And there’s the edge of town.
They’ve left Yulbash.
“Zuleikhaaa!” rings out a barely audible voice.
The convoy of sledges rides up a hill. The smattering of Yulbash houses darkens in the distance.
“Zuleikhaaa!” the wind howls in her ears. “Zuleikhaaa!”
She turns her head to face forward. From the top of the hill, the plain that sprawls below seems like a giant white tablecloth along which the hand of the Almighty has scattered trees like beads and roads like ribbons. Their caravan is a thin silk thread stretching beyond the horizon, over which a scarlet sun is solemnly rising.
PART TWO
WHERE TO?
TAKING THE ROAD
She’s a good-looking woman.
Ignatov is riding at the head of the caravan. At times he stops to let the detachment pass by, looking intently at everyone: the gloomy kulaks on sledges as well as his own fine troops, all reddened from the cold. Then he overtakes them again because he likes to be the first to forge ahead, with only a broad, inviting open space and the wind in front of him.
He’s trying not to watch that woman, so she won’t think he’s up to something. But how could you not watch when her curves just gallop right into your eyes like that? She’s sitting there like she’s on a throne, not a horse. She rocks in the saddle with each stride, her lower back arching sharply and her chest thrust forward, tightly covered in a white sheepskin coat, as if she’s nodding and repeating to him: Yes, comrade Ignatov, yes, Vanya, yes, yes…
He rises partway in his stirrups, meticulously examining the caravan flowing past him from under the visor of his hand, as if he’s protecting his eyes from the sun. In reality, he’s screening his gaze, which keeps disobediently attaching itself to Nastasya.
The sledges sail on, creaking loudly along the snow. Horses snort from time to time and little clouds of steam rise like intricate flowers above their frost-covered snouts.
A man with a mussed black beard and a ferocious appearance is nervously and angrily driving a mare. Behind him are his wife – wrapped in a shawl to the brows and with a sack of an infant in each arm – and a motley little flock of children. “I’ll kill you,” he’d shouted when they came to his house; he’d rushed at Ignatov with a pitchfork. He thought better of things and cooled down after they’d aimed their rifles at his wife and children. No, you can’t take on Ignatov with a pitchfork.
An elderly mullah ineptly holds the reins, his woolen gloves turned inside out. It’s evident he’s never taken anything heavier than a book in his hands in his whole life. The springy curls of his expensive karakul fur coat shine in the sun. You won’t keep a fur like that the whole way, thinks Ignatov indifferently. It’ll be taken away, either at a distribution point or somewhere else along the road. There’s no reason to dress up anyway. You’re not going to a wedding… The mullah’s wife is sitting in the back, in a bulky, despondent heap. In her arms is an elegant cage wrapped in a horse blanket. She brought her beloved cat with her. A fool.
It’s disconcerting for Ignatov to look at the next sledge. It would appear that, well, he’d killed a man, leaving his wife without a husband. That had happened more than once already. It was the man’s own fault: he’d rushed at Ignatov with an axe, like a madman. All they’d wanted in the beginning was to ask the way. But a repugnant sort of feeling gnaws at Ignatov’s guts; it won’t leave him alone. Pity? That woman is painfully small and thin. And her face is pale and delicate, as if it were paper. It’s clear she won’t survive the road. She might have made it with her husband, but like this… Ignatov has as good as killed her as well as her husband.
He’s begun pitying kulaks. That’s what he’s come to.
The small woman looks up as she rides past. And, oh, mother of mine, are those eyes of hers green! His horse is pawing at the ground, dancing in place. Ignatov turns in his saddle to have a better look but the sledge has already gone by. There’s a black welt on its back, left yesterday when Ignatov hacked it hard with an axe.
As he looks at that mark, the back of his head is already sensing the approach of a large, shaggy chestnut horse and Nastasya’s magnificent bust, bending toward its mane, breaking out of her clothes, and shouting to the whole plain with each motion: Yes, Vanya, yes, yes, yes…
Nastasya first caught his eye back during training.
The new recruits usually gathered in the morning in the courtyard right under his window. For two days they listened to rousing political speeches and practiced with rifles; then on the third day a certificate was shoved at them and off they went on a job, special assignments under the command of a State Political Administration colleague. There would already be a new batch in the yard the next morning. Lots of volunteers came – they all wanted to be involved in a just cause. Women turned up, too, though for some reason more women signed up for the militia. And rightly so – the State Political Administration was man’s work, serious.
Take Nastasya, for example. All the training in the courtyard had come to a standstill when she arrived. The recruits’ eyes bugged out at the sight of her, their necks twisted like dead chickens’, and they only half-listened to the instructors. Even the instructor wore himself out, sweating all over as he explained the structure of a rifle to her – Ignatov had seen all this from his office. Somehow they trained the detachment, sent them to work, and breathed a sigh of relief. But the memory of the beautiful woman had remained in his belly like a sweet chill.
Ignatov hadn’t gone to see Ilona that evening. She was a sassy kind of girl, she wasn’t too young (not broken by life yet, not proud), nor too old (still pleasant to look at), and her body had turned out well (there was something to hold on to), plus she hung on his every word, couldn’t gaze at him enough, and her room in the communal apartment was large, twelve square meters. This was basically too much of a good thing. She’d even told him, “Ivan, come live with me, it’s a good idea!” But it turned out to be too much.
Tossing and turning on his hard dormitory bed, he heard his roommates snoring and reflected on life. Wasn’t it caddish to lust over a new girl while the old one was still hoping, most likely plumping the pillows as she waited for him? No, he decided, it wasn’t caddish. People experience a burning for something: that’s what feelings are about. And if those feelings are gone, what’s the point in clinging to the embers?
Ignatov had never been a womanizer. He was an impressive, strapping man driven by political ideology and it was usually the women who looked at him, trying to catch his fancy. But he was in no hurry to get to know them better and feel an attachment, too. This was embarrassing to admit, but he could count the number of those women in his life on the fingers of one hand. Somehow, he’d had other things to do. He’d enlisted in the Red Army in 1918 and that got him started: first there was the Civil War, then hacking at the Basmachi in Central Asia. He’d probably still be swinging a sword in the mountains if not for Bakiev. Bakiev had already become someone important in Kazan by that time: he’d transformed from lanky, redheaded Mishka into staid Tokhtamysh Muradovich with a respectable shaved head and a gold pince-nez in his breast pocket. It was he who’d returned Ignatov to his native Tataria. “Come back, Vanya,” he’d said, “I desperately need my own people and can’t do it without you.” He knew, the sneak, how to get you. Ignatov bought into it and came rushing home to help out a friend.
That’s how he started working at the Kazan State Political Administration. It didn’t exactly turn out to be interesting (paperwork, meetings, etc.) but there was no use sighing over that now. He soon met a typist from the office on Bolshaya Prolomnaya Street. She had plump, sloping shoulders and the doleful name Ilona. Only now, at a full thirty years of age, had he learned for the first time about the joy of long-term contact with one person; he’d been dropping in on Ilona for four whole months. It wasn’t that he was in love with her, no. It was nice to be with her, tranquil – there was that. But as for love…