Ignatov’s running to the train station early on the morning of the first day of spring in 1930, gulping the biting, frosty air. The trams aren’t operating yet and it would be a shame to spend an entire five-kopek coin on a cab. It’s a long way from the women’s dormitory where Nastasya lives, so he had to get up early, before the factory whistles.
A mug rumbles in his suitcase, hitting against its plywood sides. His boots crunch on the hard-packed path along the banks of the Bulak, which is long and pierces Kazan like an arrow. The slumbering city is lighting its first lamps and releasing occasional sleepy pedestrians onto the streets. The hoarse voices of half-awake dogs yelp; the first tram pulses somewhere in the distance.
Candle-like minarets – the Yunusov, Apanaev, and Galeev mosques – float, dissolving into the dark-blue morning mist. Denisov did well to come up with that idea back then, raising the red banner like a revolutionary at the former village mosque. Why hadn’t they reached that point yet here in the capital? The Kazan minarets stick out like useless shafts poking meaningless holes at the sky.
Ignatov turns toward the bazaar. The kremlin’s paper-white teeth flare up on the hill. Five-pointed stars shine on the triangular towers like little golden beams. Now that’s genuine beauty, correct beauty – ours.
The station building is like an embossed gingerbread cookie: chocolaty-red, adorned with pilasters and windows, festooned with emblems and decorative urns, strewn with spangles of tiling, and studded with spires and weathervanes. Ignatov winces: the Kazan train station is Russia’s gateway to Siberia, but it looks like a cultural center or some kind of museum. In a word, ugh.
The square in front of the station is already chaotic with people, the crush of carts, and the porters’ brisk cursing. Ignatov slows from a run to a walk and calms his breathing; it’s not fitting for the commandant of a special train to puff like a steam engine himself. He sternly inspects the cursing porters along the way and they grow quiet, too, when they cast sideways glances at his gray military overcoat with the red insignia on his left sleeve. Well, that’s better now.
Ignatov pushes a station door that’s as tall and heavy as a wardrobe. The smell of human sweat, bread, polished weaponry, gunpowder, sheepskin, unwashed hair, machine oil, soldiers’ boots, homeless dogs, turpentine, wood, and medications hits his nose. The air’s so thick you could cut it with a knife. It resounds with shouting, barking, neighing, clanging, bleating, and crashing. A steam engine whistles piercingly outside, drowning out all other sounds for a moment. It’s not morning here. There’s no time of day here. It’s perpetual bedlam. Ignatov wedges his way into the crowd, elbowing and stretching his neck in search of the right office.
“Behind me! Don’t spread out! Stay together! Together, damnit!” A group of recruits in civilian clothing, wearing red armbands and with rifles at the ready, is leading a dozen scared, narrow-eyed peasants dressed in summer clothes – colorful robes and embroidered skullcaps – who are looking all around. The detachment’s leader is shouting himself hoarse, yelling out commands, then he quietly hisses through his teeth, “You are trouble, you Uzbek sheep…”
“In your places! Everybody stay in your places! I’ll shoot anyone who tries to escape on the spot!” bellows a slim soldier on the other side, waving his revolver around and attempting to stop several peasant women on his own. It seems they’d been sitting submissively on their bundles but had suddenly jumped up one after the other and started wailing and jabbering away, maybe in Mari, maybe in Chuvash, when they caught sight of other peasants.
“Step aside!” yell the porters, ramming the stirring crowd with unwieldy carts loaded with rocking mountains of crates containing sharp-smelling oranges and roasted beef. “Provisions for express number two! Step aside!”
Ignatov looks around with the advantage of his imposing height – seeing over the tops of shaggy fur caps, headscarves, fur hats with earflaps, embroidered skullcaps, brimmed hats, and pea coats – to find the door he needs: the office of the head of the Kazan transportation hub. The door slams loudly and incessantly, letting streams of people in and out. The train station’s heart is beating. Swearing and excusing himself, stepping on people’s feet and suitcases, Ignatov makes his way inside and grasps a tall, rickety wooden desk with his hands. Petitioners just like Ignatov push at him from both sides.
Ignatov takes documents from his suitcase: he has a brand-new gray folder that still crackles deliciously at its folds and carries the austere inscription “Case” and the painstakingly formed figures “K-2437.” Inside there are a couple of thin sheets with the names of the dekulakized typed in small print, a little over eight hundred people in total. He holds it out to a small man with infinitely tired red eyes, who doesn’t notice the folder in the midst of the constant shouting and trilling from a telephone.
“Yes, yes!” the little man yells hoarsely into the receiver. “Dispatch the Taishet train! There’s congestion on number seventeen already! Dispatch Chita, too, to the same hounds of hell!”
“Is number ten to Orenburg?” The question carries over heads, from somewhere outside.
“You still here? What do you mean, Orenburg? It’s to Tashkent, to the goddamned hounds of hell, you son of a bitch,” the official barks in response.
Ignatov leans across the desk and jabs the folder like a sword, right at the green uniform. Barely glancing at it, the official detaches a wrinkled sheet of paper from a heap of documents on the desk, with the slanted inscription “Leningrad – remainders” written in purple ink, and shoves it at Ignatov.
“Take these people, too. Sign.”
“But where–” Ignatov doesn’t manage to finish as the telephone explodes in another shrill ring and the official grabs the receiver as if he wants to chew it up.
“What do you mean, a railroad car isn’t expandable?” He’s spitting saliva into the holes of the receiver. “It was stated: ‘Load sixty per car’! The bunks are wide, people will move over a little!”
Ignatov grabs the official by the lapels:
“But where am I going to put more people? What ‘Leningrad remainders’? My train’s already at breaking point.”
“At breaking point?” The official is losing his temper and his voice is becoming surprisingly similar to the telephone’s trill. “You call fifty heads per train car breaking point? So you don’t want sixty like the Samarkand train? Or seventy like the Chita train? And soon it’ll be ninety per car! They’ll ride standing, like horses! Now that’s really the breaking point!” He grabs a stack of disintegrating fat folders from the table and hurls them back down. “There are eight thousand just dekulakized! And they all need to be sent within the week! How about that? And there are new ones every day, every damn day. Soon we’ll be putting them on the rails. And you don’t want to take an extra dozen mouths to feed?”
“Fine.” Ignatov gives in, gloomily scrawling on the transfer slip with a pencil. “Give me your… Leningrad remainders.”
“Don’t you worry,” the official suddenly says quietly, blowing feverishly on the bottom of a large official stamp before imprinting “Kazan Hub” in bold blue ink on the folder. “They’ll be scattered to the goddamned hounds of hell in a few weeks. You’ll be traveling light.”
And he enters the date: “1 March 1930.”
Ignatov decides to drop in on Bakiev before his departure, anyway. He senses anxiety when he enters the building on Vozdvizhenskaya Street. Everything appears to be business as usuaclass="underline" a thorough young soldier is checking passes at the entrance, office doors are slamming, secretaries are clattering up and down marble stairs. But there’s something in the air.