Nuts are next. Hard little hazelnut balls roll and knock inside their shells like a thousand wooden rattles as she lugs the long, narrow sacks from the storehouse into the winter shed and places them in the bottom of the manger then sprinkles them with hay. The cow and horse watch the fuss around their feeders with indifference. The foal peers out from under Sandugach’s belly, squinting curiously at his mistress.
Zuleikha places the salt, peas, and carrot flour from the cellar on a wide shelf under the outhouse roof and covers it with boards.
She brings honey in large wooden frames wrapped with thin, sugared rags up to the attic. It is there, under some boards, that she also hides the salted goose and heaps of pastila stiffened from the hard frost.
The last thing left to hide is five dozen large eggs, shining with gentle whiteness in the depths of a birch bark container, where they’re lying in soft straw.
Maybe they won’t come after all?
These were wicked guests who made themselves at home in any household, not asking permission to seize the owner’s last food supplies or painstakingly selected seed grain that had been carefully stored for next spring’s planting and was thus even more valuable. And they were also ready to strike, jab with a bayonet, or shoot anyone standing in their way, without a second’s hesitation.
In her fourteen uneasy years of hiding from these uninvited guests in the house’s women’s quarters, Zuleikha has observed many faces through the curtain’s folds: unshaven and groomed, blackened from the sun and aristocratically pale, with iron-toothed smiles and strict, prim expressions, briskly speaking in Tatar, Russian, and Ukrainian, or keeping sullenly silent about the dreadful truths that were inscribed, in even square letters, on thin sheets of paper worn at the creases that they kept trying to stick under Murtaza’s nose.
Those faces had many names, each more incomprehensible and frightening than the next: grain monopoly, food confiscation, requisition, tax on foodstuffs, Bolsheviks, food appropriation detachments, Red Army, Soviet power, regional secret police, Komsomol, State Political Administration, communists, authorized this and that…
Mostly long Russian words with meanings Zuleikha didn’t understand… so to herself she called those people the Red Horde. Her father had told her a lot about the Golden Horde, whose harsh, narrow-eyed emissaries collected tribute for several centuries in this part of the world and took it to their merciless leader Genghis Khan, his children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren. The Red Hordesmen collected tribute, too, but Zuleikha didn’t know who received it.
At first they collected only grain. Then potatoes and meat. And during the Great Famine, in 1921, they began making a clean sweep of everything edible. Poultry. Cattle. And everything they could find in the house. It was back then that Zuleikha learned to divide the grain between several sacks.
They hadn’t made an appearance in a long time now; Yulbash had calmed. During that period that had the peculiar name “New Economic Policy,” peasants were allowed to cultivate the land without worry and were even permitted to hire wage laborers. After listing so scarily, it seemed that life was leveling out again. Then last year Soviet power unexpectedly took on an appearance that was familiar to all the villagers and so wasn’t frightening: former wage laborer Mansur Shigabutdinov became the head of the rural council. He wasn’t born locally – he dragged his aging mother and the bachelor living with her after him, from the next canton, long ago. Malicious gossips joke that he hasn’t ever in his life had the honor of saving up bride-money for a good fiancée. They call him Mansurka-Burdock behind his back. Mansurka persuaded several people to join his own Party cell and meets with them in the evenings to discuss things. He organizes gatherings and enthusiastically summons villagers into an association with the scarily named kolkhoz, but hardly anyone listens to him on that collective farm: only those as needy as he is go to the gatherings.
But now it has happened again, the signaling knock at night, like the nervous beating of an unhealthy heart. Zuleikha looks out the window. Lights are burning in the neighboring houses, so Yulbash isn’t sleeping; it’s preparing for the arrival of uninvited guests.
So where should she hide those eggs? They’ll crack in the cold, so she can’t put them in the attic, the hallway, or the bathhouse. They need to be concealed in warmth. They can’t go in the men’s quarters because the Red Hordesmen will turn everything upside down there; that had already happened more than once. In the women’s quarters? Those tyrants won’t be shy; they’ll search everything there, too. Maybe with the Vampire Hag? The unbidden guests had often faltered under the old woman’s stern, unseeing gaze, so searches in her mother-in-law’s house were usually short and rushed.
Zuleikha carefully grasps the bulky birch container and darts out to the hallway. There’s no time to mill around by the door asking permission to enter so she opens it and glances in. The Vampire Hag is sleeping, snoring loudly, her cleft chin directed at the ceiling, where light is cast in blossoms of whimsical flowers: the kerosene lamps are burning in case Murtaza gets the urge to look in on his mother this evening. Zuleikha steps over a fat log at the threshold and scampers into the area behind the stove.
And what a nice stove it is! It’s as huge as a house, covered in smooth, almost glassy, decorative tiles (even on the women’s side) with two deep kettles that are never used: one’s for preparing food, the other’s for boiling water. If only Zuleikha had kettles like this. She’s been struggling along her whole life with just one. She places the container on a ledge and removes the lid from a kettle. Now she’ll pile the eggs inside, sprinkle them with straw, and bolt back to her own house. Nobody will even notice…
The door opens with a squeak as Zuleikha piles on the last egg. Someone’s stepping heavily over the threshold; the floor-boards groan from the strain. Murtaza! Her hand cramps from the unexpectedness, the shell crunches very quietly, and the cold, slippery liquid slowly oozes through her fingers. Her heart turns into the same kind of thick goo as the egg that burst in her hand and it’s flowing along her ribs, to somewhere below, toward the chill in her belly.
Should she leave now? And admit she intruded into her mother-in-law’s quarters without permission? Confess to the broken egg?
“Eni.” She can hear Murtaza’s low voice.
The old woman’s snore is stifled and stops right away. The bedsprings make an extended moan – the Vampire Hag is raising her large body as if she’s heard her son’s call.
“My darling,” she says quietly, in a hoarse, half-awake voice. “Is that you?”
Hanging in the long silence are the sounds of the old woman’s body cumbersomely settling and Murtaza’s heavy sigh.
Without breathing, Zuleikha carefully uses the rim of the kettle to wipe the slippery egg from her hand. Hugging the stove and pausing after every movement, she takes several soundless steps to the side, leaning her cheek against the warm tiles and pulling back the folds of the curtain with her index finger. Now she sees them, mother and son, through the gap in the curtain. The Vampire Hag is sitting very straight on the bed as always, with her feet on the floor, but Murtaza is kneeling and his gleaming head is pressed into his mother’s belly, arms firmly clasping her large body. Zuleikha has never seen Murtaza genuflecting. He would not forgive her if she were to come out now.