Death is everywhere. Zuleikha grasped that back in her childhood. Tremblingly soft chicks covered in the downiest sunny yellow fluff, curly-haired lambs scented with hay and warm milk, the first spring moths, and rosy apples filled with heavy sugary juice – all of them carried within themselves the germ of future dying. All it took was for something to happen – sometimes this was obvious, though sometimes it was accidental, fleeting, and not at all noticeable to the eye – and then the beating of life would stop within the living, ceding its place to disintegration and decay. Chicks struck down by a poultry disease dropped like lifeless lumps of flesh into bright green grass in a yard; lambs skinned during Qurbani displayed their pale red innards; one-day moths poured from the sky, strewing themselves as if they were fresh snow on apples that had already fallen to the ground, their sides spotted with purplish abrasions.
The fate of her own children was confirmation of that, too. Four babies born only to die. Each time Zuleikha brought the little wrinkled face of a daughter to her lips for a kiss after birth, she would peer with hope into half-blind eyes still covered with slightly swollen lids, into tiny nose holes, into the fold of doll-like lips, into barely distinguishable pores on skin still a gentle red, and at sparse shoots of fluff on a small head. She thought she was seeing life. It would later turn out she was seeing death.
She had grown accustomed to that thought, just as an ox grows accustomed to a yoke and a horse to its master’s voice. Some people, like her daughters, were allotted a pinch of life and some got handfuls; others, like her mother-in-law, received immeasurably generous entire sacks and granaries. Death awaits everyone, though, hiding in actual people or walking alongside them, snuggling up to their feet like a cat, settling on clothing like dust, or penetrating the lungs like air. Death is ubiquitous and it is slyer, smarter, and more powerful than a silly life that will always lose a skirmish.
It arrived and took away the powerful Murtaza, who had seemed born to live a hundred years. It will obviously take the proud Vampire Hag away soon, too. Even the grain that she and her husband buried between their daughters’ graves – with the hope of saving it for their new crop – will rot in spring and become death’s quarry, shut away in a cramped wooden crate.
It seems as if Zuleikha’s time has also come. She was prepared to accept death on that memorable night, lying on the sleeping bench alongside the already dead Murtaza, so she is surprised to still be alive. She waited as the Red Hordesmen barged into the house and destroyed her home and hearth. And she waited when they brought her along the snow-covered expanses of her native land, too. And while spending the night in the desecrated mosque, to the sleepy bleating of sheep and the yellow-haired harlot’s shameless shrieks. And now she is waiting again, in a damp and cold stone cell, passing the hours with lengthy reflections like this for the first time in her life.
Will her death take the shape of a young soldier with a long, sharp bayonet? Of some thief who’s been moved into their cell, with a faintly predatory smile, a homemade knife hidden in his boot, and a hankering for her warm sheepskin coat? Or will death come from within, turning into disease, cooling the lungs, appearing on her forehead as hot and sticky sweat, filling her throat with heavy green phlegm, and, finally, squeezing her heart in its icy fist, forbidding it to beat? Zuleikha doesn’t know.
That lack of knowledge is distressing and the long wait excruciating. Sometimes it seems she is already dead. The people around her are emaciated, pale, and spend entire days whispering and quietly weeping: so who are they if not the dead? This place – frigid and crowded, the stone walls wet from damp, deep under the ground, without a single ray of sun – what is it if not a burial vault? Only when Zuleikha makes her way to the latrine, a large, echoing tin bucket in the corner of the cell, and feels her cheeks warm with shame is she convinced that, no, she is still alive. The dead do not know shame.
The Kazan transit prison is a legendary, distinguished place through which numerous bright minds and dark souls have passed. There’s good reason it’s located near Kazan’s kremlin, right up close. From their cells, the luckiest of the arrested can admire the dark blue onion domes of the Blagoveshchensk church, covered in golden stars, and the Storozhev tower’s brownish-green spire inside the trading quarter. The transit prison has been running continuously for a good century and a half, pumping the large country’s blood from west to east like a beautifully healthy heart that knows no fatigue.
In this same cell where Zuleikha is now listening to Professor Leibe’s half-crazed monologue and furtively scraping the first louse out of her armpit, there sat, exactly forty-three years ago, a young student from Imperial Kazan University. The locks of hair on the top of his head were still youthfully disobedient and lush, and his gaze was serious and morose. He had been imprisoned for organizing student gatherings against the government. After ending up in the cell, he initially pounded his angry little fists at a frost-covered door, shouting something daring and foolish. His disobedient blue lips sang “the Marseillaise”. He diligently did gymnastic exercises to try to warm up. Then he would sit on the floor, placing his rolled-up student uniform overcoat – irrevocably ruined by thick prison grime – underneath himself, clasp his knees with arms numbed from the cold, and cry hot, angry tears. The student’s name was Vladimir Ulyanov, later better known as Lenin.
Nothing has changed here since then. First, emperors succeeded one another, then revolutionary leaders, and the transit prison served the authorities with unwavering faithfulness, as good old prisons should. Here they held exiles before sending them for hard labor in Siberia and the Far East, and, later, Kazakhstan. Criminal and political prisoners were usually housed separately, as a precaution against spreading criminal ideas. Customs established over the centuries had begun breaking down in recent times, though.
At the end of 1928, a thin stream of dekulakized people stretched to the capital from the far reaches of what was once Kazan Governate. These deportees needed to be gathered together, loaded into railroad cars, and sent on to destinations according to instructions. It was decided to hold that seemingly not very criminal contingent – which nevertheless still needed to be guarded – here in the transit prison, particularly since dekulakized people were sent along the very same age-old routes as convicts (Kolyma, Yenisei, Zabaikalye, Sakhalin…), often even in neighboring railroad cars on the same trains.
The stream gradually swelled, strengthened, and grew. By the winter of 1930, it had turned into a powerful river that flooded not only the prison itself but all the cellars near the train station, administrative buildings, and nonresidential premises, too. Hungry, furious, and uncomprehending peasants were now everywhere, taking shelter and waiting for their destiny, both hoping for it and simultaneously fearing its rapid onset. This river swept up everything in its path as centuries-old prison traditions broke down (the dekulakized were housed along with criminals and later with political prisoners, too); entire crates of documents (meaning whole villages and cantons) were lost and mixed up, making any sort of registry of those contingents – or, later, determinations of identity – impossible; and officials of various ranks from the regional and transport divisions of the State Political Administration lost their posts.
Zuleikha and those who arrived with her will end up spending an entire month in the transit prison, until the first day of spring, 1930. By that time, the cells were so densely stuffed that the prison chief had a stroke due to his desperate attempts to free himself of the specialized contingent of peasants foisted on him. Through sheer luck, they sent Zuleikha and her traveling companions on their way just before an epidemic of typhus broke out, mowing down more than half the detainees and freeing up the premises in a natural way – to the utmost relief of the boss, who was on his way to recovery at the Shamov Hospital.