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.