He takes his brown uniform jacket from the chair and starts swishing a brush over the thin wool. So, you bastards, I might as well be all dressed up to get fired. Ignatov has often worn civilian clothes in recent years so his uniform looks almost new and cleans easily and quickly. Jacket, breeches, peaked cap – everything is dandyish, bright and fresh, flaunting itself on a nail pounded right into the middle of the wall. Ignatov places his wax-polished boots underneath and the picture takes on an appearance of finality. It’s as if someone let the air out of Ignatov himself and hung him up for all to see: Here he is, our commandant, feast your eyes on him.
The scariest thing is that he doesn’t want to leave. How has he come to be so attached to this harsh and inhospitable land over the years? To this dangerous river, treacherous in its perpetual inconstancy and possessing thousands of shades of color and smell? To this boundless urman that flows beyond the horizon? To this cold sky that gives snow in the summer and sun in the winter? Damn it, even to these people, who are often unwelcoming, coarse, ugly, poorly dressed, missing home, and sometimes wretched, strange, and incomprehensible. Highly varied.
Ignatov has imagined going home: being jostled in a third-class railway car, watching as monotonous landscapes change through a dingy little window, and then, dazed from the long journey, stepping out on the Kazan platform and walking along deserted evening streets. But where to? Who will he go see? Mishka Bakiev is no longer in his life; the fleeting crushes of his youth – Ilona and Nastasya – married long ago; and his former subordinates – Prokopenko, Slavutsky, and the rest of the group – have forgotten him. Kazan is no longer in his life. But Semruk is.
Ignatov starts packing his things. What is there to pack, anyway? He’s wearing his set of civilian clothing. You can’t roll up the view out a window and put it in your suitcase. There’s nothing else to take since he has no household equipment, never acquired any. Or even a suitcase – he doesn’t have one of those, either. He’ll leave here empty-handed, just as he arrived. It’s the same in his souclass="underline" empty, as if everything has been extracted.
He decides to go through his papers so he has something to do with his hands. Mishka Bakiev was going through papers back then, too, as he prepared his exit. The time has now come for Ignatov to do the same. He opens the large, steel safe. All of Semruk is stored here, on five high, strong shelves in the deep, cool innards. There are children and adults, old-timers and brand-new residents, the living and the dead, their personal and work lives, hopes, crimes, unhappinesses, successes, punishments, births and deaths, illnesses, production targets, and performance figures. All of that is lying stamped and threaded together, neatly sorted, distributed into piles, folders, and boxes, carefully tied with string, pressed by paperclips, and smelling of absorbed iron and ink. Ignatov looks through the passports (they’ve been issued to several exiles but there was an order to store the documents at the commandant’s headquarters, as a precaution), children’s birth certificates (he himself has written them out, every last one), photographs, lists of new arrivals, statements, denunciations, recommendations, petitions, letters seized by the censor and not reaching the addressees, all now buried here for the foreseeable future in personal files…
People, people, people – hundreds of figures stand before him. He’s the one who greeted them here, on the edge of the earth. Sent them off into the taiga, exhausted them with excessive work quotas, squeezed the economic plan out of them with an iron hand, scoffed at, frightened, and handed them over for punishment. He built homes for them, fed them, scared up foodstuffs and medicines for them, and protected them from the authorities at the central office. He kept them afloat. As they did him.
Something dark and flat is lying in a corner on the lower shelf. Ignatov kneels, reaches in, and pulls it out. It’s the “Case” file. Once gray, it’s now brownish and covered in faded stamps. He opens it without rising from his knees. Thin sheets smelling of papery dust have been scribbled on with pencil and coal. Several names are boldly circled. There’s a crooked inscription in the corner of one page: “Yuzuf.” A couple of dark-reddish spruce needles are stuck to the sheets.
Someone knocks at the door. The thought belatedly flashes into his mind that, oh, he doesn’t have time to change his clothes. They’ve showed up fast. He hastily rises from his knees, flings the folder in the safe, and closes the door. He stands in the middle of the room, hands behind his back.
“Come in,” he says clearly.
The door opens. It’s Zuleikha.
She slowly walks into the house. She’s pale and thinner, and there’s a headscarf wound down to her eyebrows. She stops and her teary eyes, the lids puffy and reddened, look up at him, then down again. The sound of the wind and the nearly inaudible drone of spruce trees in the taiga rushes through the open window. They stand silently for a moment.
“Are you here for a specific reason?” he finally asks.
Zuleikha nods. Over time, her skin has become yellowish and waxen instead of white, and thin, fine wrinkles have settled on her cheeks in many places, but her eyelashes have remained just as thick.
“Let my son go, Ivan. He needs to leave.”
“Where?”
“He wants to go to school. In the city. This isn’t a life for him here, with us.”
Ignatov clenches his fingers in a fist behind his back.
“Without a passport? Even if he had one, there’d be a note in the tenth box all the same, so who would take him, the son of a kulak?”
She looks even smaller when she lowers her head more, as if she wants to scrutinize something below her, under her feet.
“Let him go, Ivan. I know you can. I’ve never asked you for anything.”
“Whereas I asked so much!” He turns around and walks off toward the window, positioning his face toward the breeze. “So much I lost count…”
The bed squeaks plaintively for a long time. Zuleikha has sat down on the edge, with her hands squeezed between her knees. Her head is lowered all the way to her chest and only the top is visible.
“Take what you asked for, Ivan. If you haven’t changed your mind.”
“That’s not what I wanted, Zuleikha.” Ignatov is looking at the Angara’s gray breadth, covered in fine frothy ripples. “It’s not like that.”
“Nor for me. But my son, it’s not his fault…”
A familiar brown rectangle emerges from the bend in the river. It’s Kuznets’s launch. How about that – he’s making the visit himself. So it’s definitely to discharge him.
“Go, Zuleikha,” says Ignatov, observing the boat’s rapid approach to the shore.
He buttons his jacket on his chest; he’s decided not to change into his uniform since it would infer too much honor. He combs his hand through his thinning hair. Zuleikha is no longer in the room when he turns around.
Kuznets understands everything as soon as he enters and sees the stern Ignatov by the window and his cleaned-up uniform on the nail.
“You were expecting me,” he says.
Kuznets isn’t wasting his words so he opens his map case, puts the document on the table, and sets a bottle of the white stuff next to it. It’s a flat bottle with a bright label, obviously trophy vodka. It’s as if Ignatov doesn’t see the bottle. He takes the document, though, and scans through it: Relieved of post occupied… stripped of title as someone who’s discredited himself during his time working in the administrative organs… become unworthy of said rank of senior lieutenant… transferred to the reserves for ineptitude…