“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 awclass="underline" “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.