“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.”