“Volf Karlovich Leibe?” they ask.
“Yes!” he answers, delighted. “You’re here for me? From the university?”
“We are,” they reassure him. “Let’s go to the car.”
“Since when did they start sending such luxurious automobiles for professors?” gushes Volf Karlovich as he settles into the back seat and feels the car’s silky leather interior with childlike curiosity.
People in uniform sit on each side of him, pressing their firm shoulders against him. Leibe smiles and keeps going out of his way to shake hands. The door of the black Ford slams shut and the professor jauntily and cheerily waves a hand to the chauffeur: Let’s go!
The Black Maria carrying away Volf Karlovich has hardly disappeared around a bend in the road, spraying snow out from under its wheels in parting, when a big, heavy padlock clasps its jaws on the door of the professor’s former office. Shoving into his pocket a round, dark bottle that has long been at the ready, Stepan heads off to see the building manager. With a tsarina’s gaze, Grunya surveys the neighbors crowded by the closed door – they want to profit from the professor’s furniture, the jackals! – and Grunya goes to her room without saying a thing.
They won’t take Professor Leibe far, just straight to the State Political Administration’s regional headquarters. For a couple of weeks, investigator Butylkin will work on cracking the German spy who’s posing so successfully as a half-wit, but he’ll give up in the end, deciding to send Leibe to the psychiatric clinic at Arsk Field: they can figure out for themselves if he’s reaping anything or truly just a nut. They’ll be too late, though.
In the middle of February 1930, the Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic will approve the decree “On the liquidation of kulaks as a class in Tataria.” A week later, it will be determined during an operational meeting at the CEC that the pace for collectivization and dekulakization in the republic is horrifyingly low.
And somehow, of its own accord, without the knowledge of the Party leaders and upper ranks of the State Political Administration, it will work out that certain guests of the regional State Political Administration who aren’t especially necessary for investigative purposes will be turned into kulaks. Their cases will be misplaced, gather dust on shelves and safes, and burn in fires. And they themselves will be transferred from solitary confinement and pretrial detention to dungeons in a transit prison crowded with the dekulakized. By mid-March, Red Tataria will already be in third place in the country for its pace of collectivization.
Volf Karlovich Leibe will land in the legendary transit prison building, too. He won’t be the slightest bit surprised; he’ll likely even be glad since he’d started to miss people during his ten years of seclusion. Only one question will trouble him slightly: is all well with Grunya?
Grunya’s life will take a favorable turn. She’ll drink coffee from the professor’s cups in the mornings. True, the cups themselves will turn out to be extraordinarily inconvenient: they’re small and fragile, just trouble. A year later, Stepan will free up another room for them, and two years later, the regional arm of the Joint State Political Administration will move to Black Lake, into the building next door. Stepan will think a little and then he’ll start work there. His career will come together and very soon they won’t need to free up the next room using their well-established means because they’re allocated luxurious living space of their very own on Pochtamtskaya Street.
Grunya will grow bored after becoming the rightful proprietress of a large and empty new apartment, since there’s nobody to battle and Stepan works day and night. And so when, at the age of forty-six, she discovers her pregnancy, Grunya will decide to carry the child to term. She will pass away during labor and the doctors from the university clinic will just throw up their hands in distress. It was too tough a case.
KAZAN
A shaggy snout bares its yellowed teeth and wails, shaking its inside-out lips. Zuleikha squeezes the reins tighter. May Allah protect me, what is this hellish monster?
“A camel!” cries someone behind her. “A real one!”
The outlandish beast swings its master, who’s sitting between the humps and wearing a colorful quilted robe, side to side as it floats past. A sharp smell of spices trails after them.
The sledges are traveling along a central street. The caravan has formed and straightened out so the vehicles are riding close together past buildings of brick and stone, painted light blue, pink, and white, like huge carved jewel boxes. Lots of little turrets tower over the roofs; there are weathervanes blossoming with tin flowers and roof tiles glistening like colorful fish scales under spots of snow. Decorative flourishes creep along pediments and tickle the heels of half-naked men and women (what shame this is, Allah!) who bear heavy cornices on their muscular shoulders. Railings curl like iron lace.
Kazan.
Young ladies in little boots with heels (how do they not fall off those!), servicemen in mouse-colored military overcoats like Ignatov’s, public servants chilled to the bone in patched coats, middle-aged women wearing huge felt boots and selling little pies (the smell, the wonderful smell…), portly nannies with children swathed in shawls on wooden sledges… In their hands are folders, briefcases, tubes, reticules, bouquets, and cakes…
The wind tears a pile of sheet music from the hands of a skinny young man wearing glasses, hurling it into the sorrowful face of a cow that a frail peasant is leading past on a rope.
The hulk of a tractor for agitational propaganda rolls along, its heavy wheels rumbling as it tows a large, cracked bell, around which winds a snake-like red cotton banner: “We will reforge church bells into tractors!”
Dirty slush on the road explodes into a crooked fountain under the hooves of a cavalry detachment rushing past, and under the wheels of shiny black automobiles tearing along toward it, driving in the opposite direction.
A fiery red tram flies along with a deafening clang; its brass handles blaze and there are faces clustered in its glassless windows. A small pack of waifs flit away from a gateway and hang on the handrail with frenzied shrieks. The furious conductor curses and waves his fists; a policeman is already running, cutting across the road, and blowing his whistle.
Zuleikha squints. A lot of buildings, a lot of people. All loud, vivid, fast, and strong-smelling. This is understandable since it’s the capital. Kazan is generously throwing its treasures into the stunned exiles’ eyes before they’ve had a chance to recover.
The red-and-white spire of the Church of Saint Varvara is solemn, the aperture of its bell tower window forlornly empty, and there’s an inscription painted in yellow above the entrance: “Greetings to the workers of the First Tram Depot!” There’s the governor-general’s former home, as well decorated as a torte and now housing the tuberculosis hospital. The ice on Black Lake rings with children’s laughter. The columns of Kazan University, each as thick as a century-old oak, are a delicate white.
The city’s kremlin has sharp little towers like heads of sugar. Instead of a clock, there’s a large, stern face – with wise, narrowed eyes under falconine brows and a mustache like a broad wave – gazing out at Zuleikha from a round opening on Spassky Tower. Who is it? He doesn’t resemble the Christian god, whom Zuleikha once saw in a picture that the mullah had shown her.