“Zuleikha, we came to see your husband…”
An ornate little frozen cloud blossoms by Mansurka’s mouth. He speaks Russian with a heavy accent but briskly, coherently. Better than Zuleikha. Mansurka’s become adept at chatting with the Red Hordesmen.
“Get up, we need to talk.”
Zuleikha doesn’t know if this is real or a dream. If it’s a dream, why does the light hurt her eyes so much? If it’s real, why are the sounds and smells carrying from so far away, as if from the basement?
“Zuleikha!” Mansurka is shaking her by the shoulder, first lightly, then harder. “Get up, woman!” he shouts loudly and angrily, finally in Tatar.
Her body responds to the familiar words like a horse to a slap of the reins. Zuleikha slowly lowers her feet to the floor and sits up on the sleeping bench.
“There you go.” Mansurka switches back to Russian, satisfied. “Ready, comrade representative!”
Ignatov is standing in the center of the house, his hands tucked into his belt and boots placed far apart. Without glancing at Zuleikha, he takes a wrinkled sheet of paper and a pencil from his rigid leather map case. He looks around, annoyed.
“What is this anyway? How many houses have I seen without a table or bench? How am I supposed to write a report?”
The chairman hurriedly thuds his palm on the lid of the top trunk by the window:
“You can do it here.”
Ignatov somehow settles in on the trunk; the linen kaplau wrinkles up under his large body and slips to the floor. He breathes on his hands to warm them, licks the pencil’s point, and scratches it along the paper.
“They haven’t yet cultivated socialist life,” Mansurka mutters in an apologetic tone, holding on to the trunks, which are attempting to slide in various directions. “Heathens, what can you expect from them?”
There’s a sudden crash of smashing pots and the ringing of copper basins falling in the women’s quarters. The hens are clucking in a frenzy. Someone’s tangled in the folds of the curtain, swearing loudly and colorfully. The soldier with the gold tooth springs out from behind the curtains in a cloud of feathers and down. He has one hen under each arm, loudly squawking in alarm.
“Well, how about that! Green Eyes!” he says joyfully when he sees Zuleikha. “May I?” Without stopping or releasing the fluttering chickens from his armpits, he neatly pulls the lacy web of kaplau out from under Ignatov’s feet with a magician’s quick motion. “I’ll take these trunks a little later.” He finally backs toward the door under Ignatov’s angry gaze and disappears, leaving a swirl of feathers behind him.
Ignatov finishes writing and places the pencil on the completed report with a thud:
“She can sign it.”
The sheet of paper on the trunk is white, like a folded, embroidered towel.
“What is this?” Zuleikha slowly shifts her gaze to Mansurka. “What’s it for?”
“How many times have I said that you have to call me comrade chairman! Is that clear?” Mansurka menacingly raises his chin, which shows through his reddish beard. “You teach them a new life, but they just don’t… Look, we’re evicting you.” He glances around, dissatisfied, at the bed where Murtaza’s powerful body lies, dark. “Just you. As a kulak element of the first category. Active counterrevolutionary. The Party meeting ratified it.” Mansurka’s short finger pokes at the paper on the trunk. “And we’re requisitioning your property to use for the rural council.”
“Don’t confuse me with newfangled words. Just tell me, comrade Mansurka, what’s going on?”
“That’s for you to tell me! Why isn’t your Murtaza’s property collectivized yet? Are you going against state power, as individual peasant farmers? I’ve tried convincing you so much my tongue’s going to fall out. Why isn’t your cow at the collective farm?”
“There is no cow.”
“What about the horse?” Mansurka nods at the window: Sandugach is outside, still harnessed and standing in the yard with the foal circling her legs. “Two horses.”
“But they’re ours.”
“Ours,” he mimics her. “And the flour mill?”
“How can you have a household without one? Remember how many times you yourself borrowed ours?”
“That’s just the thing.” His already-narrow eyes squint. “Leasing equipment used for labor. A sure sign of the dyed-in-the-wool, deep-rooted, irredeemable kulak!” He squeezes his small hand into a mean, wiry fist.
“Pardon me, excuse me…” says the soldier with the gold tooth, who’s returned and is now pulling a stack of pillows in embroidered cases out from under Murtaza’s head, which thuds against the bench. He strips curtains from the windows and embroidered towels from the walls and carries a huge heap of linens, pillows, and quilts out of the house in his outstretched arms. Unable to see anything in front of him, he kicks open the creaking front door.
“Careful, Prokopenko, you’re not in your own house!” Mansurka snaps after him. He tenderly strokes the wall of bulging logs and the carved patterns on the window frame, where he fingers the deep notch from the axe and clicks his tongue in distress. “Sign it, Zuleikha; don’t drag it out,” he sighs amiably and sincerely, unable to tear his loving gaze from the smooth, fat logs generously caulked with stringy, high-quality oakum.
Prokopenko’s head pokes through the doorway again, his eyes gleaming with excitement:
“Comrade Ignatov, the cow, there’s… only the meat’s left. Should we take it?”
“Add it to the inventory,” Ignatov says gloomily and rises from the trunk. “Are we going to be here a long time working on political education?”
“What’s with you, Zuleikha?” Mansurka arches his thin eyebrows reproachfully toward the bridge of his nose. “These comrades came all the way from Kazan to get you. And you’re delaying them.”
“I won’t sign it.” She utters this to the floor. “I’m not going anywhere.”
Ignatov walks over to the window, raps his knuckles on the glass, and nods to someone outside. The floorboards groan under his boots, squeaking for a long time. He’s standing on the sausage and doesn’t know it, thinks Zuleikha.
A soldier bursts into the house. Zuleikha recognizes him: his face is dark red and his scar is completely white after standing in the cold for so long.
“Five minutes for her to gather her things, Slavutsky.” Ignatov motions his chin at Zuleikha.
The indefatigable Prokopenko is examining the bare, seemingly unlived-in house one last time, as if he’s searching for some unnoticed loot. Finally he catches the blade of his bayonet on a tapestry embroidered with a saying from the Koran that hangs high over the entrance – he tries to take it down. The ornate interlacing of Arabic letters pulls and wrinkles under the steel blade.
“That’s what they have instead of icons,” Slavutsky tells Prokopenko quietly in passing.
“Planning to pray?” Ignatov looks intently at Prokopenko, his nostrils quivering in disgust, and then goes out.
“There you go. And you were saying they’re heathens.” Prokopenko sniffs at Mansurka and hurries after the commander.
The tattered tapestry remains hanging in its place. The mullah once explained the meaning of it, saying to Zuleikha: “No soul can ever die except by Allah’s leave and at a time appointed.”
“You’ll leave anyway, even if you don’t sign it,” Mansurka-Burdock tells Zuleikha.
And he points significantly at Slavutsky, the soldier with the scar. He’s strolling through the house, examining and prodding the exposed beams of the storage shelves under the ceiling with his bayonet.
Zuleikha falls to her knees next to the sleeping bench, pressing her forehead to Murtaza’s cold, hard hand. My husband – given by the Almighty, to direct, feed, and protect me – what should I do?