught him, so it wouldn’t crack.

He needs the boat. He’s planning an escape.

Sometimes news items and even entire articles about prisoners’ escapes from jails and camps appear in newspapers on the agitational board. They all end the same, with the fugitives being captured and punished harshly.

Yuzuf knows he won’t be caught.

Of course it would be best to escape in the summer. Go down the Angara to the Yenisei, and then it’s a stone’s throw to Maklakovo. From there, hitchhike to Krasnoyarsk, go west by train, through the Urals and through Moscow, to Leningrad. Straight to University Embankment, to the long, severe building with columns the color of dusty ochre and two stern sphinxes of pink granite by the entrance, to the Academy of the Arts, the famous “Repinka,” Ikonnikov’s alma mater. As it happens, he’ll make it in time for entrance exams. He’s decided to bring a couple of his paintings with him (some of the ones Ilya Petrovich would have liked) and a folder of pencil sketches.

Yuzuf knows they’ll definitely admit him.

He could live at the institute, in any tiny room, even a caretaker’s quarters, even a storeroom, even a doghouse. He could earn his lodging as a caretaker. But he has something stored away, in case of emergency. In a hiding place carefully guarded from his mother’s gaze there lies a thick, snow-white sheet folded in quarters, where there are several brief lines written in Konstantin Arnoldovich’s floating calligraphic hand. Sumlinsky appeals to some “Olenka,” sending her distant greetings and requesting in the name of youth to shelter a young lad, bearer of the letter. Above is an address whose magical words take the breath away, beaming like an inviting lighthouse: “Fontanka River Embankment.” Unsigned. “She’ll understand,” Konstantin Arnoldovich had said when he handed Yuzuf the letter. That was a month before his death.

Yuzuf has no money for the trip. They’ve told him that if he’s lucky, he’ll be able to make it there by riding a month or a month and a half in freight cars.

Yuzuf knows he’ll be lucky.

He doesn’t have documents, either: all the birth certificates of the exiles’ children are kept in the safe at the commandant’s headquarters. Yuzuf will turn sixteen soon, but he won’t be issued a passport, since the majority of Semruk residents still live without them. They don’t need them. But this doesn’t matter. The main thing is to reach Leningrad, race off to the Neva, burst into the building under the approving gaze of the sphinxes’ slanting eyes, fly up the stairs to the admission committee’s room, and spread his work on the table: “Here I am, all of me: judge for yourself! Roi ou rien.” Who needs a passport?

He’s been thinking about escape for a long time. A couple of months before, something happened that served like a well-dampened lash, whipping up all his ideas and wishes, subordinating them to this one passion. Freedom.

That day, Mitrich, the old office worker who fulfilled a whole slew of various responsibilities in Semruk – secretary, clerk, and archivist, as well as mailman – called out to Yuzuf on the street.

“Letter for you,” he said, smiling with surprise and affection. He rummaged around for an unbearably long time in a large canvas drawstring bag for carrying newspapers, fished out a dirty white paper triangle soiled by fingers and finely frayed on the folds. “Let’s see, how long did this take from the front?” he said as his hands twirled the odd-looking letter, which was blotched with round postmarks. “A year, no less.”

He finally handed it over. He stood alongside Yuzuf, watching attentively instead of going away; his brows even tensed and bristled. Yuzuf had no desire to open it in front of him, though, so he thanked Mitrich and ran off into the taiga, to the cliff, far away from everybody. He thought his heart would leap out as he was running. The letter was on fire in his hands, burning his fingers.

He flew between the boulders and sat on a pink rock. He swallowed and opened his sweaty hands.

Krasnoyarsk Krai. Northern Yenisei Region. Labor Settlement Semruk on the Angara. Yuzuf Valiev.

Yuzuf unfolded the letter carefully so as not to tear it. There were no words in it but at the center of the sheet was the candle of the Eiffel Tower (pencil, ink) and in the corner was a small inscription: “Field of Mars, June 1945” (the censor had blotted out “Paris” in black but left “Field of Mars” and the date). Nothing else.

He somehow folded it back up, though his fingers had suddenly gone numb and unresponsive, and stuffed the letter inside his jacket. He sat for a long time, gazing at the leadenness of the Angara, which the brownish-gray taiga squeezed at the edges and the skillet-like sky flattened from above.

And that’s when he decided he’d definitely run away. He knows he’ll do it. And he would run away now, even today, but one thing holds him back: his mother. After leaving the hunting artel, she became somehow tired, broken, and aged quickly, irrevocably. She’s been completely lost, like a child, since the doctor left, and her huge eyes look at Yuzuf in fear. He can’t leave her like that. But he also can’t stay here any longer.

Ikonnikov’s letter is hidden in the same secret spot as Konstantin Arnoldovich’s. Sometimes it seems like his heart doesn’t beat in his chest but in there, in that cold, dark crevice where two letters from two close friends lie tightly pressed against one another.

Yuzuf doesn’t know what to do about his mother; she’s probably the only obstacle to leaving he can’t see a way round.

And so that’s that: things are packed, bundles are tied. Zuleikha and Yuzuf are moving into the dormitory in the morning and they’ll sleep apart tomorrow. Now, on this clear Sunday afternoon, she can finally sit and say goodbye to this quiet, empty building. Zuleikha walks around the house checking that she hasn’t forgotten anything. She peers behind a door, behind the stove, on shelves, benches, and windowsills.

One floorboard squeaks underfoot; it’s the far one, by the window. At one time, maybe a hundred years ago or maybe in her sleep, she and Murtaza had hidden food items from the Red Hordesmen under a board like this. Zuleikha steps on it again and the long, high-pitched squeak sounds like someone’s voice. She sits down, inserts her fingers in a crevice and pulls, smiling to herself as the wood gives, easily lifting a little. A black rectangle of darkness under the floorboard breathes of the cold, damp earth. She slips her hand in, gropes around, and pulls out a light little parcel wrapped in a rag. She unties the strings and folds back old fabric and pieces of birch bark. Inside are two sheets of paper that don’t look alike: one’s snow white, the other’s dirty yellow, and they’re stuck together because they’ve grown into one another, from lying here so long. Zuleikha unsticks and unfolds them. She can’t read the first message and doesn’t know what outlandish building is depicted on the second. She understands only that Yuzuf hid them and that it is his secret, something so huge he couldn’t share it with his mother, or that he was protecting her for a while from whatever they contained. She stares at beads of small letters with long tails that seem to twist in the wind and the tower’s thin skeleton, which vaguely reminds her of a minaret; the words and the drawing scream of something, of summoning somewhere.

She feels it shoving her in the chest: her son has decided to flee.

Zuleikha sits on the floor for a few more minutes, pressing the fist with the crumpled letters to her chest, then she stands and runs to the clubhouse. She doesn’t remember running; it seems like she’s flown in an instant, in one leap. She tears the door open. Yuzuf is inside, at an easel, as always.

“Mama, why are you barefoot?”

“You! You…” Gasping for breath, she hurls the balled-up letters at him as if they were cannonballs.

He bends, picks them up, slowly smoothes them on his chest, and puts them away in his pocket. He doesn’t look up and his face is hardened, white. Zuleikha understands this is how things really are, that her son has decided to flee. To leave her. Abandon her.

She shouts something, throws herself against the walls, and thrashes her arms around; canvas crackles under her fists, frames break, and something falls and rolls along the floor. She herself falls, too. She coils up, huddles, and twists like a snake, burrowing into herself, wailing at something inside her. Abandoned, abandoned… She understands she’s not wailing at herself but at Yuzuf, who’s attached to her from all sides. His body, his hands, and his distorted, wet face are around her. They’re lying on the floor in a ball, tightly interlocked.

“Where?” she whimpers into Yuzuf’s chest. “Where are you going? Alone, without documents… They’ll catch you…”

“They won’t catch me, Mama.”

“They’ll put you in jail…” She clings to him as if she were drowning.

“They won’t put me in jail.”

“What about me?”

Yuzuf keeps silent and embraces her so it hurts.

“I won’t survive.” Zuleikha tries to catch his gaze. “I’ll die without you, Yuzuf. I’ll die as soon as you take the first step.”

She feels his damp breath on her neck.

“I’ll die,” Zuleikha stubbornly repeats. “I’ll die, die, die!”

He mumbles, moves away from her, and detaches himself from her. He pushes away her grasping hands and scrambles out of her embrace.

“Yuzuf!” Zuleikha rushes after him.

Her outstretched fingers slide through the dark hair at the back of his head like a comb, down his neck, leaving red scratches, and catches at the collar of his shirt so that Yuzuf runs out of the clubhouse with it torn.

“You’re no son to me!” Zuleikha wails after him. “No son!”

Her eyes don’t see, her ears don’t hear.

Abandoned. Abandoned.

She stands and trudges away, reeling. The wind is in her face, carrying the mewling of seagulls and the sounds of the forest. Underfoot: soil, grass, rocks, and roots.

Abandoned. Abandoned.

The world is flowing, streaming, before her gaze. There are no forms or lines, only colors that float past. And then there’s a distinct figure, tall and dark, amidst the flow. A head proudly set on broad masculine shoulders, long arms almost to the knees, a dress beating in the wind. You’re here, too, you old witch.

Zuleikha wants to push her away. She raises her hand to do so but for some reason she falls on the Vampire Hag’s chest instead, embracing a powerful body that smells of either tree bark or fresh earth. She buries her face in something warm, solid, muscular, and alive, feeling strong hands on her spine, the back of her head, around her, everywhere. Tears rise in her throat, winding around her gullet like a rope, and Zuleikha cries long and sweet after burying herself in her mother-in-law’s bosom. The tears flow so generously and swiftly that it seems they’re not coming from her eyes but from somewhere at the bottom of her heart, urged on by its rapid and resilient beating. Minutes or maybe hours later, after purging herself of every tear she’s kept inside over the years, she calms and comes to her senses. Her breathing is still fast and her chest is still heaving convulsively, but a tired, long-awaited relief is already flowing through her body.

“Tell me, Mama,” she whispers, either to her mother-in-law’s bony shoulder or to the wrinkles at the base of her neck. She doesn’t force open her eyes or unclasp her arms; it’s as if she’s afraid to let go. “Those stories about you going out into the urman when you were young – I always wanted to ask, why did you do it?”

“That was a long time ago. I was a stupid girl… I was looking for death, for deliverance from unhappy love.” The old woman’s broad, firm bosom rises and falls in a long, powerful sigh. “I went into the urman but it wasn’t there, that death.”

Zuleikha backs away in surprise so she can look her mother-in-law in the eye. The old woman’s face is dark brown, with large, twisting wrinkles. And it’s not a face at all: it’s tree bark. Zuleikha has a gnarled old larch in her embrace. The tree trunk is bumpy and immense, with streaks of silvery pitch, roots like knots, and long sprawling branches that look upward, piercing the sky’s blueness; the first gleams of spring foliage tremble on its branches with a light emerald radiance. Zuleikha wipes away pieces of bark and needles that have stuck to her cheeks and trudges back to the settlement from the taiga.

Ignatov has known for a long time that he’ll be discharged. Kuznets has cooled greatly toward him since the 1942 incident with the plot that never happened. He rarely comes by, sending his fine fellows for inspections instead. He and Ignatov have never again sat for a bit. Kuznets himself is flying high, at colonel altitudes. He thinks it unnecessary to hide his hostility, so Ignatov’s personal case file has already been enriched with two official reprimands. A third means inevitable dismissal from his position.

Ignatov, who’s now a senior lieutenant, recently turned forty-six. (The promotion wasn’t the result of valiant service, just a planned restructuring within the hierarchy of the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, shifting the line of ranks.) He’s spent sixteen of those years in Semruk. He’s not old yet, but he’s already half-gray and limping. His face is sad and his disposition is gloomy. He’s lonely.

Gorelov’s excessively obnoxious appearance on the morning boat can mean only one thing: that Ignatov is being discharged. He couldn’t wait, the dog, and had rushed over before everybody else so he could delight in his own power and drink it down leisurely, savoring it. Ignatov’s discharge might even come today.

He takes his brown uniform jacket from the chair and starts swishing a brush over the thin wool. So, you bastards, I might as well be all dressed up to get fired. Ignatov has often worn civilian clothes in recent years so his uniform looks almost new and cleans easily and quickly. Jacket, breeches, peaked cap – everything is dandyish, bright and fresh, flaunting itself on a nail pounded right into the middle of the wall. Ignatov places his wax-polished boots underneath and the picture takes on an appearance of finality. It’s as if someone let the air out of Ignatov himself and hung him up for all to see: Here he is, our commandant, feast your eyes on him.

The scariest thing is that he doesn’t want to leave. How has he come to be so attached to this harsh and inhospitable land over the years? To this dangerous river, treacherous in its perpetual inconstancy and possessing thousands of shades of color and smell? To this boundless urman that flows beyond the horizon? To this cold sky that gives snow in the summer and sun in the winter? Damn it, even to these people, who are often unwelcoming, coarse, ugly, poorly dressed, missing home, and sometimes wretched, strange, and incomprehensible. Highly varied.

Ignatov has imagined going home: being jostled in a third-class railway car, watching as monotonous landscapes change through a dingy little window, and then, dazed from the long journey, stepping out on the Kazan platform and walking along deserted evening streets. But where to? Who will he go see? Mishka Bakiev is no longer in his life; the fleeting crushes of his youth – Ilona and Nastasya – married long ago; and his former subordinates – Prokopenko, Slavutsky, and the rest of the group – have forgotten him. Kazan is no longer in his life. But Semruk is.

Ignatov starts packing his things. What is there to pack, anyway? He’s wearing his set of civilian clothing. You can’t roll up the view out a window and put it in your suitcase. There’s nothing else to take since he has no household equipment, never acquired any. Or even a suitcase – he doesn’t have one of those, either. He’ll leave here empty-handed, just as he arrived. It’s the same in his soul: empty, as if everything has been extracted.

He decides to go through his papers so he has something to do with his hands. Mishka Bakiev was going through papers back then, too, as he prepared his exit. The time has now come for Ignatov to do the same. He opens the large, steel safe. All of Semruk is stored here, on five high, strong shelves in the deep, cool innards. There are children and adults, old-timers and brand-new residents, the living and the dead, their personal and work lives, hopes, crimes, unhappinesses, successes, punishments, births and deaths, illnesses, production targets, and performance figures. All of that is lying stamped and threaded together, neatly sorted, distributed into piles, folders, and boxes, carefully tied with string, pressed by paperclips, and smelling of absorbed iron and ink. Ignatov looks through the passports (they’ve been issued to several exiles but there was an order to store the documents at the commandant’s headquarters, as a precaution), children’s birth certificates (he himself has written them out, every last one), photographs, lists of new arrivals, statements, denunciations, recommendations, petitions, letters seized by the censor and not reaching the addressees, all now buried here for the foreseeable future in personal files…

People, people, people – hundreds of figures stand before him. He’s the one who greeted them here, on the edge of the earth. Sent them off into the taiga, exhausted them with excessive work quotas, squeezed the economic plan out of them with an iron hand, scoffed at, frightened, and handed them over for punishment. He built homes for them, fed them, scared up foodstuffs and medicines for them, and protected them from the authorities at the central office. He kept them afloat. As they did him.

Something dark and flat is lying in a corner on the lower shelf. Ignatov kneels, reaches in, and pulls it out. It’s the “Case” file. Once gray, it’s now brownish and covered in faded stamps. He opens it without rising from his knees. Thin sheets smelling of papery dust have been scribbled on with pencil and coal. Several names are boldly circled. There’s a crooked inscription in the corner of one page: “Yuzuf.” A couple of dark-reddish spruce needles are stuck to the sheets.

Someone knocks at the door. The thought belatedly flashes into his mind that, oh, he doesn’t have time to change his clothes. They’ve showed up fast. He hastily rises from his knees, flings the folder in the safe, and closes the door. He stands in the middle of the room, hands behind his back.

“Come in,” he says clearly.

The door opens. It’s Zuleikha.

She slowly walks into the house. She’s pale and thinner, and there’s a headscarf wound down to her eyebrows. She stops and her teary eyes, the lids puffy and reddened, look up at him, then down again. The sound of the wind and the nearly inaudible drone of spruce trees in the taiga rushes through the open window. They stand silently for a moment.

“Are you here for a specific reason?” he finally asks.

Zuleikha nods. Over time, her skin has become yellowish and waxen instead of white, and thin, fine wrinkles have settled on her cheeks in many places, but her eyelashes have remained just as thick.

“Let my son go, Ivan. He needs to leave.”

“Where?”

“He wants to go to school. In the city. This isn’t a life for him here, with us.”

Ignatov clenches his fingers in a fist behind his back.

“Without a passport? Even if he had one, there’d be a note in the tenth box all the same, so who would take him, the son of a kulak?”

She looks even smaller when she lowers her head more, as if she wants to scrutinize something below her, under her feet.

“Let him go, Ivan. I know you can. I’ve never asked you for anything.”

“Whereas I asked so much!” He turns around and walks off toward the window, positioning his face toward the breeze. “So much I lost count…”

The bed squeaks plaintively for a long time. Zuleikha has sat down on the edge, with her hands squeezed between her knees. Her head is lowered all the way to her chest and only the top is visible.

“Take what you asked for, Ivan. If you haven’t changed your mind.”

“That’s not what I wanted, Zuleikha.” Ignatov is looking at the Angara’s gray breadth, covered in fine frothy ripples. “It’s not like that.”

“Nor for me. But my son, it’s not his fault…”

A familiar brown rectangle emerges from the bend in the river. It’s Kuznets’s launch. How about that – he’s making the visit himself. So it’s definitely to discharge him.

“Go, Zuleikha,” says Ignatov, observing the boat’s rapid approach to the shore.

He buttons his jacket on his chest; he’s decided not to change into his uniform since it would infer too much honor. He combs his hand through his thinning hair. Zuleikha is no longer in the room when he turns around.

Kuznets understands everything as soon as he enters and sees the stern Ignatov by the window and his cleaned-up uniform on the nail.

“You were expecting me,” he says.

Kuznets isn’t wasting his words so he opens his map case, puts the document on the table, and sets a bottle of the white stuff next to it. It’s a flat bottle with a bright label, obviously trophy vodka. It’s as if Ignatov doesn’t see the bottle. He takes the document, though, and scans through it: Relieved of post occupied… stripped of title as someone who’s discredited himself during his time working in the administrative organs… become unworthy of said rank of senior lieutenant… transferred to the reserves for ineptitude…

“Where are the glasses here, anyway?” Kuznets is forcefully twisting the screw-top (they do know how to seal a bottle, those imperialists!) as his gaze roves the room.

Ignatov’s cold fingers fold the paper and pocket it.

“You’re driving me out of the commandant job, fine!” he says. “But from the administration as a whole? What for?”

Giving up on the glasses, Kuznets tosses the cap to the floor and holds the bottle out to Ignatov. Receiving no answer, he tilts it toward his own mouth: the liquid slides out as cleanly as a blade. After drinking up a good third of it, he grunts, mumbles, and shakes his balding head.

“We don’t need you, Vanya. Not here, not anywhere else.”

The son of a bitch.

Ignatov looks for an instant at Kuznets’s flushed and flaccid face, at his gray old-man’s mustache drooping over his lip, and the pudgy fold under his square chin that hangs over his collar tabs. Now, if only… using that same bottle to the skull, then his fist to the well-fed mug and the ample paunch… But there’s none of the usual cold malice in Ignatov’s heart, no rage, no desperation. He’s empty.

“I have nowhere to go from here, Zin.”

“Then stay,” Kuznets simply says. “There’s a ban on free workers but we’ll find something for you – work can be found in the forest. There are empty houses – settle in one, live there. You’ll find yourself a woman for your old age.”

“This means Gorelov’s taking my place?”

Kuznets swigs from the bottle again, running his hand from his throat, over his gullet, down his powerful chest to his belly, as if it’s accompanying the liquid. He exhales loudly and pungently, then nods:

“He’s a familiar person here, won’t let me down.”

“He’ll let them all rot the hell away.” Ignatov looks pensively out the window.

“He’ll improve standards of discipline!” Kuznets raises a fleshy finger and his shining eye looks askance. “He won’t touch you, don’t worry. I’ll keep track of that, for old time’s sake.” He pours the rest of the vodka into his mouth, places the bottle on the table with a thud, and stands, overturning the chair behind him. “All right, Ignatov, five minutes to pack. You’ll turn the commandant’s headquarters over to Gorelov.” And Kuznets walks to the door without saying goodbye.

Through the window, Ignatov can see Gorelov waiting by the front steps. Has he been eavesdropping, the dog? He catches Kuznets, who’s unwieldy from vodka, and leads him down along the path, solicitously holding him at his spreading waist.

Ignatov opens the safe and takes a birth certificate out of the packet: “Yuzuf Valiev. Year of birth: 1930.” He tosses it into the stove’s cold, black hole and strikes a match; a small, hot flame quickly overcomes the paper. After thinking for a second, he tosses in the old “Case” folder, too.

As the smoldering corners of the papers slowly rise and disappear into the orange flame with a crackle, he takes a blank birth certificate form, dips a pen in ink, and traces out: “Iosif Ignatov. Year of birth: 1930. Mother: Zuleikha Valieva, peasant. Father: Ivan Ignatov, Red Army man.”

He stamps the birth certificate and puts it in his pocket. He places the key to the commandant’s headquarters on the table. And leaves.

The immaculately clean uniform remains hanging on the nail and a sunbeam warms itself on the peaked cap’s scarlet band. Long-forgotten names writhe in the stove, blending, bonding, and burning into black cinders. They smolder, turn to light smoke, and float out the chimney pipe.

Zuleikha opens her eyes. The sun is beating down, blinding her and cutting her head to pieces. The vague outline of trees all around her are quivering in a sparkling dance of sunbeams.

“Are you feeling unwell?” Yuzuf is leaning toward her, looking at her face. “Do you not want me to go?”

Her son’s eyes are enormous and a thick green: they’re her eyes. Zuleikha’s own eyes are looking at her from her son’s face. She shakes her head and pulls him further into the forest.

At first she’d felt lost when Ignatov came, his face hardened as if he were all frozen, to bring Yuzuf’s birth certificate, which was still crisp and smelling sharply of new paper and fresh ink.

“He should leave as soon as possible,” he said. “Right away. Now.”

Zuleikha bustled around, rushing to gather things, some sort of food.

“There’s no time.” Ignatov placed a hand on her shoulder. “He should go as he is, empty-handed.”

In the right breast pocket of a jacket with mismatched buttons and worn to weightlessness, Yuzuf placed the two letters from the hiding place; in the left pocket was the new birth certificate and a fat packet of wrinkled banknotes of various colors, also from Ignatov. Zuleikha had never seen so much money in her life. And that was all Yuzuf took with him.

She didn’t even have a chance to say thank you to Ignatov, who left quickly, vanished. So she ran with her son into the taiga, to the cliff where Lukka’s old boat was hidden, down roundabout paths along back yards with neat, square garden beds; past the small clubhouse, thickly grown with moss and seeming to have contracted and settled with time; and past the broad swathes of kolkhoz fields already sprinkled with their first timid green shoots.

Nobody noticed them leave. Only the cracked yellow-brown skulls on the leaning poles watched them continuously; gazing through black eyeholes, they understand everything. One of the skulls – the largest, the bear – fell to the ground long ago, rolled off into the tall weeds, and burst in half. A little redheaded bird has woven a nest in it and is now looking around uneasily, sitting on the eggs she laid, her eyes following two people hurrying into the urman.

Yuzuf and Zuleikha have now been running for a long time. Old spruce trees extend their boughs, pricking at their shoulders, arms, and cheeks. The Chishme thunders, resounds, and roars under their feet. High grass at Round Clearing whips at their knees.

Zuleikha stops a moment for breath, inhales deeply, gasping for air. It catches in her nose and throat, and that hurts. Bushes, tree trunks, and treetops float past as she runs; bright greenery gleams like an emerald, blazing with flashes of sun and beating at the eyes, and that hurts. Evergreen needles slither treacherously underfoot and bristle with cones like sharp rocks; tree roots lie in knots, catching at their shoes; the clayey rise is steep and harsh, and climbing hurts. It hurts the legs, hurts the back, and it hurts in the chest, in the throat, in the belly, in the eyes. Everywhere.

“Just tell me and I’ll stay.” Yuzuf stops again and searches for her eyes.

She has no strength to look at him. Without raising her face, Zuleikha pushes her son further. Ahead, up.

Red-trunked pine trees burn with an unbearably bright, scorching color. Mossy boulders roll under the feet, trying hard to throw Zuleikha off. The fine teeth of thorns on a dry spreading bush tear at her dress. And here’s the height of the cliff where the Angara’s dark blueness is so blinding it pains the eyes horribly. And there’s the unprepossessing path, almost for wild animals, down to the river. That’s where Yuzuf is going.

“Mama.”

He’s standing in front of her, tall, ungainly, and guilty. She averts her gaze: Keep quiet, ulym, don’t make it more painful.

“Mama.”

Yuzuf extends his hands. He wants to embrace her in parting but she holds her hands out in front of her: Don’t come closer! He grasps her hands, pressing them in his own, and Zuleikha breaks away, pushing him back. Go, right away, as soon as possible, now. She clenches her teeth, holding the pain inside so it doesn’t spill over.

He looks at her helplessly, lost, then lowers his eyes and strides toward the bluff. He turns around at the edge; his mother is pressing her hands to her throat and has turned her face away. He exhales hard and descends the cliff down a winding trail of rustling stones between boulders, picking up his feet and flying. The sky withdraws as the Angara nears, opening in a broad, deep-blue embrace.

When he reaches the bushes at the river’s edge, Yuzuf stops, scans to find the thin figure at the top, and waves. His mother is standing motionless, like a stone pillar, like a tree, and her long braids are half-unplaited, beating in the wind. She hasn’t even looked at him.

He darts under green masses of plants by the water. He unties the boat, pushes it away with his foot, and the current catches him immediately, directing him forward. Yuzuf inserts the oars in the oarlocks and splashes icy water on his flushed face. He turns around, reaching his hand toward the distant cliff again, but still his mother isn’t moving; only the wind flutters the light cotton of her old dress.

Zuleikha can’t hold in the pain anymore so it spills out, flooding everything around her: the gleaming Angara water, the malachite shores and hills, the cliff top where she stands, and the firmament in a white froth of clouds. Seagull wings cut the air like blades and that hurts; the wind bends shaggy spruce tops and that hurts; Yuzuf’s oars rip open the river, carrying him beyond the horizon to the Yenisei and that hurts. Watching it hurts. Even breathing hurts. If she could close her eyes and not see anything, not feel, but…

And is it really Yuzuf there, in the middle of the Angara, in that tiny wooden shell? Zuleikha peers out, straining her sharp hunter’s vision. A boy is standing in the boat and desperately waving his arms at her – his dark hair is disheveled, his ears point in different directions, his tanned arms are thin and fragile, and his bare knees are covered in dark scratches; this is the seven-year-old Yuzuf leaving her, floating away, saying goodbye. She cries out, sharply raising her arms with her hands flung wide, “My son!” And she waves, waves with both hands, answering so strongly, broadly, and furiously that it’s as if she’s about to take flight. The boat recedes and shrinks, but her eyes see the boy all the better, clearer, and more distinctly. She waves until his pale face disappears beyond a huge hill. And much more after that. She waves for a long time.

Finally, she lowers her arms. She pulls hard, tightening the knot of her headscarf very firmly on her neck. She turns her back on the Angara and leaves the cliff.

Zuleikha will plod off, heeding neither the time nor the path, trying not to breathe, so she won’t increase the pain. At Round Clearing, she’ll notice a person – grayed, limping, with a stick – walking toward her. She and Ignatov will catch sight of one another and stop, he on one edge of the clearing, she on the other.

He will suddenly realize how much he’s aged. Eyes that have lost their sharp sight will not be able to discern the wrinkles on Zuleikha’s face or the gray in her hair. And she will sense that while the pain that fills the world hasn’t gone, it has allowed her to breathe.