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 toweclass="underline" 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.