“Where are the glasses here, anyway?” Kuznets is forcefully twisting the screw-top (they do know how to seal a bottle, those imperialists!) as his gaze roves the room.
Ignatov’s cold fingers fold the paper and pocket it.
“You’re driving me out of the commandant job, fine!” he says. “But from the administration as a whole? What for?”
Giving up on the glasses, Kuznets tosses the cap to the floor and holds the bottle out to Ignatov. Receiving no answer, he tilts it toward his own mouth: the liquid slides out as cleanly as a blade. After drinking up a good third of it, he grunts, mumbles, and shakes his balding head.
“We don’t need you, Vanya. Not here, not anywhere else.”
The son of a bitch.
Ignatov looks for an instant at Kuznets’s flushed and flaccid face, at his gray old-man’s mustache drooping over his lip, and the pudgy fold under his square chin that hangs over his collar tabs. Now, if only… using that same bottle to the skull, then his fist to the well-fed mug and the ample paunch… But there’s none of the usual cold malice in Ignatov’s heart, no rage, no desperation. He’s empty.
“I have nowhere to go from here, Zin.”
“Then stay,” Kuznets simply says. “There’s a ban on free workers but we’ll find something for you – work can be found in the forest. There are empty houses – settle in one, live there. You’ll find yourself a woman for your old age.”
“This means Gorelov’s taking my place?”
Kuznets swigs from the bottle again, running his hand from his throat, over his gullet, down his powerful chest to his belly, as if it’s accompanying the liquid. He exhales loudly and pungently, then nods:
“He’s a familiar person here, won’t let me down.”
“He’ll let them all rot the hell away.” Ignatov looks pensively out the window.
“He’ll improve standards of discipline!” Kuznets raises a fleshy finger and his shining eye looks askance. “He won’t touch you, don’t worry. I’ll keep track of that, for old time’s sake.” He pours the rest of the vodka into his mouth, places the bottle on the table with a thud, and stands, overturning the chair behind him. “All right, Ignatov, five minutes to pack. You’ll turn the commandant’s headquarters over to Gorelov.” And Kuznets walks to the door without saying goodbye.
Through the window, Ignatov can see Gorelov waiting by the front steps. Has he been eavesdropping, the dog? He catches Kuznets, who’s unwieldy from vodka, and leads him down along the path, solicitously holding him at his spreading waist.
Ignatov opens the safe and takes a birth certificate out of the packet: “Yuzuf Valiev. Year of birth: 1930.” He tosses it into the stove’s cold, black hole and strikes a match; a small, hot flame quickly overcomes the paper. After thinking for a second, he tosses in the old “Case” folder, too.
As the smoldering corners of the papers slowly rise and disappear into the orange flame with a crackle, he takes a blank birth certificate form, dips a pen in ink, and traces out: “Iosif Ignatov. Year of birth: 1930. Mother: Zuleikha Valieva, peasant. Father: Ivan Ignatov, Red Army man.”
He stamps the birth certificate and puts it in his pocket. He places the key to the commandant’s headquarters on the table. And leaves.
The immaculately clean uniform remains hanging on the nail and a sunbeam warms itself on the peaked cap’s scarlet band. Long-forgotten names writhe in the stove, blending, bonding, and burning into black cinders. They smolder, turn to light smoke, and float out the chimney pipe.
Zuleikha opens her eyes. The sun is beating down, blinding her and cutting her head to pieces. The vague outline of trees all around her are quivering in a sparkling dance of sunbeams.
“Are you feeling unwell?” Yuzuf is leaning toward her, looking at her face. “Do you not want me to go?”
Her son’s eyes are enormous and a thick green: they’re her eyes. Zuleikha’s own eyes are looking at her from her son’s face. She shakes her head and pulls him further into the forest.
At first she’d felt lost when Ignatov came, his face hardened as if he were all frozen, to bring Yuzuf’s birth certificate, which was still crisp and smelling sharply of new paper and fresh ink.
“He should leave as soon as possible,” he said. “Right away. Now.”
Zuleikha bustled around, rushing to gather things, some sort of food.
“There’s no time.” Ignatov placed a hand on her shoulder. “He should go as he is, empty-handed.”
In the right breast pocket of a jacket with mismatched buttons and worn to weightlessness, Yuzuf placed the two letters from the hiding place; in the left pocket was the new birth certificate and a fat packet of wrinkled banknotes of various colors, also from Ignatov. Zuleikha had never seen so much money in her life. And that was all Yuzuf took with him.
She didn’t even have a chance to say thank you to Ignatov, who left quickly, vanished. So she ran with her son into the taiga, to the cliff where Lukka’s old boat was hidden, down roundabout paths along back yards with neat, square garden beds; past the small clubhouse, thickly grown with moss and seeming to have contracted and settled with time; and past the broad swathes of kolkhoz fields already sprinkled with their first timid green shoots.
Nobody noticed them leave. Only the cracked yellow-brown skulls on the leaning poles watched them continuously; gazing through black eyeholes, they understand everything. One of the skulls – the largest, the bear – fell to the ground long ago, rolled off into the tall weeds, and burst in half. A little redheaded bird has woven a nest in it and is now looking around uneasily, sitting on the eggs she laid, her eyes following two people hurrying into the urman.
Yuzuf and Zuleikha have now been running for a long time. Old spruce trees extend their boughs, pricking at their shoulders, arms, and cheeks. The Chishme thunders, resounds, and roars under their feet. High grass at Round Clearing whips at their knees.
Zuleikha stops a moment for breath, inhales deeply, gasping for air. It catches in her nose and throat, and that hurts. Bushes, tree trunks, and treetops float past as she runs; bright greenery gleams like an emerald, blazing with flashes of sun and beating at the eyes, and that hurts. Evergreen needles slither treacherously underfoot and bristle with cones like sharp rocks; tree roots lie in knots, catching at their shoes; the clayey rise is steep and harsh, and climbing hurts. It hurts the legs, hurts the back, and it hurts in the chest, in the throat, in the belly, in the eyes. Everywhere.
“Just tell me and I’ll stay.” Yuzuf stops again and searches for her eyes.
She has no strength to look at him. Without raising her face, Zuleikha pushes her son further. Ahead, up.
Red-trunked pine trees burn with an unbearably bright, scorching color. Mossy boulders roll under the feet, trying hard to throw Zuleikha off. The fine teeth of thorns on a dry spreading bush tear at her dress. And here’s the height of the cliff where the Angara’s dark blueness is so blinding it pains the eyes horribly. And there’s the unprepossessing path, almost for wild animals, down to the river. That’s where Yuzuf is going.
“Mama.”
He’s standing in front of her, tall, ungainly, and guilty. She averts her gaze: Keep quiet, ulym, don’t make it more painful.
“Mama.”
Yuzuf extends his hands. He wants to embrace her in parting but she holds her hands out in front of her: Don’t come closer! He grasps her hands, pressing them in his own, and Zuleikha breaks away, pushing him back. Go, right away, as soon as possible, now. She clenches her teeth, holding the pain inside so it doesn’t spill over.