Zuleikha turns around. The large hole in the window looms like a black star with many points, and slow, shaggy snowflakes float into the room. Small pieces of glass are still dropping off, jangling gently as they land.
Murtaza is sitting on the floor, his mouth stuffed. Between his spread legs is a stone wrapped in thick white paper. Murtaza unwraps it and continues to chew, stunned. It’s a poster: a gigantic black tractor’s large treads are crushing horrid little people who are scattering in every direction like cockroaches. One of them looks a lot like Murtaza; he’s standing, frightened, and aiming a crooked wooden pitchfork at the tractor’s steel bulk. Heavy, square letters are falling from above: “We’ll destroy the kulak as a class!” Zuleikha can’t read, especially in Russian. She understands, though, that the black tractor is about to run over the tiny Murtaza and his ridiculous pitchfork.
Murtaza spits a scrap of sausage on the sleeping bench. He wipes his hands and mouth thoroughly with the crumpled poster and flings it into the stove. The tractor and the horrid little people writhe in tongues of orange flame, turning to ash in an instant, then Murtaza grabs the axe and dashes out.
Almighty, all is at Your will! Zuleikha leans toward the window – it’s webbed in long cracks. Murtaza bursts outside with his tunic open at the chest and his head uncovered. He looks around, using his axe to threaten a blizzard that’s running wild. There’s nobody there – glory be to Allah – otherwise Murtaza might have hacked them down, brought sin upon his soul.
Zuleikha perches on the sleeping bench and positions her flushed face toward gusts of wind from the broken window. This is no doubt the dirty work of Mansurka-Burdock and his lowlifes from the Party cell. They’ve walked from household to household more than once, agitating people to join the collective farm and arguing with them. They’ve covered Yulbash with posters. They had not yet dared break windows. But now things had come to that. It’s obvious they know something’s afoot. May a devil take them. They’ll have to go to the next village for new glass. Such expenses. And the house will cool down overnight…
Murtaza still isn’t back. May he not catch cold. Out in a blizzard without his sheepskin coat – it really is as if a demon has possessed him…
Zuleikha leaps up suddenly. She runs headlong from the house into the hallway. She throws open the door.
Murtaza and Kyubelek are standing in the middle of the yard, forehead-to-forehead. Murtaza is tenderly stroking the cow’s furry face, which is trustingly nestled against his own. Then he takes the axe from behind his back and slams its butt between Kyubelek’s large, moist eyes framed with long lashes. The cow collapses to the ground with a quiet, deep sigh, and a thick snowy cloud rises around her.
Zuleikha screams loudly and races down the front steps toward Murtaza. He jabs his fist in her direction without looking. She falls on her back and the steps hit her in the ribs.
The axe whistles. Something hot spatters Zuleikha’s face. Blood. Murtaza is working quickly and powerfully with the axe, not stopping. The blade enters the warm flesh with an even groan. Air hisses as it leaves Kyubelek’s lungs. Blood gushes out of the vessels with a rumbling gurgle. Solid pink steam cloaks the motionless beef carcass, which Murtaza is quickly breaking into pieces.
“There’s your requisitions in 1916!” Murtaza chops through the bones as easily as if they were branches. “The food armies in 1918! 1919! 1920! There’s your taking grain for resale! There’s your food tax! There’s your grain surplus! Take! That! If! You! Can!”
Sandugach is rearing by the door to the cowshed, neighing harrowingly, beating the air with her heavy hooves, and showing the whites of her crazed eyes. The foal is darting around under his mother’s legs.
Murtaza turns toward the horse. His tunic is red and his chest is steaming heavily in its wide-open collar; the axe in his hand is black with blood. Zuleikha rises up a little on her elbows, pain searing from her ribs. Murtaza steps over the cow’s muzzle, its teeth bared and sharp, its inky-blue tongue hanging out, and heads toward Sandugach.
“Plow? How are we going to plow?” Zuleikha throws herself on Murtaza’s back. “It’ll be spring soon! We’ll die of hunger!”
He tries to shake her off, swinging his arms; the axe he clutches in his right hand whistles. Zuleikha sinks her teeth into her husband’s shoulder. He cries out and flings her off, over his shoulder. She flies, the earth and sky changing places again and again. Then something large and hard, with prominent sharp corners, is pushing at her back – is it the front steps? She rolls onto her stomach, half-slides, half-scrambles up the icy steps, and scampers into the house. Her husband stomps after her. Doors slam sharply, like a shepherd’s whip, hitting once, twice.
Zuleikha runs through the room. Broken window glass clinks under her feet and she leaps on the sleeping bench, squeezes herself into the corner, and covers herself with a pillow. Murtaza is already beside her. Sweat drips from his beard and his eyes bulge. His arm swings. The axe cuts through the pillowcase and pillow cover in an explosion of white feathers. The feathers fill the room, hanging in the air like a cloud.
Murtaza lets out an extended whoop and tosses the axe to the side, away from Zuleikha. The blade flashes through the air and plunges into the carved window frame.
Feathers fall from above in a slow, warm blizzard. Breathing heavily, Murtaza wipes off something white that’s stuck to his bald skull. Without looking at Zuleikha, he pulls the axe out of the window frame and walks out. Glass crunches loudly under his heavy steps, like ice-crusted February snow.
Snowflakes float into the house through the broken window, blending with the floating down. The white swirl inside the house is elegant and festive. Carefully, trying not to cut herself, Zuleikha plugs the hole in the window with the chopped pillow. She sees the scrap of kyzylyk on the sleeping bench and eats it. It’s delicious. Praise be to Allah. Who knows when she’ll be able to eat kyzylyk again? She licks her fatty, salty fingers. She goes outside.
All the snow by the front steps is the color of juicy wild strawberries mashed with sugar.
Murtaza is chopping meat in a distant corner, on the wooden block by the bathhouse. She can’t see Sandugach and the foal.
Zuleikha goes into the cowshed. And there they both are, in their pen. Sandugach is licking her foal with her long, rough tongue. They’re alive! Glory be to Allah. Zuleikha strokes the horse’s warm, velvety muzzle and scratches the foal on its ticklish withers.
And in the yard, thousands of snowy flakes settle on the red snow, covering it and turning it white once more.
AN ENCOUNTER
Murtaza’s secret storage place is in a secure spot. Everything he has thought up and built with his own hands is good and sound enough to last for two lives.
Today they rise before dawn. They eat a cold breakfast and leave a yard still lit by a translucent moon and the last pre-dawn stars. They reach the place before daybreak. The sky has already turned from black to bright blue; trees covered in white are filled with light and touched by a diamond brilliance.
There’s a morning quiet in the forest and the crisp snow crunches especially loudly under Murtaza’s felt boots, like the fresh cabbage Zuleikha chops with a hatchet in a wooden vat. Husband and wife make their way through deep, dense snowdrifts higher than their knees. They’re carrying precious cargo on two wooden spades, like stretchers: sacks of grain for planting, carefully wound with rope to the spade shafts. They carry it cautiously, protecting it from sharp branches and rotten stumps. Zuleikha will be in trouble if the burlap tears. In his exhaustion from waiting for the Red Horde, Murtaza has become a complete madman – he would hack her to death, like Kyubelek yesterday, without blinking an eye.